A republic, if you can keep it
And still it’s being allowed to happen
How was anyone supposed to know he was gonna do the things he said he wanted to do.
tbf, an america politician actually honestly laying out what the intend to do to the public and then carrying out is a massive outlier
He said he had nothing to do with project 2025 tho.
Trump lied
Whenever the dipshit says something, the opposite is always the truth.
Damn, doing p2025 but the exact opposite would be a pretty rad society.
many of his most reckless efforts in his first administration were stymied only because of others in his administration who blocked, delayed or watered down his aims to ensure that he could not put himself above the law or the country.
I often wonder what would have happened if his first term was unleashed. Eg if McCain voted yes to dismantle ACA. If Trump got his way the first time, would he have gotten in the second?
If Trump had gotten his way the first time, we’d be in a fascist dictatorship that is 9 years old now instead of one.
Donald Trump was a lot of peoples’ fault. One article nailing him doesn’t cancel out all the articles that normalized or sane washed him, or ran with his narrative. Nor does it undercut all the well-justified mistrust of legacy American media. It’s not as if people started trusting pundits out of nowhere - they started looking for commentary and news from alternate sources because yeah, actually, a lot of legacy media does report like they serve their wealthy owners. Not that MAGA pundits don’t, but that’s beside the point.
Hell, even right now, they’re generally running with the narrative that Trump’s Israel-Gaza ceasefire has been effective by not reporting that Israel still murders many innocent Palestinians every day.
Yup.
Reminds me of the time everyone was excited about Joe Biden and I (rightly) predicted that for the vast majority of Americans, your lives were about to get vastly more expensive.
And before the peanut gallery chimes in, yes, I voted Biden. At the time I naively thought that a cultural backlash against MAGA would put Donald back in private life permanently where he belongs. Unfortunately, Genocide Joe didn’t concern himself much with fascism, and largely, made it worse. (Especially when it comes to militarizing cops.)
Every single fucking thing Trump has done I predicted and warned people about and got shadowbanned across half the goddamn internet for it.
Okay great we were warned, let’s stop whinging about the idiots of the past and start working to convince today’s idiots.
I think the most important thing about this era is to understand how the fuck this happened. I have no answers and have never heard anything convincing. I think if humanity lasts long enough, hundreds of years of scholars will be trying to understand it. Most people on earth could’ve predicted most of this shit, yet no amount of spreading that knowledge made a fucking difference. If nothing else, this tells us how unbelievably irrational humans are.
I have a pretty good idea how it happened, I just have no idea how we can guardrail our human weaknesses against every single entity committed to exploiting those weaknesses in new and inventive ways so that they can gain power over others.
We had this entirely new thing come into our lives where we could get mental stimulation on-tap anytime we want, perpetually and it fucked everyone’s minds, we lost our attention spans and learned to fear each other as organized groups worked tirelessly to change our thinking and behavior, either for commercial purposes or for social/political agendas, and it worked spectacularly because we had no idea what “the internet” does to a human brain until someone makes the internet and does it all to us.
Social pressure holds communities together, as primitive as it is, it’s a system we’re designed to work within, and as we’ve given up community outside influences are replacing it with incel-forums, loot-boxes, 24-hour news feeds, same-day shopping and and endless stream of jokes, memes and voices each desperately trying to get your attention, and getting just enough that you don’t look away or question your own capacity to question.
And of course it doesn’t help that actual bad people are doing things like indirectly paying millions of people in developing nations to spread propaganda across the US for retweets and clicks because it’s just enough money to make a career for someone in India or Philippines.
You’re right about all of this. What I can’t fathom though – is that in the past, facts mattered. A lot. How did all of the propaganda literally erase that entirely? That’s what I cannot figure out. It’s not like the internet invented the concept of the lie. Before social media, at least most people would have some skepticism and if nothing else, ask their smart friend. How the hell did that go away?
How did all of the propaganda literally erase that entirely?
I struggled with this also around the pandemic watching people deny reality, and my result is that in my adult life I have been re-black-pilled by depressing new knowledge about the human species:
We are not a logic, rational creature. Our brains are not machines for working out problems, they’re machines for telling stories to create a coherent narrative. And that narrative doesn’t need to follow rules of reality, it just needs to tie ends together. This is why you ruminate and get depressed about things that aren’t real or have already happened, this is why people will cheer for their wrestlers while also knowing it’s scripted, this is why people can get into positions at the height of power by just saying “I’m the best at this.”
We are massively vulnerable to cognitive dissonance, and once again, the only thing that has kept this in check for the majority of human society has been social pressure to know the rules.
The rules have changed over the centuries, but they’ve at least required the members of the community to know how to distinguish things that are against the rules from things that are allowed, and with this comes critical thought (for self preservation) and pondering one’s choices (for self preservation) and the desire to conform and adapt to the will of the people around you (for self preservation.)
When you take away the community and the pressure for survival, people can just live with whatever stories run wild in their minds, without consequence. The rest of us just hit the “mute” button or walk away and go be alone in our own universe of our own choosing. We’re all guilty of doing this about something, at some point, and when you get millions of people doing this at all once, you no longer have “objective reality” you have millions of Main Characters not caring about consequences for choosing to believe in things that run against reality.
We are not a logic, rational creature. Our brains are not machines for working out problems, they’re machines for telling stories to create a coherent narrative.
I gotta push back against this. It’s much more complicated than this. Humans have a complex brain, with some parts matching this description perfectly, and others that do not at all. If we were not capable of both being rational and prioritizing facts, we’d probably still be roughly the same as chimpanzees. Instead, we developed incredibly complicated systems for accomplishing long term goals, and throughout human history, cooperation based on rational thought has played a huge role in the direction our species took. Hell, without that ability, there probably wouldn’t have ever been a coherent ruling class. They wouldn’t have been able to put all the pieces in place to hoard wealth indefinitely.
What I see now as a distinct change is that rational thought just literally gets turned off at will, at any moment. In the past, 98% of people would watch a video of a crime and agree at least roughly on what happened. Now people literally seem to deny what their visual cortex perceives in favor of something they heard already. That is new.
I’ll concede that my explanation is very simplified, but the nuance has more to do with how the brain pulls together its story-telling material, which is predominantly from associations and experiences and practiced knowledge/actively reinforced education.
But for the vast majority of people who feel things, the brain just hastily assembles an explanation for those feelings on the fly, from materials “laying around” and that path of least resistance is usually whatever is on the surface of an issue or feeling, and that can be a defaulting to a supplied narrative “You’re poor and can’t succeed because immigrants ate your cat.” or it can be tied to your past “You’re suffering because girls are bad, per that one girl who was mean to you in 5th grade.”
And while there is complexity to it, we’re talking about population groups more than individual capacity to be rational.
and throughout human history, cooperation based on rational thought
My turn to push back. I am talking from experience talking to psychologists and reading about brains so it’s only partially out of my ass, but I don’t think cooperation is at ALL required to be based on rational thought, in fact most of our cooperation is based on survival impulses and hardwired defenses, which is why so much cooperative action is based around violence and fear through history. The fact that we can cooperate at all to build bridges and Arby’s restaurants and fiber-optic networks has far more to do with the vision of a small group with more advanced conceptualization using primitive tools to move large numbers of people. (Primitive tool: We pay you to build fiber-optics so that you can eat and not die.) But the thousands of people involved in the project aren’t emotionally tied to the feeling of completion when the last line is laid.
And for the most part, most of our successes and modern world has been built on more of a process of gradual trial and error than a logical plan being seen through from start to finish, of the unsuccessful cooperative actions getting left behind and the successful ones shaping the world. And we define success as that which gives us a more comfortable life with less suffering… so that alone should tell us how flawed this process can be. We are broadly using this overpowered skill of cooperative action for self-preservation, not community preservation, and logic rarely needs to apply.
I wasn’t very clear about the cooperation part. What I mean wasn’t that you have to be rational to cooperate. What I’m saying is that you have to be rational to plan out things that take dozens or hundreds of years and effectively utilize the cooperation of thousands of individuals who are all looking to solve the same problem.
You are using modern societal issues like inequality as evidence that we aren’t rational, but I dispute that strongly. Those problems used to be much, much worse, literally because the ruling class used a rational but evil plan to take care of themselves. Because of rational working class fighting back in a very organized and rational manner at a few different points in history, we made progress against them. We don’t have a 40 hour work week or OSHA in America because a bunch of emotional and angry public kept trying random things without a thought. We have those things from planning and hard work. Both are examples of being entirely rational.
Intentional psyop
I don’t disagree with the content of this post but take this OPs hour-old account with a large grain of salt; this is likely another self deleting spam account.
I can see the URL, I know it’s the NY Times … but it feels like it could just as well be a link to the Book of Revelation. Fuck this timeline sucks
The only thing I’m aware of which was predicted by anyone which he hasn’t done or tried to do is launch nukes at North Korea. Which he has threatened that. I think he’s enough of a psychopath that he is not above launching nukes if he ever finds himself in the position Hitler did. I mean why wouldn’t he? He’s shown us thousands and thousands of times that he cares about a singular person and that is himself.
But yeah, every fucking concern we had has been validated and then some. And these fucking zombies don’t care because they somehow can pretend he does nothing wrong, literally no matter what.
Never has there been a more disappointing time to have a working brain. All of this would’ve made way more sense before everyone could instantly check facts any time they wanted. Yet somehow, that ability made people less informed. I get that propaganda works and all, but I still will never understand how people could remain so adamantly ignorant when it’s genuinely so easy to learn and to stop being ignorant. I could even understand a world where people hate Trump’s specific actions but support a lot of the things he does. Would still be disappointing but it would make sense. Instead we live in a world where he can do anything and be loved for it no matter how heinous.
This is Lemmy. Ain’t no one here surprised by this. We’ve been shouting at each other that this would happen for 2 years.
Try 10+ years
On Lemmy?
Paywall
But but Kamala didn’t say Palestine! /S
