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Comment by dudefeliciano | Hacker News Reader

Not stupid, just lacking class consciousness

I would love if the public discourse would allow for more diversity of opinions. Unfortunately, where I come from, the left has simplified the rhetoric to "If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi." Unfortunately, this elitist attitude has only contributed to the divide of the people.

> If you are of a different opinion then we are, you are either badly educated (read, stupid) or a nazi

Depending on where you are from, this could absolutely be true, as "elitist" and insulting as it might be. Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries.

Minor quibble but wouldn’t it be a subset?

> Well, fascist is more appropriate than Nazi because Nazi is superset of fascism with a heavy anti-semitic element, and I'm not aware of many rabidly anti-semitic parties in the mainstream in many countries.

Scratch a little deeper on the things popular Republican politicians and members of the current administration have been saying and promoting for the last few years.

Conspiratorial movements almost always end up at "it's The Jews", and so do theirs.

If you see talk about their opponents engaging in dark "rituals" involving child murder or abuse, you can be 100% sure you've found one that'll get you there. It's just blood libel, keeping reading and listening and you'll see that they're fully at that point before you've had to do much work. It's tedious.

True, but other than the "Jewish space lasers" brain worm lady, the others aren't outwardly anti-semitic. Unlike the Nazis who were very very much so.

So for now, I'm billing them as fascist.

No. Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist. In fact, thats the core of my criticism. Political views are a spectrum, and you can't just push someone to the far right just because you disagree with them. This black-and-white thinking is doing far more harm then you might imagine.

> Just because a conservative is not willing to support a liberal position, that doesn't make them automatically a fascist

Their methods and their positions make them fascist, not their support or lack thereof for opposing positions.

Say, a coup attempt. Or someone in power talking about ignoring term limits. Or getting bribes and favouritism for corporations (corporatism is a heavy component of fascism). Or silencing opposition with brutal and illegal methods (such as kidnapping in the middle of the night by unmarked and masked men). Those all scream fascism, regardless of the fact that e.g. the person in charge of healthcare is an antivaxxer.

I don't know what to tell you, I'm never going to be happy about people voting against my rights or about secret police disappearing people and ignoring the court system

You seem to be completely ignoring lynx97's actual point.

If you're not happy about those things, stop telling everyone who disagree with you how stupid they are and how they're literal Nazis. Then at least some of those who disagree with you on some issues will be less driven to vote for the people whose positions appall you.

Thanks for rewording my point. You pretty much nailed what I was trying to say.

Decades of name calling and refusing to compromise from the right and it’s the left with the bad attitude that’s dividing people?

people have absorbed so much american "the left is always evil and the right can do no wrong" propaganda they dont even realize it.

Yes. If you pretend to be the better person, you better make sure you act like it. If you give up and fall back to name calling, people will judge you based on your actions. "But I used to be the good guy" doesn't count at all.

If people judged name callers based on their actions then how did we get here?

I agree, it's a huge trap. The right exploits leftists who insult normal people as dumb. It worked when they insulted George W Bush, who people identified with and found likeable, and was probably coached to bungle sentences despite likely not talking that way at Yale and Harvard; and when they insult Trump and his ideas, though he's perceptive and effective.

Many say it works because liberals now represent the professional-managerial class, who often come across to workers/poor as infuriatingly patronizing, slick and humiliating. Whereas many don't know who owns their big corporation, so they don't inspire such visceral feelings.

While some may argue that liberals aren't leftists (but are rather good-cop), nevertheless many leftists do this too. The dynamics are explained in Thomas Frank's book "Listen, Liberal", David Graeber's essay "Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good", and Participatory Economics's coverage of the coordinator class.

Army of Altruists, by David Graeber: https://harpers.org/archive/2007/01/army-of-altruists/

Thanks for the pointer, that was a very interesting read.

sure this sounds bad, but we also currently have, in the USA, and administration who deports student protestors and does Nazi salutes. Ive been hearing about how "oh, the left just calls us Nazis for any opinion that differs from them" and now they are in power doing Nazi salutes. They were Nazis the whole time. No one is getting called Nazi for their opinions on tax rebates.

Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular, you'll never convince someone swayed by bumper stickers to read and thoughtfully consider your 500-word ultra-concise argument for it.

"Vibes" and populism drive voter behavior. Cheap populist messages will always resonate at least as well as even an ultra-simplified "it's all of us versus the owners of capital". Us vs. Them is what populism is, but getting the right Them according to class consciousness is really hard (and it'll constantly be at risk of someone subverting it to something else, probably "the Jews and other child-sacrificing Evil Cultists in their sway" because it's usually that for some stupid fucking reason).

Even Bernie had to settle for the shitty and inaccurate "the 1%" to get even a little traction with class consciousness on a mass scale.

Right now outright conspiratorial thinkers are ascendant and doing the usual thing of being some of the elites (the capitalists) we should all be against, while painting everything as the fault of other elites (how are they differently elite? Well, follow their stupid threads of "evidence" and you always end up at blood libel, truly, it's so consistent that it's boring)

> Class consciousness is entirely too intellectual and nerdy to ever be popular,

well yea, and Marx is a taboo, nothing new there. Those ideas can be repackaged though, in a way that won't make people foam at the mouth because of the "communist sounding words" (thinking of gary's economics for example). I agree with what you said, it's easier to package an "Anti-something" message, as we see with all the anti-immigrant messaging in the US and Europe, the Anti-Billionaire movement still has not gained even a fraction of the traction though.

Well, I dont remember any "immigrants for the poor" movements. But I know from personal experience that Lions Club and Rotary people actually sometimes do something useful for the poor with their money...

Given that context, do you really not understand that you shouldn't bite the hand that might feed you?

Immigrants are never going to feed the poor and disadvantaged.

The oh-so-bad-and-evil rich people might at least sometimes.

Immigrants are a net positive contributor to the welfare and pension system in the EU, they are statistically very likely to be the literal hand that feeds you when you will be old and in need of care.

I never said rich people are bad and evil, just that they should pay their fair share. For their own good too, to live in a more harmonious society, but maybe this is better.

Let me expand a bit on this. I personally think it is a very bad sign for our society that we are about to outsource the responsibilities around caring for the elderly to (mostly) female workers from neighboring countries to save a few bucks. Personally mostly because I find the prospect of a language barrier in care horryfing. I don't want to imagine how it must feel for those we already subject to this treatment to be cared for by someone who barely understands your language. In that context I find it hard to feel cozy about the future of care being "solved" by using immigrant workforce. Regarding pensions, all I can do is hope the statistics you are refering to are actually true. The cases I know about are heavily blocked on the language barrier when it comes to finding a "good" job. The best positive example I can think of are construction workers where it seems to work quite well that one or two guys speak the local language well enough to translate/coordinate with the rest of the crew. But most other cases of immigrants I know are actually pretty much blocked on the language issue. Only some are talented enough to learn a new language fluently in a few years, and some languages are actually pretty hard to learn. I count me in on that group. If I had to learn a new language at my age, I would probably do very badly. I didn't even pick up enough spanish during a 2 month trip through south america to do any interesting conversation. It would probably take me years to be able to respond to a random sentence from a native speaker of anything other then english and my native language. You might be able to survive with just English in the tech industry. But in pretty much every other industry, especially service, it is hard to find a job without good language skills. So most of the examples in that area that I am currently thinking of actually ended up depending on the welfare state for income instead of contributing to the pension system.

Nothing to feel cozy about, that was just an example of how immigrants do in fact help the poor and disadvantaged. In the same way that you mention how working class jobs are now also increasingly done by immigrants. Now if the rotary clubs want to donate money that’s great, but the fact remains that there is a redistribution of wealth happening before our eyes, and the direction is not wealthy -> immigrants, it’s middle class and below -> ultra rich. We are effectively subsidizing the profits of billionaires, while they skirt taxes and lobby for cutting even more funding to the welfare system. The economic divide between the super wealthy and the ever fading middle class is increasing year by year. How is this supposed to function?

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