if you corner a liberal and confront them with enough facts and history they can usually be browbeaten into conceding that it's not a democracy, and then after five minutes of cable news they are back to pretending that their vote means as much as the donations Jeff Bezos makes
this post was submitted on 22 Jul 2024
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This is why media criticism is how I try to start deprograming libs. Citations Needed is probably the easiest option for them to get into.
Have to interrupt that backsliding or you'll never get anywhere.
Nima and Adam do have the advantage of being able to go in to soothing NPR stupor voice mode between exasperation and knowledge dumps. It's one of the liberal's key metacognitive weaknesses.
Exactly what I was thinking -- it's a very similar presentation style to classic lib slop.
This right here. Bullying and browbeating has its place in larger discourse but in my opinion, and based on my own experience, you have more success changing people's minds when you learn them down the path to feel like they figured it out for themselves.
Bullying, like posting, is for the audience. If done right (and that's a real easy line to cross) it can sway people listening in, but it's effects on the subject are all over the place.
If you're actually trying to change the mind of the person you're talking to, they first have to respect you, and even then anything beyond friendly cajoling is more likely to backfire than succeed.
The problem is bullying is fun and feels good, and the biggest proponents of it will angrily dismiss any criticism of it as a tactic.
I dunno i think bullying has its place! If someone's just parroting and they get hot with a response outside of their expectation it could knock some shit loose.
You'll never see bullying work in the moment but if someone's primed to open their mind anyway i don't think bullying is bad, just overused (cuz yes it does feel good)
Of course we might be operating on different definitions of bullying. Im thinking "derisive/dismissive comments mocking a commenter’s point, with a direct correlation to the amount of hubris with which point was delivered"
Yeah?
Yeah, that all seems spot on, especially with that fairly tame version of bullying. It can cause people to reflect later on, I just think it's easy to go so hard people just say "fuck that person" and write it off entirely. May even cause them to dig in further.
This is why I'm skeptical of most of the "I managed to talk my Lib/Chud friend/family member into being a socialist" narratives you see online. Seems like you just bullied them into conceding you were right, and I suspect 9/10 they'll just wait a week till the memory or you owning them fades and then watch some Fox/MSNBC and be right back on their bullshit.
I agree. Both Dems and Reps use pseudo-socialist talking points (pro worker, anti rich) so a lot of it is already ingrained in the US psyche. It is not dissonant for them to agree with socialist arguments one day and then with republican newscasters the next day. I’ve had staunch libertarians tell me that they actually want communism more than communists.
Ah yes, the classic libertarian fall back of 'Despite having no understanding of my own ideology, I actually understand what your ideology wants better than you do. What, no I haven't actually read anything about it, I just remember history class really well.'
God i feel that, im like fucking sisyphus trying to get libs to remember or read anything
Won't even take five minutes. In one breath they'll admit that voting does nothing, then they'll go right back to fearsturbating about what might happen if Mussolini von Hitler (D NY) doesn't win.
2020 is worse than you recall, Buttigieg and Klobuchar are phoned by Obama the weekend before Super Tuesday to drop out and endorse Biden, who'd ate shit worse than them in the preceeding contests. Warren stays in, reneges on everything she'd campaigned on to work with a Super PAC just so she could get 3rd in her home state.
i'd forgotten about this shit. So much happens so fast it's just disaster and defeat after disaster and defeat. None of it sticks
2020 was even worse than that, tbh: https://web.archive.org/web/20201105081005/http://berniewouldhavelost.com/
I don't think they care, nor do they think it's something to care about. I think for most of them "democracy" is a sacred religious state that has nothing to do with any method of decision making. It signifies holiness, not the day to day bureaucracy of government function. The "democracy" that is at stake for them isn't control of government by the demos, but some kind of spiritual conflict within the American Civic Religion where Trump, as a political outsider not annointed by the system, is a god of evil threatening the ACR's "good" god that they call democracy".
They're completely insane. It's completely irrational religious fanaticism. They're not engaged in political struggle, they're participating in a spiritual ritual where every four years they find out if their faith was strong enough and if the world will be ruled by the god of good or the god of evil. Absolutely delusional, fanatical devotion to a world of magic and spirits.
That's why none of it matters, the death, the misery, the poverty. The world isn't ruled by economics and policy, it's ghosts and devils. They can't effect the material reality around them, they can only lend their faith to the divine power that beats back their idea of evil, and if evil wins at the ballot box it's because they lacked faith and spiritual purity, not anything to do with the vulgar material world.
Just fucking religious madness, it's the only explanation i can beat in to a shape that fits this bullshit.
You can even hear it in how they talk if you can make yourself stop treating them as rational people. Their talk about the "end of democracy" and "the last election" isn't expressing the collapse of the electoral system or a change in government. They mean it's the end of the world. We're in their eschaton, their final battle between good and evil, and they genuinely believe the world will end and we'll have a thousand years of darkness or something if Trump wins. They can't think of political organizing after the election, or of any political action beyond voting, because how could any action they take except casting their holy ballot effect things? They cannot act, only their gods can act. All they can do is perform the rituals their gods demand.
warhammer 2k
the systems laid down by more competent learned ancients have become so mysterious and self-sustaining that everything has devolved into a series of complex rituals
are USians likely to notice
Death to America
The DNC won a lawsuit after the 2016 primary by arguing in court that they're a private corporation and do not have to even pretend to be democratic, they could pick anyone they want and ignore primary votes and it wouldn't break any laws. This made zero impact on the voting public and the devoted Dem voters will gaslight you and deny there was anything weird about the 2016 election. If you point them to the book written by the DNC chair at the time where she outright says they fixed the primary, they'll do the Westworld "Doesn't look like anything to me" + blank stare
One of many things that will immediately raise my bloodpressure to pre-hypertension is trying to beat this information through the ceramide laced brainal dome of the average liberal.
the ceramide laced brainal dome
It just rolls off the tongue doesn't it lol
I was trying to think of "cranial" but I couldn't find it and made something up. : (
lol it's ok 
Every four years a new cohort of USians is old enough to pay attention to elections and gets to learn how undemocratic the US actually is, as opposed to what they learn in school.
Anyone who doesn't get the lesson the first time is hopeless, though.
Anyone who doesn’t get the lesson the first time is hopeless, though.
It's hard to imagine even one other situation where we'd apply this thinking. It may actually take people a while to change their axiomatic political beliefs.
Our comrades must understand that ideological remolding involves long-term, patient and painstaking work, and they must not attempt to change people's ideology, which has been shaped over decades of life, by giving a few lectures or by holding a few meetings.
It’s hard to imagine even one other situation where we’d apply this thinking.
How about learning to not touch a hot stove?
Maybe, but "owie that's hot!" is pretty different from "my entire political worldview that is reinforced by every part of mainstream culture is wrong in a way that would require a mass national movement to change."
Well, yeah? That's my point.
If someone doesn't figure out why they keep getting burned because the media is telling them the burning sensation is being caused by Russian bots, I don't have a lot of hope.
Kamala Harris, handpicked successor 
To be fair, westerners have been conditioned to not even think about any alternative to the status quo, so to them the only choice is the two major parties.
And when the other party is the GOP you can see how the "lesser of two evils" voters are created.
Not justifying the vote blue no matter who types, just reminding that the vast majority is condition to be scared to death of revolution, so they hold their nose and that's how we get nerds like Biden. Americans are a sad, scared, brainwashed, oppressed people with a Gucci belt
Democrats will tell you with a straight face that the Democratic party is a private organization
no lol things will have to get a lot worse to precipitate any kind of mass class consciousness triggering in the US i think
This clusterfuck + a loss to Trump would at least cause a lot of discourse. The question would be if that produces any change in how the party's run (big changes are unlikely, but smaller ones are possible).
Did you just tell me to vote for a cheeto????
on this day we are both cheetos
No because as I'm sure you recall USians have a peculiar belief that everything politically happens in a vacuum, and context/conditions are the idle fancies of fools and conspiracy nuts
I think it really ties back to the rigid fictions we have drilled into our heads in primary school. If you take it on faith that the system works as advertised, you just will not see it what you need to see to go, "hey, what the fuck?"
Dispelling this illusion requires breaking the basic understanding - which is some school house rock ass shit - but also breaking the more complex "adult" understandings like what is conveyed in drivel like the west wing - there are several layers of "here's how it *actually works" spoonfed to us that is as equally fictive and serving of this viewpoint as the basic shit children are taught - it's just a transformation appropriate to beguiling an adult that thinks they're figuring out how the world really works.
You need to be able to shake those up, and just doing that on an individual level is like pulling teeth and requires willingness which is a resource that only appears in select conditions - drug trips, or during trauma directly caused by the government's real nature - very little else primes anyone in the US to be even willing to see how it really is.
It fucking sucks.
In trying to be empathetic I attempt to wonder how much that propaganda would still work on me if i were subject to it daily. It was just my cheap nature that cut the cable cord initially. finding my answers to how the world actually works on my own instead of having it fed me by fiction (both tv drama and tv news) over 20 goddamn years could be the difference between who i am now and just another bobblehead.
TV is so powerful. When i see talking heads these days, it's almost a joke... they all speak so quickly, like used car salesmen... as if to pump n dump their narrative faster than the brain can think. How did i not notice this before? Did something change or was it always this way? Can i only see it now that I'm not immersed in it?
I also dropped TV, and later, because my partner needed it, I began to release myself from immersion in pop culture, and I was already a socialist - I was liberal but socialist in self-conception, and open to leftist politics before I ever left highschool - the intervening decades saw steady radicalization - but I can echo that it really accellerated in the last half decade - where i just absolutely do not, and will not, plug into "news of record" - some time away initially must've made me attentive to former blind spots, because at some point, and i can't even measure when, I suddenly saw what you mention - the pump n dump fast talking bullshitter nonsense. It didn't help that these personalities really showed their ass regularly on twitter - it became obvious in 2016 and 2020 that, to anyone paying attention, they weren't dealing honestly - and it kind of made the curtain come up on the entire media operation in the US.
I am not sure everyone invovled understands their own place and role though - some of these people are bitterly stupid, and possibly true believers - but many of them just are on the take and defending their financial interests and putting their employer's ideology before their own in the interest of climbing up the ladder - but seeing these dweebs show their ass on social media for several years really effectively undermined the illusion of authority they used to project in days when most media folk were invisible except as a name under the banner of their employers.
That's probably why there's a turning back to that - musk running everyone that's not an insane fascist off twitter is gonna end up serving that crowd even if they're not happy about it (egos are like that lol) but it's honestly a good antidote to the illusion at-large to see how dishonest these people really are, and any leftist org worth their salt should emphasize their importance by rising to the unchallenging goal of being more honest and consistent than these folks in presenting information and processing world events.
I liked the whole thing but i particularly loved your term "bitterly stupid" and imma add it to the lexicon
"at some point i voted for something, ergo democracy"
Most don't even seem to comprehend how undemocratic the electoral college and the senate are.
no. they were really angry with the bernie stuff in 2016 but they seem to have forgot their own criticism about it as soon as the election season ended.
for them democracy = voting on a ballot
If you have faith in the system, you don't keep receipts in the same way we do.
I've had to explain it to people for years that the primary process doesn't need anybody to vote. All the groups are private entities and not governmental, if they ask their dues paying members or the general public to vote for a candidate they do so because they want to and not because they have to.
furthermore they are all centralist parties (DNC and RNC) at their core and vanguardist for the capitalist class
as always every single accusation is a confession
This is the first time that BlueMaga types have been disenfranchised. I feel like a lot of them will just stop voting but will tell their friends they still do