No Stupid Questions

Promote and get behind actual progressive candidates, not corporatist shills like Hillary or Kamala. I like Kshama Sawant because she calls shit like she sees it.

Young adults needs stronger world frameworks that don't feel forced on them.

IMO that's a virtue system!

I've been a Stoic for over 20 years now and managed to convert dozens of people to progressive thought just by discussing virtues that are inherit to human nature (justice, courage, wisdom, temperance). People like abstract virtues because they're easy to incorporate to their personal world models with very little friction and friction is the real thought killer.

Most people are truth seeking but can be very slow learners and some really rebel against strong friction so there's a need for more abstract approaches like - using "colorblind" instead of arguing race, using "cosmopolitan" when argueing geopolitics, using "secular" when arguing religion etc etc. Every other argument can follow afterwards.

This is the way.

Punching nazis can be nice and masculine if you like.

Simple. What do young men care about? Getting laid and getting paid. Promise them that, and you'll get their votes.

You'll need to use coded language, of course. But using coded language is politicians' whole job.

Quit trying to make young white men feel guilty for existing. I come from poor white trash. As near as I can tell, my family never benefitted from slavery in any possible way. So fuck you. I dont feel bad about something I didn't do, no one in my family did, and we aint gonna pay for it.

Well it would be a good starting point if we actually had progressive politicians. The Democrats lose because they have no substantive platform for actually helping people because doing that would go against their donors. To be clear, it’s the same for Republicans. There’s a reason why the government just ping pongs between the two parties. The only reliable base either party has is the one that’s more culturally aligned with them, whatever that means at the time.

If they literally ever credibly ran on basic issues like housing, food, healthcare and the elections were fair, they would win. But they don’t, because they can’t, so they will never have consistent support.

Maybe stop labeling them the “enemy” with posts like these?

Education. You will never be able to explain taxes in a way that can counter propaganda if the person is an idiot. You just won't. And until then it's an uphill battle.

Idk how do you "sell" being a decent fucking person?

I don't follow the media and the debate where you live, but over here left leaning politicians and media tends to frame it as: women, minorites etc have a problem. Men are the problem.

You're basically pushing any undecided man over to the right.

Look at what men are missing and how the right is selling it to them.

Men aren't doing so hot right now, emotionally and mentally. They feel like they are not manly, and criticized for trying to be manly or liking manly things. There's a lack of transitions into manhood, and the bar that is seen as a successful man with a good career is pretty much impossible.

If you have a poor paying job, you're not manly. If you have a well paying job but it's blue collar you're not manly because you're a dumb working stiff. If you have a white collar job you're not manly because you're not doing anything tough with your body. Maybe if you're a CEO who owns the company but also does rock climbing and bear fighting are you seen as manly enough, maybe.

Then you have these guys, your Andrew Tates and so on, who act very manly and tell you it's ok to be a man and then spout off some of the most toxic, asinine shit saying that's how you be a man. And young guys fall for it because they aren't shown any alternative.

Then on the left you have people who speak ill of men as a whole, and manliness as a whole. Sometimes the criticisms are correct, but a lot of times it's presented as men overall. If you try to say that it's not every man out there who's a monster, you get blasted with criticism for saying "not all men". They also don't provide anything positive or solutions for feeling manly, with the best they can be offered is to be more like women.

So young men, especially young cishet men, are actively pushed away from leftist spaces, leaving them feeling demonized by those spaces, and actively pandered to by the right which are offering mind poison dressed up as solutions.

So what do we do? There's a few things to fix.

1. leftist media has to stop demonizing men and start demonizing actions. Instead of saying "men are rapists" start saying "rapists are bad". When people start to say things like "cis people are shit" other people need to call them out of it, because if you're supposed to be the side that accepts people's gender identity, it should be for all gender identities. It can feel cathartic to rail against the majority demographic, especially when people of that demographic have hurt you, but if you feel that it's unfair to rail against a group because of the actions of a few members of it, that should apply to all groups. Things like "what's wrong with the straights" doesn't help build bonds with allies, and it turns young men away from leftist spaces.

2. there needs to be validation and recognition from the left for problems men have, like suicide, workplace death and heavier prison sentencing. The left needs to show that they are trying to fix these problems, too, instead of telling young men to suck it up and be a man about it because they are the oppressor demographic.

3. there needs to be people who counter toxic masculinity, not with telling men to be more like women, but with positive masculinity. If a man is having emotional or mental problems, toxic masculinity says to push that down. Femininity says it's ok to be soft and vulnerable. Positive masculinity would say that a real man is true to himself and his feelings and expresses then freely, even if others might ridicule him for it. There's a subtle difference, and the end result of femininity's and positive masculinity's tactic might be the same, i.e. the man expresses those feelings, but the way that they get there is very different. The former makes the man feel less validated in his identity, while the latter uplifts it. The memes where they say stuff like "I always tell my homies I love them before they go to bed" actually work.

4. leftist influencers need to make fighting for the rights of minorities seem manly. Badass. Like a hero. Worthy of praise and celebration.

5. while they won't get the financial and political backing that the toxic male influencers get, there needs to be positive male influencers who talk about masculinity in a positive way, while promoting the ideas above. There needs to be an alternative, who acts manly but in the fun, positive way, that validates young men's feelings of inadequacy, frustration, and isolation, while promoting an egalitarian perspective.

6. there needs to be a cultural shift in what makes a man. A shift away from dying in battle or becoming a tycoon, and a resurgence of the working class hero. Mass media itself needs to change and promote positive male figures. It can work and be popular, like in Avatar the Last Airbender. We need to show men that they are still men, and still worthy of love, respect and adoration, even if they aren't a super soldier or a wealthy elite. A lot of this is counter to capitalistic goals, so it may have to be subversive, but eventually it needs to be made the norm.

7. other men need to continue to step up and speak out about injustice towards minorities and against toxic masculinity behaviors in the day to day, and start decrying those behaviors as unmanly. People need to call Andrew Tate and the like unmanly.

8. ideally, the men's rights movement should be absorbed by the left and the toxic incels kicked out. It should be done in the name of gender equality. Fixing only woman's problems won't solve the patriarchy (which could be changed to a different term so everyone feels like it's less of an us vs them) and feminists should try to help solve men's problems directly rather than indirectly. Young men would see feminism as more appealing if feminists actually focused on men's problems as well, rather than ignoring or worse, demonizing them. Feminism could be rebranded as an egalitarian movement for all sexes and genders, maybe get a name change. If the patriarchy affects everyone, then the focus should be on everyone. Maybe it would have to be a whole new movement entirely.

So it's a larger problem than just getting more leftist male influencers, and some of those problems are systematic. Some can get worked on today. Talking about masculinity in a positive way, promotive equity, stop both their side and your side from bigotry, and, probably the thing that would get young men on board the most:

Actually trying to solve the problems young men are going through.

This is all from the perspective of a non-american from a country where thankfully we are still liberal at heart and only entertain some progressive ideas, instead of buying it wholesale, meaning the right has yet to completely cannibalise the government over the mistakes of the left.

1. Move away from equity and return to equality of opportunity as the main goal. Equity demands lack of competition, and men love competition.

You can want everyone to receive equal opportunity and dignity, but people are not equal and will not end in the same place once the race is over. You can't demand equality of outcome and onboard the most competitive demographic, there is a reason if the stereotype of leftist men is passive wimps. This is completely compatible with prgressive ideas, but it's incompatible with progressive brains, apparently.

2. Actually understand what intersectionality looks like, stop treating it like a hierarchy of oppression.

The core idea of intersectionality is that each demographic has its own issues and they manifest differently if more demographics overlap in the same individual (e.g. sexism against white women vs sexism against black women exhibit different tropes and connotations).

This does not mean whoever has the least minoritary traits is the most acceptable target, that is some marxist "oppressor vs oppressed" horseshit and, while it was probably the intended idea, it is massively counterproductive and doesn't have to be the actual application of the issue.

Men have issues that women don't have, women have issues that men don't have. As soon as your movement decides to prioritise one they have lost the other.

The reason this does not happen with race is that no movement in the US can realistically exist politically without white people simply by virtue of how huge the white slice of the demo pie is, and because this whole thing was started by highly educated, economically mobile, overwhelingly white, college grads who live in very specific coastal bubbles, hence the endemic hatred of farmers and factory workers, the actual working class of the US, as hicks and racists, and the lionisation of serving staff like baristas and waiters (the only working class most large city dwellers ever interact with).

3. Move away from "patriarchy".

It's just a fucking L on its face isn't it? "Yes come join the party that thinks men being in power is the problem" fat fucking chance lol.

And when they do join, the parodies write themselves.

I don't care if you think it's "just a name" (especially in light of what progs consistently do over "just a name" and "just a statue" and so on) it's a massive optics L that shows all of the horseshit about microaggressions and non-confrontational language and whatnot are entirely performative.

You have the most obvious othering language in the core ideas of the movement and then complain about microaggressions? And you wonder why people don't take you seriously?

And while we're on that:

4. Politeness is baseline, respect is earned. Confrontation is necessary and men are more likely to thrive in confrontational spaces.

You can't have a political movement that does not tolerate dissent and confrontation, or only tolerates it in one direction. See the implosion of the "Unfuck america tour" as a good example of this.

The whole point of politics is to create a critical mass of people who align on some goal to push for it, you don't have to agree with them on every point, if you had enough people who agree with you, you would be already in the majority and would not need to participate in politics.

Easy example from the last decade: TERFs.

Now, I don't like TERFs, on account of them being radfems and thus automatically hostile to me due to the circumstances of my birth (i.e. penis), but you know what? I reckon they probably want women to have better salaries and fewer barriers to entry into professional fields.

Let them force themselves into political irrelevance if they refuse to play ball, don't make a big fucking show of kicking them out of the movement, because then you end up on the back foot of having to explain "trans women are women" to the mass population and the TERFs simply need to say "look at these brainwashed biology deniers, they think males and females have no differences" and you end up eating your own ass in public, when the point is that trans women ought to be treated as women for their own good and a more welcoming society.

(side note: if you are in that brainless chunk of progs who do believe there is no difference between the sexes, I highly encourage you to look at the world records in any discipline with easily measured metrics such as 100m dash and freestyle swimming. Not a single male record is under the women's record, in some cases every historical male record eclipses the current female one. Males and females are different, this should be acknowledged, and it should not be a barrier to equal dignity in treatment.)

A movement that can't include anyone but the most in-line and pure of the ideological adepts is doomed to be irrelevant, and on that the progressives have an almost complete lock.

You need to make it fun and engaging for them. That is what the far right is doining. You and I might find it reprehensible, but they het som much traction bu having fun and giving young men a purpose and the feeling that they are doing something to netter themselves and their commuity.

How you go about that I dont know. In my local area we are focusing on having fun partiets and going out together as a group instead of just being political nerds in our own little grottos. Som far it seems to be working.

Tl;dr: Have fun visibly and invite them to join you. It takes forever, but at least you have fun while doing it.