Tag: leftism

• Human?

  I took my joy and gave it to a substance to feed back to myself. And now it’s stopped. Why the fuck did I get a job? To prove a point to x? To have structure? Idk. I struggle so, so, so very much w/ my mind and the life furnished by horrors of generations past.

  Mine isn’t better, just more info jammed down our throats from the outset. I can’t imagine the beautiful privilege of life before total screen takeover, briefly though I may have enjoyed it as a child. The world, not just images curated by a machine of that world. We had to render our own images, think our own thoughts; ruminate, paint, live; shouldn’t be possible to avoid boredom in the human world. We lose context, awe (obviously given loss of context), boredom, imagination, 

  I sold those things to the screens for them to feed back to me. But I think I want my things back. I am really not happy or whole-feeling. But was I ever happy before I sold those things? Maybe more natural. But the deep tragic system-halting dysfunction is powerful in that it has just enough potency to its numbing techs for me to survive in the depths of nothingness. Just enough simulated social interaction, emotional stimuli, distractive noises, that I can be almost comfortable in my depleted body-cage and apartment that becomes dirtier every time I look up from my phone, an inhuman bunker where I can order food and goods I need (consume), watch or listen to things (consume), drink or smoke (consume), but all that watching and buying – participation in the spectacle – leaves me very little mental or temporal space for anything but getting angry about my cyclical failure and hunkering down in incredible deep aquifers of self-hatred or paranoia or fear or sheer capitalistic lust. No room for production of anything – out – empathy, joy, love, even boredom – the space is reserved for technofeudal overlords. And I know that but it doesn’t stop me from consistently inundating my brain with context-shorn information. Even good full-length pieces of art turned to mental static in service of being-feeling-knowing nothing of my human self, only constructed algorithm facsimile that constantly sags into its own bad habits. The internet is ostensibly enormous and I’m trapped on three treadmills all owned by billionaires. I am not more connected, but more isolated and hateful. I am not more informed, I am more misled and ignorant about broader contextual frames, I am not happier or more fulfilled or more human; more art may be viewable today than before, but the internet is a massive dump that one has to sift through; ‘oh there, a bigot; oh there, a sports gambling ad, oh there, AI generated spew, oh there an AI generated bigot’; technology is rarely ‘for the people,’ it almost always enters the world as a form of capital and starts dividing from there. And to change that – to reach people, to encourage humanity – I too find myself online. And I wish I could eschew that entirely. But it has successfully interceded in a number of procedures – basic introductions between young people, for example: “Hey, great outfit, what’s your instagram?” “What’s your snap?” The social  interaction has changed, and if all you have is a phone number (still more than I’d prefer most days) then you’d better hope that person actually wants to follow up, or the connection may already have died. 

  Now for some AI has interceded in the basic processes of learning, self-expression, knowledge, even emotional dialogue. Because…?

  We’re lazy, I guess, and the primary values inculcated in our society thanks to the predominant modes of production, distribution, and consumption devised and sold to us by ultra-international-mega-corporations who have conquered the problem of scale, are uncritical ease and convenience for the consumer and efficiency and profit gone mad for the industrialist; yet we’re all well meaning. Chat with most low-level Amazon employees and you’ll discover a normal person who knows this is all fucked. And when we as a proletariat all know, and all want the best (well.. most want the best and many who appear not to have come under the spell of those looking to mystify and displace their legitimate concerns for their personal gain; yet there are enough of those emotional and financial pressure points to effectively avert revolution or even basic awareness of the class-based predicament. And one must know class and race wars are being waged every day in the United States, just without much organized resistance. Capitalistic states have aided and abetted both wars forever, sometimes domestically, and sometimes abroad. This revolution without end stands in stark contrast to the social/political revolutions which fought these formations/configurations of power and capital; in the French case, they ended up at war with the monarchies of Europe; in the Soviet case they started fighting internal capitalistic/absolutist enemies and wound up in a long-standing confrontation with the greatest configuration of power and capital in human history, the United States post-war machine (which funny enough never seemed to really be post-war). The baby boomers, at least in part, fought these capitalistic/imperialistic tendencies then were sent en masse to die in an ignominious imperial war, a coupling of events which unleashed a strange incumbent class for my peers and I to have to interact with as we negotiate our entry into society. 

  So what? Social revolution is stemmed and young men die, and capitalistic revolution – aided by existing power structures, technology that enables further subjugation of the working class (see time work discipline, and industrial capitalism by EP Thompson), and today by their ownership of media spaces and the control over information dissemination which that involves. The police, there to defend capital, operates at a level of militarization and counter-insurgency tactics that render any serious effort to transform the system EXTREMELY dangerous.

  (Bleak ending and a bit of a meander meant more to begin to discuss a few of the ideas bouncing around in my mind but that’s where I stopped writing for now.)

  December 8, 2025

  capitalism, distraction, leftism, revolution, writing

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• assorted thoughts

  (Critical) thought and action terminating clichés embedded in culture, some intentionally and some naturally

  There are behaviors and thought patterns you can promote that influence elections aside from political agency through promotional information

  The point of education – self-expression and formation of personal ideology 

  I want to give voice and articulate struggle and the ways in which we are splayed open and systematically discouraged and displaced from our humanity and collective responsibility to life and to each other

  So one unconsciously possesses an ideal of what life should be like and I personally would like to try living that way for a week while writing actively the whole time to help myself do it and at the end debriefing and thinking about my ideals and goals and routines and limitations honestly to arrive at a new practice for myself. I have been instinctually brilliant (and super humble, evidently) in seeing elements of revolutionary struggle for myself while existing in a very privileged position which may legitimately be harmed by acting to better society; (although one must critically examine one’s media consumption given the existence of algorithms designed by corporations and wonder whether there is much or any agency in my direction, even if the only thing the algorithm did was automatically sag and familiarize itself to my existing psyche, even when I wasn’t paying attention) this is of course a fundamental mechanism of preventing revolution. I am fixated on the problem of the profit motive, and am imagining a solution integrating a number of attached motives and aims and values that are then embodied by a state with power to investigate, debate the acceptability of, and potentially end the existence or practice of a technology, including sale/design of objects, methods of business practice, etc.. There are so many obvious ills that deserve contemplation by groups genuinely motivated to improve the human experience, not just accrue profit. The uncritical values of wealth (‘abundance’), ease, convenience, passivity and the sort of lazy hypocritical suspicion of intrusion and manipulation by ‘other’ cultivated carefully to ignore the total intrusion and manipulation at the hands of capital; it seems so difficult to animate change given the current state of information ownership/dissemination/reception. The act of beginning to understand the dialectic of images and reality, to articulate the sea of images that one swims through to arrive at personal purpose or act at all, is a choice to try to become more human. I failed to take full advantage of my college experience, but I seriously want a chance at seriously making a statement and affecting change, something that I – rather uncritically – have accepted to involve me acquiring more education, more shiny pebbles (and also undeniably meaningful, humanizing, emboldening moments that enabled this sort of self expression in the first place, lost due to the fundamental orientation of values in American society) to show to the public and next pulpit-owner; but this is a sad practice and aim in certain ways, a man running from his insecurity and internal insolvency to try to become big enough in the – a – world to compensate for the misery of my daily experience, in certain ways not understanding that mending that misery and moving honestly is the only way to actually make my dreams come true, if occasionally by changing what those dreams are when it emerges they are impractical and harmful and derived as a form of self defense. I want to create art that captures these structural critiques and observations and communicates them to the public at large, that elucidates a novel set of values fundamentally different from the profit motive underlying our entire society. I want to examine things like personhood (‘humanity’), sex, power, etc.; I want to combine these themes intentionally and think about their interplay, set in a variety of contexts; I want to create demonstrative stories about wealth and its effect on human possibility, setting people of different socioeconomic groups in the same situation and demonstrating the unique struggles that they have due to their identity and vitally their wealth, power, and agency; about the fact that there are those who manage capitalism who are liberated from the negative consequences of this system and exist in unacceptable ways, and that society becomes something for them to engage with almost as if it were in slow motion, plundered and played with and used vicariously in one’s quest for personal expression that, undertaken with the set of priorities of the average american, can never be wholly successful and will always breed misery universally; that there is a public ‘thing,’ a res publica, that needs to be tended to and fostered and critically thought about and promoted, values beyond just individual abundance but individual and cultural expression and dignity, priorities that need to be adapted and fundamental expectations that must be changed. And yet I am still dancing on the outside of the circle here, saying ‘I want to write’ instead of writing, even as this piece of writing is produced it represents the bones of what should be written or what I want to write. Side note, I am wildly unwell physically and it is a struggle that I have been attempting to not consider even though it, as part of the collection of sensations I am having, constitutes my lived experience, and even as I deny so much of what is real and human about myself I cannot winnow illness 

  If I were the government in its current ideological state I’d use blackmail to have a roster of “unconnected” dangerous people to commit serious crimes like assassinating leaders who threaten the status quo because their operations which are currently not being investigated; If I were a football team I’d also cultivate a class of bruiser football players meant to injure opposing star players (this is impractical and actively stupidly cruel, to say nothing of the idea above); that one would likely find these suggestions ignominious implies and gives some shape to the cultural practice and public expectations of these institutions, as Machiavelli could be seen to reveal something about the ideals of princehood in his rendering a negative of sorts (one not necessarily opposite of reality but uncanny and naked and too honest about its purposes, in a way that was immediately revealing about the substance of the activity of rulership itself), yet we fail to acknowledge that those operating vital systems think and move in downright horrifying ways to maintain and accumulate more capital and power, and had to think and move in horrifying ways to get to that position in the first place. 
  I live in a state of perpetual lack and it is nearly entirely unnecessary; I don’t know why I don’t seem to recognize the possibility of having multiple sets of towels / dishes / silverware / pants so that I am not constantly running out

  I also, in order to facilitate that, need a consistent schedule of house maintenance, something that doesn’t happen because my little splayed open oblivion world has avenues through which I can acquire things to effectively permanently perpetuate my self-imposed status that is almost like living under house arrest with a hoarder who is me in my careless apathetic self hating state. This is dangerous and must be broken free of.

  “Blow as deep as you want to blow” – this is blowing pretty deep

  And while on one level this is another form of avoidance, it is about as confrontational of my issues as can be; there is so much not being said and – critically – done. There is so much in the kaleidoscopic fullness of humanity not being embodied by my human experience, so much of me not touched by my own mind for a long time out of fear of vulnerability and a sort of existentially-embodied scowl at the world and times. But the world and times are what they are; power is acting in the world and on me, and I can either make a sincere effort and augment my own humanity or not, and still have to drag myself to work whether it’s an anonymous office job or something that I feel more happy about. That is to say, as the Stoics expressed (Marcus Aurelius specifically), I would prefer to run alongside the cart than be dragged, to express my humanity, autonomy, and vision as best I can and find out, for better or worse, what I can do. 

  And how much of this voice, this tone, this worldview really reaches a reader? How does it sit in their mind, does it appear cogent? Does it have the power and context necessary to change somebody’s mind? And how much is my voice really here; am I performing my intelligence in an insecure way that jumps off the page? I have a great fear of being stuck in a goldfish bowl of ‘insight’ that never goes anywhere which is clear to any observer but not to myself, and that nobody is honest or direct enough to tell me just how off base I am. In my long bouts of thinking and writing recently I have really felt like I am onto something, but I wonder how much this effort is something on this level of supreme confidence and perfectionism? This doubt is more about the way I’m recording and presenting my opinion and thought pattern, becoming open to psychoanalysis and leaving all sorts of characteristic little indicators which are telling about the human creating the thought. A LOT of my position about self improvement is based in comprehension that began for me several years ago with Brené Brown’s book Daring Greatly, along with Atomic Habits. These two popular books are couched in ideology – as everything is – and incite people to act according to sets of values which are only implicitly set out (because they emanate from the creator of the work on a semi-intentional level), a set of values that include work and ‘normalcy,’ even as Brown does acknowledge and try to eliminate the toxic elements of that value; they also do not ask effective questions about class/logistical limitations to self transformation. And I, embarrassingly, feel that I haven’t read enough total material to have a consistent read on my relationship with a text and really know for certain if I am being shown a clear picture or not. One danger of AI (here’s the once-a-day shaking of my fist at the sky) is the creation of context and source material soup that warps existing ideas and deprives one of clarity about where something came from, a question we ask so rarely given the way that the internet works and is structured that it is very hard to begin meaningful transformation. 

  October 24, 2025

  Creativity, Humanity, leftism, revolution and art, writing

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• Democrats and Change

  In their current form, the Democratic Party is likely content to be the ‘last opposition party,’ an extremely dangerous historical trend with liberal / neoliberal politicians (see the February Revolution, Nazi party takeover in Weimar Germany, and, albeit not exactly liberal, the Optimates in the Roman Republic); they will sit there until our/their political system has been completely cannibalized by those looking to increase their power in the absence of governmental oversight (capitalists in this case), lending their legitimacy to this process and only being consumed last when it is too late and the loss of the dignity of old men is no longer of public concern because they gave their own power away. Democrats are normative political agents in a world that is no longer normative, attempting to arrive at consensus and compromise with the Republican party, a group of individuals interested in ending American politics on every level that they cannot control and continue to subvert. This lack of a strong representative group advocating for positive change leaves many Americans with the sensation that politics have already ended, giving the Republicans a massive advantage. This situation is intractable unless the Democrats do something that I believe is imperative for the vast majority of American institutions and impossible given their neoliberal ideology: turn around from the interests of capital and shareholders – the few – and specifically attend to the interests of workers and citizens (and, in the case of businesses, consumers). Another issue is that given the amorality of corporations, the increased power and license to operate with less oversight offered by Donald Trump represents a position too attractive to refuse for long; while the Democrats share their primary stakeholders (capitalists and billionaires) with Republicans, they will never offer an appealing alternative and suffer attrition as those with wealth and power complete their slow-motion coup d’état. 

  Republicans have prudently chosen to rally workers and citizens with their rhetoric, but I do not believe that their governmental policy does anything other than hasten wealth transfer and provide psychic returns for their followers. These psychic returns seem to be part of a phenomenon described by Slavoj Zizek (and consequently Lacan) – “worsting,” a response to the undermining of an authority where things are taken to their logical extreme and that authority manifests as a farce of itself; Donald Trump as president is the ultimate example of this intentionally ruinous caricature of a once-dignified office (Idea comes from pp. 43-4 of Zizek’s Against Progress). That dignity and the exact world of political nicety that was once prized and is still clung to by Democrats became an object to be subverted for the pleasure of those who felt excluded and snubbed by the expansion of the American democratic and capitalistic project to include marginalized groups. To summarize, Republicans have effectively chosen to undermine the legitimacy of the government in their various capacities and positions to build and reinforce their poorly informed base’s preconceived notions that 1) the government is corrupt and permanently inefficient, 2) politicians are corrupt and selfish and 3) these things have been and will continue to be true forever. This has prompted their base to select from among their options unqualified, intentionally incompetent, bigoted, scandal-plagued people that serve to fulfill their vision of and also help ‘get back at’ the political system itself. 

  How does one respond to a political movement who has power in the palm of its hand and is actively working to remove checks on its speed of reform and is actively disinterested in reasoning and discourse, especially from those that it perceives as being on the left (as I am permanently, irrevocably going to be seen as by those Americans whose news comes from a Murdoch mouth)? Why should any of those people listen if they are getting what they want? I believe that given the Democratic Party’s collection of policies and the reputation-albatross around its neck nothing can change. New rhetoric, new policies, new leaders, and a new key demographic must emerge for politics to remain competitive as things change. I think it is essential to remind people: change is already happening, whether it is what you want or not. Donald Trump has changed America and will continue to shape it. 

  The ultimate challenge and paradox here is related to the dissemination of information in the United States and the paucity of actual political discourse due to the dominance of the ‘image of discourse’ in news spaces. Additionally, Democrats struggle because they can only offer ‘negative’ discourse – in the sense of critiquing Republicans’ policies, character, and behavior – while having a relatively weak ‘positive’ (substantive) policy platform paired with messaging that was easily taken out of context and weaponized against their campaign by conservative media sources. I frankly believe the discourse about calling ‘conservative’ (in my opinion reactionary is a better word given the reforms they are putting into place) people racists and nazis swinging the election was relatively unserious and more important is the proletariat’s feeling that the Democrats were not developing policies in their interest (even when their basic umbrella policies foster a better economic environment than the piggy-bank-smashing-Trump). The average American is poorly informed, un(der)educated, and often moves through a media environment saturated with context-stripped information designed to sharpen their existing resentment for ‘politics as usual.’ The way that people consume media in selective echo chamber-bubbles renders critique of sources like the New York Times’ media practices almost moot; NYT articles and especially headlines legitimize Trump constantly, yet most NYT readers aren’t going to have a novel serious revelation about Trump at this point of his exposure to the public. This all strengthens my case for the left’s need for positive populist messaging that, at least for the time being, eschews intersectionality and the legacy of American liberalism for universality of economic and social causes in opposition to the billionaires. I believe that Trump supporters THINK they are thinking through things clearly, and when you present them with a policy proposal they understand that advantages them that doesn’t explicitly also help a demographic that they feel threatened by, you can begin to change things and help the public by giving them a serious populist alternative to our current “elite” populism, which is an absurd oxymoron; the double issue of the Trump supporter craving respect and the Democrat apparently offering zero solutions but calling them many names is hard to solve in these discrete spaces of pretend discourse where people can feel comfortable and confident about their beliefs and not experience a single moment of seriously uncomfortable learning and transformation prompted by interaction with someone different from oneself. This is my concept of the loss of social serendipity, something that has transpired in our society given television and the internet; when we do not have these natural moments where our beliefs are challenged, the space for malice and misanthropy balloons, both individually and politically.  

  Ultimately, I believe that we cannot create the change necessary in our current two-party system, because the capitalists are just going to stay where the fastest wealth transfer is and work to divide and subjugate the working class. We need to develop a legitimate, distinct leftist party whose stakeholders are workers and citizens first, and we need to develop and use a language separate from existing discourse to access the public while avoiding sources of pre-existing bias; they need to see and hear ideas that aren’t contained in the negative context of American politics. However, in the interim while there are still Democrats in government and these ideas have about 10 views on a blog, here are a few thoughts about how Democrats should act. 

  The current political moment is embodied by audacious erosion of traditional political processes (e.g. senate confirmation of presidential political appointments, the insertion of oligarchs into budget management, the power of the legislative branch and the influence of the president in budget decisions, etc.) that are going undernoticed for the power grabs that they are; the avalanche of gaffes, incompetent fools intended to attract and thus distract the public eye (and ire), and generally discombobulating atmosphere all help to keep the public shocked and trapped in petty discourse that never reaches the necessary systematic and legalistic review of Trump’s activity that is transforming America. I fear – deeply – that Donald Trump will simply run again in 2028 and effectively break American institutions for the final time while proving that the rule of law is a farce, and it feels like most Democrats are not moving with that urgency. People are worried, but a lot of the time their fears bubble under the surface and we’re all hastened down the American river to our destination mute and full of fear, anger, and futility. Most Americans aren’t in a position to do much, but Democrats in both houses of Congress and every state legislature in America need to use the power granted them by their constituents and resist. The goal is to force the urgency and tyranny of the Republican Party to become explicit; moments like Nicole Collier’s choice to stay overnight in the Texas state House chamber that create a splash are good examples to aim for (https://www.texastribune.org/2025/08/19/nicole-collier-texas-house-lawsuit-police-escort/). However, I have an even more appealing playbook to pull from: Republican obstructionism! It is necessary to incite/elicit these acts of palpable fascism by pulling the VERY SAME LEVERS Republicans pulled every day a Democrat has ever been in office, with just as little decorum (https://www.dpc.senate.gov/dpcdoc.cfm?doc_name=fs-110-1-120, https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/12/republican-party-obstructionism-victory-trump-214498/). I am disgusted by the two-party system and the possibility for endless gridlock (which does, indeed, help give rise to reactionaries and even the flimsiest promises of populism), but for the time being the left’s mission needs to be twofold: those in office need to obstruct, resist and make evident the abnormality of this political moment, and those outside the political establishment must develop a new political position and language built for citizens and workers. Finally, all Americans must begin having difficult conversations across political and sociological barriers to begin the process of transformation. 

  September 15, 2025

  democrats, leftism, liberalism, political change, politics

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