going to preface this with, don’t worry about my immediate health or anything. i am not having a psychotic episode of anything like that, i am 100% sober…and…that’s honestly the scariest part for me.
there is a message that finally got through to me, woke me up (wait, motherfucker…is that where “woke” comes from???), something I’v been aware of for a long time now i think, but it got suppressed down for…10 goddamn years… for whatever reason, until now.
now that I’m aware of it, I see it damn near everywhere, almost every majorly acclaimed movie, song, book, poem, fucking everything…
and it’s not like this is some short-term problem either, it’s not going away when trump dies, it’s not even going away if trump dies and the establishment regains control (i have my doubts they can pull this off).
it’s the same goddamn cycle over and over (with slight variations), boom followed by completely deliberate bust, one privacy-overreach followed by another, the same playbook used over and over. and occasionally either end is some random organic act-of-god, which just works to obfuscate the intentional acts.
it’s so large and all encompassing you can’t even be sure which parts are apart of it and which are just…people still asleep just going about their lives.
and now, because this world seems to be ran by a bunch of fucking psychopaths, I’m even more paranoid sober than when I was having a actual mental breakdown
because how the fuck do I trust anyone now?
how do i seperate those that know from those that don’t?
psychopathic assholes from regular assholes?
friend from foe?
hell, how the hell do Ieven confirm that this is real, I know that everyone in my own immediate family is stuck in these little arithmetic bubbles too so i can’t bring it up with them, if i tried they would probably be worried I’m going crazy.
and because of past-me’s mistakes over the years I have no irl friends whatsoever to talk with either, so i guess all I have left is to send this out onto the internet and hope for the best?
I actually help train for combating disinformation and the such, I could forward you a few docs if you’re interested in the read.
i would be
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/how-to-combat-fake-news-and-disinformation/
https://www.un.org/en/countering-disinformation
Easy points to start with. Generally, keeping a neutral view on something new, and striving to maintain a trust but verify attitude is your absolute best bet. The more you understand global politics, especially current agendas of various nations, political groups, etc. can help to discern one bias or another. In general, giving yourself room and time to properly process any information you encounter, and especially destress yourself, makes a huge difference.
it’s the same goddamn cycle over and over
This is the key. The people you can trust are the people who are going against that cycle.
Bringing up the Bible on Lemmy is generally a no-no, but I love Ecclesiastes. It’s a book about meaninglessness. Everything is the same as it has always been and there is nothing of true value; everything is meaningless. It’s the same goddamn cycle. While when it was written is debatable, it’s comforting and horrible to know someone thousands of years ago saw things the same way I do. Comforting, because I’m not alone in how I feel. Horrible in that people still feel this way after thousands of years.
The writer’s conclusion is to fear God and keep his commandments. The commandment is to love your neighbor as yourself. Loving your neighbor as yourself means being kind and empathetic. Kindness and empathy solve nearly everything.
So, even though it may achieve nothing, be kind and empathetic. Cling to people who are kind and empathetic. Be an oasis amid the hate.
My suffering is the same as my ancestors.
The suffering is a part of the cycle. It’s just our turn.
It is comforting once you realize. Doesn’t help truly, but it does bring comfort. Being kind to others also brings comfort.
Come on everyone, lets trauma bond
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Find a hobby that will get you out of the house and around people. Isolation is how they limit your thinking. Other people expose you to new ideas, experiences, and perspectives.
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Now that you’re “woke” you need to come to terms with the fact that people wake up at their own pace. Just because you’ve seen the light doesn’t mean you can pull the wool from other’s eyes.
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You need to curate a list of reliable sources. For me, I don’t really take any sensationalist science or astronomy news seriously until I hear established voices I’m familiar with talking about them. With politics its a little less straight forward, but the same principle applies.
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Educate yourself. Learn about the mechanisms that these cycles operate on top of. Learn methods of critical thinking. Learn the scientific method, learn the basics of money over time, learn how stocks/mortgages/bonds/real-estate functions. If you know nothing about how the world actually works than you’ll never be able to discern a liar from a valid source.
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Focus on building and contributing to your immediate community. It will help ground you in more ways than I can describe.
Understand psychology and marketing, as well as crime and geopolitics.
…crime like Mafias and Cartels and even street gangs. …because it’s all the same whether is mainstream or in the street.
I might add, start good trouble. This follows from 5. above.
Hold your state and federal representatives’ feet to the fire. Protest injustice. Demand transparency and equity. Understand how your local community works. If it doesn’t work, build on that.
Definitely this. Right now americans are confused as to why their fat cat democrats have been unable to prevent a clearly incompetent gaggle of morons from burning the house down. Americans stopped holding democrats accountable and gave them too many free lunches. Now dems have no teeth and the only solution is to primary the vast majority of them asap.
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Welcome to the Internet. Hopefully, I read as a good person. I am not a bot.
I lived as a young adult through Bush II. 9/11, Afghanistan, Iraq, Halliburton, Blackwater, and loads of corruption. It was tough to trust anything then. The goal was pure profit.
Apparently, Dubya was the warm-up presidency for this shit.
First, let me share a clip from Margin Call, 2011.
As long as the prevailing mode has been capital, there has been speculation. As long as there has been speculation, there have been lying liars who exploit the system.
The last few pump and dump bubbles he mentioned (1987, 1992, 1997, 2000, and 2008) are all market crashes I can remember. The market is a casino. Crashes since '08 include 2010 (Flash Crash), 2015 (sell-off), 2018 (cryptocrash), 2020 (Covid), 2022 (Ukraine War), and 2025 (tariffs).
These were once “once in a lifetime” events.
Second, everything in the world is designed to generate more:
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self-serving, self-centered, selfish
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short-term-focused
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extroverted, charismatic, vain
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action-oriented
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thoughtless
psychopaths and sociopaths. This ethos runs things because of profit motives, monopolies on the exercise of violence, and the development of contemporary morés rooted in exploitation, expropriation, and (deemed) externalities of colonialism. Identifying some humans as “the other” makes much more inhumanity possible.
So, I’m here to tell you, it’s real alright. What you’re feeling is real. What you’re feeling against is real. We are immersed in it. Algorithms are doing their best to lock it in.
Finally, what to do and who to trust.
Establish your own moral center. Decide what matters to you. Find those who are telling the most truth, especially when tested. Demogogues fall apart under examination. Lies fall apart when questioned. The unchallenged authority is no authority at all. Get the receipts; find primary sources as often as possible. Seek those who share at great personal cost.
For me, it started with Star Trek. Then, hip-hop. Then, journalists I could trust. Even films that challenge prevailing narratives. I read a lot of books from many perspectives.
20 years later, Chris Hedges, Naomi Klein, Jeremy Scahill, Henry A. Giroux, Amy Goodman, Arundhati Roy, and Noam Chomsky have never wavered. Films like The Insider, Erin Brockovich, and The Corporation light a fire in me. I’m rewatched David Simon and Barry Levinson’s Homicide: Life on the Street and, hilariously, Murphy Brown.
Challenge the prevailing narratives. You’re not alone.
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It’s sometimes easier to focus on solutions that would rebalance this imbalance of power.
IMO, wealth redistribution is the single most important policy for limiting the influence of the rich. A UBI funded by perpetually redistributing all excess wealth over a certain point would prevent anyone from gaining enough money to break the systems we depend on.
From the political power angle, removing representatives at any level and replacing them with direct democracy or direct influence from the people removes the opportunity for our representatives to be corrupt.
UBI funded by wealth redistribution and direct democracy, these are the tools that will allow humanity to break the wheel.
I’ve come across Against The Machine by Paul Kingsnorth. This is pretty much getting at the same. He’s a great writer, imo.
Yes. This is exactly where the word “woke” comes from. Now that you are, there is no going back. You can either live with your rage, or do something to fix the problem. It’s up to you.
If you want to know who to trust, look for the ones that are trying to help others, and help them.
Honestly, in my opinion, follow the money. In any situation, try to figure out who will be making money. That’s where the truth is today.
Politicians --> money
Corporations --> money
News --> money
TV/Music/Movies --> money
“the establishment regains control”? Bruh Trump is the establishment.
Anyway, figuring out what to trust can be tricky. That’s why I like to sometimes lean on rationalist practices. Learn what fallacies are, learn to how to spot them, and a lot of lies become apparent.
no, at this point Trump is a braindead puppet for whoever has his ear last.
The likes of Shumer and McConnel are the establishment.
Carter with Rockefeller’s congress, during the last (long) Dem super-majority…proceeded to tie the american pension system into the casino. acting as a regular wave of bagholding liquidity pumps.
Obama, during that short super-majority, passed Romneycare…a blank check for pharma and healthcare corporations to ratfuck public funds.
and of course while all that happens they’re all insider trading the whole time too, the greedy fucks
that is the establishment
obviously republicans are worse, but in a way they’re better…cause atleast you know they’re pieces of shit. meanwhile the dem side preaches Hope and Change to the public while reassuring their donors the status quo will be maintained
it’s fucking insidious
The establishment is people who are in power, which sure isn’t the Democrats right now. Not that they have anyone to blame but themselves.
If you really dish it back, both the Dems and repubs are the establishment.
Either way saying Trump isn’t the establishment I feel isn’t true, especially right now. He’s literally in charge of everything.
yes…obviously both are a part of cycle.
for me, establishment means they do atleast want keep this fucked up game of theirs somewhat sustainable. in that sense, trump and co. are not establishment.
trump was establishment, but now he’s a braindead parot repeating the last thing he’s heard
You don’t. Don’t trust this reply either, it’s biased and there’s a whole political agenda behind it. Goodnight.
Spend some time figuring out what your core principles are. Once you have identified those, use them as your “guiding light” when you encounter news or points of view, and constantly refer back to those principles to keep yourself centered.
I think therefore I am. We can only known that we exist in some form, we can’t know if others are even real, but its still a good idea to trest them as if they are real, because otherwise you’ll run into problems with the reality you know, whether its real or false.
In general, my guide to the truth (lowest is most trustworthy, higher is less trustworthy):
- Internal Logics formed by your consciousness
- Your senses, what you see and witness, what you hear, your first-hand account
2a. If you wrote a journal, and if you can authenticate your handwriting or writing style, then you could use that to clarify any fuzzy memories
2b. Same with photos/videos, but be skeptical of potential modifications. We know image alteration tech already exists. - IRL First-hand account from people you know
3a. People you trust
3b. Stangers
3c. People you are skeptical of (if they have a history of lying or exaggerating, you can rank them even lower on their trustworthiness) - Stories from someone that know someone that you know (e.g: “friend of your friend”)
- Mainstream News Media, Mainstream Internet Sources, Official Reports.
- The Internet in general.
You should take all the things that stress you out that you have no control over, and just toss them out window. You can’t control them, so why worry about them?
There’s plenty of things worthy of your time that you can control. So focus on them.
Yeah, the only reason I’m not a raving psychopath is that I continuously remind myself of the circle of influence.
There’s only so much that any of us have the ability to do.
There’s only so much that any of us have the ability to influence.
If you stop looking beyond that circle and only focus on the stuff inside the circle, you can have a lot more control over your daily life.
You can do things like block out news companies that only report on things that terrify you. There is other news out there.
The ones that are always telling you the scary things are doing it because they know you will reflexively keep your eyes glued on them and therefore see more ads and make them more money.
It is a fundamental human aspect. It’s just like PTSD, when something hurts us, we become more aroused, more aware of its existence, and we pay more attention to things that are like it, our pattern recognition brains kicking in, so that we can protect ourselves from the pain.
Hyper-vigilance towards evil is the default.
But if you remind yourself that there is some evil out there in the world that you can’t do a damn thing about, then it’s a lot easier to just dismiss it and ignore it.
It doesn’t make the evil okay. It’s just a reminder that you literally cannot stop murder rapes in Timbuktu if you do not live in Timbuktu and serve as a police officer.
If it’s not your responsibility, not your authority, not your ability to stop it, then don’t waste your energy on it and instead focus on decreasing the number of murder rapes in your local area by not murder raping people, you know?
And if you see a murder rape happening, attempt to intervene if it is within your capabilities.
This applies to places like Lemmy as well. If seeing all the bad shit on the politics community is triggering, block it!
I view interpersonal trust like a ladder. You trust a little, if someone trusts you back or validates your trust, then you can progress to trusting more. If not, don’t!
As far as institutional trust, you’ll have to decide for yourself IMO. Do you agree with the messaging from the institution? Do you generally trust the people within it? If so, progress, otherwise don’t.
If you have a different question let me know. Hope this helps.
As far as institutional trust, you’ll have to decide for yourself IMO. Do you agree with the messaging from the institution? Do you generally trust the people within it? If so, progress, otherwise don’t.
Something I do for this is to look at what the “opposition” says in response to anything salacious or inflammatory. Does the other side address it directly and provide evidence? Do they ignore it? What’s their track record on the subject? Consider the end of Obama’s last term when all the right could talk about was him golfing. Then trump gets in office and golf’s even more. Anyone who bitched about Obama and was silent for trump lose a ton of credibility. The exact same thing for the debt. The right was screaming about how much debt Obama added. Then trump goes and adds more in his one term than Obama did in two. Those same critics? Fucking silent.
Always excellent, The Evolution of Trust, and interactive exercise in Game Theory.
You’re touching on the idea of a “truth baseline” as I call it. How do you know what’s real vs bullshit?
My truth baseline is that maintaining the habitability of Earth is good. From that, I can deduce the following:
- excessive carbon dioxide in atmosphere is bad
- reliance on fossil fuels is bad
- clean renewable energy is good
- people who rail against renewables are bad
- political part(ies) that do the same are bad
- news figures that normalize that are bad
Etc. See where this is headed?
The ambiguity of whether someone is good or not is due to goodness being a subjective quality. There is no such thing as objective good. The closest thing to objective good we can attain is sustainability.
The same can be said about truth. If you want something objective, that’s called fact. Truth is a subjective perception of facts. Thus… there is no one correct truth. Just an openness to adjust to new information while dismissing those who are opposed to your truth baseline.
You seem to have an inherent trust in scientific consensus. Some actors are also trying to weaken this and misinformation is rampant. Some figures seem to support far right ideas until they get put into perspective by people who are well informed on issues. These people rarely get enough funding, attention or time.
I think one of the most important ideas is to spend your attention on things that you can influence for the better. That often means struggling to accept that our impact is limited but worthwhile.
You don’t need to trust consensus to observe global average temperatures and infer that we’re in uncharted territory in regard to the climate.
