Your political opinions are disjointed; the positions you hold in no way line up with the labels you apply to yourself. When you talk about politics, it sounds like someone live-tweeting the writer's room at Last Week Tonight on a particularly unproductive day.
Your every thought was spoon-fed to you by a group of propagandists who want you dead. Every conversation we have feels to me like digging through a pile of excrement looking to find out what a sick animal had for its last meal. That's how distasteful it is, finding the regurgitated chunks of headline you half-understood, and how easy it is to identify the corny chunks of Sam Bee tweets and blood-red WaPo opinion column titles.
When you asked me to read a technical manual and summarize it for you, I empathized with your learning disorder and helped you out - don't you goddamn dare claim what little you've read of contemporary politics or current events is even on the same plane of validity as my own. When you patronizingly say "No one is entitled to their own facts", I agree, but you mean the ones you were given rather than than the Truth. You imagine yourself a free-thinker, a scientist, and the truth is you question nothing and do not think at all.
I know you're trying to justify your position in the company during layoff season, but I have half a mind to make your job look unnecessary instead of helping you prove how necessary it is, even knowing it will make my own long days even longer.
I doubt I'm the only one who ends a day at work feeling like this. If you read it, thanks for listening to me vent.
If making that guy look unnecessary will remove a progressive from your workplace, do it.
This is the level of hostility that will be needed to avoid annihilation. Remove enemies where you can.
I wish more people understood this. The time for tolerating SocJus is long passed. We need to be every bit as hostile to them as they are to us. We need to shun, ostrascize, deplatform, cut them out of our lives, remove them from any space we can, and adopt a mentality of total noncompliance with them.
These are not your countrymen any longer. These are hostile infiltrators. They want you dead, your kids raped and brainwashed, and they think its funny.
Act accordingly. Be absolutely ruthless.
Well said. Give these neo-Marxists NO QUARTER. They want to destroy Western civilization.
The reason the left gained so much ground in the culture war was because for most of its existence they've been the only ones fighting it. Sure we've pushed back, but only politely. Meanwhile they were taking over key positions of power, silencing important voices, and reporting and cancelling people for wrong think.
When it comes to the culture war, I am reminded of a very awful video of mass executions in the middle-east.
Two men walked down a line of people, cutting their heads one by one. They didn't have a gun, just a machete each. The people would kneel, and procedurally, chop, kneel, chop, kneel, chop.
They were not chained, just tied hands. They could resist. It was like 100 vs 2, they could easily win if a couple dozen were willing to die in the attempt. But rather than save half at the risk of death from personal agency, they all die. Better to die than to risk being impolite to your executioner, I guess?
Same but less bloody in cultural spheres: One side kneels, the other side chops. That's their roles, and they follow those roles. When the one side runs out of kneelers to chop, they in-fight and scream to get their fellow choppers to kneel, so they can chop more, all they know how to do is chop. The other side cowers and kneels, hoping the choppers will bore or grow tired of the divinely-inspired religious zealotry that drives them to chop. To stop them from chopping isn't their role, their role is to kneel and cower, and so that is what they do.
The ones who don't kneel and cower earn scads of money, at the expense of being insulted by the choppers. But the choppers can only chop someone who kneels, so hurling insults is all they can do. But that threat of insults is enough to keep most kneeling.
I'm with that. The left likes to cancel because of lies. For you, just use facts. Sounds like the progressives in OP's workplace are retards. Get them fired for being incompetent, the rest will follow.
Do it, don't leave knives at your back. And especially don't help them sharpen their knife collection when they ask fake-nicely, that's just crazy.
This is projection once again. I seem to remember they were the ones that came up with the phrase "its my truth" to begin with.
i'm extremely embarrassed that i yelled that at my aunt as we were leaving her and my uncle's house after a political argument.
i'm glad i stopped being that person.
Have you apologized?
Who needs fact when they have "lived experiences"?
Out of curiosity, what other kind of experiences are there?
If you weren't aware, "lived experiences" and "personal truth" are concepts, descended from post modern philosophy, that critical race theory and intersectional feminism like to use to give legitimacy to bullshit claims that aren't reflected by reality.
If a woman complains about how our society is a misogynist patriarchy because she feels unsafe to walk alone, and you point out the fact that men are actually much more likely to be assaulted than women, the you are a bad person for invalidating her "lived experiences" and "personal truth".
If we take a black woman from a wealthy family, who went to a fantastic school, was admitted to a prestigious university and given a scholarship because of her skin color, and hired to a cushy job at a company trying to improve their "diversity" ... if that woman claims she has been oppressed by systemic racism, without any evidence to support these claims whatsoever, we're not allowed to question it because the oppression is her "personal truth" based on her "lived experiences".
A fun reminder than it was Stephen Colbert who popularized (maybe invented?) the phrase "Truthiness" over a decade ago on the Colbert Report to make fun of Republicans for avoiding the reality of the world in favor of what "felt right." It's never stopped.
I recently did my performance eval, which was fun since I've started detaching from wider Woke Capital society and no longer care if I get fired.
Me: "this all seems arbitrary, and my 'self eval' doesn't factor into the process at all, so why make me do it?"
Boss: "so there can be a dialog between us"
Me: "but I have to submit my eval before you're allowed to start yours, and you have to submit yours before we're allowed to have this 'dialog', and nothing can be changed once it's all submitted. And only your eval matters for raises and promotions. Seems like two monologues instead of a 'dialog'
Boss: "why do you have to do this every year?"
It wasn't even a bad eval. Not caring is fun.
It's already backfired on me several times: I keep doing shit I figure is going to kill my career, and they keep promoting me.
Fortunately I grew up kinda poor, so I never learned all the ways middle class people waste money and was able to save like crazy. So the more they pay me, the more I save and the less dependent on their money I am. Which allows me to care even less about my career. So it all works out in my favor.
Edit: when I started out on my own I lived in a neighborhood full of Mexican day laborers, because it didn't make sense to live in a "good school district" like all my coworkers. Now those same coworkers criticize me for not being "diverse and inclusive". I wonder how many of them have lived someplace where you couldn't assume you could speak the same language as your next-door neighbor.
They think you're capable of being cold hearted, when really you're just apathetic to it all.
Keep that facade - if it gets you the money to help you pursue your real goals then I'd say that's time well spent.
My career and work persona serves me, as opposed to the other way around. Sadly I think a number of my coworkers have taken that other approach.
These and maskers are the worst. Life is difficult enough without having some self-righteous asshole trying to make everyone feel bad about everything.
Plastic face shield, alone at his desk. Not even joking. The delusions are getting worse.
The way I do it at my workplace is I try to sow some doubt into someone's psyche. If they parrot a mainstream "fact", I go "Hey, but did you know actually it was this or that" - and because people at my workplace aren't reddit retards, they'll go "You don't say? Really?"
Basically I push centrist/right wing talking points but I kinda just lightly shove it into their faces. Like when they were talking about the stimulus I asked them where the money was coming from. They go "They're printing/making it", and then I point out Venezuela, which makes them pause. I then roll it back by going "Of course we're not at that point, but you can kinda see why constantly printing money out of thin air is going to screw us over in the long run right? Is this really the way to go?"
If my coworker has a brain it makes them think. The problem is, most are too fucking blue pilled TO think. I have ONE coworker that knows I'm right wing and an ex-Dem. That's it.
They're frickin' demons, man!
Literal pot-bellied goblin vampires.
how dangerous is that co-worker?
Good question. He's very... passive about things. He has strong opinions but he doesn't shove his opinions down your throat. He's not a raving lunatic and actually listened to me bitch about the MSM, if that tells you anything.
One big one, is that the military budget is 60%+ of the federal budget. Everyone "knows" that that's true. Problem is, it isn't true. In fact it's roughly the inverse, with healthcare and social security making up around 60% of the federal budget.
The military is part of the "voluntary" budget, but that's less than half the overall budget - the entitlement programs make up the "mandatory" half the budget, the one nobody argues over.
Yup. But it's super disingenuous and misleading to try to convince people that military spending is around 60% of "the federal budget," or try to lead them to that conclusion. And that is what they're trying to do. So many people think we spend more than half the total budget on the military, and almost nothing on healthcare and social security, and such programs.
I did stuff like that too. I would mostly say things like "Oh I that true? I thought I read something different once. Maybe I'm wrong though, it was a long time ago." And I had no problem admitting I was wrong about stuff, which I did occasionally misremember.
Mostly the point was to get people to question the stuff they were parroting from John Oliver or whoever. A lot of the time I think people just repeat that stuff because they don't have anything else to talk about or want to sound smart. It becomes some sort of charade where people are just high-fiving each other over how well they can recall the latest propaganda.
I started off by thinking that the old mainframe operator's "fuck off" of "Go away, before I replace you with a small shell script" was applicable here and that it's about time we started making some of these useless bastards that do nothing but move numbers around on an Excel spreadsheet all day obsolete through some programmatic action.
Then I realized that there's a greater-than-zero chance that they've managed to finagle themselves into an un-fire-able position by claiming that they're some sort of protected class. Sure, we could prove to their boss, and their boss's boss, that they're a damn moron that should never have been hired in the first place, but as soon as they try to give them the sack (even if it's for proper reasons that violate company policy), their ass will be putting the company on blast all over Twitter, Glassdoor, LinkedIn, and every other outlet they can that the company is run by every -ist and -phobic under the sun. HR and the company won't want to risk the PR nightmare they know could happen, so they'll shuffle the moron around to different departments until they find a place for them that they'll be least likely to fuck something up.
I'm not saying we shouldn't pull the trigger on proving someone is useless at their job, but one should tread very carefully and make sure the evidence is rock solid against the offender.
You're clearly a reasonable person and the fact that you're saying it here rather than unpacking it at work speaks to your character.
But it sounds like you're propping up a burden that could turn toxic. If it slipped, unintentionally, that you felt the way all of us here do, would you trust this person to return your patience and respect, or go running to HR?
I can regulate.
More importantly, I'm essentially irreplaceable - the number of people who can do what I do is small, and we're all working (paid) overtime already.
Perhaps more importantly, I don't think this coworker is malicious, just an NPC.
I don't know if I could justify separating the two TBH. As long as they're going to unthinkingly parrot the propaganda, they're going to be a conduit for the malice of the propagandists.
They're a bomb primed to go off and the trigger is firmly in the hands of people who have already demonstrated great malice to anyone who disrupts their narrative, I don't see them as any less dangerous than someone harboring personal malice. Either disarm that bomb or move it where it can't reach you if you don't intend to be forced to conform to the demands of their narrative.
You're not alone. I've said in other posts that I am in graduate school and I want to say things like this to my boss/thesis adviser every damn day. I never feel safe expressing even the slightest conservative opinion to anyone there, and one thing I want to say to him specifically is how he treats the Democrats like his undergrad football team: He can't tell you any details about anything about them, but they can do no wrong and their rivals are literally evil despite the fact that he can't tell you the first thing about them either.
Fuck corporate America.
Replace him with a small shell script.