I sadly don’t think that’s the case. I still talk to people every day who are parroting 50s-era anti-communist propaganda straight from the mouth of the CIA unironically. Circumstances may be dire, that I don’t dispute, but I feel like they’re going to have to be considerably worse before most people are willing to overcome their indoctrinated bias and start considering alternatives that don’t involve ‘maybe make capitalism suck a little less?’
Kissinger was Jewish, so that was antisemitism. That’s how it works (according to Israel), any political statement or action made against anyone who is Jewish is antisemitism, right? :P
Hmm, someone call maga a waaaaahmbulance, it’s nappy time.
If you feel like hunting for it I’d be happy to look at it, but I’m not gonna go digging in your posts for who knows how long to find it.
I agree that’s definitely the case, but I think the problem here is that most Americans can’t tell minorities apart, they see brown skin and assume. I once watched a grown adult yell ‘Mexican go home’ to a Pakistani couple, and this sort of thing is far too common.
Yup. When he did those nazi salutes I didn’t think ‘omg he’s secretly a nazi’, it was ‘omg that fucking 12-year-old edgelord cringe-factory is so fucking proud of himself for pulling that off.’
To be clear I do think he’s a nazi, just not because of that salute. Dude has some weird ideas about ‘spreading his seed’ and shit that I’ve only ever seen in fanatically religious communities and among white supremacists.
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.
No, I have to assume he’s doing it on purpose and thinks he looks cool and fails to realize what a complete fucking moron he looks like.
I have been reading The Onion for decades, and it’s bad when even I can’t tell the difference between legit stupid shit Trump says and made up stupid shit.
I dunno what this article is about, all I see is that image of elongated muskrat being bad at wearing hats. :P
Sure, I realize it’s not universal, I’m just saying counter-examples exist because I am one.
I’m also a pretty non-violent person, I’ve never been in a fight or thrown a punch in my life, even as a kid. But yeah that’s probably not the norm.
Yeah same, I’ll buy like a 6-pack of small bottles of Barq’s like once every few months maybe, and drink it over the course of a week or so, or I’ll have a coke with a meal at a restaurant or something.
Nowadays, I make a gallon of tea every couple days, I have a 40oz water bottle that I drink ~1.5-2.5 of a day.
You are conflating civilization with empire, the two words have different definitions for a reason. Imperialism is, according to Miriam-Webster, ‘the policy, practice, or advocacy of extending the power and dominion of a nation especially by direct territorial acquisitions or by gaining indirect control over the political or economic life of other areas’. New Zealand qualifies as civilization in most peoples’ books, it’s not an empire, and there are lots of other similar examples out there.
Holy shit you’re the best, thank you!
You know, I just realized I don’t get it (or at least not as much) with Voyager on mobile, and I didn’t even think about it. I’m using the Alexandrite UI on desktop and it’s bad about it, I haven’t found any options for it in the settings or anything. I noticed it a few times on reddit, but I was subbed to so many communities and they were so much more active that it almost never happened. Oh well.
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
That’s a fair point actually, and one I’ve not heard before. I’m not sure it’s worth trying to convert all (checks notes) 174 countries/territories to right-hand drive, but that’s reasonable.
Yeah, I like Scaled, I’ve switched to using that now. Thanks!
And yeah with Active I’ve noticed it seems to put the same posts at the top if I check it multiple times a day (I’ll often pop in for 20-30 minutes while waiting on something else or whatever), so hopefully Scaled does a better job about mixing that up.
As an aside: I am subbed to several political/news communities and I keep seeing the same post cross-posted to all 3 of them back to back, do you know of a way to avoid that? I want the other content from those subs but seeing the same ‘human fire hose of shit spews some more shit’ article 2-3 times in a row is annoying.
Yeah, I think after reading a couple replies in here I’m gonna go make an account on lemmy.ml and see how it goes. I just don’t want to be account-hopping every 5 minutes or whatever, I want a place where I can get the posts I want without the bullshit. I left reddit for many of the reasons comfy mentioned, so lemmy.world does not seem to be the place for that.
That’s interesting. Like it seems that, like most people, he had a complex relationship with his heritage and the way it manifested in the world. But what’s especially telling is despite him making the antisemitic comment about breaking of the 1973 ceasefire it turns out he gave them the green light to break it, so that makes it seem like that comment might’ve just been an act for the benefit of others. Saying the equivalent of ‘Oh lawd, those silly Israelis are breaking ceasefires again’, etc, to conceal or misdirect from his involvement in giving them the go-ahead.
But also this isn’t particularly relevant to the joke I was making. Which is that Israel calls anything said or done against Jewish people for any reason antisemitism, so I was turning that back on Israel for doing/saying things against a Jew. It’s funny regardless of Kissinger’s relationship with his ethnicity/religion or Israel because it’s about Israel, not Kissinger.