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As the general level of educated/informed people decreases or morphs into whatever the fuck people are becoming now, with attention spans of gnats and more cynicism than wits, we are going to have to embrace this fact of life harder than ever. We have to consolidate messaging, stick to key ideas that average, nihilistic idiots can connect with like class-war/wealth-disparity, and we need to FLOOD online spaces with these kinds of shorts, memes and clips to make points.
There is a joke going around. “How do you know it wasn’t a real leftist who shot Charlie Kirk? Easy, he would have needed several thousand rounds to write his messages on.”
We have to make our messages less wordy and preachy. Nobody cares.
Let me reiterate that. The thing you care about? NOBODY CARES. At least not nearly enough people for it have momentum. If we want people to care, we have to use short, succinct and biting memes and short-form media to spark an emotion, to ignite the briefest glimmer of empathy, sympathy or rage directed at the proper people and forces.
We have to stop sharing our tired, self-indulgent memes, we have to stop trying to “point out hypocrisy” or make people aware of how the product or media they love is “problematic.” Start making fun of Stephen Miller’s height. Start calling them “weird” again. Start making fun of how they look. Start using terms and attacks you find distasteful and disrespectful. Show AI pics of cute children and animals looking sad and abandoned because of Trump’s policies.
Our care and compassion and avoidance of confrontation about these issues, as well as our fear of offending our allies is being used against us, and as a result we will lose everything.
Hard agree. I have pushed for using the tactics of the enemy against them for a long time. It is usually met with “high road” flavored resistance.
Let’s appropriate the word “re tard”, apply it to Republicans. “That’s what the ® next to their name stands for after all.” This shit practically writes itself.
When someone says that’s offensive to people with mental disabilities, act incredulous. “Why would I refer to someone with a mental disability as a re tard? Not everyone with a mental disability is a Republican.”
Apologies for the spelling. I’m on .ml
While I fully agree, I can’t even say that in Lemmy, it’s the “word of peak performatism” that leftists cling to to paint people as “bad” like many other pointless, cringe social battles that don’t lead to outcomes of any kind, much less good outcomes.
We have to stop policing language, we have to stop policing people who have bad attitudes or dumb-pseudo-racism that we all know can be turned around with 10 minutes of conversation if we made the effort. We have to realign our priorities to the life-threatening, existential threats to our lives and futures, like wealth inequality, oligarchy, wage theft and unemployment, education and social safety nets and preparing for climate change. These are not areas that the right has a leg to stand on, nor a real desire to fight broadly, we just get turned off by the small minority who are loudest. We have to stop butting heads with people who do not care about the things we do, thinking if we just “frame the perfect argument” they will suddenly care about other humans. We CAN change people though if we make the effort, if we have a shred of emotional intelligence we’re still a thousand times smarter than them, so it’s wild so many on this side are so afraid to engage. We don’t make the effort to talk to them because too many sensitive tulips on the left perceive insults and schoolyard taunts as “oppression” and use that as an excuse to hide, to stay in safe spaces like this one. (Of course real oppression exists, but we have to get better at identifying what hurts us and what just hurts our feelings, the lack of nuance on both sides is killing us.)
Too many on this side are exactly the same as the right, in that they want vindication and vengeance instead of a better world. They want to see the people they hate suffer, and still are the side who point out “hypocrisy” as a rhetorical weapon. They don’t want to organize coordinated narratives and storylines for dumb people to connect with, they want to police other leftists for using specific words or not being gentle enough with their audiences or pets.
We’re going to end up the most morally superior refugees being herded into the camps by robots.
I’ve taken to saying that I’d call them that, but I wouldn’t want to disparage the mentally disabled
The problem has never been the words, but how they’re directed.
The right broadly has no concept of “punching down” and just see anyone different than themselves as threats that need to punched. But they do love to twist our words against us, to use our kindness and empathy to get us to reconsider our language, leaving us spinning in circles worried that the actual effective ammunition we have against them might hurt the wrong people.
Meanwhile they will carpet bomb entire populations with hateful policies and rhetoric without second thought. This is their strength, it’s why they are gaining numbers and have won so much ground.
I don’t think we should make a “movement” to be “allowed” to use slurs, but we definitely have to stop caring about and policing those who have no qualms about directing painful language upwards.
Don’t even mock Miller’s height, his eyes are so much easier to mock. They’re as bright and sunny as an Alaskan Christmas eve. He’s so soulless that hed be instantly destroyed upon contact with collard greens. He’s a weird little loser man who’s hurting people and doesn’t even have the decency to like it
The issue is he would take all of that as a compliment.
I need to start giving TED talks about how conservatives think and what their weaknesses actually are.
Yes, yes body shaming is bad, we get that. We all get that. But they do it because it’s literally all they understand. These are the most superficial of our species, these are the people who are racist and demonic because they’re bothered by how people look or talk different than themselves. They are far, far shallower than we can even imagine, but we project all this sinister, machiavellian intention on everything they do. No, they’re just insecure about their height, their hair, and if they’re sexually desirable. Every last one of 'em. This has been a motivating factor for fascism for centuries.
But they do love the villain aesthetics, they are the people who saw the dark, evil characters in WWE and said “I wish I was scary and badass like HIM” and thought it was real.
Memes… the DNA of the soul…
🙄
I mean, plenty of great OG leftists out there with great knowledge to pass down. Most of my college profs were anti-tankie left-wing types.
Ah, those were the days… when hope still existed as a glimmer in my heart…
I reject the notion that liberals will go on to do far greater things than the leftists who taught them. But I am open to the idea that I’m overthinking the meme
Without a theory of change, or centering human experience in our analysis, leftists wont go on to do anything meaningful either.
Flesh simulator has a good video on this kind of thing
What is flesh simulator
a youtuber he has a thing about hoe it can be effective to correct someone through memes that makes them rethink stuff but I feel I might not be explaining it right
Oh I get it, it’s just that the name sounds morbid and weird.
I’ll go check it out, thanks for the suggestion.
Leftists, the OG internet warriors. If only they could step away from their keyboards long enough to vote.
The last several presidential elections had the highest voter turnouts in US history, including the highest turnout of youth voters in recorded US history. Our problem is not turnout, it’s education and information on actual policy and issues - as exit polling showed most people who voted for Trump had no political knowledge past whatever memes they saw on Facebook, and generally associated the price of groceries with whoever was in charge at the time, and just wanted to “try someone different.”
People voted for Trump because they didn’t know about or believe whatever people said about him, because they got an equal mixture of absurd headlines about both candidates and tuned both out or believed what validated their passing attitudes at the time.
Where we’re also floundering broadly is involvement in local state and city elections, as many of the congressmen and women who are supposed to represent us have ran with little or no opposition. This is again, an education and information issue, not “laziness.”
And stop infighting.
