For those who aren’t familiar with the term, it means believing something that probably shouldn’t be believed, or being influenced to believe something that’s not necessarily in your best interests.
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Countless times throughout my life. In fact, a big part of my life is slowly deprogramming from years of propaganda. Whether it is religion or politics the amount of misinformation is enormous as it is prolific.
Even something very personal like relationships is fraught with tons of negative cultural issues around control and love. Most of what society teaches is a lie designed to perpetuate things like the Patriarchy.
Edit: After reading a lot of these I would like to offer an alternative to what a lot of people have said.
I learned about a conspiracy back in the early days of computing that was essentially that the US was intercepting all emails and all phone calls around the world.
There was a lot of good evidence including a spy pact with Canada where we had an installation on their soil and they had an installation on ours so we could spy on our own citizens without breaking the letter of the law.
Also good evidence that AT&T and other providers had let the government access their major server trunks to install their own hardware.
Well Snowden proved it was all real. This was probably the biggest conspiracy theory of my lifetime.
Go all the way back to the echelon conspiracy. You were a crazy person to believe the government could intercept your phone calls at any time. 30 years later it’s an accepted norm.
Pizza party, soccer practice, Christmas, whenever it’s served really
Kony 2012, not the genreal idea of raising awareness about Joseph Kony, but that it would actually lead to his capture.
I believed that I had to be certain way in society or I was fundamentally flawed and bad.
I dropped that belief, acknowledge that to some point it’s convenient for me to follow societal norms but trying to fit in makes me mostly miserable. I naturally don’t want to do things that bother other people but I also don’t really want to be around them so why should I try to be likeable to them any more than is normal to me. This way people who like me, are sure to like me as I am. If I like them enough, I’ll naturally also want to be considerate of them, even if I have to occasionally behave a little different.
I somehow made it very complicated with just beating myself up for being bad/stupid/ugly/broken because I kept believing people who I don’t even like.
I was raised evangelical Christian in the Bible belt. I was a “true believer” I call it now. I literally believed there was a hell that people were going to. I’m glad I’m out of that.
I ran 5 km every day and ate very low fat, mostly plants. Ended up with non alcoholic fatty liver.
seems inherited, did you ever find a cause?
No one else in my family or extended family has had fatty liver. Fortunately yes, I reversed my NAFLD by eating a low carbohydrate high fat diet.
Used to believe that humanity would inherently self-improve, especially the more easily information became accessible.
People couldn’t read and write at first, and didn’t know much about the world, and now we have instant communication and access to vast repositories of knowledge.
I believed that people were naturally curious, and wanted to learn and figure things out. Education systems sucked, but with improvement it could foster that curiosity in everyone!
Turns out that was incredibly naive. Humans have an inherent ego that tries to make themselves more than reality. Their problems are more real than another’s. Their inconveniences are more important than anything bigger-picture. I thought religion were old dinosaur structures of primitive belief systems that lasted for too long, but humans will literally make shit up or believe in some made up shit from someone else if it helps them ignore the inconveniences of reality.
COVID-19 really helped sink that in.
People are naturally curious but we live in a system that punishes curiosity.
Oh man. Yeah, I remember in middle school reading about WW1, WW2, Vietnam, the Civil War (USA) and thinking that thank god we’re smart enough to be past that.
Yes, also, COVID killed any hope I had left. I remember before the pandemic thinking that if aliens landed all of humanity’s petty bickering would end once we had something that united us all, and when COVID hit I thought “this is it, we have no choice but to come together as humans and face a challenge”…holy shit was I wrong. In the years since the pandemic I’ve had to actively try to forget most of what happened for my own sanity.
covid also shifted the anti-vaxers to the RIGHT.
Humans are smart.
But this isn’t our natural habitat. Its a laboratory and we are the lab rats.
Can you judge an animal’s intelligence if they are in a controlled environment and manipulated by mad scientists? (mad scientist = the 1%)
deleted by creator
Mine have generally been mentioned. In my early 20s in the early 2000s. Got into the ancient aliens stuff briefly.
Believed in supernatural and past life stuff for a good bit.
By the mid-2000s, having “pulled myself out of poverty” (I didn’t do it on my own; I had help and support for family after having been homeless at one point) and gotten a salaried job, started listening to rightwing radio hosts. Thought I just needed to work a bit harder and success would come. All the other people were lazy and social programs were bad with the possible exception of something like WIC. Nah, I was just fairly lucky to have survived some stupid situations, had help from family, and was generally just way too entitled and thinking I was special. I was fairly insufferable for a good while.
I voted for Ralph Nader in 2000
But he was a great tennisman ! Who wouldn’t vote for him ???
I believed the USA was a liberal democracy full of concerned citizens. I also had faith in the financial system at one point!
In fairness before the Internet we could pretend people were decent and thoughtful. Facebook well and truly ended that.
So you just drank the socialist kool aid. Got it.
Hahah socialism. Like subsidies for farmers who grow corn for ethanol? Or like subsidies for Amazon warehouses. Or should we only do socialism and when banks gamble to hard and collapse? Or socialism like getting a government/military jobs to avoid poverty?
Fallacious reasoning. I could also reference Stalin, breadlines, and the fact that the greatest famines in human history were the result of the authoritarian nature of socialism.
We could discuss the pros and cons of specific policies but instead the “socialist” kool-aid drinkers just tend to rant about capitalism = bad and therefore socialism = good without any grasp of any nuance or willing to do any critical thinking.
For example, with ethanol growing corn pulls carbon out of the air, burning the ethanol of course returns it back. It’s carbon neutral, which is significant because Global Warming is a real thing. Pulling oil from the ground and burning it is obviously not carbon neutral. Ethanol is a much better fuel than burning oil.
Amazon was facing an anti-trust lawsuit: https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2023/09/ftc-sues-amazon-illegally-maintaining-monopoly-power
But something has changed in the last year, so now it’s drill, baby drill and corporations like Amazon can bribe the government to look the other way on their anti-competitive practices.
You’ve probably been convinced “both sides are the same” because that is the belief of your group. But it’s in the the nature of cult behaviour to deny reality to conform to the group. Which is what the phrase “drinking the koolaid” is in reference to.
You have faith in the financial system?
You say socialist like it’s a bad thing and it screams “I’m ignorant.”
If you hate socialism stop using the things socialism provides you. Mail, paved roads, power and water delivered to your house, fire and police, education, etc. Socialism is a big part of why our lives are so decent despite the capitalist hellscape the billionaires are pushing. They’ve lied to you that social programs are why your taxes are so high; they’re high because the wealthiest among us aren’t paying a fair share.
None of that is socialism.
All of that is infact socialism. Taxing individuals and creating community services. It’s like the core tenant or our education system which is socialist, even if it failed to teach you that. It’s the core tenant of social security and Medicare. Those third rail policies that everyone loves? It’s socialism.
Thinking everything is a “hellscape” and only those in your group are enlightened enough to see a better way (those outside the group are “ignorant”) is what most people refer to as “drinking the koolaid”.
Modern “socialism” is at best a grift, at worst a cult.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in…
…don’t make me post the whole copypasta.
“socialist kool aid”
If caring about others is kool aid, call me the kool aid man because I am about to burst through the glass ceilings and bring delicious nectar to all.
He did a good thing for sure
Once thought that Google eas a great company and earnt evil.
I gushed over them when Android Open Source Project, Chromium, and the Google summer of code were new. I still think the free and open source projects they maintain are positive things, but I’m disgusted with just about everything else they do.
If you work hard, are honest, and moral, you will get ahead in life.
It was embarrassingly late in life before I realized how much of a farce that was.
Oh man! The pieces of myself I gave working for companies that gave zero shits about me! I worked way too hard for way too little. I was nothing to them.
Kids if you’re reading this unionize your workplace. Through a union is the only way I’ve gotten a decent wage, benefits package, and shield from the whims of management. They’re nothing without us, they produce no value.
An oldie but a goodie
9/11 truther. Missile pods on military jets and fed reserve gold heist. WTC7 got me in. But I was also a welder and I’d been making thermite for fun since I was a teenager so I knew that jet fuel didn’t have to melt steel beams to significantly reduce its tensile strength, just several hundred degrees was enough to weaken steel. And I know the difference between thermite products and liquid aluminium pouring from the buildings, thermite looks like straight up lava, and in any case, you need way, way more thermite to melt through a steel girder than you might expect from watching movies. It takes at least half a kilo just to melt through the hood of a car, let alone and engine block like the anarchist cookbook would have you believe, I know because I did it.
Ok, I’ve always wondered what’s up with WTC7, but I could never be bothered to wade through the noise. What was up with that?
It’s still a very strange looking collapse. But the sort of damage caused to it by two giant skyscrapers collapsing next to and into it must have subjected it to stresses is was never designed to take.
And a raging fire inside the building near it’s base that was left to burn mostly unchecked because most of the firefighters were already killed or their equipment destroyed by towers 1 and 2.
Controlled demolitions target the very weakest parts of a structure, causing a cascading failure throughout the structure. In a huge uncontrolled fire and impact, the same weakest points are by definition the most likely to fail first, so the collapse looks similar. Also WTC7 was built above an existing building, so it’s vertical columns didn’t go straight down into bedrock, they went down to near street level, and then transferred the load horizontally around the existing building. From the outside it looked like a regular rectangle, but on the inside, it effectively had a giant unsupported hole on the inside. Under normal conditions, structurally sufficient, but if you shake the ever loving fuck out of it twice and then light it on fire with no firefighters nearby…
Still waiting for any other buildings to collapse like these three buildings did. It will never happen though. Three nearly perfect collapses in the same day in a row was a pretty insane random occurrence.
Just about anything is possible and able to be proved through science. This doesn’t necessarily mean that is what happened though.
I remember watching one of the Flash animated “truth” “documentaries” on flight 77 crashing into the Pentagon.
It talked about missiles being used and similar stuff, I was 13-14 at the time and I showed my parents, they rightfully explained that this was just a random video that anyone could have made.
They brought up the importance of using trusted sources, but also emphasized that they didn’t have the facts either.
They told me to calm down and wait for verifiable facts to surface.
Yeah the Pentagon impact site never made any sense and the government was never open about the evidence. I was never convinced the official explanation made sense based upon the damage to the building.
The US government could easily clear it up by realizing the footage, but they won’t.
spongebob meme dot gif tventy foor yeers later…
I once watched a 9/11 truther type program that hand waved away this issue by simply stating the government used “nanothermite”. What is “nanothermite”? It’s thermite but acts in whatever way it needs to when somebody pokes holes in the idea of thermite.
It takes at least half a kilo just to melt through the hood of a car
Counter argument: if you did this at home on a hobby budget, imagine what is possible with a high tech lab and a military budget.
imagine
Not a terribly convincing start to a hypothesis.
The start was what they achieved with no resources. Keep up.
You are grossly overestimating military budget spending. Now, a private contractor with a government contract, on the other hand, maybe. As long as they didn’t waste it and delivered on schedule. Wait, that doesn’t happen either.
IF a private contractor can hijack 4 planes in the most heavily guarded airspace in the world without scrambling a single defence fighter, then they can source Nanothermite on schedule.
Not saying that happened, but suitable explosives are not the weakest link in the 9/11 conspiracy theories.
Elon Musk in his early days. He was fresh, convincing and his ideas sounded good. It turns out they sounded a bit too good. With hindsight he really is the world greatest con-man. Why this still goes on its beyond me, though.
I knew of Tesla and SpaceX and I’d vaguely heard of him but didn’t really care so I wrote him off as another rich asshole immediately. Then I had some friends raving about him going to Mars and saving the world. I almost bought in but within a few weeks of that happening he called the guys who rescued the kids trapped in a cave a pedo just because he couldn’t use his sub. That started my hatred of the man.
In early days of Tesla I felt pretty sure a Tesla was going to be my first car. Now, I’m kind of just happy not having a car at all.
I remember when Reddit was in love with him. I never really engaged with him either way. It’s probably indirectly thanks to him that my opinion on self driving cars has soured, and I theoretically stand to gain the most if it ever becomes a thing since I can’t drive. We shouldn’t try to make a machine learn the messy landscape of roads designed for humans, we should develop better rail and bus infrastructure and make cities more pedestrian-friendly.
wild to think that whole house of cards of his collapsed because his PR person wanted a raise and being the greedy little ratfuck he is he refused.
cleanly they earned it
kimd of makes me wonder who all else out there is a complete piece of shit but we just don’t know/realize it
Never heard about this. Do you have a source I can get some further reading on this?
don’t have any links off the top of my head but it should be easy enough to find.
it could just all be coincidence but the timing of public-facing downfall and that event seems too good to be true imo.
Ok I’ll have a look. Thnx for the interesting info
Report back. I remember somethingabout there being a musk cleanup team who followed him around and put right everything he meddled with. But internet search is so shit now that this is the best I can find. SpaceX employees denounce CEO Musk as ‘distraction’ in letter
