Responded to his shitty Biden Crackpipe meme with the :citations-needed: episode criticizing the Biden response to this absolute shitshow of racist misinformation. His initial response was “I don’t know what reality is anymore”. When I suggested it’s clearly not listening to :live-tucker-reaction: shit. He is like “but my property rights”.
All socialists have a price!!! LMFAO. Like no dude, that's explicitly capitalism's deal. WTF.
Bernie broke so many people’s brain. Allowing a radical lib to take the mantle of socialist has fucked some real basic bitches
tbh it scares the shit out of me that amerikkkan fascists are now successfully using anti-communist rhethoric that's just copypasted from what the nsdap said in the late 1920s. they did the exact same thing, using the socdems as evidence that all socialists actually serve capitalism.
honestly he probably just said that to get on Hayaca's nerves and try to get them to shut up
Stop saying everything you don't like is 1984, the substance of that book has lost all meaning.
100% has never read the book. Given I owned a copy in high school and I’ve never seen him actually finish a book
1984 is now a more apt description of capitalism than it ever was of communism. Everything Orwell was writing about in his fever dream of painting the soviets as big bad scaries he was describing late stage neoliberal capitalism in 2022.
Mobs of people wanting to rewrite history to favor their preferred racist ideology. Capitalist surveillance in every goddamn device. The big bad police state disappearing and torturing people (like they did in Chicago, warehousing victims) and the federal govt. doing the same. Rats and snitches infiltrating resistance groups, or being led astray by :fedposting:, and the continued feeding of the war machine to avoid people basic decency.
:1984:
When I was a kid I think I was the only one of my peers who read 1984 and attributed it to the system I lived under and not communism. As a result oddly enough it was the initial step of radicalising me lul.
When I read animal farm in school my initial interpretation was also attributing it to capitalism.
fuck man, just take the engagement-maximizing algorithms on social media, amplifying negative emotions because they drive engagement the most.
The only people who misunderstand George Orwell’s 1984 are those that go around trying to imagine it has a leftist message. It is mistaken to imagine that children in the English-speaking world get his work drilled into them like a mantra because, somehow, genuine socialists managed to sneak his work past a censor that banishes the likes of Karl Marx and Malcolm X.
The less complicated reading is the correct one: it’s an anti-communist book that the establishment pushes, and the right adores and cites constantly, because it is effective anti-communist propaganda.
Let’s part from a very basic fact: The CIA loves Orwell.
Between 1952 and 1957, from three sites in West Germany, a CIA operation codenamed ‘Aedinosaur’ launched millions of ten-foot balloons carrying copies of George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and dropped them over Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia — whose airforces were ordered to shoot the balloons down. [1]
The movie adaptation of Animal Farm was the UK’s first animated feature film, and it was entirely funded by the CIA. This fact was kept secret for 20 years, and only revealed in 1974, to no cultural impact. [2]
Orwell enthusiasts insist that he would be horrified by this turn of events, that he was trying to preserve a genuine and humane socialism from the clutches of “Stalinism”. They insist Orwell was against all empires, not just the one he lived in. However, his life and his work rather undermine this interpretation.
from https://redsails.org/on-orwell/
I read it in like freshman year with zero real political knowledge. Got through the entire thing and at the end I had to turn to the smart girl in class and ask her who TF "the proles" are. It really doesn't give a shit about class - and especially if you read the book with no class consciousness its just going to make you into a "goberment bad" Ayn Rand libertarian. I remember people talking about Orwell being CIA before but good post.
I had a fucking college history professor make the class read 1984 for an upper-level class. Embarrassing.
EDIT: actually that fucker made us read two Orwell books (I forget the other one), and specifically peddled "red fascist" bullshit on the basis of an Orwell quote that asserted it.
Stop saying
Wow. Telling people they shouldn't say something? This is literally :19::84:
The response "I don’t know what reality is anymore" is really good there. It's incredibly difficult to deconstruct their ideology because it's so incoherent and based upon an assumed confusion. It's based around a detachment from any source of information other than learned gut instinct. So often it feels like they believe in nothing at all and it's all a game they play in their head, because nothing in reality is reliable anymore.
A lot of the time evidence doesn't even matter, they feel it's correct and that's good enough. Like how my family doesn't care JFK was a Democrat, he feels like a Republican to them and JFK Jr definitely feels alive too. They're alienated from all sources of reliable information including their own eyeballs.
A lot of time their ideology can be boiled down to something as simple as "I'm not gay and refuse to be perceived as gay." And then you're just stuck, because leftist politics are inherently gay to them.
I don't know your situation, but I will say that having these conversations over text is just generally an L. I know someone who is Q adjacent now (despite him having received racist comments and threats from other Q addled individuals), and whenever we speak over text, everything is wooden and the convo has zero structure. You also just get lost in the weeds because people just start throwing shit at you, and you find yourself Googling every few seconds to fact check. Over the phone, or better yet in person, it's much easier to conversate and get to the root issues of why this person is feeling this way. I have had some breakthroughs doing it this way, but the biggest issue is not being able to speak to this person consistently, which just resets some arguments down the line.
This. It's basically barrier aggression in people. Like when you see two dogs on opposite sides of a fence trying to go at it then you remove the fence and they just stand there all quiet.
The Roman abstraction of private property rights is possibly the most evil and destructive thing that human beings have ever worshipped.
Romans were the first Europeans to develop legal codes based on notions of private property rights. Of course, in Rome, this was specifically a legal code based on the freedom to control other human beings. A father was legally the property owner of his wife and children. Much legal theory was based on figuring out who is responsible for stuff slaves do.
is this another thing from David Graeber? its not true. everyone in the mediterrean had legal codes and slavery and misogyny. there's a parent-system relationship from Roman law for parts of Europe but notably not England, that little-known capitalism developer.
i swear i've had this exact conversation on this site before, someone's gotten it in a bunch of heads that Roman law was some novel and malicious invention because it has legal theory literature that's come down to us. it isn't very different from the rest of the ancient world. the economic paradigm this law described got transmuted at least twice to get to capitalism. Socialist law is also descended in the same way from very distant roman roots.
and besides law is descriptive of social relations, not the driver (this might be a materialist hot take)
Yeah, this is maybe a good 60-80 pages of Debt. Perhaps a more critical take would be that the Roman legal premise of private property rights is found on a broader regional conception of freedom that involves a notion of property ownership and that much of the lingering malevolence of the Roman system is simply that when expanded to such a scale the atrocities committed have effects that linger over much larger time scales.
Property laws in the west are generally derived from legal concepts developed in ancient Rome.
I get you. My family literally will not shut the fuck up about how much they hate homeless people. Literally when they see me or each other after not having visited in a while, the topic they always want to bring up is how awful the homeless people are for being dirty and annoying.
Or bitch about how wages going up "so much" is causing inflation, and casting it as "oh these lowly fucks want more money, but they just made their groceries more expensive" lol.
I flicker between hearing this shit and remembering when I was a kid and had to give back several hundred dollars of saved up allowance money so that my dad could pay the fucking mortgage on our family home because he had been unemployed for several months. We were poor my whole fucking life growing up but now these old fucks want to act like they're rich for some reason.
I try to remind myself that they aren't public figures and aren't out there actively trying to influence people to think like that, but it hurts a lot to hear them say awful shit like that. I want to think of them as good people that will be on the same page as I am when this all falls apart, but that's hard because those are all beliefs and attitudes that I think are basically causing the downfall of our society and species.
My family literally will not shut the fuck up about how much they hate homeless people.
Invite a different homeless person to dinner every day until they shut the fuck up. If they get outraged, let them sleep there. Afterwards let them sleep there anyways.
Quick reminder that the right doesn't really believe in private property and free speech when it comes to non-citizens, of which they are always eager to shrink thea category. Within China homeownership is still among the highest in the world. Just so we don't have to cede that.
The dept of justice just recently announce they wouldn’t prosecute safe injection sites, so up until recently there had been a flagrant violation of private property rights. But nobody cares to argue for the privacy and protection of drug addicts.
They will basically cede anything as it suites them. For the most part theyre just libs. Thats why if Trump does something theyve railed against its fine. But once Brandon is in office its the end of democracy.
I cannot sympathize enough with losing connection with your family. I have a huge extended family and nearly all of them except a handful have gone deep into fascism. A lot have died of covid while refusing to vaccinate. I used to like them.
I would offer optimism and say that it gets better, that they can break out being reactionaries. But they probably won't. They get worse and unrestricted Facebook and TV news poisoning just makes it accelerate.
It really feels like a pandemic on top of another pandemic. It often feels to me like my family's Qanon fascism nonsense was built into their DNA because of just how impenetrable it is. They're actively living in a separate reality they've conjured out of their own imagination.
I hope it won't be too difficult for you and I really hope for the chance your family will someday listen to you
"You Ain't got no capital lieutenant Dan."
Does your brother own any capital? What property rights does he enjoy?
At least right wingers still believe in owning property and free speech
This is just American right wing culture in a nutshell. Chuds could give less of a shit about policy, they just care if they can make racist jokes like the good ole days.
My brother has been saying my dad has been slowly moving more right recently. He’s always been conservative but I called him a Schwarzenegger Republican. Now every time I come home Fox is on.
Last time I went home he spouted off some nonsense about “tinted windows aren’t illegal now because it’s racist”. It was so out of nowhere I firmly said “give it a rest already. I’m always hearing about this same shit over and over.” He tried to argue and I told him I don’t care. It shut him up.
OP, not sure how you can handle it but I’ve been taking the route of making them feel stupid for caring about nonsense. It must trigger an emotional response where they feel like babies for complaining.
You can’t battle Fox News propaganda but you can make them feel stupid for caring about inane things so they keep it to themselves.
Iirc tinted windows have been used as an excuse to profile black drivers and do drug checks and car searches. Tinted windows = hip-hop style thugs in the mind of the chud. So they're right, it very much is racist.
Which are not banned where he lives as far as I know. He just wanted to complain that cops can’t do whatever they want because every single car with tinted windows is going to shoot.
He doesn't like libs. You don't like libs. It should be possible to make that a bridge for discussion and alignment but he doesn't know what socialism is, he's inundated with vague anticommunist bullshit and thinks of it as a form of liberalism that's coming for his toothbrush. Example: y'all should be able to agree that Bernie Sanders is a SocDem trying to harm reduce and that this has led him to work within the sociopathy of the Democratic party - and to pull his punches. But he thinks Sanders is a socialist, so anything Sanders does that he doesn't like is something wrong with socialism.
Sorry the challenge is basically to teach your dad/brother theory, lol. I wouldn't want to do that. Also sorry you're surrounded by such :brainworms:.
I have chud family and mutual hatred of libs doesn't work, because the connection a chud expects from you is mutual racism. They don't define libs in the same way we do. Once you reject racism, homophobia, transpobia, etc, you are a lib to them. Once you bring out the scary theory words, you're worse than a lib.
The only instances I've ever gotten chuds to reconsider their stances wasn't during a discussion, it was during a unionization petition where we embarrassed the chuds into shutting up and signing the paper to get better pay.
Oh yes, mutual distaste for libs is far from agreement, but I'm pointing to the immediate barrier. OP's post hints at the family member having a false consciousness on class and that's screwing up the ability to even communicate.
![[family posting] I’m surrounded by chuds. My dad is a fascist. My brother is a chud, and just getting worse. What the fuck.](https://hexbear.net/pictrs/image/nqIB51Q3lQ.jpg){kind=link}