For the DNC ticket it’s going to be Newsom, Harris and like, one candidate we actually like who won’t make it past primaries because the system isn’t designed for radical change.

What sucks about this is I’ve seen it play out so many times before that I already know that when the populist/socialist doesn’t make it past the primaries, progressives everywhere will balk and choke and say “Well there’s no WAY i’m voting for any of the people still on the ticket. The DNC is corrupt, my vote doesn’t matter.”

And then the bar slides further right.

Every time they break our hearts, and we respond like they predict, they get to slide the bar closer to fascism and authoritarianism. Which is what capital wants. Both republicans and democrats are servants of capital and we don’t defeat capital with some idealistic notions of revolution or uprising. Shake that fantasy out of your head. We have to start pushing the needle back to the left, and sure that means making shitty choices at the presidental elections, but it also means shaking off your introversion and asocial habits and going out and helping your local community and town/state elections so that we can cut the foundations out from under this mess. We can still turn it around but you’re really not going to be happy with the timespans involved in doing so.

You’re not going to see the Star Trek post-scarcity future. I’m sorry. Now start doing the fucking work to make it so your grandkids or grandroids will see that future.

I despise overly-liberal and even overly progressive-minded young people who are absolutely naive and delusional about society, and can only view the world through their bubble that gets reinforced by their friends and online social groups. And I ain’t even talking just about tankies and people down at the bottom of internet brainrot barrels.

I am a progressive and believe in socialism and a borderless world and would fight to the death against fascism. But I’m seeing way, way too many young people tuning out of reality and supporting absolutely dumb-as-fuck takes and having unrealistic expectations about what’s going to happen in our world.

The lack of ability to recognize how and why a side you oppose wins and gains power is a biproduct of living with those blinders. The dismissal of millions of people who don’t think like you is just as bad as the millions of people who hate you for your identity. We have to get a lot smarter and accept a lot more hard truths about how we’re going to keep pushing the needle towards progress. Sometimes you have to make sacrifices like getting out and voting even if you don’t like the candidate. Supporting and physically getting involved with community and groups even if you’re a self-diagnosed introvert with autism.

For some screwball reason, the concept of forcing yourself to do hard things so you get better at them has become very conservative-coded but it’s how we’ve succeeded against evil for generations. We have to start being a lot tougher and stop balking at people who don’t share all your values. We win with community and organized resistance, not constant scolding and trying to be the smartest lefty in line for the camps.

Any people of color or other marginalized groups or minority populations reading this really, really need to share this on your community’s social media and get it visible within your cultural space instead of just sighing at Lemmy posts that won’t make it out of our bubble here.

Trump secured a large vote from black and latino people because everyone’s attention spans are so fried that people basically filter everything they see to distill it to just what they want to see. (Even before the algorithm distills this further.)

So what we had were a lot of people who didn’t get the memo that Trump and Republicans broadly suckle at the heart of racism and hate to power their machine. They just heard messages about “returning to traditional values” and pictured their parent’s lives when they were growing up and got exploited by the ol’ “nostalgia” hack. A lot of people of color come from communities that have held onto tradition for a long time as a survival tool, and there are a lot of conservative values that line up with that kind of tradition, so people, desperate for meaning and leadership, thought that a vote for Trump would restore that nostalgic feeling of “when men were men and women were women” and all the dumb shit we say to justify our hard lives.

Nostalgia is a tool of fascism. Stop being nostalgic, start beating that shit with a hammer when people bring it up.

Your life wasn’t better when you were little. Your parents were miserable. Life was hard, you were just little and stupid and thought everything was amazing.

I hear you, I just don’t agree with you.

quit trying to “fix” other people.

I’m offering a rope, many people have taken it and have thanked me. So no, I have no intention of stopping.

You don’t have to touch the rope, you don’t have to even look at it.

But for some reason you are here looking at it scorning it, and you interpret the fact that the rope exists for some people as an implication that anyone who doesn’t reach out for it is “fucked up," which I have never remotely suggested, that came from inside you, my only implication is that you have a greater capacity for change and elasticity in your brain than labels are letting you believe. You do with that what you will.

Now we’re here wondering if we’re going to get an anti-christ funded billionaire for our next fascist president, or a nazi-funded billionaire for our next fascist president.

Thanks guys, everyone out there who went “eww, I can’t vote for that person, they make me feel cringy and icky.” I’m sure you will feel comfortable with your choices in line for the box cars as the Palantir drones watch lovingly from overhead.

That’s some fantastic examples of clinging to labels which I am speaking against. As someone who managed to stop feeling the need to be isolated, stopped feeling social anxiety and social exhaustion as rapidly, I know quite a lot about the work it takes to change, and how you look back and realize that it’s not mature or helpful to use these kinds of labels to describe yourself or anyone else.

The qualifiers give people a bridge to escape, a way to say “No, that’s not me, I know my situation and my feelings, and despite being sad like 90% of the time, in this once instance I am the exception to the rule and don’t have to do shit to feel better.”

So yah, I rather make people mad and get them to reply “whaa that’s not me, you don’t know what you’re talking about” because that is action, that is something that forces people to think about why the message makes them mad, and if they get hit with that enough, they often think about it more and can change. The fervor to pile on and say “you don’t understand me” just tells me it’s working. Because it takes an almost subconscious obtuse rejection of a broad, not-targeted message to lash out at it. We need to understand this behavior in ourselves as well.

And what about people who feel exhausted by every type of social interaction? Because that’s my experience.

That is literally what I’m talking about. That feeling is a muscle, it can be exercised and changed.

IF YOU WANT IT.

This is where people lose their minds when I do this ill-fated game. I don’t care if you’re fine.

But a lot of people are not fine, they cling to the label to avoid change because comfortable patterns are going to be what your rationalizations default to before it will rationalize doing something really uncomfortable like even going to therapy, much less going out and meeting new people and pretending to be social long enough that you get stronger at it. This is where the label, and all the “personality profile” horoscope bullshit online does real damage to young people who need to be exercising their brains.

If you’re fine, it’s fine. But a lot of people are not fine. The trends isolation and avoidance of each other is causing real harm to a lot of people.

I was once you, and and had the same feelings and wrong ideas that I derived from sources I sought out to reinforce my avoidance of change rather than looking at actual human experiences, getting therapy, and accepting that I could break free of depression, social avoidant behavior and anxiety and doing the fucking work. I’m not telling anyone my answer is for everyone, but if I can turn from someone like you, to someone like me, than I will NOT stop sharing my experiences and opinions and guess what.

This will really burn you up.

I’ve helped many, many people.

I won’t see another message from you, and if my attempts at reaching even a small number of people who need change bother you that bad, you also know what to do.

Yah this is important, there is no real such thing as “natural” selection anymore.

There is still selection happening but it’s wildly more complicated than nature alone and likely will take much, much longer to show effects, because we have reshaped the world to provide for us and can safely breed even with health conditions and bad habits.

Don’t forget the big one, carbs. Carbohydrates are fairly hard to find in nature, even if you have a carnivorous diet and you get plenty of fat and proteins, you will desperately crave carbohydrates which are easier for the body to convert to energy than just fat by itself, and most animals were pretty lean so you would be very lucky to even get a lot of fat in your diet to begin with. If you just eat lean meat you will die.

Fruit, starchy tubers, honey and other natural sugars were prized sources of energy, this is why we love sweets so much and why a package of oily french fries feels like heaven, you are responding to natural imperatives that still think you’re at risk of starving.

I don’t care about the specific qualities of the labels, I’m talking to and about people calling themselves introverts who are miserable and lonely and think that they can’t change.

This may seem shocking to you

I often come off as rude or abrasive because I assume people are smart enough to understand that on this topic, I am specifically talking about if you have a problem or you’re unhappy, so I don’t drop a wall of qualifiers.

And I still won’t drop a wall of qualifiers because in my 25 years of having this conversation more often than not, the people who respond that they’re fine and happy usually aren’t and wish that they could make some kind of changes to their life, which is why they felt the need to respond that they’re fine despite obviously not being the target of the message.

By the logic that you can just call things whatever you want and then you’re magically allowed to treat them as that thing

Welcome to realizing how actual geopolitics work. There are no rules, just “gentleman agreements” that most of the time major powers have held because they worried about reprisals for breaking the unwritten rules.

There is no such thing as “law.” Law is a word we use for the systems that keep citizens of a country from harming each other or the economy. When you’re a nation, there are no international police who will ticket you for literally just doing whatever the fuck you want to whoever you want.

Telling a person with depression to “not be sad” is in fact, in essence correct, but usually it’s woefully incomplete when people say something to that effect.

What’s missing is the steps to get there. I advocate for gradually pushing yourself through discomfort and challenging how you feel so that it encourages your brain to change. Just like a therapist will tell you to tackle your depressive episodes in small, bite-sized pieces that you can handle until you finally can realize what thoughts and feelings trigger your episodes so you can reduce them.

You are at that point, in essence, doing all the stuff that sounds like empty pabulum if you were to decribe it to someone else. (“I learned to think positively and not dwell on negative thought loops.”) But again, there’s a gulf of work between depression and that kind of lightness, and there’s a gulf of work between being alone and socially awkward and managing a team and going out to dinner events without feeling nervous or self-conscious.

They’ve been doing this game for a while. (They, being establishment politics, Dems and Republicans working together)

They push the needle further right, put up less and less progressive, human candidates, and hope more and more people either tune out of politics or say “I’m out.”

The unwillingness for people to wait out the hard shit as long as it’s pushing the needle back the left has brought us to the point that we have to choose between demons and ghouls. We could have nipped this back when we were forced to choose between “boring and not-quite-progressive-enough” but there were vast numbers of people saying “I’m out” that far back, and I know for a fact most of ya’ll would love one of them “boring” presidents if it means we have institutions back.

Rails against celebrities in politics.

Nominates a celebrity instead.

I’m not prescribing platitudes and positive thinking, I’m saying if you think you’re an introvert and you’re unhappy with it, you can change with practice and work. It’s hard work and you fall down a lot but you can have a very different lifestyle with far more opportunities to meet people, have relationships and get recognized in your career or study.

The problem I am outlining is that many people think this is outside of their capability because they are “An Introvert™” and that’s just a word, not a diagnosis of a disease.

There isn’t any issue if you’re happy and no need to do anything. I feel like that should be pretty self-evident.