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Anyone who hasn't read Kill all Normies by Angela Nagle, buy a copy (and ignore the name, it's anti-Trump). It's written about the first Trump election but seems more relevant now than in 2017.
The Right was able to weaponize online spaces far better than the Left, against all conventional wisdom that the Dems were the party of the young people and the Repubs for the older ones.
Great, now I'm at the point of the post election grief cycle where I'm getting a bunch of books to try to figure out what happened. I remember this phase from 2016. Thanks for the recommendation for my list!
It's convenient that they're already all written because we're repeating history.
It's really short, I read the entire thing last night, but it probes into the right-wing online space deeper than any other scholarly resource I've read.
Check out Democracy in Chains.
Also note that a lot of leftist YouTubers have either retired or moved to Nebula, a platform where their videos are harder to reach. Guess who didn't paywalled their videos! Your crappy gaming streamers creating reaction videos to crappy right-wing grifters whining about "masculinity in gaming" and how some video game women aren't fuckable enough for them.
I agree, but it doesn't help that YouTube rewards low effort daily posts and if someone spends a week making a video as opposed to quick 10 minute rants about "the woke in gaming", they won't get as much attention by the things YouTube put in place.
There are leftist content creators that make things that put some Ken Burns documentaries to shame. Engaging, well edited, comedic, time spent crafting the points that educate and joke. Sometimes they get focused in attention, often times they don't.
Meanwhile TrumpFan1488 can make more "The DEI in this game will make it go broke! Women ruined Star Wars!" posts every day, and YouTube pays them more and more for constant engagement with the site. YouTube doesn't care if its costs IQ points to host, they need that ad money!
Nebula at least pays people who put out quality content. I am curious how many people stopped watching when Nebula was a thing for some content creators. I'm a broke bitch, so streaming service didn't exactly engage me. I did however still watch when those exclusives when to YouTube.
Even then, it was better than nothing. "Theory" is very dry, and is menacing to those who have been taught by the current school systems, as they're being taught that socialism is an "extreme" ideology, and is "probably worse" than nazism, because it killed more people on paper. Also you can just make lower effort videos without the fanfare of Philosophy Tube, or the multi-month research HBomberguy or Shaun does.
Most Nebula creators that I'm familiar with still also upload to YouTube. They just post to Nebula first, like a timed exclusive. The truly Nebula exclusive stuff is almost universally stuff that wouldn't work on YouTube anyway.
I hear Hamas is modeling their insurgency after the vietnamese, so I'm reading Kill Anything That Moves about how the US prosecuted counter insurgency operation in vietnam, and why and how they won.
We should probably all start reading and prepping about how to keep safe under unsafe regimes.
Does anyone have another Kill the ______ book recommendation so I can complete the trifecta?
Killing Hope, by William Blum.
Is that book anything like Killing Hope by William Blum?
Not sure yet. Killing Hope looks good, I'll add to my list, thank you!
Yeah, Gen Z had better not talk about the lack of housing or how hard it is to make a living again after this. Whatever happens, you all made your bed and you best hope that you're getting what you voted for.
This is the sort of attitude that gifts power to repulicans ever more.
Instead of blaming voters, blame the Democrat party. It needed to appeal to voters concerns and needs. It needs to ask why it failed to convince younger voters, and address what their priorities are.
The obvious answer at the moment is the Dems failed to campaign well on the economy. Harris defended the last 4 years as a success but for many lower income people of all ages it will not feel that way. Middle class voters who own their own homes were shielded more from inflation than renters whose housing costs due rent inflation sky rocketed as well as all other living costs - they were hit doubly hard.
The Dems decided to focus on women's reproductive issues and a fear of democratic loss, and hoped women would come out and vote balancing our other groups. This failed. It's clear Harris and the Democrats should have campaigned hard on economic change and offered a different vision to trump.
So don't blame voters. Blame the Democrats for this and many other failings in this election (no real contest at their primary, Biden hanging on til late with patronising dismissal of concerns over his health by the Dem leadership, and then a coronation of Harris who also inherited Bidens team rather than had time to build her own campaign).
Looking at the overall vote count the Rep vote seems largely similar to 2020, or slightly up, but the democratic vote has fallen significantly. This is largely due to the Democrats failure rather than due to Republicans success.
Weird how Republicans do literal nothing to help their voters but they still turn out. Democrats at least make marginal improvements but don't do everything that every one of their voters wants, so the voters don't turn out. It's the voters' fault.
Republicans give them the red meat they want. They piss off the people they hate. Their campaigns are all about making the base happy.
Republican voters don't care about being helped. They simply want somebody to blame for their problems. They would happily jump on a grenade so long as they could jam an immigrant underneath them on the way down.
The Republican voter doesn't believe that they're poor - they're just temporarily embarrassed millionaires. Any day now, the money will drop out of the sky and into their laps. So they happily march to toe the party line as it hurts them over and over, because they think that one day they'll be the ones stepping on everybody else.
Yep, and both the "liberal media" and the Enlightened Centrists (TM) and tankies pile on with this framing, as well. The qons wreck the place, set it on fire, and smear shit on the walls. The Democrats get a tiny bit of power and are expected to fix it all in 2 or 4 years, with qons kneecapping them the entire way....and because of course they cannot fix everything in this time frame and in these circumstances,, they get blamed for this.
We need a lot of stickers that say "Trump 2024 - You Did This" put it on gas pumps, in front of stores, hospitals...
Honestly they'll probably provide massive subsidies to the oil companies to lower the price of gas while preserving the 2017 tax cuts and proposing more for rich people while Gen Z'ers will lose their college forgiveness but get a very temporary, very low tax cut.
Basically democrats are losing: the youth, minorities, and the working class. They're gaining among white college-educated. They're also mildly gaining among women, but they were already the party of choice for non-white women. Crazy to see the democrats becoming the party of white privilege.
When the initial disbelief wears off a little it becomes more clear that the democrats are not a very good alternative for people. If they were they should have won this by a landslide. Their current path seems like a dead end and they need some new thoughts.
This is a global problem, too.
The majority just wants bread, and all the left offers is morality.
Tbf, Democrats are centrist not left. It's just us politics collectively is so right leaning you folks don't have a real representative left leaning 3rd party. A real left party would institute policies to give everyone access to bread (so long as it isn't in short supply). It's absurd a country as big and rich as the US has such poor social support programs.
Half a century of sabre-rattling and proxy wars with another superpower with an opposing ideology will do that to a country. It's going to take a long time before "socialism" isn't a dirty word here, if ever. The Cold War fucked us, ideologically. We still cling to raw capitalism like the Bolsheviks are hiding around every corner. This stuff is still huge in living memory, my own included. As a kid spending my childhood under Ronald Reagan, I'd often hear about the Berlin wall and how it was being used to keep people from escaping to the West. Which is true, yes, but it was definitely also used as a propaganda tool here, a showcase of what "socialist thinking" can bring.
It's a pity that social policies are blamed for the fucked up history of the east instead of the real culprits - totalitarian regimes.
And it's important to understand that those can develope anywhere, no matter whether the country is more socialistic or capitalistic or religious.
Maybe your left, I think the global left is trying to offer a lot more than that. Don't conflate Dems with useful politicians.
Absolutely. And nobody seems able to stop the trend. We’re in dire need of some good thinking right now.
Morality is easy in some sense, it just requires thinking to figure it out, and in practice being the moral choice when the other side is this bad requires doing basically nothing at all. Retooling the economy to increase the wealth of average people, directly against the forces of the already wealthy seeking to suck up all the available wealth for themselves, is both much harder and requires being given an amount of power that's rarely won these days.
Dems lost among the white college educated this cycle.
Yeah, any gen z that voted for fascism definitely deserves a good leg breaking while the fascist is in office so they can see how badly they fucked up when they aren't allowed medical treatment because they can't afford it.
They'll still do some extreme mental gymnastics to blame Obama for it.
I've been sus about people proclaiming that somehow certain "generations" (we all would do well to remember that the idea of "generations" is a rather suspect one: https://www.vox.com/2016/3/21/11277726/millennials-adam-conover) were somehow just inherently better, more savvy and media aware than their elders. There is no reason to believe that just because you were on the 'net since you were a baby, and had smart phones nearly your entire life that you are somehow immune to all logical fallacies inherent in such things.
I for one am not buying it. If anything, boomers, Gen X, and millennials have set up platforms and have been influencing people in the Gen Z age range (as well as Gen Alpha) to buy into totally toxic, moronic and just plain wrong things. Someone is watching all that algorithmic content, and it's not all Gen-X or boomers or even all Gen Y.
Whether it's to buy into qanon/pizzagate bullshit, or buy into tankie narratives about "genocide joe" so that they either flat out vote for a dirtbag like the convicted felon, or vote third party, or sit at home, all of those outcomes help the Republicans. If the Republicans can capture these people young, they'll have them consumers for life - just like other brands strive to do.
I've been saying this for a long time. Before Trump even. The left could not rely on liberal youth defaultism forever. I hate being right.
What really drove it home the direness was nobody else has been seeing it. Culturally younger people are just different some how. I mean every generation has its idiosyncrasies but people just couldn't get past that idea. Sounded like I was speaking in tongues to them I'm sure.
I could not put my finger on it. It's not the current slate of political issues like housing or whatever. It predates this. I used to chalk it up to internet skull fucking kids minds in ways the older generations cannot grasp.
I had hoped the political mega minds would be able to hone in on these things. Turns out they're all fucking clueless. Just winging it.
Yes. It's shit like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson and Youtube and Facebook and Tiktok and so much more...boomers had their parents yelling at them about the "boob tube", but the algorithmic skew is soooo much more insidious than even the worst television could have hoped to be.
It's rather common to point this out these days, but people talk about experiments where you spin up a new VM (use Proxmox or what have you, or maybe use a container even), and just click into Youtube and let it run its course....and they get pushed toward right wing content eventually.
I sure do wish that Gen Y, Gen Z, Gen-A and whatever is coming next are somehow smarter, immune to the usual emotional strings that are pulled, know how to spot logical fallacies better than anyone that came before, are more auto didactic, and actually know how to "do your own research" more than anyone that came before....but my cynical self knows that is just wishful thinking. Without a stellar liberal education, they'll be just as prone to the manipulation as any other set of people.
Everything has to be a meme. Lower taxes, healthcare, or racism isn't exciting. Couches, weird, eating pets and out of context outbursts get way more engagement. Mostly, because people have given up.
I don't think they've given up because the issues the care about matter to them but it has to be communicated in the form of inside joke meme-speak. Republicans seem to have cracked this nearly a decade ago. That's how long a head start they've got on Democrats. By now they've thoroughly indoctrinated a generation with their own baseline.
I think what's breaking older peoples minds is how far fetched all of this is. Not only do the kids speak in coded language. They cannot be reached by speaking normally to them. You have to use the codes.
Keep in mind that part of the reason I think they've given up is because there's no reason to believe the promises made will ever be delivered. They may care about taxes, but you'd probably get more engagement by making an AI generated tiktok video of a dinner table splayed with food in the image of rich oligarchs. There just isn't much left but the jokes, it's not code - it's that if everything is going to be bullshit, it might as well be entertaining.
They fucked themselves. Trump will absolutely further the killing of the planet with reckless abandon.
Apparently young Americans don't want a future.
I'm sure they do. Shame they chose poorly.
I'm gunna suggest that left wing voters probably wanted a left wing party. Pretty obvious that the Dems hate progressives and young LW people want progressives