It’s not an issue of believing/not-believing politicians nearly so much as it is a media environment that’s fully saturated with right-wing propaganda.
What do you tell a person who has been listening to AM Radio for 30 years? What do you tell a person that was taught Ayn-Rand-o-nomics in High School while the teacher clutched a copy of Atlas Shrugged alongside her Bible? What do you tell a person who has never actually been involved in the higher levels of business management, because our economic model is so subdivided and the commodities so fetishized?
You can’t get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult for praying to the cargo gods if that’s all they’ve ever known. Neither can you simply ignore the Cult Leader, who has been blaring the message from a megaphone into everyone’s ears, for their entire adult lives.
I have immense sympathy for people who are pre-programmed to get hoodwinked by this shit and I count my lucky stars every day that I only get hoodwinked some of the time and mostly on things that don’t obliterate my quality of life when they come due.
But more than them, I feel awful for the people who come after us, because we at least got to enjoy that World’s Greatest Middle Class Life while it was on offer. The next generation is going to be fed all the same propaganda, but they’re going to be doing it from in the pod while eating the bugs.
I think comparing this to a cargo cult is a bit misguided. These people live in a world with unlimited information right at their fingertips. I get finding factual information is incredibly difficult these days, but that’s just all the more reason to not blindly accept the bias of one source. The propoganda machines are to blame for a lot of our problems, but that doesn’t let the assholes gobbling it up off the accountability hook.
These people live in a world with unlimited information right at their fingertips.
Unlimited inputs, certainly. But the signal-to-noise ratio is absolutely fucked. It is easy enough to be fully insulated from useful information, and easier still to be insulated from actionable information. That’s before you get into how all the old-guard liberal(ish) news sources - your 60 Minutes and NPR and local papers of record - have been gobbled up by right-wing advertisers or shut down by corporate cartels.
The propoganda machines are to blame for a lot of our problems, but that doesn’t let the assholes gobbling it up off the accountability hook.
Sure. At some point, you’re the guy in the DHS detention camp sodomizing an eight year old with a night stick because your ex-IDF police trainer told you it builds character. Or you’re a billionaire in your ivory tower, shoving ketamin up your nose and screaming “The Wokes want to destroy me!” at your third wife. You’ve given up even the pretext of your own humanity and we should treat you like the monster you’ve become.
But for the millions of middle Americans in states with failing infrastructure and polluted air and water and far-right mass media blaring into every eye and earhole, the demand that they line up to vote for Charlie Crist over Ron DeSantis or Jim Justice over Bill Cole or Eric Adams over New York Republican Placeholder Candidate becomes a fucking farce. The dogged insistence among Chuck Schumer liberals that we need more Liz Cheneys and Michael Bloombergs in the Democratic Party to save us from the Ken Paxtons and Pam Bondis of the Republican Party is fucking mental. And if people don’t go along with it, I can hardly blame them.
What do you say to someone who works in a recession proof field? That they made all the wrong moves?
That, even though they looked ahead and made all the right decisions, they are still wrong and should shoulder the burden to supplement the lives of everyone else at the expense of their own families?
I do work that stresses me the fuck out every single day. It’s not the field I wanted to get into when I was younger, but the payoff is that my family can live on a single income. My wife and kids have the opportunity to travel and learn. I sacrifice those trips so that they can make them.
Selfishness is labeled as such a horrible quality, yet so many perpetually online people only care about their own situation. They belittle anyone with an “I’ve got mine” attitude to support their claim that those people should be supporting their lives through taxes!! Simple hypocrisy.
I don’t mistake my “selfishness” for a twisted understanding of how the economy should work. I know exactly what I want. I’ve worked hard to get it. I will not let someone take that from me just because they want it without putting in the work.
That, even though they looked ahead and made all the right decisions, they are still wrong and should shoulder the burden to supplement the lives of everyone else at the expense of their own families?
If you’re a military contractor who gets to enjoy the benefits of a recession-resilient Pentagon budget despite the downturn in the overall economy, and your response to a civilian construction worker or an HVAC repair guy or a restaurant waiter out on the unemployment line is “Suck shit, asshole, you should have made the right decision to drone strike overseas daycare centers, like me”, I won’t say I’m surprised.
But when the wheel turns, and those angry voters say maybe we don’t need USAID or the latest model F-35 or the VA, I’m not sure you get to be the first in line to complain, either.
Selfishness is labeled as such a horrible quality, yet so many perpetually online people only care about their own situation.
Selfishness is a state of nature, as you have varying limited exposure to other people, but you spend 100% of your time with yourself. It’s something you have to learn to grow beyond.
But what I see online isn’t selfishness nearly so much as it is tribalism. They form social niches and empathize with one another. That can be a source of strength when they recognize a communal source of aggrievement. But it can also be a source of weakness, when marketers and propagandists exploit a superstition or common gullibility. The era of Big Data has revolved around industrial manufacturing of consent and delusion.
That’s not a consequence of any single individual’s failure. It is a systematic psychological attack on communities at-large. It is a strategic effort to alienate people from one another, to weaken them, and then to consume them - devouring their accrued wealth, their free time, and their valuable human labor - for the profit of the industry sponsoring the deceptive content.
I will not let someone take that from me just because they want it without putting in the work.
If you see unemployment as a consequence of laziness, I suppose that makes sense.
But if you see unemployment as a consequence as a form of industrial lock-out, in which business conglomerates and cartels force down the price of labor by deliberately understaffing and overworking a fraction of the population…
This isn’t a matter of someone taking from you because they want it. This is a matter of someone withholding something from you through violence, because they can extract more of your wealth in exchange.
First, I would like to thank you for responding as you did. It wasn’t just a dismissal of my argument, but an honest take from your perspective. That is rare to see these days.
I find it a bit interesting that you used the HVAC field as an example. I’m assuming that you are perhaps in the field and have felt some kind of sting in your day to day operation. If this is the case: I do feel for you, as I am in an adjacent field that has not felt any signs of recession. In fact, I have seen growth rather than loss.
I know this is probably not comforting, but I do want to punctuate that it is because I haven’t felt the effects of tariffs in my daily life that I feel the way I do. As I stated previously, I drifted into the field I am currently in because I saw signs that I wouldn’t be subject to getting laid off (I originally worked in a field that was happy to lay off half of their workers at the first sign of financial trouble). I saw the potential for economic turbulence and decided that a more stable field was worth more in the long term, even though I would be sacrificing higher pay.
Every move I have made was in the service of my family. Which is why I find it hard to sacrifice an inch in order to supplement the lives of other families.
I find it a bit interesting that you used the HVAC field as an example. I’m assuming that you are perhaps in the field and have felt some kind of sting in your day to day operation.
It’s a field I flirted with, back before I banked on college, thanks to a bunch of “Vocational Training is better than college because no debt!” older neighbors and high school advisers. I watched a few friends go through the ups and downs of the field, and it wasn’t pretty. Needless to say, the cushy office job with the six figure salary in the recession-proof health care industry ended up being the better choice.
But I’m not going to piss on my peers who took the other road, or suggest they are somehow slackers or losers or lesser people because they took a different set of hot tips from a bunch of blowhards. Downturns come for us all, one way or another.
Every move I have made was in the service of my family. Which is why I find it hard to sacrifice an inch in order to supplement the lives of other families.
I moved a lot because of my family. My dad worked O&G and we changed states several times before I eventually graduated high school. It fucking sucked, but it was the nature of a boom-and-bust industry. One thing we couldn’t do was reach back home and support the families of my mom and dad, precisely because we were so far away and my dad’s work consumed so much of his life. I got to watch the toll that took on extended family - that net of support torn apart by the push and pull of global economics - on both sides. My mom was the full-time caregiver, because we didn’t have grandparents / aunts / uncles / cousins around to help. And when her mom got sick, she couldn’t be there in turn. She had to book a red-eye flight just to hold her hand as she died.
The fact that we submitted to free market economics was fucking horrible for everyone… except our employers, who profited handsomely (and strangely enough would brag about how they were Sixth Generation Texans! without considering how they could afford such deep roots).
When I got into health care IT, one of the benefits was that I didn’t need to travel and I could spend time close to my family. I did get to be there when my dad passed. I did get to hold my mom’s hand. I did get to have a big family wedding, because everyone we knew was nearby. And I’m happy to have my mother in law home with my son right now, while I’m just down the road paying the bills.
I don’t find it hard to sacrifice because I’ve accrued more wealth bonding with my extended family and long term friends. I have more to give because I’ve needed less to spend.
You speak to them of how they aren’t an island. You speak to them of how even a recession-proof job is still subject to the rising costs felt by everyone. You speak to them of how these rising costs have over time reduced the actual value of what they’ve been paid, even with regular cost of living increases. You speak to them of how they have to work harder now for the same results. You speak to them of how much less stress having a good safety net provides, since a recession is not the only way one can fall on hard times. You speak to them of how a small decrease in take-home pay results in a much larger decrease in living expenses, resulting in a net gain.
You speak to them of how they need not be the sacrificial lamb, that they deserve to travel and learn and have a good life as well; and that their family should not have to give that up either to protect their health and well being.
You speak to them of how helping everyone is good for everyone, including themselves. The goal is to raise the standard of living across the board.
You can’t get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult
Yeah, I can. It’s probably not productive or helpful or change inducing, but boy, can I. And some days I don’t have energy to waste on regulating my feelings towards intentful idiots and then I do get mad. It doesn’t change shit but at least I don’t have to bottle all that up.
It’s probably not productive or helpful or change inducing, but boy, can I.
Alright, fair enough. But you cannot see the symptoms of the problem as the root of it.
It doesn’t change shit but at least I don’t have to bottle all that up.
No, no. Sorry. I definitely get that. But at some point you need to look past the guy in clown makeup dancing around your neighborhood to the clown college that’s churning these people out.
It’s not an issue of believing/not-believing politicians nearly so much as it is a media environment that’s fully saturated with right-wing propaganda.
What do you tell a person who has been listening to AM Radio for 30 years? What do you tell a person that was taught Ayn-Rand-o-nomics in High School while the teacher clutched a copy of Atlas Shrugged alongside her Bible? What do you tell a person who has never actually been involved in the higher levels of business management, because our economic model is so subdivided and the commodities so fetishized?
You can’t get mad at the loyal acolyte of a cargo cult for praying to the cargo gods if that’s all they’ve ever known. Neither can you simply ignore the Cult Leader, who has been blaring the message from a megaphone into everyone’s ears, for their entire adult lives.
I have immense sympathy for people who are pre-programmed to get hoodwinked by this shit and I count my lucky stars every day that I only get hoodwinked some of the time and mostly on things that don’t obliterate my quality of life when they come due.
But more than them, I feel awful for the people who come after us, because we at least got to enjoy that World’s Greatest Middle Class Life while it was on offer. The next generation is going to be fed all the same propaganda, but they’re going to be doing it from in the pod while eating the bugs.
I think comparing this to a cargo cult is a bit misguided. These people live in a world with unlimited information right at their fingertips. I get finding factual information is incredibly difficult these days, but that’s just all the more reason to not blindly accept the bias of one source. The propoganda machines are to blame for a lot of our problems, but that doesn’t let the assholes gobbling it up off the accountability hook.
Unlimited inputs, certainly. But the signal-to-noise ratio is absolutely fucked. It is easy enough to be fully insulated from useful information, and easier still to be insulated from actionable information. That’s before you get into how all the old-guard liberal(ish) news sources - your 60 Minutes and NPR and local papers of record - have been gobbled up by right-wing advertisers or shut down by corporate cartels.
Sure. At some point, you’re the guy in the DHS detention camp sodomizing an eight year old with a night stick because your ex-IDF police trainer told you it builds character. Or you’re a billionaire in your ivory tower, shoving ketamin up your nose and screaming “The Wokes want to destroy me!” at your third wife. You’ve given up even the pretext of your own humanity and we should treat you like the monster you’ve become.
But for the millions of middle Americans in states with failing infrastructure and polluted air and water and far-right mass media blaring into every eye and earhole, the demand that they line up to vote for Charlie Crist over Ron DeSantis or Jim Justice over Bill Cole or Eric Adams over New York Republican Placeholder Candidate becomes a fucking farce. The dogged insistence among Chuck Schumer liberals that we need more Liz Cheneys and Michael Bloombergs in the Democratic Party to save us from the Ken Paxtons and Pam Bondis of the Republican Party is fucking mental. And if people don’t go along with it, I can hardly blame them.
What do you say to someone who works in a recession proof field? That they made all the wrong moves?
That, even though they looked ahead and made all the right decisions, they are still wrong and should shoulder the burden to supplement the lives of everyone else at the expense of their own families?
I do work that stresses me the fuck out every single day. It’s not the field I wanted to get into when I was younger, but the payoff is that my family can live on a single income. My wife and kids have the opportunity to travel and learn. I sacrifice those trips so that they can make them.
Selfishness is labeled as such a horrible quality, yet so many perpetually online people only care about their own situation. They belittle anyone with an “I’ve got mine” attitude to support their claim that those people should be supporting their lives through taxes!! Simple hypocrisy.
I don’t mistake my “selfishness” for a twisted understanding of how the economy should work. I know exactly what I want. I’ve worked hard to get it. I will not let someone take that from me just because they want it without putting in the work.
If you’re a military contractor who gets to enjoy the benefits of a recession-resilient Pentagon budget despite the downturn in the overall economy, and your response to a civilian construction worker or an HVAC repair guy or a restaurant waiter out on the unemployment line is “Suck shit, asshole, you should have made the right decision to drone strike overseas daycare centers, like me”, I won’t say I’m surprised.
But when the wheel turns, and those angry voters say maybe we don’t need USAID or the latest model F-35 or the VA, I’m not sure you get to be the first in line to complain, either.
Selfishness is a state of nature, as you have varying limited exposure to other people, but you spend 100% of your time with yourself. It’s something you have to learn to grow beyond.
But what I see online isn’t selfishness nearly so much as it is tribalism. They form social niches and empathize with one another. That can be a source of strength when they recognize a communal source of aggrievement. But it can also be a source of weakness, when marketers and propagandists exploit a superstition or common gullibility. The era of Big Data has revolved around industrial manufacturing of consent and delusion.
That’s not a consequence of any single individual’s failure. It is a systematic psychological attack on communities at-large. It is a strategic effort to alienate people from one another, to weaken them, and then to consume them - devouring their accrued wealth, their free time, and their valuable human labor - for the profit of the industry sponsoring the deceptive content.
If you see unemployment as a consequence of laziness, I suppose that makes sense.
But if you see unemployment as a consequence as a form of industrial lock-out, in which business conglomerates and cartels force down the price of labor by deliberately understaffing and overworking a fraction of the population…
This isn’t a matter of someone taking from you because they want it. This is a matter of someone withholding something from you through violence, because they can extract more of your wealth in exchange.
First, I would like to thank you for responding as you did. It wasn’t just a dismissal of my argument, but an honest take from your perspective. That is rare to see these days.
I find it a bit interesting that you used the HVAC field as an example. I’m assuming that you are perhaps in the field and have felt some kind of sting in your day to day operation. If this is the case: I do feel for you, as I am in an adjacent field that has not felt any signs of recession. In fact, I have seen growth rather than loss.
I know this is probably not comforting, but I do want to punctuate that it is because I haven’t felt the effects of tariffs in my daily life that I feel the way I do. As I stated previously, I drifted into the field I am currently in because I saw signs that I wouldn’t be subject to getting laid off (I originally worked in a field that was happy to lay off half of their workers at the first sign of financial trouble). I saw the potential for economic turbulence and decided that a more stable field was worth more in the long term, even though I would be sacrificing higher pay.
Every move I have made was in the service of my family. Which is why I find it hard to sacrifice an inch in order to supplement the lives of other families.
It’s a field I flirted with, back before I banked on college, thanks to a bunch of “Vocational Training is better than college because no debt!” older neighbors and high school advisers. I watched a few friends go through the ups and downs of the field, and it wasn’t pretty. Needless to say, the cushy office job with the six figure salary in the recession-proof health care industry ended up being the better choice.
But I’m not going to piss on my peers who took the other road, or suggest they are somehow slackers or losers or lesser people because they took a different set of hot tips from a bunch of blowhards. Downturns come for us all, one way or another.
I moved a lot because of my family. My dad worked O&G and we changed states several times before I eventually graduated high school. It fucking sucked, but it was the nature of a boom-and-bust industry. One thing we couldn’t do was reach back home and support the families of my mom and dad, precisely because we were so far away and my dad’s work consumed so much of his life. I got to watch the toll that took on extended family - that net of support torn apart by the push and pull of global economics - on both sides. My mom was the full-time caregiver, because we didn’t have grandparents / aunts / uncles / cousins around to help. And when her mom got sick, she couldn’t be there in turn. She had to book a red-eye flight just to hold her hand as she died.
The fact that we submitted to free market economics was fucking horrible for everyone… except our employers, who profited handsomely (and strangely enough would brag about how they were Sixth Generation Texans! without considering how they could afford such deep roots).
When I got into health care IT, one of the benefits was that I didn’t need to travel and I could spend time close to my family. I did get to be there when my dad passed. I did get to hold my mom’s hand. I did get to have a big family wedding, because everyone we knew was nearby. And I’m happy to have my mother in law home with my son right now, while I’m just down the road paying the bills.
I don’t find it hard to sacrifice because I’ve accrued more wealth bonding with my extended family and long term friends. I have more to give because I’ve needed less to spend.
You speak to them of how they aren’t an island. You speak to them of how even a recession-proof job is still subject to the rising costs felt by everyone. You speak to them of how these rising costs have over time reduced the actual value of what they’ve been paid, even with regular cost of living increases. You speak to them of how they have to work harder now for the same results. You speak to them of how much less stress having a good safety net provides, since a recession is not the only way one can fall on hard times. You speak to them of how a small decrease in take-home pay results in a much larger decrease in living expenses, resulting in a net gain.
You speak to them of how they need not be the sacrificial lamb, that they deserve to travel and learn and have a good life as well; and that their family should not have to give that up either to protect their health and well being.
You speak to them of how helping everyone is good for everyone, including themselves. The goal is to raise the standard of living across the board.
Yeah, I can. It’s probably not productive or helpful or change inducing, but boy, can I. And some days I don’t have energy to waste on regulating my feelings towards intentful idiots and then I do get mad. It doesn’t change shit but at least I don’t have to bottle all that up.
Alright, fair enough. But you cannot see the symptoms of the problem as the root of it.
No, no. Sorry. I definitely get that. But at some point you need to look past the guy in clown makeup dancing around your neighborhood to the clown college that’s churning these people out.