Been watching since he started, I guarantee his previous content has aged well and is really worth watching today. It’s actually agonizing how slowly we progress technologically unless you’re speaking strictly about microprocessors and touch screens.

Otherwise we’re largely using the same damn household tech we used in the 1950’s, and even lost some over time.

Facts made a much bigger impact 20 years ago.

I’m just saying that they only did because we had social pressure on us to respect facts, because we still largely functioned in large social groups. People don’t actually care if facts are real and rational and good or make sense, they care far, far more about if their tribe-mates are going to make fun of them for not knowing the right facts according to that tribe. I firmly believe that the only thing that makes the majority of people respect reality is the pressure to conform so they don’t lose social standing or worse, be expelled from the tribe.

Now that we have atomization, our realities are entirely flexible and we don’t suffer for it, if anything we find these pseudo-tribes of invisible people to populate our heads online who will validate even the most irrational thoughts, so our driving motivation to respect shared reality just isn’t there anymore, or is dwindling rapidly at large scales.

I think we’re saying the same thing but coming to different conclusions.

I see our successes as a species as examples of trial and error and the efforts of the minority in manipulating the masses and see this as an example of why we will never rise above the same problems coming up over and over again, because our minds are inherently flawed and primitive.

You are seeing this as an example of how progressive politics actually succeeds. And I don’t argue that either, but I’m saying we’re going to having these same fights in 200 years, while our species is mostly huddled in the alleys and shadows of those titanic beings with upgraded minds and thinking capacity, if we even get far enough to build our descendant species.

I have almost no hope for our future in our present form. Something will see a better tomorrow, either an upgraded version of ourselves or some new entity unlike anything else that has lived on Earth. But it won’t be us, we don’t even know what a better future means broadly. We cling to stories and explanations to explain feelings originating in 500,000 years of ice-age survival and fighting each other.

I’ll concede that my explanation is very simplified, but the nuance has more to do with how the brain pulls together its story-telling material, which is predominantly from associations and experiences and practiced knowledge/actively reinforced education.

But for the vast majority of people who feel things, the brain just hastily assembles an explanation for those feelings on the fly, from materials “laying around” and that path of least resistance is usually whatever is on the surface of an issue or feeling, and that can be a defaulting to a supplied narrative “You’re poor and can’t succeed because immigrants ate your cat.” or it can be tied to your past “You’re suffering because girls are bad, per that one girl who was mean to you in 5th grade.”

And while there is complexity to it, we’re talking about population groups more than individual capacity to be rational.

and throughout human history, cooperation based on rational thought

My turn to push back. I am talking from experience talking to psychologists and reading about brains so it’s only partially out of my ass, but I don’t think cooperation is at ALL required to be based on rational thought, in fact most of our cooperation is based on survival impulses and hardwired defenses, which is why so much cooperative action is based around violence and fear through history. The fact that we can cooperate at all to build bridges and Arby’s restaurants and fiber-optic networks has far more to do with the vision of a small group with more advanced conceptualization using primitive tools to move large numbers of people. (Primitive tool: We pay you to build fiber-optics so that you can eat and not die.) But the thousands of people involved in the project aren’t emotionally tied to the feeling of completion when the last line is laid.

And for the most part, most of our successes and modern world has been built on more of a process of gradual trial and error than a logical plan being seen through from start to finish, of the unsuccessful cooperative actions getting left behind and the successful ones shaping the world. And we define success as that which gives us a more comfortable life with less suffering… so that alone should tell us how flawed this process can be. We are broadly using this overpowered skill of cooperative action for self-preservation, not community preservation, and logic rarely needs to apply.

Real men fear no intimacy.

How did all of the propaganda literally erase that entirely?

I struggled with this also around the pandemic watching people deny reality, and my result is that in my adult life I have been re-black-pilled by depressing new knowledge about the human species:

We are not a logic, rational creature. Our brains are not machines for working out problems, they’re machines for telling stories to create a coherent narrative. And that narrative doesn’t need to follow rules of reality, it just needs to tie ends together. This is why you ruminate and get depressed about things that aren’t real or have already happened, this is why people will cheer for their wrestlers while also knowing it’s scripted, this is why people can get into positions at the height of power by just saying “I’m the best at this.”

We are massively vulnerable to cognitive dissonance, and once again, the only thing that has kept this in check for the majority of human society has been social pressure to know the rules.

The rules have changed over the centuries, but they’ve at least required the members of the community to know how to distinguish things that are against the rules from things that are allowed, and with this comes critical thought (for self preservation) and pondering one’s choices (for self preservation) and the desire to conform and adapt to the will of the people around you (for self preservation.)

When you take away the community and the pressure for survival, people can just live with whatever stories run wild in their minds, without consequence. The rest of us just hit the “mute” button or walk away and go be alone in our own universe of our own choosing. We’re all guilty of doing this about something, at some point, and when you get millions of people doing this at all once, you no longer have “objective reality” you have millions of Main Characters not caring about consequences for choosing to believe in things that run against reality.

I have a pretty good idea how it happened, I just have no idea how we can guardrail our human weaknesses against every single entity committed to exploiting those weaknesses in new and inventive ways so that they can gain power over others.

We had this entirely new thing come into our lives where we could get mental stimulation on-tap anytime we want, perpetually and it fucked everyone’s minds, we lost our attention spans and learned to fear each other as organized groups worked tirelessly to change our thinking and behavior, either for commercial purposes or for social/political agendas, and it worked spectacularly because we had no idea what “the internet” does to a human brain until someone makes the internet and does it all to us.

Social pressure holds communities together, as primitive as it is, it’s a system we’re designed to work within, and as we’ve given up community outside influences are replacing it with incel-forums, loot-boxes, 24-hour news feeds, same-day shopping and and endless stream of jokes, memes and voices each desperately trying to get your attention, and getting just enough that you don’t look away or question your own capacity to question.

And of course it doesn’t help that actual bad people are doing things like indirectly paying millions of people in developing nations to spread propaganda across the US for retweets and clicks because it’s just enough money to make a career for someone in India or Philippines.

Every single fucking thing Trump has done I predicted and warned people about and got shadowbanned across half the goddamn internet for it.

Okay great we were warned, let’s stop whinging about the idiots of the past and start working to convince today’s idiots.

I do entirely mental work all day and it leaves me feeling like I’ve been digging trenches. I can’t really impart this to people who don’t have similar jobs, I get told I should be energetic and grateful I have a job I can do from my home office.

And I am grateful, that doesn’t make it easier when you actually care about your work and try to do it effectively. I’m just as tired doing a week-long analysis project for a big-ticket corporation doing it from my office as if I went into corporate and made use of their “first come, first serve” workspaces.

All that said, I will still be able to make a goddamn sandwich or salad and not spend $700 a week on take out.

I was fully expecting it to be an ad for hello fresh or some delivery service like that.

I dream of an absurd day when ROBO-ICE comes to haul off my robot housecleaner for being an illegal import.

Jokes on them though, I will never afford another house. It will actually be another robot who owns the house. And that robot will likely be my boss. I’ll be retiring under an overpass near 7th and Pershing.

And by retiring, I mean dying.

Nah, you’re too reactionary, I’ll pass.

My original comment was only to clarify that a friday protest isn’t remotely a “general strike” so I wish that outlets, forumgoers and media would stop using the term because it’s reducing the power behind the word. Actual general strikes have been performed in our modern world and have crushed governments. This isn’t doing that, and I fear too many naive people are going to think that a couple friday marches on PTO are going to make anyone in seats of power cry.

I never said it’s bad to march and protest, it IS having an impact, but by itself it won’t move anything because the people in power don’t actually care about the will of the people, if all you’re doing is saying you’re unhappy, well great. They WANT you unhappy.

I don’t know how to get hundreds of millions of Americans to understand this, neither do you. None of us do, but we can keep trying and we can keep making sure that our language isn’t getting watered down because we want to believe in things that aren’t real. This is all going to get worse before it gets better, and people will point to it and say “See? General strikes don’t work!” when we haven’t even done one yet.

Turns out it’s hard to orchestrate hundreds of millions of people spread out over 9 millions square kilometers isn’t exactly easy to do, who are blissfully unware of anything happening around them and are comfortable sitting at home consuming media and games and don’t want to risk their jobs because they don’t have the security of community, because everyone has embraced being rugged loners as personality traits and not an obstacle to better lives.

FTFY

I started watching network nightly news again after throwing it away for years and years, because I want to see what the average American who isn’t stuck online sees every night while cooking dinner for 3 screaming kids and having to juggle two jobs. NBC, ABC, even CBS.

It’s so bad. It’s dishearteningly bleak when you realize how much of the population catches blurbs and snippets of actual issues sandwiched between stories about weather and a local boy-scout who grew the biggest pumpkin, and of course the required nightly “true crime” story about a spouse who murdered their partner and had an affair.

I have nobody to scream at, nobody to shake. They didn’t even MENTION the strikes (protests) so far on any network, they have not shown the scale of the marches and the chaos on the streets of American cities. To say nothing of the neutral, blameless tone they use.

They only just barely started taking the people’s protests against ICE like an actual news story after Alex Pretti was murdered, because at a certain point, even the hand of the state can no longer dismiss or avoid actual reality.

This is because there are three forces of political capital in the country broadly. The strongest is the liberal masses, the majority. Farmed cattle used for the labor and attention spans and purchasing power. Middle-class America holds ALL the power because they have the most money and keep the system moving… as a result, they are manipulated and sedated the hardest.

The second force is nationalism. About 20% - 30% or so of the population are illiterate, rural or wannabe-rural grown toddlers screaming and waving guns and hating everything that moves, while worshipping the flag and kissing the king’s ass. Armed groups of nationalists have been the driving force of political capital for thousands of years, it’s no different now.

The last group is progressivism. Arguably the weakest, almost not worth mentioning it has so little power now, but is still technically on the list because we’re still here, still trying.

But it’s all shifting, as leftists start taking up arms and marching in larger and larger numbers, the networks and marketing companies have no choice but to notice it. This is because the liberal middle class is now noticing it, and when THEY shift, everything shifts.

To this end, I support continued protests and marches, even if they’re utterly pathetic by historical standards for moving systems.

Just bring a burner phone with a camera. It needs to be filmed and streamed so they can’t take evidence.

Honestly, at this point in the fight, if they track you that’s the least of our concerns. We need to shoot this whole thing down so they don’t have the power DO anything with your tracking data.

Came in here to say, this is all fine and good, but we’ve been broadly asked a question in response to our demand:

“Or what?”

The left and progressives broadly need to start understanding power and where it comes from.

We need to use the amendment that the founders placed there to answer the question “Or what?” when it’s asked by our government when it goes bad.

If we met force with force, the cowards in masks and swastikas would RUN home and hide in their basements and whinge on the internet how persecuted they are. They’re not going to get in a gunfight with anyone, they’re emotionally-empowered internet chuds and pasty nazi-loving 4-channers. Every single one of them.

I dream of a day when I see nine-hundred thousand people of color, pink-haired LGBTQ+ allies and families of all walks of life marching on DC while open-carrying and demanding social change and accountability for the people selling off our rights to the lowest bidder.

A general strike is a strike action in which participants cease all economic activity, such as working, to strengthen the bargaining position of a trade union or achieve a common social or political goal. )"

“The largest general strike that ever stopped the economy of an advanced industrial country—and the first general wildcat strike in history—was May 1968 in France.[105] The prolonged strike involved eleven million workers for two weeks in a row,[105] and its impact was such that it almost caused the collapse of the de Gaulle government.”

This entire wiki article is a list of HUGE events in history that were affected by general strikes and what was involved in organizing and challenging them.

A one-day protest is fine, but it’s not a “general strike.”

General strikes aren’t things you can use your PTO for to get a three-day weekend. That’s like protesting a brand by buying their product and then destroying it.

I roll my eyes that these all are on Fridays 🙄

I mean, it’s fine. Go ahead, it will help, but it’s not really a general strike. It’s a day of protest. Come on America, you don’t really get how this works. You can’t use your PTO to challenge authority. It’s the same as protesting a company by buying their product to destroy like MAGA does.