Oddbean new post about login | logout These largely aren’t teenagers to whom Marxism appeals because they’re broke and it sounds good after smoking pot and reading the communist manifesto - these are people who have been institutionally indoctrinated into Marxism. They’re beyond the point of a wake up call, they’re on a path that they’ll carry on til old age because their lives are intertwined with it (see how many of them live off taxpayers and couldn’t produce anything if their lives depended on it). The Jimmy Dore socialist types aren’t going to counterprotest parents claiming your kids are theirs. He’s a different beast than the vanguard. But that’s why I say you don’t want to be around when this snaps because those who do snap aren’t going to take the time to differentiate between the different species of socialists, they’re just gonna purge the fuck out of everyone on the other side. Dore wouldn’t be stupid enough to associate with them - many boomers are though, and they’re too naive to handle real conflict. That time is coming. They won’t stop antagonising. They won’t negotiate. They won’t back down. They will keep pushing until they either get what they want, or they are violently confronted and stopped from getting what they want.
People will just keep pushing in one direction if nobody pushes back. But we can't push back because those people don't even listen to the other side. They want to censor any pushback, so they can live in their fantasy world that everybody believes the same things they do except for a tiny group of fascists (when in fact is is at least 65% of people who disagree with them). It reminds me of something a dog trainer told me: If a dog growls, and you scold it, you can indeed train it to not growl. But if you go down that path, the first hint you will have that something is wrong is when the dog bites you. The most important and relevant thing they are ignorant of is how righteously steaming angry they have made their political opponents. And that this is not a safe way to proceed.
I don’t think normies want to change the Marxists minds, not in the sense of having a reasoned discussion and getting them to see things differently at least. I think normies just don’t want to be engaged with them, at all. They want to be left alone to live their lives with their families. It’s the fact they can’t do this without constant encroachments from the leftists that is causing the problem, they’re given no respite from people whom they don’t even want to think about in the first place. Throw in government supporting these fringe positions and it becomes impossible to ignore. Today I saw clips of them telling Muslims to ‘go home’ - the same people a month from now will be protesting on behalf of immigrants! When anyone raises the obvious dichotomy they’ll be shouted down as racists and it’s this forever-gaslighting in the censorship environment you mention that will see things break, you can’t keep people in a perpetual state of anxiety where they’re fearful of the repercussions because they missed this weeks latest “current thing”. And none of them will see it coming. They’ll claim any attack is unprovoked (ala Russia in Ukraine), and the incumbent powers will go SUPER hard when the snap happens to try and make an example out of anyone involved (ala Jan 6) which all that means is now you’ve got a dog who has been trained not to growl, who has attacked, and probably figures they might as well go all the way because they’ll have hell to pay if they don’t win. This isn’t a standoff that ends after a few scuffles, it ends with either the government stomping out all dissent and creating a totally compliant populace, or the government being overthrown and their vanguard being run off such that none never dare advocate that ideology in public ever again. That’s what I find concerning about it. It’s not even that the Marxists ‘win’ and get what they want - A totalitarian right wing putsch will be every bit as bad and probably send cultural norms back a hundred years if they get their way. Basically we’re headed to one of two very shitty options that really no one other than tiny fringes of extremists actually want.
The absurd election of Trump was those angry people growling. Unfortunately, the political left in America interpreted that growling not as a warning related to their own, let's call it "questionable" behavior, but instead as an indichtment of the mental health and morality of the numerical majority of Americans. I'd say that the most important and relevant thing they are ignorant of is the fundmental hypocrisy at the core of nearly all the values they are currently mindlessly championing; Ardern, for example, calling for government regulation of online speech as a means of protecting free speech. She (using her here as a representative example of the political left in the west) really does not seem to be aware at all of the self-contradictory nature (much less the embedded elitist, superior tone) of this sentence: "As leaders, we are rightly concerned that even the most light-touch approaches to disinformation could be misinterpreted as being hostile to the values of free speech that we value so highly,"