So, I made the mistake of picking a performing arts degree, so I spend most of my days pondering how pointless of a degree it is. I did manage to pick a module about performance protest, and while some of it gets a bit bullshitty, there's been other parts like looking at native American performance/protest at the Dakota pipeline and stuff, which have been interesting and useful.
Yesterday there was some group work. It was a bit of a brainstorming exercise but as a group we settled on the idea of spamming the illegal immigrant report line/letterbox with shit so that new reports wont go through. Ok, it's nothing amazing, but it served the purpose of the exercise we were given.
Then this girl speaks up. Previously her contribution to class has been telling everyone about how she culturally enriched herself by going on holiday in places where poor people exist.
On our idea, she says that it might be illegal to do, so we should create a fake website and have people fill that in as a symbolic message.
A FAKE WEBSITE FILLED IN AS A SYMBOLIC MESSAGE
At that moment I realised why the arts seem so useless at changing things. It's jam packed with trust fund kiddies.
that is complete insanity. what could possibly drive someone to have that thought at my young age? To remove all potency from the tiniest little act. Seriously ghoulish.
Was at a bar and this lady and her boyfriend decided to talk politics with me. I'm hammered, as my girlfriend was the bartender at the place at the time.
The discussion starts slow but eventually they bring up climate change and I drop the 100 companies produce 70% of greenhouse gas line.
Then this lady looks at me and laughs and says "Yeah so? Do you drive an electric car? What do you personally do to help the environment?"
I sort of begin to foam at the mouth at this line and that was the end of the Convo. They left and my gf yelled at me for scaring the patrons away.
It was just so weird, this otherwise normal lady had this gut reaction to defend companies that were poisoning us. Not only that, she felt the need to blame me, the individual, in their stead.
Shit still fucks me up
electric cars being an indulgence purchase that absolves your sins
Holy shit I hate how accurate that is
i saw a zizek interview that talked about this more generally, i know hes hit and miss but i thought he had a good point on this
that back in the day you bought your commodities that you needed or wanted and that was an act you would feel ethically neutral or bad about (especially if it was an unnecessary treat). and you (as joe middleclass) would absolve your guilt separately by donating to charity or whatever - still in a commodified way, but entirely separately. whereas now with green capitalism (or other "ethical" capitalism), the two become intertwined in the same action, and purchasing these commodities becomes the good deed in and of itself - absolving the consumer of the perceived need to do anything else and also absolving any sense of a guilty, wasteful purchase. buying commodities becomes the way you save the planet. he was talking about rainforest friendly chocolate bars or something as the example, but the principle is the same.
“Yeah so? Do you drive an electric car? What do you personally do to help the environment?”
Driving an electric car doesn't help the environment. At most, it hurts the environment slightly less than a comparable ICE car, but far more than more sustainable forms of transport (public transport for example). This is so stupid. "I'm a good person for buying a nice car".
I was very good at weeding out that crowd lmao
I cringe at some of my behavior during that time but sometimes I was rad
“Yeah so? Do you drive an electric car? What do you personally do to help the environment?”
Love for someone to pull this line on me since I'm too poor to have a car right now :tofu-cool:
Oh yeah, same. That was the other half the reason I went nuts. Was wearing very obviously thrift store clothes and drinking dollar beers and tried to guilt me into a 35k purchase lmao
People are a disappointment a lot of the time. Anything good will be polluted by capitalism and the cult of individualism.
There’s a good movie called “Soul on a String”. It’s a Chinese film set in Tibet, with a mostly Tibetan cast and based on a book by a half Han half Tibetan author. Me and my sister saw it at a film festival together. Like a year later she went on a rant about how China “wiped out all the Tibetan and suppressed their culture”. And I was like “uh, we saw a Chinese movie set in Tibet like a year ago”. She said they must have censored it in China, but like no, they didn’t it was released there. I literally pulled this info up on my phone. She just rolled her eyes and went “okay commie”.
I’m genuinely convinced once someone is that lib brained they’re a fucking lost cause, gonna feel real bad when I gotta gulag my own sister.
when these little stupid notions pile up its easy to write them off as a fucking moron, but at the end of the day all it reveals is that they have no idea what they are talking about. i hate that we have to learn a new way to talk to people with these prepackaged beliefs because even the rare attempt to remove the veil seems to them as if all we want to do is make them feel wrong and/or stupid. like, you are, but it's your fault you feel that way and there's nothing i can do about it. fuck.
One time my mother yelled at a homeless man for having a phone
One time my burger joint owning cousin fired two high schoolers for speaking Spanish to one another
One time a college classmate gave a presentation about why gay people should be segregated into an internal country within a country because this would somehow sell more consumer goods
gay people should be segregated into an internal country within a country because this would somehow sell more consumer goods
:jesse-wtf:
His reasoning hinged upon some very shaky math and a claim that gay men "buy both female and male products." It was some kind of bonkers idea you could test out how well certain clothes, foods, and cosmetics sell because in his words "gay people do both." So he was coming at it both from an angle that gay people are abominations who should be removed from public, and that gay people are good test subjects for whatever pointless consumer products capitalism makes.
The professor didn't stop the presentation and the other students mostly nodded along
I assume of course that he in no way offered any basis for the claim that gay men buy products aimed at women basing the idea solely on the foundation of gay men and women both being stereotypically effeminate
So concentration camps as focus groups to test out new products?
I mean it would get them a job at the :pete: consultancy company, but wow.
I got suspended once for an art project in high school that involved portraying nazis as literal demons that were burning in hellfire. After my art teacher (who gave me the assignment to portray the most evil I could think of) defended me, I could return on the condition I would change my artwork to remove references to nazis. Meanwhile, I had literal white power necklace wearing skinheads in my class. I remember that one of the main demons had a swastika on its forehead, and I changed it to a dollar sign after. (okay remember I was a 14-year-old edge lord at the time that wasn't very subtle). A week later, the art piece got 'lost' and I got a passing grade.
Looking back, it was a pretty successful art piece. It made me aware of how people like to put evil things under the rug/ignore it for comfort rather than to expose it and fight it.
One time in high school I wrote an essay about how it would be cool to track down and burn every confederate flag in the country. I requested this essay be read aloud in the class, but was told it was too extreme. The teacher had a whole litany of notes in red ink on my essay, criticizing my hatred of the confederacy and southern reactionaries. At one point he even wrote "Think about the heritage the flag represents, not the hatred you say it represents"
My essay was returned to me, I was told to pick a different topic, and I had to go to the school counselor for three days for "violent thoughts." A few days later someone carved a homophobic slur into my locker.
Yes I grew up in the south
"Heritage Not Hate" - brought to you by the organization called The Sons of Confederate Veterans
“Think about the heritage the flag represents, not the hatred you say it represents”
ah I see, YOU are the problem here, not the people who fought a war to own slaves. Lovely stuff.
It's like the cliche "I'm sorry you feel that way." line.
So you owe the fash the energy to "see their point of view" yet you're not given the same courtesy? Typical hogs.
“Think about the heritage the flag represents, not the hatred you say it represents”
That heritage being a slaving nation run by and for slave-owning slave-raping slavers? Or did they mean grits and banjo music?
I got sent to the counselor after writing an essay with the prompt "what can students like you do to stop climate change?"
Luckily, the counselor was a lefty, and just said "It's my professional duty to ask the following: you gonna hurt anyone?" Then we chatted about radical Hip-Hop for the remaining 25 minutes.
Getting sent to the counselor for violent thoughts isn't the worst.
Damn, shit sucks man.
I have no idea why they think they're allowed to mess with people, but they believe their victims owe them niceness. "Two wrongs don't make a right, but the first definitely does."
Some of my coworkers regularly get into debates about how they would run out workplace if they owned it (they never will). And you'd think they'd talk about running it more efficiently or more rights to the workers? Nope, they'll fantasize about reducing PTO, lowering pay, and mandating longer work hours for everyone. One guy regularly says "when I started I made $8 per hour and that was enough."
They're so ingrained with neoliberal conservative nonsense they have ceased to identify with their own interests and instead live on imaginary bourgeois interests.
And I tried unionizing there
Well you see it's something worse... But you get to be at the top. Everyone else is a lot worse off and you're about the same. Therefore the king.
Makes sense I guess since everyone is basically told constantly that it's literally impossible to make things better.
Imagine the absolute waste that a massive space habitat FOR COWS would be. :jesus-christ: just make the same thing and grow plants on it, that's atleast self sufficent to a point. Fucking burger brains
:frothingfash: "NO I MUST HAVE MY SPACE TENDIES!!!"
Even if humanity survives long enough to abandon a wasteland Earth to those who can't afford to go to space... People will be eating lab-grown meat by then.
I know a lot of people who are like this, and met most of them while studying law at university. Tried to join a local org that ostensibly wanted to use volunteers to help some marginalized communities, and like 90% just wanted to turn the place into a book-club that occassionally held seminars for trans people about their rights. All I could think of while listening to them was "if I was 15% more charismatic, I could coup this place in a month". Because the desire to do good was definitely there, but people were incredibly afraid of doing anything that might get them in trouble, and I think the same is true for the trust fund baby you had an encounter with.
I once had an art teacher, in college, go on a bit of a tirade about how she doesn't understand why we do drug trials and/or testing on animals when we could just do it on prisoners instead. Had to walk out of the classroom for a bit and really do some evaluation on the human species...and I was still a sucdem at that point even.
The same people who whinge and cry about Salinist gulags wish our prisons were as brutal as they imagine the gulags to have been.
No, see, you fool, if America mass-incarcerates people, it's good, because we're the good country, and it makes the GDP go up. Gulags were evil because they weren't profitable.
Copying and pasting my own post from 2 months ago because it's relevant
My mind keeps thinking back to a brief exchange I had with my mother about a year ago. It was sometime in the late fall/early winter of 2020 and my mom was watching some local news channel that was showing a segment on the state of pre trial detention in the U.S., and my mom turned to me and said something along the lines of “That’s terrible! Did you know that some people are spending over a year in jails just waiting for their trial?”
(I don’t remember the exact words said in this exchange but I remember the jist of it)
“Mom, you know I spent the entire summer yelling at cops. What makes you think that I didn’t know about the terrible things they do?”
“Well, this doesn’t have to do with cops because this is just the justice system not taking care of these people’s cases fast enough”
Now normally I try and educate my mother about the bullshit in the world but that answer was so blatantly intentionally ignorant that I was just fucking speechless. It took me a couple seconds of complete bewilderment before I could ask the very, very obvious follow up question of “WHO DO YOU THINK PUTS PEOPLE IN JAIL???”
At that point my mom just threw up her hands and just gave up. I’m pretty sure she even realized that what she said was completely absurd. But I keep going back to this exchange in my head because it’s such an eye opening view into the liberal mind
It just fucking baffles me how many mental hurdles liberals jump through to justify the cruelty of their ideology
there's a couple examples of activist performance art making the illegality of the performance part of that performance. i think it was rimini protocol that programmed a bot just randomly ordering stuff from the darknet and shipping it to their art exhibition. they ended up with a bunch of ecstasy that got seized by the police, but they didn't get sued for it.
zentrum für politische schönheit had a performance where they built a fake holocaust memorial in the backyard of a german nazi politician, then used the ensuing media attention to announce they had also secretly observed him for months. when they got sued by him, they revealed that all the "observation footage" was just pics from his own press kit and that "there was nothing to observe, this guy does nothing but chop wood all day long".
I was in a masters public policy program, and one of my classmates, who was sort of like one of the star students, said that he didnt like Trump, but he liked Pence because he was better at using the English language.
I was always tell that story whenever I talk to people that feel bad about not going to college. some of the dumbest people I ever met were in grad school and are probably working for McKinsey or Deloitte now
I had an argument with both my roommates who said Bush wasn’t a war criminal and that he had the best interest of the country in mind unlike Trump. I found out that one of them thought the Iraq war was a good thing and that we couldn’t let Saddam kill innocent people. I always thought people in my age range realized that Iraq was a shitshow but apparently there are a few who call themself liberal and have the same politics as John Bolton. I even recommended the Blowback podcast to them and they just refused saying that since they’re from Turkey they know more about the region than me.
Do liberals even remember what Bush did? They seem to forget things as time goes on or replace it with some made up memory.
The discourse around Bush is indicative that liberals care more about norms and decorum than actual policy. So what he bombed a country into oblivion, at least he wasn’t an asshole on Twitter.
Once had a mate - fallen out of touch with him for very related reasons say that as a communist I should share my girlfriend as a 'gotcha' comment. I've gotta say I was a bit fucking shocked at the sheer stupidity of it but did manage (though not quick enough to be cool) that that'd only really work if you saw women as objects and not people.
Anyone give you this shit, hit them with Marc's absolute zinger on the topic:
The bourgeois sees in his wife a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production. For the rest, nothing is more ridiculous than the virtuous indignation of our bourgeois at the community of women which, they pretend, is to be openly and officially established by the Communists. The Communists have no need to introduce the community of women; it has existed almost from time immemorial. Our bourgeois, not content with having the wives and daughters of their proletarians at their disposal, not to speak of common prostitutes, take the greatest pleasure in seducing each other's wives. Bourgeois marriage is in reality a system of wives in common and thus, at the most, what the Communists might possibly be reproached with, is that they desire to introduce, in substitution for a hypocritically concealed, an openly legalised community of women. For the rest, it is self-evident that the abolition of the present system of production must bring with it the abolition of the community of women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both public and private.
Lol yeah I don't think I'd read up and absorbed as much theory stuff back then but yeah this is spot on. The reason he thought that was because that was exactly how he saw women. I have never before or since seen someone go through so many girlfriends and cheat on every single one of em. Odd guy to be honest.
Tell them this: if not voting for Democrats you're voting for republicans, then by the same logic by not voting for republicans, you're voting for Democrats.
Therefore if you vote for a third party you're casting 3 votes, therefore maximising your voting power
I got told that not voting is the same as a vote for Trump. Because of course if I voted it would be for the white racist rapist not the orange one.
I mean that can just be proven false with basic arithmetic. Show them a tally of votes with you voting for trump and abstaining and ask if it's the same ratio.
I'm sure that he would have thought voting independent was the same thing.
yeah I mean at the end of the day status-quo warriors don't actually care about democracy
This was the line during the last month. Not voting for Biden was white privilege.
Love being trans cus it makes libs idpol compasses start spinning in circles when I tell them I didn't vote.
I was told to check my privilege when I was suggesting that for neurotically folk digital access to meetings and some write up of what happened is good (this was obviously pre covid).
I was told that it was because I was male socialized that I wanted that (implying that non-male socialized people and people with kids would chose real life meetings and forgo digital options, even when they can't attend).
My mom expressed absolute outrage at the fact that there are homeless people on the streets when we have so many empty houses, and then the exact same level of outrage about the estate tax existing.
