daltotron

Yeah. I thought this sort of shit would've been cut down after those CIA layoffs trump did or whatever, or, that's what everyone's been jokingly saying, at least. Probably it's more along the lines that social media companies keep selectively propagating this shit because they're a revolving door with those three letter agencies anyways. Saw a LOT of black liberals posting with starbucks cups and mcdonald's after the election, and talking about how they want to buy beachfront property in gaza, because the michigan vote didn't come through for Kamala. Most of those people probably weren't conforming to the boycott in the first place, and more broadly didn't give a shit at all, but still, incredibly harrowing stuff, there.

Anyways yeah I agree with the other guy, if you wanted to spurn discussion, you probably would've been better off posting some shit that's not like, immediately just blaming the protest votes? Is in better faith more generally? Probably wouldn't gain as much traction exclusively because of that, as is the case with the site, but you'd at least not be contributing to that sort of bad faith discussion as much, which I think the initial post is doing.

You know I think maybe this resolves me that more people should just, run for political office, or maybe, resolves me that the dirtbag left is a concept which could probably be measured with some sort of success. You're probably right, the left needs to learn that people would probably vote for any stupid piece of shit with no sense of decorum, as long as that guy gave them healthcare. No sense of decorum actually might be an advantage, even, because then there's nothing left to rhetorically attack you with. That's sort of the whole, like, john fetterman-phenomena. Too bad he turned into an actual piece of shit instead of just being a guy that dresses in a hoodie.

I was up and down many threads immediately before the election straining with every fiber of my being to explain to people the variety of ways in which their democracy is actually a sham and isn't effective or reflective of popular will or sentiment.

The most I got in return was that, nah, none of that applies, because I just don't really feel like it. It's infuriating.

Every 4 years the machine churns, every 4 years people forget everything that happened the last time, forget every detail of the system, and just decide to kind of, sloganeer constantly rather than discuss critically, because that brings them some sense of control over the way things are going. It can be prefigured into their personal narrative of events, and how much they, personally, put on the line, how much they tried to change people's minds. A participation trophy for their rubber stamp, for their ticking of a certain box, while the real rulers are off in washington making the real decisions. Ultimately it's kind of fruitless, I think, or should only be viewed along the same lines as being personal slop-entertainment, or "self-improvement". Anyone who's not honest with at least that much can't really be trusted to speak on these things, I think.

It's not even really that, it's just that home loans of like 10,000 to people who have made rent for the past 2 years and have a salary of over 80,000 but not over 200,000 and own a small business and own at least 2 cats but not over 3 cats and have a birthmark in the shape of a strawberry, isn't very enticing or hopeful policy. Neither is campaigning with liz cheney when like 200,000 people are being killed with US bombs.

Can we find five or ten people like that amongst the American population of 330 million people?

probably not, no

You know, I think despite what I've all said, being mad is good. It drives people towards action, it's just that I'm concerned about what said action is. I don't want everyone to get trapped in another 2017 #resist spiral, and I don't want us to fall into the trap of believing that feeding rhetorical owns to the algorithm in the form of content is some kind of valuable praxis. I don't want everyone to just kind of, have their punches absorbed by this kind of non-newtonian fluid machine that we've been met with.

I do agree that they get kind of, coddled by the media, or maybe a better word is, infantilized. Current VP basically wrote a book which basically did just that and rode that to his current position. Of course, you know, it's impossible to have these kinds of conversations with a lot of them, you know, it's impossible to have conversations about what's good to believe in, much less what to believe, much less what's good, if you're almost barely capable of talking in the first place.

In any case, I can empathize. I haven't built anything out of my life, many of my friends haven't really been afforded the opportunity either, especially those ones which are sort of, compoundingly less fortunate. I really worry that I won't be able to do anything substantial for my trans friends, you know? I can get them DIY, I can host a couch surfer, but to not be able to really solve these things at any larger level is kind of a motherfucker. It's depressing enough to look around at your own life and realize that everything is shit, it's much more depressing to realize that's also the case for everyone you know and care about, or is worse. I dunno. Depressing note to end on, but I guess that's how it goes.

but they don’t get off the hook because of that.

That's precisely my problem, there. I don't understand why people are "on the hook", or what "the hook" even is. Why we entertain this idea that people even have any agency whatsoever, for one, right. Like, the inherent problem of free will, people will just reject that either at its face, and supplement it with absolutely nothing, or they will reject the core lesson at play there.

Like, if this "hook" manifested in terms of people going out and engaging in mutual aid, or resolving to live, out of a sense of keeping other people accountable through just their own living, their own existence, that'd be cool. I've seen some people actually do that, and that seems productive, sure, why not. Hell, if "the hook" manifested in people going out and starting to move luigi style, against the people that are enabling this in, order of magnitude, I'd be fine with that. Other forms of militant action would also be acceptable.

Instead, oftentimes "the hook" just manifests in a bunch of easy rhetorical owns that often aren't even really productive for letting off steam. Probably because people aren't really capable of any other form of agency, or "holding people accountable", in their own lives, so they just resolve to like, making kind of aggressive twitter posts at people. That feels like fun and epic praxis, but it's not, it actually actively serves a counterproductive purpose as it is manipulated by these larger algorithms. That's the sort of thing that I'm talking about when I talk about, say, people FAFO-posting about how happy they are that conservative migrants are gonna get sent to the fucking death camps. There are liberals who are overjoyed at the irony in that idea, and I don't think that serves to do anything but make people rightfully more bitter at that behavior.

Like, what's the purpose of this "blame" here, what does it do? I don't want to shoot myself in the foot just to spite someone else, is what I'm getting at.

I think it's in some sense a reflection of the modern system, right? It's obviously optimal, more efficient, more moral, whatever, to organize the economy in certain ways as opposed to other ways. Or, at least, I think so, or, I think that the underlying reality doesn't really change regardless of the observer or how you term things, so what is efficient and moral will still arise naturally, and these disagreements, minor material management squabbles, don't matter all that much in the grand scheme of things.

So, realistically, even under capitalism, you might expect the economy to be run efficiently, right? It does, or, almost does, in some places. Nevertheless, the sort of, initial belief, unyielding as it is in the face of reality, that there are certain people which are better than others, certain people which are more deserving of others, whether that be due to an inborn difference, or if that's just due to them "working harder", for whatever reason which we can't actually point to logically. That belief creates a scenario in which people, maybe believing themselves to be the best, maybe just believing that their idea of management, their values, are more productive for society, perhaps, they want to extend their reach, survive and compete naturally in the market. Maybe even the idea that they just, are better than the immediate alternative, or that if they didn't do it, then someone else would, which isn't exactly hard to believe. The best immediate gains, so as to outcompete and absorb your competition, happen in the short term, and then eventually we have a market that's shaped entirely just by short term thinking, shaped entirely by the competitive environment that spawns it.

And so, I dunno, the people that sort of, absorb this mentality through cultural osmosis, I don't know if it's abnormal or not. Then extend that to your basic xenophobia, like you said, pretty ripe recipe for a society that sort of progressively falls apart in this sort of a way.

You're not really who I'm talking about in my post, then. I agree with most of what you say. I was mostly talking about liberals who explicitly mock them, I was talking about "FAFO" shit, I dunno if you've seen it or not, but it's become a prevalent reaction. Just the same as, say, when you see people online mocking the idea of a starbucks boycott because palestinians didn't vote, right. Posing with their starbucks cups. Most of these people weren't ever committed to a boycott, which, sure, fine. But it sees that sort of a politics as explicitly transactional, rather than being founded on just doing what's right and good. That's the sort of thing that I'm getting at, rather than people just, I dunno. Not going out of their way to talk to conservatives at all about their ideologies or try to convince them. I think people should do that still, sure, but I'm not going to personally fault people for not going out of their way to do that, or being like, explicitly focused more on the people immediately around them, and their safety.

Are these pleas for nuance ever aimed at the people voting for real actual neo-Nazis, instead of the people the neo-Nazis are going after?

My point is that those people are often the same. We saw a lot of this in the immediate aftermath of the election, with people pointing towards the apparently shockingly large contingent of latino trump voters. These are people who will be explicitly targeted by the administration that they voted for, and many liberals are fully willing to turn around and blame them for their current circumstance, laugh at them, mock them, whatever. I kind of find that behavior disgusting, is what I'm getting at, basically. More than just being kind of, uncouth, in my mind, it's unproductive. You're not gonna win over a voter with which you would actually have much in common, with those methods. I think it's easy to forget that in our current hyperpolarized social media age, the sort of, uninformed idiot centrist voter, even though they now have the pretense of being extremely informed and extremely radicalized after listening to two hour podcasts, they still exist. Those idiot bros now pretend to be super informed and edgy extremists, and we get that, again, even in your latino voters, but the fundamental lack of information still remains. These are just people who have been manipulated, they're not actually real or substantial ideological opposition. They exist in this propagandized state, this eclectic and confused ideological ball of misinformation, as a kind of explicit rubber stamp for our current political landscape. Many of them can still be convinced.

Empathy and nuance aren't something that you do because you're guaranteed to get something in return from the other person as a kind of, reciprocal action. They're tools that you use to analyze your opposition, understand them better, and plan accordingly. They're internally rewarding methods, rather than being something you just do to get a reward.

I think we've all understood it to be the case for quite a while now that plenty of conservatives, being relatively uninformed blank slate or single issue voters, will actually agree with communism, as long as you don't use the word communism. Liberals, even, will not commonly do this, because they usually have much more pre-established and calcified opinions about the reasons why the world is the way that it is that go beyond just the surface level. That could even be considered a symptom of their higher education. We've understood that to be the case for like the last 20 years.

Why, then, is there still such a significant commitment towards mocking your rural conservative idiot voter, in the rhetoric of the left? I think there's a lot of people who still hold onto some semblance of liberalism in their culture, their rhetoric, their attitudes, even after they become a part of the left. I think there's probably also a significant proportion of actual liberals which, being controlled opposition, seeks exclusively to widen that divide and sort of, function as the pepsi to the coke, even as that strategy actively drives us towards more and more extremism and destroys the country. In any case, beyond the extremely cynical corporate institutional wing that actively desires for the country to be more right wing in service, at least theoretically, of tax breaks and a lack of regulations, or maybe more coherently, in service of short term gains, the regular individual should understand that this rhetoric, this strategy, it isn't really getting them anywhere. It's actively harmful. I think at some point with the individual participation in this behavior, people start to build up their own complexes around it, eerily similar to the complexes that conservatives begin to take, as I've described previously. A belief in a total and logic-defying free will, an innate moral character, meritocracy.

They fall for true liberalism. It shouldn't be any mystery why I might not like that ideology, I should think. Not in my leftists, not in my liberals. We should understand that's failed.

I mean, you can understand why black people have and have had historically a very unique position in this country as a kind of uniquely ostracized population, right? That's not a 1 to 1 comparison we'd make in like, any other circumstance, I dunno why we'd start now. Effectively, what I'm saying is something that goes back quite a ways, you could come up with a lot of historical examples of this, it's not new. Italian immigrants after ww2, eastern european immigrants, irish immigrants, even jewish immigrants to a certain extent, they were all able to be subsumed by the larger umbrella of whiteness precisely as they voted in accordance with more conservative interests which explicitly do not like them. The same thing that would have happened in this election with latinos, except we've run up on the rails of that process because things are materially different. What I'm saying is that it doesn't really make sense to get mad at that voterbase for voting in that particular way.

The broader point I'm making is that there's a difference between thinking about these things critically, and getting mad at the wind, and I see a lot of people getting mad at the wind. Except, unlike getting mad at the wind, their anger is actually harmful, actually creates a constant feedback loop in how it's directed. Some people get mad at a dog for biting them. Certainly, it makes sense to get mad in general, since you've been bit, that's painful, and the dog is the most directly at fault object for that. Some people get mad at the owner, since they can't control their dog, you know, maybe that's a step removed, maybe that's even actually effective at preventing future bites, I dunno. Some people just start to move towards the medicine cabinet as soon as possible, so they can clean their bite. I would rather be the third person, in that example.