Author: admin

‘we just need stupider leftists. I’m dead serious. charismatic guys with the stamina to record 100 instagram reels a week in the front seat of their car saying stuff like “trump made summers too hot” and “the fries at wendy’s taste better ever since they went woke”‘

https://www.mediamatters.org/google/right-dominates-online-media-ecosystem-seeping-sports-comedy-and-other-supposedly

We are (still) in the majority.
They are divided.
The separation of church and state is a good idea—and we should try it.
Extreme levels of material inequality are eroding democracy.
Knowledge is power.
Organization matters.

How Democracy Supporters Can Still Beat Back the Rising Tide of Fascism

‘Here’s the thing. What books get and we don’t get now is that technology does not largely change human nature. At least on short scales as our lives actually are.

And to that, us humans have not faced the reality that narcissists, sociopaths and psychopaths are drawn to seek power, lie and persuade to get it and once they’re in power, are only satisfied creating or enforcing an artificial hierarchy where they feel “above” others by abusing and persecuting those people below, commonly reinforced by manipulation of the masses’ base instincts like fear of the unknown, stories by the campfire (narratives), protection of family and friends, so on and so forth.

They will do this with ANY level of technology around themselves, and the greater the technology, the more refined and greater the ability to do this, both control/manipulate and persecute those same people.

What we’re seeing is the inevitability that would come from our rise in technology starting 30 years ago. Those people have learned to use it to do what they always do: accrue power and be only satisfied using it to crush those beneath them.

Until we face the reality of these malignant forces in the world, those 1-2% of us who would be forever only happy ruling over a pile of ashes than sharing paradise as equals with others (and who are driven constantly to seek that power), they will continue to do it.

The plague of untreated, malignant ASPD and NPD (and all other things resembling it) and the inability to do significant self-reflection to prevent being manipulated by them, is the entire reason why we can’t have a utopia we’ve read about.

We have the tech AND the resources to make earth a veritable paradise, with streets paved with gold. They choose to not have it that way because they want it this way.’

“if you’d be upset if the other team did that…what you are doing is probably wrong.”

we have quickly left the post-truth era and are now firmly in the Weaponized Stupidity times.

what’s your favourite instance of haptic nostalgia—a poignant memory of the physicality of an obsolete thing—like dialling a rotary phone, shifting gears in a manual transmission (#SaveTheManuals), tossing a lawn dart?

Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring.

A wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it.

The function of ignoring, of inattention, is as vital a factor in mental progress as the function of attention itself.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09637214221121570

“But the one great shocking occasion, when tens or hundreds or thousands will join with you, never comes. That’s the difficulty. If the last and worst act of the whole regime had come immediately after the first and smallest, thousands, yes, millions would have been sufficiently shocked—if, let us say, the gassing of the Jews in ’43 had come immediately after the ‘German Firm’ stickers on the windows of non-Jewish shops in ’33. But of course this isn’t the way it happens. In between come all the hundreds of little steps, some of them imperceptible, each of them preparing you not to be shocked by the next. Step C is not so much worse than Step B, and, if you did not make a stand at Step B, why should you at Step C? And so on to Step D.

And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.”

• ⁠Milton Sandford Mayer, They thought they were free: The Germans 1933-1945

Williams wants to let his former comrades know “a faggot is doing this to them.”

‘This guy will betray me.’”

https://www.propublica.org/article/ap3-oath-keepers-militia-mole