Permanently Deleted
When I try to figure out why my dog is doing something, I’m hurt more than helped when I anthropomorphise him. If I assume we think the same thing the same way and make the same calculations based on that for the same goals, he’ll usually prove me wrong because we are fundamentally different.
I don’t think the right is going to march on Rome, but that was never the most realistic option for them due to the same reason we can’t do an antifa in DC. The country is too big. Knowledge Fight followed Alex Jones’ caravan and noted how exhausted they sounded just driving from Houston to Baton Rouge in one small stop of it.
They’re not looking at this or the world like I do though. In any of the photos where there are more hats than there are teeth, a good chunk of those people have a parasocial attachment to Trump and a personal investment in MAGA correcting all of the contradictions in their lives. They’re the special kind of pathetic that drives them to Qanon. They aren’t materialists or socially conscious or independent thinkers or drawing from reasonable news sources. If not for Trump they’d be chasing any other get-rich-and-get-into-heaven-quick scheme.
Terrorism makes sense to them. Their entire project relies on escalating tensions to the point that something snaps, and when it does that something is an insecure loser like Kyle Rittenhouse. They’re so driven by mythos and mythological identity, and that’s offloading their own alienation onto some social prestige label like white or rugged individual or moral majority. That alienation will only increase and they’ll continue to view it as increasing levels of white genocide and christian persecution and radical socialist liberalism, existential threats to the narratives that give them any sort of dignity. Losing Trump, the prophet of all of those things, isn’t the end of Trump or of the things that created him and drove them to such a degree of investment in him. Everything there is going to boil hotter and hotter until it begins boiling over, and there are many ways that can happen without some single televised spectacle. Dismissing it outright because the group of which 75% doesn’t view the election as legitimate didn’t spontaneously start the day of the rope is dangerous. It’s assuming my dog won’t chase a squirrel because I wouldn’t because my identity doesn’t revolve around being a hunter.
Add to that, the rhetoric coming out of them now is getting more and more insane. They are being driven towards even more extremist materials.
People just write off “lone wolf” attacks around here. As though we haven’t seen dozens or even hundreds of people killed by one psycho with guns and/or bombs.
As though there aren’t countless examples of other right-wing movements doing just that. The idealistic optimism toward people literally arming to kill socialists, who are one facebook post away from mobilising with everyone around them, is such lib shit when the only reason given is “current conditions discourage the most extreme form of violence even though we are entering a depression and the Nazis got 2% of the vote in 1928.”
Matt’s comments about people voting for Biden to “turn the volume down” is also extremely astute and extremely important when it comes to reaching out to people.
The entire organized Left is dominated by people with severe depression and anxiety, and this creates a feedback loop. Normal people aren’t persuaded or inspired to take action by being told that the world is awful and death is certain, any day now. They mentally shut down or write you off as a crazy person. You only appeal to fellow losers and broken brains, which makes the problem worse.
Most people’s political desires fundamentally are “leave me alone”. You can spin this in a Marxist way, because Capital ultimately does not leave anyone alone, but you have to meet the people where they are to an extent. Screaming and yelling, even if it’s completely valid and true, simply does not appeal to the great majority.
I honestly don’t ever find matt very astute. A lot of “normal people” already know the system is fucked, can’t be reformed and has to be burnt down. Any kind of revolutionary potential in the US is not to be found amongst the libs or the online left. The most historically oppressed people in the projects and reservations etc don’t generally want to “turn the volume down”.
IMO Matt is not worth listening to for this very reason. He only sees things thru this blinkered vision of twitter and rich podcasting friends. He has no understanding or connection to the masses who are becoming more and more fucked over everyday.
His ideas about where things are going start out sounding fine but then they go off into nonsense territory real quick.
I have a hard time believing it’s going to morph towards everything being culture war bullshit when we’re experiencing 3-4 massive ongoing crises plus massive civil problems.
He has no understanding or connection to the masses who are becoming more and more fucked over everyday.
Matt isn’t talking to the masses. He’s taking to his rich podcaster friends and trying to actually help them understand what the masses are thinking (because he actually has family connections to “the masses” vs Felix and Will who live in a literal liberal media bubble).
A lot of things in podcast land make sense when you realize that the people making the podcast assume that the audience is literally “their friends”. There’s been times when it’s extremely obvious that a specific person is inspiring a specific argument/take that comes up, that’s how incestuous all this shit is.
Normal people are getting fucked over, but they do not want to hear some Leftist shriek and go insane over it. They literally just want the noise to go down and people to leave them alone. When you scream at them about how bad it is, the just associate you with yucky feelings, then don’t like you, and they don’t give a shit what you have to say.
My point is that if he is only talking to his rich podcaster friends, as you say, then why the fuck should I or any other working class person care or pay attention to him?
Matt is the literal embodiment of a shrieking leftist that does nothing to help the people (even though I’d guess he pulls in 10k a month from the podcast). And you are right people don’t want to be screamed at about how bad things are. They want real material change in their lives and as leftists our job is to be in the trenches with people, helping to give revolutionary form to these desires.
The most historically oppressed people in the projects and reservations etc don’t generally want to “turn the volume down”.
that’s not who he’s talking about voting for Biden
The comment I was replying to said that the left has trouble organizing basically because “normal people” are not sufficiently fed up with the system and they don’t like being told that “the world is awful”. My point is that a lot of people know full well that the world is awful and would not be shocked to be told so
actually lately more west wing thing and the dollop. Funny stuff. :)
I still like Chapo, I just think Matt’s takes lately are ridiculous.
I don’t think this theory is completely accurate. When talking about “people voting for Biden” you can’t just forget and ignore the way the primaries happened. Bernie flopped but he also put tens of thousands on his rallies and had a significant volunteer movement. It wasn’t a campaign about modestly trying to convince people at all but constantly tell others what the source of the problems are from a sucdem perspective. Hack even for a moment Warren had some momentum and looked like a strong candidate and in some ways she was as obnoxious as Bernie.
Then we can even look back at 2016. Neither Hillary or Trump’s campaigns were modest at all. Indeed you’ll find Trump supporters were always extremely loud and obnoxious about their beliefs. Hillary? “Well why are you NOT going to vote for the first woman president in history it is her turn your know I’m with her!”(repeat 10x a day to random strangers).
There is definitely some truth to the idea that libs want(ed) normalcy back, but this isn’t ground breaking theory. Indeed this is exactly what we already knew about Biden from day 1. He was supposed to be Obama 2.0, to rally the guaranteed minority vote away from Bernie and use the eventual Obama support to just say “hey here is your chance to go back to 2015 and pretend the last 4 years didn’t happen.”
I think the reasons why actual socialists are unlikely to have electoral sucess is due to electorialism itself. We don’t have cable news networks and the ability to bombard millions and millions with propaganda every day in any western country. The reasons why the revolution is hard if not impossible are not just simply down to “people want normalcy” because that is very much not true.
Republicans built the Trump movement entirely around the idea America isn’t normal anymore and there is no returning to normal MAGA is about rebuilding not turning the clocks back to 2006 or 1985. Liberals do want to turn the clock back to 2015 but that is due to Trump’s image. In social economic terms again look at the Bernie campaign, a large number of people already understand the 2010’s is an economic nightmare and want none of it back again.
The entire organized Left is dominated by people with severe depression and anxiety
wrong, while mean days with poor mental health are higher among “the left” (which extremely liberal means here) it is not significantly higher than among libs or centrists. Also Leftists may well report higher rates of mental difficulties due to there being less stigma for it amongst them.
Or do you have any evidence for that claim besides gut feelings and anecdotes?
eh i’ve been feeling like that too. i feel this entire site is just a way for us lonely, depressed, anxious and powerless people to not be alone for a moment, or have a laugh at some meme, or hear some good news about evo or china or whatever and feel like things aren’t hopeless. maybe you could do a study of asking around for rates of depression/anxiety for the future around various internet forums and see the different between the leftier ones and others.
Fuck off.
Plus Biden gives them suffering to complain about, and people love that shit. They will rally, and intimidate libs until the next republican administration in 4 years. Honestly, it would be a great time to be a chud.
Not sure how anyone got into their head that the right would oppose cops/three letter orgs and if that was a basis of their theory, of any sort, they are a monumental idiot
