Starker on 9/11/2020 at 22:02
No, they are not stupid. Just like the people of Weimar were not stupid, but were fed insidious lies upon lies until they started seeing the scapegoats as less than human.
As for identity politics, the biggest peddlers of it are undoubtedly on the right. It's about nothing but white identity politics these days.
lowenz on 9/11/2020 at 22:20
Quote Posted by Starker
It's about nothing but white identity politics these days.
It can't be in any other way when the "system" tells you since the childhood that you'll have "success" while in reality you'll only be a pawn in it, feeding the guys who know the
real inner working behind
the prosperity curtain.
So of course people when they realize their inevitable dreams failure see the group identity as a forgiving family to return to (as some islamic terrorists do after a nihilistic or criminal youth): they're in searching for acceptance simply being part of it by genealogical affiliation (racists call this "blood").
So no more useless strife,
just follow your blood, be part of the pack.....BLUT UND BODEN as nazis put it.
It's how our society creates these dangerous fanatics from our friends and maybe brothers.
lowenz on 9/11/2020 at 22:30
Addendum about "identity politics": maybe some of you know that Jill Biden is really critic about DeVos school organization.
And guess why? DeVos (being from an elite dutch family) of course is a supporter of this society model from Netherlands: (
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pillarisation)
What a totally unexpected thing to find this woman in the Trump team......really totally unexpected :p
Pillarization is an elegant version of.....apartheid.
Gryzemuis on 9/11/2020 at 23:11
As a dutch person, I can tell you you got a totally wrong idea about pillarization.
Kolya on 10/11/2020 at 00:55
Trump got his voters among blue collar workers because he addressed their fears. It used to be the job of the left to do just that.
Trump's language is simple and direct as preferred by blue collar workers. The left now speaks the language of metropolitan professionals, which is highly regulated, not least because of identity politics.
This doesn't even offer an easy win among the minorities who are supposed to benefit from that language(!), while it actively drives away the larger voter base of BCW.
If you want one simple explanation for Trump: Blue collar workers hate professionals/intellectuals but envy the rich. Because professionals and intellectuals order them around, but you could become rich without changing at all and you'd never have to listen to anyone again. That's Trump.
And yeah, UBI would be great, but it's unlikely because everyone suspects their neighbor would just stop working, start taking drugs and watch tv all day. And they may not even be wrong.
And saying that Trump voters just fell for a lot of lies is only a veiled way of saying they are stupid. This explanation doesn't lead to a solution. Why did they believe the lies? What insecurities did these lies fill?
Nameless Voice on 10/11/2020 at 02:07
Quote Posted by Kolya
And yeah, UBI would be great, but it's unlikely because everyone suspects their neighbor would just stop working, start taking drugs and watch tv all day. And they may not even be wrong.
Well, that's my other belief. That the huge amount of the work we do is pointless.
Production is useful - of food, clothes, and other goods. But we don't need the entire population of the earth to be doing that. Some other things are also very useful.
Meanwhile, a lot of us are just working to earn money, while not actually doing anything that's all that useful to anyone other than inside the current framework of work.
If I stopped doing my job tomorrow, everyone in my company stopped working there, the company closed... no one would really care. It's all pointless make-believe work.
While
some software development would be useful, the current system of private corporations all making their own software to compete with each other is terribly inefficient. Everyone works in secret, solving the same problems over and over again, in order to make the company profits of which the employees don't even get all that much.
I know you can never get groups of people to agree, but a far more efficient model would be to pay people to all collaborate on a shared base of knowledge - e.g. open-source software - instead of each company reinventing their own wheels.
That same thing applies to a lot of other areas, especially on the science/research side of things, like developing drugs (each drug company trying in secret to invent their own Covid vaccine, for example, instead of working together.)
Of course, people collaborating would mean that we'd need far fewer people, and so those people wouldn't have any jobs to do. But that's a problem that we're going to have to solve eventually anyway, as automation takes away more and more of our jobs.
Uhhhh.... tl;dr, why do we value working so much as a society? Certainly some work needs to be done, but we (again, as a society) do more work than we need to because it's expected of us.
demagogue on 10/11/2020 at 03:08
I guess the virtue of groupthink is I (we all) can usually tell the greater mass movement just from our individual contacts. So Fox News is apparently being ditched as not radical enough, as several times I've already read some variation of "Dump FOX NEWS! I'm watching OAN and Newsmax" (The latest line they apparently crossed was cutting off Trump's press secretary spouting off kookism about illegitimate this fraud that.)
And then that kind of comment will see dozens of likes and comments like hoping certain commentators make the switch, a lot of them already switched over ages ago, etc., and it's always Newsmax and OAN that are getting mentioned, like there's a media powershift happening here.
This isn't the trend one would have hoped to see come out of this, since you have to imagine how much more polarized and detached from reality these kook stations have to be if Fox News is way too compromised for them to be acceptable. (Like Saturn, all Revolutions eventually eat their children, etc.) But this is where we are now.
Edit: Also, legit lol comment: "I like OAN too, haven't watched Newsmax tho, is it less bias?" :laff:
Edit2: I should also point out, these were all relatively normal people in high school. I mean in relative terms; they would be hotheads and pigheaded about politics, but they weren't like the ones who's dads were literally in militias and they just naturally talked like a character from the Turner Diaries and Elders-of-Zion speak just pops out, because we had some of them too. But when you get the blockheads all agreeing that Fox News is too "biased" to the left that we need an "unbiased" network for the even further right... God help us.
howeird on 10/11/2020 at 03:42
I believe the reason Fox News is backing off is fact that republicans need the Georgia senate run-off to go republican. If Trump convinces enough republican voters that the system is rigged then they won't vote in the Georgia run-off for 2 senators they need have the majority in the senate. Lindsey Graham, Trump, and the other republicans are idiots to tell everyone the election process is rigged. More than likely many republicans may never vote again because they believe everything Trump says.:cheeky:
Tocky on 10/11/2020 at 04:21
Another thing is Parler being the new twitter because twitter developed a conscience and decided to flag lies. Now they can lie and echo chamber them into bigger lies.
Also there has been some truly scary jettisoning of reason and decency from Trumpers with denial problems.
Inline Image:
https://img.ifunny.co/images/3fcf7d5786d18c3a1d55c56dcdf99a83c603d2ccb13e15e318682aa0a6db0983_1.jpgNevermind that Sam Elliott voted Biden, the evil in that statement and implied I'm going to shoot me a liberal is nuts.
nemyax on 10/11/2020 at 06:16
Quote Posted by Nameless Voice
that should be a huge target for educating people if we want a better world: that if you don't need as much money to live well
What would you "educate" them about? History doesn't have a single example of a poor freeloading society that made any significant progress. The reverse has always been true.
