Comments

1

this guy is awesome (he asks the same question)

https://twitter.com/Lesdoggg/status/1348360474178449408

"i'm out of breath from how stupid y'all are!!!"

2

My theory is their suffering is engineered by design by their own party that promises them riches and success. They follow a strict ethos of rugged individualism (in name only) and that those who succeed must deserve it and those who fail don't, but since crony capitalism shits on everybody no matter what race, then all those who fall through the cracks are left with intense frustration and anger that is misdirected to the outgroup and scapegoated away by those who explain what they are doing by attribute it exclusively to those who look, sound, or believe different things that would force them to face their own culpability for their stunted growth and pain.

3

Great question Charles... As a white person this is my take.. I posit this: so many people looking outside of themselves for the brass ring.. Someone else is responsible, someone else has done me wrong, someone else is accountable for my shitty results. .. Easier to blame, point the fingers, bitch about doing the real work, demonize the people who are busting balls/vaginas to get ahead (immigrants) etc. To the point where idiotic/gullible choices are made against one's self interest. Susceptible to snake charmers, orange clowns who tell them what they want to hear. Throw on top of all of it a shifting economy, lack of initiative to invest in new skills and ideas, and presto.. A victim culture is born.

4

I understand Rutskales was once asked to use someone’s preferred pronouns and learn something for Black history month. Do you really expect him to just take that lying down?

5

@2. Sorry that was poorly written. Let me try again.

My theory is that white people (in this case angry MAGA supporters) suffer due to the designs of their party and the corporate elites who pass laws that disenfranchise everyone regardless of race. However, the GOP is excellent at scapegoating the negative effects of their policies to the outgroup, which commonly looks and sounds and believes different things. However, due to loyalty and strong identity politics, facing any opposing explanations would require self reflection and acceptance of their own inability to surmount the high expectations placed on them by their culture of survival of the fittest capitalism (which is rigged by design to benefit the top earners). The cognitive dissonance is staggering and reinforced by groupthink and victimization, so as long as they can offset the pain and frustration from their own lives to someone who is worse off, or someone they are allowed to hate because the leaders give sanction it, then they are trapped in anger even if they do meet some success. As far as the CEOs, my guess is that financial success cannot necessarily dispel the acculturation to this mentality because someone somewhere else is always doing better.

6

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HX_du6Gcp1w

7

Begs the question: Why are so few white people happy?

8

Why are so few white (AMERICAN) people happy? Because they have been indoctrinated with the fantasy that they are superior to all other human beings and deep down they know it is not true. Ignorance isn't bliss, it's misery.

Worth reading:

America’s Problem is That White People Want It to Be a Failed State

America’s problem is that white Americans as a social group, its majority social group, want America to be a failed state. They don’t want to live in a modern, civilized democracy, and never have.

White Americans are the rich world’s most hostile, ignorant, violent, cruel, and selfish social group — by a very long way.

White Americans have almost nothing in common with White Europeans or Canadians — who back the expansive social contracts of social democracies reliably. White Americans reliably reject such choices, which is how they made their society collapse. instead, they have more in common with the ethnic-religious-fundamentalist majorities of nations like Iran, or the authoritarian-nationalist majorities of nations like Russia. They are regressive, sectarian, fundamentalist, unable to change, trapped by their own ideologies.

https://eand.co/americas-problem-is-that-white-people-want-it-to-be-a-failed-state-bac24202f32f

9

A lot of white people are dumb trash who've skated by their entire lives thinking that they're something special.

10

Ah yes, this question is a good question. It is a revealing one indeed, if we allow a slight rephrasing:

Why can't Marx explain the unhappiness of white, economically secure Trump supporters?

12

@11 Neither can adherents of the Prosperity Gospel, so I think you may have missed the mark slightly there.

14

@9: There's nothing wrong with thinking that you're something special, even throughout your entire life. In fact, those that don't are the ones to keep an eye on.

15

The ‘Shared Psychosis’ of Donald Trump and His Loyalists

Forensic psychiatrist Bandy X. Lee explains the outgoing president’s pathological appeal and how to wean people from it.

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-shared-psychosis-of-donald-trump-and-his-loyalists/

16

It's very simple.

Anyone born and who has lived in the South knows it.

It's because they were promised if they just hated and discrimated against all non-white people, they would be the chosen ones, and be able to get first dibs at all jobs and have all the non-whites kept out of their private clubs and parties.

... oh, you were being ironic ...

17

Why are so many people unhappy is a better question.

18

For me, the most profound reaction to 9/11 wasn't the Towers, but the people on Flight 93. You lucky bastards, I thought (and think still): you get to die in one bright morning fighting clear evil, while I have to die across years getting nickle & dimed by fat cats who were born into great slots gaming the system, until I'm old and sick and drained away. Last Wednesday I was thinking how Flight 93 gave their lives to save the same Capitol that those losers were trashing. My only consolation is that I've stood here and absorbed it with as much dignity I could manage while those idiots made themselves pawns and suckers to the same fat cats who pick our pockets.

19

I was a govt employee, and at times would encounter the classic angry white guy. It puzzled me why they were angry- after all they were well-educated, and had good careers in Seattle, and were not battling chronic disease. This irrational anger never made sense to me.

20

Working people should be angry.

The problem is that the GOP has convinced white people to punch down instead of going after the people who are really holding them down, the rich.

It's the same divide and conquer tactics that the wealthy have used to control the poor since slavery.

They have convinced poor whites that things like education, healthcare and a social safety net are "socialism" that only helps minorities instead of the vital program need to help all poor and working class people.

The problems in your life are never caused by people less fortunate than you.
Punching down never works.

21

Great question and article Mr Mudede! Such confusion in folks but not something that hasn’t happened before. This is one theory and approach to interpreting historical data: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2020/12/can-history-predict-future/616993/

22

To quote someone much more succinct than myself:

"You’ve got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know 
 morons.

23

@14:

That explains so much. I hate to break the news to you chuckles, but not only are you not special, you're whatever the opposite of special is - insignificant and unnoteworthy come most immediately to-mind...

24

Their skeered that the immigrant is coming for their CEO job but not at all skeered about something actually real like looming environmental collapse. In other words: fucking idiots.

25

@24. I always found it strange that people who advocate cutthroat capitalism are afraid of a little competition.

26

@25:

That's because they believe rules are only meant to apply to others, never to themselves...

27

Good question on why a wealthy CEO would ruin his career like that.

Maybe because this country's media has had the anger narrative turned up to 11 for the past several decades? Even the "mainstream" conservative sources like fox news go on non-stop about how terrible the democrats are going to make things. So even though regardless of who the president is their lives will be just fine, their anger is so ramped up they overreact?

Could also be that this is a result of the pandemic and half-assed lockdowns? Rich, entitled white people absolutely do not like being told what to do, especially if their friend in another state isn't being told to do the same. They get butthurt and angry and lash out.

Dunno though, those are my guesses. Maybe he really did just make a really stupid decision thinking nobody would care that much and it wasn't that big a deal. A lot of those rioters really did think they were still just a part of a patriotic protest. How they went through the mental gymnastics to arrive at that conclusion? No idea.

28

@25, 26,

Capitalists hate capitalism. In theory, it's the consumers who are supposed to benefit from capitalism, not the capitalists.

If Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk had their way, there would be no capitalism. They would own everything and therefore get to set all the rules and all the prices. Everyone would be forced to both work for them and buy from them.

A capitalist's wet dream is for the entire nation, or world, to be one giant company town with them as the boss.

29

I'm going to show this to the kids when they're older as an example of extreme bias so they know how to spot it


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