How do you guys deal with being surrounded by fucking idiots? Everywhere I look...

How do you guys deal with being surrounded by fucking idiots? Everywhere I look, there's some news article of Trump doing something fucking retarded. Every comments section is inevitably filled with the politically illiterate. I hop on a video game, general chat has some cuck shilling for that retarded meaningless slogan. I hope on Facebook, my righty friends are acting like they're the fucking resistance, arguing with my lefty friends, who are acting like they're the fucking resistance. It's the newest thing to talk about like you have some fucking idea about what you're about. I'm so fucking tired, Jesus fucking Christ. How do you deal with it?

Blaze it

Sadly this is the world we live in. Everyone is eager to give their hot take and not realise that no one gives a shit. Politics has become the new shitty reality TV show.

By applying the wisdom of our old comrade Posadas, of course!

I start on the premise that people who seem stupid to me aren't necessarily stupid.

And then I off myself.

That said, if you're 'Merican I'd be willing to work on a project to help you pass the time before I can an hero. How should we improve the world?

Stop getting bothered by the fact that social media is filled with propaganda.
The painful truth is that the majority of the proletariat are fucking mouth-breathers who care more about scandals and such as the previous poster mentioned and don't have an ounce of critical thinking when it comes to politics. Once you accept this as a fact it becomes much more bearable I guess.

Get off the internet.

Not before he gives me a project.

Come on, OP. I'm dumb and broke and I don't wanna be sitting around being NEET. I wanna do something in the city to make it better.

What do you want from me? If more people thought like that, this trashcan of a political environment wouldn't exist.

Are you OP or the person I replied to directly just then?

Idk. Like if you have info to spread or something. I already walk like 10 miles a lot of days, and I can print out pamphlets or whatever and just put them in every box on the way to basically nothing.

I mean, they'd have to be small and more like flyers cuz there's not that much ink. Or maybe I could like report on something locally, like just give info about what's going on at our state capitol or something.

I'm OP. On that subject, I'd recommend flyers hosting workshops where you can encourage political discourse. Have a goal in mind and welcome all comers. Sharpen up on debate skills of course, lots of trolls will no doubt drop by, but it's a small step to get involved at the most grass-roots level. On a larger scale, you can contact your congresspeople, visit town hall meetings, join community landscaping projects, etc.

At the risk of sounding hokey: Once in a long while you are at the right time at the right place and find the right words in a discussion with someone who is miraculously able to reflect and you can make society a tiny bit less painful to live in.

Deal with it by actually knowing what you're talking about and knowing how to keep your emotions check in public

Right, I probably can't organize that stuff. Was hoping there'd be something immediate to distribute, but that's probably a bit stupid.

I actually live in one of the newly contested districts, but contacting congress is a hobby I sometimes indulge otherwise. Will see about Town Halls though but dunno if any are gonna happen that soon. Good to hear advice, though.

DUDE

I'm doing my part by arguing on Holla Forums now and then because I actually can't help myself. I've got the trainwreck syndrome bad. My happiest moment was someone actually using the words "I concede" after a discussion.

It's not that I hate all political discussion, just how much I'm subjected to on the daily. It's fucking eye rape. And it doesn't help that it's all idpol nonsense.


This makes it worse. Then I'm just angry and it ruins the feel.

I always assumed that this was par for the course in this political "movement".

Perhaps we can seek a more meaningful mission together, then. What has meaning to you on the local level where you are? On the national level in politics?

I guess it's less advice I'm looking for and more interested in hearing how other people deal and do things.

As far as the local level, I try to keep up with my community. I live in a pretty blue state and so there's not much difference I can make outside of trying to lobby for infrastructure amendments, which I'm not well-read enough on to try to take larger positions. I help out my neighbors with chores, I do gardening and intro ecology volunteer workshops for those interested. It helps and it makes the community nicer, and that's of course important, but, man, there is a deep poison in this country, and I have no idea how to address it outside of constant political discourse, which is fucking exhausting.

Step 1: Leave leftypol
Step 2: Immediately be around less idiots

smart posed

I whittle down my contact with other people to a bare minimum.
I'm already down to

Every conversation everyone has is propaganda. The more you realize this the more you realize you can't have fun without talking about politics anymore.

Just sit back and enjoy the Spectacle.

Wait, you mean that there exist people who don't drop alcohol into themselves?

Just gotta wait for the boomers to die out. They are the gullible ones.

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its a sad truth tbh. im lucky i have 2-3 friends and a gf who arent falsely conscious and smart enough to discuss shit with. but most people are just husks of insecurity and alienation with a wrapper of stupidity on top.

Get with the times people, tell people that you're either for or against trump on facebook if you want to change the world.

Not knowing who Hegel is doesn't make someone stupid. I understand you believe you've found the secret to life and you're better than everybody else, but the truth is you're not, and arrogant assholes like you and everyone else in this thread are a big obstacle to organizing people.

Try living in the southern US for 20 years.

You don't have to think you're better than everyone else to realize 90% of people are shit.
I'm worse than 90% of people, but they're not better enough to escape the scope of being shit.

If you want to organise people, offer free alcohol at the end.

well ye it does. not understanding the materialist dialectic of history makes you a retard. im not spiteful about it either, its just the sad truth.


not true at all. in fact it's the opposite, people who realize the proles are dumb as fuck are the ones who set out to organize and guide them. it's retard anarkiddies like you that believe people will shed their false consciousness spontaneously and we'll all hold hands and live in full communism happily ever after. case and point, im a member of my country's vanguard party while you shitpost on Holla Forums all day getting mad at people who read books you cant understand

I mean, in the interest of actual discussion the simple absence of knowledge doesn't make you stupid.

Really, the presence of incorrect knowledge is infinitely more frustrating than the absence of it. Any idiot can be made to understand the broad generalities of how it all works if you get to them first. ("Just trust me, we've got to kill the bourgoise.") The problem is, of course, overarching culture gets to them first ("Just trust me, free, deregulated markets lead to prosperity.") and then it becomes incredibly hard to scrub this background noise. (And I don't deny it's present: It's just in my case, the background-noise preference is for public services, leading to the inherent distrust for those who want to cut them and so on and so forth.)

That's really the nebulous thing though. A wrong smart person is the worst thing in the world, because they're smart enough to actually defend their wrong position quite well, sometimes better than you can be to counter it. With a stupid person you can eventually just duck out and laugh at their stupid phraseology and try to make them feel inferior if you're convinced they're never going to come over to being convinced.

In conclusion: humans are emotional creatures and you should always try to make them upset if they disagree with you. Or poke their eyes out.

I feel for you user. Maybe don't spend so much time wasted on discussion that ultimately don't matter. Read a nice book, or train yourself not to talk about politics and then have some discussion with friends about a hobby or something. Just take some edge off the nerves.

Yes, most proles are stupid, but not understanding something you've never heard of does not make you retarded.

ye i was mostly referring to the moxy that accompanies many people with incorrect knowledge


no it doesn't, vehemently supporting your position despite never having read a book in your life and the general moxy the average "trust me mate ive done my research" type of prole shows is what makes them retarded.

Day after day, this board catalogs its hate for "the working class" (rarely does anyone here acknowledge themselves to be working class, most likely because it's middle class assholes that populate these pages), old people, "boomers," nonwhites, women, and gay people.

Yet you still pretend to be left. You're not on the left. You're a social reactionary who fulfills the worst stereotypes the right paints the left with. You actually don't care about people, you care about getting power and lording over those you deem inferior.

also


you're literally the "wrong people" defending wrong knowledge you fucking lump of human cancer. i hope you're shitposting with that flag

I am working class mate, even the middle class is still working class. acknowledging that the average prole is uneducated and stupid doesn't change that, wanting to guide them through a vanguard party is the essence of leftism.

your pseudo-humanist attitude of "everyone's opinion matters" or the anarkiddie "everyone is good deep inside" rhetoric is what's not leftist. you're the type that wouldn't teach the peasants in 1917 how to read and write, but "have a conversation" and "try to hear THEIR side of the story" or some shit like that.

god i wish liberals left this board and gtfo back to reddit

New developments in socialist theory, guys

not exactly new lad

Man, these pictures are getting downhill. At first they hit home because they were true but now they don't sting as much.

I was a socdem, my background knowledge is socdem. Insofar as "managing capitalism" to be less shit goes, social democracy is the answer. Arguably the absolute peak of humanity was during the era of the pseudo-social-democratic consensus.

That said I've completely crashed out of faith in people being able to implement socdem policies on a grand scale instead of as simple palliatives to the misery of neoliberalism. I still want capitalists to know I'm right so that when things get even worse and they suffer too, they know as much.

Now I'm really more of a doomsayer, but there's no flag for that. See, it's all well and good to say that capitalism is the problem (it is) and that it needs to be replaced (it does), but here's the great thing - and the thing most theorists seem to hold in the background: we have a serious fucking time limit on overthrowing or mitigating capitalism before it literally wipes out humanity. Me? I've already given up. I'm just postponing suicide until I get to laugh at some neoclassical economist or another drink the acid-water. (Or more ideally, completely ignore politics and die from the carbon monoxide atmosphere while trainspotting.)

fuck did i just get goaded into giving legitimate discussion instead of telling you to chug a bottle of rat poison for being rude to me?


are you saying this isn't the perfect representation of chad?

I plan on getting the fuck out of the US the first chance I get and never going back.

I listen to some "Aviators" tbh. Helps the pain of life go away. Oh right, then I get super pissed off again

go fuck yourself faggot, most people here is aware of being worker class.

Fixed the image

I dunno, it's a bit weird. You're claiming that anarchos, leftcoms, and Kauts are all not T R U E leftists because they don't follow its E S S E N C E. So the vast majority of leftists is not really leftist to you.

socdem isnt the answer, its just another safety net for capitalism. syriza is a bright example, people's mandate to tell the IMF to fuck off and of course they betrayed the people like they had been doing since ww1.


people that don't embrace dialectical analysis and thought aren't leftists. they aren't capable of instigating change, hence lumpenproles with no revolutionary potential.


didnt know kids playing pretend communism in abandoned houses, a niche stream of revisionism with some 100 followers and socdem capitalists constituted the majority of "leftists". here i was thinking capitalism isn't leftism to begin with user

Hm your analysis still seems weak to me. You're not a leftist by virtue of your theoretical competence. You are a left-winger if you want left-wing solutions; these are usually qualified as progression or equality. We usually define leftists at the hand of the ends they desire, not the means they use to do so. So, you would be a vanguardist leftist. Not *just* a leftists.
I just realized I'm just bitching about semantics like an autist.

Early kautsky wasn't socdem in the sense that we know it, hell, Lenin was a fan back then. Wasn't Lenin's party originally the Social Democratic Labour party or whatever?

theory is the core of the movement, praxis without theory is meaningless.


you are writing empty platitudes with no real arguments. you are a leftist because you want to wage class warfare with the goal of worker control of the means of production, so you actively work towards this goal in a systematic and organized approach.


problem is, if i state i desire x but actively work against it my statement on what i desire is kinda meaningless


yes socdems and communists weren't separate political entities for the majority of the 19th century and the start of the 20th. again, you are arguing in a relativistic way typical of a postmodernist liberal. socdems were proven to be class traitors on many occasions, from their support of ww1 up to tsipras and syriza's betrayal of the people's mandate they were given. saying "x wasn't a murderer before he started murdering though!" isn't really an argument about anything

these keep getting funnier and more depressing, "spills beer on himself and the table" made me want to die

nah this shit hits home way harder than the others. Alcohol ettiquette is just another thing that chad does noticably better and incels handle like retards. They should have added behaviors like being a fag/emotional when you're drunk, being inappropriately forward with women (and failing terribly, as an incel) and then getting away with mass mayhem while drunk as Chad since Chad's seem to be allowed to break any property or noise laws while they're fucked up and never go to jail

My vast intellect does provide some comfort

But i am the idiot

Okay, so how about we call this the definition of leftism and call it a day?


Yes, we would call this stupid or incorrect leftism, whatever. I'd still call it leftism. Just like a fascist is not suddenly no longer a fascist when he suddenly believes something that will probably not lead to fascism.


Yeah I agree there. I probably wouldn't call people leftists when they actively collaborate with the social order they were supposed to destroy.

Being left doesn't necessitate loving anyone. You can hate every last person on the planet and still want to end capitalism.

it is the definition of leftism. but the streams of ideology you call leftist either denounce organized class warfare in favour of some miraculous "spontaneous worker awakening" or straight up don't fight capitalism at all like socdems. neither of those things are therefor leftist.

what i'd call "incorrect" (your terminology) leftism would be maoism and it's peasant guerilla tactics, but anarchists for example aren't leftists by definition.


fascism is the perfect example to illustrate my point. they claim not to be capitalists, they claim to be some 3rd way outside of class struggle but in reality they are simply another safety net for neoliberalism masking itself with militarist tribalist idpol.


so out of your 3 examples, you admit 1 isn't even an example. so we are left with anarchists? i can write you a wall of text about why anarchists aren't leftists. since you agreed with me on my definition of leftism, you do also realize anarchists are against organized workers movements and believe the workers will spontaneously shread their false consciousness one day and live happily ever after right? Anarchist political praxis literally consists of burning down shit and taking over abandoned buildings. Most of them haven't even read their own shitty theory, let alone marx or hegel

Yeah but they also don't claim to be left.


No, I agreed that the moment you actively collaborate with the social order, you stop acting like a leftist. If you do so constantly, you're not a leftist anymore. Kautsky was a leftist before he supported WW1, I'd say.


For some anarchists, there's a case to be made that they are reactionary, so in some cases I'd agree. But, then again, many anarchists are committed to large-scale organization and syndicalism. They just don't get anything done.

And, often, anarchos act stupid (Oh I'm so against the state but my little collective will have pages of rules plastered all over the walls). I still just don't agree that bad praxis ensures you're not left-wing. I don't believe in vanguardism, but I acknowledge that the ideology behind it is still left-wing. The ends intended are still leftist.

i didnt say they did. i said they claim not to be neoliberal, when in fact they are.


so in essence you're just trying to justify your worldview here. by definition, if you're against organizing the workers and just play pretend communism with your m8s in empty buildings you're essentially just another lumpenprole. thats a truth whether you're willing to admit it or not

Hm, corporatism isn't exactly neoliberal tho. Income inequality is not the definition of neoliberalism.


Tbf with you, at this point I'm a bit nihilistic about whether anything whatsoever can get us to communism.

any form of laissez-frair economics with some token social safety net is neoliberal

Hm, I'd say that is ordoliberalism. Neoliberalism, if closely related, would be mostly the application of individualistic economic principles to every part of society. A sort of hyper-liberalism. That's foucault's theory anyhow, I guess I agree. As a term it is often overused- a point Harvey makes in his history of neoliberalism, I think. Not all societies are actively neoliberal.

Why did you have to post that picture, now I feel bad for a frog labeled as /r/The_Donald

Sorry… it was one of the few semi-related pictures I had. I like this user's more though:

Can you blame anyone here?
If the masses are so stupid they prefer to be enslaved then to be free, then I don't blame most people here wanting to instal a dictatorship.

not all are, but neoliberalism has global hegemony at the moment

Yes I can. It's a failure of political imagination and a failure of empathy.

Def. the ideology of it, I would agree there.

Yeah, there's no excuse to be a dick.

Graduating college, finding my first job and realise that people around me have their reasons and angles for doing what they are doing, and that something I might be sure about might be wrong.

Yeah, you should always remember that smarter people than you have held and hold wrong, yet well thought-out, opinions.

I always try to remember I might be totally wrong in about everything I hold to be true.

All this Russia shit on the news 24/7 is making me want to kill myself

Confusing this place for Holla Forums perhaps? Return to reddit, faggot.

Maybe I should just give up. Every time I talk to him I just end up sounding like a smug know-it-all bookworm and treat him like trash for not knowing his shit. I don't think I have a superiority complex but I get mad when morons ruin the image of the left by saying dumb shit.

If your friend is actually a communist, then he must know that he needs to educate himself because otherwise he will be no better than a radical liberal. Give him this, it should help.

tryna do this but so far my gf's only knowledge about communism is r/fullcommunism memes and such. and she sometimes shares 'woke' instagram posts about cultural appropriation and such. feels bad man.

might actually do this. my local communist party are complete tankies. I'm a pretty soft ML (what I mean is I don't feel the need to defend every action of Stalin or the USSR, or fetishize the soviet aesthetic), but the people in the party are actually really fucking cool.

there's too much, I haven't even got through much of Marx' work yet. how 2 read faster

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This is actually true. Holla Forums embodies the worst of the right, Holla Forums embodies the worst of the left.

Actually Twitter embodies the worst of the left. They're the ones that make up 99% of "lefty" stereotypes.

Your mom embodies the worst of the left when I spunk up her snatch.

Nah, IMO pol is the best of the right , leftypol is the best of the left.

Haha self-deprecation is so profound.

t. tankie

Leftypol is what happens when you take the left, sift the pricks from the self-righteous pricks, and create an image-board

I don't.

Leftypol is what happens when capitalism sucessfully commodified any revolutionary action and destroyed/absorbed any of the moderately sucessful movements of the 20th century, leaving leftism as nothing more then an outlet to the frustrations of inescapeable capitalism

I constantly talk shit about everyone and nobody in real life knows my actual political leanings except for my closest friends.

Realize 9/10 of them think you are one of the unenlightened idiots surrounding them and the rest are just beta idiots

Fam, this is the last kingdom of the left that does not succumb idpol sinners.

I don't careeven about lording anything afterwards, I just won't let the rest of the psychos ruin the world by themselves.