I didn’t even say it was the KGB doing it entirely, just that it was first documented as a “thing” in their manual from decades ago, and we still didn’t do anything to protect our society broadly from it.

I know well that we’ve been under assault from an absolute charcuterie board of forces both foreign and domestic. Twitter alone is like the Ukraine war, in that it re-wrote how we thought modern tactics are going to unfold, people are going to writing manuals about how to do what Musk has done with that platform.

The more you think about it, the less sense it makes.

If you actually read the book, it makes so little sense you will weep for humanity.

I have mixed feelings about modern anarchist wolf.

On one hand, I don’t agree with every idea or value that anarchists hold, but I do respect the positions broadly.

On the other hand he kinda cute.

while the techniques were pioneered and written down by the KGB, I’m not even saying the blame lay on Russia alone. There are a lot of forces adopting this tactic, both foreign and domestic.

Wait 'til you learn about Twitter.

Hey introverts, if it’s just some friends getting together, go hang out with them. You’re not “an introvert” you’re introverted, you’re out of shape. Flex those muscles a little and force yourself to rebuild community.

Community is what will save our future more than any amount of posting or tweeting or advocacy about whatever this week’s social issue is. Stop wearing your labels and excuses like a shield to keep yourself from doing the hard things.

No, shut up. I don’t want to hear it. Do or do not, there is no try.

The fact that our species has a glaring weakness in identifying abstract threats, while at the same time we’re developing tools capable of performing the most abstract possible attacks on our free-will and agency, makes me feel a tad uncomfy about the near term future.

Every single line item in your comment became ammunition for foreign agents to get into our culture over the last 20 years and just escalate the FUCK out of both sides of each idea there.

It was directly from the KGB handbook written over 50 years ago, that if you infiltrate a nation’s culture and just amplify the most radical takes of both sides of every issue, it will create so much chaos and completely destabilize a culture so that people tune out and stop trusting each other or any news story they read. This has the effect of making the population just default to whatever state media they see and stop caring about social issues entirely. It’s been shocking seeing how effectively it’s played out in the US.

I watched it happen, I was on the frontlines, managing a few social sites and moderating a huge subreddit about relationships. It was a creeping infection at first, but eventually it was like Helm’s Deep, but instead of orcs outside, it was astroturfers, crybullies, sea lions, and the entire goddamn ZOO of bad-actors and subversive chuds. For every horrible, shit-mouthed incel ranting about how women need to be put in cages, there was also some delusional, insane “feminist” screaming about how all men are rapists and men should never be left alone with children.

I gave up the fight, reddit banned me for being an involved human, but it continues to this day, getting worse by the day.

Tucker, Gavin, AOC, Vance… all bit players in an inevitable gravity well towards a known outcome. Everything is circling the drain towards a techno-fascist oligarchy as our principle system of rule for like, several decades at least before the system collapses from the weight of competing corporate agendas, AI psychosis and manipulation, and massive climate change leading to levels of human migration we’ve never seen in the modern world, combined with population collapse in huge urban centers from failing birth rates.

The existence of the article alone is either deliberate or organically emergent bad-faith, even if it’s pushing back against a supposed movement against fact-checking, it is legitimizing the argument by saying there’s “sides” in the issue.

I am very aggressive about some topics and unapologetic. I have seen too much hate and death and loss to feel like I need to be gentle with people who are ostensibly on my side. People retreating from discomfort is how we have such an atomized world with so many people withdrawing from socializating, and as a result, abandoning the only real power we had which is community.

Seeing nostalgia for what it is, a tool of destruction, is a hard step to get over, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.

I already said I know it sounds hyperbolic, I am saying broadly, we need to take better care with how we talk about things in the past.

Lots of people saying “I want to have the system we had in the past” has a very different material outcome in our world than lots of people saying “It was better in the past.”

I know all that, I was also there, I am saying that even with the marches and protests, there was still an overwhelming mandate among Americans, manufactured or otherwise, for blood.

You could edit this very lightly and actually distribute it in conservative spaces and people would connect with it.

• “Why yes, I think the tax money I pay should go towards social safety nets in case I or my grandma gets sick and can’t work.”

• “Why yes, I don’t think getting sick should make me have to close down my business and sell my house to CHINA.”

• “Why yes, I think people should just enjoy whatever they wanna do with each other in the privacy of their own homes, I don’t need government shoving it down my throat every day or making LAWS about what people do with their genitals.”

• “Why yes, I also think adults should be able to drink or smoke what they want, lets tax it and use that money for better border security!”

• "Why yes, I am sick of rich fucks deciding what I can and can’t do, I value my FREEDOM and no one person should have so much money that they can decide MY future. Tax them and put that money towards [insert right-wing fear thing here.]

Then end it with. “That’s all I want as a FREEDOM LOVING AMERICAN, so why are so many people trying to make this an argument? Why are rich people trying to make the things we agree on into politics? KEEP POLITICS OUT OF MY FREEDOM”

Yes it’s kinda dumb, but I think I’m actually going to make the thing and distribute it.

Not sure what the point is. I’m saying people always look back and cherry-pick what was “better” and things are always changing.

You can advocate for those better things without tying it to the past. When you do that, you are feeding fascism. I know it sounds hyperbolic but I am dead serious, every time anyone even casually says “it was better back when…” a GOP intern gets promoted to media manager.

Factually correct, practically impossible for a vast swath of humanity right now.

Rates of self-isolation are soaring, people forming new relationships and having children is plummeting harder than we ever imagined.

I would say to people longing for that “simple pleasure” night for themselves, put yourself on a diet first. Stop feeding your brain media, including sites like Reddit or Lemmy. Stop reading the thoughts of thousands of strangers written as text, read in your own voice inside your mind. Stop reading or watching pundits or reaction streamers or people sitting on chairs, playing games and talking about shit in a one-way narration.

Socialization makes you feel happier generally as an adult, and now we’ve fostered an entire movement of people who cling to their self-diagnosed introversion, autism, ADHD and other labels as if they are shields against having to do hard things like learn emotional intelligence and socialize like an adult. Get out, meet people, start getting comfortable with not knowing what’s blowing up on Twitter.

If the death of Charlie Kirk is any kind of barometer, the death of Trump, no matter how it happens, is going to be the biggest clusterfuck imaginable for the right. They know this too, that’s why they are feebly parading Vance around, propping Erica Kirk next to him, making him try to sound “trumpy” by having him complain about how he hates turkey, and it’s all falling completely flat.

The atomization of our perspectives is what allowed the cancer to metastasize.

Most people don’t browse forums, most people don’t read news stories, most people don’t fact-check or watch debates or listen to pundits talk for more than 3 minutes.

This should normally lead to rapidly shifting political landscapes, but we’re all being a carefully cultivated feed of validating and self-affirming information that makes people feel a lack of involvement and urgency. You see it right here on Lemmy, people are reposting all the pandering news site bullshit every day “Trump and MAGA is collapsing!” “Trump HUMILIATED by latest release!” “GOP is crashing and people are fleeing the sinking ship!”

For every headline like that you read, people who lean right are seeing the exact opposite. And since we’ve all isolated ourselves from social connection, we don’t see how atomized our worlds are, we just assume everyone is seeing the same headlines and it makes us complacent.

Shifting narrative, it’s part of the perpetual political swing.

Shit is always going to suck, and people have attention spans that last maybe 3 years at the most. Shit is sucking right now, and people are associating that suckiness with the people and faces who appear on their TV.

For further evidence of this very dumb, simple phenomenon, look at 2024 exit polling in the presidential election. Overwhelming results said that average Americans saw eggs and other basic necessity prices skyrocketing and connected that to Biden being in power, so the reaction is to over-correct and pick someone as far from Biden as possible. People weren’t thinking about policy, people don’t watch news or listen to debates. People get their information from 30 minutes of Facebook memes every sunday night while getting ready for bed.

And in 50 years there will be people waxing nostalgic for the good ol’ days when you could just fire up your own access to the internet and buy a plane ticket with your credit card.

Wanting freedom and comfort is not a “return to the past” thing as much as a “why has capitalism robbed me of the feeling of freedom and choice” thing.

pop an energy drink and boot up some new, uncharted game after reserving a whole night to yourself. Yeah, you gonna feel like that kid back then.

Our problem as a species is we’re cursed with knowing.

You can do this but you can’t escape the things you’ve seen, the experiences you’ve had, the new context you view the world in.

Some people can get out of their heads, some people need chemicals to do it for them, but every adult is weighed down with more knowledge than our minds were built to parse and file away safely.

People aren’t scrolling in misery until 4:00 AM looking for something new and exciting, they’re trying to not be in their own head for even a moment so they can feel like that kid with fewer worries again.