Edited to replace original incorrect Herzog attribution with my own version that correctly attributes the quote
this post was submitted on 05 Sep 2024
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It's gruesome, isn't it? When I was young, I used to believe that people were, for the most part, decent. Misled, often, stupid, very often; but good at heart. Now, I'm convinced that a good third of our society is broken and a third of our society is blind to anything that doesn't affect them.
It was a strange feeling when I reached an age and realized that most people I know didn’t meet the standards of what I thought should be a good person.
Good people make mistakes, often repeatedly. Great people eventually learn something.
I actually originally dug this picture up for a post of this RawStory article titled 'Their ignorance is willful': WaPo analyst says enough with the MAGA voter pity, which is highly relevant.
The problem with the majority of right wing extremists isn't that they're just stupid misled bumpkins, but that they're actual psychopaths who vote for people like Trump because he's promising to hurt everybody they hate
I'm convinced that we've lost, at minimum, 20% of our nation to some kind of mass-hysteria style sociopathy. I mean, maybe they've always been lost and we just didn't realize it, but going forward, I don't think anything can be done to 'fix' them. Most people, I think, are responsive to their environments and social standards, but after a point, you get so dug in that peer pressure doesn't work, even on social animals like us. All we can do is save the children of that 20%.
It's the same with conservatives pretty much around the world right now.
I really don't know how we're going to unfuck the situation without a lot of bloodshed – and make no mistake, it would be them who spill that blood like they're already doing, just at a much larger scale. As it is, conservatives are a threat to stable and peaceful societies, and due to their resistance to meaningful climate action they're an existential threat to humanity in general.
I have some hope, at least. People in general are passive, even when they hate the status quo, they often cede to a fait accompli. The trick is getting each bit a done deal before conservative talking heads have time to formulate the best Pavlovian Ten Minutes' Hate for their audience.
And making sure the kids continue to be alright.
It starts with us not engaging in the same thing.
I think what happened is that it became more acceptable to show their nastiness; that they used to have to hide it because our society wouldn't accept it. Then Trump being elevated to president normalized the violence and hatred being out in the open and those people felt safe to come out of the woodwork.
I feel like it was always there, simmering beneath the surface, but I'm a self-admitted (overall) misanthrope who thinks most people are, on average, pretty shitty.
We could start by addressing the actual causes of conditions of despair.
None of what you describe is necessarily mutually exclusive. You can be broken, misled, misinformed, and stupid, while still being good at heart.
I think that everyone is blind to something. Some of us are less so than others. Growing up in this world will do that to a person. Shit happens to everybody. Some of us are better equipped than others to handle it, while others are not.
It takes a lot of work to keep your heart from hardening in this world but it is work worth doing.
For me the jury is still out.
Yes, but the issue is that they're broken, misled, misinformed, stupid, AND malicious.
I would ascribe that intermittent blindness more to the other ~80% of the population.
We are blind too. It’s just that the things we were raised to believe but don’t realize aren’t petty and mean.
How your raise kids matters.
For instance, most of the people who are atheists in the west argue for a set of beliefs that perfectly aligns with protestism without God. It is baked into every lesson they were taught as a kid.
if it makes you feel any better you were wrong and it was always fucked up. the difference between now and when you were young is that you're more aware now.
Oh yeah, I'm not saying I think society has changed for the worse. It's definitely just that my eyes are open now.
i dont think it was always fucked up, there was always some amount of fucked up, but there's vastly more amounts of fucked up now.
compared to what time? Tulsa massacre? jim crow? pre suffrage? slavery?
those are specific selections of fucked up ness in society. At some point that was considered to societal norm, people pushed outside of it, as the government and society intends to happen, shit gets goofy, eat sleep repeat and gay people are normal now.
we're also talking about a specific problem in politics, manifested in a very specific way today, that wouldn't have been possible merely 20 years ago, so i think it's fair to treat this like a sort of historically true fact.
unless you're trying to argue that humanity has been a constant state of bad throughout it's entire history, which i doubt, and also changes from person to person. It's not really relevant to go that far back i think.
they're not selections in the cherry picking sense; the country's history is a constant stream of oppression and political violence.
only one of them is a specific event, but i pointed it out it was particularly fucked up. but the rest aren't specific at all; they're entire periods of time where the "fucked up" was the norm, and the law.
i don't exactly understand what you think we're talking about. you say it's a "specific problem" but didn't specify it really. so i don't know what's supposedly impossible merely 20 years ago.
but merely 20 years ago gays couldn't marry. 20 some years before that the AIDS epidemic was ignored because the government thought it was a gay problem and didn't care.
there was always oppression and there still is. the orange cunt didn't invent anything. he just started saying the quiet part out loud.
this would be applicable to the entire history of the human race as well.
i'm talking about the fascist conservatism problem, and the specific ways in which it's being empowered. Something like this has literally never happened before, hitler being the closest thing, arguably. But that was before the modern era and now we have so many more avenues for social control and influence than with hitler.
i don't disagree, i just think in this specific aspect (politics) it's gotten substantially worse since the early oughts.
The specific mechanism of the problem is brand new and very hard to deal with, which compounds with the problem.
irrelevant, as we're talking about US history, not world history. you're the one saying we're in worse times than before and I'm asking when that was.
i disagree that fascism wasn't a serious problem before, i just think they're more comfortable with visibility today thanks to the orangutan leatherface. if you mean this to be the specific mechanism, okay, but i don't know if it's really worse than the insidious cryptofascism doing the same shit but with masks and dog whistles instead.
i get that, granted that was the argument i just made previously so this is a bit redundant here. Regardless, if we're just talking about the specific capacity of the human race to do bad things to other people, it's probably pretty consistent over time. Even through the global world history.
i think the modern incantation is worse simply because of how accessible it is, paired with how inconspicuous it can be. It can become a rather dangerous thing. And extremely coordinated. unlike the hitler arc, there is very little need for control of the media in this case, because they can literally just create their own narrative and it's global within about 20 minutes.
As far as stability, and the shaking of this country from a NATO sided democracy to a BRICS sided dictatorship? Yeah, I'd say it's right up there if it does happen.
“10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.” -Susan Sontag
The problem mostly aren't the individuals. Human normally are nice.
These are processes started by psychopaths using the heard instinct for their plans.
Most individuals are nice, groups of people on the other hand can never be trusted.
Gonna have to disagree with you there. Individuals are good are pretending they're nice. The number of people who are horrifying when they think it's safe to let their mask down around you is... concerning.
Not even kidding, about a year and a half ago, I took a job in a different department at work, and within 10 minutes, the guy that I was training with, had said 3 offensive slurs within the first 10 minutes of meeting the guy. Like dude, I could go to HR right now and you'd be gone in another 10 minutes. Wtf? In 2023? I mean, the guy was 71 years old, so I kinda gave him a pass on doing that, which kinda gives me the ick, but still. I didn't turn him in because they basically built the building around where this guy happened to be standing and got offered the job the day it opened up. Another guy, whose only 38 and should know better though actually did get a 30 day suspension for repeated racist remarks. He's actually a smart guy but he's been mislead. Not a very nice guy, but smart.
Our politics as of late indicate to me that people of good heart will now kill you for their dear leader.
We're all just reeling from traumatic experience to traumatic experience. We don't get any real time to slow down and heal, so emotions from one trauma show up in other unrelated problems. People become a bull in a china shop, hit someone else, who then becomes another bull in said china shop, they hit a few more, who then in turn become more bulls, so to anyone in the china shop that hasn't been hit yet, it all seems chaotic and evil. We're all just deeply traumatized with no avenue for healing.
Anyway, vote for Hindenburg.
Many of them are misled. You can be born into a completely alternate reality with the way conservative culture has been cutting itself off from news and media.