Which are certainly guilty of social conditioning and ideological indoctrination en masse, but this is mostly an emergent phenomenon. It's too simplistic to just say that it's all centrally directed by some small cabal of malevolent puppeteers.
It's been substantially less time since Eastern Europeans had to live under tyrannies, so their cultural memory of what it looks like is more intact.
2 doors down from Nancy Pelosi.
In my study of communist societies, I came to realize that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate. Therefore, the less it corresponded to reality, the better. When people are forced to remain silent while they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to participate in evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One's standing to resist anything is thus eroded, or even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
-Theodore Dalrymple
Except that's not true. Western propaganda makes Putin out to be a Stalinesque autocrat, but that's just not accurate. He can't govern without the oligarchy on his side, and he can't afford to piss them off. That's the truth.
Clarence Thomas is not suicidal.
This is pure propaganda. Putin will do no such thing. He's not an absolute dictator: he has a political class that he answers to, and these guys own it. On top of that, he's one of them.
Who do these people think he is? Trudeau?
If there's anyone whose been missing large public gatherings more than the average European over the past two years, I guess we know who it is.
The globalist agenda part, sure. As for the root cause, the existential crisis of Western citizens, I really don't accept that it's the result of a multigenerational social engineering project. These people are malevolent and opportunistic, but they're not that competent.
Compared to the recent past, true, but in the grand scheme of human history, this is still pretty much the best time and place to be alive, materially speaking. The problem is, people didn't evolve to live without struggle.
So many spoiled, decadent Westerners have grown up in unprecedented opulence and prosperity, but are unable to confront the real reasons why they're so unhappy in spite of it all. Their ennui and listlessness turns to rage and frustration, which is directed at everything around them in the form of resentment and disgust for their own family, community, country, culture and society. This aimless, impotent animosity is easily co-opted by the globalist propaganda machine. It's simple to get people like that to cheer for the erosion of families and communities by the state, for mass immigration, and for foreign interventions.
It might have the opposite effect. Who wants to move to a country with a collapsing economy, plagued by shortages with no jobs and 10% inflation?
Assuming that we can believe the Chinese when they say COVID is the reason for all of this. That may be what they're telling everyone, but I'd say the point of this nonsense, especially in manufacturing hubs like Guangzhou and Shenzhen and financial centers like Hong Kong, is to deliberately disrupt global supply chains, possibly in a conscious effort to destabilize Western countries and governments in the lead up to war.
We'll know what restaurant this was when it gets swatted.
Get off of Twitter.
They are doing this to piss you off. They want your anger, and the attention that comes with it.
Ignore them.
Everyone please lock up your daughters
Hide yo kids. Hide yo wife. We not having sex with anybody up in here!
I don't disagree. The left is a cult, and like all cults, it's comprised of vulnerable people with identity issues, centred around a few very charismatic individuals who are usually psychopaths.
I don't necessarily think feminists specifically fall into that category. Feminism is an emotionally-driven movement: the politicization of women's resentment and entitlement, and even the pseudointellectuals whose work forms the theoretical basis for feminism are not necessarily intelligent so much as they are good at convincing themselves of their own bullshit.
But for the real ideologues behind the left, the trans movement represents the final revolution: the revolution of the personal. It's about giving themselves the ability to supercede biology and to control people's identities on an individual basis, to disrupt not only the bonds of family, but also an individual's ability to formulate a coherent sense of their own identity and to replace those things with the state.
Yes, I agree with you: there are people behind that who know exactly what they're doing and why.
Only the left appreciates the true power of self-indulgent skateboard-mounted pseudojournalists.
They hate men and the trans movement was a weapon they could use to attack men and emasculate boys. It's really not any more complicated than that. They're not exactly deep thinkers.
The center is where we say it is, say communists.
The media won't call Bezos, Gates, Soros, Buffett or any western oligarch by that name because it would be a tacit admission that we live in an oligarchy, not a democracy.
It's the vodka.
Thank you. I understand the relevance of this now.
To show how naive I was, I was actually excited when Disney retconned the EU. I grew up loving the Star Wars novels, games and comic books, but by the time Disney bought Star Wars, the EU had already been completely ruined for me by the Yuuzhan Vong bullshit. I was silly enough to think Disney couldn't possibly do worse than that.