this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2023
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Ug. Yes. Politics is important and inevitable but ultimately exhausting to look at. Just impotent yelling across the ether.
An analogy that I have been using is that politics is like linguistics. It is useful to study language in a granular way from morphemes to phonetics to syntax to discourse analyses, and everything in between. The structure of a language is fascinating, it helps to discover its relationship to other languages, and it can reveal profound things about the cultures that would otherwise be lost.
Yet, studying linguistics does not make anyone better at learning to speak, read, write, and understand other language. It does nothing for fluency. Nobody learns a language to only talk about the language, they do it to connect to other people or to experience art and media in its original form.
Political discussion is not action, by itself it does nothing to improve the world, it only serves to bias us and disort reality.A person can only hope to be inspirational and change the minds of the prejudiced.
... sorry for rant there. I have way too many opinion about politics for someone who does not care to see it either.
Ehh, i mean it definitely does do that, but political discussion is also important to guide action. We can see plenty of political action that gets nowhere and does nothing, because the people instigating it do not have a solid theory of how political change is accomplished. Political discussions are how that understanding emerges.
That being said the internet, especially platforms like mastodon that encourage short posts, is rarely the best place for productive political discussion.
I admit I am being closed minded here. I just cannot see having a beneficial discussion of politica with all the hair triggered reactions and noise.
Fuck, it used to be that the anonimity of the internet empowered people to be piss-stained jerks. Seeing all the hate and ignorance put to faces is overwhelming. People think free speech means they are entitled to others people's attention and personal lives. I do not need to participate in that shit, and I definitely never want to look at it.
Personally, I need to be more informed about political theory. There does appear to be an optimal way to things for effective action. I want to be useful in making the world a better place.