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Zeroisanumber posted:It always blows me away how bitter and miserable these people are. You're in the last chapter of your life and this is how you spend your time?
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Mar 21, 2021 20:31
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I dunno, we all have access to the same information. Everyone with a computer in their home with an internet connection, or a phone in their pocket, or a TV in their front room with all the same channels everyone gets, has access to the same sources of information as each other. Some of us choose to watch bullshit, and some of us don't. That is the difference between us, not whether or not we have access to the bullshit. Because we all have access to bullshit just as much as we all have access to good information. And we all have access to ways of finding out how to discern between the two. The only difference between any of us is those that choose to do their due diligence and those that choose to become bitter twisted arseholes. And gently caress the latter group. gently caress them all to hell, they don't deserve the benefit of the doubt in the information age.
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Mar 21, 2021 22:37
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Ehh, some of us exist for other reasons in environments which prime us to disregard certain types of bullshit. We are not, in each moment, recreated tabula rasa and given the opportunity to choose based on our innate moral fiber whether to intake bullshit or not. Some of us have been on a trajectory our entire lives which lead us to the right conclusions and some of us have been on a trajectory our entire lives that lead us to the wrong ones. Though that certainly doesn't need to be an obstacle to just hating the people who end up with the wrong ones if you don't want it to be. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 22:51 on Mar 21, 2021 |
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Mar 21, 2021 22:49
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I think it’s fair to say freepers and their ilk are victims of a very large, very successful, very profitable right wing propaganda machine. That’s not to let them off the hook, by any means. But propaganda will never stop being effective.
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Mar 21, 2021 22:56
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These people have agency. They aren't victims.
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Mar 21, 2021 23:30
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Captain Log posted:tubad4ya
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Mar 22, 2021 00:23
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This one is sure special. Again, I'm not digging for these comments. These are what's recent. I didn't go any further than the most recent stuff on the first page. Most of the comments are less than a half hour old. Article Published - Less than one hour ago 612 Total Comments 76 More in the time I made this post Also, the Fox gif they use for the article is of a running crowd, but it zoom in on two black people running. Because of course it does. Miami Beach spring breakers hit with extended curfew after SWAT team forced to break up rowdy crowd https://www.foxnews.com/us/miami-beach-police-blocking-entry-into-city-after-swat-break-spring-breaker-crowds-up -------------------- Wass This isn’t a typical spring break crowd unless they’re all from Grambling and Howard Universities. Reply Likes - 203 HaywoodJablome066 Responding to Wass Miami got a “Spring Black” problem. Reply Likes - 60 earp1848 Responding to HaywoodJablome066 So does the world. Everyone hates em. Reply Likes - 15 ------------------------- DreamofSiargao I thought for a minute it was spring break in Nigeria. Likes - 75 ---------------------- HPT3 I would take bets that those involved in this latest of rowdiness were in no way college kids on spring break! More disruption by outside interference such as BLM or Antifa taking advantage of the situation! Likes - 19 ------------------- AmanitaVirosaMushrooms666 9 minutes ago 13% of population 90% of countries problem. Does it ever change? Not. Likes - 13 boforit Replying to AmanitaVirosaMushrooms666 8 minutes ago You can fix this with a heavy hand. Likes - 1 ------------------- godhimself435 14 minutes ago Nope.. definitely not. When whites move in an area, the neighbourhood expands, develops and it's property values go up and crimes down.. Blacks only create Ghettos and depreciate the area they reside in and they all become crime ridden. Want a problem at a party.. invite some Blacks. Likes - 27 earp1848 Replying to FedupVoter 19 minutes ago They cause over 70% of the US problems and don't even get me started on the rest of the world. Every country in the world HATES them. Fact. Likes - 32 ----------------
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Mar 22, 2021 00:46
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:These people have agency. They aren't victims. Abusers can be victims too. Their parents were all this way and so were their friends and neighbors. When you're raised like that you are actively told that critical thinking is evil and only satan leftists question certain things. They really don't have certain kinds of agency at all despite thinking they do. Of course none of this excuses anything they do or say and it's never too late to learn to be a better person but they simply refuse and I'm happy that they're dying off.
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Mar 22, 2021 01:22
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Edgar Allen Ho posted:I think it’s fair to say freepers and their ilk are victims of a very large, very successful, very profitable right wing propaganda machine. That’s not to let them off the hook, by any means. But propaganda will never stop being effective. I never said they weren't. But we're all exposed to the same propaganda, every time we go read Drudge or Breitbart, or everytime we click on a Ben Shapiro video against our better judgement, or (if you're in the US) every time you switch a TV on or walk into a bar and Fox News is on. Hell, every time we read this thread we're exposed to those viewpoints. We all have the agency to take the hatred we're fed from those sources at face value, or not to. Some people choose one way, others choose another way, and there has to be a difference between that. If not, then there's no free will and the universe is deterministic.
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Mar 22, 2021 01:25
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FLIPADELPHIA posted:These people have agency. They aren't victims. I don't pity them, but they are kind of amazing.
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Mar 22, 2021 02:56
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They want to believe it. The lies they enjoy are not the ones that we do. People's behavior is deterministic, but it doesn't change the fact that reality exists, and acting on false beliefs makes suboptimal outcomes. Truth-seeking is healthy. The problem is that it's healthy on a time scale far beyond an individual human's interests. Moment to moment, day to day it's easier to be happy and enrich yourself by believing or selling fiction. These guys are old and broken. They are thinking about their interests today, tomorrow, next month maybe. In their own minds they are finished and better outcomes are impossible. Truth has nothing for them. They are afraid of, for example, crime, but only right now. They can manage that fear perfectly fine by putting a label on it and attacking the label, bing bong. A more educated person with a longer view could realize that a real solution to crime involves long term education, correctional and racial reform. That would actually work. But that reform to these people would be like a house to a termite, so out of scope to be unimaginable, and totally irrelevant. Even if you explained reality to them, and even if they understood they would just be confused. Like, why are you explaining this to me when I clearly don't care? e. They would probably also think the smarty-pants was stupid for caring about truth at all, rather than just pursuing his own interests in a civilization that will take it's plotted course despite how you may rail against it. I think it's a strong candidate for a solution to the fermi paradox. There is no hope for a species to survive long term if it's made of myopic individuals that discount the future, and are able to produce fantasies that are preferable to reality. Preen Dog fucked around with this message at 03:50 on Mar 22, 2021 |
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Mar 22, 2021 03:25
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A lot of them also believe the world is inherently corrupt and broken and will be until Jesus comes back so if you can't fix the world and make it perfect why bother trying? In fact some of them even believe that it's evil to try and make a perfect society because it's arrogant because you think you can defy God's will. How much of that is actual genuine belief, and how much of it is just a convenient excuse they can use to be lazy and/or gently caress over people they don't like is up for debate, I guess. But evangelical Christianity does very much have the "the world is hosed and will always be hosed, and humans can't fix it" doctrine so that shapes a lot of how they view the world.
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Mar 22, 2021 04:49
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Most people raised by lovely people or experiencing bad conditions become at the very worst simply neutral. Maybe it is genes or bad luck or both but frankly if you get to the point of a loving Trump supporter or Freeper I really don't care.
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Mar 22, 2021 06:04
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Yeah but the fact that there exists people that came from either bad conditions or lovely upbringings that turn out to be perfectly nice level-headed reasonable people takes away that as an excuse/reason. (I know nobody here is excusing them, I'm more replying to all those countless "lets try to understand and empathise with the Trump voter" articles that plagued the Trump years)
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Mar 22, 2021 06:18
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Cactus posted:Yeah but the fact that there exists people that came from either bad conditions or lovely upbringings that turn out to be perfectly nice level-headed reasonable people takes away that as an excuse/reason. Yeah, that was what I was saying, sorry if it didn't come across. As someone who has been repeatedly probated for not empathizing with the Trump voter enough I'm the last guy to want to excuse them.
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Mar 22, 2021 08:11
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I'm in the middle on the issue. Most of what I'm talking about took place in the 90's, so if I say liberal it's in regards to being socially liberal more than anything else. A little backstory - My parents got divorced when I was five in 1989. It was a messy, nasty, courtroom divorce that my mother's side turned into a scorched earth campaign that ultimately backfired, because my father got joint custody. My mother's side are hundreds of years of southern, ultra-conservative, hardline evangelical, anti-evolution, anti-abortion, the Bible IS the Word of God Christians. I'm the first American on my father's side. They are British, socially liberal/left, mostly politically agnostic, atheists. I was a die hard Christian, taught to believe in literal demons scheming against me in physical "horns on their head" bodies. I also believed even thinking about a sin was the same as committing it. I've often heard my mother compared to Carrie's mom, but I've read that book. Carrie's mom ain't got poo poo on mine. It was bad enough I developed OCD from the constant need to perform prayers as a ritual to ward off the gates of literal hell. I also proudly told people I was a Republican and would try to lecture people about why Bob Dole was better than Bill Adulterous Clinton. When I made it to fifteen, I started to see through poo poo. I went to a public school and my father's British side of the family made a point of taking me to the UK every summer. They didn't rail against my mother's family, knowing it was too much to ask a kid to be at constant war. But they put a ton of effort into exposing me to a wide array of social experiences. For whatever reason, from fifteen to seventeen saw me do an about face. I turned agnostic, became vehemently anti-religion, and nearly became estranged from my mother throughout the process. I got rescued, but I don't feel like that's because I "rose above" or anything. I was lucky enough to get shown enough poo poo to make me question the hell I was born into. My purpose for this rant - I absolutely know some good, caring people who hold abhorrent views due to living their entire life without leaving the state of Tennessee, their church, or their family group. Those people are hosed and have little hope for making it out. Am I giving them a pass? No. People should be able to do the math about good and bad. But believing these people living in a box are going to start voting blue out of their own self reflection isn't gonna happen. Some people are intellectually trapped, so I don't necessarily hate them. I pity them.
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Mar 22, 2021 08:21
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I'm sorry you went through that. You could have chosen to reject everything you saw on those trips to the UK. You had the agency to continue to believe all of the hateful, magical thinking-type stuff you'd been taught all your life, just like so many do. But you didn't. You chose of your own free will to evaluate the information available to you - the exact same information that is available to everyone in the developed world who has access to TV channels, or libraries, or an internet connection - and come to the realisations that you did. No-one forced you, YOU did that. Which I think helps to make my point. I grew up and still live in the UK so I know what you're on about on that side of things and even I had some shameful beliefs as a kid/teenager some 25-30 years ago, but yeah I recognise that it must be much harder coming from the American deep south. Your existence, your story, proves that anyone else from that background that wilfully chooses to remain in hate and ignorance, is an arsehole, not a victim. The real victims are those that are disenfranchised by the people that these arseholes vote into power.
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Mar 22, 2021 13:53
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I really think the idea that it's individual choice that matters is a very strange thing because it's exactly the same kind of thinking that the right wing employs. If you do well in life (or in this case, if you have the right opinions) then it is because you are a superior individual, which as a way of looking at things seems entirely at odds with how we would approach literally everything else from a left leaning perspective. It might be nice to think we are intrinsically better people somehow but I don't think it's accurate.
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Mar 22, 2021 14:00
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Captain Log posted:HPT3 mods change my name to "ANTIFA SPRING BREAK!!" please
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Mar 22, 2021 14:08
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OwlFancier posted:I really think the idea that it's individual choice that matters is a very strange thing because it's exactly the same kind of thinking that the right wing employs. If you do well in life (or in this case, if you have the right opinions) then it is because you are a superior individual, which as a way of looking at things seems entirely at odds with how we would approach literally everything else from a left leaning perspective. How successful you are in life is subject to far, far more external forces that you have no control over than whether or not you evaluate all sources of information available to you when deciding your worldview, no? i.e. the former takes place in the wide world, whereas the latter takes place in your own brain, which is where you have the most control out of anywhere in the universe.
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Mar 22, 2021 14:10
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You aren't born a leftist, whether you develop those skills and how you develop them and how you apply them and whether you maintain them and whether or not that's even the basis of your politics (because it certainly doesn't have to be for you to be a leftist) is entirely subject to external factors? Unless you believe in some sort of soul what happens in your brain is entirely a product of the things your senses are exposed to and the unpredictable effects of how the meat of your brain tissue works, neither of which you have control over. Like I'm not a lefty because I'm smarter than other people or because I am a dilligent critical thinker I'm a lefty because I am aesthetically and reflexively prejudiced against rich people and their poo poo, and the people you hang around with when you're prejudiced against rich people poo poo are generally lefties and you absorb their thinking by exposure. Like I can, sometimes, do critical thinking but I don't most of the time and when I do I do it primarily against things that I look at and reflexively distrust. I've just been trained to reflexively distrust specific stuff and then the critical thinking bit happens if I need to justify why I reflexively distrust it. And the justification might actually be correct, even. But that doesn't change the fact that am only applying it to further a position I already hold. If you take this same mechanism and change the things I instinctively dislike I could just as easily be some qanon nutter, coming up with after the fact justifications for why I think what I think. I would be doing a lot of mental effort and arriving at entirely the wrong conclusion. I don't think laziness of thought is really a good predictor of political alignment, you can have any politics and be either extremely mentally involved or extremely lazy. It's got far more to do with what ideas you are exposed to and which ones your existing prejudices are primed to accept, which are built up from birth by your environment. And it doesn't have to be as simple as "well I was raised right wing so I will keep being right wing" because it is also possible for people to be raised one way and find it to be unsatisfying when they try to integrate it with other things they have been exposed to, and this can cause them to reject the initial conditioning all the more ardently because for them it takes on the aspect of being a prison. Or perhaps as they grew up they found the people who conditioned them that way were actually very unpleasant to them, and so they associate the conditioning with personally experienced cruelty. Again this might have very little to do with its actual veracity and far more to do with how they feel about the environment and people they associate with it. People's responses to things are complicated but I don't think we need to believe they are not, fundamentally, materialistic in their operation. OwlFancier fucked around with this message at 14:25 on Mar 22, 2021 |
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Mar 22, 2021 14:12
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Some other goon said it earlier and it’s pretty much the only way to look at it - 1. Are they victims? Yes. 2. Does that excuse them? No. You can feel bad for a person and still think they need to lose their job or whatever consequence so that they don’t do further harm. You can also still mock them for their beliefs because it’s a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that they are actually monstrous in their beliefs.
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Mar 22, 2021 15:35
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Millions are spent every year to make more Freepers, they're not naturally-occurring
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Mar 22, 2021 15:37
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As I said before there is also no obligation to feel bad for people just because they are products of their environment, because everything is a product of its environment, so if you adopted that approach you would just feel bad all the time and be unable to take any action. I think there's a tendency on the left to internalize the idea that you can't blame people for things that they can't control, possibly because we spent a fair amount of time using that excuse to advance stuff like gay rights. But the reason gay rights are good isn't because being gay is uncontrollable, but because being gay is also good, and cool, and everyone should do it. Or at the very least it isn't bad in any way, even if you could control it at will you would be under no obligation to. I feel like the argument about something being involuntary is a bit of a bad one in a lot of respects because everything, to some degree, is involuntary, but I don't think it is practical or useful to let that get in the way of you getting extremely mad about stuff. Someone can be a product of a system designed to produce horrible people, but at the end of the day they are still a horrible person and you don't have to feel bad for them because they didn't get a choice in the matter.
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Mar 22, 2021 17:36
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InsertPotPun posted:i once had an old, fat, white man slam a door and threaten to "kick my rear end" because i said "excuse me" too loudly after he interrupted me as i was talking to an employee at michaels. I just do this and give them a crazy look. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PRi0FT8uYMY
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Mar 22, 2021 17:43
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Captain Log posted:whtnationalist What Nationalist? He's just asking the question!
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Mar 22, 2021 18:04
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Captain Monkey posted:Some other goon said it earlier and it’s pretty much the only way to look at it - This is a little closer to how I feel. It's loving complicated and I could sit and stare at this blinking prompt all day trying to articulate it. I've known some objectively good people - charitable, community oriented, kind hearted, selfless - who hold loving foul political views. But when it comes to their actions, what the physically do with their body and money, they do outright good. Some of these people have literally never left their bordering counties. I have a hard time lumping them in with the garden variety literal proud racist freepers. I guess I'm talking ideology vs. action.
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Mar 22, 2021 21:34
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This lady asked people what their "woke breaking point" was. Here are 55 of the best and most eye-opening responses. Let's see what drove Freep over into madness quote:To: tbw2 quote:To: tbw2 quote:To: tbw2 quote:To: tbw2 quote:To: cgbg quote:To: tbw2 If all it took for them to tip into full crazy racism was people promoting helmets in full contact sports and people disapproving of smoking they didn't need much pushing.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:14
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Captain Log posted:This is a little closer to how I feel. I also think that you have the fact that Freep is one factor in most of these people's lives. There are no doubt many people like you describe; and even more who are essentially in the deep throes of poster brain and will never do anything but post about their misery. You do have to watch out for the ones who may actually do something, but this is a specialist skill and I do not think we can easily gain it.
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Mar 22, 2021 22:55
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Finnankainen posted:This lady asked people what their "woke breaking point" was. Here are 55 of the best and most eye-opening responses. Duke Lacrosse affair was bullshit but a sane person would place the blame on prosecutorial misconduct and insane pundits. But of course FReep think it's all shrill libs and black people colluding to destroy white men.
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Mar 23, 2021 00:14
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I like that the 'Jewbacca' guy is clearly lying because no Orthodox I know, especially a loving Israeli born freak, would use a 'ratty' shawl for their hilarious pun costume every Jew has heard countless times. Gotta get better with your cosplay, Freep, these are rookie mistakes!
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Mar 23, 2021 00:53
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OwlFancier posted:I feel like the argument about something being involuntary is a bit of a bad one in a lot of respects because everything, to some degree, is involuntary, but I don't think it is practical or useful to let that get in the way of you getting extremely mad about stuff. Someone can be a product of a system designed to produce horrible people, but at the end of the day they are still a horrible person and you don't have to feel bad for them because they didn't get a choice in the matter. So it's kind of like, it's not the tornados fault that it wrecked the neighbourhood, it was a product of the laws of physics and it couldn't decide to be, or do, anything else, but it's ok to be mad at the tornado and wish it out of existence, because it wrecked the neighbourhood.
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Mar 23, 2021 00:57
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One of my friends (that I looked up to when I was a kid, because you never really know someone's  opinions until they get on Facebook) has carried a grudge against liberals for decades because he went to college in liberal Colorado and the university biking club wouldn't let him join their bike rides unless he wore a helmet.I don't think that's what made him conservative, but I don't think these freepers' bizarre grudges about NHL helmets and whatever the gently caress made them conservative either, I think being a conservative means carrying around weird rear end grudges forever.
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Mar 23, 2021 00:58
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VitalSigns posted:I think being a conservative means carrying around weird rear end grudges forever.
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Mar 23, 2021 03:35
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Nessus posted:Maybe this is the real root of the weird 'goes from being a Trotskyist to being an extreme-right-winger' phenomenon? Trots self-betray because they react so hard against the authoritarian nature of Stalinism that they willingly jump into bed with neoliberal internationalists in order to combat "authoritarians". That's why you had old Trots like Hitchens happy to make the case for the Iraq War.
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Mar 23, 2021 04:52
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The trot to neocon pipeline is not weird at all, they're both authoritarian messianic philosophies preaching that there's no problem that can't be solved by stacking up bodies ever higher, and boy do they love solving everyone's problems everywhere.
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Mar 23, 2021 05:02
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Trotsky *wading through the blood of sailors and workers at Kronstadt* "boy could you imagine how bad authoritarianism would be if it were anyone but me murdering anarchists and poor peasants and workers' councils?"
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Mar 23, 2021 05:08
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sexpig by night posted:I like that the 'Jewbacca' guy is clearly lying because no Orthodox I know, especially a loving Israeli born freak, would use a 'ratty' shawl for their hilarious pun costume every Jew has heard countless times. Gotta get better with your cosplay, Freep, these are rookie mistakes! He's also clearly lying because he said that a "bitch," made him vote Republican, which proves that he was already a Republican.
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Mar 23, 2021 05:31
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I'll never forget how confused I was the first time I saw an ad for a motorcycle law organization, with one of the bullet points being that they fought against helmet laws in a couple of states. I kept looking at it and my brain refused to understand how this was a thing that should make me go "Wow these guys are great." It wasn't until years later that I learned right wingers really, really loving hate helmets, not just for riding motorcycles but also for sports, workplaces, pretty much any kind of helmet gets them incredibly mad. It's still weird and childish and I'll never fully understand it though.
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Mar 23, 2021 07:02
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Its because Toxic Masculinity, dear Twelve.
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Mar 23, 2021 07:09
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