this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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chapotraphouse
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That's the thing though, there's an undercurrent of "actually it's responsible adulting to do bad things, sweaty" to it. They have thought terminating defense mechanisms that respond to exposure to uncompromising ethical positions on things they have proudly compromised on with rage. Fascists worshipped the suffering and death that their actions brought to everyone including their own ranks. Far right liberals believe that brutal subjugation and abuse is "responsible leadership," believing it to be bad but necessary. Mainstream liberals tie their brains in knots to ignore the suffering capitalism and the brutal violence it requires causes, finding justifications for inaction. Radlibs reflexively move towards the mainstream and concede and capitulate to it, and have been trained to be enraged by anyone who does not.
I mean when we respond with PPB they probably think we're angry too and are thought terminating. Which usually I am, internet debates are dumb, I just want my trans folks to be living good lives free of discrimination, adequate housing, and with free healthcare that resolves their dysphoria. Everything I believe is bent around that and frankly idgaf how it happens so long as it does
If the liberals somehow do it tomorrow I'd be stoked, but history shows they're incapable of it, whereas what I described is actively underway in Cuba and even areas less developed on trans rights like China simply because they care a lot about housing and food access
I mean that's how it looks on the outside, but it's and understandable conceit on the inside. You can, with a sufficiently complicated yet wholely coherent and individually reasonable set of premises justify things like sanctions that are going to starve a bunch of children. When you or I come along to cut the Gordian knot and say "starving children is bad and unallowable axiomatically", they will object, once again self-consistently, that we can't do that because even worse outcomes will happen if we don't starve the children.
There's also plenty of this to go around on the left. Pop quiz: should the Romanovs have been gunned down in cold blood? (The answer is no), but once again, with a sufficiently complex set of premises and inferences you can justify machine gunning a tsarevich.
Those premises are that a talking head or oped told them it was the responsible if unpleasant thing to do. You're just describing layers of propaganda and contradiction-deflecting defense mechanisms: they know the costs of austerity and hegemony are wrong so they recoil from learning about the details and latch on to prevaricating bullshit from some propagandist to wear it as a shield. They want to believe that their team is good, and censor their consumption of information to stop that from being challenged.
Yes the way we form our beliefs and vocabularies is largely contingent on our experiences and sources, be they Thomas Kuhn, Michael Parenti, or Tucker Carlson.
That's what these look like from the outside, but from the inside they look like, and for all intents and purposes, are, eminently reasonable and defensible justifications for thinking the things they think. In certain meaningful ways, we don't even live on the same planet as them.
How do they know this? We know this, but I don't think we can assign this knowledge to them. If we ask them this, their just as likely to say it's regrettable, but on consideration, morally preferable to the alternatives.
They would not need to justify starving children unless they knew starving children was wrong. Compare libs to reactionaries here: the latter will openly say "yeah kill all them [slurs], I don't care" at the drop of a hat, even when we aren't at war with one of the Bad Countries. You need to bombard libs with endless propaganda for months before they come close to that.
I'm also not sure that propaganda justifies horrors like starving children so much as it diverts blame. Ask a lib if food shortages in the DPRK are the result of sanctions and they won't tell you it's sadly necessary, they'll tell you we don't sanction food, so if people are hungry they should blame it on their government.
It's only propaganda external to their frame of reference; internally it's nuance. The whole point of ideology in the Zizekian meme sense is that it's invisible and totalizing from within the system, and only becomes apparent when one ideology is replaced by another, which is why we can see it for the propaganda that it is (at least from our frame of reference).