There's never a reckoning of just how toxic, reactionary and downright conservative 'Left' discourse is often on Twitter - even pre-Musk. It's incredibly naive to believe that the algorithms on that site have not impacted people's politics and sense of self-worth directly, and that this hasn't had an impact on 'irl' politics.

It's been a decade since I start pointing out that the very vocal, online, anglophone 'Left' has a reactionary problem. Dictators from Assad to Putin are romanticized and even supported. Entire movements and revolutions are dismissed as some kind of CIA plot. The only people allowed to have any political agency are Westerners, and this includes non-Westeners who exclusively center the West in any analysis. There is nothing remotely revolutionary about this ideology.

The only criteria in many circles is that you say something vaguely 'pro-Palestine', but God forbid this includes knowing anything about the Palestinian working class in Syria that was annihilated by Assad. God forbid you know that even before Israel unleashed hell on Gaza, Assad unleashed hell on Yarmouk.

Meanwhile, authoritarian regimes happily learn from one another. China very explicitly referred to Russian and American imperialism as well as Israeli surveillance tech as models to follow in so-called 'Xinjiang'. But hey, China is doing a communism coz they occasionally produce nice quotes that can be turned into memes for you to feel edgy and shit.

The EU continued to fund the genocide in Ukraine by allowing Russian fossil fuels to be 'oilwashed' (or wtv) via their genocidal buddy Aliyev while he does his own genocide in Nagorno-Karabakh, but hey Russia something USSR wow nice anthem Stalin am I right?

Everything is so fucking stupid

Today it is not just controversial to be anti-Assad in so many so-called 'pro-Palestine' circles online, but actual Palestinian-Syrians whose entire history is being tortured, murdered and exiled by both Israel and Assad are completely erased because their very existence is inconvenient to dumbass campist/tankie politics. It's now the norm.