{"id":17,"count":5,"description":"In early May, 2020, during the covid-19 lockdown, I signed up for this facebook group that promoted itself as left-wing.\r\n\r\nI lasted about a week. I expected thoughtful lefty reflections. There were a few, but for the most part, I found the posts dominated by shallow-thinking, ranting, often name-calling lefties (or claimants thereunto) with personal axes to grind and endless self-indulgent repeating (like lamenting Bernie's failure to win the presidential nomination).\r\n\r\nFor awhile, I tried posting gentle correctives, but I soon realized that my efforts were as useless as trying to reason with Trump supporters. I offered a few independent posts, but most were rejected by the monitors. Since the same monitors were approving all those other rants, and since I was writing reflective pieces, and since I was never told of a rejection or its reason, I can only make unpleasant guesses about the critical ability of the monitors. I even came to wonder whether this was really a site to sow dissension among leftists, or even one run by old old-left sectarian leftists intolerant of any viewpoint that veered an iota from any \"principle\" of their own dogma.\r\n\r\nThe posts in this category are a collection of some of what I encountered and wrote about before I opted out of the site.","link":"https:\/\/www.richardyanowitz.com\/wordpress\/category\/political\/turnleft\/","name":"TURN LEFT facebook group and its discontents","slug":"turnleft","taxonomy":"category","parent":2,"meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richardyanowitz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/17"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richardyanowitz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richardyanowitz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/category"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.richardyanowitz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/2"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.richardyanowitz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?categories=17"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}