Sorry if the premise is inflammatory, but I’ve been stymied by this for a while. How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country? I get it - not everything is bad now, and not everything was good then. FDR’s internment camps, etc.
That said - our country seems to be at a low point in intellectualism and accountability. The DHHS head is an antivaxxer, the deputy chief of the DOJ is a far-right podcast nutball, etc. Their supporters seem to have no nuance to their opinion beyond “well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”
Have people always been this unserious and unquestioning, or are we watching the public’s sanity unravel in real time? Or am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed, where politicians acted in good faith and people cared about the social order?
Yes
1960s leftism of having race separated water fountains?
I think so yes (there is a stereotype about them for good reason after all), but I think things are trending in an extremely concerning direction and things are going to get worse. I mean, they’re clearly trying to make younger Americans less intelligent, look at what they’re doing with the department of education.
Before micro plastics and covid, we had hook worms in the south and leaded gasoline everywhere.
I blame the Left becoming TOO tolerant of all beliefs and allowing this direct to flourish. We really need to acknowledge that some ideas are too far out of mainstream to not be ridiculed into oblivion.
And this is why the Left can’t win.
It’s too obsessed with purity and infighting to focus on the true enemy.
The fascists, on the other hand, focus on the true enemy, then focus on purity and infighting!
those people you call “fascists” are too selfish to be fascists. Trump and his minions don’t care about their nation or the well being of its state and people.
Fascists are always selfish. The claims about caring about the nation or anything else are always a front. They are the marketing, not the product. The product is always self-enrichment, which is exactly the goal of the Trump regime. They are archetypal fascists.
Most leftists are unarmed finger waggling sign-holders.
We spent the last thirty years making gun control a priority, making anywhere near a blue state or democrat controlled city impossible to buy a gun, making democrat/Leftist protests just impotent and likely helped with police training rather than change policies or influencepoliticians tonl protect LGBTQ.
Meanwhile Bubba and his redneck Republican states allowed him to have his ergonimic advanced arsenals delivered to his front door from online purchases at cheaper prices.
And if you, whoever you are casually scrolling by this random nested comment, as a Leftist who wants to rebuke me, prove it by posting a pic of your gun. That’s right, you don’t have one and can’t protect our trans folk if they needed our help, you think fascist cops would do that. GTFO of here.
I’m reliably accurate to about 800 yards and I really don’t like fascist assholes.
It’s also not hard to buy a gun, that’s just a bunch of baloney, even here in CA. Yes there are carry restrictions, and yes it’s more involved than other states, but buying one is not as difficult as people make it out to be.
That thing looks cool af and Magpul furniture looks decent, but know that MAGA not only own disproportionately way more guns than you, they also aren’t worried about joining militias and regularly train with their morbidly obese friends, meanwhile you are trying to solo these inbred fucks and will 100% die to them if they start shit.
It’s not a Magpul, I forget the brand but it’s super comfy.
My small town is very heavily armed, but is also way more moderate (purple) than anything. Sure we have our far right wingnuts, but they tend to be on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum in these parts. They tried forming a militia a while back, and most everyone in town just laughed at them. A lot of of us enjoy going shooting regularly (when it’s not freezing out), and I’m certainly not trying to take on the gravy seals by myself lol. My good buddies and I have contingency plans in place in case shit goes sideways in the worst of ways.
It’s not a Magpul, I forget the brand but it’s super comfy.
What? Your barrel shroud is Magpul, your pistol grip is Magpul, your bipod is Magpul, your p-mag might be Magpul, and your stock looks like a Magpul too. Your lower looks like Aero and the upper looks like cheap off-brand. Your Vortex optic likely costs more than your entire gun for no reason i can imagine for such a low caliber, and is too high a magnification for 5.56/.223 unless you use +p+ ammo
Did you just purchase this shit and not know what the fuck you own? Please don’t be a stereotype moron Lefty who bought a gun and knows nothing about it and never trains with it (hint, you definitely are).
Damn dude, chill out. You’re assumptions are out of this world and it’s laughable.
I can tell you’re blowing smoke out of your ass because anyone with eyes and rudimentary gun knowledge would be able to tell pretty quickly this is an ar-10, not 15. This was built for me by a buddy, the optic and stock I purchased after the fact. Yes the optic is overkill for this particular rifle, and will likely get transferred to my 30-06. The image is from the shop where we signed the transfer paperwork.
You’re showing your colors as a stereotypical arrogant keyboard warrior, who takes their assumptions and runs a marathon with them, parading around like a pathetic asshat to make yourself feel better. Grow up and be better.
Explain to me how a gun would help you when police or government agents or even just a rowdy local militia come knocking on your door, I’m genuinely interested in hearing how you think that will play out.
It completely changes how they act with you. It goes from them fearlessly stomping you, to respectfully cautious because they don’t want to die. It’s almost as if people only respond to threats of violence. Otherwise why the fuck do we bother building nukes? If Ukraine never gave up their nukes, Russians would have never invaded. If Vietnamese farmers didn’t fight with AKs, that entire region would look different. Go read a fucking history book. Quit being a pacifist pussy
to respectfully cautious
Lmao to quote you, GTFO out here with that
Please elaborate your nonsense comment
I think you better go ask someone on your opposing political spectrum if they’d leave you alone if they found out you had a gun when knocking on your door to arrest or harm you.
Ergonomic is bad now? Should I throw out my ergonomic keyboard? My keyboard might assault someone!
You should work on reading comprehension and I need to work on writing better. If Bubba can shoot you from his diabetic mobility scooter, then ergonomic is good. Don’t know where the fuck you took it as a bad thing
People are down voting you, but I’m hyper left and also believe this. A big one for me is overly sensitive consideration for things that aren’t truly problematic, such as the use of “LatinX.”
A massive majority of us Latinos do not give a shit about this or think its idiotic. A white person definitely decided that the linguistic gendering inherent to Spanish was sexist.
The left has undeniably alienated some of their group (my mum was alienated by trans rights, I was alienated by the DNC, Elon was allegedly alienated by Biden’s EV push ignoring Tesla), but I think the bigger problem is the left doesn’t fight for things people care about.
The right are the only ones in the news cycle (look at how many articles we have about Trump, even when he wasn’t president) which, to anyone who doesn’t treat politics like sports teams, makes you obviously see a thing or true that you support Republicans on. This imo is the critical flaw of the left; I now have no reason to be excited about their platform, and I’m completely numb to anything they say negatively about Trump.
my mum was alienated by trans rights
How in the world does us trying to exist and not be harassed alienate anyone?
Anecdote time: My mother’s wechat have posts claiming schools are doing sex reassignment surgeries on kids in school… (which is obviouly false, I’ve been in school in a blue city)
Yea, facebook and whatever probably have the same shit.
Its the propaganda machine.
She’s not even anti-trans, but she’s “tired of hearing about it” and all the “pandering the left does”
🙄
That’s like the most transphobic thing your mother can say, “I’m tired of trans people,” quit your bs, we know your conservative , there’s a reason why your mom is getting that reaction, because shes hateful
Your mom sounds like kind of an asshole. She was alienated from liberalism because she was tired of hearing about a minority being targeted by a fascist party for existing?
That’s some asshole behavior.
Lol @ thinking Elon Musk was ever ‘left’ he was never even left of center.
Compared to outside of the US, this is true, but within the US he was pretty leftist. He publicly supported UBI, pushed for renewables, donated to the Obama and Hillary campaign, etc. Now he’s anti-trans, pro-Trump x1000, but there used to be a time he cared.
I now have no reason to be excited about their platform
I’m excited about the part where they AREN’T FUCKING FASCISTS.
I’m completely numb to anything they say negatively about Trump.
Then Trump has beaten you through attrition, which was his goal.
Removed by mod
who is the Nazi that was almost president instead of FDR?
Removed by mod
What’s the evidence of Lindberg being behind the kidnapping? I’ve read something about a eugenics angle, that the baby possibly had some deformity. Is this what you’re referring to?
Removed by mod
People who seem reasonable still say there are good people on both sides. I don’t understand that at all! My hairstylist moved here from vietnam as a kid. Last week i made a comment about bezos and he actually said, “both sides…”. I thought my brain was going to pop.
Vietnamese people are very conservative people, not surprising. When I was a public speech course, we had a Viet guy speak and he was very pro war and Republican( this was pre trump(
They’re talking about the moderates on both sides. I can probably assume you aren’t.
They were pretty stupid back in the 90s and got worst over time. Obviously this is a generalization as there are some non-stupids too but judging by the election results they seem to be the minority.
Yes and forgetful as well. Utterly unable to learn from history since the history they are taught is whitewashed.
The requirements for justice includes truth (objective facts of reality not merely opinion or belief or rumors) for accountability, attacking education prevents an ability to evaluate if something presented confidently as truth is truth. It’s a fast track to corruption and injustice.
Putin, Trump, Erdogan, etc style of extreme right wing populist propaganda is to attack truth and prevent justice by weaponizing ignorance. They’re spreading a firehouse of distracting lies, for example staged attacks against people representing their beliefs on facebook and twitter, to a public who is at least in part unable or unwilling to critically evaluate facts of reality from propaganda lies. Another more general example is if you’re not aware of confirmation bias and how it’s used and works due to a lack of education you are going to be much more susceptible to it’s effects when used.
People aren’t necessarily getting dumber other than some temporary dips due to toxic environmental things like lead in fuel or maybe some effects of toxicity we’re not aware of yet, It’s just the people who were already susceptible to fascist rhetoric & con artists are being indoctrinated against education as either unnecessary or harmful, which makes them easier to continue to mass propagandize to with more methods that have fewer rules platforms need to follow compared to older mass media propaganda like newspapers or network TV news.
the same % of Americans have always been stupid. but for a long time it was honest ignorance that made them pliable, in small communities, to conmen… who quickly worked their con and moved on to the next town.
But thanks to the internet connecting disparate crazies, and elevating crazy to a mainstream voice, and then hostile foreign powers elevating that further on social media thanks to the internet, giving it a heavy dose of false legitimacy… its devolved into a unique bouillabaisse of cromagnum hyper-idiocy the likes the world probably has never seen before.
and thank to isolated media bubbles like Fox News and OANN, it will only continue to get worse and worse.
Read the book “bowling alone” if you’re interested in someone’s attempt at researching why we went from collectivism to individualism as a country. There are a large amount of factors but if I were to take a crack at it, I’d list a few: TV, the Internet, smart phones, air conditioning, capitalism, and (last but certainly not least) racism. Racism is foundational to the country and its history.
As far as the stupidity, some of the same factors apply, but there are also additional ones like environmental factors (US citizens eat more microplastics than any other major country since like 2020 and we lead poisoned ourselves for a century), a deep-seeded anti-intellectualism, and we’re a large part cultist/religious idiots that see everything through the lense of “some guy” being the best thing ever and the source of all truth.
Every country suffers from this, America is just the most rich and therefore visible due to geographic benefits and the Bretton Woods system.
Germany was actively shutting down its nuclear power before Russia attacked, China has a giant property bubble that’s collapsing, the Eurozone is rushing in a CBDC to prop up its failing currency, Canada is doing mass immigration to hide it’s failing business climate. Its the same all over, people love faux economic growth and they love to borrow from the future.
Every country suffers from what? Mass stupidity?
Maybe that’s true but it certainly seems like we are more individualistic and stupid than most…and I don’t think those two things are entirely unrelated.
Are you familiar with the elders of zion, which was believed by a huge number of people all over the globe, even though it was totally ridiculous. The average person is not smart, though I may be a tad pessimistic I suppose.
Lead was used in Europe too, and is still used by some member states. If there’s anything we know about micro plastics, it’s that they are ubiquitous. What we don’t know is what effects, if any, they have on health/cognition.
America is more car-oriented than most other western countries and leaded gas is how we did the majority of our poisoning.
Yes, of course microplastics are everywhere, but I’ve read studies saying that internationally they’re eating about the same amount of plastic as we did years ago, but they kind of plateaued whereas here in the good ol USA people still don’t know that it’s not a good idea to eat three meals a day of microwaved food cooked in plastic containers.
Unless you can show any research done that indicates micro plastics influence intelligence I wouldn’t be using that as an answer to this.
Yeah, I’m a hunching it up a bit, but I can’t imagine it’s a good thing (for reasoning) to have your brain full of microplastics.
It’s a bit of an aside, but there’s a large amount of absurdity in expecting scientific rigor in lemmy comments when purportedly scientific bodies are being led by vaccine-denying simpletons.
That ubiquitous expectation of powerless individuals to reason and behave perfectly while ultra-powerful people can behave like spoiled five year olds is foundational in making life fucking miserable for me personally.
Driving in a car/metal box instead of sharing the space or walking/cycling and connecting to others is another one.
Othering of others is super easy in a car. There are studies about how much more violent and vitriolic people are when driving.
Not to mention the rise of vehicle violence, running over protesters and such.
Yeah lack of third spaces and class mixing is big. Everyone is segregated into their own existing (shrinking) in groups, that then get concentrated by the webiverse.
The 70s oil crisis was an inflection point for Europe and a lot of cities/countries started moving back away from cars as the sole transportation option but the US didn’t have the same reaction.
Parties and what they represent evolve over time. America is going through a rapid evolution currently.
Since the end of the Cold War America has pursued or engaged in free trade and Neo Liberalism and the War on Terror.
The result is there are significant sections of the populace that feel left behind by our economy as wealth inequality builds. They see their jobs going over seas and an ineffectual government that has failed at protecting them economically and has failed in the War on Terror. Add to it a powerful propaganda machine in the form of our news and social media and it is a recipe for change… What that change will end up shaping into may not be the future you want.
This is the backlash. After the Democratic establishment has ignored unions and the working man. Leaving them open to the populist out reach of Donald Trump.
Never mind that Trump will never deliver any of what he promised. The fact is he now has the power and is using it to break up the system that has been in place since WW2. Which benefits a small number of oligarchs who want to cement their power over the US.
I suspect we will see a shift in the next mid-term election (if it takes place) and a realignment of the Democratic Party toward populism. We as a people have to figure out how to fight corporate propaganda and their hegemony over social media.
That is if Trump doesn’t kill our Democracy first.
“The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’”
-Isaac Asimov
Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture. Or call it ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’. Community has been replaced by an atomised screen time facing our individual echo chambers. Decades of neoliberalism has impoverished swathes of the population, materially and intellectually. There are many chickens coming home to roost.
I don’t think postmodernism had much to do with it. Go ask your average MAGA racist if they even know what that term means and they’ll shrug their shoulders. Similarly, the research does not show that your echo chamber theory holds water, and in fact it suggests the opposite. In the days before the world wide web, people were actually stuck in echo chambers, that being the communities where they lived.
It’s not that the MAGA voter is debating merits of intelectual movements, but a change in mindsets.
the shift from philosophers wondering “why are we here?” to “doesn’t matter why, what do we do now?” removed a sense of duty or obligation to less individualistic moralities drom the way people thought.
Which contemporary philosophers demonstrate this supposed shift in thinking?
Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture.
I feel like this is a common regressive take. The Right/anti intellectualist movement understood postmodernism as giving them the right to claim that facts don’t matter.
Post modernism itself is a way of interrogating frameworks we take for granted. It’s not saying “facts don’t matter,” it’s saying “how do we know those are facts”? There are valid questions to ask about science as a way of knowing - which epistemological frameworks we take at face value, and if we really can. Lolita is a postmodernist work, because it’s asking you to interrogate what a novel means (in the context of an unreliable narrator - HH is lying to you, but he isn’t real. what does that mean about what is being described in a novel? Is a novel a window into a different universe which has a reality to be described?)
The Right’s unreality is more of a Romantic one - none of those fuckers are reading Derrida or Deleuze. It’s more related to sexual insecurities and the death drive. I’m not a Freudian but I look at anti intellectuals and see deep sexual confusion and fear. If “male” and “female” are permeable categories, how does someone who defines their existence solely by their white masculinity going to police the boundaries of their own identity?
I think most of this is being driven by personal vendettas. if you look at each person on the right, it seems they all have a grudge of some such and this current administration promises to deliver based on revenge.
The biggest player being Elon: His son Xavier has transitioned. And when his (now daughter) called out Elon’s nazi wave as being legitimate, Elon tipped his hand by saying the woke killed his son and he is out to kill the woke mind(https://www.aol.com/news/elon-musk-estranged-daughter-responds-155107557.html) - So Elon sank a tonne of money to sway this election to his own vendetta.
For Dementia donald : it’s Biden winning the 2020 election.
For Vance it’s repressed feelings you can see he’s trying to break out the drag queen smokey eye: although he’s an opportunist at the base of it. So he’s getting two things met here. I think because he’s at odds with himself(still eyelining everyday) his soul has vacated, he has much self insecurity and is unhappy with himself as a person and projects that as anger and revenge on everyone who he views is as weak as he feels. Sort of a projected self hatred.
For the speaker mike johnson: he’s a gay convert, big proponent of the conversion therapy so lots to unpack there. even lives with a reverend while married to a woman. to simplify it : He’s against the ‘woke mind’ because he has a lot of self hate. He’s against himself. Likely why he drinks so much as well and does wreckless shit : https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johnson-chief-staff-arrested-dui-charge-trump-speech-rcna194986 - this person is self destructing.
For Hegeseth: he’s an untreated alcoholic that self medicates rather than face a true recovery.
JFK Jr: wormbrain. his worm is against anything that would kill parasites. I don’t think there’s much of a human being in that brain anymore. I think it’s all parasite now.
For Leavitt: greedy and sees this as an opportunity(as do most of the party) - and while we can say she’s young and easily influenced I’m not prepared to let her off the hook on this. There are too many progressive young minds to prove this was a choice of her’s. Not simply ignorance. It’s stupidity for sure. but not from not knowing any better.
For the speaker mike johnson: he’s a gay convert, big proponent of the conversion therapy so lots to unpack there. even lives with a reverend while married to a woman. to simplify it : He’s against the ‘woke mind’ because he has a lot of self hate. He’s against himself. Likely why he drinks so much as well and does wreckless shit : https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/speaker-mike-johnson-chief-staff-arrested-dui-charge-trump-speech-rcna194986 - this person is self destructing.
You better have actual proof of Mile Johnson being gay otherwise this us the most homophobic thing I have seen in months.
The idea that people who hate gay people just closeted is at odds with the simple fact that straight people vastly outnumber non-straight peoples. The fact is most people who hate gay people are just hateful people.
When you suggest that these homophobes are actually self loathing homosexuals you shift the onus of dealing with homophobia from the straight communities that are homophobic on to the victims of homophobia. That’s not cool.
I’m sorry–small, but necessary, correction:
The biggest player being Elon: His daughter, Vivian, has transitioned. And when his daughter called out Elon’s nazi wave as being legitimate, Elon tipped his hand by saying the woke killed his “son” and he is out to kill the woke mind virus.
Thanks!
People in general are fairly fucking dumb. It’s frustrating…
Removed by mod
