Excerpt from this Substack post: https://nickrafter.substack.com/p/the-rent-may-always-be-too-damn-high
this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2026
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A Boring Dystopia
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This is why both politicians and those who have a strong interest in politics need to chill with the jargon and labels.
People voted for Mamdani because they liked his ideas, his approach to things, not because he was a "socialist". Hell, most people, including me, aren't sure exactly what that means.
"People don't know what Socialism means" is the worst case of intentional ignorance about things that are completely understandable by people who refuse to look something up since "People in the middle east have been fighting for centuries and nobody understands why."
It also doesn't help that it seems to mean something different to everyone.
It's just someone who isn't capitalist. Or right wing. Or just doesn't agree that trans people should have rights.
groups that self label aren't exactly helpful for understanding what the label means (see german socialist party)
Pro-good anti-bad party is the future we are heading ig. Because some dude cant bother to open giant source of infornation right in his pocket.
They're all pro-good and anti-bad in their own words.
Personally as soon as somebody reduces anything to "good ones" vs "bad ones" I'm immediatelly suspicious that they're either activelly trying to swindle everybody else or they're usefully idiots parroting the shit put out by those activelly trying to swindle everybody else - almost nothing involving humans can be reduced to 2 and only 2 sides, which aren't even ranges but actual absolutes.
But realistically we can agree that reality leans left.
but the orphan crushing party is offering free bones if they win
Jargon and labels are part of the way people are controlled - simplify complex concepts down to repeatable simple words and now you can both control the meaning of such soft definintion terms (notice how the meaning of "terrorist" has been moved over time to become "against those in power") plus constant repetition breeds familiarity, thus the very same cognitive paths that transform brand-familiarity into "comfort with brand" and hence favoring it over less familiar brand, are exercised to get people to accept provided political "explanations" & "solutions" using those slogans.
That said, in my experience if you try and explain complex things to people with enough complexity and completeness for them to understand the subtleties of the subject, they switch off half way (like, I bet, plenty of people reading this post that didn't pass the first half of the first paragraph), so you have to somehow find at least simple metaphors, so not quite down reducing it to slogans but not all that far.