• Schwim Dandy@lemm.ee
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    9 months ago

    I would hate to think that this group is as gullible and easily fooled as Trump’s cult followers are.

    • TheDoctor [they/them]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      Obama was born watching Magnum P.I.

      Biden was born at the Dunder Mifflin paper factory.

      Trump was born in Waziristan.

      These are facts.

      Check Wikipedia if you don’t believe me.

    • miz [any, any]@hexbear.net
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      9 months ago

      the post is a shitpost making fun.

      this essay makes some strong points about why people endorse absurd lies, and it isn’t primarily because they’re gullible

      https://redsails.org/masses-elites-and-rebels/

      Westerners aren’t helpless innocents whose minds are injected with atrocity propaganda, science fiction-style; they’re generally smug bourgeois proletarians who intelligently seek out as much racist propaganda as they can get their hands on. This is because it fundamentally makes them feel better about who they are and how they live. The psychic and material costs are rationally worth the benefits. As for those anti-imperialists who don’t participate in this festival of xenophobia — and here I include myself — we have our own elitist consolation: we accept the tragedy of masses of gullible sheeple falling for cunning propaganda because having overcome it flatters our own intelligence. The more we condemn society’s stupidity, the smarter we feel in comparison.

      But am I not just worsening the problem, aggravating our hopelessness, by criticizing the critics in a way that suggests that no one escapes ideological self-flattery? I don’t think so. Paradoxically, it brings us all back to a more even and possibility-rich playing field.

      The prevailing populist narrative grants the People (of the West) moral innocence by attributing to them utter stupidity and naivety; I invert the equation and demand a Marxist narrative instead: Westerners are willingly complicit in crimes because they instinctively and correctly understand that they benefit as a class (as a global bourgeois proletariat) from the exploitation enabled by their military and their propaganda — organs of coercion and consent. [6] We’re not as stupid as we’re made out to be. This means that we can be reasoned with, that there is a way out.

        • heartheartbreak [fae/faer]@hexbear.net
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          9 months ago

          Yea theres an element of this essay that has always felt wrong, which is what you said about how the proletariat doesnt benefit from imperialism. Every problem the working class has is directly tied to the existence of imperialism, and although there are upper stratas of the working class that get more of a buy in, its only relative to the massive towering wealth of the monopoly capitalists who are still sucking the blood out of society and humanity itself while completely immiserating the lives of the lower strata even in the US. On a long enough timeline, all upper strata workers and petty bourgeois either join an ever shrinking monopoly capitalist class or join the continually growing proletariat and theres only one solution to this that isnt the common immiseration of humanity as a whole.

          People choose to believe because there is no communist alternative between the two parties. Building that communist alternative is the only solution.

      • Schwim Dandy@lemm.ee
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        9 months ago

        This is interesting but to make sure I’m understanding it correctly, does the last paragraph posit that the people that are representative of the shitpost cliches actually understand and are complicit in the “wink-wink” nature of the lies being passed off as legitimate information because they understand that they benefit from the goal achieved?

        Like, this guy is aware of the completely baseless and disingenuous nature of their fearless god/leader and is just putting on a show?