The secret hidden in this article is that talking about the cost of living, cost of groceries, cost of gas resonates across party lines stronger than any culture war distractions. The way to bring down fascism is to simply talk about how expensive things are and why there is no help.
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Ah, common clay of the new west
These are people of the land
🤌Zohran Mamdani 🤌
It's crazy how the emoji made me read that with an Italian accent.
but, specifically, Brad Pitt's Italian accent from Inglourious Basterds
I think I understand the bizarre train of thought, something like:
- Democrats don't care about my interests.
- Democrats are socialists, because the TV said so
- This guy doesn't sound like other democrats
- That must be because he's not a socialist, like they are.
I know rationally that running on material interests can cut through culture war bullshit, but it's funny to see how it gets rationalized when it does.
Don't forget " oh he's Italian, so he is white" was probably a decent amount of their piggish thinking
Cuomo is also white/Italian though.
Funny thing is, there are at least a couple Middle-Eastern comedians on r/StandupComedy who made jokes about how the audience must be confused when the ‘Italian’ man on the stage starts talking about his Lebanese, Palestinian or Iranian background.
I'm sorry but if I think Italian I immediately think slightly dark skin in my mind...idk not that it matters just what I visualize
It's insane that it works because these people are so dumb
I'm not going to argue they're not dumb. But I think writing people off as dumb is a dead end. Trying to educate people in mass will never work, and honestly is scary. Re-education should chill everyone's blood.
To me, it's that they don't have time to investigate further. They've adopted the R is good, and these talking points mean R mental model.
And that's a problem that has scalable solutions. Four day work weeks. National holiday for voting. Increased paid time off for vacation and sick leave. Medicare for all.
These all give people their time back. Time to think about things other than how they're feeding their kids this week.
Got the math wrong but the answer right.
I've also heard of such a "conservative" calling for the nationalisation of Google in order to save it from socialism.
...wh...what? What are the inner workings of that person's brain...
If you look at it very superficially, the "logic" is not actually that hard to follow:
- Socialism is bad
- Google is doing something the person considers bad (be nice to minorities, LGBT or something)
- The person therefore thinks Google is being taken over by socialism
- Trump is anti-socialist
- Person trusts Trump
- Trump is the government
- To stop Google from its evil socialism, the government should step in and take over
As long as you're unburdened by the slightest inkling of what socialism actually is, this line of "logic" makes some sort of sense.
Because they legitimately don't know what they're saying. They're just saying "them big college-soundin' words" without any clue to their meaning.
I think there was a movie called Red Zone Cuba where the moral was everyone had to give their money and businesses to the US Government in order to stop communism.
I mean.... Ill take all of this type of brain-dead I can get
I'm surprised this misconception isn't more common. Conservatives constantly run on reducing the cost of living (despite doing the opposite), so someone actually vowing to do it with a plan in mind seems perfect for this lot
Yup, instead we all get strung up on not welcoming "racists" in our tent. Economic issues should be the main focus of the left!
The reason race is divisive is because Democrats, as a national party, refuse to run on economic issues that would endanger their corporate donors. In the absence of economic policies that would improve their lives, white people will vote for racial grievance every time.
Yup, corporations have truly become the enemy of the people. Just look at the obscene payouts from the tariff debacle. With my conspiracy hat on, I think that was the goal all along. A lot of these companies will have record profits this quarter because they get money from the taxpayer to cover the tariffs that regular consumers already paid. Insanity
Well, it seems like the propaganda and defunding schools worked as intended. These are the vote-cattle the right are working towards.
Don't take this badly, but in my experience, formal Education doesn't teach people Skepticism (the real deal, not the Denialism that morons have whilst thinking they're being "skeptics"). It also doesn't at all train people to be self-aware and spot when it's an emotion (fear, wanting to belong, even hope) making them want to believe something rather than cold hard logic.
My formal Education is in Science and Engineering, and whilst education in those areas does push you more towards a more analytical kind of thinking and an as objective as possible measuring of things, most higher education out there is in soft "sciences" at best, or even just the kind of domains were the main required expertise is in convincing people, so the very opposite of being as Objective and Logical as possible.
From my observations even some people with higher education in a Sciences or Engineering domain are gullible cattle when it comes to politics, mainly because they don't engage it with logic and the way of thinking they use in their professional life, but rather with tribalism (which is emotional) or just straight raw emotion (like anger or fear) and thus are stupidly simple to control and pretty much self-convince that whatever the propagandists want them to believe is true even when the most basic analysis of it immediatelly shows inconsistencies.
TL;DR Whilst better and more Education somewhat improves people's resilience to propaganda, even the highest levels of Education in highly objective and analytical domains won't make people immune to this shit, since people are controlled via emotional subconscious cognitive pathways, not logic, and even highly intellectual people who WANT to believe something will find some kind of seemingly "logic" explanation to conclude that which they want to believe is indeed so.
So the way to make them vote for socialists is to talk about costs. Looks like an easy win.
That, and just say what you're going to do, rather than labelling yourself.
Republicans voting for Democrats because they don't watch Fox News and thought he was a super Republican? I hope I never runs into these weirdos.
Yeah, for most people politics is like the winter Olympics. They genuinely have no idea what's going on unless it's repeated ad nauseam over and over again or it gets slipped into some other media they're consuming.
They're also terrible at spotting what's fake or untrue.
It was fine when during their evening tv watch they got commercial promos for the top evening news stories each ad break, but those days are gone.
Goebbels, in essence: “If you want to make it in propaganda, you have to repeat the same trite phrases over and over again, no matter whether intellectuals contradict you and refute you. You convince scholars with clever arguments, and the masses with simple ones.”
They’re also terrible at spotting what’s fake or untrue.
It's not a small feat when it does feel like every fucking person on TV is lying to you constantly.
From NPR to the Houston Chronicle to BBC News One to the Joe Rogan Podcast, it's just mountains of bullshit and lies and jingoism and native advertising.
It was fine when during their evening tv watch they got commercial promos for the top evening news stories each ad break, but those days are gone.
Go back 30 years, and you still had this shit. It was just pitched to the Median Voter rather than some rarified hot house of partisans.
You still had John Stossel with his crypto-libertarian bullshit and Tucker Carlson screaming at James Carville on Crossfire, but always over something totally incidental. People like Rush Limbaugh and Rachael Maddow hadn't quite gone mainstream yet. Jon Stewart was confined to the back corners of a cable news comedy channel. FOX (the whole damned network, not just the news channel) was just getting off the ground. Everyone agreed gay people shouldn't get married, but women should be allowed to hold a credit card.
Everyone agreed Iraq had WMDs and Cuba is being run into the ground by Nazi Communist Fidel Castro and China is a backwards hellhole where Tianamen Square happens twice a day.
Now you've got Controversy as the focus of news rather than Consensus. So if CNN says the sun rises in the East, Newsmax will bring on Laura Loomer to tell people the CNN anchor rapes puppies, so don't believe them. And if the WSJ says the economy is booming, sixteen podcasters will release episodes about how we're a decade into the New Great Depression You Just Don't Know About.
People believe crazy shit because there is no consensus reality anymore.
Because lying gets more attention than the truth and we live in an attention based economy. Human attention is now the commodity that every tech overlord is fighting over and they amplify the influencers that get the most eyeballs and earballs hoping their platform will be at the top. That means the most unscrupulous and bombastic liars are shoved in our faces because those are the ones that rally engagement from both fans and haters. You can farm more engagement by being a piece of shit than by being a smart, interesting, or good person. Also, the media is totally complicit in this and will happily prop up these schmuck podcasters by tirelessly writing articles criticizing them. They cannot help but participate in the meaningless twitter feuds and gotcha online culture because that's what most people consume.
Not just American.
Have you seen the news of the Italian 4 year old girl who died from diphtheiria, a disease for which there has long been a vaccine (mandatory in Italy, even) and which hadn't been seen in that country for more than 3 decades due to vaccination, but her parents thought that vaccine gave autism to that kid's cousin so didn't got her vaccinated.
Curiously, the mentioned vaccinated cousin also got infected and survived.
A young child literally died because her parents were gullible braindead morons who (doubtless via Social Media) got fed the same shit that's fed to American braindead morons and actually believed that even though it originates from a country which is a postcard for Idiocracy.
Well, guess they did indeed made sure their child won't ever have autism ...
(All this shit makes me so fucking furious!)
Clearly the education system is getting too much funding. Somebody cut this waste.
It's the economy stupid. Trump won on the economy. Mamdani won on the economy.
Yup, The problem I'm seeing is there is a strong faction that controls prices but also leans right? This war with Iran should cause fuel prices to skyrocket but because the rich vote right they are able to control them to help Trump.
Yep, it isn’t that socialists and dems run on making things expensive, it’s that conservative ultra wealthy raise prices of goods and services in their very large businesses when dems are in control because they know people will blame dems and not the wealthy who actually set the prices.
Talk about living in peak dystopia. It's all a big game and the working class are just pawns to be played with
This is why both politicians and those who have a strong interest in politics need to chill with the jargon and labels.
People voted for Mamdani because they liked his ideas, his approach to things, not because he was a "socialist". Hell, most people, including me, aren't sure exactly what that means.
"People don't know what Socialism means" is the worst case of intentional ignorance about things that are completely understandable by people who refuse to look something up since "People in the middle east have been fighting for centuries and nobody understands why."
It also doesn't help that it seems to mean something different to everyone.
groups that self label aren't exactly helpful for understanding what the label means (see german socialist party)
Pro-good anti-bad party is the future we are heading ig. Because some dude cant bother to open giant source of infornation right in his pocket.
They're all pro-good and anti-bad in their own words.
Personally as soon as somebody reduces anything to "good ones" vs "bad ones" I'm immediatelly suspicious that they're either activelly trying to swindle everybody else or they're usefully idiots parroting the shit put out by those activelly trying to swindle everybody else - almost nothing involving humans can be reduced to 2 and only 2 sides, which aren't even ranges but actual absolutes.
Jargon and labels are part of the way people are controlled - simplify complex concepts down to repeatable simple words and now you can both control the meaning of such soft definintion terms (notice how the meaning of "terrorist" has been moved over time to become "against those in power") plus constant repetition breeds familiarity, thus the very same cognitive paths that transform brand-familiarity into "comfort with brand" and hence favoring it over less familiar brand, are exercised to get people to accept provided political "explanations" & "solutions" using those slogans.
That said, in my experience if you try and explain complex things to people with enough complexity and completeness for them to understand the subtleties of the subject, they switch off half way (like, I bet, plenty of people reading this post that didn't pass the first half of the first paragraph), so you have to somehow find at least simple metaphors, so not quite down reducing it to slogans but not all that far.
How do these white trash bootlickers even manage to breathe propely with th3ir "heroes" toying them around like puppets?
decades of demonizing education, attacking and undermining education by making sure it doesnt teach essential skills like critical thinking and punishing anything but blind acceptance and obedience, the abolition of the fairness doctrine to begin the locking of people into isolated information bubbles, social media and facebook that uses algorithms to maximize profits by serving inflammatory content to vulnerable people to further expand the the right wing information bubbles online with the happy little bonus of it bringing in billions of dollars and thus being a capitalistically selected for behavior of feeding innocent people into the hate machine because right wingers post more, see more ads, and click more ads, because of their constant engagement due to their constant manufactured outrage.
and, i mean, thats just the tip of the iceberg thats created these people, but I'm not gonna spend an hour highlighting every single thread in this blanket.
New political spectrum just dropped.
They sure found an interesting way to square Fox News propaganda with Mamdani's campaign promises.
This is cherry picked as fuck. They'd rather call their voters stupid (they do it regularly) then admit they are losing them. Obviously conservatives voted wrong because they were tricked by their feeble dumb brains not because Mayor Mamdani had a better platform.
I wonder how many thought they voted for this guy:

This movie was actually how I was introduced to the Israel/Palestine conflict.
And thats what Trump and fascists hate art, it's a median where story tellers convey deep nuances about dumb shit happening in the world
Every time I read one of these I lose a little faith in humanity and that meme quote from that nutty Indian cultist plays in my head
At the same time this increases my faith in humanity. When people aren't propagandized, they listen to the politician and vote in their interests. At the end of the day, they agreed with what Mamadani was saying and that's why they voted for him.
It doesn't have to be elaborate and sophisticated, what matters is getting the right result.
always have been


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