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“Two things can be true at once.” — person definitely not struggling with cognitive dissonance
(hexbear.net)
Yea yea I know, not all contradictions imply a fundamental error.
This line is currently in popular usage by online liberals who are forced to work through their 
as China ascends, as DPRK approaches normalization, as Iran demonstrates its regional force, as Ukraine inevitably loses, as the US murders and still loses, as Sahel states inch toward sovereignty. These contradictions are becoming more striking and difficult to hand-wave. And in the first phase of this dissonance, the reflex is to allow the dissonance no matter how deafening.
I have literally had a liberal show me a video which has obviously piped in sad music of normal people in North Korea walking down a mildly busy sidewalk on a quiet street to wait at a bus stop and go to work, then turn and say to me, "Isn't this so uncanny and dystopian?"
They then got mad at me when I pointed out that, no it wasn't dystopian, and that nothing they showed in the video was strange unless you just assume that asian people walking around minding their own business are thoughtless and have no interior lives.
They are so wrapped up in their own narratives that they will warp visual evidence to support their point of view, and viscerally reject any kind of common sense.
It's also something some YouTuber tourists have said. They are at a subway station there and say that everything feels staged. Just to make the place look good to them, someone who is practically a nobody. Really makes me skeptical of the notion of seeing is believing.
As years and years of eye witness testimonies, psychological, neurological, and anthropological research will tell you, seeing is most definitely not believing. Your brain is the most important mediating factor for lived existence and it is a horrid pile of shit.
Which is why scientific rigor is extremely important in determining baseline facts, and why questions that struggle or are completely unable to be scientific, such as those of metaphysical and ethical ideology, will always vassalate to reflect the material conditions that spawn them.
Yea you're telling me
vacillate? or did i just learn a new word?
It is vacillate (to go back and forth)! I think that would be vassalize (to become a vassal).
Which technically speaking, both are true, so this is how jargon is created. To "Vassalate" is to be subject to something and change as that thing changes. Not that I plan on introducing this term into the discourse.
Americans seeing people use public transportation:
Americans getting in their 2027 Ford F150 and promptly moving down 5 children 2 bicycles and a small car (they couldn’t see any of it) to get to mcdonald burger to make an offering to the cattle rancher who just sent a death squad to exterminate some indigenous peasants in the amazon, burning an entire saudi oil field’s worth of gas in the process: