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‘Everything you’ve been told is a lie!’ Inside the wellness-to-fascism pipeline
(www.theguardian.com)
this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
312 points (94.3% liked)
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Grifters, con-artists and fascists all use the truth to sell a lie. The truth is that we have been steadily raised on a diet of mass produced garbage, optimised purely for profit while disregarding all public and environmental welfare in its construction and delivery. The lie is that the grifters, con-artists and fascists are not just doing the exact same thing to the extreme.
They offer what they call good, wholesome and honest solutions to contrast with the big globalist elitist fat-cats selling expensive unnatural poisons. But natural or synthetic, poisons can kill you the same type of dead.
Donald Trump successfully sold the slogan: Drain the Swamp
as long as the "truth" they're advertising is scary and misunderstood somehow, they can sell anything while they're pandering to the listener's ego.. this is Alex Jones' entire ethos..
Pandering to egos, or what I see more frequently, predating on fears. I run my own email server, partly because I enjoy watching the diversity of spam and trends, partly so i know what new scams to look out for. I receive far more "drink this to cure your disease once a day!" types of emails than I do "smoking hot babe wants to send you a message" types of emails.
the pandering can be pretty sly, although there is as much tits and ass as necessary.. Rush Limbaugh pandered to his listener's ego by convincing him that he already knew everything he needed to know.. he did that sort of with his method of bitching about the world, and they sat there and ate it up.. and just got stupider by the minute.. Rogan does the same thing.. it's the entire right-wing playbook, all the way back to Goebbels..
the idiot's response to every good conspiracy theory is: SEE I TOLD YOU.. they just get addicted to listening for that SEE I TOLD YOU ego stroke moment..
I like to pretend it's a 5D chess long con (it's not, but pretending is fun). It's much easier to scoop off the scum when it floats to the top, and trump got a whole bunch of them to take the mask off so they can be arrested for treason.
Similarly it's fun to pretend Apartheid Clyde went full fascist so that neonazis would replace their coal rollers with low-poly 90s video game pedestrian crushers to own the libs.
what the hell are you talking about
A phrase that refers to someone being openly fascist/nazi rather than trying to hide their true intentions.
Mask-on: Bush era GOP or current European far right.
Mask-off: DeSantis
i don't like pretending any kind of chess.. it's a scatterbrain thing to do..
It implies the number of opponents isn't changing, in a thread about how they increase in number.
Taking the mask off isn't always a good sign. Sometimes it means the hate is being normalized.
It makes sense that the people who will believe one category of such "simple and easy explanations and solutions" will also believe other categories of "simple and easy explanations and solutions" - believing crystals will help you tune your soul to feel better might not at all be the same thing as believing all the problems of society are due to people with the least power in it (immigrants, the "lazy" poor) but it certainly is the product of the same kind of cognitive take on the World and emotional desire for understandable "explanations" and silver-bullet "solutions" so the path from one to the next is way shorter than it might seem if all one looks at is the information space rather than the psychological and intellectual characteristics of the "believers".
Or to put it in cruder terms: both kinds of outlook in the World appeal to the the same kind of sucker.
I think it's important to realize that almost everyone is at least occasionally a sucker. There's a grift that targets basically every personality type. There's grift for health conscious folks, for worried parents, for 'I'm so much smarter than others', for gamers, for outdoorsy types, there's something for everyone. If you aren't careful you'll be laughing at the other 'idiots' while you yourself fall into a different trap.
Honestly once you start paying attention it's really scary how many different and seemingly totally unrelated topics can be used to pull people into facism. So many times I've clicked on a different YouTube video or something and then all the sudden my feeds been taken over by right wing bullshit.
The strange thing to me is how much the Youtube search results and suggestions have changed, even just in the last few months. I mostly go there to listen to music and I used to get stuff I was actually interested in.
Yesterday I went looking for a specific video. Of the top 15 results, only 2 were close to what I wanted. It wasn't even the top 2. One relevant result, then a bunch of political clickbait. Zero connection to music. And the autoplay will feed you the same thing if it's on.
A couple weeks ago, YouTube was still giving me a whopping 3 relevant results at the top before turning on the BS algorithm hose.
It’s the anger / fear feedback loop.
The more angry / scared you become, the more videos you watch. The more you watch the more angry / scared you become…. etc.
The more you watch the more money YT makes. And that’s all they care about.
I watched one youtube video which contained a complete takedown and exposure of Tucker Carlson and his lies (back when he was on Fox). Of course this meant that youtube thought I was interested in Tucker Carlson, so immediately all my recommendations was to actual official Tucker Carlson videos and similar right wing talking heads.
I had to expunge the anti-Tucker Carlson video from my viewing history to get rid of all those shitty recommendations.
I agree that at in some ways and at some points in time we're all suckers.
I once was scammed and analysing the whole thing later I had to admit the scammer came at in the right ways to get me to draw the conclusions that better served his objectives and use my wants against myself.
Frankly, I both was impressed and was felt it as quite an eye opener on my own blindsides and the limits of intelligence.
Not saying he was an amazing scammer and that's only why I was scammed (frankly I have no idea were in the hierarchy of scam artists the guy was), rather that, as you pointed out, we're all suckers in some way or another.
People refuse to try to address that sort of wooly thinking when it is low stakes then when it becomes high stakes act shocked to see the people around them acting irrationally. One's hypothetical friend who refused to take the vaccine because they thought it had a mind control chip in it and died as a result invariably was previously banging on about how their acupuncturist was going to help them win the lottery and people simply indulged them because "what's the harm in them having funny beliefs about things?" The only time you actually could get through to people around you about these harmful ways of thinking is when it's about things that don't really matter much. If you wait until it's life or death it's too late to get though to them.
This is the lie though. It's the "widely believed fact" that makes it easy to accept the other lies.
Most of our food is just "fine".
Nutritional content of grains, fruits and vegetables has declined over the past 70 years
The world is decidedly off-track to reducing Sodium levels in foods by 2030, salt is considered the leading dietary indication for non-communicable disease. I think we're off-target for all the diet-related sustainable development health goals?
Moderate to severe food insecurity has risen for the past 10 years, nearly half of people cannot afford adequate nutrition
And this is before more localised issues like food deserts, natural disasters, recommendations influenced by industry, etc. Or even other issues like additives, factory farming, sugary drinks being cheaper and safer than the water supplies...
Don't get me wrong, many of us have access to a much larger variety of food from across the world, if we can afford it, the fortification of many foods helps maintain some forms of nutrition, and regulations have made a lot of our food safer. But overall, our produce is worsening in quality and the cheaper per calorie/time foods are what people are forced to eat, and it is killing them.
But I also meant less literal forms of diet too.
yes if you eat only a high sugar and fat diet you will die a premature death, but honesty it's still probably healthier than the diets of our 200,000 year old ancestors (I asset confidently with no evidence).
I'm just assuming that when any type of farming was a rare occurrence, disease, malnutrition and poisoning were much more common.
For every complicated and difficult question there's a simple, and above all, wrong solution.