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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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!
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.
Ironically, antifa is fascism. Its like they lack self awareness.
… 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.
Doctor Xavier’s School for Gifted Children
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.
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.”
