My thoughts are so
free.
Where do they come
from?
Do they come from
me?
I cannot understand where their origins
be.
So I wrote a poem about how they make me
feel.
Their originality makes me feel
unique.
I never check the comments because
I
Might find one of the other fifty million
people,
Who have writ the
same.
It’s unfortunately not all that surprising, when considering how commonly US people have full-throated ignorance of imperialism and support it blindly, and then you combine that with somebody who has a big platform and gets validated for doing it. Not defending him at all, mind you, but when I think about the state of US political education, like even some of the more aware celebrities seem to linger in a hazy state where they sort of know something is screwy, but haven’t quite cottoned onto what imperialism is yet and what that means beyond vague notions like corruption. Bo Burnham is the one time I can recall seeing a major US celebrity tackle it head on with the kind of language we might use here and he even did it in comedy song form, but he also seems to be an oddity of a celebrity in terms of consciously fighting against celebrity going to his head almost as a form of protest against the nature of it.
Psychoanalysis is quackery. It was progressive at a certain point, but it got pretty fast reactionary.
Systems getting warped by the cultural/social/economic conditions they exist under… I go to therapy every week and while I have derived a lot of benefit out of it, it is also persistently painful going to a therapist who talks in individualism and trying to figure how I can translate that back over to something that will make a difference in my life in the long-term. It honestly feels sometimes like a language barrier, even though we are both speaking in fluent English. I always get the sense they mean well and are doing everything they know how to do, to help me (and some of it does help) but I can also sense the underlying “the system works, it’s you that is broken” undercurrent of it that is not explicitly said, but is expressed in the solution focus always being on elements like “you have no control over others and can only change how you react to things.” I think if I were to say that I want to tear down the system in those exact words, they might actually support me to a point, but from a framework again of individualism and how does the individual do this as an individual without being too forceful toward other individuals.
And like, I don’t expect them to say “you have nothing to lose but your chains” and they could probably get in trouble depending on what they were advocating for in a therapy context. But then it comes back to, what is the status quo and what is considered something bad to advocate for, within that. And that’s where under capitalism, at least in my experience in the US, it’s confined to the individual. The very cause of wanting to make a difference is isolated out into a sort of personality trait, like what movies you like to watch, rather than an organized movement that goes beyond any one person. And in this way, it allows a sort of shallow “diversity” where people can be all sorts of directly conflicting things, as long as they don’t try to translate those things into organized behaviors. What I would call individualist therapy, in my experience, seems to encourage this as a solution, that you sort of figure out how to co-exist alongside those who are radically different or retreat from them and find others more like you, rather than directly confronting the contradictions and either forming alliances on clear grounds or rejecting one another entirely on an organized level.
I feel like I heard of some method that is long enough to get through a REM cycle but also relatively short like 1:30-3:00 hour increments or something. But it’s been years, so I could be remembering wrong. I wonder how that would compare to this thing of 20-30 minute increments. On the face of it, it seems like the 2nd would be a disaster because of not giving sufficient time to get into REM sleep.
I’m glad to hear that, thank you for being thoughtful. 🙏
If this group of people are the ones convincing everyday Americans to band together for something better, it’s no mystery why there hasn’t been any traction.
Taking this personally and blaming a handful of people you briefly interacted with on the internet for the failures of communism in the US rather than taking into account the violent and pervasive worldwide campaign of anti-communism over decades makes you sound like a liberal who, however well-intentioned you may or may not be, has yet to make meaningful progress on unlearning the elitism that has been socialized into you from day one and has yet to begin internalizing the gravity of how violent these matters have been, historically, toward anyone who opposes imperialism, much less tries to organize a socialist state.
If you read this through that same socialized lens of people being ranked on a ladder of quality, you will probably think this is me “dunking on you” or “putting you down” or “trying to one up you”. But it’s not meant to be any of those things. I like to think of these things, as relating it to the framework of scientific socialism, as striving for “effective compassion.” The end goal is a decolonized world where the working class is empowered and free, the ultimate end goal is communism. But the steps to get there require a combination of theory and practice along the way, to understand what is required in context and develop toward change that is effective toward these compassionate goals that side with the colonized, the marginalized, the working class.
This also requires a certain amount of learning from each other. No one person has all of the answers and if you don’t already have the humility to consider what others are saying on the face of it without reaching for these sweeping proclamations about the entirety of an instance and the entirety of “leftist” efforts in the US, you need to develop some. We can’t afford people viewing contestment of theory and practice as a game of personal attacks and wholesale dismissal with only minimal consideration. Unfortunately, many of us online are accustomed to getting a heaping helping of disdain, if not accusations of being a foreign agent, simply for taking a patient and diplomatic anti-imperialist stance.
Ultimately, when it comes to things like “being an ally,” this isn’t a secret club that requires a secret handshake. It’s pretty transparent about what the ideological expectations are. Vague statements of organizing and caring about the same things make you, if honest in intention, a person who cares, but does not automatically mean you are ideologically aligned. This is something that I once had to learn when I was deep in liberal thinking still. Caring what happens to your fellow human beings is great. Doing something about it is even better. But populism alone is not marxist-leninist, nor anti-imperialist.
If you are already some of these things and I am misunderstanding, you are welcome to correct me on that. But if you are, it is all the more reason to take seriously the discussion of these things in the context of their mechanics, and try to look past whether people are nice to you in how they convey them.
You appear to be presenting some sort of dichotomy that is based on your interpretation of an amalgamation of positions you have read and does not relate to any specific take, so I’m not sure what to say on it.
There are people who are supporting PSL or other such efforts, for example. That is already one way it goes that contradicts your dichotomy, where it’s not as simple as “vote for nobody” or “vote blue no matter who”. Supporting an effort like PSL can be useful for educating and organizing, without having behind it the belief that a PSL candidate will win the presidency against all of the inertia, funding, celebrity, and third-party-blocking they are up against. Similar to how some of the energy behind Bernie’s campaigns had value for educating and organizing in spite of him not succeeding.
You don’t seem to be someone who thinks you’re using binary thinking. “Vote blue no matter who” folks often seem to be talking of strategy and compromises. But what kind of compromises? What kind of strategy? What are you gaining from going up to the democrat party and effectively saying, “Look, I’m going to vote for you no matter what, as long as you aren’t the other ones.” That tells them they don’t need to do anything differently, they don’t need to listen to you, they don’t need to care one lick what you have to say. They can continue doing their genocides and their billionaire-supporting acts and you’ll vote for them anyway because the wrong other one might get in if you don’t. What are you accomplishing? When has power ever listened more when you apply zero accountability to them and just say “you’re not as bad as the other one, so I guess you”?
To me, it ends up sounding like some of you have effectively given up. Like you don’t believe there’s ground to be gained here and you’re just trying to stave off collapse. Because if you truly believing the country is like a rolling bus headed for a cliff, are you thinking about how to do anything that will turn things around for the most marginalized, disenfranchised, colonized peoples? Or is the only thing you’ve got, “This bus driver will drive it off the cliff at 1mph rather than 2mph?”
What is your idea for turning this around? “Not total collapse right away vs. total collapse right away” isn’t a solution (if it were even a believable description of democrat vs republican and that’s a stretch to begin with).
Obama was president for 8 years, was he not? Did he fill the supreme court to guard it from such things? As I recall, he made milquetoast compromises on it. Now we have Biden in office, one of the architects of the crime bill known for mass incarceration, one of the architects of the student loan bill that made it harder to get debt forgiven, among other problems, and there are people calling him “progressive” because of his administration doing some minor tweaks while he funds a genocide. How much worse does the democrat party have to be before it is clear to you they are not meaningful opposition to fascism and, in fact, work in lockstep with it much of the time.
I find it strange that you pull out words like “petulance” when we are talking about a party that funds genocide. Are you honestly telling me you think it is childish and feet dragging to resist supporting a party that is complicit in such things? That you think you are mature to throw a Palestinian kid in front of a bus in a vain attempt to save your niece and sister’s reproductive rights? Which are already in shambles? When are you going to get that what we’re up against is not defeated by voting once every 2-4 years for whoever they say is the worse one this time.
Why do you assume I have nothing to lose, that I am “willing” to lose things? Do you think my individual will had anything to do with Roe V. Wade getting overturned? Am I a supreme court justice? No. Did I choose who gets appointed as one? No. No matter who I vote for now, or voted for in the past, I was never consulted on that decision. In fact, the near total ignoring of the people’s will on that matter was demonstrated handily when Brett Kavanaugh was nominated and ultimately confirmed in spite of the SA allegation and subsequent protest during his nomination.
The first step is admitting that the US isn’t a democracy to begin with and never has been. At its most democratic, it is “democracy for the rich with some labor unions that aren’t completely powerless as negotiating entities for subsets of workers but nevertheless have little to do with what the ruling parties of the country do.”
If you go back in time to the original language, you get that language coupled with genocide and slavery. As time goes on, it doesn’t get a lot better. Civil rights paved the way for liberals to act like “we’ve got democracy now because people have the right to vote”, but ignores mass incarceration and its disenfranchisement, it ignores the electoral college, it ignores voter suppression, it ignores gerrymandering, it ignores lobbying, it ignores how little regular people have anything to do with what people are candidates to vote on in the first place. What is democratic about that system, for a person who can afford to drop thousands on buying politicians? Sure, something. What is democratic about that system, for a person who is working two jobs to make ends meet and getting eaten alive on means testing and debt? What is democratic about that system, for a person who gets racially profiled and thrown in jail over false accusations, if not gunned down in the street over absolutely nothing other than the whims of police?
“And do not quote me.”
At this point, Brynjolfsson points out that, “You’re on camera,” to which Schmidt responds:
“Yeah, that’s right. But you see my point. In other words, Silicon Valley will run these tests and clean up the mess. And that’s typically how those things are done.”
I almost wanted to say the US is a clown car of a country, but that would be insulting to clowns.
The US when it’s time to send more bombs to be dropped on other countries: Bipartisan support, instant pass, delivery ASAP.
The US when it’s time to fund public infrastructure or resources for the public for much of anything: Money is haaard, omg, how do we pay for things??? I don’t understand how anyone of this works. It’s gonna take like 40 years to build this, right? And we’ll never be able to afford any of it. Ahhhh. 😢 Plz vote for the person who is going to gut public funding more and increase the zero accountability military budget, we can’t afford this stuff.
You see this most often on social media, where the order of the day is to make cheap jokes, quick “stream of consciousness” quips, and confirming one’s own already formed beliefs.
I can only speak to the western english-speaking parts of the internet, but from my experience with them, there is a big problem of arrogance and ego, and I don’t exclude myself from being caught up in it at times; I have tried to consciously unlearn those tendencies, but I suspect it’s made more difficult to do so living in the US, with all its caste and competition.
I find that whether it’s social media now, or smaller internet forums a bit further back, it’s common for people to make confident assertions on things they know nothing about; invent entire explanations out of thin air rather than investigate their source; and generally derive pleasure and self-esteem from being perceived as the “smartest in the room, the most smooth and well put together.” One way I think I could misstep here is in looking at this and doing the liberal moralizing thing of saying, “I don’t want to be consumed by such base desires, so I will not try to present my ideas in a way that is compelling and will instead just sort of throw them out there and hope people listen.” But then I am abandoning effective rhetoric as a tactic, for fear of it being “corrupting.”
It may be that there is a time and place for quips in order to puncture any notions of the other person having something valid to listen to. But if it is not done tactfully and just done sloppily in order to indulge in arrogance and ego, then I would agree we aren’t really gaining any ground there.
Asking what it is exactly that we are trying to “advance” in context may be helpful. We can know, vaguely, for example that we’re trying to advance “communism”, but there are also fascists who pose themselves as communists, so we can’t depend on that being enough to clarify in vague language. We can know that we’re trying to advance anti-imperialism, but being anti-imperialist does not automatically make one’s cause communist. We can know that we’re trying to advance working class interests, but some working class elements, such as in the US, are imperialist or racist still and need to unlearn that if they are to be part of the liberation of the international working class.
This can slow things down and on some platforms, in some contexts, it may be more important to say anything rather than getting too deep into how to say it and what the aim is. But some of this reflection can be done outside of heated exchanges, even such as right now, with others who are of similar views. So thanks for bringing this up.
I remember reading about your post on that the other day. Interesting perspective on it.
Love this. Needed a cathartic thing like this to get my spirits up. Edit: And I mean that unironically, sometimes it helps to have these things acknowledged throughout all the denial surrounding it.
I made the mistake of reading a reddit thread on the politics subreddit about Biden giving a speech to step down. The full-throated, salivating vapid patriotism brain was hard to read, to say the least. People calling him a great leader and such things. Acting like it was some amazing act simply for him to choose to step down. One of the worst people in modern US history, his political career. The inability to have any standards at all drives me up the wall. It’s like the US electoral version of what I see on some game forums, where people will praise and defend anything a game company does because it’s their favorite game.
Like even setting aside the whole genocide thing, not that it should be set aside, but pretending for a second that it wasn’t that obvious the issues with these presidents. People still will do this “lesser evil” thing with no standards. Like my god, what about good things? Um, are you okay in there? How do you still think this is a democracy, republic, whatever (some form of government where you have choice) while believing your options are limited to evil and evil?
US thought is exhausting.
Chuds are like:
Meanwhile in the US, George Jackson is really dead. MLK is really dead. Fred Hampton is really dead. Among countless other black and indigenous people, whether of a revolutionary bent or just regular people trying to keep their head down and continue to exist without being targeted by state-sanctioned violence.
Not sure this is the rhetoric you think it is. Sounds like you’re saying that in order to keep Trump out, you would vote for… an inanimate object, if you had to. Which in effect, starts sounding like you’d vote for someone/something that has no chance to win. Not unlike the 3rd party candidates the “vote blue no matter who” people say “leftists” are wasting their votes on. So it’s like… you’re looping around to implying Biden is a crap candidate and is going to lose, but you’re going to vote for him anyway? Wouldn’t it make more sense at that point to go for someone who isn’t a terrible person, if they’re going to lose anyway?
As far as I can tell, base skepticism doesn’t accomplish much, if not grounded in a conscious understanding and embracing of one’s biases (such as a bias for the working class), as well as translating that to an understanding of the biases implicit in sources (not just whether they are “factual” or not). For example, an article could say, “A man at the supermarket today was wearing a pink shirt.” Okay, on its own, this may be factual, but why are they focusing on the color of one man’s shirt and specifically the color pink? Sometimes answering that is way more important than whether it’s strictly true or not that there was a man at the supermarket wearing a pink shirt.
But if people don’t even get to that stage because they’re too exhausted with the exercise of verifying whether what they’re being told is even true on a basic factual level, I’m concerned they’re just going to tap out in general. Do you see what I mean?
Tbh, while I think this is a funny meme that uses a good format, I’m not a fan of the generational rhetoric in either direction. I will focus on the US because that seems to be where a lot of the generational rhetoric is centered on: From what I can find on dates, Fred Hampton would be considered boomer age range, if he was still alive today. Assata Shakur, still living, is another. I’m sure one can find many more who fought for better and got imprisoned or murdered by the state, or are still actively free and fighting even if they don’t have a lot of visibility.
The best way to counter generational rhetoric, in my view, is not to flip it back on the ones who say millennials/z/alpha/etc. are bad, but to counter the whole premise of saying that one generation is causing problems and another isn’t. We know that’s not true. It’s a minority of people orchestrating most of the damage, across generations. That’s not to say there isn’t any damage being done by people beyond that range, but, for example, it’s not some protesters showing up for Palestine or some dentist who barely reads the news who is bombing kids in Palestine, it’s the US federal government and military apparatus in partnership with israel. Some people are more complicit than they should be, but the ones actually organizing the terror and pulling the trigger are not the majority.