It just took a handful of connected conspiracists with no principles and some forward thinking about how to sow the worst seeds.

Names like Bannon, Epstein and others who funded them worked in the dark and with great amounts of support from a variety of institutions, worked to simultaneously make fascism cool and make average Americans too distracted to care. Eroded attention spans, people fighting online until nobody knows how to relate to each other anymore, dissolving communities and amplifying the most ridiculous or rage-baiting takes on both sides of ever issue.

That’s all it took for people to stop caring as cartoonishly iconic fascists and nazis took power in the US, and the whole time we were thinking that cartoonishly stereotypical “bad guys” belong only in hollywood and can’t possibly be real.

We all said that to some degree as the cartoonishly iconic and stereotypical villains rose in power and people were too burnt-out or distracted to give it any deeper thought.

The only people Newsom appeals to are neo-liberals ashamed that Trump won’t keep up appearances and isn’t keeping his criminal imperialism masked in the liberal pageantry that we’ve done for decades or centuries in the US.

He is courting the right, he made a day to celebrate Ronald Fucking Reagan, jesus christ how loud of a dog-whistle do you all need.

Tankies are just roleplay kids, they hate everyone who isn’t roleplaying also. Newsom is an actual threat to democracy wrapped in a too-wide smile and promises of a “return to normal.” He would be more dangerous than Trump and he would do his damage behind a facade of national cooperation and stability while empowering the lunatics like Thiel and Musk.

I’m glad I can use reasoning and deduction to actually figure things out or I would be equally stuck in a black-and-white false dichotomy.

For example, I assumed you’re a bot immediately, then I made a small effort and checked for clues, and found your first mod action was a comment removed for asking about microwaving your balls, which tells me you’re likely a human. But I also know in relatively short time even those clues will be meaningless as tactics get more and more advanced. It’s just like always being on guard when you go outside. You can be on guard for danger without always being anxious or paranoid.

See? it’s not so hard.

Ah, another victim of the chaos, flailing and directing energy at an entire narrative spun by people deliberately having dedicated time and energy to making you specifically feel outraged at people who are your ally, filling all the blanks with your worst case fantasies and the lovely opportunity to police your own side.

Get off the internet. https://www.progressivevictory.win/ has people you can support and actually get off your ass and help for local representation and leadership. Nobody is coming. Nobody is saving us. There will be no revolution. Rebuild community and drop the rage.

If the unpopular voices of a random person on the internet are too worrisome and problematic for you to focus on what matters, you’re no good to any of us.

MAGA DESTROYED

TRUMP FANS REVOLT

GOP CRUMBLING IN SHAME

MAGA REGRETTING THEIR VOTE

Etc, etc.

it’s all utter bullshit, the base hasn’t budged. It’s still between 23% and 28% and holding very steady in that range from the start. This is just the algorithm pushing stuff to Lemmy browsers that it knows will get the most views.

Now the nuance here is a LOT of liberal America who voted for Obama also voted for Trump, because again, atomization and algorithms, and basically a population completely tuned out.

I would be a lot more impressed if I saw a headline that reads “MEDIAN MIDDLE-CLASS VOTERS START USING CRITICAL THOUGHT AND LOOKING UP INFORMATION ABOUT THINGS BROADLY” because that would mean something far more profound than anything else we’ve seen so far.

These people are the normal, liberal, middle-class of America and have the greatest political capital, more than any other group, because they are the breadbasket of our nation’s tax revenue and disposable-income shopping habits.

The second strongest form of political capital is armed groups of nationalists who will fight and die for their nation’s flag.

Where does progressive political capital sit on this scale? Somewhere below “unarmed protestors politely asking for civility.”

We need to understand how power works if we ever want actual change in this country, and it’s not hugboxes and performative inclusivity, it’s flags and guns and money.

Too many people have grown so massively comfortable with discord that entire communities of people just relying on each other for social contact leave their voice chat or cameras running 24/7 so they can be around each other.

They would break down having to change platforms, and there are LOT of younger people in this demographic.

Personally I think it’s a deeply sad way to live and socialize, and they would probably largely be healthier if the whole thing shut down, but I recognize how lonely and depressing the world is and how everyone wants to find comfort with others.

I had to go through all of this so many times when struggling with a failed life and business.

I had ONE good agent who helped me and reminded me that I pay for all these programs, and the agent’s job is to help us qualify for them, not to judge nor moralize any part of it.

All the other agents judged and moralized to a degree that I eventually let my SNAP funding expire because I couldn’t keep going in there and facing the people scouring my business receipts for some implied wrongdoing.

Despite that, it’s still your right, you still paid for all of it, even if you don’t pay income tax, there is tax on anything and everything you buy and do, so you’re not doing anything other than collecting what you’ve loaned to the government. Hold your head up and look them in the eye if they ever challenge you, and apply for every goddamn program you’re eligible for, and if anyone gives you shit about it, you talk to their manager, and if they don’t help, talk to that person’s manager.

(One agent who was openly hostile and lectured me about “looking capable of working” and had a bad attitude through the whole process actually got fired because I complained, the manager of that DES office actually called me to let me know and to tell me they felt bad about it and that it’s not their job to be judgemental or invalidate others.)

Someone said it best describing Destiny 2, that it’s a perpetual feeling of building towards something that’s always just around the corner, but when you get around that corner, it’s just more grinding and pushing premium content, just around the corner. It’s gonna huge bro, I promise. Big stuff coming. Just ahead, just buy one more season bro.

I notice it’s a reoccurring theme for people to go through stuff like that with MMOs.

I think we all have our check-out bottom we will fall to when life hurts too much, some people will just rot in bed and some will watch old movies and some will camp in the woods. We have breaking points in life, and sometimes an online game where people seem to be having normal lives just feels like being someone still connected to the world. When I was little and my parents would go on week-long drug benders and spend the whole time screaming at each other, I would check out into comics and books, so it’s probably where I learned how to do it inadvertently.

The best pushback for this message is to post the entire interview between Newsom and Ben Shapiro and then tell me again who cares about people.

No, I disagree.

Trump is creating a chaotic shitstorm, but it’s almost entirely performance and theater and mindless destruction, all focused around him and his personality.

If you get someone in there with the same agendas and intentions, but who is cunning enough to mask it under populism and pretending to care about people while signing into law bills that will allow capital to have unrestricted access to our lives, allow them to take part in our politics even more and in the open, packing the courts with corporate aligned-judges… well Liberal america will be HAPPY with this, they just don’t want to see all the violence in the street, they want stability and the image of peace, which will let someone like Newsom soak up all the adoration for “making America normal again” while signing away all of our futures in a much less openly opposable way.

Trump caused the wound, but someone like Newsom will rub the sewage into it.

I fully agree, and you can just look around here for an example of what they intended for this to do, lots of lefties here screaming and crying that we need to do a civil war or some shit, and that the election will be stolen and voting is useless.

(For bonus points, check the account ages on many of these people.)

I just don’t think it’s going to have the impact they think it will, I think there’s going to be a public sentiment steamrolling them. People always vote out the incumbent leadership when they’re struggling and unhappy and I’ve never seen the country less secure and more fed-up with the prices of shit and the distracting culture-war nonsense.

A long, tireless campaign of turning all of our social discourse and social pressure into online arguments and forum exchanges has made the bulk of America’s literate people tune out of political involvement entirely, how do we think there’s any chance of a “revolution” like so many people are calling for?

We can’t get enough people on-board for “general” strikes, we can’t get average people who want the same thing to agree on basic facts about reality like if science is valid and if vaccines work, we can’t get average, literal people to even want to be around other people anymore. Dating and sex have fallen off a cliff, people are more lonely than they’ve ever been, while at the same time clinging to their discord friend groups with snarling defensiveness when you suggest that they need to socialize more. Asociality has become an identity.

We can rebuild a positive movement if we focus on our communities, our neighbors and neighborhoods and our schools and workplaces, we can get people to connect again and start working towards group goals… but it takes a kind of work that most online leftists want NOTHING to do with, which is actual work towards better outcomes that they may not see themselves, because all of this takes a long time and a lot of patience and persistence.

The shot reminded me of Elder Scrolls Online at first, and I had that very real PTSD.

When I was going through the worst part of my life, losing everything, burying my family and pets, closing down my business and having my home foreclosed due to family medical issues, I played Elder Scrolls for a couple years for no other reason than to spend time with someone I cared about. I hated the game, it was exciting for the first couple hours until I realized how far it deviated from the actual franchise and how limited the gameplay really was, how everything was just a funnel towards premium content and skins.

I drank like a fish and laid in trash watching my life fall apart as I sat in Elder Scrolls listening to people chatter and watching them duel, because I didn’t want to be alone because I didn’t trust myself to be alone.

I did start over and everything is a lot better now, but holy shit, that game ruined Morrowind, Skyrim and the entire game world for me.

We have ZERO leadership to capitalize on momentum by people marching and protesting, this is why BLM and No Kings had the highest turnout of protestors in history but led to NOTHING.

This isn’t a matter of people being complacent, this is people waiting for a “perfect leader” who will never come.

At least the right is so dumb that they will latch onto anyone, warts and all, to be their “daddy will save us” figurehead. It’s utterly broken and deficient on every level, but it becomes actual movement and political capital.

We can’t even get liberals and progressives to agree “if it’s okay to carry the American flag” and that’s why we have lost ALL our ground and why things are going to get worse.

Let me repeat that so you and everyone really get it.

Nobody is coming. It’s going to get worse.

I’m still wondering if this is going to be another case of themselves shooting themselves in the dick.

Most major urban centers and areas with the most electoral value are populated by metropolitan people and immigrants who already are well-used to carrying their passports and copies of all their validating paperwork. I travel a lot and know a lot of immigrant families, they almost all always carry a passport as primary identification (especially right now) and have photocopies of their paperwork and related documents.

Meanwhile, across most of rural, white hicksville America, people often don’t even have ID because they never left their town, and those who do may have their driver’s license and not much else.

I am really unsure what the administration’s plan is here. I figured they would have rolled out a voter ID law that actually helps them.

Ironically, passports which most non-native-born Americans already own.

It’s projected this is going to hurt red states more than blue, since most midwest white-as-fuck Americans who never left their hometown and are scared of the whole world don’t have a shred of identification past their driver’s license.

Meanwhile, most immigrant families I know have their passports and copies of their birth certificates on-hand at all times.

We are about to see Kim Jong Un outsource the country’s desperate need for overhaul to his own daughter to implement radical reforms so the country has a future, and then she will either succeed or more likely get coup’d and murdered horribly by her own relatives and generals and oligarchs who still run the country.

I’m sure Kimmy will be fine where he retires to though, likely it won’t be North Korea, that’s for sure.

Perfection is the enemy of the good

This is Lemmy, if it’s not the Ultimate Policy that includes everyone, gives every last person exactly what they want WHILE punishing our enemies, WHILE costing nothing and requiring no effort, it’s trash that should be spat on.

doing it just for already-successful artists is a bit random.

I think a lot of people have radical misconceptions about what it means to be a “successful artist” or even what the spectrum of the field looks like for an average creator.

Everyone in this post feeling salty about this whole story are picturing either struggling deviantart furry artists making terrible sonic OC’s for sheltered discord kiddies, or snooty dudes in black turtlenecks having showings of abstract nonsense at galleries in upscale neighborhoods, and nothing in between.

Most artists who survive by art are either making minimum wage grinding out graphics and designs for like, edges of price-tag-holders on magazine racks at drug-store checkouts and the other millions of tiny details that go into making our world deliberate-looking and designed, and most of those kinds of artists are working contract/gig work and aren’t even full-time employees. Employers hate paying artists, there’s a very real stigma and aversion to paying people for creativity and most companies choose either outsourcing small projects at a time, or more and more choosing to just use AI.

A graphic designer can make a logo that redefines a global company’s image and helps launch a multi-billion dollar venture, and make $200 for it. This is why there’s a very real need to fund art unless we want to hand it over to AI entirely and just let the world dissolve into mediocrity and soullessness.