Sorry if the premise is inflammatory, but I’ve been stymied by this for a while. How did we go from something like 1940s era collectivism or 1960s era leftism to the current bizarro political machine that seems to have hypnotized a large portion (if not majority) of the country? I get it - not everything is bad now, and not everything was good then. FDR’s internment camps, etc.

That said - our country seems to be at a low point in intellectualism and accountability. The DHHS head is an antivaxxer, the deputy chief of the DOJ is a far-right podcast nutball, etc. Their supporters seem to have no nuance to their opinion beyond “well, Trump said he’d fix the economy and I don’t like woke.”

Have people always been this unserious and unquestioning, or are we watching the public’s sanity unravel in real time? Or am I just imagining some idealistic version of the past that never existed, where politicians acted in good faith and people cared about the social order?

  • dandelion@lemmy.blahaj.zone
    8·
    9 days ago

    Unsolicited advice, but you have to escape your - to make it not create a bulleted list.

    Lemmy uses markdown for its formatting, and this means - is has special meaning, it is syntax used to create bulleted lists with.

    For example,

    - Isaac Asimov will look like:

    • Isaac Asimov

    If you want it to look like

    - Isaac Asimov

    you have to escape the - character with a \:

    \- Isaac Asimov

    The \ basically says “ignore the special syntax meaning of - as starting a bulleted list, and instead treat it as a literal -”.