Chapotraphouse

"be normal" has always been a pretty shit phrase, IMO it should be replaced with "be social". The point allegedly is about not alienating people from the movement, and I think putting the sentiment on a social/antisocial axis is much more useful of a framing and doesn't smack of discrimination.

Big rant incoming:

Yeah I've said this before too. I don't mind some of the stuff that sub posts, but when they get into the, how do I put it, social postering? Trying really hard to be one of the cool kids by using slurs and appealing to the same old highschool level social hierarchies "biting the outcasts" stuff? It makes me roll my eyes. It's the same teenager aesthetic maturity that people keep falling for again and again despite being grown ass adults.

It wild because we were literally these people 6-7 years ago. I guess having a lot of users from marginalized backgrounds helped us do a little self-crit. Sure, we might not be a big popular subreddit, we might still have our own shitty toxic issues, but we sure as hell aren't like these guys stuck in 2018 Dirtbag Left mode long after it's lost it's usefulness. That sort of thing was cathartic when the only 'left' voice were libs who were too afraid to hit the right below the belt, but now everyone does it, even liberals. Hell, the word chud has even lost all meaning and has been coopted by liberals to just mean 'incel' which in has also lost it's meaning. The machine has caught on to that kind of thing and can absorb it now. It's time for the left to change strategies now and start actually start offering solutions to the structural failings of capitalist conservatism and liberalism while it's crumbling.

Because it's no longer a "How do we convince people we aren't losers like the liberals" thing anymore. Most people can see the cracks in the two party capitalist system and are seriously struggling. Without communists offering real, tangible solutions to the current system things will continue to go the same way it has with COVID and Climate Change. In other words people will go into that state of hyperrealism where they know the world is crumbling but keep doing what they always do because they see no way out and in their heads acknowledging the truth does nothing but cause them pain over things they can't change. So they turn to the right in the hopes that they can get a tiny bit of comfort and normalcy while they can. Every man for himself style. Grab whatever junk is lying around while the ship is sinking type shit.

People don't feel like they have the power to change anything. So our job now isn't to call Harry Potter loving liberals gay and stupid, it's to somehow make organizing/cooperation/revolution/radical action/whatever you want to call it seem something they have to do and heres how. It's to provide a viable alternative and to somehow get them to take part even if that alternative will make them a target for the powers that be.

I believe the biggest barriers to this is the underlying unspoken truth behind why people fall for "just be normal". That is, societal norms that condition us to be so scared of being cast out from society that the majority of people will sit by and allow horrible atrocities to occur as long as they're the status quo. It's a deep instinct that transcends logic and the ruling class has become very, very good at using it against it's population.

Because the truth is, that there is no way for the people to stand up to the ruling class without being mercilessly dragged through the mud. As soon as they do anything the capitalist controlled narrative can and will paint them the same as they paint everyone that poses even a minor threat. Do you think a society that is as afraid of being seen as cringe as ours is will last one second in that environment? Could handle being painted as unhinged extremists? Because really the 'normal' people I talk to who know the problem with capitalism and that want it to end would never consider taking real action and deep down I know this is why. Most people can't even handle the mockery they would get for being vegan even if they know it's the right thing to do, so what makes you think they could handle the ostracisation they would get from being revolutionary communists?

So yes, I think we should challenge the idea of normal. There is no way to fight against a current regime that has this much control of our social structures and still be considered normal. The world will burn long before we find away to make communism normal under the boot of the 2026 capitalist propaganda machine. We should be showing people the solutions to the current problems, as well as working to assure people that they cannot avoid being publicly tarred and feathered eventually because shits falling apart, so they're better off just fucking doing the damn right thing. Doing nothing is going to be more extreme and painful than playing along with daddy capitalism so it's time to kill normal.

Most of all we need to kill the idea of accepting the status quo. Aceptance isn't wise and mature, it's defeat. We need to be saying "Being a good little pick me for the capitalist status quo won"'t save you." but we can't stop there because the response is usually defeated "Well I guess there's nothing we can do and everything being terrible is normal" which is where I feel most of society is at. So to this we need to be saying "Actually there is something that will save us, this is what it is and this is what we will do." Normal got us the Epstein class, so the attitude needs to change from "how do I get normal to accept me?" into "Boo me all you want, I've seen what makes you cheer!"

Make the concept of adhearing to the current normal so contemptable that it is no longer safe to take part.

be normal

talk in normal words about leftist stuff

every time i hear someone say dialectics or proletariat irl, i go like inside

(a) you sound like soviet poster

(b) unless your interlocutor is in philosophy, even if they know this stuff, it still takes time to retranslate the meaning (analytical philosophy worst european invention btw) of the sentence

(c) politicians talk like middleschoolers, there is a reason for that, you can ramp up precision and wording depending on audience

(d) good rule of thumb for slurs is can a person with that characteristic (or people loving them) receive your utterance? (say by reading a tweet, or hearing you talk in a bar) -never use it, if so. the reason for clean speech is in not offending those you don’t want to offend, not because of a thought police/authority/tolerance whatever, it’s about being caring while talking to potentially thousands via social media (which encompasses probably all human conditions by statistics alone). and it is different when you talk to coworkers/friends, because there are literally two of you.

trueanon i think fails on all except maybe (c), but for obvious reason

The only normal people are those who you don't know very well.

I even got shat on here for calling out what brace means by “be normal” as ableist.

I sometimes think the whole leftist podcaster/YouTuber phenomenon is a way for a very small minority of left leaning people to cash out and not much else. A lot of them are micro celebrities and their popularity is sustained massively by an unhealthy parasocial element. Very few put out rigorous academic level content and mostly it's just vibes.

Like with trueanon, what the fuck are they talking about half the time lmfao. And hakim from deprogram is highly educated but being a religious communist is entirely contradictory. My own path to becoming a wannabe communist (because I am just a capitalist subject that wishes they weren't ) was abandoning my own religion first which allowed space for me to actually begin understanding how the world works. But just a few examples. These days the only lefty YouTubers or podcasters I listen to is academic videos like critical workshop theory on youtube. I find it so much more interesting.

I remember during the world cup there were quite a few posts on there about how if you root against the US and were American you were a freak weirdo who doesn't understand how to be normal in person. Bro's couldn't imagine me wanting to talk shit about the US in a supposed socialist/communist subreddit.

Like yeah man I'm going up to my friends irl who are cheering for team USA and going "erm you're actually a bad person and should kill yourself" and not just going "oh I don't care for soccer that much" 🙄

This "Just be normal" attitude is the same bullshit that got people like Gorbachev and his crew to assume he can just be reasonable with the Capitalists.

Yes there's obviously benefits to being publicly likeable, approachable, accommodating, there's benefits of learning customary norms and employing them when appropriate. At the same time this world we live in is not even close to normal, I refuse to adjust to this world. I do not want to get adjusted to this world. I don't want to destroy this world. We can build better.

How do they square the circle with the fact that nobody in Burgerland is fucking normal? Every Burgerlander is a fucking freak compared with the rest of humanity. "Being normal" in the Burgerland context just means being unhinged but being unhinged in such a way that the majority of other unhinged freaks approve of your particular brand of unhinginess. Burgerlanders are even freaks compared with other Westerners, who themselves aren't exactly close to the global median of normality either.

(Yes, I know the idea of normality itself is problematic, but even if you accept this problematic framing, the vast majority of Burgerlanders aren't normal compared with the rest of the world. The only "normal" people in the US are immigrants from the Global South.)

The normalcy discourse always rubbed me the wrong way. Normalcy is death.

I know that what those people mean by "normal" mostly is to not alienate people within and out of your movement for pragmatic reasons but it always raised an eyebrow with me. At least from other TrueAnon redditors who uses that quote, there is always an air of cutting out the undesireables less it sabotage the movement. It also doesn't help that many of those people also tended to usually point the issue with LGBT, the homeless, people of color and disabled folks first. Asking for them to be quiet so that the "normal" people can get things done.

Isn't Brace kinda a weird guy himself?

the thing about becoming an adult for me was realizing nobody is normal, everybody is a weird little fucking gremlin person in one way or another. As someone who frequently has had difficulty interpreting people in social situations I'm also pretty sure most "normal" people have no clue how tf to respond or consider most other people's thoughts, they just pretend that's not the case much more effortlessly than an autistic person masking, to the point that they don't even realize it's a thing

I was recently typing up a write-up that I'm yet to post — assuming I ever do post it — and I found myself falling into this exact trap while writing it. I don't even follow any "cool kid podcasters" so I must've just learned the "be normal" rhetoric through osmosis, maybe a site tagline here? In any case, immediately after I'd typed the words, I thought, "Where did I even learn this line from?! I'M not normal, for chrissake! I'm autistic and go by neopronouns, and somehow I have the audacity to call other people weird?! Guess I've got some more internalized prejudice to unlearn…"

…I mean, my write-up's point about being in touch and loving your fellow human being and all is still valid, but the way I was framing that argument with these loaded terms definitely came from a place of internalized ableism. But hey, at least there's a lesson about the importance of self-crit to be learned here, right?

I mean its not surprising, this is the same group of "leftists" who think Kendrick Lamar is the pied piper of Black people and rappers are the reason there's no revolutionary energy in the black community....

After the mass purge of 2020 reddit has become a wasteland of incels, bots and crank dead-enders of all types, it's biggest organic engagement is porn subs and sports and even then it's still largely inorganic because it's so much more white than it was ten years ago

Kill the idea of Reddit

We have people on this very site who use "be normal" and out themselves as ableist when challenged on it.

Yeah I'm normal, I meow, make 80k, program on the side, supporr unions, meow

you have to be perpendicular to the ground along all axes

hypercapitalist dystopia is what's "normal" these days and "normal people" reflect that. there is a reason they aren't usually the ones in the trenches.

fuck that and fuck them.

I have been falling out of most of the podcasts, trueanon, the deprogram, all the 'cool kids' podcasts. These people really show themselves when they talk about being normal. I am proud of you for taking this step.

they put old.reddit.com behind a login now