Average median voter.

And why innocent people are being murdered in the street and why we don’t have auto emission standards anymore and why the FDA is abolishing disease research.

Because that’s not enough, they are a resource, if we don’t tap that resource, the other side does… as they are doing now.

I’m saying it’s not an “abstract group of people,” I am talking about the currency that shapes nations, the force behind the declarations and policies and intentions.

That power comes from only a small number of sources, the top two are violence or money.

The right has both, and they are doing everything they can to secure them before others can, and there are a LOT of forces trying to get a piece of both those pies. We could wrest a section of it with careful political messaging and coordination and establishing local communities and electing leadership that actually wants better outcomes instead of better donations. But you don’t do that without knowing exactly who you’re trying to message and what your message needs to be.

None of this is as simple as “fuck them, we’re doing our own thing” we’re all in this together, even the people you don’t like.

I’m glad I can use reasoning and deduction to actually figure things out or I would be equally stuck in a black-and-white false dichotomy.

For example, I assumed you’re a bot immediately, then I made a small effort and checked for clues, and found the first mod action performed against you on lemmy was a comment removed for asking about microwaving your balls, which tells me you’re likely a human. But I also know in relatively short time even those clues will be meaningless as tactics get more and more sophisticated. It’s just like always being on guard when you go outside. You can be on guard for danger without always being anxious or paranoid.

See? it’s not so hard.

Ah, another victim of the chaos, flailing and directing energy at an entire narrative spun by people deliberately having dedicated time and energy to making you specifically feel outraged at people who are your ally, filling all the blanks with your worst case fantasies and the lovely opportunity to police your own side.

Get off the internet. https://www.progressivevictory.win/ has people you can support and actually get off your ass and help for local representation and leadership. Nobody is coming. Nobody is saving us. There will be no revolution. Rebuild community and drop the rage.

If the unpopular voices of a random person on the internet are too worrisome and problematic for you to focus on what matters, you’re no good to any of us. I won’t see a reply, I don’t have the energy to deal with .ml’ers right now.

Whatever, slippery coward.

MAGA DESTROYED

TRUMP FANS REVOLT

GOP CRUMBLING IN SHAME

MAGA REGRETTING THEIR VOTE

Etc, etc.

it’s all utter bullshit, the base hasn’t budged. It’s still between 23% and 28% and holding very steady in that range from the start. This is just the algorithm pushing stuff to Lemmy browsers that it knows will get the most views.

Now the nuance here is a LOT of liberal America who voted for Obama also voted for Trump, because again, atomization and algorithms, and basically a population completely tuned out.

I would be a lot more impressed if I saw a headline that reads “MEDIAN MIDDLE-CLASS VOTERS START USING CRITICAL THOUGHT AND LOOKING UP INFORMATION ABOUT THINGS BROADLY” because that would mean something far more profound than anything else we’ve seen so far.

Every time someone in Europe tries to start some shit about how dumb Americans are for allowing our democracy to crumble, I like to gently remind them that we’re all being held hostage by the same people. This isn’t a local problem, this is what happens when you give corporations everything they want to control your society.

It’s a very depressing worldwide scale-back of all science and development.

I mean, worldwide except for China. China is going to have the whole solar system in a generation.

These people are the normal, liberal, middle-class of America and have the greatest political capital, more than any other group, because they are the breadbasket of our nation’s tax revenue and disposable-income shopping habits. Their comfort and desire to preserve that comfort is why ANY of this is happening. Yes they can be distracted by keys easily, but they’re already held by capital because again… they are comfortable.

The second strongest form of political capital is armed groups of brainless nationalists who will fight and die for their nation’s flag.

Where does progressive political capital sit on this scale? Somewhere below “unarmed protestors politely asking for civility.”

We need to understand how power works if we ever want actual change in this country, and it’s not hugboxes and performative inclusivity, it’s flags and guns and money.

I can’t even read this.

I was happy believing snuff movies were a myth, or extremely rare.

I read a lot of anthropology and have read numerous stories about mass graves being found from pre-recorded historical times, early bronze/copper age days, excavations of giant pits filled with bones of women and children with cut-marks on the bones and signs of systemic, ritualistic cannibalism and torture. (bones that healed after being broken repeatedly to show victims were kept alive and immobilized.)

And the dark pill to swallow here is that we are the same species as we were then.

These were things done by developed humans who could write and do art and think. We have not changed or evolved, and the worst people among us will continue to do the worst things imaginable, which is a naivety that our modern world of comforts has instilled in us broadly and made us ignorant of and incapable of addressing with the severity and deadly punishment it should warrant.

Epstein was just one of many, many people who deal in this too. It’s happening right now somewhere in this huge world. Probably in many places.

No, we don’t want it shared on the open internet but legal institutions and law enforcement agencies should absolutely have unrestricted access to all unedited video and photo evidence.

The fact that they’re hiding evidence from state law enforcement is one of those things that is baffling that nobody is talking about.

The files themselves have witness statements describing at least some of the victims being thrown over boats.

There is evil reported in those documents that’s not getting shared because the details are bafflingly evil and horrific, and nothing is going to come from it.

History will look back at this entire affair with the same level of horror as we look back at some of the most vile practices of the dark ages.

We don’t want to see them but they should be made available to legal institutions and people with actual credentials to investigate by request.

Also, the removal of actual pictures of humans being harmed, despite my wish for those things to not be shared online like so many 9/11 memes, should be shared with congress and senate and every last lawmaker and their aides and sure, family members too.

Everyone needs some kind of tangible reminder that we’re dealing with evil against human beings and innocent children of the very worst kinds, so that there’s social fucking pressure and moral fucking pressure to DO SOMETHING about it and start doing their goddamn jobs by bringing justice.

We pay them to do this for us, we pay them to uphold justice and not a single American named in those files has even resigned, much less had charges levied against them.

Too many people have grown so massively comfortable with discord that entire communities of people just relying on each other for social contact leave their voice chat or cameras running 24/7 so they can be around each other in some capacity.

They would break down having to change platforms, and there are LOT of younger people in this demographic.

Personally I think it’s a deeply sad way to live and socialize, and they would probably largely be healthier if the whole thing shut down, but I recognize how lonely and depressing the world is and how everyone wants to find comfort with others.

I had to go through all of this so many times when struggling with a failed life and business.

I had ONE good agent who helped me and reminded me that I pay for all these programs, and the agent’s job is to help us qualify for them, not to judge nor moralize any part of it.

All the other agents judged and moralized to a degree that I eventually let my SNAP funding expire because I couldn’t keep going in there and facing the people scouring my business receipts for some implied wrongdoing.

Despite that, it’s still your right, you still paid for all of it, even if you don’t pay income tax, there is tax on anything and everything you buy and do, so you’re not doing anything other than collecting what you’ve loaned to the government. Hold your head up and look them in the eye if they ever challenge you, and apply for every goddamn program you’re eligible for, and if anyone gives you shit about it, you talk to their manager, and if they don’t help, talk to that person’s manager.

(One agent who was openly hostile and lectured me about “looking capable of working” and had a bad attitude through the whole process actually got fired because I complained, the manager of that DES office actually called me to let me know and to tell me they felt bad about it and that it’s not their job to be judgemental or invalidate others.)

As a species we tend to mask irrational feelings with stories our brain make up, connecting abstract social issues and ideas to make us feel like our irrational discomfort is somehow part of a bigger, more “rational” story, but it all leads back to something that makes us uncomfortable. The cure is sanitizing sunlight.

And because Lemmy is packed with incel-adjacent minded young guys and require some pushback on their bad ideas, because people no longer experience social pressure as long as they can retreat to like-minded online spaces, so I rather people are open about what they think so we can challenge it, support it or offer alternatives depending what the actual feeling is.

That’s why I care.

Your turn.

Someone posted on reddit a clip of her screaming about the stock market with a superimposed picture of a child tied up and blindfolded on a bed next to her.

I don’t know if it was a real picture from the files or real at all, but it was such a sharp reminder of what the hearing was about, and what we seem to be debating in this country that I haven’t really recovered, I keep seeing it, or seeing some of the things I’ve read in the files, and it’s hurting me mentally.

Like, for a large segment of the country this is a debate about “Is my side good or is your side bad??” and nothing is changing. There are still Epstein’s out there, there are still leaders in our government going to these people and getting their sickest desires fulfilled, there are children and adults suffering and being tortured and murdered in sadistic ways that are so profoundly horrible that even talking about makes most people clamp up and their brains start looking for reasoning against it being real.

We are hearing about the worst things happening, with evidence, and still most people rather pretend it’s “exaggerated” or “unverified” across millions of pages of testimony and eyewitness accounts, combined with us knowing well that in human history this has gone on over and over.

Someone said it best describing Destiny 2, that it’s a perpetual feeling of building towards something that’s always just around the corner, but when you get around that corner, it’s just more grinding and pushing premium content, just around the corner. It’s gonna huge bro, I promise. Big stuff coming. Just ahead, just buy one more season bro.

I notice it’s a reoccurring theme for people to go through stuff like that with MMOs.

I think we all have our check-out bottom we will fall to when life hurts too much, some people will just rot in bed and some will watch old movies and some will camp in the woods. We have breaking points in life, and sometimes an online game where people seem to be having normal lives just feels like being someone still connected to the world. When I was little and my parents would go on week-long drug benders and spend the whole time screaming at each other, I would check out into comics and books, so it’s probably where I learned how to do it inadvertently.

The best pushback for this message is to post the entire interview between Newsom and Ben Shapiro and then tell me again who cares about people.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hrDpBwpSqSc