To those coming in to this post to say “Wow, a billionaire shouldn’t be able to impact the outcome of geopolitical conflicts with the touch of a button!”

All I can say is…

In my experience there are a LOT of leftists who cling to the label without actually being more than a liberal with some angry outbursts.

The only thing worse than vindictive, bigoted conservatives is vindictive, bigoted leftists who don’t want to find ways to live alongside the stupid hicks.

At least they’re stupid enough that they can be turned and manipulated to supporting better outcomes, but leftists holding a grudge do entire goddamn worldbuilding exercises around justifying hating everyone with a simple life and a simple mind.

(Go ahead and downvote me browser, while you do, think about what kind of biases you hold against people based on how you imagine their house and yard to look.)

It’s still important to push the message to not be lazy about going out and doing the thing, especially in mid-terms which get far less turnout.

But that 89mil who did not vote in 2024 is very close to the average percentage that stays home every election anyway. My point is, the sampling of those who did vote, didn’t necessarily make me think that if uninterested people did show up, that it would have gone much different.

Of the people who were actually registered and voted in 2024, a vast number of the people who voted for Trump identified as Obama voters and Bernie supporters. People had basically discarded whatever political alignment more informed voters adhere to and just looked at the price of eggs at the time and associated that with Biden/Harris, and that was the most informed opinion shaping voting habits.

People did not watch debates. They did not pay attention to large news stories. They got most of their political news from social media; tweets and facebook memes in the small amount of time they spend scrolling content that isn’t entertainment. They did not know what either candidate was advocating and largely didn’t care, most thought it didn’t effect them either way.

This is all by design, and if we want to talk to about vote manipulation, this is the biggest issue, which is there are too many fake shills and sock-puppets all over social media, even here on Lemmy, who will adopt the stupidest or most radical takes on both sides of every issue until bystanders and browsers roll their eyes at the whole thing and tune out.

There are literally millions of people in India and other countries who farm Twitter for a few dollars every month by pushing rage-bait, arguing with people, pretending to be Americans and pretending to care about our future, while sharing propaganda and memes designed to make people hate political involvement.

Our biggest problem is not turnout but engagement and information.

Hey look at it this way, we may finally get our mechs out of this.

I mean, they may be the last thing you see, but at least we may see them.

There are a lot of really miserable, insufferable kids on Lemmy right now seething about this because it flies in the face of the “voting is useless, everything will be rigged” narrative that they push to validate not wanting to be involved.

Showing up at the polls is not our problem in the US, it’s getting people involved enough to actually learn about and read what candidates represent. We had the largest voter turnout in US history over the last couple elections, but people basically voted at random because they tuned out of the political chaos.

It’s far more clear this time around who is doing what to disrupt the status-quo in the US and I expect we’re going to see a massive swing in the opposite direction between this November and 2028.

If Kazakhstan did have it, they would have already used it in some capacity.

I expect maybe putin to keep it in his back pocket because he’s capable of using it tactically to leverage massive geopolitical moves like averting/sparking WW3.

Psssst. We’re all political prisoners here now.

If you fucks don’t do everything you can to overwhelm the midterms to primary every incumbent democrat, you better not complain when President Newsom rolls back 20% of Trump’s policies and decides that some trans people can be released from some of the camps.

The most important revelation I ever had about existing and being human was the understanding that our brains are not machines of logic and reason, despite being capable of performing logical reasoning.

The brain is, by default, a story telling machine. It just takes your memories and experiences and uses those things to explain whatever you’re feeling at the moment. Those explanations don’t necessarily have to make sense or be connected to reality, it just has this massive priority to weave a coherent story to explain how you got here, feeling this thing, doing whatever it is you’re doing.

In the early world of survival, this helped us. Seeing paw prints by your watering hole made you feel uneasy, your brain tied that to the time a saber-tooth cat killed your uncle. Emotional connection to a sense, an association, a story for why you should feel afraid.

In the modern world, the brain tries to do the same goddamn thing when someone you like ignores you or when you feel embarrassed in a social setting. Small things that spark the same survival response to weave a story together around it. Or you feel a sad spell from a chemical imbalance and instead of waiting for it to pass, your brain decides it’s because of your entire life, the people around you, and your lack of success.

From that understanding, you can beat rumination, you can challenge yourself, you can overcome addiction and do a lot of amazing things with your life, but it all comes back to understanding that your brain doesn’t work “out of the box” and if you want to make better decisions and feel better, you have to manually TRAIN IT to make you feel better and make better choices. You have to learn to control not your emotions, but your reactions to those emotions, to think through your thinking, to follow your chains of thought to a source. This is what a good therapist will do for you, set you on a course to retrain your brain.

A lot of people resist this because it feels “fake” and that you’re “fooling yourself,” so they resist change and training their own brains.

You are not your brain. Your brain however is very, very complex, with a multitude of voices inside of it each trying to get attention, you’re only aware of the top-most surface level that uses language to think, but the very best thing you can do for yourself is get in the habit of thinking about how you think.

It was the faux 2A who go to the range for a photoshoot and buy the Gucci gear who voted for Trump.

I am FINALLY starting to see some guntubers start to call this shit out, and call attention to the fact that their community is getting overrun with people who don’t actually care about proper gun safety and laws, and are only there for the politics and “masculinity” around having guns.

I hope this continues. I was first to speak up that we needed better gun laws in the US, but I also am a gun owner and have always been really disappointed how guns became a political issue and not a guarantee that these political issues don’t overpower us and take away all our rights.

The left needs to arm the fuck up. Political capital comes from force and patriotism, it’s a fucking shame the worst people have taken our most powerful tools for change in the US and used them to get us here.

The vast swaths of tuned-out, comfortable, liberal America look at two sides, the right kissing the flag and promising to defend the country with their lives, and then they look to the left, spitting on the flag and demanding de-armement, and they make a choice which makes them feel safer. It’s utterly stupid that they have this binary vision, but we have to understand how power comes from this perception, and we don’t win without power.

They are absolutely going to pull ahead on the world stage, whatever that really means.

But if you have lived in America all your life and been told how we’re the gleaming city on the mountain, the land of milk-and-honey and all that pabulum we’ve been fed for decades and decades, and then walk around in one of China’s newer cities you will have a radical culture shock. Then have a medical problem and walk into one of their hospitals.

Fuck, just walk into a public restroom or use their mass transit and you will wonder where the fuck your tax money is going.

Their space program alone gets zero coverage in the US and has done amazing things that will guarantee them the solar system in just a few decades.

Not saying they’re some kind of perfect nation, their human rights issues, their abuse of their workers, their racism and xenophobia are still huge and glaring, but it’s going to be a lot worse in the US before long.

I mean, yeah everyone is saying it but there’s no consequences so that makes it pretty apparent that nobody actually cares.

The US has broadly held up the so-called fight against racism as a purely performative, liberal status-quo exercise, but has barely actually cared about equality in any regard in their personal lives as a population, or we wouldn’t have had all the contention we’ve had, with almost nothing being done on a legal level to combat it. There are public figures who have said and done things that would have landed them in PRISON in other countries that we just finger-wag in the US and forget a day later.

These kinds of posts are deliberate, they’re not even dog-whistles to racists because again, nobody actually cares about racism in the US. They’re signals about “following the rules.”

Trump/Miller posting this and all the other ones we’ve already forgotten about was about demonstrating to their base that they don’t care about the rules, that they will break the country before they submit to the constitution and individual rights.

They are the kid screaming the N-word in the playground not because he knows what the word means, but because he knows how much attention he gets for it.

I’m sorry for your friend, and yes mortality puts life into new perspectives.

But I want to make it clear… I am not kind. I just have values I live by, knowing what your values are is your guiding star when you can’t decide to care about something or everything. I have a train-wreck derailment of people I’ve made angry in my life by sticking to my values and principles, and I feel zero regret about it, because I know my values are correct, and I don’t compromise at a certain level.

I am getting increasingly distressed by how alien this seems to modern generations, and how many people are open about the fact that they can’t decide or figure out how to build their values and seem to default to “attitude” over ethics.

No. I take butthurt whinging about my tone as success. Ya’ll need to get slapped around a lil’, these sheltered spaces just breed echo-chamberism and that’s how we get a new, even weirder MAGA-like movement.

I grew up in a conservative area, in a conservative household, survival preppers even.

I was raised my whole youth with the narrative that we were collecting guns and supplies for the day that the federal government starts taking away our rights and interfering with democracy.

For my entire younger life, growing up in the cold war, it was the back-country, blue-blooded American way to push back against Russia, against threats to our vote, against government overreach and intereferring in both people’s personal lives as well as the business of other countries.

I changed ideology as soon as I escaped and got a taste of reality, but I still do believe we need to protect our democracy with force, and now that’s the opposite of the conservative stance and it’s like living in the Upsidedown. I understand how we got here, but I am constantly astonished how fucking stupid everyone is. Everyone.

I know this will get some reactions, but IMO conservatives change much easier than progressives, particularly leftists.

Conservatives have no consistent values, no coherent mental value system, they are reactionary and will shift gears like the wind changes. A good, charismatic leader can easily set a new tone for a whole nation that calms down a large percentage of them, as I’ve seen a few times in my decades. They don’t have to even agree with the new leadership, they just have to feel like it’s their time to sit in the time-out box and they will remain quiet and grumble to themselves about imagined slights. They are children and have the attention spans of children.

I’m more concerned about the many, many progressives and leftists who are thirsty for retribution, because everything is remembered, a score has been kept and it drives a need for validation, for even a shred of recognition of the harm that the conservative movement has done over the years. These aren’t un-relatable feelings, but it’s going to start pushing the pendulum again, add to that the large number of sabotaging forces who work tirelessly to amplify the worst takes on both sides, fanning flames, trying to stoke contention.

Yah he learned from the second time, never climbed another tree even as we lived in the woods.

That’s a great story, I appreciate your sharing.

I want our species to be judged by how far out of our way we go to help those who have no impact on our own lives, and how much we value even the smallest lives and the connection between us and other species even.

I’m actually delighted my pushback made you fly off the handle and spit incoherencies and ignore my points, it tells me I hit the right buttons.

If my efforts at reminding people that we still have a future, hope and community and ways to fight oppression made you this mad, then it tells me all I need to know about what you’re doing here and why. Have a good one.