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So I get in my car, and i'm listening to the beat on MSNBC, and a reporter is saying that she was talking with a bunch of young voters, especially young black voters.
Basically, they think that they've already been through a Trump presidency, and it's not gonna be any different from the first time. Oh boy, could they not be more wrong. Apparently, they haven't heard about project 2025, or they think it's nothing big that 20,000 fascists are itching to take over government roles in the next Trump White House.
Maybe I am dumb but... I am genuinely starting to think many people are fundamentally incapable of imagining complex, abstract potential outcomes (like allowing Trump back in office).
I always assumed envisioning such things was easy, instant, and obvious for nearly everyone.
Several years ago I started noticing a couple of people make decisions that to me seemed insane and later they were surprised by the outcome that I saw coming a mile away.
And I started wondering, could this ability to imagine how things will turn out be much rarer than I ever imagined?
I genuinely don't know for sure. Not like I have a ton of conversations with different people let alone ones about cognitive abilities lol.
Like, I didn't even realize some people can't see images in their heads or don't have an inner monologue (think by "talking to themselves" using language) until fairly recently and I'm in my 50s.
Surely anyone can imagine some vague idea of what happens if they jump in front of a speeding bus. That's simple. Surely you can at least conceptualize that you'll be run into and injured or killed. Maybe even imagine it with some internal video of your body being run over by giant bus tires or being flung from the impact and landing in a crumbled bleeding mess. Nothing complicated there.
But is it actually impossible for some to imagine the many ways Trump and the Project 2025 people are going to fuck up everything?
That would certainly explain the bafflingly cavalier reactions to cybersecurity vulnerabilities I've seen over the years. Or the shrugging off of egregious privacy issues.
You bring up an interesting question, and it's something I noticed in my own life, but for me I always related it to confidence/optimism.
I'm naturally very anxious, and I think ahead because I worry a lot and I need to have some control of my future or to at least feel like I do by having as much information as I can. Stability has always lacked in my life, and still does, so I know confidence and optimism are in very short supply for me.
I think more confident/optimistic people tend to be more relaxed about the future because of their natural tendency to believe they'll be ok and therefore the things around them should be fine.
That's an interesting insight. I, too, tend to be anxious about negative outcomes and I think that comes from bad experiences due to ADHD and maybe childhood stuff. Idk.
Normalcy bias certainly is a thing. So is paranoia. I tend toward the latter lol. But have come to see that outcomes almost always land somewhere between, "eh, it will be fine," and, "omg we're doomed." And usually they wind up slightly more toward the "fine" side of things.
Yes - it is. As someone with ADHD and in my mid 30's now, i have wondered the same thing quite often, because a lot of times solutions to complex problems seem extremely easy to me, where people around me are absolutely baffled by me calling a solution very simple and easy.
I started wondering the same thing a few years back and came to the conclusion: Most people don't care. I've had quite a few very recent discussions about various issues about consumers needing to be more educated and able to make decisions on what they buy. Every time i bring this up, i realize that even these simple things are too much for most people.
Coincidentally, I too, have ADHD. Oftentimes, I can envision the general shape of somewhat complex solutions. And either they don't see it as simple, don't understand it, don't understand the point, or can't see it at all. Now sure, sometimes I come up with idiotic ideas that make no sense once I know more. But not always.
I have found it is easy for some of us to get spun up about the sorts of things you mention. Like "omg how can you use Windows 11 with all the ads and whatever". The kind of stuff we rant about on Lemmy. And yeah I think people don't care a lot.
Sometimes it is because they have other more pressing priorities. I've had to learn that well in my infosec career. It is easy for me to fixate on something important to me. But if a person is just trying to get through the day (I mean, let's be honest, I am struggling to do that), raising a kid, paying the bills, and so forth, then they have better things to do than fret about an OS and try to find time to learn Linux or cough up the fortune required to buy a Mac or whatever.
Sometimes they can't seem to forsee the potential consequences. Either they just are incapable--my original point above--or, in some cases, they don't have any practice imagining what bad people could try if they wanted to. Maybe due to ADHD and anxiety I had a lot of practice imagining bad outcomes. (Maybe that's an evolutionary advantage of ADHD lol). I suspect about half my team has ADHD and I think that's common in the industry lol.
Nice to find someone with similar experiences! Helps to know I'm not crazy or at least not crazy alone 🤪
Ha! I know what you mean :D I do too^^
Yeah...there are lot's of things i get spun up :D
Same lessons in Infrastructure (although, i have to admit i'm not trying to get through the day, i've had a lot of help throughout the years to get a grip on my ADHD except some occasional very heavy distractibility and chaotic thoughts)...but i still except some very basic 1+1...sometimes even that is too much asked. I mean, if you can click a damn start menu on Windows, i can expect you to click it on Linux as well, even if the Icon is a little different, it's still only a damn menu! ;)
Personally, i think my Star Trek addiction helped me a lot in those terms, because i always try to imagine the best possible outcome first and then go down the rabbit hole and tell myself "Well, there's still a chance!". Which is also why i try to imagine that in most people, there's still some good left (there are exceptions...Trump and his cronies being some) - but i agree with you, that most people have lost the ability to just "imagine". Personally, i also think that's why the overall state is not that great, because with loosing the ability to imagine things, people also lost the ability to dream. Problem solving, imagining and dreaming are all things that are heavily interconnected and interwoven. I also am of the firm believe, that one advantage of ADHD is that the ability to shape our imagining "as we go", because "we" can flip between numerous possible outcomes pretty damn fast. And so on. Just a little tip: Try to imagine more "good" outcomes as well - just in case ;)
Same :) And no - you are not crazy and you are not crazy alone :D
Interesting about Star Trek as a way to deal with anxiety about bad outcomes :). My Trek love helps me too but more with giving me a nearly imperceptible glimmer of hope for humanity.
(I wasn't sure if I was a true Trekkie but now that I've been catching up on all the post-Voyager shows I guess I must be because I love all of it... I mean I even found things to like about ST V, so... Lol). Anyway ...
But yeah you may be onto something about people either losing the ability---or maybe the will---to dream of something better. Once you get discouraged enough, it is hard to bother dreaming.
If you spend enough time online steeped in endless doomerism, with no talk of action or organization or anything, learned helplessness inevitably sets in. Sort of by definition, you stop dreaming. Which is why my recent Trek binges have been so helpful.
I should add that meds and introspection have helped a lot with the anxiety and imagining the worst outcomes. Now I do it without getting twisted up in knots and it serves me vs the other way around. But I could still stand to imagine good outcomes more often.
Anyway I appreciate the dialog! You're a good egg. :) Hope to run into you again in the Lemmyverse before long.
Ah yes, I believe you've encountered people in the wild who support leopards eating their face. This is a documented phenomenon and I, for one, don't have a clue what can be done about it.
Maybe Biden should have done some shit the first two years instead of "looking into things" until right before midterms.
Then after losing the House, saying it was too late to do anything.
People didn't elect Joe Biden so he could spend 2 years looking into how to undo the damage of trump.
And Biden failed at that.
Now he's telling us that this time will be different. Historically, this is what makes 1 term presidents.
So how should he have "done some shit the first two years"?
You mean like:
The American Rescue Plan
The Bipartisan Infrastructure Law
The largest gun safety bill in 30 years
The CHIPS and Science Act
The Inflation Reduction Act
and support for Ukraine so they can fight off the orks that directly impacts our economy by giving Ukraine old weapons that would have rotted in wearhouses and resupply with new ones providing high paying jobs to American workers.
Stuff like that?
I ain't writing an essay to talk about the whole list at once.
Oh yeah, that thing that's the reason American inflation is higher than comparable countries?
https://www.vox.com/23036340/biden-american-rescue-plan-inflation
Also...
You know only a tiny little slice went to working class Americans right?
Like, everyone got the $1400, even Bill Gates. But a lot went to people, companies, and states that just didn't need it.
That article is really good, and somebody got paid to write it.
So go read that, soak it up.
And then, if it's not too late, I honestly wouldn't mind getting into that infrastructure bill. That's a doozy, and if you're bragging about, there's a lot you don't know.
But let's be honest, this comment and that article are more than most would read.
Bruh.
If you're going to claim nothing happened in the past two years and someone gives you a laundry list of milestones and events, you can't just say "eh I don't feel like writing an essay on it". Either explain why none of them count, or concede the argument. As it is, your argument is incredibly weak since you're barely addressing their point.
Also,
Bruh. What.
If you aren't going to write a proper response, don't bemoan that people aren't reading shit.
Don't feed the troll.
I mean, I said that...
Went over the first on the list...
Then said:
Because that was the next thing on the list...
Did you notice how that person never replied?
It's known as a gish gallop.
None of them pass scrutiny alone, but it would take a lot of effort to disprove all of them at once. Especially when the likely result is the person latches on to a small part of a source you quoted and refuses to read the actual source that goes in depth and was written by a professional
Did you try reading the whole article for more info?
Or did you really think those three paragraphs was the whole thing without clicking the link?
Well, you could have read the article and gotten a great explanation...
Instead you choose to hurl insults, weird how often the people blindly supporting Biden do that.
Have a nice life bud, life's to short for that type of discourse about something so serious.
Your article is two years old and provides a mountain of speculation about economics that didn't pan out in reality. Seriously, check it out, inflation in the US peaked lower than the UK or EU, and has trended below them consistently through today.
Go ahead and argue about the relative stability of more insular economies like Japan and China, but the Fed did exactly what they set out to do, and they did it more effectively than other comparable central banks.
Objectively, verifiably false. Single taxpayers under $75k, couples under $150k. Bill Gates didn't benefit. Maybe you're thinking of the stimulus that Trump signed that blindly handed out thousands of dollars to businesses with little to no accountability?
So what do you want, Trump?
I want Biden to smarten the fuck up while there's still time to beat trump, and the DNC to learn their lesson about shoving unpopular conservative candidates down our throats.
But I don't think it will happen.
I always wanted every state to have delegates for the primary, I thought that was a low bar too.
So excuse me if, like most Dem voters, I'm kind of pissed about it.