Advanced tactic for people who aren’t afraid of dumb people and are social enough to make friends: get to know your right-leaning or centrist neighbors anyway, make them like you even if you’re a different race or culture. It’s far easier than most people think. Run to them for help. Make them confront the situation they would normally feel removed from. It’s amazing how often these people flip when they’re in the middle of it.

You decided to feel preemptively offended. Don’t play dumb(er).

This is a group of people who are almost entirely led by, or are themselves, incels who grew up and got attention for screaming about how bad women are and how everyone needs to be an “alpha male” to succeed. They’re not healthy. They are fascists, and every fascist movement has been the product of sexual insecurity.

There’s a Ven Diagram out there of conservatives who are obsessed with if people are trans, and men who are afraid to touch their ass in the shower to clean because it’s “gay” and those circles almost line up perfectly.

My favorite stage of fascism is when there are grainy newspaper pictures of the dictator’s body being paraded for the citizens to witness.

Not sure if we’ll get that, but a man can dream.

Our problem here is one that has cropped up in history over and over, which is a huge, stable, liberal, comfortable population benefitting from their state’s imperialism become aware of a schism in their country’s direction, they see two sides:

One side is screaming that the country is collapsing, burning the country’s flag, lecturing about human rights.

The other side is declaring glory and success for the mighty Empire, worshipping the flag that keeps everyone safe and comfortable.

We can argue day and night about what events and specific things started the schism and how aware the population was about the atrocities, but at the end of the day, the majority of a comfortable population is always going to veer away from change and accountability, they will always lean towards the nationalists who basically say “You don’t need to feel bad or worry, our country is fine, we’re all gonna be okay, just go back to work, pay your taxes.”

This has happened over and over, and eventually always has the same end. I wish to fuck more of my countrymen would learn about history.

I don’t play stupid games.

The fantasy that this is all entirely the fault of outside influence gives everyone a nice, comfortable “out” for not having to get involved or feel like they’re not doing enough.

They’re not doing enough.

Get the chip off your shoulder when talking to adults, I hope the country I live in but don’t represent manages to get its shit together and they don’t do the bad things they want to do to you. You need to understand who your friends and enemies are here. I won’t see a reply, take a walk and blow off some steam.

If you take that kind of persecution complex away from this conversation instead of realizing that we need to rethink our approach and work on finding actual political power, you do deserve all the blame.

I fully agree, but that US imperialism is powered by tens of millions of people who listen to Rogan and Musk every day and think the US military are like the badass heroes in the Transformers movies. We don’t make traction telling them “ARMY BAD” we make traction telling them to stop believing what they see. Carts and horses.

Sure, I’d be fine with that, it would be great, but it would be preaching to the choir. The people who would nod in agreement on that message will be people who already know that Musk and Rogan are pieces of shit who should be questioned. My point here is that this connects with the people who don’t see it that way, and that’s important for power. There are several million military families, and far more adjacent and extended members who have a favorable image of the US military.

The left broadly needs to start thinking in terms of power and politics, we’re too hung up on trying to get everything perfect instead of capitalizing and leveraging the actual sources of power, such as liberal, uninvolved, uninformed America.

I summarily block people who take any opportunity to brag about their possessions instead of making any attempt to understand others.

Because the punchline, not the content before it. It’s telling the average American with an ambivalent at worst view of the US international presence and military (and there are a LOT of military families in the US, we need to understand this to move politics) will see a cartoon like this and it will plant an idea in their head that we can’t trust the shit the Joe Rogan promotes and that Elon Musk is just bad. This is what we want, this about the most we can fucking hope for in the US, the average American has no clue what’s going on.

I beg people to actually read the 2024 exit polling, I promise you, no matter how bad you think the situation is, it’s worse.

This is fantastic, part of the reason the right has been so emboldened in being anti-society and anti-humanity for a while now is because they have a tight-knight community who take care of each other. This is what we need to do to cancel that effect out.

For every right-wing piece of shit who screams racist epitaths out their car window and gets fired for it and ends up making a half million dollars, we have to make sure we’re taking care of people who get fired for posting videos of ICE murdering innocent people or quoting Trump’s own words without editorial.

The challenge: not digging into these people’s past and history and finding “problematic” things that make other users hesitate before donating to pushing the needle back where it should be.

Exactly this, but if you replaced cute animals with competing headlines meant to pander to your specific feelings and make you think your side is “winning,” it would be depressingly accurate.

Must have been either a really edgy “joke” or a critically important system, or you had a history of goofing and someone didn’t like it. Or a company about to get digested by private equity and they were looking for any excuse to get rid of people.

You’ll be fine, just stop posting things that will get the FBI looking at you. When I hit my 40’s I didn’t think I was doomed already, I don’t get this resignation to doom about aging. You have decades of life and health ahead of you if you make good choices.

Ah, the Nothing Ever Happens community not knowing how to look for all the things that are happening.

If you actually tried, you could find a rich tapestry of events, stories, discoveries, and people doing interesting things, it’s that you’ve let large political stories overshadow all of that and are expecting the same level of “Let’s get a streamer reacting to another streamer reacting to a debate between four influencers while subway surfers runs in the corner” level of spectacle.

Make your own spectacle in your head, stop expecting the internet to deliver you dopamine on demand.

Genuinely, this post makes me pissed. I hope OP is a kid or this was an attempt at irony, because adults who feel this way about the world are worthless.

You are 100% on the road to becoming your country’s version of MAGA. Congratulations, nuance is for losers, right? As long as you think it’s a fight over “moral fucking high ground” you’re going to be blind to more intelligent political analysis and you will get led around by your sensitive feelings. There is no moral high ground, only people with agendas and outcomes. I say again, get smarter. You’re not invulnerable to the same forces that you despise. The more you think you are, the more vulnerable you are. I’m done. Won’t see the reply.

The algorithm may only feed us rage-bait and the worst news because it gets the most engagement, but it needs to be repeated that Trump’s efforts have been shot down or blocked over and over, almost every day, by judges and the existing institutions. He can abuse the powers he has, but he can’t bend the entire judicial system or he would stop burning through thousands of lawyers.