AFAIK neoliberal policies have destroyed society leaving behind bunch of alienated humans seeking purpose and anything beyond center-left politics has been pushed far underground and far-right “populism” has massive mounts of money to give to anybody with an audience or just willing to say shit…
I see the Edge* and it’s coming for me.
*By the Edge I mean my ability to survive.
I understand and agree, but I don’t see the relevance of nude Urho?
Ööö… idk… Nude dude is better then screaming into the Void?
A bit, I suppose.
I know it won’t make a bit of difference, but you folks in the US are in my prayers today. And if you’re the praying type, one for the future of the EU would be highly appreciated.
i’ve got an old friend who is a parasitologist (mostly working on malaria) and he recently suggested (not seriously; i don’t think…) covid includes behavior modifications (like for instance toxoplasma gondii does to rodents) to make human hosts stupider and more tribal. …don’t think that’s it; but it sure would explain a lot. (i’ve seen maps which tend to correlate republican tendencies and covid infections; now we ‘need’ global maps of covid infections and fascist political tendencies?)
Long Covid reportedly knocks off a few IQ points. I imagine that repeated infections can’t be good in that area either.
Edit:
I expect there to be same correlation, but the causality is pretty straightforward. The response to Covid-19 required people to listen to experts and make some minor sacrifices to keep everyone safe. Fascists would rather die.
With toxo, the impact and change in behavior is part of the mechanism of the parasite to complete its life cycle. With COVID the neurological impacts are incidental side effects, the strategy of it is piggy backing off of existing social behavior rather than changing behavior to suit its reproductive needs. I could be wrong though considering that the microorganisms that are inside us also modify and drive our behavior in ways we’re only beginning to understand.
Maybe my memory is faulty from the COVID, but to me it sure felt like the planet was deep into embracing fascism before the pandemic even started. I’ve often wondered about there being some environmental factor involved, though. Even keeping in mind the billionaires manipulating things behind the scenes (or at this point, right out in the open) and the sustained efforts of the right to wreck public education, it feels like humans couldn’t collectively be this stupid and gullible without some kind of actual brain damage being involved.
I feel like a significant point was when Syria collapsed into civil war, and there was a huge wave of refugees that needed help, only they were mostly brown-skinned and Muslim. Both Trump and Brexit came in on the wave of overt xenophobia the west responded with.
I suppose if we’re talking about fascism alone, racism is a much larger factor driving that. I’ve said before that I think Trump was a direct response mainly to Obama- we had a Black president, the world didn’t end, and this drove white supremacists in the USA into a permanent frothing-at-the-mouth rage mode where all that matters now is punishing everyone else, at any cost, forever.
I was thinking more along the lines of just how unhinged the right has become, though, throwing away all personal dignity and choosing to inhabit an absurdist alternate reality that would be outright laughable if they weren’t trying to enforce it on everyone. I’ve tried to come to terms with it for 8 years now but I still have a hard time accepting that people actually believe the conspiracy theories and lies that fascists (admittedly, mostly the American ones) continually spout. Some part of me has enough faith in humanity that it just will not understand how people can sink so low without some kind of outside force like lead or viruses or microplastics disrupting their thinking.
As the song goes, just a little bit of history repeating. Three generations on, living memory gone, lessions learned forgotten. And hey, we’re so much more advanced than our ancestors, just look at our new and shiny technology… Nothing bad can happen to us, the past is irrelevant.
Frustrated, me? Naaah…
Something’s wrong with people’s reasoning.
People say “I asked ChatGPT” and post the excretions and I don’t think they’re joking… facepalm
Yes, and let’s add the right’s deliberate use of social media to isolate and silo a huge gullible audience, comprised especially (but certainly not only) of vaguely angry white men. People like Limbaugh, Bannon and Alex Jones made big money, and used others’ even bigger money, by stoking that anger and focusing it in a classic divide and conquer manner on already oppressed others, who are supposed oppressors (especially of white men).
Naomi Klein clarified a lot for me (in her book Doppelganger) how deliberate and long term that process has been, a process made all the easier by something else these far right opportunists have long been both taking advantage of and as they do so, helping to further: the breaking down of confidence in widely acknowledgedand trusted experts and truthful purveyors of information and news.
