Right. No fast change will undo decades of damage.

I guess I just want more concrete plans. Like, universal basic income, no more wealth exploits (eg: low interest loans against stocks, no tax), changing the election system to something like ranked choice, uncapping the number of representatives, statehood for DC and peurto rico... now I'm just rattling off ideas.

Maybe policy can come later, and trying to nail it down would lead to infighting and failure? But it needs to happen eventually.

A core principle behind Hands Off! is a commitment to nonviolent action. We expect all participants to seek to de-escalate any potential confrontation with those who disagree with our values, and to act lawfully at these events.

Ok, but like what are we going to do? Marching on the streets alone isn't going to fix anything. We don't have to march into DC, drag the republicans onto the street and shoot them (but that would fix a lot of problems). What's the next step?

It's like...

• They're dismantling the government and doing other bad stuff
• We march in the street
• ???
• Things are better

What's the ??? there? Strikes? Sabotage (or is that violent?)? Voting? That feels too slow to save much.

I saw him in Prospect Park (Brooklyn) once and he legitimately was walking around with atrocious posture. Funny, in retrospect.

On poor reading skills, this was a really interesting read/listen: https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/ - We've apparently just been teaching kids how to read poorly, and not because of like a sinister agenda. That almost makes it worse, that it started with good intentions.

Also I think about how a lot of the people who are, as you're alluding to, bad at language simply won't show up on a platform like this that's all text. That's probably why visual platforms like youtube and tiktok are hugely popular. There are a lot of people who simply cannot comfortably operate in a text-first medium.

I disagree. Pick a random Republican voter from this country and you’re very likely to grab someone from a red state. Let’s say Alabama. Their vote is as insignificant as a blue voter in California. So regardless of who you or who they voted for, their impact is nil.

They vote in local elections, which are not insignificant, and have real impacts. You have like school board elections decided by a few dozen votes. The conservatives win and start banning books and doing low grade hate crimes against queer people.

You have contributed to the bottom line of a company that hires death squads to kill labor leaders (this is has been proven in court).

We all know there's no way to be a wholly good person under capitalism. We're both writing this on hardware that is likely metaphorically soaked in blood. That doesn't mean that any amount of blood is equal to any other amount of blood.

No matter who you vote for; over the long term the same policies will be enacted regardless.

I don't think this is necessarily the case. We had a new deal. Trusts were broken up. It is possible to make changes. It's an uphill battle because of many factors, including the republicans pulling as hard as they can in the opposite direction. The republicans (or more broadly, conservatives and reactionaries. or even more broadly, the ownership class and their useful idiots) are the problem.

The first step is to get rid of this atmosphere of hostility. You blame someone for the country collapsing, they get defensive and blame you for the country collapsing. We’re in the post-truth era so it doesn’t matter what is true or what is false. People believe what they do based on vibes. This isn’t an accident but intentional.

A key difference is they are incorrect. But as you say, we're in post-truth and facts don't matter anymore to a lot of people.

This isn't a serious policy summit because we're just two dorks on lemmy. In real life you'd have to spend a lot of time massaging people's emotions so they come a little closer to reality. In my internet-tough-guy persona I just want to shoot every red-hat in the head. I know it's not that effective, but I'm an emotional sack of meat like everyone else.

And again, they may feel the same way and want to just shoot the queers dead, except that wouldn't solve any problems. It's not the queers (or the jews or the blacks) that are voting to remove child labor laws, to remove environmental protections, to keep wages low and prices high. The animosity might be similar but they are wrong.

The answer is that wealthy people thought it was in their interests. Simple as that. It’s why for example when you had the Trump inauguration the top tech CEOs all came to bend the knee and sat in the front row. The capitalist system has decided that having Trump at the helm is the most profitable outcome.

The right wing will always chose fascism and profits over anything else. Given a choice between paying a little more for labor or burning the entire country down, most of the ownership class would burn the country down. They're not good people. I'm pretty sure that was a key factor in fascism's rise in ww2- the wealthy class backed fascism because they didn't want to pay more wages to unions.

I knew a guy that worked for in a smallish factory, and the owner verbatim said "I'll burn this place down before I let you all unionize."

Personally, I think they should have broken into that guy's house at night and murdered him, but I understand not wanting to throw your life away on a class war skirmish that likely won't make a difference.

I think one key thing you are missing here is that the Democrats are just as guilty as the Republicans in creating Trump. Bill Clinton for example amplified Reagan’s economic policies that accelerated our descent into brutal neoliberal capitalism. As we descend further down, people become increasingly insecure.

I said elsewhere that it's like squares and rectangles. All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares. All republicans are a problem, but not all democrats are a problem. Some are. That doesn't mean they're good. Maybe we want stars. Neither of them are stars.

People who are scared for the financial future vote for dictators. This has happened before and it will happen again. I believe fascism is like a herpes outbreak. It’ll never go away, but your immune system keeps in check most of the time. The issue is that our immune system is weakened and now it has a breakout.

It's funny because that's such a self destructive behavior. It's like someone having an itchy outbreak of some kind, and then they scratch and scratch and scratch until it bleeds and it gets infected. What's the political equivalent of cones for people's hands so they can't scratch?

Because you are just as guilty and complicit in maintaining the system as the Republican voter

This is false

Your life sucks? It’s Republicans.

This is actually true. The ultra wealthy that keep us in this hellscape are republicans. They have much of the blame. But the low level people who keep voting for them also have some of the blame.

Blaming the queers (for example) is a total non-sequitur. They're just living life. The republicans are dismantling the government, ending vaccination programs, and rolling back environmental protections. They are for real doing actual harm right now. It is not the same as the imaginary harms "the jews" do. People would make up stories about nefarious evils of jews, but meanwhile the republicans are right there on TV doing evil. There was a nazi salute. There was an insurrection. These are things that happened.

The working class republicans are class traitors. They should realize that our interests align, but they don't, and they are actively doing harm.

If you have ideas on how to instill class consciousness in the kind of people who vote against their interests, let's hear it.

I feel like because of how much insider bullshit there is, there's a good chance the billionaire would get rich again even if they were left with only $1mm

They'd go to their investor buddies and ask for funding for their new startup, and they'd be right back to being ownership class.

They wouldn't suffer. I want them to suffer. I think that's the only way they'd learn empathy.

Squares and rectangles.

All squares are rectangles, but not all rectangles are squares.

All republicans are fools/monsters/traitors, but not every Democrat is. Some are. But not all.

You need a way to prevent this from being corrupted. Conservatives would love to use this to prevent black folks from voting. They're single minded and will chip away at it for decades.

Perhaps honey pots? Set up fake meetings to discuss how to prevent "those people" from voting, and everyone who attends is barred from working in government for life.

We don't have to go door to door shooting everyone registered R. The leadership should definitely go up against the wall.

But every person that votes R is voting for climate disaster, unchecked pandemics, rolling back decades of medical science, violence against queer folks and other minorities, and other horrors.

They might not be a comically evil person who kicks puppies and steals candy from babies, but they've thrown what little power they have behind tremendous evil. When that stops, that's a win.

I concede I could amend my previous statement that they don't need to die. We can also celebrate them leaving the party and changing themselves so they're not doing evil anymore.

Republicans should be wiped out. Fools, monsters, and traitors. They've done incalculable damage to the world and all those who live here.

Every Republican that dies should be cause for celebration.

The problem is the people who support trump don't care about facts, history, or internal consistency. They're riding the emotional high of in-group supremacy.

There's no easy way to fix that in bulk. You can fix an individual by removing them from their bad influences and spending a lot of time emotionally supporting them.

But, maybe it would encourage some people and nudge some fence sitters.