Sarah Valentine

Imagine thinking that all the secondary stuff does nothing to improve or encourage life. But I guess expecting imagination or thinking from some people is too much to ask.

I hope you understand that this take puts you in the company of tyrants and fascists, including the Nazis. Your hate is no better than their hate.

Right here: “USA as a country is our enemy now, not just the GOP. So in that way it is actually all Americans.”

Backpedaling later in your comment doesn’t fix this awful take.

Right. And it’s not like I’m doing nothing about it. I’m not a fighter, I’m a healer. I’m staying in school, enduring a shitty situation in a shitty country so that when the survivors turn up traumatized, I will be there to help them recover. Meanwhile I do what I can to arm my fellow Americans with knowledge of psychological theory - the biases and weaknesses of the human mind, how corporations and governments exploit this knowledge to empower themselves against us, and how we can strengthen our minds to resist them. That’s what I’m about, and I’m not going to let a diaper-shitting pedophile and his plans for world domination turn me into something I’m not.

I think it’s really awful that you’re telling Americans to either get themselves killed by the tyrant or be treated as supporters of the tyrant. Just awful.

You know who else was into collective punishment?

“What if we just use our binoculars to watch flowers bloom?”

“You’re not gonna believe this…”

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Sure. It’s called Model I Theory-in-use.

Sorry , what I mean to say is you’re making a ridiculous claim that’s untrue on its face, and for me to believe something like that I’d need to see some actual scientific research, not essay articles made for consumption in “popular media”. I’m anti-capitalist, but capitalism is a symptom of a problem that has existed since civilization began.

Occasional problems? The entirety of human history up to the 16th century, just had occasional problems? Come on, now. All the popsci essays in the world aren’t going to make me buy that take.

Cooperation isn’t a good thing in and of itself. People can have all sorts of reasons for cooperating, such as in the case of kapos in Nazi Germany. I wish human beings were mutually beneficial in nature because I was raised on Star Trek and dreamed of mankind advancing toward a utopian society. However, reality tells a different story. We have a long way to go yet.

I get what you’re saying and I agree that the basic concept can be generalized thus, but capitalism by name wasn’t invented until the 16th century AD.

I’m pretty sure the problem started long before capitalism. As soon as we developed agriculture to feed more people with less effort - which is to say, as soon as survival stopped becoming a moment-to-moment problem in constant need of solving - we outpaced evolution.

Being told that they can have their base desires without deep consideration, that the people from which they would take what they want aren’t really people, or are beneath consideration for various reasons, is a hell of a drug. It’s the kind of state in which pretty people get to live, offered to the ugly masses. Combine that with overlords who keep those masses in a state of struggling to survive, and you have an army ready to do as you command. It’s fucking insidious.

So far, society and technology have been advanced primarily by greed stemming from evolutionary drives gone haywire. Intellectualism and progressivism are anomalies that have struggled to survive in a world still dominated by senseless, brutal hegemony. We need to fight to keep our flame from going out, to preserve ourselves and our ideals until the rest of humanity catches up to, well, humanity.

Funny, we don’t know that masked thugs are actually ICE agents.

We are once again being presented the lesson that we didn’t learn every previous time a tyranny has been overthrown: That the overthrow must be total, that the power and influence the tyrants wielded must be entirely destroyed, that those responsible can’t be allowed to survive their crimes, and that the ideas that enabled their rule must become warnings taught to all from birth.

Until we learn the lesson, we’re never going to grow out of this insane cycle.