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Suppose communism is bad (if you think it's good this isn't addressed to you but sure feel free to chime in). How do you teach normies this?
I mean the kind of normie who lives in a world where powers far beyond them do incomprehensible things like set the prices of stuff in the store, so that some of the stuff they really want is too expensive for them, but look, the store is full of that stuff, so somebody has all this stuff but they're not letting them have it except for way too high a price, those greedy assholes.
And then you try to explain to them how markets work and how prices come to be and it all just comes across to them as some weird bootlicking apologism because they're simply not on that level.
Is there a more "down to earth" approach that is needed? Normies who have deeply internalized rules of decency and ideas of "thou shalt not steal" (often normies with religious backgrounds) seem to naturally be anti-communist.
Now I'm sure some of y'all here (you know who you are) will say these people basically just need to be oppressed because if they have their way civilization is destroyed and everything is shitty for everybody, but if you oppress them then they complain but otherwise you have a civilization that hums along. But I hate this, I feel like there has to be a way to make society work that doesn't require telling a huge segment of the population "stfu and get in line or we're putting you in a cage". And I mean obviously violent (as needed) enforcement of civilized norms is necessary, but I notice there are a lot more people who are sympathetic to communist ideas than are actual active criminals. My point is more about these people, not the active criminals (who I support putting in cages)
Is there really no way to get through to people other than to just tell them shut up and take it because we're trying to run a civilization here
I think the surest path to success is to play dirty. Play the man and not the ball.
Make communism look creepy and weird. Hammer home imagery of some fat, ugly blue-haired woman, or this soyboy: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DIbHYhPVoAEIxzs.jpg
Then dive deep into Beria's sex crimes and pedophilia, Mao's sex crimes and venereal diseases, his rotten teeth... Establish that communism is led by losers, it's run for losers and makes winners into losers. Dive into the gruesome crimes of NKVD officials, the torture, the encouragement of children to report on their parents. Focus on how everything was broken, how Soviet televisions exploded from time to time, they couldn't get anything done correctly... Imply that the benefits of communism flow solely to a class of ugly, bald, fat middle-aged men who are the best connivers and plotters. It doesn't need to be coherent that we're casting communists as ineffectual weaklings and dangerous criminals, this isn't a rational argument but an aesthetic one.
Resist at all costs the urge to glamourize it as a mighty dragon that we have slain. No Command and Conquer Red Alert 3 memes. No World in Conflict cutscenes or Soviet military parades. Choke out all evidence of vital energy and coolness.
Amazon's Man in the High Castle was supposed to be anti-Nazi but it made Nazism look cool. They had supersonic jet travel, H-bombs, sick uniforms, big strong men marching in columns, enormous halls, the vigorous and manly Obergruppenfuhrer Smith. Lots of Nazis liked the show (or the 5 minute edits made of it), they skipped the boring bits about how eugenics was so bad and the angst of women and gays. No amount of hamfisted 'oh the Nazis go around destroying American monuments and eventually retreat from America for no good reason' could undo the damage those few minutes showing the Volkshalle did.
It's also useful to think about how Communism made itself inspiring. You have bold posters of attractive, young, bold comrades ushering in a new world; powerful displays of military might and stories of the underdog throwing off the yoke of foreign oppressors through sheer will and heroism; technological marvels invented by Communism. (And, of course, the enemy is ugly, misshapen, obese old capitalist men.)
Turn that around. Create an unashamed capitalist aesthetic of beauty and power and success. If you do that, it's barely even necessary to paint Communists in any light at all. We certainly don't have that at all today. Probably Musk is the closest to that aesthetic, which is pretty pathetic when you think about it.
Oh, well, this is a first for me. Merging two current and active threads.
There is an interesting potential connection to this thread (tagging @jeroboam for awareness).
What if a way to encourage more children is to simply have a bunch of posters of attractive young people pumping out babies.
Yes, on two level. First, hate to say this, but Musk does code as .... weird. A lot of the Musk superfans are that precisely because they see Captain Aspergers doing so well and think, "one of us! one of us!" Normies might like Teslas, but they don't get Musk at all.
Second, he's a pretty awful model for paternal responsibility. By my count, he's got 12 kids with 3 women. Although those aren't Antonio Cromartie numbers, they're still up there. Again, a bad model for normies.
We need conserva-Chads. The frackas with Harrison Butker a few months back showed how those battle lines could get drawn.
On the one hand, that's why normies ended up getting their fancy electric cars from Tesla. As the old economics joke goes, there can't be a hundred dollar bill plainly lying on the ground, because someone would have picked it up already. Musk had to search through muck like "electric motors are for golf carts" and "it's literally rocket science, you're not going to beat Boeing or Lockheed!" to find his hundred billion dollar bills, because if you pursue ideas that any normie can see aren't stupid, then the normies probably already did, and some of them are way ahead of you to monetizing them.
On the other hand, most apparently-stupid ideas are apparently stupid because in fact they are actually stupid. In PvE fields like engineering that's still fine, because the math or the testing will winnow out the bad ideas anyway. If you try out 199 failed filament materials and one good one then you don't become famous as a 99.5% failure, you become famous as the guy who invented the light bulb. But in PvP fields like social media / business / politics, taking stupid ideas seriously in public burns credibility, wasting social capital you could have put to better use elsewhere. Musk does have enough actual capital to not care so much about that, and I can't help but be amused by someone using "fuck-you money" to literally tell people "fuck you", but he's investing in so many good causes that I wish he wouldn't waste so much opportunity cost on bad ones.
6 kids (5 surviving, one died of SIDS) with his first wife, one of whom publicly hates him. 3 kids (X, Exa, and Tau) with a later girlfriend (after his second divorce to his second wife, his third divorce total) who he's currently fighting for custody. 3 biological kids via IVF with one of his employees at Neuralink. This sounds like a bad model for Musk, not just a bad model for normies.
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