DocWatts

To add to what's already been said, the metrics that have traditionally been used to gauge how well 'the economy' is doing - the stock market, unemployment, inflation - have become increasingly decoupled from the well-being of the bottom 80% of the country. While on paper the United States had a world-class economy under Biden, the numbers masked a cost of living crisis that has made owning a home or starting a family an impossible dream for at least half the country. 'Unemployment' may be something like 4%, but a huge portion of those jobs don't pay enough to meet a person's basic needs, let alone provide a firm foundation to build a prosperous life from. Trump cynically used this crisis to lie and con his way into power, having no intention whatsoever of addressing these kitchen table issues. On the contrary, the last 9 months have been a process of intentionally adding jet fuel to this dumpster fire. 40 million Americans are about to find themselves going hungry due to an abrupt disruption of nutritional subsidies, thanks to Trump's government shutdown. Add to that that the US economy is being artificially propped up by a speculative AI bubble, which is poised to pop in the coming years. No one yet knows what the fallout from this will look like, but a second version of the 2008 Financial Crisis and Great Recession isn't an unreasonable starting point.

$40 billion dollars to prop up Argentina's failing austerity economy for the benefit of billionaire investors while Americans go hungry.

If you can afford to, consider making a donation to a food bank in your community. Because the fascist regime that controls all three branches of our government - Does. Not. Give. A. Shit. if Americans are going hungry. If anything, Trump and Stephen Miller see millions of hungry desperate people as a benefit, since the regime has been going out of their way to provoke riots as a pretext for a military crackdown. They've failed to do so with the terror tactics that ICE is employing, children and families going hungry gives them another opportunity. The US House is currently shut down because speaker of the House MAGA Mike Johnson does not want a vote to release the Epstein files - is in fact refusing to inaugurate a newly elected Democratic representative for that very purpose, because it would give the House enough votes to release the files. Senate Republicans meanwhile are lockstep with their Cult leader who refuse to negotiate with Senate Democrats, who are demanding rollbacks to healthcare cuts and enforceable guardrails to illegal impoundments and rescissions of Congressionally approved spending. Meanwhile, Trump has earmarked $40 billion to prop up Argentina's failing economic experiment, while refusing to allocate the tiny fraction of that amount that it would take to fund SNAP until the end of the year.

In short, it's because we tend to use ideologies to meet our identity, belonging, and survival needs - with the truthfulness of the ideology being a distant, secondary concern. We like to flatter ourselves that we're rational actors who 'choose' our ideologies like how we choose between boxes of cereal at the grocery store - but this is putting the cart before the horse. In actuality, our sociopolitical views are of outgrowth of the lives we've lived. Tldr: the ideologies we adopt aren't a dispassionate 'choice' based on the merits of the evidence - we instead gravitate towards ideologies that accommodate our lived reality. 'Extreme' ideologies, then, are often linked to trauma or difficult survival circumstances. No one chooses to become an incel, for example - they slip into it out of despair due to negative experiences they've had with women, and a lack of self worth.

Yeah, that checks out, since we're living in a timeline where a vindictive man-child became the wanna-be king of America.

More like: First they came for the immigrants And I spoke out immediately because I read the rest of the damned poem.

https://www.politico.com/news/2025/10/14/private-chat-among-young-gop-club-members-00592146?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR6z5ke5GEyhK8QNtNCqy2RvK2Ca7iY0ehk5VcQm4L1x5Ep3lKUtAQlG-aOGlQ_aem_S-iEcpxGPkXYD3pubgQ3gA Exclusive ‘I love Hitler’: Leaked messages expose Young Republicans’ racist chat NEW YORK — Leaders of Young Republican groups throughout the country worried what would happen if their Telegram chat ever got leaked, but they kept typing anyway. They referred to Black people as monkeys and “the watermelon people” and mused about putting their political opponents in gas chambers. They talked about raping their enemies and driving them to suicide and lauded Republicans who they believed support slavery. William Hendrix, the Kansas Young Republicans’ vice chair, used the words “n--ga” and “n--guh,” variations of a racial slur, more than a dozen times in the chat. Bobby Walker, the vice chair of the New York State Young Republicans at the time, referred to rape as “epic.” Peter Giunta, who at the time was chair of the same organization, wrote in a message sent in June that “everyone that votes no is going to the gas chamber.”

Amazing how 7 million Americans had very little difficulty protesting against a fascist regime on No Kings Day without commiting any crimes. Yet if you put 2500 MAGAs at the steps of the Capitol Building, they can't resist the urge to bludgeon police officers with flag poles, trample people to death, and attempt to murder their political opponents. "Law and order for thee, not for me". The intent was always to let white bigots with red hats do whatever the fuck they want with zero consequences, while using a lawless state to persecute minorities. There are ways to remove people who are here illegally while respecting due process - so let's not pretend that the terror tactics we've seen over the last 9 months are anything more than racism for racism's sake and a ploy to consolidate naked, unaccountable power.

To be clear you made two claims. Stating that he got 78 million votes: true statement. Going on to claim that a majority of the country supports him: not even remotely true. The best propaganda is based on a kernel of truth that's been contorted to serve a deceitful narrative. The Big Lie here is that Trump's authoritarian power grab is somehow justified because a majority of the country supports his actions - this is, and always has been, utter horseshit.

That's not even remotely true. Less than a third of American adults voted for the wanna-be dictator. More Americans stayed home than voted for Trump. If 'didn't vote' was a candidate, it would have won the election handily. It would be more true to say that apathy won the election. Even among people who did bother to vote, Trump won a plurality rather than a majority. 9 months into his presidency, less than 40% of the country approves of the job he's doing - this is historically low when you consider the first year is typically the honeymoon period where presidents enjoy the highest approval ratings of their entire term. A larger percentage of Americans support having him impeached (52%) than approve of Trump 2.0 (< %40). He's underwater on every single issue, including the economy and immigration. An overwhelming majority of the country, including a majority of MAGA Republicans, want the Epstein files released. Stop spreading propaganda.

What got the country where it today is anticipatory obedience - institutions and individuals obeying in advance out of cowardice and political expediency. Or to quote Timothy Snyder: "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do." I suspect that folks pooh-poohing what's likely to be the largest single day of protest in American history have spent very little time researching how authoritarian governments are actually toppled. Speaking from my experience as an actual activist - one who's involvement in the pro-democracy movement is far more extensive than attending a single protest - I can say with confidence that we don't need everyone to be doing everything, we just need a majority of people doing something. Civil resistance movements succeed when they're able to separate an authoritarian regime from its pillars of political, economic, military, and cultural support. In practice, this is achieved by building a demographically and ideologically diverse pro-democracy coalition while simultaneously fracturing the autocrats coalition. Demonstration like No Kings are important because they draw people into more active forms of resistance, push back against the atmosphere of fear and inevitability that the autocrat is trying to instill in the public, and make it abundantly clear that the regime is weak and unpopular.

We're starting to see seeing this already, in the frankly embarrassing ways that Trump and his enablers are trying (and failing) to discredit and intimidate the No Kings protests - from calling ordinary Americans terrorists to smearing No Kings as a 'hate America rally' to shooting missiles over freeways in California.

"I consider myself an animals right advocate, but we keep focusing on nonsense issues like factory farming." ----> This is you. I'm open to having a good faith discussion about the limitations of progressivism, but I can't take you seriously when you simultaneously claim that racism isn't a serious problem - especially in a context where here in the States we're fighting for our lives against a racist, authoritarian government. Learn to read the room, my man.

And this is how you do nuanced observation on the limits and potential drawbacks of progressivism (I agree with all of these points, btw). This is something which shouldn't be that hard on what's supposed to be a Conscious Politics Forum, but I've come to accept that the 'Conscious' part is more of an aspiration than a description, judging by some of the posts I see here.

Wow, gaslight much? "Minorites don't know how good they have it and the people pointing out racist behavior are the actual racists" - you managed to sockpuppet white nationalist propaganda verbatim. So congrats, I guess. Not sure if you live in the States, but maybe having a loved one disappeared to a detention camp by the secret police for the crime of not being white in Trump's America would cure you of some of these delusions.

Ill give you the benefit of the doubt and assume this isn't a deliberately bad faith take, but if so this is completely delusional.

Thanks! I'll be wrapping up the last section of the book over the next few months, and am looking to release it in the latter half of 2026.

I thought I might share a snippet (the first half or so) of an in-depth article I authored on Malicious Perspectives, which is the culmination of a series of articles on the epistemology of perspectives. The series is part of a philosophy book I'm writing, 7 Provisional Truths, which aims to make in-depth epistemology accessible for non-specialists. The write-up is essentially a field guide on how to skillfully navigate bad-faith viewpoints, which explores why we're vulnerable to these manipulation tactics, how to spot them, and what to do about them. We also explore on of history's most most consequential examples of these calculated deceptions: the 'Stabbed In The Back' myth that became the founding mythology of Nazi ideology. The full article can be found here: https://7provtruths.substack.com/p/malicious-perspectives ___________________ _________________________________________________________________________________ Calculated Distortions And Their Consequences What happens when viewpoints aren’t just misguided, but deliberately poisonous? The answer begins with acknowledging a basic truth about perspectives - their partiality. ‘Partial’ means localized, limited, and incomplete. This partiality isn’t a flaw, but a fundamental feature of how we engage with reality through these vantage points. While we might aspire to ‘a view from nowhere’, what we actually occupy is a ‘view from within’. For our sensemaking is always situated within a particular body, culture, and historical moment that shapes what we see. And while we can certainly step back from these lived orientations, we can’t step outside of them entirely. Which means that perspectives necessarily reveal and distort - capturing some aspects of a situation while obscuring others. High-quality perspectives acknowledge these constraints and work within them. Misguided ones ignore or deny them. And malicious ones weaponize them. A malicious perspective is a calculated distortion of reality - one that’s deployed in service of goals its architects dare not state openly. The harm they cause isn’t an unintended byproduct, but a deliberate strategy for achieving ends that honest methods can’t reach. If you have a rotten agenda that would be rejected if stated plainly - and lack the means to impose it through brute force - then manipulation is what’s left. From run-of-the-mill con artists to aspiring dictators, where there’s an incentive and a means, bad actors will use any opening they can find to push their schemes. Hitler, after all, had far more success overthrowing democracy from within than by storming it from without through a putsch. The scale varies, but the pattern doesn’t. So what do these malignant operations look like on the ground? Whether the aim is to deflect accountability, obstruct solutions, or consolidate power, the overall arc of this calculated deception remains the same: exploit problems where they exist, manufacture them where they don’t. And above all, ensure that nothing gets solved, because the goal isn’t to fix anything - it’s to consolidate power, deflect blame, or line pockets. And nothing opens doors to these ambitions like a good crisis. An exploitative employer doesn’t want you to feel secure at your job - they want workers whose positions are too precarious to make demands. A demagogue doesn’t want kitchen-table issues addressed - they want a citizenry desperate enough to grant them emergency powers. If this playbook sounds familiar, there’s a reason - it bears more than a passing resemblance to an abusive relationship. Like an abusive partner, pushers of malicious perspectives will: 1) Reel you in with flattery, validation, and belonging. 2) Gradually distort your perception of reality. 3) Exploit your emotional vulnerabilities for control. 4) Attempt to isolate you from outside perspectives that might break the spell. That’s the playbook. But what makes these manipulative tactics viable in the first place? After all, nobody sets out to join a cult, become a mouthpiece for propaganda, or get swindled by a demagogue. Yet people fall for this stuff all the time, so what gives? Social Animals In A Messy World The answer is that we’re navigating inherently murky terrain as social animals who are permeable to influence, with skin in the game for the conclusions we reach. Human intelligence is innately social - the same factors that allow for culture and cooperation also enable manipulation. But how does this play out in practice? Benefit of the doubt gives these malicious framings an initial foothold, and the permeability of our situated perspectives gives them traction. Our viewpoints don’t emerge from some pristine inner sanctum, but from our messy entanglement with the world. We do our meaning-making as social animals - inheriting cultural templates and adapting or inverting them to fit our circumstances. And critically, this process is thoroughly entangled with our emotions, identity, and social belonging. Given these stakes, the bulk of our attitudes and beliefs aren’t the product of careful reasoning - they’re organic outgrowths of the lives we’ve lived. We can’t deliberate over everything, so this autopilot is an essential feature of how we navigate the world. Our intellect is mostly content to step in when this pre-reflective flow hits a snag. Reasoning does play a role in this process - just not the leading one. The star of this show is intuition, with intellect acting more like a public relations firm for these emotionally grounded judgments. Reason’s primary job is to rationalize our existing beliefs - reconsidering them is secondary. There’s considerable inertia to revising convictions that we’ve already staked out - which is why it’s usually much easier to dig in than to change course. Changing our minds is of course possible - it’s just that the path of least resistance runs in the opposite direction. Self-examination is hard, while self-justification runs on autopilot. Which is why we don’t tend to do it until the world knocks us on our ass in a way that our typical defenses can’t cover. But before we get too hard on ourselves, it’s worth understanding why we’re swimming upstream in the first place. If these shortcuts seem pointless, that’s because we forget that they’re actually adaptations. However much we assume that our minds are built for rationality, evolution had different priorities - namely, keeping us alive. And because there’s no designer driving this process, the solutions it arrives at can be inelegant. In short: evolution doesn’t optimize - it satisfices - settling on adaptations that are ‘good enough’ for survival and reproduction. We see fingerprints of this process in our psychology, which is wired for speed and efficiency over accuracy and precision. The proof is in what we don’t notice. Consider the countless tasks you’ve executed flawlessly today - from getting dressed to eating breakfast to scrolling and tapping while on the toilet - without a moment’s thought. We conduct most routine activities on autopilot, and there’s a good reason for this - we’d grind to a halt if we were forced to deliberate over the thousands of micro-decisions we make on a daily basis. Careful deliberation is cognitively and emotionally taxing because stopping to deliberate carries real opportunity costs. So it pays to be strategic about what we question - and this selectivity is intertwined with our deeply social nature. While there’s a modern myth that our ancestors were rugged individualists who survived on grit and self-reliance, the reality was exactly the opposite - for most of human history, being cast out from the group meant certain death. The equation was brutally simple: ‘together we are safe, alone we die’. That ‘together’, however, was radically smaller than today’s sprawling anonymity. Living in a ‘society’ of millions would have been an unthinkable contradiction for our distant ancestors, who survived within a hostile world by trusting and depending upon a small, tight-knit group. Dozens of individuals at most, whose survival was inseparable from your own. When your entire social universe is small enough to fit around a fire, reputation and belonging aren’t vanity but essential for survival. This ancestral legacy has carved deep grooves into our psychology that continue to color our intuitions to this day. We are, fundamentally, groupish creatures. That means we’re calibrated for in-group loyalty over impartial judgement, and sensitivity to our social status over merit-based assessment. And these instincts run deep - operating at an intuitive level that’s scaffolded by reason and reinforced by emotion. The practical takeaway is that we’re wired to trust what feels familiar, fear what feels foreign, conform to the group, and accept simple explanations over complex ones. This creates predictable vulnerabilities that skilled manipulators know how to exploit. And the most effective means for doing so often isn’t through lies. Lies are a liability - they take effort to maintain, leave trails investigators can follow, can collapse under their own contradictions. What’s better by far is to manufacture an unreality where truth itself is beside the point. Which brings us to the realm of bullshit. Flooding The Zone Bullshit is speech that’s manufactured without any regard for truth or falsehood, where the real aim isn’t to persuade, but to overwhelm and distract in pursuit of an undisclosed agenda. Bad actors are drawn to it like flies to shit because it’s a remarkably effective scaffolding for propping up a rotten edifice. This is how malicious perspectives gain their deepest foothold - not through convincing arguments, but by flooding the zone with shit until people give up trying to separate fact from fiction. It’s a deliberate scorched earth campaign against the epistemic commons, corroding trust in the type of shared reality that allows for productive disagreements. And when bullshit is deployed at a societal scale, it becomes something even more dangerous - what scholars of authoritarianism call The Big Lie. Not an isolated falsehood - like denying an affair or fabricating evidence for weapons of mass destruction - but a narrative so audacious and repetitive that it wears down the mind’s ability to resist. History's Most Consequential Lie What happens when these audacious unrealities gain purchase? They draw blood. They build gas chambers. They turn neighbors against one another until societies fracture along lines of manufactured hatred. In short, they don’t just distort our understanding - they pave the way for real-world violence. We don’t have to speculate about this dynamic - the historical record offers no shortage of case studies. From The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion that fueled pogroms across Europe to the Lost Cause narrative that paved the way for Jim Crow, the examples are as familiar as they are horrifying. Yet there’s one that towers above the rest as perhaps the definitive example of the Big Lie. The story begins in the final months of World War 1, in a war-ravaged Germany facing imminent defeat and collapse. After four years of brutal conflict that had sent two million Germans to their graves and a naval blockade that left millions more on the brink of starvation, the military dictatorship that had emerged over the course of the war could no longer deny the reality that was staring them in the face. With its armies on the brink of collapse and civilian unrest escalating towards revolution, Germany faced a stark choice - surrender immediately or face imminent invasion and inevitable occupation by the Allied Powers. The Schlieffen Plan - Germany’s blueprint to avoid a two-front war by delivering a swift knockout blow to France - had failed catastrophically in the opening months of the war, condemning Germany to the grinding war of attrition the plan was designed to prevent. With Allied armies pressing in on all sides, the generals who had promised swift victory now confronted total defeat after four years of industrial-scale carnage that had bled the nation white. This wasn’t just a bitter pill to swallow - it was a social apocalypse for the military aristocracy that had driven their nation to ruin. The toll on Germany’s civilian population, which had endured years of deprivation while their husbands, sons, and brothers died in trenches was similarly catastrophic - creating a traumatized nation that was desperate for answers, but would settle for scapegoats. It was within this volatile environment that the architects of this defeat concocted a scheme to evade accountability for the catastrophe they’d engineered. The solution was to shift the blame to the newly formed civilian government, which had been hastily assembled as a prerequisite for a negotiated peace with the Allies. Rather than signing their names to the humiliating peace they’d made inevitable, Germany’s military elite instead engineered a transfer of power that left civilians holding the bag for a military disaster whose true scale had been systematically concealed from the public. Unless you were an exceptionally imaginative or unusually well-informed civilian, the sudden declaration of defeat would have arrived as an incomprehensible shock. While soldiers in the trenches had no illusions about Germany’s dire situation, those on the homefront were kept in the dark through strict censorship and wartime propaganda that assured them that victory was around the corner. Adding to this veneer of plausibility was the fact that Allied troops had yet to set foot on German soil, its armies still occupied foreign territory, and no climactic battle had sealed Germany’s fate. It was into this perfect storm of shock, grief, and manufactured ignorance that Germany’s military elite orchestrated their coup de grâce - a Big Lie that would become the founding mythology of Nazi ideology, reshape German politics into a cauldron of conspiratorial grievance and betrayal, and open a path for decades of dehumanization that would ultimately lead to the Holocaust. The Dolchstoßlegende, or the Stabbed-In-The-Back myth, held that Germany wasn’t defeated from without; it was betrayed from within by Jews, socialists, and democratic politicians. While all three groups were vilified, antisemitism was the beating heart of this Big Lie. One where Jews were cast as the enemy from within - never mind that thousands of German Jews had died in trenches trying to prove their loyalty to a nation that would turn on them. While the Stabbed-In-The-Back myth stands as history’s most consequential Big Lie, the technique didn’t die with the Third Reich. Its malevolent logic has been a tried-and-tested tactic of authoritarians ever since: bury the truth beneath a mountain of audacious bullshit until reality itself is contorted into something unrecognizable. Variations of the Big Lie have motivated state sponsored violence from Jim Crow era lynchings to the Rwandan Genocide to the January 6th attack on the US Capitol. The tactics differ, but the thrust remains the same - to give malicious actors carte blanche to consolidate power, persecute enemies, and destroy lives. Brutal stuff - but history, real history - doesn’t pull any punches. Likewise, epistemology is never just academic - it has consequences that can be measured in body counts. When done well and honestly, both should make us uncomfortable.

%1000 agree with this.

I've also appreciated Parkrose Permaculture for her grounded, knowledgeable takes on how to build an effective pro-democracy movement. I've found her content to be a much needed reprieve from both 'we're cooked' doomerism and 'business as usual' elections-will-save-us perspectives. You might also enjoy Knitting Cult Lady who Angela (ie Parkrose Permaculture) mentions on her channel, who's a US Army vet with expertise in cult dynamics.

@Scholar Two things can be simultaneously true: 1) People should face social, political, and financial consequences for spreading malicious bullshit (ie Alex Jones spreading conspiracies that the victims of mass shootings are paid crisis actors without one iota of evidence) 2) These consequences can sometimes be poorly calibrated for the actual offense (ie dog piling on someone for a nothing burger). That doesn't mean we just give up holding people accountable for their actions - it means that we make sure the consequences are proportional to the harm caused

Democracy, at least on a federal level, is likely cooked - SCOTUS is poised to gut section 2 of the Voting Rights act, which will give Republicans the green light to create 220 safe seats (ie a majority) in the House by gerrymandering the shit out of every Republican controlled state. America can no longer be meaningfully called a democracy when one party has permanent control of the US House, which puts the US squarely in the realm of being a hybrid regime. In other words, a mixed authoritarian-democratic regime, with democracy existing to some degree on a local and state level while being hollowed out on the federal level. A hybrid regime is essentially a failed democracy that's in the process of authoritarian consolidation, but isn't a full-on authoritarian state yet. It’s a political system that retains some formal features of democracy - such as elections and a constitution - but these are increasingly hollowed out in practice. In such a regime voting still happens, and on paper you still have 'rights,' but those rights function more like optional guidelines than guarantees. If they get in the way of the ruling faction's ambitions, they're ignored, reinterpreted, or swept aside entirely. So that does that mean we throw in the towel and accept our fascist, pedophile-protecting overlords? Fuck no. Autocratic regimes have been toppled in the past, and they can be toppled in the future. We're not going to become 1940 Germany overnight. The kind of regime we're going to be left with 3-4 years from now is going to be a reflection of what the American public is willing to tolerate.

That's a very fair point, which is why I've also gone to great lengths to educate folks on this topic - the typical American has a very shallow understanding of this period ('it can't happen here'), thanks to generations of educational neglect and willful disinformation.

What's routinely misunderstood is that the people who voted for the Nazis in 1932 didn't think they were voting for the Holocaust - it took another decade of dehumanization and consolidation of power to get to that point. The Nazis in the early 1930s, while they were still consolidating power, is absolutely an apt comparison to make right now - from the complicity of non-fascist conservatives who were willing to go along with it out of political expediency, to a demagogue with a cult of personality failing at a violent insurrection only to enact an auto-coup after being elected into power. Again, the comparisons aren't 1:1, but that's to be expected - history doesn't repeat, but it does instruct by providing case studies. Fact of the matter is that the tactics and rhetoric of Trump's regime closely parallels the tactics and rhetoric of the Nazis while they were consolidating power. We're not 1940s Germany - obviously - but none of what Trump and Stephen Miller are doing is new (these aren't smart of creative people) - they're working from a well-known playbook. Stephen Miller and JD Vance have publicly praised a book called 'Unhumans', which praises fascist dictators like Franco and Pinochet who enacted campaigns of mass state violence against 'subhumans' (ie, liberals and the left). Even if the end goal is a white Christian apartheid state rather than gas chambers, I'm not going to lose sleep by applying the comparison to a movement that 'only' wants a dictatorial ethno-state rather than a full blown genocide at this point.

Obviously the comparison isn't literally 1:1, because 2025 America isn't 1933 Germany. The larger and more important point is that we need to unapologetically be willing to call a spade a spade: if Nazism is what a homegrown fascist movement looked like in 1930s Germany, MAGA is what a modern-day fascist movement looks like in America. Or put differently, not all modern Republicans are white Christian supremacists, in the same way that not everyone who voted for the Nazis had personal animosity against Jews. Yet both have proven that they're more than willing to go through the mental gymnastics to avoid taking accountability for their choices.