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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2236 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 4, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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My local TV station was on full damage control/max gaslighting. They focused on the riots themselves and the cause for them was an offhanded remark by the talking head, mentioned only ONCE, saying the murder by the immigrant was "racist fake news on twitter", while saying this an image of Tommy Robinson's twitter account was on the screen.

I don't know what these people think they'll achieve, with such obvious brazen lies. They've again reached firey but mostly peaceful levels of blatant obvious lies. I think it will backfire even more spectacularly.

No, it works, at least on big groups of people. My Conservative-voting family think that it was, and I quote, "bored football fans" who "deserve to be put away forever and ever". There are still lots of people who get their news entirely from mainstream radio and TV.

Did you educate them on reality?

How? They have beliefs slightly to the right of the BBC. At this point, the gap between our worldviews is so large that anything I say comes out as alien and incomprehensible to them; if anything our conversations push them further into their own hermetically sealed worldview. If I attempt to say anything honest about politics, it's drowned out by loud wails that their son has been brainwashed by Russian misinformation and Andrew Tate. I've never even seen Andrew Tate.

@2rafa put it best:

It reminds me of real life conversations I’ve had with white English people, intelligent, center-right conservative types, about groups, identity, mass immigration, genetics, civilization, and they just shut down. I don’t mean that they shut down the debate, they’re usually polite enough and I wouldn’t discuss ‘edgy’ things with people I didn’t trust anyway, but they shut down internally. They display the exact pigheaded stubbornness that the Seattle video interviewees do, the strange combination of [post] Christian guilt complex and superiority complex and absolute, ‘Emperor’s New Clothes’ type emphasis on propriety above policy. [...] Some (politically involved people, one a former MP) will even admit the current levels of immigration are a catastrophe, but then suggest in the same breath that what happens will happen, and that above all the focus should be on preventing the far right from making too much hay of the situation and “destabilizing” things. What can you do with such people?

I come back to that quote often. It's true. And it drives me to absolute despair.

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