Grifters, con-artists and fascists all use the truth to sell a lie. The truth is that we have been steadily raised on a diet of mass produced garbage, optimised purely for profit while disregarding all public and environmental welfare in its construction and delivery. The lie is that the grifters, con-artists and fascists are not just doing the exact same thing to the extreme.
They offer what they call good, wholesome and honest solutions to contrast with the big globalist elitist fat-cats selling expensive unnatural poisons. But natural or synthetic, poisons can kill you the same type of dead.
Donald Trump successfully sold the slogan: Drain the Swamp
as long as the “truth” they’re advertising is scary and misunderstood somehow, they can sell anything while they’re pandering to the listener’s ego… this is Alex Jones’ entire ethos…
Pandering to egos, or what I see more frequently, predating on fears. I run my own email server, partly because I enjoy watching the diversity of spam and trends, partly so i know what new scams to look out for. I receive far more “drink this to cure your disease once a day!” types of emails than I do “smoking hot babe wants to send you a message” types of emails.
the pandering can be pretty sly, although there is as much tits and ass as necessary… Rush Limbaugh pandered to his listener’s ego by convincing him that he already knew everything he needed to know… he did that sort of with his method of bitching about the world, and they sat there and ate it up… and just got stupider by the minute… Rogan does the same thing… it’s the entire right-wing playbook, all the way back to Goebbels…
the idiot’s response to every good conspiracy theory is: SEE I TOLD YOU… they just get addicted to listening for that SEE I TOLD YOU ego stroke moment…
I like to pretend it’s a 5D chess long con (it’s not, but pretending is fun). It’s much easier to scoop off the scum when it floats to the top, and trump got a whole bunch of them to take the mask off so they can be arrested for treason.
Similarly it’s fun to pretend Apartheid Clyde went full fascist so that neonazis would replace their coal rollers with low-poly 90s video game pedestrian crushers to own the libs.
trump got a whole bunch of them to take the mask off
what the hell are you talking about
A phrase that refers to someone being openly fascist/nazi rather than trying to hide their true intentions.
Mask-on: Bush era GOP or current European far right.
Mask-off: DeSantis
i don’t like pretending any kind of chess… it’s a scatterbrain thing to do…
It implies the number of opponents isn’t changing, in a thread about how they increase in number.
Taking the mask off isn’t always a good sign. Sometimes it means the hate is being normalized.
It makes sense that the people who will believe one category of such “simple and easy explanations and solutions” will also believe other categories of “simple and easy explanations and solutions” - believing crystals will help you tune your soul to feel better might not at all be the same thing as believing all the problems of society are due to people with the least power in it (immigrants, the “lazy” poor) but it certainly is the product of the same kind of cognitive take on the World and emotional desire for understandable “explanations” and silver-bullet “solutions” so the path from one to the next is way shorter than it might seem if all one looks at is the information space rather than the psychological and intellectual characteristics of the “believers”.
Or to put it in cruder terms: both kinds of outlook in the World appeal to the the same kind of sucker.
I think it’s important to realize that almost everyone is at least occasionally a sucker. There’s a grift that targets basically every personality type. There’s grift for health conscious folks, for worried parents, for ‘I’m so much smarter than others’, for gamers, for outdoorsy types, there’s something for everyone. If you aren’t careful you’ll be laughing at the other ‘idiots’ while you yourself fall into a different trap.
Honestly once you start paying attention it’s really scary how many different and seemingly totally unrelated topics can be used to pull people into facism. So many times I’ve clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
So many times I’ve clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
The strange thing to me is how much the Youtube search results and suggestions have changed, even just in the last few months. I mostly go there to listen to music and I used to get stuff I was actually interested in.
Yesterday I went looking for a specific video. Of the top 15 results, only 2 were close to what I wanted. It wasn’t even the top 2. One relevant result, then a bunch of political clickbait. Zero connection to music. And the autoplay will feed you the same thing if it’s on.
A couple weeks ago, YouTube was still giving me a whopping 3 relevant results at the top before turning on the BS algorithm hose.
It’s the anger / fear feedback loop.
The more angry / scared you become, the more videos you watch. The more you watch the more angry / scared you become…. etc.
The more you watch the more money YT makes. And that’s all they care about.
I agree that at in some ways and at some points in time we’re all suckers.
I once was scammed and analysing the whole thing later I had to admit the scammer came at in the right ways to get me to draw the conclusions that better served his objectives and use my wants against myself.
Frankly, I both was impressed and was felt it as quite an eye opener on my own blindsides and the limits of intelligence.
Not saying he was an amazing scammer and that’s only why I was scammed (frankly I have no idea were in the hierarchy of scam artists the guy was), rather that, as you pointed out, we’re all suckers in some way or another.
So many times I’ve clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
I watched one youtube video which contained a complete takedown and exposure of Tucker Carlson and his lies (back when he was on Fox). Of course this meant that youtube thought I was interested in Tucker Carlson, so immediately all my recommendations was to actual official Tucker Carlson videos and similar right wing talking heads.
I had to expunge the anti-Tucker Carlson video from my viewing history to get rid of all those shitty recommendations.
People refuse to try to address that sort of wooly thinking when it is low stakes then when it becomes high stakes act shocked to see the people around them acting irrationally. One’s hypothetical friend who refused to take the vaccine because they thought it had a mind control chip in it and died as a result invariably was previously banging on about how their acupuncturist was going to help them win the lottery and people simply indulged them because “what’s the harm in them having funny beliefs about things?” The only time you actually could get through to people around you about these harmful ways of thinking is when it’s about things that don’t really matter much. If you wait until it’s life or death it’s too late to get though to them.
The truth is that we have been steadily raised on a diet of mass produced garbage
This is the lie though. It’s the “widely believed fact” that makes it easy to accept the other lies.
Most of our food is just “fine”.
Nutritional content of grains, fruits and vegetables has declined over the past 70 years
The world is decidedly off-track to reducing Sodium levels in foods by 2030, salt is considered the leading dietary indication for non-communicable disease. I think we’re off-target for all the diet-related sustainable development health goals?
And this is before more localised issues like food deserts, natural disasters, recommendations influenced by industry, etc. Or even other issues like additives, factory farming, sugary drinks being cheaper and safer than the water supplies…
Don’t get me wrong, many of us have access to a much larger variety of food from across the world, if we can afford it, the fortification of many foods helps maintain some forms of nutrition, and regulations have made a lot of our food safer. But overall, our produce is worsening in quality and the cheaper per calorie/time foods are what people are forced to eat, and it is killing them.
But I also meant less literal forms of diet too.
yes if you eat only a high sugar and fat diet you will die a premature death, but honesty it’s still probably healthier than the diets of our 200,000 year old ancestors (I asset confidently with no evidence).
I’m just assuming that when any type of farming was a rare occurrence, disease, malnutrition and poisoning were much more common.
For every complicated and difficult question there’s a simple, and above all, wrong solution.
This exact thing happened to my Pilates teacher of a decade. We used to joke about all the woo. Then she somehow discovered Josh Rogan and things began to go downhill. What if Trump is right about this one thing? Aren’t there two sides to everything? When covid hit she went completely down the rabbit hole, antivax, global conspiracies, the works. Just about everything in that article.
I considered her a good friend. She was the only one who brought flowers to my house when my mother died. I haven’t seen her since early in covid, after the first lockdowns.
And I read another article about this same phenomena about two years go, which of course my google fu is too weak this morning to find. But the anecdotal point here is that this is not the first time people have noted this phenomenon.
Josh Rogan
The sh is silent. Unfortunately, he doesn’t hear people telling him to be quiet.
Ssshhh.
“Thanks to hundreds of years of treating the male body as the default in medicine, we simply do not know enough about how disease manifests in the female body.”
This is big one. I’m a woman who’s been misdiagnosed for the simplest of things. Twice I’ve blown my ACL, and both times it took 6-8 months to diagnose … even tho the first time I pulled the ACL right off the bone. My rotator cuff took 20 yrs. All because women aren’t supposed to hurt themselves at work.
I’m sick of the BS
Yeah, people often talk about scammers and grifters and how “insert-ableist-slurs” and “gullible” people who believe them are, but none of those “I’d ever fall for that!!1” types ever look at why people were so easily convinced, what large chunks of care are missing in society that people have no choice but to be drawn to the “alternatives” no matter how bogus or even dangerous - at some point the system has let you down so dramatically that even if it did finally offer a solution, you’d have no reason to trust it.
The result of which is instead of trying to better the system so that fewer people get treated poorly or not at all, they just shift the blame to those who fell victim to the scan, and can pat themselves on the back for being “better” without actually doing fuck all but ridicule vulnerable people.
People like that are just as much a part of the problem - the grifters give them someone to ridicule and feel superior to, they pander to the ego of the “unconvinced” as much as, if not more, than to the ego of the people they’re trying to scam, giving that (ego boost) up even if it is to do the right thing (but in favour of those these individuals see as lesser) just doesn’t make sense to them.
It’s such an exhausting problem that so many people hold society back from meeting everyone’s needs, because society fails to meet everyone’s needs and thereby creates people who hold society back from meeting everyone’s needs, because…
It feels like being locked in a room full of people flinging shit at each other because they are mad that people won’t stop flinging shit at them and everytime you try to gently suggest they all just stop flinging shit they just start flinging it at you until you shut up.
Crab mentality is by design, and the only way out is to look at who’s fucking bucket it is.
So
it’s such an exhausting problem that so many people hold society back from meeting everyone’s needs
while this is true on the surface, to find the core of the problem you have to look at who actually benefit from this state of affairs and never forget that it’s those few who hold society back, not the many people they pit against each other to stop us from turning on them.
How does one find those few people? And how can they be worked against? I honestly don’t know and I don’t know how to find out. Do I ask ChatGPT???
Shit, maybe I should ask ChatGPT…
There is definitely a small set of powerful, rich, and influential people who “benefit”, but I don’t think it’s a pyramid of nefarious overlords so much as it is just a large web of people acting on their own interests.
The same could be said for people with crab mentality. They are acting on their impulses, values, and opinions, born from likely unfortunate circumstances, when they drag their immediate others down. They aren’t thinking about holding society back at large.
Plus, quite often things are the way they are because of historical inertia. It’s why historians place make such a big deal about continuity. For example, many laws we have can be traced back to some series of awful events that happened to a set of people. But those awful events were probably caused by yet another set of awful circumstances.
If you’re looking for some group of people to blame for all of your woes, you might just become a fascist.
There is definitely a small set of powerful, rich, and influential people who “benefit”, but I don’t think it’s a pyramid of nefarious overlords so much as it is just a large web of people acting on their own interests.
The same could be said for people with crab mentality. They are acting on their impulses, values, and opinions, born from likely unfortunate circumstances, when they drag their immediate others down. They aren’t thinking about holding society back at large.
Those are all just crabs in the bucket. Some of the more aggressively single-minded ones are nearer to the top of the pile than others.
If you’re looking for some group of people to blame for all of your woes, you might just become a fascist.
right, because looking to free yourself from the grip of fascism = fascism.
You “enlightened” centrists never cease to amaze me with the bullshit you pull out.
You’re entirely reading what you want to read out of my words, and then promptly applying some vague label as if you’re somehow the most enlightened yourself. As if, probabilistically, we both aren’t in very similar circumstances being here this very moment in the system that you seem to so despite.
I don’t actually think you’re asking in good faith with the bot joke, but if you really care you don’t need to look that hard, they are literally all around you (the person who pays your wages, the person who collects your rent, the government that allows them to continue to do so), you just need to open your eyes to how they exploit you and the rest of society.
It’s called capitalism, look it up.
And no, abolishing capitalism isn’t fascism, it’s quite literally the opposite (since capitalism in decay leads directly to fascism as we can see being demonstrated around us in real time).
The other person saying that targeting an individual group of people turns you in to a fascist is full of shit in this instance - capitalism isn’t a marginalised or oppressed group it is an active marginalisation and oppressing system, and standing up to oppressors does not equal oppression, it’s literally liberation.
It certainly feels like a runaway process
Not just medicine, also things like crash safety. Female crash test dummies just entered use in the past couple of years, and still aren’t required.
Awful to hear about stuff like this, it continues to blow my mind how privileged men are without even realizing it.
That privilege had its price.
Our medical knowledge didn’t come from from doctors sitting down with pen and paper and figuring stuff out. It came from field research, trail and error on alive and dead subjects. Subjects that two world wars provided by the millions. It just so happened to be that those subjects were mostly white men between 14 and 50 years of age in dire need of medical treatment. Naturally our knowledge of male physiology skyrocketed during and after that period. On the contrary, when it comes to psychology, men are light years behind women. While trying to “”“cure female hysteria”“”, we got a far deeper look into the function of our brains on the female side than on the male side. Even though most of these women took part as voluntarily as someone would take shrapnel in the war. I’m trying to say that it’s not just as simple as men or women have it better, it all boils down to historical availability of patients for research.It also developed from scientists trying to keep things simple. Women’s bodies are a lot more complicated than men’s in terms of varying ratios of hormones, pregnancy, etc that have to be accounted for in studies. Same reason HeLa cells and genetically-identical mice are used.
It’s still not a justifiable reason to neglect 50% of the population under the incorrect assumption that human physiology is the same across the board.
It’s still not a justifiable reason to neglect 50% of the population under the incorrect assumption that human physiology is the same across the board.
I’m not sure who’s worse. The people planning research who still mistakenly believe that it’s correct to just study one group and presume it applies to a group that would have been more complicated to study or the ones who know it doesn’t work that way but just pretend it does because it’s more convenient.
Don’t get me wrong, there are contexts where doing an imperfect job now and trying to fill in the details later is the best strategy. But I don’t believe that’s actually what’s going on most of the time.
It’s true that wartime produces massive leaps forward in all sorts of technology. And the military does use and abuse soldiers (of all sexes) for research. But patients involved in medical research are almost always ordinary people, recruited by their doctors. And we’ve only been doing medical research properly since the 1970s, after the thalidomide scandal happened. The first randomised controlled trial was conducted in 1948.
Most trials avoid recruiting pregnant women, despite the fact that if the trials are successful the treatments will be used in pregnant women (unless known to be mutagenic from animal studies) without any testing at all.
And many trials exclude women because of the risk of pregnancy, or hormonal fluctuations making it more complicated to interpret results (despite hormonal fluctuations in men being just as wild but much less predictable).
I know you feel hard done by. But your perspective is warped. We still have medical professionals debating whether the female orgasm exists, FFS.
While trying to “”“cure female hysteria”“”, we got a far deeper look into the function of our brains on the female side than on the male side.
As far as I know, treatments for “hysteria” tended to range from quackery at best to sexual assault at worst. You’re going to have to do a lot better than a bare unsupported asstertion if you want me to believe science actually learned anything of value from it.
That’s why I put it in triple quotes, because I know that hysteria research is questionable at best and straight torture at worst.
I started doing Yoga 25 years ago after fracturing a couple of vertebrae and needing to learn to walk/move again. It literally saved me from a life lead in an opiate haze to control the pain.
That said, this article comes as no surprise as there has always been an undercurrent of of bat-shit crazy control freaks in the “alternative movement”.
Are you trying to tell me that easily manipulated mindless clowns flock to fringe conspiracies and bullshit pseudo-science filled snake-oil wellness programs?
Color me surprised!
The article threw out a lot of potential reasons but the unsaid part about all of them was that they wouldn’t be an issue if so many people weren’t so goddamn stupid.
Isolation?
Mistrust of the government?
Poor treatment of women’s health?
In all cases, it takes two parts to drive someone to conspiracy theories. A catalyst like one of the above, plus fuel of pure goddamn stupidity.
I read it in its entirety.
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I don’t think she meant to mention you. OP is a mastodon user, and it automatically mentions the OP plus the person you are replying to when creating a response.
Oh I see.
There’s so many pipelines out there
And curiously enough all leading to fascism.
Ted Stevens was right all along.
What isn’t a pipeline to facism?
Libraries!
Plenty of fascists got their start reading 1984 and distrusting the news.
I mean… That seems like an argument for equipping people with better literacy skills given that any competent reading of 1984 would turn you away from fascism.
I don’t know man, with how misused the term is these days, not trusting the government is fascism. And a proper reading of it certainly gives you a distrust of the machine.
not trusting the government is fascism.
That absolutely is not fascism. Stop listening to bullshit that’s designed to piss you off and drive a wedge between you and others.
how misused the term is these days
The term isn’t becoming more misued; more people are accurately fitting the definition.
I said libraries, not books!
Antifascism? I hope?
You’d think so, but I knew a guy
It’s complicated because some antifa are just a different bunch of mindless tribalists.
It really depends if you ended up antifa for social reasons (mainly being part of something) or for having thinked a lot about what are your principles and politics and figured out that haters have to be stopped early, before they get to the stage were they’re hurting lots of people - the latter kind will likely also spot hate replacing reason in themselves and thus stop it before they hurt somebody who might very well be innocent.
Sadly a fraction of self-proclaimed antifa are just another hater mob, just raging against different groups of people than the fascists, which is how you end up with things like cruxifiction-by-social-media against people for the sin of not treating slogans as Sacred Truth.
I like the antifa who go up and punch people saying horrible shit - I feel like getting punched is a fair reaction to calling for genocide. It’s visceral, it makes a point, and the guy on stage probably deserves to be hit.
I don’t like the ones that try to police the Internet and exclude anyone with extreme views. Engaging people like that is the only way to make them less extreme. Isolating them only shows them their only companionship will be through their little cults
I support strongly free speech, I just think sometimes getting punched is a fair response
Engaging people like that is the only way to make them less extreme.
Tolerating people like that is the best way to let them chip away at and destroy a decent tolerant society.
Not tolerate - engage.
You challenge them, maybe just tell them what they’re saying is wrong, ideally you gently prod them to acknowledge conflicts in their ideology.
We have to offer them a path back to acceptance or they’ll always be on the other side, ever growing in number
Yeah, I think the same.
As I see it, when one decides that the Rules Of Society shouldn’t limit their own words and actions towards others, its only fair that the Rules Of Society also don’t protect them from the words and actions of others towards them - “live by the sword, die by the sword” and all that.
Ironically, antifa is fascism. Its like they lack self awareness.
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Well, go down the list of what makes fascism fascism, and they meet like 80 to 100% of them, depending on what list you use.
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… an almost infinite number of things?
I’ll start.
- Knitting socks
You should check out the cottage-core tradwife trend going around. Some extremist Christians are doing the “going off grid” and “back to our heritage” thing on social media.
Some of them are doing this and then freezing to death with their whole shitty family.
- Pipeline to Antifacism
- Baking cookies.
“Step one, add only the whitest flour, free from any impurities.”
They bake cookies. They bake them in swastika shapes.
Well, fuck!
Somepeople think being a tradwife is fascism, and that would include knitting socks.
I think anything can be twisted into a pipeline to fascism if prominent people within a community are pushing it. Let’s take My Little Pony for example. You would think that would be the last place for fascism to foment, but there are certain communities online that have pushed it in that direction.
Doctor Xavier’s School for Gifted Children
Love and acceptance?
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The way people define fascism today? Everything is fascism. It’s fascist for you to even ask this!
Not really. People use the word in a pretty measured way. Usually people with fascist views just say that because they’re offended at being described accurately and want to try to rationalize it away.
People use “fascism” when they mean “authoritarian”. But that’s not a fun Italian word with Hitler connotations.
They mean fascism.
“Scratch a hippy, find a fascist.”
