I don’t know about y’all, but if I grew up in a country that never has the news criticizing its leaders, I’d be very skepical and deduce that there is censorshop going on and the offical news could be exaggerated or entirely falsified. Do people in authoritarian countries actually just eat the propaganda? To what extent do they believe the propaganda?
This can be controversial, but my opinion is that religious education normally is the opposite of critical thinking. If you teach the kids to accept beliefs just based on faith, you’re killing critical thinking.
It’s not religion that’s the problem but ideology and lazy thinking in general. How many people in the political parties we oppose just accept the lies being fed to them with no critical thought or investigation?
My point is that religious education trains the kids to believe things without verifying facts, even unbelievable fables. I’m just trying to point a potential source of what we know is a big problem.
Shitlers base is evangelicals. Evangelicals are the biggest religion in the u.s. Evangelicals are the largest single voting bloc in the u.s. Christianity indoctrinates people from birth to believe obvious lies. Shitler is an obvious liar.
Religion is the poisonous tree that has bore us this fruit. It is most definitely not a “both sides” (cringe) issue.
True People saying “im from the government and here to help are the scariest words ever”. Aren’t really any different then people that drill a religious phrase into their kids.
People focus their energies on getting through the day for the most part of their lives. It is very hard for people to muster the time and energy to paying attention to politics, let alone ideologically political propaganda.
The vast majority flat ignore it entirely and remain in an apolitical state. This is a primary function of propaganda: insulating people from political action or thought that might alter the status quo.
Many of the United States have removed teaching critical thinking from their curriculum.
I find way too many people talking about “common sense” as if that was even a thing. It frustrates me to no end.
“common sense”
A set of assumptions(usually false) acquired before age 12.
I’m wondering how you are measuring “common sense” that arrives at “usually false.” Are you ignoring obviously common sense things, like “the sky is up” – since that’s just common sense?
If you are in North America and you draw a line straight up, will you reach the sky in Australia?
Well I didn’t say the sky isn’t also down. (Begrudging upvote.)
You know, you are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct.
I respect your technical smartass response to my technical smartass check attempt.
Decision fatigue is a real thing. Ask anyone who sat through three tests in one day; even if you have studied the material, it’s hard to focus after a while. It’s easy to fill our day with minutia that distracts us from the impostant issues.
Seriously, if you are AWARE of propaganda, you are also aware that you have been influenced by it. Propaganda is pervasive in civilizations. It is simply manipulation. TV ads and guys trying to pick up chicks are everyday uses of propaganda.
I go on Reddit and come here and I nod along and I’m like yes, yes, and then I leave and sometimes it feels like coming up from being underwater. We are quite literally surrounded in propaganda. It has never been easier to disseminate opinions, especially when the majority of our communications (mine for sure) come via text on a screen. It is in every single facet of our lives.
And so I talk to my brother and he always tries to get me to think more, he’s a smart guy. He says things like “Who benefits the most” from whatever, opinion I’ve talked to him about, and so frequently it goes back to corporations. I don’t want to get overtly political, but personally the best way I try to think about things is linearly: this thing we are talking about, trace it to its logical end point and origin. And then feel helpless again.
Something like host over half of all Americans cannot read above a 5th grade level. Almost a third are functionally illiterate.
It’s not that they don’t have critical thinking skills. It’s that the entire lower-90% have been so badly nerfed that it is increasingly difficult for anyone in that cohort to get to a point where they can educate themselves without copious assistance.
And that’s exactly how Republicans prefer the population - uneducated, illiterate, ignorant and gullible. The better with which to scam them for their votes.
Critical thinking has been an increasingly rare skill, partially because people are focusing on conspiracy theories instead.
If you believe you’re the only one feeling this way you’re likely to doubt yourself. If it’s dangerous to voice how you feel, you won’t hear that others share this skepticism.
A lot of people don’t think. But a lot of people do think critically, and they just think differently from you or me.
If we believe nobody thinks critically, how can we even begin to effect change?
Propaganda doesn’t necessarily need to convince people, but can instead attack the peoples ability to differentiate truth and lie by sowing mistrust about the most mundane and conventional things. When people stop believing their own eyes or following logic, they become easier to manipulate. A bit like gas-lighting, where you sort of turn the critical thinking against them, but on a large scale.
There is no greater enemy to logic, common sense and critical thinking than religion. Religion punishes skepticism and logic. In many places you can still be killed for blasphemy. When children discover Santa isn’t real, this should be an opportunity for them to break free of the gaslighting of their family religion, instead many parents double down on the gaslighting. When people are too brainwashed to accept something as simple as “fairy tale creatures are not real” their brains become mush. What would you say if I told you, yesterday on my way home I crossed a footbridge and I saw a man walking on the water. Not only that, the man was a zombie. I saw him raise another man from the dead. We should probably be getting ready for a zombie apocalypse? You would immediately think i was either insane or making some kind of joke. And if you didn’t, I would ask you to give me all your money for my new church.
It’s so nice of you to tell us what would you do and how you’d behave in an hypothetical situation that you have never been nurtured and raised on, and how good you’d do facing it under your current morals and mental framework that may or may not be available during that situation
Good times, critical thinking was had by all
Intelligent people in those countries do realize though…
No one, including you, is immune to propaganda.
I try and explain this to people all the time but many don’t want to believe it.
There are 2 types of people in this world; those who are influenced by propaganda, and those who don’t know they are influenced by propaganda.
Most of hollywood is propaganda. It relies on getting revenue from other sources. If you’ve ever bought a star wars action figure or a marvel funko pop, you’ve fallen for the propaganda. Hollywood isn’t producing art for art’s sake. They’re producing commercials for merchandise.
There’s a third type. People like me see the propaganda everywhere, get a sad laugh out of it every time, and go about my day dodging rain drops and replacing alternators.
IDGAF
Toupee fallacy. Just because you can recognize some of the propaganda, it doesn’t mean you can recognize all of it. You’re not aware of what flies under the radar while still influencing you.
I don’t have anything influencing me except my roommate and my mom, and that’s usually just helping keep their vehicles running, carrying groceries, taking the trash out, and bathing the dog.
I see the politics and propaganda every day, I just don’t give a fuck. Nothing I can do about it anyways.
Ah so you’ve fallen for the propaganda that says you don’t have the power to change anything, that’s just what the small number of elites want the large number of masses to think
I’ve helped the NSA return stolen laptops, and risked my life putting out a forest fire with my hoodie before it got a chance to reach the dead grass field.
Of course there’s things I can and have done to help change the world, but politics ain’t quite my thing.
You’re contradicting yourself my dude. You give enough of a fuck to help people. Doing things for your community is a political action. Maybe you just haven’t gotten the chance to understand your political leanings
So you’ve been propagandized into thinking there’s nothing you can do, so you shouldn’t care.
Nah, I just don’t have the means to do anything.
I’m a repair tech, not a politician.
It’s working.
If you see propaganda everywhere, the it was successful on you. One purpose of propaganda is to erode the fundamental trust in society and sow distrust about anything and anyone, that way people become politically ineffective and easy to manipulate.
I don’t have any significant distrust in society in general, just a heavy distrust of the greedy oligarchs in positions of power.
Meanwhile, the orange turd posted an AI generated image of himself as the next pope…
https://youtube.com/watch?v=5AvLxeTvivY
Go ahead and read some comments there, he done offended even the atheists out there!
I’m not a governor, attorney, judge, senator, etc in any position to directly do anything about the crooked powers in charge, but as a citizen, I guess this is the best I can do, share the news.
Bold of you to assume you recognize every piece of propaganda for what it truly is. And that you have a choice to just ignore it. It often feels like we are in control of what we give attention to and what we choose to retain as factual knowledge but we’re not.
The best we can do is try to recognize when some piece of information, or source, we believe may not be as valid as it once appeared and try to rectify our beliefs moving forward. It’s a never ending job. But if you want to actually have beliefs based in fact there’s no other option.
I believe in mathematics and schematics. I also believe in the right to repair.
I do not believe in invisible deities and I don’t trust most politicians.
Edit: And I damn sure don’t trust AI!
Those are like the most superficial layer of propaganda. The real danger of propaganda is that it doesn’t look like it, it looks like other regular people making you support their interests without you realizing it.
Do you like engines? Do you dislike electric vehicles? Do you like guns? If so, when and where did those ideas come from? You weren’t born with them.
The real propaganda is money.
Like, whoever designed the idea of rent (which is basically a safe place to perform the biological function of sleep and store your stuff).
You don’t own a damn thing anymore, nor do I. But for real, whoever invented the concept of rent, invented the concept of taxing humans for the right to sleep in a safe space.
Edit: Do you own the dirt under your feet?
Didn’t think so.
Do you own the dirt under your feet?
The house around me, and the dirt under it, yes.
I mean, honestly, I’m questioning if anything my parents told me is even real, or is it just exaggerated to make themselves seem like great parents in order to diminish my view on their toxicity.
It’s hard to distinguish between what’s a genuine doubt from a conspiracy theory.
That’s the thing with people.
Some have zero skepticism, and believe everything they see.
Others are overly skeptical and distrusts everything, including science.
It’s hard to find the right balance.
I find the right balance (for me) to be actively seeking out conversations that challenge my beliefs and worldview, being open to being wrong, and developing a good bullshit detector. I guess growing up during the Cold War helped instill in me a fair amount of distrust for authority of any kind helped. Even still I believed the propaganda about the US being a beacon of freedom and democracy until I was exposed to the truth of the matter, but still, I sought out counter-narratives and listened to the weight of evidence and was willing to admit to being wrong and changing my views, so… shrug
Yes, but, how does one actually develop “a good bullshit detector”? We all think we have one of those. Especially people who don’t. And thinking that when it’s not true is the hook, line and sinker that gets people deeply into dangerous conspiracies.
The first step is not accepting everything you read at face value. Start investigating the claims you see on the news or social media and you will develop a sense for which ones tend to be bullshit and which ones tend not to be, you will learn to recognize the bullshit ideas not because they’re obviously bullshit at first, but because they’re surrounded by the kind of language that bullshit claims are often smuggled into. It’s just pattern-matching, it’s a skill like everything else and you can practice it and get better. One way to do this is to just find a news article, scroll to a random point in it, highlight a sentence that makes a truth claim about something, and go ‘That seems like bullshit, I’ll look for corroborating sources’ even if you’re sure it’s true. Then go do find 3-4 other sources that talk about the same thing and see how they shade things differently. Aside from learning to match the pattern you also learn which sources are more or less reliable, more or less biased, etc. A good tool for this specifically for news is GroundNews, every article they show includes ratings for how biased the source is, a list of other sources that also report on the same incident and what their biases are, etc. Plus it’s been my experience that looking at things from several angles is kind of like drawing a bunch of lines that pass near the point of truth - the more lines you draw, the narrower the space in which the truth must reside, so the easier it is to find the center.
The second and perhaps most important step is being willing to be wrong, especially in public. Be concerned not about whether or not you will look bad but whether or not you are putting good information out there. Develop the habit of stopping in the middle of your political rant or whatever and going ‘Wait, am I sure about this? I should check.’ In a similar vein, get into the habit of providing sources for your own claims, even if only because that reinforces the habit of checking yourself. I discuss politics a lot online and have often found myself going ‘Oh yeah, well <this> is how the world really works!’, then I go looking for a source to cite and discover that I was wrong. Don’t flee from that uncomfortable feeling, swallow your pride and embrace it. The more you get into the habit of checking yourself the easier it becomes to remember to check others too, and again, the more familiar you become with what truth and bullshit look like from the inside and from the outside. It will also help you develop a bit of humility, which is unrelated but still a good thing to have.
Also on the subject of sources, look for authoritative sources first. If you’re investigating a claim about vaccines making people sick, for example, don’t look for news articles about it; go straight to the CDC where they have data about adverse incident rates for vaccines that is publicly available. When you hear about something that happened in a particular place check the local newspapers first because they’re likely to have picked up the story before anyone else and are more committed to providing accurate information that’s relevant to locals than the national media, they tend to sensationalize stories less. This isolates you somewhat from some of the more egregious bias and spin out there.
Up until recently, I thought carrots were good for seeing in the dark. It’s something my mother told me over and over as a kid. I never bothered to research it - I liked carrots after all.
How would a carrot help with seeing in the dark? All my carrots emit zero light not even a faint glow.
You need to bite off the end first
Do you believe in religion? Do you believe in any home remedies? Do you eat the same foods you grew up with?
It’s a very rare person that questions literally everything and logically analyzes why they think what they think.
As someone who has always done this, this has been a very hard lesson to learn. It doesn’t make sense to me how you can go through life and NOT do that. Like… Fuck dude… I just feel like everyone is so fucking DUMB. Like I don’t want to be narcissistic and shit but Jesus people … Maybe try a little!!!
eat the same foods as you grew up with
That’s unfair. Food has a subjective component, so naturally most people who enjoyed their childhoods will rate the foods of their youth higher than others might.
I more meant the choice to be an omnivore or vegetarian or vegan or carnivore. Most people don’t question why they do what they do.
Questioning beliefs takes a lot of time and courage. Very few people do it.
What does eating the same foods you grew up with have to do with it?
i try all new things even bugs, but some foods I grew up with are delicious
That is fantastic. I’m glad you like them.
The difference here, presumably, is that you’ve thought about what you eat and continue to do so knowing full well what that means, whatever it means. But~ not everybody thinks about it. Some people are carried forward through life just by the sheer momentum of their childhood.
And I say some people, but really, everybody is in some way or another. It takes active effort to change your course in life.
For example, no idea what your diet is like: if you eat a lot of junk food, do you know how much sugar you’re consuming? Have you ever thought about whether that’s a good thing?
Did you choose to eat meat? What’s your logic? Which animals? Would you eat dog?
Did you choose to eat meat?
Yes.
What’s your logic?
There is none, I wholly accept that it is entirely illogical and unethical. I am addicted to the flavor. If I could have the flavors and textures without the killing i would switch in a heartbeat, however.
Which animals?
Any so long as it is delicious. Even human as long as the human wanted it and was not killed for the meat.
Would you eat dog?
Yes. It’s no different than pig in my eyes.
These questions probably don’t work on me because I was raised in a vegan/vegetarian restaurant as a child.
They work perfectly actually. You have a proper grasp of your situation. I do question your moral choice of putting flavor above killing, but you get the concept and have put the thought in.
That was my original point. The VAST majority of people never question their diet. You did. That’s rare.
My own choice to be vegetarian has it’s own moral issues, but my thought is that: if I have to sit in a box 10 hours and a day work to survive in capitalism, I won’t expect less from farm animals.
I do question your moral choice of putting flavor above killing
To be clear, I do not. What I’m doing is morally wrong, in fact, it’s morally terrible, but I do it anyway.
