The situation is so, so much worse than a relatively easy-to-define divide between “smart people and stupid people.” If it was just a segment of the population who are stupid on some quantifiable level, we could work with that, we could work on outreach and education and compensation by making issues easier to understand and so on.

But it’s not just stupidity, there is a larger, society-wide phenomenon that is plaguing the world right now, which is the systemic suppression of thought.

This is a very unpopular fact when I post it, but it remains true: the last three federal elections we held in the US had the highest voter turnout in American history. It wasn’t a matter of people not caring or staying home, the issue shown in exit polling is that most voters had no idea what the candidates represented and felt basically like it was a coin-flip, and mostly went with their “gut” and said they had concerns about grocery prices that seemed to go up under Biden and Harris didn’t make them feel confident enough that she would do things different from Biden, and that Trump seemed to at least promise things. Many Americans haven’t paid solid attention to politics since.

So the picture is this: people who work 6 days a week, have no time or energy to read forums or browse for facts are just pulled along by facebook posts and ignore politics broadly to stay submerged in a lifestyle that simultaneously overworks us, and provides us with so many comforts that we’re not incentivized to exercise thinking skills or be curious about anything broadly. Work, scroll, work, scroll… how many of you right now are on Lemmy on work-hours looking for things to keep your brain distracted? Imagine that but across hundreds of millions of people on their phones endlessly scrolling through youtube shorts, ads, clickbait headlines, bad science stories, drama and hype around insignificant bullshit and so on.

Even if you’re not leaning one direction or another politically, you’re going to scroll past a thousand memes of both political parties saying absurd things about each other that you don’t feel connected with at all, because at the end of the day, no matter what they read about Epstein or Palestine or tariffs or “HE SAID WHAT” headlines, people are still just trying to not feel anything while they grind through the day so they can order a cab for their burrito later, and only really care about what that burrito is going to cost tomorrow… and I promise, Big Burrito has worked out exactly how high they can raise prices and how slowly they can do it before people start to feel uncomfortable.

It’s not an accident you always have only just enough money to make your ends meet. This is all by design. They made a population of cattle and they milk us daily and keep us drugged and placated.

They don’t believe in democracy. That’s it.

I would make the argument here that they don’t know what democracy is, at least not in terms that they can directly make applicable to their lives, their homes, their immediate concerns. To most Americans, not just the right, terms like “democracy” carry a negative connotation now.

This is also by design, we have so many conflicting ideologies screaming at each other through bot-wars and large-scale social manipulation efforts and psy-ops that people have pretty much tuned out, and there are plenty of factions who want that result as well and have worked to amplify the worst ideas and thoughts from every angle of every issue.

The last three election cycles saw the highest voter turnout in American history, so it’s not that people aren’t involved in politics, they just don’t really have any idea what’s going on. Exit polling showed most people were almost ambivalent towards either candidate and didn’t really have a clue who to vote for and just went with their concerns over grocery prices and whatever their facebook feed was showing them.

People don’t believe in democracy because they don’t believe we have a working government because everyone, everywhere is locked into their own feeds, their own perspectives of the world, they are not sharing realities and not talking to each other.

Conservatives are largely dumber than dirt, you can sway most of them to believe in socialism and freedom of identity and ANY other issue you care about if you engage them directly and know how to push their emotional buttons in specific ways. But we don’t do that anymore because we have no shared spaces, no shared perspective, no single source of truth that we can even debate or engage with each other about anymore, so the nation is splintering into a million shards that hate each other.

We’re going to see a lot more of this kind of thing, and a lot of it has roots in the idea that Garland and the SC threw away Rule Of Law and decided that political agendas are above the law and that the social contract no longer matters.

More and more people, groups and institutions are going to decide that they can interpret and enforce whatever laws they want to see.

That is just…a little too convenient?

Too convenient? It’s an assassination attempt, of course it’s convenient, it’s deliberate.

We just don’t know what the exact motive was, or if there even was one. There’s a lot of information we’re missing.

He hasn’t been pronounced dead, he was taken to the hospital, where we can assume they’re doing everything they can to keep his brain alive. Likely massive blood loss, throat and neck trauma and potential spinal damage, if he does live it’s a radically life-altering injury.

Death isn’t such a simple process, doctors have different levels they respond to before they make an announcement. Not much we can speculate on other than that. Wait and see.

edit: he ded

It doesn’t matter what state of even what country you live in, you should ALL be fixed on this election and deeply concerned about the outcome.

The New York mayor is a massively powerful seat in the world, it’s one of THE cities that move our entire world. For an open socialist to get this much public support flies in the face of the authoritarian/capitalist narratives that have been trying to convince people all over the world that no, they don’t actually want affordable groceries or affordable rent prices.

If this lands, if Mamdani succeeds, and the chances are quite high if not sabotaged, the precedent means a LOT for the world. Populists will take notice. Up and coming leaders will be inspired. Corporations will realize they’re pushing the line too hard and may back off just long enough for our world to get back on track. Maybe.

It’s worth watching. It’s worth being invested in.

If you’re insecure and on lemmy, that makes you a sub, not a conservative.

I wish we lived in a world where people were arguing where the 100% tax kicks in, if it’s at 100 mil or 200 mil, etc. If that was our most divisive issue we would all have 4-day workweeks, guaranteed universal basic income, and maybe even dental care we can afford.

Insecure minds attach to authoritarianism because they rely on narratives and a sense of promised security. It’s literally the answer, it’s been studied.

if we ignore the doodle

Don’t worry, everyone will.

He will do what he’s been doing, send it to the supreme court and Thomas and the Stoogey Gang will stamp it with the gold-plated “Trump Gets To Do It” stamp.

I’ve prepared my whole life for this

Wow, so glad we’re just now finally getting to that line where your years of studying the blade finally are called upon.

While you’re out naruto-running through the park pretending to fight ninjas, I’ll be continuing to organize my neighborhood the best I can to get involved in our next election cycle and know who’s running for what positions so we can hopefully kick the legs out from under the establishment. If they can do it in fucking New York they can do it in every town in the US.

Hey now, Cory Booker did that thing where he stood in one place and talked all day, and Schumer wrote a VERY stern letter.

They have a whole belief system and a sacred book that tells them otherwise.

Everyone knows. Nobody cares enough to do anything. He is the most powerful man on Earth and he’s currently mobilizing the military against cities in the united states.

It might be time to set the epstein shit to the side and start like… getting up and getting geared up for actual civil disobedience and group action. The physical kind.

This is arguably a bigger immediate concern.

We can hit him

There’s several thousand things we “can” do and hit him with, but the problem is we we’re not doing those things. Or more specifically, we have not done of this broadly for so long that we’re now relying on the goddamn democrats to be our final bastion of defense against losing democracy entirely. We let too many angry young men become incels and let our moron neighbors retreat to their own online spaces unchallenged. It’s set-in now, it’s a stain. We will never undo it.

No, seriously, they’re deploying military forces on political enemy cities, our time for making his base raise their brow and go “Hmnn! What is he UP TO!” is long over. They sidestepped the Epstein thing and just plowed right through, and most of the base moved on too. They have the judicial branch, they have house and senate, they do not care.

We can keep talking about it when we talk to people already shaky in their support, but we’re moving into endgame territory, it’s going to take some huge, catastrophic event to bring this to a head, such as national guard soldiers and deaths on one or both sides, or some other bloodbath that changes American narratives. Right now in sites like Lemmy and Reddit most of the people are still not taking this seriously are chanting “nothing ever happens” as they sit there doing nothing. Gen Z broadly wants to check out and roleplay and play games right up until they can’t anymore.

If you can get people rallied to get involved in social programs, local elections and city/county policy, it would be our best bet for saving the future, even if it takes generations now. But it’s gonna be shit for a long time because too many people who actually cared hid.

I’m sure Cory Booker will stand in one spot for a very long time and Chuck Schumer is drafting a VERY stern letter as we speak.

It ain’t happening. They already stopped caring. So have most people.

We all knew it would go away, but it should serve as a pretty profound reminder that we don’t have rule of law anymore, and we have the exact same fucking situation that we declared independence as a nation from. The SAME thing.

In a reasonable world.

We diverged from that world sometime around 2013 - 2016.