I'm beginning to think that reactionary politics (from any faction, not just right wingers) is the norm in America and that trying to argue for reason and moderation is a lost cause in this country
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our systems of meaning-making and value formation are just broken. have entered terminal states of disintegration. we'll either invent new ones or we'll perish. no civilization long-run survives losing it's systems of meaning-making.
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and in the short term we suffer the consequences. we have sham democracy and intractable fake "debates" between petty criminal malefactors as a kind of political theater instead of actually finding consensus solutions to our serious problems.
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the "elected" government is so dysfunctional that private corporations are now taking it on themselves to enforce political agendas on the masses. this is the worst form of government I can think of that doesn't include brown-shirts (or equivalent)
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the political agendas of those corporations are non-sensical and incoherent. grasping in the dark to find some purchase where the conflicting priorities of profit maximization, fake corporate "social responsibility", and Managerialism overlap
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they're also implemented by amateurs who have no sense of the responsibility of wielding power, almost no accountability (and certainly not democratic accountability), and usually lacking even in relevant domain knowledge
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End of conversation
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Yeah, this is more or less true. Most people whose opinions I respect (YMMV) agree that US politics started collapsing precipitously under Reagan. Even watching old TV debates with NIXON of all people is a completely different experience.
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People easily forget that loose terms like left and right meann "coalitions along certain lines", making ideas within that paradigm completely useless except as pertains to political bodies. But most people use them about *people*, which is complete idiocy.
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this is a keen observation. what you're pointing to is ideological possession, which is an unholy terror in my opinion. a very nasty, violence-prone variant of fundamental attribution error.
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Mmh. It's like if you criticized the cooking at a restaurant and someone responded "WELL YOU'RE NOT A GREAT COOK, EITHER". Complete distortion.
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I think it's fair to blame the left and right alike for working so hard to brainwash people into this dumbass tribalism. Not to imply that people don't think that way by default, but the propaganda is pervasive.
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it's ridiculously easy to get people to align tribally based on ethnic/racial terms. it's no accident that both parties have swung hard into identitarian messaging.
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Or any other terms you care to mention, really. It's more arbitrary than we give it credit for. "THEY, THEY are obsessed with identity politics. Not us!" - 0 irony detected
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