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things are going to continue to get much, much worse for nearly everyone, which will be awful but also lead to the resurgence of an organized, militant labor movement that will eventually but inevitably overthrow capitalism if a habitable biosphere exists afterwards remains to be seen
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Feb 2, 2022 18:09
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Vasukhani posted:John Brown was part of a line of puritan radicals, they would be anti-theists if they lived today. Ideas like eternal life, and non-materiality are anti-democratic. You are an animal with no intrinsic value. Death destroys you. John Brown would not be an "anti-theist" are you loving kidding me lmao
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Feb 4, 2022 17:31
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you're conflating your own weird thoughts about anyway I won't bother reading replies to this because it's clear you're trying to use this thread to dump the same sort of dumbass teenage atheist contrarianism and unwelcome suicidal ideation that you keep getting kicked out of covid threads for so I'll just take this opportunity to recommend you see a therapist and wish you luck in the coming year
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Feb 4, 2022 17:42
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punk rebel ecks posted:I find it odd that part of my write up was quoted when the small paragraph right above it gave it context. Not to pile on but I think ANOTHER SCORCHER has a generally correct critique of this, but I want to add that the idea that this is a messaging issue and that the American Left can correct this problem through good arguments is a fundamentally liberal viewpoint that is doomed to fail. The liberal-left/progressive/post-Occupy left -- whatever you want to call it -- cannot engender working class consciousness because the approach is from a liberal position of and ambiguous and inarticulable conception of "human rights", not one of worker power: People should have healthcare because it's good. Black people shouldn't be shot by police because that's unethical. You should use someone's preferred pronouns because doing so is polite. All of this is true, but irrelevant. The socialist position is that the axes of oppression that the liberal viewpoint (mostly) correctly identifies, that establishes liberal interpretation intersectionality (and is the basis of liberal "identity politics") are secondary to the axis of exploitation that underlies class struggle. The socialist position does not view eg. police violence as primarily a human rights abuse, but instead as primarily a tool of class suppression and intra-class alienation. Allowing redlining, gender-identity-based employment discriminations, any sort of restriction of healthcare by any means -- these are structures of class oppression, not a result of bad laws or people's inherent bigotry or a messaging failure. You are correct in identifying that poor and working class minorities don't view liberal and left-liberal organizations as fighting for them because they fundamentally are not. The skeptical poor and working class minorities are the ones correct here! The "leftists" are fighting -- at best! -- for a nebulous and individually-defined idea of goodness and propriety (derived, as A.S. points out, from higher education). People aren't that dumb! Everyone understands, or should understand, that the Democrat politician or the left-ish NPO activist does not really have any skin in the game, and that any flowery talk about "rights" etc. immediately dissolves when it meet an actual, personal, cost. You can't get around that, especially when people see it happen over and over, constantly, in national and local politics. It's no wonder that most people tune out after the fiftieth betrayal! The American "left", which is to say the post-Bernie, post-Occupy generally highly educated, generally white political activist set, cannot and will not convince anyone other than people exactly like them of much of anything. Not for lack of trying, but because it is generated by specific material conditions that it cannot, itself, change. The American left -- the real American left -- if and when it arises to be of much use to anyone, will fundamentally be fighting a battle against capital, not for "rights". A future useful left will certainly fight for eg. healthcare or police defunding but because they are strategically important towards the ultimate victory of the working class over the capitalist class, not because "people deserve healthcare", true though that may be. When this left arises it's going to be a lot less "woke" than progressives today might hope or imagine it to be, but it will be actually capable of meaningfully addressing racism, sexism, queerphobia, etc. A.S. is further correct in stating that moving more and more towards liberal, exclusionary identity-intersectional politics is the only thing the Democrats can do. First because we're out of runway and we're not in a historical moment where there's any room, or motivation, for capital to concede to working class demands. The working class has no meaningful political power, nor the capacity (right now) to build any, and the capital class is busy pulling out the copper wiring on the social structures won in an earlier era. There's nothing left to do but endless, increasingly polarized culture war. Secondly, though, and I think more importantly is that liberal "woke idpol" or whatever you want to call it is strategically useful for the capital class, and therefore the people who can direct the Democratic party. It's the mirror image of the Republicans' naked white supremacy, but accomplishes the exact same task: the alienation of the working class from itself.
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Mar 10, 2022 23:05
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punk rebel ecks posted:At the end of the day this is how collations work. Blacks and Hispanics can't take and rule the country by their power alone. Even the entire working class by itself won't be able to do that. You need to make allies with segments of the community. That's how a democratic system works, even after direct action is applied. Coalitions manifestly do not work on the basis of shared class consciousness. If they did they'd cease to be a coalition and just be one singular and indivisible group of a common class. You're still thinking and talking about this in atomized liberal racial politics, an approach that is one hundred per cent doomed to failure. The "entire working class" -- which is to say everyone who isn't a capitalist, everyone who sells their labor to survive -- can indeed take and rule the country by their power alone. In fact, you'll find this has happened multiple times in history! In living memory, no less! Hell, if you read the right German political theorists you might even come to understand that such a thing is inevitable. As to the "American Left", I've been careful in my post to make a distinction between the working class (a group which includes the vast, vast, vast majority of all people of color, globally), and the post-Occupy/Democrat-adjacent American left-liberal progressive. I'm not conflating the two. Also, as someone who lives in Chicago, linking me to a Lori Lightfoot video to show me how the working class is meaningfully fighting "the powers that be" is... I don't know what to say. It's, frankly, astounding. Ghost Leviathan posted:You guys do know what happened to the Strasserists right Is this directed at me? If you read my post and took it as "Leftists gotta get more bigoted to win" I don't really know what to tell you, aside from that you will have very poor luck in trying to get a group of people that aren't trans (or, maybe, have a trans loved one) to fight on the liberal basis of rights and propriety. When push comes to shove and people who don't have skin in the game are going to bail. If you want to actually make meaningful, material progress towards anything you might want to include in the liberal bucket of "trans rights" (which you absolutely should!) you will need people to understand -- actually understand, not just be roped in by clever messaging -- that an injury to one is an injury to all; that every trans worker imperiled is a direct threat to their own livelihood. That whatever mechanisms demean and destroy trans lives will be used, and expanded, and made more powerful and subtle and will be employed and continued to be employed against other out-groups. Just as it is has always been with black people. Just as it has always been with Latino people. Just as it has always been etc. etc. etc. You can not do this with liberal standpoint-epistemological political bloviating. You can't do Good Messaging to elect Smart Technocrats who can craft Wise Laws to save everyone from the bad stuff. You can never resolve the structures that propagate racism, or sexism, or queerphobia this way. The only way forward is through class consciousness.
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Mar 11, 2022 04:55
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Also I'd like to change my answer to the thread question to the one veryslightlymad posted a few posts above, that America will be saved by a vibe shift
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Mar 11, 2022 05:05
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The assertion that any significant number of people using closed groups and block functions to curate echo chambers is kind of nuts. Social media algorithms go out of their way to show you directly opposing viewpoints because outrage drives engagement.
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Mar 13, 2022 06:22
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The algorithms these companies use are designed to keep you on the site as much as possible. They like the things you click like on (you're willing to spend more time on the feed if it's full of stuff that interests you), but they love the stuff you comment on. Inevitably, because people like arguing on the internet (just like us, right now), controversial posts that start arguments (where multiple parties are making many comments) are goldmines. That stuff keeps you engaged, reading back through comments, incessantly refreshing the page to see who has responded to you, etc, which all provides ample time and space to serve you ads. The algorithm doesn't understand any of this in a human way, it just has a fuzzy link between the cohort of people who have data profiles like you and posts that generate interaction from that cohort. It wants to show you stuff you'll engage with often, so it often, but not always, shows you things you will get mad about because that's what drives your interaction with the site. It doesn't "know" that you're a BLM guy and therefore "wants" to show you a Ben Shapiro video. It knows that you have a data profile that looks like this and that there's a high degree of probability you'll interact with posts that look like that. It'll show you a Ben Shapiro video if the people who have similar data profiles to yours comment on videos that look like Ben Shapiro's -- and they do, so it will. Anyway, underlining your arguments is this chiefly liberal delusion that the things you believe are so self-evidently true that there's no way someone with a functioning brain could be presented with "the facts" and come to any conclusion other than the one you made. The panic about fake news and alternative facts and conspiracy theories are a fundamental misunderstanding about what belief is and how it works. I guarantee you that everyone in those pro-ana groups have heard all the arguments about how anorexia is bad -- they just don't believe it, and no amount of hard data on a webpage is going to convince them otherwise. That's not how people change their minds. I don't know how often D&D needs to hear this but: posting is not praxis. You don't change hearts and minds by showing people Good Posts. You're not going to convince any Q-Anon wackos that Trump isn't a white hat pedophile hunter by showing them a news article where government officials say it isn't true. The reason people are falling into these weird alternative views of reality and cultlike groups is because we are all miserable, and we are all alienated from any sort of political power we might have had. You're seeing the shared culture cracking as people increasingly become unable to ignore the contradiction of what they've been told their whole lives in terms of their freedoms, their rights, the democratic nature of the society we live in, a person's ability to lift themselves up by their bootstraps, etc., etc., and the material reality of the world that they see around them, which they are powerless to change.
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Mar 13, 2022 18:02
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Fame Douglas posted:And posting that on a forum that is most definitely an echo chamber is even weirder. I don't think there is any better proof of my argument than the fact that D&D hate reads C-SPAM and C-SPAM hate reads D&D. Everyone loves being outraged about other people's bad opinions. We love talking about it, we love thinking about it, we love rebutting and debunking them. We love it! It's bad for us but we all love it.
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Mar 13, 2022 18:06
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