the left is back to being despondent

https://jacobinmag.com/2021/02/lauren-oyler-fake-accounts-review

the world around us can be so difficult to understand, so overwhelming, so addled with inputs, all of the time, that many of us have slid slowly but persistently toward nothingness as a reaction to the muchness

most of us have been so beaten down, our own humanity moved so far out of reach by forces economic, political, and social, that it can be easy to give in to the temptation to throw up our hands in the face of it all

fighting for the world we deserve, in a world that seems to never want to move, when the odds are stacked so high against us, when basic solutions to our problems are consistently ignored by those in power — it comes to seem fruitless

we want to get rid of everything in advance, including our expectations, so that we won’t have anything left to lose

it’s easier to make ourselves want nothing than accept that if we want more than nothing, we’re going to have to fight tooth and nail for it

it’s a dark, lonely, alienated world where our narrator lives and which has produced this novel … I wish it weren’t so

consensus: the world is ending

the popular turn to fatalism

apocalypse finally imminent

we don’t want to do anything challenging

there must be a way out of our alienation

a widespread denial of our humanity

a contemporary tendency to stop wanting, to stop expecting, to just survive

there is no enthusiasm for desire in this culture, only the wish that we could give it up

hope … Occupy … dissipation … frustration

hope … Bernie … dissipation … frustration

ISO folded last year

Spartacist is folding this year

leftism as bummer