People talking about people about concentration camps after Democrats have supported a genocide campaign in a concentration camp for more than a year.
You can tell OP does not believe any person outside of America is human.
Don't waste your energy on people who won't listen.
Look for people, places and groups that support your own beliefs.
If you can't find those people at work, then just be nice to them but not too close. Them in your free time, use your energy to support those people and groups you believe in.
Don't waste your time on those who won't listen.
You can stop using stupid shit like "cishet white" for starters. Statistically, most people who do not care will be cishet white. Those who care, will also mostly be cishet white. With this type of exclusionary discourse bordering on racism, no one will ever listen to you because from the start, you already sound like you have nothing important to say. There's three types of people in the US: Slaves working 2 and 3 jobs to make ends meet, middle class being pit against the slaves by the third group, the capital. By using exclusionary discourse, assimilated from bougie fake activism, you're promoting infighting within the classes that should be hunting the capital like animals, the French way!
Edit: your country has sacrificed countless children to never eschew the right to bear arms. Well, stop bitching online to make yourself feel good and use them.
By using exclusionary discourse, assimilated from bougie fake activism
This is a totally normal, relatable sentence
I used that term to show that they are privileged folks who likely won't be directly targeted by the administration, at least at first.
Lots of good answers here already. I'll just add that Jon Stewart recently did a great segment that touches on this. Basically, he says if everything the government does is "OmG nAzIz FaScIsTz TrAiToRz!!!" then people who aren't already paying attention will continue tuning it out. I forget at which time in the video he gets to this point, but honestly the whole 20-minute video is worth a watch.
IMO 'comedy' does a lot more to further political debate & informedness than it gets credit for.
I love Jon Stewart but I think he's a little off base with this take. Are we supposed to not call out the overtly fascist stuff the government is doing? Will that get more people to listen the next time we have to call out an overtly fascistic act or will we have to hold our tongue then, as well? How many grannies need to be eaten and impersonated by wolves before we're allowed to move past the "ooh what sharp teeth you have" crap?
With fascism especially, if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem. The people going through life like everything is fine are implicitly supporting the fascism. I'm not going to stop yelling about how a pack of wolves has taken over the government, just because some people think the word is overused.
I spend a good amount of energy trying to explain the merits of Marxism-Leninism and Leftism in general on Lemmy (and IRL, though that's much trickier). Ultimately, you can't make someone care. You can't convince people of something they choose not to want to believe, either, no matter how much evidence you throw at them. Roderic Day wrote a great article titled Masses, Elites, and Rebels: The Theory of "Brainwashing" that perfectly encapsulates this process. People license themselves to believe whatever it is that they believe benefits themselves, regardless of evidence or empathy.
What you can do, however, is explain the merits of that which you believe in, and this is far more effective with people already targeted by the current system. Those closest to the edge, those radicalized by their conditions but not yet organized or versed in theory, are the perfect people to talk to. The effort required to gain an ally in that sense is far less than someone who is convinced that the system is fine, but just needs a little tweaking. Building strength through organization helps legitimize your positions and expands the circle, so to speak, by moving the "line of radicalization" further. Person A, who believes the system is fine but needs tweaks, goes from comfortably mainstream into the new line of radicalization, one step away from working to supplant the system, when those who were radicalized near them organize.
Further still, as conditions deteriorate, more people are impacted and more people are radicalized. This is both good and bad, bad in the sense that more are affected by the evils in society to a greater degree, but with the good being further chance of organization.
Just my 2 cents as someone who has spoken with many different people about Marxism.
The first thing I would ask is, have you made any attempts to really understand what motivates them and why they believe as they do? Given your flippant dismissal of their belief systems, I suspect you have just mentally bucketed them and, instead of really trying to understand them, you fall back on your per-conceived notions of what you think they believe. Without that understanding, you will never be able to "make people care", because you are not treating them as fully formed people with their own beliefs and priorities. You expect that, if you just yell at them loudly enough, they will come around. They won't and, if anything, they will just dig their heels in further. To them, you're this guy:
Not everyone has the same priorities you do. What you see as "the most important thing in the world" may fall much further down the list for someone else. They may not even see it in the same framing you do. Maybe they do care about your thing, but they have their own "most important thing" and if your thing and their thing are in contention, they are going to pick their thing. This is part of the reason we have politics in the first place, once you start dealing with other people and trying to decide what and how things should be prioritized and run, you are going to run into differing beliefs and priorities. It's why most government polices generally suck and don't get everything done. Because those policies are the result of compromise between people with different and often competing priorities. And yes, it may be that some of those other priorities come from bad information, though more often they will come from radically different base beliefs. And not understanding what those beliefs actually are means that you will not have any sort of basis for convincing them of anything.
Changing peoples' minds is hard. But, it starts from a place of understanding people and not dismissing their beliefs. Step back from your outrage for a moment and try to really get in their heads. You may not agree with their position, but you need to understand how they got there before you have any chance of getting them out of it. And, maybe you can't. It may just be that they have some foundational beliefs which are completely at odds with what you want to convince them of. But, if you know and understand that, it becomes much easier to walk away from the situation and not waste time and energy on a hopeless fight. And while it feels good to yell at people, that basically never works and only serves to push them further away.
You mean the US is building MORE concentration camps
Again…
To help you find an answer i'll return you the same question: why did you not care about US building concentration camps and following the fascist playbook until now?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indictment_and_arrest_of_Julian_Assange
I care, you care, and many of us here on lemmy care. We should work on how to coordinate ourselves together rather than try to change minds.
I've tried, a lot, to change minds. I started with the most difficult person, and recently a new hire at work is kinda centrist-left and I tried to convince him. No matter whether it's a nazi you're talking to (ahem.. the first one) or a liberal, minds can only change themselves. They have to want it, you cannot hack their brain and override it.
I gave up, because even the people who are closest to me politically seem to move further to the right when faced with uncomfortable reality. They don't engage with icky thoughts like "What if police killed an innocent man?". They rationalize it to keep their comfort zone intact. "Well, if they just followed police instructions..." blissfully unaware of many cases like Daniel Shaver.
You point to an example that breaks their rationalization, and they will diminish it. "Oh that cop made a mistake". Point to many examples and they suddenly got to go wash their hair. People's psyche protects them from stress.
And that is the default mindset in this society. Avoidance of discomfort and inconvenience. Fear of the unknown. They want their life to be neat and happy and to all make sense. They don't appreciate it when someone tries to take that away from them.
Do you think there's something about people like us that makes us more accepting of challenging our own worldviews? I have some thoughts but I've written enough.
I think there's a mixture of not believing Hitler-level nazi shit is happening until actual gas chambers are running, and a what can one person do anyway attitude. Frankly, I had high hopes of Trump being soundly defeated and that it would be the turning point in the collapse of MAGA. But since not enough people could be bothered to vote against him, I honestly believe his long-overdue final Big Mac Attack is the only thing that will stop MAGA. Without him as a figurehead the self-centered opportunists running it will tear it apart as they claw at each other to get on top. Until then we just have to hang on.
The only thing one person can do is get armed, get trained, and get ready.
Do you want people to care or do you want to lecture people who don't agree with you. People like to give lectures on politics, but no one listens to them. If you want people to care you have to care about them.
Idk I listen to politics lectures all the time, most of which I don't fully agree with, many I disagree with outright, listening to other takes, especially opposing ones helps me scrutinize my own reasoning and critically analyze what's what.
It's not really the lecturer's fault he was lecturing, if he was right and so he should be lecturing others on truth. Much like any subject really.
This idea that all opinions are equal are how we ended up in a post-truth world.
Thought-terminating clichés of "everyone likes different things" or "people believe different things" are not just signs of a lazy intellect, they are the harbingers of our doom.
You can have beliefs that aren't facts, in fact - you have to, but you can't just believe whatever, you need to be able to justify it, and to do that you need to understand logic, you need to understand evidence, you need to understand the scientific method and how to reason.
There a big difference in seeking something out and someone walking up to you and talking at you.
Yeah, but what do you do when a good chunk of the population doesn't go 'seeking something out', yet vote and influence the lives of those who do anyway?
Try making friends first, or at least understanding them. If you aren't willing or capable of doing that you are just going to make things worse.
Especially at work, where you can't leave and should probably be focusing on the work.
As someone who admittedly is guilty of "lecturing," many do enjoy it and have DM'd me or replied thanking me for it. Different people respond better to different approaches, be they the walls of text I am frequently guilty of or shorter questions trying to get them to elaborate on their own understanding.
Work in medical too, but work in the lower sections with the blue collar workers while living in the bible belt. They're all Trump fans and think this is all great.
The best advice I have is find your people, the ones you know who've been against this (not the non-voters, they folded to apathy, and will fold when the going gets tough) and start working on survival plans. Gardens, mutual aid, mutual defense, how to hide those in danger ESPECIALLY if you're the cishet white guy. Build the community as best you can.
This is not some big overall "Fight the bastions to overthrow" but right now as a regular schmuck in the middle of nowhere, right now this is what we have.
People won't care until negative things start effecting them. Even at that point, many will still deny negative things are happening or they will put the blame somewhere else. This is why I believe things are going to have to get bad, really bad, before they can turn around. The biggest thing to go bad would be the economy. An economy so bad would be hard to deny and live with. Unfortunately, the more money you have, the longer you can "deal with" a bad economy, and still think everything is okay.
That is a particular subset. There are people who see nothing g bad happening to themselves, but do have their eyes open and see the bad things happening around them. But, again, they are ready and primed.
It is much the same as addiction counseling: until people are primed to change, there is little to do but leave your hand out stretched, not pushing any further than that.
I mean, I care, but what can I do about it? There isn't a CEO I can shoot to make it stop, nor can I make voting day get here any sooner. All I can do is stamp out ignorance when I see it.
There is so much you can do about it, here's a simple suggestion: promote open censorship-resistant communication systems like Lemmy.
I think what we're dealing with, in part, is a collective action problem. There's a lot of people who want to do something but either don't know what to do or don't agree on what to do. It's one way that a minority population can stay in power.
What an individual can do is miniscule compared to a crowd. Also, some people are willing to break laws to make change and others are not.
What would you like for them to do? Have they discussed how they vote with you? Or how they spend their money? Maybe they just don't want to talk about it at work?
If you are trying to make them care or discuss it at work then that is where you are failing.
Very few people want to or are willing to discuss politics at work. Many will report it as harassing behavior and you run the risk of getting fired.
You need to talk to them outside of work.
This is correct. Leave this shit out of work. I agree with OP but I don't want to talk about religion or politics at work.
How do you make people care before it's too late?
none of my co-workers care
You can't force another to care. We can educate them with facts and reason while trusting them to make their own choices. And, that isn't done in a workplace, instead one on one in presence of a human relationship.
But, if you insist, then there's always a way. Read the Bible as part of a Bible study to develop a nuanced understanding of its message. Relate that message to social democrat, socialist, communist, and anarchist ideology. Determine the relevant Bible passages useful in the specific situations you encounter with specific Christians, then memorize those passages. Then, in full context of Bible and situation, in the moment, quote the passage. Finally, shut up and wait.
To add to this, be sure to wait for the immediate pushback. Stay calm, and understand that this will be a slow burner. Kindness and repeated contacts to the change minds more than one off aggressive arguments.
People have a difficult time changing their points of view, and some people can feel lots of psychological pain during that process.
In the case of my mother, I instituted a no-politics rule in 2020. However, as of last week, I’m sending her accusatory emails about the various articles of his fucked up actions. I’ve decided that she is partially a bad person for having full info about who and what he is and chose not to know. I’m very angry and she’s going to keep hearing about it. The relationship might be over.
I know that doesn’t help your situation. I just needed to vent. As noted, I’m very angry. With her in particular. For choosing this again.
I wish I knew. People keep telling me to "organize" and "strike". Like yeah a Walmart full of 60yo conservative white people is going to strike over this, fucking idiot.
Suburban white trash thinks they won't get hurt by this lol
They think they are on "the team"
But George Carlin called decades ago... There is a club and these idiots are too stupid to figure out they are not in it.
When I meet someone who doesn't care, I work twice as hard to fix things.
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