Original title was “A big Seattle name is in the election battlegrounds — helping Trump” which I editorialized primarily to better explain who Kshama Sawant is over the generic “a big Seattle name”.
Original title was “A big Seattle name is in the election battlegrounds — helping Trump” which I editorialized primarily to better explain who Kshama Sawant is over the generic “a big Seattle name”.
I googled her thinking I’d find she wasn’t a socialist, but she is…
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kshama_Sawant
She’s got a huge Wikipedia, and I agreed with everything I skimmed till I got here:
But its of note that she’s a crazy smart immigrant from India, which I’m sure we’re all aware is a hell of a lot worse than it is here.
But she went from computer programmer to economic professor, and if you read all her policies on Wikipedia, there’s not a lot to disagree with.
I think it’s just that she both understands the path we’re on, and knows it can get a hell of a lot worse and become much harder to change. Like when the grizzled survivor in a zombie apocalypse chops someone’s arm off when it might be a bite. When you’ve been thru some shit, your risk assessment changes, you play it safe long term even if it means short term pain. As bad as America is now, it’s not India in the 90s, especially for a woman going to school for computer programming.
She’s an accelerationist, and I dont agree with that. But fuck, if she had just a little more patience and restraint with her platform and coming out of Seattle with a progressive backing she’d have probably been an AOC level name in a decade.
She’s burnt any political future she’d ever have now.
There is no such thing as a “crazy smart” accelerationist. By definition they don’t have a firm grasp of reality or the fate of most successful accelerationists.
There are a lot of smart people who don’t have a firm grasp on reality.
Bruh, IQ isn’t just one number, people are just talking about the average…
And risk assessment isn’t even part of it, but I think it should be personally.
Hell, for the last part I’d point out that most people with a really high IQ are considered not to have firm grasp on reality.
It legitimately doesn’t take that rare of an IQ until you’re at the point where Idiocracy has been happening for decades. It’s my main argument against a governmental system where the smartest lead. There’s a lot of human variation and ignorance is bliss is a saying for a reason.
Really smart people are often incredibly jaded and misanthropic.
From her point of view and the timeline she may be looking at. This could be like putting toilet water on the plants even tho it doesn’t have electrolytes.
Maybe she’s right. I don’t think she is. But I can see the argument
I never said anything about IQ. IQ is a bullshit measure.
I don’t think accelerationists are intelligent because they don’t understand the consequences of their actions.
So…
Do you think “intelligence” is real?
And do you understand that it’s not one thing that’s equally distributed, people have strengths in some areas like associative memory, processing speed, critical thinking, or long term memory?
Helping to elect a guy that straight up hates free and fair elections is a great way to get 3rd parties a seat at the table. /s
Genuinely curious: Has accelerationist theory ever worked out? Does the rise and fall of Nazi Germany count as an example where it “worked out”?
Successful accelerationists tend to be murdered by the people they help put into power.
Depending on your political leaning, the American Revolution comes to mind…
The French Revolution…
Pretty much any revolution makes modern “accelerationists” look like boring moderates on a long enough timescale.
Yeah, I think there’s some sort of survivorship bias going on to encourage accelerationists. They identify the successes and never hear about all the terrible failures. Sometimes making things worse does actually result in mass movements. It’s just that that’s pretty rare and usually it just makes things worse without an awakening, sometimes disastrously. But if it does happen it’ll cause a lot of change and end up in the history books. And in the event it doesn’t the accelerationists probably won’t even be mentioned in the description of the dark times they helped usher in.
And the big problem with all of this is that if people know you’re doing accelerationism, it’s a lot less likely to make people believe in your cause because it just seems like you’re playing a game and detached from people’s actual lives. Because to some extent that’s true and you are.
In the example of Nazi Germany, the closest thing to modern left wing accelerationists helped create the domestic political chaos that Hitler promoted himself as an antidote to.
Shortly after WW1 you had the KPD (Communists/Revolutionary Socialists) and the SPD (Social Democrats/Union Workers).
After WW1 ended, Rosa Luxemburg of the KPD supported a revolutionary overthrow of the government, but was assassinated by right wing paramilitary groups collaborating with the SPD.
This led to the SPD remaining in control, mostly, tentatively, via coalitions, of the Weimar government, but created a whole lot of bad blood between the KPD and SPD.
Throughout the 20s and 30s, the KPD viewed the SPD as their primary enemy, and more than once allied with the Nazis to achieve the downfall of the SPD, though they now were less revolutionary and more electoral reformist.
In 1931, the KPD leader Thalmann declared 'After Hitler, Our Turn!" while instructing the KPD members to vote for a Nazi referendum that would overthrow the SPD government. Though this referendum failed, it caused much dissent within the KPD, as the Nazis grew in power and popularity.
In 1932, the KPD and Nazis both supported a series of labor strikes in Berlin which the SPD, normally aligned with unions, did not support.
This caused the SPD to lose enough seats in the Reichstag that the next government that formed was a coalition led by Nazis, after many months of Nazi paramilitary violence.
At that point, the KPD leaders mostly fled, Hitler was put into power with the SPD providing all the votes against him, and then the SPD and KPD were outlawed, and now we have the Third Reich.
…
So this parallels our current political reality broadly: Leftists (or left of center people) fight amongst themselves to their own detriment and ultimately accelerate the rise of a right wing authoritarian strong man who promises domestic stability, but ends up creating even more chaos and destruction.
If your leftist accelerationist goal is destroy as much as possible so the new world can maybe? rise from the ashes, then sure Germany is a good example of that working.
If your leftist accelerationist goal is get to communism as fast as possible by deft, 12-d chess political maneuvers including allying with fascists, then uh, no, Germany is a perfect example of that backfiring in the most horrible way imaginable.