My social media environment (mostly Lemmy for the last year, after I left Reddit) is very leftist. I’m finding myself floating more and more left because y’all have a point and there’s not many counter-arguments in this social media environment. I sometimes wonder if that’s how MAGA folks feel–floating more and more right because that’s what they’re surrounded by.
Of course, my floating is (naturally /s) based on reason and leftists making good memes/arguments.
Anyways, that’s this morning’s introspection.
Side showerthought: my convictions are based on memes. Anyone have nice, accessible resources for giving those convictions a more solid base? I’d love something like a graphic history of leftist thought (similar to Queer: A Graphic History). Something approachable but with citations. Thanks :)
I suppose you could say both are pipelines in a manner of speaking, the difference is that one is designed to target the ego and promote artificial and toxic individualism in the service of a powerful few, while the other is designed to target our natural need for community and cooperation in the service of all members of the group.
One has to be promoted artificially, dishonestly (most often by co-opting leftist ideas, see national “socialism”), and at great cost to be effective, while the other just needs to be (unless my comrades are getting those Soros cheques I missed out on? lol).
Most people, when presented with leftist ideas with the “scary” isms removed, tend to agree with them, it is the capitalist indoctrination that makes them fear said isms. Remove the indoctrination and the systems it supports, provide people with their needs rather than hold them hostage behind a paywall, as well as providing an honest and critical education, and the left wouldn’t need a pipeline at all.
Meanwhile the right already have things their way, and yet they’re still dependent on those levels of deep manipulation to recruit to their side, because their side is shit and only serves a handful of people.
Anyway, I’m rambling, as for resources, these are unfortunately not as accessible as a graphic history, but here are some links I have saved for more general introductory material, and a couple of more topic specific articles to get you going (they’re not all from there, but in general, the anarchist library is a great resource, it can take some navigating to find what you’re after, but if nothing else, you’re guaranteed to find something interesting and informative on the way):
anarchism - a beginner’s guide
What is Communist Anarchism? Now and After: The ABC of Communist Anarchism
Are You An Anarchist? The Answer May Surprise You!
How Nonviolence Protects the State
Red Flags: Before You Join That Org
E: as for the bullshit notion that we must platform and listen to fascists and other bigots “for balance” or to avoid an “echo chamber” or whatever other bullshit - NO. Our priority is to survive in spite of those people, not to allow them to continue to walk all over us and invade literally every single space in existence so that they don’t feel excluded. Fuck that.
The key to it is to never get comfortable in your beliefs. Challenge them, break them down in your head over and over. Not until anything. You never stop.
Yes, you still run the risk of self selecting what you already believe because you use the same reasoning each time, but there’s limits to what you can do in that regard. It takes practice to work around that, so the only way to avoid it is through practice. When you find yourself agreeing with what you already believe, seek out a different stance and pick it apart to try and convince yourself of it.
Again, it isn’t perfect, there’s no echo chamber as complete as our own heads. But the more you work at it, the better you’ll get.
Part of that is rigorous fact checking though, and that’s where the far right in specific falls short. Too much of what they rely on is about fear and hate that is based in falsehood. Now, the far left also has its problems with facts vs faith, and that can lead to hate and fear, but it isn’t based on it from the start, so it’s easier to sort out when a specific belief is poorly constructed.
That isn’t a centrism argument that the middle is better, there’s way too many flaws in that concept. It’s saying that you can end up at extremism in different ways, for different reasons and it’ll still behave the same.
ironically, this leftish area has caused me to go from thinking the right was terrible and the left was good to realizing there are really annoyingly aggressive people on both sides. I generally can’t stand oppression, so I am naturally on the side opposed to antiLGBTQ oppressors, racists, and sexists; which causes me to fall on the left side. But, now being in a leftish area a while, I dislike how the sheer vilifying and mob mentality disrupts calm logical thought. I will get downvotes for saying this (and that’s exactly my point), but, for example, if I were to think a policy of trump or elon was smart and good, you know there is no way i could mention it without 80 downvotes and constant personal attacks. If Trump liked gummi bears, saying ‘thats cool gummi bears are good’ would instantly result in 40 people yelling how terrible Gummi Bears are… because Trump likes them.
So lemmy caused me to go from leftist to instead having a distinction between respectful, nonaggressive people and those that aren’t. I would value a respectful, wellmeaning republican that I can have a meaningful conversation with (even if I disagree), over an aggressive lefty attacking any hint of an ideology other than their own.
Yeah it’s the pile on mentalities that every online social media seems to get.
If you’re in the “wrong” on that specific site there’s rarely room for calm discussion just a pile on of abuse solidifying everyone’s echo chambers
I ended up more left after a few years on Reddit because as I saw how many ideas were expressed and challenged and had my own ideas tested, the conclusions I came to pointed in that direction over and over.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_People’s_History_of_the_United_States is accessible, though I had to stop a bunch to just give myself time for the “damn, that’s fucked up” to pass pretty much every chapter.
