there is a cure for political illiteracy

They’d have to cure their normal illiteracy first, and that’s kind of a tall ask I think

me when I love solipsism

well when you say it like that, it makes me think that’s cool as long as I’m part of the half that doesn’t get exterminated

Extermination and jailing people aren’t really equivalent.

You have plenty of out and about fascists who would vote for trump, actual groypers and nazis and shit. As a kind of, probe question, right, do you think it would be pertinent to go and actually kill those motherfuckers, given the kind of, borrowed time on which we’re living right now, the lack of resources, right, lack of popular support from a mainstream political system and their ability to so clearly co-opt it in this moment, and impending climate change which means we can’t waste time on them really more than is necessary. Those are some of the justifications that somebody might give for exterminating out and about fascists, right, even if they can’t guarantee that those people are actual fascists, in their heart of hearts, and that it would’ve taken too many resources to convert them, or too much time. That’s all normal shit, right, normal death sentence justification, which I usually don’t agree with, maybe greased up a little bit since you can have the apologia of a kind of wartime or desperation, right. You get what I’m saying?

I agree with you also, that there are plenty (I would even say, a majority) of supporters that legitimately just don’t realize how bad he is, and how bad things are in general, lots of them because they’re coked up on denial and lack of imagination, lots of them because they stand to benefit from these systems as they currently operate. They might not be “racist”, but they might still be perpetuating racism, they might not be fascists, but they might still be perpetuating fascism, through their ignorance and incompetence. Those people, right, sure, doesn’t make much sense to kill them.

But then, how do you propose to change their minds? A staunch communist might propose that we change the system, and then the majority will more naturally come to like, normal conclusions, right, and then you can just round up the rest that are sort of very staunch in their misinformed support, and then you can perhaps “re-educate” those people, right.

This is a process most people have problems with, but I dunno, what’s your take, what’s your alternative? If you’re dealing with those people, and you’re still giving them the freedom to attain power, control the economy and other people’s lives, even as misguided as they are, just sort of, for the sake of not having them in jail, right, then I dunno if that’s really going to work long term. It locks you into an untenable position, especially as many of these people will be actively dedicated to your dissolution, even if they’re just fooled, which dooms your movement from the start. You have to remove them from power, and if you want to remove them from power and ownership, while also not expatriating them from your country, an act which is usually viewed as genocide and for which you will constantly hear bitching from gusanos in the miami herald about, then you need to put them in some sort of reeducation camp, basically, and that camp is going to constitute jail.

So I dunno, hit me with your argument against that kind of jailing.

I don’t really think there’s any level of like, very natural reform that you’re going to engage in, or slow convincing over time to get people to give up their own power, that’s going to improve things, or that’s going to improve things at nearly the rate that we need right now considering what’s on the horizon. I might be wrong on that, but my basis for that belief is that people are in the positions of power that they’re in because they are naturally groomed and ensured to be the ones who have the beliefs and attitudes most suited to retain that power. If you have a business size of like, hundreds, and you’re promoting people in your business to positions of power, promoting people to become CEO by the board of directors, then naturally the system is going to start appointing people which reinforce the system. Asskissers who will do anything to get promoted, are usually the ones to get promoted, we know this. This doesn’t even need to be a universal tendency, this just needs to be a tendency more of the time than not, for it to be really problematic, for the majority of people in power to be assholes. The board of directors doesn’t want to start appointing CEOs that turn their companies into co-ops, that take the power out of their hands, there’s a natural incentive structure there. The same is mostly true of political systems which are mostly autocratic.

So, I dunno if there’s really much of an alternative, if we’re taking a sort of, step back look down at that idea of jailing your opposition. Maybe you have one, I dunno.

https://lemmy.world/post/16709798

It’s weirder than that, even

No, I think the main point in contention is mostly just that the experience of the American GIs are always centered in these tellings of the stories to american audiences, and obviously that’s going to whitewash a lot of the history and context of a conflict and just transform it into “I got stationed in a random place I hated for a couple years and then I had to kill a bunch of people for reasons I didn’t understand while they tried to kill all my friends and then I got back home and got jack shit for it”. And then on top of that, those movies are going to be a lot about the psychological trauma that’s inflicting on those particular american GIs, and often, again, without a broader context of what system they’re placed into, it’s just sort of like, turned into sanitized hollywood melodrama, much like how they’ll sanitize any historical fiction into being oscar bait.

Obviously that’s not gonna really be the same experience as, say, some random guerilla fighter somewhere, or some random person who just lives in one of these places. About the only movies I can think of that actually attempted to expand on that particular perspective was good morning vietnam, where that’s touched on, but not explored, and maybe the breadwinner, which is a pretty good movie but also more just adjacent to what I’m talking about rather than directly in dialogue with it. I might be wrong on that one though, it’s been a while since I’ve seen it even though that movie is fucking good and you should watch it.

That’s my recommendation. Go watch “the breadwinner”.

We love our supermarket shelves, don’t we folks? The biggest and the fullest in the world, mao zedong, stalin, they all love our supermarket shelves. 30 different flavors of oreos, all in one aisle. can’t have that in russia, folks, can’t have that, horrible country, horrible country. You can only have pizza hutt in russia, folks, believe me, or, as I call it, pizza butt, and that’s only because of our favorite supreme leader gorbachev. You couldn’t even choose your healthcare plan in the USSR, folks, can you believe it? They only had one plan, horrible, horrible healthcare. I’m going to go make out with supreme leader Kim, folks, but I’m going to hate every second of it, believe me.

nope, he’s too bald. can’t be havin that

throwing kyle under the bus is a classic Tenacious D bit, though

I mean that’s kinda like, 50% antifa by way of fa hating fa, I guess.

The ability to selectively enforce prohibition gives you ample opportunity to profit from the gaps in the system.

It’s like 12 at night for me so this might be a little bit rambly and stupid, be prepared:

Yeah, that’s pretty true, but I also mentioned that to some extent in my OP, that selective enforcement is the case with basically every law that has ever existed. I’m not really a stranger to the institutional fuckery that happens in the illegal market either, gary webb and allat, but also the classic uncontrollable mexican government drug cartel shenaniganery. I just also think, maybe to the core of what I’m getting at, that people shouldn’t also be like, immediately snap judgement in terms of condemning illegal action on the basis of it’s illegality necessarily. The black panthers collapsed and all the other civil rights organizations that were around at the time. MLK probably got assassinated by the feds, Fred Hampton definitely did, I think Malcolm X probably also did, but those organizations, or so I am told, didn’t dissolve immediately, they just began a long process of ostracization and alienation and probably atomization as suburban poverty increases more recently, until they basically just became normal gangs, as they were engaging in illegal activity before, and selling drugs, or illegal property, is a quick way to make cash to fund ventures. I dunno I still need to find a good place to watch “the bastards of the party”, I think that documentary has something to say about that. Also never heard of boardwalk empire

I think the biggest thing is just that I have seen amongst most of the zoomers a kind of instantaneous reaction when presented with a glut of information. They either reject it out of hand with some thought terminating cliche almost instantly, or they will voraciously try to find more, it’s kind of a split between two extremes, and there’s rarely a kind of casual lust that I think has maybe been the case more in the past. I think it’s partially the internet, I think it’s partially the fact that society is slowly rotting and all of the formalities are also rotting away, but yeah.

So I think that this casual do-gooder vote blue no matter who kind of mentality is not really appealing to most people I interface with. They’re going to have more questions than that like 50% of the time, and then 50% of the rest of the time when they’re on like, tiktok, or twitter, or some other echo chamber where they understand that it is all pure optics and neoreligious brainrot and there is no genuineness to be had, they just will out of hand be like “just put the fries in the bag, bro”, kind of a deal. But yeah, I don’t think the casual political engagement plays well.

I was being hyperbolic, but, a famous part of the prohibition was the organized crime which was both kind of naturally occurring at the time and was created specifically to traffic booze. Illegal material can’t be protected by legal means, obviously, and so in order to trade it, you basically have to create your own police force, your own privatized military. a gang, a mob. That’s how we got nascar and shit, the rumrunners. If you made porn illegal, I’d imagine it would just be added as kind of another form of valuable property which would be traded around by gangs which would see increased power and are kind of inherently anti-institutional. So, turning to black market cartels is a form of resisting policing, it’s a form of anti-institutional action, I’d say, as it gives more economic power to anti-institutional organizations.

I’d also say, you know, I mean, the hippies did go to wall street in 2008, so that’s something. We had the big liberal feminist pussy hat shit sometime after that, which I’m not as familiar with. More recently we had BLM which was possibly the highest level of street marching we’ve seen basically ever, and then we’ve seen like two riots to try and overturn elections, one of which was successful. We’ve seen more recent campus protests which are still constantly ongoing despite a lack of media attention. I don’t think it’s as absurd as you think, that something kind of stupid like porn getting banned might be the tipping point, especially considering the pretty steady upward trend that we’ve seen with political action concerning other somewhat disconnected issues.

Is this ever gonna happen, though? I see it like guaranteed under every single social media post that complains about how we don’t have a functional system and while I agree that fptp as a system is bad and horrible, it almost feels like a red herring at this point because it has such a low chance of ever being changed as each party in power, and any party that theoretically ever able to take power, would not stand to benefit from alternative voting. It’s like prison reform or free healthcare or making weed legal or any number of other things that has high levels of voter approval but conveniently never happen because it’s not in the best interest of the party, except this one is possibly more niche and easier to spread misinformation about.

Like I dunno, what’s the M.O. on getting this done? Get it approved in a couple local elections and then just hope it bubbles up from there? I know in oregon there’s supposed to be some referendum on it, but I kind of doubt it’s going to pass even though I’m gonna vote for it. I seriously don’t see it happening, at least on a federal level, without some extremely serious reform that basically completely reworks how the government currently functions.

If that legitimately happens and makes it into law in a broadly enforceable way rather than a “this person who I don’t like was caught checks notes watching porn! book em!”, which is definitely what it would be like basically every law that came before it, I guarantee that the government would collapse within about three weeks if less. Which I think is maybe a good rule of thumb, that if your law would collapse society if it were enforced equally, it should not be a law.

Do not underestimate the power of the gooners when they are kept from the goon.

I mean, in this case, yarrrr. but in other cases, i think, probably also yarrrr. but like, physically.

Probably the mild centrist bent to the comment I’d imagine, and also the fact that it’s in response to a comment saying fascism is pretty popular, saying that it’s not. People like their persecution complexes.

Well yeah, but that’s only one part of fascism. You could say pretty much the same of any war, lots of non-fascist goverments, and hell, you could say we already do that, just look at how the campus protests were treated, the BLM protests, the civil rights protests, the sufferagettes, a personal favorite of mine would be the horrid history of our oppression of labor by siding with companies and enabling the use of pinkertons to gun down crowds, yadda yadda.

No, if america was to be fascist, it would be fascist for historical reasons which already existed, which have been around for a while already. I don’t know whether or not america suddenly having a dictator, would really have too much of an effect on it suddenly becoming fascist, despite the popular consensus that fascism just requires a really racist guy to suddenly be a dictator. I actually don’t think that would factor too much into the definition at all, I think you could pretty easily have a fascist democracy, and you could definitely have a fascist oligarchy.

I’m pretty sure imperial japan was mostly run by a military cabinet which internally needed a certain number of votes, and the emperor was more like a figurehead and religious figure that had a certain amount of sway over the cabinet’s decisions as he was like, a big deal, more than him being a figure of political power. From what I remember, anyways. Me personally, I’d be pretty comfortable calling imperial japan a fascist state, even if it maybe conforms to that definition less well than, say, italy or germany.

Not so much, it would more be along the lines of a standard military coup, which doesn’t necessarily have to originate from a fascist. Those can and do come from all sides of the political spectrum.

I don’t think biden would ever do that, and probably if he did, he’d be the worst president dictator of all time with only the mild upside that he could maybe only do so for the rest of his probably not long lifespan, or for the next couple months as they run another election, which he would probably do since he seems like kind of a sap.

But, if he were replaced by a person I actually liked, or there was someone who’s policy I agreed with in that position, I’d pretty much be fine with it, and I get the feeling that most people would be fine with it too, as in, a majority of the population. The levers of power might freak out though, and that might put a damper on things.

So, obviously he could just [redacted] the supreme court justices he doesn’t like, appoint new ones, and then the only thing congress could do would be to expand the court or whatever, right? but then why couldn’t he also just keep killing people in official acts until he gets a bunch of people that are like “yup, that was official and you don’t need to do anything about it”? I know that’s probably a slippery slope, right and would probably get him a shit ton of public pushback, especially after a certain point, from both conservatives, who predominantly make up the military, and economic power structures, to liberals who would prize decorum and “fair play” above all else (but I repeat myself), and so maybe that leads to a dissolution of society, which maybe leads to an even worse society as the people who control the levers of power are already the most horrible people, but, yadda yadda.

But, I dunno, how many congress people does he have to make go away, before the rest of them start to get the picture and then start to behave in their own self-interest, as they’ve always behaved? How many people do you really have to threaten in a system where the people who climb to the top are only going to be there out of their own extreme self-interest?