restless [she/her]

I’m still unconvinced that’s not a reason at least 10% of right wingers identify as such

If the system wasn’t working for people with the power to change it, those people generally would change it until it suited their interests. More importantly, they’d try their damndest to keep it that way once it does.

Right I mean the whole deal with “planting seeds” is that you never know when or even if they will grow. You do your best and hope your efforts are net positive.

I mostly mean two way street in the sense that there are also scenarios where you’ve been written off by someone else, and once that happens there’s very little you can do about it.

I typically don’t discuss theory with other people directly, but usually more practical matters like walkable curious cities/neighborhood, identifying causes of bad behavior instead of policing symptoms (e.g. ppl littering in a space with no trash cans available), explaining why some folks including myself don’t feel safe around police, how it’s not as simple as “hard work pays off”, and similar subjects to my somewhat privileged direct and extended family members. There was a lot of discussion during COVID where I was trying to explain to people that even if masks aren’t 100% effective that you should wear them anyways (that even if it were only 10% effective that it makes a big difference on a population scale), that we genuinely could have made the disease into a non-issue if we took it seriously and viewed stuff like lockdowns and social distancing as a civic duty instead of some weird deep state control conspiracy theory thing. I’m also prone to being a little one-note on pointing out profit movies behind a ton of terrible things that keep happening all over the place.

On another point though, there are legitimately people so radicalized in the opposite direction that they’d kill people like me if they had an excuse and the opportunity to. Others functionally are obstacles because of the job they hold or capitalist propaganda they never questioned. What do I call such people? Even “enemy” is too strong a term for most, the roles such people serve are adversarial nonetheless.

The problem in my experience has been that the potential for writing someone off is a two way street.

I’ve had family and friends who I’ve spent legitimately dozens of hours with in what I thought were really good chats, deep conversations, where I wouldn’t be afraid to get into the weeds and lay things out from a class consciousness or even just an “everyone deserves to live/have access to healthcare/etc” framing, and realize far too late into my interactions that very little to none of what I’ve been saying has stuck. That people enjoy talking at me but not with me. My general approach to everything in life is that I’m open to being wrong on any given subject, but that a given refutation has to be proportional to my understanding; it has to actually poke a hole in the underlying reasoning.

There’s a certain pain that comes from discussing a matter such as the death penalty issue with someone, going point by point and getting them on board over the course of an hour long discussion, and then to get the first point thrown in your face again like it’s a gotcha that wasn’t touched on earlier. I came to realize in this specific example that the person I was talking to, and thought I was engaging with, just held different axiomatic beliefs than I do, and regardless of how well I was able to get my point across and have it resonate that it would inevitably bounce off of a core belief they considered integral to their identity.

And so where do I go from there? Try to discuss first principles, and bring up the most maligned academic subject in the United States: philosophy? I honestly think it’s a good place to start but it has to cut through so much bullshit and cultural baggage that has been assigned to it. To me, at its core, philosophy as a topic is fundamentally about the “critical thinking” so many seem to mourn the loss of in our education, without understanding why or what that actually means. The process of knowing what “an argument” is and what makes it valid—what makes it sound—is I think a really important part of engaging in a back and forth between others. To know the animatic beliefs one holds, and to know whether or not two beliefs contradict those axioms to push one towards modifying or outright abandoning one that doesn’t fit to come away with more consistent views in the process.

At this stage my comments here are also probably on the level of “old lady yells at clouds” just the same, but yeah I think one shouldn’t write people off out of hand, but one should also know where their time is best spent. Past a point of being patient and understanding with someone close who refuses to understand, I have to realize if my goal is to further class consciousness that I need to have those conversations with people who will be more receptive. My interactions with a person are at best a fraction of their day; they have their own lives they live, their own groups of people they interact with, and their own media they consume. Unless you can essentially shatter someone’s worldview then they will (largely) patch over holes in it with whatever is convenient. Given how hard the various systems push for reactionary sentiment in the general populace, that’s largely going to be an uphill battle. It’s still worth doing, mind you, but part of the tactics here include the fact that it’s unfortunately impossible to get everyone on board. I’m not that big of a fan of the term lumpenprole myself but the fact stands that our time is ultimately a finite resource.

If someone finds me fun to talk to because of my wacky and queer (but ultimately, to their mind and because of who I am, fundamentally unserious) ideas, then I’m wasting my time.

A successful meme is generally short and punchy. Most theory is pretty specific and nuanced.

We have images with punchy quotes from prominent leftist, socialist, communist, what-have-you theorists or political leaders from the past 100+ years and they almost always end up pulling reactionary pushback in the comments. A political position loses something when distilled down to like 3 sentences and a name with a less than absolutely perfect history to pick at.

There is also the fact that moneyed interests can literally just pay propaganda mills to push reactionary talking points and memes for them, such that they outnumber a leftist position 100:1. Slopaganda doesn’t have to be good, it just has to soothe already reactionary sentiment just enough keep people with those views complacent. It’s a very hostile environment especially when the current day Internet allows (and often directly facilitates) people with different beliefs to filter into their respective echo chambers. I’m not immune here or some exception; I don’t particularly enjoy hanging out with bigots or chuds, so often don’t go out of my way to sow seeds unless I get the opportunity to speak with someone who’s not outright hostile to my ideas 1 on 1.

You can tell it was actually done by the IOF through the use of passive voice describing the event here