Am I having a stroke, or is this mostly gibberish?
I reread it 4 or 5 times and I can’t understand what he’s saying. Sometimes my reading comprehension is low, but I literally can’t make out what the sentence means.
Various ideological descriptors (e.g “socialist”) are free-floating - this is demonstrated by the fact that Biden not pushing for student debt relief is a standard critique in “socialist” media.
I’m a dummy and needed to look up what free floating means in this sense:
- not attached to anything and able to move freely. “free-floating aquatic plants”
- PSYCHIATRY (of anxiety) chronic and generalized, without an obvious cause
What a stupid statement stuffed with an overly-complex sentence structure to sound like he’s making a point. What the left wants is pretty damn clear, and it’s not our fault your liberal heroes choose the wrong side in every decision they make.
I read this 4 hours ago and was baffled, but I opened this thread again and holy shit it just clicked.
The “free-floating ideological descriptors” part is Matty Ygs complaining that people can latch on to any word they like to describe their own ideologies. Yggles is upset that people who he believes are upper class dorks are describing themselves as “socialist” just because it’s the cool thing to do.
By way of evidence he provides a tweet from a self-professed socialist and Jacobin editor claiming that young people are right to be disgusted with Biden’s refusal to cancel student debt.
Matt Yglesias (who by the way despises socialists and socialism) thinks that this position is antithetical to his strawman of socialism, because true socialism is based on the belief that the lower classes should be in held in permanent debt peonage by the bourgeoisie. Or maybe he just thinks “people who have massive college debt aren’t destitute, and therefore true socialists wouldn’t care about their issues.” Third choice, he believes that only Democrats and Republicans exist, and anything that is anti-Democrat is pro-Republican, and no true socialist (who is on the left and thus a Democrat) would be pro-Republican. It’s hard to tell.
