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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.

They’ve been doing this game for a while. (They, being establishment politics, Dems and Republicans working together)

They push the needle further right, put up less and less progressive, human candidates, and hope more and more people either tune out of politics or say “I’m out.”

The unwillingness for people to wait out the hard shit as long as it’s pushing the needle back the left has brought us to the point that we have to choose between demons and ghouls. We could have nipped this back when we were forced to choose between “boring and not-quite-progressive-enough” but there were vast numbers of people saying “I’m out” that far back, and I know for a fact most of ya’ll would love one of them “boring” presidents if it means we have institutions back.

The other user who replied first nailed it, at least nailed the starting point. Just listen.

This is harder than it sounds, because they will spout off some really, really wrong ideas and wrong takes that will make steam shoot out your ears. Everything inside you will want to correct them. This is the point where you HAVE to reign in your desire to use your brain and try to bring them up to your level, because you can’t. Not if they deny basic facts about reality like evolution or that race doesn’t come with intrinsic values or that science can prove facts, or they say that trans people are literal devils and all these ideas you will immediately identify as wrong or even dangerous. You will desperately want to “fix” that problem, but if you try that first they will close all mental doors on you.

I would suggest that many do this unconsciously even as a “litmus test” of sorts to see if you’re going to attack their identity. We are progressive/intellectual so we have to understand that “being a dumbass” is a valid identity if that’s what matters to someone, so we have to give them that space to carve out their rebellion against order and logic. At least for now. As soon as you invalidate someone’s identity they will never see you as anything other than a threat, and if you’ve ever raised dogs, you will know that a scared dog acts very aggressive, not usually cowering or hiding. They bark, they try to escalate the situation, they bristle and act tougher than they are.

So the biggest challenge to everyone who wants to change these people will be to listen to them without trying to fix their broken worldview. You have to let them be them for a while and just ask them questions. Ask them questions about how they feel about things, and what they want for themselves, their loved-ones, etc.

A great magic happens as you give a simple mind a safe place to talk. I’ve done this over and over. They will start letting down guards pretty fast when you prove you’re not going to “hurt” them in some way by challenging their beliefs. They will start showing you their uncertainty, their fears, their vulnerabilities. They will start leaving cracks open for you to explore and ask deeper questions.

See, all that shit they think they believe, the spiel they gave about immigrants or gay people, they don’t cling to these values because they’re well-thought out, logistical philosophies that they’ve studied, it’s just emotional venting with a narrative that was supplied to them. They are equally capable of shifting 180-degrees because that’s how emotions work. You just have to make it safe for them to do so.

In fact, I would say this is your “win condition” by itself, just to get them to feel safe to talk to you. You have to abandon any expectations that you’re going to make their eyes open wide and go “Wow, I’ve been so wrong!” No, your best hope is to change how they feel about one small thing at a time.

I used to “flip” incels this way, and I am currently “one of the good ones” to several older, set-in right-wingers who will seek me out to get my takes on issues or ideas despite knowing that I’m on the other side of their ideology, because it makes them feel good and feel smart to have someone who they can safely get a second opinion from. Imagine if your parents were actually non-judgemental and you could have brought home any new, challenging idea to debate comfortably around the dinner table. Everyone would have wanted that growing up. You can be that environment to someone.

Imagine if every right-wing dumbass out there knew “one of the good ones.” Imagine if several million people were exposed to just one person who proves an exception to their emotional rule that your side is the “enemy.” This is how you topple mountains, not by butting heads against it, but by carving out cracks in the base.

I thought these dumbfucks wanted low prices, LOL?

Nope. They never cared about grocery prices. They never cared about border security. They never cared about the economy. They never cared about protecting children and the whole laundry list of “huge conservative issues” because they are getting their values from FOX-feelings-news, not any carefully thought-out positions.

They’re just dumb people. Every population is going to have a dumb segment. Our ire and desire for destruction should be focused squarely on the grifters and networks and pundits on Youtube who are feeding this stupidity-powered machine.

The dumb people themselves? We can turn them. It’s not that hard, they are… and I cannot stress this enough, dumb. What the left broadly forgets though is that you don’t turn dumb people with smart arguments, you have to influence them the way you would a toddler. Change how they feel, then you can point them at a new target. People like Sanders have been doing this for decades and has huge success. The whole plot is right there, easy to use, we have tyrannical oligarchs who are stealing our money and hiding in boats in other countries and so on.

It’s just that said people in boats have designed a culture war so that the dumb fucks don’t realize who the real enemy is. It sounds stupid simple to anyone who can read, but I have to remind everyone, nearly a quarter of US adults are functionally illiterate. We have to stop expecting smart arguments and preaching and scolding to work. We have to say dumb shit to make dumb people attack the right targets.

Can’t wait for all the videos of people trying to destroy stuff they bought at Costco.

This is all calculated. I can’t say if it’s going to be a successful calculation but here’s the reasoning:

She knows what a lot of Republicans know, which is that the Epstein file release could be massively damaging, it may already have sealed the mid-terms. Every Republican is going to feel scrutiny no matter what comes out and they’re already taking a thrashing in public approval about a host of other issues like ICE. If damning evidence comes out of the files, Republicans are going to take even more heat for hiding it. And even if nothing comes out, Republicans are going to take heat for obscuring it. Republicans are royally fucked next election cycle. Look at what happened in state elections. There is no winning move here… except not to play.

Greene will be able to say next year “I wanted nothing to do with any of that, I did not identify with my corrupt party and I left as soon as I could” and this line will go over fantastic with her base, who will feel Trump-less, lost and still will desperately want a strong (read: dumb, relatable) representative.

In fact, she may be the only thing left of MAGA/America’s nationalist movement after all this, both center-right liberals and conservatives are going to forget her worst and remember her best, because she’s going to have a big change in tone and be the right’s chance for a strong, female leader finally so they can pretend they’re not evil misogynists.

Distancing herself now is a strong statement down the road.

edit: to be clear, I am saying she’s going to make a run for senate, and she may make a play for the Iron Throne itself. Maybe not in 2028, but at some point. She has a good chance too, sadly.

The headline alone tells me this is bad-faith drivel, either meant to inflame tensions or to pander to the unrealistic “leftists” who think we’ll have our glorious revolution aaaannnyyy day now.

The country is not “divorcing” we are nowhere close to a “civil war” and there will be a tomorrow. And a day after. And a day after that.

We can start pushing the pendulum back the other direction on the momentum of whatever the latest scandal is, we can have grass-roots campaigns for people who represent us, we can be more social and more active, we can plant gardens and donate to food banks and attend city council meetings. The whole thing goes on.

Do not trust or even believe headlines that inflame tensions or make things worse. We can work harder to make sure nobody is getting abandoned. We had huge setbacks but over the long arc of history, we are still making progress.

You want entertainment. He wants to take the job seriously. The mayor of New York wants to secure some form of business dealing going forward and do right by his constituency.

When his hands are tied behind public image, he can’t talk openly about a lot of things that would make the general public panic or not understand the meaning and context. We tend to forget or choose to forget that even the best politics is still public perception management.

100%, the American public, for as much as everyone complains about the state of politics, are not much better as a driving force for policy and good outcomes.

Because everyone can’t keep their shit together and the most ill-informed voices now speak loudest, we’re going to see more and more actual politics moving behind closed doors, for better or worse.

That’s how a lot of the deeply “set in” authoritarian empires have started you know.

A lot of people unhappy with the situation but just keeping quiet and pretending to go along with shit. Until years pass and a whole new generation of government workers who grew up with all this as normal come in and sign the oaths with a shrug and a smile.

It was obviously Trump’s idea to begin with, and the GOP haaaates the idea of giving away even twenty cents to a starving orphan so they have been grinding their teeth on this idea for a while now.

Trump is not republican. He’s not anything. He’s a colossal, spiteful, angry, narcissistic old man who just wants people to love him. He’s been very consistent that way. He would break whatever rules and regulations there and do whatever he’s told will help to get that outcome of being loved by people, it just so happens that his hatefulness aligned better with the republicans this round.

In some alternate timeline, Trump is our greatest president ever as he became a useful tool for an upstanding, socialist-majority congress and senate who use his willingness to trample tradition and regulation to pass sweeping reforms of our entire country’s oppressive financial systems. Just doing whatever he’s told so people can cheer his name.

It makes perfect sense if she wants to start focusing on her senate/presidential plans. And she is. And she will run.

He’s been one of the absolute weakest, belly-exposing, fealty-bowing establishment dems in the entire government. He has literally cited Trump’s “mandate” as a reason why they can’t oppose him. Fuck him and his tepid “he better not say bad stuff” response. I hope he gets primaried but we all know how set-in this old-money is.

A lot of political experts are predicting that this latest Epstein drama may actually have consequence.

Not the way we wish, we will never see Trump impeached, much less arrested, but it’s very possible that we don’t see real policy movement from Trump for the rest of his term. He is not going to be able to secure votes as his loyalists start to scatter into their own little power groups, each avoiding the burning, sinking ship that is the fallout of the Epstein falls.

It’s not the justice we fantasize seeing, but it’s a real good thing for the future of our country if it goes down like this.