#two very hard pills to swallow: 1. art has always been created for money and it's a very normal practice in human history

[shiraishi--kanade]

"It's so embarrassing to admit I only create art for validation" did paleolithic humans not paint for other humans to see. Does a child making their first drawing to show their parents makes it any less valuable. Do gardens arranged for the visitors' eyes make the roses any less beautiful. Do love poems written for one person alone to hear make your heart ache less. You're fine

#jay rambles.txt #two very hard pills to swallow: 1. art has always been created for money and it's a very normal practice in human history #and actually artists being expected to produce art for free or as cheap as they do now is a relatively new thing #2. humans have always created art for validation because being recognised and understood by your fellow humans is a universal human need #if you start to idealise artistry as something inherently selfless that needs to come with no gain or benefits or instead brings only pain #you are going down a VERY dangerous path of not being able to express yourself without shame - if at all #and potentially dragging other people you told close down into that mentality too if you're vocal about it #I've been there #I am there #It's a shitty feeling but the only way out of it is true embrace your need to be loved and desire for human connection or it won't end well #idk that's my opinion tho

[evilelitest2]

So how do the rest of us get the dirtbag left to piss off?

You are speaking my language.  Its actually less hard than it should be, the dirtbag left isn’t that large it just seems larger because of how Twitter and Tumblr works.  The big thing we need to do get ride of those fuckers is to tap into their recruitment which means we need to very publicly talk about their issues.  THere are three main things we need to openly talk about, two of which are easy and one of which is...hard.  

1) Making it clear from the start that leftism and progressivism go hand in hand, that both of them come from the same place, the belief in human equality and justice.  

2) Make it clear that the so called “woke” values aren’t just good because they are morally good (though they are) but also because they are an objectively good idea and helps any real form of socialism.  Because again, treating gay people better isn’t just the right thing to do, it helps the nation.  Because having a large percentage of the population actually able to spend their time earning money, paying taxes, spending money and supporting social structures (to say nothing of their personal contributions to art/culture/science/entertainment ect) makes the society as a whole more healthy and productive.  Just to give a few examples

Keeping qualified women from working jobs that they can do better hurts everybody 

The sooner trans people can transition and get access to hormones and reach a state of emotional health the sooner they can actually live productive lives (constant misery does not make for a good citizen) 

The fact that about 40% of the US population is constantly denied access to good jobs, wages, education, opportunities, and cultural employment due to racism means that the nation isn’t benefiting from their possible contributions 

Making workplaces, even capitalist ones more gender neutral, racially/sexually diverse will produce better policies overall, because a lot of shitty elements of capitalism come from toxic masculinity, religious fundamentalisms  and white supremacy as much as it does from a pure profit motive

And even beyond those issues, no socialist policies are ever going to be enacted as long as otherwise marginalized people aren’t able to benefit from it  

Those are pretty easy arguments to make, we just need to make them loudly and do so even when the dirtbag left isn’t around.  Like we need to just openly state why intersectionality is a practical policy not just a moral one.  The last thing though...thats tricky because I think a lot of leftists don’t want to deal with it.  Which is

3) We need to do a better job of understanding conservatives

See we tend to understand Rightist as...failed leftists.  Like they just don’t know any better, if they weren’t so ignorant, they would accept our world view.  We just need to find a better way to explain equality to them and suddenly they would magically be on board.  And that ignores the biggest problem when you are dealing with a movement made up of bigots, fundamentalist's and conspiracy theorists, led by grifters and megalomaniacs...they like the policies that are enacted.  

The left has long believed that poor white men are voting against their own interest when they support bigoted policies that hurt them economically, but in many ways they are voting for their own interests if they view the world through a tribality “us vs. them” mindset...which they do.  ANd if they are a bunch of people who revel in the idea of hurting the weak and defining themselves as the sense of normal, and rejecting any notion of intellectualism.  I think Trump’s election really eye opening because every single evil, cruel, stupid, incompetent, and absurd policy was...openly cheered on by his cultists.  The notion that conservative voters are “misguided” or “misled” is hard to reconcile when you see how much they reveled in the images of immigrant children being taken away from their families, how much they delighted in Trump rejecting science and intellectualism, how they cheered him on every time he advocated torture, deportations, abuses', cruelty, and violating human rights, and finally how they were delighted when the police opened fire on unarmed protestors.  The Dirtbag’s left argument is that the average MAGA voter is a good old boy who is really just a good person who disagrees with you and wants to be able to swear, and that image is one that leftists created because white people don’t want to acknowledge that their family members would have been little Nazis if they had been around in 30s Germany.  And that is the big hurtle we have to address, that a about 60-74 million Americans are not just ok with but actively rooting for conspiracy theories, anti intellectualism, mass murder, torture, child abuse, dictatorship, racism, sexism, homophobia, and above all cruelty.  And that they will do so at the expense of their own self interest, these people are letting themselves die of Covid in order to support a man who will hurt the people they hate.  

And that is sort of the most difficult pill for the left to swallow, because the left still is in love with the Roussouian idea that most people are fundamentally good and its just systems that make them bad, and we don’t want to abandon that. And the dirtbag left takes advantage of that to provide a really comforting narrative to a lot of leftistst

“Oh Trump supporters aren’t really cruel selfish cultists who worship willing ignorance, they are just misunderstood, if we just use more slurs they will come around to our way of thinking”

The left really needs to understand that they really do believe what their actions indicate.  Its the same problem we had with post war Germany, the whole idea that “oh only the leadership were evil, most Germans didn’t know anything” when in reality most Germans (and really most Europeans) were complicit in antisemitism and dictatorship long before Hitler came to power.  The left never likes to believe the worse in people, the right is always too willing to do so.  

#ask evilelitest #the left #dirtbag left #Cruelty is the point #Alt Right Playbook #Hobbes #jean jacques rousseau