And a vast number of the people who voted for Trump voted for Obama and are Bernie supporters, so if we’re trying to figure out some kind of through-line narrative that makes sense, we’re not going to find it.

He did a short video about sex and gender a few years ago, it was a tad performative but that’s how he does a lot of his work. Broadly though it made a LOT of people angry because even people who ostensibly pretend they’re progressive and care about science, freak the fuck out when thinking about genitals.

That’s basically the US in a nutshell.

“America. Freaking the everloving fuck out about other people’s genitalia for 249 years strong!”

Angry chuds all the way.

Not to mention that this assessment only applies to the universe we can see, we’re missing a LOT so it’s really hard to say even the actual age of the universe (roughly) or if there’s a whole other angle to the universe we can’t observe like we’re seeing hints of with observations of dark matter and dark energy, plus the fact that every time we send up more powerful instruments we detect a whole lot more “stuff” broadly than we ever thought, and of course the bubble of observation we’re stuck in and have no way to know if our observable sphere of the universe is unique or odd in some way, or if there’s even a point in scale where the universe becomes homogeneous, for all we know it’s infinite and varied beyond description at the highest scales.

The things we don’t know outweigh the things we know by orders of magnitude, so it’s very, very hard to say if we even have the right foundational ideas when we ponder life in the universe besides us.

Growing up and forming adult political views usually just means realizing that everyone is fucking evil as fuck.

We’re in the warhammer 40,000 universe but without the cool capes and swords.

There’s no actual rules like that, nor is “martial law” like a bell you ring to cancel elections, but enough people believe it works this way that it’s very likely they will attempt to use this card.

Yah, but it’s also statistically more likely that we have missed crossing paths with them or even seeing their signs by millions of light years, as well as millions of years of history.

Entire empires could have risen to galactic power and ruled vast portions of the galaxy and finally splintered, evolved or gone extinct in just the million years before humans invented stone tools. Or some thousands of years during the Devonian period or something. Or the nearest planet with life is still just boneless fish and will need a hundred million more years to develop radio.

We’re not only a microscopic dot in space, we’re also a microscopic dot in time. And our ability to even look out into space and detect anything is a tiny shaving of time off that dot.

I don’t know about aliens or whatnot, but I don’t believe for a moment that people with actual secrets and important information, along with years or decades of intelligence experience and training, would look at Donald Fucking Trump and say “Damn, it’s too bad I have to share this highly-secret information with this guy, but I guess I have to.”

Hell no, this is still the liberal mindset that there are “rules” that governments need to follow. We should know well by now that there are no rules, that the government of the US is built largely on lies and image, compartmentalized knowledge, and that nobody with actual power suffers consequences for breaking whatever rules they were supposed to have.

That fat fuck could not keep his mouth shut if he knew about aliens.

We’re assuming that if the conspiracy has any truth to it, that it’s something that the government broadly has a unified front on and are willing to share and report data with each other and report it upwards.

I think the last several years should have taught us that it’s more than plausible with the size, scale and complexity of the US government, intelligence agencies, the thousands of huge subcontractors and other “grey” organizations, that some agencies or entities could have knowledge of things that the rest do not.

I don’t have an opinion on “aliens” or if there’s a crashed saucer cover-up, there’s been too much disinformation and BS for me to have a take one way or another, but I firmly believe they are hiding shit that no sane person would share with the president if they wanted to keep it secret, not everyone is like the average American and most people with years of training and professionalism would look at Trump and know at first glance he’s an impotent clown and a con-man, most people in highest levels of defense and government broadly are just waiting for him to pass.

Like a lot of Simone’s videos have a bit of language

So do most 12-year-olds

Geddouddahere with that shit, Nye has been based and solid his entire professional career as a science communicator, if you didn’t like him talking about gender and sex, that’s a skill issue.

If that’s not what you’re talking about, then you deserve equal condemnation for cowardly vagueposting.

The basic costs of getting a van and converting it can be thousands of dollars at the cheap end, not counting the van itself.

If you want to get a pre-made travel van with amenities like a toilet and lighting already installed it will set you back tens of thousands more than just getting an old beater and modifying it, and that counts on your ability and energy to actually engineer and build the stuff you will need.

So you need either a huge up-front investment, or you need to make monthly payments if you finance it, or you need an already stable lifestyle that lets you slowly collect and build the stuff you need over a long period of time.

I don’t know how you support a mobile lifestyle anyway unless you have a job you can do from the back of a van parked in a walmart parking lot, which is where you will spend most of your time as you will need daily life shit like toilet paper and a few meals a day. (Except you can’t park there overnight, you will need to park either in a campground or an RV park or some place for designated overnight parking, which usually comes with fees if they’re anywhere near a city. Long-term sites with utility hookups or bathrooms will need a monthly rental contract.)

I’m fully convinced, that at least in the US, every last “van life” influencer can only support the lifestyle by promoting it and riding on trust-funds when views run short. Homelessness isn’t that fun actually.

It just took a handful of connected conspiracists with no principles and some forward thinking about how to sow the worst seeds.

Names like Bannon, Epstein and others who funded them worked in the dark and with great amounts of support from a variety of institutions, worked to simultaneously make fascism cool and make average Americans too distracted to care. Eroded attention spans, people fighting online until nobody knows how to relate to each other anymore, dissolving communities and amplifying the most ridiculous or rage-baiting takes on both sides of ever issue.

That’s all it took for people to stop caring as cartoonishly iconic fascists and nazis took power in the US, and the whole time we were thinking that cartoonishly stereotypical “bad guys” belong only in hollywood and can’t possibly be real.

We all said that to some degree as the cartoonishly iconic and stereotypical villains rose in power and people were too burnt-out or distracted to give it any deeper thought.

Worst thing is those in power in the US think they’re actually winning

No they do not, they don’t even give two flying shits about America other than the nutcases that think they can reshape it into a white-techno-fascist-oligarchy and that they know what’s best for the population as they practice super-villain speeches in the mirror. But enough Stephen Miller specifically. The rest are just trying to get their bag and run.

Those in power in the US are deliberately hiding the advancements of other countries to keep the middle-class and blue-collar workers here deluded into thinking that their 10-hour workdays with no benefits is still the best in the world because you have the “freedom” to go buy mass-produced goods at Walmart or pay $7000 to walk into the ER of your choice when you suffer a critical illness or injury.

And it works wonders. You don’t need to censor the whole world or make militarized walls like North Korea (But it helps, hint hint: the “wall” they wanted to make was not to keep people out.) you just need to keep the bulk of people busy and distracted and out of touch with the rest of the world, and most people don’t care about anything outside of their daily life anyway.

If you want evidence of how deliberate this campaign of mass-delusion is, just fire up your favorite media website in another country, and look how radically different the news stories are, how radically different the tone is, how huge the outside world is and what the bulk of humanity actually care about. (Usually it’s everyone worried America is going to fuck everything up for everyone else.)

I’m glad I can use reasoning and deduction to actually figure things out or I would be equally stuck in a black-and-white false dichotomy.

For example, I assumed you’re a bot immediately, then I made a small effort and checked for clues, and found the first mod action performed against you on lemmy was a comment removed for asking about microwaving your balls, which tells me you’re likely a human. But I also know in relatively short time even those clues will be meaningless as tactics get more and more sophisticated. It’s just like always being on guard when you go outside. You can be on guard for danger without always being anxious or paranoid.

See? it’s not so hard.

Ah, another victim of the chaos, flailing and directing energy at an entire narrative spun by people deliberately having dedicated time and energy to making you specifically feel outraged at people who are your ally, filling all the blanks with your worst case fantasies and the lovely opportunity to police your own side.

Get off the internet. https://www.progressivevictory.win/ has people you can support and actually get off your ass and help for local representation and leadership. Nobody is coming. Nobody is saving us. There will be no revolution. Rebuild community and drop the rage.

If the unpopular voices of a random person on the internet are too worrisome and problematic for you to focus on what matters, you’re no good to any of us. I won’t see a reply, I don’t have the energy to deal with .ml’ers right now.

MAGA DESTROYED

TRUMP FANS REVOLT

GOP CRUMBLING IN SHAME

MAGA REGRETTING THEIR VOTE

Etc, etc.

it’s all utter bullshit, the base hasn’t budged. It’s still between 23% and 28% and holding very steady in that range from the start. This is just the algorithm pushing stuff to Lemmy browsers that it knows will get the most views.

Now the nuance here is a LOT of liberal America who voted for Obama also voted for Trump, because again, atomization and algorithms, and basically a population completely tuned out.

I would be a lot more impressed if I saw a headline that reads “MEDIAN MIDDLE-CLASS VOTERS START USING CRITICAL THOUGHT AND LOOKING UP INFORMATION ABOUT THINGS BROADLY” because that would mean something far more profound than anything else we’ve seen so far.

That means it’s the turtleneck guys, or more likely the Celtic fine art equivalent, not gig work graphic designers.

And? That’s fine. The country wants to boost their artistic culture, it has to start somewhere. And honestly, despite me holding it up as a picture of stereotypes, even those “cultural” artists rarely see any measure of actual success despite trying their whole lives to gain some kind of social connection to an art market. Again, this is a matter of deciding if we want art in our lives and where that goal is going to begin.

If celtic sculptors and “art lifestylers” get a UBI, that’s great. It just means the struggling graphic artist is a little closer to also finding some level of support, and the closer the struggling graphic artist gets to social respect and support, the closer YOU get to a broad-scale safety net.

I just will never shit on efforts to socialize our vast resources as a species, at least not until the last billionaire is made into mulch.

Too many people have grown so massively comfortable with discord that entire communities of people just relying on each other for social contact leave their voice chat or cameras running 24/7 so they can be around each other in some capacity.

They would break down having to change platforms, and there are LOT of younger people in this demographic.

Personally I think it’s a deeply sad way to live and socialize, and they would probably largely be healthier if the whole thing shut down, but I recognize how lonely and depressing the world is and how everyone wants to find comfort with others.

I had to go through all of this so many times when struggling with a failed life and business.

I had ONE good agent who helped me and reminded me that I pay for all these programs, and the agent’s job is to help us qualify for them, not to judge nor moralize any part of it.

All the other agents judged and moralized to a degree that I eventually let my SNAP funding expire because I couldn’t keep going in there and facing the people scouring my business receipts for some implied wrongdoing.

Despite that, it’s still your right, you still paid for all of it, even if you don’t pay income tax, there is tax on anything and everything you buy and do, so you’re not doing anything other than collecting what you’ve loaned to the government. Hold your head up and look them in the eye if they ever challenge you, and apply for every goddamn program you’re eligible for, and if anyone gives you shit about it, you talk to their manager, and if they don’t help, talk to that person’s manager.

(One agent who was openly hostile and lectured me about “looking capable of working” and had a bad attitude through the whole process actually got fired because I complained, the manager of that DES office actually called me to let me know and to tell me they felt bad about it and that it’s not their job to be judgemental or invalidate others.)