VirtualExile

I read the Atlantic article “How San Francisco Became a Failed City” even though I disagree with the headline at the outset — how is it a failed city? It seems what the author describes are mainly problems affecting the entire country, but with an air of “how could this happen here, to me, to my own precious city”, along with some specific examples of how Democrats in SF have been unable to fix the problems — but as unable as anybody else anywhere else. Crime is up everywhere. Fentanyl deaths are up everywhere. The political class is out of touch everywhere, regardless of party. Every large city is hamstrung by zoning restrictions. Every large city has seen arrests go down after the GF protests and especially COVID as police quit and courts got backed up.

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In recent years when I've visited SF it has felt like a caricature of its supposedly progressive past -- mainly colonized by tech firms and their highly-paid staff, with its old legendary LGBT bars and bookstores steadily closing one-by-one, clinging to its annual kinky street festivals as though SF were still some sort of cultural touchstone for the radical left in the US.

But you can't be a cultural touchstone for the radical left when the average rent for a 2BR is over $3,200/month while the minimum wage is $16/hour -- people simply cannot afford to live there on a minimum wage job, it takes 200 hours to pay the monthly rent, not counting taxes.

In 1970, you could rent a 2BR in SF for $140/month, when the minimum wage was $1.65 -- 85 hours could pay the rent.  The ratio of rent to minimum wage has gone up 135%.

Similar stories could be told about other large cities in the US, rents have increased so much faster than working class wages during my lifetime.

A radical left city would be doing something about this monstrous inequity.  But instead we worship at the altar of property values and stock options -- whatever the tech workers are focused on.

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There's actually no state in the US where you can afford even a studio apartment on the state's minimum wage, assuming 30% of income going toward rent.

The closest you get is Arkansas, followed by New Mexico, then South Dakota -- mainly the emptier states.  These aren't radical left states LOL, South Dakota doesn't even have an income tax.  They just don't have crowded cities.  The market hasn't bid up prices as high in those states.

To the extent we have a Left in the US anymore, it is either powerless or it doesn't give a shit about the working class and housing affordability.  What could be more important to workers than the ability to pay your rent and have a place to live?  Why don't Democrats do something about this?  Because now the Democratic Party is run by people with graduate degrees who can afford the rent in big cities, and by billionaire donors who can live wherever the fuck they want.  And these folks are way more concerned about identity politics and abortion rights and "saving democracy" than about making sure the people who work at Chipotle can afford to pay their rent.

We LGBTQIA+ started this mess, instead of sticking with a one-word description for non-heterosexuals like "queer" (or "non-heterosexuals") we had to give each member of the sexual minorities their own letter in a concatenation of letters and then stick a "+" on the end just in case we left you out.

So now BIPOC and AAPI are joining the concatenation party, because we have to give each member of the racial minorities their own letter.  The word "colored" fell out of fashion long ago, and now the strangely-less-offensive term "people of color" is falling behind as well.  I'm waiting for somebody to be the first to squish these two racial minority concatenations together --> BIPOCAAPI+.

There are not enough letters in the Roman alphabet to describe all of us!  There are hundreds of ethnic groups!  Someday there will be a backlash, as the future teenage kids of today's woke liberals speak truth to power about how ridiculous this alphabetizing became.

Don't lump the first letter of my identity in with a bunch of other first letters in this way, presuming that I have anything in common with them.  There ain't even an "N" for nonbinary in the LGBTQIA+ list and I'm OK with that.  A letter in a string of letters is not "visibility", damn it.  Living my life in front of other people is visibility.  And that's my responsibility, not yours.

Not too long after I came out as nonbinary to T, he gifted me a nonbinary flag. I brought it to my office and hung it there, where occasionally it would elicit a question from a coworker.

It's the only consistently visible way in which I'm nonbinary, and now nobody has seen it in a year, except the cleaning staff who presumably continue to clean my vacant office.

I also started buying some nonbinary-themed t-shirts, that I'd started wearing to the monthly spanking parties, and maybe to some other social events. There was no effect on the spanking, or on anything else.  Some short conversations about being nonbinary, nothing more.

As I don't care about mandating my personal pronouns, for reasons I've written about before, there's really been little to make of my coming out as nonbinary except that I've come out as nonbinary. I think I'll be able to change my gender on my driver's license when I get it renewed. Recently on an anonymous survey at work I had the option of choosing nonbinary as my gender in the demographics section.

The spell check as I type this tells me "nonbinary" isn't a word, LOL. OK, I just "added it to the dictionary". That's better.

It's been zero-drama for me coming out. And zero-effect.

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It seems for many people it's a more difficult process, driven by dysphoria and resisted by family & friends. For example, a person assigned the female sex at birth but they experience dysphoria from having breasts and periods. A person assigned the male sex at birth but experiences dysphoria when their romantic partners gaze upon them as "male" so having sex is difficult. But all I really know about these difficulties is what I see on the Internet, I don't know any other nonbinary people in person, I don't think. Sometimes I saw people on Metro or elsewhere who I thought, "that person looks nonbinary!" My main exposure to other nonbinary people was at the GaymerX cons I went to with T. A lot of them dyed their hair unnatural colors.

There's a stereotype that nonbinary people must find a way to express themselves that is androgynous, somehow distinct from either male or female fashions. But I've always liked to keep things simple in a way that falls easily within the masculine circle on the Venn diagram of gender styles. Short hair, beard but trimmed, t-shirts and shorts. I have a hairy chest and exercise regularly, including with weights, so I end up with a standard masculine physique.

I guess I've experienced dysphoria at having to wear suits and ties. Until now I never said it like this, using the word "dysphoria". For my entire life I've HATED wearing suits and ties, to the point that it probably limited my career options. I do have to wear a suit and tie a few times per year in my current job, but not daily. Thank Goddess not daily. I'll wear one when I have to, like when I was Moose's Best Man at his wedding. But otherwise, NO!

But I don't want to wear dresses either, yuck.

I also don't like being referred to as a "husband", which T does rather often, even though we aren't married. I guess I could apply the word "dysphoria" to that. But I'm not a "wife" either, yuck.  But I'm not concerned enough about the words people use to describe me to bring it up.  Whatever.

This idea of dysphoria feels strange to me, though. In a high falutin way. Did we really need to invent an entirely new identity with new vocabulary to describe how some of us don't like conforming to society's expectations?

Well, I'm also gender non-conforming. Like I don't want to wear the formal clothes of either gender. I don't want to play the role of spouse or parent of either gender.

I'm still generally attracted to men for sexual purposes, however.  But as AMAB this is definitely gender nonconforming.

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It's the dysphoria stuff that kind of bugs me about nonbinary culture, such as it is.

If you were born female and don't like wearing your hair long, then don't. Don't like wearing dresses, then don't. But elevating these matters to the point of "dysphoria" sounds weirdly clinical to me, like a vocabulary overreaction.

Also, there's so many things that so many people dislike about the world. I'm not sure where to draw the line between "throwing a tantrum because you can't have things your way" and "dysphoria so I'm nonbinary".

I've always had more body fat than I want, but this doesn't seem to have anything to do with gender in the US, so it doesn't feed a nonbinary identity, instead we call this feeling "body dysmorphia" which seems like a subset of dysphoria. So dysphoria feels like a bigger concept than a motivation for choosing a nonbinary identity.

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But then the issue of "choice" is itself politically fraught! When I was reading that stuff about banning "anti-trans" writers, one alleged form of transphobia listed by the anti-transphobia movement is stating that choice is involved with respect to LGBT identities.

I think choice is involved, I always have thought this! I've been in arguments with people before about whether being gay is a choice. We may not choose our sexual impulses, but we definitely choose what to do about them, and there are definitely men who have sex with men who do not choose to identify as gay.

I was troubled to see that discussions of choice with respect to LGBT identities are supposedly a form of transphobia that could bring the pitchfork brigades to my doorstep.  I've been out as LGBT for 30 years, I think I have some expertise in whether, for some people, choice is involved.

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So, here I've been writing to you this morning as a nonbinary. It feels weird, both because it is still relatively new for me, and because I don't feel qualified to speak on behalf of the community. But then, who ever is qualified to speak on behalf of their community, how does that work, especially on the Internet where everybody is self-appointed. It's not like there's an elected office: Speaker for the Nonbinary Community, or Speaker for the Gay Community, or whatever.

I remember years ago I had an LJ friend who was a title holder in the Gay Leather community, and so he saw himself as a legitimate spokesperson for that community, but these titles are not exactly the result of a democratic process.

So, I think we should be skeptical of people who claim to speak for their community. The self-appointed activists who have the most followers on Twitter and have their essays published on the more partisan websites.

What used to unite the LGBT communities was that we were all gender and/or sexual outlaws, literally. But as we've altered the laws to become more inclusive, now we find ourselves standing partially inside the dominant culture, and partially outside. And this has created hierarchies of political correctness within our movements -- now that we have some power, our movements are corrupted by the taste of power. Instead of defining ourselves outside of the law, now we're starting to identify with the law and trying to oust our perceived enemies as outlaws.

For somebody like me, who has been around a long time, it feels like our LGBT communities are turning upside down or inside out, trying to become the cultural arbiters instead of trying to avoid them. And, as I've been starting to say out loud, I think I preferred it the other way around.

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I think I've always shared a certain type of dysphoria with Henry David Thoreau: "I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,"

Multiculturalism was supposed to open doors so every subculture could flourish without fear of oppression, in a world of mutual respect.  Instead it is creating a new multilayered oppression field that goes back in time to turn stuff you did years or decades ago into fireable offenses today.  To survive in 21st Century Multiculturalism you need to be able to predict years or decades into the future whether anything you say or wear today will get you fired in the future, because it might offend identity groups then that don't even exist yet today.

And this is a liberal talking to you -- you know conservatives are even more irate about this than I am.  And on this issue, I'm starting to have a lot of sympathy for conservatives.

If you want to hold people to a new standard of conduct, you need to clearly communicate that standard of conduct ahead of time, and give people time to learn about it, and give them "first warnings" when they screw up, so they can learn from their mistakes.  Changing the rules and then applying them backward in time to punish people for stuff they did while they were in college, or before offense was widely taken under these new rules, is absolutely unfair.  This is fostering widespread resentment and is not the way to move us all forward into a world of mutual respect.  It helps people like Trump to get elected.

The growing intolerance on the Left is a major problem for achieving our goals.

has a few more black actors, thankfully; first season was def feelin' too white, but, the leads are all still white white white

I guess I'm stuck on this popcorn TV show for a while, because the other shows I was watching were much more emotionally demanding, and I need popcorn for a while, but I'd like my popcorn to be a bit more multiracial please!

Thank you for your perspective on the name-tag thing. I shared it with my nesting partner by reading parts of it aloud to him. We've been working on helping him to understand what my nonbinary identity means to me.

I wonder how many genderfluid, transgender, agender, or nonbinary folks would agree with you that the name-tag thing is oppressive. Personally I'm not a fan either. On social media profiles I refuse to provide my pronouns -- some people act like if you don't provide your pronouns you are failing to show solidarity with the transgender community, but what if I'm a member of that community and I don't want to provide pronouns and I don't appreciate you doing it either? It can turn into a sort of LGBT fascism, forcing everybody to declare their pronouns.

It reminds me of how many folks on the Left refer to hispanics as "Latinx" when a majority of hispanics do not like that term applied to themselves, if they've even heard of it.

It's OK for each individual to choose their identities, but when as a group or culture we force people to declare identities, or we choose identities for them without consulting them, that's taking the concept of diversity too far.

Progressives commonly categorize Latinos as people of color, no doubt partly because progressive Latinos see the group that way and encourage others to do so as well. Yet in our survey, only one in four Hispanics saw the group as people of color.

In contrast, the majority rejected this designation. They preferred to see Hispanics as a group integrating into the American mainstream, one not overly bound by racial constraints but instead able to get ahead through hard work.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/18/opinion/biden-latino-vote-strategy.html

I don't identify as Hispanic, so I cannot speak to this issue with the same level of authenticity as these authors, but their survey result echoes the past "integration" of other ethnic minority groups into the US (White) mainstream. There was a time when German, Irish, or Italian heritage was much more salient than it is today. Now these European peoples are part of the White polyglot category in the US. It seems most Hispanic people would also rather identify with the White polyglot than the POC polyglot.

The oversimplified categories of White and POC don't work the same way for everybody. Even the US Census recognizes that there are White Hispanics and Non-White Hispanics -- and according to the Census a majority of Hispanics in the US identify as White.

If I arbitrarily threw most men into the category "women" and addressed them as "she", they would probably get pissed off.  But on the Left we arbitrarily throw most Hispanics into the category of POC, even though most of them identify as White.  Why are we doing this?  What purpose does it serve?

And is a White Hispanic today part of the supposed 400-year-old White Supremacy project in the US?  Should a White Hispanic feel guilt over the behavior of their White ancestors in the US?

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How would we begin to assimilate the Black identity into the mainstream?  How can we diminish the salience of black skin, the way we've diminished the salience of German ancestry?

We don't call anybody in the US a German-American the way we call people African-Americans or Cuban-Americans.  How did that happen?

It requires both the ethnic/racial group, and the rest of us, to stop focusing on their group identity, instead focusing on their individual accomplishments.  That's what happened with Germans during the first half of the 20th Century, that's what's happening with Hispanics now.  But we seem to be going the other way with respect to Blacks, focusing even more on their group identity now than we did 10 years ago.

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Personally, as a Leftist, I'd rather we focus on each individual's rights than each individual's accomplishments.  Because if we're playing a game of accomplishments, then we're creating a class society in which some people are greatly rewarded for being better than others in some arbitrary way.

The concept of "work ethic" is abused by our ruling classes to keep the vast majority of the population in wage slavery (or unemployment) with only a fraction of their fair share of the country's wealth.

I mean, we do have Black billionaires in the US now.  We've had a Black President and the odds are we'll soon have a Black Vice President.  We have Black Senators, Black CEOs, a Black Supreme Court Justice.  It is possible for a Black person to play the game of accomplishments and win.

I'm more concerned about the rest of us, the 99% who don't win the game, regardless of our skin color or ethnic heritage.  Too much of our national income and wealth goes to the winners.  I think more of our national income and wealth should be shared by everybody, regardless of accomplishments.

People on the Right argue that Socialism will destroy the work ethic, that the only way to motivate people to work hard is to reward them for hard work.

But can't we do both?  Can't we both reward hard work and share more of our income and wealth with the 99%?  Why is this presented as an either/or situation?  Either Socialism or Capitalism, you must pick one extreme or the other.  I advocate for more sharing, not to eradicate the rewards for hard work.

Sure, reward people for working longer hours.  Reward people for taking risks.  Reward people for coming up with great ideas.  Reward people for leadership.  But our current rewards system has gone completely bonkers, handing out extremes of wealth over $100 billion to the top three winners, while one in six children lives in poverty -- 12 million children live in poverty.  This is an unimaginable number of children living in poverty in the US, the richest country in the world as measured both by total income and by total wealth.

If you lose the game, your children grow up in poverty.  Something's not right about this game.  Way too much goes to the winners.  Not enough goes to the losers.

Yet on the Left we're consumed by the application of racial and ethnic identities to each other, sometimes to people who don't even want them applied on their behalf.  Most Hispanics don't want to be treated as POC.  Most Hispanics identify as White.  I think there's a lesson for all of us on the Left --> a lot of people care more about improving their lives than about the labels we apply to them.

White men are part of the 99% also, part of the working class also, part of those who "confront corporate power when they fight for equality on the job and in their communities" also.

When you're aiming for inclusivity, don't forget to include white men.

Yeah, yeah, there's plenty of white men in positions of corporate and political power. But there's even more white men who are not in positions of power. Those are the people I don't want the Left to forget. Most white men are not in positions of power.

I was talking with a friend the other day, he's a white guy. He donates time and money to a local volunteer organization. He told me one of the leaders of the organization, a woman, asked him if he was interested in joining their board. At first he deferred, saying, "I'm a white guy, the last thing you want on your board is another white guy."

She disagreed, "No, we're having trouble finding white guys to join our board nowadays. They're all saying what you just said. I think you'd be a great addition to our board."

It seems we're training an entire generation of white men on the Left to shut up and sit down, when we need everybody on board if the Left is to start solving our problems. Diversity means white men also. Diversity means everybody is represented.

And so long as I'm preaching diversity here, don't forget to include Christians. Jesus said a lot of things that folks on the Left would agree with:

For I was hungry, and you gave me food to eat. I was thirsty, and you gave me drink. I was a stranger, and you took me in. I was naked, and you clothed me. I was sick, and you visited me. I was in prison, and you came to me.

So let's not rule out Christians when building our coalitions on the Left.  Diversity means everybody is represented.

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And here's when I go all the way:

A lot of people who consider themselves to be conservatives or Republicans, they still share some of the goals of the Left.  Some conservatives care deeply about immigration reform, others care deeply about the environment.  Some conservatives think rich people should pay higher taxes, others think we should increase the minimum wage.

There are pro-choice conservatives.  There are LGBT conservatives.  There are POC conservatives.  There are definitely women conservatives.

Instead of treating conservatives as an implacable bloc of opposing interests, the Left can work with individual conservatives on individual issues, to build shifting majorities in favor of Left issues, shifting majorities that include different sets of conservatives, depending on the issue.

Diversity means: including conservatives.  Diversity means everybody is represented.  Even the people you disagree with on one issue or another.

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Diversity means: including police officers, and border police.  The last time I paid attention to a Democratic Socialists of America leadership election, the biggest drama was the discovery that one of the candidates for the board had, OMG, once been a police officer.  People were irate, they called it a "cover up".  The candidate stepped down over the furor.  How dare a former police officer run for a leadership position with the DSA!?!?!

If we really believe in the 99%, we've got to include all 99%.  That means including every family who earned less than $400,000 last year.  Even if they're white, even if they're conservative, even if they're police officers, even if they're Christians.  If you really believe in the 99% taking on the corporate interests that are destroying the planet while increasing inequality, you need to figure out how to make common cause with as many people in the 99% as you can.

Many Native-American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_among_Native_Americans_in_the_United_States

There's such reverence for Native Americans on the Left.

The 2020 Democratic Party Platform begins by acknowledging, honoring, and paying respects to the Tribal Nations and Indigenous peoples who have existed "here since time immemorial".

https://www.demconvention.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/2020-07-31-Democratic-Party-Platform-For-Distribution.pdf

There's a narrative on the Left about how White Supremacy came to North America, how White civilizations introduced both genocide and slavery to lands that were supposed to have previously been occupied by more innocent types of nonwhite humans who lived in accord with each other and with nature.

The historical record does not show that the First Peoples were generally more peaceful and egalitarian than other groups of humans.  They fought wars, they captured and traded slaves, they practiced torture.

The main differences between the European colonists and the First Peoples who preceded them were these two: (1) Europeans had tougher immune systems because they'd been exposed to more diseases, diseases that practically wiped out the First Peoples upon exposure; and (2) Europeans had deadlier weapons technologies.

Otherwise, we were all humans, all members of the same species, all descendants of the same Mitochondrial Eve who lived in Sub-Saharan Africa around 150,000 years ago.

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The main reason we humans do not continue to endorse legalized slavery in the 21st Century is because we have ubiquitous labor-saving machines powered by fossil fuels that are cheaper to own and operate than slaves.  Slavery, serfdom, and similar caste systems have been widespread throughout human history.  But slavery became economically inefficient during the 19th Century.

We ignore history when we presume that White Supremacy is somehow different from how any set of humans have operated.  When one class of humans has power over another class, they oppress them.  It's human nature.

These class systems operate differently among capitalists, and differently among socialists, but they persist.  Our ideologies and justifications are endlessly creative -- why one group of humans should have more power and more wealth than another.

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There have also always been counter-ideologies -- that everybody should be treated fairly, that leaders should serve at the pleasure of the led, that resources should be shared, that neighbors in need should be welcomed and cared for, that humans should live in harmony with nature.

I can add my weight to these counter-ideologies in the 21st Century, but I have no illusion that my side will win.  Especially when my side tells lies to itself about human history and human nature.