…whether it was by a cult, by propaganda, by an algorithm, etc…
And did the person ever recover from it?
“Well, that’s just how it is”
Person attempting to justify an injustice they also suffer, without even a thought about whether it being “how it is” might actually be connected to all the people saying dumb stuff like “Well, that’s just how it is.”
I learned recently that there’s a word for this, which is “thought-terminating cliche”
Its all good, man
It Is What It Is
This is one of the few acceptable ones IMO. Sometimes, something is bullshit, you know it’s bullshit, everyone else knows it’s bullshit, but you have no ability to fix or avoid said bullshit, so… it is what it is.
And it ain’t what it ain’t.
Ok Yogi
And now you’re going to notice them all over the internet.
I just respond “if that wasn’t how it is there’d be nothing to talk about.”
Maybe not the worst but the most recent one is my father in law. You know the type: baby boomer who had every advantage growing up but didn’t avail himself but still managed to eke out a comfortable life while working at the business his dad started and he inherited. He doesn’t take in the bucks but it allows him and my mil to own a comfortable home in an area that is only going up in value. Anyway…
As you can imagine super religious, super right wing, trump loving, gay hating (has a gay brother that he’s estranged from), you know… the usual. What gets me is remember trump did an interview a week or two ago where he said that all federal employees are “crooked and dishonest and must be held accountable”? He couldn’t agree more! Guess who my wife (his daughter) and I work for? Yeah…
Happened recently actually.
TW: Talks of SA, Maga
Tap for spoiler
In class we somehow got into a debate of politics and it went as you expect. Teacher asks if abortion should be legal, which she agrees but the two guys in the class disagree. The idiot guy starts arguing that the anti abortion laws are warnings for “”““the girls who can’t keep their legs shut””“”. Even when the teacher tried to give examples of rape cases, he just kept repeating it like he was right. The girl, which I’ll call Jessy, tore his shit up. Teacher stops the debate and we take a break. I have a lot more respect for Jessy.
I sincerely don’t understand how someone can be that fucking deluded, and not see a problem with it.
Well my mother said that she would forgive me for rejecting her religion (JWs) if I came back to the church. I was 18. I threw that letter out and haven’t heard from her in the 27ish years since.
Pro tip kids: conditional love is not love - it’s control.
Covid. People are still pretending there’s no pandemic in 2024.
I meaaan, there is no pandemic in 2024. We fucked the whole thing up and it’s just a regular ol’ endemic disease killing people every year that could have been prevented. Weeeeee!
Jehovah’s Witnesses, who rejoice in the deaths of children. The whole thing is utterly bizarre.
Worked with one a while back. She was trying to get out. Her whole family abandoned her. She finally went back and agreed to the arranged marriage temple leadership was demanding. Was immediately pregnant after the wedding. Forced to quit her job to be a stay at home mom.
Firmly believe such behavior should be in our modern concept of slavery.
Magats
Does dehumanizing them help?
Edit: From the downvotes it seems that most people here think “yes!”
I don’t think so, because dehumanization is kind of their whole mantra, and I’d rather not stoop so low.
They’re people, just not very bright people.
They don’t care. They are so deep in their cult, nothing can pull them out. If tomorrow, Trump came out, completely lucid, and admitted everything was a hoax, his supporters would just shift to another cult leader.
Also, at one point, they referred to themselves as Centipedes. They probably got tricked into it, but they still did it proudly. Calling them Magats isn’t much different.
Can you tell me how to say that differently? If people from America are Americans, people who believe in Catholicism are Catholics, people who believe in MAGA are what exactly? It isn’t Republican, because they are a subgroup, like Jacobites. It isn’t to dehumanize them, it is just what they would be called from what I would expect.
Maggots has a different spelling, which is what i know you are referring to, but maybe they should have choose a different name/slogan to go under
Maga is mainstream Republican now
My brother got fucked up psychologically from murdering Iraqis and Afghans and then came home and started “self-medicating” with meth while spending all day sitting in his house alone while listening to far-right propaganda like OAN. He tried to check himself in for treatment at the VA but they committed malpractice which nearly killed him, and he responded violently, which put a flag on his record making it difficult for him to get help in the future, while at the same time giving him a deep distrust of doctors. He was incredibly paranoid and accused everyone of being part of some sort of conspiracy against him and would make violent threats, veiled just enough to not be actionable. Eventually, he went over to someone’s house with a gun, but the cops had been watching his house and they showed up, he pulled a gun on them and got shot in the arm, which he lost the use of, but he eventually recovered somewhat on account of getting off the meth while in jail. He’s still a fascist and still listens to all the same shit, but he’s at regular fascist levels of paranoid-schizophrenia now.
I don’t give a shit about him but the pain he put my family through, a memory is burned into my mind of tears in my mother’s eyes as she gets another text and it’s another crisis and she can’t enjoy even a single night out at dinner because she has to act like a 911 operator 24/7 - and whenever I think about any of the people responsible for the stupid, pointless wars that caused all this, Bush, Obama, Biden, Trump, and all the rest, I remember that we got off incredibly easy, that our suffering was absolutely nothing compared to the actual victims of our country’s wanton slaughter and pointless wars of aggression, and I multiply the pain I felt in that moment and the trauma throughout the whole experience by a thousand, a hundred thousand, by as much as my mind is even capable of comprehending which is still only a tiny fraction of the reality, and I focus it into pure hatred directed towards all the people responsible for the wars.
The Goebbels speech for total war:
In all fairness I went there to see what the issue is, the top post was about ants and most things that popped up were good memes. Which communities are you referring to? I’m guessing not c/earth or something…
Threads like this, with highly upvoted comments like
americans are more propagandized than they think citizens of the DPRK are
They also use sarcasm try to push the narrative that North Korea is actually just fine, OK?
Guys you don’t understand; the West has spoken; we MUST hate North Korea, our governments have already decreed it so.
Many of them are also seemingly physically incapable of communicating without hexbear’s custom reaction images, which is a weird behavior common to many cults. Makes it harder to communicate with the outgroup.
I think LW is defederated from them (or vice versa) so you can’t post over there, but for further examples, try making an account over there and saying that maybe, just maybe, Putin did a bad thing by invading Ukraine, and they’re defending an imperialist.
Yeah these things sound awful. Thanks for the pointers.
There are six companies that control a very large percentage of the media consumed by Americans. They are all mega corporations. The media Americans consume is mostly corporate propaganda, and it’s invisible to us. It’s the water we swim in.
Whatever opinions the oligarchs want us to have are dictated to us.
It is not a coincidence that all our national political races come down to a wire, that we are divided almost 50/50. We are being intentionally divided so that we don’t unite and challenge the oligarchy.
John Stewart did a great bit where station after station reads the exact same script over and over again. It’s unsettling.
It’s not just the news. It’s TV shows, movies, books, periodicals, commercials - even music. The oligarchs have massive influence over all of it and can manipulate the public at will.
My ex got radicalized on Stormfront and accused me of “muddying his bloodline”.
And yes he did eventually realize that some of that was bullshit, he is not like he was before he got propagandized but not as bad as he was in the thick of it.
Can you explain what Stormfront is? I don’t want to get put on a watch list 😅
White power nonsense. He ended up speaking a whole language I didn’t understand. Was absolutely convinced he had some deep understanding of reality that I did not. I think he still holds on to some of it but quitting alcohol helped and getting a job helped, he sort of had to hit bottom to bounce back.
Jebus! He’s lucky that you stayed IMO, that’s some crazy kill your family brain washing.
I left when he tried to choke me in bed (woke me up, not sex play), then realized what he was doing and stopped and freaked out.
When we first left my older kids said they wouldn’t even go to his funeral if he died. They have since reconciled but certainly are not close - they and I appreciate that he’s trying now, but I have to say that when I left and my life got so much better while his got so much worse I did feel a sort of happiness about it. A breakup is never one sided, I did also do and say things I regret, but time kinda proved he was the problem.
I guess everyone has a crazy ex but I honestly did not see that coming, we had over 15 good years before he lost it. And I absolutely blame the right wing fascist conversion machine.
Any religion.
COVID, MAGA, Q Anon, support by poor people for defunding of schools and infrastructure even as bridges collapse and water systems are becoming poisonous while supporting building new tactical nuclear weapons that the country doesn’t even have a use for unless the intend to start nuking Mexico which would mean more refugees, not fewer…etc.
The COVID denial was strong in so many people. I remember some stories where people would go to the hospital with extremely low oxygen saturation, be told that they have COVID, and for them to go into a blind panic about getting microchipped or tortured by experimental government treatment, and immediately discharge themselves - only to drop dead pretty much immediately after they left.
Dafuq is wrong with these people?
Well, they’re dead, so not much else outside of that.
It goes to show just how effective the brainwashing is, though. So many people were afraid of what is essentially science fiction. If we could inject nanobots into someone to control their mind and body, holy shit we’ve made one of the craziest scientific breakthroughs in a century! They were so afraid they ignored the fact that they were incredibly ill and tried to leave on the assumption that they had been attacked.
