The idea that a "conspiracy theory" is inherently ridiculous is probably a product of a conspiracy. Like how the CIA boosted UFO conspiracy theories to discredit suspicion about the government in general.
I wish everyone would watch this:
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg9xgJc2efc
for those curious the link is to a recording of Michael Parenti's talk "Conspiracy and Class Power"
Yet another Parenti talk to watch :) Honestly tho maybe someone can make a post with Parenti's top lectures
That post will be where the Vocel Police finally nail me
Has happened to me before when talking about shit that's in publicly available govmt documents. Incredibly rage inducing.
Libs just want everything to be nice and pretty and fuck the truth.
uh oh sweaty looks like it's 18:30 in Moscow to putin give you that document on your dinner break?
I can see how one might do a mental somersault onto something sharp to believe the war was just - but that the US won!? is his argument something like "winning a war is when you flee in disgrace, and the more disgrace you are in when you flee, the more you won" or what
You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge!
--George Carlin
--Michael Scott
This is the problem right here.
You don't want to frame it as "US media agitating against China" as if it's some top-down, conscious project. It sometimes is, of course, but you don't want to lead with that. You want to lead with stuff like:
- Most reporters get their foreign information from the State Department or other official U.S. agencies
- Those agencies are not neutral sources and sometimes lie about other countries (toss in an example like the WMD story invented to justify the Iraq invasion)
- Reporters who are too hostile to these agencies lose access to them
- Reporters without access see their careers suffer
- Over time, reporters either figure this out and curb their skepticism or they get drummed out of the spotlight
It's more about career incentives and who gets the job/keeps the job/gets promoted than about an intent to deceive.
There almost certainly is astroturfing going on organized and funded by Bannon, the Atlantic council, and their exiled billionaire Chinese rapist friend but yeah for the most part it's just bullshit news laundered through the State Department.
I feel you. People who say stuff like "oh even though HRC took Goldman Sachs/private prison money, that doesn't mean she's in any way influenced by them" don't stand a chance of being deprogrammed — unless their material conditions fundamentally change (it's all the PMCs in my life saying these things cuz they sOoOoOoOo hooked on pRoFeSsIonAl EthIcS). At some point you might just want to disengage
trump was incredible for the media, because now theres a much larger population who will never ever question why the media is saying what theyre saying
Donald Trump said fake news several times, so now they think the news is less fake than ever.
Imagine mainlining fact-checker garbage on the daily and then declaring that fake news is itself fake news. Shit for brains.
Liberals accusing others of conspiracy theorizing is pretty rich considering the sheer levels of hysteria they've displayed these last four years about anyone remotely slavic
Any time I bring up the Iraq War, libs insist that this is nothing like the propaganda blitz preceding the Iraq War (but can never articulate how or why this is any different).
Last time I tried to do this, my posts were all deleted and I was banned from the subreddit for "tankieism" :(
Where were you accused of this? In real life, or in a heavily astroturfed, ideologically beige, rhetorically infantile online space like r/politics or something?
If the latter, for your own sanity and emotional growth, you should probably stop posting in those places. It has about the same amount of impact on your and everyone else's lives as if you wrote "fart on my tits" on a post-it note and threw it in the garbage. Except doing that is probably more fun.
ideologically beige
:che-laugh:
you should probably stop posting in those places
While we should be conscious of whether our specific posting is actually influencing anyone, many people are actually influenced by what they read online, and we should try to steer that to our benefit. Getting agitprop out there on big lib subs is good.
We will never log off o7.
I should have added, you should stop doing the posting if it's pissing you off or making you sad for real in your real life.
I know the feeling. You’d think after all the wars we’ve been in libs would start to realize how the media sells them. Instead they idolize it just because Trump was against it.
I usually retort "Are you calling Noam Chomsky a conspiracy theorist? Because I'm just parroting his writing."
I mean if they are lib they probably went to college, so they might have heard of him
I doubt they know the names of anyone beyond whoever popular on the TV atm.
in the trump era, trust in mass media from self identified liberals/democrats has increased something like 30%.
