Libra00 @ libra00 @lemmy.world

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4 mo. ago

shame them into doing something progressive

That's been failing for the 30+ years during which I voted blue, why does anyone imagine it would suddenly start succeeding now?

You can avoid grossly misunderstanding the point of someone's comment by reading the whole thing, too.

No, I did not have some good bases to build from. I built myself back up from a years-long depression in which I had firmly decided that I was definitely going to end my life. But when the moment came I discovered that, for whatever reason, I just couldn't do it. At which point I was left with no choice but to start finding ways to make life a bit less miserable no matter what it took. I dug myself out of that hole not because I had 'good bases to build from' but because I had no other choice. It sucked a whole lot for a long time, but having come through the other side of it I can tell you that it was absolutely worth it to put in the effort. Also when I say rekindled curiosity I mean the kind everyone has in childhood. I lost it sometime around puberty (for a variety of reasons), and didn't get it back until my 40s.

But if that's the case re:running out the clock, let me ask you this - and I am by NO means suggesting a particular course of action here - why keep marking time? What do you gain from it that's better than the alternative? There must be something, right? Figure out what it is and latch onto it like it's the last lifeboat off the Titanic. The thing about life is that you don't find meaning, you don't get handed meaning by someone else, you make it yourself: you decide what is meaningful to you and what isn't. If you're content with the way things are then great, but if not then it's on you to make a change.

Did you not catch this part?

which, fair enough, that describes me too

I am also biased against Israel, for what I feel ought to be some pretty self-evident reasons. Reading comprehension in the replies to my comment has been surprisingly low.

Also can't take anyone seriously who can't read the comment they're replying to.

Did you not catch this part?

which, fair enough, that describes me too

I am also biased against Israel, for what I feel ought to be some pretty self-evident reasons, but a single highly biased source reporting something is not news.

Fortunately, they link to the original material.

Yeah, fair enough, I just wasn't up for reading the ~50 page report myself to find out if what they said was true.

Did you not catch this part?

which, fair enough, that describes me too

I'm not saying the bias is a problem in general, it's just a problem for the trustworthiness of the reporting because they could be reading stuff into the source material that isn't there.

Power for the people in charge, and a combination of enforced stratification of society (with those who support the regime on top of course) and reduced status for, the removal of, or outright sanctioned violence against the people upon whom all of society's ills are blamed.

I wonder the same thing. What I wonder even more, though, is why you think inconveniencing others is acceptable or funny?

If this is true then that's great news. Unfortunately the article seems to have been written by someone who is very clearly biased against Israel and not ashamed of airing that dirty laundry in public (which, fair enough, that describes me too, but I wouldn't trust me to write an unbiased article on the subject either) so I can't take this single source's word on it. I'll definitely keep an ear out in case any more reporting gets done on it from elsewhere.

Edit: To the people downvoting and replying to this: please read past the 'biased against Israel' part - especially to the bit where I say that I am also biased against Israel - before assuming that I'm some pro-Israel shill here.

They're skills, they require practice like everything else.

I have been on disability and unable to work for ~14 years now, and I certainly went through a long phase of just being a big couch potato with no ambition or dream other than to do the least amount of work I could possibly get away with and still have a tolerable life. My house was a mess, I was a mess, shit fell through the cracks, etc. But it wasn't those things that drove me out of that pit, it was boredom. I started watching youtube videos and stumbled into science-related topics and discovered that despite hating school I actually quite enjoy learning. That's what rekindled that curiosity in me, the drive to be doing something to better myself all the time, even if it was just packing my head full of information that served no other purpose other than it being pretty fucking cool to know shit about the world. From there I got motivated to read (I used to read literally everything I could get my hands on, and stopped for various reasons), to start caring about my health, to take care of myself, etc, and from there I started wanting things again. I discovered that what I - a ~20-year veteran of network engineering and security - am passionate about is writing and politics, so now I divide most of my time between seeking out deep, serious political discussions/debates and trying to write a novel (emphasis on the 'trying'; maybe it'll work out, maybe it won't, but in the meantime I'm writing and it's making me happy.)

I'm not saying all this to say 'lookit me, I'm so fuckin' awesome', but to say that even going from being really depressed it's still possible to find things in the world to be interested in and if you pursue those interests you will find something you're passionate about. If you want to.

Yeah. It's sad to finally give up the last shred of hope that maybe this will all sort itself and somehow get back on track, but the track is now a smoking crater and there's nowhere to even build new track 'til we fill that back in.

install a firewall around the US so the citizens don’t see news from Europe or China and how their quality of life is. This could be in 10 - 15 years.

The US has been doing this for the entirety of my life at the very least, and I'm in my 50s. They did it with the USSR, Cuba, China, Vietnam, North Korea, Venezuela, etc (not saying all of those places had great quality of life tho.) That was the whole thing with Domino Theory and containment - not just containing the spread, but containing the ideas behind propaganda and sanctions so thick that Americans couldn't even access the truth of the matter, that way they wouldn't get any bright ideas about eating the rich and nationalizing industries over here.

It's definitely exhausting.

Listen, I voted blue for 30 years and watched them steadily run to the right so hard the party leadership is sitting in Reagan's lap now, primarying candidates does not change the system because all of the candidates are just puppets hanging from the same set of strings (otherwise they don't have the funding to get (re)elected.)

Also you definitely can change the government without the will of the people, Trump's doing a pretty fair job of that while his supporters go 'I was in favor of deporting the bad people not my mom!' or 'I was in favor of firing the lazy government employees not me!'.

The world is absolutely flooded with people warning about literally everything all the time. Sometimes a few of them happen to be right; that doesn't make them prescient, just lucky. Broken clocks, and all that. Whose advice do you follow? The guy who says fascism is on the rise, or the guy who says the economy is going to unrecoverably tank? Does it matter that both of them have pretty good evidence to suggest that they might be right? Or that there are 400 more books released in any given year that claim that fascism is on the decline and the economy is booming like there's no tomorrow, and that they also have pretty good evidence to suggest that they might be right? This is the nature of prediction: it's all down to how you interpret the signs and signals.

For most of us, it is not that it was impossible to predict, it was more like it was much more convenient to believe the comfortable lie than to face the harsh reality

The more recent you look the more that becomes the case, but 40 years ago anyone who said 'in 40 years we're going to have a fascist dictator of a president who wants to ransack the courts he packed' or whatever would just be one more whisper in the hurricane.

Passion isn't something you either have or you don't, it's something you develop by being curious about the world, by seeing a need that you could fulfill and wanting to feel useful, etc. Sitting on the couch all day is not the way to develop your passion (take it from someone who has done it). Find something you care about, find a way to help make it better. But, if everyone's needs are met by automation I see no reason you couldn't be a giant couch potato if that's all you want out of life, because no contribution is required of anyone at that point. I'm not here to judge.

We definitely have aliens in spaceships flying around in the real world.

I, uh.. we're gonna have to agree to disagree on that one, chief.

but you don’t get magic powers you still have to have scientist and tech bros figuring shit out and inventing new shit and YOU have to teach at least the first few generations how to do that.

But the aliens have already invented all that shit, so it seems like a real dick move to not let us use it. Especially since if we have to reinvent technology from the ground up all over again there's a whoooole lot of people who are going to die that wouldn't have had to otherwise, so that's trending into 'if god exists he's a fucking asshole for allowing people to suffer needlessly' territory. I'm gonna assume they're helpful aliens, cause otherwise I'd have to pause my experiment to tell them just exactly what I think of them, but with guns instead of a few impolite words.

Why do I assume people wouldn’t contribute? It seems reasonable that at least some people will want to smoke weed instead of building houses, but idk! I literally said that I wasn’t sure and asked what the solution was because this is fun little prompt that I am curious about and want to hear everyone’s different perspectives on. I think that asking follow up questions is kinda reasonable.

That's fair. If everyone's needs are taken care of then there's no requirement to contribute at all. Sit on the couch and smoke weed if that's what makes you happy. But having done that for a few years I have to say I found it hard to not get up and do something useful on occasion. In the scenario where everything isn't fully automated? Well, if you don't care about your community and don't want to make your/their lives better, why are you a part of it? Maybe you'd be happier somewhere else. Life (currently) requires effort to sustain, if you aren't willing to put in that effort then it seems like you're probably not terribly interested in continuing to live, so maybe there's a conversation to be had about that.

Yeah, too many people in the US are still fat and comfortable with their lot in life, not even dreaming of what could be but stuck in the daily grind.

And I mean I made the same argument many times re:Israel - my standard for whether or not I can vote for someone has been reduced to a binary 'supports the Israeli genocide in Palestine, yes/no'; it's an extremely low bar, but both major candidates still managed to ooze under it somehow - but I did at least vote for not-fascism (for what good it did me living in a deep red state) which is more than I can say for most of those folks.

But yeah, we need something to wake people up, and my estimation of what that will take grows increasingly dire as the country goes to shit around us and still people are like 'No this is fine, we can fix this by voting!' Nah, the days of voting fixing a damned thing have been over for 20 years at least. And yeah, while the outcome will be the same, one of those is unfortunately going to hurt a lot more than the other, so I'm still reluctant..

Fair.

Yeah, I just watched the ~hour long interview he did with Jon Stewart that someone posted, and like it was all good-sounding ideas that may do some good but don't meaningfully challenge the status quo. Which is a pretty good summary of Democratic policy for the last 40 years. I'll give it to him though, he's definitely charismatic (I can't help but like him even though I think he's not very far left of, say, Hillary Clinton who is a full-on neoliberal) and he could probably win and be a damned sight better than the current administration. But also that's maybe not the best long-term because we need the system to fail messily as it is right now to wake people up to the alternatives. I hate advocating for accelerationism because even if the harm caused in the short term is outweighed by the harm prevented long-term, I still have a hard time advocating for things that I know will definitely cause harm.

Why do you imagine people wouldn't contribute? People aren't only motivated by money - unless I've somehow been missing out on getting paid for doing the dishes, cleaning up trash at the park, or helping my friends move this whole time. People are so programmed by capitalism to stop any idea that comes into their head that might challenge the status quo and apply the 'rugged individualism' bullshit to it until they figure out how it couldn't possibly work, while failing to realize that humans worked together for thousands of years before capitalism came along and taught us all that we should be thinking of ourselves first, last, and only.

But also you missed something important here, in the first two words:

Fully automated luxury gay space communism for everyone!

What contribution do you imagine is required if automation can meet everyone's needs? This isn't the real world, we've got goddamned aliens in space ships flying around, there's no reason to believe someone with that level of technology couldn't automate away literally everything. And even if that wasn't the case, the point of the bit I said about education was explicitly to deprogram people who are still hung up on capitalism's 'fuck you I got mine' attitude, if that's required (the prompt said nothing about where these people come from, what their preconceived notions are, etc, so I was covering all bases.)

Here's a radical idea: let's not have one. Let's instead have a society that is committed to ensuring that the needs of all of its citizens are met instead of just those of the capitalist class. Voting (blue or not) will never get you there though, because both parties are on the same corporate dark money IV drip. This shithole is the way it is because the people with all the money and power want it this way, and if you think voting will dig you out of it you haven't been paying attention.