politics

What can we do to make people respect and care for gays?

Identifying a specific group of people to be regarded with respect and care is an approach to an issue akin to “preaching to the choir.” Those who already understand, appreciate, and embrace the concept of positive support toward a marginalized group don’t need to be reminded of their mistreatment and told they should not mistreat them.

Meanwhile, those who already harbour ill will to marginalized groups tend to respond with ill feelings toward the message while citing reasons why such a sentiment is exclusionary to them and their feelings. This is why “All Lives Matter” became a response to the message “Black Lives Matter.”

That black lives are snuffed out at rates which prominently indicate a social bias against them that results in a significant degree of avoidable victimization is irrelevant to them in this issue. Such people already feel victimized themselves, and providing positive attention toward other marginalized groups gives them the excuse to feel even more marginalized than they already do.

It may be true that they are not victimized to any additional degree by statistical contrast. However, a large part of their animosity is derived from feeling marginalized from society in general.

The marginalization they feel is universal. The extremes of income disparity we live with today universally exacerbate anxieties throughout the population. In contrast, only those who do not live with economic insecurity find some insulation from the challenges of daily living.

Encouraging people to develop respect for and care for others requires addressing the barriers preventing them from alienating others from a small and shrinking circle of safety in the face of an increasing array of reasons for insecurity.

Most people are already clear that when life is good for them and without survival issues predominating their concerns, it’s much easier to be open to strangers. Strangers are always viewed as a threat when life itself feels threatened. Accepting strangers without instinctively assuming they’re an additional threat to pile onto their activated fight-or-flight instinct is much easier when life isn’t under an omnipresent threat. Increased anxiety levels are a consequence of our economic disparity. Fixing that makes it easier for people to open themselves up to tribal outsiders naturally.

I remember experiencing directly how familiarity seemed to function like a cure for bigotry through a few simple words, “We don’t think of you as a Paki, Biker.”

Biker was a quiet and unassuming personality who worked hard and performed well within the McDonalds restaurant I worked in during my teenage years from 15 to 16. He was one of the gang who would join us in our “car parties” and was appointed as our designated booze-buyer. I don’t remember how old he was, but he passed inspection well enough to never run into any trouble buying alcohol for the rest of us.

In retrospect, I don’t think we pronounced his name correctly, but he never indicated that he minded it. I think it made him feel part of the crowd. I do remember feeling awkward whenever someone gave him that back-handed compliment with complete sincerity, “I don’t think of you as a Paki.”

I grew up in a predominantly blue-collar town with an economy primarily sustained by several sawmills and pulp mills in the area, situated at a significant crossroad between north and southern highway arteries. The average education of the town at the time was grade nine, and bigotry was so rampant it became invisible, but it was there for those who cared enough to pay attention.

Gay people were tolerated as long as it remained only speculative that a person was gay. The moment they were outed, however, they risked severe injury. No one wanted to think of people they liked as being gay, and so few would overlook the obvious to avoid feeling like they needed to do something about them.

The gay people I knew from school had their friends who accepted them as they were; whether or not they revealed their “status” was not a matter I was privy to, but I could tell and just kept my mouth shut and treated them like anyone else.

About ten years ago, an old high school “friend” looked me up, and we had coffee together while he brought me up to speed with gossip from school. One piece of news he had for me was that Lawrence had come out of the closet. He spoke those words while still expressing surprise, and my nonchalant response confused him. I quickly changed the topic before he could ask why I wasn’t surprised. I asked him about someone who had demonstrated some kindness to me as a bullied fat kid in school, and his response made me feel like we had travelled back in time, “Oh, she’s a slut.”

That meeting made me feel justified in completely cutting myself off from the people I grew up with because they hadn’t changed. I remember being invited to the first ten-year reunion from our high school by telephone. I was informed of someone who had committed suicide, and that made me feel sad for her. In the background, I could hear someone make a joke about swallowing a shotgun and that sent chills down my spine. I asked myself why I would want to travel to the toxic town I grew up wanting to escape it to endure entirely obnoxious people. I remember indicating that I might attend, but I wasn’t sure. I knew then that I didn’t want to go and haven’t been to any they may have held.

I had and still have no desire to surround myself with such a tone-deaf form of sociopathic toxicity. It doesn’t change within the individual once it’s set within their personality, mainly from their upbringing and early socialization experiences.

People don’t grow to respect and care for those groups they’ve spent a lifetime marginalizing. They only become more tolerant and less overtly abusive but can easily get triggered into being abusive if the conditions are ripe for it.

Living in hardship makes it easy for latent bigotries to surface. That’s why MAGAts are so easily riled up. They will never be convinced to respect and care for the people they’ve learned to hate unless they’re exposed to them in person and begin to think of those people they know as different from the bigoted image they have of that group within their mind.

That tone softening happens only when their lives are more manageable, not more complicated.

This is the very crux of our class warfare as people are weaponized against each other by the plutocrats in our midst who have stolen trillions from the working class and exacerbated their struggles. They further weaponize the undereducated by messaging designed to stoke hatred while pointing fingers of blame at the marginalized groups for their struggles.

The ownership class deliberately riles these people up to set them against their neighbours because that distracts us from their efforts to benefit themselves while further impoverishing the rest of us.

We may sincerely want to cultivate respect and care for each other as citizens, but we must approach the issue from a universal perspective. We must address the stressors serving as barriers to caring. Sadly, the solution appears more and more to require chaos to force a return to sanity.

“Those who make peaceful evolution impossible make violent revolution necessary.”

During this time of year and this “sacred” day when we are all called to regard each other as members of a family we call humanity, we can only hope that sanity will return without requiring the ritual blood sacrifices we’ve paid throughout history.

For what it’s worth, I hope your day today is filled with peace and contentment.

Temet Nosce

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora. For answers to additional questions, my profile can be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/profile/Antonio-Amaral-1/“

Is the entire world moving further to the right?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Is-the-entire-world-moving-further-to-the-right/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

The entire world is undergoing a massive transformation that has steadily escalated in speed and scope year by year for decades. Although the world has constantly been changing, this degree of change is unprecedented.

I remember Alvin Toffler’s predictions on this in Future Shock from when I was a kid in school, and we had the opportunity to watch his documentary in the classroom. Among the many predictions, this rate of escalating change has always stood out for me as a consequence of being repeatedly reminded of it throughout my lifetime. I thought the beginning of the Information Age represented a peak of speed of change, but that was just the beginning of ramping up the rate of change to come.

With great changes come great uncertainty, and that fires up anxiety levels everywhere.

Making matters worse has been the class warfare reaching new peaks of disparity driven by thefts of the working class by the tens of trillions over the last few decades as world politics began shifting rightward.

Before Reagan and Thatcher, many of the democracies in developed nations around the globe still viewed the government as somewhat of an ally, even after experiencing perceived betrayals through global events like the war in Vietnam and Britain’s mishandling of the IRA in Ireland and “Sunday Bloody Sunday.” JFK’s assassination shocked the world. Labour strikes rocked the world.

People were fed up then with disruptive elements and had developed a level of comfort with their daily lives and their expectations for their future that they lost touch with the value of disruptive events like strikes. No one then realized how a disruption to their air travel plans was a positive and necessary event in a healthy democracy when negotiations broke down. The general attitude of entitlement to expectations of service became an easy wedge to force between the public and the labour organizations fighting to maintain equanimity between the classes.

Demonizing government became a path to power within government because the people in democracies began believing corruption was also as endemic to the government as unions. Political systems began being viewed through a cynical lens, while conservative politicians have since leveraged that sentiment to gain political power for themselves.

Regan’s firing of air traffic controllers was accompanied by a cheering public who saw their travelling conveniences disrupted rather than their quality of life being protected. People had begun forgetting almost a couple of centuries of sacrifice in fighting for fundamental rights and protections like weekends off, overtime pay, and healthcare benefits.

Employers had begun implementing progressive strategies for supporting staff, so the protections provided by unions began to seem redundant and perceived as an unnecessary cost for supporting a political organization that often ignored the needs of its constituents. Unions began being viewed as corrupt organizations rather than protectors of the middle class that they helped build and grow.

Conservatives took advantage of this new embrace of the ownership class and cultivated a belief that it was within reach of everyone who worked hard and lived responsibly. The American dream was possible by the beginning of disassembling the structures that gave rise to the middle class.

Reagan’s tax cuts and the heyday of spending, which characterized the 1980s, made it seem like the wealthy were just like everyone else and were equal members of a human community willing to share in the prosperity.

It was easy to support conservative ideology because it seemed the most pragmatic. Even today, people will describe themselves as “conservative” more out of an avoidance of needlessly attracting unwanted and disparaging public attention and appearing reserved than out of an embrace of a political ideology.

When people refer to themselves as “conservative,” they usually do so to appear “normal,” “predictable,” and “approachable,” while those who are not are generally viewed as “erratic” and “disruptive.” This perception is what has made conservativism most popular. It is easy to equate “fiscal conservativism” with sound financial management strategies, even though political conservatives constitute the worst among the worst economic managers. We have had decades of conservatives blowing up debts across every nation they held leadership roles in and are still publicly viewed as fiscally competent.

Conservativism represents an imaginary form of stoicism in which people hunker down and do what needs to be done because that’s the only way to survive adversity.

In times of stress and fear, withdrawing from positions of risk seems generally the safest approach toward surviving adversity. We’ve had countless generations learning to do without to make ends meet. Our forefathers lived during times of scarcity while production efforts scrambled to keep up with demand.

Most people lived independently and without the social support fought for and won by the progressives in society who demanded equitable treatment from the ownership class. They also responded to adversity by hoarding their assets as a survival strategy through adversity. Scarcity was a fact of life until only a few decades ago when our means of production exceeded our demand.

We are already living in an entirely new world, while most people born before the advent of the information age still live as if scarcity were a challenge for the human species. Most do not understand how dramatically opportunities have shrunk for people starting today like they did yesterday. Many, if not most, perceive today’s complaints and social disruptions as a consequence of overreach by attitudes of unearned entitlement.

Many live in today’s world as if it were still the 1980s without realizing how much they once took for granted has been stolen by the ownership class. What they see is increasing disruption to the predictable life and world they once knew, and they seek to blame progress itself as the culprit responsible for their anxieties. This causes people to turn inward in a protectionist strategy for survival.

The attitude of protectionism has been steadily rising while being stoked by conservative politicians as they have cultivated a cynically misanthropic attitude among their supporters toward their fellow neighbours. They take every opportunity to demonize concepts that make people feel uncomfortable and politicize them for personal gain.

Everything about the conservative ethos today has been geared toward hating anyone and anything that can potentially disrupt the sanctity of a predictable existence. Fear and hatred have been the weapons of choice wielded by conservative power mongers, and it works because people respond to threats on a visceral level before they can afford the risk of examining them for their rationale.

Conservativism is a “shoot first and ask questions later” approach to anxiety, and that used to work on some levels in a simpler world with simpler problems. Unfortunately, it only exacerbates the issues we face today.

Fortunately, within the hard swing to the right throughout these last several decades exist the seeds for reversing the course of a political pendulum that has been perpetually swinging to either extreme before being yanked back to an inevitable centre where stability lies.

It may be that we will continue swinging further rightward, but the further we go to the right, the more powerful the backlash becomes. If we find ourselves facing full-blown fascism as a clear threat to our democracies, then we may be in for some seriously chaotic times, but that’s when the voice of reason becomes influential as a guide out of madness.

We desperately need bold leadership that can press for the necessary changes we must make to our systems to ensure our transition into a fully automated society creates minimal casualties, or we will risk warfare. We can no longer afford capitulating gestures because the conservative opposition has been clear that it doesn’t negotiate in good faith. Like all situations with bullies, the only solution to their entrenchment is to meet them on their level and overpower them to such a degree that they relent.

This is the prisoner’s dilemma in game theory, where tit for tat is the only way out of this mess right now. We can face the issues head-on or watch everything collapse, hoping some miracle saves our assets. We are most definitely at a crossroads as a species, and the right appears hellbent on subjugating everyone not approved as core representatives of their tribe.

Would hastening societal collapse do more harm than good?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Attempting to increase global problems to bring societal collapse sooner, would that do more harm than good?”

Societal collapse is, by definition, the most harm that can be done.

It may seem like the easiest way to address the rampant corruption we see today, but there is no guarantee against a new and next-generation form of corruption taking root in the ashes of the old. The odds are greater that a new form of corruption will be even more corrupt because they will have better learned how to protect themselves from reprisals.

If you look at the responses to Brian Thompson’s execution for crimes against humanity, there is no remorse being displayed by the monsters among us. They feel righteous anger at having been assaulted so violently.

Their response to a situation where their victims strike back is to hunker down with increased security measures.

They learn nothing from random acts of violence.

It may be the case that destroying all of them at once will eliminate the currently most powerful of the corrupt among us. There are always new generations following who are eager to outdo their forerunners.

Indeed, this generation of corruption defining the ownership class is a case study of learning from their prior mistakes. It is precisely why they have essentially co-opted all media.

The best thing we can do is build from where we are while learning to embrace values and contribute to solidifying the social contract we share.

We must stand up against the corrupt in whatever way we can. We must also be evident in our statements so that the world understands how violence is treated as a last resort after all other options have been exhausted. This is the only way to minimize the destruction of everything we have built together. This is the only way to preserve and protect the best of what we want for our society and our children’s future.

From Marvel’s Loki Series

Why don’t big businesses reduce profits when raising wages?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why don’t big businesses reduce profits instead of increasing prices when forced to raise wages?|

Never in the history of generating income for oneself has anyone ever said, “Gee… I think I earned too much money. I should give some of it back.”

The answers you’ve gotten essentially echo the above sentence.

For example, many companies, like Walmart, deliberately underpay their people by enforcing tactics like union-busting and denying employees full-time status to permit them to qualify for additional benefits.

What they save on employee costs forces their people to qualify for government benefits. So even if you’re not their customer, you still subsidize their operation through your taxes. Their major shareholders laugh at you and your question.

There is no way to solve this problem within the status quo. Even worse, this problem will continue to worsen as technologies in AI and robotics mature while automation replaces jobs to reduce employment costs even further.

The Walton family doesn’t care about how their employees might struggle. Jeff Bezos considers employees dying on his warehouse floor as collateral damage and the cost of doing business. A few thousand dollars toward a token effort to address optics is a low price to pay to force people into running according to the inhuman scheduling they’re forced to endure by filling orders according to a timed system.

Part of the problem with this question is that it presumes wages determine the costs of products that you pay for when that is the furthest thing from the truth. Wages are a minimal determinant in the price of products you buy.

Products are priced at the highest level that a market will bear. IOW, the price of a product is based on a formula applied to the speed at which shelves for that product are emptied. You have probably heard of the phenomenon of “supply and demand.”

The more demand for a product, the easier it is to justify its increased cost. The company knows it will still sell its product but get a higher margin, growing annual revenue and making it more attractive to investors. In turn, its stock value increases, and it appears much more successful as a company doing business in the marketplace. The entire system is geared around pricing products as high as possible while reducing costs as much as possible. The cost of labour is considered the most significant repeat cost of an operation, so it’s always targeted for reduction. Capital costs are written off in tax deductions, so a one-time purchase far exceeding the cost of labour for the year is still cheaper than labour because of that tax benefit.

When employers, capitalists, and their flying monkeys threaten higher costs for products due to higher wages, they’re just lying to the public to create the optics that their products require price increases that are functionally unnecessary but acceptable because people believe the justifications that are given. This happened due to the COVID lockdown when companies took advantage of public sentiment to indulge in price-gouging strategies.

Solutions to this and many related problems, such as the persistence and even increase in poverty, involve multiple strategies.

  1. First, the downward pressure on wages can be addressed by eliminating the leverage of destitution that employers have with employees. Suppose an employment candidate doesn’t like the pay scale offered by an employer. In that case, they currently have a choice to begrudgingly accept being underpaid or face the risk of homelessness, starvation, and premature death. The solution to this problem is easily implemented through a Universal Basic Income. If candidates are free to turn down insufficient wages, then employers are put into a position of being more competitive to attract those they want on staff.
  2. Corporate structures are an inherently antiquated holdover from medieval organizational structures. Corporations are strictly hierarchical entities that function like mini-autocracies. This dynamic existing within a democratic society cannot be but at odds with the society it operates within. It is in the “corporate DNA” to essentially function as a subversive entity within a democratic society that inevitably plots the demise of democracy and its overthrow to institute an oppressive two-class society of owners and serfs. The solution to this problem exists within worker co-ops.
  3. Worker Co-ops (continued) Richard Woff is an economist and a professor emeritus of economics at the University of Massachusetts who provides compelling arguments in favour of worker co-ops. — Richard D. Wolff — Wikipedia — RDWolff –

  1. 4. (Numbering Bullets in this kind of HTML formatting truly sucks the big one) Finally, the primary solution to the greed infesting human behaviour today that functions as a threat to human society is to place a global cap on personal net worth. This is the most difficult of all challenges to implement because it’s already hard enough to have an entire nation agree on something. For the world to develop solidarity in this matter appears to be an unreal fantasy, but it may be the case that Donald Trump and Elon Musk are opening the door for the world to get on board with it. There is no valid argument against it, particularly since the only argument that once held validity — financing large-scale endeavours — is now rendered moot through crowdfunding. The more money that exists in the working class’s hands, the more able the working class can participate in a democratic economy rather than be subjected to the whims of psychopathic power-mongers. We must first drop this delusion that wealth is accrued only by “special humans” who stand above the rest of us. It’s becoming ever more apparent to the public that not only does power corrupt, it is the corrupt and corruptible who are attracted to power.

We are rapidly approaching a point of no return in which we will either quickly resolve the problems threatening human civilization or lose the ability to respond to a global environmental threat.

Why is the MAGA cult proud of being ignorant?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why is the MAGA cult proud of being ignorant? Is it a lack of self-awareness and/or emotions dictating their every thought over any logic?”

That’s a mischaracterization. They’re not “proud of being ignorant” because no one is ever “proud of being ignorant.”

They are proud of feeling they were right because they got their way and got the guy they wanted. They are pleased to beat those they view as their enemies.

They are proud of what they perceive as winning.

They are proud of what they perceive as defeating their enemies.

They are driven by emotion because reasoning at high levels is confusing, frustrating, and tiresome. They tend to despise reason when it is used in ways that make them feel inferior.

They tend to mistrust people capable of using reason in ways that confuse them and contradict their intuition. They will often misinterpret what is being conveyed through reason by simply adopting a polar extreme to what they experience.

Their reaction is no different than a familiar dynamic between an emotional child and an adult.

Here’s an example I discovered as I have been poring through texts I’ve written (many to myself as a way of coping with reality), which typifies the mentality in question:

Loren,

Let’s walk back through our last conversation.

(paraphrasing)

You: “Should I peel the apples and put them in water?”

Me: “No. Just sprinkle a little lemon juice on them.”

Later, when I came downstairs:

Me: “You didn’t need to put them in water.”

You: “Sorry. They’re not perfect because you didn’t do them.”

Now I’m wondering how I can have respect for someone who responds to me with the emotional development of a teenager. The sad thing is that this is VERY typical of what I often experience with you.

In retrospect, I should have given this note to this person, but I wrote it to myself, as I stated, to record my frustrations so that I could learn to manage my emotions better.

This dynamic is precisely the nature of dealing with a MAGA mentality that refuses to see past their insecurities to focus on a rational apprehension of the reality they are dealing with.

There aren’t many options to dealing with this mentality if they’re not a literal child who can be given a dose of negative reinforcement to ponder the consequences of failing to think through their position on any given matter.

The dynamic of parent and child is the most straightforward form of addressing such negative behaviour because there are many options to how one approaches the emotionality of their response. One can be supportive in how they deal with it, such as by using the Socratic method and turning their thoughts inward to question their motivations while guiding them through reasoning. This is impractical in most cases because it requires significant time, concentration, and strategic evaluation of the direction in which their mind goes.

With an adult, there is no wiggle room for conveying the implications of such thinking because they will have already perfected their entrenchment while having no obligation to respond to a parental dynamic in their conversation. Just like the example above. Any attempt I would have made to have that person understand how utterly toxic her thinking was would have escalated a conflict between us.

If you ever try to have a MAGAt understand how the notion of “small government” is an entirely irrational statement, you will quickly realize how fruitless such a conversation is. The problem lies in their adherence to principle and an inability (mainly a lack of desire, not capacity) to process reasoning. Any criticism of the soundbite they’ve planted as a territorial flag in their mind is interpreted as an assault against their principles, not a critique of the concept they haven’t bothered to flesh out in detail.

Every issue they champion is practically the same approach to standing fast on principle and counter-attacking any criticism like they were defending a great fortress from barbarians at their gate.

Their self-worth is derived from the strength of an adherence to their principles and loyalty to whomever they pledge allegiance to. They are proud of standing fast on their principles.

This mentality has long been a template for any cult leader to exploit.

Anyone who can communicate with them in the same atavistic language of emotion, appealing to their egos and baser instincts with soporifics that soothe their defences and confirm their biases, will be able to convert that person into a willing puppet on a string who will kill one’s enemies on their behalf. That’s why January 6th occurred without them questioning the irrationality behind storming the nation’s capital. None of them considered what would have happened had they succeeded in taking control of the building and its grounds. Fortunately for them, they didn’t succeed.

Why doesn’t Elon Musk want to save poor people in the world?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-doesnt-Elon-Musk-want-to-save-poor-people-in-the-world/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

He is saving the “poor people in the world.”

The disconnect is presuming he sees other people in the world as people rather than as objects placed on this Earth to cater to his poor existence.

Haven’t you noticed how much whining Trump does about life even though he was born on third base and has destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives throughout his life? After all that destruction, he still views himself as a victim.

Ironically, they’re both victims of failing to maintain contact with their essential humanity.

They will both go to their graves, completely frustrated and confused about why most people hate them.

Sure… they have devoted followers, but those are the easy and gullible idiots to manipulate. It’s not enough because they know the people who challenge them think poorly of them.

The jealousy is why Trump can still gripe about Obama a decade later.

Supporting a hated monster like Trump is the closest Musk will get to camaraderie. Meanwhile, both regard each other as useful idiots to their self-serving causes. Once the wheels fall off in their relationship — and it will because there isn’t enough room on the planet for two competing megalomaniac egos — eventually, one of them will step on the other’s toes hard enough to escalate into an open conflict — we’ll see embarrassing demonstrations that remind us of all the sandbox behaviours we experienced in elementary school.

Sadly, the more Xitter fails, the harder Musk will go after austerity for the little people, and that’s how he will deal with his “poor stature.” Musk is this century’s poster boy for why restraints on personal wealth and power are crucial to the stability of human civilization.

The MAGAts won’t see that, though, because they’re conditioned to desire submission to authorities they’ve been accustomed to worship. They will identify more with Musk’s struggles than their fellow citizens who suffer from Musk’s spitefulness.

Elon Musk is essentially living a life of revenge against whatever broke him in his childhood. His and Trump’s attitudes and behaviours are typical for bullies who remain convinced of their infinite entitlement to destroy others. They are self-righteous in their acts of destruction to levels equivalent to extreme religious zealotry.

Musk will sincerely believe he is a poor victim for being denied the $56 billion he demanded as compensation from Tesla. Self-serving bullies like won’t stop until someone stops them. Until then, Musk in his “DOGE” role will strip away lifelines from the little people to save himself a few dollars on taxes with righteous fervour. He will sincerely believe he’s doing the right thing for society by getting revenge on his victimization.

The attitude of being a poor victim is a common among billionaires who brazenly justify denying people their right to life to save themselves a few dollars in taxes. Meanwhile, all of their justifications for austerity for the little people is presented as if tax increases are and should be equal across the board. The wealthy have had their taxes cut by more than half in the last several decades which constitutes billions in savings for each billionaire. The little people have conversely gained pennies in tax cuts by contrast. Meanwhile, people like Musk, Thiel, and those support Trump consider themselves poor and unjustly victimized if their taxes were increased by a few percentage points.

The next time you hear someone use the expression, “victim mentality,” pay close attention to the person who accuses others of having such a mentality because that expression is projection for a sociopath. We’ve all had enough experience now to understand how the corrupt will make accusations that are confessions in disguise — deflections away from responsibility for their actions. People like Musk and Trump embody that mentality. Every choice they make is a form of revenge for their victimization while anyone who suffers as a consequence deserves their fates.

If you are a Leftist, do you think it is wrong to build Utopias?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/If-you-are-a-Leftist-do-you-think-it-is-wrong-to-build-Utopias/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1“

As humans, it is vital that we all work together to make a better world for all of us today and for those who come after us.

After all, we are currently enjoying many freedoms and luxuries we would otherwise not have had it not been for the contributions of those who came before us.

Failing to do our part to make this a better world makes us a parasitic element that erodes the social fabric.

Working against the betterment of humanity is a betrayal of the social contract. Today’s dynamic resembles a tribe that survived a primitive existence by everyone working together. Having one person in that tribe work against the tribe’s survival was viewed as a threat to that tribe.

They had much more efficient ways of dealing with such betrayals then.

A utopia is otherwise just a setting on a compass that keeps us on track. Utopia is a concept and a direction, not a destination.

Hiding one’s misanthropy behind a political ideology is the polluting act of an intellectual coward and a morally depraved psychopath.

As you can see from how people are united in support of Luigi Mangioni, it’s not about left versus right. It never has been. It’s always been the top attacking the bottom, while people like you who play into that divisiveness are just useful idiots keeping us all distracted from saving ourselves from disaster.

Framing this question within the context of a political ideology only adds to the chasm between political polarities, imbues it with passive-aggressive disparaging implications, and is irresponsibly divisive nonsense.

Shame on you.

Why do so many people ask why “liberals” are so intolerant?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “If being liberal means being open, and generally tolerant, why do so many people ask why “liberals” are so intolerant?”

Tolerance cannot exist without limits, and the tolerance limits are the intolerant in society. Society cannot survive a tolerant existence without being intolerant of the insular and narrow-minded. Karl Popper described this limit within his “Paradox of Tolerance.”

Being tolerant means embracing the tolerant and rejecting the intolerant.

People who spread hatred cannot be tolerated if we wish to live in a tolerant society. In essence, people who spread hatred are in breach of the social contract, and the only way to address that is through the social pressure of rejection. The logic is not much different than the logic used when incarcerating criminals. Separating disruptive elements from society is a necessary strategy for preserving social cohesion.

Hate-mongers fail to understand this principle when they discover, to their chagrin, that their abusive intolerance is no longer tolerated.

They are often shocked and concoct accusations like “cancel culture” to serve as deflections for disguising their confessions. They are, after all, the same people who ban books. Most bullies in society get away with being bullies for a long time because most people just quietly turn away from them to give them the illusion they can continue being bullies. Most people prefer to avoid conflict and will often comply with a bully to get rid of them, making them think they have won.

This is a sad consequence of conflict-averse people because they only enable bullies in society while the one or two brave enough to stand up to them are destroyed.

The only way we will end the abuse we experience from bullies is when everyone stands together to show the intolerant that their intolerance will not be tolerated.

Being liberal has nothing to do with this. A decent human being willing to fight for a better world constitutes values that transcend political ideology.

Conservatives also have it within them to be better. The current prevalence of MAGAts and MAGA-style hatemongering the world over overwhelms their parties with cumulative toxicity that erodes the social fabric. At the same time, the rational conservatives among them, tacitly endorse the assault on the social contract through their tolerance of destructive MAGA attitudes and behaviours.

This is a difficult period of transformation for those who have felt themselves entitled to their biases, and we see examples of it everywhere in every contentious issue where mainly MAGA people attempt to impose their biases onto others. They can’t stomach the idea of equality when they and all of the working people are struggling during a period of extreme income inequity. Instead of being angry at those responsible for their strife, they’ve chosen the easy route of punching down instead of up because all bullies are cowards. It’s much easier for them to pick on those who appear vulnerable in society, such as immigrants, transitioning people, and women.

When liberals try to refocus their anger on those responsible for their strife, they often react with anger toward liberals, and that’s why questions like this exist. Those “so many people” who ask why liberals are intolerant are those who are too afraid to hold the people responsible for their anger accountable. Everyone else has had their tolerance eroded from the futility of attempting to reason with people who hold fast to positions they did not adopt out of reason. There is no point bridging a divide while the other side insists on digging a chasm.

Are progressive liberal voters leaving Twitter for other sites?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you think more and more progressive liberal voters will leave Twitter and go to other sites where their views will be more respected?”

Being on Xitter right now is like being outdoors at a campground that’s become a free-for-all and sitting in front of a fire, watching a massive log slowly burn itself into ash.

Nothing is stopping anyone from cross-posting to any or all of the competition. At this point, there’s no reason not to while waiting for the log to crumble into dust. Xitter still has a massive database of postings and a long enough history to be helpful on some levels for research.

Knowing which of the alternatives will emerge as the front-runner is still early in the game, and it could very well be the case that all three (Mastodon — https://mastodon.social/@, Threads — https://www.threads.net, and BlueSky — https://bsky.app/) will establish comfortable niches for themselves. There may emerge reasons for choosing only one, but it’s too soon to do that now.

This phenomenon is an example of how socializing on a virtual scale robs us of experiences that are common IRL. For instance, it’s been less than one year since I predicted Xitter would die within five years. I received a lot of mockery for it then. Less than six months ago, when it was announced that Xitter had lost 40% of its value, I posted that it was tanking faster than I thought it would and made a softer prediction about its data being sold off in less than five years. I received a lot of mockery from Elonia’s fanbois for that. A few days ago, it was announced that Xitter is now worth only 25% of its purchase value. It’s tanking faster than I expected. Elonia’s doing a marvellous job of teaching the little people how much contempt the rich psychopaths among us have toward their pawns.

(To be clear, not all the rich are as contemptuous, but they are obnoxious because they are captains of industry and de facto leaders in society. They should all be like Nick Hanauher and banging a drum for positive changes for humanity. That’s the least that can be expected from them. If they’re not doing that, they are callously egomaniacal for a myopic and self-serving regard toward the benefits they enjoy and take for granted. They’re also quite stupid for failing to apprehend how they would be much better off if they supported dignified living for the little people.)

This is one of those cases in which I am not only happy to be way off on my prediction, but I can also boast about it, and I have no idea who those people were while I’m sure I blocked a lot of them. If this were IRL, I’d be enjoying a lot of gloating while downing several beers at a bar that were owed to me by people I’d have made bets with.

Eventually — and sooner rather than later, the people who continue to use Xitter exclusively will begin to wonder if their experience is worth the effort to log into it, and that will be the day the Xitting dies.

If you’re posting on such sites to build up top of mind, there’s no reason not to cross-post. That way, you can see what kind of attention each gets you, and that will let you know who to focus on and with targeted messaging that can be most effective for your goals.

I’m generic in that respect and don’t have a specific target or strategy for sales or what you have in mind, so my approach is just “put my shit out there and see what happens.”

There appear to be developing differences between the alternatives. While Xitter is emerging as the haven for lunatics, there are still a lot of progressive voices there that seem to be there while cross-posting on other platforms. Robert Reich, for instance, appears to be on all three.

People more focused on a specific community to engage with will find it tough to know where best to put their eggs right now, particularly since all three platforms are still establishing themselves.

Will Trump’s enemies change direction?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Will Trump’s enemies change direction and become his worshippers if he really can stop the war in Ukraine within the first 24 hours of his presidency?”

People who view themselves as his enemies don’t hate him for what will be his betrayal of Ukraine. They hate him for the damage he’s deliberately done to them. Handing the Ukraine over to Putin will only make them hate him that much more.

Everyone else who is disgusted by him doesn’t hate him because they hate YOU for allowing that monster a second attempt at doing a more thorough job of destroying the nation than he did the first time.

Most people understand and acknowledge what kind of demented egomaniac Trump is, and they understand that he doesn’t care in the least about policy or that he doesn’t have any vision for the nation beyond whoring himself out for attention while bilking the American people out of every penny he can for himself. Most people understand from the first time around that he’s going to sell national secrets for personal profit and that he will put the lives of American agents in jeopardy by doing so. Most people know who he is, what he’s done, and what he can do.

No one knows better than a New Yorker who’s had to deal with his rapacious stupidity for decades and up until they finally ran him out of the state.

People are not unclear about the consequences of another Trump presidency.

People are angry at the utterly contemptible stupidity that has put the entire nation at risk and will forever change American standing in the global community.

You have crossed a threshold, and you still haven’t a clue what kind of nightmare you have invited into your lives and that you have imposed upon the people you think you care about. You still don’t understand how your wives and daughters will hate you for the rest of your lives. Your grandchildren will hate you. Hell, your great-grandchildren will want to piss on your graves because you have fucked up on such a biblical level.

What’s worse is that you’re going to continue blaming anything and anyone before you understand how the nightmare you have imposed upon your nation is YOUR fault… not Trump’s fault, not the Democrats’ fault, not the fault of “librulz,” but entirely YOUR fault.

You have already lost your right to overtime pay, and I’m sure you’ve glossed that over as unimportant in your mind until you have found yourself working without sleep for a few days while expecting a huge bonus in your pay and getting peanuts in return for all your hard work. Sure, you’ll complain about how unfair that is. You’ll still drag your ass to work another three days straight, though or get fired. You will have no coverage because the budget for unemployment will have been cut back while your qualification requirements have become so restricted that most everyone is rejected.

Meanwhile, the medical health plan you counted on to keep your kid on insulin alive no longer covers them and the price of insulin skyrockets. To keep your kid alive, you’ll have to sell your car and walk to work for a 36-hour shift. Then, when you fall asleep at work because you’re too tired, you’ll get fired and lose the health coverage you need to keep your kid alive. Oh well, you can always make another… amirite?

Meanwhile, your daughter gets pregnant and then gets hauled off into jail because she tried crossing state lines for an abortion that you set up for her because you can’t afford another mouth to feed.

Then you’ll start protesting, and hope will return when “the Don” himself shows up to grace you with his presence. Then he throws you a roll of paper towel and tells you to suck it up.

Then you’ll start crying to anyone and everyone who will listen about how unfair it all is, and the “librulz” who tried to prevent all of this will flip you the same bird you flipped them when you strutted around like the cock on the block, enjoying your “librul” tears.

You won’t have anywhere to turn or anyone to turn to besides your brothers in stupidity. All you idiots that brought this nightmare to the nation will have nothing but each other to console yourselves while concocting excuses for why this isn’t your fault.

You will then realize you have only one of two choices: end it all or sacrifice yourselves to make things right.

I suspect many more of you will choose the coward’s route rather than try to make things right.

By then, the nation will be in tatters as the price of eggs will have skyrocketed to more than ten times what they were when you were complaining about Biden.

And after all that, you’ll still try to sell the notion that Ukraine should have just surrendered to Putin because you are all cowards and hypocrites at heart.