FanonFan [comrade/them, any]

The weird jab is only working against the fash because they’re obsessed with aesthetics. And now that it’s being overused by people who are similarly hollow, it’s gonna lose its impact very soon.

You’re not getting a serious answer because everyone here is irony poisoned as a defence mechanism from watching liberal electoral politics fail over and over again while continuously being gaslit by Dems. Most of us voted for Obama because we believed his progressive rhetoric. Then we watched him bail out banks and continue bloody imperialism and torture, failing to fulfill most of his promises despite at times controlling all three branches. We’re living in the world of Obama’s cynicism, or backing up further, of (Bill) Clinton’s rightward shift into Republican politics with a Democrat mask.

Most of us backed Sanders then watched him get ratfucked twice. A lot of us still voted for (Hilary) Clinton because we believed she might be marginally better than Trump, and we watched her lose the electoral college despite winning the popular vote. A lot of us voted for Biden for the same reason, then watched as he continued Trump’s policies and funded genocide.

At each step more and more people started realizing bourgeois electoralism is a sham and turned to reading theory and organizing. So we really don’t care who you vote for. If you actually care about anything more than aesthetics, read some theory and join an org.

You know what, you’re right. I’m gonna vote for Biden too. It’s HIS turn

I’m writing in Trump.

Ivanka trump.

It’s HER turn

If you actually care, go join an org and read some theory. “Snoozing the timer of the bomb” requires working for a real solution that can be actualized in this supposed extra time. Otherwise it’s the same performative nonsense we’ve been told by liberals for the last three elections.

Wtf is this 2012 meme lmao

Someone as old as you should have recognized the lesser evil trap by now

From the start, right? Like chattel slavery and settler colonialism is about as unequal as you can get

I mean, a person’s senses aren’t supposed to be infallible, but I see no utility in elevating baseless conjecture above them. The “brain in a vat” problem is fun and all but it’s based on zero positive evidence, just a lack of negative evidence. On the other hand the senses are giving us continuous and reproducible and interactible information about the world around us, which despite its inherent subjectivity can be communicated with other people’s perspectives to approach and approximate an objective understanding of things.

Now when you start shifting from abstract to concrete epistemology, things like symbols and language games and power structures and ideology become important facets to examine. What filters and tensions are influencing a person’s perspective? What mechanisms might be elevating or silencing their perspective socially?

We can and should be skeptical of our senses, but in a productive or dialectical manner, testing them against reality and other perspectives in efforts to approach a more concrete understanding.

Selfishness may have been selected for tens of millions of years ago in our evolution, but as pre-humans became social animals it’s clear that selfless or other-centric thinking became strongly selected for as well. You otherwise couldn’t have a species that’s almost entirely other-dependent, throughout the whole life but especially for the first 10-15 years of it.

Humans can’t sustainably exist outside of a society.

She’s taking a page out of Trudeau’s climate plan

Adhd

I have a few dozen books. A third I’ve read all the way through, the rest I’ve picked up and put down or skimmed.

It helps to have a lot of options so that I’m more likely to find one that clicks and holds my attention for longer.

Plus I frequently reference books for specific info or quotes.

Empathy is probably your best bet as far as a single variable goes. But otherwise we’re talking about something that’s incredibly complex on multiple levels, making it near impossible to address as a whole.

I like to envision human behavior and consciousness as a network of tensions and influences. (Perceived) material interests are one such tension, a particularly strong one. Strong enough that I feel confident saying that in general, people will tend to drift towards approximating an ethic that aligns with their material conditions.

The archetypes and behaviors modeled for us in our childhood and throughout our lives are a sort of structure that these forces interact with. We may have empathetic or selfish responses modeled for us by our parents, so those are the responses that spring to our minds when decisions arise. Good behavior modeling could mean the inherent tension towards self interest may be mediated or tempered by the limits of behavior we think to enact. Parents have a big impact on this early on, but so do later role models as well as media portrayals of people.

Social cohesion can be a big tension on people, incentivizing them to not act outside of group norms out of fear of being ostracized. Or on a more subconscious level, perhaps acting out of a “self” interest that benefits the social group, because the lines between Self and Other become blurred. Extending beyond the small self to consider the well-being of the large “Self”, sometimes even at the expense of the small self.

Critical theory may be of interest to you.

deleted by creator

it’s either that or something chromium-based

i mostly degoogled years ago

firefox just works most of the time. still have chromium installed for edge cases

Regarding the latter concern, I think a lot of this type of thinking comes from misconceptions about how evolution works, largely perpetuated by our culture to be fair.

But most people think evolution is an external pressure on the level of the individual. Which, it is, kinda-- that’s one scope of evolution. But evolutionary pressure happens on all levels in different ways: one family against others, one tribe against others, one social group against others, one species against others, etc. And networks of cooperation are just as influential as networks of competition, all happening at the same time in a churning mass of energies.

So rather than thinking that individual humans are losing hardiness to evolution, think of it as our species gaining hardiness through specialization and technology, evolution taking place outside of our individual bodies. It’s why we have language instead of tusks.

I mean, malevolent to the degree that their interests are diametrically opposed to our interests. To the NSA, more avenues of data collection are good, so they will do what they can to expand. To Amazon, more profit is good, so they will sell as many devices as possible and sell as much private information as possible for as much money as possible. To police and federal agencies, more arrests and more political control is good, so they will use information gathered by these devices to the extent allowed by law (and further).

If you’re someone who values privacy and freedom then those entities’ actions could be called malevolent, even if they’re just acting in their best interest. If you don’t care about those things then it’s probably no big deal I guess.