The political ouroboros.

That, and just say what you’re going to do, rather than labelling yourself.

Don’t take this badly, but in my experience, formal Education doesn’t teach people Skepticism (the real deal, not the Denialism that morons have whilst thinking they’re being “skeptics”). It also doesn’t at all train people to be self-aware and spot when it’s an emotion (fear, wanting to belong, even hope) making them want to believe something rather than cold hard logic.

My formal Education is in Science and Engineering, and whilst education in those areas does push you more towards a more analytical kind of thinking and an as objective as possible measuring of things, most higher education out there is in soft “sciences” at best, or even just the kind of domains were the main required expertise is in convincing people, so the very opposite of being as Objective and Logical as possible.

From my observations even some people with higher education in a Sciences or Engineering domain are gullible cattle when it comes to politics, mainly because they don’t engage it with logic and the way of thinking they use in their professional life, but rather with tribalism (which is emotional) or just straight raw emotion (like anger or fear) and thus are stupidly simple to control and pretty much self-convince that whatever the propagandists want them to believe is true even when the most basic analysis of it immediatelly shows inconsistencies.

TL;DR Whilst better and more Education somewhat improves people’s resilience to propaganda, even the highest levels of Education in highly objective and analytical domains won’t make people immune to this shit, since people are controlled via emotional subconscious cognitive pathways, not logic, and even highly intellectual people who WANT to believe something will find some kind of seemingly “logic” explanation to conclude that which they want to believe is indeed so.

decades of demonizing education, attacking and undermining education by making sure it doesnt teach essential skills like critical thinking and punishing anything but blind acceptance and obedience, the abolition of the fairness doctrine to begin the locking of people into isolated information bubbles, social media and facebook that uses algorithms to maximize profits by serving inflammatory content to vulnerable people to further expand the the right wing information bubbles online with the happy little bonus of it bringing in billions of dollars and thus being a capitalistically selected for behavior of feeding innocent people into the hate machine because right wingers post more, see more ads, and click more ads, because of their constant engagement due to their constant manufactured outrage.

and, i mean, thats just the tip of the iceberg thats created these people, but I’m not gonna spend an hour highlighting every single thread in this blanket.

Jargon and labels are part of the way people are controlled - simplify complex concepts down to repeatable simple words and now you can both control the meaning of such soft definintion terms (notice how the meaning of “terrorist” has been moved over time to become “against those in power”) plus constant repetition breeds familiarity, thus the very same cognitive paths that transform brand-familiarity into “comfort with brand” and hence favoring it over less familiar brand, are exercised to get people to accept provided political “explanations” & “solutions” using those slogans.

That said, in my experience if you try and explain complex things to people with enough complexity and completeness for them to understand the subtleties of the subject, they switch off half way (like, I bet, plenty of people reading this post that didn’t pass the first half of the first paragraph), so you have to somehow find at least simple metaphors, so not quite down reducing it to slogans but not all that far.

“People don’t know what Socialism means” is the worst case of intentional ignorance about things that are completely understandable by people who refuse to look something up since “People in the middle east have been fighting for centuries and nobody understands why.”

Yeah

Most of the stupid cunts are even more hateful and even less intelligent

This movie was actually how I was introduced to the Israel/Palestine conflict.

…wh…what? What are the inner workings of that person’s brain…

I think there was a movie called Red Zone Cuba where the moral was everyone had to give their money and businesses to the US Government in order to stop communism.

Mamda Nia!

It’s crazy how the emoji made me read that with an Italian accent.

We’re already spending this much and they’re still like this? Clearly it’s ineffective and needs to be gotten rid of entirely.

Also to not use ANY of the conservative buzzwords they have conditioned them to hear and associate with certain things. Also don’t say anything related to all their Thought Terminating Cliches.

Don’t say: Socialism, Communism, Capitalism, Immigrants, anything LGBTQ, anything economy, anything equality, anything related to DEI, anything they fixate on.

Instead, use actual basic terms and explanations without using the shortcut words that they have been conditioned/brainwashed with. It’s a minefield, but can be done. Don’t say the economy is bad, say the cost of food is very high and I wish we had better pay or cheaper prices. Don’t say you want democratic socialism, say it would be great if medical costs were fair and we had more help with everyday things we all want and need.

It’s because of them immigrants taking our jobs, right? Like those idiots voted for Trump because he talked about lowering prices. He did the opposite, but of course they are gonna vote for him again. Can’t vote for those dang socialists!
I fear people are just too dumb to ever not fall for it.

I think Lewis Black said it best: “We have a party of bad ideas and a party of no ideas.”

It’s the economy, stupid.