I don’t even agree with your shit how am I better at it than you. How are you gonna jerk off over the rules based societal order and then claim you can ignore whatever highest court you have because you personally disagree. mfer you just reinvented feudalism again
It feels like liberals are discussing the lore of a book or TV show or video game when they talk about politics sometimes; they can get into very angry debates over it but there’s always this sense of detachment from it actually affecting them in any significant way. It’s taking abstract positions in real life problems that affect them directly. “How do we best protect democracy and fight authoritarianism?” Dude, who gives a shit, how does this affect you at all?! You’re dying from the fucking pesticides the agribusiness companies pump into farmland, and PFAS, and polluted water, and pandemics! “See, I think that autocrats like Putin really get off on having a sense of power over other people - there was this really great body language expert that–” My brother in christ, a police officer just shot a child outside your house and all your kids are depressed.
It’s fake, it’s fiction, it’s bullshit, but the suspension of disbelief allows them to discuss it as if it was real - except the things that they are discussing are actually real! Their framing is completely off-kilter. “Here’s my favorite and least favorite faction in Game of Thrones, and here’s what that says about why China’s authoritarianism doesn’t work and why the United States is, despite its flaws, still a good force in the world.” What the fuck are you talking about? You’re going to die in the post-WW3 rationing period when all goods from China are cut off! Every acre of natural land within 10 miles of you is being converted to cement! You need to start figuring out how to do first aid, not giving explanations on reddit as to why Israel, on the other side of the planet, has some abstract metaphysical right to exist! You might as well be writing a paragraph on Dumbledore’s Army and their training regimen. You don’t actually give a shit about Israel, you just picked up a series of beliefs from the zeitgeist that are totally incompatible with that other set of beliefs you have, but it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, you don’t care about forming a coherent worldview informed by history and science, but instead creating justifications for your own position in the golden billion and feeling variously good or bad about the events that pop up on the nightmare rectangle while you’re on the shitter, while your life and everybody else’s crumbles in slow (or fast) motion around you. It’s entertainment, it’s a football game, you root for one side - Democrats and Republicans, Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Palestine, China and Taiwan, Trump vs the Deep State, whatever. And if they win, that’s great! If they lose, that sucks! But your life, your own life, the stuff you do when you aren’t engaged in the theater, is getting worse either way.
Not only that, but there’s a sense in which everybody has to ditch their own self-interest in the belief that it makes them selfish children, and the only way to be taken seriously isn’t to say “Well, I want to increase hospital funding because I have X disorder and I would like myself and similar people to survive,” but instead “Here’s some economic analysis showing that doing this funding would lead to increased profits from people with X disorder working harder and more efficiently in the future.”
Me telling my friends how fucked life is on SSI, watching them agree with how awful it is, and then realizing they think it’s some kind of accident
I need to relisten to like six Chapo episodes to find where one of them mentioned the quote (paraphrasing) “The ideology of neoliberalism is one where there are many victims and no perpetrators” in the sense that people suffering is treated in all cases like a natural disaster, with total blindness to the idea that systems might be built for the outcome that they consistently produce, decade after decade, for the majority of people the impact.
That’s perfect. If you can find the original please give me a ping.
A friend of mine (this one a Marxist) had their teaching hours unexpectedly and catastrophically cut right before the beginning of the semester. When they ranted to their graduate advisor, the one who was supposed to advocate for them at faculty meetings or whathaveyou, he replied, entirely unironically, and as if it excused his failure, by saying “Well, Hannah Arendt said that in a bureaucracy, no individual is to blame . . .” For some reason that didn’t help with rent.
God I want that on a tee shirt or something
Seems a little clunky to me. What makes you say it would work?
Maybe not literally, its just such a good quote
tag yourself im “feeling variously good or bad about the events that pop up on the nightmare rectangle while you’re on the shitter”
GOOD post
Leftists aren’t free from this too, sadly. Most of the usual debates like Trotsky vs Stalin, anarchists vs communists and so on are too completely abstract and disconnected from reality.