Pretend you have one hour to convince a random normie that the mainstream media is propaganda rather than a collection of well-meaning, objective journalists who sometimes get it wrong but overall try to deliver fair and accurate reporting.
If you fail, you die.
What's your approach?
It's a stupid hypothetical for several reasons but I'm very interested in this topic and I'm curious to hear your thoughts, so I'll ask for a pass on the overly dramatic scenario.
I'm guessing the most common response will be, "It won't work no matter what you do", and fwiw I think that's correct. But for the small group who can be reasoned with, what do you think is the optimal approach?
Believe it or not, get them to tell you about someone they hate, then look up all of the out of context quotes and defamation that's been written about them. The problem is with normies they simply don't want to hear it and shut you down or dismiss you, meanwhile they want to feel free to spew off their bullshit opinions even if you can prove them wrong on every single point.
In terms of the back end stuff as well I would point towards much of their financing and how all of these people know each other. The evidence of their nepotism within industries. GamerGate is a great route to go down with this because it's so blatant and we only keep getting more and more evidence of their behaviour. If they end up learning how much of western society is about who you know then that just might be what tips the average person over the edge because they realise that ultimately we don't live in a meritocracy and anything they do is futile.
I've thought the same. Find out what they're knowledgeable about and use it to basically force them to have a Gell-Mann effect moment. But I suspect most will still compartmentalize so they can continue believing things like orange man bad.
I feel like people who do the compartmentalisation thing are one of the groups that are beyond saving, they are extremely difficult to talk to and unfortunately a lot of normies do that. Partly the reason why my social life is so shit these days really, when the lockdowns happened peoples' craziness really turned me off socialising with others and now they try to gaslight like it never happened.
Yeah you're probably right. I do think a forced Gell-Mann effect is the most sensible place to start.
I also like people's advice to try and stay clear of politics at the beginning.
It's not their opinions.
If you start citing arcana, then you are losing. But if you say "turns out that journalists give positive coverage to the products of people they're sleeping with" - it's concise, it appeals to people's pre-existing moral compass.