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I don't disagree that just about any regulation of these groups will be interpreted as more conspiracy. I guess the crux of my argument is that these people ar
by tmuir 9y ago
I don't disagree that just about any regulation of these groups will be interpreted as more conspiracy.
I guess the crux of my argument is that these people are the victims of psychological warfare. I'm not throwing out the word brainwashing for emphasis, but I truly believe a lot of these people are actually brainwashed. To give context, I don't believe its controversial at all to say that boot camp in the American armed forces, and most assuredly other countries as well, is brainwashing, through and through. Put people in a prolonged state of stress. After sufficient time, tell these people you can end all of the stress if they just follow your directions. Run till you puke. Have trained soldiers screaming in your face. Be woken at all times of the night to both run till you puke and have trained soldiers scream in your face.
Instead, many conservatives in America have been fed a constant diet of outrage/dopamine cycles about how evil Bill and Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and anyone associated, are. They're given 30,000 emails to peruse that are eventually framed to "unveil" a pedophile ring tied to all of the current players in the democratic establishment.
Then most importantly, a billionaire with no political experience, no political capital to lose, whatsoever, comes along and trolls, and proves wrong, nearly the entire national media for over a year. Nearly every week, he makes some offensive remark that leads every veteran of any election anywhere to believe he has committed political suicide. Thus, a year and a half of reporting that Trump will soon quit the race, and has no chance to win. But since, unlike all of those previous politicians, Trump has no "betters" to please, no one in American politics had anything with which to pressure Trump to do anything he didn't want to do. So when Trump won the election, the brain washing was complete. Trump had lead them out of the "prolonged stress" of Barack Obama's 8 years, and the year and a half long prospect of Hillary Clinton being President for 4 years after that. Everything he said about the lying media turned out to be "correct". Witnessing Trump win under the unique circumstances in which he won has had the psychological effect of making him a nearly god like figure in the eyes of his base. He has cut through political correctness, sexual assault claims, ethics concerns, taken his red meat to the supreme court and won. In the eyes of someone already inclined to pull for they guy on their side, Donald Trump became nothing short of Luke Skywalker. If you think this is hyperbole, heres another example of how people can be brainwashed by witnessing uncanny success against all odds, especially when that success stands to improve the brainwashed's lives immediately.
There is a known email scam where the scammer emails a sufficiently large enough pool of marks, the winning team for a single National Football League game every week, ahead of the game, so the marks can bet on the game. Every week (out of 16), the scammer simply takes the group of people who "won" the previous weeks game, and splits them in half, telling half that team A will win, and half that Team B will win. Obviously, no one will listen to someone who picks losers, so assume that every week, half of the marks leave the scam. If the pool is sufficiently large, (only 32768) after 15 weeks, there will still be marks who have been given the winning team ahead of time, for 15 consecutive weeks by some anonymous stranger. It's not controversial to see why those marks may have been brainwashed by the process, and would be willing to pay large sums of money for that 16th pick.
Obviously, Donald Trump didn't run this scam, but it goes to show that people can be casual observers to information, and be presented with just the right information to be essentially brainwashed.
- lopmotr 9y agoWow. You seem to be experiencing your own conspiracy theory. Not every popular idea has some puppet master controlling it. It's completely understandable that supporters of a widely ridiculed underdog would gloat about his success. It was just another election, and just another president, not the end of the world. America hasn't collapsed. Nonetheless, I don't want to censor your ideas. Let people make their own minds up. McCarthyism censored communist ideas because they were too dangerous and people might get brainwashed. Was that a good idea too? I though the whole free speech ideal of America was to keep political ideas out in the open where they can stand and fall on their own merits, not silenced groups of violent supporters like you get in Venezuela or Egypt which leads to revolution after revolution. For an example of what might be a dangerous idea of the left - how about the popular one that blacks are poor because whites oppress(ed) them? That sounds like a recipe for endless failure. Don't work to improve yourself - just get angry at the bogeyman. They did it in Zimbabwe and it ruined them. They're doing it now in South Africa. And American blacks are listening to the left mantra of oppression too. All it can do it make people angry and hateful - what if it leads to race riots?
- tmuir 9y agoIf you don't believe there are massive psychological exercises successfully influencing, and arguably radicalizing people, occurring on the internet, specifically on Reddit, you're being willfully ignorant. Or a Trump supporter, but I repeat myself. I realize that the topic of brainwashing is loaded enough that any rational discussion of it can easily be derailed by someone by simply making the strawman you just made, by comparing my arguments to claiming the end of the world or collapse of America. Isn't it ironic that you can easily spot a culture of victimhood in others, the psychological effects, the futility of it, but I imagine you don't see the same thing in your average revanchist conservative? The level of hatred and frothing at the mouth over 8 years of Barack Obama, fed by people like Donald Trump, Sean Hannity, Alex Jones, and other charlatans created a victim complex that seems to persist even now in many Trump supporters.
- el_cid 9y agoWow... instead of debating the pertinent points raised, you resort to name-calling.