2 things:

• Remember 2016 when the media gave Trump an absurd amount of free publicity by covering every stupid thing he said and did then he won? It wasn’t the only reason, but it clearly didn’t help.

• People know who Trump is at this point. He’s awful in a way that’s really easy to see and either you’re someone that’s a problem for or you’re someone who loves the awful.

Whoever is the current corporate lackey being put forward by the DNC is the one that needs to claim to be the good one, co-opting the language of progressives while taking corporate money and maintaining the brutal status quo.

So for people who come looking for someone who’s gonna do good, the bad stuff represents inconsistencies with that narrative and despair at a lack of representation in a supposedly democratic system.

Did I miss something and they dismantled the mass surveillance state, reigned in the police, and stopped funding endless imperialist military ventures while I wasn’t looking?

Yeah. I got this a while ago too, but my friends from college now have jobs and live in 4 different time zones. It’s pretty hard organizing more than two of them being around for more than like an hour or so.

It’s crazy that this is real. It looks like a comic someone would make to make fun of the idea. Like the fact that they’re watching some guy shoot someone, then the burger commercial comes on and the guy stands up and cheers “McDonalds!” Before sitting back down to watch more of guy shooting other guy.

This is peak “dumb Americans” humor, and they’re using this unironically to describe their business idea.

Yeah. I don’t know what the % breakdown is, but I get the sense that while the general community is inherently anti-corporate/anti-commodification, there are some that view this in the left wing sense of communities supporting each other and some who view this more of as a consumption/voting with your wallet individualized choice. They recognize that some or even all corporations are bad, but think opting out of those structures without directly challenging them is all that they need.

But like I said, idk what the actual distribution of these views are. It’s just the sense I get from seeing some of the comments.

Agreed that it’s something I need to overcome. But I still think collective action is the only way forward. Half our problems stem from everyone acting as individuals divorced from community.

Admittedly not much anymore. It’s hard organizing people in the face of systemic opposition under the best of circumstances, but I’m also incredibly unhealthy. Socially awkward and anxious is only the tip of the iceberg of the personal problems I have that make it hard for me to engage in real life activism anymore. I’ve tried, but it’s not really something I can do at the moment. I can barely do anything at the moment for that matter.

That said, there is some small value in trying to convince others to think about these problems and develop class consciousness. I’m not claiming it’s much and it’s stressful/depressing knowing I’m not doing more, but at least I’m not trying to get people to stick their heads in the sand. I’m not actively making things worse.

Part of the problem is the atomization of society. We’ve have vanishingly few truly public spaces to build the kind of connections with people necessary to form shared political causes. People spend most of their lives either:

• In their private homes, suspicious of anyone who tries to interact with them there.

• In private workplaces where management surveils employees and tries to stop organized activity.

• In private businesses where you are only welcome as individual consumers.

• Online on platforms that are privately owned and designed to manipulate behavior and social interactions towards interacting with more advertising. Controversy is only allowed to the extent that it gets more eyeballs on ads and doesn’t upset advertisers.

Back when I was more involved in electoral politics, I found it extraordinarily difficult to reach out to people to organize them, either because they were in spaces where political campaigning wasn’t allowed or because they have become distrustful of strangers.

It’s suffocating any kind of broader public consciousness and I don’t really know what to do about it.

I am tired of living in a world with all of these problems. Whether or not I have the luxury to ignore them is besides the point.

Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.

Calls for individualized actions on smaller contributors to climate change is the stalling tactic. Oils companies popularized the idea of personal carbon footprint as a way to steer attention away from their larger role in climate change. Instead of organizing to end fossil fuel use, create infrastructure to reduce our dependence on cars, or cutting back on the US war machine, people instead focus on changing their spending habits in minor ways that won’t fix anything but will give them catharsis and social capital. And for people who are even less committed to climate action, they see people pushing for these kind of things and they just see people telling you to give up stuff you like or even depend on for no reason.

Climate change is an emergency that we’re running out of time to fix. We need massive, society wide changes if we’re going to avoid catastrophe. Little incremental changes are not only insufficient to solve the problem, they reduce the political will needed to make the necessary changes.

This is more language/writing style than math. The math is consistent, what’s inconsistent is there are different ways to express math, some of which, quite frankly, are just worse at communicating the mathematical expression clearly than others.

Personally, since doing college math classes, I don’t think I’d ever willingly write an expression like that exactly because it causes confusion. Not the biggest issue for a simple problem, much bigger issue if you’re solving something bigger and need combine a lot of expressions. Just use parentheses and implicit multiplication and division. It’s a lot clearer and easier to work with.

Removing humans from your side of the war lowers the cost of going to war and allows for even more centralized power. It’s a lot easier to do morally bankrupt acts if you don’t need to convinced a group of human soldiers to do it. Clearly you can anyway a lot of the time, but going for the robots is a lot cheaper/less risky.

It’s pretty obvious why powerful people would want this and why it would be terrible for the rest of us even without worrying about a hypothetical sky net future.

Where do they get the money from?

I’m basically a hermit.

In the US? No US official will hold a president accountable for any crimes they’d like to be able to get away with in the future.

In the world at large? No country or perhaps even no conceivable coalition of countries has the power to do anything about the US. We spend more on the military than the next 10 countries combined. We have so many military bases and warships around the world the sun doesn’t set on the American empire. We have enough nuclear weapons to destroy the world several times over. Our intelligence agencies coup governments for reasons as petty as them not wanting to trade their resources with us. The US military is the disgusting end point of might makes right.

For me, I don’t support what Russia is doing. I just don’t want to further empower the US military industrial complex. Every couple of years there needs to be a new evil enemy for us to be scared of so that the money can keep flowing into weapons and so that we have excuses to extract value out of other countries in conflict. It’s obvious we don’t do this for humanitarian reasons or we wouldn’t be allies with countries like Saudi Arabia (or see the entire history of US intervention since WWII). Whether Russia wins or loses the war, people in Ukraine aren’t winning, they’re just seeing which imperialists are going to be exploiting them for the near future.

In the abstract I don’t oppose assisting countries against imperialist aggression with military force. But playing into US warmongering doesn’t really do that and in the process is further making the world a worse place.

Half I guess? Graduated in a non technical field but I ended up taking a lot of CS and math classes. But now I’m not really doing anything since I’ve been depressed since college. There’s probably a lot of stuff I could do if I could get over the motivation hump.