PierreMenard
1yr ago
PierreMenard
1yr ago
Agreed.
Propaganda is a thing because it works.
If all you're looking for is enjoying yourself then knowing as little as possible and even being able to selectively forget things as time goes will be your greatest asset.
Me? I could not enjoy a picture with a black Queen of England or another 'racist cops abuse innocent minority, real culprit was enemy-of-the-day' trope. Even worse, when it's blindingly obvious that the film-makers specifically hate me, as a person.
I don't want my children to fit in with that crowd either, or we would not be able to get along.
If you embrace a belief in "shadowy gray cardinals " sitting in a room somewhere deciding what will happen this month, you can make everything fit that theory.
Well that's the point of beliefs, that they fit the observed world. It'd be weird to have a belief that does not adequately address what actually happens.
Unfortunately I'm not aware of a website that tracks media lies over time to reliably be able to provide receipts for what I consider as evidence in this case.
One such example would be for example the response to the Steele dossier. My understanding is that a number of media outlets all came together with claims of leaks from US/Western officials of a mysterious dossier circulating among the 'experts' in intelligence that would implicate candidate Trump in nefarious immoral or anti-American acts. Such media reports were riddled with quotes from 'anonymous sources' and such.
Another example would be the coverage of the Jan6 protests. For example the NYT made the incorrect claim that a police officer was killed by protesters:
A few days ago, the New York Times quietly “updated” its report, published over a month earlier, asserting that Capitol Police officer Brian Sicknick had been killed by being struck with a fire extinguisher during the January 6 riot.
I saw recently somebody claim online that these protesters killed a policeman, which shows that the strategy of 'lie loudly then quietly retract' had the intended effect of priming the mind of people who don't pay attention.
A third example would be the reaction to the NYPost article detailing their finding of Hunter Biden's laptop containing materials implicating him in at best in highly promiscuous activities with many connected socialites and at worst in international corruption, influence peddling, potential incestuous pedophilia... The reaction was of course to censor, dismiss, diminish as much as possible, using the same previously discredited 'anonymous intelligence' sources as for the Steele dossier, or the WMD in Iraq story... Why'd they stop using the same gimmick when it still works?
I believe that there are 2 underlying facts behind these examples:
- media professionals have a narrative that they're trying to push (duh)
- they coordinate together to either push false narratives or kill true but embarrassing ones, along with intelligence agencies/government operatives and social media companies, especially when it matters most right before elections
Does this involve "shadowy gray cardinals"? I suppose you could call the people in charge of media companies that, as well as the government officials they interact with, as well as the coordinators at the social media company level. Can the room be an email chain? Or a zoom meeting?
Perhaps when they wipe the servers they use to communicate confidential information on, they do not use acid, and Hillary does not personally smash them with a hammer.
Is it still a conspiracy if they're not literally wearing capes and bathing in blood?
PierreMenard
1yr ago
I'm not a white nationalist, but I'm also not smart enough to offer a rebuttal and I'd like users here, who are a lot smarter, to point out blind spots in white nationalist arguments.
If you can't offer a rebuttal does that mean that you agree? In that case why are you not a 'white nationalist'? Why do you care so much about white nationalists when they are such a fringe movement at this time?
I don't really see what the big deal is?
You are upset that there are people who you would want to work with that you cannot work with? Like who? You need a specific plumber from Guatemala? What specific tasks need to be performed locally that it's impossible to find somebody local to perform equivalent work?
Professionals have been working remotely for a few decades now, you could literally manage a company with somebody without ever seeing them face to face if you wanted. Unless they're in Russia and some other countries that non-nationalist governments have decided to isolate from financial services, what's the issue?
If sharing a physical location with these people is so important for you, have you considered moving? Surely libertarians could get together, pool some money and figure out a way to make their border-free utopia a reality.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
I took Economy 101 and the measure of inflation seemed like it was basically made-up. One could argue that the average modern poor person in a Western country is immensely wealthier than one 400 years ago due to great technological developments but 400 years ago every single food item was fully organic, non-GMO, non-processed, free of microplastics (perhaps including different types of pollutants)... A physician at the time probably had a live-in cook and nanny to handle all the domestic work. A lot of that work has been automated but you still see billionaires pushing buttons to call elevators for some reason.
Even if you go back a couple years. Somebody who graduated in 2020 probably paid roughly the same price as somebody who has yet to graduate and spent perhaps a full year of watching essentially youtube videos and being forced to wear a muzzle and other humiliating rituals.
Entertainment is cheaper? Are the 2020s versions of Lord of the Rings equivalent to the 2000s? Are the 2010-20s versions of Star Wars equivalent to the previous ones?
Does $1 million spent in real estate in SF or NYC give you the same quality of life than 20 years ago?
From my experience, you can apply in person to entry-level, wagie jobs, and they may want you to work there, but if it's not a small business, you will still have to painstakingly submit an application online anyway. Some kind of humiliation ritual, perhaps.
The best part is that the people in charge of hiring you will also struggle with the process, as the devices they have in their grocery store have awkward hardware, the 3rd-party app (successfactor) is complicated or constantly changing, and they don't actually perform that process very often.
The technology was supposed to make hiring easier, more convenient, practical, but it is questionable whether that was actually achieved. I'm sure some metrics were improved, corporations have better awareness of who was hired and when, and they can do more background checks, penny-pinch wages and target workers for layoffs more accurately, they can optimize diversity scores to manage unionization risks...
On the other hand perhaps 'old-school hiring' wasn't so bad. Perhaps somebody can still be a good employee despite having used the n-word in 2008 or being an ex-con in some other state.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
My understanding is that there are entire organizations dedicated to gather votes, some of these people essentially go door-to-door to target people that would otherwise not vote, perhaps because they don't speak enough English, are too old or too cognitively-impaired to direct themselves to a polling place. Then they perform the same kind of art on these people as the door-to-door salesmen or phone scammers (2.4 millions fraud last year, a $8B business), and they make these people input their customer's information on the ballot, which they collect and then go on to drop at a ballot drop box.
Is this illegal? It may be in some places. But it should look pretty suspicious to have one person deliver hundreds or thousands of votes at once in a ballot drop-off box.
Observers are avoided through various tricks depending on the area, sometimes more obvious than others.
There is a lot of variation on how absentee votes should be processed and counted and how that process is tracked, and there were a lot of last minute changes to these rules across the country ostensibly 'due to covid'. Here is an example :
State law doesn't explicitly say ballots lacking a secrecy envelope must be discarded, and the secretary of the commonwealth advised counties to count naked ballots in the primary.
Should a poll worker discard or not discard a ballot lacking a secrecy envelope? Perhaps if it's a ballot for evil orange dictator it's okay?
PierreMenard
1yr ago
That's the 'women are wonderful' effect. Everybody loves women. Everybody of any race has some women they care about.
On the other hand, aside from some with exotic racial preferences, people usually want to see people that look like them in the media they consoom. Moreover, adding characters that look blatantly out of place from a historical, common sense point-of-view, takes away from the immersion.
For a lot of (male) gamers, adding attractive women in skimpy clothing is just a bonus. It does take away from the realism, still. The problem these days is that Western content creators have a tendency to pair a 'realistic, gritty' aesthetic with feminist fantasies. So the male fantasy of a scantily-clad (it's magic armor ok) Amazonian goddess turns into a rough-looking, middle-aged, square-shouldered she-man.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
If we believe Trump "In the end, they're not coming after me. They're coming after you — and I'm just standing in their way," then it's just a matter of time.
If they successfully manage to prevent Trump from getting elected in 2024, then that's done isn't it? The hordes of poor people wanting to move to the USA is not going away by November. Abbott is just in the way for a little bit. How much business does he even have in NY?
They can always find some guy who committed fraud in NY who talked to Abbott's wife's nephew once to get him subpoenaed and jailed for failure to appear in court etc once the proof of concept is established and everybody moved on from Trump.
There doesn't seem to be a statute of limitations on people Democrats really have a grudge against like the Charlottesville protesters.
Maybe trump should be threatening a civil war instead of ranting on Twitter.
Probably. Running a second time in a race that you claim was rigged the first time does have a certain unseriousness.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
What's wrong with giving creationists more power? Defending evolution does not seem to be very popular. The top post is about American public intellectual slightly adjusting toward 'HBD' which is in essence the belief that human evolution does not stop at the neck. The Dr Watson position:
he's "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours--whereas all the testing says not really." He went on, reports the newspaper, to say that "people who have to deal with black employees find...it is not true" that all humans are equal.
Another popular one from a previously resigned Harvard President :
"even small differences in the standard deviation [between genders] will translate into very large differences in the available pool substantially out [from the mean]". Summers referenced research that implied differences between the standard deviations of males and females in the top 5% of twelfth graders under various tests. He then went on to argue that, if this research were to be accepted, then "whatever the set of attributes ... that are precisely defined to correlate with being an aeronautical engineer at MIT or being a chemist at Berkeley ... are probably different in their standard deviations as well".
Which political movement is defending these science-based, evolution-grounded positions?
Not to mention the contemporary dualist belief that some people's souls get mismatched to the wrong body and hormones. Nobody ever explains who creates these souls and how this works from an evolutionary point-of-view, but this is apparently the Science.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
Plenty of gamers loved playing CJ, an African-American character, in his GTA San Andreas adventures, fighting for his street gang and taking part in various criminal activities per the GTA formula. It's a great game because it mixes good gameplay (guns, cars, open-world which was somewhat new then), and an interesting story with characters that are both colorful, memorable, and also somewhat realistic, with the usual humorous exaggeration of the series.
The player, who is most likely not a would-be criminal from an impoverished inner-city black neighborhood, gets to experience a fascinating (exaggerated, fictionalized) facet of contemporary American life, with hundreds of references to TV shows and movies, music, sports, etc.
And of course, plenty of opportunities to drop the gamer-word while playing.
In this case, what does a black samurai bring to the experience of the game? Do we get some special scenes of the main character experiencing racial discrimination and having to take revenge? Does not sound like a lot of fun to me.
In the best case scenario, they'd bring some flashbacks of the main character's past life in Africa, with some neat well-researched African culture on display. Somehow I'm skeptical, unless they can somehow place the character in a part of Africa that wasn't having a ton of enslaving, public executions and human sacrifices going on all the time.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
This all reminds me of the movie Pleasantville.
What I most distinctively remember from it is that the kids are taught in public schools about the evils of STDs and teen pregnancy. It appears to me that condom-related sex ed was a major psy-op for the average middle-class teenager. Indeed, STDs are mostly transmitted by drug users and MSM, not the average encounter for the types of people most likely to conform to what the teachers say.
It really is propaganda, where characters of a 1950s' sitcom gain colors as they gradually go through a sped-up sexual revolution and some other modernization (not racial integration unfortunately)
"Pleasantville" is the kind of parable that encourages us to re-evaluate the good old days and take a fresh look at the new world we so easily dismiss as decadent. Yes, we have more problems. But also more solutions, more opportunities and more freedom. I grew up in the '50s. It was a lot more like the world of "Pleasantville" than you might imagine. Yes, my house had a picket fence, and dinner was always on the table at a quarter to six, but things were wrong that I didn't even know the words for.
We're already fully bathed in this type of propaganda, like fish in the sea, we don't even imagine that things could be different.
Second I'm not saying you out not to notice who your enemies are. I'm saying that you ought not to care.
Noticing is usually a first step toward action. You can't notice if you don't care, and you can't take action if you don't notice. What your hypothetical enemies want you to do is not care; they want you to only get upset if you actually see more white people than usual.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
I can't take the faux outrage
Today the shoe is on the other foot. After years of crying over Trump 'fascistic' takeover, 'migrants in cage', the cruelty of not taking every single African that shows up at the border etc, etc, we are now being told by the same journalists that 'actually genocide is good m'kay' when it's jews doing it.
I can't take the faux outrage the remaining rest of the time when it's not jews doing the hecking racism, and the current attitudes by the respected members of the media is a demonstration that it was always faux outrage.
Given the chance, he'd push the button for mass deportations of non-White Europeans and racial segregation, not to mention what he thinks of Jews.
Who would not? All people like Keith want is the sovereignty to behave like Israelis do in their sovereign nation, or even not as cruelly as they do.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
This is what I think is going on:
- like all women, feminists want to be 100% safe at all time
- yet they want to partake in fornication, which is a very unsafe activity
- additionally, they are not interested in men who follow feminist principles, ie constantly asking for consent is not something they associate with an attractive man
So perhaps what we can deduce from these observations is that the 'don't rape' seminaries are in fact shit tests (Usually unconscious effort by a woman to test man's worthiness and social status).
They do want the men that they are not attracted to not to make any kind of conventional romantic gesture (ie 'rapey' attitude or 'pre-rape' or what not), which is completely understandable.
They also expect the men that they are attracted to to be bold enough to push past these rules. After all, 50 shades of Grey is a best-seller.
In essence, the 'Hello HR?' meme, institutionalized. Plus it's a nice grift.
The men smart enough to fall for the training will eventually find out that successful men disregard it as needed, that's not gonna help with the I.N.C.E.L. terrorism, such as ;
More women report being randomly attacked while walking in New York City
PierreMenard
1yr ago
The right of self-determination of Ukrainians is first and foremost not to be sent into a meatgrinder by conscription officers. The women of Ukraine have this right, and like a lot of modern people in that situation, they simply choose to live somewhere else.
To the most liberal, Western-minded young Ukrainians the 'special military operation' has been a great bounty. They finally were able to obtain a visa to Miami, NYC, Los Angeles or any European capital. They'll probably pay lip-service to the 'cause' to assure their status in their local circle of liberals, but they might not be thinking of ever going back.
Perhaps the middle-aged Ukrainians who have not grown up with Western propaganda online and feel unable to learn a foreign language go either way, they are attached to their country and see Russians either as enemies or former brothers in the Soviet Union.
Then there are the retirees who are (probably?) exempt from conscription, and may still feel nostalgic for the glory days of Bandera and think perhaps the wrong guys won the 'Great Patriotic War'. I'm not sure how they reconcile that with a desire to join NATO/EU or even voting for Zelensky.
Either way I think the most important development in all of this is that post-internet, nationalism cannot really be a thing. It's hard to convince the youth to die for your government after years of telling them that the people who just arrived have as much of a claim to the country as they do.
What's the difference if Russia takes Ukraine? That's like a change in government. Before it was Trump, now it's Biden.
Would an American zoomer care if China bombed the local strip mall, apartment complex full of Somalis and Venezuelians, the Indian-owned gas station, the gender-correction clinic etc? Perhaps they want to die for 'transkids'? Maybe if China bombed Instagram's or Netflix' servers and made it go dark they'd care? If the situation is too dire they can always move somewhere else (if somewhere else is at peace, that is), after all they were told they would own nothing and they'd be happy, so why here specifically?
Who on this website would go die in a trench for their government and under what circumstances? This is the first step to clear before allowing yourself to symbolically vote for somebody who wants to 'ear-mark' money for these foreign wars.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
What's with the concept 'radicalizing social media algorithms'? This is like that idea that 'Putin hacked the elections'... by putting ads on facebook or something? How can people simultaneously defend democracy and believe that the average person is the cognitive equivalent of a fast food public wifi network?
If democracy is so great, why do we need to ban doctors from posting their opinions online? Why do we need to prevent people from taking horse deworming medication but make sure they get to vote?
If AI is racist, if Silicon Valley companies, the most powerful, data-driven, progressive companies ever, still can't seem to make DEI quotas, then perhaps they have a point?
PierreMenard
1yr ago
It's a self-solving problem. The deeper the lack of parenting drive across society, the more parents are likely to notice and make connections.
'60% of women who go to college never have kids? 80% of women who graduate with a gender studies degree never have kids? 73% of women who attended more than 5 years of public school have fewer than 2 kids? Well I want grand-children so I know what I need to do'
PierreMenard
1yr ago
It's what the majority of people in the country agree upon.
And what is that?
Prior to 2015 same-sex marriage was illegal on the federal level, after that it was legal. Did same-sex marriage supporters become Americans in 2015 after decades of "America not being their country" and did same-sex marriage opponents stop being American after 2015?
Roe vs Wade was overturned in 2022, did believers in federally-protected abortion stop being American while Roe opponents suddenly gained a new-found American identity?
PierreMenard
1yr ago
But "Clark Kent dual-identity" is the fruit of identity politics across the West, and everyone is playing the game.
There are 2 hot wars that the US are engaged in by proxy and none of them have to do with anal sex but both of them have to do with who is in charge of the country they are supporting.
Strangely, when it comes to defending borders, there is this opinion that the Southern US border is not worth defending, but borders of such important countries as Ukraine and Israel are worth billions of dollars (and the blood of millions).
You'd think that ~168 million Americans would be more interested in protecting their own borders but apparently it's the ones with distant relatives in some swamp lands that get to have their borders of choice defended by US taxmoney.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
you're poor because immigrants are driving down your wages
So let's build a wall says the right-winger.
No you can't do that says the left-winger, you just can't. You really can't says the left-winger, so the right-winger says, ok we'll jan6 then, and then the left-winger says no, no, no, you really, really, really, can't.
You're afraid to start a business or do anything because of crime?
So let's gather all the gang-members says the El Salvadoran President. But at what cost??? Asks the NYT.
When is the last time a politician or right-wing influencer told someone from West Virginia that they have the power to improve their life by relocating, retraining or abstaining from drugs?
How's 'relocating' working as a strategy generally? Plenty of 'relocated' Americans homeless on the streets of blue cities, not sure what good it does them.
Why is this never a solution to the mysterious problem of 'food deserts' that seems to plague African-Americans, completely unrelated to the spontaneous combustion of businesses in their neighborhoods when Republicans get in power?
Why is this never offered as a solution to racism? There are plenty of countries with way fewer oppressive white people.
I've seen right-wingers advise journalists to learn to code, does that count?
abstaining from drugs
Does the so-called 'War on Drugs' count? I'm all for going Duterte on drugs.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
So there are people in this world like you who do not necessarily need violence to stay in line, and then there are people who do. You have personal experience of this.
I imagine that there are millions of the 2nd kind (violence-needing), and that you would get a lot of them in an open-border territory. And the more of those you would get, the less likely you would be to attract the 1st kind.
What's your plan?
PierreMenard
1yr ago
What are you conservative about? Why are you a Republican?
Taylor Swift is an attractive, unmarried, childless white woman who 'puts in efforts to make a comfortable experience for liberals'. Should conservative white parents see her as a model for their daughters?
We can understand Taylor Swift Democrats as men and women comfortable with their birth sex, eager to play the roles traditionally assigned to it
The role that is currently assigned to white women is to not have any children. Many conservatives see that as a bad thing.
PierreMenard
1yr ago
What is better, a very competent person enacting a very evil agenda, or an incompetent person attempting to enact a good agenda?
If somehow whoever got into office did exactly nothing, it would still be 100% better than somebody getting into office and continuing existing policy by Biden, Clinton, Bush, etc.
vs just making things worse for everyone
As it stands, bad people are the ones who have the most to lose.
That's one way of finally ending the blatant sex discrimination in the criminal justice system. After decades of loud protest for 'equality', life, uh, found a way.
More options
Context Copy link