Comment by js8

Wow, thank you for the effort in typing out that this synopsis! Seems like quite the compelling read.

I have already retrieved the book & will start it tonight.

That alternate alternate timeline sounds like what leads to V for Vendetta.

Heh, I was watching the series two days ago. That reminds me that I have to buy both Ubik and The Man in the High Castle, preferabily cheap but commented (with footnotes) ones in Spanish. PKD it's very tedious to readin English for non natives. And sometimes in Spanish too.

There's a similar feeling story in a later League of Extraordinary Gentlemen book* where it's a history of England in that universe. The part that really stuck with me was the description of the government from 1984 as just another strange period in history. Eventually, Big Brother just falls and the next government takes over. Compared with how the system in 1984 feels hopeless and eternal it gives me a strange kind of hope.

* The Black Dossier

I'm contemplating it, but I'm not that old yet !

Of course there was always a bit, sometimes a lot, of propaganda everywhere. But at least it was (mostly) for the right causes and ideals. Right now, US is being governed by what I see as the worst possible people, with 0 morals.

All you had to do to see this for yourself was look under a bridge in any major American city.

One of the joys of poetry is that it can contain multiple hard-to-describe facets of the same concept.

* The revolution won't be televised because they won't show it to you.

* The revolution won't be televised because it's not a passive, external experience that you just consume.

* The revolution won't be televised because it starts inside yourself.

There's a recording from the 80s where he makes the same point in the middle of reciting the poem. It's a really good version.

"A lot of times people see battles and skirmishes on TV and they say 'Ah-ha! The revolution is being televised!' Nah. The results of the revolution are being televised. The first revolution is when you change your mind, about how you look at things, and see that there might be another way to look at it that you have not been shown. What you see later on is the results of that, but the revolution, that change that takes place, will not be televised."

https://youtu.be/6xxMvoDuBFs?t=498

That's clever.

Yes man you got it.

Fresh NFTs! Get your fresh NFTs! We've got revolution, civil war, fascism, communism, all for the low low price of just ten thousand bitcoin!

Most of which had, in fact, no basis in truth. So no that’s nothing like the Mexican election.

Not sure why this is getting down voted. I remember how masks were proclaimed to be ineffective. I remember how masks were suddenly effective, but only available for medical personnel. Then when masks were available for everyone, they became mandated.

> More often than not, the opposite is true,

Interestingly enough, it doesn't matter in the slightest if some times the excuse is actually true. The intuition is good to have at all times, as Intel's founder Andy Grove used to say - "Only the paranoid survive".

> hence the existence of Occam's razor.

Occam's razor has nothing to do with the topic at hand, you're probably thinking of Hanlon's razor which is a dumb idea 99% of the time, regardless of what actually produced it - stupidity or malice.

There is no way to know if you are applying Occam's razor correctly because we always have invisible cultural assumptions that are hard to escape.

Relevant story: my mother grew up in the Soviet Block where they taught her about American Segregation in elementary school. She said she and all her friends immediately dismissed it as made-up propaganda

In that case she was wrong. But I think the intuition is the correct "rule of thumb" to take. By your application of Occam's razor, you would end up believing most propaganda the Soviet education system pushed as long as it offered a simpler explanation. I don't think that's a good intuition to have either.

Okay, apply the razor: the simplest explanation is the state is censoring coverage of fascism

California made open carry illegal when the Black Panthers started doing legal street marches with big guns strapped to their backs. It seems one of the best ways to make the right wing do something you want is to expose them to their own policies.

In Florida, a surgeon refused to administer anesthetic to Republicans under the law intended to made it legal to deny abortions, since it said it was legal for any medical professional to deny any healthcare on religious or moral grounds. Not really — unfortunately that was a hoax screenshot, photoshopped. But it would make them repeal that law post–haste.

This has been proven wrong again and again. My grandparents were subsistence farmers. They had much less material wealth than any working class American and the vast majority of unhoused Americans. Yet, I can assure you that back then they were much more satisfied with life than the vast majority of working class and unhoused americans today. Second point, no amount of material wealth can compensate for severe mental illness. When people have severe mental illness, medical interventions must be performed against their diminished "free will." For those of you of American descent ask your parents or grand parents how their grand parents lived. I am certain you will be shocked at their extreme poverty and general hopefulness. Conclusion: once basic needs are met, the perception of "material" is more important than the material.

It's one thing to analyze the world with this lens, which is perfectly fine, as long as it's part of a bigger analysis. But materialist views have never stopped the boot. Materialist political ideology has produced some of the finest jack boots history has seen.

i personally find presenting a black and white "it's either one way or the other" perspective to be problematic.

yes, materialism and cause and effect etc. etc. agreed on that. it is a thing. interestingly though, as people sit static and just work on becoming more aware of that feedback loop you mentioned it can lead to people trying to not be so much of an arsehole -- through refraining from doing a thing -- because they can see their part in causing things to happen in the world. and that's not just limited to immediate surroundings. i know that i affect everything with every action i do (or do not do).

idealism becomes useful at that point. it can provide people with a set of loose guidelines on how to "not be an arsehole" aka how to not affect everything in a way that's going to cause problems.

the problems come when people do idealism without being aware of that materialistic feedback loop. they're usually doing it out of rule based dogma based on tribalism. sometimes it's "we're better than you are" or sometimes it's "outsiders are not welcome".

caveat: this is all just my personal experience, but i think it would scale if enough people became aware that their actions matter and have profound consequences, so try to not be an arsehole to anyone today

> What you're describing here (ironically) is unironically the basis for Western political thought.

It's not just "western" political thought if such a thing even exists. It's political thought.

For example, Japan's stated goal in ww2 was to liberate asia from european invaders. They portrayed themselves as the good guys. The liberators. That's true for every empire and war in history, "western" or "eastern" or "northern" or "southern". It was always the self-proclaimed "good guys" fighting self-proclaimed "good guys". The winner gets to keep the "good guy" handle while the loser gets assigned the "bad guy" handle.

Had japan won ww2, that's how history would have taught ww2. Instead, japan lost and the US won and hence we get to claim to be the good guys while japan does not.

Marxism, a materialist ideology, is western political thought as well.

> Then about ten years ago things changed.

No, they didn't.

We had McCarthy in the 50s. We had Focus on the Family and the Catholic League getting shows canceled. The Simpsons had a public feud with George Bush Sr.

Cancel culture long predates the internet. Hell, it predates humans; plenty of other species kick antisocial members out of group gatherings.

Do you condone all actions made by all people claiming to be part of your party? We're all told that we must pick the "lesser evil", and if you truly believe that one particular issue is more important than the rest, is it not your moral obligation to pursue that?

You can pretty much lump all of the billionaire bootlickers in the same category. Almost none of them have any ethics, whilst of course proclaiming the opposite.