Excerpt from this Substack post: https://nickrafter.substack.com/p/the-rent-may-always-be-too-damn-high
Everyone loves socialism, except for the word itself.
It is impressive how people don’t question their own assumptions and beliefs.
They just believe that socialist support making things more expensive. They don’t even know what that statement means. It’s just a = b and that’s it.
I mean it’s exactly to Republican plan as those areas controlled by the party of Idiot America, tore apart education and the ability to have any critical thinking skills. You now have generations of people who will believe anything they hear without thinking for a single beat.
They’re ignorant and easily duped. Trump loves the uneducated.
I could more or less say the exact same thing about the left though.
Captain Both Sides strikes again!
Yeah, for most people politics is like the winter Olympics. They genuinely have no idea what’s going on unless it’s repeated ad nauseam over and over again or it gets slipped into some other media they’re consuming.
They’re also terrible at spotting what’s fake or untrue.
It was fine when during their evening tv watch they got commercial promos for the top evening news stories each ad break, but those days are gone.
They’re also terrible at spotting what’s fake or untrue.
It’s not a small feat when it does feel like every fucking person on TV is lying to you constantly.
From NPR to the Houston Chronicle to BBC News One to the Joe Rogan Podcast, it’s just mountains of bullshit and lies and jingoism and native advertising.
It was fine when during their evening tv watch they got commercial promos for the top evening news stories each ad break, but those days are gone.
Go back 30 years, and you still had this shit. It was just pitched to the Median Voter rather than some rarified hot house of partisans.
You still had John Stossel with his crypto-libertarian bullshit and Tucker Carlson screaming at James Carville on Crossfire, but always over something totally incidental. People like Rush Limbaugh and Rachael Maddow hadn’t quite gone mainstream yet. Jon Stewart was confined to the back corners of a cable news comedy channel. FOX (the whole damned network, not just the news channel) was just getting off the ground.
Everyone agreed gay people shouldn’t get married, but women should be allowed to hold a credit card.
Everyone agreed Iraq had WMDs and Cuba is being run into the ground by Nazi Communist Fidel Castro and China is a backwards hellhole where Tianamen Square happens twice a day.
Now you’ve got Controversy as the focus of news rather than Consensus. So if CNN says the sun rises in the East, Newsmax will bring on Laura Loomer to tell people the CNN anchor rapes puppies, so don’t believe them. And if the WSJ says the economy is booming, sixteen podcasters will release episodes about how we’re a decade into the New Great Depression You Just Don’t Know About.
People believe crazy shit because there is no consensus reality anymore.
Because lying gets more attention than the truth and we live in an attention based economy. Human attention is now the commodity that every tech overlord is fighting over and they amplify the influencers that get the most eyeballs and earballs hoping their platform will be at the top. That means the most unscrupulous and bombastic liars are shoved in our faces because those are the ones that rally engagement from both fans and haters. You can farm more engagement by being a piece of shit than by being a smart, interesting, or good person. Also, the media is totally complicit in this and will happily prop up these schmuck podcasters by tirelessly writing articles criticizing them. They cannot help but participate in the meaningless twitter feuds and gotcha online culture because that’s what most people consume.
Goebbels, in essence: “If you want to make it in propaganda, you have to repeat the same trite phrases over and over again, no matter whether intellectuals contradict you and refute you. You convince scholars with clever arguments, and the masses with simple ones.”
Just goes to show you what’s important to people and the efficacy of echo chambers and propaganda of the right.
People often want the same thing. But the right is so effective at repetition and corralling their followers that they aren’t able to separate the rhetoric from the politics and assume anyone saying the “magic words” is automatically on “their team” until told otherwise.
Not just American.
Have you seen the news of the Italian 4 year old girl who died from diphtheiria, a disease for which there has long been a vaccine (mandatory in Italy, even) and which hadn’t been seen in that country for more than 3 decades due to vaccination, but her parents thought that vaccine gave autism to that kid’s cousin so didn’t got her vaccinated.
Curiously, the mentioned vaccinated cousin also got infected and survived.
A young child literally died because her parents were gullible braindead morons who (doubtless via Social Media) got fed the same shit that’s fed to American braindead morons and actually believed that even though it originates from a country which is a postcard for Idiocracy.
Well, guess they did indeed made sure their child won’t ever have autism …
(All this shit makes me so fucking furious!)
This vaccines giving autism shit all because of facebook.
New political spectrum just dropped.
The political ouroboros.
So the way to make them vote for socialists is to talk about costs. Looks like an easy win.
That, and just say what you’re going to do, rather than labelling yourself.
I always think of taking the angle of “people can call me whatever they like but I stand for these principles -” is always the right approach. Labels are much easier to subvert in people’s minds than actual plans of action.
Do people just read stuff like this and assume this actually happened?
I’m smarter than they are and I had to look up how to spell “aneurysm” to say that reading this post gave me an aneurysm
How do these white trash bootlickers even manage to breathe propely with th3ir “heroes” toying them around like puppets?
decades of demonizing education, attacking and undermining education by making sure it doesnt teach essential skills like critical thinking and punishing anything but blind acceptance and obedience, the abolition of the fairness doctrine to begin the locking of people into isolated information bubbles, social media and facebook that uses algorithms to maximize profits by serving inflammatory content to vulnerable people to further expand the the right wing information bubbles online with the happy little bonus of it bringing in billions of dollars and thus being a capitalistically selected for behavior of feeding innocent people into the hate machine because right wingers post more, see more ads, and click more ads, because of their constant engagement due to their constant manufactured outrage.
and, i mean, thats just the tip of the iceberg thats created these people, but I’m not gonna spend an hour highlighting every single thread in this blanket.
This is why both politicians and those who have a strong interest in politics need to chill with the jargon and labels.
People voted for Mamdani because they liked his ideas, his approach to things, not because he was a “socialist”. Hell, most people, including me, aren’t sure exactly what that means.
Jargon and labels are part of the way people are controlled - simplify complex concepts down to repeatable simple words and now you can both control the meaning of such soft definintion terms (notice how the meaning of “terrorist” has been moved over time to become “against those in power”) plus constant repetition breeds familiarity, thus the very same cognitive paths that transform brand-familiarity into “comfort with brand” and hence favoring it over less familiar brand, are exercised to get people to accept provided political “explanations” & “solutions” using those slogans.
That said, in my experience if you try and explain complex things to people with enough complexity and completeness for them to understand the subtleties of the subject, they switch off half way (like, I bet, plenty of people reading this post that didn’t pass the first half of the first paragraph), so you have to somehow find at least simple metaphors, so not quite down reducing it to slogans but not all that far.
“People don’t know what Socialism means” is the worst case of intentional ignorance about things that are completely understandable by people who refuse to look something up since “People in the middle east have been fighting for centuries and nobody understands why.”
It also doesn’t help that it seems to mean something different to everyone.
It’s just someone who isn’t capitalist. Or right wing. Or just doesn’t agree that trans people should have rights.
groups that self label aren’t exactly helpful for understanding what the label means (see german socialist party)
Pro-good anti-bad party is the future we are heading ig. Because some dude cant bother to open giant source of infornation right in his pocket.
They’re all pro-good and anti-bad in their own words.
Personally as soon as somebody reduces anything to “good ones” vs “bad ones” I’m immediatelly suspicious that they’re either activelly trying to swindle everybody else or they’re usefully idiots parroting the shit put out by those activelly trying to swindle everybody else - almost nothing involving humans can be reduced to 2 and only 2 sides, which aren’t even ranges but actual absolutes.
but the orphan crushing party is offering free bones if they win
Well, it seems like the propaganda and defunding schools worked as intended. These are the vote-cattle the right are working towards.
Don’t take this badly, but in my experience, formal Education doesn’t teach people Skepticism (the real deal, not the Denialism that morons have whilst thinking they’re being “skeptics”). It also doesn’t at all train people to be self-aware and spot when it’s an emotion (fear, wanting to belong, even hope) making them want to believe something rather than cold hard logic.
My formal Education is in Science and Engineering, and whilst education in those areas does push you more towards a more analytical kind of thinking and an as objective as possible measuring of things, most higher education out there is in soft “sciences” at best, or even just the kind of domains were the main required expertise is in convincing people, so the very opposite of being as Objective and Logical as possible.
From my observations even some people with higher education in a Sciences or Engineering domain are gullible cattle when it comes to politics, mainly because they don’t engage it with logic and the way of thinking they use in their professional life, but rather with tribalism (which is emotional) or just straight raw emotion (like anger or fear) and thus are stupidly simple to control and pretty much self-convince that whatever the propagandists want them to believe is true even when the most basic analysis of it immediatelly shows inconsistencies.
TL;DR Whilst better and more Education somewhat improves people’s resilience to propaganda, even the highest levels of Education in highly objective and analytical domains won’t make people immune to this shit, since people are controlled via emotional subconscious cognitive pathways, not logic, and even highly intellectual people who WANT to believe something will find some kind of seemingly “logic” explanation to conclude that which they want to believe is indeed so.
It’s anecdotal evidence. It’s braindead to take this as a representation of conservatives.
Yeah
Most of the stupid cunts are even more hateful and even less intelligent
