Since most voters participate in democratic politics only as an expression of their fear and loathing of their cultural enemies, and since the only way they know of winning is to dominate the other side, the only story of victory they know is sadistic domination.
This is from Curtis Yarvin’s Gray Mirror. If somebody disagrees with this, I’d love to hear their argument, but it sounds like a very exact description of what’s happening to us.
We are people who can’t limit our appetites and tame our emotions. We are a raging maw of desire but our libidinal object is not the other but the self. We need constantly to prop up our belief that we are prescient and in control because without this skill the instability we inhabit becomes too scary. It’s not each other that we hate but the unpredictability. But we can’t put that into words or come close to this realization intellectually because the whole point is to deny that there is any unpredictability.
The sadism in our political space is a ritual burning of the mirror image of the self that didn’t figure things out flawlessly. The enemy is what the self could have been if disinformation / propaganda had their way with one.
The civil war we hear so much about is waged inside the self that is terrified of being discarded and punishes itself for being discardable.
Clarissa's Blog 
Uh.
Well, got a flyer in the mail yesterday– bunch of our FL pols got tapped for federal jobs recently, and we are having some general elections to replace them.
I’ll be showing up to vote for that, because one of the guys who’s running for our region’s newly-empty office is a competent sort of fellow, who’s done a good job in his current elected office, who went to high school with one of my siblings and wasn’t a jerk then, and I know his mom. I’ve met him a couple of times and he didn’t give me the creeps. Wife’s pretty aloof and his kids were glued to electronic devices at a very young age– so not perfect, but then who is?
Everybody else vying for the seat is a total looney, as far as I can tell, so… I’m gonna go vote for the known quantity.
Is that a sadistic desire for domination?
I feel like we mostly vote for the least-bad option in self-defense.
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“I feel like we mostly vote for the least-bad option in self-defense”
You’re a lot more self-aware than most people. A real change in US politics in the last…. 10? years (the trend goes back much further but has only become the predominant mode of politicking for about 10 years now) is a shift of enemies.
I remember when the biggest enemies were other countries, the USSR, Iran, Iraq, China… now each political faction sees other political factions as their greatest enemies who must be vanquished and made to eat dirt… This is a bipartisan phenomenon and neither side has much to be proud of…
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I don’t need enemies to eat dirt. Generally prefer whatever’s closest to “will just run things with a minimum of corruption and otherwise not bother me” (we lucked out in this department, with our last two sheriff elections– if only other offices attracted practical get-the-job-done people like that!), but nobody’s running on that ticket, are they?
So we don’t vote for. We vote against. Right now, we’re voting against institutional corruption, embezzlement, nepo jobs, inflation, and the weird insistence that we must verbally comply, yea even celebrate, every weird personal-identity whim of everybody who belongs to the dominant political faction. Are you clapping loudly enough for gay panda furries? I don’t think you’re celebrating enough! Burn the heretic! Everybody is sick to death of that shite. But we might’ve ignored it another decade if we could afford a house, and our library had good books instead of meth zombies…
If the current set screw it up badly enough, maybe next election we’ll be voting against… whatever their besetting vices turn out to be. Cutting programs but then instead of reducing deficit spending, the money goes to cronies? Lack of follow-through on the illegal border-crossing and drug trafficking problems? Using the last admin’s executive overreach to justify their own brand of overreach, instead of putting a damn clamp on the overreach?
We’ll know in a couple years.
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“I don’t need enemies to eat dirt”
Again… you’re more self-aware than a _lot_ of people, but a lot of political rhetoric now (seen from Europe) is one side wanting to rub the other’s face in the ground.
“Cutting programs but then”
I think the point of cutting programs is to cut programs and disable any kind of functional government for a long time. Pure neoliberalism which is aggressively against any kind of thinking in terms of how systems work. I think the next election is going to look a lot more like elections in Brazil or South Africa.
I don’t like a lot of what the federal government was doing but a system like a country is very intricate and complicated and when you go whacking at it with an axe a lot of…. undesired consequences are going to occur.
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There were paroxysms of sadistic glee that people were getting fired. People who are purportedly Christian were mocking, foaming at the mouth. Acting like a cancel culture mob. Let’s not pretend this isn’t happening. One can support the need to reduce the government apparatus and at the same time feel compassion for individuals. These are our brothers and sisters, with children and mortgages who are having a bad time. These are not enemy combatants. In a few years they are back in power, and they’ll be doing the same to us, also pissing themselves with delight. When does it end? We are destroying the country and our immortal souls for no reason.
Everybody should start and end the day by repeating, “people who voted differently from me are good people.” Because they are. National unity should stand above partisan concerns.
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And of course, we’ve all observed the sadistic glee of the Democrats, persecuting, ululating, humiliating people they perceive as an ideological enemy.
Neither side is blameless. Neither has a moral advantage.
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There certainly seems to be ritual retaliation in politics. SA been picking fights with the US ambassador for critising the country’s pro Russia stance.
https://www.biznews.com/global-citizen/2024/11/21/ex-trump-diplomat-tough-stand-sas-foreign-policy
Now the US has kicked out the SA ambassador, not that anyone will miss him since he only got the job due to political failures at home.
https://www.dailymaverick.co.za/article/2012-02-10-the-ancs-ebrahim-rasool-headache-that-will-just-not-go-away/
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