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i guess this shows that sanders did attract all sorts. would have been a really weird unstable coalition if he had won
A Sanders coalition would have been immediately poisoned by opportunists and grifters and he would welcome them with open arms. I'd still prefer that to what we've got though.
He had the most donations from veterans and active service members because, iirc, people who have actually been in combat don't like it, and he was the only one who actually wanted to scale back the american war machine.
I have one friend who's political ideas are unintelligible but seem to be right wing, yet I feel like I make progress with them and then 2 weeks their brain has reset.
I am not going to apologize for the length of this post.
This is my dad except he's a lib who voted for Bernie twice, but now he supports Biden, even though I can't get him to mention a single policy of Biden's which actually aligns with my dad's beliefs. Basically Biden good because coronavirus gone. (And honestly, although mass vaccination began before Biden took office, I'm not sure that coronavirus would have "gone away" had Trump won the election. Either that, or liberals would be freaking out about our current coronavirus rates rather than celebrating them—or claiming that the president has nothing to do with how they've decreased—or claiming that they haven't actually decreased at all and that we're still in immense danger (this last part is true!). If someone wants to argue that coronavirus would have decreased with Trump in power, I guess you can, although honestly both of these guys are dog shit.)
Anyway, my big thing with my dad is getting him to stop swallowing the nonsense from the liberal media. He actually pays for the Washington Post and I just can't fucking get him to stop. He comes from a wealthy Jewish family, spent his entire life working in kitchens, and just inherited a buttload of money. We live in a pretty peaceful liberal area that is insulated from all the shit that's going on everywhere else, at least for the time being. The result of this is that we just had a huge fight about the Wuhan lab leak theory. His argument was that "everything should be investigated," even though he would have called the same theory a conspiracy just a few months ago when Trump was talking about it. I told him that these fuckers in the corporate press have done nothing but lie and distort since the day he was born—they've done nothing but ruin his life—but he still pays for their lies! We're kind of getting over the fight now but things are still a little tense. He says I called him a fascist, which I honestly don't recall doing. I did say, however, that if you spout racist and fascist talking points (the Wuhan lab leak), I'm going to call it what it is.
Usually every few weeks we'll spend like an hour or two walking and talking. He'll come around to whatever I'm saying because liberals possess, at best, a superficial worldview while communists go to the roots. Then, after a few days, he'll be repeating whatever nonsense he saw on The New York Times front page about how we must incinerate every Chinese person now (while celebrating AAPI Pride) and getting angry at me when I say that fucking place is owned by pedophile billionaires. His childhood friend is a reporter there who "took down" one of the previous corrupt governors, which proves that the system works, right?
He also got so angry at me when I referred to him as a boomer. With liberals, either everyone's at fault, or no one's at fault. The idea that there could be groups, and that certain groups could be more guilty than others, is anathema to them, especially since they usually belong to these groups. (I have met actual socialist boomers who somehow survived the '80s and '90s with their beliefs intact, but we all know that generation is extremely bourgeois in the USA; most of the cool boomers are dead.) They will say that it's wrong to generalize about anyone because it seems racist, even if we aren't talking about races; they will also say, contrary to all historical evidence, that human races are not social constructs and have existed in exactly the same form since the dawn of time.
But yeah, I think it's pretty insightful to call this Joe Rogan syndrome and also to bring up the Mass Line. (I too suffer from JRS because I don't believe that the corporate media lies about everything, just nearly everything, and that what they choose to emphasize and how they interpret events reveals their fascist bias.)
My dad has said positive things about Mao and claims that one of his teachers in school was on the Long March—a white woman who lived in China so long that she apparently forgot how to speak English. He thinks that Cuba is good, that Venezuela has been sabotaged, that the CIA is full of Nazis, etcetera, etcetera. But his emotional attachment to Biden and to the corporate press—we would watch Dan Rather blame Republicans for every last problem in the universe every evening at dinner time when I was a kid—is just amazingly poisonous, and he really does think that he's just kind of this neutral arbiter (as you say) taking in information from all sides. He gets so upset when I say the corporate press is full of shit—the idea that they would ever lie or distort is so painful to him even though it's so easy to point to these massive examples (like the Iraq War) where the consensus is that they did exactly that, and no one was ever punished for it and nothing was ever reformed. He claims that everything is biased—which is actually true and the kind of point that Zizek would make—and I just tell him that I'm biased in favor of the global 99% while he's biased in favor of the global 1% because he actually pays for a newspaper owned by the world's richest man and thinks that it's absurd that they would ever do anything improper!
I asked him a few weeks ago what kind of future he saw for my kids, his grandkids. And he admitted that the best he could hope for was that we managed to "hold the line." Basically, nothing can actually get better. For whatever reason—we have no idea why!—the USA is a pit of despair which only a handful of bright liberal luminaries like Joe Biden can just barely hold at bay. Although liberals rarely think about the future (or much of anything), it's still such a profoundly bleak worldview that honestly goes beyond the most depressed predictions of the future I've seen among leftists. Like, with leftists, we admit that everything can stay the same or get much worse. We are fully aware of that. But we also hope for things to get so much better. We know there's a chance of that happening, too. But with liberals, there is no chance. The best they can hope for is to keep things as they are now, which is completely and obviously impossible.
You're not really making progress with them, they're just agreeing with you out of social necessity. You can't change people's core values, no matter how hard you try.
Ah, so you're responsible for all the weirdly cognizant comments on the Donald.
I feel like this should go without saying, but communists should not have friends who work for the CIA.
Sorry friends I'm gonna be late for the communist book club meeting I'm hanging out with my gestapo friends.
If you value your friendship with them, it might not be a bad idea to start showing them what the CIA does. And if they just dont care then well...prolly not the best people to have as friends.
I live in the middle of trump country and even I could find good anti-capitalist leftist friends. We may not all be the same kind of left but I can speak my mind around them and don't have to hide who I am. Like if you have to hide who you are then you objectively don't belong in that group and they don't love or appreciate you for you. Why would anybody put themselves through that? I say this as somebody who spent 6 years of my life cripplingly alone (lemme know if that's a bad term) and then a few years with some really unsupportive people. I would have rather been alone. Unsupportive friends can do more damage to your self-image than you think. I'm still working through some of my past hangups caused by them. Some of you need to recognize that you deserve better.
I have lib friends but they're mostly apolitical. Nobody irl really describes themselves as a "neoliberal" unless they're a weird PMC or are terminally online.
We rarely talk politics, and when we do its mostly lib stuff. I dont want to tell them im a communist because theyre all good friends and I dont want to lose anyone just because they have anticommunist brainworms
Hey, I hate to tell you this but there ain't a friend in the world that would bail on another friend for wanting to make the world better. Especially not a good one. If you have friends bailing on you for things that aren't harming you or people around you they are not friends let alone good friends. I'm not saying you need to go full tankie and talk about how it's actually good to kill billionaires but if talking to them about maybe making exploited workers across the globe the beneficiaries of their hard work at the expense of some of our more absurd comforts makes them want to never speak with you again frankly you're probably better off without them.
As I have gotten older I seem to have alienated everyone in my life who doesn't have socialist sympathies. I see leftism as an expression of human empathy, and I just have no time anymore for people who don't exude empathy.
I don't pretend to be perfectly empathetic and I know I fuck up and can be selfish or a jerk at times. It's exactly for those moments that I want to be surrounded by people who I trust to push me in the right direction.
My "apolitical" friends I try to give the leftist perspective on stuff and they're generally pretty accepting. My left-leaning/soc dem friends I'm willing to engage in conversations with because I think they are coming from the right place.
Anyone centrist or right I pretty much openly declare to be my enemy, and I take them to task over every expression of their ideology. If you see the moral stain of capitalism and are genuinely comfortable with it, you are not my friend and I see it as my job to make the world uncomfortable for you.
It's very annoying, and I have lost friends, relationships, and professional opportunities over it, but fuck it. I think it's worth it.
My center/right "friends" were all fake. Dropped me the instant I said the A word.
It's just a fact that all right wingers want lefties dead. That's the cold reality.
Yes. Due to a few circumstances, I accidentally became real-life acquaintances with a moderator of /r/neoliberal. I could probably find out which one, but I don't want to know any more of their politics than I already do.
There's not really much to elaborate. Sometime after meeting them they mentioned they were a moderator of the subreddit and I was surprised lol. Everything else is personal info honestly.
Nothing to be done about it, now you have to start a podcast
"Neoliberal" as in dedicated idealogues? Or as in people who just can't imagine life outside neoliberalism and get mad when you try to make them?
Know plenty of the latter, don't know enough PMC nerds to run much into the former.
Oof. Yeah, can't wait for the U.S. glastnost reforms that will tell us in real time exactly how when and why the CIA decided to instigate a coup.
:07: on being social circle traitor.
Or are you? :amogus:
But yes, acquaintances :pete: