It really is like this
Sounds a lot like my experience with Americans re: their government.
I guess propaganda can be pretty insidious.
1 person being held with no due process is as bad as 30000.
Please explain this one to me, because I'm not understanding your math.
"To understand revolutionary suicide it is first necessary to have an idea of reactionary suicide, for the two are very different. Reactionary suicide: the reaction of a man who takes his own life in response to social conditions that overwhelm him and condemn him to helplessness.”
“I do not think that life will change for the better without an assault on the Establishment, which goes on exploiting the wretched of the earth. This belief lies at the heart of the concept of revolutionary suicide. Thus it is better to oppose the forces that would drive me to self-murder than to endure them. Although I risk the likelihood of death, there is at least the possibility, if not the probability, of changing intolerable conditions.”
“But before we die, how shall we live? I say with hope and dignity; and if premature death is the result, that death has a meaning reactionary suicide can never have. It is the price of self-respect.”
– Dr. Huey P. Newton
There's a growing body of research from behavioral neuroscience which indicate that power and privilege have a deleterious effect on the brain. People with high-socioeconomic status often:
- Have reduced empathy and compassion.
- Have a diminished ability to see from someone else's perspective.
- Are more impulsive.
- Have a dangerously high tolerance for risk.When you don't need other people to survive, they become irrelevant to you. When you're in charge, you can behave very badly and people will still be polite and respectful toward you. Instead of reciprocity, it's a formalized double standard. When you have status, you're given excessive credibility, and rarely hear the very ordinary push-back from others most of us are accustomed to, instead you receive flattery and praise and your ideas are taken seriously by default.Some sources:
Hubris syndrome: An acquired personality disorder? A study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the last 100 years
Does power corrupt? An fMRI study on the effect of power and social value orientation on inequity aversion.
Social Class and the Motivational Relevance of Other Human Beings: Evidence From Visual Attention
The Psychology of Entrenched Privilege: High Socioeconomic Status Individuals From Affluent Backgrounds Are Uniquely High in Entitlement
I tend to think that information should be free, generally, so I would probably be fine with "OpenAI the non-profit" taking copyrighted data under fair-use, but I don't extend that thinking to "OpenAI the for-profit company".
I hope that in publicly questioning the narratives I've been fed all my life I am not assumed to be advocating for China.
I just like to try to think critically, compare disparate sources, and not pretend that I'm somehow immune to propaganda.
It seems like people are quick to try to label me a tankie these days for engaging with the world in that way, but I don't consider myself a tankie. It feels like a thought-terminating cliche.
Is there anything you could share that would shed more light on the Zenz thing? I'm not very keen on just "tuning out" my ideological opponents or dismissing them just because they don't affirm my biases. I'd rather read up on it myself and decide.
Part of admitting that I'm not immune to propaganda, for me, is working to root it out wherever I can by reading and cross-referencing a wide range of sources. If my deepest beliefs and biases can't stand up to that sort of scrutiny then I don't want them anymore.
Give it another 60 or so years. It took the US Justice Department over 100 years to "Review and Evaluate" the Tulsa massacre.
Any word on Beepy V2? Migicovsky's been pretty quiet on that lately.
Has Migicovsky said anything Beepy 2.0 lately, or is it basically a dead project at this point?
Seems a bit reductionist.
If the only two people running are Mr. Magoo and Adolf Hitler, and a voter thinks it’s acceptable to let Hitler win, that voter is a fascist or a fascist enabler. End of. And that is not some minor thing, some little oopsie, but a major problem.
What if they'd been subjected to a "Fascist propaganda" campaign, as you called it?
Left and Right wing liberals, it would seem... if 2020 was any indication.
Let's say you're making widgets, but your widgets aren't selling very well. You look around and realize that your entire company is made up of Chinese women, from designers to marketers to manufacturers. All Chinese women.
You live in an area with a very diverse range of people, and your product is not intended only for Chinese women. You want to sell your widgets to as many people as possible. Unfortunately, no one on your team is able to effectively market them to other demographics, because they don't know what those demographics want in a widget.
This is just a ridiculous example, but I think illustrates at least one way that diversity is useful to a business.
Here's more information and examples from Washington State University's college of business.
It's tough. Colbert is actually a great example in this case, because, while I also loved his schtick, a lot of conservatives didn't realize it was satire. There was actually a study done about it, in fact!
I wish we'd gotten to see the rest of Lovecraft's redemption arc.
He died so soon after beginning to realize and acknowledge that his views about the world had been abhorrent.
Edit to add:
If anyone's curious to read an example of the beginnings of his realization, check out this letter, written about a month before his death:
https://github.com/punchmonster/Lovecraft-Letters/blob/master/19370207-Catherine-L-Moore.md
It's a fairly long letter, but the whole thing is interesting. He seems to have been radicalized and was becoming quite critical of capitalism, if not a full blown Marxist. You'll find the following quote in the last paragraph:
I looked around for a 1924 photograph of myself to burn, spit on, or stick pins in! Holy Hades—was I that much of a dub at 33 ... only 13 years ago? There was no getting out of it—I really had thrown all that haughty, complacent, snobbish, self-centered, intolerant bull, & at a mature age when anybody but a perfect damned fool would have known better!
There's more evidence in there than just that passage, but this is already becoming a wall of text!
So do I.
"I think America must see that riots do not develop out of thin air. Certain conditions continue to exist in our society which must be condemned as vigorously as we condemn riots. But in the final analysis, a riot is the language of the unheard. And what is it that America has failed to hear? It has failed to hear that the plight of the Negro poor has worsened over the last few years. It has failed to hear that the promises of freedom and justice have not been met. And it has failed to hear that large segments of white society are more concerned about tranquility and the status quo than about justice, equality, and humanity. And so in a real sense our nation’s summers of riots are caused by our nation’s winters of delay. And as long as America postpones justice, we stand in the position of having these recurrences of violence and riots over and over again. Social justice and progress are the absolute guarantors of riot prevention."
“Let us say boldly that if the violations of law by the white man in the slums over the years were calculated and compared with the law-breaking of a few days of riots, the hardened criminal would be the white man. These are often difficult things to say but I have come to see more and more that it is necessary to utter the truth in order to deal with the great problems that we face in our society.”
It sounds to me like your parents are engaging with nuance in a complicated world, rather than boiling everything down to either "this is good" or "this is bad".
ETA: You're welcome to downvote me, I don't mind, the points don't matter. But I prefer discussion. Tell me why I'm wrong so we can have a conversation!