foragoodworld.bsky.social
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216 followers
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Spread thy word, and rejoice
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Yeah, broken back by the millionth dumb meme. The internet is indeed real life
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Ive tried explaining this reality to people, especially people older than me, and they look at me like I'm just too chronically online and dismiss it. Harris lost PARTIALLY because of Biden's age meme, and I think thats hard for people to accept, because yes, it is dumb as fuck, but its real.
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We encourage people to seek their own truth - find channels and voices that reflect our biases and beliefs back to us - because that’s how you get people to like, subscribe, share. The hallucinatory nature of modern media doesn’t come from AI or fakery but from endless fragmentation.
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i've heard liberal podcasters unironically sneer at breitbart's "politics is downstream of culture" philosphy and now they're bewildered to find themselves hopelessly outgunned in the culture wars and have no idea what happened
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At least What’s the Matter with Kansas recognized that we needed an explanation for why deliverism had failed. The discourse now is like “but probably it’ll work if we just do it right.”
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Was just going on about this yesterday.
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the result of the last two decades plus of rural areas developing a massive drug problem while quality of life substantially improved in urban areas was to make people in rural areas believe that if they had it bad, the cities, by definition, must be hellholes
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it's the one step in the causal chain towards political outcomes that always must be present and cannot be altered under any circumstance
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The basic issue here is that the really noteworthy thing about this administration - and the truly unreconcilable fissure with liberal democracy - is its open bigotry and lawlessness, so virtually any effort to move past that and talk economic issues ends up functioning as conflict avoidance.
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It's true that it's better to call attacks on YOURSELF a distraction than attacks on constituents, but again, this is literally what Sarah McBride does and people get furious. (And I understand why!)
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If Sarah McBride or Hakeem Jeffries said this, you would all be (rightfully) angry about it.
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It's all in pursuit of the same thing - the little rush of electric pleasure that they get from hurting a person weaker than themselves, a person who is from a social group they hold in contempt. Everything flows backward from the mass demand for that rush, including inventing new groups to hate.
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Over time Trump's far right has built up social and political structures that grant greater permission to indulge in more open and elaborate forms of cruelty, which is how MAGA evolved from shouting "build the wall" at kindergarteners to building concentration camps for those same kindergarteners.
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The tendency of left-wing thinkers to search for economic explanations for political phenomena has consistently pulled the entire left-of-center away from the obvious explanation for MAGA, which is that they find torture and domination psychologically rewarding, and are seeking that reward.
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That's literally the meme. How could you miss this
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The ICE kidnappings, concentration camp tours, it's all pornography, keeping MAGA junkies in on the hook with an endless dopamine drip. When it gets boring or they simply run out of targets they'll upgrade to new victims and more exotic cruelties, forever. We know where it ends, history tells us.
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There's a reason they aren't hiding their concentration camps, but going on TV to do walkthrough tours of them. Whether they realize it or not, their audiences are thrilling to the idea of their social inferiors being sent into these camps to suffer.
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And that's what Trump offers: a hallucinatory political phantasmagoria where you are always the rightfully-aggrieved victim, and also always the triumphant bully, watching one repulsive enemy after another get fed into the torture machine. The pleasure of indignation and domination all at once
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Material rewards only influence behavior to the extent they create psychological rewards. But there are other ways to create psychological rewards. Social status, domination, the ecstasy of being part of a jeering mob watching your shared enemies get purged.. a few extra dollars can't hold a candle.
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Simply the knowledge that if you do violence on behalf of Trump, you’ll get away with it? More powerful than any drug on the street.
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if their feelings are irrational, or their beliefs are wrong, their political behavior will be warped as a consequence
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people try to reduce the internal psychological component out of politics for ease of analysis - collapse individuals into groups and assign the groups shared interests or whatever - but you really can't escape the fact that individuals are going to be steered by what they believe and feel
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again, this is a strawman. of COURSE things like social structures, social environments, media and information environments impact each person's inner world. the point is that while the things that can create that inner world vary, political decisions all inevitably flow out of it.
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there is also a lesson here for the youth vote, which is that if you show up in primaries - really, truly show up - you can kick the establishment in the teeth
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I can’t even be mad, this is a ludicrous electorate, of course nobody modeled it this way
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Lander himself said it well.
bsky.app/profile/kenk...
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A liberal should be someone who does the right thing because it is right and stands up to bullies and abusers. The type of liberalism that America has suffered with for decades now has been a craven exercise in soulless hedging and cowardice