Just as a tangent, Jubilee and ALL the related content-farmers on Youtube, Tiktok and other social media platforms are radically skewing our own perceptions as well as that of the right. They are the enemy of our better tomorrow.

We’re all getting lost down ideological, algorithmic bubble-worlds but the worlds look so different it’s hard for us to identify that we’re also being manipulated.

This is another area you can find common-ground with the right, and a way to get them to start realizing they’re being played and cucked by corporate elites. (Use that language.)

It’s shockingly easy to reach people of different political ideology if you view them as humans. Don’t interact with the people who have punisher tattoos and roll coal, but that’s not everyone right of center. Most conservatives are just ill-informed working people with no emotional intelligence or no capacity to care about larger problems than their next utility bill and resent progressive messaging because they’re struggling so hard.

You can break through with class consciousness, almost every conservative I’ve talked to, and turned, started with educating them where their tax money goes, so get educated yourself how the tax code works, what the federal budget actually looks like, what your state’s work laws are and such, and teach them why they can’t afford food AND electricity some months.

You also need to be social and hospitable, do not have the intention of changing people, have the intention of teaching ONE thing and stick to it. This is what Bernie did for decades.

Edit: I will reemphasize for anyone reading down this far, PLEASE STOP TRYING TO CHANGE EVERYTHING. You’re not going to get Bubba and Sheila down in the trailer by the scrapyard to suddenly start promoting trans rights and advocating for a free Tibet. Just let it go, our focus on micro-problems and social issues that don’t impact the majority of people has been a deliberate sabotage of progressive movements to make people turn away. If we can turn people against Republican politics the rest falls in place and we get a better tomorrow, maybe not today but eventually and we have to start planting trees and stop expecting to have all our desires satisfied in our lifetimes.

It is possible to reach them. But it is one of the most Herculean tasks you will ever undertake.

If we’re talking about the stereotypical cartoon characters that you see hired by Jubilee to drive up hate and “engagement” then yes, they are real and they are almost impossible to exist around.

But they’re not the majority of people who identify as “conservative” or to be more correct, they don’t tend to identify as anything. The large swath of America’s conservative movement has been just uninformed people who work all day and night and don’t even have time to watch the news and believe earnestly that one out of five people are now trans and they’re trying to shape public policy… because this is the reporting they see on their two hours of downtime they get on Sunday night while scrolling Facebook. These are the tens of millions of people who say “I didn’t know who to vote for, I would have voted for Bernie if he ran, but I picked Trump just to see if he would be better than Harris, at least he’s gonna do something about [problem X].”

If you want to change people and reach hearts and minds, you become better at socializing, you make people like you, then you introduce actual progressive politics to them slowly and gently, starting with class-consciousness. Teach people where their tax money goes first and you will create Marx’s greatest warriors in a week.

I was a conservative, I found my way on my own but I have reached many people, I have turned many people to community consciousness and equality and even equity, because I know what it really looks like, I understand that the stupid unwashed masses just need guideance and they fall so very fast.

The antidote to infighting in my experience is organizing in ideologically diverse spaces.

You are saying (correctly) that we need to organize in ways that appeal to more median voters, moderates, liberals and even conservatives around much broader initiatives that appeal to more populist ideas like wealth inequality, social programs to help poor neighborhoods, rebuilding infrastructure and creating more livable communities.

But people who read this are going to translate it as:

“They’re saying I should reach out to the Green/Primitivist Anarchists I banned from my discord server” or “Maybe we should include the Orthodox Marxist–Leninists even though we hate them”

Or even worse: “HOW DARE HE SUGGEST I COMPROMISE WITH MY OPPRESSORS I WILL RIP THROATS OUT”

We all have to live next to each other even if we get the best policy results and I think everyone on either side forgets this. This isn’t centerism, this is understanding that we have to rebuild together even if we don’t share objective realities, we have no choice in the matter. I think too many people get stuck in their algorithmic ideology bubbles and think “the revolution/race war is coming, and everything will be great after.”

Nobody is coming. Nobody is going to make it better. There is no secret cabal or underground movement, there will be no socialist revolution. What we see is what we get and if we want it better, we need to get a LOT better about getting our shitty emotions under control, learning to socialize and using our energy wisely.

“My own entitlement and vindictive emotional state is far more important than broad policy measures to make the best outcomes for the most people.” - Tankies 🤝 Nazis

edit: I will forever smirk that over a third of the people who read this felt “Well they don’t understand that MY emotions are special, the unrealistic things I want are more important than any of those other things! How dare they equate my feelings with those of nazis, those creatures weren’t even human, unlike me!”

Why am I even here?

Because reddit will shadowban or IP ban you for so much as using poor punctuation because they’re so desperate to create a virtual AI world of fake conversations where they can control social narratives and “common attitudes” creating even more effective systems for manufacturing consent about anything from politics to what brand of toilet paper you should use?

I firmly believe in community action to get a city focused on the right goals, sadly not many places have active participation from residents, so I’m not at all surprised when a city gets lazy or distracted or doesn’t serve their population. Places where neighborhoods have regular meetings for whatever reasons tend to be squeakier wheels and get the oil faster.

Thank you, I push back on anti-intellectual reactions wherever I can. And it’s not just “put the X in the bag” or “I ain’t reading all that” responses, it’s also people assuming a hegemonic understanding of the world. We need to exercise mental empathy as much as emotional empathy to make better communication and bring the water level up for everyone.

I admonished a relative’s dog for not stopping at a curb while we’re walking. My relative asked me “Why do you say that to the dog? Do you think he can understand what you mean?”

I said “No that lecture was more for his owner’s sake, that he needs consistent training to not run into the street.”

It’d be actually interesting if they all weren’t so intellectually dishonest as well as stupid.

There is no difference.

The human brain is not by default a reasoning or logic tool. The human brain does one thing and one thing only: it provides coherent narratives to explain feelings and sensations. Not reasonable narratives, just coherent. That’s really it. It can do this to varying levels of complexity depending on experience and learning, but even the smartest people will discard reason to validate an emotion. This is why we have anti-vax nurses and climate-change denying scientists and engineers who think the Earth is flat.

We are not a species that makes sense, and the most clever among us have figured this out either directly or implicitly, and are exploiting this fact to get things they want.

I think our hangup with trying to figure out if negative outcomes are rooted in what someone knows/doesn’t know, versus what someone’s subjective, internal motivations are, is a false dichotomy and a useless mental exercise when we can treat it all the same way for better outcomes. I am more concerned with material reality than what’s going on in someone’s head. It’s not like we can throw the average asshole or moron into school or an education camp and “fix” them. The only way we fight negative outcomes in a society broadly is to create strong disincentives for anti-social or anti-community behavior. Shame, punishment, public humiliation, and in worst cases incarceration or expulsion.

This forces the dumb and evil alike, if there is even a difference in most cases, to think before acting and make choices that won’t end up with them in the ol’ stockade having rotting vegetables thrown at their face.

Dumb is evil and evil is dumb. Not all dumb people are evil, but all evil people do things against the interest of society or even themselves, which is “dumb” according to the rest of society. Lets normalize moving past this argument entirely and dealing with universally accepted consequences for doing bad things. We have to stop giving stupid people some kind of pass for pulling our society apart at the seams.

The bar is in the basement, having conscious thinking take place in your head, with actual language/narrative and associative connections and consideration of anything for any amount of time regularly makes you “intelligent.”

The number of people gliding through life on the same kind of autopilot we use when we do things like driving in traffic, is astonishing and extremely frightening when you realize just how prevalent this lack of conscious thought is.

I am very technical-minded and have been using PC’s since the early 90’s on a pretty deep level, but have no experience or interest in anything linux related so about 30% of Lemmy frontpage posts might as well be Sanskrit.

Lack of diversity can create stagnation problems and biases that go unchallenged, which is why you see communities with barriers of entry always seem to have very specific kinds of cultures or attitudes.

For better or worse.

“don’t even know how to boot from USB”

This is entirely accurate.

Are you serious with this post?

You’re not giving any context for your incredulity or what you’re asking is serious or not.

Most older computer users, as well as most younger users, do not interact with file systems or operating systems anymore, much less concern themselves with alternate boot options and other specific case examples. A lot of younger GenX and a good amount of Millenials have more exposure to traditional computers growing up and have a better chance of knowing some basics.

I think the post-human-creativity epoch is further down the road, our species has this habit of doing the same things over and over, so even in a world of technological miracles and Gods in bottles, we will still have plenty of poor communities, purists, “normal” people doing things the way their parents did for generations, working alongside mechanical wonders and partially submerged in some kind of information landscape we can barely imagine.

If we do stay on this current course, we will eventually be easily outpaced by AI, likely much further away than the tech cultists and AI-bros want to believe but it is inevitable at this pace. I personally think it will be further away than a thousand years, our species is a very slow-turning boat. It’s very possible that some segment of the population will in fact find some way to merge with machines in a way that lets them interact with larger systems and expand their consciousness in some way, which might be the only way we could ever say with even a little confidence that there is conscious, human creativity still in the universe, but like with the machine-born ideas and creations, they will be ideas and creations that will probably be outside of a normal human’s capability to understand or even perceive.

And I didn’t even get into the “mermaids” thing that I have nearly lost friendships over.

I had a very vivid dream of the future once myself and it made zero sense. It was weird lanes of color and metal and light and holographic abstractions moving across the sky and landscape, there were huge objects moving in the distance, so large they were shrouded by atmospheric haze and seemed like mountains, people were completely missing, there weren’t even visible homes, I couldn’t even tell if I was in a city or an industrial area or inside of some huge machine. It was a harsh and unfathomable world that looked nothing like anything we would recognize.

I think that is what our world will be like sometime before the last humans die off.

I think we can all agree that their obsession with doing things the “human way” would be our modern equivalent of hipsters just performatively kneecapping themselves by like, pulling out a mechanical typewriter in a Starbucks.

Come on guys, you can have the Holodeck do ANYTHING and you all choose the same damn Sherlock Holmes novels and british sailboats? Lets just admit that kind of stuff is just cover for what they really get up to in there. It’s like the equivalent of quickly pulling over a Wikipedia window when Mom walks in.

We can go back further.

When Reagan’s economic policies were described as “trickle down economics” and they didn’t get laughed off the political stage and like, cast into the sea, we should have predicted where this was heading. And some smart people did, but nobody listened.