OpenStars

Perhaps I am being unfair with my language, so here's an example if it helps clarify: this is a video combating vaccine disinformation campaigns. It is cute, slow paced enough, but also keeps moving fast enough, it aims low but at the same time it contains high levels of content, and basically answers anyone's questions about the situation. It is as perfect a video as I think can possibly exist - extremely bold words, but... accurate imho? Edit: oops, this is the one I meant, but notably the fact that there are multiple that fit this criteria also serves a different point as well!?:-)

However, instead of watching this, more people died in the USA from the pandemic than from all wars combined, and like so many other scenarios (e.g. gun violence) we will forever be ignorant of the true numbers because we are actively prevented from counting them.

This is literally, actually, full-on life vs. death, but people cannot be bothered to watch even so much as a 10-minute video to save their life, or the life of everyone around them including their entire family. And the nation that they claim to love and be patriotic for.

Knowledge can easily cure ignorance, but not much if anything can be done about obstinacy. Maybe if they suffer enough pain they may finally start to care enough to open up to listen a real answer, but brainwashing is so tough to attempt to break through.

That channel also deals with climate change, technology, etc. But to switch to a very different example, another one is the rise of fascism all around the world. Ian Danskin's Innuendo Studios has a playlist for his series on The Alt Right Playbook that is as comprehensive and deep a collection on that topic as I have ever seen. One example of the series is I hate Mondays and another is There's always a bigger fish. These in some ways are more important than knowledge about climate change or vaccines or gun control or whatever, bc it discusses what we as a society will do about those matters. But instead of watching such, and/or even reading the Constitution that they claim to love, people instead show up at the White House with the idea to literally behead people (January 6), and on the other side liberals always seem shocked, Shocked I tell you, SHOCKED!?! at the actions of conservatives, despite how remarkably consistent they are.

With so much free, virtually instant knowledge (okay so less than an hour?) available to us all, and with an ad blocker needs nothing at all in return but even without one having to watch a handful of ads is nothing in the grand scheme of things - with all that is available, I can only conclude that people do not want that knowledge. i.e. people in both sides - liberal and conservative - remain in their ignorance by choice, bc it's easier to watch something akin to a TikTok dance.

Their decision, whether they have spent even one second's thought about it or not, is "strategic" as in one that will get them personally some benefits, but it is also short-sighted as in one that may doom us all. On the other hand, my naivite is perhaps far worse so I should be careful throwing stones in glass houses.

I rarely like popular TV shows but one that does make me think is The 100 that illustrates thougher choices needing to be made and all the gamesmanship going on surrounding those. e.g. will neoliberals survive whereas progressivism was too impractical to ever have a chance? I don't know the answer but those seem like the kinds of questions that needed to be explored by people far smarter in such matters than I. Unfortunately, they instead have been explored by people who are fairly smart but whose defining characteristic may be a desire to become personally richer, which again far exceeds my own.

Without having heard the podcast yet, I can assume that the conservatives won by actually trying, aka giving a damn about winning. They listened to their base - okay so abortion is bad, check, also gays are bad, check, etc. - then went on an enormous campaign that lasted for decades as you said, until they finally fucking delivered on what they promised... or some facsimile thereof. And now that they did, some conservative folks are finally questioning whether it was a good thing after all... but anyway the most important stuff of all got taken care of: tax cuts on the wealthy, check; also owning the libturds, check.

Trump goes to jail? Who cares, they still banned abortions. The nation slides into a totalitarian regime? So long as gays are prevented from marrying one another, that still counts as a win! OMG I wish I were joking!! 🤮 But that is reality, and conservatives are facing it.

Whereas if Hillary Clinton had faced it, maybe she would have campaigned a bit harder in Midwestern states, rather than merely make comments about liking grits and carrying hot sauce in her purse.

Anyway as you said, run for city councils and schoolboards. Conservatives do that, based on their alternative facts, but liberals with our actual true facts usually seem to not bother, at which point ofc they will win, by default - that's just how that works, especially when someone runs unopposed. We may talk about UBI or whatever, and some exceedingly rare instances are able to give such things a try, but for the most part it's the slow grind, the basic gains, the slow and steady progress that wins the race. Maybe we can (re-)learn what we seem to have forgotten from ye olden decades by watching modern conservatives.

As the great man Jon Stewart once said (in reference to media), "liberals aim to be correct, while conservatives aim to be effective". I don't fully know what that means, except FAAFO, as we are always doing right now, at every moment.

YOUR kids would, I suspect, be better off than most kids in the USA - bc having parents that actually give a damn helps so much:-).

Will we keep up military?

^This right there - this is about all that we have going for us. We provide protection and direct services, which isn't nothing, nor is it never improperly abused (more's the pity), but it is something. Otherwise, what, Apple, Microsoft, Facebook, Twitter/X - these are the "innovations" that we share with the world? Along with Hollywood and whatever art like fashion we can get people to care about?

Anyway, things look bleak right now - bc, you know, they are:-D - but also remember: our media lies to us. Constantly. "If it bleeds it leads", but conversely all the dry boring stuff simply doesn't get reported, which is a travesty. Like how Biden made happen a MAJOR breakthrough in railway workers, taking six months of negotiations but eventually delivering everything that they asked for iirc including scheduling issues and PTO and sick leave (the dedicated latter is minimal but the former is flexible and can be used for anything) - that's hella impressive, and considering how no other president has done such for railway workers specifically addressed a huge gaping hole in our nation's infrastructure, with that form of transportation being so crucial to us all, mostly in ways we don't even take any time at all to think about. And yet what did the media say about it? So when they preach doom & gloom for like climate change and the economy, setting aside how those are truly accurate, keep in mind that it's also extremely biased.

Things won't be the same as before - they won't be as good as when life was easy. And maybe that's for the better even bc damn did the generation that is putting us into this mess get complacent and entitled. But we'll move forward regardless. And it's not all bad - e.g. all the fantastic medical breakthroughs, which keeps happening even if they are for like highly specific diseases, yet for those that have them it makes all the difference, and also every advance helps scientists learn and makes possible future ones. 😁

Not merely the USA, as e.g. Brexit shows - this is happening everywhere, across the majority of the world stage, and in a targeted manner especially the Western nations. Even before Putin, things were set in motion, and we knew it at the time even yet did nothing to halt it, like a cancer growing or a virus infection, and because it presents as "us" we leave it alone, until it is ready to burst out and reveal its true intentions, when hiding is no longer necessary. To illustrate, one example seems to be the creation of Fox News, but surely that is not the only such thing.

So what happened to the left then, for it to have become so hopelessly inept? HRC was extremely disconnected from any irl people, but so are all such wealthy individuals who don't live in the same world that the rest of us mere ~~slobs~~ humans do - is it really just a function that her campaign manager was not as good as the efforts put forth from the other side, similarly to how legal battles are won by lawyers rather than actual matters of substance like facts? It certainly doesn't help that various outside actors got involved - with the numerous and exceedingly severe "email scandals", but even aside from those she really seemed to be struggling with campaigning.

What it feels like is two giants fighting - the elites (and I think you know but to be absolutely clear, not the paper masks that they wear like "Biden" or "Trump") - while the rest of us poor chumps get stepped on as they do. Which is obviously true, but somehow not fully, either, bc the true giants don't even care (much) who wins bc they have the system so rigged that they win either way. The latter we could not begin to fight, but we may actually get to choose our own brand of toothpaste, if we work hard enough at it. And women's rights seems like it is something up for grabs that way?

Especially, and this is the crucial part of my point, at the local level - at least currently, until the conservative politicians decide that they need another win and take that as well. While we argue amongst ourselves but do actually nothing to stop it.

Oh... I thought they had someone already and this was him, sorry - I edited my comment to apologize for misinformation, thanks for the update!:-)

Honestly I'm not sure what to do with this. I wanted to spread the word of this interesting, well-written (imho) article, so I put it into BestOfLemmy, but that wasn't quite right, and now it's here, even though it is news, and in the companion community to globalnews where it came from even, which also does not seem right!?

Basically I guess I want this article - or possibly more likely globalnews and interestingnews - to be promoted more highly, b/c I had never subscribed to either until today, so they are definitely not getting noticed as much as I would like, at least they were not by me.

Ofc my ignorance isn't reason enough to hold a TED talk, but I am saying that surely it is not just me who did not notice that these existed before today, when they have only a few thousand subscribers, compared to the several tens of thousands of subscribers to other News etc. communities?

Possibly, but that is why I put that last paragraph stating that I had never heard of that community before. At a quick glance, it seems to be number 13 in the rankings of communities that have the word "news" contained within them, by subscriber number, and with 2.18k subscribers is <10-fold smaller than World News@lemmy.world with 37.1k subscribers.

So perhaps that entire community needs promotion, here in this community or elsewhere? Since I was not subscribed to it, I suspect that my All feed was de-emphasizing it, or perhaps not explicitly but indirectly it would preferentially emphasize posts that are somewhat popular elsewhere, so with <10-fold subscribers that community was simply not making its way to me organically terribly often, or at least was not back when I last went on a rampage hunting for things to subscribe to.

I have cleaned up my feed significantly by blocking several even non-political communities from Lemmy.ml (e.g. memes and comics and such, b/c despite their rules they kept putting in politics into every single thing), before I blocked that instance entirely. I have no desire to beat that dead horse here, just pointing out that at one point those communities also dominated my feed but now that they do not I am starting to see more content that I am more interested in, such as this.

But good point - at this juncture the interesting discussion about this topic seems to be here:-). I had expected (hoped?) to see more lively discussion in the post itself, especially if it were promoted more, but that does not seem to be happening.

Edit: also, I do not recall having heard of the first of those other two communities either. But I cross-posted there, and will delete from here as you pointing out that it does not match the scope here.

Upvoting b/c yes, but also... it is though? Click it. It is to https://lemmy.zip/post/17644464, which is a Lemmy post, that itself links to an article, but there are comments... well okay so far only mine:-P, but theoretically people could put their additional comments onto that post!:-)

Upvoting for the lolz, but also allow me (if you will) to whole-heartedly disagree: the way to deal with a problem is to first acknowledge that it is happening, and obtain a proper diagnosis; plus more to the point I was impressed with the lack of click-baityness that this particular one had, which seems exceedingly rare these days.

Every time I get to where I wonder if I should decide to not click on articles anymore, b/c 99.99% of them leave a profound sense of disappointment in their wake of being an absolute waste of my time, I come across such a rare specimen that makes me wish that we had a community dedicated to like "real news only - not alternative or 'enhanced' or empty fluff that wants your click regardless" that restores my faith that there is solid content out there, if only we manage to find it.

Worse, even the old metrics to filter them no longer seem to work - e.g. The Guardian has routinely broken my trust lately, but more complex than simply all one way or the other yay or nay, it started with the titles being shit but the content was fine, now more often I see that the first few paragraphs are shit but later it eventually finds a point to it, and lately I am also starting to see articles where the entire thing is crap (iirc?).

So I decided to be the change that I wanted to see in the world, and at least promote this one more heavily. :-) That way people that have sworn off traditional news sources can know that this one exists, in case they are interested. I wish an entire community of people could share the load of doing that work, but it seems too much effort and other people have different ideas of what the upvote button is for - e.g. reading just the title but not the article? - so I understand that it will not happen, but I wanted to at least share just this one:-).

Also, I mean no slight against the other articles in that community or its moderation practices - I did not even know about it until today, and only happened to stumble across this article in All b/c I was not subscribed to it. But e.g. news@lemmy.world I have unsubscribed to b/c many of those articles seem worthless to me (example), and I have even started to block some of the posters who contribute nothing but those types of posts. The Fediverse requires such heavy curation to become usable, but I can't control it all, so I at least attempt to control myself, and be that change that I would like to see happen.:-)