Why does it feel that the evil sides globally are winning. Even evil people are winning. Why?
I saw on Mastodon someone say something kinda like this: good people don’t feel the need to dominate others.
Evil isn’t “winning” as much as it is “on top.” If you look around, talk to your neighbours and such, you’ll see that good and reasonable people are everywhere; good is the overwhelming majority.
That being said, positions of power are chased and coveted by those obsessed with power, and those aren’t good people. Good people need to take charge, but it’s — in a way — against their nature to do so.
good is the overwhelming majority.
Let the overwhelming centrist majority in 1930’s Germany tell you otherwise. People who peacefully ignore evil, even if it’s preserve their own safety, are not good at heart. People just don’t want trouble or disturbance, that’s why people are naturally kind from day to day. But ignoring the piles of bodies while saying “no politics at the dinner table” is literally how the holocaust happened - the majority failed to act.
1930’s Germany at least had the excuse of limited information/education, all they had was radio from which only Hitler’s voice was present. 100 years later with the worlds knowledge at our fingertips, ignorance to politics is a choice. Might I say an evil one, all things considered.
I agree, people understimate the amount of assholes in the world
I’ve been lied to, gaslit, and blamed by my self-proclaimed “centrist” family my whole life, been called alarmist my whole life when i’ve been pointing at these very same things coming from a mile away. There are tons of others that did the same, at least alt-right MAGA freaks give you the time of day to argue. Centrists though? They’re the first to say they “dont really care much about politics” yet hold their heads high with masturbatory egotism and confidently proclaim “both sides are wrong, I disagree with extremists of any kind.” They’re betting their childrens lives and future on their own malicious ignorance, like that joke with the priest who denies life saving medication because “Don’t worry, God will take care of me,” but replace God with the Markets and you have the modern day peasant that’ll rat you out to soldiers for “heresy” and have you hung, disembowled, or burned at the stake. A person of self-interest is not a person of reason.
“Centrist” is often a word for unscrupulous fence-sitter… It’s a shame you’ve experienced that. I despise self-proclaimed centrists as much as the next guy.
Do you think they are the majority, though? Maybe it’s my echo-chambers, but that doesn’t feel like it’s the case. I’m not American, mind you.
Pretty much my entire family fit under this category, plus at least 75% of the people i’ve met in my entire life, including schoolmates and work colleagues. Of the 25% that are barely conscious, 80% of them are (somehow and unfortunately) MAGA while 20% have moved into a tiny home or cabin somewhere to grow their own food. The MAGA crowd are at least looking around going “wtf, workers need to seize the means of production” meanwhile the centrist liberals are the ones going “things would’ve been better with Hillary or Kamala.”
I was with you until that last statement, I haven’t met a single centrist that supported (voted for) Hillary or Kamala
I haven’t met a single centrist that
supported(votedfor) Hillary or Kamalalet alone attended a protest or demonstration.
MAGA, those voting for a privatizing fascist cutting taxes for the rich working with the richest people in the world to further the goals of the owner-class, are looking around going “wtf, workers need to seize the means of production?” Are you sure?
I can’t tell if you’re joking…
Yeah, those MAGA. The ones you typically see on youtube videos or twitter aren’t your average MAGA supporter, if you actually talk to one and ask them what they want, they start going off on things that even the most far-left Star Trek commie eutopianist could agree with, only to right at the end blame “the libtards!” or “DEI” or “immigrants” etc. They’re uneducated, they’re seeing things aren’t good and rightfully so, but they’re tricked into scapegoating before coming to the right conclusions.
Centrists? They say “You shouldn’t pay attention to these things.”
I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice […]
-MLK Jr. in his Letter from a Birmingham Jail
The major problem—one of the major problems, for there are several—one of the many major problems with governing people is that of whom you get to do it; or rather of who manages to get people to let them do it to them. To summarize: it is a well-known fact that those people who must want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it. To summarize the summary: anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.
Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, #2)
There was more to say than that quote. Still, it does feel that good and bad (“good” and “bad”) people have a different rulebook, and it’s not as simple a fight as who wants things more, but rather who’s willing to do more for them, and evil simply has more tools.
It’s not that good people don’t try or don’t want to make a difference, but rather that their scrupulous nature doesn’t allow for the means necessary for rule, in the majority of the cases.
Plenty of good people do succeed in reaching and using power to do good, or at least I do hope and think that that is the case. Higher the stakes, though, or more the power, less likely it is.
Unpopular opinion, but in the west particularly, folk have mistaken writing on the internet for action.
Tweeting resistance rather than performing it.
A lapse into inaction framed as radical rest and self care.
Online they are fierce warriors of justice, offline they go to work in Starbucks, use their apple devices to talk to their families and enjoy the treadmill of streaming services.
And this isn’t to blame them. This is the point of consumerist capitalism. To trap you in a gilded cage.
Well observed. People pour a lot of energy into political actions. The question is what that energy gets used on.
This is why I’ve stopped reading much of the content I had been reading before. Unless an article is about what someone is doing to stop what is happening, what is the point in reading it? I don’t care so much about the bad, rather in how the rest of us are preventing it.
For all the people complaining, I haven’t seen many talking about what steps they are taking to change the momentum. I get why I’ve may not want to announce what protests they are attending, but I haven’t noticed much new talk about mutual aid or volunteering efforts. I know the recent political climate globally is motivating me to be involved in both.
I’m waiting to hear back in a volunteer position helping local wildlife, and once I get that schedule worked out, I’ve already started looking into local food aid opportunities as well.
If our society is leaving gaps unfilled, as you said, it’s up to us to fill them ourselves before we all fall through.
I used to go to protests, from USA to Australia to NZ and UK… I’m not going to another protest until we start occupying gated communities. I’m sick of standing around looking pathetic occupying some sidewalk and politely leaving when told to by police. And to think that’s the best the so-called “leftists” can do, then I remember to back when things were bad - how the police and FBI would raid groups, murder them, drop bombs on them, and assassinate their leadership - and realize that leftism was defeated long ago. I want to keep it peaceful, and start picketing in places that matter like outside mansions and gated communities. Just stand outside the homes of billionaires to tell them we know where they live, we out number them, I think would be enough to shake things up a bit because they’re cowards too. However, in my heartest of hearts, I believe anything short of an armed overthrow of one dozen billionaires will never be enough. Fuck tinkering and pushing the needle slightly. Loud and armed leftist groups are needed now more than ever and there’s zero of them to be found.
you might want to look into socialism
I haven’t seen any socialist or anarchists show up with guns to protect protestors from police with guns, nobody has since the 60s.
theyve been definetly doing stuff like this sometimes in the us.
Exactly I budget and limit my time online to get specific kinds of information.
What kinds of information?
Where and when. I will make time to be there.
It’s time for good people to do some association too.
I’ve noticed no one actually wants to change their habits. I know so many people who will spout off about the environment, then think nothing of flying thousands of miles multiple times per year on the flimsiest of pretexts. Think nothing of eating meat with every meal. Will look at you with horror when you suggest public transport.
When it comes down to it the vast majority of people are selfish af. They’ll justify whatever their greedy little hearts desire, then tell themselves they’re the hero of the story.
That would make sense except when you realize this is new media and is exactly how the right is warping minds. Elon didn’t buy Twitter because he was bored. We cannot concede all social media to the right and until there is a platform that can’t be bought the people won’t ever have a voice.
The common version of the phrase…
“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,”
The actual version of the phrase…
“When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”
A favourite of mine on that theme is from Boondock Saints (1999)
Now we must all fear evil men.
But there is another kind of evil.
Which we must fear. Most.
And that is the indifference of good men.I should re-watch this again. That a good movie.
Don’t. I did and it ruined it…
You’re not my mom! 😭
What the fuck were you gonna do, laugh the last three to death, Funny-Man?
I think it’s fine if you’re okay with the call from God part of it
Yeah I remember this just being ok. It had that 90s Tarantino-ish style, some decent scenes but overall not super memorable.
Watch* the documentary on it instead.
Overnight. Peak 2000’s fashion and the director is over the top unlikable.
I still love that movie IDC what anyone says lol
Can I reccomend for you Vlad Vexler on utube. He is a polital philosopher in the UK, whp spends most of his time dealing with this topic. He has some wonderul content which is both educated and humane.
To summarize: democracy is waning, and we have some rough times ahead, but there will be wins mixed in with the losses.
Because good natured people don’t want conflict so they avoid it.
Bad natured people actively seek conflict and engage with it whenever possible.
Evil never sleeps. Peace does.
Class solidarity among the rich. Rich people want willing servants. They want people to fear disobeying them.
Just an hour ago I heard EmiliaRoig.com talking on the EuropeansPodcast.com (minute 28) and she said something that at first sounded naïve to me. But in hindsight, it may be true.
She said that “times are changing for the better (i.e. referring to the last 10 years or more.) and what we are seeing nowadays is just a shout of despair to that, being done by right-wing extremists, and is loud.”
I can recommend all that she said afterwards, be warned: talks fast ;p
Rent is due in 2 days. Things must be changing for the better for my landlord.
- Rampant unchecked capitalism of recent decades has created large wealth disparities akin to the earlier decades of the last century. It is no longer possible for one person in a household with a regular job to support a modest lifestyle for their family. All benefits especially medical for the whole family, being completely intertwined with the current job reduces mobility and further feeds into the wealth gap by keeping wages low. It’s easier to blame the powerless for this state of affairs than the powerful because the powerless cannot object.
- The fear of the other has been accentuated by media and misinformation. Targeted algorithms feeding most of the information that is consumed has created echo chambers that reinforce existing beliefs and fears. The propaganda state has never had it easier.
- The large military and police has given never before control to the state about what is allowed to be protested. Combined with the day to day struggles, it’s extremely hard to come together for what is right. The ruling class is able to maintain the fine balance between absolute misery and general dissatisfaction that it is still better to struggle through a thankless job than to say fuck it. Failures of recent large uprisings like Middle East and Hong Kong have reinforced the futility of standing up against the rulers.
- Evil has many heads and there’s always one head that you can find alignment with. It could be the deregulation of businesses, lower taxes, anti abortion, racism, but as long as there’s one thing you can align on, the general sense of powerlessness makes it easier to overlook the other heads.
- The line between evil and good has never been murkier, especially with globalization. If you focus on the betterment of your community, it would be considered good, but what if it leads to suffering of others outside the community. Is it also evil? What is community - is it the people in your neighborhood, your religion, your country, fellow business owners? The fuzzier these lines are, the harder it is to untangle them.
I felt so evil this morning that I drove my car. Fuck you Nature, I’m taking climate back
Evil people control almost all sources of information
That’s, ironically, how the white supremacists felt all these years lol
Edgy
Why would they feel that way? Not enough privilege, racism, genocide, etc? I don’t think that’s how regular people are feeling.
If you’re genuinely curious you could experience what Fox News offers (or here in Canada, Rebel News) - for many years these platforms have placed a concerted effort into stoking either rage or fear about the most ridiculous topics. The kind of rage and fear that make white supremacists feel like their “evil” is “winning”.
Propaganda is a powerful tool, and it’s wielded unceasingly by those with resources. Entire industries have come to rely on the sweet-sweet injection of Propaganda $$$, including the completely unregulated “Influencer” industry.
Throw religion into the mix and… it can be real easy to label pretty much anything as “evil”
I think about this often. It’s the overall world view for some people. It’s hard to escape the bubble, despite us clearly seeing how stupid the bubble is from the outside. Sometimes I wonder if some people are so afraid of failure that they have to have something, anything, to hang their pride on. Choosing your race or skin color to be proud of is much easier than being proud of your community or actions or cultural expression or scientific achievements. Probably because those things shift and change and require thought and patience. In their minds, they may not think they are privileged but rather victims. They may not think they are racist, but that they are looking our for their own and just misunderstood. A lot of it is victim-mentality and quite frankly collectively narcassistic. I don’t think this is unique to white supremacists, but any supremacists at all.
You are more informed in how shitty the world have always been.
Also the decades from the 90s to the 10s were probably a small golden age that has already ended.
I study history a lot, also I’m older so I have the perspective of two or three generations now.
Things have normally been not the idealized concept of Disney princess goodness in government. Evil shits normally have been doing stuff for as long as civilization has existed. So all this is not new.
What is new, and makes this newsworthy, is the masks have fallen off. Those masks and idealized fantasy much of the population indulges in took decades, generations to build up. In many ways this is a very rude culture shock.
The other reason this is important now is the climate is rapidly collapsing while the trade systems have reached unprecedented complexity. So a group of particularly thuggish people rising to power in several nations at once, as they tend to do with regularity. May have epic and disastrous consequences! It’s a really bad time for this to happen
Simple material effect.
People are shaped by the interrest of the social and material class they are part of. And the evil people are always the one in power and have the money, so they act in the interest of their class and do things that help themselves.
Fucking Marx wrote about this quite a while ago, now his predictions just manifest more visibly, but the cultural and material forces have always been at play. Now we just reached a breaking point as a planet and population, so the underlying systems start to break too and the people on top do everything to stay in power, including ditching reality altogether.
A ruling class of ultra wealthy lording over the vast majority of people who are left with crumbs is a common sign that an empire is in decline. With the US having more global influence than any previous empire, the whole world will be feeling the effects in one way or another.
That is the eventual conclusion of capitalism, the way it is currently set to play out.
The only forces that could act against it depend on the distribution of critical information… And those are owned by the same private interests… Soooooo. We’ll see. Doesn’t bode well at all.
We are entering a major transition period, with many technological changes happening to disrupt the existing economy. One of the most important is the transition from fossil fuels to renewable energy.
For hundreds of years, the energy economy has been a system where certain countries and companies controlled the locations on earth where fossil fuels are located, and had the technology to process the fuels. Fossil fuels by their nature require the user to buy “feedstock” as they go. The countries and companies that control fossil fuel production profit from this system and are some of the wealthiest groups in the world.
Renewable energy systems, such as solar, wind and batteries, require an upfront payment for the equipment. The cost of equipment for renewable energy is dropping every year. They can be located almost everywhere. There is no ongoing feedstock payment. Renewables break the fossil fuel industry model, and some of the wealthiest people in the world are scrambling to control governments to somehow retain their income flow. Currently their strategy is to delay implementation of renewables, but eventually they will try to create monopolies where they control the source of power and charge the customer about the same as they are paying now, with the utilities benefitting from the low cost of renewable power.
This is only one of the transitions happening at this time. There are many major disruptions coming from implementing AI in the economy, from electric vehicles and self-driving vehicles. There are probably many more transitions that no one is predicting or even imagining at this time. You can expect things to be crazy for a decade or more as these technologies change the way our economy, infrastructure and society is shaped.
The implementation of AI is an effort by those wealthies to increase the class divide and consolidate power. They see value in it beyond profits. It’s about omniscience and control. They just wrap it in what they think is a desirable package for the common folk and push it as though it’s a breakthrough technology (it’s not).
Self driving is just a dream that they won’t have to see a chauffer or God forbid take public transit and sit next to a plebian.
and fossil fuels, that continued “subscription” model, is a massive incentive for war and disrupting competing suppliers. Solar does require copper (distribution) and sand plus a bit of silver, batteries just lithium phosphate and iron, and all of these are relatively abundant (sodium as lithium replacement even more abundant). More importantly, once you’ve bought your solar and batteries, you have fuck you energy: secure and independent.
War on Russia was a last grasp effort to keep diesel refining at maximum capacity, and attempt to capture Europe’s NG supply. Doesn’t matter how much Biden loved US O&G, he wasn’t going to be loved back.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a last ditch effort to recapture former Soviet territory before its oil and gas resources lose economic value.
Simply not credible. Russia has enough drilling sites available to it to serve decades of demand. It set clear reasonable red lines to avoid an invasion, and investing in developing resources on contested land is an extra, unnecessary, risk that makes such investment uneconomic. It is grossly unfair to impute imperialist objective to Russia’s special military operation which was purely to prevent rabid NATO expansionist evil.
Except for this war, global oil/liquid fuel demand is declining. But use in the war is just a massive, at least 3% of global diesel use, nevermind the terrorist attacks on refineries/depots/supplies. US aligned nations have simply wanted this war more than Russia all along, and it is unfair to fantasize Russian resource expansion as an objective.
It is grossly unfair to impute imperialist objective to Russia’s special military operation which was purely to prevent rabid NATO expansionist evil.
And you’re blocked. What a moron.
How many NATO countries are former Warsaw Pact that begged and clamored to join quickly after the USSR dissolved? Why did Finland and Sweden finally decide to join NATO?
If not Ukraine, maybe someone from Georgia, Chechnya, Moldova, or Tajikistan could explain it to you.
Propaganda and hatred is a perfectly valid explanation. Georgia escaped stupidity this year despite propaganda objectives. Moldova succeeded in stupidity. Doesn’t make Russophobia smart, or an objective good, just because it exists.
LOL propaganda, yeah sure… I am sure that, let’s see here…the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovinia, and especially Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania would all have been safe from Russian interference or invasion if they would have stayed independent. Just like Ukraine, Georgia, Moldova, Chechnya and Tajikistan are super safe and totally independent and haven’t been bothered by Russia since 1991. 🙄
I would respect Putin and his political machine a lot more if they would just commit 100% to continental imperialism, as opposed to trying to hide behind playing the victim. It’s so obviously a lie it’s laughable. Stop the double-speak. If Ukraine was always Russia, that’s all you need to justify yourselves, right? Because we know blaming NATO, de-nazification, and all the rest is all bullshit.
What you are calling BS, is the genuine reality. There is no reason to believe your country list would be under Russian threat after Russia granted their freedom peacefully. The treat exists for being US empire puppets antagonizing Russia out of hatred. Normal human behaviour would not be that corrupt, but US military aid/CIA democracy helps corrupt.
It is surprising how weak Russia actually is. At this point just about any other nation could come in and wipe out the Russian government.
That was the big propaganda hope of suiciding Ukraine. “Surely Russian people will believe complete BS that NATO is a purely defensive alliance that has an open door policy because it loves everyone it captures”. Russian economy has outperformed the colonies who embraced their pipeline sabotage. The fantasy of invading Russia has occurred multiple times in the last centuries. It never worked out, and of all of the attempts, this is the biggest failure of them all.
