https://twitter.com/juliaioffe/status/1413545742023659524?s=19
Ioffe sucks but these are great excerpts.
LMAO. They enjoyed the aesthetic of speaking truth to power so much that they actually believed they were doing the real thing instead of obeying their media executives.
I can't imagine lacking awareness so badly that you're getting leaks from the shitshow that was the Trump administration and you think it's because you're so goddamn good rather than because the West Wing was a den of backstabbing vipers that was leaking all over the place and you just happened to be standing in the right place to catch a few drops.
That's what hero worship culture does to a mother fucker. Our entire culture is built around a sociopathic self-obsessive lens for perceiving the world. We attribute causes to individuals, not systems, and then due to availability bias, massively inflate our own experiences' importance because it's what we use to play adlibs for the hero story we're maintaining in our own heads that we pass off as a "self-identity." But it's just fiction, pure idealism, untethered from material analysis or systemic critique. I'd pity them as wretches were their actions not complicit in incalculable human suffering caused by the maintenence of global capitalism and imperialism.* They're worse than wretches, they're class-traitor goons chasing an ego bump and approval from their bosses/capitalist owners at the expense of millions. Then THEY have the audacity to feel let down by the system. Insulting, tbh.
*(inb4 THOSE ARE THE SAME THING, LIB)
Sorry for the word vomit, this just really struck a fucking nerve and I needed to let off some venom.
In addition to what MemesAreTheory said, it's also that delusion that these people with wealthy backgrounds and premium educations had to somehow be amazing. They couldn't get to where they are by connections or privilege. Nope! They earned it.
This is a wake up call for a lot of these liberal elite types.
The myth of meritocracy does so much heavy lifting when it comes ideologically justifying this shit show of a country. I'm reminded of this article about self-validating belief systems, and how they're surprisingly epistemically resilient despite how they seem obviously false to those who aren't indoctrinated into them. A great deal of rationalizing goes on to preserve the ego and mitigate cognitive dissonance, and belief systems tend to evolve mechanisms for self-preservation in the face of contrary evidence by exploiting biases and fallacies our stupid meat brains are almost incapable of avoiding.
https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09515089.2011.579420
You can probably find a free copy somewhere, I'm assuming this is nerd shit and most people won't actually read it.
I don't want to summarize the entire article, but it's a pretty interesting read, and while it focuses on cults/Woo and other ideological oddities, I think it's painfully obvious that liberalism's defenders are engaging in the same behavior as their beliefs about the world are proven false by events day after day.
people with wealthy backgrounds and premium educations had to somehow be amazing
Some of the dumbest and dullest people on the planet are consistently always rich people with educations from prestigious backgrounds. Their entire personality is aesthetics and the pantomime of finding meaning in a life they didn't even work to achieve.
