The people who constantly say things like "We need education" in response to problems of the world make me want to stab someone. Probably them.

My dude, look at the fucking people running the planet. How educated are they? Very. They have gone through a number of "prestigious" schools and programs. What the fuck are they doing?

Please, stop just going WE NEED EDUCATION to every problem. No, we don't. We know shit's wrong, and we're still not giving a shit. This is not an education problem.

Tangentially, I'm also tired of the whole "The fascists have taken the wrong lesson from dystopian fiction!" people. For the love of all of our mental healths, THEY DO NOT CARE.

It's aesthetics to them. They do not give a single solitary shit that they don't understand the themes and morals of dystopian novels. Hell, we know they don't understand what they read; Elon Musk made a great display of entirely misunderstanding the point of Hitchhiker's Guide. He doesn't care that he doesn't know what it means; to him, it means what he says it means. It means what he forces it to mean.

That is how he sees it.

That is also not an education problem. That is a problem of how self-interested fascists (same thing) behave and believe the world to work. No amount of education is going to fix that.

@whatanerd

A lot of people just refuse to see fascists and conservatives as anything other than naive, instead of actors with their own horrifying logic, motives and ethical framework. Which to be honest just shows more about their unexamined assumptions about "intelligence" (assumptions deeply rooted in white supremacy...), than anything else.

For them it is more about making a liberal hierarchy of thought, then to engage with how the logic of fascism functions, how to take it apart, and how to destroy it... cause that would mean also having to engage with how they profit from these things.

It is so frigging disheartening...

@auriblackcat @whatanerd

Do you know that Sinclair quote? 'It is difficult to get a person to understand something, when their salary depends on them not understanding it'?

elilla&'s Collorary to Sinclair's Law: It is difficult to make people see the enemy, when the conclusion is we are morally obliged to arm ourselves and fight.

capitalism doesn't coopt people just with salaries, or tech gadgets or other petty luxuries. the purpose of a monopoly of violence by the State isn't just to depower opposition to the State. the purpose is to create false security; a sense that anything to do with the sphere of violence is Somebody Else's Problem. it is very difficult to make people break away from the bubble of false security. it is the same process of the classroom watching a bully beat a nerd—nobody likes it and the bully wouldn't be able to fight half the classroom, but he would hurt the first few who tried, so everybody looks away and tries to think of something else.

George Orwell: "When I joined the militia I had promised myself to kill one Fascist — after all, if each of us killed one they would soon be extinct." That's the only way fascism has ever been stopped. The question is how far will the fascists push until people who are not fascists finally recognise they will keep doing more and more atrocities until the rest of us take this step. Given that the USA now has multiple active concentration camps and ICE stormtroopers remain distinctly unmurdered, I'm pessimistic about how far.

@elilla @auriblackcat @whatanerd
the dynamics around false sense of security are so frustrating because they're easy to see while you're out of it, but evidently very hard to see when you're in it. people trust the state to protect them from antisocial crime, while in reality it's the state that creates most antisocial crime (as well as defining other things as crime). they trust the fascist to protect them during war, meanwhile the fascist is the one creating war.