• UnderpantsWeevil@lemmy.world
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    5 hours ago

    I heard in America that the government will allow your father to shoot you until you die if you disagree with him politically but ask to see his gun.

    I think this is a great illustration of the kind of propaganda we see online wrt any “Evil Foreign Country”. In this case, it was the British Press reporting hysterically about a father hosting his daughter’s family for Thanksgiving, bragging about being a Trump supporter, bragging about owning a gun, and then accidentally shooting his daughter (literally a room away from the rest of the family) because he’s the exact kind of dipshit that doesn’t know how to handle a firearm professionally. Grand Jury threw the charges out precisely because it was so obvious that he’d been negligent rather than willful. The rest of the family confirms it. But the Brits report it like it was an Honor Killing that the local government endorsed and facilitated.

    We see this kind of manipulation of events in US media - wrt China, Russia, Venezuela, Cuba, France, Mexico, Antifa, Immigrants, Brown People, you name it - any time national news organizations decide they need to flog a particular government or demographic group.

    Hardly unique to the US. But when you’re getting the full Clockwork Orange, it’s hard to know what it feels like to be an outsider looking in.