312
‘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)
News
23275 readers
4822 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
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 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.
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.
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.