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Yep. Victim blaming people for drinking the Kool aid is part of how the system works. It drives a wedge and feeds tribalism, causing less people to leak over to based land
Also, resisting the more overt forms of propaganda doesn’t stop you from being influenced in subtler ways.
Works the other way around too.
this world would be a much better place if more people were interested in being helpful than correct
Either would be nice.
We need to be at least slightly resistant, though. At the moment most people are like some ancient old smoker with an immune system as fragile as a generic brand garbage bag with just a bit too much stuff in it. The shit people are falling for is absolutely ridiculous and unacceptable and they should be mocked mercilessly for hearing “the minorities are who’s ruining your life” and going “yea! I’m gunna dedicate my existance to shilling for billionaires now!”
Of course I am, unrelated I do hate Mondays and love lasagna.
What a bigoted opinion.
Propaganda didn’t cause this, your problems are a personal moral failing and you should just try being different!
Structurally identical to
Depression didn’t cause this, your problems are a personal moral failing and you should just try being different!
Nothing will ever get better if leftists are more interested in displaying their personal flavor of bigotry than they are in unity
First, it was not a bigoted opinion because OP did not display intolerance. Rather they pointed out an opinion on an issue. This opinion is simply people are upset for the wrong reason and that they are part of the problem.
Propaganda shapes our society and is present in our lives throughout everyday in countless forms. Pointing out the hollowness of a piece of propaganda, which is what the OP attempted to do, is a time honored tactic meant to inspire reflection.
Obviously this is not the best way to get people who resent the message to agree and is more meant as a gotcha or slap in the face, metaphorically of course. I can see your disdain from this perspective.
Not sure what you mean about leftists in the end. I mean their core philosophy is to fight against bigotry. Leftists are not inclusive to bigotry and that is okay. If you want to learn about this some more you can lookup the paradox of tolerance.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_tolerance
I think your message would make more since as the left won’t tolerate bigots and that is wrong because they need unity. In which case, I would refer you back to the paradox of intolerance.
On a personal note, I will readily admit this is not a way forward. So even if you are not articulating things perfectly, there is an important question here. I think it may be how does a leftist change the heart of bigot.
How do you change the heart of a bigot? You start by admitting to your own flaws so they don’t see you as a blind hypocrite. You can cope all you want about that opinion not displaying intolerance; the entire point of the post is to deny the reality of how propaganda affects people and cast a huge swath of people as fundamentally bad. That is the exact structure of ableism, which I sincerely hope we can agree on as an example of intolerance.
Tolerance is not a paradox, it’s a social contract. Those who abide by it should be protected by it, those who do not abide by it should not. People who break the contract should be socially sanctioned, but “you and people like you are fundamentally bad people” goes well beyond the point of being a social sanction into just being bare intolerance itself. Tolerance includes forgiveness, and while that shouldn’t be given freely, it shouldn’t be off the table either.
Propaganda can be true or false… I focus on trying to learn the truth, and am not concerned with whether it is propaganda or not.
Expecting truth from any government or corporation is ridiculous in my opinion, the truth is often not discussed by anyone on any news network or government proclamation, and is only revealed long after the particular event (if ever).
Who keeps track of the opinions of billionaires? They change day to day, I don’t know whether I share any of their opinions or not
In my experience no one is 100% free of the influence of such propaganda, though every person believes they are. As soon as you get comfortable, it’s easy to lighten your guard and start letting some ideas through.
For example, all of my friends are exclusively left leaning and will join me in rants about eating the rich. They’ll agree with me about the corporate hellscape we live in and how privacy is being violated more than ever.
Half of my friends own an Alexa. Many of them have Ring cameras. Some of them don’t vote. One guy I know had the police illegally take his phone and force him to unlock it, then they went through it looking for evidence of any crime to arrest him for. We were talking later about how you can’t be forced to undo a code but you can be compelled for face scan unlocks, and he told me that story as well as the fact that he still uses a face unlock. Like ???
No one can be on guard all of the time, sometimes bad takes are going to get through. And those bad takes will often be influenced by billionaires. I think step one is recognizing that and not believing you have already reached complete enlightenment.
Not sure if that is what the post from OP meant, but I’ve heard plenty of bad takes from tumblr sjws. Still one of the nicer places to hang out on the net.
Okay but, like, they literally did though? They bought up all the media companies and funded a bunch of chat room campaigns to normalize a lot of bat shit opinions.
They shaped “our” belief system.
They didn’t shape “my” belief system. (At least, I’m pretty sure a “burn it all down and eat the rich” anarchist wasn’t the belief system they were trying to shape me into.)
They paid famous anarchist author Noam Chomsky, and this is in connection to what others have said.
I’ve never read Chomsky.
Checkmate, billionaires.
Are you kidding? They love that belief system, because it’s just a bunch of edgelord nonsense. The rich aren’t afraid of anarchists because they have zero chance of affecting them in any real, tangible way, aside from perhaps a random assassin like (allegedly) Luigi. Socialists and similar leftists, on the other hand, are fucking terrifying, because they can unite the workers and force the rich to pay higher taxes.
Socialists and similar leftists, on the other hand, are fucking terrifying, because they can unite the workers and force the rich to pay higher taxes.
Sure, buddy, sure.
i can agree with criticisms of blunt insuractionism, as op might be arguing for, but insuratctionary anarchism is only one strand out of many.
many anarchists are building horizontal organisations, and mutual aide and governance networks, to re-empower lower classes and build the better society in the here and now.
of course these anarchists can also be considered socialist, but i think in contrast to other socialist, they do not centralize and do not build hierarchies, making it less likely for their achievenments to regress into systems of domination or be coopted (into for example embracing the electoral system)
i think it’s a mistake to dismiss anarchism in its entirety
Could you give some examples of these decentralized, non-hierarchical organizations?
Kind of reverse shaped it maybe? Same, anyway. Now I distrust all hierarchy.
Ehhh they kinda do need an enemy to point at…
No shortage of those.
They can always point at minorities, LGBT+ people, homeless people, etc…
Well, when I hear a lot of people and media outlets saying something that I know is hateful and wrong, I still think it’s hateful and wrong.
I don’t suddenly start thinking it’s cool and normal
If people were immune to propaganda, the advertising industry wouldn’t spend trillions of dollars suffusing our lives with it.
You are being influenced by media and the people around you. You pretending you aren’t just means you aren’t consciously processing how you’re being manipulated.
The only way to not be influenced by media is boycotting it - and that’s precisely what I’ve been trying to do for years. Problem is, to not be influenced at all, you must become a hermit first
I think they got the people who were predisposed, and those on the borderline
The reality is 'Murica is a hateful country, ruled by fear, and it always has been
People will do shitty things if they can personally benefit, but’ Murica celebrates it
Uh… how is someone “predisposed” for being hateful?
Being born in 'Murica seems to be a contributing factor
Murica is a hateful country, ruled by fear, and it always has been
But it could not be so maybe? This feels like more billionaire friendly doomerism
Honestly, I really don’t think it can be. When you scrape away all the paint and polish and just look at the actions of our nation it’s actual values are very evident and consistent. Property and money have rights, people only get them by having the two. Success is measured by the amount of defeat you deal. As things that benefit everyone are considered losses.
After 180 years of fighting for equality, women still have less control over their bodies than I do over what’s allowed on my property. When public works are sold as a universal good, they almost always work in an exclusionary way. The poor side of town where a bus route is most needed will have half as many stops as the business districts that no one takes the bus to. Almost all crimes can be paid for, allowing you to commit them so long as you afford them.
These aren’t new things, this has been happening since day one and we’ve spent twice as much learning how to make it look pretty than we’d have needed to fix it. It’s the makeup and masks that hide the disease as we tell everyone else they’re lesser for marching gawdy attire. Every black man dragged behind a truck, ever child raped by their parent, every homeless person beat by the police has been in service to the true ideals we hold.
The makeup can’t replace the person, it needs it to exist. If we want an america that isn’t a wretched, soulless walking corpse we have to kill it, bury it, and salt the ground around it so it might never feed new growth and replace it with the values we actually want. We’ll never be able to cut enough of the rot away to save the body that exists, it will always be a disgusting game of racist, Nazi Wack a mole.
Yep
'Murica wasn’t founded on some lofty ideals of freedom and shit
It was a bunch of cunts who decided to steal a country because they wanted to rule rather than be ruled
The indoctrination that yanks experience since birth has been amazingly successful. So many of them believe the bullshit, and the rest are either still being eradicated (native peoples) or are dismissed as “woke” whackos
Where to start?
Getting got by a Taco Bell ad when your hungry is not the same as being influenced to hate trans people or any other minority. Pretending it is is as dangerous as making the propaganda yourself, which you just did.
It’s concerning that you refuse to take a moment to entertain what kind of propaganda would actively target you. We already know about the well documented disinformation campaign efforts by the Russians to interfere in foreign elections and destabilize the US:
Russian disinformation operations in 2016 targeted the political right and left, including Republican Senators Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, Black Lives Matters activists, and secessionist movements in Texas and California. Bottom line: Russia’s goal was to exacerbate the divisions that already exist in the country to destabilize its democracy.
Propaganda campaigns often work by simply targeting and amplifying existing beliefs, so if you think all white people are transphobic, for example, they feed you more examples of transphobic white people to further entrench you in that belief, eroding your empathy and trust for fellow Americans.
To me, reading about PR campaigns against celebrities was a good way of realizing I have also fallen for propaganda many times in the past, particularly when the “internet” suddenly decides a celebrity is universally loved or hated. Now, you can simply call me stupid for falling for it and move on in your moral superiority, or you could take a second to wonder about all the little, seemingly meaningless, things you’ve read on the internet that confirmed your beliefs, or fed you negative emotions like outrage and dejection, and you didn’t bother to dig into them more deeply to understand why is this being shown to me now? Who benefits from my gut reaction to this and who suffers from it?
I appreciate the effort you put into this post, but I don’t think you read what I wrote.
At no point did I refuse that.
There are an insane amount of assumptions here. I have dug into it. It’s rich people owning propaganda machines to make us tear each other a part.
Same side. Don’t let them win.
Maybe you don’t hate trans people but maybe you hate liberals, or centrists, or white men… etc etc etc etc etc
Maybe is doing a ton of work here
I’ve definitely swallowed some copaganda or bootstraps myths without questioning them. Probably lots of other things too
I’d be shocked if someone didn’t have any weak spots.
Yea but a lot of these idiots do.
My friend grew up in the sticks with a community whose opinions came directly from Fox and InfoWars. He didn’t know a single person who’d be considered remotely progressive until he went to college. He’s told me some terrible things he used to believe.
People are absolutely capable of seeing through the bullshit but when everyone you trust says 2+2=5, it’s no surprise that people don’t think to question it. Especially when you’re poor. The billionaires know this and exploit it. Keep em tired and poor and you can convince most of them of anything.
I’m not defending bigotry at all but I do think most of them have been victimized and it’s fair to say billionaire pedophiles shaped their belief system. A lot of them just do not have the brain space for reflection given their circumstances. Being poor is fuckin hard.
Just found out my friend is one of those, he emigrated to Russia…he is fucking dead soon.
RIP your friend. It sucks that he got brainwashed.
Exactly, we were supposed to think “the billionaires aren’t making any sense” snd then when the Epstein stuff came out “ohhh that makes sense they were raling children that’s why they were saying all this racist sexist stuff to distract us.”. Instead most americans are like "no they cant be pedophiles because we trusted them already "
Nonsense. I never used to hate billionaires!
This is a gamergate reference as Epstein accomplice maxwell was a reddit mod at the time and apparently had some part in amplifying the movement into the red pill ideology that we know today.
The strong prey on the weak is a good argument for pedophilia and wealth hoarding.
What a username.
