There is a vast, deep ocean of things Americans should be strapped into a chair and forced to watch. We can start with motherfucking saturday morning cartoons where they clearly showed who the bad guys are and what it means to be a bad guy.
I am utterly baffled how we all grew up watching the same damn shit and took such vastly different messages from it. Were there kids booing every time the turtles beat Shredder? Were there kids getting pissed at Mr Rogers for saying everyone should respect each other?
I first noticed this a few years back when I started to see “The Empire Did Nothing Wrong” on bumper stickers. Sure it seemed like a joke at the time but I was confused that so many people thought this was a statement worth putting on their vehicle. I mean, pretty early on in the OT, Darth Vader uses the Death Star to murder an entire planet so surely no one was serious, right?
Whoooo boy have I learned a lot about my neighbors’ values since then.
Let us remember that the entire “The Donald” meme subreddit was entirely satirical when it was made back in the early days of his first campaign. It was people posting memes of Trump as the Emperor from the fascist human empire in Warhammer 40k. (Which is also an entire related topic on its own)
What happened pretty fast is people who didn’t get it was satire started coming in absolutely LOVING the worship of the golden clown and started posting unironic memes of Trump riding tanks and carrying eagles and shit. They eventually drove out the people who were there for laughs and it became one of the largest subreddits and a huge chunk of his online support came from that subreddit before it was eventually banned for all the reasons you would expect.
I think we have vastly overestimated people’s capability to discern media, we have vastly overestimated our population’s capability to rationalize and reason things out. We have a massive segment of the population that has cognitive dissonance baked-in to their very being.
Seriously, I had a whole ass mental breakdown when I started realizing just how bad it is. Most people are on autopilot and just react to stimuli. No brain use. They’re fucking CLAMS.
Yeah, being able to plan and do more than just react is apparently a shockingly low percentage of our population.
They have a couple “truths” they tell themselves and hope everything else just falls into like or will complain to someone else to do something about it so that it does. Listen to the hymns in a church some time and listen to how people talk about God. Its very lazy
Religion has been a thought-stopping tool for literal millenia.
The digital age and age of mass media does the same thing but with limitless reach and focused power to rob people of their most precious ability, the ability to make judgements and comparisons and use mental language to make abstractions to better understand topics more complicated than where the next meal will come from.
When I found out about the 501st Legion, I was absolutely baffled. George Lucas dressed the bad guys to look like Nazis, and now fans were dressing up as the bad guys because they love the movies so much? What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Then Captain America came out and people started dressing as Hydra agents, and I was like, “Oh, they’re just straight-up okay with Nazis. Got it.”
I had the impression the 501st was a different beast from “The Empire Did Nothing Wrong” types. I thought the point of them being stormtroopers was so everyone else had someone to heroically oppose? Their charity events seem to focus on things like kids shooting them with dart guns.
I’m not saying they haven’t been co-opted since I learned about them several years ago; but last I knew, they were happy playing bad guys to let other people be good guys.
“We can learn a lot about people’s intentions just by how they interact with fictional media.” A statement I would have ridiculed people for a few years ago. But it’s true and it’s sad that we even have to now.
I mean, cartoons from when I was a kid were problematic in different ways.
G.I. Joe taught me that the U.S. Military were the good guys and ‘Cobra’ were the bad guys. While I’m sure Cobra was probably bad, I’m not so sure about the first part. Also, guns are less dangerous than pepper spray and never lethal. On the other hand it also taught me that no matter how hard the GI’s fought against the bad guys, they would never stop them for long or truly defeat them, so I guess that it wasn’t wholly inaccurate.
Ducktales taught me that miserly Billionaires that hoarded vast amounts of wealth were lovable good guys actually.
I’m not even going to get into what Thundercats taught me.
I see this take all the time, I have a friend who always has to say “copaganda!” when I mention Zootopia (speaking of what Thundercats did to us) but I disagree with the whole impulsive need to call out “problematic” things in these iconic programs. They were problematic mostly in terms of being toy commercials, and the money we fed into toy companies for kids at the time probably contributed to a large portion of the algorithms that are doing far more damage to society than the very abstracted “message” that you can possibly be a lovable billionaire (if you’re a duck.)
All that said, yes it’s hard to watch now as adults, but I am not going to preach about it or even bring it up. It’s cherished memories.
There’s no faster way to get people to abandon everything you will ever have to say than by shitting on their cherished memories. We have to start learning to simplify our fights if we’re ever taking society back from the orcs. I am serious here. I’m really tired of losing because we can’t figure out what people actually need to hear to make the world better.
Well I was half joking, but it seems to me like you are promoting a pretty big double standard here. You start off by saying “We can start with motherfucking saturday morning cartoons where they clearly showed who the bad guys are and what it means to be a bad guy.” So you are clearly criticizing something you find fault with (aka problematic) about modern cartoons (I’m not sure what, I don’t really watch cartoons anymore) but turn around and say I shouldn’t criticize “Problematic” things in “iconic” programs. Then you turn around once more and criticize them your own self in that they were glorified toy commercials, which is a good point. Things can be problematic in more than one way.
I agree that we should teach kids right from wrong (who are the good guys and who are the bad guys), but if you then portray the U.S. Military as ‘The good guys’ I have a problem with that. I bet a lot of kids who grew up idolizing the Joes ended up joining the military themselves, only to be forced to help overthrow democratically elected leaders in Central and South America, or protecting the U.S.'s ability to buy oil or opium products for cheap by murdering brown folks in the middle east. In my view, the U.S. Military haven’t unambiguously been “the good guys” since 1945, and even then the way that war ended was problematic as hell, and I’m not joking about that.
It’s irrelevant that Scrooge is a Duck, the message that some billionaires aren’t the scum of the Earth is a dangerous message to put out to impressionable young minds- no matter how cutesy you make it look. Look at how many of us who grew up in that era now idolize Elon Musk or Bill Gates.
Yes, I understand that people have cherished memories of some of these shows (just like young people today will someday look back fondly on the shows you feel comfortable criticizing), but being able to look back at the past with the nostalgia Goggles off, and be honest about the things that shaped our values is a part of maturing and growing as people. If the only defense you have of such programs is that they are ‘cherished memories’- that seems weak af tbh.
And btw, you friend is absolutely right. Zootopia is 100% copaganda. Just like 1000 other TV programs and movies in our culture. The fact that portraying cops as unambiguous ‘good guys’ is far and away the norm, but even the mildest of critiques such as Zootopia being copoganda sticks out as silly to you is the reason why it’s important to call stuff like this out when we see it.
I’m really tired of losing because we can’t figure out what people actually need to hear to make the world better.
People need to hear and wake up to reality. Coddling reactionary fragile egos isn’t going to accomplish that. Unflinchingly evaluating where we are and how we got here is the only way to do that- even if it makes people slightly uncomfortable for a moment.
This entire spiel was another attempt at justifying making people wake up to a reality they don’t want to see or hear. I can’t understand how the current trendline doesn’t make every progressive or leftist back up and rethink everything we’re trying to do. We are seeing nazis marching with jackboots and we’re complaining about the jackboot industry. It’s fucking absurd.
I don’t have a double-standard, I have awareness that two conflicting things exist at the same time. There’s a huge difference. One is a condemnation of a way of unfair thinking, the other is nuance.
We are going to fucking LOSE EVERYTHING if we keep wokescolding people about the things they enjoy. It might already be too late.
It feels great when someone recognizes your points, and I do, but it’s like any weapon or tool, how you use it is going to have a major impact on our world. Stop trying to fix symptoms, it’s gotten us absolutely nowhere. Fix causes and seek outcomes, policing the minutia is literally killing us.
I can’t understand how the current trendline doesn’t make every progressive or leftist back up and rethink everything we’re trying to do. We are seeing nazis marching with jackboots and we’re complaining about the jackboot industry. It’s fucking absurd.
It’s not the boots we are criticizing but literally the fact that they are Nazis. You want us to refrain from calling a Nazi a Nazi for fear that it might hurt their fragile little egos and alienate them. You seem to think that racism, sexism, and bigotry at little, insignificant problems and if we just stop complaining about them it will go away.
Racism, sexism, and bigotry may not affect YOU, but I bet you can guess the people they do affect. The people complaining about those things aren’t just doing it to hear themselves whine. They are sick and fucking tired of being discriminated against, and they have every right to demand they be treated as equals.
Yes, there is going to be push-back from reactionaries. They’ve been pushing back hard against equal treatment for all humans since before the civil war- the fought a whole god damn war to stop it ffs. Could you imagine if the people on the side of freedom and basic human dignity had simply capitulated when they saw where demanding the slaves be free was heading?
They pushed back when women wanted to vote. They pushed back when minorities wanted equal rights. They pushed back when gay people demanded fair treatment. The only way decent folk have ever made progress is by fighting. The only way we will continue to progress is by demanding equality for all humans and accepting no compromise. Burying our heads in the sand and capitulating to the Nazi’s WILL NOT make the Nazi’s see the error of their ways and bring them to our side, they will see that as weakness and confirmation that they have the right of it.
The problem is one of LACK of Education. It’s not talking about these issues. We will never, ever gain freedom and equality if we ignore the reality for the people that bigotry effects. The problem isn’t women, or minorities, or lgbtq people demeaning fair treatment, it’s that the ruling class has convinced working class conservatives that they are the enemy. That it’s ‘woke’ people who are making their lives suck, and not the Billionaires who treat the working class as slave labor. Not the right wing politicians (and that includes Democrats) who raise taxes on the poorest of us and to give to top 10%. That immigrants- the group of people with the lowest crime rates, who pay way more in taxes than they see the benefit from are the ones making the economy bad and crime high.
The ruling class has been successfully sewing a rift between the “left” and “conservatives” with a propaganda and misinformation campaign that goes back over 100 years. To McCarthy and Hoover. They pit the working class whites against the socialists and communists- the very people who are trying to free them. And what’s your solution? To keep quiet about the propaganda? To shut up about social and economic injustice? To roll over and allow the modern day McCarthies and Hoovers to win? We have to expose the lie.
We have to find a way to unite the people, but if you think that the marginalized groups are going to trust and work alongside the ones complicit in their disenfranchisement without the others putting in the work, while they are still tools of the oppressors- I just don’t understand why you think they would or should do that.
policing the minutia is literally killing us.
Equality (economic and social) isn’t “the minutia”- it’s literally the entire fucking point. Equality doesn’t just benefit the ‘woke’ crowd, it literally benefits everyone other than the ruling class.
So what’s your plan for turning the country around. One that doesn’t involve expecting a revolution or someone else charming the whole country into suddenly having the values and principles we all want.
Facts:
Conservatism and hate is on the rise.
The left has been using the same tactics and talking points and attempts at raising awareness of social issues for decades and we’ve lost more freedoms and broad social respect in the last decade than we’ve gained.
There is an entire universe of people in the country who are having comfortable, happy lives while also condemning “wokeness” and whatever that means to them, so there’s no incentive to abandon this way of thinking.
If you really think banging the same drums forever and ever is going to eventually work, knock yourself out.
if you think that the marginalized groups are going to trust and work alongside the ones complicit in their disenfranchisement without the others putting in the work, while they are still tools of the oppressors- I just don’t understand why you think they would or should do that.
See this is the rhetoric that is holding us back. Whatever happens, we will still have to live next to the people who have anti-woke bumper stickers and are afraid of the “wrong” people in the bathroom. We won’t make lasting change if we don’t focus on the wealth divide that has made so many dumb fucks so vulnerable to fascism. If you can’t help but view them as malicious oppressors we’re never going to be able to exercise our actual power of intelligence and reason. It’s ridiculous how much fucking POWER we’re giving to the country’s least principled and most easily influenced population instead of actually just letting them be assholes, but making them OUR useful assholes. What lack of self-confidence does the left have broadly that we’re so afraid to do this? I’ve done it, it’s EASY.
If you genuinely think that continuing to harangue people that fucking Duck Tales is bad actually, you’re simply not winning the people to your side who you need. It’s dumb and I am not taking part in that kind of rhetoric ever again. We can make a class war SO EASILY but we get lost down these side-quests of “also, we have to include shaming people about their sports mascots and wearing leather and we have to make them feel ashamed they won’t date a trans girl, and here’s a list of other issues that we want to make these people aware of because we want vindication and validation far more than outcomes.”
One that doesn’t involve expecting a revolution or someone else charming the whole country into suddenly having the values and principles we all want.
My guy- in case you haven’t been paying attention- the revolution is already in progress! It’s not the one we wanted. It’s not the Leftists freeing the working class, it’s the god damn Nazi’s assuming control. And every day we sit back and do nothing, allowing them to gain and consolidate more and more power the harder it will become to free ourselves from. We are Germany in 1933. Orange Hitler is in power and is trying to make America the 4th Reich. The only question left is will we overthrow them ourselves or are we going to wait until the rest of the world unites against the U.S.?
Conservatism and hate is on the rise. Just like in pre WWII Germany.
The left has been using the same tactics and talking points and attempts at raising awareness of social issues for decades and we’ve lost more freedoms and broad social respect in the last decade than we’ve gained.
You are once again blaming the victims of the ‘culture war’ for the actions of the perpetrators. You are saying ‘woke’ people were “asking for it”, by demanding equality. You want to blame someone for taking away freedoms- blame the fascist pieces of shit taking away our freedoms! Shifting the blame to the victims is EXACTLY what the propaganda machine is designed to do, and you are eating it up!
There is an entire universe of people in the country who are having comfortable, happy lives while also condemning “wokeness” and whatever that means to them, so there’s no incentive to abandon this way of thinking.
They aren’t having ‘comfortable, happy lives’. If they were it wouldn’t be so easy to manipulate them into scapegoating immigrants, minorities, ‘liberated women’, socialists and trans people for their misery. Clearly they think something is wrong with the country and are willing to sell their very souls to a fascist dictator who promises to ‘fix’ things and ‘make the country great’.
The incentive is there, but they are too ignorant to realize it. The incentive to fight for freedom from our oppressors and equality for all people is a better, happier world for everyone. They are just focusing on the wrong enemy- exactly what the ruling class wants them to do.
How do you fight ignorance? By simply ignoring it and hoping it will sort itself out eventually? When has that ever worked? The only way to fight ignorance is with Education. Knowledge. Facts. The truth. Not burying our heads in the sand and being too afraid to step out of your comfort zone to learn about the Truth.
Right now we are in The Matrix. You are Cypher, and you want us to stay plugged in so you can continue to enjoy your delicious steak and be someone important (a white man). You are right that waking up to reality is tough. It’s uncomfortable. It’s dark and bleak and scary. Seeing our oppressors and their strength for what it is doesn’t make fighting them any easier. What it does do is allow us to actually see who the real enemy is. It gives a fighting chance that staying plugged in simply will never give us. Yes there will be millions of other Cyphers too comfortable ever want to wake up. Who will fight to protect the system that keep them ignorant and enslaved.
“The Matrix is a system. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around- what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, andthat makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
If you really think banging the same drums forever and ever is going to eventually work, knock yourself out.
That’s exactly what reactionaries told abolitionists. That’s what they told the women fighting for suffrage. That’s what they told the black folks demanding equal rights. That’s what they told gay people who wanted the right to marry. “Just give up already, it’s never going to happen- you are only pissing people off- just give up!”
We won’t make lasting change if we don’t focus on the wealth divide that has made so many dumb fucks so vulnerable to fascism.
WE are focusing on that. WE mention it ALL THE TIME. Over HALF of OUR talking points are about the ever growing wealth gap, about the buying and selling of our politicians, about the ways capitalism is destroying our freedoms and our environment. It’s the Right Wing Controlled Media (all mainstream media in the US) which is the main tool the ruling class have, that hammers home the fact that the same people who advocate for economic equality also advocates for social equality, and people need to ‘pick a side’.
Show me an example of what you are talking about. Show me even ONE politician who is anti-human rights, but also anti-capitalist. If it would be ‘SO EASY’ for the bigoted ‘anti-woke’ working class to suddenly switch over to anti-capitalist class warfare- there should be TONS of people already advocating for that, right?
We can make a class war SO EASILY but we get lost down these side-quests of “also, we have to include shaming people about their sports mascots and wearing leather and we have to make them feel ashamed they won’t date a trans girl, and here’s a list of other issues that we want to make these people aware of because we want vindication and validation far more than outcomes.”
Again you are missing the entire point. ‘Wokeness’ isn’t about making crackers feel bad. It isn’t about shaming people for not dating trans women or wearing leather. "Woke’ LITERALLY means waking up to and being aware of your oppressors. For YOU, the only people oppressing YOU are capitalists, because YOU clearly aren’t a member of any minority group. YOU expect minorities to just Shut up about Oppression so that the Oppressors don’t feel bad about it. One of the main goals of ‘Class War’ is to eliminate CLASS entirely.
If by some incredible miracle the fascist boot liking contingent of the working class were to suddenly show interest in class war and a willingness to work with the ‘woke mob’ to fight against the ruling class- and we were able to win that battle, we would still be just as divided by race, gender, and ideology as we are now- the battle would only be half over. There would still be hierarchy aka ‘Classes’. Asking ‘woke’ people to just accept bigotry is like asking the people in the concentration camps to stop criticizing the bigots that put them there in order to fight the Nazis. It makes no sense. The people that put them there ARE the Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.
Right now we are in The Matrix. You are Cypher, and you want us to stay plugged in so you can continue to enjoy your delicious steak and be someone important (a white man).
I literally almost stopped here and this me just sort of skim the rest because it’s so obvious that you’re not participating seriously or you’re woefully new at all this.
I think we live in different worlds. I am out talking to actual people on both sides of issues, I am out doing actual things with real people. You have the same syndrome that a lot of leftists have, which is getting the need for intellectual battle out of your system online because you literally cannot debate the right, they are also in a different world and don’t care if you best them in games of rhetoric.
‘Wokeness’ isn’t about making crackers feel bad. It isn’t about shaming people for not dating trans women or wearing leather. "Woke’ LITERALLY means waking up to and being aware of your oppressors.
The people who updoot this type of rhetoric are already on your side. The people not on your side roll their eyes at this bullshit, and until you get that through your collective skulls on the Terminally Online Left, we will continue to lose young men to fascist rhetoric that tells them to stop worrying about thinking with their heads and points an enemy at them. You are still spinning your wheels imagining we’re going to form the “perfect argument” that turns everyone around. At least I think that’s what you’re saying, I asked what your strategy would be to turn things around, you didn’t give one, you tried to turn it around on me saying that there’s no “representation” proving that it’s easy to turn people.
Bro, it’s so easy to turn people that people have been fucking turned nazi because we’re all here pondering theory and culture behind isolated cultural lines. Have you spent any time in a conservative hangout? Have you lived around rednecks and working class people? Do you have ANY idea what goes on in their minds? And yet you think you know how to change them? Give them a new story, one by one, each of them, get to know them, talk to them, listen to them, and turn them against the proper target and STOP TRYING TO MAKE EVERYTHING PERFECT FOR EVERYONE, WE’RE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE.
It’s like being in a dream where you are trying to shake people into becoming aware it’s a dream and they just stare like zombies. Smuggest fucking intellectuals in line for the gas chambers, all of you. I’m out.
They’re strictly literal; less than zero humanities education. These are the people who see a ‘warning: car may hit pedestrian!’ Sign and speed up and steer into the pedestrian.
There is a vast, deep ocean of things Americans should be strapped into a chair and forced to watch. We can start with motherfucking saturday morning cartoons where they clearly showed who the bad guys are and what it means to be a bad guy.
I am utterly baffled how we all grew up watching the same damn shit and took such vastly different messages from it. Were there kids booing every time the turtles beat Shredder? Were there kids getting pissed at Mr Rogers for saying everyone should respect each other?
I first noticed this a few years back when I started to see “The Empire Did Nothing Wrong” on bumper stickers. Sure it seemed like a joke at the time but I was confused that so many people thought this was a statement worth putting on their vehicle. I mean, pretty early on in the OT, Darth Vader uses the Death Star to murder an entire planet so surely no one was serious, right?
Whoooo boy have I learned a lot about my neighbors’ values since then.
Let us remember that the entire “The Donald” meme subreddit was entirely satirical when it was made back in the early days of his first campaign. It was people posting memes of Trump as the Emperor from the fascist human empire in Warhammer 40k. (Which is also an entire related topic on its own)
What happened pretty fast is people who didn’t get it was satire started coming in absolutely LOVING the worship of the golden clown and started posting unironic memes of Trump riding tanks and carrying eagles and shit. They eventually drove out the people who were there for laughs and it became one of the largest subreddits and a huge chunk of his online support came from that subreddit before it was eventually banned for all the reasons you would expect.
I think we have vastly overestimated people’s capability to discern media, we have vastly overestimated our population’s capability to rationalize and reason things out. We have a massive segment of the population that has cognitive dissonance baked-in to their very being.
Seriously, I had a whole ass mental breakdown when I started realizing just how bad it is. Most people are on autopilot and just react to stimuli. No brain use. They’re fucking CLAMS.
Yeah, being able to plan and do more than just react is apparently a shockingly low percentage of our population.
They have a couple “truths” they tell themselves and hope everything else just falls into like or will complain to someone else to do something about it so that it does. Listen to the hymns in a church some time and listen to how people talk about God. Its very lazy
Religion has been a thought-stopping tool for literal millenia.
The digital age and age of mass media does the same thing but with limitless reach and focused power to rob people of their most precious ability, the ability to make judgements and comparisons and use mental language to make abstractions to better understand topics more complicated than where the next meal will come from.
When I found out about the 501st Legion, I was absolutely baffled. George Lucas dressed the bad guys to look like Nazis, and now fans were dressing up as the bad guys because they love the movies so much? What the fuck is wrong with these people?
Then Captain America came out and people started dressing as Hydra agents, and I was like, “Oh, they’re just straight-up okay with Nazis. Got it.”
I had the impression the 501st was a different beast from “The Empire Did Nothing Wrong” types. I thought the point of them being stormtroopers was so everyone else had someone to heroically oppose? Their charity events seem to focus on things like kids shooting them with dart guns.
I’m not saying they haven’t been co-opted since I learned about them several years ago; but last I knew, they were happy playing bad guys to let other people be good guys.
“We can learn a lot about people’s intentions just by how they interact with fictional media.” A statement I would have ridiculed people for a few years ago. But it’s true and it’s sad that we even have to now.
I mean, cartoons from when I was a kid were problematic in different ways.
G.I. Joe taught me that the U.S. Military were the good guys and ‘Cobra’ were the bad guys. While I’m sure Cobra was probably bad, I’m not so sure about the first part. Also, guns are less dangerous than pepper spray and never lethal. On the other hand it also taught me that no matter how hard the GI’s fought against the bad guys, they would never stop them for long or truly defeat them, so I guess that it wasn’t wholly inaccurate.
Ducktales taught me that miserly Billionaires that hoarded vast amounts of wealth were lovable good guys actually.
I’m not even going to get into what Thundercats taught me.
I see this take all the time, I have a friend who always has to say “copaganda!” when I mention Zootopia (speaking of what Thundercats did to us) but I disagree with the whole impulsive need to call out “problematic” things in these iconic programs. They were problematic mostly in terms of being toy commercials, and the money we fed into toy companies for kids at the time probably contributed to a large portion of the algorithms that are doing far more damage to society than the very abstracted “message” that you can possibly be a lovable billionaire (if you’re a duck.)
All that said, yes it’s hard to watch now as adults, but I am not going to preach about it or even bring it up. It’s cherished memories.
There’s no faster way to get people to abandon everything you will ever have to say than by shitting on their cherished memories. We have to start learning to simplify our fights if we’re ever taking society back from the orcs. I am serious here. I’m really tired of losing because we can’t figure out what people actually need to hear to make the world better.
Well I was half joking, but it seems to me like you are promoting a pretty big double standard here. You start off by saying “We can start with motherfucking saturday morning cartoons where they clearly showed who the bad guys are and what it means to be a bad guy.” So you are clearly criticizing something you find fault with (aka problematic) about modern cartoons (I’m not sure what, I don’t really watch cartoons anymore) but turn around and say I shouldn’t criticize “Problematic” things in “iconic” programs. Then you turn around once more and criticize them your own self in that they were glorified toy commercials, which is a good point. Things can be problematic in more than one way.
I agree that we should teach kids right from wrong (who are the good guys and who are the bad guys), but if you then portray the U.S. Military as ‘The good guys’ I have a problem with that. I bet a lot of kids who grew up idolizing the Joes ended up joining the military themselves, only to be forced to help overthrow democratically elected leaders in Central and South America, or protecting the U.S.'s ability to buy oil or opium products for cheap by murdering brown folks in the middle east. In my view, the U.S. Military haven’t unambiguously been “the good guys” since 1945, and even then the way that war ended was problematic as hell, and I’m not joking about that.
It’s irrelevant that Scrooge is a Duck, the message that some billionaires aren’t the scum of the Earth is a dangerous message to put out to impressionable young minds- no matter how cutesy you make it look. Look at how many of us who grew up in that era now idolize Elon Musk or Bill Gates.
Yes, I understand that people have cherished memories of some of these shows (just like young people today will someday look back fondly on the shows you feel comfortable criticizing), but being able to look back at the past with the nostalgia Goggles off, and be honest about the things that shaped our values is a part of maturing and growing as people. If the only defense you have of such programs is that they are ‘cherished memories’- that seems weak af tbh.
And btw, you friend is absolutely right. Zootopia is 100% copaganda. Just like 1000 other TV programs and movies in our culture. The fact that portraying cops as unambiguous ‘good guys’ is far and away the norm, but even the mildest of critiques such as Zootopia being copoganda sticks out as silly to you is the reason why it’s important to call stuff like this out when we see it.
People need to hear and wake up to reality. Coddling reactionary fragile egos isn’t going to accomplish that. Unflinchingly evaluating where we are and how we got here is the only way to do that- even if it makes people slightly uncomfortable for a moment.
This entire spiel was another attempt at justifying making people wake up to a reality they don’t want to see or hear. I can’t understand how the current trendline doesn’t make every progressive or leftist back up and rethink everything we’re trying to do. We are seeing nazis marching with jackboots and we’re complaining about the jackboot industry. It’s fucking absurd.
I don’t have a double-standard, I have awareness that two conflicting things exist at the same time. There’s a huge difference. One is a condemnation of a way of unfair thinking, the other is nuance.
We are going to fucking LOSE EVERYTHING if we keep wokescolding people about the things they enjoy. It might already be too late.
It feels great when someone recognizes your points, and I do, but it’s like any weapon or tool, how you use it is going to have a major impact on our world. Stop trying to fix symptoms, it’s gotten us absolutely nowhere. Fix causes and seek outcomes, policing the minutia is literally killing us.
It’s not the boots we are criticizing but literally the fact that they are Nazis. You want us to refrain from calling a Nazi a Nazi for fear that it might hurt their fragile little egos and alienate them. You seem to think that racism, sexism, and bigotry at little, insignificant problems and if we just stop complaining about them it will go away.
Racism, sexism, and bigotry may not affect YOU, but I bet you can guess the people they do affect. The people complaining about those things aren’t just doing it to hear themselves whine. They are sick and fucking tired of being discriminated against, and they have every right to demand they be treated as equals.
Yes, there is going to be push-back from reactionaries. They’ve been pushing back hard against equal treatment for all humans since before the civil war- the fought a whole god damn war to stop it ffs. Could you imagine if the people on the side of freedom and basic human dignity had simply capitulated when they saw where demanding the slaves be free was heading?
They pushed back when women wanted to vote. They pushed back when minorities wanted equal rights. They pushed back when gay people demanded fair treatment. The only way decent folk have ever made progress is by fighting. The only way we will continue to progress is by demanding equality for all humans and accepting no compromise. Burying our heads in the sand and capitulating to the Nazi’s WILL NOT make the Nazi’s see the error of their ways and bring them to our side, they will see that as weakness and confirmation that they have the right of it.
The problem is one of LACK of Education. It’s not talking about these issues. We will never, ever gain freedom and equality if we ignore the reality for the people that bigotry effects. The problem isn’t women, or minorities, or lgbtq people demeaning fair treatment, it’s that the ruling class has convinced working class conservatives that they are the enemy. That it’s ‘woke’ people who are making their lives suck, and not the Billionaires who treat the working class as slave labor. Not the right wing politicians (and that includes Democrats) who raise taxes on the poorest of us and to give to top 10%. That immigrants- the group of people with the lowest crime rates, who pay way more in taxes than they see the benefit from are the ones making the economy bad and crime high.
The ruling class has been successfully sewing a rift between the “left” and “conservatives” with a propaganda and misinformation campaign that goes back over 100 years. To McCarthy and Hoover. They pit the working class whites against the socialists and communists- the very people who are trying to free them. And what’s your solution? To keep quiet about the propaganda? To shut up about social and economic injustice? To roll over and allow the modern day McCarthies and Hoovers to win? We have to expose the lie.
We have to find a way to unite the people, but if you think that the marginalized groups are going to trust and work alongside the ones complicit in their disenfranchisement without the others putting in the work, while they are still tools of the oppressors- I just don’t understand why you think they would or should do that.
Equality (economic and social) isn’t “the minutia”- it’s literally the entire fucking point. Equality doesn’t just benefit the ‘woke’ crowd, it literally benefits everyone other than the ruling class.
So what’s your plan for turning the country around. One that doesn’t involve expecting a revolution or someone else charming the whole country into suddenly having the values and principles we all want.
Facts:
Conservatism and hate is on the rise.
The left has been using the same tactics and talking points and attempts at raising awareness of social issues for decades and we’ve lost more freedoms and broad social respect in the last decade than we’ve gained.
There is an entire universe of people in the country who are having comfortable, happy lives while also condemning “wokeness” and whatever that means to them, so there’s no incentive to abandon this way of thinking.
If you really think banging the same drums forever and ever is going to eventually work, knock yourself out.
See this is the rhetoric that is holding us back. Whatever happens, we will still have to live next to the people who have anti-woke bumper stickers and are afraid of the “wrong” people in the bathroom. We won’t make lasting change if we don’t focus on the wealth divide that has made so many dumb fucks so vulnerable to fascism. If you can’t help but view them as malicious oppressors we’re never going to be able to exercise our actual power of intelligence and reason. It’s ridiculous how much fucking POWER we’re giving to the country’s least principled and most easily influenced population instead of actually just letting them be assholes, but making them OUR useful assholes. What lack of self-confidence does the left have broadly that we’re so afraid to do this? I’ve done it, it’s EASY.
If you genuinely think that continuing to harangue people that fucking Duck Tales is bad actually, you’re simply not winning the people to your side who you need. It’s dumb and I am not taking part in that kind of rhetoric ever again. We can make a class war SO EASILY but we get lost down these side-quests of “also, we have to include shaming people about their sports mascots and wearing leather and we have to make them feel ashamed they won’t date a trans girl, and here’s a list of other issues that we want to make these people aware of because we want vindication and validation far more than outcomes.”
My guy- in case you haven’t been paying attention- the revolution is already in progress! It’s not the one we wanted. It’s not the Leftists freeing the working class, it’s the god damn Nazi’s assuming control. And every day we sit back and do nothing, allowing them to gain and consolidate more and more power the harder it will become to free ourselves from. We are Germany in 1933. Orange Hitler is in power and is trying to make America the 4th Reich. The only question left is will we overthrow them ourselves or are we going to wait until the rest of the world unites against the U.S.?
Conservatism and hate is on the rise. Just like in pre WWII Germany.
You are once again blaming the victims of the ‘culture war’ for the actions of the perpetrators. You are saying ‘woke’ people were “asking for it”, by demanding equality. You want to blame someone for taking away freedoms- blame the fascist pieces of shit taking away our freedoms! Shifting the blame to the victims is EXACTLY what the propaganda machine is designed to do, and you are eating it up!
They aren’t having ‘comfortable, happy lives’. If they were it wouldn’t be so easy to manipulate them into scapegoating immigrants, minorities, ‘liberated women’, socialists and trans people for their misery. Clearly they think something is wrong with the country and are willing to sell their very souls to a fascist dictator who promises to ‘fix’ things and ‘make the country great’.
The incentive is there, but they are too ignorant to realize it. The incentive to fight for freedom from our oppressors and equality for all people is a better, happier world for everyone. They are just focusing on the wrong enemy- exactly what the ruling class wants them to do.
How do you fight ignorance? By simply ignoring it and hoping it will sort itself out eventually? When has that ever worked? The only way to fight ignorance is with Education. Knowledge. Facts. The truth. Not burying our heads in the sand and being too afraid to step out of your comfort zone to learn about the Truth.
Right now we are in The Matrix. You are Cypher, and you want us to stay plugged in so you can continue to enjoy your delicious steak and be someone important (a white man). You are right that waking up to reality is tough. It’s uncomfortable. It’s dark and bleak and scary. Seeing our oppressors and their strength for what it is doesn’t make fighting them any easier. What it does do is allow us to actually see who the real enemy is. It gives a fighting chance that staying plugged in simply will never give us. Yes there will be millions of other Cyphers too comfortable ever want to wake up. Who will fight to protect the system that keep them ignorant and enslaved.
“The Matrix is a system. That system is our enemy. But when you’re inside, you look around- what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters. The very minds of the people we are trying to save. But until we do, these people are still a part of that system, and that makes them our enemy. You have to understand, most of these people are not ready to be unplugged. And many of them are so inured, so hopelessly dependent on the system, that they will fight to protect it.”
That’s exactly what reactionaries told abolitionists. That’s what they told the women fighting for suffrage. That’s what they told the black folks demanding equal rights. That’s what they told gay people who wanted the right to marry. “Just give up already, it’s never going to happen- you are only pissing people off- just give up!”
WE are focusing on that. WE mention it ALL THE TIME. Over HALF of OUR talking points are about the ever growing wealth gap, about the buying and selling of our politicians, about the ways capitalism is destroying our freedoms and our environment. It’s the Right Wing Controlled Media (all mainstream media in the US) which is the main tool the ruling class have, that hammers home the fact that the same people who advocate for economic equality also advocates for social equality, and people need to ‘pick a side’.
Show me an example of what you are talking about. Show me even ONE politician who is anti-human rights, but also anti-capitalist. If it would be ‘SO EASY’ for the bigoted ‘anti-woke’ working class to suddenly switch over to anti-capitalist class warfare- there should be TONS of people already advocating for that, right?
Again you are missing the entire point. ‘Wokeness’ isn’t about making crackers feel bad. It isn’t about shaming people for not dating trans women or wearing leather. "Woke’ LITERALLY means waking up to and being aware of your oppressors. For YOU, the only people oppressing YOU are capitalists, because YOU clearly aren’t a member of any minority group. YOU expect minorities to just Shut up about Oppression so that the Oppressors don’t feel bad about it. One of the main goals of ‘Class War’ is to eliminate CLASS entirely.
If by some incredible miracle the fascist boot liking contingent of the working class were to suddenly show interest in class war and a willingness to work with the ‘woke mob’ to fight against the ruling class- and we were able to win that battle, we would still be just as divided by race, gender, and ideology as we are now- the battle would only be half over. There would still be hierarchy aka ‘Classes’. Asking ‘woke’ people to just accept bigotry is like asking the people in the concentration camps to stop criticizing the bigots that put them there in order to fight the Nazis. It makes no sense. The people that put them there ARE the Nazis and Nazi sympathizers.
I literally almost stopped here and this me just sort of skim the rest because it’s so obvious that you’re not participating seriously or you’re woefully new at all this.
I think we live in different worlds. I am out talking to actual people on both sides of issues, I am out doing actual things with real people. You have the same syndrome that a lot of leftists have, which is getting the need for intellectual battle out of your system online because you literally cannot debate the right, they are also in a different world and don’t care if you best them in games of rhetoric.
The people who updoot this type of rhetoric are already on your side. The people not on your side roll their eyes at this bullshit, and until you get that through your collective skulls on the Terminally Online Left, we will continue to lose young men to fascist rhetoric that tells them to stop worrying about thinking with their heads and points an enemy at them. You are still spinning your wheels imagining we’re going to form the “perfect argument” that turns everyone around. At least I think that’s what you’re saying, I asked what your strategy would be to turn things around, you didn’t give one, you tried to turn it around on me saying that there’s no “representation” proving that it’s easy to turn people.
Bro, it’s so easy to turn people that people have been fucking turned nazi because we’re all here pondering theory and culture behind isolated cultural lines. Have you spent any time in a conservative hangout? Have you lived around rednecks and working class people? Do you have ANY idea what goes on in their minds? And yet you think you know how to change them? Give them a new story, one by one, each of them, get to know them, talk to them, listen to them, and turn them against the proper target and STOP TRYING TO MAKE EVERYTHING PERFECT FOR EVERYONE, WE’RE ALL GOING TO FUCKING DIE.
It’s like being in a dream where you are trying to shake people into becoming aware it’s a dream and they just stare like zombies. Smuggest fucking intellectuals in line for the gas chambers, all of you. I’m out.
They’re strictly literal; less than zero humanities education. These are the people who see a ‘warning: car may hit pedestrian!’ Sign and speed up and steer into the pedestrian.