timemachineyeah
drives me up a wall living in a very very red district, like “no democrat is ever going to win any local election, let alone a real leftist” district, like “our school board members ran on who was the most anti-mask” red, like “I pass white supremacist signs on the way to buy weed” red
and being in the local leftist community and the guy who runs the anarchist book club and the lady who helps keep the warming shelters open and the people who marched on city hall when a local business was getting death threats for having a drag show are all members of a discord and we get on this discord and have frank discussions about how best to vote
the people who do the protests and the mutual aid and all the real work
going “okay, they’re both fascists, but this one lacks ambition and seems happy to just glide in the position” or “they both suck, but this one can be reasoned with if you frame it patriotically enough” like we don’t even have a democrat to vote for. we know what a vote is. we know what we hope accomplish with it. we know what it can do, and we know what it can’t.
and going from those discussions to here where people think that your vote is some kind of fucking??? enabling maneuver??? as if someone isn’t going to end up in that seat regardless of what you do???
we didn’t build this system, we just live in it. we’re just trying to survive. a vote isn’t a statement of your values, it’s not an endorsement, it’s not a marriage contract, it’s a strategic play you make to keep alive.
the biggest mistake I see leftists making is overestimating their own popularity. “well but everyone would be leftist if they just-” no, stop, 1) you can’t possibly know that 2) everyone will not just
that’s also true. i think there are a lot of selfish people that understand that if america came to live within its means and stopped profiting off of a lot of other people’s misfortune, that our collective quality of living would go down a little bit, and they’d rather see other people suffer than sacrifice any bit of convenience or luxury.
that kind of thinking is incongruent with altruism and those people need to be culled or reeducated.
This reminds me a bit of Singapore, where everyone with any money has a maid to clean around the house. It’s because the minimum wage for maids is really low. It’s about $400 to $600 per month for a live in maid, based on their country of origin. You pay less for maids from certain places (yes it’s pretty racist).
If they increased the minimum wage, the average Singaporean would not be able to afford a 24 hr maid. The funny thing is, people in developed countries mostly do not have maids and are not really worse off. The idea that Singapore would have a “lower standard of living” without maids is kind of silly to everyone else.
Unfortunately, your “reeducation” idea is really undemocratic and not altruistic. People in developed countries have a right to believe stupid things because conservative governments (monarchies) used to outlaw it. We already tried that and it didn’t work.
it does more good to get rid of the bad elements of society because they pave the way for a better society. we’ll never have the society that benefits all until we get rid of the barriers to it. everyone cannot be saved, and every minute we don’t take direct action to fix our society dooms millions more that have yet to be born, if not billions (not even counting the animal life affected by it). it’s a simple trolley problem. I temper my altruism with basic logic. you take the direct path to alleviating the suffering for the most creatures, not all creatures.
Once you create a tool, it will be used. And not necessarily for good.
“Reeducation” is bad in general, except for helping criminals or the mentally ill. Advocating it is an extremely authoritarian view that goes against all modern concepts of personal liberties (real ones, not “the freedom to cough everywhere”).
It indicates to me that you believe that you are 100% correct and will always be in power, so it will not be used against you. That’s not an altruistic view. That’s what a king believes.
Truth. The mission is to get the right tools to insure that that they can never be used to create suffering ever again.
Personal liberty is not as important to me as the welfare of all sentient beings.
It’s not that I think I’m 100% correct, but rather that there is a 99.9999% correct way to be stewards of this earth, and I believe that answer is attainable through science and reasoning. So much of global policy is decided by greed rather than altruism. It’s possible to set up a system that works towards humanitarian goals, but there are humans that don’t want to give up power and control, and they’re not all billionaires or governments. most of them are just ordinary people brainwashed by religion and tribalism. We will never be able to achieve anything like a utopia as long as those people are in the way. Reeducation is just a kinder alternative to the most logical course of action, and if you really think about the consequences of inaction, it’s imperative that we act soon.
All I want is for people to see that.