100% there.
look for local mutual aids, or political organisations fighting for your rights.
being active will make you feel better and will actually make the world around you better.
“They” want you to give up and doomscroll
This! Political activism is about networking and mutual aid, not visibility in media. At least it should be. Give me less Gretchen more aid workers.
I have considered joining NGOs, but they all require WhatsApp.
and?
want to cry about how coercive those systems are? go ahead. but don’t use it as an excuse not to work to fix the system
And? Jesus people need to get off their high horses sometimes. Yes we all get Facebook is bad. We all get that Whatsapp is not ideal and something like signal is infinitely better.
To use Whatsapp as a reason why you won’t do good? Fucking weak bro.
George is not the sensible one
he had his moments
Me in my 40s, who’s been feeling this way since my teens:
It’s not a competition, and if it is, it’s not one anyone should want to win
It’s not a meme about making it a competition. It’s a meme to point out how this shit isn’t new nor novel.
Relevant username?
to quote jreg, “these people have physical bodies”
Make an app that tracks them … it seems to bother them. They dont seem to care if companies spy on us, so spy on them. Im sure nothing bad could happen just from an app that shows the physical location of a politician, CEO, or billionaire.
Make an app
I’ve seen this Rick & Morty episode.
Watch the world burn.
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This is sorta why I think capitalism is both a useful pragmatic system and a terrible idea.
It’s the whole greed is good thing. It’s this clever little hack of “well let’s let the greedy sociopaths be that way, and we will just arrange the game so it benefits everyone.”
It sorta work in the beginning stages of capitalism. They realize that they can make profits exploiting workers and go to town and consumers reap the benefits of there being lots of stuff to buy to meet their needs.
Sure your boss is an amoral exploiter, but it means the widgets get made.
But capitalism is not static, it’s a game played over time where those least bound by morals and ethics trap greater and greater rewards. Leading to where much of western civilization finds itself today, beholden to a handful of the worst human beings.
The only mechanism to keep them in check is competition, and it’s a system that devolves over time to have little to no competition, so we shouldn’t be surprised.
I often wonder what the world could be if we took seriously the job of restraining the impulses of that 5% of the population. We teach young children to share and be kind and the golden rule. Then you reach adulthood and realize that all of that is still true but unrewarded, and the way to get ahead is to exploit people. The wealthiest and most “successful” amongst us in this society are those most willing to exploit their fellow man for their own benefit. You get a billion dollars by being willing to steal a billion dollars from your workers. No one can earn a billion dollars you have to have thousands of people working for you everyday, and for each one of those people you have to be willing to extract value out of them, what in any other context we would call theft.
just got to reset it every 100 years or so. we may be overdue
Many ancient societies had recurring debt jubilees on approximately that time scale… for basically this reason.
Debt jubilee season comes, everyone’s debts are wiped clean.
Sucks for the lenders, great for the borrowers, but also everyone knows when it is scheduled.
That is pretty close to a reset of the playing field of your economy in many ways…
… though of course slavery did also exist in many of these societies, so… far from a perfect reset.
Adam Smith agreed with you in the 1600s when he thought up the system. He specifically said that capitalism couldn’t be the end goal, but he wasn’t aware of what the end goal would be, just that it would necessarily benefit the people, not the rich.
Well, comrade smith maybe fucked up.
He didn’t fuck up, and his work is important in early leftist literature.
The fuck up was everyone after him not listening except to the bits they wanted too.
people reading selectively
I think on some subjects, when writing publicly, that really needs to be considered.
Capitalism might be the mechanism, but it’s not the root cause. Any system will eventually be corrupted in the same way without constant vigilance.
The worship of capitalism certainly contributed. Capitalism needs heavy controls.
I think we underestimated the harm that capitalism would do in terms of normalizing greedy sociopaths. It’s turned into a giant propaganda machine that serves to gaslight the masses into believing that the sociopaths are good and right and deserve what they’ve stolen.
And we’ve built a world that silos people away from other normal people so it’s even harder to use your community to fight back.
It’s going to be incredibly hard to do any sort of reset now. Most people refuse to even see any sort of problem with it.
Another pseudoscientific theory about how a small minority of society are naturally bad in a way that causes all social ills?
And of course none of this is exacerbated by said socirty. It’s your fault if you don’t fit thos artoficial thing we built, which cannot fail-only be failed.
I mean there are some options for dealing with that.
A. Early monitoring in childhood followed by extensive therapy
B. Eugenics if a genetic link is identified (least savory option and likely not possible)
C. Rebuild our social circles and communities
To expand on C, I think a lot of what you’re identifying as narcissistic behavior or sociopathy is actually caused by the destruction of our communities. The way our society is built it rewards anti-social action with money and it’s cold and depersonalized. It’s easy as a upper executive to fire 500 people you’ve never once met and you will never meet. You don’t have to know them beyond a few spreadsheets of data. People will absolve themselves of personal responsibility and refer to the financial aspects. Additionally, our communities have been destroyed. The addition of the nuclear family structure encourages you to provide as much as possible to as few individuals instead of valuing extended family and community. Plus in some places in the world it is possible to go days or weeks without ever interacting with members of your community.
Eugenics
hitler approves
Fun fact: Eugenics doesn’t have to mean killing them.
Yeah these days it’s just altering in vitro. We have the tech, but we are rightfully frightened by it. It’s hard to deploy in a way that it does good and is not abused
Even sterilizing people to try and produce a specific result is eugenics.
… not that I’m in favor of it without a TON of causational evidence for something, since plenty of great people come from absolutely shit parents. Not to mention that not all people with “undesirable” traits behave undesirably.
The sad thing is we do have the potential to shape a healthier human race. The potential to cure all genetic diseases and have a better future. We have the technology today.
Unfortunately we cannot be trusted to use it. It will 100% be used to target minorities and harm people to create something racists ideal. It’s kinda sad
Dude we can’t even take polio. You think we’re ready to fuvk with our own genomes for this shit?
Individualism is a dead end, the forces you describe are powerful because society is organized for their benefit. The cruel and psychopathic have avenues to make themselves useful to the ruling class. This is a social construct not an individual virtue or vice.
We can only make changes together. I def think people need to be more individually courageous, but the most common source for courage is social support, not some inherent trait. Some people are oppositional defiant in a way that can make them practical for a time, but without something larger steering circumstances then these individuals end up becoming tyrants all the same.
I agree that this is the root of all human problems, but I think there’s more to it also. There aren’t 95% of people willing to resist it. I imagine the opposite kind of people, those deeply selfless and incapable of tolerating injustice, also make up less than 5% of people.
And so even though only a small minority are naked power seekers, something like 80+% of all humans are just looking for someone to tell them what to do. They don’t want responsibility, power, or self-determination. They want to be made to feel safe, and be given orders.
I think you’re right, and this is why it’s so important to protest and create a movement, be visible and make a noise in every way you can. Those 80% will follow a movement but they won’t act as individuals.
Don’t forget their cowardly base that will claim ignorance of the Paradox of Tolerance while they claim those who are intolerant of intolerance are just as bad and evil. Those who would step in front of the only solution found to work with any permanency. The fascist apologists and enablers.
Fucking YES. Thank you, extremely well said
Luigi.gif
I don’t think this is a long term sustainable solution.
Only needs to work a couple thousand times.
Hard to see such a thing. At least we can take some satisfaction from Luigi events.
That’s what many think about punitive systems. And you are correct. But we are at the magical point where a large number are just fine with that.
It’s a temporary short term solution that is repeatable. If my time working under capitalism has taught me anything it’s that a temporary short term solution works perfectly well as a long term solution if you accept it as maintenance. Just gotta clear out the cunts every once in a while.
Is authoritarianism also cluster b? There are a lot of people who seem to get off on being part of the group. Like, it brings them chemical joy to be screaming in a crowd about how that other group of people need to die. Those people kind of suck, too.
I don’t think every maga hat is a narcissist, but a lot of them are trash humans who value their in-group feelings of solidarity over everything else.
Yes.
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We need a preventive cure for authoritarian personality, rather than the extant extremely violent cure.
I imagine early intervention helps, but right-wing (ie: authoritarian) people don’t want to invest in quality education. Not the kind with a good teacher-student ratio and time spent on social skills.
Well yes, the virus is tryong to breed. It does that in pig shit ignorance and filth. Suffering and inchoate rage.
Well it would be nice if we ever return to normalcy to overturn CU and clamp down HARD on the issues that enable the rampant abuse of the system. Like I’m talking union busting levels of “No you’re complicit in this more than X% you are out, forever”
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Spoilers: Democrats have already failed repeatedly on this task. Americans are also too stupid and stubbornly independent to properly unionize against this BS, so it’s suffering under tyrants as your only option unless you can figure out a way to unbrainwash the dumbest mother fuckers in this county.
Has anyone made a tarpit for these types? Some sort of scoring system to trap them in.
Fascist uprisings are the closest we’ve come.
Oh my god this essentialist bullshit.
Yeah some inbred ancient greek ivory tower assholes couldnt teach someone to be good in between beating their slaves and fucking their kids and believing lightning came from an old guy with a big fluffy beard whike changing nothing about their surroubdings. Someone else tried one thing three thousand years ago, and im all out of ideas. guess it’s impossible. Shows great passion for the subject.
This is all fundamental elemental unchangeable nature of humanity. Our social system has no effect on what that is or how it manifests. the system has zero culpability for the outcomes it produces, it could have been no different.
And we obviously know this. You can look at neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat baguettes and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat deep fried twinkies and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat poutine and neofascist empires where they eat borscht and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat fried rice(i know, but too many distinct regional cuisines) and neoliberal colonialist empires where they eat sushi. Plus accounts from a bunch of their current and former subjects, and historic accounts of monarchic slave societies. Weve got data on people from all kinds of society. All kinds of culture. And they all turn out some percentage of shameless manipulative bastard-monster. Allof them! Every possible kind, even the cutthroat neoliberal one that just eats boiled sheep! So obviously no ither proportion of humanity is possible. Weve even done formal studies on upperiddle class male college students from a couple of these places to confirm it!
And, look, heres where we get into much harder science: it’s in the DSM as a disorder. That means its always bad and always gonna be bad. There’s no social arrangement or technology that can make it benign. Just cant be done. That’s not just some shit some guy decided so he could get home and start nursing the hangover from his four martini lunch and the mountainous pile of cocaine he snorted for his daily insight into normal humanity-that’s a fact.
For fascists, sure. If we killed all the sociopaths, who would cut us up when we’re sick/injured and run into our burning buildings?
If we kill all the mentally ill, who ths fuck would make our art? The actually good stuff?
You’re just asking why I think it would be good to harm people who have done nothing wrong. I wouldn’t. I can point to several posts in my history that will show I’m not a eugenicist. Which appears to be the brush you’re reaching for.
Maybe you were replying to thee wrong comment.
Yeah, probably.
I keep being told it’s my own fault for not voting. I’m not even a non-voter. But every time things get worse, I’m told that I deserve it for not making Texas a winning Dem state by… idfk, sneaking into the back of a voting booth and spamming “D” into the console until someone drags me out.
People love an easy answer to excuse why they can treat someone else with less care or not listen to them as if they are already wrong. We love the little lies that make life easier. Its far less effort needed than trying to understand.
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I’m right there with you. For all of you that say to just wait this out — how many of these am I supposed to wait out?! I’ve been doing this since Reagan, and it’s only gotten worse.
Insert (I’m tired boss) meme.
I just want out at this point.
Not too many more; you’ll either die in the camps here, or, after a couple brief decades of the living envying the dead, the planet will no longer support life, and you will necessarily die.
This is the refreshing optimism I come here for. Finally someone talking sense!
There is an alternative, but it is jnfortunately against the rules. So either die in the camps, or kill yourself (on a planetary scale)
Personally im very lazy, hoping i end up in the camps.
Yeah! A coward dies a thousand deaths, and with climate change, those who survive fascism, if we dont depose the billionaires, will surely add some zeroes.
Vote.
*Protest-no-voters in shambles downvoting.
Organize.
Voting is doing the bare minimum.
And protest-no-voting is actively punching yourself in the face.
Definitely! Always vote, even if you have low confidence in the election’s integrity or your influence on the overall outcome. You have nothing to lose by voting anyway.
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Sign a strike card, baby https://generalstrikeus.com/ we’ve got a long way to go but I’ve been handing out flyers on the street… Spread the decentralized jeezus-i-wish-we-had-labor-unions word. Please. No really… I’m begging.
I’ll participate, but I’m not giving out my info. I’d rather not be on as many lists as possible.
Labor unions are good, but they’re not the be-all end-all of wbat we need; they’re a moderate compromise measure. A good one, but if it atarts getting too bloody or hard to take a necessary internediate goal because the state deployed all its violence and disinformation, well… The state has already deployed all its violence and disinformation.
It does seem like the number of non-violent options are dwindling. I really meant that I wish we’d had strong labor unions for the last several decades, as I don’t think we would be in quite the same mess as we are.
If an action works, it will be defined as violence. There’s a point to playing the theatrics of an action, and most things are not best accomplished by shootin’ dudes en masse, but our opponents have taken nonviolence off the table, and pretending otherwise is masochist or suicidal.
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too damn true. same as it ever was.
Given that this is Lemmy I suspect that OP’s “solution” is to repeat yet another failed geopolitical experiment.
Actually we’ll do it different this time, smartass
This is why we need the /s. I can’t tell if this is funny depressing or just depressing depressing.
It seemed to work well for Russia. Oh wait… no, no it did not at all.
I see pedo Zionist meme I downvote
You may not be able to stop the idiocy, but you can stop the feeling of isolation. Get out there and connect with political groups that are working against fascism.
went to my first protest this decade for labor day! met some really interesting folks and found a couple local groups i’m gonna meet up with later this week. can’t really recommend this enough
try thinking smaller. where can you help in your community? volunteering is my emotional bastion against the larger, more uncontrollable horrors of the world.
Bingo. Anytime I see a too-large way of thinking, I try to suggesting thinking small. You can’t save the rainforest, but you can plant a tree in your community, you know? And it feels good.
I volunteered as en EMT for about 10 years, until the second kid came, and COVID and all that. It was difficult, took me away from work and my family, long days, mentally and emotionally taxing at times, and one of the more rewarding experiences I’ve had in my life. And it was all done within a few miles of my home. I (like to think) I had an impact on my community, and it feels good.
I second this, and add that if you have an area of expertise, you will have more impact if you utilize that expertise. Some examples:
- If you have access to a commercial kitchen during off hours, you could cook food for the poor.
- If you are good at socializing, try meeting with local political groups, influencing election candidates, or running for office.
- If you are a software engineer, volunteer on an open-source project related to a cause that you care about.
And if you don’t want to spend effort, you can always donate to a cause.
As well as helping, make sure to connect with these people and build up community bonds. Our power comes from unity.
