the worst dudes online are the guys who are like “the time for electoral politics is over, it’s time for guillotines.” yeah bud i’m sure you’ll stop posting and get the ball rolling on the guillotines any minute now.
this basically serves the same purpose as QAnon shit on the right. it projects itself as an aggressive form of political engagement, but it’s really just a retreat into fantasy and nihilism
The difference is that Q Anon has numbers in the street and the Stalin people are just really good at drawing political class attention to themselves online. I cannot stress how much you can ignore them. You go to a big DSA meeting and there are maybe 2 of those dudes there. They represent nothing.
Other than that it’s just young punks being young punks. Same kind of talk that used to not get broadcast very much farther than zines and small press records. Been part and parlance of youth culture for 60 years or more.
Well because there’s more than zero who are there and the more dedicated & serious ML groups are so tiny as to be rounding errors of rounding errors when talking about the American polity. I have a certain amount of respect for spitting against the wind that hard, but there aren’t many of them.
Thankfully. I feel like a lot of these guys, if they did have their revolution, would mostly use is as an excuse to vent their urges for violence. That's the main thing keeping me from being pro rrevolution
It would actually be better if there were a lot more than two of those dudes there. I don't know how you can say "Q Anon has the numbers to make big changes and fuck up the entire country but it's a good thing these lefty wackjobs don't have the ability to effectively counter them" seriously.
Q Anon doesn't have the numbers to do revolutionary violence either, mostly they just talk a big game but aren't actually willing to actualize), the thing that QAnon is good for is providing a large crowd of weirdos to hide Oathkeepers in ( and the Oathkeepers are very willing to actualize violence)
Very little of right wing stochastic violence has been Q-Anon driven ( which is not 0, I can think of roughly 5 small scale events ), explicit white supremacist stuff is way more common especially for mass scale attacks.
A lot of Q-Anon folks are old Boomers like my 70-year-old MIL and my 78-year-old mother.
Those people aren't doing anything but bitching and posting right-wing memes on Facebook.
tbh this is heartening about the DSA? this is, now that I am typing it, very dumb of me, but I kind of assumed DSA was like 99% this. like "oh ok you want anarcho-soc or full communism and not actually dem-socialism but DSA is the farthest left we have"
Don’t judge literally anything by the people who are vocal about it online. Especially on any platform that runs on engagement driving algorithms. Personal online experience is the mother of all sampling biases.
that's very true. i think with this stuff, it's tough emotionally because it's like... it's not sports, it's not Star Trek, it's about real lives, real values, real stakes, and i want leftists & liberals to come up with stuff productively together online but... yeah yr right
Social Media replacing traditional media is the worst shit that has ever happened. There are literally AIs that take psychological profiles of us to match us with content that we will find especially annoying / enraging and then presents it in a way where it seems important. It’s like an evil spell.
