ameancow

I have no real idea what you're arguing against, but let me know when the revolution starts. (Bonus points if everyone in it actually knows what they're uprising against, if only there was some kind of narrative or thing we could do that will help make everyone align against a common enemy. Oh well, guess we can skip right past that after all.)

I can’t wait for all this brand loyalty and fan people culture to end.

My blackest pill in my adult life was the realization that we've leveled off as a species. This is as good as it gets.

Our brains made monumental leaps in development over the last half-million years, with the strongest changes being made during the last ice-age, times when resources were scarce, and survival was extremely difficult and humanity was caught up in many wars and fights with other humans and animals and weather alike. Our brains were shaped to do a couple of things better than others: invent stories to explain feelings, and join communities. These adaptations worked amazingly, it allowed us to band together and pool resources, to defend each other and spot signs of danger. These adaptations allowed us to develop language and agriculture and formed our whole society, but lets not forget what they are at heart: brains invent stories to explain feelings, and we all want social identity and in-group. Deeply. This shit is hardwired into us.

Nearly every major societal problem we have today can be traced back to this response system from the average human brain to either invent a story to explain a discomfort, and those discomforts are often the simple desire to have a group identity.

Our world will get more complicated, but our brains aren't moving. We can only push brains so far. They're not designed to know how to form words and do calculus, we trained our brains to do those things, but our systems are far more complicated than language and calculus. Complex problems produce results like lack of necessities, which create negative feelings, which the brain invents stories to explain (or are provided stories by the ruling class.)

So this is it. Nobody is coming. Nothing is changing.

We MIGHT be able to rein in our worst responses over enough time, we MIGHT be able to form large enough groups with commonalities that we achieve tenuous peace. But we will never be a global species, we will never form a galactic empire, we will never rise above war and hate and starvation and greed. Not in our current forms at least. There's no magic combination of political strategies and social messages that will make everyone put down their clubs and knives.

This is it, a cursed, stupid primate on a fleck of dust spinning around a spark in a cloud of sparks, just looking at every problem like it's either a rival tribe or a sabertooth-cat hiding in the bushes. Maybe if we don't destroy ourselves someday our AI descendants will go out into the larger universe, but it certainly won't be us.

Unfortunately, it's not a message that everyone wants to get behind just yet. There are still countless neoliberals and the like who make up the bulk of the population, and they're just apathetic and nihilistic on some level because they've never known community and security and don't want things to change.

The only way people are going to start aligning together is when they start feeling the discomfort, so to this end, I have done a 180-pivot in my own agendas and desires for the future and now I'm an accelerationist, I cheer every time Trump signs some heartless piece of burning shit bill or order, because I know the faster he breaks the system, the faster the countless dumbfounded dipshits will get off their ass and start to try to make things better.

The game the republicans have been playing is to stretch out the actions so that people forget. We have a population with a memory span no greater than 5 years or so, this is why people seemed to forget the chaos of Trump's first term and shrugged and voted for him again. (Among many other reasons.) What we want more than anything right now is for people to NOT forget this pain, we want the hardships to start stacking on top of each other so people don't get a breather, only then will enough people be ready to turn to a new story to explain their pain.

I’m gonna have to ask why you think this strategy is working

I literally just described that it's an effective strategy to change the narrative to class-consciousness over whatever the blazing fuck the left has been trying to do for the last several decades. My evidence is the fact that it works, that people like Sanders make waves, that people cheer when someone kills a wealthy CEO, that people engage with the narrative.

What are you expecting? Some tactic with 100% conversion rates? Delusions. Of fucking COURSE you can't extend solidarity through a population that easily, what you do is change it enough. Narratives have momentum, people are a liquid in large numbers, you are not trying to contain all the liquid, you cannot possibly. What you do is divert the course. You don't blow up a meteor heading towards Earth, you will just get shotgunned. What you do is alter the course ever so slightly over long periods of time. Russia has been doing this to us for decades and we ignored it.

It's a simple tactic that people can do without government support, and without even political alignment. We have been finger-wagging at the right for a century trying to tell them to be better, they can't be better, they're just our population's dumb, there will always be a dumb segment of the population. Nations who give a flying fuck about their future make sure that the dumb are both provided for and they provide a narrative that they can engage with and get behind.

Since we've never done either of those things, others have and have made the problem worse. But it can be turned around and it will be, the question is who is who we divert them into hating, and who is going to be holding the leash at the end.

Panty theft, naturally.

working class solidarity is the first step

There is a reason every time FOX News brings Bernie Sanders in to debate socialism or some such tripe, he ends up converting the entire panel to his ideas and it turns into the hosts asking him questions about things they weren't even aware of in terms of class divide.

Seriously, this is LITERALLY THE REASON WHY THEY ARE TRYING TO DIVIDE US WITH RACE. If we don't realize that the very same deluded idiots who believe these lies are also our best bet for kicking the assholes out of government, we're JUST as bad as they are. Yes, they are doing atrocious things and they are reprehensible.

But even if a magic genie appeared and gave us a new, amazing, socialist president who wanted to bring our country to the 24th century and beyond, we would STILL have to live next to the millions and millions of dumbfounded fools who will always believe the simpler story. Education may help, but not for generations. We have to work with the hand we've been dealt.

Start spreading the story that it's rich versus poor, that it's wealthy elites crushing us all, left or right, that we're all being fooled and played against each other. Read up on economic distribution in the US and listen to some of Bernie's speeches and take fucking notes. We CAN change this, but we have to make a better story for the morons to follow.

One thing on this list will kill you a lot faster than the other things.

That's right, sliding down a hillside on a slip-and-slide covered with crisco is by far the surest way to harm yourself, especially if you haven't done meth beforehand.

The sad, scary news here is that Miller represents an actual segment of the population.

Those nutcases who scream incel nonsense out of nowhere on a reddit post? Those facebook messages where a complete stranger starts cussing you out for being a woman, being dark-skinned? For posting a picture of yourself smiling? These are the people who are Stephen Miller. He's an archetype right now, and yes this is revolting to think about, but we've nurtured or allowed the nurturing of communities of these broken, sad messes of humans. They are deeply wrecked by lifetimes of self-hate and shame and sexual insecurity and there are far, far more of them than any of us realize and yeah, we should be worried.

The fun part about fascist takeovers is when they take power, they stop trying to hide what they really are.

The thing that makes fascism self-destruct in every instance in history is that they never actually had a "playbook." They had one trick, one narrative to get them to the top and they leave a wake of ruin behind them to get there, then they consume the host like botflies in the skin of the nation. This is why they're going to try to stop elections and mettle with democracy broadly, because they know they will never be able to maintain a playbook narrative with this wild pack of ravenous orcs pillaging the countryside.

The real Russian plot we've all missed completely has far, far less to do with paying Trump to sell them documents. That's the 2-dimensional public face of a cold-war that never ended and has been devastatingly effective against the USA.

The real Russian attack that we may never fully comprehend is exactly what they've done in other countries that they've subsequently annexed, which is making the general population stop caring about what's true or not. It's frighteningly easy to poison the well of public knowledge. You simply pour funding into efforts to boost BOTH SIDES of every social issue. When social debates and your nation's interests are ramped up and the rhetoric gets more and more extreme on both sides of an issue, when every story on both sides becomes suspect, people simply tune out or stop caring about what's true or not, and this is exactly where we are. Most people are more willing to just throw their arms up and go find a distraction than try to sift through what's real or not.

It was even easier to pull off in the USA than anywhere else because we have a built-in policy of fierce independence and individuality. We don't have communities around us, we don't have social circles that will make us want to step up our game, we don't have groups of people we care about telling us we're wrong, we don't have help from anywhere but inside our own heads. And if you've never been taught how your own thoughts can be wrong, if you've been fed the "special birthday boy" narrative for so long that you think highly of yourself, truth will seem toxic and poison because it will tell you things about yourself that will hurt. We don't seek out pain as a species, we use pain a signal to avoid a thing.

You can google "KGB tactics for destabilizing nations" and spend weeks reading about what's being done to us right now. But most people who read my message here will immediately feel that sneaking doubt or words of caution because "how do we even know what's real anymore."

If you're a republican at this point you're one of two classes:

1. Elite, business owner, capitalist. Out for yourself and with enough money and resources and support to do what you want and evade hardships with ease while blaming people below you for their own problems. These are the people who know that if the system changes, they will lose their benefits and comforts and have every motivation in the world to keep pushing right-wing ideology even if they don't actually believe in it on some level. They have the luxury of not actually caring.

2. One of the people below the elite who work two or more jobs or can't get ahead no matter what they do because the system is designed to keep the poor where they are and keep filtering the wealth upwards. These are the people without the time or education to learn why their lives are trash, and manage to watch 30 minutes of FOX or OAN news clips on facebook every Sunday night before bed so they truly, honestly believe that immigration and trans people are the source of all their problems and genuinely don't understand why the good guys aren't doing something about all the bad guys, because this is the extent of their mental strength.

Whether or not they were being ironic, we HAVE to stop capitulating to corporations deciding how we speak and what we can and can't talk about. They successfully turned our own social messaging into a justification to block out conversations about issues that are actually affecting us.

(No, to the chud about to cry about being censored for spreading misinformation about vaccines, that doesn't go against corporate incentives, that goes against reason and knowledge, there's a difference and if you can't tell, you will when you get older.)