Content Warning: Wearying Endless Hope-Destroying Fascist Evil, Apocalyptic Crapola. “wontbehere4long” don’t read this. You’re too high strung, kid.
Projection is a phenomenon in psychology whereby a person protects themselves from awareness of their own flaws by accusing someone else of having said flaws. I’m not the racist, that guy is! Sadly, this is so widespread among right wingers that one could make a serious case that it’s a defining feature of the motherfuckers.
Dave Futrelle at We Hunted The Mammoth has been facing a fucknado of fascist irony victims, defending their most transparent act of projection to date: the spreading of the “NPC meme.” Let me see if I can break down the background of this situation to a simple timeline:
In video games, non-player characters are the guys you interact with that have just a few pre-programmed things to say and never meaningfully change.
Random fucklord says he sees people he doesn’t like as NPCs, thoughtless and soulless.
Projecting fucklords who speak in “kek” and “cuck” notice that social justice advocates use some jargon and assume it’s the same sort of group-affirming dog barks that they use.
Projecting fucklords adopt random fucklord’s meme and promote it.
As they always fucking do, they form a massive wall of hive-minded tools bargling at decent people about how we’re mindles soulless conformists.
They do this kind of shit all the time. Any given anti-feminist argument, for one small example, is repeated VERBATIM by forty thousand fucklords who somehow feel like they came up with the idea.
The reason that it’s ironic this time? The projection is an accusation of conformity and mindlessness.
Now, despite this being a fresh incident with that minty taste of a new twist, why does this feel instantly wearying and soul crushing? I didn’t get it, but then I reflected. Right wingers always do this shit. Fucking always. “You want to take away our religious freedom!” “You want to control our lives!” “Atheism is the real dogma!” “You want to censor us!” “You hate freedom!”
This last couple of weeks has been hard as fuck. For me, the worse part of it was the newest report on climate change. Like the scientists sounding alarms since the fucking industrial era began, I’m feeling that Cassandra Complex. It’s worse now because we’re in the 11th hour and there actually is nothing anyone can do to stop the hell that’s coming. It’s about mitigation and we can’t even get the demons in power to do anything about that.
Humanity is so consistently foolish and venal that we’re destroying ourselves and taking down most of the biosphere with us, when we have the ability to do better. It’s just that grain of thoughtfulness and compassion is always overwhelmed by fear and loathing.
Because white right wing cattle vote with their spleen, we’re down to hoping we can shape the apocalypse instead of preventing it. Will it be Mad Max or 1984? A little of both, but an increasingly safe bet there’s no humans left on the other side of it.
And these chucklefucks are jeering and capering while the ship goes down. Thanks guys. You wanted to “pwn the libs”? You got me. I’m “pwn’d.” Not in the sense I’ve come to realize you are the super geniuses who were right all along. No, I’m owned in the sense that I understand you’ve won, and I feel bad about it. And the “I told you so” we’ll get as we all die? Doesn’t make me feel better about it.
Fuck, y’all are so pig ignorant and compulsively projecting, you’ll figure out how to blame us for that too.
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Random fucklord says he sees people he doesn’t like as NPCs, thoughtless and soulless.
I was a neonazi, until I took an arrow to the knee.
Future Republican: “Well, maybe those Republicans back in the old Trump era helped to bring about climate change, but that was them, not us. We never voted for any of those guys, so you can’t blame us for this mess! We’re an all-new party!”
Well, you don’t change what works for you, I guess, even if it just works short term and you’re fucking yourself over in the process.
Republicans have been successfully employing the projection tactic since at least the 70s. What I can’t quite understand is why it works for them, but not for the Democrats. How can people still be falling for the “Democrats are tax and spend” trope when it gets more blatantly obvious that the reverse is true with every round of power transfer?
I suppose it has to do in part with the inability of the general electorate to grasp that the state of the economy usually lags about a year or two behind the policies any administration enacts. So Clinton can leave a surplus which W. somehow takes credit for, and he can blow through that surplus and crash the economy just in time to hand it off to Obama, who gets blamed for it and fixes it just in time to hand it off to Trump, who gets credit for it. When Trump’s trade wars crash us again, Democrats will take over, take the blame, and fix it just in time to hand the credit over to the next Republican admin. It’s truly disheartening how well that always works for them.
I’m sorry, I really am truly sorry.
You can blame Orlando for turning me into this mess of who I am.
You gotta understand that, and I know that this is really silly playing this card, but my autistic view of the world is so radically different compared to everyone else. I’ve never encountered these kinds of norms and cycles and routines and habits and expectations and such, and I don’t know how to appropriately react to them. Now that I am fully aware that there are people like Trump and Bolsonaro who want to end my life because I do not conform to certain norms, I’m sorry, but I feel I have every right to be high strung and defensive.
If you want me to take some time off away from you, or either never speak to you again, I will respect that.
All I want, though, is a reassuring hand on my shoulder.
@wontbehere4long:
I don’t think you were being told to go away. You were just being warned that, given the state of mind you appeared to be in before, this article would not help.
Marcus @1 – memez!
Bruce @2 – you got their number.
Ridana @3 – i wasn’t even thinking of it as a tactic so much as a personality trait in this post, but yeah, that makes sense.
Wont @4 – i told you not to read this post, ya goof! i avoid telling my boyfriend my apocalyptic feels for the same reason. some people are more sensitive than others, i don’t think you should be looking at this kinda stuff. i will do posts that anyone can look at in the future, but this wasn’t that.
On the subject of reassurance, this blog is not the best place for that kind of thing. In general, I’m a bad guy to talk to for depressive people. You say you have the right to be upset and I agree, so where does that leave you? I want you to take care of yourself.
If I make a post about Sam Waterston’s eyebrows or cute animals or some low-key sass, you’d feel better looking at that kinda stuff. I have a tumblr of intentionally non-political content at http://less-than-triggery.tumblr.com/
Jenora @5 – thanks for having my back on that, you’re right. i don’t have much time to interface with the comments this week.
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If I finally get the motivation to start my YouTube channel soon I would like your permission to use parts of this piece in a video essay wip. Please let me know. Just to be upfront I’m a anarchist with strong Marxist sympathies. Or just call me a filthy commie sjw I’m used to it.
That’s cool, comrade. A little verbal attribution to anything like a direct quote is formal, but using the ideas as inspiration for something with your own wording is fine. I will say this: I’m not the most thoughtful writer and you could probably google up some articles that hash out the same ideas more succinctly or successfully. I’d look at the Dave Futrelle articles I linked to above for sure.
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