Every time I see westerns post some 
shit the usual response is “well propaganda is a hell of a drug”.
But if western propaganda is really that effective, how the fuck did we get here? I’d think if it was really this good at melting people’s brain’s it’d be effective enough to prevent communities like this from even existing. So like are we special or something?
Also raises the question, if we’re able to get over this BS, wtf is everyone else’s excuse for falling hook-line-and-sinker for it?
You can’t fool all the people all of the time.
I will also add, because the original quote could come off smug. But, I think it boils down to there always being people that fall through the cracks of every complex operation or policy. And the more the propaganda has to stretch from reality, the more cracks and people falling through them.
Okay but why didn’t we get fooled specifically?
It’s different for different people. For me it was a combination of working a shit job for shit pay and the lies about the Iraq War.
I know tons of people like that but still fall for every clickbait story about the DPRK. I knew one who was an AnCap for christsake.
That was just the start of my radicalization. I would still be a listless liberal if I had never stumbled into /r/COMPLETEANARCHY, which led me to /r/cth.
So it’s just completely chaotic determinism then? That makes me a bit doomer.
No, it’s because I managed to get a proper political education. If you want more communists, go out there and teach people about communism. Find out what’s wrong in their lives and show them how it’s capitalism’s fault.
So I get what you’re saying and agree, but a problem I have is I have a hard time convincing them that capitalism is also OTHER PEOPLE’s problem. They totally get why it’s their problem, and so they embrace so populist succdem shit, and want themselves and other people in close proximity to them to get better goodies from their own government, but they can’t seem to extrapolate things to the global scale. So you end up with people who are bolsheviks at home but support NATO abroad.
Some people will disagree with me here, but I think being a western leftist, especially an American leftist, is more or less random. The material conditions for an influential leftist organization do not yet exist. People joke about treats, but getting the average American on board with communism is a tough sell while they still have decent quality of life.
My personal belief is that either climate change will upset material conditions enough for the political setting to change, or that America will slowly slide into irrelevance while clinging to neoliberalism.
Probably a bit of both tbh, both those conditions are rapidly developing.
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having lefty parents and being poor got me there tbh
My hometown is quite prominent in the nation’s history for things like labor movements and women’s rights. Also I grew up on a lot of older counterculture, so a lot of the people I looked up to were giving me the tools to see beyond what the media was (and still is) telling us.
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I mean, on the individual level things are chaotic and complex enough that you can’t always point to a specific person and say “this is why they believe what they believe that”. But the predominant reasons I see with people is that they have enough awareness and interactions with the negative outcomes of the status-quo that they do not buy into the propaganda, by some reason like rebelliousness or curiosity read theory and get a better paradigm to understand the world, or they actually have some proximity to struggle explained in a socialist/leftist lens.
What I find weird and frustrating, so many of these people THINK they are rebellious and curious, but actually aren’t for anything that matters. Why bother? What’s the benefit of that little garnish of rebelliousness? If you’re gonna still eat the ham why not just eat the fucking ham.
in my case i’m pretty sure I’m just built different
What makes you think you are not get fooled? Maybe you are getting fooled in a different way.
Yeah, sure, nobody is totally immune, but like come on, there’s a difference between us and some K-Hive weirdo or Hamilton fan.
Well jeez if we’re that bad why are you here with us?
I’m personally built different
I am also a main character. How’s your book going?
going or cumming who knows these days
edit: sperm
Pretty sure most of us did. Hell, most of us still are. Just to varying degrees. How many people here are still masking?
i still wear a mask when i go out
even outside of covid, i haven’t got a cold or a stomach bug since the pandemic started
Same. Given some of the struggle sessions, I’m pretty sure we’re not in the majority though.
Tbh not as much as I should but when I judge it necessary (public transit, crowded places, especially indoors, etc.), probably a bit more so since the wastewater numbers have been indicating a spike here (actually I just checked and they seem to have shot back down but they were up a lot the last couple week so best to be safe)
If people are not masking indoors with n95s in public, they are not comrades.
And you don’t need to do it, fool a critical portion of the population and is as good as fooling everyone.