A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_[email protected]~
Anyone that says J6 was a "peaceful protest" that "got out of hand"
We all saw the footage of that day. There were gallows and calls to hang a sitting vice president.
It was an insurrection, fomented and encouraged by Donald Trump's speech and actions leading up to that day. Plain and simple.
The right-wingers who say it wasn't as serious as it was are gaslighting their base.
Edit: Victims of gaslighting in my replies
A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink.
“I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up,” the CIA agent says.
“Thank you,” the KGB says. “We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them.”
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. “Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America.”
“Democrats are liberal/progressive”
In reality, they’re pretty conservative.
The Overton Window
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
A concept where political discourse is slowly shifted to one side or another over time. For example conservatism.
Politics are talked about the right who move even further right, the centralists are moved to old right and the leftists are moved to the center .... the old leftists are now seen as extreme and unacceptable while the far right are also unacceptable but gain some ground ... everyone shifts one step to the right and now everything is more conservative.
The right shift is what is happening now ... but it can happen and shift towards the left as well.
They are still liberal though but not progressives. Liberalism isn’t necessarily a left wing ideology.
“brexit will bring in more trade! brexit will provide 350 million to the NHS!”
On a related note the whole notion extremely prevalent in the UK that all they have to do is decide they want to rejoin and it will happen. No matter which side of that a commentator is on, they almost never mention that they need to present something the EU27 actually want and convince them that the UK is not the 'break international agreements' kind of country any more. Overall the British still all seem to think that they are something better than everyone else and others have to do what they want and have no real agency.
You could call it a colonial mindset. Wonder where that way have come from.
The thing I loved about that lie is even as a 20 something who’d never been to that hemisphere I knew it was a lie because weren’t these the people trying to kill the NHS
Vaccines will give you autism, microchips, actual diseases etc. It's one of the best medical breakthroughs in history and we have idiots ruining it.
The concept of trickle down economics. Anyone with a functioning brain can tell you that it would never work. But somehow people as a whole in the US still think giving corporations and rich cunts extra money, and tax breaks somehow lead to the 99% reaping a benefit.
It has never been true because the basic function of capitalism is to get as much money as possible, while spending the least amount of money to do it. There’s no room for passing on the extra profits to your employees, clients, or vendors.
America is the greatest country in the world. Only those who haven't travelled much would believe that.
Republican talking points. All of them. Pick literally anything they say about guns or economics. Literally anything.
Americans with their 'greatest nation on earth' charade.
It has a name: American exceptionalism. It's used both by people who know it's a lie and by people who believe it.
Israel is defending itself against an antisemitic terrorist group which attacked it for no reason
Communism=Authoritarianism
I was taught in school the characteristics of authoritarianism and a couple weeks later, when i was being taught about communism, the same characteristics were said
That Israel is not a colonial state. All it's founders defined it as a European colonial project. It was and is allied with all the colonial powers and projects like Britain, the US, apartheid south Africa, and Rhodesia. Its funding association was called the Palestine Jewish colonization association. It's bank was called the Jewish colonial trust. The Jewish national fund and the Zionist project at large was from the beginning concerned with building segregated colonies.
First, lands were bought with foreign funding from feudal land lords, and their inhabitants were entirely dispossessed, kicked out. Then when awareness of the ultimate goals of the Zionist project crystalized and resistance against Palestinian dispossession mounted, the lands were ethnically cleansed by force and the people massacred. 700 to 800 thousand Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in one continuous military operation that spanned two years from 1947 to 1948.
Zionist leaders fully acknowledged that Palestinian demographics were a core issue to the Zionist project, that the Palestinian population had to be removed at any cost, which is exactly what Israel did. What lead to the Palestinians being defenseless in this situation? Colonial Britain abetted the formation of heavily armed Zionist militias with soldiers numbering in the tens of thousands. The arms of Britain's colonial military presence were inherited by the Zionist forces that it supported. All this while Britain summarily excecuted any Palestinian found in possession of a firearm.
This is not to mention the enthusiastic support of european antisemites for the Zionist project, or its strict early opposition by antifascist jews.
The idea that Israel has any right to exist on Palestinian land is a lie that has been so heavily proliferated, it has to be debunked when it should be paid no consideration at all.
"Your socioeconomic status is a measure of work ethic, sacrifice, and ability to make good decisions. Poor people deserve to be poor, and suffer, for making bad decisions."
Birth lottery which includes not just wealth but family connections is the biggest metric. We are way down the list of developed nations in terms of upward mobility. Only the outliers that prove to be of the greatest service to entrenched capital are granted entry. Most Americans, religious or not, have internalized the dogma of the prosperity gospel, itself an absolute parody of the dogma of Christianity it claims to be part of.
Go to any local fast food restaurant at rush hour, hell, go to any produce field at harvest, and tell me how much that studious hard work pays off. conversely, please regail me with tales of how hard it is to be a capital landlord, ~~making investments~~ gambling with insider information with capital gained from previous exploitations, and then merely expecting an endless steam of capital for NO labor into what generated it. It's like we were conquered by the traveling snake oil salesmen of old.
It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Rising early and going to bed early is more virtuous than rising late and going to bed late.
"Owning a car = freedom"
"You need a big truck/SUV to haul things" (it's just a coincidence that people drove much smaller cars before a multibillion dollar deluge of advertising)
"It's consumers' responsibility to reduce plastic pollution by recycling, and recycling is effective" (whoever came up with this one belongs in the PR scumfuck hall of fame)
Too many famous people are hailed as something they are not, and everyone believes it. For example Elon Musk is hailed as a genius when he seems to be showing lately that he is the dumbest person alive.
The belief that colour blind glasses work
See megalag's videos
"Owning a car gives you freedom" is a big one considering how expensive they are and that most people just use them to sit in traffic jams on their commute 90%+ of the time they are using them.
People believe insane shit about North Korea because they heard other insane shit about North Korea.
Donald Trump claiming executive privilege for his various crimes. It seemed like everyone was laughing about it even a couple months ago, like how can it be executive privilege when this is about things he was doing before and after his presidency? Then there was a narrative shift and now the media is back to hand-wringing over whether or not you can prosecute a former president. I don't think anyone is expecting any of it to stick anymore.
communism means no freedom / no food / whatever. anti-communist propaganda was a massive and very successful effort in the west
Off the top of my head:
-Anything involving babies and incubators is immediately suspect. (Or babies and bayonets, for that matter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah_testimony
-And this one is pure conspiracy, and I know it's not what you asked for... but it's ridiculous and 'tis the season. My mother in law is convinced that the lyrics to "Oh Christmas Tree" (O Tannenbaum) were changed by people who wanted to erase the true and original lyrics. By who? Big Tree financiers? Communists who are stealing Christmas and replacing it with trees?
Anyway...
The original lyrics, according to this conspiracy, praise God and never mention trees at all. It's completely ridiculous and always ends with the whole family singing along with the "true lyrics" from a badly photocopied paper that she hands out. I hope this doesn't come up again this year because it really makes me want to fight. Which would make me the bad person, because who initiates fights on Christmas? The next couple of days are going to be tough.
Colonialism was a civilising mission.
Neoliberalism has also broken people’s brains to believe that nothing better is possible and anyone promising something other than managed decline or being vindictive against an outgroup is a charlatan.
"Once all the boomers are dead everything will be better!" Yeah, corporations will still rule your life, inflation will still outstrip income, you won't be able to afford a house, and your politicians will represent whichever special interest pays them the most. Also you won't ever be able to vote in progressive candidates because every year there's going to be some vile ghoul like Donald Trump, but somehow worse, and the Democrats just need you to close ranks and vote in whatever corporate liberal whose turn it is to sit in the Big House this time so a literal fascist doesn't get his finger on the button and attempts to dismantle what little democracy our republic has over night.
Grandma and grandpa being six feet under doesn't change these things. And, guess what...you probably won't change them either because you're too lazy and apathetic to do anything other than shitpost on the internet about how badly your life sucks.
Here's a specific one that we are told about history: that we work less than our ancestors did thanks to automation and labor-saving devices. Truth is that the period of history (granted I'm talking specifically about European history) where people did the least amount of work per year was probably the middle ages (the other top contender for "least work required to live" is hunter-gatherer societies), until right before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution sees people go from working for about half the year to working through the entire year, and from having relatively slow schedules to absolutely brutal ones. Kids went from working half days (when they worked at all) to working full time, and the compensation everyone got bought them fewer luxuries than their grandparents had when they were literally peasants.
There's been some clawing back of our lost free time in the past century - and without modern productivity many of the things we take for granted simply wouldn't exist - but we're still pretty deep in the red compared to back then, and of course there are plenty of places in the world where working conditions are still comparable to the worst times of the industrial revolution. I'm not a "Retvrn" guy but I think this bit of context regarding modern work culture compared to the ten thousand years preceding it is something everyone should know, but that our society constantly paints over with misrepresentations of what the past looked like.
That a guy has to spend three months salary on a diamond wedding ring. It was a very good marketing campaign from a jewlery company.