I fucking hate living here. The culture is poison. The economy is a fucking disaster. The education is designed to leave a huge portion of the country illiterate. Every single atom of it is white supremacist. The land is all stolen. The capitalists are completely above the law. Fuck cars. Fuck America,
The most insidious aspect of America (to me at least) is that whenever I voice these same exact concerns, most people treat me like an escaped lunatic. Hating cars might as well be like saying you hate oxygen. Saying I hate America outright just gives me snarky looks or a chud telling me to leave. Voicing any amount of concern for the homeless makes people wide eyed or dismissive. Saying I hate cops makes everyone go into panic mode and start dialing 911.
This whole country is like a psychology experiment designed to produce as much paranoia and alienation as possible. The vast majority of people I interact with either have no clue what I'm talking about when I voice my concerns or they're instantly hostile. I'm so frustrated.
Thankfully I’ve managed to get myself into a really left wing bubble. The furthest right wing acceptable opinion in neuroscience academia seems to be “Elizabeth Warren types,” with my being an out and proud communist never prompting more than “Interesting! I’d love to hear more about that!” My white upper class professor was like “don’t call the cops unless you really have to, fuck cops.”
When I say shit like “cars bad” “America bad” “cops bad” “just fucking house the homeless jfc” and even “China handled covid way way better than we did” everyone mostly agrees. It’s pretty cool.
That's why you don't start the conversation with nukes like badmouthing usa or pigs. The trick is replacing the socially unacceptable phrases with the ones that won't get you in trouble. Instead of badmouthing usa, talk about specifically the swamp or the elites.
The most tragic part about all this is how close the qanon is to being right about pretty much everything. I'd say an average qanon has a better grasp of reality than your average lib. Call out shoehorn theory all you want, but at least qanoners understand that the world is fucked up and the rich and the powerful are to blame, they don't think america is already great. It's not their fault hollywood poisoned everyone's brains with fifth grade level propaganda about superheroes and supervillains. Sure, the people in charge are not literally demons and vampires, but are q really wrong about the swamp? Of course not.
Learn how to speak like a normie.
Instead of badmouthing usa, talk about specifically the swamp or the elites.
This is a risky move because you can easily end up confirming and supporting the audience's fascist beliefs. Always, always, always work in a lefty spin on why those actors are destructive and how things should be fixed.
My big thing is to focus on working class internationalism, most chuds I've met will either be receptive or suddenly be on the defensive and insecure trying to explain why an international movement against the ruling class is bad and only "real Americans" can save the world from the elite they vaguely recognize as the enemy. At that point it's easy to push them to reveal their mask off fascism and they will get embarrassed and stop talking.
That's pretty awesome, I've never tried that tactic. What do you usually lead with?
Start by quickly emphasizing the existence of a global elite/ruling class, which most will agree with, and then explain why a global elite requires a global response that will involve every worker. You can even call them the liberal elite and say we'll need everyone, from every country, to organize and take down the liberal elite. At this point I'll explain that the source of the elite's power is their control of multinational corporations and make the case for democracy in the workplace (can even be framed in Jeffersonian "consent of the governed" language) and bring it back to why it needs to be an international movement or else we're just making American citizens the new global elite to lord over the rest of the world. If they are ok with that outcome, they're a fascist.
That's the only move you have if you want any chance to actually get to people.
If your goal is to make people agree with you, then step one is finding common ground and agreeing with them on something. You can't start with confrontation and debate people into doing something they don't want to do, that's not how real world works.
Obviously some of their opinions are shit, I'm not telling you to agree on everything. I'm just saying focus on the things you already agree on. I'm sure you can find plenty of things to disagree about even between the left, name more iconic duo than leftism and infighting. That's why it's important to talk about the things you agree on.
That can only work for a long-term engagement, though. Confirming a budding fascist's biases and then not seeing them again is only a 100% bad thing. It would be infinitely better to state a socialist position clearly and plainly, though that doesn't mean announcing death to America lol. Can just talk about how bosses don't actually work 10X harder than workers and workers should have more say over how the business runs, for example.
If it's a co-worker you're going to talk to for months, maybe you could lead with talking about "the swamp", but you're gonna have to find a way to turn the corner from Trump to socialism.
the swamp was just an example to use instead of usa, I didn't mean to always open with specifically the swamp
“Oh, I don’t know about that” is a far more productive disagreement than actually confronting whatever horseshit they’re saying, it lets you segue into more nuanced discussion of issues where you cloak explicitly left politics in a veneer of “common sense” rhetoric.
If you can cite the saints and canon of US civil religion (founding fathers, originating documents like the constitution, Jesus, that sort of thing) as justification for your position it’s like arguing on easy mode and they’ll agree with almost anything you say.
I'd still not be surprised if Q wasn't some sort of CIA psyop to channel revolutionary energy into chasing after satanists in the bushes. But yeah, they come closer than your average lib who's totally clueless.
I'm not talking about the leaders of the movement, I'm talking about the normies. They can't all be cia.
Oh yeah, the normies are just fools along for the ride.
Yeah I know how to talk to normies but it's such a daily grind. I'm not even attempting to sway them to my side at this point, I just want to know someone at the very least understands what I mean. It's wearing away at my soul to know people for a little bit just waiting for them to be transphobic, or some other weird reactionary shit to come out of their mouths. Maybe it's at an ignorable level wherever you are, but I live in Texas and the chud, right wing rah rah America shit never stops, 99% of people seem to buy into it, and I'm just tired and need out. I hate keeping up this act and I hate how alone it makes me feel
Yeah I know how to talk to normies but it’s such a daily grind.
The grind is so physically exhausting...
shoehorn theory
know you meant horseshoe but this is bringing to mind some fun meme ideas
How would you deal with someone that's an irl stupidpol/ patsoc type? Agree with them when they use a slur to describe LGBT+ comrades since they are "economic leftists"? The moment you agree with their beliefs just to get them on board you are just allowing the hate to propagate in their mind.
In this scenario you're talking to someone who already has an established political opinion. Talking to these people is basically useless, there's no way to make people replace their political opinions with some other, new alternatives. They can only do it themselves. The focus should always be on the normies who don't care about politics and mostly repeat the things they've picked up through the osmosis without actually caring about what they say. If their heart is in it and there's an argument, there's no point. Now sometimes it's hard to draw a hard line between a normie who might be open to new ideas and a fossilized chud... Well, sorry, but being a leftist is hard work, get used to it.
Not doing anything is always easier than doing something. And doing something without making a mistake isn't easy, either. It all depends on what you're trying to do. If you're just having a broad conversation about nothing, then it doesn't matter if you agree or not, because there are no consequences, really. And if you're talking to a stupidpol person about something specific, then agreeing/ignoring their opinions will depend on what exactly are you doing. How often are you in a situation when a stupidpol person would be willing to do something lefty but only as long as you denounce minorities? It sounds like a weird hypothetical scenario, it that really something that happens often?
For example, if you meet a stupidpol in a homeless shelter and their stupid opinion comes up, what's the context here? Are they going to refuse giving someone food because they have a rainbow flag pin or something? That sounds really strawman-y, I doubt a stupidpol person would go full cartoon supervillain mode and deny them food or something like this. In this hypothetical scenario, it's more likely they'll might just say something stupid but keep doing their job. So just say something back at them and continue doing whatever it is you were both doing, because what you two are doing is probably infinitely more important than an argument about pronouns.
And if the arguments start flying before any actual work even starts, well, we all know how it's going to go. Things will just fall apart and everyone will walk away feeling smug about themselves no matter what either you or I write in this thread.
We need ways of breaking through the dynamic of how if you say all-American things are bad, you get seen as the bogeyman.
Failed, bankrupt, corrupted, deceptive, shallow.... There are lots of things we can say without outright saying "America bad".
Fuck cars.
I really can’t stress this enough. Fuck cars, and fuck this god forsaken country where I’m forced to rely on them. My friend lives in one of like the 3 places in the country you can get by without a car, it’s a shorter walk for him to get from his front door to Safeway than it is for me to get to my car. The amount of shit that would fit in this town if you just deleted every parking lot.
And why can’t I get a train to a major city 2 hours away? I’m literally at the mid point between 4 major cities. But there’s not a passenger rail service for over 100 miles. Want to visit my friends? That’s a two hour drive on the interstate. Hope my meds don’t put me to sleep! Oh and it’s toll roads too, thanks Florida.
I hate driving, I hate maintaining a car, I hate having to own a car, and I hate what cars have done to our cities. Immediately ban the construction of new cars, roads, and parking lots and move towards the banning of cars for most private use.
And it's literally impossible to undo the way we've built it, too. Yeah we can densify downtown neighborhoods and maybe if we're lucky we can get a few intercity rail lines going in 20 years, but 99% of suburban strip mall single family shit hole america is stuck that way. We literally sunk all of our cheap fossil fuel energy into building the whole country like that and now we don't have enough cheap energy to change it. Kunstler calls it the greatest misallocation of resources in human history. It's a fucking bummer.
Literally the only way to deal with it is to allow huge areas of suburb to be abandoned and rot. Densify already dense downtown and urban areas and simply ban new construction in certain areas and allow them to deteriorate, with some public transit and electric cars as a temporary bandaid. But there’s no salvaging most of Orlando for example. Recycle the building materials we can, and let it rot.
You say allow like it should be a policy, but the fact is that it will happen regardless. Suburban cities all over the country can't pay to maintain themselves because the cost to take care of infrastructure exceeds the tax revenue they get from sprawled out development. We're talking thousands of miles of roads and sewers PER CITY, all paid for and subsidized by the federal govt, transportation lobby, and private development over decades.
And when they reach the point of facing bankruptcy (without understanding how they got there), cities will be forced to raise taxes like crazy and beg the fed for cash (already happening now with municipal bonds), at which point those who can move away to avoid paying more will, and those who can't will be stuck with a dying city. It's really fucking bleak, and it's going to be the norm in 10-20 years.
Yeah I say “Allow” because instead of letting it idly happen like it’s going to, we should do it as a matter of policy, so that we can actively manage which areas are abandoned and which are maintained and give assistance to people to leave the areas being abandoned and to move to city centers.
You’re right though, that’s not gonna happen, it’s just going to idly fall apart until it’s too late.
lol there’s no point saving Orlando anyways. most of Florida will probably be flooded in the time it would take to undo the damage
True, I just said Orlando because it’s 99% suburbs. Honestly Florida should already be in the early stages of a nearly full, permanent evacuation. The fact that there’s still new construction happening in Miami is 🤡 shit
Or we just respect a few culverts, transformers, and gas stations.
Suburbs and exurbs are basically hanging by 3 threads.
Yeah it's why we do actually need electric cars even though they are not that great. It's the best we can do now that we fucked ourselves... unless we want to burn even more carbon and waste even more resources literally destroying most buildings in the country.
Electric cars are a mediocre band-aid at best, but yeah they are part of the solution. More important though is making more room on roads for bikes, buses, and people.
Yeah in even the poorly designed urban areas you can get by with a lot of electric buses instead of trains. But in suburban America it's such a massive fucking twisting labyrinth of low density housing and zero infrastructure / zero nearby stores, that people would wait hours for a bus
I hate driving, I hate maintaining a car, I hate having to own a car, and I hate what cars have done to our cities.
unfortunately forcing every American to buy a car allows the capitalists to squeeze like a cool $20k out of everyone which is "good for the economy" I guess because cars are one of the few things we still make here. Everything in this country is a fucking racket it sucks.
Eco Gecko's video on SUVs, "Vroom Doom", estimated that a typical automobile costs 6k (low-end sedans) to 11k (high-end pickups) per year to own/operate, all told. That doesn't include roadway spending, so it's possible that we spend up to 25% of our GDP just on having motor vehicles.
I live in one of those 3 places that you "don't need" a car, and I still need a car. Every job on my field is in a location that is not transit accessible, period. The nearest grocery store is over a mile from my house and involves crossing multiple intersections that I - a healthy, fit 29 year old man - feel sketchy crossing, let alone someone not in "peak physical form". Buses come once an hour at best outside of rush hour, and even then getting anywhere could take multiple transfers.
Fortunately, america will be utterly annihilated by itself within 20-30 years, and the entire concept of the United States will no longer matter
The death and balkanization of the United States is the absolute minimum necessary step for anything close to communism anywhere in the world. So long as the United States operates as the bastion of finance capital, sanctioning and invading nations who would seek any other possible world other than this neoliberal hell we inhabit, there will be no real alternative. For the rest of the world to live, the United States must die. It is absolutely bloomer.
It’s not going to be bloomer for anyone in North America. But in love, tragedies happen.
Hold up, I'm in north America and I would love nothing more than to witness the death of the united states. Outliving this shithole is the most bloomer possible outcome of my life
I think I would enjoy it ideologically. The Living conditions for the vast majority of the underclass will become much worse in a Balkanization. At best, there are two stable but diminished states engaged in permanent economic warfare. At worst, you have nuclear civil war and genocide. The results are not going to be pretty in North America. It should buy the third world more than enough time.
Well, hope or not, that depends on how conscious the working class in America is of their conditions.
but have you considered that nuclear winter could delay the effects of climate change for several years? think of how much more human suffering can be minted into capital in that time!
"Spring herself when she woke at dawn, would hardly know that we were gone"
I was in Cincinnati over the weekend for the first time, cool city with a modern, free streetcar and old, dense urban housing, but there's homeless people everywhere. What is the point of cool city revitalization efforts if they do nothing to do relieve the suffering of the poorest in society? And the racial dynamics of class in the city are as stark as anywhere in the US.
What is the point of
cool city revitalizationsociety if they do nothing to do relieve the suffering of the poorest in society?It is forcing the rest of us to become numb to human suffering lest we ourselves cannot survive either.
can't wait to go downtown after work, enjoy a microbrew, and pretend I don't see the squalid human suffering
I watched an old homeless woman lift her dress and bend over and piss in the street yesterday afternoon with her ass pointed right at me while I was driving toward her. I got the full moon view.
Yeah america rocks.
I try my absolute best to not become misanthropic, but Americans are genuinely diseased. Some of the most smugly ignorant, entitled, and needlessly aggressive people in the world.
And yet it's also full of good people who get treated like absolute shit by the system. There are many more oppressed than oppressors.
I often think of Lenin's speech on antisemitism. "The landowners and capitalists have created abysmal ignorance among the workers and peasants. Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews." The oppressed aren't inherently good, they are molded into hateful, ignorant people by the bourgeoisie.
They're still shitty people, but it's capitalism's fault and that's yet another reason why it needs to be fought. So that people can be more empathetic and have greater social consciousness.
What amazes me is how often the native prosociality of people still manages to break through no matter how much capitalism tries to beat it out of them.
There's definitely a perverse undercurrent within American society. A disease for sure.
Yeah it’s bad. Gerald Horne says that there’s a mass-base for fascism in the US, and that this in particular is something the US left really needs to grapple with. Every day, when I critically analyze my life as a white guy, I come to realize new evidence about just how true this is.
Racialized class-collaboration, it’s very real and I personally need to figure out how avoid it to the greatest extent possible while still supporting my family and the struggle
Correct. Western socialists need to be in panic mode for growing membership and keeping a basic, socialist party line (left unity yes, nazbol unity no). We are outnumbered 10:1, easily, and under deteriorating conditions the backlash will be to neoliberals, which the right (10 times bigger at least) will perceive as the left, making them capable of organizing similar to other fascists. If there's a comparison to be made to The Weimar Republic, the situation is much more dire, if less explicit in its motivations.
There's no Soviet Union to save the world from Fascism this time. And the Fascists have nukes now. The situation is grim.
Buddy of mine just ran across some Patriot Front posters in public. Not good!
Yep, there have been some going up in my town since last summer. They've been getting torn down as fast as they go up, but it's disturbing
the amount of mental poisoning that makes people in america apply race lines to everything they see, and pretend their not when they are and enforcing white hegemony is just insane.
I sort of had this snap moment about a year ago when all at once I internalized the knowledge that this isn't a real country, just a grotesque theme park if you're lucky and a human slaughterhouse if you're not.
I sound insane to a lot of people when I express my real opinions. Even the shadow of them, when toned down for uncertain company, is enough to make me an outlier. I never bother backing myself up anymore, once I'm talking I just push the other person further and further into a corner by discussing US military atrocities. There's no defense of them.
"Don't you know that I am a famous poster who signs off their name under every comment. Smh. What do you mean saying 'We should allow transphobia if we want socialism and saying the average worker is a cis white man' will get me banned!!!"
