General Politics XII World • Page 298

No

 

and no this does not mean the answer is be more racist and throw vulnerable people under the bus, I actually don’t know what the answer is, it just sucks

 

something I noticed that I think ties in to what you are saying is that, aside from completely and utterly missing the point of why Harris lost, a lot of the mainstream Dems that I am seeing takes from sound a lot like sore losers of a sports game where they were simply outplayed. meaning that a lot of the complaints that they are levelling against voters who didn't vote for them are actually things that trump specifically was able to turn into strengths.

this might sound overly optimistic, but I think this leaves us at a moment in time where people actually on the left have a chance to try to build something progressive that voters who are looking for that can get behind, and they need to somehow find a way to reach and connect with these disillusioned people.

which I understand is an extremely difficult thing to do, but still - I don't think it was easy to pull off what trump did, either. he's a unique figure.

 

Yeah I think a big mistake was how divorced the identity politics stuff became from people’s actual material conditions and a winning message became impossible. Identity politics have a place but without class analysis all you’re really doing is scolding people. And I hate saying this because I know how it comes across. But I also think it’s true. When your opponent uses fear mongering and scapegoating minorities to win people over you have to have an uplifting message to help people realize their problems are because of the ruling class not their fellow Americans and foreign citizens desperate to make a better life here. Dems wouldn’t adopt such a message because they are the ruling class

 

This should be incredibly self evident by this point

 

Good band.

 

You would think so and yet the pundits have decided we lost because of pronouns

 

I don’t know man, I hear where you’re trying to make connections but I just don’t think it quite works like that. The Smiths and The Cure were some of the defining indie rock bands of the mid-late 80s and early 90s. Smashing Pumpkins and REM were massive for Gen X alternative scene and they exist on a sonic-qua-emotional-character spectrum that maps pretty nicely to where emo eventually got to after Rites of Spring.

I think the range of musical tonality and character has only gotten wider over time and don’t feel like you can draw such distinct relationships between generational beliefs and the music they listened to. I don’t think everyone imbues the character of the music they listen to into themselves. Hell, half the folks who grew up on hippie music voted for Trump haha.

 

I can’t say I agree haha

 

I think it's good if the democratic party goes full right wing anti-woke. At this point I am rooting for them to make decisions that accelerate their collapse. They're worse than useless. Throw em out.

 

Kind of where I’m at tbh. It’s almost spectacular how horribly they’re fumbling the message post election

 

bringing it full circle back to the internet before it sucked, but one thing I noticed in the shift about how these things were talked about was, when I learned about things like implicit bias and white privilege and etc, they were explained to me by other posters on forums in “nerdy” (for lack of a better term) ways and links to studies and articles written about it that made me explore the topic and etc, and somewhere in the 20teens the discourse shifted to a mix of snarky humor (“white people suck lol, men suck lol”) and more inflammatory language (white people are colonizers, men are abusers, straight people are doing genocide on lgbtq people, etc) that had become more about accepting the conclusion of those studies and points about why it was bad and berating everyone that hadn’t learned that yet about why they’re terrible people for not knowing it and etc.

I think there’s a lot to be said about the language people use to spread these messages and giving people, especially young people, opportunities to learn it first before you hit them with the “well if you don’t accept this premise now you’re clearly a misogynist” or whatever. Like I have clear memories of being on forums in my
mid-late teen years having gay people compassionately and patiently explaining to me why using gay as a negative connotation was bad/not cool. And it probably took me the better part of a year to internalize what they were saying and how it made sense, and reading shit links they’d share! But I’m a teacher so of course I say all that hah.

 

Sort of unrelated, but one thing that’s always bugged me with Gen Z is how the escalation of prank videos and main character syndrome has really poisoned a lot of people and how they’re supposed to act in public. It feels like everyone is always raising the stakes and embarrassment of folks in the real world in order to get likes online and directly appeal to an echo chamber of people who think the behavior is acceptable. We reward absurdity and when you start fucking with people in a mean-spirited way, I can see how that translates to gravitating towards the party that’s not exactly built on civility. Idk, this probably reads like word vomit but i’m having a hard time articulating exactly what i’m trying to convey. It just feels like selfishness is at an all time high I guess.

 

Yeah I was gonna add that white privilege discourse around 2013-15 was the start of this and most people were really incurious about what that means. I was like 21-22 at the time and had taken some psych and sociology classes so I could grasp it pretty easily but if it had swung around even 2-3 years earlier I could’ve easily had a very reactionary view of the entire thing. I was also in the ap politics thread with people around to explain things to me if I didn’t understand

 

Yeah that shift in tone in these discussions is really interesting. Just think of what the tenor of these conversations was on AP in 2012-14. Doesn't even make sense at this point. My theory is a lot of people started believing these things not because they were explained to them smartly - ever - but because that's just the consensus of the environment they are in. There were precious few such environments in 12-14, there are countless now. When everyone around you agrees with your social ideas you don't really have to interrogate them to the point that you can explain them intelligently, browbeating starts to work.

 

Blue wall was winnable if they do this and also don't be absolute ghouls on Gaza.

 

Picking walz and then muzzling him was a bigger fumble than picking Tim kaine

 

i would have set you straight no matter what

 

that being said, privilege discourse actually sucks.

 

is that a promise or a threat

 

Day 1 post-election I switched from Democrat to Green

I just feel like it's easier to rebuild that party into something useful than it is the Democrats.

 

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