There are about a hundred post-titles like this across everyone’s feed right now, and not a thing will change.

It should be your glimpse into our atomized worldview that makes us think that “our side is winning, our day of retribution is coming any day now.”

Meanwhile the right is also seeing their own versions of every story, often written by the SAME media groups, to make them think their side is winning, and their day of retribution is coming any day now.

It’s going to start any minute, at least in terms of ads and stunts and attention-seeking social media things. But as we get closer to mid-year we’ll see a lot more chaos and carnival stunts, culminating in November when it will be full on “raw dogging a warp jump with no navigator” level of chaos and bullshit to wade through every day.

I don’t know who’s running, but I know how i’m voting. With a few exceptions, all incumbents must go. Every last rotten piece of ancient, withering meat who hasn’t made any attempt at reform or pushback is out on my ballot, and this should be our goddamn ANTHEM.

It’s time to dismantle the Democrat party.

it will give cover for gerrymandered red-states to reduce their efforts to make voting available and visible to their citizen.

I think you’re absolutely right, as it draws near we will get a steadily increasing narrative how elections are rigged, there’s massive corruption in voting systems (the paper is chinese!) and many other distracting nonsense claims.

But what they have overreached on over and over again is they are broadly very stupid people, and they can’t grasp the scale of this country and the people. I’m sure there will be election shenanigans but I doubt it will be enough to turn the tide. If they try to cancel any elections outright, while people are this tense and ready to riot, there will be widescale violence. Which the administration may want, but no town mayors or state governors want. The states still hold the cards here.

Republicans likely have funded putting him away and out of sight in some nice hotel while they figure out what to do about the situation.

They have no idea what to do about the situation. I just watched Kristi Noem basically set herself on fire on Jake Tapper. The emperor demanded she fall on her blade and she’s so weak and pathetic that she did it.

They aren’t nearly terrified enough. They shouldn’t be allowed to sleep, nor leave their car tires unattended, nor get delivery, nor trust what’s in their fast food orders.

the meme can be interpreted that way, and was originally used to portray some level of naivety on the part of the victim.

Okay but our messaging shouldn’t be “it’s useless to resist,” we need more people to resist in any capacity they can.

Sadly, a lot of the left is really naive to just how fucking evil these kinds of people are.

They worked hard to craft the narrative around trans people as the new sub-human scourge trying to destroy our nation etc. It was deliberate from the start, they picked a group that has low representation and low population, whom average people don’t understand or connect with.

You don’t fix this kind of thing with education, outreach and lecturing. You fix this with regime change. All of the transphobic chuds and all of the terfs have the attention-spans and emotional consistency of toddlers, that’s why they were vulnerable to the narrative to begin with. If we had new leadership who, no matter what ideology they represented, said “trans people ain’t a big deal and we ain’t going after them” you would see vast waves of people lose interest and start looking for the next target to hate and scapegoat.

I am not sure what point you’re trying to make spamming this. It’s no good to resist? Bend the knee because they’re armed?

I will agree that the system is now a cycle, that it’s now self-sustaining apathy that breeds exploitation that breeds apathy, etc. It’s a downward spiral, but I will not budge that our dead internet of mindless dopamine hits isn’t a strong link in that chain of despair or a major factor in people’s lack of willingness to organize to actually address those problems that are making people want to escape reality. To say nothing of what it’s done to our atomized perspectives and inability to agree on a shared world anymore.

But that aside, the crux of what I’m talking about is community. In other times, we were much better as a species and society at creating community that reinforces both the laws of the land and provides us with opportunities to either change the system or to reinforce it and help each other. Whether or not you think that doomscrolling is responsible or not for the conditions we’re in, it’s absolutely keeping us divided and isolated and alone. We are a species wired to have face-to-face socialization and it’s on the decline. Rates of young relationships are dropping like a rock, birth rates are dropping, people don’t go out and hang out and enjoy being around each other anymore because we all have a billion voices of strangers stomping around in our heads making us fear and hate each other and ourselves. Social pressure is what drives people to want to make better choices, it’s what drives people to want to not look stupid so they will be pushed to learn about issues and ideas. Social pressure is a stronger guiding hand for morality and ethics than any legal or religious system. Instead of nurturing community we all have discord servers with other self-diagnosed people unwilling to answer the phone or even say hi to a stranger.

This might not be the only problem we have, but it’s a huge one and we’re broadly not addressing it or caring how much harm it’s doing, and people, particularly in places like this, will feel so triggered by the mere suggestion that their online habits are depriving them of a better world and more opportunities that they’ll rage and drop essays about how much being online all the time has helped them, and then 5 minutes later make another post in another forum talking about how lonely and depressed they are. Make it make sense.

Here’s a short assortment from top results in youtube for “Minneapolis Shooting”:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQCvNExBDjE

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hCsV_NyiLY

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N5j0lkQiVEw

He’s most likely being put up in a hotel with his family and hidden from public while the administration hires the biggest legal team they can and they’ve probably already started shopping for boats for Clarence Thomas ahead of time in case it heads to the Supreme Court.

It’s absolutely maddening because as you browse the internet broadly, there are still people who either looked at the video and “still can’t decide what happened” or have refused to watch it and are open that they haven’t watched and won’t watch it, yet are still going to bat for a brute squad who would put a bullet in their heads just as easily as anyone else.

A lot of people have zero interest still, and it wasn’t always like this. If this kind of thing had happened in the 90’s, it would be a national incident that would have led to entire cities being shut down for civil disobedience and rioting. Something is harming all of our minds, something happened to our country on a deeper level than just the creeping tentacles of fascism, something is harming our very being and sense of agency and it’s highly disturbing.

The only reason we have our country being taken away by a dictator who wants to go to war with europe and dispose of his opposition is because broadly most people just don’t give a fuck about anything. You see it here in places like Lemmy with younger people who are utterly cynical and discourage activism or even hoping for a better future. You see it in exit-polling from the last federal election which despite having the highest voter turnout percentage in history, most people broadly had no idea who to vote for or who represented what. You see it when you try to order a hamburger and the 22-year-old cashier stares straight ahead looking tuned-out or confused. You see it on late-night comedy television where the audience just laughs on command at “jokes” about how France is preparing to fight a war with the US.

We’re all gonna die if you guys don’t put down the phones and tablets and keyboards and start talking to each other face-to-face. Your brains are being rotted out of your skulls and nobody is DOING anything about it. We’re going to lose EVERYTHING.

100%, we need to keep the focus on what our government is doing for us, we’re supposed to be the people who pay for and “own” our government, we pay their bills with our hard work and money, we sacrifice our future so that we can have a government. “We the people” needs to have meaning. Turn people’s desire to be patriotic against the right targets.

They were going to cut welfare and social programs anyway, that’s all they’re here to do, they are gutting our treasury before they all get kicked out or guillotined. If the wind shifted in the wrong direction they would announce it’s reason to cut funding.

Pay attention people, this is your script. When you talk to people on the fence, tuned out or already leaning right, you do not argue about social policies, racism, immigration or any of the other hot-button social issues that are on fire right now. Average dumb fucks (which is everyone) don’t actually care about any of that. I’m sorry but people just broadly only care about themselves. Maybe that will change someday, but for now you are not going to get success finger-wagging and pointing out the suffering of marginalized people.

What you say is this: “Okay they’re cutting all this funding for medical care and poor people, they cut NASA and all these boards for health and education and environment protection, so where’s the benefit? Where is that money going? Are your groceries cheaper? Is your healthcare cheaper? Is anything getting better?”

That’s it. Just ask this one question. If it’s some MAGAss who starts ranting and sputtering, you let it go. Or just repeat the question. “Where is your money that they’re taking out of your check? Where is going to? Getting oil from Venezuela? Are YOU going to get a barrel of crude?”

We can leverage the average dumbass American if we make it a question not a lecture. People are dumber than they’ve ever been, but they still want to look smart, and if you ask them a question they can’t answer, they will chew on it so they know how to answer it next time someone asks.

You could edit this very lightly and actually distribute it in conservative spaces and people would connect with it.

• “Why yes, I think the tax money I pay should go towards social safety nets in case I or my grandma gets sick and can’t work.”

• “Why yes, I don’t think getting sick should make me have to close down my business and sell my house to CHINA.”

• “Why yes, I think people should just enjoy whatever they wanna do with each other in the privacy of their own homes, I don’t need government shoving it down my throat every day or making LAWS about what people do with their genitals.”

• “Why yes, I also think adults should be able to drink or smoke what they want, lets tax it and use that money for better border security!”

• "Why yes, I am sick of rich fucks deciding what I can and can’t do, I value my FREEDOM and no one person should have so much money that they can decide MY future. Tax them and put that money towards [insert right-wing fear thing here.]

Then end it with. “That’s all I want as a FREEDOM LOVING AMERICAN, so why are so many people trying to make this an argument? Why are rich people trying to make the things we agree on into politics? KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MY FREEDOM”

Yes it’s kinda dumb, but I think I’m actually going to make the thing and distribute it.

The atomization of our perspectives is what allowed the cancer to metastasize.

Most people don’t browse forums, most people don’t read news stories, most people don’t fact-check or watch debates or listen to pundits talk for more than 3 minutes.

This should normally lead to rapidly shifting political landscapes, but we’re all being a carefully cultivated feed of validating and self-affirming information that makes people feel a lack of involvement and urgency. You see it right here on Lemmy, people are reposting all the pandering news site bullshit every day “Trump and MAGA is collapsing!” “Trump HUMILIATED by latest release!” “GOP is crashing and people are fleeing the sinking ship!”

For every headline like that you read, people who lean right are seeing the exact opposite. And since we’ve all isolated ourselves from social connection, we don’t see how atomized our worlds are, we just assume everyone is seeing the same headlines and it makes us complacent.

Countdown incoming before the left turns on Mamdani because he is a politician forced to do politics in his job and average people don’t understand how any of it works.

Good, we hate the establishment Dems too. Last thing we need is people flocking to the dems before the midterms, we need to empty that jug out and fill it with new people.

It’s just the nature of the population who will flock towards an authoritarian, they’re not making rational, thought-out choices, they’re JUST following a narrative of feelings. It could flip 180-degrees the next day and they will go with that new storyline if it validates their anger or frustration or just the need to follow a soap-opera of pundits and angry shouting people on TV.