amemorablename @ amemorablename @lemmygrad.ml

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2 yr. ago

Thought I had about liberal individualism: It's well-illustrated by the scene from the movie Office Space, where the boss is chastising the employee about her flair and people who do the "bare minimum." Because of policy, he can't just tell her to wear more flair than the minimum, but he still very much wants her to do so, so rather than getting the policy changed (which would be "restrictive" and go against the concept of "being yourself"), he tries to convince her through repeated shaming and browbeating and talking around it. The whole thing centers around him trying to convince her that she wants to be someone who wears more flair and comes off very passive-aggressive because it has no real understanding or respect for her as a person, only this sort of facade of respect that is grudgingly given.

I think it also fits well with the notion about "scratch a liberal and a fascist bleeds." Because it helps show how underneath liberal individualism, there is this aggressive desire for conformity and adherence to a strict way of being. But the norms of liberalism say you're not supposed to directly pursue that, lest you become "authoritarian", so people find passive-aggressive ways to pursue it instead. End result being you get this confused cocktail of mixed messages, where you're simultaneously being told you should live your life how you want to live it, while also being told you better only live it within a very narrow framework.

People joke in a self-effacing way about "leftist infighting", but this kind of stuff is a good reminder that rightists do plenty of infighting of their own. USian rightists are, after all, a bunch of "survival of the fittest", competition obsessed people. If memory serves, it's actually kind of abnormal that so many of them rallied around Trump, without tearing each other apart about it. But this may be a sign that even rightists are starting to tire of the Trump cult. Tucker sidesteps on criticizing Trump directly, but is perfectly happy to humiliate him through Cruz. What it makes me suspect is that some of these rightists see Trump as a "useful idiot", but don't want to show their disdain directly for fear of angering his supporters or messing with the coalition somehow, so now it's leaking out on one of his sycophants.

I bet Tucker would love to do this to Trump.

I don't think this kind of sycophant understands the implications of using a nuke. This is not, in fact, 1945. The only reason the US got away with nukes in 1945 is because 1) the war was about to end anyway and 2) people did not have a suitable armed response for such an armageddon weapon, nor a very good understanding of them.

It is decades since, with plenty of nuclear proliferation across the globe. The idea of breaching that has no resemblance to Truman in 1945. Except for maybe that Truman was very racist and so is Trump.

Don't have much to say about Iran cause fog of war and not knowing much about what's going on and all. But damn, it is hard not to have some anxiety about it. May this be a turning point for liberation from the colonizer in the region. 🙏

I really have to remind myself sometimes that just cause "scientific socialism" has scientific thought and practice in it, it doesn't magically make people any less prone to common human pettiness and errors in thinking, especially if they didn't grow up with it and are just now learning the basics. Else my expectations will be unrealistically high, for others or for myself, and I'll just get upset.

Yes, I misread what you said in a hurry.

but I think the anxiety is fine so long as it’s not paralyzing, is all I’ll say.

I think fixating on defending anxiety on the internet, while implying the situation is bad enough that it's a kind of crisis warranting anxiety, is contradictory and it shows in your haste here. If it's really that bad, there are far better things to be doing than meta-arguing about it on the internet. If it's not that bad, it can be addressed with a calm mind and a clear head instead. People's feelings are their feelings, no one is going to take them away. But it is one thing to take a situation seriously and it is another thing to be stuck in high cortisol for extended periods of time long past when it was supposed to drop normally; that is what prolonged anxiety is, it is not simply motivation or something.

As my therapist has probably explained to me multiple times, in a literal in-the-moment crisis, anxiety serves a purpose. The fight/flight/freeze style response kicks in and you act before reflecting. Outside of crisis, it is a drain on one's health for them to be stuck in that mode with high cortisol levels. So, to reiterate, if it's at the point of actual crisis, the last priority is arguing on the internet. If it's not, take a breather and then tackle it with a clear head.

That said, if you read this and decide you still want to insist on anxiety in some way, then please leave me alone about it. I'm never going to agree that anxiety is a healthy response outside of actual crisis. It is a crippling and exhausting thing to deal with that I'm trying to unlearn for years now and I don't want to hear more rationalizations that I've dealt with in my own head for much of my life.

??? Yeah, that's what I said, to think about action and be prepared rather than wallowing in anxiety and you reply as if you're arguing with me.

I don't think you're being mean, but I think you're wrong here and generally misunderstand what I said. If anything is "bad thinking", it's being anxious about things that are out of your control and having no action to take against them; I have chronic anxiety, I grapple with this shit on a regular basis, and trying to justify unproven anxieties is not helpful.

As I said:

Those in the capitalist west in general should take the usual precautions with regards to the law and be prepared for the possibility that it will be used against you anyway.

What more is there to say? I'm encouraging people to be prepared, which is far more important than looping on fretting about what could happen.

My general point in what you quoted is simply that the history of repression of communists is not going to start tomorrow or something. This shit has been ongoing for decades and communists in the US already have to walk on eggshells as watered down mostly electoral groups. As it is, there isn't that much for them to repress via another Red Scare. The west already sucks pretty hard on the communist front, if we're being real with ourselves. Furthermore, the Red Scare didn't end. It's still so embedded there are politically illiterate people who call democrats like Biden a communist.

Could it get worse? Yeah, that's generally how the world works, is things can get worse. They can also get better. The action we take, especially in an organized fashion, is a significant part of that. If you want to focus on the possibility of Trump cracking down even more, then start thinking about what an organized response to that would look like.

I don't see how it would reasonably be used against PSL unless there were documented party organizing of the act (unlikely: if the manifesto published by Klippenstein is indeed the shooter's, he seems to have been acting alone and in no way affiliated with any particular party or group).

Of course, they could try to unreasonably go after PSL, but I'm not sure that's much different than what socialist/communist types have been facing in the US for decades. Lest we forget the Black Panther Party got vilified over such "horrible" acts as trying to feed schoolchildren. It has long been a grim tightrope for communists in the US, and going back even more than that, liberation efforts in general, marked by the state using misinformation, harassment, intimidation, infiltration, imprisonment, and assassination.

Those in the capitalist west in general should take the usual precautions with regards to the law and be prepared for the possibility that it will be used against you anyway. It can be understandably scary, but it is a marathon struggle going back a long time, don't forget that.

Reminds me of this one time, when I still used reddit, ran into somebody who was talking about being an immigrant and something about how they'd managed to succeed. I think I had tried to give them some socialist style commentary and it turned out that they were a landlord of a kind, and I was pretty blunt with them about the ridiculousness of their "success" being to become an exploiter.

I guess I think of it because some people who are migrants can technically succeed, if we consider the "American dream" to be "become the oppressor." But that's nothing to be proud of and few can do that even if they all had so little of a conscience to try.

At first glance, I get some of the skepticism people have about it, but at the same time, if he was sitting there talking about being 99% sure about MKUltra and there was not concrete evidence for MKUltra, I'd probably have some skepticism for that too. And yet, the US is the kind of state that did MKUltra. And this is significantly less far-fetched, as far as I can tell. I think it just seems more extreme on the face of it because of the consequences; the plausibility of it as presented is rather mundane, mechanically. A state (the US) that couldn't care less about human life other than as a strategic asset calls upon science for a magic bullet answer to some problem, mismanages it, gets an actual bullet instead.

God that is grotesque. Sounds like cut from the same cloth as the west vilifying support for Palestinians.

Wonder if it's just me, or somewhat of a general ADHD thing, of finding "doer" speeches annoying at times. Mind you, I don't mean stuff like targeted calls to action, I don't think, because in that case it feels like a "let's do this" - it's more focused on the we, with the speaker being included in it.

I guess what bothers me is the sort of individualist kind of "put on your adult pants" talk, where like no matter how diplomatic the tone of it, the underlying implication is that there's some kind of action you're not taking that you're "supposed to" take and that you have missed the fact that you could be doing this action. And for some people some of the time, that's probably helpful. I think for me and why I bring up ADHD, is most of the time I already kinda know what I could be doing (sometimes to an absurd degree relative to proportional action because of gathering more info in lieu of actually doing). It's the mechanics of executive functioning that are more so the struggle rather than a lack of knowing. And I suspect if there's any trend to it and it's not just me, what people like me probably more often need is emotional support, an actual physical "I will go do this with you" if necessary (like for body doubling), and in general, a certain amount of trust that we're capable; that the problem isn't so much ignorance as just needing more support (or even just space, not being distracting) to get started.

Not about anything I've seen here BTW. More a general thing I've seen in various ways, some of which may be rugged individualism culture, though I'm not certain because I don't know how well executive functioning struggles are recognized in general, in the world.

I have some fear about it, but then, I also have fears about a lot of things. In general, it feels hard to muster much headspace for it with everything else going on in the world. Plus like, I don't even really understand it and I don't want to do a bothsidesism unfairly, so there's not much for me to do with the information coming out about it.

He should have known that English has been around in the exact same form for 6,000 years, back when Noah wrote the Bible while riding the Ark of the Covenant.

He was this guy who got extremely good grades in school, so one day, somebody called him Carl Marks and it stuck. Then he went on to write Capital, an in-depth guide on uppercase, lowercase, and all things grammatical, and anti-comma-use English professors have hated him ever since.

I thought this was hyperbolic at first, but after getting into a thing about it in youtube comments, the person could be garden-variety overzealous fan, but I'm not discounting the possibility they are part of an astroturfing campaign; they were weirdly adept at twisting everything I said to be the most bad faith, bad intentions comment possible and their coherence had a tinge to it that reminds me of LLMs that are almost on track, but just a little bit off. It felt like they were doing what Ethan does, like they knew how to do the same thing, of twisting everything.

Ah good to know, thanks.

What about it is scam-like behavior to you? I'm not real familiar with it myself.

I just know from what people said in this thread, it sounds like some of the products can be low quality, some high quality, kind of a mixed bag: https://lemmygrad.ml/post/7336237

That is helpful, I appreciate it. I will think about what you've said and will keep in mind about reaching out. Also, is reminding me I've meant to practice git use more in the past, but didn't get around to it, I guess cause it was easy to do simple use of git through Visual Studio on solo projects. But that is something I could work on while looking for job opportunities.

Also also, that is somewhat reassuring about the interview process. I tend to find some of it intimidating, but it helps knowing that some of those more intimidating ones are that way precisely because there's some ego stuff going on.