JemmyBillionaires - Pearls Before Swine
Flying Squidhttps://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/46749927-0cc5-400b-b498-c306330934ea.png
I honestly believe Stephan Pastis is a better and more insightful satirist than anything you would see on (for example) The Daily Show.
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Why do people on the left believe that reactionaries would agree with them if they just had access to the correct information?
I think this mistake rests in the left assumptions that "The People" are noble and good; that education leads to good politics; and noble people with good education will make a wise democracy. It's good ethics, too bad none of those ideas can survive an encounter with reality.
I wouldn't call attending a prestigious university for just the name and daddy paying someone to complete all the assignments an education, and that's gotta be the higher end of what any of the people in question got.
The Quuuuuillthrough the ages it's the best way we've found. hateful ideologies originate from a place of false consciousness supported by hegemonic propaganda. our best bet is anti-hegemonic counter programming to dislodge as many people from the death cult as we can. it's not simply access to those information, but also verbal confirmation from a flesh and blood human
FernThis is a classic conservative line of thinking. It's not true. It's simplistic. It makes people who believe it feel like they are smart and hard-core. And the rich want them to believe it, so they pay people to say it loudly and often.
People are not all good or all bad. They have some good views and some bad views, and they can change. They are regularly swayed by the constant stream of propaganda being pumped out. Even so, most everyone wants the world to be a better place, and they are mad it's not.
Thoughts like this are what push people further right. "People are bad. Therefore, if the world is to be better, we should punish those people." Convservatives basically become masochistic and sadistic through these lines of thinking. Punish me, father, I'm a sinner. It's a very effective mechanism for control.
The reason that the left thinks reactionaries would agree with them is because in many instances they already do. Reactionaries are just reacting to the constant stream if propaganda being pushed their way. But often, in spite of that, many of them do agree with what the left stands for they just don't know the left stands for it. Most of the policies the left pushes have broad public support. People just don't know the left is the side fighting for things they agree with. Or they're convinced that the left is fighting for it in a way that is incorrect. They are too "extreme."
These all have broad public support
Universal Health Care
Higher taxes on the rich
Expanding social security
Investing in public infrastructure
Faster and cheaper internet for all
Legalizing weed
Paid family and sick leave
Cheaper college and student loan relief
Worker's rights and union support
Criminal justice reform
Universal background checks
Reproductive rights
Lgbtq rights
Environmental protections
Climate change action
Green energy investment
These are the things the left is fighting for.
These all have broad public support
That is a big assumption.
Many Americans are climate skeptics or "agnostic," even more are environmentalism agnostic. People who don't have to personally deal with social security, slow internet, paying for college, weed, unions, personally going through the criminal justice system and such are often not very supportive of those issues. Reproductive and lgbtq rights are extremely partisan and framed entirely differently for different groups.
Most *probably* know healthcare is screwed up. But even then, many young people have not experienced serious issues (for themselves or others), and many still have a bad image of universal healthcare. And I know small business owners that are rightly concerned about tax increases.
It's not that these ideas *wouldn't* have appeal if conveyed, but the message is just not getting though.
Personally, I believe it because I was a reactionary that changed my mind when presented with information. It's not as rare as the doomers make it out to be.
Would you care to share what helped you? It's hard to find instances of deradicalization, so it'd be great to hear your experience.
I was raised in the New Apostolic Reformation, so I was deep deep into crazyland. It made a lot of promises that never happened and made a lot of statements that didn't line up. It took a few years, and there was a LOT of resistance on my end, but I eventually realized that one side was going to make my life better, and one side would make my life worse.
The hardest part of deradicalizing people is keeping a level head, because coming at it with anger is playing into the indoctrination. I was raised to believe that people were going to hate me for speaking the truth, and that the anger I was getting was evidence that the cult was correct. This is where the persecution fetishism comes from, they're trying to convince their brain in lieu of facts. Getting internet hate is like a meditative litany in a way, it's seen as a digital analogue to a scourge purging the weakness from you and leaving only the pure fire of god behind. I honestly wouldn't have gotten out if it weren't for my gaming group believing I could be a cool person, and taking the time to educate me instead of just kicking me or hurling hot takes at me.
I'm now big on Street Epistemology as a framework for deradicalization.
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I might even agree, but I want to add that that's damn high praise because The Daily Show is no slouch either.
I agree, it's high praise. And deserved.
I mean as much as I do like the Daily Show, a lot of it is, "here's the dumb shit that happened today." It's funny satire, but it's less insightful.
This is where the "temporarily embarrassed millionaire" (or billionaire) come into play. That's the most relevant form of being a class traitor.
I mean with only 300 billion, we could make 300,000 new millionaires. If you took that from Musk, he’d still have over 100 billion dollars all to himself.
Yes, that's what I mean. What you described happened and it's a core part of how capitalists build up a popular base. The temporarily embarrassed ones are looking up to the ones who are actual millionaires. Don't worry, they get that money back in the end.
With wealth, like properties, shares and various "passive income", the class interests of the former working class person tend to turn into capitalist class interests: lower taxation, more deregulation, more personal and family wealth accumulation, more welfare and aid for "business owners", smaller social welfare systems (for the masses) with private (and exclusively expensive) alternatives, and so on.
From the horse owner's mouth: How FDR Saved Capitalism
couple decades back, some study claimed that people who watched the Daily Show with Jon Stewart knew more about current events than anyone who watched any of the network news programs
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I think you are ignoring the message at the end of this comic about *why* they have supporters.
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Division is created by choice. The left saw the same news, read the same lies and heard the same bullshit, but we did not became hateful and ignorant racist and mysoginist. The right isn't the right because the billionaire pushed them that way; they choose to be like that and used the billionairs lies as reason for it. They became that way because they wanted to be that way.
We tried for decades to work with them to make the world a better place for everybody. They don't give a shit. So why should we?
Fuck them and fuck the billionaires. The left is big enough to kill them both. We just have to do it. Cut the cancer out!
I have no idea why you think people inside a Fox News/Newsmax/etc. right ring media bubble are absorbing the same news. They very much are not. 10 minutes spent on either source, or many, many other right-wing sources and you will be in a different, and very much fictional, universe.
The point is, they are there of their own free will. They want to be lied to. They want to use it to justify their inherent hatred. They are not good people who have been seduced by evil. They are evil. Maybe not all of them but most. You can't talk with them, you can not convert them back to good.
Or maybe i'm just bitter and frustrated, who knows.
They are there after a lifetime of indoctrination in right-wing views. Do you think someone raised evangelical from birth is able to just shake that off? Not that many people escape.
"it's not that I have different experiences, it's that I'm inherently superior"
Great claim. Why are you generically superior then?
I broadly agree with the message in this comic but... Isn't the 664 billionaires thing a bit misleading? It ignores all the inflation and population growth that has happened in the past 30 years.
The correct number of billionaires is zero.
The difference between a millionaire and a billionaire is a thousand. Population isn't 10 times larger than it was 30 years ago. Inflation hasn't grown by a thousand percent in 30 years. None of the things you named can account for an order of magnitude increase in the number of billionaires. Nothing you said can account for them holding a larger percentage of the total wealth. It's not like when there was 60 and now that there are 664 that they both had the same relative proportion of the wealth. The wealth gap is increasing. So that hundred-plus million number that they hold more wealth than keeps getting larger and that number is growing faster than the population.