daltotron

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.

Social media really accelerated that particular kind of violent, hedonistic stupidity, I think. Explicitly monetized it, explicitly selects for it, even on platforms which would otherwise appear to be algorithmically agnostic in their format. I'm not sure how to solve that, or if it's even solvable, in the current system in which the internet exists. I think I still need to watch that one zizek video where he talks about how the function of ideology is to kill hope, and I maybe kind of agree with that statement at face value even if he's probably going to end up saying something much more complicated and nuanced in the actual video.

You don't have to read all this if you don't want to, but it feels as though many things which are otherwise politically agnostic, ideologically agnostic, are kind of, thrust into the political realm with great violence, mostly as a kind of hedonistic rhetorical game rather than through a legitimate desire to improve things. In order to score political points. Things like public transportation, something which is otherwise politically neutral, actually not that related, fundamentally, to any ideology inherently, get politicized, and then they're guaranteed to die in that throes of that. The rights of transgender people is maybe another such example. These are things which, regardless of your ideological or political predisposition, are totally fine to have, right. Public transportation, or, maybe put more literally, regardless of public-private structure, trains, buses, trams, subways, even bikes and pedestrian-friendly development, is just explicitly more efficient than the car centric, overly privatized shit we currently have. That's true in both a privatized context and in a public context, and you could have an orientation towards either method of development regardless of your politics. The elites, presumably, want a better standard of living, not even just long term, but on the scale of, say, the next five or ten years, right, and mass transit projects can achieve that goal, even for them, by virtue of letting them save on the costs spent on their peasantry, their underclass, and increases the level by which private roadways, a private transportation, can be used easily by them. Transgender rights are the same way, decreasing trans healthcare provides a maybe minor, yet still existent, cost, it imposes a cost on society. You hear this explicitly called out whenever some chud talks about the suicide rate. Ideally, you would want to avoid suicide! You would want that healthcare, you should want to prevent that, in an ideologically neutral context, because it's strictly inefficient!

I think, then, maybe the great achievement of the social media superweapon in a post-nuclear, cold war context, is to manipulate these aesthetic ideological dispositions, disconnected from reality, to recreate the appearance of politics without any of the content. I think maybe cynically that it's just a grand kind of illusion used by three letter security agencies and private capital interests to explicitly manipulate the population, not into necessarily being concerned with actual material reality, but into being lost in this kind of hedonistic game world. I dunno. I think even beyond that we're kind of, as we're seeing now, we're now all explicitly lost in that illusion, the illusion that was created by the internet, or, maybe, the illusion that created the internet. Even at the highest levels of government, this is the case. There's no concern with any basis in reality, anymore. So under the guise of that, right, I think maybe we're cooked, is I guess what I mean. Nobody's steering the ship, anymore, even.

Liberals are sort of, fundamentally incapable of understanding that the republican voter is more than just like, some stereotypical idiot white southerner, or self-interested multi-millionaire, I think. They're incapable of understanding that republican voters can often be some of the more marginalized in society. The disabled, and migrants, as we've seen. Dumb people, even, right, people with less education. Explicitly, explicitly this is the case, they bring it up all the time! As though that lack of education is some sort of moral failing, or thing to poke fun at. They don't understand that conservatives will rightly point out that sort of mockery and call them cruel elitists. It takes this cruel and apathetic stance towards those groups, this unempathetic stance that has no interest in understanding how we got there, this incurious stance. It's so overly moralized, to the point of incoherence. Well, that disabled person or migrant voted for trump, so, FAFO, they deserve to die, I guess. What am I to do? Well, looks like the palestinian voter in michigan decided not to vote, so, FAFO, guess their family is reserved to being buried under beachfront property. What am I to do?

It's callous, it's a self-callousing kind of reaction. It makes you number, and it makes you dumber. It's cope, basically, I guess is what I'm saying. It's a way to contend with a cruel reality by becoming crueler yourself.

It also has some intersection with two things. This assumption of free will, and thus a kind of innate moral character and disposition, a constant internal moral agency for all your actions, and so there's obviously something it inherently shares there with liberalism philosophically, right.

It also, in the positive rhetoric, has an intersection with this sort of, political armchair jockeying, where everyone theorizes that rhetorical moves are being made by politicians for some theoretical person out there that isn't them, but the fundamental character of the party is still agreeable, and okay. You can't question the party's positioning on Gaza. Even if you can cede that it's immoral, explicitly, then it has to be done because it's electorally advantageous. I don't understand how they can't see how this alienates a ton of people right off the bat, because it shows that you're willing to do things which are actively morally detestable and still not win. It's never the case for policy which itself is a positive end, like healthcare, that they are willing to violate legal and political norms in order to take action on that. Or even, say, violating political norms in order to stop a genocide. It's only that they're willing to keep up a genocide in order to win electorally, and then whatever follows is sort of what you're just supposed to get as a reward for sitting through 200,000+ people dying.

So I dunno, that all just pisses me off. I wish people could argue about actual tangible policy, and then pursue that unabashed as an unqualified good, rather than being tricked into believing that their own sense of good, their own goals, are naive, and they need to settle for more exploitation as the cost of doing business. It's both a cope that makes you callous and it's a nihilism that grinds you down. An apathy, in the face of politics.

I also don't understand why in the political realm we have all been so reduced to viewing things purely in terms of like, whatever is within our black and white moral compass. So team-based. No attempt at nuance, understanding, or empathy. It's insane, I think social media has truly kind of rotted people's brains, in that respect, by shaping the contexts in which these kinds of interactions happen, reducing the means of people's expression into pre-approved categories, into little sequestered realities. We're maybe cooked cause of that, I don't know.

Stage a coup of their own?

Unironically, yes.

Well, I dunno if I'd have faith in the democrats to really do that well, considering they implicitly agree with a good majority of the shit trump's doing and don't really seem to give much of a shit either way. Especially looking at how they haven't fought back against narratives around illegal migrants being criminal superpredators, even though that's all completely made up. There are other examples of democrats being totally incompetent but I do pretty much fully believe at this point that they're controlled opposition.

More broadly, no, I don't think I hold that the democratic legitimacy of the obviously dumb as shit system is more valid than the lives of migrants, trans people, the elderly and disabled dependent on public medical care, or really anyone else under threat right now. I don't think they should have to suffer just because like, 20% of the population of the country are kind of politically unengaged dumbasses or psychotic small business owners who've been radicalized by facebook. I don't even particularly think that said 20% of the population should be made to suffer just because they're dumbasses or because they voted wrong, since we're all products of our circumstance, and suffering doesn't really make you a better person, so much as it just makes you suffer.

The FAFO attitude people are taking this time around is kind of concerning to me. Strikes me as very blatantly cruel, apathetic, and maybe naive. I can't blame people for being disengaged, but I can blame people for taking their frustrations out on people. I've even seen those freaks that want to report people to ICE for both being migrants and voting for the wrong guy. It's insane.

A lot of ink gets spilled around this kind of bullshit, when most of communism is focused more directly around anti-capitalism and economic theory.

Effectively, the preventative mechanism against authoritarianism is just democracy, but extended towards parts of the economy which, under capitalism, are conventionally privatized, and thus, are kind of ruled in an authoritarian, "meritocratic" manner. Then this authoritarian capitalism infiltrates and rules the public, democratic portions of society, as we've literally just seen right now with the kind of, explicitly corporate-backed trump administration. I mean, as we've been seeing for maybe the last 80 or so years, right, in a slow ramp up. Which isn't to say the US really had much of a democracy to begin with, it was sort of, designed from the inception to be more of an kind of joint-corporate state ruled by landowners, so in a roundabout way we are actually making america just as it was at inception. You could maybe contrast this situation of authoritarian capitalism with co-operative corporations, which sort of exist at various levels of democratic ownership, and exist to mixed success in a capitalist market context. Or union activity, maybe.

More specifically and directly to answer your question, you'd probably wanna use a Condorcet method, I'm partial to the Schulze method, and you'd maybe wanna set up certain factions of the economy to be voted on by those with domain-specific knowledge so as to not be overly politicized, weaponized, or met with undue interference by other portions of society. You want your railroad guys to be in control of the railroads, basically, rather than having to frame everything for the perhaps relatively uninformed general public. You want to avoid just using the public as a kind of rubber stamp where their approval of your program is contingent on how well you've phrased your proposal, because it just sort of meaninglessly increases costs for no reason. You want engagement to be legitimate rather than taken advantage of by cynical forces. Hopefully, by breaking up these specific sections of society, and giving them agency over their specific domain and nothing else, you can prevent a massive overly centralized and thus more authoritarian hierarchy from arising.

The other criticisms, say, of democracy itself, socialism doesn't quite do as well with. Say, with majoritarian rule slowly shrinking over time, or, the lines and borders that you draw up around particular domains creating a kind of insular and exclusive self-interest of a given class. Which conflicts explicitly with the previous idea, right, of splitting the economy into more and more factions so you can have each of them operate in their domain more efficiently. These would sort of be, more anarchist criticisms of socialism. Communism is sort of, depending on who you ask, some theoretical end state of all this which puts all of these questions out of mind, where everything is as flat as possible.

Realistically, these all tend to be kind of overblown as criticisms anyways, and the much bigger problems stem from the real world circumstances of trying to establish a communist state in a global capitalist hegemony, which is an inherently isolating, hostile, and cruel context. It's hard to do effective democracy in such a context, for the same reason that it's hard to have democracy on a pirate ship when you're getting shot full of holes, while, in other times, the ship would actually be ruled democratically.