this post was submitted on 30 May 2026
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Don't be mean. I promise to do my best to judge that fairly.
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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
Yea but a lot of these idiots do.
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
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.
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
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:
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.
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.