why did the ruling class do this? i have vague ideas but not sure what is the actually correct analysis

  1. jesus

republican people with power actually believe the crap they say and/or know their voters do, so they genuinely just dont want abortions to happen because jesus

  1. class warfare

millennials arent having enough babies to support the labour pool + people with children make for better cogs, since they are less likely to stir shit and cause problems for their employers/landlords as they will feel they have more to risk

  1. fascist state

hearing stories from people reporting on their neighbours in texas, its about creating a fascist panopticon with people increasingly policing themselves and everyone they interact with across the country, with more things to police about each other to be added in the future

is it one of these, or a mix, or something else, or is it pointless to even search for the "correct" analysis here?

  • AcidSmiley [she/her]
    ·
    2 years ago

    i think it's mostly a mix of 1 and 3 - call it clerical fascism, call it dominionism, call it "literally Gilead", that's what the US brand of nazism is rapidly shaping up to be. there's some 2, but mostly when it comes to how much they think this may affect themselves or somebody close to them.

    as useful as a strictly materialist analysis is, we need to avoid the mistake of viewing everybody at all times as a rational actor. people are emotional, people make mistakes, people have false consciousness and brainworms, and false consciousness and brainworms are actively encouraged in the USA with the biggest agitprop machinery in human history. the chuds act out of a deep ideological conviction. they are at the point where they are fully buying into their own propaganda now, and it'll only get worse and more fanatic and more frothing-at-the-mouth unhinged from here on out. this will have catastrophic effects in the short term, it will also be the chuds' undoing in the long term - the former because they are beyond restraint and beyond being argued with, the latter because they quickly turn into unthinking, easily fooled berserkers that will shoot themselves in the foot just like the OG nazis did.

    Prepare for the worst, but stay calm and level-headed. Leave the blind frenzy to the hogs and be ready to be an ice cold mfer instead.

    • pink_mist [she/her]
      ·
      2 years ago

      America dropped two nukes, unnecessarily, to end the war against fascist states. How many nukes will they drop unnecessarily to keep their own fascist state going?

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        How bad can it be when there's an entire generation of nihilist "some people just want to watch the world burn" edgelords?

        • emizeko [they/them]
          ·
          2 years ago

          oh it's fine, I'm sure none of the 20-year-old soldiers doing shifts sitting in missile silos waiting to turn keys that could end the world are like that. [thousand yard stare]

          • sooper_dooper_roofer [none/use name]
            ·
            2 years ago

            America doesn't have enough nukes to end the world.

            The downside is they have enough nukes to end China (but also vice versa). If a nuclear exchange happened, China would probably cease to exist almost completely, and America would have all of its cities destroyed. Then it's just a matter of which country colonizes the remnants of the US first. Mexico would obviously make huge gains for one.

            It's a tragedy but there'd be a silver lining

            • redladadriver [none/use name]
              ·
              2 years ago

              The dust that gets thrown into the air from even a limited nuclear exchange (less than 100) will destroy a large percentage of life on earth.

      • AcidSmiley [she/her]
        ·
        2 years ago

        I might be taking the analogy of organic systems too far - but the stuff that seems to “just happen” as a natural result of certain kinds of organization and how firmly tilted in the self defense of the system certainly feels like it doesn’t require conscious effort. Whether one brings panpsychism into things and wants to read the metaphor literally, or not, is a step beyond the point.

        I don't know anything about panpsychism, but societies as self-stabilizing systems are a fairly common idea for any sociologist influenced by Marxism. there's entire books with circuitboard-like diagrams for that and walls of text that make Deleuze and Guattari look like a light novel. system theory and all that jazz. i never looked deeply into that because it's so incredibly dry and information-dense.

        if the material point 2 weren’t true, would the ideological points 1 and 3 exist in the form they do?

        most likely as fringe views only. it would be extremely hard to mainstream them. sure, false consciousness always boils down to people acting against their very material needs, it's the very point of bourgeois ideology to make people do contradictory things that hurt their class interests. but such an absurdly self-damaging idea has to rest on a mountain of previously accquired false assumptions to be believed. when we're talking really egregious stuff like "let the state interfere with what people do in their bedroom" or "people should surrender bodily autonomy to religious zealots", then yes, i'm assuming that it either aligns with the interests of these people or they can ignore it somehow, otherwise you couldn't on-board them for this kind of obscene overreach.