If I can take a stab at this - it exposes that an underlying issue in left of center spaces is that everyone both has to believe they they’re constantly making morally pure decisions and needs to be lauded for them. It stinks!
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when you are on "the left", however defined, you're aware of the cruelties and injustices that are a feature, not a bug, of the system we live in. The need to make sure we're doing the best we can cld be a way of managing the cognitive dissonance of participating in and benefitting from it.
jul 26, 2025, 3:38 pm • 2 0 • view
I think it also belays a lot of what we see on the right, a desire to be the victim. “I can’t cook because no one taught me/my family was too poor/worked too hard to teach me/etc”
jul 26, 2025, 3:02 pm • 21 0 • view
And then add urbanism/city discourse to it and 😘👌 unending maw
jul 26, 2025, 2:58 pm • 7 0 • view
There are so many layers to this. I really don’t care whether people mostly cook or mostly get takeaways, personally. I raise my eyebrows when someone insists that the cost of the takeaway going up is somehow unjust to them. (1/2)
jul 26, 2025, 3:26 pm • 14 0 • view
Especially since the discourse generally includes the point that takeaways are more economical once you factor in cooking. It all breaks down when someone one insists that the service that saves labour should not cost any more than performing that labour yourself. (2/2)
jul 26, 2025, 3:26 pm • 12 0 • view
Also that for all their talk about "Worker Solidarity", most leftists just want cheap shit like everyone else.
jul 26, 2025, 2:59 pm • 44 0 • view
yes but then feel really guilty about wanting it even tho we know about the zillions of advertising $ and psychological manipulation in marketing techniques that are getting us to want it.
jul 26, 2025, 3:39 pm • 1 0 • view
Yes, this is it, it’s a result of people relating to the economy primarily as a consumer rather than a worker
jul 26, 2025, 10:16 pm • 3 0 • view
The desire for praise is an innate flaw, I think. Maybe at some level of society it's even beneficial, but social media meeting that instinct means disaster. I say the "morally pure decisions" are the cart, not the horse. The need to be lauded is the driving force. The moral purity isn't even moral.
jul 28, 2025, 6:45 am • 0 0 • view
For me & many on the left the "trans issue" was the breaking point. The leftish position isn't moral. It's not even virtuous or rational. All it is is trendy. What it forces you to see is that the left's supposed moral superiority is itself just another sham.
jul 28, 2025, 7:10 am • 0 0 • view
Some bad choices are very, very bad and consequential, and some are just a bad habit. I think a lot of people on the left either don't act like venial acts can exist, or don't have the ability to discern between serious and venial.
jul 26, 2025, 4:08 pm • 9 0 • view
Sometimes you do things that you know aren’t perfect, or even great, because they’re convenient or feel good to you. That’s part of being alive in society. What we’re seeing now is people unable to handle that and it’s driving them completely up the wall.
jul 26, 2025, 2:59 pm • 204 12 • view
It’s very similar to telling people they shouldn’t shop at Walmart in the 2000s, but instead of just doing it, there’s a bunch of people who have decided they need to argue why going to Walmart is actually the good thing to do.
jul 26, 2025, 3:01 pm • 162 8 • view
Social media traps and encourages people to engage with other people who have stupid and bad opinions. We used to ignore and walk past those people. Now, we feel compelled to tell them how stupid they are. But stupid babies need the most attention, so it just encourages it to happen more often.
jul 26, 2025, 3:58 pm • 4 0 • view
There's another factor, which is that if individual personal advice, practical stuff, doesn't also overturn capitalism, it's received as apologia for capitalism rather than as a survival technique.
jul 26, 2025, 3:04 pm • 48 2 • view
This scales up beyond the individual. "There's no point in building more homes if anyone conceivably could profit from it" is the same sentiment. Right-wing concern trolls have made nuance and "getting a foothold", material improvements, read like do-nothing incrementalism.
jul 26, 2025, 3:16 pm • 41 0 • view
Hyperindividualism means that even communal/socialist arguments have to use the individualist frame: I need the government to deliver XYZ to me specifically. And because new housing is, definitionally, almost always for unseen other people rather than "oneself", it doesn't fit the frame easily.
jul 27, 2025, 2:18 pm • 1 0 • view
Like, if the norm for apartments was that in order to move you always had to pre-order one to be built just for you, then even though that would clearly be worse for society, it would actually be *easier* to make the too-online-sort-of-leftist argument in favor of allowing new housing.
jul 27, 2025, 2:18 pm • 2 0 • view
I've literally had someone make the argument to me that housing should be made to order
jul 27, 2025, 2:23 pm • 2 0 • view
jul 27, 2025, 2:25 pm • 0 0 • view
Like, on the basis that it's the only way to prevent speculation and keep "undeserving" gentrifiers out. If you're a refugee, ask for permission and we'll build you an apartment.
jul 27, 2025, 2:24 pm • 1 0 • view
And by right-wing concern trolls I include, like, many elected Democrats lmao.
jul 26, 2025, 3:27 pm • 9 0 • view
Just got back from flying a plane to South America to pick a banana to put over some cereal grains I harvested, and it appears I missed some discourse?
jul 26, 2025, 4:41 pm • 3 0 • view
I think there are also a lot of people in left of center spaces that a perceived list of credits and debits theyve accumulated in their life, and they think its owed to them for it to be zeroed out as part of any political project they become a part of. And thats just not how society works.
jul 26, 2025, 3:43 pm • 13 1 • view
*have a perceived list
jul 26, 2025, 3:43 pm • 4 0 • view
It's also incoherent and ahistorical. I'm old enough to remember when milk was delivered to your house. Pizza boxes to enable takeout and delivery were in use in the 1940s and by the 70s pizza delivery was common across the USA.
jul 26, 2025, 3:23 pm • 10 0 • view
I would be interested to see an analysis of the inflation-adjusted cost of milk from the milk delivery service back then, compared to what you would today pick up yourself at the grocery store, now that you mention it.
jul 26, 2025, 3:28 pm • 6 0 • view
Too late, I have already created an internally consistent moral framework to justify drunk cigs at the bar
jul 26, 2025, 3:06 pm • 19 1 • view