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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 28th, 2025

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  • You seem to have misinterpreted my point.

    It’s not about people being uninterested in politics, it’s about most people losing the ability to even see politics as something else than some topic you could be interested in or not. To feel like they might be able to have any kind of meaningful effect on their environment. And it’s not about mental illness being criminalized it’s about mental illness being used (conscientiously or not) as a tool to fight against dissent.

    And why would it be ridiculous? Culturally enforced and internalized rules are way stronger than the ones enforced by coercion. I agree that it’s worse on a personal level to risk being arrested for a thought crime and institutionalized or sent into some camp as a result of it. But as a society it’s less effective and pernicious than the collective apathy and political impotence we’re swimming in.

    Under the Soviet union people saw or knew other disappeared. They knew something was happening and that they’d better shut up about it. When you were caught as an enemy of the state or of the ideology, you at least had a clear indication of what outside force is at work against you. Psychologically it’s very different.

    Nowadays apart for the few percents that are actually politically active (and even some if not most of those are not spared on the inside), people feel that it’s their fault if they don’t fit in, they feel or are told by the ambient noise that they have to fix themselves, that the problem is them. That there is a disconnect from reality, from the world. The classical “what is wrong?”. And to be happy, to fix that, all they have is to consume, focus on themselves, find themselves, improve, or just look like they’re doing that. Like rats taking electrical discharge after discharge with no way to get out or even understand what’s causing it in sight.




  • Kinda how it works in our late stage capitalist societies to be honest, except that it’s collective pressure/belief instead of state-imposed.

    You have trouble accepting the shitty state the world is in? You don’t want to be exploited and end the month with not enough to pay your rent? You’re fed up with that human crushing machine that keeps on destroying the planet because There Is No Alternative?

    Well, you should consult you might be a tiny bit depressed. Take antidepressants and shut the fuck up. Learn to see and focus on the beauty in life and the little things instead. Take small hobbies, a lover or a cat. How you deal with all of that is your own individual problem.

    Does it seem so normal that you really can’t see any other way? Congratulations, you are well programmed. Those problems aren’t to be delt with on an individual level, they are political.

    In the past, most people formed unions and parties and did strikes, political rallys, protested and burned the landowners’ manors as a way to process those kind of feelings.


  • Not only that but what most people call the left nowadays (socialists, communists and beyond) categorically refused to be called left until the 30s. They saw themselves as playing outside the Assemblée.

    The left of the time were calling themselves the “Radicals”, and they were fine and dandy with capitalism, just liberal in their cultural beliefs, whereas the right was conservative/reactionary (in that they wanted to keep the status quo/go back to monarchy/more autoritarism). Socialists were fighting against both left and right.

    The left and the socialists only allied themselves during the Front Populaire, a large union against fascism that was heavily on the rise in France (and Europe obviously) at the time, with a failed far right Coup attempt (la Cagoule) and a ton of high profile people having at the very least sympathies for Hitler (those were instrumental in France’s defeats and surrender at the beginning of the war by the way). The sentence “Plutôt Hitler que le Front Populaire” (better Hitler than the Popular Front) was used a lot, and is still widely remembered today.

    It’s only after the Front Populaire that the socialists started to be bundled with the left in their and the common political discourse.

    Funnily enough, today’s US democrats show a perfect example of why socialists didn’t want to be labeled in the same way as the “Radicals” at the time.