There are plenty of people who are marginalized or lacking in education who don’t vote Republican because it doesn’t take a college degree to see that Trump tried to overthrow the government. Just because guys who are mad about not getting laid become neo-Nazis doesn’t mean the rest of us who are dealing with hardship do. Black people have been getting shit on since well before this country was even a country and they’re the most reliable Democratic demographic there is. Pretty much everyone has access to the internet and if they cared to learn about they world they could.
I mean, you can understand why black people have and have had historically a very unique position in this country as a kind of uniquely ostracized population, right? That’s not a 1 to 1 comparison we’d make in like, any other circumstance, I dunno why we’d start now. Effectively, what I’m saying is something that goes back quite a ways, you could come up with a lot of historical examples of this, it’s not new. Italian immigrants after ww2, eastern european immigrants, irish immigrants, even jewish immigrants to a certain extent, they were all able to be subsumed by the larger umbrella of whiteness precisely as they voted in accordance with more conservative interests which explicitly do not like them. The same thing that would have happened in this election with latinos, except we’ve run up on the rails of that process because things are materially different. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t really make sense to get mad at that voterbase for voting in that particular way.
The broader point I’m making is that there’s a difference between thinking about these things critically, and getting mad at the wind, and I see a lot of people getting mad at the wind. Except, unlike getting mad at the wind, their anger is actually harmful, actually creates a constant feedback loop in how it’s directed. Some people get mad at a dog for biting them. Certainly, it makes sense to get mad in general, since you’ve been bit, that’s painful, and the dog is the most directly at fault object for that. Some people get mad at the owner, since they can’t control their dog, you know, maybe that’s a step removed, maybe that’s even actually effective at preventing future bites, I dunno. Some people just start to move towards the medicine cabinet as soon as possible, so they can clean their bite. I would rather be the third person, in that example.
I have plenty of blame to go around, and I’d put people who voted for Trump after four years of him being president and trying to overthrow the government after only the fascists and the media that enable them. He’s not an unknown quantity anymore.
I know a lot of people in this country are dumb and selfish, but they don’t get off the hook because of that. Plenty of white people don’t vote for blatant racism, my parents grew up in a rural town in the “good old days” and figured it out.
That’s precisely my problem, there. I don’t understand why people are “on the hook”, or what “the hook” even is. Why we entertain this idea that people even have any agency whatsoever, for one, right. Like, the inherent problem of free will, people will just reject that either at its face, and supplement it with absolutely nothing, or they will reject the core lesson at play there.
Like, if this “hook” manifested in terms of people going out and engaging in mutual aid, or resolving to live, out of a sense of keeping other people accountable through just their own living, their own existence, that’d be cool. I’ve seen some people actually do that, and that seems productive, sure, why not. Hell, if “the hook” manifested in people going out and starting to move luigi style, against the people that are enabling this in, order of magnitude, I’d be fine with that. Other forms of militant action would also be acceptable.
Instead, oftentimes “the hook” just manifests in a bunch of easy rhetorical owns that often aren’t even really productive for letting off steam. Probably because people aren’t really capable of any other form of agency, or “holding people accountable”, in their own lives, so they just resolve to like, making kind of aggressive twitter posts at people. That feels like fun and epic praxis, but it’s not, it actually actively serves a counterproductive purpose as it is manipulated by these larger algorithms. That’s the sort of thing that I’m talking about when I talk about, say, people FAFO-posting about how happy they are that conservative migrants are gonna get sent to the fucking death camps. There are liberals who are overjoyed at the irony in that idea, and I don’t think that serves to do anything but make people rightfully more bitter at that behavior.
Like, what’s the purpose of this “blame” here, what does it do? I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot just to spite someone else, is what I’m getting at.
There are plenty of people who are marginalized or lacking in education who don’t vote Republican because it doesn’t take a college degree to see that Trump tried to overthrow the government. Just because guys who are mad about not getting laid become neo-Nazis doesn’t mean the rest of us who are dealing with hardship do. Black people have been getting shit on since well before this country was even a country and they’re the most reliable Democratic demographic there is. Pretty much everyone has access to the internet and if they cared to learn about they world they could.
I mean, you can understand why black people have and have had historically a very unique position in this country as a kind of uniquely ostracized population, right? That’s not a 1 to 1 comparison we’d make in like, any other circumstance, I dunno why we’d start now. Effectively, what I’m saying is something that goes back quite a ways, you could come up with a lot of historical examples of this, it’s not new. Italian immigrants after ww2, eastern european immigrants, irish immigrants, even jewish immigrants to a certain extent, they were all able to be subsumed by the larger umbrella of whiteness precisely as they voted in accordance with more conservative interests which explicitly do not like them. The same thing that would have happened in this election with latinos, except we’ve run up on the rails of that process because things are materially different. What I’m saying is that it doesn’t really make sense to get mad at that voterbase for voting in that particular way.
The broader point I’m making is that there’s a difference between thinking about these things critically, and getting mad at the wind, and I see a lot of people getting mad at the wind. Except, unlike getting mad at the wind, their anger is actually harmful, actually creates a constant feedback loop in how it’s directed. Some people get mad at a dog for biting them. Certainly, it makes sense to get mad in general, since you’ve been bit, that’s painful, and the dog is the most directly at fault object for that. Some people get mad at the owner, since they can’t control their dog, you know, maybe that’s a step removed, maybe that’s even actually effective at preventing future bites, I dunno. Some people just start to move towards the medicine cabinet as soon as possible, so they can clean their bite. I would rather be the third person, in that example.
I have plenty of blame to go around, and I’d put people who voted for Trump after four years of him being president and trying to overthrow the government after only the fascists and the media that enable them. He’s not an unknown quantity anymore.
I know a lot of people in this country are dumb and selfish, but they don’t get off the hook because of that. Plenty of white people don’t vote for blatant racism, my parents grew up in a rural town in the “good old days” and figured it out.
That’s precisely my problem, there. I don’t understand why people are “on the hook”, or what “the hook” even is. Why we entertain this idea that people even have any agency whatsoever, for one, right. Like, the inherent problem of free will, people will just reject that either at its face, and supplement it with absolutely nothing, or they will reject the core lesson at play there.
Like, if this “hook” manifested in terms of people going out and engaging in mutual aid, or resolving to live, out of a sense of keeping other people accountable through just their own living, their own existence, that’d be cool. I’ve seen some people actually do that, and that seems productive, sure, why not. Hell, if “the hook” manifested in people going out and starting to move luigi style, against the people that are enabling this in, order of magnitude, I’d be fine with that. Other forms of militant action would also be acceptable.
Instead, oftentimes “the hook” just manifests in a bunch of easy rhetorical owns that often aren’t even really productive for letting off steam. Probably because people aren’t really capable of any other form of agency, or “holding people accountable”, in their own lives, so they just resolve to like, making kind of aggressive twitter posts at people. That feels like fun and epic praxis, but it’s not, it actually actively serves a counterproductive purpose as it is manipulated by these larger algorithms. That’s the sort of thing that I’m talking about when I talk about, say, people FAFO-posting about how happy they are that conservative migrants are gonna get sent to the fucking death camps. There are liberals who are overjoyed at the irony in that idea, and I don’t think that serves to do anything but make people rightfully more bitter at that behavior.
Like, what’s the purpose of this “blame” here, what does it do? I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot just to spite someone else, is what I’m getting at.