from one of their recent episodes, please post in the comments which one it was

grow soy

(soulless consumerist voice) "I will never eat bugs!!! We need eco-modernism, not Malthusianism" :Peter-Coffin:

imagine being so petit bourgeois you literally believe McDonalds is bad, this is what happens when the most worthless people alive pretend to be in touch with the people. Will these LARPing Marxists ever visit a farm or factory to actually get in touch with the material conditions?

  • mr_world [they/them]
    ·
    3 years ago

    It's really how you frame the problem. People frame it as "we need to talk to this problematic group" as if we start with problematic groups and then seek them out. It's more like a broad coalition of workers will include problematic people. We don't seek out problematic groups specifically, it's just that the average worker is going to have some terrible opinions. Can't be helped.

    The people who are constantly anxious about any kind of interaction only view it as the first framing. Because they're online and everyone is already divided up into neat little bubbles so that if you want to approach anyone outside of your bubble, you must enter another. In the physical world you usually get to know people first and then slowly discover their opinions. It's very hard to immediately pigeonhole them into a category simply because you don't have the information to do so. Unless you're a judgemental prick who is highly prejudiced on appearances and demeanor. Being online you're already presented with that information by virtue of what communities you frequent. A person goes on hexbear a lot? Leftitst. Person goes on 4chan a lot? Chud. You don't have to think about anything or bother with finding anything out about another person. You have a nice convenient box ready to go just by being online to begin with.

    This is why it's important for people who have spent their entire adolescence on these sites to log off and actually go practice real socializing. If your entire experience of human interaction is this easy-mode internet bubble stuff, it tends to make you hard to be around. The workers we need to reach aren't online so they just end up seeing a weirdo who obsesses about a bunch of unknown cultural affectations from podcasts and forums. We all look like black_mold_futures to a non-online person.

    Someone might say it's our job to kick out all the people with terrible opinions, but that's because they think real life works like a web forum. All their social interaction happens in a place where people are a button-push away from being ignored. And they think that it's their job as leftists to be as confrontational as possible (another symptom of existing purely in a frictionless online plane). They'll bring up the Mao quote but ignore the part where he was talking about confronting them face to face. As in talking to them in person. Not just getting your jollies dunking on libs, knowing the mods will ban them if they argue back too much. If you really think of yourself as part of a community, which you should, then the goal isn't to ban everyone. You're supposed to organize the people around you. Online you get to choose. We're all thousands of miles away from each other. We can select who gets to be here. In a physical community you don't have that luxury. So you have to learn to work with people who do think differently than you and have bad opinions that must be worked on slowly over a long period of time. It's harder and messier than posting. You don't get to choose who your neighbors are to an extent.

    Ask yourself if you really want a revolution. That means logging off and spending several hours in an uncomfortable room with people who say silly things. It means putting in the effort to get to know your boomer ass neighbors who you have absolutely nothing in common with. It means learning to cope with all the social anxiety in a productive manor not to mention the frustration too.