>>2108506>This is somewhat of an aside, but something I've always found interesting about Trump is that he's relatively progressive when it comes to the the LGB side of the LGBT spectrum.You picked up on this. Trump's introduction to Republican Party politics at CPAC was organized by GOProud, a group of gay Republicans, for precisely that reason. The 2016 election year was also interesting because Peter Thiel was up on stage at the convention saying he was proud to be gay (and a Republican). Milo Yiannopoulos was also turning into a celebrity and was performing drag shows to college Republican groups, but I think he was a bit too degenerate even for them so he didn't last much longer beyond the election as a quantity. There wasn't as much of it last year, but I did remember Joe Rogan and J.D. Vance talking about how they'd win the "normal gay guy vote."
>>2108594>This is an ideology that lack any direct economic justification.Where do ideas come from? Some God in the sky? When I look up, I don't see one. If these things seem like they lack an economic justification, then you haven't looked deeply enough at the underlying economic logic. But when I say that, it's not to look uncritically at the supremacy of economics, or the dependency (which might be a better word than justification) on a material substructure, or that such categories would/should structure a non-capitalist society.
>Why don't banks organise processions too? I'm pretty sure there are just as many hardcore Christians as there are LGTBs. Maybe not processions (just curious, do you live in a heavily Catholic country?) but banks in America sponsor religious events all the time. They're always partnering with these televangelists on "philanthropic" endeavors and "community outreach" programs "to benefit local communities." In addition to providing financing for everything they do. But people don't think much of it. But that's what religion is now, it's another business.
>It's sad how so many leftists become ultra-progressives in terms of familial or sexual relations when big capital is saying the same thing and trying to capture and commodify it along with the underlying economic and property relations. It's goofy-ass cartoon Marxism to assume the existence of a politically unified capitalist class, which is actually a fragile and arduous achievement even within a single nation-state, to say nothing across nations. "Big capital is saying…" but which capital? Capitalists have different interests, and capitalism as a whole has contradictory tendencies.
An example of how that relates to LGBTs, I think it's pretty simple. I may be gay, but I really have the industrial revolution to thank for that. That has freed people up (along with urbanization, modernization) to live more autonomous sexual lives. But the "family" is still important for acquiring and dividing private property contributing to the reproduction of class society, and so there was a contradiction which was resolved, dialectically within capitalism, by same-sex marriage and the embourgeoisement of same-sex life. Strictly speaking, however, "the family" does not exist.
>>2108660>so whats the point of all the macho shit, to prepare the country for war? bush era 2.0?If you listen to Palantir CEO Alex Karp's interviews, he can sound like that. He describes wokeness as the biggest threat to "our way of life" as it's undermining America's ability to wage wars against ruthless and amoral enemies in the world, and things being as they are, America must be at least as ruthless and amoral as them, so they'll be afraid. At the same time, I think he thinks of himself as a "progressive" guy and probably sees macho gays as compatible with that project, but it's hardly like there are any real monarchists left either.
>>2108678>yeah but a ton of young men are voting for the right because they think the dems will send them to die in ukraineIf young men voted for Bernie instead, would that stop the build-up towards war? Think of the social democrats who wonder why electing AOC doesn't change anything. It's because the legislature, or even who the president is, is not the only institution in society as a source of power. There's a lot of other stuff from educational institutions, communications / media, corporate offices, factories, business associations and assorted lobby groups, the military etc., which altogether amounts to a hegemonic structure of power by some social blocs over others. I'm not saying don't vote actually and that it doesn't matter, but people can become too fixated on elections, so everything else is secondary, as if power exists in a relationship in a symmetrical way between the population and who is sitting in the White House or Congress. I just wouldn't stake everything on it, is all.