"If you tell a lie big enough and tell it frequently enough, people will eventually come to believe it". What is an example of this happening today?
I would really rather that these were actual examples, and not conspiracy theories. We all have our own unsubstantiated ideas about what shadowy no-gooders are doing, but I'd rather hear about things that are actually happening.
Anyone that says J6 was a "peaceful protest" that "got out of hand"
We all saw the footage of that day. There were gallows and calls to hang a sitting vice president.
It was an insurrection, fomented and encouraged by Donald Trump's speech and actions leading up to that day. Plain and simple.
The right-wingers who say it wasn't as serious as it was are gaslighting their base.
Edit: Victims of gaslighting in my replies
A KGB spy and a CIA agent meet up in a bar for a friendly drink.
“I have to admit, I'm always so impressed by Soviet propaganda. You really know how to get people worked up,” the CIA agent says.
“Thank you,” the KGB says. “We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them.”
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. “Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America.”
…in Ba Sing Se
promptly fires everyone who criticizes Israel
“Democrats are liberal/progressive”
In reality, they’re pretty conservative.
The Overton Window
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
A concept where political discourse is slowly shifted to one side or another over time. For example conservatism.
Politics are talked about the right who move even further right, the centralists are moved to old right and the leftists are moved to the center .... the old leftists are now seen as extreme and unacceptable while the far right are also unacceptable but gain some ground ... everyone shifts one step to the right and now everything is more conservative.
The right shift is what is happening now ... but it can happen and shift towards the left as well.
They are still liberal though but not progressives. Liberalism isn’t necessarily a left wing ideology.
A lot of leftists (and I hardly ever saw it before coming on Lemmy) use 'Liberal' to mean Classic or Neo Liberal - basically a synonym of capitalist.. That's not at all what it means in American politics, where it means the opposite of Conservative. If we used that definition, Conservatives would be called Liberals as well as Liberals being Liberals, which obviously makes no sense for US lingo. However, they both are Liberals in the neo/classic sense as most US Liberals aren't calling for communism.
The conservatives are only liberal in the economic sense. They are the party of book banning, anti-abortion and anti-lgbtq. Liberalism is also about human rights and freedoms. But just because you think gays should be allowed to marry and acces to have an abortion should be a right that doesn’t put you left on the political spectrum or even make you a progressive. Since that is pretty much a centrist political position in the rest of the world. Most Democrats are liberal in the economic sense but also in the human liberty sense. But only a few Democrats in the house and senate can be truly called progressives. Since most Democrats are fine with the status quo and aren’t pushing society forward. They are just fighting of the attacks of the GOP
This sort of confusion is why I think we need to always define economic and social political positions separately rather than lump them together.
Right, I agree. The progressive side of the US is not fairly represented by Democrats nationally.
Two red scares and a cold war created an Orwellian memory hole such that Americans don’t even have the words anymore. It’s double-plus ungood.
It's an inherently right wing ideology lol. They're just conservatives that want/like to think they're progressive.
The real lie is the notion that "liberalism" was ever anything other than right-wing to begin with, let alone adjacent to progressivism.
Democrats are liberals. Republicans are too. Both of them are reactionary.
By any civilized standard democrat politicians are far right extremists (a few token exceptions are closer to right or even center-right on some points, but they have little effect on the whole). Republicans are outright deranged lunatics, mixed with a worryingly increasing percentage of fascists.
“brexit will bring in more trade! brexit will provide 350 million to the NHS!”
On a related note the whole notion extremely prevalent in the UK that all they have to do is decide they want to rejoin and it will happen. No matter which side of that a commentator is on, they almost never mention that they need to present something the EU27 actually want and convince them that the UK is not the 'break international agreements' kind of country any more. Overall the British still all seem to think that they are something better than everyone else and others have to do what they want and have no real agency.
You could call it a colonial mindset. Wonder where that way have come from.
The thing I loved about that lie is even as a 20 something who’d never been to that hemisphere I knew it was a lie because weren’t these the people trying to kill the NHS
The idea that they could leave and somehow get better trade deals, especially with European countries. The EU is the deal! It's a trade agreement that favors the participants, how could they ever get a better deal?? What's baffling is that a lot of older people voted for it and they can actually remember when the UK joined the EU. That means they realize that the UK joined for the deal but somehow that's worth nothing.
A lot of those older people are racist and blame foreigners for literally every problem, and continuously vote against themselves
Vaccines will give you autism, microchips, actual diseases etc. It's one of the best medical breakthroughs in history and we have idiots ruining it.
The concept of trickle down economics. Anyone with a functioning brain can tell you that it would never work. But somehow people as a whole in the US still think giving corporations and rich cunts extra money, and tax breaks somehow lead to the 99% reaping a benefit.
It has never been true because the basic function of capitalism is to get as much money as possible, while spending the least amount of money to do it. There’s no room for passing on the extra profits to your employees, clients, or vendors.
Supply-side Jesus (short animation) is a brilliant take on trickle-down economics and circular arguments about why the successful are successful and the poor are poor.
"Tax cuts will double our revenues and ensure that the empire never declines or falls!"
"Should you feed the lepers, Supply side Jesus?"
"No Thomas, that would just make them lazy."
"Then shouldn't you at least heal them Supply Side Jesus?"
"No James, leprosy is a matter of personal responsibility. If people knew I was healing the lepers there would be no incentive to avoid leprosy"
Lol yep, any child who has played monopoly a few times can see how capitalism works. It always ends in one person having literally all the property and money... and generally with players quite upset at one another. And once all players have optimized the game, it simply becomes a game of luck.
It's literally the name of the game.
Trickle down economics does work though.
It’s just that the thing that trickles down isn’t money.
Republican talking points. All of them. Pick literally anything they say about guns or economics. Literally anything.
It's wild how unburdened they are by having to conform to observable reality, they can just go nuts and say whatever. Jewish space lasers? Fuck it, why not, throw some alien clones in there too
America is the greatest country in the world. Only those who haven't travelled much would believe that.
It is a libertarian's dream country though. No where else is it so easy to get others to invest in your idea.
My parents still think the 2020 election was stolen...
I'm sorry
Which election?
Merkuh
That you catch a cold because you're cold
While being cold isn't the cause of a cold there are some links between being cold and transmission of the flu even beyond people huddling together inside.
The lipids the viruses attach to become more durable hence resilient, and multiple studies have shown that cold temperatures have a suppressive effect on the immune system.
https://uscvhh.org/news-and-stories/the-real-reasons-you-get-sick-when-its-cold-outside.html
IIRC there's some evidence that cold temperatures weaken the immune system. Assuming it's valid, that does mean that cold could be the deciding factor between contracting a cold or fighting if off.
Now obviously germ theory is correct and it takes external infection to catch a cold, but it's a pretty safe bet you're being more or less constantly exposed to COVID and the flu whenever you're in an indoor public space.
It's weird seeing a regular colloquialism in a sea of politically charged comments. This one really seemed to get people riled up.
Americans with their 'greatest nation on earth' charade.
It has a name: American exceptionalism. It's used both by people who know it's a lie and by people who believe it.
So it worked!
Most of what people believe about America's history is post WWII mythmaking and revision. It's a shame because the labor movement in America has a fascinating history, and we're about to relive it.
The shoot-outs are going to be 100x better this time
Communism=Authoritarianism
I was taught in school the characteristics of authoritarianism and a couple weeks later, when i was being taught about communism, the same characteristics were said
Going a step further, the idea of authoritarian. Every ideology with a state relies on some type of authority to function, as a term it is an attempt at equating fascism and communism and serves as holocaust trivialization.
They usually come packaged together. You'll have a hard time naming democratic liberal communist countries/leaders.
Israel is defending itself against an antisemitic terrorist group which attacked it for no reason
* gestures broadly at US politics *
"Your socioeconomic status is a measure of work ethic, sacrifice, and ability to make good decisions. Poor people deserve to be poor, and suffer, for making bad decisions."
Birth lottery which includes not just wealth but family connections is the biggest metric. We are way down the list of developed nations in terms of upward mobility. Only the outliers that prove to be of the greatest service to entrenched capital are granted entry. Most Americans, religious or not, have internalized the dogma of the prosperity gospel, itself an absolute parody of the dogma of Christianity it claims to be part of.
Go to any local fast food restaurant at rush hour, hell, go to any produce field at harvest, and tell me how much that studious hard work pays off. conversely, please regail me with tales of how hard it is to be a capital landlord,
making investmentsgambling with insider information with capital gained from previous exploitations, and then merely expecting an endless steam of capital for NO labor into what generated it. It's like we were conquered by the traveling snake oil salesmen of old.It's called the American Dream, because you have to be asleep to believe it.
Also known as "prosperity gospel." The religious justification for obscene wealth. The basic idea is that if you are rich, it's because God has chosen you to BE rich because you are morally superior to everyone else. It's an absolute perversion of Jesus' teaching in the New Testament.
A while ago I read Bezos was posed a question about why he isn’t using his money and power to help impoverished people. IIRC he replied with something along the lines of “oh, we did a study and poverty is a moral failing, it can’t be solved, now if you’ll excuse me I have to go buy a dick-shaped rocket”
Ok, I made the rocket part up but you get the idea, Jeff Bezos is a pos
Hey, he is supporting the massive FL mansion and mega yacht industries.
Is that last sentence a quote from George Carlin? I've heard that one before.
Yes.
https://youtu.be/H-PSCqhkWhg?si=WfSvAWVkEVr42ySr
George Carlin - Your Owners
That Israel is not a colonial state. All it's founders defined it as a European colonial project. It was and is allied with all the colonial powers and projects like Britain, the US, apartheid south Africa, and Rhodesia. Its funding association was called the Palestine Jewish colonization association. It's bank was called the Jewish colonial trust. The Jewish national fund and the Zionist project at large was from the beginning concerned with building segregated colonies.
First, lands were bought with foreign funding from feudal land lords, and their inhabitants were entirely dispossessed, kicked out. Then when awareness of the ultimate goals of the Zionist project crystalized and resistance against Palestinian dispossession mounted, the lands were ethnically cleansed by force and the people massacred. 700 to 800 thousand Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in one continuous military operation that spanned two years from 1947 to 1948.
Zionist leaders fully acknowledged that Palestinian demographics were a core issue to the Zionist project, that the Palestinian population had to be removed at any cost, which is exactly what Israel did. What lead to the Palestinians being defenseless in this situation? Colonial Britain abetted the formation of heavily armed Zionist militias with soldiers numbering in the tens of thousands. The arms of Britain's colonial military presence were inherited by the Zionist forces that it supported. All this while Britain summarily excecuted any Palestinian found in possession of a firearm.
This is not to mention the enthusiastic support of european antisemites for the Zionist project, or its strict early opposition by antifascist jews.
The idea that Israel has any right to exist on Palestinian land is a lie that has been so heavily proliferated, it has to be debunked when it should be paid no consideration at all.
Rising early and going to bed early is more virtuous than rising late and going to bed late.
Yeah we really gave morning people too much power. Awake at 5AM? You’re a go-getter. Doesn’t matter that you had to be in bed by 8pm to accomplish that. Awake until 4AM? You’re lazy and immoral, and should feel bad for being productive when there are fewer distractions. All because you don’t like being awake before the sun is up. Even if you sleep fewer hours than a morning person, (because morning people will start demanding your attention at 8AM on the dot,) you’re still considered lazy when compared to the morning person.
"Owning a car = freedom"
"You need a big truck/SUV to haul things" (it's just a coincidence that people drove much smaller cars before a multibillion dollar deluge of advertising)
"It's consumers' responsibility to reduce plastic pollution by recycling, and recycling is effective" (whoever came up with this one belongs in the PR scumfuck hall of fame)
Unfortunately in a country where the infrastructure is so hostile to public transit or even pedestrian/biking amenities that it's nearly impossible to live, work or function without a car unless you're lucky enough to live in a dense urban community, I can see how people might believe this.
https://futurism.com/the-byte/scientists-recycling-backfired It's not that it is useless, it' just not the solution
Too many famous people are hailed as something they are not, and everyone believes it. For example Elon Musk is hailed as a genius when he seems to be showing lately that he is the dumbest person alive.
Jesus birthday is 25 December
The belief that colour blind glasses work
See megalag's videos
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ppobi8VhWwo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_QQtOv2PlOE
The videos I've seen on YouTube saying they don't work have all been by people who have normal vision.
I have mild red-green colorblindness, and for someone like me the glasses absolutely do work.
I don't have enough cones for red and green to see certain shades properly. The glasses turn down the other colors in order to bring my perception of red and green back into balance. I then see the right shades but darker like wearing sun glasses.
The first time I wore them in the fall it blew my mind to see all the different colored trees that are just green or brown without the glasses.
There would have to be thousands of people lying their entire lives saying we see brown where other people see color in order for the colorblind glasses to be a hoax.
It's such a ridiculous assertion, yet YouTube is full of videos saying they don't work.
Disclaimer: Let me be clear, I'm definitely NOT defending the color blind glasses, and especially not the ridiculously expensive and over-priced, scam brand(s). Also, not going to watch videos on YouTube so my comment doesn't take any context from those links. All that being said ...
Sometimes people don't realize that color blindness is a spectrum and that there are different types. For example, a lot of people like me might more accurately be described as color vision deficient. To me, I can clearly and easily differentiate between red and green in most practical circumstances, particularly in close range. Things can get dicey from a distance, as well as with very subtle tints or with very dark colors.
A number of years ago, I purchased a cheap (like less than $20USD) pair of fishing sunglasses (mirrored, polarized sunglasses that typically use bright red, orange, or green tinting of the lenses) right before taking a trip in the fall. When I put those sunglasses on, it was really surprising. All of a sudden I could differentiate between the trees that were dead or which had already dropped their leaves, versus those that were actually bright red. Normally, unless I'm looking at a specific tree from a close distance, the browns, reds, and grays all sort of look the same and blend in. From a distance, like from the top of a mountain looking down into a valley, the fall color change of the leaves is a bit underwhelming normally. With the glasses on, I could actually see individual trees or clusters of trees that were red.
To be clear, the cheap sunglasses didn't restore my color vision. I assume it just shifts the spectrum a bit so that colors, which are normally very muted for me, actually stand out in the same way that bright yellows and blues do. And I know that the colors I'm seeing are tinted, so not 100% accurate to what a person with full color vision would see.
And when I've tested the fishing glasses with Ishihara tests (numbers in the colored dots), they do not improve my ability to make those out. So, that's further evidence that they aren't actually restoring my color vision. Granted, the fishing sunglasses never marketed themselves that way, where as the expensive scam color vision correcting glasses heavy imply that they are miraculous even if they don't outright state that they restore color vision.
Wow, I actually believed in this one. Is there a short text version of what the videos are explaining?
Main idea: They can't restore any color by filtering or let you perceive any new colors as their marketing likes to claim. At best they might be able to improve contrast of certain colors while reducing contrast for others - which is not at all what they say it does
The video goes much more into depth about their deceptive marketing and such
The simple version is that color blindness is caused by a physical problem with your eyes. If you don't have the parts required to detect certain colors then no glasses are going to fix that. They're just tinted glasses, the guy in the video tries three different pairs from different companies and all they do is tint the world a hideous shade of pink/magenta.
As someone else said above, what they can do is change your ability to differentiate between objects of slightly different colors. You might have a really hard time telling the difference between red and green, but find it easier to tell the difference between hideous vaguely reddish magenta and hideous vaguely greenish magenta. They don't grant you a greater range of color vision, but they do change what color is actually hitting your eyes. Mostly into hideous magenta.
FWIW the guy in the video points out that in his experience it generally made colors harder, not easier, to differentiate.
That never made any sense to me. If the problem is with the cones in your eyes, then filtering the light going into them isn't going to magically do anything. At best, you might be able to do stuff with contrast to make colors more distinct, but someone that's red-green color blind could only have that actually fixed with new eyes.
Turns out that some people have overlap in color perception that muddies things, and when you use these glasses to filter out the "in between" wavelengths, everything becomes easier to distinguish.
Whereas I believed it with the analogy of hearing aids. There are a lot of people with hearing issues who can benefit from a simple amplification, or a more complex amplification of specific frequency ranges or filtered sound. By analogy, it seems perfectly reasonable that color-blindness may not be a binary condition so many people could benefit from more clearly distinguishing or amplifying certain frequencies. If I have a hard time distinguishing red from green, why wouldn’t glasses that filter red and green differently potentially work?
The wage price spiral.
I didn't know this concept was criticized. I just found a paper from the IMF which says the following:
Sollaci, J. a. a. C. B. H. H. H. P. (2022, November 11). Wage-Price Spirals: What is the Historical Evidence? IMF. https://www.imf.org/en/Publications/WP/Issues/2022/11/11/Wage-Price-Spirals-What-is-the-Historical-Evidence-525073
"Owning a car gives you freedom" is a big one considering how expensive they are and that most people just use them to sit in traffic jams on their commute 90%+ of the time they are using them.
It is context dependent.
Owning a car does give you freedom in rural settings where mass transit never existed before it was bought out and run into the ground by automotive companies. They were even fairly cheap for decades if you bought them used!
But yes, if you live and work somewhere with traffic jams then owning one instead of using and pushing for more mass transit is the opposite of freedom.
Yeah my car gives me the freedom that people in some states and countries have without cars. I keep advocating for that freedom to be universal without cars because I hate having to have one to go out.
I'm not even in a rural setting and the only way to get my dogs to the vet is via car. Getting a taxi to drive there is difficult when one of your dogs starts vomiting after the second turn.
That and getting to by family in a rural setting. 2 hours by car vs up to 8 by train. With two dogs. That won't happen 😐
Besides that I don't really need a car.
And depending on your car make, model, and year, there is constant surveillance/data collecting negating the owners "freedom".
Donald Trump claiming executive privilege for his various crimes. It seemed like everyone was laughing about it even a couple months ago, like how can it be executive privilege when this is about things he was doing before and after his presidency? Then there was a narrative shift and now the media is back to hand-wringing over whether or not you can prosecute a former president. I don't think anyone is expecting any of it to stick anymore.
communism means no freedom / no food / whatever. anti-communist propaganda was a massive and very successful effort in the west
The entire conservative party
"Trickle down economics lead to more wealth for all."
"Trickle-down economics." They're literally saying, "we're pissing on you."
They also love to say, "a rising tide lifts all boats." Unless, of course, you don't have a boat and we know what happens to them. How well the stock market is doing means literally fark-all to most of us.
"Of course it's true! Supply side economics is the cornerstone doctrine of colleges of economics the world over!"
And the entrenched, generational capital that fund/endow the most prestigious colleges of economics, that the rest want to be like, clearly stand to gain nothing ensuring global economic theory revolves around give the owner class all the money and pray for rain.
Supply side Jesus will save us all
Off the top of my head:
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/11/897692090/how-big-oil-misled-the-public-into-believing-plastic-would-be-recycled
https://www.earthday.org/plastic-recycling-is-a-lie/
-Anything involving babies and incubators is immediately suspect. (Or babies and bayonets, for that matter).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nayirah\_testimony
-And this one is pure conspiracy, and I know it's not what you asked for... but it's ridiculous and 'tis the season. My mother in law is convinced that the lyrics to "Oh Christmas Tree" (O Tannenbaum) were changed by people who wanted to erase the true and original lyrics. By who? Big Tree financiers? Communists who are stealing Christmas and replacing it with trees?
Anyway...
The original lyrics, according to this conspiracy, praise God and never mention trees at all. It's completely ridiculous and always ends with the whole family singing along with the "true lyrics" from a badly photocopied paper that she hands out. I hope this doesn't come up again this year because it really makes me want to fight. Which would make me the bad person, because who initiates fights on Christmas? The next couple of days are going to be tough.
Wait, the lyrics of a song with a title that literally translates to "Oh, Christmas tree" originally had absolutely nothing to do with trees?? I'd ask how she wraps her mind around that dichotomy, but I know people who believe in conspiracies do not need proof nor logic to believe.
Good luck. I'll be entertaining my Trumpster QMIL, so I'll be fighting along with you to control myself.
Now I'm really curious. Can you post those supposedly original lyrics?
That's hilarious, since the sources on Wikipedia say that the original lyrics were about a tree, with no relation to Christmas.
and many translated version never mention Christmas, like the Dutch and French versions.
Minor correction: the French version (Mon beau sapin) definitely mentions Christmas. The line "Toi que Noël planta chez nous" appears twice, translating to "You (the tree) that Christmas planted in our home".
Capitalism lmao
"Once all the boomers are dead everything will be better!" Yeah, corporations will still rule your life, inflation will still outstrip income, you won't be able to afford a house, and your politicians will represent whichever special interest pays them the most. Also you won't ever be able to vote in progressive candidates because every year there's going to be some vile ghoul like Donald Trump, but somehow worse, and the Democrats just need you to close ranks and vote in whatever corporate liberal whose turn it is to sit in the Big House this time so a literal fascist doesn't get his finger on the button and attempts to dismantle what little democracy our republic has over night.
Grandma and grandpa being six feet under doesn't change these things. And, guess what...you probably won't change them either because you're too lazy and apathetic to do anything other than shitpost on the internet about how badly your life sucks.
Future generations will blame you for everything also.
If you're a millennial, some already are.
Love how everybody forgot Gen X existed and skipped over them to hating millennials.
We're used to that.
The boomers being dead means the largest, wealthiest support of old ass laws is gonna, and nearly every single member of the population at that point would have been directly harmed by capitalism.
Trying to stop people from improving things will by far be much harder, and betting on peoples apathy is a gamble that can only last so long
(Unless we get some full my mind control shit in the best future, but we can pray not)
And at least here in Finland, the under 25s are actually more conservative than millennials or even Gen X, which is highly alarming. They voted for an extremist right wing party in droves in our latest parliamentary election, something like 30% I think
In America, it's starting to shift that way as well. Gen Z is the first nominally sex-negative generation in, well...generations. They're very inclusive and will say things like "sex work is real work." But then they also seem to hate nudity in film and television. So it seems they're fine with sex as long as it just...doesn't involve them in any capacity. I think I heard a streamer one time say they were "puritan-pilled."
I've noticed as a pattern that it tends to be nudity/sex in media that might appeal to a straight male in particular that they tend to have the most problem with. Probably because the "puritan" wire gets crossed with the "pro-LGBTQ+" wire or the "appeal to women" wire.
Our far right is great at TikTok, and their algorithm seems to favor far right talking points greatly.
Also, we'll have plenty of formerly-young people who age into being similar to what the boomers are now
Colonialism was a civilising mission.
Neoliberalism has also broken people’s brains to believe that nothing better is possible and anyone promising something other than managed decline or being vindictive against an outgroup is a charlatan.
People believe insane shit about North Korea because they heard other insane shit about North Korea.
That's one of the wildest ones, like it just bypasses the critical thinking part of their brains. "Yes, there's a town in North Korea surrounded by fake fields, which are harvested by fake farmers. They all live in fake homes and go into a fake school that that has power but don't have any windows."
South Korea has potemkin villages on its side of the border. The government pays people to live there for a few weeks out of the year. Otherwise they’re empty. Source: been there.
It is hilarious how the villages are remarkably similar (and I say that to the South's credit, in some respects), but one gets called "Propaganda Village" and the other -- if it is mentioned at all -- is merely called by its name. It's that meme about "Our noble government, their nefarious regime" in such a literal and direct portrayal that you couldn't write it in a parody without it being seen as too hamfisted.
That a guy has to spend three months salary on a diamond wedding ring. It was a very good marketing campaign from a jewlery company.
That's an opinion, not a lie. Still a stupid opinion, though.
Here's a specific one that we are told about history: that we work less than our ancestors did thanks to automation and labor-saving devices. Truth is that the period of history (granted I'm talking specifically about European history) where people did the least amount of work per year was probably the middle ages (the other top contender for "least work required to live" is hunter-gatherer societies), until right before the industrial revolution. The industrial revolution sees people go from working for about half the year to working through the entire year, and from having relatively slow schedules to absolutely brutal ones. Kids went from working half days (when they worked at all) to working full time, and the compensation everyone got bought them fewer luxuries than their grandparents had when they were literally peasants.
There's been some clawing back of our lost free time in the past century - and without modern productivity many of the things we take for granted simply wouldn't exist - but we're still pretty deep in the red compared to back then, and of course there are plenty of places in the world where working conditions are still comparable to the worst times of the industrial revolution. I'm not a "Retvrn" guy but I think this bit of context regarding modern work culture compared to the ten thousand years preceding it is something everyone should know, but that our society constantly paints over with misrepresentations of what the past looked like.
And stress, damn stress 24/7 ever since mobile phones appeared. Some company tequires you to answer even if it's your off day.
There's a solution for that, BUT the only way you can fairly negotiate is during a job interview - pretty much any other time the company has an imbalance of power
This is a common confusion though when people say serfs worked only half the year that is working for their owner and doesn't include all the other work they need to do to live - to actually eat and have a basic life involved a lot of toil.
Of course not for rich people but that's never changed.
Free market is the most effective way of allocating resources
It's a great way of allocating resources between Cheetos and Doritos. Not so great at choosing between healthcare for the masses and yachts for oligarchs.
…in an upward direction”
Now it’s true.
communism has killed 100 million people
Stems from the black book of Communism which counts nazis killed by the Soviets, everyone killed by the nazis in the USSR, unborn children and even more absurd shit like that just to get to that number lmao.
If we count shit like that, Capitalism has killed billions.
Even using their numbers, if the choice is between 100 million people and every single living thing on the planet, communism sounds like a pretty good deal.
China's great leap and the soviet famine alone take you more than half way there using the higher estimates (now add gulags, red terror, etc...) might not get exactly to 100, but it's not so far off to qualify meaningfully as a lie (unless you're speaking to a braindead tankie).
The problem with these counts is there is no way of making them look good, like lives saved due to "x". How many people lived because the Soviets managed to eliminate all famines in their territory after that? A huge feat given their relative frequency beforehand.
And then you can blame countless deaths on capitalism, feudalism, slavery, but then do you normalize those numbers based on total world population?
What about blaming AK-47s? The police?
My point is that it's a pointless metric that is only used to drum up support against some group of people, not a useful one for objectively understanding anything. It does away with all context, and replaces it with some inane number.
I think the point is that it's difficult to attribute that to communism in any meaningful way where you're comparing it to non-communism. Like if those 100 million people would have died anyway, how to do you say 'it was communism that did it' since maybe more would have died under the next most likely form of government that would have been in it's place. How many people have died for Democracy, assuming that both world wars and countless other ones were fought to defend it.
The Toungue map.
The idea that different parts of the tongue are responsible for feeling different tastes. This blatantly false idea was made up in 1901 out of thin air and then made its way into biology classrooms somehow. It was taught to schoolchildren (including me) for about 100 years as a biological fact, even though every human being in that time proved it false by experiment thousands of times by eating things and tasting them with the "wrong" parts of the tongue. It doesn't quite count as an example of this happening today, because we finally realized that it simply wasn't true and have stopped teaching it, but still: 100 years is a long time to realize that something is false when every human being in the world is confronted with physical evidence several times every day.
Its still being taught at least in Romania
I don't think this is actually a myth. I think there's an extreme version of the statement, but it nevertheless is true that there are specialized taste buds and that they aggregate on sections on the tongue.
And I think there's a whole rabbit hole here, of overeager "corrections", that are not in fact corrections but just someone engaging in bad faith with a statement that's close enough to the actual truth. It's actually more wrong to categorically dismiss it, then it would be to note the difference between it and the truth, which is to say while they are not strictly regions, they're nevertheless as attested to be the NIH:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8956797/
In my opinion, the more interesting phenomenon is understanding how these facts, and the temptation to correct, challenges our ability to sustain nuance and to carefully differentiate between degrees of truth, instead of just making blanket denials.
Getting in to the fine details of it is important for researchers or doctors who specifically work with the tongue, but the issue that we're talking about here is how this was commonly taught as absolute fact to young children with no nuance and seemingly for no reason other than it being widely believed.
If anyone is specifically claiming that the tongue is completely uniform in taste reception then they're it taking too far, sure. But generally when I see this brought up, the focus is on questioning the process of how some facts make it in to what schools teach as "common knowledge" even when they are both wrong and unimportant to daily life and general education.
When a teacher tells a 6-7 year old that flavors can only be tasted on certain parts of your tongue, the problem isn't that they failed to call it a "spatial component to our experience of gustatory stimulus". At that age, teachers have to strip out most nuance from any lesson, and the goal is to find a way to explain things that is true enough while still being understandable to young children.
So why, if stripping out the nuance makes it basically wrong, did teachers keep teaching it for a century? Even if it were true, it's not really important information for most people. Necessarily even, because if it were important to daily life, it would be a lot easier to notice it's mostly wrong.
I don't know, and I don't think there's an exact reason. I had teachers tell us about this, then seem to realize they needed a reason for it to matter and try to turn it in to a lesson about scientific inquiry. They told us to go home and try putting flavors on the 'wrong' parts of the tongue and notice how we couldn't taste anything. I tried it once, and it didn't work, and it was never brought up again.
Feel free to educate people about the mechanics of our sense of taste, but I think this is a fine example of myths making it in to what's taught in schools.
the entire history of past socialism
"You're too much into politics"
Said by people who are unwilling to admit they're on the wrong side. Or in a more extreme setting (like say, South Africa during apartheid), they'd most likely report you to authorities or outright even kill you.
Started getting into communism recently, and my brother spies on the stuff I look for, called me a paranoid, jobless loser (he is jobless himself), and that I should kill myself for being so miserable. By the way, I am a lower-middle class family from India, a far-right shit hole, with the highest unemployment rate (40% under 25 are jobless, 10.57% is the overall unemployment rate), unskilled college graduates, atrocity towards minorities, and on the very verge of turning into a theocracy.
Welcome to the team! May I ask what radicalized you?
If you'd like help with anything that can be offered from an Anglophone perspective (obviously you're going to have better access than me to the robust and interesting material from Indian communists*), I or a ton of other people on my instance or lemmygrad would love to help, and we've got people from all over (I'm pretty sure including India, we just don't get many "As an Indian" posts) who can offer their perspectives too.
*This isn't just lip-service. Aside from what can be tied to movements like the Naxals or the people of Kerala, I think Utsa Patnaik has some very compelling writing.
That coconuts falling on people's heads kills more people than shark attacks. It's was literally an experiment to see how far a lie could spread, and now it's used by many as an actual fact.
Source?
From what I understand, it's unknown if coconuts kill more people per year than sharks as death by coconut are not well tracked. But the specific number quoted of 150 isn't legitimate. However, I can't find anything about it being related at all to an experiment to see how far a lie could go though. Did someone tell you this? Definitely a possibility of some irony here...
I don't know if you're mixing up stats or I was told a falsehood, but I was told that the lie to see how far and fast they spread was about eating X spiders in your sleep throughout your life.
That was actually a result of a statistical blunder. The people who ran the study forgot to exclude Spider-Eating Greg as an outlier.
Wasn't it Spiders Georg?
Iran has convinced a large portion of their population that the holocaust never happened.
What is the purpose of that lie? Anti-semitism?
Iran is politically opposed to the US and the US is closely aligned with Isreal. My understanding is that it's mostly just political but with the Ayatollahs it's never clear.
So it's just "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" logic?
It could factor in to stuff relating to Israel in the Middle East. Although, like other commenters here, I don't know much about this and I'd like to see some more substantiation.
People, no matter the inteligence or schooling, are more likely to believe what they hear more often. (If 10 people you know swear that eating mint will keep you from going bald it might just be true)
This makes sense and is normal, at least until the modern world.
Now add social media and an algorithm that its only purpose is to increase clicks/likes/interactions. Suddenly everything everyone is talking about is whatever you clicked on last time. A positive feedback loop occurs. The more videos you look at on the same topic, the more those get served, the more you view them, the more you believe them.
Experiment : Try creating a brand new Google account and watching 3 videos on YouTube on a single topic. Refresh YouTube page, or check back tomorrow.
Switching to electric cars will save the planet. Not when they increase tire pollutants at higher rates and still rely on fossil fuels and fracking to charge their batteries.
Also for the US specifically that we can't afford universal healthcare.
America might be flawed but it’s still overall a force for good in the world.
Biden might suck but we should still vote for Democrats on the state or local levels and participate in the [nonexistent] primary to put pressure on Democrats because they are clearly better than Republicans and progressives would never lie to us (cough bernie cough fetterman cough AOC).
Communism is impossible because it goes against human nature.
China is capitalist.
Organizing for revolution in the USA is hopeless.
It’s impossible to scientifically understand human societies, even though humans are part of nature and nature can be scientifically understood.
We can solve all our problems with technology alone. There’s no need to change anything else.
Things will be better in the future even if I don’t actually do anything to make them better. (This one has been an issue for me. “The future” for a Marxist like myself isn’t terribly different from religious visions of paradise.)
I wish i would never here that load of shit ever again
"we are free"
The US military is there to protect their country's "Freedom"
News ownership has consolidated over the last 40 years from around 40 companies in the 1980s to 6 today. This is that "liberal news media" conservatives keep yammering on about. The one that's owned by 6 corporations.
"conservatives" are just a subtype of liberal. The "Liberal" in "Liberal Media" simply means that it is private property run for profit of individuals and not State owned media run in the interests of the nation.
What does Murdoch own?
He's currently the Chairman and owner of Fox News. He's been the chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox and News Corp going all the way back to 1980.
Ukraine is winning and Russia is collapsing.
Also Russia is winning and Ukraine is collapsing.
Also Russia is collapsing and on the verge of invading the rest of Europe.
cope
cry into your bandera burger
"Russia is winning" is premature, but Ukraine absolutely is collapsing, as evidenced by the press-ganging.
These are objective facts that even mainstream western media now openly acknowledges, here are a few examples for you from just the past month
I have not seen this mentioned before, but the Teslas people buy in the US isn't helping the environment. You just are saving on fuel!
Nah, they're an incremental improvement. EVs are more efficient at turning energy into locomotion. They get >100 mpge. The increase in tire wear isn't nearly as significant the CO2 emissions. I'm pretty sure there are studies that show EVs are better for the environment as a whole than ICE vehicles (even accounting for things like lithium mining and fossil fuel powered grids).
Tesla is a horrible, anti-consumer company. A lot of companies make EVs now (but a lot of those companies are pretty horrible too, I guess).
How is it not helping the environment when compared to a gas or diesel car? You’re saving on fuel but you’re also burning far less fuel to produce the energy required and are using it more efficiently. I think you got this one wrong.
Literally anything regarding China, especially Xinjiang if you talk to anyone from
I was talking to a mate about Palestine and he immediately went for the "bUt TiAnAm3n SqU@r3 k1LLeD oVeR tEn Th0uSaNd" and the "Ch1n@ cEnOcIde iN UygHuRs Th0" with the swiftness of a 737 flying into the 2nd tower. They will disregard who originally makes these claims and are 100% unfazed by say, World Uyghur Congress being totally in support of the genocide in Gaza, the response being either dismissal or "you're too much into politics and also ableism".
Hexbears sucking up to dictators while claiming to be pro lgbtq will never not be funny
China's bottom-up system of power starting at the mass line via committees and polling does mean a slower progress on social change than a top-down approach like you see in the west, but it also means a more consistent gradual improvement as younger generations age up. Whereas it's always a constant battle in the west, with a large (quite often successful) push for reversal.
Trans rights got a boost in China just last week for example with a court ruling.
Since 2020 China literally has more workplace protections for trans people than the US
https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.scmp.com/news/people-culture/gender-diversity/article/3243608/blessing-china-court-lauds-rule-law-backs-transgender-staffer-fired-being-absent-while-leave
Don't pinkwash your redscare.
Also Xi isn't a dictator. He was literally elected by a democratic assembly. Also he historically pushes for more democracy in China, more than the US. Literally look into the idea of whole process people's democracy
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/whole-process-peoples-democracy-in-china-what-does-it-mean/
The West seems to define "democracy" in a very specific form: there MUST be multiple competing political parties and power MUST, at least in theory (compare Singapore, Mexico, etc) regularly transfer between them as the result of elections.
This is something Western states have been able to pull off, but it's actually sort of peripheral to the theoretical INTENT of democracy-- that the government serves the masses. Good governance is pretty much a by-product of the fear of being voted out of office.
You can, and often do, have the all-sacred elections and peaceful transfer of power and still have a government which isn't acting in service of its electorate. Sure, you can pick red corporate stooge or blue corporate stooge, but the Overton window is still a narrow slit that represents no real threat to the rich, and factionalism and winner-take-all elections sabotage any actual forward motion.
Meanwhile, the single-party state, unencumbered by having to tear itself apart in battles for the throne every four years, can focus on consensus and actual needs. Good governance can come from a sense of civic duty, or even a smartly weaponized corruption (if everyone thrives, my cut of graft grows with it!)
I came into the comment section hoping for interesting things, but knowing it would be almost all political. Why do I keep doing this to myself, I know better.
Most lies of that nature are political.
I feel you, but when the topic is propaganda, politics is inevitable
A bird for your troubles
What were they expecting 😭😭 what even is a non-political "big lie"? That the earth is round or something???
There's the TVTropes page someone linked, which has a bunch of stuff everyone believes because they became common audio/visual shorthand in TV and movies.
The earth isn't round, it's an oblate spheroid
;P
Spheroids are round, that's what makes them sphereoidal.
Everything is political lmao
USA Civil War: It was only the Southern states that were racist.
USA Civil War: The Confederacy was "only fighting for its way of life". With the hope that most USA'ians will assume that "its way of life" was anything but slavery.
Not every "way of life" needs to exist.
“We fought for state’s rights!”
“State’s rights to do what?”
“……”
That global poverty has declined because of the spread of liberal economies
So many things I could type here... I'll just keep it silly:
Some people think drinking peroxide will give their body "extra oxygen".
Certainly seems like a better idea than drinking dihydrogen monoxide... Monoxide means it only has one oxygen. That sounds dangerous and I hope people drinking it manage to get enough oxygen somehow.
If it only was dihydrogen monoxide... these days they're putting all kinds of chemicals in water... oxidane, hidrol, hydric acid, oxygen hydride, hydroxylic acid, hydrohydroxic acid (and a bunch of other acids, really), μ-oxidodihydrogen...
Ah yes, you breathe through your gut. Even if it did provide oxygen you'd burn through it in a few minutes at most.
With 30%, it’ll burn for a while…until you pass out from the pain
the vast majority of americans believe the obvious lie that buying things can make you happy
Death to America
That the 2020 election was stolen.
There's a TVTropes page for things like this, of course.
"This war is different, this war is nessasary" "This is the most important election of our time" "Invasive surveillance is done for your protection" "We only censor misinformation"
Liberalism.. that is classical and neo-liberalism, as they were invented by a bunch of lords and sir's who were angry that the monarchy was getting a cut. It's the preferred ideology of the finance industry, as they can't have liberationism or lazze fair capitalism because the guillotines would roll out much too quickly. But they sure can define global markets and the value of currencies.
Watch US pundits harp on and on about the monarch's of Europe, but not a squeak about the aristocracy or the barons. It's also funny to note that because of goal post moving, liberalism which technically is slightly right from center, has become "left wing". So when you tell Americans that technically they have two right wing parties, they lose their absolute shit.
Lmao to that. It almost as if the lies people have spread about how the system is supposed to work has gotten out of hand, so controlling it has become nigh impossible. No wonder the backlash to Gamestop went how it did.
And I know this will sound facetious (just trying to be helpful!), but the phrase "lazze fair" is spelled "laissez-faire". It originated in 18th century France!
That the 2020 election was stolen via widespread voting fraud.
That the USA could have won the Vietnam War in the early years but went easy on them and it back fired
You hear the same talking point with every US military failure. It's a version of the stabbed in the back myth.
We would have won if those pencil pushers let us shoot into crowds of civilians! (Ignoring that they did do that and did not endear them to the local populations)
the same narrative we're starting to see shaping around the debacle with the proxy war in Ukraine incidentally
Capitalist realism
That there was a protest against something in Beijing from April until June 4th 1989.
Heard the glorious communist party rolled over the protestors with tracks but that's impossible!
This isn't reddit you don't have to do that
There is no war in Ba Sing Se.
This is the entirety of trump. Tell the lie on a TV show to accelerate results
The council of nicea verifiably, empirically did NOT collect the gospels to make the new testament as we know it. The gospels were already being bound together, seen as a whole, etc before the council, and after the council there was still a bunch of what's now considered apocrypha.
98% of everything that Americans especially but the people of white countries in general have heard about North Korea is false, and the general ethos of being some kind of psychotic tin-pot dictatorship with no grip on reality is purely an American invention (with the help of the sellouts and agents in the South). There is plenty to criticize the DPRK for -- even including stereotypical lines about the less-social elements of its Confucian heritage coloring state ideology all the way back to Kim Il-Sung -- but the image that most "westerners" have in their heads is fundamentally a fabrication, despite how confident they are in it.
Could you go into detail? I'm interested in hearing your take on this and what it comes from. For reference, I have a good friend (with a stupid amount of money) who loves to travel. Having kind of exhausted all of the typical places, and wanting to do something different, he decides to go to North Korea.
His stories are that it was absolutely as bizarre as he was expecting and how he had zero freedom and everything was perfectly controlled so he could only see what they would allow him to see, including being moved around in vans that didn't have windows when they were going outside of the city where he was staying.
The Tesla truck is already there and just needs to be built at scale.
Full self driving has been fully achieved in 2017 and will reach end consumers next year (as claimed by Tesla every single year since then).
It is desirable that SpaceX rockets fail hard instead of succeeding in their missions.
Musk has truly mastered this principle and only now are people getting impatient. Most investors still regard him as too big to fail. Either Elon will be able to present sufficient success in the next few years or that bubble will burst very violently. He has almost used up the good will he has built up over years (earned our not).
SpaceX has been doing incredibly well at rockets, just because you only know about tests that ended in explosions doesn't mean that's how everything goes
You hate musk, I get it but that doesn't mean everything he associated with is automatically bad
Gwynne Shotwell. She built the rockets. Elon was one of many challenges she managed to work around.
Exactly, and thousands of other highly educated and skilled people - I can't think of anything worse than having to put up with Elon then getting told your life's work is rubbish just because he's associated with the company you work for.
Just another hated boss. Not too uncommon. I'm sure plenty of people who work for him don't like him either. SpaceX does get plenty of positive recognition and feedback, too.
the Hitler was an atheist seems pretty popular, also that Einstein was religious.
Trickle down theory
This does remind me of the standard conspiracy or creationist reversal, if something is said frequently enough it must be a lie. (except it only applies to their specific hangups)
This sounds like a question from a homwork worksheet
That immigration from the third world is good for every country except Israel.
That there are no extreme right wing/nazi elements in both sides of the Ukranian conflict.
Since the Russians used the dishonest method or calling their war "denazification", a "useful lie" for both sides was to claim their armed forces and government were completely clean and it is the other side boasts swasticas.
The sad truth is that full blowm nazism permiates in armed forces of both sides, and that both government have some very strong right wing revisionism going on (Russia is worse than Ukraine on this matter, but Ukraine is also far worse than most other countries on the continent regarding this)
I've got to disagree here. Well, partially agree partially disagree. I think it's absolutely the case that your example qualifies, making a big deal about representation of Nazis in the armed forces is a kind of big lie that's just getting repeated without any sense of context or proportionality.
But I don't think it's a both sides thing the way you're making it out to be. You're acknowledging that it's Russia being worse than Ukraine, but it's not merely a difference of one being slightly worse, it's a huge part of the Russian narrative, whereas it factors in in no way whatsoever in Ukraine's message to the outside world. Ukraine has made historical analogies, in major speeches and communications to the outside world, but has not made the case that their sovereignty is legitimized due to anything having to do with Nazi representation in the Russian armed forces. It just doesn't at all play an equal role in the moral cases they're making.
Russia can't call ukrainians ukrainians because everyone here knows at least a couple of persons with ukrainian background or a surname. They only call them ukronazis, ukrofascist to distant them and further dehumanize, to sell it to public. And then, if you look at formations actively participating in the conflict, there are intermixed remains of said Azov on one side, a shadow from their autonomous existence in 2014, and actively recruiting neo-paganist Rusich with their head Milchakov saying on an open mic he's a nazi and still walking free as we talk.
There's indeed no bothsiding about it.
And whenever you see a ukrainian hatred against russians, you should put it into a context of nine years of continuous violence against them. It's maybe irrational, maybe unreasonably grouping the whole country together, but would you really ackshually them out of speaking about their pain? I'm a russian, and I understand it, and that our failure to hold onto power in the 00s now led to some 100k+ people cities being brought to the ground for no fucking reason, all that fear, and hatred, and loss. Half of them woke up to artillery blasts, ducked and covered, slept in metro and basements, had electric and other outages, if not lost relatives or have some serving on the outposts. It's obvious why they don't like us.
If some american or european would try to downplay it, you can use our secret slavic spell. It sounds dee nakh. Say it to them. Say it again. They'd not know it means 'go fuck yourself', but they'd certainly feel it.
And OP can eat some berries - green ones, purple ones, bloody ones. In the end, they are all the same. And there's no bunch of corpses laying under one of these plants, winking, suggesting one won't like to eat them.
Specifically for Ukraine there is also the fact that, when your country is under attack, nationalists are the first ones to sign up to fight the invaders. It's like their whole thing. And the intersection in the Venn diagram of Nazis and nationalists is usually almost a circle.
I don’t know … all of it 🤷
Seriously, our world and reality are complex enough that we make up ideas and theories that are useful but likely untrue in some way that isn’t negligible. But so in need of useful operating theories are we that we peddle and believe them.
Constantly questioning everything is way too tiring for a species that’s still very much in the survival mode or stage of evolution.
"All models are wrong, some are useful."
Orbán
That corporations doing bad things are anything other than individuals doing bad things and hiding it in the anonymity of the “corporation”. Corporations are not people. People are people, and people have a sad tendency to do horrible shit to other people, especially those outside their social circle.
That sodium is the leading reason for blood pressure and heart disease. Evidence has been shaky at best, and at worst it's a cause among many.
"Belgium sucks."
Yeah, it has its imperfections, but that's what makes it so much more special from most other European countries. I absolutely love that place.
Also, some people genuinely think that this country "doesn't exist" for whatever reason.
Tesla Model S is a sedan and KFC sells burgers, if you say otherwise you're a semantic nazi
No specific examples but that's the echo chamber style
This fuckin quote is from Joseph Goebbels and was about one of his views on a Jewish conspiracy. I so hate this quote.
Wasn't that fake? Reference link but also wikipedia false nazi quotations
Hrmm. TIL. Thanks!
Irony of ironies
The whole Shohei Ohtani fiasco from Toronto's perspective. Wow, people bit hard on that. To be fair, everyone was waiting on confirmation. But, seriously, a writer for the Dodgers makes the first call, then people are checking Flight Aware, there's a restaurant reservation rumoured, and on and on.
Finally, the flight lands and one of the Dragon's Den guys hops out. Word comes down that he's signed with the Dodgers.
Seems to me like it was misreported on purpose, using Toronto as a foil.