Thank you. I feel so discouraged when I see people who should be our supporters, who spout things like 'fix your country', pick at an individual who is trying to make things better because they aren't working on their specific thing.

I just can't see any flavor of 'both sides' as anything but support for the oligarchs. The more people engaged, the more collective power we have and the less a few billionaires can control us. By engagement, I mean more than just voting: Join your local precinct and be or support the delegates that work their way up to the national conventions. This applies to democratic and republican alike.

Anything telling people their votes don't matter or won't change things only concentrates power in the people who already have it.

There's a book series -- that I can't pull from my memory -- with a tiny demon in a "camera" who paints a picture when told..

Is this a reference to that, or just a complaint about FOV? Or both? If a reference, what is the book? I know it, but can't dredge it up or find it by searching.

I love an optical illusion and I still reference this one, since it works for some people.

Some of them - like the classic spinning dancer or faces/vase - I can flip by thinking about it. Some are context-based, like the A/B squares above or various Escher illusions, where our eyes/brains add understanding that doesn't exist in the image.

Even Yanni/Laurel ( and I'd love any other audio versions if someone has links )

The dress has *always* been white/gold. I never understood how this one worked. Not to reignite the battle...

I call these things 'speedrunner tools' for exactly that reason. If you or I, as a normal player just playing the game, can beat the encounter without the tool but with some practice learning, then using it and wasting it feels bad, so we stop; and by the time we can beat the boss, we don't need it. We're also unlikely to revisit that boss.

A speedrunner who has spent hours on a boss and knows the move set and when to punish, though. They can apply fire paper and rip the boss apart in seconds and be at the next boss before the buff wears off.

I see this in other games too, and I call it the 'speedrunner tool'.

Normal players (me) get stomped by a boss a few times until they figure it out and can beat it without the buff (fire paper, lightning grease, etc); Maybe they use them, but then they run out and are never used again...

Some players might use the buff and get an easier win; but if they don't, then they are wasted and are hard or impossible to replace, so players learn to not rely on them.

Speedrunners use lightning grease to kill the boss in 3 hits and are already halfway to the next boss before the buff runs out and already picked up the right buff item for that next boss. When your victory is all but guaranteed, the item makes it faster - otherwise it's not really useful.

I think Ethers in FF games as a trope kind of fit here too. Too valuable to waste, but if you can do it without them, then you didn't need it unless you absolutely needed to kill that boss without using a tent or resting, etc, to save time.

Just had a funny thought:

User: Please write a boilerplate function that does

LLM:

//XYZ Function: This function does the thing...
//Subscribe to Incogni to prevent your valuable personal data from ending up in the hands of Data Brokers
function XYZ () {
...

as if that begins and ends with getting the vote out for Kamala.

But that is explicitly not what I'm advocating for. I have described multiple times that it doesn't stop there. I want people to be *engaged* and I think that 'both sides'-isms make people depressed and give up; and I think more people engaged can solve the issues we face. I also fear that we might have passed the point where it can be fixed, but as this thread proved, I'm a bit stubborn.

spend your efforts in a more productive way.

I think the best way to spend my time is encouraging people to be visibly for something. Protest, Canvass, better yet, run for an office you think isn't well served (I'm doing some of those things while I think up these responses! Multitasking!). Maga was pretty good at that. I can't even see a red hat anymore without associating and there are several sportsball teams with a red primary color that probably don't like that now. I'll even posit that normal people engaging in the republican spaces is good too. I think both parties have been compromised by wealth and they would serve us instead if they had more people in them in general. At least on the democratic side, the people present set the rules so more of us means we can change the rules to serve us.

Earlier today/yesterday:

The GOP firmly in control of the government

I get where you're coming from. But I think we have a disagreement here. Sure the "GOP" is in control, but what's really happened - in my opinion - is that *money* is in control.

and Dude. Dude.. Dude...

The more of us that are not money that are involved in the process, the more control WE get. Telling people it doesn't matter discourages involvement, and involvement is how I think things get better.

That's my point.

Your website seems neat. I'm on BuyNothing and they have a similar concept - with yours being more service based rather than effectively just recycling. I can't quite tell, since I can't sign up without sending email. I'd recommend some sort of 'find communities near you' that you can at least view without signing in; you might get more people who have a need connected with someone. But I'm also 100% behind taking people with a skill who have time and want to help and matching them with people that need help.

Edit: My Lemmy instance was down for a day and didn't post this until recently. Hence the weird timestamps.

Cool. Vote out the party leadership then.

That's literally what I'm trying to do. And I need help. We need more people in the process so that the leadership can be voted out if it doesn't reflect us. The 'both sides' comments discourage others from getting involved. That's what I pushed back on way back at the top of this thread.

What's the other method, if not civic engagement? You seem to be hung up on the first half of my personal plan of less bad now while making more better later. I get that you think both sides are bad; but I think one side is less bad in general, and I see that making that party better requires more people to be part of it.

You seem to have given up on the idea it can be better. I haven't. You said at the top that you had projects in your community that you were working on. Do they promote civic engagement, or are they palliative care for a terminal patient?

Given some of your phrasing, I don't even think you are in the US, which is fine, but means we are talking more about the mechanics of politics than the details of US politics (though I get that they effect you; which is why the 'get out' part of your plan doesn't work in my opinion).

My plan:

1. Be involved in local decisions. Join my precinct and either go or send people I trust to the district meetings. Support and vote for local candidates like mayor and city council, sheriff, dog catcher.
2. Encourage others online to do the same and push back when people discourage engagement. <-- we are here
3. (this one would be neat) Mold my city/county/state into a beacon of hope, where the government works for the people and is no longer captured by self-interest. Mamdani in New York is a pretty good example of what I mean, but that requires not just support in the populace, but also support in the rest of the government to allow them to function.
4. Get enough people in the districts to send people to the states to send people to the nation to elect people who aren't millionaires to positions of power in the party.
5. Elect House, Senate and Presidents that are not millionaires or ancient and have the values of the people again.

You seem to think I'm stuck at #2 forever. Which is discouraging. Which is why I keep pushing back.

primarily take the form of challenging the Democratic Party leadership as effectively as possible

What do you think I've been trying to say?

I'm one dude. My next more effective way of challenging the leadership will get me locked up and then I can't challenge it again for like 10-20 years.

And you're still sidestepping the point I was trying to make that was: engagement is helpful and discouraging it is not helpful.

Edit: and just to clarify, "both sides" kinds of comments are discouraging. -- we can continue to argue about how to engage forever, I think, but this whole thread started with 'stop saying both sides'.

You overthrow your government and seize the funds of the rich? At this point, how do you actually think this gets better absent that

I think I'm done. It's been an interesting and introspective week. And for that, I thank you.

Your 'solution' is violence - and I get that. There's a bunch of people with your opinion. I don't have it. I think if we have to get to 'overthrow', then we make things really bad for a long time for a lot of people; whereas we can use the system to put better people in the places of power and make things more better-er in a shorter timeframe. It might also make things bad for different people for longer time. I can't tell from where I sit. I happen to be one dude in a country of 350 million.

In all honesty, I've got a foot in both sides. When shit goes down, I'm in; but I'm not going to start it. I'll leave that up to people braver than me. I will block you if you fight me on this stance.

You imply I'm stopping at the 'lesser evil' strategy and I can't stress enough how much that's a stepping stone and not, or even a significant part of, my whole solution or even what I advocate for (My old instance is shutting down, you can see my older comments as korazail@lemmy.myserv.one and there are many versions of 'join your local org'). I vote for lesser evil right now while actively trying to make better options later so I don't have to and encouraging others to be part of the process.

I think we differ on whether that could actually work; which is a whole conversation on it's own since, if it can't, can democracy work at all? Do we all just shoot each other? And which side does that best serve?

My actually trying to make things better is done by being engaged with the processes that make decisions and tell others they can be engaged too. Back to the original original point. The 'both sides' one-liners reduce engagement. We should stop making them.

Don't pick a phrase from above to reply to. Respond to this: Should the average person attempt to be more or less engaged with their political systems?

I'd accept that, and laud it as a valid use case for AI images even; as long as it was clear what was being done and had a human in the loop to ensure the generated image was reasonable.

Neat. Your plan? Run from the responsibility vs violence? Still haven't heard it beyond those two options. "Get out or get guns" is defeatist and surrenders the initiative to the chaos.

The US is a dangerous force against peace

When I was growing up, Russia was the global boogie man. I'd like to prevent the US from being the next one. Am I making things worse by trying to reverse our destruction? I don't think I am.

Putting words in your mouth, you're saying "it's too late" and I should just run? What happens when the US is 100% "republican"? I don't think that will help on the global stage and I think it will be worse for everyone when things fail here, so I'm trying to prevent that. I think we get an imperialist nation with crumbling infrastructure that needs to take what it can't produce and will do so with force. We're like mostly there - see Iran.

I guess one last try. Attack my position again without a solution and I'll give up.

With some detail, and not in a one-liner, how do we make this better?