this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2024
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Far right or far left. Both obnoxious. How hard is it to do what's right for people and not have to be on either end of a fucking seesaw?
Some of us have held our political opinions since before 2016. We’re much more bearable, even those of us on the far left. I firmly believe people need to go through an obnoxious political phase. It’s just way more normal to go through it in high school/college. But will it be just a phase when people are going through it in their adulthood? I dunno. But I guess we’ll have to find out the hard way.
I was so apathetic in my early voting years, so I guess I'm doing my weird political thing in mid-life.
I mean, it’s great that people are getting more involved and aware. But I think the combination of the explosion of political awareness with the current state of discourse thanks to social media/the devolution of the right into petty, bald-faced, reactionary rage (some of you may not have been around for this, but the right used to have a mask over their petty reactionary rage) has made for a noxious cocktail of nothing of value ever being discussed.
Now, was it more frustrating when they were less open about their intentions? Sure. Because it felt like shouting at a wall. And it was more “boring” to be politically aware. But under those wraps we had the patriot act, PNAC, intelligent neocons playing politics way more competently, and a serious problem with somehow even less conscientious democrats.
But now we have companies operating blanket eavesdropping via apps/home aid/LLMs (and the patriot act is still hanging around), project REDMAP/Project 2025, less than intelligent far right lunatics not understanding how to play politics, and democrats playing conscientious for appearances while still being, at best, useless neoliberals and at worst, reactionaries themselves.
Things have changed, and not for the better. Add on top of that discourse deteriorating into nonsense while everyone throws their hat in the mix with their uninformed opinions…it’s a depressing landscape. So, I don’t know if people can grow out of that obnoxious, I’ll-informed political stage because that’s just politics now.
Definitely a skewed signal to noise ratio, which at this point feels intentional. Politics felt far more boring in the before-fore, but I think most of that was me not paying close enough attention.
I had a casual conversation with ChatGPT a while back about how this level of political division is unprecedented in the country (I guess I conveniently forgot about the civil war during this), and the response was basically "Everybody says that in every era," so I wonder if I just have too narrow a focus. I should look into that...
What if an opinion held on the far end of the spectrum is what is actually right for people? Do you dismiss it because of being on the end of the fucking seesaw?
Obviously. Im just not dumb enough to put myself in a box.