A Boring Dystopia

Goebbels, in essence: “If you want to make it in propaganda, you have to repeat the same trite phrases over and over again, no matter whether intellectuals contradict you and refute you. You convince scholars with clever arguments, and the masses with simple ones.”

They’re also terrible at spotting what’s fake or untrue.

It's not a small feat when it does feel like every fucking person on TV is lying to you constantly.

From NPR to the Houston Chronicle to BBC News One to the Joe Rogan Podcast, it's just mountains of bullshit and lies and jingoism and native advertising.

It was fine when during their evening tv watch they got commercial promos for the top evening news stories each ad break, but those days are gone.

Go back 30 years, and you still had this shit. It was just pitched to the Median Voter rather than some rarified hot house of partisans.

You still had John Stossel with his crypto-libertarian bullshit and Tucker Carlson screaming at James Carville on Crossfire, but always over something totally incidental. People like Rush Limbaugh and Rachael Maddow hadn't quite gone mainstream yet. Jon Stewart was confined to the back corners of a cable news comedy channel. FOX (the whole damned network, not just the news channel) was just getting off the ground. Everyone agreed gay people shouldn't get married, but women should be allowed to hold a credit card.

Everyone agreed Iraq had WMDs and Cuba is being run into the ground by Nazi Communist Fidel Castro and China is a backwards hellhole where Tianamen Square happens twice a day.

Now you've got Controversy as the focus of news rather than Consensus. So if CNN says the sun rises in the East, Newsmax will bring on Laura Loomer to tell people the CNN anchor rapes puppies, so don't believe them. And if the WSJ says the economy is booming, sixteen podcasters will release episodes about how we're a decade into the New Great Depression You Just Don't Know About.

People believe crazy shit because there is no consensus reality anymore.

This vaccines giving autism shit all because of facebook.

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

The political ouroboros.

I could more or less say the exact same thing about the left though.

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.

"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."

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.

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...