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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   30748 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 21, 2022

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The evergreen quote:

In my studies of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, not to inform but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is ...in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A variety of emasculated liars is easy to control. I think if you examine political correctness, it has the same effect and is intended to.

The point is not to determine true culpability, it's to humiliate you today in order to change your behavior tomorrow. It's uncanny how your anecdote is perfectly explained by this change in perspective.

I love Thanksgiving, it's my favorite holiday. I'm thankful that we actually moved, and it actually worked, and we're not dead yet. I had low expectations, despite agreeing with the necessity of the move, so I'm very thankful it has exceeded those expectations and raised my hopes that this community might live a little longer yet.

This is not a novel idea, but the overall practice of nonstop atonement for ones privilege was part of the Maoist struggle session as refined version of Marxist-Leninist self-criticism. This has similar effect as various gang initiation rituals that often consist of participating in gang activities like killing or robbing someone. This is meant to make not only the target but also the mob participants in the ritual, which makes them more prone to consistency fallacy and sunken cost fallacy methods of manipulation, with added benefit that this manipulation is enforced by those closest to you in form of snitching. This creates a false feeling that the enforced ethos and values are shared by the mob and that you are the faulty one who needs to work harder. It is incredibly insidious shit.

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