It feels like liberals are discussing the lore of a book or TV show or video game when they talk about politics sometimes; they can get into very angry debates over it but there’s always this sense of detachment from it actually affecting them in any significant way. It’s taking abstract positions in real life problems that affect them directly. “How do we best protect democracy and fight authoritarianism?” Dude, who gives a shit, how does this affect you at all?! You’re dying from the fucking pesticides the agribusiness companies pump into farmland, and PFAS, and polluted water, and pandemics! “See, I think that autocrats like Putin really get off on having a sense of power over other people - there was this really great body language expert that–” My brother in christ, a police officer just shot a child outside your house and all your kids are depressed.

• Freedom of speech - on one day you’ll have people saying that godsforsaken phrase “I disagree with what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it”, and on the next day you’ll have those same people calling for people who disagree with them on Ukraine or Palestine or China to lose their jobs, even their lives.

• Funding programs like healthcare and welfare - talked about generally in such detached language about “efficiency in the sector must be improved” and such, that they ignore that cutting the funding that hospitals receive - or, a step further abstracted, the funding that medical students receive such that they don’t have to enter crushing debt or poverty - will end up killing more people and increasing the net suffering of humanity, including people they may know; and when they see the lengthening waiting lines and increased mortality, they talk about how we need to solve this problem through common sense solutions etc etc.

• Interfering in other countries - atrocities in Yemen and Palestine get ignored or justified, while lesser atrocities in Ukraine get amplified. Complete dissonance based on racism, but even then, it’s all in terms of idealist “We must stand up to dictators and terrorists!” word salad bullshit, not “Hm, I need to do a deep dive into the history of the region and see what the political developments have been over the last few decades and try and find a systematic, materialist understanding rather than relying on platitudes and truisms and quotes from random celebrities that I imagine to be authoritative for whatever reason.” It’s a fucking ferris wheel of pure drivel, bleating sayings at you as if they’re meaningful. Why can’t we have communism? “Because communism works on paper but not in practice.” Why doesn’t it work in practice? “Because human nature is to be greedy and selfish and take resources for yourself and away from others.” Why is human nature like this if we’re social animals, and if it is, why can’t we change it? “A leopard cannot change its spots, and besides, social arrangements like communism only work in small groups like primitive tribes.” Why do they work in small groups and not larger ones? “Because economics is too complicated for planning to work; the free market provides all our needs for cheap.” Isn’t competition inefficient compared to co-operation? Aren’t you wasting resources by developing a similar thing a dozen times compared to if those people all collaborated to produce one very good thing? “Competition is efficient and needed in society or everybody would be lazy and useless.” Why? “Because it’s human nature.” and on and on it goes, and at no point is there any actual fucking evidence or investigation into the claims beyond utter oversimplifications, it’s all informed by youtube and TikTok videos and Reddit comments and movies and TV shows and books and the entire superstructure of society, entirely abstracted from the base.

It’s fake, it’s fiction, it’s bullshit, but the suspension of disbelief allows them to discuss it as if it was real - except the things that they are discussing are actually real! Their framing is completely off-kilter. “Here’s my favorite and least favorite faction in Game of Thrones, and here’s what that says about why China’s authoritarianism doesn’t work and why the United States is, despite its flaws, still a good force in the world.” What the fuck are you talking about? You’re going to die in the post-WW3 rationing period when all goods from China are cut off! Every acre of natural land within 10 miles of you is being converted to cement! You need to start figuring out how to do first aid, not giving explanations on reddit as to why Israel, on the other side of the planet, has some abstract metaphysical right to exist! You might as well be writing a paragraph on Dumbledore’s Army and their training regimen. You don’t actually give a shit about Israel, you just picked up a series of beliefs from the zeitgeist that are totally incompatible with that other set of beliefs you have, but it doesn’t matter because at the end of the day, you don’t care about forming a coherent worldview informed by history and science, but instead creating justifications for your own position in the golden billion and feeling variously good or bad about the events that pop up on the nightmare rectangle while you’re on the shitter, while your life and everybody else’s crumbles in slow (or fast) motion around you. It’s entertainment, it’s a football game, you root for one side - Democrats and Republicans, Ukraine and Russia, Israel and Palestine, China and Taiwan, Trump vs the Deep State, whatever. And if they win, that’s great! If they lose, that sucks! But your life, your own life, the stuff you do when you aren’t engaged in the theater, is getting worse either way.

Not only that, but there’s a sense in which everybody has to ditch their own self-interest in the belief that it makes them selfish children, and the only way to be taken seriously isn’t to say “Well, I want to increase hospital funding because I have X disorder and I would like myself and similar people to survive,” but instead “Here’s some economic analysis showing that doing this funding would lead to increased profits from people with X disorder working harder and more efficiently in the future.”