This but unironically.
Can you imagine a presidential candidate running on the platform of seizing the assets of the billionaire class? They would transcend political parties, they would unify the nation and people would finally gain something from our politics.
And they would probably be found with thirty bullets to the back of the head and it would be ruled a suicide.
The reason we don’t have a US rail system is because of the constant, unending efforts by automotive industries to dismantle all plans and dreams we’ve ever had for mass-transit. And every other possible public offering or social service that we pay taxes for.
Privatising literally everything has been their end-goal with ALL of this the entire time. They plaster it with conservative talking points but this entire administration is an effort by corporate forces to dismantle public services, rights and benefits, so that if you so much want to drive to the store you will have to pay a subscription to use the privately maintained roads, so you have a credit-card reader by your faucet and toilet, so that they can tax you on rainwater you’re required to have to collect rain from your gutters. (This is real in other countries.)
The efforts towards killing public services goes way, way back and if you look at every conservative/republican legislation, it all hinges around how “bad” public services are. Public schools teaching evolution, public television for simply existing, and they’ve been massively successful and killing the regulations and oversight on things like media fairness, public health proposals, safety nets and social services, and yes they really, really want to kill our medicare and medicaid, so they can replace them with more bullshit commercial services. They won’t be happy until we stop getting paychecks we can choose how to use and we all just hand our pay right over to a number of subscription services for things they can take away if you miss a payment.
They want us poor, they want us stupid, they want an army of slaves and if they can’t get it via racism and dehumanizing some identifiable group or population, they will just settle for full on serfdom and monarchy. Now get out there and work your lord’s fields!
I never lived anywhere near them, never seen a bioluminescent creature in my life despite my wish to do so.
But when I was about 6 years old, I have a weird memory of my parents driving out to the deep desert with me and we parked off some dirt road and my dad got out of the truck for maybe a half hour. My mom seemed nervous. I saw a green light at the base of a bush about 15 feet away from the vehicle, just a tiny little bright green light, solid color, middle of nowhere.
I asked my mom what it was and she said “it’s a glowworm” and I asked if we could go look at it and she snapped “NO don’t go outside!” and I was absolutely boggled what was going on. My dad came back, they drove out of there without a word. One of those life mysteries we all have tucked away in our memory banks. I’m pretty sure I wasn’t dreaming, but it’s getting back there in years, probably was early 80’s now. (This was the Sonoran desert in winter, there are no “glow worms” out there, and no bugs generally coming out in the cold anyway. I lived there for decades, there are no bioluminescent critters there.)
It’s not the “lead” in the reporting though, media is as complicit in the attention-span blackout we’re all experiencing. There are not-bad people in this very post who think this is entirely misinformation because media isn’t leading their charge with this context.
Every headline and every major political story is focusing on what Trump is saying and doing, not the historical context of what our national relationships have been like and what Trump’s history is.
I know we hate this, but our population is eroded. We have like, fucking microplastics in everyone’s brains that are making people not think with words anymore. Everyone is just scrolling and working and slowly boiling to death as the pan heats up. If mainstream news sources actually did their job and showed us what was happening with intentionality and a focus on trying to FORCE people to pay attention, we wouldn’t have gotten anywhere close to this mess.
But the media is complicit. They profit from chaos and they LOOOOOVE donny, he is their cash-cow and they will mourn when he finally passes away, or bursts into a cloud of bats or however people like him die.
When I was a manager at a tech company this pattern female white woman was about 50% of our entry-level team. Every single day was a new journey into essential oils, herbalife, astrological signs and dreamcatchers. Their racism is there, it is subtle, but it’s also entirely a product of trying to appease the angry people in their lives.
These women are dim enough to be led to ANY way of thought. And I say this with kindness, they are often good parents and have sympathetic lives and want simple things. But holy shit their families and husbands and partners are literally demons in human flesh influencing them to the worst ways of thinking and feeling, I’ve gotten to witness them in the background on zoom being violent pigs and screaming at their infant children loud enough to pick up on the mic through a closed door.
The one thing that you don’t see that is shockingly common though is the physical abuse. As funny as this cartoon is, it doesn’t show the finger-shaped bruises up and down the woman’s arms.
Then the Sianai Times reported how the Pharaoh isn’t actually a that bad of a guy and it would serve the Israelites to reopen communication with Egypt and discuss trade partnership, and how slavery should be an individual’s choice and that they should vote Moses out for unilateral decision-making. Also, no haha the river never turned to blood and there are no locusts, don’t look up at them.
He seems to be mostly making a big show
This but amplified from the rooftops. In the criminal business, they call someone like Trump a “distraction.”
I wonder why so many people think there is something fundamentally different about North Korea and the people there. Sure the media control is a bit tighter, but the same thing is happening there as here, always has been in fact. Media is controlled by the state who are controlled by the elite/wealthy. Because of this, meda lies, they just tune their lies to whoever is watching.
You don’t NEED to wall off your nation to make people spout lies for you, to make newscasters and printed headlines tell the population that their leader doesn’t poop and that he’s 700 years old and shoots money beams from his navel. The people who want to hear it will repeat it with glee and don’t want to fact check it, and the ones who don’t believe it know enough to be quiet and keep their head down so they can get through the day. The same things are happening here and have been happening here.
Hell yeah! This is exactly what I’m talking about, but what’s holding us back from this process, an act that was once known as “talking to each other” is the sad fact that people don’t talk to each other anymore.
I swear there are people online who act like manipulating people is some kind of dark jedi trick that only the most intellectual sages and evil wizards will ever accomplish, when it’s literally what we do with each other all day long anyway, the simple act of having a conversation is trying to get someone to understand you or feel what you feel. If you can learn how to have a conversation, you can learn how to change people’s minds.
I can explain things to dumb people with patience and an effort to make complex topics understandable and if you can do this AND sound halfway confident, BAM you either got a convert or you’re on your way to starting a cult.
I don’t doubt the reputation of the writer or his general knowledge of economics…
But this is coping. The Trump administration is trying to wave their hands around and create a giant fuss for people like us and this writer to speculate on and create debates and panels to think about… while he and his people simply walk out of the white house with the treasury and all the inside investment opportunities they will ever want.
He’s just making chaos, plain and simple. These ideas about his master plan to disrupt the world’s reliance on the US dollar? Distraction and coping.
I agree this administration is more clever than we give them credit for, but any house thief can step up their game and pull of a heist when they set their mind to it, it’s not some kind of magic skill. If anything, I think it’s harmful to assume Trump is at all smart or has a plan because this makes a lot more assumptions than the most simple answer which is almost always the correct determination. He is making a mess because his ONLY plan is to make you think he has a plan. He does this with literally everything he says or announces, why would anyone think this is different? This is EXACTLY the fucking delusion I was railing against in another comment. There is no plan. Nobody is coming. Stop thinking others are smarter than you or have a backup plan.
My evidence? We’ve done all this fucking before, this is part 2 of a failure of a presidency. He didn’t change the world before, he won’t here. (Other than diminishing the US role in geopolitics so Russia can take center stage, all he really wants right now)
I’m saying this all over Lemmy, I was saying it all over reddit until they banned me with an aggression I never saw from that site’s administration in over 14 years of using it regularly.
Which is that if we wish to save the human species, much less progressivism, we need better stories.
Trump won because he exploited the human need to simplify complex ideas into 2-dimensional narratives that even the most cracked-up yokels in the backwaters of the southern swamps could understand. Instead of the leftist need to educate, to inform, to give people all manner of rights to self-actualization that most people will NEVER exercise, he just plowed through all social decorum and started telling people how to feel and who’s to blame and what they need to do. Simple, direct, effective.
Abhorrent sure, and may yet lead to end of us all, but if you cannot understand the effectiveness of the tactics he used you’re blinded by emotion. Instead of being blinded by feelings, we need to start working together to craft new narratives for the results we actually want. It’s not even that hard to do.
On an interpersonal level, we share more with each other than what separates us. I grew up in the boonies surrounded by the most racist hicks and rednecks you can imagine. I was one of them for a spell until I grew up, but a lot of people never grow up. They’re all scared children who cling to their guns and bibles but when they’re not trying to act boisterous and macho, they want the same things and can be shaped. The large majority of them don’t actually want harm to come to LGTBQ+ people or people of color. They may be scared of these folks but if you just managed to expose enough of them to the right stories about these people, they would care a lot less. Their hate is largely manufactured because… and I don’t say this lightly, they are fucking dumb.
We need to start accepting people are dumb and need fairy tales and exaggerated WWE wrestling theater productions to keep their interest. We have to stop pretending people care about principles. No, they care about how they feel right now. People don’t care about values, about the constitution, they certainly don’t care about what’s real or not, they just care about how their leadership is making them feel at this moment. The left is TERRIBLE at managing other people’s feelings, but the right doesn’t care, they don’t mind stepping on people’s rights to think for themselves if it spreads the word. Why can’t we do that? Why can’t we start new stories to get the best results? Where is our up and coming generation of inspired grifters who can cold-read a room? We need them, but we need them harnessed for good.
If there’s a “they” who made me feel this way, then I owe them a lot of gratitude and gestures of thankfulness for helping me wake up and gain control over my own brain.
See, I’m not talking about economically, but I do agree that there has been an effort, if not overt then implicit, to make people feel that money will always be out of their reach. I get that and it’s not what I’m talking about, I mean on a higher level, this is a child-like belief we all carry in our lives, we just tend to project it outward into the world of sociology and politics because we tend to stay the same in life. We’re all children, we’re the same people we were when we were kids, we just have more layers of complexity piled up around that inner child.
Wicked people exploit this. Again, whether or not they consciously understand the principle doesn’t even matter, this is something we’re wired to do as social creatures, either seek protection from outside sources or exploit those looking for it.
When you start embracing the reality that at least on an interpersonal and existential level, you ARE alone and always will be, I think that gives you great strength to push back against toxic rumination and unwise social influence. It clears your mind and at least after you finish mourning something you didn’t know you were hoping for, you start finding what your real powers are, you start thinking about actually taking control over your life.
If we could impart this feeling to everyone, everywhere, we would see an overnight turn in our species. But that’s impossible. Too many people are too different and no two people would understand the message the same way. We are all the main characters of the story standing around waiting for the show to start, not knowing it’s already running and we can write the story at any time.
My blackest blackpill moment in my adult life was the realization that we ALL hold a strange little belief somewhere in the back of our minds that someone, somewhere is serious enough that they will step in if our life or the whole world starts to go off the rails.
We hold this belief, this feeling about more than politics, we think this way about our whole lives. We always carry an unconscious sensation of sorts that there’s some safety net that will catch us if we screw up too badly. That if the world gets too chaotic the “army” or someone is going to deploy and restore order.
Then there’s the people who have projected this feeling into superstition and conspiracy and believe aliens are watching us, or that lizard people are actually in control, that there’s some shadowy cabal of people with all the real power who are pulling all the strings and everything is going according to their plan even if it doesn’t look like it. It’s funny how that sounds exactly like religion if you change the characters around.
But truly, finally, realistically internalizing that there is nobody coming, that you are utterly alone, even if you have people close to you, that NOBODY is going to help you in the worst case, that NOBODY is going to lock the country down and restore order, that NOBODY will give you fair hearing and let you plead your special case if your life falls down too far, that God isn’t there, there are no angels or demons, there is no cabal. Everyone is dumb. Everyone is insecure and looking at each other for acceptance and cues what to do. We’re all children… this is a painful thing to accept and understand but it’s massively liberating. It’s like jumping out of an airplane without a parachute and there’s no ground. It’s weightless falling through the cosmos.
But it’s your fall. Yours alone.
Years of propaganda showing fetuses as fully developed babies with like, wives and families at home waiting for them to be born. This is why they’re trying to crush science and reason, because it points out flaws in their emotional arguments. Emotional arguments that were spawned by people manipulating them for decades, the original purpose long since forgotten, so that now it’s just “culture” among conservatives to view other people’s pregnancies this way.
The wildest glimpse into our human failings of reason is on full display with the right though, because they have ZERO qualms about getting their own abortions. When they do it, it’s different. It’s a clump of cells or an unthinking organism when it’s them.
but the need for something to change is overwhelming for a lot of people
More than that, it’s the need for community.
We are social creatures to the degree that we literally can die without a social identity.
The missing sense of community in the developed world is part of the many reasons so many young men are lonely and don’t know how to talk to girls anymore making them seek out incels and andrew tates, but it also community is supposed to help you feel purpose, identity and belonging. Your community is who (traditionally) helped you find a job, make friends and establish your traditions and ways of thinking.
When you don’t have these things around you, you will seek it out and yep, the right certainly has a open-door policy, they don’t care HOW fucked you are in the head or how ignorant you are, they welcome everyone with open arms, give them a target and reward you when you lie to the enemy and cheat them. This gives a sense of accomplishment and belonging to something greater than yourself. It’s addicting.
We don’t have community anymore, we have unwalkable neighborhoods and delivery services and social media and a general sense of apathy and cynicism that often results in violent pushback against ANY form of genuine emotional expression between peers. Is it any wonder young, dumb, desperately lonely men are reverting to dark-age attitudes?
This has all been designed. A population at odds with each other will never unify and cripple institutions of power with combined effort.
Can you give examples of what you think might be working stories?
It’s really hard to create a narrative with the sheer power and influence of stories using fear and hate, because we all respond much stronger to fear and anger than we do more abstract ideas like charity and empathy as a matter of survival. I genuinely have no idea how you fight this. It’s literally an exploitation of all of our survival responses and it will always work on some segment of any given population, and once it starts to work on a few people, the effect will snowball. My prescription here is that we can’t let hate speech start in the first place. We have held the sanctity of bad ideas in too much regard for too long, other nations don’t fuck around with this shit because they know how contagious hate and fear is.
There is however one great example of successful, working populism I can think of though, and that’s Bernie Sanders. He’s been effective in messaging to both right and left for decades because he’s consistent, he validates our problems and keeps his focus laser-tight and narrow on one talking point: which is how the wealthy oligarchs are hoarding our wealth. That’s all, and he’s held the same talking point for decades and it works on both sides of the political spectrum. It’s just a shame that we’re in a place where power has already been ceded to the corporate interests and people like Bernie are muzzled long before they get real power.
the idea that the best narrative is the one that thrives
I was pretty clear that the effectiveness of a narrative is dependant on the results you’re seeking. I think you can turn a narrative loose into the world and it will run autonomously to a degree, and you could use a story’s ability to thrive and survive as a measure of at least how attractive and engaging it is, but no, I don’t think that is what makes a story effective for the purposes of influencing a large amount of people to make better choices, to have more curiosity, to think more about things they don’t normally think about.
Social engineering like this does take deliberate work. It takes effort and work to keep a story alive and growing. The problem is we already have tons of people doing this work for their own agendas. Sometimes they’re good stories, sometimes they’re terrible stories, but it almost doesn’t matter the “quality” of the narrative, since our brains are designed to hook into narratives to explain the world even if the explanation doesn’t even make a lick of sense. See: anti-vax doctors and flat earthers.
Yep, he has no political will of his own, he’s a fucking geriatric reality TV host, he has no energy left, he’s being paraded around to push the talking points of people like Stephen Miller and Putin. He gives zero shits and it shows. He barely bothers trying to articulate his reasoning for anything, and he still has a rabid following of zealots who have turned off all thought and will just invent his justifications for him.