I grew up in a conservative area, in a conservative household, survival preppers even.

I was raised my whole youth with the narrative that we were collecting guns and supplies for the day that the federal government starts taking away our rights and interfering with democracy.

For my entire younger life, growing up in the cold war, it was the back-country, blue-blooded American way to push back against Russia, against threats to our vote, against government overreach and intereferring in both people’s personal lives as well as the business of other countries.

I changed ideology as soon as I escaped and got a taste of reality, but I still do believe we need to protect our democracy with force, and now that’s the opposite of the conservative stance and it’s like living in the Upsidedown. I understand how we got here, but I am constantly astonished how fucking stupid everyone is. Everyone.

I know this will get some reactions, but IMO conservatives change much easier than progressives, particularly leftists.

Conservatives have no consistent values, no coherent mental value system, they are reactionary and will shift gears like the wind changes. A good, charismatic leader can easily set a new tone for a whole nation that calms down a large percentage of them, as I’ve seen a few times in my decades. They don’t have to even agree with the new leadership, they just have to feel like it’s their time to sit in the time-out box and they will remain quiet and grumble to themselves about imagined slights. They are children and have the attention spans of children.

I’m more concerned about the many, many progressives and leftists who are thirsty for retribution, because everything is remembered, a score has been kept and it drives a need for validation, for even a shred of recognition of the harm that the conservative movement has done over the years. These aren’t un-relatable feelings, but it’s going to start pushing the pendulum again, add to that the large number of sabotaging forces who work tirelessly to amplify the worst takes on both sides, fanning flames, trying to stoke contention.

Yah he learned from the second time, never climbed another tree even as we lived in the woods.

That’s a great story, I appreciate your sharing.

I want our species to be judged by how far out of our way we go to help those who have no impact on our own lives, and how much we value even the smallest lives and the connection between us and other species even.

I’m actually delighted my pushback made you fly off the handle and spit incoherencies and ignore my points, it tells me I hit the right buttons.

If my efforts at reminding people that we still have a future, hope and community and ways to fight oppression made you this mad, then it tells me all I need to know about what you’re doing here and why. Have a good one.

Yah there people in here, on Lemmy of all places, making the argument for the stability of businesses.

I feel the effort we put into the smallest acts of kindness is a much better measure of who and what we are as a species.

I’m sure some of the folks responding in here may be on the spectrum or failing to express their arguments and reasoning in a neurotypical way, but for the rest, I hope they actually never learn what it feels like to be the entity depending on someone or something to save them for no reward to themselves. It’s a rotten, hopeless feeling and the callousness that people embrace to justify allowing others to experience that, well that’s a state that spreads quickly through our society when we allow it to fester. Always push back on heartlessness.

You’re digging yourself into a hole that seems oblivious to normal human feelings and getting irate at the responses. This is all you baby.

No no, I’m sure that old wooden pole with the ceramic donut insulator, splinters and dangling wires is powering like fucking NORAD or something. 🙄

No really, thank you. There is a segment of people who think themselves “progressive” in spaces like Lemmy but are utterly heartless and exist like soulless automations when it comes to the stuff that actually matters in our lives like protecting the innocent and making sacrifices for small things that make someone or something else have a better experience in life, even if the risk “outweighs” the reward. It’s denying the human experience to make that kind of calculation.

Imagine how much better our world would be if everyone, everywhere stopped what they were doing to help someone or something innocent in need. We wouldn’t have the fucking Epstein files right now. It actually makes my blood boil and I deleted a few comments here before moderating my tone to be more civil.

WRONG!

Freedom of speech.

Freedom of information.

The hoax that we have the best anything.

I could go on. Americans are massively deluded into thinking they’re special and our country is amazing because they’ve never set foot outside of it. Even our internet feed is radically tuned towards isolationism. We are slightly above the “communist” countries that so many people in the US decry for building great firewalls or cutting their people off from the outside world.

Anyone who’s ever traveled and opened up their youtube account in another country’s airport even would know just how limited our vision of the world really is, and how much our news and speech is controlled.

He was my only friend for many years, living in isolated areas and being kept out of school I didn’t have much else besides shitty parents and siblings that just wanted to get high, the whole idea of people being heartless towards innocent beings in need of aid makes my blood run cold and the back of my neck feel hot with anger.

Lemmy, looking at an old wooden pole with splinters and hanging wires and old ceramic insulators: “LET THE CAT DIE, THAT THING IS POWERING THE ENTIRE WESTERN SEABOARD, RUSSIA WILL TAKE ADVANTAGE AND INVADE, MILLIONS WILL DIE.”

That power line fed some houses. It’s an old wooden residential line, they also usually have redundancy because these things have to be serviced all the time.

It’s crazy how many people in here are like “FUCK LIFE UTILITIES ARE MORE IMPORTANT” no wonder we’re in an age of heartlessness where people don’t care about harm to innocents.

Isn’t Lemmy supposed to be mostly rational intelligent people?

Are you fucking insane.

When I was about 11 I had a cat I loved dearly get stuck in a massive cottonwood tree over my house for 5 days, it was agonizing listening to him cry every day.

My parents were cold and heartless about it and joked that there would be a “cat skeleton tree” in our yard.

I tried everything, finally got an older sibling to help throw a fishing line up and pull up a bucket with wet food. It didn’t make it quite to his limb, but eventually the smell drove him to climb towards it, and from there I was able to coax him down. He was covered in ants and dehydrated but he was fine.

A couple weeks later he ran up a pine tree and got stuck for 4 days again. This time I fashioned a pole and just knocked him off the branch. He fell about 20 feet into a pile of leaves and pine needles and was fine.

They reroute and turn off sections of wiring all the damn time for maintenance, they have crews out in the field who are literally going around, turning some lines off after turning others on, and doing routine work on lines, transformers and other components. It’s not life and death, it’s just a company being cheap and lazy.

If having a love for life and wanting better outcomes and hope and inspiration for innocent life baffles your sense of logic, then maybe your sense of logic is flawed and holding you back from emotional growth.

I would be astonished if that janky, raggedy wooden pole connects to anything but neighborhood housing.

I strongly feel this time around it’s going to be a bigger spectacle, a bigger event all around because the tone has shifted. Watch nightly network news for an example. If you can choke through the liberal slop, they are featuring stories now about ICE acting like terrorists, about the administration lying, about people driving masked agents out of their town, they are painting it like an “underdogs versus the feds” narrative. (Not because the networks are suddenly finding human consciousness, but because this storyline sells.)

Midterms may go either way, but we’ve had too much success either way to discount the power of individual states in changing their representation, and with that, their votes and funding. That’s a huge deal. We just need to break the stranglehold a little and the system could stalemate for the next couple years and that’s enough time for people who aren’t Vance or Harris to start capturing media attention.

Despite the rampant doomerism in Lemmy and other spaces, it’s still very hard to subvert the entire US electoral process, even if they put a lot of money and effort behind it, it’s not like other countries that have been overthrown or had their voting rigged, the administration would need to do whatever they’re going to do 50 times, across a vast landscape of different procedures and policies around voting and security.

For example, if it was that easy to rig US elections we wouldn’t have seen giant bogeymen like Mamdani and Katie Wilson and other socialists/progressives take so many local leadership seats recently.

Yes, they are going to try to use ICE like their own private mercenary army to intimate voters in blue states, in areas with large populations of immigrants and people of color, that should be expected. And that’s fine, that’s where we meet them.

massive civil war.

We are decades from a “civil war” Tim Pool.

Yes, the problem is the media landscape is corrupted that the average liberal American thinks there’s some bad business going on with ICE but knows nothing about the world past that, because most people are just working 6 - 7 days a week and get their news from Facebook for a half hour every week. The exit polling from 2024 confirms all of this.

The thing we do is we build community and instead of thoughts of “murdering your neighbor” (where the FUCK did that come from) let’s start thinking about TALKING to our neighbors and getting to know them again so that we rebuild the thing that oligarchy is actively trying to take away from us, which is social involvement and community and locality.

The USA isn’t like the Philippines or Turkey or other countries that have been deposed by dictators or foreign powers, we still are made of 50 individual states and those states have a LOT of power. We need to stop looking at the Federal Government like a monolithic empire that can’t be defeated, YOU PAY THEIR BILLS.

Go on https://www.progressivevictory.win/ and find local progressive leaders who you can help support and we kick the legs out of the system that has empowered fascists.

I hate your whole comment, it’s bad and wrong.

Anything in media has to make it past his cabinet of Wormtongues.

It’s well known in the administration that Miller and Rubio and others actively filter his media so he doesn’t see what people are saying about him and the administration.

When he was traveling he turned on the evening news by himself and saw the footage of Alex Pretti being murdered and that’s what led to a sudden shift in course.

Not because he gives a shit about people like Pretti or anyone really, but because of the outrage and hate directed at him. He’s a very simple monster, he wants adoration, he has no morals past that.