https://twitter.com/bariweiss/status/1367127211434672133

  • thefunkycomitatus [he/him,they/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    If you don't spew obscenities every time you speak then you're a cuck.

    One aspect is that as our economic range of movement keeps getting smaller, more emphasis is placed on the few freedoms poor people can enjoy freely. This is why we had organic open up protests over covid. Despite it making sense to close everything people were mad because their only freedom other than sitting in a beige skinner box all day was to go out to eat and buy grass seed. But even since last year our range of movement has been restricted even more. So now the emphasis is on just being able to speak whatever pops into your head, no matter how unexamined, without consequences, anywhere, anytime. Because now the noose is getting tight and there's no new frontier to escape. You used to be able to escape online but now that's long gone too. There is no choice but to confront just how limited we really are as a society.

    The other part of this is that so much emphasis has been placed on this kind of stuff very much on purpose. It's just like the gun stuff. People think as long as you can own a gun then you're free. While your actual range of movement closes in around you and you're exploited more and more, as long as you can make a gun company rich and help the NRA intimidate on behalf of capital, then you're still free. That was extended to social media and the internet too. No matter how bad the real word was as long as you could post screeds criticizing the government and your boss and say nazi things as a joke, you were free. But now that the freedom is being restricted for genuine political reasons and petty PR reasons, it's unavoidable.

    People once thought you could at least vote with your wallet. If you didn't go see Captain Marvel then Disney would have to stop making them. If you didn't buy Nikes then footballers would have to stop kneeling. But that never worked, as the left always said it wouldn't. The illusion that voting for your wallet is even broken and now dupes are feeling more powerless than ever. Just like the chronically online left does, these people placed so much importance on posting and felt they were doing politics by posting. Their powerlessness sublimated into being hyperfocused on these online spaces while the real power of capital did what it wanted to regardless. And so the importance on being able to say whatever dumb political opinion that comes to mind is the most important expression of feeling. Second Amendment fetishism was appended to include First Amendment fetishism.

    Then the future affects the past. This imagined world of unrestricted speech never actually existed. But now it has to exist in order to explain away the current state of things. Life wasn't better 30 years ago because the economy was less gutted it was because there was more free speech. Life isn't bad now because of what the wealthy have done with the past 30 years, it's bad now because there's less freedom. But the lack of freedom has nothing to do with the wealthy people doing stuff, it's some unique emergent evil that only started existing last Thursday.

    This shit is wack as fuck and I really wish people would just stop avoiding doing socialism. It's getting really silly at this point. Surely socialism cannot be worse than this.