Comment on The House Of The Guy Calling You A Libtard
CarbonIceDragon@pawb.social 19 hours agoIf one wanted a generous interpretation, it could be pointing out the irony in a poor person advocating for the interests of the rich that keep people like themselves in that position.
I think the meme is classist because it directs anger toward the people living in the pictured low-income housing. People who have the least control over the forces shaping their lives. Meanwhile, the billionaire class, who paid a hefty and blood-soaked price to keep them uneducated and inundated with right-wing propaganda, escape scrutiny.
Don’t get me wrong, the people in that picture probably suck. They’re more of a symptom tho.
Let’s ignore that low income people are more likely to vote for Democrats, or the underlying classism inherent in using the size and value of someone’s home when it comes to determining if their arguments are worth listening to. Somewhere there’s a guy like that, so let’s just make him the symbol of all of them!
Im not saying the stereotype of “conservative people living in trailer park style homes” isn’t classist, I’m suggesting that actively spreading it might not have been the objective of the OP, and that them doing so might have been more a case of not thinking through all the implications of what they were saying than an actual antipathy for people who live in cheap housing. I do realize its problematic even if so, I’ve spent a portion of my childhood in a place like that myself, I just felt a bit uneasy seeing some people here appear to assume the worse interpretation was the intended one when it still seemed ambiguous to me which it was, and that discomfort made me a bit defensive about it.
This may be a naivety of mine, but I struggle to communicate myself a lot and as a result I tend to look for the most benign intent that could lead to a given statement and assume that one until proven otherwise, because whenever I end up being the person phrasing something poorly or in a way that causes offense, it feels a lot easier to handle and address when people calmly point out what is wrong with it and why than when people jump on it as proof of a character flaw, and it’s very easy to project one’s own struggles and modes of thinking onto other people one runs across, I guess. I’m probably overthinking it all.
That’s fair, sorry if my earlier reply was too flippant. It’s just very frustrating to see people (not you specifically, but others in the thread) defending it as not classist at all, or classism that’s okay because it’s aimed at shitty people. I think a lot of the comments I see on the fediverse aren’t doing it intentionally, but seem to have the mentality that people who are living or have lived in poverty aren’t also here and participating.
So Democrats too right? Considering they’re generally laser focused on the urban professional class with a big push on things like student loan forgiveness that would give zero assistance to workers while largely hanging them out to dry whenever labor disputes pop up. There’s not a party that represents these folks interests so they default to identity politics.
That’s absolutely the point
That’s how I read it, too.
That’s what I was saying, exactly. I was not trying to be classist, though I can absolutely see how that person jumped directly to that conclusion.
empireOfLove2@lemmy.dbzer0.com 18 hours ago
I believe that is the entire point of the meme that Lemmy lefties missed