— apologies for wall of text. A bit rambly. —

Hard to say. What I believe is that in more desperate times, civil rights leaders were average people. They weren’t people working in academia. They weren’t working for political parties. They were laborers, they were people that met and organized at church, people that met at work. Filmmakers, musicians, painters, fashion designers - they were all in their own bubbles making art about people that actually did the work of organizing and were desperate in their situation to feel the need to do so.

The art and career politics world is filled with people that can move neighborhoods, cities, states, countries. That automatically alleviates pressure to succeed in changing politics. The people at the auto shop conceivably can’t buy citizenship elsewhere, don’t have connections to get a “refugee” visa, education to apply for a workers visa for a field the counter considers in high need like tech. You don’t see landscaper visas for successful landscapers like you see governments do for people deemed successful artists.

These people are more successful in organizing people, inspiring people, relating to people than any career (even aspiring artist) artist can. Art as a hobby but no hopes as a career are relatable. The ones selling their postcards at the local farmers market, sorry guys not so relatable compared to the grocery store cashier that after work goes home and watches YouTube shorts

So effective leadership will not come from universities or the art world. Not from documentarians. Not from journalists. It will come from places like the restaurant kitchen, the auto shop, the factory, gig economy workers. No their language is not polished. They may say something crass here and there. But it takes practice to be a public speaker and the well off middle to upper class drown out the lower middle to poor people. Mistakes of crassness are judged to harshly and permanently. I do not think civil rights leaders of the 80s and back would make it today because of how judgmental we are today on the left. Like there’s little avenue to have the wrong/bad/evil opinion one decade of your life and try to join up and be embraced doing good things the next decade. The average adult person unsurprisingly knows how to talk to the average adult person better than university students and professors and politicians. Better than artists.

Anyone that doesn’t vote or skipped a vote get treated like trash by the left. Shouldn’t be the case. Disenfranchisement whether by political machinations or mental exhaustion should not be shamed. They need to be find belonging with us

Conservatives do that. They speak with patience and respect to those that don’t vote. They do that to those that don’t study high brow media. They do that for the non aesthetic. A leftist will own a fence sitter by making fun of visibly poor diet and hygiene if that’s the case and a conservative will step in and say that’s fine as long as you’re good people. Come hang out with us. Play video games with us. Fish with us.

And I call out artists and university students and professors because they’re so deep in their bubbles that they are deeply unaware just how unlikable they are when heard. Like the revulsion they have for the poor and less educated is not well hidden at all. Conservatives hide it very well in comparison

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So for us, stop being obtuse with our communications and be direct. Simple to understand. Also no dunking. Stop the diabetes, small penis, uneducated, trailer park, lol you can’t afford to travel type shaming. Nothing wrong with liking Marvel movies or liking McDonalds.

Too many times I’ve had to console good people to at work 7 days a week because people in the community think it’s funny someone doesn’t know much outside the city they live in. Too many times playing damage control over people making diabetes, small penis, poor people jokes for why conservatives are as they are. All of those have a ton of people that lean left or people that barely follow politics at all. 7 8+ hour work days a week doesn’t let people follow politics much so the dunking on poor people for being dumb and voting against their interest is insanely stupid

It’s not a good thing anytime I see leftist taking joy that the left is more educated and wealthier in comparison to conservatives. That’s an inevitable loss with growing income inequality. Leftism shouldn’t shame others for not reading the right books, not going to university for a humanities degree, not understanding how artists of whatever movement use color gradients for meaning. Most people watch blockbuster movies and play games like fortnite. That doesn’t make them any less of a person than someone who watches Andrew Tarkovsky movies.

When a person who likes average things feels attacked by leftist art/entertainment, that’s avenue for conservatives. Leftist have to step in to and make average interests identifiable as leftist just as much as conservative. Same with stuff like not living in a big city or not caring for travel or living by a beach or not caring about journaling. Leftism these days are expressly too much about self expression. It derails organizational meetings when everyone wants/needs to express how such and such has made them feel and affected them especially when it’s from people that can comfortably afford therapy and to spend so much time of the thought of, am I happy

Look towards poor/working class people as voices that need to be at the forefront rather than university students, professor, celebrities. I don’t think we need 100k people marches where everyone is having a fun time with their protest boards and posters. What’s needed is professionalism. People that have settled into a life of compromise and may not live that beautiful life of travel and creative expression but are good people. They’re normal people. The average person. We care way too much about people that live outspoken lives. They don’t spend so much time of metaphor and meta thought exercises. They’re completely concerned about achieving what were once normal life goals and therefore don’t practice wordplay. Wordplay is annoying for people with limited time out of work and need people to get to the point. Metaphor is annoying. Symbolism is annoying.

It was a problem when Stephen Bannon was talking about how he’d recruit by reaching out to people playing World of Warcraft. Nothing about being a gamer should be conservative but because I suspect gamers not being aesthetic in appearance or lifestyle, we don’t want to associate our images with them. That is foolish. Same with kitchen staff. Same with warehouse workers. Same with farmers and fisherman. Vegans are largely leftist but their food comes from mostly conservative farmers. There is common interest here for common working class action rather than culture war splits. That Bannon recruiting 20 years ago on WoW wasn’t call to action on the left to do the same is insanely dumb.

That nuclear average family influencers are a conservative thing shouldn’t be the case. It should be politically neutral. The same with much of the cultural examples of conservatives taking over. A countries flag shouldn’t be synonymous with the countries conservatives/racist. Basic black and white idiosyncratic Tolkien medieval fantasy wouldn’t be so dominated by conservative fandom if on the left we weren’t so obsessed with doing real world inserts and prefacing that medieval such and such was evil and racist and the getting back to to story until the next time to remind people that such and such is racist and evil. Let fantasy be fantasy. It’s a stupid low yield battle that we on the left for some reason always have to force ourselves to fight

Escapism doesn’t have to bad. High brow art is itself high brow escapism/surrogate activism at best, poverty tourism at worst. We need to stop spending so much time and energy fighting battles that we imagine. Holy hell every time I listen to a conversation derail for what feels like eternity because someone reads a fictional book and they feel it’s problematic because it’s a period piece that is too realistic for the time. It should adopt modern demographics and language because it’s fantasy so it shouldn’t be a problem to modernize the content

Average people don’t care about modernizing their fantasy media and the conversation exhausts them. And it’s such a waste of energy compared to convincing people to join a union and pay union dues. To attend city council town halls and badger them for local problems they should address

Stop wanting local politicians to be national politicians. If there are any politicians that have potential to be locally in touch and conversationally persuasive, it’s the local ones. But we want national politics remakes from everyone and vote on that, that local politics is unknown to locals the average person doesn’t feel like they have anyone speaking to issues like local safety, bad roads, rent price, childcare costs, etc. Your city treasurer will be campaigning on on opposing fascism and justice for Palestine. It’s asinine. It’s asinine for most mayors to be campaigning on national politics but thats where we’re at now. Not even local politicians feel the need to campaign on local issues anymore

Don’t know if it’s just me doing crappy human pattern matching or when I was studying art history, I noticed that “peak” art periods were often “late” republic/kingdom/empire eras where the political structure was breaking apart and inequality was growing while the last generation raised on previous generations wealth focused on art/entertainment/self-care. That’s how I feel right now today. Leftists have been mostly trying to live their best lives for the last like 40 years with entertainment while conservatives have been chipping away more and more power. Leftist art doesn’t direct action. Mostly just commentates and serves as mental exercise. Very opaque in purpose and audience. Conservative art is comparatively simple but suggests simple solutions, actions, identity. Art made for targeted audiences

iPhones are too locked down for the hardware they have. I’m writing this on an iPhone 15 …

The foldable I like the most I’ve seen are the Motorola razrs. That’s vertical. The best fat foldables are going to be Android because of all the video game emulators for Android

I’m of the opinion that neither whiskey nor bourbon are worth it even tariffs or country of origin. Became real trendy for a long time now. Overpriced. Drink rum

The bill passed to ban TikTok was terrible bill. A bunch of people ate up the marketing for it and it didn’t take even 2 years from passing to start getting abused. Easily predictable outcome

As others, my basic home lab NAS plans are grounding to a stop because of worsening prices. Next up, phones are going to be even more expensive. Video game console price increases again

Chat control is definitely going to pass eventually in my lifetime. Resiliency for secure and private communications will continue to develop. Anonymity will be needed too. Right now our governments instead of trying to inspire patriotism through improving living standards for the masses are focusing on information and communication control