dragontamer
Except I’m not against manipulation of the masses. I’m tacitly for it, because if I don’t manipulate them, someone else will.
Leaving the masses to be manipulated by Trump (or other bad actors) is obviously a bad idea. If you haven’t noticed by the last 10 years of US Politics.
The reality is that 30%+ of the country (the current Trump voter base) accepts manipulation and embraces it. Its a huge cohort and a resource that can be turned to my side. Maybe not all of them, but its more than you or most people ever realized. And furthermore, anyone else who is intelligent and on my side about it will also join me and see that we have a winning strategy.
What’s your strategy exactly? You want to try to beat back human psychology one-person at a time and deprogram on a mass scale? Good luck with that. I’m not sure I’ve seen a successful argument that breaks through the psychological games being played out here.
It looks to me like the point of the comic is to draw a line between Patriotism, a basic technique for getting your fellow countrymen to help build the country better… and Nationalism, a technique for getting your fellow countrymen to hate each other and turn violent.
Followed up with a bunch of people who don’t even understand the point to “Patriotism” to begin with.
Patriotism doesnt automatically mean america.
My point is that your entire perspective is already warped. You have no way to get me and you to communicate and effectively work together. The very fact that you and I are disagreeing is the very point I’m trying to make.
Now an American who discusses things with me, that’s different. Because we can at least hold commonality between our country, and both of us would benefit from our country moving forward and progressing.
I know you skimp on your education system
Exactly. You hate us, look down upon us, etc. etc… That’s fine. I’ll work with the people who are willing to talk with me, work with me, and think about the betterment of our country. I honestly don’t need people like you in my life.
And if you want to talk to Americans about american problems I suggest a less international community dedicated to such musings, instead of self centeredly derailing a random, at best tangentially related comment section.
This is a discussion about Patriotism. IE: things we do for the love of our country. If we don’t share a country, there’s not much we can share being Patriotic about, now is there? And thus, the discussion goes sideways and there’s no hope of us ever possibly coordinating with each other.
Alas: such is life.
Again, why are you even talking about america?
Because this is a topic about Patriotism and who is actually going to help my country. And building a culture that encourages people to help my country.
but outside your bubble
I’m happy with “Americans” being my bubble. I honestly don’t need to care about others, and as you point out there’s plenty enough to worry about if we keep it to Americans alone.
SMBC-comics is obviously itself an American comic strip as well (A PH.D who lives in USA in any case), so you’re coming over here to talk about an American comic, talking about American issues that’s bringing up American political discussion and… like shitting on it? Okay, no one asked you to come over.
Now my question to you is: what are you doing in this topic? Are you seriously trying to discourage me from improving the country where I live? Or are you trying to say your country is better or something? I don’t even know what your perspective is.
Good luck building up a coalition of people who will cooperate with you.
And worse: good luck politically defeating those who are smart enough to use basic psychology to coordinate the masses. Its not evil to do so, its just practicality. We know how people act and how they think. Its not so hard to then use psychology and sociology to build up our own coalitions.
As Terry Pratchett wrote in The Hogfather : We tell little likes like Santa Clause because we’re training children to believe in the big lies like Truth and Justice. And only when we all believe in that stuff can it possibly work. “We’re the best country in the world” is part of that, its a little lie that helps smooth over problems and helps us work together. And in my experience, its effective at it.
Last time I checked, we were able to deploy the Office of Censorship to censor US Postal Mail. Conscript Disney and Loony Tunes to build up a massive database of wartime propaganda. Use it to influence the entirety of the US Civilians. Use it to drum up support for War Bonds to help expand the US Debt to pay for the war, raise taxes to 90% on the highest end and build a better country while defeating both Fascism and Communism.
We, as a country, decided that desperate times called for desperate measures. And not only that, we also got rid of these dangerous emergency powers (of explicit Censorship / War Information / Propaganda) before we corrupted our society into an irreversible state.
And therein lies the problem with people who just yell “fascism” whenever they disagree with someone. Yall obviously don’t know the history of this country.
Oh nothing. I’m just theoretically interested in this part.
In practice, I’m not moving off of the AVR tool chain or chips. AVR does more, and I’m spending like $20 on PCBs in practice anyway so 1.5c chips and $1 AVR chips both basically cost the same to me.
Heck, $20 in various chips isn’t very expensive for a project in practice.
We need to build a shared culture so that we can work together.
My house will become the best house should be a message we all can get around. Otherwise, why should I work with you to build society?
If you don’t like shared work or shared culture to begin with, it’s a bit problematic in that your own political ideologies are destined to die. At the very minimum, your ideology must be self sustaining.
Winnie the Pooh is also Xi Xinping’s nickname on Chinese bloggers. It was a way to avoid Chinese Censors and still talk about him without explicitly getting disappeared by the Chinese secret police. It worked for a while, but the jig is up and everyone knows that Pooh is codeword for Xi now.
Its a nickname embraced by Chinese specifically. Its not racist at all but instead its us Americans trolling Xi Xinping by taking an codeword/insult used by the internal Chinese dissenters.
