The amount of propaganda they believe and are certain of plus their unending love for capitalism is just mind blowing. I’m done trying to convince people of the opposite, they will either arrive at the truth themselves or never will.
You can have the most level headed discussion about something, cite sources, evidence etc. and still get called “chinese/russian propaganda” or “show me where socialism works” or “I will not live under a dictatorship like they do in china” or “If we let china dictate our lives we are all working in sweatshops or 996”.
Sorry for venting, I’m just more and more realising that people straight up believe something without ever challenging that narrative and it’a frustrating.
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If we let china dictate our lives we are all working in sweatshops or 996
ahh…it’s pretty frustrating when they start projecting the crap they defend in capitalism into a socialist country. they don’t understand that “gig economy” is basically that
But those workers can choose their customers… or starve!
edit: I feel for you, comrade. It is so incredibly frustrating.
I got in an argument with a friend of mine about human behavior. He is convinced that humans are greedy and will take a mile if you give them an inch. Even when I sent him a 40 page review paper citing hundreds of articles, which all discuss different ways humans exhibit altruistic and pro-social behavior, he still tries to argue you can more easily count on people to be greedy than you can count on them to be altruistic or cooperative.
He also tried to argue that people can’t self-regulate. As if giving people an abundance of resources would cause them all to overindulge because, apparently, the only thing stopping people from eating themselves to death is the limited amount of money they have.
I’m not saying greed and self-regulate on issues aren’t behaviors that humans exhibit. I’m saying you can pretty consistently count on people not being selfish, and self-regulation issues are better addressed by mental health experts than to design an economic system such that people are faced with a choice between moderation or death.
So, how does that work for Jeff Bezos? How is that prick still alive and not eaten himself and all his family to death?
Unfortunately most of my time is now spent among petit bourgois and damn do they have brainworms.
It helped me to see their “ideas” as just expressions of their class position. Until they are ready to interrogate that, dialog can only go so far.
Absolutely, I have to keep this in mind every time these people say something about “foreigners” (ie. coloured people; to get more specific, [insert slur here]), taxes, or people who get welfare benefits. It’s not to say they get a pass on being assholes, but I understand where it comes from.
What really bothers me is the constant use of slurs as if it’s the normal way to talk about people. Contrast that to “normal people,” ie. whites who are ostensibly citizens.
Sometimes I wonder how I, a white immigrant, am spoken about when I am not present. But then again I don’t think I want to know.
Man I’m lucky I’m not around people like that anymore. The slurs are really the icing on the fecal layer cake. Not that it helps, but I think their racism is just a derivative of their worldview.
- I and people like me earned our money through hard work
- Ethnic group G has less money than mine
- Therefore, “they” don’t (or can’t) work as hard as “us”
Again it seems that first pillar is doing all the work here. But attacking that means attacking their class position, which many are not surprisingly reluctant to do.
The first point is definitely the thread through everything. I’ve been told by these people that having more money is as simple as working harder and more.
petit bourgeoisie when you tell them to condemn the shop owner who shot a teenager over bottle of water
I worked with someone that, when I saw him watching YouTube ads I commented that there’s “this “YouTube vanced” program that cuts out ads” his literal response was “I watch ads to support my content creators,” and I actually had to just stand and compute for a moment that this was a real human I just spoke to. These people are beyond anything I can comprehend. I know it’s fucked up to say but, there are times when I have to stop seeing them as real humans because to accept that actual people think in this manner is like, Eldritch horror level realizations. Like it would be easier to find out that, “actually Cthulhu exists and has awaken from his slumber in the depths of the ocean.”
I worked with someone that, when I saw him watching YouTube ads I commented that there’s “this “YouTube vanced” program that cuts out ads” his literal response was “I watch ads to support my content creators,” and I actually had to just stand and compute for a moment that this was a real human I just spoke to.
There’s a material reason for this. I’m going to summarize and simplify a lot because it’s a lot of nuanced and detailed history that I do not have the detail knowledge to go into, but basically:
In the beginning, Youtube was more like “people sharing stuff with each other and connecting over it”. When the partner program was introduced, that started to change over time. People still presented as your friendly neighborhood quirky individual content creator, but now there was a clear connection between profit and video making on the platform. However, this was somewhat misleading. Under the surface, you had stuff like Maker Studios behind a lot of channels, so not as individual and organic as it came across. Still, people were being conditioned to see things in the way of “this is an individual who is providing something for free, so it makes sense to support them where I can if I want to see more of it.”
Some of this form starts to go away (I think cause it wasn’t making the big names behind it enough money), some channels who were under a big name try to make it on their own, stuff like that. But between advertisers getting shy of their ads showing up on videos that give them a bad rap and youtube algorithm fuckery, individual channels start having a harder and harder time making it on ad revenue. Some branch out into merch or things like that.
Enter Patreon. Patreon creates a streamlined way for video makers to directly ask for money for what they do. It’s still not as transactional as making people pay for videos, but it’s a step closer to it. And again, for many, this seems reasonable to them because they’re literally getting stuff for free and they like the person and the stuff they make, so it becomes like this volunteer support of artisans thing. (Patreon is based on the idea of a patron of the arts even, IIRC). This is more or less where things have stayed at, where even as algorithm stuff and youtube automated moderation choices get worse, people cling on through voluntary donations.
The idea of voluntarily viewing ads to “support a creator” is not so odd in that context. It doesn’t even cost you anything directly to do it other than time (unless you get manipulated by the ad into spending money). Would I personally do it? No. I can’t stand ads and would almost certainly stop using youtube if I had to endure ads on it. But in the context of how youtube developed, there’s a clear connection between the personalization of content creators as human rather than business, the individualization of video making as artisanal work worth supporting rather than conglomerate that is doing a transaction, and the voluntary choice to “support” someone in it.
That is… wow… I don’t even know what to say
He was extremely robotic in all his responses to stuff. One of my buddies calls him the capitalist cuckbot. Which I find both funny and inappropriately appropriate. Like I had trouble arguing with him, not because he was good at debating or anything, but because I often was so thrown off by what he would respond with I would not know how to respond
idk man thats not a weird thing to say and the average layman really might not understand how they can support their favourite content creators without the ads. i feel a bit bad for this person now because they were dehumanized over such a simple statement and innocent sentiment. you yourself confessed to having right wing beginnings so maybe chill out with dehumanizing people and being so quick to give up your empathy.
Honestly I like to (like is a big word here) study other ideologies for fun and I go to r/neoliberal sometimes and oh my gosh some of the stuff they say is just so vile, I totally get what you’re saying
I used to be friends with a guy that thought that anti-monopoly laws against Google and other Big Tech companies was unjust because they were the first “innovators” and that all-day public education was bad because schools become open grounds to “drug dealers”.
It doesn’t help that he’s also a massive homophobe and denies that evolution happened.
He lost a business and is stuck doing gig jobs for now. Petit Bourgeois brainworms are hard to kill, I suppose.
That’s why I stopped arguing with shitlibs. Nationalists and anti-capitalist religious people can be pulled closer to our sides, but shitlibs are too far gone. We need MKUltra level brainwashing to fix their brains.
