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Bleh. Politics. (Edited)

4 years ago - Edited 4 years ago1,935 words

Bleh. Politics.

I haven't posted a personal entry in like a month! I've started writing a couple of different ones, and I keep coming up with ideas, but haven't finished anything for various reasons.

Last week, I was really busy and motivated and felt actually GOOD for the first time in ages! That was wonderful! I got loads done on the Atonal Dreams script, and finishing that seemed on the horizon. This week, though... It's Thursday morning now, and I've done maybe one or two hours of work all week. And I feel awful about it.

Why have I done so little? No reason at all! The same reason I felt so good last week. Mental weather. Sometimes there's a chain of lovely days, other times it just keeps raining. It'll change again, I know, but it's annoying making plans to go out on a long hike only to find that it's pouring with rain.

What can we even do in situations like this? I don't know. I wonder whether forcing myself is a good idea or a bad one. Maybe I'd get something out, but would it be any good?

I suppose these doubts are why I'm failing to get anything done in the first place. Procrastination comes from the feeling that you have to achieve perfection, but the doubt that you'll actually be able to do that, so you hesitate, don't try at all. It's much better to just crap something out and tweak it to perfection later, but knowing that doesn't make the mental block disappear, annoyingly.

Bleh.



I should be doing work, but the US election's ongoing as I write this, so I want to say something about that since why not!

It's something I'm more invested in than I ever was in my own country's election (I don't even know when it was or who the candidates were, or if they're even called that here; come to think of it, who's the current Prime Minister?? Uh... Boris Johnson? Oh, I did know that, but I had to think about it). What with America being the World Police and all that, who are more present online than anyone else. I browse Reddit all the time so it's annoyingly impossible to avoid this stuff.

I don't know or care enough about politics in general to fully understand how it works, but googling "us election results" brings up a convenient info thing, which makes it clear that each state is worth a number of 'electoral votes' and that someone needs 270 to win. I kept checking it throughout yesterday, and for a while it was tensely close. As I write this, Biden's on 264 and Trump's on 214, though if Trump wins all the states still counting, he'll win overall? I think? I don't know.

I do know that I was worked up enough about it yesterday that I woke up from a nightmare about it this morning, in which it turned out that the evil Orange Man had won. Oh no!

And it's surprising to me that such an apparently evil buffoon could get such a huge amount of votes despite the last four years. Makes me wonder whether in an election between Eculox, an enlightened alien being who was offering to grant everyone everlasting peace and superpowers were he to be elected (and had demonstrated the ability to actually do so), and Totthrottler the Baby Rapist, who literally violated toddlers on stage during his rallies and debates and whose policies included daily nukings of cities chosen by tea leaf divination, a not-insignificant number of people would be screaming to put Totthrottler in charge because 'at least he's honest' and Eculox was 'untrustworthy'. Or something.

Or at least that's the impression we get from our bubbles. While I'm not interested in politics, I am interested in psychology, especially the psychology of belief and group dynamics. As I think I've mentioned before, psychology studies have shown that groups form ridiculously easily, and members favour other ingroup members while dehumanising outgroup members. A classroom of children assigned one of two colours based entirely on a random number generator or the position of their desks would quickly come to see 'their group' as more of every positive quality, and the 'others' and more of every negative quality. They'd be more likely to help out ingroup members and less likely to trust outgroup members. Even if their groups were based on absolutely nothing.

We're a tribal species; we evolved to be like this because it helped us survive. But it's concerning seeing it at play in the modern world where we're more connected than we ever were when these mental tendencies first developed.

Reddit is extremely left-wing, at least on the surface, so they're strongly anti-Trump. I looked at a few threads about the election to see what they were saying, and one quoted an example of how the morons in r/Conservative rationalised their evil to themselves. The quoted comment was long and thought-out, and I found it interesting how responses to that quote were things like "This guy can make sentences and is conservative. Weird.", or assumptions that the only way someone could come to such wrong conclusions that they came to is because they'd been indoctrinated by propaganda, brainwashed by a cult.

Those commenters, of course, are intelligent, aware, perceptive, unswayed by lies. They know how it is, they see the truth. The only way that you could think otherwise would be if you were an idiot.

I read the comment they were saying this to (I wish I'd kept it open in a tab; annoyingly I didn't so I can't quote it myself), and I could understand - based on some immersion in the manosphere previously - where they seemed to be coming from. They're seeing the left as screeching 'SJW' types who constantly try to shame and control them and tell them how wrong they are for being the way that they are, giving them -ist and -phobe labels, ruining their reputations and getting them fired for their jobs, etc.

Control seems to be a big thing for them - hence the obnoxious, catastrophic resistance to wearing masks - though it seems so bizarre to me that they're also the group who embraces religion - which is all about following rigid rules - and have bullheaded views on abortion with no allowance for nuance.

I saw this apparently right-favouring video recently (titled "How Internet Politics Look to Normal Humans", with "normal humans" here being the right):



The left person is a ridiculous caricature you might find annoying or even offensive. But I find it interesting because in the minds of people on the right, that's what the left are like, regardless of how reasonable any given left-aligned individual might personally believe themselves to be. Many people would find it frustrating to be seen in such a distorted way, but I wonder if they realise they're likely seeing the other side through a similarly warped lens.

The vast majority of people see 'the others' as dangerous, inhuman monsters, while they themselves are reasonable humans who aren't clouded by lies and evil like they are.

That said, here's a clip from Borat 2 (which I've not yet seen) where conservatives cheer on the idea of chopping up journalists 'like the Saudis do':



Worrying.



My values (compassion, tolerance, understanding, etc) and personality traits align with the left - I'm high in Openness, ∞ which inclines people towards liberalism, whereas conservative attitudes are more related to high Conscientiousness ∞ - so I find the right generally distasteful. I don't like the extremism on either side though, which is essentially a forceful effort to control or suppress others in some way or another. I think a big part of why I find it so unpalatable is because I'm reminded of how I ran Fig Hunter back in the day... but I wrote a whole post about that kind of thing (one of the ones I've not finished/posted yet) and don't really want to talk about it more here. It's mentally exhausting.

Like I said though, I find the psychology side of things interesting. How people come to see others as less human, less capable of reasonable thought, than they or their allies are. We are the enlightened right. They are ignorant monsters.

I'm concerned that it'll lead to violence in America. Maybe Biden will get elected and then assassinated by some Trump nut. Maybe there'll be a civil war and America will fall. Both presidential assassinations and a civil war have happened in the past, though it's concerning thinking how they'd play out in this modern, connected world.

Or maybe nothing major will happen and it'll just be business as usual yet again.



EDIT: I'm updating this since it seems that Biden's just finally won... sort of? Or at least that's what the Google map thing is telling me.

I read back over this post, and I notice now (but didn't when I wrote it) how sarcastic I was in certain places, and I wonder if that was read as intended or not. Hmm.

I checked Reddit - which is currently buckling under the weight of activity on there about this - and saw a lot of anti-Trump sorts saying they were literally crying with relief, as if they'd just heard that the antichrist had been slain, or a comet heading straight for the Earth had been disintegrated. In r/Conservative, they're... surprisingly calm about it (though the fact that it's perceived as surprising says a lot about the general sentiments I see on Reddit's surface), saying things like "I'm so angry. I'm gonna get out of bed tomorrow. Storm to my car. And go about my day as usual".

I'm still concerned some people with serious mental issues and access to and passion for guns might do something drastic... but I'm also wondering how the sorts who blamed Trump for all their world's ills will redirect their mental attention!

Since I watched the video I included in this post, the algorithm's thrust in my face a couple of other videos by the same guy. Like this one:



Caricatured, for sure, but there do seem to be people like that out there, and I wonder what both types are going to do now!

I haven't responded to most comments on this post because I don't want to get into any political discussions; that's not interesting to me since I know very little about things like political policies etc, and I'd only end up offending people and making an idiot of myself. I'm more interested in psychology, but it's not really possible to talk about the psychology of political beliefs without seeming like directing or judging the ones that people hold, which I'm not interested in doing (though I suppose it wasn't much different when I talked about nostalgic attachment when writing about perceptions of a MARDEK Reimagining...).

It is valuable to have somewhere to vent about this stuff though; a lot of thoughts that'd been going over and over in my mind for days disappeared after writing this. I don't want to make a habit of it, though there are some other political-ish things I'd like to hear people's thoughts about, so maybe I'll finish the other post I was writing at some point after all... Maybe. We'll see.

Anyway, hopefully everything will just be boringly settled within a week and Donald Trump's removal from power will be smooth and without incident!