Idk. I’ve been on lemmy for only about a year and now all I do is argue about leftism while wearing skirts and building Linux machines.

I can’t, for the life of me, shake the feeling that the person writing this is Captain Beatty.

Lately, our independent work has coalesced around a particular shared idea: that misinformation is powerful, not because it changes minds, but because it allows people to maintain their beliefs in light of growing evidence to the contrary. The internet may function not so much as a brainwashing engine but as a justification machine.

The current internet—a mature ecosystem with widespread access and ease of self-publishing—undoes that.

I’m not trying to be dismissive of the important things the article is talking about… but this is almost exactly the kind of justifications Captain Beatty uses in Farenheit 451 for the of burning of books. Boiled down to the basics, what Beatty preached was that all books disagreed with each other, and it made things confusing, and people didn’t know what to believe, and people were in constant argument and disagreement, so the best way to solve it all was to burn all the books so people couldn’t find differing ideas and disagree anymore.

This article makes no such prognosis, in fact, it’s not making a prognosis at all other than “this is happening and you should know” (making it good journalism), but I do worry about the way it’s framed and how that could lead people down the path Captain Beatty traveled. Especially when it seems like it’s on the verge of understanding but falling short.

The commission’s work was the sort of precise and methodical case-building that is the opposite of the frenetic and immediate justification engine. In an anti-institutional moment, the congressional truth-gathering process read to some as academic, slow, even elitist.

On some level here they understand it, but they’re failing to admit to themselves truly how many it read to as academic, slow, and elitist. It read that way to so many people that literally millions of Democrats chose to stay home in 2024 because they felt like their party was failing miserably in fighting against real, actual fascism on our doorstep. Instead of trying anything daring and new the Democrats were going to trod the same broken path that had failed them time and time again.

They weren’t shy about it being fascism, too. You can’t scream from the rooftops how dangerous the fascists are and how we need to stop them and then roll over to shake their hands and hand them power and act like anyone is going to take you fucking seriously. Because at no point did the people in positions to change anything take big risks themselves. They’re all going to be comfortable and pampered because they’re part of the elite, while the rest of us are going to be literally crushed to death in the Orphan Crushing Machine that Trump is going to build into an All-Humanity Crushing Machine.

So yeah, when they are literally just going to hand Trump power after Trump clearly broke every rule in the book to make this happen, the people who supported you up to that point now view you as not being serious. You won’t put your money where your mouth is. You’re not stopping certification using legal trickery like the Republicans, you’re just saying “Well I guess fascism won and we’re good people, so we always let winners win.” Even when those winners plan to basically start a genocide, that’s fine to them, I guess.

Have they actually tried a brainwashing machine because I feel like a dedicated device would be more efficient.

dog piling machine too!