• drthunder@midwest.social
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    11 hours ago

    I have plenty of blame to go around, and I’d put people who voted for Trump after four years of him being president and trying to overthrow the government after only the fascists and the media that enable them. He’s not an unknown quantity anymore.

    I know a lot of people in this country are dumb and selfish, but they don’t get off the hook because of that. Plenty of white people don’t vote for blatant racism, my parents grew up in a rural town in the “good old days” and figured it out.

    • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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      9 hours ago

      but they don’t get off the hook because of that.

      That’s precisely my problem, there. I don’t understand why people are “on the hook”, or what “the hook” even is. Why we entertain this idea that people even have any agency whatsoever, for one, right. Like, the inherent problem of free will, people will just reject that either at its face, and supplement it with absolutely nothing, or they will reject the core lesson at play there.

      Like, if this “hook” manifested in terms of people going out and engaging in mutual aid, or resolving to live, out of a sense of keeping other people accountable through just their own living, their own existence, that’d be cool. I’ve seen some people actually do that, and that seems productive, sure, why not. Hell, if “the hook” manifested in people going out and starting to move luigi style, against the people that are enabling this in, order of magnitude, I’d be fine with that. Other forms of militant action would also be acceptable.

      Instead, oftentimes “the hook” just manifests in a bunch of easy rhetorical owns that often aren’t even really productive for letting off steam. Probably because people aren’t really capable of any other form of agency, or “holding people accountable”, in their own lives, so they just resolve to like, making kind of aggressive twitter posts at people. That feels like fun and epic praxis, but it’s not, it actually actively serves a counterproductive purpose as it is manipulated by these larger algorithms. That’s the sort of thing that I’m talking about when I talk about, say, people FAFO-posting about how happy they are that conservative migrants are gonna get sent to the fucking death camps. There are liberals who are overjoyed at the irony in that idea, and I don’t think that serves to do anything but make people rightfully more bitter at that behavior.

      Like, what’s the purpose of this “blame” here, what does it do? I don’t want to shoot myself in the foot just to spite someone else, is what I’m getting at.

      • drthunder@midwest.social
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        7 hours ago

        I know nothing’s gonna come of me shitting on Trump voters but they get coddled by the media and they’re voting to kill all of us. I want everyone to have free housing and healthcare, including them, but I’m still fucking pissed that people with a third-grade education have made it so I have to flee the country. I was finally building a life and had a home for myself and I have to chuck that all out because there’s no way the gestapo doesn’t start rounding up trans people in the next few years.

        • daltotron@lemmy.ml
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          4 hours ago

          You know, I think despite what I’ve all said, being mad is good. It drives people towards action, it’s just that I’m concerned about what said action is. I don’t want everyone to get trapped in another 2017 #resist spiral, and I don’t want us to fall into the trap of believing that feeding rhetorical owns to the algorithm in the form of content is some kind of valuable praxis. I don’t want everyone to just kind of, have their punches absorbed by this kind of non-newtonian fluid machine that we’ve been met with.

          I do agree that they get kind of, coddled by the media, or maybe a better word is, infantilized. Current VP basically wrote a book which basically did just that and rode that to his current position. Of course, you know, it’s impossible to have these kinds of conversations with a lot of them, you know, it’s impossible to have conversations about what’s good to believe in, much less what to believe, much less what’s good, if you’re almost barely capable of talking in the first place.

          In any case, I can empathize. I haven’t built anything out of my life, many of my friends haven’t really been afforded the opportunity either, especially those ones which are sort of, compoundingly less fortunate. I really worry that I won’t be able to do anything substantial for my trans friends, you know? I can get them DIY, I can host a couch surfer, but to not be able to really solve these things at any larger level is kind of a motherfucker. It’s depressing enough to look around at your own life and realize that everything is shit, it’s much more depressing to realize that’s also the case for everyone you know and care about, or is worse. I dunno. Depressing note to end on, but I guess that’s how it goes.