2024 politics thread (why not)

[Eviltaco64X]

This place got pretty heated about politics back in 2016 - not just about the US election but about issues like Brexit and the surge of both right-wing and neoliberal sentiments. I think the back and forth aged pretty well and is now a good time capsule of that era. That was almost a decade ago, and some would say 2020-2022 was like a decade in its own right. Where does everyone stand these days? Do they at all?

In hindsight, I was a shut-in who grew up on the internet when it was still an anomaly. Now my shit upbringing has become tragically commonplace for younger people who have no opportunities in life. All these atomized kids are falling down weird rabbitholes and getting radicalized and I hate to see it. The internet was a lot more wild when I was a kid but I'd say it is far far more dangerous for kids now. In my instance, I was brought up around a lot of ultra right wing fundie types and hypocritical moral busybodies who were obsessed with the end times and Fox News. The types who worshiped Reagan and thought Obama was the anti-christ. The internet was my mental escape, and I couldn't wait to physically escape and go some place "normal". I was starting to move to the left in the earlier 2010s, then a lot of people on the left started behaving more and more like the radicals of my youth. They had an unquestionable gospel, spoke in absolutes, felt morally justified in dehumanizing others for wrongthink, and they even re-badged the concept of original sin into born oppressor/oppressed role dynamics. Breath the wrong way and you're a heretic. Beg for mercy and atone for the rest of your life and it will never be enough to absolve you of the terrors you didn't commit. This drove me to become a spiteful reactionary and advocate strongly for Trump in 2016 as a middle finger to the entire political establishment. Back then, I followed the 24 hour news cycle, social media, etc around the clock. In hindsight, I consider it all to be a massive waste of time. Life is short. Energy is finite. It's better to invest time and energy into constructive, practical things and aspects of life that can actually be controlled. Had I spent that time more wisely, I probably could have used it to become fluent in a new language or learn jazz piano or something. I used to argue politics with friends, family, coworkers, etc and now I cringe thinking about it. Someone or something else owned a part of my head and it took years to get it back.

It's sad how everyone gets backed into corners and forced to take stances on a handful of hot-button cherry-picked topics that they have zero control over. So easily and unconsciously, people fall into these traps and lend out a part of their head and identity even though their well-intended opinions and feelings on these things are almost entirely inconsequential to what happens and manifests in reality. One buzzword is enough to set many people off the wrong way and activate their programming. People stop being themselves and start parroting talking points from the media, getting defensive and anxious, accusing you of being the problem, speaking out of fear.. I used to fall for all this crap. What I learned in the past few years is that, if you get good enough at sidestepping and changing the subject to things outside that "frequency range", you can help people turn back into the normal, lovely human beings they are. The most amusing thing about most "scary extremists" is that they are one or two topics removed from being perfectly normal, ordinary human beings who like to play Animal Crossing and cook Italian food in their spare time. Some of them are insane of course, but many more are just lonely and isolated souls who were deprived of a normal healthy life for an infinite number of unfortunate reasons. One or two steps removed from their choice flavor of propaganda, most people are quite reasonable and not all too different from one another.

Something in the air has changed over the past few years and, on average, I'd say most people are a lot more radical now than they used to be. I think the pandemic and the lockdowns irreversibly fucked a lot of people up and broke a certain spell that was cast on society. Many people who were totally apolitical before the pandemic, and many who trusted the media and societal institutions without question, were ejected from a comfortable life for the first time ever and became permanently scarred from it. All these people who were trusting are more angry and disillusioned than ever. They see the media and institutions as snake oil now. I think it's great in a way, but it also sets a dangerous precedent because it invites newer more potent flavors of snake oil into the fold. I've become a big advocate of deradicalization above all in this regard. A lot of people can be happy and healthy if given some dignity and regard for their well-being. This philosophy, when embodied, seems to have a lot more positive effects to it than voting, which is inconsequential at worst and a disappointing abusive relationship filled with copium at best. I voted for Trump twice, but this time I may not vote at all or maybe use my vote to shitpost (Ultra Instinct Obama for Chancellor of Ohio 2024 never 5get). I'm just an old stick in the mud with inconsequential opinions. There are more and more people like me these days. I kinda want to just sit back and see what happens in the aftermath.

This ends my essay - if it's tl;dr I totally get it. I signed up here when I was 14, 300 lbs, and Dubya was still President. Now I'm in my 30s, 130 lbs leaner, hopefully a little less brainwashed. This place is like the last remaining touchstone of a totally bygone and shitty era for me. People on here challenged my views back then, so I'd love to hear what you all think all these years later.

[|darc|]

We certainly had a great run on this site over the years with the Politics board.

I really love that you made this topic. Unfortunately I no longer feel safe discussing my political opinions publicly since the summer of 2020. During that time I scrubbed all social media of such opinions and removed many radicals from my life.

[Eviltaco64X]

We certainly had a great run on this site over the years with the Politics board.

I really love that you made this topic. Unfortunately I no longer feel safe discussing my political opinions publicly since the summer of 2020. During that time I scrubbed all social media of such opinions and removed many radicals from my life.

I totally understand. People get real unhinged about all this stuff and it's just not worth all that cortisol. I say, if everyone insists on being sectarian and vicious towards one another, might as well do it over something really really stupid to make it funny. Maybe Gen Z or Alpha will save us with a few extra layers of irony and turn riots up to 11 while depriving them of any seriousness by making them about which anime waifu and type is purest. I'm just a little too old to comprehend the 2D vs 3D Atrocity of 2034 in anything beyond spirit.

"The yanderes did it first, we're just counter-punching.. baka.."

[cube_b3]

Well for this year, whoever wins we lose.
2016 - I was Jill Stein - heard all the options she sounded best to me.
I was shamed for it and brain washed to subscribing to the idea that you vote someone out rather than the right person in.
During the primaries I voted Bernie and
2020 - I voted Joe Biden - I regret it.
2024 - Back to Jill Stein.

[MulletMan13]

The movement of the Overton Window makes real discussion very difficult.

Although I have some major issues with some of what EvilTaco64X presented, I do agree that it is definitely not worth the increase in cortisol

[Eviltaco64X]

The movement of the Overton Window makes real discussion very difficult.

Although I have some major issues with some of what EvilTaco64X presented, I do agree that it is definitely not worth the increase in cortisol

The Overton Window requires a certain degree of uni-polarity and a monoculture, and there's been an interesting shift away from that. For all the Ls humanity has taken - automation, technology weaponized against our most primitive senses, dopamine overload, purposelessness, the death or cheapening of most rites of passage we cherish, a myriad of evil rabbit holes to fill the void, etc etc - this decentralization may be one of the best silver linings of the 21st Century human condition, and this culture of dissent went from a primitive stone age-like state to shanty towns by the river to rather developed communities in a very short frame of time.

More than ever, it appears that western culture exists as a multi-polar one in increasingly larger bubbles with less overlap. Now the Overton Window is more like a multi-dimensional funhouse of mirrors and bends rather than a clear 2-dimensional picture. There's infinitely more deception than there was before, but more opportunity than ever to see truth hidden between all the bends and distortions. Some people yearn for the the clear picture of old because it was simple and easy to understand, but it was an illusion that only included what the artists wanted the people to see - nothing more, nothing less - leaving the observer with little beyond other than to question the artist's intentions and wonder why things were painted that one specific way.

It's neat how all the technological advancements of the 20th Century - printing technologies, means/networks of distribution, radio, and television - firmly established a monoculture with a distinct 4th Estate. The last of those 20th Century advancements - the Internet - then went on to completely dissolve everything about the old order so quickly. First it killed all the smaller independent outlets that kept a healthier balance (and with it, a lot of the cultural outlets that let original ideas foster), allowing only the largest corpos to survive and consolidate. Then finally it reduced the most prestigious to hostile, dying animals who get ever more aggressive by the year.

In a way, what's happened to the old guard/old media over the past 2-3 decades runs a very similar parallel to the development and subsequent death of private rail in the United States as the automobile came along - tons of little rail companies start it off, cars get popular and (along with war and a bad economy) tons of small rail companies go bust, only the titans of the industry survive and absorb what's left, get even bigger, reach their apex of wealth and influence, then go on to face a number of difficult complications (including lots of strikes and cuts), decline, consolidate with one another (Penn Central), and finally go bust. We can only hope that Amtrak and Conrail don't come around to absorb what's left.