• Tiresia@slrpnk.net
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    9 hours ago

    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.

    • FistingEnthusiast@lemmy.world
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      8 hours ago

      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

      • grrgyle@slrpnk.net
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        7 hours ago

        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

        • Postmortal_Pop@lemmy.world
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          4 hours ago

          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.

    • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
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      8 hours ago

      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.

      • searabbit@piefed.social
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        7 hours ago

        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?

        • Whostosay@sh.itjust.works
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          7 hours ago

          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.