Extremely well put. The individualism really is weird and terrible. The main character syndrome is part of what takes away the agency, I think… Like, we need to hear The Call To Adventure. We need The Plot to show up at our fucking house. We need to be the Person that Does The Thing in the Room Where It Happens. The founding father. It’s all or nothing. Either the thing we personally do somehow fixes the country, or we don’t do it at all.

Maybe we imagine that we can be the hero and shoot the bad guy and save the day. But we can’t imagine, like, Fixing Things. Deciding what the future holds. What would that even look like? Boldly waving a parchment in the air? When would everybody cheer for me in particular?

No, it doesn’t look like an individual. It looks like a crowd. It looks like people, outside, angry.

Cheers to Good Troubles.

Don’t sit and wait for better opportunities. Fuck the lists. Band together for some of Booker and Lewis’ Good Trouble. Get out on the streets. There are millions of people who are just as upset as you are, and every voice added to the crowd multiplies the reach.

Most of them are so isolated that chaos in the streets really wouldn’t change their lives or opinions

Emphasis mine. This has been said about every single ruling class ever. It has been proven wrong many times. The wealthy are afraid of the lower classes. Their lives depend on the status quo, and their lives change when the status quo changes. Otherwise they wouldn’t press so goddamn hard on the boot.

Except that this 4D chess move is not going to make the wealthy a fortune. Dismantling the global economy will only hurt, everyone, in the long-term. Including billionaires’ profits. Just the threat of tariffs is enough to do that damage. Whatever short-term gains anyone might make on a market dip are going to be completely washed out by the long-term losses of destabilizing international trade on a whim.

Even if it is “according to plan”, it’s a stupid fucking plan, and it won’t work.

This is nonsense that gets spread way too often. The wealthy benefited from Covid, but they did not benefit from the Great Depression. The billionaires are shortsighted hoarders who can’t help but screw themselves over in their race to the top end. They really are so fucking stupid and greedy that they will crash the economy by accident, AGAIN.

Trump dismantles regulatory and social support agencies and enacts tariffs on a level we haven’t seen since Coolidge and Hoover caused the Great Depression

The collapse is going to be the democrats fault

Keep on keepin’ on my friend

1920’s 2: electric boogaloo. Good luck everyone. Wish it didn’t have to be this way. Do what you can to prepare your families and your communities, because this is going to hurt.

When Coolidge Trump’s term ends early and Hoover Vance puts the final nails in the coffin of the US economy, let’s all try to pull an FDR and not a Hitler, please?

someone should have continued after him because the nomination passed and i am sad again.

Another senator can’t take over for Booker, only way it ends is when he cedes the floor. They were only able to ask questions to give him a break.

Q1 2025 is almost over and there has been no realistic counterbalance against the crimes and coups. Investors are growing comfortable with the new world order. Like many Americans, the wealthy believe that if the riots haven’t started yet, they never will.

Like many Americans, the wealthy have forgotten how bad the 1930s were. Many think they will “cash in” on a downturn but the truth is the wealthy are just short-sighted idiots. The only difference this time is public access to information and communication. I’m not a time traveller believing that the internet will bring us together, but I do think it was a lot harder to plan a fun outing with your friends before wireless telecommunications.

Corporate profits dropped from $10 billion in 1929 to $1 billion in 1932. You might think “oh they still made profit” but a 90% decrease is devastating to a group like that, and it wasn’t evenly distributed. Many wealthy became decidedly not wealthy. And they still had to live in a world where society had broken down and dust storms hit the United States capitol building.

It took decades for them to rebuild their monopolies, bring down the tax rates, and tear up the market regulations again. Without WW2 and reagonomics the wealthy may never have recovered their power over the world economy. I guess what I’m saying is buckle up for the 30s and 40s everybody. If you happen to get a choice between dishonor and war again, choose the fucking war.

Surely there is eventually a level of stupid that we can agree is just stupid? This is it right here. There’s no plan. No 4D chess. No intentional leak. It’s just a bunch of idiots breaking the law, praying to God, ending lives, and then clapping themselves on the back and sending high five emojis.

It’s the threat of danger that matters.

Correct! It is the threat of danger that matters. Domestic violence as you described is threatening and abusive, and therefore violent.

Is it the same thing when the property is owned by a company, not a person?

Is graffiti terrorism? It’s property damage. It can be ideologically motivated. If someone had spray painted the cars, instead of lit them on fire… would it still be terrorism?

Who was threatened here?

Violent, criminal acts

Property damage is not violence and nonviolent protests are not terrorism. They will claim it is. They are lying.

It’s a state response, not a federal one. NY doesn’t really have the jurisdiction to file suits for crimes commited by the federal government against itself.

The states do have the jurisdiction to sue over a violation of the rights of its citizens commited by the federal government, especially when the violation is explicitly against federal law and the state has hard evidence with which to present their case.

So yes, I’ll take it too! Anything is literally better than nothing!

It’s odd to me that anyone fantasizes about nature in general being peaceful. Especially when the plot of most nature documentaries can be summarized as “fall in love with this creature, then experience the stress of watching it struggle desperately to survive.”

Sorry but the problem right now is much simpler. Gullibility doesn’t require some logical premise. “It sounds right so it MUST be true” is where the thought process ends.

That covers some things, but the algorithm feeds people such nonsense at such a high rate that it’s hard to keep up with.

I think your idea is laudable. Normally I’m not one to dissuade someone from fighting a good fight in the age of disinformation, but I worry that you’re coming at this problem from the wrong direction, and you alone will never be able to fight misinformation at its source.

Have you ever been able to change someone’s mind on an insane belief, just because you knew exactly where it came from? Or because you were aware of the idea before they were?

We’re talking about a hydra’s infinite rectum here. No matter what you -ectomy, more stool samples are coming than you will ever be able to process and analyze.

More often than not, a person does not rationalize their way into believing misinformation. It is not a logical process of collecting and analyzing facts. It is an emotional process of consuming content that elicits a level of fear, pride, or hate.

They fear what they do not understand.

They are proud to be a part of a group that does “understand”.

They hate feeling like they’re being told what to do and what to think. They feel a vulnerability within themselves - a gap in their knowledge - and rather than address it as an internality, they externalize it. They don’t understand because you don’t want them to understand.

To their mind, the answer can’t be complex. They have arrived at the belief that knowledgeable, professional, and underpaid experts are all wrong or outright greedy and dishonest, and that comprehending truth doesn’t require significant education and research.

Really, they believe the answer should be simple. If it isn’t, that must mean the “true” answer - the easily digestible TIL TLDR of the entire field of healthcare that they could actually understand without much effort - well, that answer must be hidden from them.

Note that this is not intended to describe a particular group or flavor of ideology or conspiracy, but rather the experience of believing in ideas that contradict observable reality, verifiable fact, and leigitimate sources of information.

You can’t just come at them with logic, evidence, or rationality. These things are necessary but insufficient. You need to approach it with emotion and empathy. Bedside manner is crucial.

Don’t waste your time trying to master the lies - spend time mastering the truth. Present your knowledge as clearly and simply as possible. Address your patients holistically. Use their language. Teach them without condescending to them. Don’t try to tear apart individual pieces of information they regurgitate, but understand the underlying themes and emotions that you can actually help them with.

Lastly, please don’t burn yourself out. It’s brave to want to immerse yourself in the rabid chaos of digital misinformation for the sake of your patients, but it’s a soul-crushing exercise that should be undertaken with extreme caution.

There are plenty of patients who really just need a good doctor more than anything else. And some of them will be more likely to believe in scientific truth when they already believe in the knowledge and good faith of a scientific expert.

Typing this out made me realize a distinction I failed to bring up. People do like to learn, but people HATE to UN-learn ideas. The person in your example wanted to learn something new, but did not want to unlearn the iphone walled garden.

This is an excellent point. You’re right, we do agree, sorry my comment came off aggressive.

I’ve just described to you a person that really wanted to learn something, and did it. Put in hours of mental and physical effort. And your response is that nobody wants to learn, and that people only learn what they want to learn? Which is self-evident and vacuous.

Inertia and degradation of curiousity is a real issue but my point is that the creators of the walled gardens intentionally discourage that curiousity.

Most people naturally want to learn. Even into adulthood. But people - like water and electricity - naturally tend toward the path of least resistance. And everywhere they go, walled gardens offer them more and more paths with less and less resistance at every step.

There still lives a generation or two that ripped apart computers, crashed them with amateur code, bricked them with viruses, reformatted the drives and put it all back together again as kids and adults. They did that because it was something they wanted to learn. It wasn’t easy, or simple. It was hard, and confusing, and risky. Kids of the generations that followed don’t do that nearly as much, even though they could.

Are those kids inherently less curious than their parents were at the same age? No. At least, not by birth. They’ve just been offered a path of less resistance, and they took it. Does that mean they want that path? No. There’s just so many paths in front of them that the path of technological literacy is lost in the weeds.

Yes, people only really learn what they want to learn. But the reason people in general are getting less curious over time is because they are being convinced that they want to learn something else, or worse, more often than not they’re being deceived into thinking they’re learning at all.

Eh, like almost everything else in human experience it initially started because of daylight and agriculture. Hunters and gatherers had fluid schedules, but farms had strict requirements. Without electricity and with a life built around plants and animals, everyone just has to work when the suns up. With most of the population involved in agriculture and not much else, you’re right - you either woke up or you died.

Then candles, gas lamps, and eventually electric lights opened up the darkness for meaningful work, while agricultural technology slowly pushed workers out to other fields (heh).

But out of necessity the hours for schools and markets were originally built around the hours of the fields, and it just stuck.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I think morning people are playing a hand in perpetuating this issue. They probably get to keep deciding the rules because they keep showing up before us, all energized and efficient and judging us for showing up late or tired. Or something.

But I would be curious to see if any studies have checked if there’s a correlation between sociopathy/narcissism and sleep phases, I’ll take a look. Or maybe they’re just signalling that they’re early risers as a way of feeling superior to the rest of us.

Just interesting because even non tech people want this when you sell it to them properly. They don’t actually want a walled garden ecosystem that is “simple”.

Nobody actually wants a walled garden, they just get entrapped in them (“it’s just where my friends/music/content creators are”)

They then become convinced that they want it, and its reinforced by the walled gardeners (looking at you, iMessage videos and bubbles)

I know a person who built their own PC (Windows, but still) from scratch for the first time as an adult. Had the money and the opportunity to buy a prebuilt rig in two clicks, but instead researched the market, ordered parts and tools, exchanged a part that didn’t fit the case, learned how to assemble it all by hand, and exclaimed that it was a great experience and would do it all over again.

And yet at every opportunity still buys an iphone despite the cost because it’s “simple” and they “don’t want to learn” something new. That’s not the actual reason - that’s just stockholm syndrome.