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I wonder why he ended up with a bullet in his head.
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Three big things:
- Compartmentalization of media (echo chambers)
- Tribalism (thanks Russia!)
- Macho culture (treating politics like a college football game except being LESS informed)
We'll never recover from this. This is the United States of Ignorance now. I'm deeply sorry to those who did their part and will be victims in the future, but it HAS to get worse before it can get better. We need a great reset in some form. Revolution, world war, alien invasion...
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This is sort of my train of thought, however, historically, when that sort of thing happens, very rarely is the resulting government a unfucked democratic nation.
I hope there are enough people with actual core American values that rise to the top if/when it happens.
My hopes aren’t high, but they’re not high with the status quo either.
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"I love the poorly educated" - You know who
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We've now seen what the ignorance of 10 million who don't bother to show up can do.
That's how many Democrats voted in 2020 but not this year, and are blaming the results on "the party". Nope, it was you fucktwats.
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No I voted and still blame them. People were vocal about their concerns and intentions to not vote months before the election and the campaign ignored them and somehow that isn’t their fault.
Also the 10 million, like you said, were ignorant. It wasn’t the ultra-impassioned grandstanders that affected an election. It was people that saw the last 4 years relatively boring politics as a license to tune out and figured this election wasn’t something they needed to worry about. Those people exist in far FAR higher numbers than anybody actually paying attention
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Well, ooooobviously that's because the democrats cheated in 2020 and then inexplicably, while in power, decided not to cheat in 2024. Obviously.
Massive /s.
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Don't worry. Plenty of blame to go around. The fuckwad voters who enabled fascism by staying home, and the fuckwad party elite who couldn't find their own asses with both hands and a map and lost a lay-up election to fascism through their own venality and incompetence.
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Well that went well didn’t it
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I can guess what he means by the other points but I wonder how being more educated means being more free?
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Liberty consists of the capacity to make meaningful choices; those ignorant of their choices cannot possibly make them. Ignorance itself is a kind of tyranny which chains people.
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because uneducated people are easy to lie to.
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Harder to be taken advantage of if you know the means by which one takes advantage of another.
Knowing the wealthy need you more than you need them lets you make stronger demands and form unions.
Being knowledgeable gives you job security and independence, you have intrinsic value as a capable resource - and if spurned can become a troublesome enemy because you understand your opponent and can take advantage accordingly
Knowledge is absolutely power, and power gives you opportunity for freedom to choose how to live your life.
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Not strictly: he says only an educated people can be a free one, meaning that all free peoples are educated ones, but the inversion of that is "No uneducated people can be free". By that, I assume he means that uneducated people are far more susceptible to deception and manipulation compared to the educated that will be better able to detect lies, point them out and understand explanations of why that's bullshit.
As an example: If I tell you that the "vaccines cause autism" study was a) just a pilot study, not an actual one at scale, b) heavily fudged to the point that one scientist was kicked off the project for refusing to falsify results, c) only examined a specific vaccine, the MMR combination vaccine usually given to infants and d) led by a guy that had financial stakes in a company trying to sell individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella, you can probably smell the bullshit.
If I tried to explain that to someone who's not educated enough, they'll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of "Well, you never know what to believe these days" and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Things get far worse when someone tells their base that some group is capturing and eating their pets and ends up inciting violence by people who take him at face value.
Edit: I don't know why I said "harmless" there. Anti-Vaxxers aren't harmless, even when compared to incitement of hate crimes.
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If I tried to explain that to someone who’s not educated enough, they’ll probably stare at me blankly, then shrug and say something to the effect of “Well, you never know what to believe these days” and change absolutely nothing about their stance.
Wow, I never knew I had conservative-related PTSD, but here I am having vivid and terrifying flashbacks to just that scenario.
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one way is, that if you do not know the impact of policies, you cant make informed decisions about them and thereby lose control over your life and environment.
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This criticism of democracy is way older than Kennedy. Socrates thought democracy impossible due to the ignorance of the common person.
And that's what this is, an argument against democracy. A vote cast by a shut-in illiterate who chooses candidates based on their astrology sign is just as valid as the chair of the political science department. Anything less than that is an argument for weighted or exclusive suffrage. You can believe in democracy or the "low information" voter, but not both.
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Acknowledging that democracy as glorified sortition is not actually in any way better than sortition is not an argument against democracy; it is an argument for creating the circumstances in which an active citizenry meaningfully and knowledgeably participates in the civic life of their polity. It's not about 'weighting' or making suffrage exclusive, it's about creating a society in which good citizenship is enabled and valued by the institutions of society.
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I don't think the educated do know that last part anymore. i spent a decade (2014-2024) in rightwing spaces mostly on reddit... I didn't see too many other lefties in them arguing against the alt-right.
Most lefties ignore the majority rightwing places like the plague. They're not out there trying to save democracy by educating one voter at a time. They're just not.
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In the defense of the left, going into right-wing online spaces to try to change someone's mind is probably one of the worst uses of one's time possible. At least at a protest you can't get banned by an assmad mod.
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They had different levels of respect for free speech, ranging from from the extremely open places, like 4chan and 8chan, to the middle range, like the Jordan Peterson subreddit... To the fairly closed, like the Conservative subreddit.
From what I observed the biggest way a leftist could waste their time over that decade, was acting smug and self-righteous about how dumb Trump supporters are.
That particular behaviour is a big part of why Trump won, because he just had to pretend to work at McDonald's (a joke in which he's questioning Kamal job history), or dress up as a garbage man (in defense of his supporters)... And make a few jokes or outlandish statements to get supporters thinking a) this guy is different b) he makes me feel freer with his antics and c) he seems like a real change from stuffy politicians who never listen to me.
The left's response to the jokes/traps was mostly to mock them and be smug, to say Trump supporters are stupid, and basically doubling down on moralisms and making them feel bad/oppressed.
It was an emotional game, Trump's team made voters feel like change was possible, politics could be fun, and maybe someone was listening to them and going to shake things up.
The lefts message was constantly: you're stupid, you're bad, we're going to do politics as usual and we're not listening to you.
So that's how the election was lost. On emotional games and felt sentiments.
Could have used more people in those spaces wasting their time with me. Oh well. The so right won. That's just how it goes, voters aren't rational, they're emotional.
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If you're trying to reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into, you're not gonna do anything but act as a straw man for people to make into whatever they want to attack
Yes, it's absolutely vital to reach across the isle and offer understanding and share knowledge, but you're also up against a national propaganda system that is universally accessible.
The only two real avenues of change are
people getting negatively affected enough that the wealthy may potentially lose their status quo so they're willing to capitulate to the middle class in a small way that keeps their illusion intact
Or, you are able to humanize yourself and your views in a way that successfully removes the difference between left/right culture war and reframe it as a top/bottom class war.
Usually best accomplished by demonstrating that most people want the same things and aren't as different as Media tries to make us. This realization will also be worn down over time in the face of (now) every media source available inventing realities to explain how everything is correct, going to plan, and paradise is just over one more horizon of tax cuts, austerity, and diminished rights.
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So you disagree with the JFK quote, is essentially what you're saying.
I think there are plenty on the left who felt their way into their opinions (that's often how people find their world views), and also are emotional in how they operate or interact when disagreement happens.
But I do agree money is part of how people vote too.
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I have no more faith in this Democracy (and I mean globally). To the point where I literally cannot bring myself to participate in the silent acceptance which is voting.
Edit: to prevent this from sounding like my Edgelord Master's thesis, as I see it, Democracy is now one two things:
- a lie we've been fed from the very start
- a noble idea which has been twisted and corrupted beyond any recognition
In either of those cases, it feels like I'm being forced to pull the lever and decide who gets killed by the tram. So I choose to never again touch the lever as long as the death of something is the only outcome.
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The whole thing with the "trolley problem" is that blood is on your hands regardless. Not touching the lever doesn't stop the trolley and can lead to more death.
In the recent voting case not pulling the lever put lgbtq, disabled, immunocompromised, minorities, Ukraine, remnants of democracy and a habitable planet on the tracks. The other track had Palestinians and could have been shifted away with enough protest.
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Oh, no, had I the chance to vote in the USA (not American), I would've voted for anyone who wasn't a Trump adherent, just to prevent The Orange Man from participating in the unfolding of history any more than he already has. Don't get me wrong, I'm frustrated and disillusioned, not stupid.
But in other places, such as my country, we're well past the point of that choice even being on the table.
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so then what else are you doing? are you out protesting, boycotting, participating in mutual aid?
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As much as I can. Truthfully, there's not much of that going on around these parts, but yes, I try as much as I can to find ways to act against the choices with which we are presented nowadays.
To be clear, I am not against Democracy as a fairer-than-most political system, my meaning was related to the Democracy-that-is. Just like I appreciate Socialism, but not Stalin's brand of such.
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I think it's still good to go vote to keep the worst from happening and to improve the circumstances for emancipatory struggle.
But I also think voting is one of the lesser important levers, compared to activism, organizing, unions and so on.
Both, giving up using levers and cosplaying trying by just voting for a shitty neoliberal mess and watch them making people frustrated enough to vote for trumpf and not doing anything else are irresponsible at the end of the day
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Normally, I'd agree with you in regards to voting, but this endless cycle of always choosing the lesser evil while the obvious and truly necessary solutions are either underrepresented or not even represented at all (depending on country) is an exercise in futility and only ever serves to obfuscate the goalposts, like digging our own hole. Feels like the illusion of choice nowadays. Maybe this would've been effective given a lot of time, but with the accelerating degradation of socio-economics and the planet itself, I strongly believe we're just wasting time dancing around the problem.
I always at least cancel my vote when there's nothing to choose from so they can't use my name for voter fraud (we've had thousands of dead people showing up in voting registries and skewing the numbers, this is how bad things are around here), but that's pretty much all I've been doing in the past decade, with a few notable exceptions which didn't affect things in the long run. What we now have on offer are: a combo of lukewarm buzzwords pertaining to climate protection (while changing as little as possible) with regressive social policies on the "Left", a not-quite-Fascist, or a straight-up Fascist. Yes, here as well! Yay!
I agree with you that civic action is the most important element nowadays, can't wait for the day when more people'll pick up on that.
So, yeah. I don't normally like to do this, but Plato may have been right, unfortunately. At least as far as the contemporary context is concerned.
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