"No one is immune to propaganda" does not equal "everyone is equally scrupulous when confronted with propaganda"

Considering that the content of this post is tacitly holding ourselves up to be superior to other people, I think it's important to remind that no, actually, we are not so special. Let alone that any of us might have ended up believing very different things, we are all still vulnerable to being misled. Stay humble out there, Hexbear.

The Hexbear pigpoopballs on moscow time.

And so we once again arrive at phrenology with online-leftist characteristics

Takes minute differences I guess. I got radicalized through cycling, which is an innocent enough thing to pick up on it's own. But I eventually noticed that hey, every institution and law that's supposed to make this not deadly is smoke and mirrors and often actively works to fuck you, maybe these other people complaining about such issues have a point

“Better” is not the same thing as “more competent in some respect”. “Better” implies inherent worth, that someone for some reason, possibly even a literal physical disability, who cannot access the same level of knowledge as us but still desires to and is a leftist, would not be worth as much as people as people who are able to access more knowledge are.

if you’re a Marxist then I’d expect you to think other Marxists have a better understanding of politics and propaganda than the average layperson

I believe people who study Marxism-Leninism seriously tend to have a more accurate understanding of politics and propaganda than the average liberal because history has demonstrated Marxism-Leninism's explanatory power in describing the relationship between past conditions and current conditions to accurately predict future conditions. That's very different than the OP's suggestion that humans have an innate hierarchy of value that expresses itself in the form of better people espousing better ideas, which is the same self-justifying vanity that led colonial powers throughout history to make the same claim to justify stealing land from "barbarous" natives who demonstrated their inferiority through their "failure to develop civilization".

"Built different" is a meme, not a retort.

Again this all just loops around back to hard determinism where we really can’t judge anyone for anything. Hitler was just a smol bean what had doomed by fate.

It's fine if you're working through your understanding of philosophical determinism, but shaping your understanding of the world around "I want to judge other people, what helps me most easily facilitate that?" isn't a very stable base on which to build egalitarian politics. Ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish by judging people. Is it making yourself feel better, or is it making other people better? If it's the latter, have you found it to be effective in your own life? Have you found your life to be improved primarily through being shamed and judged by people "better" than you? Have you found others receptive to your shame and judgement, and grateful to you for improving their lives in that way?

If you're trying to change someone's mind, it's difficult to be successful if you don't understand how and why they came to believe what they believe. If your answer is just "they believe stupid things because they're stupid", then you have a built in excuse for not trying to change their mind. You can't do it because it's impossible. You're smart, they're dumb, and that's just the unchanging natural order of the world.

That's a belief system that's effective at making you feel better about the status quo, but not very effective at changing it.

Ew, they use a term like that? Makes sense. Any type of internet "-bro" will take actually useful terms and turn them into meaningless junk designed to shut down conversation.

oh good, I'm not the only one involuntarily twitching

You don't need to emotionally judge someone who is malicious to want to stop them from doing harm. I don't see how us being against nazis is incompatible with thinking that we could have ended like them in their shoes

Its soft determinism of likelihoods. Historical materialism speaks of classes, millions of people thinking this or that, but that just means 80 percent of them might think something in particular, due to life dice rolls being this or that in certain composition of class relations.

I try not to, i'm a dumbass in lots sorts of things. Anti-vaxxer who masks or lives in rural parts is completely different from anti-vaxxer in restaurant business/healthcare. One is cautious, the other is malicious person, intellect doesn't enter it

And that right there is privilege gone unrecognised. Not as much of a privilege as some others, it's still the sum of something. You didn't will yourself into questioning your position in life, nor were you struck by lightning to do ao.

I mean if you earn 200 k a year, how likely are you to even start asking questions? why would you start asking them, isntead of thinking others are lazy bums.

And that's also ignoring following filter: is my salary (for example cocoa beans importer) built on child labor in ghana? You lose 95 % percent dice roll on first entry, another 80 percent on second one. Lots easier to internalise of "them being over there and i receive my salary over here" than to follow through

what if you're not curious enough to ask those kind of questions? what if you just accept that life is garbage? because that's a reasonable viewpoint to have, it's valid.

Suppose I'm bourgeois. I've just googled that most other peoples' lives are shit, yet mine isn't. Why should I give a shit about my inferiors?

You can get angry at that child all you want for not making the "choice" you want, or not putting in the effort you expect. It's not gonna do a whole lotta good without substantive action.

People on this site literally do exactly this every day. Do you believe people in the DPRK get out and push trains?