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Some people are more or less followers, but we all have it to some degree. You're more likely to believe a trusted source than someone you've never met before. If your best bud tells you a game is good, you likely give it more credit than some random guy on the street, or a guy wearing the t-shirt for a sports team you hate.

edit: I forgot i usually link this comic https://theoatmeal.com/comics/believe

it's a very similar idea

I say this a lot, but all humans are heavily biased towards believing their in-group. For some people that's basically all that matters. I feel like authoritarians, right wing authoritarians, are especially prone to this. Facts and figures don't matter. It's the emotional core of "fit in with the group" and "outsiders BAD" that's driving it, and all the justifications come afterwards.

I don't want to say anything like they're like animals or subhuman, because this behavior is extremely human. We all do it to some extent. It's just for some people it's so dominant, and their in-group is so dangerously stupid, it's a real problem for all of us.

Everyone who votes Republican deserves shit like this. But unfortunately we're all stuck with them, and they seem incapable of learning.

I don't know if that's exactly a Venn diagram that's a circle, but I think if you lose all the conservatives you also lose the capitalists. Whoever you'd have left would be amenable to change.

I took a like journalism 101 course in college as an elective, and we had a couple lessons on this. One of them, the teacher gave us a bunch of websites and was like "Tell me which of these are legitimate." Some were crackpots, some were satire, some were just weird news. When we went over the assignment in class, we talked about strategies for figuring it out.

I think a lot of people never had that class, or they slept through it.

Sometimes I'm really optimistic about humanity, but sometimes I remember the stupidest kids from school. No attention span. No curiosity. A lot of them are probably out in the world making decisions right now.

Group membership matters to all of us. It's like one of the primary drivers of belief. We might think we're rational and cool logical people but that's a lie. We trust people we see as being in-group, and we trust facts from them.

For some people, like many republicans, it's also the only thing that really matters.

This may have been a viable strategy in like 3000BCE when you had to stick with your group of idiots, because otherwise you'd be left for dead or worse by the enemy tribe. It's not really a solid strategy in 2025CE.

But that's really the whole problem. People (often but not always republicans) put their group membership ahead of everything else. This is happening like deep in the emotional part of their psyche. There's no easy fix. You'd probably have to get them to join some other group and see that as primary, like maybe appeal to their sense of being American, but it's going to be hard when there's a lot of them. It's like gravity, they all pull each other into the group.

I don't know how to fix this.

One of the frustrating things is the people responsible for this brain drain, the conservative idiots, will never really suffer for this. Not in a way they understand.

If we get through this, every conservative needs to go up against the wall.

Anyone who says they are a "free speech absolutist" is a liar or a fool.

I don't believe canada is perfect but the US is really fucking bad, so it would probably be an improvement.

Though enemies of the US would probably be cackling at it dissolving. US conservatives really are a heady cocktail of traitors and absolute fucking idiots.

It might come to that. People should organize and arm now. Even though that's kind of hard and scary and I don't know where to begin.

"Why should I care about other people?" is a question that comes up a lot, and I am deeply suspicious of people who don't care about others.

Feel like we should not make disposable plastic anymore.