Forgive me, but I'm reading through r/qanoncasualties, I've been watching the QAnon documentary on HBO, and I've listened to QAnon Anonymous for at least a year. I find the subject totally fascinating. QAnon is like this twisted mirror image of socialism.

Basically it looks like this creepy fucking boomer named Jim Watkins and his weird shitposter son Ron created QAnon to bring more traffic to 8chan, which they own but which has never made any money for them. (I'm far from an expert on QAnon but the documentary makes a compelling case, let's say.)

I've seen the first three episodes of the documentary, where people are starting to literally kill each other over QAnon, and the Watkins' boys just don't fucking care. This may even go beyond CIA-level psychopathy, or is at least at a similar level. Meanwhile, r/qanoncasualties has story after story of friends and relatives losing their fucking minds, their jobs, all their relationships, and often killing themselves because of QAnon. It's just absolutely insane.

I've also spent maybe about two years "studying" (listening to podcasts on) Zizek and started drifting toward Marxism at around the same time a lot of these people were turning to QAnon. I haven't lost any close friends or family because of this, but it's definitely strained some relationships. (All of my close friends and relatives are either liberals, Berners, social democrats, or even beyond.)

When normies or liberals talk to QAnon people, they clearly think that the QAnon people are insane (although to some extent the average American believes in at least some parts of QAnon—including me, if Jeffrey Epstein counts as being part of QAnon, although I can't recall ever hearing a QAnon person mention him).

When normies or liberals talk to Marxists, does the same reaction take place? Do they just deploy horseshoe theory on us? Would they prefer to talk to QAnon folks over Marxists? Do they think that Marxists, who point to systems as the main issue, are really the same as QAnon folks, who blame all the woes of the world on a shadowy cabal of Satanic pedophiles?

To sum up: how do your non-Marxist / non-anarchist friends and family treat you when you talk about politics?

  • duderium [he/him]
    ·
    3 years ago

    I mean, yeah, those are mostly a given, even though dice-rolls are involved with everything. If you ask a liberal to imagine the future ten, twenty, fifty, a hundred years from now, I think it would be rare for them to say anything positive. Or if they did, they would do so knowing that it sounds absurd and oddly brutal to declare that in the year 2121, McDonald's will still be serving up french fries, and Democrats and Republicans will still be taking turns privatizing every last aspect of American existence (even though this is possible). But as Marxists we also at least hope that as capitalism collapses and workers around the world organize, that we can live to see a world in which there is no poverty.

    edit: people keep talking about Disco Elysium here so I'll check it out.

    • triangle [none/use name]
      ·
      3 years ago

      They're a given to you because you understand marxism, libs really don't think things will get worse. It's part of their pathology, the optimism and blind faith that technocratic solutions will save us from racism or climate change. Theyll think, yeah housing is bad right now but we just need a couple tweaks to fix it - definitely not an overhaul.