I’ve noticed all my far left wing friends on Facebook live in a bubble that seems to have them believe that their ideas are more mainstream than they actually are.
No, there will be no revolution. Get outside and talk to people you don’t like.
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After the shock that I suffered on election night, I stopped frequenting the “news” sites, like Talking Points Memo, that assured me that there was virtually no chance for Trump. I’m still too pissed off to give them another chance.
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From Ed Brayton’s list:
Occupy Democrats
Bipartisan Report
Winning Democrats
PoliticusUSA
Blue Nation Review
IfYouOnlyNews
USUncut
The Freethought Project
Addicting Info
LiberalAmerica
Newslo
Politicalo (almost anything that ends on lo; these sites specialize in taking accurate statements from politicians and then adding false quotes to them that are much worse than what they actually said)
DailyNewsBin
American News X
Being Liberal
The Other 98%
All of this stuff is, at a minimum, clickbait garbage.
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Yeah, especially from that one site called Boing Boing. Who writes that crap??
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maybe it’s because I’m in the UK, but I don’t see any of that. Mostly it’s people who know that there isn’t going to be a revolution any time soon because of various reasons (like false class consciousness)
I know it confuses people when they hear that anarchists are trying to organise (it’s not contradictory, really) but that is what they are mostly doing. Not for revolution but to stop the push towards authoritarianism and right wing economics. They don’t get much publicity outside the occasional Guardian and Morning Star article though.
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Don’t get ahead of yourself in praising the WSJ for their timely attitude:
But here’s a nice chaser for that:
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Is it? I think on some level they’re making a false equivalence between a corporate mainstream view on one hand, and an outlier corporate anarchist view on the other. They’re both corporate, sure, but one is much more moderated and fact-based than the other, and them’s just facts.
It is nearly only my former high school classmates - but yeah, there are many koolaid drinkers on FB. I honestly see a it more right wing than left wing, but this is the midwest. I sometimes call people out on thing that have out right lies, but a lot of it is just snark.
At the risk of sparking the ire of people again, I agree. People on the whole are too happy and placated. Even those who are poor and/or discriminated against still have it much better off than most people. This isn’t to see one shouldn’t work towards and encourage change, but not enough people are going to support it via violent means.
Absolutely. The more you interact with different people, you the more you will see that we are basically all the same. And the more you will see that the one person who lives up to the stereotype in your head, is eclipsed by the many more “normal” people.
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There’s nothing anarchist about corporations (anarchism means without rulers, not without rules).
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[Emphasis added.]
The problem is assuming there will eventually be The Revolution, when really history is long sequences of revolutions of various kinds and types with agitations and struggles in between. People seem to have a very clear idea of what the endpoint looks like without acknowledging that what they see as small differences between their ideas and those of their allies are actually large differences made small by distance and time. There is no singular motion of progress, because there are many different progresses.
This is the essential problem, and it’s bigger than the echo chamber: The left is immune to seeing its biggest deficiencies, and prone to overestimating the smaller deficiencies that they are aware of. The problem isn’t exclusive to the left, because it’s a consequence of basic human nature: You cannot think beyond your sphere of thought, it’s a definitional barrier. You can’t see the biggest problems intrinsic to your movements, institutions, and ideals because if you were aware of them, they could be worked on and fixed. The very fact that you don’t see them is why they are problems. The problems you do see, the ones you can work on, are all smaller than you think they are, because they’re within your sphere of understanding and control. The only way to start seeing these problems is to step back and adopt a healthy level of skepticism. The problem is that people only accept non-threatening skepticism.
If you try to push in against a core idea, like the idea that all minority and disadvantaged groups inherently have non-interfering goals, the resistance is pretty severe. When you raise the issue of resistance to critical evaluations of goals and ideas, the response is a blanket denial not just of the resistance, but of the possibility that the left can have misaligned and miscalibrated lens for evaluating new ideas. I’ve seen it before. Not in progress, but in its stagnant state, in religion. The left isn’t there yet, but that’s the direction it’s moving. I see it in the small habits that I so despised in religion: The correction of language mid-conversation to match emerging orthodoxies, the manner in which deliberation mechanisms move towards forced consensus rather than joint assent–it’s all the same dirty bathwater. But just ask anyone, nothing stinks, the cloudiness of the water is just because I’m looking at the dark parts. Everything is more or less fine, because only things outside the tub could possibly be dirty. Right?
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Can’t see this without thinking of it as a gay porn site for the uncircumcised penis fetishists of the world.
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So the question is: who are they going to be against next?
I’m wagering The Press, Iran, and Obamacare, at least for the first four years.
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You forgot China. They have been positioning against China already, but we will see if anything comes from it.
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I should clarify that I don’t know anything about G+. It could be that, having given up on the idea of making it attractive to advertisers, Google are willing to let it evolve to benefit its users instead. Mind you, that’s not always a good thing either; fear of pissing off users is pretty much why Reddit and Twitter let their platforms function as open sewers.
Reddit mostly. 
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Are those supposed to be well-known or often-linked liberal sites? They sound a little bit like spoof sites put up by right-wing fanatics wanting to make liberals look bad.
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The logical outcome of lack of governmental power is the rise of corporate power IMHO, and so yes, I very much would associate corporate feudalism with a type of Libertarian-esque anarchism.
When are they going to wake up and get over the election?
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When they run out of lube.
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I don’t even talk to people I do like.
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