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.

Best comment in post.

Qanon/pizzagate was never about protecting children or actually getting justice for people being trafficked.

It was a self-inserted live-action role-playing adventure where anyone with unemployment checks and a couple guns could dress up in their tactical gear and start piecing together word puzzles in their basements so they can go feel like they’re doing something meaningful with their lives and avoid the crushing reality that they’re just uneducated, unqualified normal-ass people who are just as vulnerable to the whims of tyrants and criminals in power as the rest of us.

What’s a more noble thing to be fanatical about than rescuing children? Surely, everyone would praise such a worthy crusade and the amount of respect and adoration you would get for rescuing children would make mom stop telling you to get a job, right?

When the actual sex-trafficking, child-murdering cabal came into light, it stopped being fun. It’s too big, too confusing, too many high-profile people involved and the average person can’t unlock any secrets or clues that will make them a hero.

Not to mention, most of the Q-anon chuds were themselves trump-voting pedophiles, a lot of those fuckers were just overcompensating for their own proclivities.

I’m beginning to think this Trump fellow was up to no good at some point.

I fully expect a legal review to be brought against him and all the proper procedures to be followed.

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.