See, I’ve been reading Common Sense by Thomas Paine, and it’s perfect example of something impossible today.
There was never a point in time where a single person could change even the majority of people’s opinions.
Was there ever a time that this was the case?
I’m not sure the Catholic Church would agree that Martin Luther changed everyone’s opinion.
MLK definitely did not change everyone’s opinion. A lot of people? Sure. Everyone? Absolutely not.
Yes.
The Pope has that power. Pretty much always has, but it was far more pronounced before universal literacy was a thing.
I don’t know that a screenshot of twitter is proof of anything, especially after the proliferation of AI.
But, go read about the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Even if I’m wrong in my opinion, you’ll learn some new things.
I dunno man, i think a comedian just saved our democracy.
If he took that ride, western civ looks a lot more fucked right now.
China and Russia be looking at us like we’re the menu.
That one came out of left field.
Trump was taking a premature victory lap, and hires a comedian to warm up the warm up the crowd, and the proceeded exactly like Trump wanted.
And then everyone suddenly wakes up and says wait, these hate spewing assholes are actually hate spewing assholes.
All because one comedian didn’t use the code words.
Oh, I thought he meant Zelensky.
You are shrooming if you think the puerto rico garbage comment does anything but drive up voting in the south.
They know they’re the only Real Americans, everyone else on the planet is garbage to them.
Thomas payne’s common sense didn’t change everyone’s mind.
and there are people today influencing how everybody thinks with tweets and memes.
language and information is evolving, and that is absolutely changing the landscape of how public opinion is affected.
Gaza is a great example.
Israeli has been bombing hospitals and schools and extrajudicially executing Palestinians for 50 years, but now that people can see that information and hear testimony from Palestinian journalists directly, they care.
Seems a bit of an exaggeration to say everyone. The population at the time of the revolution was around 2.5 million. Of that maybe 500,000 were the land owning white male “patriots” that would support the revolution and of those maybe half read or were influenced by Thomas Payne so around 250,000. We tend to attach a lot of significance after the fact to the American revolution, and Adam’s, Payne etc. Since it spawned one of the greatest empires the world has ever known but at the time it was a relatively minor tax revolt.
this isn’t even a matter of the world in general was smaller back then, France at that time had a population of 28 million. Payne would go on to have less success in convincing everyone there on his ideas because the scale is just so much more massive. Same with modern day.
