a lil bee 🐝

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 18th, 2023

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  • Completely agreed. It’s the difference between your political views being an excuse for you to feel morally validated or being a mechanism to improve lives. If it’s the latter, it’s time to get to work. We’re failing and thus losing our ability to do what we stated. If it’s people being idiots, educate them. If it’s people being lied to, reach them. Regardless, we live in a democracy and the entire point is that the people get to choose and the people are rejecting us. We cannot fail to heed those cries.

    We must create an inspiring vision that resonates with voters and alleviates their concerns. The stats clearly show people are concerned about immigration and the economy. The right has a cruel, but effective approach in just stopping immigration entirely and many, many people think that is a good idea right now. What is our better answer? I’m no expert and I don’t know, but that is in and of itself a serious problem. Why do I not have a Meloni I can point to as the beacon of my ideology, that has at least some of the answers?



  • I agree with you, and yet… It’s winning them elections. We can be upset about it all we want, but it’s increasingly clear that bigotry and xenophobia are winning arguments in this era. We’re fucked if we don’t adjust. I’m not proposing we abandon migrants, but the one thing myself and the person you replied to likely agree on is that the left is increasingly losing sight of home and the average citizen, not in terms of rhetoric but in effect. We’re about to lose the EU and possibly lose support for Ukraine, see even more immigration restrictions, and see an empowered global far-right. The voters are telling us they have different priorities, which we need to focus on in a more altruistic way than the right. We have to be introspective here if we ever want to accomplish our goals.



  • I’ve never said that people should ignore any attempt at logic and just focus on their passions, but the modern cult of rationality and stoicism is ironically hugely lacking in self-awareness and rationality.

    I’ve never said that people should ignore any attempt at passion and just focus on their logic, but the modern mobs of righteous indignation and fury are ironically hugely lacking in empathy, tolerance (not of intolerance, before that gets tossed at me), and pragmatism.

    I agree that we mostly seem to be on the same page, but I really need to stress that I have not asked people to be soulless and I think that’s a mischaracterization of my asking for people to set their passion aside as much as possible as an exercise which is inherently temporary. We’re both just looking for balance here.



  • I’m just not sure I’ve gotten my point across to you bc93. I’m not asking anyone to become an emotionless automation. That’s of course a nightmarish outcome. That’s full logic, no passion. Bad. In that same exact manner, all passion, no logic is also horrible. The history of people who have done that is also extremely dark. Nobody is advocating for either of those though!

    When I tell someone to “put yourself in someone else’s shoes”, I am not asking them to lose their sense of self or to base their final decision entirely on that other person. It’s a thought mechanism we use to emphasize our sense of empathy, which gives us a new perspective that we fold into our amalgamation of ideas.

    I’m not asking for anyone to turn their emotions off forever, or even deluded enough to think you can do that fully at all, in the same way that I don’t expect anyone to fully convert their brain into another person’s to empathize. It doesn’t matter, it’s still a useful exercise in part.

    That’s all I’m asking for. There is a lot of nuance and complexity to all situations, and passion is blinding. I’m not a Buddhist, but they have a concept of Bonno, those passions that inspire us to actions that harm ourselves or others. I don’t think Buddhists are quite on the same level as Ben Shapiro and the Nazis just because they recognize that passion can be blinding.


  • I don’t think we should completely neglect our passions. They make us who we are and define our truest selves! Passion is blinding though. Anyone who has ever felt true passion about anything knows this. It takes both passion and cold logic to achieve truly good things. Passion is inherently the stronger of the two though, so you have to set it aside (temporarily) to truly indulge your logic. Then put those together.

    I definitely do not agree with using passion as the center of your political movement. That’s demagoguery, by definition. It’s common and we’re all susceptible to it, but it’s not a good thing.

    I agree with you re: the origins of Hamas. It truly could not matter less right now. Hamas exists, and they’re doing terrible things to Palestinians and Israelis alike, just like Israel is. They’re both issues we need to solve and I’m not willing to set one aside for the other.