I am very curious to know whether this strategy will work on anyone
Like is there anyone who heard about Project 2025 and went “oh no!”, but then Trump said “oh we weren’t serious, we didn’t mean that, IDK even who these guys are” and then they said “oh phew okay back to not voting, I’m sure it’s fine”
It is hard for me to get inside the head of the average American voter so I won’t say that is impossible but it seems pretty unlikely
We’re talking about people that believe Joe Biden has “open border” policies and that Democrats are performing abortions after birth.
I’d assume they believe every word.
Yeah, that’s a good point. I wasn’t even thinking in terms of conservatives because I sort of looked at them as a lost cause and who knows what they’re gonna do; I was looking at the contest as where things are going to shake out between “willing to vote” against “nah it’s not important enough to vote what’s the worst that could happen”. But yeah there probably is a contingent of Republican voters who think what Trump says about it is relevant and believable.
They don’t actually believe it, in the sense that people usually mean when they say that. The pathology that’s going on may sort of tickle some of the same pathways that provide the “what exists in reality” context for the rest of the brain to make decisions, but mostly what they mean when they’re saying it out loud to other people is simply that it it were true, it would help their team. If you watch the way they behave, it’s very clear that it’s the second thing and not the first.
The development of that pathway and feedback loop between the part of the brain that believes things, and the part of the brain that strategizes what would hurt the Democrats if it were true, is horrifyingly dangerous. It’s at the root of some of the worst and largest-scale atrocities of the 20th century. And now, there’s a whole network of conservative media in the US that can hook in with organized religion and they can work together to explicitly strengthen it, consistently and forcefully, every single day.
If they just “believed” in in the sense that they had objectively arrived at the conclusion that it were true, it wouldn’t be anywhere near as dangerous as the somewhat more subtle thing which is actually what’s going on.
Actually, we’re talking about fence sitters, nobody cares about the people whose minds are already made here.
I don’t believe there are very much fence sitters left. They are just republicans that are afraid to say out loud they will vote for Trump out of fear of being cancelled.
I would think the sheer fact conservatives WROTE IT DOWN AND PUT IT ONLINE would be enough to solidify their intentions to people. But, I can’t imagine voting for a criminal or a rapist, so who knows what the truly brainwashed will do.
I’m still baffled how the creators of that site haven’t been arrested. It’s clearly conspiracy to commit treason or insurrection and they’ve taken steps to commit the crime.
Maybe part of the outcome of this whole godawful mess will be that people will wake the fuck up and realize that they have to prosecute things like this (going all the way back to Fox News doing things that got Gabby Giffords shot).
I don’t agree with Germany’s implementation, exactly, but Germany after the war just said no we are not fucking around if you are against democracy then you go to prison. We tried giving short sentences to the people involved and letting them out, and all it did was teach them to be more cunning, and look where it got us. So now the answer is fuck you, you wanna be the enemy well guess what, we’ll treat you like the enemy. I think the US needs way more of that energy than it has right now. I hope that we develop it before something catastrophic and unfixable goes wrong.
, but Germany after the war just said no we are not fucking around if you are against democracy then you go to prison.
Did they? I thought Germany just made it illegal to display and promote Nazism. They still have far-right parties, don’t they?
Yes. Their moderates set that stage by not going far enough to limit conservatism. Moderates pretend conservatism is a legitimate political position that deserves acknowledgement instead of the hate-based ideology that it is.
Unchecked conservatism always develops into harmful oppression of others. Always.
When you’re a conservative, they just let you do it.
20% of voters will vote for ANYTHING. You will always find at least 20% of people who will support literally any crazy shit you can think up.
Yes absolutely. There’s a huge segment of the population that doesn’t want a fascist dictator but wants to be convinced Trump is having to sidestep fringe groups that are fascist. These people want to buy into the fear culture and want their feeling of privilege restored (see: persecute minorities), but don’t want to appear fascist so they don’t lose their social connections like friends and family ever talking to them again.
But if Trump is elected they will shrug their shoulders while the rest of the country alternatingly rejoices and cries out in despair.
Fence-sitters, centrists, and others not publicly decrying Trump are just embarrassed Trump supporters.
It is hard for me to get inside the head of the average American voter
Pretty cramped space, smells of rotten onions
Individuals can be smart. But, a large group is always mediocre, an average. Small groups are the sweet spot for greatness.
It’s human nature to overestimate that which favors us. We each overestimate how smart we are and the how smart the group is. Much in human history is based on not caring about the odds. Even Hans Solo doesn’t want to know.
In the situation you present, very shallow propaganda is quite effective if the target can be saturated with it. Another example, humans enjoy simplicity. A false dichotomy can be maintained for millennia: It’s current governance or worst fears manifest.
I regurgitated four basic books and a movie reference. Read these ones:
In The Engineering of Consent, 1947, Bernays described the theory of modern propaganda developed and implemented primarily by Nazi Germany. In Manufacturing Consent, 1988, Herman and Chomsky describe how the principles have been implemented in US mass media for economic control.
Since 1988 we’ve had mass computing, the internet, and now applications of AI. The history and structure will give lived experiences roots and facilitate communication.
“A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it.”
Was that Men in Black, 1997, Agent K or On Liberty, 1859, John Stuart Mill?
The fuck cares. I started with Picard and Asimov.
This is why I want to fuck off to the woods and never deal with them ever again. Humans just aren’t worth the trouble.
And chop the wood, and have a little fire for when it gets cold at night and hunt for deer with a bow and arrow. And have a little drone network watching the surrounding woods, so that when Trump’s lackies try to come for me, I can see them coming and run into the woods behind the house and hide in safety while the booby traps get them.
I know, I thought about it, too. It gets more attractive with every few weeks that goes by.
If you make friends with the woodland creatures you won’t need the drones. They’ll let you know when someone’s coming.
One of my absolute favorite part of the wild, semi-hallucinogenic nature of the Lord of the Rings books and why I like them so much better than even the perfectly serviceable epic fantasy of the movies, was the trees.
You may already know this, but in the books, it’s not quite so simple as some trees can walk around, and some are normal trees. It’s like… all trees exist on a spectrum. Almost all of them are sleeping and stationary almost all of the time. But that’s not their only mode. When they are roused, which takes quite a lot both in terms of events and in terms of time, they become different. Not just some special trees, but all of them, although some are more lively and rousable than others. Only the special ones have eyes and branch-arms and stuff and can get up and be mobile, but all of them are rousable.
When Saruman starts woodchippering his way through the forest, killing trees on an industrial scale, they don’t really get roused up enough to be cognizant of it for quite a while. They’re just wood, after all, just normal trees, almost all of them. But after it goes on for a while, and the ones of them that can walk around and talk start to discuss the problem and how it’s for serious something that they can’t take lightly, the level of activity they can display – all of them, not just the special ones who can walk around – slowly gets to be greater, as they start to get roused to action about it.
There’s an orcish army, during the big fighting that starts to develop among the mobile types of creatures, and they have to go through a forest to get where they’re going. And it’s not really clear what happens, but this ungodly screaming and clashing sound starts to come from the direction of the forest, and then dwindles, and then goes away. And nothing of the army is ever seen again. They’re just gone. The whole fuckin army just like it never was.
It doesn’t end there. The war continues, and there’s a sort of foggy period in the weather, and when the sun starts to burn away the fog, the forest is just in a different place, overlapping with Saruman’s big factory and fortress. The trees are growing in among all his stuff, busting through the paving-stones and cracking through the foundations of his buildings and their solid stone walls, with thick roots stronger than anyone could cut through with any metal tool. The whole fuckin place is ruined, like a tree buckling through the sidewalk, or the foundation of a house, or a water-pipe, effortlessly.
But they’re just trees. They weren’t there before the fog rolled through, but now they are, and his fortress is smashed to bits with their roots growing through it now.
LotR is some fuckin great, great stuff
‐ Men in Black (1997)
Science educators continually tell us that distances of millions or billions of miles are incomprehensible by human minds. If that’s true, then a nation of millions or billions of people is even more incomprehensible, and we need to reduce the size of our groups before things will start making sense again.
The example I like for this is the US federal budget.
$5m is about 15 good homes.
$1b is about 3000 good homes.
We don’t deal with things more expensive than a good home. And, 3000 is already a hard number to envision.
$1b is a remarkably hard number to wrap one’s head around.
Right? I just learned the upgrades to the Minuteman nuclear missiles will cost $98.5 billion, out of a $1.5 trillion force modernization package.
If humans can’t understand the scale of the universe, how is anyone supposed to understand the scale of the US budget?
Why does Defense, the largest trillion, not simply eat the other billions?
A whole lot of dumbasses out there and a LOT of shills in the “liberal media”. Remember how many times they waited breathlessly on how donnie was going to “pivot” to being a decent human being and a normal President?
Instead of sounding the alarm on this at every opportunity, they’ll endlessly discuss how old Biden is.
I don’t know if other people find this as chilling as I do, because it doesn’t seem all that alarming on the surface. But I think this is an extremely accurate and frightening diagnosis of why so many people seem so weirdly uninterested in saying anything about Trump’s incredibly major crimes.
They’ve mentally realized that he has no plans to change his behavior, and it’s hard to take seriously the idea that anyone will hold him to account. So why bother saying anything against him? What difference would it make?
The more you think about it, the worse it gets.
It is hard for me to get inside the head of the average American voter
Extremely uniformed and goes off feeling of candidate.
I’ve heard more and more people very upset over the SCOTUS ruling. While it’s great for President Trump and Defendant Trump, I think it’s actually bad for Candidate Trump.
Elections are increasingly about fear, and the Supreme Court just gave a lot of people a reason to fear Trump.
They are only trying to hide this from normies and the low-info. This is a wet dream for the unhinged magabrains and informed liberals know about their plans.
