I think this is correct, especially and most concerningly the prediction for future American elections. I want to talk about intelligent life in the universe with you (btw I recommend looking for planetary magnetospheres with healthy dynamos), but all of the intelligent life inside of me is saying that we actually have to do this stupid ass shit now. We have only each other. The media is almost completely dismantled. I'lll see everyone around I guess. Well I dunno the data says the site owner needs to get way more fascists to retain users, empirically. Hmmm (this is a slash 's'). Rest of the net's a hellscape now anyways (this is true). PS biomass in the lithosphere feeding on radioactivity is an interesting canvas to paint on (idk I think the radiation keeps cell systems limited in complexity, so hmmm, bio is my science weak spot, though), and when I think about the next intelligent lifeform on Earth dominating instead of humanoids, I don't go with chimps, I like to envision the octopi triumphing, for fun. edit: here's two perhaps seemingly opposed views I hold: 1. I think it was more or less an obvious responsibility to vote straight dem in '24 from a harm reduction standpoint, 2. Populist leftism (like the actually good, not-derailed-by-fascist kind of populism, so sort of fantastical, of course) is still very possible (see AOC & Bernie), but it's hard to see the spark of momentum firing off without completely impugning this absolute joke of a corporatist democratic party establishment. Obviously it's really really bad that the dem option was STILL orders of magnitude better. Imagine that campaign... "OK Bill well, fuck 'em, maybe America will be ready for progress the next time we don't have to make it ourselves. I'll take a stand when I'm dead, we always said" two hours laytiuer PSSZTT-Liz Cheney is 15 minutes out of Ann Arbor, things are rolling smooth, everyone. People love this. it's the secret sauce. So many moderates, ripe for the voting. We're not going back.!.. to when.. Kamala was in the admin, just now. And through mid January."Well the focus panels show 53/47 majority 'against' trans Americans..."
"The Harris camp was dragged leftward, mercilessly, and kowtowed (when we didn't come out to pointedly denounce trans Americans in response to a $1 billion dollar bigotry adbuy of lies); all that woke shit (you know! the bad stuff we all hate because we're older than 53) needs to end ASAP, and Trump isn't even that bad, idiots. We ran a flawless campaign!
...
Honestly, I think Carl Sagan was right about the USA. We’ve long since abandoned the idea of seeking truth, and very much prefer comfortable lies. A conversation with the average American would have confirmed this decades ago. I’m not shocked mostly because I was watching the credulous news coverage of effing UFOs (okay we’re calling them UAPs now) and there was no real pushback even among people who like to consider themselves rational. If people still credulously believe it’s possible for alien craft to travel through the galaxy despite the laws of physics denying the possibility, I don’t expect us to have rational arguments about more serious matters. And this plays directly into the hands of fascists as their narratives tend to have the virtues of being simple and easy for people to understand. Reading three articles about climate change is work. Calling it a hoax is simple, easy and requires nothing of the believer. Blaming immigration for inflation, lack of housing, and so on is easy. Talking about home investors buying up every house on the market to make rentals is harder. I’ll agree that we’re on our own. What’s worse is that I don’t think most people can understand their times. Nor can we really sustain the attention and the dedication needed to do anything. We’re the society of the spectacle, everything is on screens or as media stories. And thus we’ll be bothered much more by things that can excite an audience— like the salute — over the boring reality of things that will actually happen.
My primary argument against this line of thinking is that credulity and fascism are nothing new. Sightings of UFOs went up right as sightings of angels and ghosts went down. Stuff we don't understand is always going to be magic, and the "skeptics" that adhere to a strictly scientific viewpoint have simply substituted one religious following for another. We'd like to believe that rationality is self-derived but for the most part it's just another kind of dogma. Can that dogma be derived from first principles? Sure. Do more than a tenth of the people ascribing to that dogma understand what first principles are, let alone have the capacity to derive their beliefs themselves? The principle problem is that the two political parties of the United States were formerly aligned over all but economics and are now divided largely by wedge issues. The resolution of this problem is that the parties differed over economics due to economics being the thing citizens care about the most - the two things that got Trump elected were (1) Immigrants are gonna take my job (see: NAFTA) (2) inflation has destroyed me purchasing power. All the Jan6 nazi-ism is a sideshow but it's a sideshow that allows a bunch of unprincipled ideologues to break democracy. Kinda like how they did during the Red Scare.
I don’t think that’s always been the case. At least in the past, it was expected of those who considered themselves educated would be expected to know something about the subject they were talking about. The new attitude is much more of a feelings based vibe where the only criterion for taking a given position is that it feels right to them. I wouldn’t expect everyone to derive everything from first principles, however I think at some point, you need to at least know how a given system works, or the actual facts on the ground before you form an opinion. But we’re a culture that doesn’t read books, one that will absolutely fall for anything. The Q phenomena was pretty much a wake up call from inside the house. People somehow came to believe that germ theory was fake. Or that Biden wasn’t really in tge White House or something. The threads on numerology of the exact timing of a tweet were insane. We are more credentialed than ever, but I think it would be fairly rich to say that we’re educated. Most people seem to lack the skills to understand anything going on around them. They don’t understand logic, probability, statistics, history, or basic sciences. As such the ability to make rational decisions about how to run a government are lost. People who think demons run Hollywood won’t make good decisions. I think the reason people are so into the culture war stuff is that it provides lots of opportunities to create negative imagery that play well on screens, and that it’s easy to generate a hot take on. It’s spectacles. The freaky looking trans person is a spectacle to dangle in front of the screen to get conservatives big mad, especially if it looks like the6 work in a school. Getting liberals hopped up by showing weird Jim Bob’s unhinged sermon is likewise easy. But this level of discourse is happening because the idea of having long conversations based on factual evidence doesn’t work on a society that runs on vibes.