Yeah I know, but this thread is semi serious. People might think we mean it. I wasn’t kidding when I said our role model might be Roger Stone earlier in the thread. I’ve come away from that because I’ve found a much more effective person’s paper to copy off of, but this thread is not about being nice. This thread is about figuring out how we can fix a potentially game losing (like the end of the species) problem.
Only one side of politics has been really using marketing and advertising to its full potential over the last 30 years even as marketing and advertising reshaped every other part of human life, mostly for the worse I should add. The level this stuff works on is not that top level voice in our heads we all love the sound of so much, it’s much lower down at the habit level. They give that lower level something that makes it feel good, a way to get it, and then as you go about your daily life they send you images of that thing you like to remind you of how much you like it.
I’ve realized very recently that my whole life I’ve watched Democrats desperately plead with Americans to actually think through politics and consider what would actually be good for them. And they never ever do it. That argument just hasn’t worked and isn’t going to.
I have a brother who is semi bright who I haven’t spoken to in a couple of years who, while stupid for my family, is very definitely operating with a slightly above average amount of candlepower. I haven’t spoken to him because I finally gave up on bringing him out of the conspiracy theories he’d been hooked on since the 9/11 truthers. He gets a HUGE dopamine rush out of thinking he knows stuff other people don’t. I get that. He had a very hard time growing up in my family, which sucked for a lot of reasons, but was even more miserable with added intellectual bullying… and that desire to look me in my face and tell me that I’m an idiot who doesn’t know what he’s talking about… I was making it worse. So he threw a drink on me at a restaurant and I felt like that was as good of a stopping place as any, and I’ll probably never speak to him again.
I also have a brother who in terms of IQ and math ability is way fucking smarter than me. Like massively smarter in STEM stuff than I am at anything. Good Will Hunting is a movie so he can’t do math like that, but he actually is a genius and has all of the problems that come with that. He can tell you at length why nicotine isn’t that bad for him. He’s totally impervious to logic on the subject. He’s addicted to it and he’s not letting it go because without it where would he get the dopamine from?
I don’t know how to help people who are getting their dopamine rush from insane right wing content on the internet yet. But I know that every day we don’t at least play back on this bullshit they convert some more people. They’re working hard on kids and you all know it. We just had an election conclusively demonstrate that almost exactly half of the population is already on the tit for this stuff. This is a fucking emergency.
