Oh, give it a rest. I don’t go to all this trouble because the people I encounter online “disgust” me. I’ve been at this since 2015 - I’m allowed a certain level of jadedness, I reckon. It’s really hard to be disgusted by text. The text allows me to build a pretty decent model of the dominant ideological narratives that a given person has been exposed to and/or internalized (which is rarely a conscious thing), but that is all. The purpose those narratives serve often ends up angering me because I witness their consequences in real life every time I walk down the street - but it’s perfectly safe to assume that none of the people I meet on here and argue with had much of a hand in creating or entrenching those narratives. These narratives (and the reality they serve to enable and justify) are bigger than us. There is no point in individualizing it - at least, not when it comes to us proles.
Ideology is something that happens to us - all of us. It’s not a personal failing.
I’m not exactly sure what it is you are trying to achieve with this discourse… it seems to me that you are trying to make a case for collaboration with formal power, and aren’t sure why leftists (at least, leftists of the non-technocratic persuasion) reject such a collaboration. That is no mystery - we understand what formal power exists to do. There are only two ways in which those at the bottom can enact change that better our lot in life - you either force change out of the status quo in the form of concessions, or you enforce a new status quo. Each is risky and dangerous (for a multitude of reasons) - but so is doing nothing. Waiting for “nicer” people to change things “from the inside” has never helped anyone except in the self-congratulatory mythologies peddled by the very same kind of people these concessions had to be forced from in the first place.
So there’s an irreconcilable difference right there - I have seen nothing in my years that will convince me that you can build anything that can be called democratic with a straight fae within the rarefied confines of institutionalized power. The best you could hope for is something that power will happily call “democratic” but that will purely exist to serve the interests of said institutionalized power - which pretty much describes the (so-called) “democratic” processes we are goaded into particpating in by the political establishment every few years. It’s not designed to allow our participation - it’s designed to prevent it.
I’d say that if we want something that can actually be called democratic we are going to have to build it in opposition to institutionalized power - that is what we have historically been forced into doing, and that hasn’t changed one bit.
You don’t say.
Oh, give it a rest. I don’t go to all this trouble because the people I encounter online “disgust” me. I’ve been at this since 2015 - I’m allowed a certain level of jadedness, I reckon. It’s really hard to be disgusted by text. The text allows me to build a pretty decent model of the dominant ideological narratives that a given person has been exposed to and/or internalized (which is rarely a conscious thing), but that is all. The purpose those narratives serve often ends up angering me because I witness their consequences in real life every time I walk down the street - but it’s perfectly safe to assume that none of the people I meet on here and argue with had much of a hand in creating or entrenching those narratives. These narratives (and the reality they serve to enable and justify) are bigger than us. There is no point in individualizing it - at least, not when it comes to us proles.
Ideology is something that happens to us - all of us. It’s not a personal failing.
I’m not exactly sure what it is you are trying to achieve with this discourse… it seems to me that you are trying to make a case for collaboration with formal power, and aren’t sure why leftists (at least, leftists of the non-technocratic persuasion) reject such a collaboration. That is no mystery - we understand what formal power exists to do. There are only two ways in which those at the bottom can enact change that better our lot in life - you either force change out of the status quo in the form of concessions, or you enforce a new status quo. Each is risky and dangerous (for a multitude of reasons) - but so is doing nothing. Waiting for “nicer” people to change things “from the inside” has never helped anyone except in the self-congratulatory mythologies peddled by the very same kind of people these concessions had to be forced from in the first place.
So there’s an irreconcilable difference right there - I have seen nothing in my years that will convince me that you can build anything that can be called democratic with a straight fae within the rarefied confines of institutionalized power. The best you could hope for is something that power will happily call “democratic” but that will purely exist to serve the interests of said institutionalized power - which pretty much describes the (so-called) “democratic” processes we are goaded into particpating in by the political establishment every few years. It’s not designed to allow our participation - it’s designed to prevent it.
I’d say that if we want something that can actually be called democratic we are going to have to build it in opposition to institutionalized power - that is what we have historically been forced into doing, and that hasn’t changed one bit.