That doesn’t help at all. We are complicit.

No citizenship ever has been in a better position to prevent their government from doing horrible things, and yet we do nothing. We wring our hands and aren’t willing to hurt, let alone die, for what is morally right. The small arms in this country are more than enough to overwhelm the entire place. We have the numbers and the weapons and yes some would have to die. This isn’t even special though, all throughout history people have died for principles, it’s just… we don’t have any.

Have you ever read Of Mice and Men?

Sometimes we have to do hard things.

I disagree with the thinking for yourself part.

I honestly believe that “American independence” has a lot to do with the current state of the system. Bowing to your friends knowledge on a subject is frowned upon. Folding one’s position is seen as weak.

Every day laborer is told they should “form their own opinion”. As if they are anywhere near educated and informed enough to form a conclusion on some of these complex topics.

So that’s one problem.

The next is that money talks. Money informs and money is in the hands of capitalists. They further their ends and have controlled what people thought for a very long time. It is extremely telling to see my grandmother receive the newspaper and go through it like a YouTube conspiracy video. All orchestrated to bring your thought pattern to a predetermined conclusion. Moving forward and backward from there…

What was before that? Town criers? “Go tell the people the news, tell them xyz”.

And after that of course it’s the same just with data aggregation, mining, and algorithms. “Move the opinion 5% in the aggregate in this direction”.

I wish people would be more comfortable identifying experts in their actual social groups and letting people specialize and disperse opinion for the good of the group. They THINK they are but they are not. Often times people sharing something they believe with their friends is not malicious it’s just they are stupid. Like letting me know that the earth is flat this really good guy who is plainly not smart recently did. Like wtf? How does this happen? How do we fix this?

I have no solutions… but independent thought isn’t it I don’t think.