#the like... vaguely leftist stuff is just so funny because

[mobiused]

looking back on it, I genuinely don't think the loonaverse is as complicated as Jaden and a lot of the theorist thought it was

Yeah and it's kind of embarrassing how much time I spent on it in retrospect. Something I talked about before. Though I am/was an avid reader of Jaden's blog and I know he knew about some complex ideas and he very intentionally wanted to inject those into the loonaverse (mainly audio technology, some heavy parts about LGBT, and collectivism), so I also don't think it's as surface level as people want to retroactively say out of bitterness - which tbh I do feel the urge to do a lot.

[flockofdoves]

this past episode of the good wife i watched yesterday had so much in it on so many levels..

main story of the episode made me burst out crying multiple times it was just really really horrific

i have so much fun with how cary and kalindas dynamic has evolved now that hes working for the states attorneys office. and also love the juxtaposition of his constant more-bitter-and-angry smirk nowadays as a changed guy with in this episode it showing him still doing stupid immature just out of college white guy type shit lol

i love grace she is just such a realistically written middle schooler to me and her asking alicia to let her go to a christian youth group retreat because her friend is going is so funny to me i got invited (and went to) so many of those as a non-protestant christian middle schooler just bc as a weirdo middle schooler, kinda weirdo christian middle schoolers in the midwest will either only know how to socialize through that or will see you as a project they need to invite to that stuff lol. throughout this season so far ive been like. omg. grace leftist arc??? but i guess maybe there is instead (or also?) a grace christian arc lol.. fascinating

and also. sorry. but im just still so kalicia brained its kind of crazy. they literally hang out drinking right next to each other on alicias bed this episode..... kalinda is like 'sorry, i'll let you get back to your life and alicia gestures to kalindas coat laid out on her bed saying 'no, this is part of my life'. its fucking crazy out here

also while kalinda is all cozy in alicias bed once alicia tries to ask her whats happening she says in such vague and evasive terms but still opening up for the first time that she didnt like her life before so she changed it. like ok john silver...

[carry-a-world]

this is going under a read more because I need to vent real quick and therapy is not until Friday 🫡

The Reality TM of the election being next week hit me today and let me tell you, as the sole leftist (and queer to boot) in a conservative family this time sucks big ole balls. There is not a single mfing lifeline for me. My brothers (both younger) are more centrist, depending on the issue. Both, however, are content to hang me out on the line when it comes to my parents and extended family 9 out of 10 times.

Messaged our siblings chat today and was like hello please consider not voting for Trump and rattled off a couple reasons. Only for the younger one, who I am generally closer with, to go off about not wanting to hear about politics or talk about politics because it’s all he hears about and it’s taking over his life. That’s cute, bucko, but my rights to make decisions about my own body and my right to marry whoever I want are about to be legislated the fuck away.

(Said youngest also told me not to use “queer” to refer to myself and I told him to shove it up his ass)

As the Eldest Daughter TM I have always looked after their stupid asses. Who was doing their science fair tri fold the night before it was due? Doing all the chores so we didn’t get in trouble? Listening to mental health stuff because our dad doesn’t believe in it (sure Jan your ADHD ass is fine)? Playing anchor even from a distance when our parents almost got divorced when I was in undergrad? Helping with resumes and handling professors and writing papers? Mediating when the youngest was in Germany having a depressive spiral and my parents didn’t want to let him come home? All me baby.

The middle child is a recalcitrant little shit who at least is getting his depression (funny how heritable that and the ADHD are in my family) treated. But he doesn’t tell anyone jack shit and is more likely to lash out when asked (making comments at holidays that were vaguely threatening to out me before I finally came out to my parents this summer). And it’s just…. So unfucking fair.

My thoughts and opinions on the world and politics, on my queerness especially, to which they were the only family members I could say anything about to until 3 months ago, were and still are always shut down. I got the “I don’t care who you date, you’re still my sister” in the moment that felt great but has had near zero follow up support on. Like fuck you. Fuck you so much. And yet I desperately want them to have my back because otherwise holidays and family gatherings are just me getting dogpiled, or me sitting there just listening to people that I love and care about shit on other people that I love and care about for being queer, or especially for being trans. It would be so nice to talk to someone who has my shared childhood experiences AND shares my opinions and it’s just not happening.

Anyway. For my fellow queer darlings, or even just cis het women at this point, who have family voting for someone that is going to actively take away their rights… I feel you. It fucking blows and we deserve better.

[taffywabbit]

ok story time let's go

(i guess CW// religious baggage? vaguely cult-y stuff? Mormons?)

so i was laughing at that (presumably bait) tweet that got screenshotted and reposted on here, with the person claiming that y'all is a problematic term used by "bigoted southerners" and someone else dunking on them, because I'm Canadian and I say y'all ALL the time. and like, that by itself wouldn't be too notable - there ARE rural areas of Canada, particularly over in Alberta/Saskatchewan, where the local accent and slang have convergently evolved into something very similar to Texas (and I DID actually grow up in a town like that, though i never picked up the accent myself).

what makes my adoption of y'all particularly odd is that I picked it up in the Caribbean of all places. if you are familiar with my Not-So-Secret Tragic Backstory then you MIGHT know where this is going already.

I was raised in a Mormon family, so when I was 18 i was basically required to go do the missionary thing with the white shirts and ties and nametags. (this is very funny considering my current status as a gay trans furry artist and leftist, but this story isn't really about that.) I got assigned a random location in the world, and was shipped off to the Eastern Caribbean for 2 years. it was very hot and sweaty and overall not a very good time for me, the world's blondest palest scrawniest teen who would have to walk around all day every day in office attire.

ANYWAYS a few months after my mission began, we got a new mission president (the old guy assigned by the church to be in charge of all the missionaries in a region, along with his wife). while he was generally a pretty jovial friendly guy, he also had an occasional tendency to powertrip and institute random arbitrary rule changes whenever he felt that the missionaries weren't performing as well as he'd like and the numbers were down. with missionaries, there's a huge focus on "exact obedience" and "consecration" - this idea that the more single-mindedly devoted you are to Doing Missionary Stuff and Thinking About Jesus and Never Having A Single Fucking Independent Thought In Your Head Or Taking Care Of Your Personal Wellbeing Or Enjoying Yourself, the more god will bless you with like. charisma superpowers or something. to just change people's minds on the spot as you blast them with your Conversion Beam. and therefore anytime that ISN'T happening (y'know, because people have free will, and also because being Mormon is wildly unappealing to any reasonable outsider), it clearly MUST be because those darn young punk missionaries are probably thinking too much about their partners back home or drawing Pokemon fanart or collecting distractingly colourful neckties. can't have that!

so with all that context, I can finally get to the point, which is that one day our mission president decided the reason nobody was knocking on our apartment door begging to get baptized was probably because we, as missionaries, were too casual in our interactions with one another. specifically, he took issue with missionaries calling each other "dude" or "bro" or "man", or referring to each other collectively as "you guys". he insisted that this was "eroding the dignity of our sacred calling as missionaries" and that we should instead strive to call each other "Elder" and "Sister" (the titles used for male and female missionaries respectively) as much as humanly possible.

specifically as an alternative to "you guys", he suggested we start saying "Elders and Sisters" every time we addressed a mixed group of missionaries. which OBVIOUSLY sounds really fucking stupid. and I was in a leadership position at the time, so I had to deliver instruction/training to the missionaries in my area every week AND call them to check-in every night. being a missionary and constantly being commanded to do incredibly stupid arbitrary things really brought out my latent rebellious streak, and there was NO fucking way I was going to say "Elders and Sisters" if i could avoid it - the only people who actually complied with the new rule were immediately identifiable as goody-two-shoes and suck-ups and everyone wanted to push them into the ocean.

so INSTEAD, i and several other missionaries quickly realized that we could simply get away with saying "you all" or just plural "you" with like, a hand gesture to show we meant the group. which naturally just evolved into y'all pretty quickly because it's an incredibly natural contraction of words and it just feels good to say. and the mission president never complained about it, because we weren't using cool youngster slang like "guys" or "dudes" and instead it just sounded like a fun twangy rural affectation. and then i just kinda kept saying it for the rest of my mission, and continued saying it after i returned home and went off to college in the city and all that jazz.

...absolutely no clue where I picked up saying "howdy" all the time tho. i don't have an excuse or backstory for that one lol, it's just fun to say

[bigtittyhimmler-blog]

Who Goes Nazi? Brooklyn Edition

If you’re anything like me, a twenty-something Twitter leftist with an advanced degree in the humanities, you hate absolutely everyone around you and badly want to kill them. You live in a brownstone playground of Timorese food and adult coloring books, and you want to suicide bomb the L train but leave a note blaming it on manspreading or whatever, so people don’t think you’re one of “those” random mass murderers (the bad kind). You hate having to tell people at parties that you “work in content,” and you hate the fact that they all also work in content. You hate that they all make content for outlets that are slightly cooler and more prestigious than the outlets you make content for. You hate that none of them have even fucked you for like thirteen months. You hate that you can’t even hate them for the ways in which they’re different to you, because there aren’t any. But fear not! There’s one thing you’ve got that nobody else does: you know that you’re definitely, 100% Not A Nazi.

But what about them? Imagine if the Nazis took over America and it was suddenly cool and prestigious to be a Nazi, and there were trendy Nazis on the TV the whole time, and they once again sold soap with slogans like “Dove: The White Pride Soap for Hating QTBIPOC and Not Amplifying Their Voices.” But also don’t imagine, because that’s exactly what’s happening.

 This game was invented by Dorothy Thompson in her classic 1941 Harpers essay Who Goes Nazi?, in which she presciently pointed out that intellectuals are definitely more Nazi than aristocrats, but not nearly as Nazi as union leaders. But she set her essay at some dinner party in the Hamptons or wherever, and last time I went out there I went swimming in the sea and a wave hit me and I lost my bikini top and a bunch of bros in boat shoes started laughing and pointing at me in a way that despite my white privilege I still feel was somehow like imbued with racism, and then afterwards I just stayed inside for three weeks writing content and ordering groceries online, so the setting needs to be updated. Let’s look at your group DM. Which of these Twitter creatives who live in Brooklyn would go along with it and become a Nazi? (All of them.) And who never, ever would? (Me.)

 Mr A isn’t actually in your group DM, and you’ve never encountered anyone like him irl, but you literally can’t stop talking about him, so he gets included anyway. Mr A is a short ugly loser, and he’s already a Nazi. He doesn’t even live in Brooklyn, he lives in his mother’s basement, and eats chicken tenders, and he doesn’t get laid, but in a different way to the way you don’t get laid, which has to do with patriarchy. Mr A is a Pizzagate. Mr A is a Gamergate. Mr A is a segregationist. Mr A opposes the reforms of the Emperor Diocletian (284-305). Mr A won’t shut up about the superiority of a “free silver” bimetallic monetary system over gold specie, and keeps on talking about the “gold shills” in a way that doesn’t really make sense until you realize that your own name is Goldschmidt, and yeah, he doesn’t really care about expansionary monetary policy at all, he’s talking about the Jews, and specifically you. Mr A is basically a pathetic worm whose life sucks and nobody likes him, but also he represents the whole of the repressive forces of society and he’s at the top of the social hierarchy. Everyone you’ve ever met is actually Mr A, wearing various masks. He is the source of all your problems. He must be killed, and once we kill him, we need to find more people like him to be the source of any problems we have left over.

 Mr B is in your group DM, but you also have a separate group DM with everyone else except Mr B in it. He keeps trying so hard to be nice, and says stuff like “so how is everyone’s day today” with a smiley emoji, and when you’re talking to him you get this airless feeling like you’re about to suffocate in his treacly good-natured presence. Every time you see Mr B at a party you’re afraid that he’s going to blurt out that he loves you, but you can’t keep your distance too much because he’s so clearly autistic, and you don’t want to be ableist. Anyway once in the group DM he said that while he obviously thought divining for water with Y-shaped copper rods was good and important and valid, he didn’t understand what it had to do with socialism. That made everything better, because clearly he’s a Nazi. The whole group DM expended hours of emotional labor educating him about how dowsing is part of LGBTQ+ culture and how his dismissive bro-y attitude was reactionary and gross, and eventually he posted a video of himself crying and begging for forgiveness and promising to do better, because you guys were the only friends he had. This was classic white fragility, but in the end you let him stay. You just have the other DM now, where you make fun of him and it’s ok, because if the Nazis came and he had license to start being cruel and sadistic to other people, he’d definitely do it.

 Ms C is one of those women who doesn’t like other women, and you know this about her because you can’t fucking stand the bitch. Plus she says stuff that’s really not ok, even though it costs nothing to have empathy and be kind. You’ve personally heard her use the D-word, the H-slur, and the L-pejorative, all while laughing and holding a glass of white wine by the stem, like she doesn’t need to consider the harm this does to others, just because she’s “funny” and “an artist.” She’s the Cool Chick. She makes nude self-portraits (the bad, skinny kind), and she’d throw you under the bus in a second for male attention and approval. She’d definitely go Nazi. But the worst thing about her is that she has the impudence to be bisexual and Asian, which makes it really hard to call her out. But then you realized that all Asian people are collectively responsible for the long history of anti-Blackness and misogynoir in their communities, and you’re thinking of holding her collectively responsible for the Rape of Nanking too, once you’re certain she’s a sushi Asian and not the dim sum kind.

 Ms D’s boyfriend works in finance, or like accountancy or something, or I think I heard he was a musician? Maybe a drummer or possibly he used to bartend at a place where they had live music. Anyway they definitely have vanilla cishet sex in the missionary position and you can’t stop thinking about it, his body, her body, naked, moving, breathing, together, almost silent, tender, disgusting. She says she’s a socialist but doesn’t devote every minute of her waking life to getting mad about people online. This means she’s just vaguely following a trend, and if the trend were being a Nazi (which it is), she’d be a Nazi (which she therefore is). You can’t imagine yourself actually hitting her but it’d definitely be punching up to maybe poison her food?

 Mr E used to be a comrade, but then he did a tweet that got 38.6k RT’s and now he’s moved to Los Angeles to spend his whole time in writers’ rooms. Last you heard he was pitching an animated show for adults about a snail with borderline personality disorder. It hasn’t even been greenlit yet, but you’re already thinking about all the ways in which it will be a missed opportunity and do harm and perpetuate tropes. Mr E will definitely turn out to have been a Nazi, and then you can start an anonymous petition to get the show cancelled so he has to move back to New York. Once he’s back you can send him a long email about how much it sucks his career burned out and how (even though you won’t say it in public) sometimes people do actually take the social-justice thing too far. That way he’ll be a comrade again, which is good, because we believe in rehabilitating people who have a genuine change of heart.

 Mr F probably thinks he’s better than you. He’s a union organizer. So are you (you added “#Unionize” to your Twitter name), but his union stuff involves workers who aren’t in tech, content, or grad school, and he probably thinks that makes him more in touch with “the real workers,” who he probably thinks are just a bunch of cis white males in a factory, who are probably all racist and probably have thick, heavy dicks that intrude on your mind in a kinda #MeToo way a lot of the time. He talks about class, and you agree that class is important because you’re not a lib (you support Bernie, you just want him to Do Better). But from the way he says it you’re certain he doesn’t acknowledge all he/him lesbians as part of the working class. He’s trying to save a tiny sector of the workers from a necessary and important socio-economic shift that will impoverish them and make their lives worse, and that’s what being a Nazi is. This is why his union needs to stop dragging their heels, change all of their rules and priorities, and let you get him fired.

 Ms G (me) will never go Nazi, because she is beautiful and kind and pure, and has all the good opinions instead of the bad ones. Because of this she’s allowed to do things that other people can’t do. She can totally fail to understand what having an authoritarian personality actually means, and construct a version of the Who Goes Nazi? essay in which the people who go Nazi are just people who are already right wing, having confused politics with personality, probably because she herself has no personality other than her politics. She can minimize, ignore, or even encourage the infliction of actual suffering when it happens to the wrong kind of people. She can write that “nothing that terrible has really happened” since the publication of Mark Fisher’s Exiting the Vampire Castle, even though Mark Fisher himself is mysteriously not around to appreciate that fact. She can do some shit with threatening to leak an unedited draft that I don’t even want to go into. She knows that the Nazis don’t come promising hatred but promising to be your friend, but it’s ok because she doesn’t really have any friends, just mufos. She’s doing great. She’s building a better, kinder world. She will never, ever be the Nazis.

[wdefender]

The Only Winning Move

This Lindsay Ellis thing has got to me. She quit youtube, in a long, sad, patreon post, about how the fiasco that started with a mild criticism of a Disney film led to the worst year of her life.

In her Mask Off video, she mentions that though this seems a lot like what conservatives call Cancel Culture, it’s got a different sense to it. It goes unnamed, but every leftist content creator sees it and fears it. It’s the mob that eats itself alive, that runs on spite and invective, the people that collate every possible mistake someone has made and spits it out at any potential misdeed.

And it always seems to happen to people with two qualities: They make smart, thoughtful content, and they’re women. Think about this, pewdiepie said a bunch of racial slurs, easily a condemnable act, and controversy flared for a while, but he’s still trucking and still richer than you or I will ever be. JonTron had his whole “rich blacks commit more crimes than poor whites” followed by his current “i dunno guys that vaxx seems pretty sus” stuff, and there he is, still producing videos with plenty of fans. Both of these guys make dumb, disposable tee-hees and they got off scott free from their bullshit. But Lindsay had to deal with so much abuse and betrayal and abandonment that she simply could not go on as she had. And she was ostensibly on the side of the people mad at her!

It’s a trend I’ve noticed that if you try to be socially conscious with the things that you make, you will face much harsher criticism than someone who simply does not care. I think about Gravity Falls and Steven Universe. Gravity Falls was a fun show from Disney that had a single black character and two men that were implied to be gay. It was standard, run of the mill, who-cares cartoon and you rarely see anything but praise. But Steven Universe tried really hard to tackle some shit. Most of the characters are lesbians, it looked at abusive relationships, consent, trauma, and a little smattering of gender in there, with Stevonnie and Shep both being nonbinary. And for that, people who call for representation all day long attack it nonstop.

It does not pay to care. If you do, you are put in a special category where any slight misapprehension you engender is harped on relentlessly by the people who ask for what you are trying to make. If you simply do not give a shit, nobody cares. A Let’s Player in it for the yuks doesn’t have to try to be a good person, and I would say they should not try. Because trying will hurt you. Somehow it’s safer to vaguely imply some sort of social stance, one with plausible deniability, than it is to fight for what you want to see in the world. Because the ones that come for you won’t just be the ones who hate your worldview, it will be the ones you thought you were fighting for.

And lookee-loo, Gravity Falls was made by Alex Hirsh, and Steven Universe by Rebecca Sugar. Wowee, sure is weird how all the hate goes to the show made by a (nonbinary) woman. I didn’t want to think simple sexism was at play here, it seemed too easy, but I can’t deny that’s a big part of it. I don’t know if people just hold women to higher standards, or if men are more inclined to not give a single shit.

There’s something to be said for how Twitter helps this happen, but I don’t think I can cover that enough to justify myself. It’s just disheartening how leftists unintentionally ally themselves with those who hate leftists to attack a leftist creator for something that doesn’t really matter.

The only people that have won here are the ones who hate everything Lindsay was trying to do. Create media literacy, critical thinking, and examine where our biases in media lie. But we didn’t win. We have lost a creator who made smart, funny videos, stuff that made me think and learn about so much. She could not take the shit being thrown at her and there was no other way out. It will only happen again. And I guess the only way around it is to never try to be better.

[spoonass69]

so often. i see people being like heh nonody on this website has reading comprehension. everyone on twitter is so defensive. everyone reads things in bad faith. but then you go on their page and they call themselves leftists but theyve completely looped around and their ironic satire posts are literally just doing the same thing they think theyre making fun of. like ok these arent very coherent words but like. i keep seeing people making more and more jokes about people calling everything a trauma response, about people saying their neurodivergent and a minor, about people asking op to clarify weather they meant something super offensive in their post. like at first when ut was just a few jokes abt some specific and ridiculous situations it was like yeah funny. but its feeling very much just like a “leftist” version of those conservatives making fun of people for being too sensitive or boys making fun of girls for saying they have a boyfriend.

like ive seen so many people on tik tok using that “that is a scarecrow” bo burnham sound to belittle actual trauma responses because they do sound silly and like normal things when you don’t understand it.

and the whole thing about making fun of people fpr saying theyre neurodivergent and a minor is just. so blatantly weird. like yes its very funny to laugh at the like. 3 times someone has actually said that in a funny situation. but come on guys. you have to be careful about these topics.

and that whole thing about bad faith it just. i get where people are coming from. but the internet is a wild place and i really dont think we should be making fun of people for making sure that when you say vague things its nog coming from a bigoted pov, because its super common for someone to say vague normal things but from a bigoted pov.

it really just feels like a bunch of kids wanted ro be seen as morally good and stuff, so they called themselves leftists and such but then they didn’t actually bother to learn anything or think critically. then they made jokes where the basis for the joke to be funny are some very ingrained and very harmful views and ideas abt the world. and if you point this out at all then youre gonna get roasted bc its not that deep and its just jokes. which yk i get. its also the same thing the conservatives say tho. i just really dont like all the similarities im seeing and i really really dont like how many other seemingly normal and safe and educated people arent seeing it at all and are participating in it

[st-just]

Okay it's 2am so I'm afraid this is going to be a bit abbreviated, but so in terms of nonleftist nonfiction/history.

...well, cut Scott and Graeber right out. But okay.

So I actually just finished The Verge: Reformation, Renaissance, and Forty Years that Shook the World, by Patrick Wyamn. Which, as the title might imply, is pretty pop-history but afaict still quite rigorous. Central subject is about the Great Divergence ("Why Europe," which is unsurprisingly one of the bigger points of historical study out there), with the theisis that even at the dawn of the Early Modern Period (1490-1530, specifically) you can see the beginnings of the intertwined processes propelling European empires to global domination over the next centuries.

On a similar subject but with pretty different focuses and much, much broader and with fewer concessions to accessibility is John Darwin's After Tamerlane: The Rise and Fall of Global Empires, 1400-2000. It is about, well, what it sounds like, on how the central example of an empire shifted from one based in inner Asia to being essentially maritime, and the growth and limits of European superiority over the early modern and modern periods.

Switching topics entirely, Mike Duncan's The Storm Before The Storm is a really excellent narrative history about 'the beginning of the end of the Roman Republic' - Marius, Sulla, the Grachi, the Social War, all that good stuff between Roman ascendancy in the Med and Ceaser et al taking center stage. I absolutely only bought it because I love his Revolutions podcast and don't particularly care about Rome, but it's an interesting and very readable piece of work.

The War That Ended Peace by Margaret Macmillan is about, well, not World War 1 per se, but about the set of underlying conditions and contingencies that made it seemingly inevitable. Also incredibly funny in a lot of places, if you like dry academic humor, and full of absolutely amazing anecdotes about the absurdity of belle epoque Europe. Which is good for keeping it from getting too depressing.

Um, okay. Martyn Rady's The Habsburgs is dry in places and either too long or not nearly long enough, but does a great job providing snapshots and a general outline of a thousand years of central European history. Adam Hochschild's King Leopold's Ghost is, well, quite possibly outdated by now idk, but the Congo Free State really is one of those things it's vaguely shocking isn't part of popular historical memory. Hopping continents, John Sugden's Tecumseh: A Life is an extremely dry biography that's also mostly a history of indigenous Americans caught in the path of Manifest Destiny and the last moment it seemed like they had a real chance of fighting back. Switching genre's entirely, Elizabeth Kolbert's The Six Extinction and Under A White Sky are excellent for really, truly understanding what 'the Anthropocene' means beyond the vague apocalypse of climate change. David Wallace-Wells The Uninhabitable Earth is great for making that potential apocalypse much less vague, without fully descending into doomsaying or fatalism. Larissa Macfarquhar's Stranger's Drowning is a really excellent look at selflessness and moral obligation, and has probably shaped my thoughts on ethics more than any single other thing. Um, Bad Blood. Killers of the Flower Moon. Uh, haven't read them since school but for non-leftist histories of the USSR then I have good memories of The Affirmative Action Empire, History As Ritual, Stalin's Railroad, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, and Magnetic Mountain?

Hopefully this isn't totally misunderstanding the question.

a bit of a weird q, but do you have any good /non/-leftist book recs (or more rather, not leftist-specific). i'm generally pretty skeptical of the "internet leftist" phenomenon where everyone only gets told to read leftist specific content, which honestly seems pretty limiting to like. expanding ur Understanding of stuff. non-subject specific, just lookin for general book recs that aren't specifically left-coded

very general question! what are you looking for, exactly? i read some fiction but it's mostly web serials/fantasy/sci-fi type stuff, and my history tends to be at the very least left-leaning, which is most of the nonfiction i read.

[evilelitest2]

Something that your piece on "Good Night, and Good Luck" reminded me of, and a fact you've brought up before in your series: why ARE Americans (and the West in general, really) so easily scared?

That is a very good question, and like all good questions, it doesn’t have a single answer.  I mean all people are easily scared, a lot of Muslim Fundamentalists are doing basically the same thing our political right is, but the west gets more scared over less so lets talk about the various factors.

Firstly, we aren’t very well educated about the world around us.  This is less true for Europeans but its still stands, we know very little about these situations and political realities, which makes things easier to get confused.  If somebody’s understanding of say, Islam, is just a vague nebulous threat that they imagined as a hoard of brown people with funny hats and suicide vests, its really easy to imagine the enemy as something inhuman and thus more threatening.  If you are actually knowledgeable about the subject you learn how our enemies are just as incompetent and stupid as we are

Secondly, a corporate culture, because fear is extremely profitable.  Now don’t get me wrong, I am not saying there is a cabal of men in business suits sitting around with cigars going ‘Mar har, we need to make the people afraid” its more just part of capitalism tendency to hyperize anything. Marketing fear is really really easy, because people who are afraid will buy things to try to make the fear go away.  Take gun companies for example, their product is something which kinda requires you to be afraid to get one, if you weren’t terrified of getting shot, then the only reason why you’d buy a guy is if you were a hunter or a sports shooter.  And while that is a serviceable market, if you have an aggressive marketing campaign to get people terrified, you can get people who otherwise would never buy guns to…buy guns, because do you know how scary things our outside right now (they say as crime rates are steadily reduced).  Or for people who have guns…why not get another gun, because you never know if like, 8 guys will break into your house and you will have to defend it with your 80 guns.  

This also applies to a lot of other markets, its just good business to have a scared audience, because they will buy you’re useless shit.  For example, if men are supposedly having their masculinity stolen from them by…something then suddenly testosterone supplements make sense.  

   Or most infamously, punditry.  I mean, if there is a giant conspiracy of Leftists controlling all the media and the only person you can trust is Rush Limbaugh, then you listen to him religiously…which makes the ads on his show much more valuable.  It just makes a lot of business sense 

Which leads too

 Thirdly Because our media’s level of success is based upon ratings rather than quality of reporting, our media priorities things that make people scared.  I mean, 9/11 was great for the news industry in terms of money, and you never get a wide spread selling headline saying ‘Everything is fine”  Apocalyptic pronunciations and constant fear just gets you better ratings, so they keep doing it 

Fourth, it is really good for politicians, particularly those who are trying to get people to vote against their own interests.  Let me give three examples on the right, center and left of this behavior.  

So to take a right wing belief, for poor Americans in rural red states, tax breaks for the wealthy don’t actually help them, in fact they hurt them because that leads to cutting of benefits.  So how do you get these people to vote against their own interest?  Simple, you get them fucking terrified of the liberals/communist/muslim/jews and they will vote against their own interests.  Or in the French Revolution, the Jacobines were able to seize power by playing on fears of a Royalist conspiracy.  Or to use a centrist example, Hillary Clinton’s primary campaign was basically telling people who didn’t like her policies to support her because only she could protect them from Trump…whoops.  

There is a reason why Republicans call the Estate Tax “The Death Tax” 

Fifth, our media loves conspiracies in fiction, and the wide spread which makes people more inclined to believe it.  People don’t understand how like…things work so they imagine conspiracies, and since most people get their understanding of reality through fiction, the prevalence of such narratives makes this stuff seem more reasonable.  I mean a lot of Alt Rightsits get their understanding of Terrorism through 24, their understanding of Crime through the Dark Knight Returns and/or Dirty Harry, and their understanding of history through Forest Gump 

Also people kinda like being scared, its exciting, which is why when the News covers a natural disaster they try to make it as dramatic as possible.  

Actually Fahrenheit 9/11 does a good job talking about this whole issue