We’re an emotionally driven species that feels first, and thinks second, and those thoughts are just made up on the spot to explain the feeling.

This is a wildly vulnerable system that people have been exploiting for as long as we’ve had language, and it’s about to get so, so, SO much worse with things like mass surveillance and AI.

I have a very close family member, my last living family member, who fell down the Qanon/conspiracy pipeline hard, lost everything when people started panicking about Covid. Was real smart otherwise but now basically has nothing after predictably getting arrested for weapons charges and endangering minors and spending a year in prison and now lives in a halfway house making nutso videos that youtube won’t even publish. I cannot explain why some people fall so hard and deep and just lose all sense of logic and reason, and these are the people I am most afraid of, because I have no idea how many of them are around us, just barely holding it together.

100%, they are trying soooo very hard to find bottled lightning again for a repackaging, but Trump’s actual political capital, the base of armed nationalists, they hate politicians. They hate “fake” people.

And you can say what you want about Trump’s honesty, but he’s not “fake.” He’s genuinely a despicable, deplorable old sack of hate, and people, particularly dumb ones, are so desperate for something “real” that he makes them feel good. They are not going to get people to feel good about some career schlub like Vance or anyone else.

Honestly, the only person who had a remote chance of rallying the right back under one war-banner was Charlie Kirk, the right was grooming the fuuuuck out of him to be the next huge media darling, and he actually could have led a sizeable contingent of the midwest christian whites who are scared of anything with seasoning.

The only reason anyone will be around his bedside is for photo ops and to be the first to release the news to the press, and with the desperate hope that they will be able to seize some measure of the power he leaves behind.

(Hot tip: they won’t, it will be massively destructive to the entire GOP and the conservative movement broadly, as without Trump his political capital, the warband of crazy maga orcs, will disperse and splinter into a thousand little shards of anger and aimless hate.)

1967 is a long way off from where we are now with a live camera feed in everyone’s pocket. That happened in a time where we were fresh out of segregation and most people read it as a “black problem” and moved on. While we still have a lot of division today, it’s not the same. We have growing momentum already with massive marches and protests, and division already happening within the government and administration.

The events where the US government has shot down protestors has paved the way for where we are now, those were large black marks on history that the government does not want to repeat, the powers that be are terrified of someone broadcasting a similar event. The desire to preserve the status-quo comes from a much higher power, the now-metastasized force of corporate power that wants people divided enough to not band together, but not so much that the system breaks and people stop buying shit.

Otherwise, they would have done it already. They want to so badly, they just want it to be a perfect situation where it appears like some organized antifa or hispanic terrorist group appear like organized insurgents, and so far that hasn’t happened because those kinds of groups don’t actually exist and we’re not in a war with insurgents.

All that said, I do not think our answer is going to be any kind of armed assault on DC. There will be no charismatic leader that waves the flag of revolution, we will not have that storybook ending. It’s the fantasy of children who can’t imagine or grasp the complexity and actual systemic challenge of changing the course of an entire nation with hundreds of millions of people.

Even if we succeeded, we would still have to live next to the millions of people who didn’t want us to do a coup, and so far I haven’t met a single progressive/leftist who has an answer for what to do about that.

Its easy to say do something from an armchair and I feel you, I wish we could do something

That’s what I am saying, and I am speaking from very much a NOT armchair place on this, I’ve done my time on asphalt. And you can do community organizing from your chair. But again, it takes discomfort, exposure to condemnation from people who don’t agree with your takes, people paid to squash messaging from anyone revealing dark stains on a local candidates career and so on.

Nobody is gunning down Americans, the outcome of that is the right and left uniting to topple the US government or at least to remove every representative from power, everyone knows this. US’s “fierce individualism” means there is always a precarious risk of going too far. This is why the powers that be have worked so fucking hard to divide us and make us afraid of each other and the “other side.”

That said, the marches are useless without political action to capitalize on the momentum.

Mussolini was not captured and executed by a plucky band of rebels who fought the Italian government. He was handed over to opposition forces BY the government when they realized that they could no longer sustain the current system. The king personally arrested him.

Nations are huge. They don’t turn on a dime, and you need politics to change things. A lot of leftists have a very dumb notion of how this needs to happen, and think that we can “do our own Jan 6th” and it will somehow work. It didn’t work then, it won’t work now.

We march, we mobilize, we organize, but we start at home, in your community, in your town or city, and we spread it through the state. We share information and vote in actual representatives for seats that largely go uncontested because people only care about democracy every four years when the circus comes to town. Vote out the current DNC stooges, vote out the sitting nobodies who want to preserve the status-quo, vote out the people who can’t say anything bad about the companies paying them. If we do that, AND march and protest, we take the country back. Right now though it’s plenty hard enough to get someone to finish reading a comment this long, much less go research who’s up for reelection in their school board or what’s the ruling history of their local judges.

Get involved in your community. Learn who runs your town, your county, your school district, your state.

Find out who represents what, spend a few hours a week reading and sharing info on local/neighborhood social media, volunteer if you really have the time and drive to make changes. Even just hold a yard sale and get to know your neighbors if you live in that kind of environment.

The reason nobody is paying attention to the law is we stopped paying attention to the people who are supposed to uphold it. We only tune in every 4 years when the circus comes to town, meanwhile the entire fetid clownshow is propped up on a foundation of local representatives and judges and boards of people who largely run uncontested or are installed by companies, not groups of people.

They are leveraging our short attention spans to vote in people who will favor corporate interests over law, and those corporations? they will work harder to erode our attention even further. We can fix this, but it has to start at home.

Spreading unfocused positivity doesn’t succeed nearly as much as picking at someone’s specific anger or insecurity and then validating it.

One makes people sigh and roll their eyes at inspirational quotes and the general feeling of being “shamed” by messaging that shows other people doing good things and for the insecure and angry, that just feels like being told “Why can’t you be better?”

Meanwhile if you’re is stressed and uneducated and hopeless feeling, being told that there is a specific group or segment of the population around you who is facilitating all your misery, well that’s a call to action. That’s a tangible thing you can get mad at and rage against and blame for your woes and it requires no actual work to get that feeling of satisfaction.

It’s a survival response that companies and political entities have learned how to exploit and there’s no quick answer for it. It may never be solved.

Maybe if all shifted our informational/media attention more towards understanding our own limitations and failings in our emotional/cognitive ability, we could start broadly pushing the needle towards systems that protect us from ourselves, but I strongly feel like we’re going to slide backwards a good long ways before we start making any forward progress again. This is the long-arc of time, and part of coming to terms with the injustice is understanding we won’t see that better tomorrow. We can work towards it and try to set it up for our descendants, but the best we can hope for in the moment is finding a little peace and comfort in our personal lives.

I said it from the start and stand by it: however you feel about political assassination aside, Kirk was one of the only right-wing media figures who had a chance of keeping Trump’s political capital alive, as in, he was one of the few people with the charisma and messaging skill that he could charm MAGA’s into shifting tone to follow his lead.

Who else is going to hold onto a segment of America who are violently stupid, armed, patriotic, and have the attention spans of gnats and each think themselves to be some kind of comic book hero? Trump was able to capture them because he seemed genuine even though it was genuine hate and anger. Kirk could have kept the hate and anger alive under a skin of righteousness and Christian ideology that would have absolutely caught on in midwest America like fire through dry brush if the GOP decided to go whole-hog and fund him in the coming years.

We averted a massive problem with Kirk, and the way everyone around him is currently grasping for shreds of that political capital as it evaporates into the wind just further reinforces what I believe.

“Something is changing here.”

I don’t even need to read this article to know it’s pandering bullshit designed to make you think your side is winning and the bad guys are losing, keeping the kayfabe flame alive and burning so we don’t realize we’re all getting played by a group of rich, dumb fucks who have learned how easy it is to keep all our wheels spinning forever, or at least tuned-out enough that we stop paying attention to any news stories. Either result is a win to them.

Do you even understand that’s the propaganda the oligarchs push the hardest?

They don’t push a narrative that trying is pointless, they are doing the opposite, they are showing pandering bullshit to both sides, every day. It is in corporate interest that we are all fighting each other and hating each other for whatever group we belong to, and then funding those groups and reinforcing those lines of division.

Part of that plan is to constantly push and design algorithms to push pandering news stories for both sides to consume and believe themselves winning against the eeeevil enemy. News stories like this are part of that machine. Nobody on the right saw this story, their version is the complete opposite of your reality, but the people who design these atomized universes know neither side is ever going to cross lines and look at what the other side is seeing.

This situation is not going to change until a better story is introduced, but right now the people controlling the distribution of the stories are the wealthy oligarchs and corporations and donor-class. Our last and only chance for change is slowly, deliberately ripping the foundations out of the political structure they build. Local communities and town and state elections are largely uncontested and produce all the people, representatives and judges who have allowed corporations to have basically unlimited power to do what they want.

And fuck these media outlets and “news” orgs who publish this pandering bullshit knowing that only the people who want to see it will have it appear on their feeds.

These are the people destroying our country. Far more than the dumb dipshits who latched onto Trump’s kayfabe storyline, it’s the grifters and liars on both sides of every news story.

100%. I hate this pandering bullshit.

Every single headline, on BOTH sides of every issue:

“People you hate are losing bigly and are getting OWNED by opposition, YOUR side is winning and things are finally about to change!”

This is exactly why Trump won. Not because people looked at these stories and believed them, but because people stopped believing this shit entirely. People have broadly gone numb to this rhetoric and tuned out of news and information because they get it from aggregators and the stuff that rises to the top is invariably “hot stories” people click on, which is always this pandering bullshit.

I have tentatively have Reuters and Associated Press as primary headline news sources, they’re a lot better about neutral reporting, and naturally those stories never make it to the aggregators because they’re far less exciting or emotionally validating.

People voted for the mess we have right now because they didn’t know what was going on, what was true and real, and said that Trump seemed “genuine” and while true to the extent that he’s open about his hate, that should say volumes about how desperate people are for anything remotely “real.”

I can’t wait to vote in the next Republican-Amazon-Prime-Super-Spectacular-Disney-Time-Warner-Johnson&Johnson-GoogleMetaAI-Election-Extravaganza. (No need to vote, that’s already been decided, it’s entirely for entertainment purposes and coveted advertiser slots.)

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We need to understand here that the real danger isn’t that someone is going to put out a video of Trump saving an armload of orphans from a burning building and it will be so convincing that everyone believes it, or that someone is going to make a “secret recording” of Zohran Mamdani talking about plans to do nine-hundred and eleven more 9/11’s, the real problem in the short term is that this technology is going to inject a seed of doubt or plausible skepticism into everything we see, read and hear.

Do you work hard all day, all week and only have time for watching political coverage a half hour a week like so many Americans right now? If you don’t know shit about the people running against each other, and there are very convincing videos of each of them saying radical, crazy bullshit or beating up puppies, you’re not going to say “Hmn, this can’t all be real, I should dig deeper.” Nobody fucking does that. We have to stop pretending that the average person has any desire to sift through raw sewage for kernels of edible corn.

No, they will turn it all off. They will shrug and just vote randomly when the time comes.

This is very evident by our previous federal election cycle, where we had some of the highest voter and youth voter turnout in US history, yet exit polling showed over and over that most people had no idea what the candidate’s actual positions, history or qualifications were, most voters said they couldn’t decide between Harris and Trump. People who stood behind Sanders voted for Trump. People said that at least Trump seemed “genuine” which is really true. The man, despite lying and cheating and being a giant asshole, he does seem genuine about it, and people don’t know what else to turn to.

This is how AI and technology like algorithms and atomized perspectives are going to subvert democracy in the short term.

In the long term, advanced AI will be able to manipulate your thoughts and feelings like you’re a fucking chicken being hypnotized by drawing a line in front it’s beak. It will know all your backdoors, hacks and overrides for you specifically and be able to predict all your patterns and thoughts that you think are soooo unique and personal. We’re so fucked.

The last federal election cycle was a constant deluge of very bad renderings of Trump saving babies from fires and all the old ladies and Joe Rogan listeners had no idea what was real or not, because the prior scourge, the attention-span-eroding algorithm has trained people to not look at anything for more than a half second.

These things aren’t even necessarily designed or used to make people think that Trump is actually a beefcake riding a tank, it’s supposed to make everyone doubt what’s real or not. That’s all they have to do, is get people to tune out and doubt everything they read and hear as “AI.” That’s the real power of this shit, it makes us not want to be involved because it forces people to triple check everything we see and hear.

And this is exactly what exit polling in 2024 implied.

BREAKING: SCIENTISTS WORRIED THAT TOOL DESIGNED TO DO THE THING IT WAS DESIGNED TO DO, WILL IN FACT DO THAT.

Any people of color or other marginalized groups or minority populations reading this really, really need to share this on your community’s social media and get it visible within your cultural space instead of just sighing at Lemmy posts that won’t make it out of our bubble here.

Trump secured a large vote from black and latino people because everyone’s attention spans are so fried that people basically filter everything they see to distill it to just what they want to see. (Even before the algorithm distills this further.)

So what we had were a lot of people who didn’t get the memo that Trump and Republicans broadly suckle at the heart of racism and hate to power their machine. They just heard messages about “returning to traditional values” and pictured their parent’s lives when they were growing up and got exploited by the ol’ “nostalgia” hack. A lot of people of color come from communities that have held onto tradition for a long time as a survival tool, and there are a lot of conservative values that line up with that kind of tradition, so people, desperate for meaning and leadership, thought that a vote for Trump would restore that nostalgic feeling of “when men were men and women were women” and all the dumb shit we say to justify our hard lives.

Nostalgia is a tool of fascism. Stop being nostalgic, start beating that shit with a hammer when people bring it up.

Your life wasn’t better when you were little. Your parents were miserable. Life was hard, you were just little and stupid and thought everything was amazing.

Now we’re here wondering if we’re going to get an anti-christ funded billionaire for our next fascist president, or a nazi-funded billionaire for our next fascist president.

Thanks guys, everyone out there who went “eww, I can’t vote for that person, they make me feel cringy and icky.” I’m sure you will feel comfortable with your choices in line for the box cars as the Palantir drones watch lovingly from overhead.

By the logic that you can just call things whatever you want and then you’re magically allowed to treat them as that thing

Welcome to realizing how actual geopolitics work. There are no rules, just “gentleman agreements” that most of the time major powers have held because they worried about reprisals for breaking the unwritten rules.

There is no such thing as “law.” Law is a word we use for the systems that keep citizens of a country from harming each other or the economy. When you’re a nation, there are no international police who will ticket you for literally just doing whatever the fuck you want to whoever you want.