You’re right, and what you need to understand is that the reason half of our idiots voted for an idiot is because we allowed corporations to atomize society so people didn’t mix anymore, we don’t have shared perspectives of the world anymore, everyone gets their information about literally everything algorithmically. This atomization of society is what took down the USA and it’s coming for you next if it’s not already happening wherever you are.
Almost every American just wants to stay home and play video games, we didn’t want any of this. We wanted healthcare.
I tried. If anyone gets what I’m saying, power to them and the kernel of hope rides in their hands. Otherwise I’m done. Peace.
Our population voted someone into the highest office riding on the promise of drilling for more oil and increasing factory farming. We have atomized our culture so much that corporate forces have stripped people of their empathy and care and passion like an overripe banana and we don’t mix perspectives anymore so that we can pull people back.
There’s no hope of ending this misery until those of us who remain thinking with our minds get off the computer and start socializing, organizing, challenging people and pulling people into our idea of a better tomorrow. Most people don’t even know where to find other people to talk to and debate with and this is by design. That’s the trap we’re in we need to break free of, and then maybe if we can get to that point we can start making cultured meats and alternative proteins a thing.
Otherwise, we’re going to fish the oceans until they’re dry and we will create hellish suffering for every life form involved until there’s nothing left to feel pain.
So wait for a charismatic and perfect savior. We see what happens every time someone of this stature reaches the actual federal election stage.
I’m talking about what people can do here and now, which is built coalitions and not have purity tests about who is in it, just focus on single-issues like the right has done successfully over and over and over.
For some reason whenever someone says “compromise” every lefty immediately pictures “submitting on trans rights and abortion” or something.
I’m saying as individuals, you and me, scared lemmy browsers who don’t think they have power: build social connections, make more friends, build activism groups, start in local communities and keep it fixated on solving ONE populist problem that we can get a much wider array of people behind, like childcare or school lunches or yes healthcare and unions, social security or other public safety nets and the whole long laundry list of items we want, but instead of overwhelming a population, local or national, with a huge list of inclusivity and ideals, we attack one thing at a time. I have watched the right do this over and over and each time they fucking WIN.
Again, your notions of an ideal candidate you would vote for are spot-on, I would vote for that person in a heartbeat, most would, but that person doesn’t exist and they won’t exist until they can ride on the momentum of grass-roots movements to tackle populist issues. The democrat party is not our ally here, not without a mandate under it and if we’re more clever about building those mandates and then tying them together when it’s time, we might have success.
But I’m getting really pessimistic here. Voter turnout is not the problem. Everyone, everywhere, is avoiding mixing. The atomization of our world is the problem. We had the highest voter turnouts and youth involvement in the last several elections than we’ve ever had, and they voted Trump. That’s my whole point, that’s the key we have to fight against, how someone like a brazen fascist and idiot can sway so many people, and it starts with re-mixing our values and perspectives and this may take some kind of “compromise” that may make a lot of isolated lefties really uncomfortable, like having conversations with people you don’t like, like accepting people who hate you into your protest so you can both tackle a problem you both hate. If we can cross that boundary we can start mixing together again and pulling people out of this programming that corporate media does. Isolationism is killing our whole world and all our hope for the future.
If you have a way to make it work without compromise let me know, I’m all ears. Expert Mode: something that doesn’t involve waiting for some charismatic and perfect savior figure to somehow come out of the sky and start successfully advocating for socialism. Nobody is coming.
Because what we’re doing now isn’t working.
The things that never happen are happening right now but our collective attention spans have been dulled to the point that you can’t recognize the actual swing of history as it’s unfolding. Everyone just gets used to incremental changes to life so that it feels like nothing changes, because time isn’t real and your memory is malleable.
Honestly, true.
We are indeed going to face massive, catastrophic changes to society broadly.
But they will take place over such timespans that most people are just going to get used to things being shitty and the death-tolls from storms, flooding, starvation, forced-migration… it will just be more dull noise in the background for decades and decades.
The “nothing ever happens” shitheads are in the middle of things happening, but our attention-spans have been so thoroughly eroded that people don’t think anything is real unless it literally shakes them out of their bed.
But then you have more dirty dishes to stare at before the notion of personal responsibility pervades your every thought and feels so overwhelming that you retreat back to your group of equally depressed “friends” on discord who are only there to whinge about their own life problems, real or imagined, giving everyone the socialization equivalent of eating cake for dinner, hollow-carbs that feel momentarily satisfying but actually does you more harm than good.
“Commander, why is the main viewscreen only getting 21 FPS?”
“Sorry captain, I had the starfield set too high while we have a Chrome tab open.”
Before it was coopted by the right to mean “child predator” or “deadly threat to everything holy” it was just a style of burlesque show, a whole niche cultural thing that never bothered anyone, open to anyone who wanted to take part.
They had problems with the fact that most performers are males or assigned male at birth, and the whole thing is basically parody of gender norms and style, but embraced rather than hated, and it was just a generally fun time. (Never mind that it’s kinda what stage performance has been like across the globe for hundreds or even thousands of years when it comes to gender-bending performances.)
Speaking as a CIS straight male, I have been to a couple shows and don’t really get it, it’s not my thing, but everyone is having fun and they’re being welcoming and happy and sharing a thing together, and it’s far more harmless than a million other silly things people do for fun as social groups.
Yah I love how places like Lemmy are packed to overflowing with “radical leftists” who scream murder at liberals and moderates and how broadly appealing progressive policies aren’t going far enough to address [issue X].
Guys, we’re getting literally murdered out there, figuratively and literally. If there was ever a time to start building larger coalitions, it’s now. No, you’re not getting everything you want. No, we’re not having a revolution, we don’t have the military. Yes, you will have to compromise. And if you hate that word because you think it means walking alongside someone you despise…
Tough shit.
Pick an issue, gather allies, overwhelm it, then repeat for the NEXT issue and realize nobody is coming, you may not see a better world in your lifetime, your immediate sense of resignation at this fact is manufactured. Get your shit together. Your personal problems are clouding your thinking.
They’re winning because they don’t recoil in horror at the idea of working towards mid-way goals or making deals they find distasteful, that’s how they pushed the overton window off the fucking map.
But yeah, lets continue to fuss over if our flags represent enough people and if [popular content creator] said the word “retard” once, while our administration builds camps and readies for war for funsies.
edit: just because I’m ready to soak up hate on this, you all also need to make real friends. You don’t build movements in discord, not ones that have impact at least. You are medicating your loneliness while the world burns outside. Get out and push through the discomfort of your introversion, your ADHD, your ASD, your sexual identity insecurity, your looks or your accent or WHATEVER it is that you think is keeping you from being social and building community. We lost because we’re isolated. Online groups don’t count. Don’t reply to me, go outside.
When we started letting tech-bros on social media hype up AI like it would be the savior for all humanity and in just a few short years we’ll all be sailing on our AI-powered yachts with AI-powered martinis and sacks of AI-powered cash from our AI-powered stock trades.
Then when they started getting snippy and biting back and saying how it “democratizes art” and it lets us spend more time working so the AI can do our art and writing, we didn’t laugh and then drive them into the FUCKING SEA, instead we all politely respected their opinions and now we have at least a decade of useless, incremental “advances” to products we don’t want.
You can love AI all you want, but the moment you go to bat for the corporate slop being pushed on us, you’re one of them.
They don’t have consistent values at all. We keep interacting with them in terms of pointing out their hypocrisy or inconsistent messages, but they literally do not care about what they said yesterday. They are simple, linear minds who only work in terms of what they’re feeling right now and I think if we did better to treat them that way and remember we’re not winning intellectual arguments with them, we would make actual progress in changing them.
They scream about “free speech” when they feel their words are unpopular and being booed. They care about life and abortions when it’s not their daughter. They cheer on cops who shoot innocent black kids, but would go firebomb the local station if a cop came into their house and shot their dog.
We seriously, absolutely HAVE to digest this so we can collectively start forming new tactics to manipulate them into making better outcomes for all of us.
Because whatever else happens, even if we win back everything tomorrow, we will continue to share a world with them as our neighbors and the people who… who… okay I guess contractors and plumbers? Probably a few truck mechanics too, but point remains, they exist all around us, and if we’re really going to be better than them, we have to be like parents who subtle change the way a toddler feels without yelling at them and making them feel mad or put out.
Our country is riddled with ancient old sacks of shit who serve as sheriffs until they die. It’s a whole thing. Among our many, many problems with police in America.
I… I don’t know how to pronounce the line through the word D:
None of the kids you’re talking to on this site have friends, much less play actual D&D, they probably just read the manuals and imagine running campaigns based on how they interact with other loners online.
As a game, it’s a purely social experience that even the rules are far less important than the narratives and shared storytelling experience, most adults know this and it’s why they play these kinds of games, not to “win” or be some champion of self-expression.
I am ranting about it because there is a wild disconnect between the kinds of people who use sites like this and reality. I don’t think a lot of people who comment about things online have healthy, balanced lives. I mean, I know I don’t, but I also know that many others have totally different kinds of issues that pulls them into the comment sections of sites like Lemmy or Reddit.
Okay, now do it every weekend until something changes
Americans on both sides of the political theater have long since given over agency to fantasy ideas about “someone coming” or someone is going to “do something” or that “nothing ever happens.” It’s why we have Trump and why nobody has done anything about him.
We are far, far from uncomfortable enough to sacrifice our weekends every week to go stand in the sun. We are the wealthiest nation, and thus the most comfortable in our routines.
I appreciate the attempt, I think you can rework it to make your point, but just for the sake of keeping our minds working I will extend the conversation out to address the higher-level premise of what you’re trying to communicate.
If your clever comeback sounds exactly as smooth coming out of the enemy’s mouth, it’s not a very good comeback.
I fully agree with this point, but it’s also not how we argue with/interact with our current ideological opponents. We’re stuck in a loop on the left where we think crafted arguments and intellectual superiority will have any impact at all on anyone. If the right broadly cared at ALL about ideological consistency we wouldn’t be in this weird situation to begin with. Our big, missing hole in our analysis here is that the left us largely about headspace arguments and logic and consistency, and the right only acts like they do because they see us arguing this way and try to use the same way we argue to score points.
Conservatives generally don’t care about hypocrisy. Like, at all. They live in a world of feelings and how they feel now, and whatever story has been supplied to them about why they feel this way at this moment, so it almost doesn’t matter if our arguments are bad. If we want to change hearts and minds, we need to back waaaay the fuck up and start attacking how people feel. Like on a very personal level, because they only exist in their present moment and present feelings. This is why they get so worked up about petty, superficial insults like “you’re weird.” It’s far less satisfying because they always have bravado and hold frame, but it DOES effect them.
We like to craft expert arguments to impress other leftists, but if it had any kind of real-world impact, we’d all be swimming in socialism and equality.
When the corporations start dividing your population and guaranteeing their own interests over democracy, look at what happened to us and learn from it. It doesn’t stop here.