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?
There's certainly something to be said about Marxism making you really see the man behind the curtain, except there is no man and it's just systems that people pretend don't even exist. Feels like Lovecraftian horror, where the more you Understand the World the more it drives you insane.
0.000% of Communism has been built. Evil child-murdering billionaires still rule the world with a shit-eating grin. All he has managed to do is make himself sad. He is starting to suspect Kras Mazov [Karl Marx] fucked him over personally with his socio-economic theory. It has, however, made him into a very, very smart boy with something like a university degree in Truth. Instead of building Communism, he now builds a precise model of this grotesque, duplicitous world.
I haven't lost any friends or family either, but for the most part I avoid talking politics with them. I'm not shy about my views if brought up, but I tend to not bring it up because I know it makes the relationships strained. It does come across as a bit crazy, but the difference is that it's more like Cassandra than QAnon. I'm almost always right about what is going to happen, it just sucks being right and nobody listening to you and then the same thing repeats forever, and everything you're right about is something profoundly awful.
Being a Marxist has not actually helped much with my predictive abilities, but of course that's because I just haven't gathered enough data—right? For months I believed that Biden would lose the election. Shortly before it took place, I concluded that Biden winning would be the most ridiculous scenario of all. But until the South Carolina primary, I was also dumb enough to believe that Bernie would win the presidency. I just hedge my bets now and say that things seem likely or unlikely. It seems unlikely that the Democrats will hold onto congress in 2022, given what happened in 2010 and 1994, but who knows?
I googled to see where that quote came from. I'm not a Disco Elysium player but I appreciated it.
Yeah I'm not talking elections more as like, long term trends. Regardless of who won, I'm sure you predicted that the camps are only going to get bigger. The Cold War with China is going to heat up. The rich will get richer. Covid will do nothing to stop any of these trends, despite everybody talking about "the new normal," there will be no "roaring 20's" because the rate of profit continues to decline and the average American has less than $500 in savings, etc etc. That's the kind of cursed predictive knowledge that I'm talking about.
Also yeah if that quote resonated with you at all I would highly recommend you give the game a try. It's a very cathartic experience in a strange way, and superbly written.
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.
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.
The social reality we all have to face, at least in the U.S., is that for most people horseshoe theory is very true. If you're politically disconnected, which is most people, then there is no tangible difference between someone yelling about Stop the Steal and someone yelling about Defund the Police. Both groups are just loud, scary malcontents that are part of the background noise of daily life. In that context, most people's instincts when confronted with an outspoken member of either a far-left or far-right camp is to just nod, put their heads down and walk away.
If forced to interact with one of those people, that indifference can turn to incredulity or even anger, as here is someone that is not only disrupting their peace but forcing them to contend with opinions outside what they've been told their whole life is socially acceptable. Opinions that potentially threaten the systems and norms they tacitly understand they depend on. Until conditions worsen to the point that just about everyone is forced to abandon the current status quo (which has its own competing currents), then yes, many of us will likely be seen as just as crazy as Q types.
After I last got fired for trying to unionize my job, my own mother screamed at me that she didn't want me to become the next unibomber, so... :shrug-outta-hecks:
I think a very important difference for us is rooting slogans and theory in praxis - decades of propaganda will melt in the face of commies and anarchists that bring you food, run neighborhood clinics, help you set up a neighborhood committee or equivalent soviet, etc.
Oh absolutely. Now is the time we need to be building left institutions and working to make those institutions part of peoples' day-to-day lives.
On that note, I have a lot of frustration with activists in my area who do good mutual aid praxis but refuse to call themselves socialists or attach themselves to the handful of orgs that are about. :agony:
At least you have orgs and mutual aid in your area. I’ve tried to start them and my efforts have gone basically nowhere. I’m going to keep trying once I get vaxxed.
We all do what we can comrade. I hope you keep at it! :fidel-salute-big:
I mean, i usually avoid talking politics in situations where education isnt relevant, but i do have the reputation to start spouting facts about declassified cia ghoul shit after a few beers in my family. Paranoid, yes, but not full blown out there like a qanon person.
lmao i do almost exactly this. But for the most part I just stay quiet because so many of them are fox news boomers and I'm never going to change their opinion and honestly it's mind numbingly boring to hear them talk politics, I just shift the convo as fast as possible because I just don't care what they think and I doubt they care what I think.
I'm sure a lot of normies do consider us on the same level as Qanon in terms how they view left wingers as a whole, but the one thing that separates us from the q people in my experience is whether or not you can hold a conversation on anything other than politics. All the Q people I know and have seen online center everything in their life around Q shit. My family member who is into it cannot talk about anything else at all. Every convo has to have a reference to Hillary or Bill Clinton, to Joe Biden, to FEMA, Obama, autism vaccines, etc. And that's what seems to drive people away. I can pretend to be normal when politics isn't relevant and shit so most people just think I'm a weird anarchist or hippie rather than a wackjob.
For real. This is why a lot of marxists like to (or are forced to since you have to be a well-versed theoretician to defend your ideological position in the face of the lazy "lol vuvuzuella gommunism no food" arguments that plague your daily life) read and study diverse shit since it helps make for nifty conversations beyond water-cooler small-talk.
Trust me it makes for hilarious conversations when you're well-versed on how the British royal family's genealogy is absolutely fucked up and can dunk on how Queen Lizzie lost not just a husband, but also a cousin.
And if you're going to talk about politics, as tempting as it can be, don't just reduce everything down to problems with capitalism. Acknowledge problems that aren't just capitalism, and when you do mention it, mention it, don't go off on a rant about it (unless the person you're talking to is ready for that, which your boomer parents and your non-fuckup siblings probably aren't). Most people are going to move one step at a time.
"Quartz242 I love you but I stopped listening after the first sentence but it sounds like you know what your talking about"
My conversations with my boyfriend are similar: he always reassures me that he loves me, and he admires my passion, but he finds it too much for him and kind of doesn't really listen to me about politics.
my lib mom thinks im like qanon for not believing everything RFA puts out about the DPRK
Friends are broadly Bernie-tier, but pretty cool with "eat the rich" talk and the occasional commie meme.
My republican parents are just all "communism works in theory" and think I'm naive. We can still laugh at Q loons though so that's kinda nice
QAnon started on 4chan, and I believe at the time 8chan was still being run by hotwheels. There's a strong case that whoever originally started the posts handed control of the tripcode over to watkins or began working closely with him later, but he didn't start it.
QAnon was the cashcow 8kun/8chan needed. It makes perfect sense for Watkins to attempt to drive as much traffic as possible to his website. Also didn't like his son or something close to him tweet out some cryptic shit like, "i just can't do this shit anymore" after some Qanon nutjob brought a gun to a pizza place? I vaguely remember seeing something like this, but idk in all honesty, i don't put too much thought into that shit.
From what I've heard (can't remember where) when QAnon got started, there was a trend on 4chan of claiming to be an anonymous insider in all sorts of agencies etc. QAnon was just another guy talking out of his ass, but it struck a nerve and people actually believed it.
Yeah 4chan's always had that element of RPing or even just telling ridiculous lies to see if anyone will fall for it. Quoth /b/:
The stories and information posted here are artistic works of fiction and falsehood.
Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact.
Most of the right-wingers I know have stopped talking to me, or I've stopped talking to them when they exposed themselves as racists.
Lots of the neolibs/centrists/Democrat hard-liners I know think I'm insane and throw horseshoe theory bullshit at me. One claimed that Hitler founded the German Communist Party, another refuses to believe that Biden promised $2,000 checks despite mainstream press reporting that he did in January, and another said that anyone who questions the official story about Epstein is crazy. I've largely written off this group as unreachable.
Most of my family and friends just think I'm a weirdo, which is nothing new. None have compared my beliefs to qanon.
Yes I've got an article bookmarked for dumbasses like him:
https://www.britannica.com/story/were-the-nazis-socialists
I try to downplay how far left I am around my parents, but they still get upset sometimes when I express my anger at every power structure we live under. I usually can make the admit I am right, but that doesn't make them happy. I try not to show anything more than progressive until I am sure I am safe where I am at, and have some friends in that environment. But occasionally I just talk about well established facts of CIA meddling and everyone stares at me like I have lobsters crawling on my head. It's a special kind of insanity to know that things are so, so wrong and have people disagree or keep trying the same solutions that don't work. At least I can dream of a brighter future.
This isn't always them agreeing with arguments, but more like me calling biden a spineless corporate shill who won't meaningfully change anything. This upsets them, but he has the track record to prove it. As for the second one, it doesn't matter how many sources back me up, people just will think I'm crazy for caring or knowing about this. It's an underpinning of society, so it is never supposed to be talked about. It also doesn't help that any kind of anti-government talk(at least in the circles I have lived in) get immediately associated with right-wing politics. So, I immediately have to dig myself out of a hole for just talking about things that have happened. It's worth noting I've spent most of life around middle class individuals, who benefit from the system. They know it hurts people, but they don't want to think about it. I'm thankful for the advice, and I might try it more, but I am not sure how successful it will be.
100% of my remaining family treats me like a complete lunatic. They just stay away from me. My politics to them, standard sort of Marxist stuff, are indistinguishable from ranting about alien brainwaves or fluoride in the water. They're also largely reactionaries and I have it on good authority several of my cousins are in the klan.
My coworkers sometimes humor me, but they believe I say defensive stuff about China or Cuba out of some contrarian streak rather than any actual convictions I have. Conversations with people outside of work or family tend to conclude with the other party declaring me some sort of real life troll with fringe, otherworldy beliefs that no person could ever possibly have.
It really is fascinating. Not only is leftist organization suppressed here in the USA, but any advocacy for leftist policy is regarded as inherently extremist or so fanciful that it might as well be imaginary. Standard Marxist/communist/leftist whatever movements are pretty common worldwide, plus several governments have leftist parties in power. I wouldn't say it's the largest political force on Earth right now, but it's certainly not some unknown, fringe movement that died decades ago, like how is usually articulated to me.
I mostly know conservative folk because of where I grew up and live. Their reaction to Marxism, so long as the s-word and c-word aren't mentioned...is actually pretty positive a lot of the time. The bare explanation of class structure and socially necessary labor time and all that is often able to resonate with people I've been around. It was actually pretty easy to get some otherwise conservative people on my side of a union vote if we kept the scary words away. This might be more of an instance of class interests transcending whatever cultural ideology had been ingrained in them, maybe, because they're working class.
However, if the socialism/communism words do come up, that's when liberals and conservatives jump down my throat. Usually their end goal is to find a way to declare me a "bad person" and so that gives them pretense to cut off talking with me. They want to find some way of tying me implicitly to genocide or advocacy of political violence or whatever, but I'm usually not shy about it. I'll outright say all billionaires are criminals or that we should be seizing empty homes and making them into shelters or whatever else is up my butt that day.
One of my aunts gave me a book for Christmas once entitled "Conspiracies and Secret Societies" because she says I like to "expand [my] mind about the world" essentially calling me a conspiracy theorist in a positive way, I guess. The book at certain points just outright repeats various theories about the whole secret Jewish blood libel new world order bullshit if you're curious about the quality of it.
I'm not even talking about people with self-identified coherent ideological positions. The average person I've met will either consider communism some distant, outlier dead thing from the past or some nebulously defined, extreme, horrifying thing that has something to do with things being taken from you. They're people who would refer to modern day Russia as communist, since they just use the word as a synonym for bad.
Someone who would claim to be a neoliberal or libertarian would probably be a bit more on the ball I'm guessing, since that would imply some level of research into various ideological stances.
Where do I start?
Been called a conspiracy nut and have been compared to QAnonners. Asked them where my conclusions when appealing to inductive evidence when it comes to my hypothesis on imperial meddling is wrong and met with silence. I even appealed to journalists here and actual historical evidence.
I've been called Peter Pan and been told 'welcome to the real world' for criticizing capitalism. This person just likes getting dunked on for some reason which is really weird because I have facts, figures, etc. lined up and ready for him to google, and he keeps coming back at me with right wing youtubers that I proceed to dunk on.
Told by English speaking immigrants from the community I belong I'm 'American' and should STFU about what's going on in the mainland from where I was born but not raised.
I've been blocked by friends for calling out Winston Churchill being a dipshit to India.
I've been called a Russian bot by a friend for supporting Bernie (who I only reluctantly supported).
I've probably been accused of being racist or homophobic for not liking Pete or Kamala which is weird if you just look at me in real life. People have looked at me differently since then.
I've always hated Joe. I've gotten silence when it comes to his treatment of migrant children and his mishandling of the current Dante Wright situation. It's always "wait and we'll get our fight later" and they aren't fighting.
I just don't any fucks anymore. If people went mask off, then I'll go mask off too. Good thing I'm naturally a loner. I always come back at them with sources from academic journals and I always get silence or some type of deflecting. IDC , I'll dunk on you.
