Ok, let’s follow this to its logical conclusion.
So for reactionary thought to be caused by disability then the demographic with the least disability would naturally also be the least reactionary.
Therefore the bourgeoisie is obviously the most communist class… well that doesn’t seem right…,
I work in university education and critical thinking is abysmal among students. I deal with 40-60 students per class, maybe 10-15 in a class show worthwhile critical skills. Most struggle to retain key points or cannot read and follow instructions. The majority don’t, or don’t know how, to access library databases or archives. Most assignments are full of sources they got from Google because the library search function is an extra click away.
Students also make life hell for themselves, their peers, and teachers because of their lack of respect for their surroundings. A significant portion of students just sit there with earbuds in and text or shop online.
And this isn’t even mentioning the fact that half the curriculum isn’t worth learning because the professor or department are compromised by liberalism and settler imperialism.
Not sure what I’m contributing here. I think this is nothing new, it’s just so intense these days that it’s hard to believe it’s ONLY education and ideology. It feels like there is more to the puzzle otherwise my story of emerging out of Christian fascism through criticism is just an accident and not a universal model for personal growth.
Edit: I want to add that my deepest frustration isn’t even with fascism per se. It’s with liberals. I am about as scared of liberals as fascists, because liberals (and anarchist types) are very self righteous about things that will only make things worse and they are so poisoned by discourse that whatever critical skills they have only function as their own ideological prison, a golden cage to be proud of. Fascists do exactly what I expect at least. Fanon was right that people can only truly become themselves through conflict against oppression and by destroying their oppressors. There is no other anvil to be molded on but imperial ideology.
I’m partial to the idea that the uniquely American approach to University causes this through a combination of a) people with little interest in advanced education going through the motions because it’s expected, b) people who might be interested in it were the circumstances different being pushed to a cynical view of it by our societal anti-intellectualism, and c) people who are very interested in it getting burned out by the often self defeating expectations and structure of the system.
In a better world, universities would be smaller, the students would be older, and most professions would train on the job. Tons of proffessions like software coding really don’t need to be taught by colleges, but that’s where everyone who wants to “learn to code” ends up because of the way we’ve bloated those institutions.
Fanon was right that people can only truly become themselves through conflict against oppression and by destroying their oppressors. There is no other anvil to be molded on but imperial ideology.
I’m not familiar with this idea. What happens in a world without imperialism, etc.?
idk, I guess I can’t say shit about it because when I was the subject of violence I basically just took it and now I’m a hollow person, but I feel like the best outcome would have involved not being the subject of violence in the first place.
I am deeply disappointed seeing how many people in this thread think that the problem with this argument is invoking genetics as the biological cause of reactionary thought, instead of the actual problem that “intelligence” or cognitive capacity has nothing to do with one’s ability to be class conscious or to have solidarity with their own class. Not lead, not covid, and not microplastics can turn a population towards reaction, even if it does affect their cognitive capacity. Being disabled does not make you a reactionary. Being ‘smart’ doesn’t make a communist.
Yeah, I think this is an issue that has existed in the community since the subreddit and it’s just a matter of Yugo phrasing it in a way that makes the reactionary nature a bit more apparent that is causing this dissonance. The community’s culture has never outgrown streaks of fundamental antisociality like you see in a lot of groups of politically radical social outcasts.
This is one of my fundamental hangups with other communists. Class consciousness in the US will not reliably produce communists. It will produce imperialists much more reliably.
Socialist revolution is not a natural outcome of American class consciousness, WW3 is.
So, in fact, critical consciousness combined with a very refined ethical (not moral, more onto-epistemological) orientation is necessary to arrive at the consciousness needed for revolution in the US. In many regards, you DO need to be very critically skilled to be a communist in the US. Class doesn’t automatically hand you your politics, and the class that would hand you a proletarian politic does not exist in the US. Having a boss and having needs doesn’t magically create communists in a society built on theft and rape. It creates fascists.
even if conservatives generally have some genetic or developmental brain condition and even if that condition causes their reactionary tendencies, it’s obviously not a disability in western society.
Its literally just years of compounded dogshit education, which is worse in red states. Thats all it is, nothing biological, its not because they fuck cousins, its not because of lead or microplastics (lead might have an effect actually), its primarily because people weren’t taught how the world works, how our country works, and how to discern media. Couple that with just poor material conditions and poverty and people will believe fascist lies.
It is our job to reach these people, we can’t just laugh at them or call them dumb. That being said, there is always a percentage that will go down with the MAGA ship and will never change their ways, and thats just something we gotta swallow, at least we can make them embarassed again.
The decades of overpowering fossil fuel exhaust is probably also not exactly doing any favors. And all the malnutrition. And the social, psychic, and physiological effects of climate disaster. Coal plants. All sorts of pit mining.
I think gacha games are also part of this, somehow.
It is our job to reach these people
Yeah imagine naming your podcast “The DeProgram” and then coming out with this take
The ReProgram
there’s been some studies on brain shit and i’ve retained the word “amygdala” but not the conclusion of any studies. Plus the people doing that research don’t know the difference between a liberal and a communist.
Also, something being observable at a neural level doesn’t not make it permanent or genetically determined.
Ive always attributed the crank shit coming out of the US to decades and decades of cold war propaganda turning their brains to mush.
Decades of cold war propaganda including an intntionally shite educatiohal sysnem
It’s ridiculous and embarrassing to suggest genetics is an issue here, but ITT “years of lead paint lol” mfs when someone just slightly rephrases their frequent theses on people being brain-poisoned at a huge scale.
Granted, Yugo and those posters are wildly overstating nonsense like that because it lets them sidestep trying to actually sociologically understand what is going on, same as others try to make it about some sort of essential evil or whatever.
lead does make your brain work worse. school shit isn’t a perfect proxy by any means but there are dips around racetracks presumably because of still using leaded gas while it’s been banned at-large.
I know lead is a real thing, my complaint was about blaming the bad politics of boomers on it.
I think infantilisation of americans through their media soup combined with leaded fuel, asbestos and now microplastics is worth considering here.
Maybe this is a uniquely euro way of thinking? I sorta lean towards what yugopnik is saying here and it’s gotta be because we’re both in europe and look at the americans in a kind of fucked up “how the fuck did they get like this?” way.
It’s ok you can call me reactionary for sorta sympathising with what he’s saying, I can definitely see how it’s reactionary. But also like… Wtf america?
Asbestos was all over Europe too (and everywhere else) and has no neurological effects AFAIK.
Leaded fuel in road vehicles was also a thing all over the world too. US banned it in 1996, UK in 1999 and EU in 2000 (though some member countries already had a ban in effect before that).
Even then America is the premier car centric society in rural Czechia you could walk basically anywhere or take an electric tram downtown back in the day without even experiencing a car.
yeah that’s less important in my thing i guess i just threw that in there as yet another way materials poisoned everyone
I believe it doesnt exactly poison so much as mechanically disrupt tissue. It is very small and sharp fibers.
Yeah i didn’t intend to be literal, just the general vibe
No Child Left Behind, focus on sight reading (just skip words you don’t recognise), standardised testing, extremely long periods without school aka having an entire summer off, malnutrition in schools all combined creates something uniquely American. All of those things exist in a vacuum to some extent elsewhere but America has all of them all at once.
And that’s not even including the bombardment of propaganda and lead.
Y’all aren’t that different ok or have you willingly dismantled your colonial legacies and ties to the zionist entity when I wasn’t looking?
It really feels very very different from our perspective. Like, european literacy rates are all 98%+ just for a start while the US is at 21% illiteracy.
I can’t really explain it to you, the vibe is different speaking to europeans compared to americans, I can not tell who is a child when I speak to americans whereas I absolutely know who the children are and who the adults are when I speak to europeans online. Americans online are very often indistinguishable to me from like 12-16 year old extremely edgy european kids.
It’s the combination of rampant illiteracy, poor emotional regulation, and insistence on having to react to any stimuli. I’ve seen two Burgerlander fash get into some online argument because Fash #1 made some sarcastic comment about needing more woke movies but Fash #2 didn’t pick up the very obvious sarcasm and accused Fash #1 of being a woket-word, which led to Fash #1 calling Fash #2 some other slur, which led to some long comment thread of them accusing each other of being woke.
woket-word
I know this is besides the point but what is this?
woket-word = woket*rd
It’s definitely the lead and whatever chemicals Dupont is serving in tonight’s dinner
The thing is with the United States, they have a ton of very smart people that both empower and “hide behind” the ignorant on a societal level, and you always hear about the ignorant and almost never hear from the very smart people, at least that’s what I feel as a non American. The right wing political movement in the US is actually a perfect example of this. You always hear about the latest idiotic thing Trump or one of his cronies said, you almost never hear about the people actually running things behind the scenes and keeping it all together. The US military is another example, you always hear about the latest foolish thing they did, and almost never about all the higher ups with multiple master’s degrees and even doctorates.
i wouldn’t be surprised if there’s some kind of detectable damage from the centuries of gutting schooling and drowning everyone in omnipresent propaganda, but that’s still nurture, not nature
I secretly suspect ADHD is an epigenetic stress response but that’s not what we’re talking about here lol
“Nature vs Nurture” usually means “how they were born vs what happened after,” so one is biological and one is biological + social. Yugopnik is being concerning here, but
he isn’t actually specifying what he means on this axis because both can be biological.Edit: but he isn’t ruling out nurture, as much as I would hope he was past ascribing these problems to “genetics” as a Marxist . . .
Rephrased what I said to be more technically accurate to his bad take
Yes definitely a lot of mental illness but whom amongst us
Would microplastics in brain count as nature?
Scientific socialism came out of the unhealthiest century in human history.
lead pipes?
In utero, yes, and after that it’s nurture for the same reason that diet differences are nurture.
You really don’t need anything beyond settler colonialism to explain America, you don’t gotta do shit like this. A lot of people don’t want to grapple with that though
europeans especially do not get that. I’ve seen some terrible takes on settler colonial conditions from europeans on this website
Saying this shit is not only ableist but also lets reactionary Americans off the hook. Like I can understand to a degree liberal Americans and Americans who default to liberalism because they’ve never really thought about it, but 99% of reactionary Americans are absolutely aware that the things they espouse are EVIL and they adopt whatever justifications or avoid looking at any evidence or simply pretend to believe whatever they need in order to resolve that dissonance.
All across the world communist movements and even communist nations have formed even in places with various mental disabilities linked to malnutrition, antenatal/childhood disease or severely toxic environment conditions. It’s a dog shit take.
I remember one of the cumtown boys saying something like I’m a dumb piece of shit but I know healthcare is a human right. Etc
Yeah this feels like it’s straying too far into “IQ debate” territory. It’s no mystery, it’s all nurture, hell I’ve met people with fucking degrees believe some heinous or outrageous shit. We are social animals and we pick up on the cues left to us by our peers, family, friends, neighborhood etc. It’s a cop out to just say “well the american people have brain damage”, no, we have societal decay damage my man.
Hakim lent Yugo his skull measuring calipers.
