The failure of online politics

[Some_porcupine]

I wanted to post in this topic last month, and instead wrote some stuff here about how the old neocons faded into obscurity and how the left won the culture wars in the 2000s with the whole anti-war movement. This is very important to understanding the millennial mindset discussed in this topic. 9/11 was the big event of their childhoods that shaped how they look at the world. Immediately after was Bush's wars and their failures. The 2008 financial crisis was the next major event they lived through. You can connect the dots from 9/11 to 2008 to see where they get this whole anti-establishment mindset that led them down the path of Marxism and radical politics. The Left won the culture war in the 2000s with the anti-war movement, and this was the consequences of that.

idk.... must be more complex. if it was all 9/11, then, "arabia" would have won... well, no, wait... it kinda did (rip)... rip for palesticucks lgbt+ front.... ok:

and i can connect 2008 with 2011-2014. after nearly 10 years from 2001, it took for "protective services" on internet to "take it from us". first feds start to appear on 4chan, facebook ends up down being fun, twitter was "bluesky" of its era with "lets eat patriarchy" and hipster-gay-scene-emo (return) kids who wanted to change world. but after 2007-2009 and so, with "future not coming" (promised from 60s-70s on), - antiwar was "just" answer for "and what we got from it?!", call it douchebag* empathy with fellow humanity. but more of, they did it because(*) ... debts, taxes, and crumbling infrastructure (and (un)education) no war could pay. it is system problem. you promise those "kids" that there is some "accountability" - but with internet and later assange (it is funny. a.c.clarke talks about it in intro in his 2010 - 2nd odyssey), there is nowhere to hide. ("money (/%thing) for me, not for thee") it took too long for tptb to actually control flow of info. all big news from "independent reporters" (could be me and you), were faster than actual newscycle. it took only in 2010 and so, for tptb, to use internet to sway into "current thing (narrative)", weapon no one is willing to give up now...

You can also throw in how millennials grew up in the timeframe that religion lost it's dominance over American culture and we shifted to a more secular society. A lot of them simply use politics as their own version of religion. You can really see this with the leftists who don't see the irony of them worshiping political figures and philosophers as their own gods. Like being told to read the bible, they screamed "read theory!" at people. Marxism becomes a religion in itself with it's dogma and true believers acting as zealots.

/ sorry, but this pfp make it no justice (hitler ss?)... do you blame society for society's faults?
well no way, wasnt the same thing said x times before? i think it was said minimally 3x, in similar sentence(s)... **

/ sorry ^ if i snap at you, but there is no way we still have steam to turn in cycle, every second or third thread became same thing with same-y takes, from "nonpolitical theme (finally!)", to "politics of what caused this nonpol thing to be"... - reminds me quite (of) that "marxism becames religion" thing. but on agora...

> "we are not normieweb"
* most "we are (, or not) 4chan/tumblr!" take youd ever hear *
* > agora is social media.url *
* looks inside: *
* > "we are not normieweb" tumblr-tier shit youd find on reffit's repost on funni.com of facebook post about twitter... -take ever *

/** (* sorry, but these repeated statements.txt just get so tiresome, to see them all over the place. use quote function or ctrl-c&v, people... (f in chat for broken search function) *)



tho, bro, if youd know how to explain to me: when exactly did this "marx is taught on school!" panic started? did young people (gen z, millennials, maybe even gen x if it started then/there...) have interest in alt-systems on their own, or is it "those damn russians"? have you got any info?
<3

 

[Some_porcupine]

Politics being screwed in the US goes way beyond the January 6th demonstrations. To illustrate the lead-up to that, you have to take a good hard look at popular news media and how it's reported what politicians in D.C. do for a great many years. If you'll go back and look at archives from CNN, MSNBC, CBS, Fox News, and the like, you'll notice very quickly that the same candidate can do nothing wrong or everything wrong on most if not all of these. I was just a kid when Bush was in power so I can't remember if Fox News tried to shill for him (it probably did,) but when Obama was elected everybody short of Fox News shilled for him. He could do nothing wrong in their eyes. Even when he was saying racially inflammatory stuff or shutting down coal-fired power plants and basically leaving people to kick rocks when they had no avenue for employment. There was no balanced way of looking at him. The farther out to the fringes you got (CNN, The Blaze when it started up,) the polarization only got more intense. He was either a savior or literally Hitler (yes, this was an accusation made towards him.)

Meanwhile the mainline news organizations are all running with their own narrative towards the nation, more and more saying that if you don't like this guy, then you're a bad person. Along with hyping up swine flu and all the usual stuff they do. Come Obama's second term this only intensifies with GamerGate making news. Some crazy narratives on the other side came out about him like the whole birther conspiracy saying he wasn't a U.S. citizen, but this underlying looking down on people just kept gradually ramping up. And then 2016 started. Trump enters the scene, is brash, abrasive, and unlike the usual milquetoast candidates Republicans like to put forward for president. Pretty much immediately most of the mainstream places utterly despise him. The people feeling disenfranchised by Obama or by politics in general start backing the outsider candidate, and the right and alt-right sites start spinning up narratives of their own. By the time he's elected president, he's either exclusively a savior, or exclusively Hitler with no middle ground, and so is everyone else on the opposite side. If your candidate doesn't ally with Trump then he's damning America to certain death, and likewise if he does then they're a Nazi acolyte. Any and all discourse is utterly crushed between two sides spinning opposing narratives.

And then comes 2020. The US voting system does not uniformly require ID to cast a vote; it varies by state. When coupled with mail-in voting and just how long it took them to count ballots, this became a huge problem. Voter fraud has been an issue in the US for some time (I remember hearing about it during Obama's stint in office,) but it was never a bigger issue than it was in 2020. All these reports were coming in about ballots being incompletely filled out with just Biden on the ticket and nothing else, which you cannot do, and ballots just coming in out of nowhere or disappearing. Now in a normal state with normal-ish media franchises, somebody would probably try to take a balanced look at this and investigate these claims of voter fraud to see if they're valid, and people would at least have some reassurance that everything was legitimate. But this didn't happen; either Biden was the legitimate president who got the most votes in history or Trump unfairly had the election stolen, as more and more courts decided to just not bother investigating. And then you have the whole case with Biden's son committing felonies being covered up on Facebook and Twitter via the Twitter Files and QAnon spouting Trump was gonna forcibly take control, and conditions were just right for a powder keg to go off.

Come January 6th. People protest outside as the electoral ballots are counted. Some people make their way in; whether they were let in or not, we don't know. Trump tells people on Twitter to go home as they take an unmandated tour of the Capitol building and then he's suddenly banned on every social media outlet at once. Chaos ensues, and Trump is accused of insurrection which has stuck with him to this day.

Most of the people who had it in their minds to protest that day were the same folks who were looked down upon by mainstream media for the past 12 or so years. And nobody's learned their lesson; those people are just as hated now as they ever were. Just regular, ordinary people who wouldn't have shown up at all if they felt their concerns were being taken seriously and felt their votes mattered; that they had some kind of power.

Politics in America are probably gonna remain this way as long as half the country feels the media and political establishment despises them and looks down on them, and takes the bait and believes their guy is Jesus and the other guy is Hitler. There's just no avenue for peace or reconciliation with someone you believe is a mortal enemy, and maybe people will get tired of all of it and see it for what it is; a sham. I hope they do. But until that happens and people see through the curtain then things will remain the way they are for at least some time.

Trump Election Unhinged Reactions Thread

All this talk about scary Marxists and nothing to say about the capitalist governance of media production and distribution that has created this ideological hellscape, through the beautiful mechanisms of competition and production governed by the pure logic of MCM. Nothing tastes quite like the...

forum.agoraroad.com

 

[Pluto]

I'd argue the politics have had a tangible impact on things... but not a good one. Mainstream video games feel the need to discuss topical subjects that have no bearing on the setting they show us, in a poorly-written or ham-fisted way that leaves people bothered instead of pondering. Same deal with films; all these gir-power films like Ms. Marvel coming out a few years ago with themes like "men sexist, women need to free themselves from their shackles," and it's just done with all the subtlety and forethought of a strategic carpet bombing campaign. Instead of dealing with things people actually care about like food prices and local crime and taxes, it's just invaded people's avenues for escape from the world. Constant reminders of "DO SOMETHING!" to a people that don't have the power or ability to really do anything.

Shows with political themes have existed in the past and actually managed to do the subject right, like Babylon 5. It's not that it can't be done. Even the Star Wars prequels do better than this, and those films have a lot of flaws and misgivings. If people can't even like a simple show or video game without being reminded that what they love is bad and they're bad for liking it, or having a constant message projected in your face by characters that aren't nuanced or realistic, then yeah I can't blame people for getting tired.

Video games, movies and TV shows aren't really important in the grand scheme of things. I'm talking about tangible effects, and whatever passes for 'mass politics' in the 21st century is clearly impotent. We see it all over the world, in developed countries and developing countries. There are still flashes of impact where the old 20th century social contract still lingers, and sometimes mass movements/protests manage to budge policymakers, but these moments become rarer and rarer.
Even when things do 'change' thanks to mass participation, it's often on the level of proceduralism and the shape/vibe of the state – things that only bored middle class assholes (of both wings) and deeply alienated online denizens care about. For anyone below, say, the 6th decile, politics have no meaning. The sort of decisions that actually impact them are made 'apolitically', behind closed doors, through a general elite consensus, or, at best, with a lot of shallow pageantry, turning quite serious issues into momentary flashpoints in the eternal culture war.
Whatever else, the politics you see online absolutely have no consequence, despite their volume.

EDIT: Just to make myself clear, when I talk about "tangible impacts", I'm talking about things like housing, law enforcement, healthcare, education, labor laws, environmental protection, land use, industrial policy, and in certain places also war and other forms of state-directed violence. You know, the sort of issues that used to be at the core of what people think of as "politics".
You may personally care deeply about whether or not the next bloated AAA release features a strong lesbian of color talking down a white male bigot, whatever. It's okay, I have my own pet issues. But that stuff is not what you'd call a 'bread and butter' question.

 

[Dead Star]

You talk about GamerGate, but that stuff is a decade in the past, zoomers were like 10 or 12 at the time. SJWism in general is receding fast, and the sort of overwhelming presence it had in, say, 2016 simply hasn't existed long enough to impact them. The far more prominent event in their lives are the COVID lockdowns. I think that is what actually shaped them, and it goes a long way towards explaining their discombobulated nihilism.

This is precisely why I mentioned Gamergate. They grew up with that happening and then the aftermath of it. All the stuff about 'incels', 'toxic masculinity', 'white privilege'. This is the generation who grew up being told that all their hobbies were bad and they were too white or had bad stereotypes. They had to grow up hearing such amazing commentary about fictional stuff Millennials enjoy having political elements (all the many arguments about Batman being a fascist and other capeshit, or Star Wars). There was a moral panic every few months over something stupid, like the first Joker movie being about incels. Entertainment became so watered down out of fear of offending millennials who made Social Justice their religion.

Gamergate was like the WW1 of the internet. It was a massive culture war that effected so many things outside of video games and dragged them in. It didn't just stop after 2016. We had the entire Great Awokening after Trump won and all the conversations about how women and minorities are written in fiction. These effects of this online manufactured controversy still lingered for years.

My general point is that Gen Z grew up in an environment where Progressives control opinion-shaping in the media, academia and entertainment. So naturally to them, conservativism is a form of counter-culture. it's no different than how Gen X and older Millennials lived in the era where evangelicals were the cultural authority and making the rules.

As for the COVID lockdowns, I agree with you on that. It came after though, and I believe all the issues are connected to each other. The most authoritarian lockdowns happened in blue states, and especially deep blue cities. Again, Gen Z being lectured by an authority that comes from the left has the effect of making several of them look at the right as the cool thing and counter-culture.

I don't really see it. In 2020, maybe. But when I look at the internet now, I see a userbase experiencing shellshock from over a decade of political hyperstimulation. It's not that people don't want to focus on politics, it's that they can't do it anymore. It's simply been too loud for too long with no tangible impact on people's IRL lives.

The majority of people voted to re-elect Donald Trump. I think it has more to do with Biden's presidency being such a disaster on epic proportions. He was more unpopular than Trump and it led people to turn back to a deeply unpopular and controversial former president as they reminisced over the country not being as chaotic before 2020.

tho, bro, if youd know how to explain to me: when exactly did this "marx is taught on school!" panic started? did young people (gen z, millennials, maybe even gen x if it started then/there...) have interest in alt-systems on their own, or is it "those damn russians"? have you got any info?

Young people have always searched for something cool and mystical out of the norms. You see this in any generation. The boomer hippies who weren't interested in politics took to eastern mystic religions to rebel against Christianity, for example.

This stuff entered mainstream discourse in recent years when the 1619 Project came out and was endorsed into the public education system to replace American history. Same thing with a lot of the 'woke' stuff. 2020 gave parents the opportunity to pay attention to what was being taught in class rooms. There's an entire culture war happening right now over school choice, and it relates to this.

When Woke started to really take off, the book Settlers was reprinted. It was an obscure book written by a Maoist, and then turned into holy scripture for anti-colonialism. Millennials really do have a habit of filling the void of religion and spirituality in their lives with political beliefs.

Post-Marxist philosophers like the Frankfurt school, and Intersectionality have been taught in higher education of universities for decades. Howard Zinn's rewrite of American history goes all the way back to the 80s and has been taught in some public schools. This has been talked about since at least the late 80s. Conservatives deserve a fair share of the blame for abandoning academia and not fighting for the balance they love to say they wish existed.

 

[Orlando Smooth]

I don't know if that was believed also by Occupy Wall Street; somebody who's more knowledgeable on their ideals at the time can fill in for me. As far as I can remember the hot button topics that divide people today like race and sexuality and such weren't all that present, which might've been why these guys at least achieved something of note.

It has been a long-standing (conspiracy) theory that the gender politics and racial tensions stuff that originated from the US only serve as a distraction from real issues.

I've written about this on Agora before; it is/was a conspiracy but it's not really so much a theory as it is a known story at this point. Occupy Wall Street did put significant social pressure on banks and financial institutions at the time. Normal, average people were justifiably mad at the financial sector for crippling the economy broadly speaking, and also for destroying the equity people had in their homes and seeing people they knew lose their homes to foreclosure after being laid off. Democrat politicians were happy to point out that it was largely the result of deregulation that happened under Bush, and were more than willing to try and use it as political leverage to win votes based on promises to reel in the banks. The democrats paid virtually no political price for this since they were still firmly the party of unions, and financial institutions had historically been aligned with the pro-business arm of the Three Legged Stool. The financial institutions were really on their back foot, because the backlash to their mismanagement was big enough that Republicans would have to pay too-big a political cost to defend them, and couldn't do anything anyways because they'd lost majorities in the house and senate during the 2008 election. So the financial institutions and the biggest of big businesses made a deal with the Democrats: do not cave in to the protestors by introducing regulation on us, and in exchange we will support all of your social policy goals and support your election campaigns via executive donations and messaging our support. Not all industries got on board, of course. Oil and gas would never be offered a seat at the bargaining table in the first place because of Democrats' climate ideologies, and defense was still eyed skeptically because Democrats were the anti-interventionist party at the time. And it took some people/businesses time to realize that this was their only path forward, which is why you can find videos of rich people drinking champagne on balconies above the protestors - people will try to use such videos as evidence to discredit what I'm claiming here, but it's not as if the transition I'm describing happened literally overnight across all businesses and economic sectors.

Spoiler: Simple, concrete example

The most obvious example of the cynicism of this bargain is that obnoxious fearless girl statue. Its creation was funded by State Street, who was under investigation for the single most egregious gender pay gap in the financial industry. So they paid for that statue in order to get positive press coverage and ensure that, at the time, if you searched "State Street women" you'd see that story instead of the one about how poorly they historically treated female employees.

And it worked, really well. As the economy slowly recovered people were eventually willing to forget their grievances with Wall Street and living under the first black president gave a lot of people hope that we were in the Civil Rights Era version 2.0, where anyone could do anything they wanted unencumbered by old stereotypes and the legalization of gay marriage would happen any day now. So people were receptive to the new tune of social justice being sung by Democratic politicians who had been in on this deal. Couple this with the tech boom that was taking off at the time (remember: first iPhone came out in 2008) and people understandably believed we were marching head on into a better tomorrow.

Spoiler: The next industry to play ball

The next industry to enter into this bargain was big pharma. People forget now that not that long ago pharma was a target of the left, not an ally. The traditional left was incredibly skeptical of an industry that made money off of people's sickness and had grievances with how pharma often researched new drugs in ways that were highly unethical and potentially scientifically misleading. For a long, long time (call it early 90's through mid 10's) the average antivaxer was a college educated white woman living in the Pacific Northwest. An "earth mother," basically. Coincidently these are the exact types of people who convinced RFK Jr to become skeptical of vaccines. But after the passage of the ACA ("Obamacare") the industry realized that the democrats had actual power and were willing to wield it against pharma and healthcare unless they were willing to cozy up. It was easier for them to figure out how to do this since the framework had already been laid by the financial sector, but also because pharma was able to play the "highly educated scientists" card. "Oh yeah we're scientists! Unlike your political rivals, those crazy climate deniers. You and us actually went to the same super prestigious elite colleges, too! So you know that really we're all on the same side here. Please do impose new FDA regulations or get rid of the private healthcare system, we make a lot of money off of it that might just be able to help your campaigns. Oh and also we LOVE hiring diverse and gay applicants!"

Literally none of these happened outside right-wing echo chambers
(except weed legalization, I guess)

This is where you're demonstrating that you're not an American, and certainly not living in a major coastal American city. Petty crime may not have literally been legalized, but systematic non-enforcement is tantamount to legalization and things like theft under a thousand and street level drug dealing are no longer enforced. When more major crimes are carried out (assault, armed robbery, car jacking, etc.) and the perpetrator is caught, they're often released on the same day without bail. Anti-social behavior such as pissing and shitting in public in broad daylight has proliferated without consequence to the people doing it. Police departments did receive major budget cuts in response to 2020. Not all of them, and they didn't cut the budget to zero, but it did happen and not without consequence. When these budget cuts were eventually eased or reversed, they typically claimed it was because "tax revenue was better than expected" but that was only to save face and avoid admitting that they were wrong and there was a spike in crime. Affirmative action has been around since the early 90's and is such a widespread problem that it took a Supreme Court case to end it. The Crimson themselves published data showing the average black admit scores 9 points lower on the SAT than the average white applicant! The difference between Asian admits and black admits is 63 points, a difference equal to 7.8% of a perfect score (800), far too big of a gap to be a statistical anomaly. Affirmative action is very real and not a secret.

I used to dream of living in a big city as a kid, like my older cousins who I'd visit after they went coastal for work. Now I'm in one myself and the experience is completely different than what it was for them all those years ago. I'm not sure where you get the idea that "literally none of these happened" because I see it with my own eyes every single day. Is it as bad as right wing grifters media personalities say? No. But just because some people exaggerate the extent of the problem does NOT mean the problem is nonexistent.

 

[Dead Star]

I'd argue the politics have had a tangible impact on things... but not a good one. Mainstream video games feel the need to discuss topical subjects that have no bearing on the setting they show us, in a poorly-written or ham-fisted way that leaves people bothered instead of pondering. Same deal with films; all these gir-power films like Ms. Marvel coming out a few years ago with themes like "men sexist, women need to free themselves from their shackles," and it's just done with all the subtlety and forethought of a strategic carpet bombing campaign. Instead of dealing with things people actually care about like food prices and local crime and taxes, it's just invaded people's avenues for escape from the world. Constant reminders of "DO SOMETHING!" to a people that don't have the power or ability to really do anything.

This is what I was getting at about entertainment.

Some call this Millennial writing. Others call it 'woke' writing, where the politics in it are meant to reflect modern day dialogue. There's some kind of social message and a reminder to the viewer that they need to "do better!" Marvel and capeshit became so inflicted by this stuff that even their own fans hate it. But if you call it out, you get told you're a sexist/racist bigot. Probably the best example of this was the new Star Wars trilogy. When people made basic criticisms about Rey having Mary Sue qualities, they were screamed at how SEXIST, SEXIST, SEXIST that made them.

Social Justice was the big thing of the 2010s as part of that generation. Hollywood became convinced that was the next money pit. Social justice themes replaced the anti-war themes that were prominent in entertainment of the late 2000s.

I posted somewhere in another thread how the millennial left does not understand the concept of warfare whatsoever. They look at it from pop culture lens and see one side as being a big imperial force (the oppressor) and the other as some scrappy underdog (the oppressed). This is literally Star Wars type thinking with the big bad empire and little rebel alliance.

Gen Z had to grow up with all this rammed down their throats. It's why so many of them are more conservative and lean further to the right despite many of them not having much understanding of stuff like classical liberalism, free market capitalism and property rights. They see the right as the counter to having to grow up with woke ideas pushed on them.

Video games, movies and TV shows aren't really important in the grand scheme of things. I'm talking about tangible effects, and whatever passes for 'mass politics' in the 21st century is clearly impotent. We see it all over the world, in developed countries and developing countries. There are still flashes of impact where the old 20th century social contract still lingers, and sometimes mass movements/protests manage to budge policymakers, but these moments become rarer and rarer.

I get what you're saying, and I agree with you to an extent. But I have one minor disagreement I want to explain;

The reason people take this stuff so seriously is cause America is a first world country. You can go about life completely ignoring politics in the US and figuring out your own path to a happy life. Trump was supposed to be the worst thing to ever happen to the country, and yet his first term was relatively fine. America has a level of comfort that other countries don't, and that's a testament to our system of checks and balances.

Entertainment and art are a reflection of society and culture. Art is more powerful than politics and religion, since it gets deep and can unite people in the way those 2 topics don't.

 

[Pluto]

My general point is that Gen Z grew up in an environment where Progressives control opinion-shaping in the media, academia and entertainment. So naturally to them, conservativism is a form of counter-culture. it's no different than how Gen X and older Millennials lived in the era where evangelicals were the cultural authority and making the rules.

I guess that's sort of true, but I think you're overestimating the impact here. Most people, young or old, really don't actually care that much about any of this shit. Counter-cultures are always, by definition, a minority position. Also, they're a form of social positioning, an aesthetics-first costume more than anything else. There isn't a lot of substance there. Very few hippies or punks or goths went on and lived their lives by the principles they supposedly endorsed.
Like, the mothers were all correct. It really is just a phase.

As for the COVID lockdowns, I agree with you on that. It came after though, and I believe all the issues are connected to each other. The most authoritarian lockdowns happened in blue states, and especially deep blue cities. Again, Gen Z being lectured by an authority that comes from the left has the effect of making several of them look at the right as the cool thing and counter-culture.

I wasn't talking about the culture war aspect of the lockdowns ("authoritarianism", "trust the science", "vax" etc). I was mostly thinking of the way that it deprived teenagers of substantial socialization, and sent them all deep into the Wired, something they were already primed for.
When I look at zoomers I see something of myself in them. Difference is, when I became an internet addict (at a shockingly young age...), that was a bidirectional rejection between me and society around me. I was a semi-rare oddity. Not all zoomers have had their brains rotted by internet overexposure, not even most, but it's a much, much, much more substantial subsection of that age demographic, to the point it's an identifiable archetype. That is worrying, if for no other reason than the state of the internet they are being plugged into. I'm not really smart enough to try and make sense of what it actually means or how it relates to the overall collapse of sociality all over post-industrial societies.
(for reference, I'm 28 years old)

The majority of people voted to re-elect Donald Trump

The majority of people who voted decided to reelect Trump. With the sort of abyssal turnout US presidential elections show, that sums up to maybe 30% of the eligible USA population. Almost 40% of the adult US population (not even counting all those who are ineligible to vote, which is not insubstantial) is completely checked out of politics. That is the part I find more interesting here, and what I was referring to in the post you quoting.
Cratering turnout is a consistent trend in virtually all liberal republics in the past few decades, and something you might not pay attention to if you're one of the "middle class assholes" or "deeply alienated online denizens" still on the hamster wheel of emotional partisanship.

The reason people take this stuff so seriously is cause America is a first world country. You can go about life completely ignoring politics in the US and figuring out your own path to a happy life. Trump was supposed to be the worst thing to ever happen to the country, and yet his first term was relatively fine. America has a level of comfort that other countries don't, and that's a testament to our system of checks and balances.

I really disagree here but whatever. I'm not in the mood for writing textwalls at the moment and this conversation is starting to feel less like less of a 'discussion' and more like a flamewar.

 

[Orlando Smooth]

How do you expect me to respond to this?

By walking back the very bold claim that "Literally none of these happened outside right-wing echo chambers."

I understand it can be difficult to find objective truth when navigating political discourse online, but sweeping claims like this are exactly why people become radicalized. You personally may not be implying this, but when people make claims like that what they are actually saying is "Don't believe your lying eyes, anyone who believes in these things is racist and regressive." When there are literally millions of people living in America who can walk out their front door and see these things happening in real time, every day.

I'm not the only person to hold this position, either. The American left is beginning to reckon with the fact that their denialism is causing them to lose support in every demographic.
https://archive.is/2024.11.16-23111...mp-new-york-election-results-turning-red.html

 

[Pluto]

By walking back the very bold claim that "Literally none of these happened outside right-wing echo chambers."

That's maybe 30% of your post. The rest was clearly an invitation to start a flamewar. I'll stop responding now. If you want a libtard to shadowbox with, go to reddit.

 

[Dead Star]

I guess that's sort of true, but I think you're overestimating the impact here. Most people, young or old, really don't actually care that much about any of this shit. Counter-cultures are always, by definition, a minority position. Also, they're a form of social positioning, an aesthetics-first costume more than anything else.

Counter-culture plays a big role in shaping culture of the future. I've written many posts about how the anti-war movement played a major role in shaping how culture looked in the 2010s with the focus on social justice.

You can go back even further in time. The hippie movement that the boomers did may not have won any elections, but they did win the culture war as early as 1972. There's an entire debate over the book Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, and how attitudes of portraying American settlers in western films changed as a result to this (if you're into movies, check out Little Big Man. That one movie completely reversed how Native Americans were portrayed in films). The left won major victories in academia in this time period and that plays a role of opinion-shaping in society. The biggest change you'll see from the 70s period is the attitudes and views towards the US military and the Vietnam war. Now it's popular opinion to blame the US for being imperialistic. That narrative became more and more popular until it was finally accepted.

I know you're not an American, which is why I'm explaining these things. US history is something I'm heavily invested in and can pinpoint a lot of these changes in modern times.

I wasn't talking about the culture war aspect of the lockdowns ("authoritarianism", "trust the science", "vax" etc). I was mostly thinking of the way that it deprived teenagers of substantial socialization, and sent them all deep into the Wired, something they were already primed for.
When I look at zoomers I see something of myself in them. Difference is, when I became an internet addict (at a shockingly young age...), that was a bidirectional rejection between me and society around me. I was a semi-rare oddity. Not all zoomers have had their brains rotted by internet overexposure, not even most, but it's a much, much, much more substantial subsection of that age demographic, to the point it's an identifiable archetype. That is worrying, if for no other reason than the state of the internet they are being plugged into. I'm not really smart enough to try and make sense of what it actually means or how it relates to the overall collapse of sociality all over post-industrial societies.
(for reference, I'm 28 years old)

I agree with you on this. I think the lockdowns did tremendous damage to them, as they lost a year from school. Some schools continued to do remote learning long after.

Jon Haidt's book 'The Coddling of the American Mind' might be of interest to you. He likens Gen Z's problems with education and focus to that of the smartphone rising in popularity. Haidt has spent years talking about the side effects of this and how Gen Z is our first generation to truly be raised on the internet and with access to it at any given time from having a phone in their pocket.

The majority of people who voted decided to reelect Trump. With the sort of abyssal turnout US presidential elections show, that sums up to maybe 30% of the eligible USA population. Almost 40% of the adult US population (not even counting all those who are ineligible to vote, which is not insubstantial) is completely checked out of politics. That is the part I find more interesting here, and what I was referring to in the post you quoting.
Cratering turnout is a consistent trend in virtually all liberal republics in the past few decades, and something you might not pay attention to if you're one of the "middle class assholes" or "deeply alienated online denizens" still on the hamster wheel of emotional partisanship.

252 million people in this country voted in the election. That's over 60% of voting eligible turnout and over 58% at voter age eligibility. You'd have to go back to 1996 when it was low at 51% total, yet that's still over half of the country.

You could make the argument that Democrat voter turnout was down due to Harris being an awful candidate, and I'd agree to an extent. I'm curious what voter turnout is going to look like in 2028 with Trump off the ballot. Republicans have underperformed in every midterm when he wasn't there, and his endorsed candidates have been disasters.

I really disagree here but whatever. I'm not in the mood for writing textwalls at the moment and this conversation is starting to feel less like less of a 'discussion' and more like a flamewar.

We're having disagreements on some things (not all, as evident from my quotes above). I'm not personally attacking you, and don't mean to give that impression. Just trying to have fun with an open discussion.

 

[Dead Star]

This is where you're demonstrating that you're not an American, and certainly not living in a major coastal American city. Petty crime may not have literally been legalized, but systematic non-enforcement is tantamount to legalization and things like theft under a thousand and street level drug dealing are no longer enforced. When more major crimes are carried out (assault, armed robbery, car jacking, etc.) and the perpetrator is caught, they're often released on the same day without bail. Anti-social behavior such as pissing and shitting in public in broad daylight has proliferated without consequence to the people doing it. Police departments did receive major budget cuts in response to 2020. Not all of them, and they didn't cut the budget to zero, but it did happen and not without consequence. When these budget cuts were eventually eased or reversed, they typically claimed it was because "tax revenue was better than expected" but that was only to save face and avoid admitting that they were wrong and there was a spike in crime. Affirmative action has been around since the early 90's and is such a widespread problem that it took a Supreme Court case to end it. The Crimson themselves published data showing the average black admit scores 9 points lower on the SAT than the average white applicant! The difference between Asian admits and black admits is 63 points, a difference equal to 7.8% of a perfect score (800), far too big of a gap to be a statistical anomaly. Affirmative action is very real and not a secret.

I used to dream of living in a big city as a kid, like my older cousins who I'd visit after they went coastal for work. Now I'm in one myself and the experience is completely different than what it was for them all those years ago. I'm not sure where you get the idea that "literally none of these happened" because I see it with my own eyes every single day. Is it as bad as right wing grifters media personalities say? No. But just because some people exaggerate the extent of the problem does NOT mean the problem is nonexistent.

I lived in a big city for 7 years and experienced these things first hand from 2020 and 2021. I will never forget what all I seen and went through during the BLM riots and seeing fogs of teargas outside my apartment block and hearing all the chaos through all hours of the night. This went on for several months. It was what ultimately made me get out and move far away. Defund the Police happened on local levels in cities spread out across the country. Crime went up, and reporting on crime went down. Many people just quit reporting the muggings and burglary cause it's no longer taken seriously.

Many of these cities elected new District Attorneys and local politicians on "Justice Reform" and the results have been crime definitions being re-written, with many things being re-classified as misdemeanors. They used the same racial based political discourse that has been rampant online for a decade now. There was also an entire push to decriminalize drug use, and it just led to cities like Portland, San Francisco and Oakland to becoming overrun with meth and fentanyl from a growing homeless population that these policies made explode.

We have the laws, they just aren't being enforced cause Progressives don't like the harsh reality when they see who is doing the crime.

Pirate Wires has been writing all year about how San Francisco's homeless problem is actually about drug tourism. You might find this article worth reading.

How San Francisco Attracts and Traps Homeless Transplants

from doordash-style paraphernalia delivery to legal teams suing the city each time it clears encampments: the

www.piratewires.com

By walking back the very bold claim that "Literally none of these happened outside right-wing echo chambers."

I understand it can be difficult to find objective truth when navigating political discourse online, but sweeping claims like this are exactly why people become radicalized. You personally may not be implying this, but when people make claims like that what they are actually saying is "Don't believe your lying eyes, anyone who believes in these things is racist and regressive." When there are literally millions of people living in America who can walk out their front door and see these things happening in real time, every day.

I'm not the only person to hold this position, either. The American left is beginning to reckon with the fact that their denialism is causing them to lose support in every demographic.
https://archive.is/2024.11.16-23111...mp-new-york-election-results-turning-red.html

All of that relates to the online politics that began years ago too.

There's a term for this - "Mugged by reality". It's what happens when you see through all of this and get a dose of reality in the real world. Once you see through the lies and narratives in one area of politics, you start to see it everywhere.

We're in the same boat. Many of us want the Left to pull their heads out of their asses and move back to the center. The only way they achieve that is to clean their party and realize they've lost the culture wars on progressive messaging and it's time for change. I believe Democrats could achieve this change if they pushed back to the center and focused on easy issues like crime, taxes and national security. It's what won them elections in the 90s. Most of Americans really do want politics to be just something in the background that they don't have to pay a lot of attention to.

 

[Orlando Smooth]

The rest was clearly an invitation to start a flamewar.

Can you please point to where you see this? I've reread both my replies to this thread three times now and cannot identify where I have conducted myself in that way, but if it's something in my blind spot I want to address it. I am asking this genuinely.

 

[wavve-creator]

The decline of Christianity in society has led to debates in regards of morality that weren't previously a problem before the 2010s.

May I introduce you to a man named Nietzsche who wrote intensely on this topic.

"God is dead, we killed him."

millennial left politics are truly dead

I would not say this. I see more people turn further left and leave the Democratic party. Saw it with my own eyes today at a full forum in lower east side of people talking about how they left, leaving, upset with the Democratic party as it has failed them. So they were seeking other representation. The dem party infact failed, hard. One reason (of many) is they do not care about the working class and only service capital. A big reason why they lost is because they offered the working class nothing. The dems are not a left wing party but a center right one. Of course they are dead when their base leaves for further left organizations or move to support Trump. I know several people who are left wing that voted all blue locally but vote Trump for president. I know a human trafficker who voted for Trump thats how bad the Democrats are at appealing to the people.

As OP said, it was starting to fizzle out in 2020, then the George Floyd incident happened and brought BLM back.

I don't think so. 2020 exposed the moderates and allowed a lot of more left wing extremists to find one another and was a catalyst for more movements that happened across the country formed by the bonds of people who met during those time. The Stop Cop City movement for one was supported by people who had met during those time.

I would also like to mention several actual socialist candidates have won seats since then. Such as Casar and others. The next Mayor of NYC race will most likely be a battle between a socialist candidate and a republican.

Nothing has fizzled out. Online spaces have just become less diverse.

this election was seeing Gen Z move to Trump

I have a feeling this is true but I don't have any fancy data to back it up. A lot of Gen Z also didnt vote blue because of their ties to Israel.

I'd argue the politics have had a tangible impact on things... but not a good one. Mainstream video games feel the need to discuss topical subjects that have no bearing on the setting they show us, in a poorly-written or ham-fisted way that leaves people bothered instead of pondering. Same deal with films; all these gir-power films like Ms. Marvel coming out a few years ago with themes like "men sexist, women need to free themselves from their shackles," and it's just done with all the subtlety and forethought of a strategic carpet bombing campaign. Instead of dealing with things people actually care about like food prices and local crime and taxes, it's just invaded people's avenues for escape from the world. Constant reminders of "DO SOMETHING!" to a people that don't have the power or ability to really do anything.

Bad decisions by studios because they thought this is what would sell. The market will correct over time. This is not even remotely the first time this has happened. The 80s were full of endless shity remakes.

 

[wavve-creator]

Pirate Wires

LOVE these dudes.

Progressives don't like the harsh reality when they see who is doing the crime.

An unfortunate fallout of progressive "justice". I hope in time they will reverse course. But you can see places like the UK where it has become completely captures by a 2 tier justice system. Rapists are let out so they can fill the jails with people who tweet mean things are arrested. Seeing things like that made me so incredibly happy to not see the Democrats win.

 

[Parzival]

On Gen Z: I don't think it matters if as a whole they've shifted right. Most boomers weren't hippies or pro-civil rights but they'll forever be remembered in their entirety for those movements because a small, vocal minority embodied that and worked tirelessly to make their ideals a reality. And now, ever since, the rest of the boomer cohort has largely fallen into those ideals, regardless of their party affiliation. What matters is that zoomers have a similarly vocal minority of right wingers that are working to worm their way into the republican party in a similar manner that MAGA (which is considerably to these zoomers' left) has.

In this way I agree with wavve that things haven't really fizzled out. They've just started to become entrenched. Increasingly we're not having elections between liberals and conservatives, nor neolibs and neocons, but socialists and nationalists. Drastic, bombastic movements are failing, but slowly but surely extremism is winning at the ballots.

 

[scattershot]

There's a term for this - "Mugged by reality". It's what happens when you see through all of this and get a dose of reality in the real world. Once you see through the lies and narratives in one area of politics, you start to see it everywhere.

We're in the same boat. Many of us want the Left to pull their heads out of their asses and move back to the center. The only way they achieve that is to clean their party and realize they've lost the culture wars on progressive messaging and it's time for change. I believe Democrats could achieve this change if they pushed back to the center and focused on easy issues like crime, taxes and national security. It's what won them elections in the 90s. Most of Americans really do want politics to be just something in the background that they don't have to pay a lot of attention to.

Al From and the DLC took Gen Zedong LARPer BIlliam Clinton and transformed him into a charming southern D with a brain and revived a dead party. Unfortunately, Gore and Team Obama erased all the institutional memory that the party had, and they are back at square one hopelessly flailing through space. So all that to say that it's happened before, and it will happen again. In our binary system there are inevitably political innovators that can float to the top of one party or another, seize power for a few decades, and then get high on their own supply thinking they created God. It's a sort of complacency you see in politics anywhere you look. It's a sort of complacent sclerosis that's easy to get when you think you have the finger on the pulse of the electorate and can install whoever you want into the most powerful position on Earth.

Team Obama did this, Hillary was handpicked by Obama, almost all of Team Obama became Team Hillary from 2015-2016. She lost. Biden won 2020 in a sort of rebuke of Team Obama, during the campaign, only to have a white house filled with Team Obama and Team Hillary staffers and an easily convinced principle. Unfortunately, father time comes for us all, Team Obama scrambles, gives Harris their blessings, and she gets walloped.

Team Trump did this too, they ran easily the most impressive WH program since PEPFAR and arguably since the Space Race, spending tons of cash on a vaccine that has saved uncountable lives. The ME and Eastern Europe weren't on fire for once. But the fan service must continue, so Team Trump didn't run on Warp Speed's success at all, instead they tried to run back the 2016 strategy in a completely different environment (GLOBAL PANDEMIC) against a completely different opponent.

Reality is a harsh wake-up call for a lot of the political / campaign operatives whose lives depend on winning elections, but the mugging will happen. You can only deny what you are seeing with your own eyes for so long. A party can only lose so many elections before it goes back to the drawing board and starts to think outside the box. 2028 will be interesting, D bench seems weak, hard to tell where the party goes yet, maybe the DNC chair race will be telling, and the jury is out whether Team Trump is able to pass the baton successfully to Team Vance/Team Techbro.

What does all this have to do with the internet? IDK. It's just another tool at the disposal of the campaign. I don't think there's really all that much value in the online organizing, and it really seems to be decreasing in importance the more the adtech monsters strangle it. It can certainly raise minor players profiles in the news, thinking of congresspeople like MTG, AOC, Gaetz, etc. Microtargeting ad strategies seem more effective than traditional ads, even if only marginally.



A lot of people never get mugged, though, and go through life perfectly happily swearing their loyalty to one ideology or another. Luckily, the median voter seems to have been mugged more often than not.

 

[Some_porcupine]

• retrofuturism: Do you remember (Now Lost) "Future"? (Promises broken - GVC, Ftgr aero, MCM...) / Don't fix what ain't broken / This would fry ancient peasant's brain
• young people losing hope (millennial dream and bust...) : (Bad, post- modern, "future-less" (culture-less) timeline) Young people (1984-2014) giving up on life, future...
• star formation allegory: History Repeats/Cycles - (8, 16, 24ys) 11 - 13 years and "Angry" Sun?
• my own dream: protest art-form! as opposition of big-G minimalism, neo-memphis and roundness (ugly) | no return (old-web) - create!!!

others:
- do it, no one else will (punp iirc)
- boredom importance on fantasy &(?) - ideas need silence

 

[Average Romanian Dude]

One thing that's always struck me about all of it is the lack of an answer to the fundamental question of "But what do we do?"

Herein lies the issue: people who are actively posting on the internet about politics and are making a living off of it (which I assume is the main demographic targeting this post, i.e influencers, youtube show hosts, podcasters and so on) have no real interest in solving any of the issues they complain about because a solved issue is one less issue to complain about and, therefore, one less income stream. I will come back with a longer reply on the topic since I cannot wait to read the essays which you have linked, but for the moment I will simply quote one of the few pieces of genuine insight I have heard from a fucking breadtuber of all people: these people do not want to obtain power in order to solve issue X or Y, they just want to be able to criticize power forever (and make a living off of it).

Edit:

Alright, did my things and read the essays. All they did was explain in a lot more terms what I said initially, so yeah. Still, very good reads. I will simply add that online politics cannot be dead since they have never been alive in the first place. It was just another type of content to be milked dry by naive idealists and grifters alike.

 

[scattershot]

Herein lies the issue: people who are actively posting on the internet about politics and are making a living off of it (which I assume is the main demographic targeting this post, i.e influencers, youtube show hosts, podcasters and so on) have no real interest in solving any of the issues they complain about because a solved issue is one less issue to complain about and, therefore, one less income stream. I will come back with a longer reply on the topic since I cannot wait to read the essays which you have linked, but for the moment I will simply quote one of the few pieces of genuine insight I have heard from a fucking breadtuber of all people: these people do not want to obtain power in order to solve issue X or Y, they just want to be able to criticize power forever (and make a living off of it).

A lot of "issues" in politics are fundamentally unsolvable. A lot of ink has been spilled over "intellectuals" arguing otherwise, but government was never meant to establish whatever sort of utopian vision one might have at any given moment. There's limits to human intelligence, control, power, etc. Thank God.

The problem of an eidos in history, hence, arises only when a Christian transcendental fulfillment becomes immanentized. Such an immanentist hypostasis of the eschaton, however, is a theoretical fallacy

Eric Voeglin in The New Science of Politics

Joachim of Fire was a fantastic theologian, and a fantastic monk, but no saint.