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Hijacking to point out to both the dumb lefty lemmies and the dumb righty lemmies that this is an amazing case study in the failure of people to separate their culture from their politics. I apologize for using you as a prop, vector_zero, but you signed up in this thread so I assume it's all good?
Here we have a person who believes that are right wing, but lives in a decidedly left wing location. What examples do they provide to demonstrate their right-winged-ness? Gun culture, cooking, sewing, quilting, home projects. Note the absolute lack of policy. When pressed about actual politics further in the thread, we get things like "yeah we need to fix gun violence, healthcare, and the economy, but I don't think any of the solutions I've heard will work." Essentially we have here a person who is completely disengaged from the reality of politics, but places high value on their culture and identity, having confused one for the other in the process.
This is all reinforced by the fact that this person lived in left wing area and is active here on a left wing website, where their self-identification as "right wing" earns them demonization, along with some doomed attempts at political discourse. Since vector_zero only really cares about their identity and culture, the demonization is all they notice, internalize, and respond to. It provides a pressure that actually validates and encourages their perceived need to stand up for and defend their cultural values. The political discourse is entirely ignored because vector_zero does not actually care about or understand politics. Meanwhile, the attacking lefties are blind to this miscommunication, characterizing it as "convenient dismissal of the real issues." No, it's not convenient dismissal, it's literally a disability: Our supposed "right wing" friend actually does not have the capacity to see beyond their shoelaces and understand how their emotional reaction to being personally attacked translates into large-scale impact for the rest of the world. So they go out and vote red (or not, since they are "powerless") without any understanding of what the consequences may be.
Perhaps the lefties as well are so blind to the importance of identity and culture that they suffer from the same "convenient dismissal" of the content of the discussion that vector_zero values. That's harder to say, but it's an interesting supposition. If that is the case, then we're doomed to go around in circles and continue beating each other until morale improves. But maybe not, maybe one or the other can recognize the tragedy for what it is and learn how to engage with it in a more constructive way.
It's painfully obvious to me that everyone involved here actually wants the same things, and there's a very clear education plan to get us all together on the same track. vector_zero simply needs to be made aware that left wing culture and identity is actually almost the same as right wing culture and identity. That absolutely nothing of themselves would be lost or reduced by voting for a democrat every once in a while. The difference is the policies, and since vector_zero doesn't actually understand or care about those, there isn't really any reason for them to hold up the label of "right wing."
You can just be a guy who likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day.
Signed: A guy who also likes guns, simple living, enjoying the day-to-day with the wife, and wants to retire one day, but also votes democrat every time because I don't want anybody else to get hurt along the way.
I would say one word covers a great deal of this (but certainly not all of it) - Tribalism.
People engaging politics in the same way as they engage sports, taking sides, living it almost entirelly at an emotional level, unquestioning of the superficial ideas (at times no more than slogans) they parrot and with thinking at best relegated to a supporting role as a "solver of puzzles" to come up with counter-"arguments" to those of the "other" side.
Whether one thinks oneself Left or Right (and, frankly, if you haven't tought through your politics in my opinion you're not really politically aware enough to be either), really analysing the pap one is fed by politicians in light of one's personal principles and of "how will this lead to the World I would like to live in" is usually quite the eye openner.
I basically agree, but I think we should also think about this in a solution-oriented way at a large scale, beyond just personally opening one's own eyes.
Tribalism is part of our nature. It's not necessarily a bad thing, and it's fun. It makes us feel good to belong. The sports analogy is frequently brought up and is the example of tribalism being leveraged for entertainment and social bonding. It's a clever way to us to short-circuit our instinct for tribal warfare and use it for something constructive and fun instead of destructive and tragic.
Politicians and media outlets have started using this insidiously for their own powergames. Maybe this is too cynical, but it seems to me that the circus has been poisoned. You hear about all these people who "aren't into politics" but will repeat their CNN and Fox soundbytes. There's nothing terribly wrong with being personally apathetic about politics, in fact that's the norm for those people currently benefitting the most from existing policy, but it's terribly dishonest and destructive to lure such people into the political arena when they have no sincere interest in the impact of their political decisions, but a few powerful people benefit and countless powerless people suffer.
How do we reclaim our circus? Do we really just need more ESPN and less CNN? Can we punish politicians and news sources for the pervasion and perversion of information as infotainment? Can we educate people to source their identity from their family and culture instead of from their senator?
I wouldn't be so sure that Sports tribalism is healthy.
Tribalism in Sports repeatedly leads people down certain mental pathways in contexts involving many people divided in groups and were one has chosen a groups, as well as personal identification with a group based on things with would otherwise be irrelevant, which familiarizes people with such ways of thinking about oneself and others.
Because the choice of the mental pathways we use when confronted with a situation is not conscious, it leads itself to us favouring what's familiar from similar contexts, so repeatedly leading people down the tribalist route in Sports can be an insidious way to predispose them to go down the exact same route in contexts were the same kind of pattern exists, such as nationalism, politics, race and so on.
All this, by the way, is not too dissimilar to some of the psychological levers used by Modern Marketing.
Consider the possibility that the culture created around the circus both feeds from and feeds in the equally mindless cultures that have been created in things like politics and nationalism.
The crux of this is whether Us vs Them is instinctual or learned. I don't think we yet have a definitive answer, but certainly Us vs Them is so ingrained in our ways of life that removing it would be extraordinarily difficult.
Again, I may be excessively cynical, but my belief is that some people, maybe even most people, WILL take these mental pathways you describe no matter what, and the best we can do is provide distractions. Bread and circuses. At their best, these distractions channel our self-destructive tendencies into harmless oceans of impunity. At their worst, they are hijacked by ne'er-do-wells to transform the apathetic into frothing zealots of a cause they don't even care to understand. It becomes the responsibility of those who are paying attention to design a system that is resistant to abuse.
Presuming I am wrong, that means that there is a path for society to eliminate competitiveness from its apparent nature. I agree that would lead us toward utopia, but I am very skeptical such a path exists, and that those who attempt to follow it will simply be eaten by the wolves they believe they can train.
I mainly agree with you on that.
I expect people might learn to "decorate" those things differently (i.e. cheerful well humoured competitiveness rather than the kind were the fans of the opposing team are almost treated as "badies") but I doubt most people will ever loose or overcome what are probably well rooted instincts.
I love your comment. As someone who's perpetually hung up on others' misaligned discourse on major issues, it feels so refreshing to see it pointed out and articulated better than I could've done.
out of curiosity, did you use a bot to write this? something about the frequency with which you use their username to refer to them stood out to me.
if that's not the case, I wonder why it is that using a proper name instead of a pronoun or stand-in reference jumps out to me as unnatural...
I've just been on the internet a long time and pride myself on writing with precision. I am a rather bot-like writer, Narrrz.
I've noticed a tendency of late by some in confusing step-by-step building of arguments in written form with the product of Chat AIs.
Don't know if it's meant as an insult, is a way to try and plant doubt in the minds of the audience without actually addressing the argument being made, or if it's people genuinelly not being familiar with structured thinking (which, for example, tends to be common amongst scientists and engineers because of their work) hence feeling it's machine-like.
This really is how people trained in analytical thinking will figure things out, build theories and put together solutions and if you're any good at it will most definitelly not include "decorations" such emotionally charged language.
(The funny bit is that Chat GPT and the like would be less unemotional, as those things are text-assemblers incapable or rationalization and trained in general language samples, so they actually fluff-up text like most people).
Are you possibly reading far too much into someone who simply doesn't want to debate politics at the moment?
"Left-wing identity and culture is almost the same as right-wing culture"
I fully agree, both embrace vacuous and contradictory ideals, care little for facts, and have a streak of individuals that really really want to kill.
Being ignorant of policy and perceiving any slight as a personal attack is a sign of a right wing voter. You know those studies that show conservative voters have higher disgust reflexes? This guy is the poster child. Downvotes?! The horror!
Then it should be obvious to you that inflaming those emotions isn't a productive way to engage. What point are you making other than, "yeah, he's a moron! fuck him!" Good for you?