one of the things that is difficult abt the internet is that sometimes when something is so ubiquitous, it becomes very difficult to talk abt having a different feeling abt it without people you know thinking you are vagueposting them. so, i want to make it clear that this post is abt my personal experience being uncomfortable with the jokes abt the oceangate submarine thing, & extrapolating on my frustrations around the resultant discourse vis a vis which emotional experience is More Leftist. i don't mean to target any one person, bc it is largely the sheer volume of it, constantly, for several days, from multiple disconnected sources, that is getting to me. i am really & truly not upset with any one person & if you feel i'm responding to you & it bums you out, pls feel free to say so or reach out privately (i have a link in my pinned post on here links in the new link sidebar feature with some ways to contact me) so we can chat. also it's alright if you just disagree & i hope you can just kind of hold the knowledge that im not trying to say anyone sucks.
in the specific case of this submarine thing, when people feel the need to start politically justifying their jokes, i find myself wondering what positive agenda this materially furthers. some billionaire is dead. ok fine. are those assets going to be redistributed? is anything going to change with this event? if not, why use that to justify the joke (that, again, i don't think needs justifying)?
i am just frustrated by what i feel is part of a general negative trend, especially Online, of "no-one takes my feelings seriously, so i am going to put them in the context of politics or ethics or morals so that they have to"
Some quotes that resonated with me, in addition to the ones Jess highlighted:
narrowing back down a small amount, i personally find "aimless threats of violence are leftism if the target sucks enough" just sort of annoying. i'm not a "no violence ever <3" idealist; i'm fully aware of the utility of some acts of violence, even extreme ones. it's actually pretty important to me that i am able to hold both "violence is bad (ie: in an ideal world, we wouldn't have it)" & "violence is necessary (ie: we do not live in that ideal world)", rather than merging those two sometimes clashing beliefs into "actually violence is good". i know i keep reiterating this, but i don't expect everyone to think the same way i do, especially when i say: i can't personally square it with my politics to say that there are categories of people who can only improve the world by dying. there are deaths i don't mourn & even deaths i celebrate, but i experience an internal misalignment of values if i ever try to say "the only (or even best) option for dealing with X or Y group is death".
the place i will admit to high grounding is that when i see someone say "billionaires don't care when people die horribly", my first instinct is to say that i think we should be better than them in the ways we think abt & relate to people. you don't have to care abt a billionaire dying, you really don't. but i just don't think saying you're only holding yourself to the ethical standards of someone you think sucks is a great defense
Really, these quotes articulate for me my own lingering frustration toward actions that the person performing them implicitly construes as serving some greater political or cultural good, yet on the surface serve no purpose other than the personal and immediate catharsis they provide the person performing the action - quote-tweet dunks that, at their worst, are little different from harassment (or "bullying", as they are often confusingly framed as). And if I've been reluctant to call this out, it's partly out of a worry about going too far in doing so, and partly from a worry that whatever push back I offer against this will be met with something that's a step or two away from calling me a liberal cuck.
It occurs to me that the main thing the actions I'm criticizing lack is a context or framework in which they could lead into the given effect or meaning they theoretically offer as justification, and that the main thing they share is their occurring in an environment that collapses all contexts into a single mega-context, IE social media. If you'll look at this chart, you'll s-*is forcibly removed from the rostrum by at least twenty armed guards*
