General Discussion

It should be its own post. I shall follow your posts .

I have complicated personal and general feelings about these topics.

I am Indian, educated in the US. But I came back to the global south after a conflict with my deeply unpleasant last employer in the US-an Si Valley connected hell.

I first came across these differences when I read Marjorie Morningstar in the early 2000s when I was in grad school in the US.

Herman Wouk is pretty conservative, but I I love his writing for all that. Even from The Caine Mutiny, a work of his I read earlier while in India, I grasped in a visceral way for the first time that the Irish or Italian American immigrant experience was very different from the Jewish American experience which was different from the WASP experience. It would not stop there of course - Eastern European versus Western European, class and generational differences with each group.

Had I not been an avid reader long before the net, on the surface it would have seemed like all groups which are white, not recognizing the differences even within.

It is that way everywhere. I grapple with how people don’t seem to get the double edged sword which is recognition that we are all the same viscerally.

If on the one hand it means that there are no real inferiorities and there is real injustice, it is also the sobering recognition that a built in bias projecting an inference that presently worse off groups would be any more decent to the planet or to other lifeforms (whom we brutally colonize (look at factory farming)), is almost certainly a myth.

I have always felt like the odd one out in my own “community” abroad- technically Indian or Indian American except I never felt it. Wherever I am, route and rote stuff aside, the person always seems to matter more than the community they are from.

If that’s atomization I don’t dislike it. It’s a broader notion of what constitutes human kinship.

My “community” often is other prickly and difficult people ..lol. I was thinking with distaste while reading this vapid and awful momfluencer Jessica Kraus or another really awful moron Yoni Applebaum, how in different ways these people package dark, self-centred and vapidly evil ideas under a saccharine narrative of community in their differnt ways. Kraus is embracing neo nazis while Applebaum a sort of steely industrial Yimbyism.

Now they want to use to “affordability” to hijack Mamdani’s success. It’s something I ponder when I read the writing of people on the left whom I respect like Yasha Levine or many of the Current Affairs writers (Nathan Robinson, Samuel Miller MacDonald etc).

My own relationship with human society has had a Boo Radley quality to it. I do feel mostly like the “Scary Crazy Old Catlady” peering out at the world from my window. But well..I wouldn’t say I am scary.

I really support solidarity where it is not coupled with an expectation of finding it heart warming that species’ crass trajectory over the planet disregards every other species with a fraudulent narrative of man versus nature or one with deeply conservative faux bucolic underpinnings attacking parts of modern human life that are not the issue-solitude over herding not loneliness.

It’s puzzling since even with well intentioned people on the left the planet is viewed as just this lump that is a backdrop.

Anyway thank you for your posts. That’s the best aspect of discussion on DU.
It’s funny. I avoid areas crowded with not so much ai slop as the slop that is very much a product of the human brain. Now that the web is losing its appeal as an ai and influencer filled fraud, I who never really saw it before as anything but a very casual entertainment tool find some use in it.

The United States’ 2-party system is Bipolar. It is understandable in one way-the GoP and its adherents are past hope to some extent.

Sadly that mentality exists the planet over and in groups that are nonwhite, poor and technically decent enough, but trapped in this overly herd like mindset. I don’t mean it like elite patronisation so much as an expectation from all of us rich or poor to open our minds to how awful this way of life is

I consider it rather unevolved even when not the traditionally “fancy” arrogant oppressor to not examine assumptions about the world. There is a certain coldness to nonhuman life on the left that distresses me the same way this Fafo stuff does. You don’t have to be fancy to find it gloomy making.

I find the Jacobin style rather chilling and reminiscent of Liu Cixin’s worldview on progress and survival of the fittest. The right is hopeless. So it is a relief that the more humane left that doesn’t have this almost equally automated and asshole version of a gleaming and creepy machines future exists. Because that’s a style of thinking that cheerfully would exploit immigrants like pawns.

As a species humans are currently enacting a version of dominion theology on the planet.

Sorry to ramble on. I liked your posts. I agree about the exploitation. And the patronisation.. but it is sad that the ideas disseminated even to intelligent people but early and assiduously fed by this machine are so terrible.
My own collective problem solving intuition told me to not have children ..lol.. so that’s where I think the species is headed unless we change track soon.