The internet allowed the village idiot to meet other village idiots and reinforce each other's stupid, stupid ideas and beliefs. Now here we are.
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2025
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I think a crucial step was when someone with money found out that a glob of village idiots can be weaponized for cheap.
Yup, and social media greatly accelerated that.
The village idiots already did that, that's how we got monarchism.
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Btw. This Keanu-quote is maybe fake.
Yeah. You don't reinforce their ignorance by saying they are correct. Best to either ignore it or state the correct answer while avoiding or acknowledging their stupid.
If it's a private conversation, attempt to correct once to test their ability to be corrected but ignore any future nonsense if they resist being corrected.
I mean, honestly, "EVEN" should be "ESPECIALLY", as spouting absurdities as fact to make one's next statements sound reasonable is a common brainwashing tactic.
"I'm not interested in your 1+1=5 pyramid scheme. What's that? It's a religion? I didn't ask and I've now gone from annoyed to feeling threatened. Please stop talking to me."
spouting absurdities as fact to make one's next statements sound reasonable is a common brainwashing tactic.
Yeah, it's how Ben Shapiro keeps "winning" debates with college students who aren't familiar enough with rhetorical fallacies:
"let's say that [absurdly incorrect but reasonable-sounding on the surface assumption]", followed by a conclusion that's inescapable when accepting that premise.
I don't understand why people just want to stay stupid for some reason. Whenever I am wrong, I am willing to accept that, even though sometimes it goes against my worldview. I also don't talk about topics I have no knowledge about (e.g. economics).
Egos aren't really a new thing. I mean if you've gone to doctors a significant number of times in your life, you're probably familiar with how problematic they are.
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It's unfortunately also a very natural response in humans when they are confronted with opposing facts or views.
Sometimes this leads to stuff like cognitive dissonance, sometimes it's just a stubborn defense reaction.
It's partly because they don't really have a concept that they could be wrong. They're so dumb that they don't realize how dumb they are.
A large part of being intelligent is being able to recognize that you don't know everything.
Because they think being perceived as "right" is a birthright not a proven mathematical conclusion
i think a lot of it just comes down to the fact that many of these people see no oversight and perceive no obvious disadvantage to entertaining only their own opinions.
To the point of OPs meme, this is extremely true for a government, where "yes men" and people who fail upwards rise the quickest and wield the most power. Add in policies that make firing, even the worst employees, extremely difficult and remove the confines of a real budget... well why would you ever care about what other people think?
And of course everyone places themselves in the "intelligent" category and everyone else in the "fool" category.
I'd argue that truly intelligent people are hesitant to put themselves in the intelligent category because they're aware that they don't know everything.
Alright, you can exempt the truly intelligent from my statement. I think it's still basically the same after you do that, alas.
And by that they consider themselves as intelligent people
The triumph of disinformation.
This is the only world we ever lived in.
It's just that the gatekeepers inherent in a broadcast world did a lot of the filtering for you (along with the intentional manipulation, selective dissemination of information and choices about acceptability).
At this point I'm inclined to say this is worse, but it's hard to tell. It's not like that version didn't trigger its own rise of fascism or pushback on mildly inconvenient health advice. Still, this sure feels worse, and who has the time to go do the research to assess if it actually is, you know?
Were there already gatekeepers in the 30s? My understanding was that, radio being a new medium at the time, Hitler was able to do an infowars/Breitbart/prageru style of mass propaganda that was impossible in the existing (print) press.
It's only after the second world war that radio and then television were strictly controlled by the state (albeit more in an attempt to unify and homogenize the nation here in France than to ensure the populace would be vaccinated of anti-intellectualism).
Gatekeepers aren't just public gatekeepers. Powerful private press outlets have controlled and filtered information for centuries. And obviously before that the relationship between rulers, church and printers was a complicated mess.
So yeah, there were already gatekeepers, which doesn't mean you couldn't get around them, especially when new media is introduced. Unsanctioned press was a thing, even before radio.
I do think it's refreshing to have someone online come at it from a European perspective, where gatekeepers are assumed to be controlled by the state. The US version of this conversation is so prevalent even not being American one forgets it's not the default.
Speaking of gatekeepers, I suppose.
To be clear, the state being the gatekeeper of tv and radio was a thing in France directly after the war, with the French government literally having the monopoly over the airwaves, but in the latter half of the 20th century they opened up the airwaves to private/independent entities. Basically, we also had a pirate radio movement that managed to turn public sentiment towards being in favor of a certain liberalization of tv and radio.
Nowadays we've come full circle; billionaire-owned media dominates tv and radio, with a handful of more independent stations eaking out a living and meagre audience on the periphery. In a very real sense, advertising and chasing views got to us just like it got the USA.
Re: gatekeepers, I guess I was more thinking about "hard" forms of it (in contrast to "soft"). You're certainly correct in stating that they've always been around in some way. Still, I think there is a meaningful difference in the case of television, as there were no "pirate broadcasters" to my knowledge even when here in France there were only 1, then 2, then 3 public channels (with about 10 year's wait between each of their creations).
Maybe a better phrasing for my question would have been, did Hitler's radio propaganda more closely resemble todays's facebook and telegram groups in their unfiltered direct access to people's eyes and ears?
I genuinely don't know enough about it specifically to properly compare. I do know enough to tell that a lot of the processes of legitimization are similar, and certainly some of the content, but I couldn't place radio specifically as part of that loop.
I think ultimately the difference is the decentralization. Even those "soft" gatekeepers are just a handful of people broadcasting one-to-many. Sure, the 20th century liberalization of media in Europe moved to a more business-driven media landscape, but it was still a handful of corporations plus the remnants of the public broadcasting systems at the helm.
Now it's point-to-point dissemination, and the disinformation and radicalization is all about SEO and playing algorithmic selection in general. It's so much harder to stop. You can get radicalized right under everybody's noses and nobody will know what firehose of garbage is reaching you. Governments don't even have airwaves to regulate or own.
I can't promise this is worse, but I can promise it's a much harder genie to put back in the bottle.
I have bad news: I think it's always been this way, see e.g. story of Socrates (especially the end).
When people are truly ready, they more often tend to find what they seek. Speaking of, here's a cool related story about Unearned Treasure (Wisdom).
we live in an age of ego and aggression artificial scarcity and emotional unreliability for the sake for exercising hungry perverted blood hounds of people
Oh yeah. I am tired of stupidity
Chaotic Equality
Everyone gets their own personal soapbox that can yell into the internet void.
im sorry to future you, please DONT read this comment...but ive started seeing this meme as a dude with a ghost beard and a fat body instead of a stick man.
IM SOOOOOOORRY!
Thank you! I now know of an optical illusion that's not the duck/rabbit drawing where I can see both at the same time.
if !not int; bool float= 1
fools who get tons of unneeded and undeserved worship and help then go and criticize people who need help the outcasts are the leader potential for the fools it's all ego manipulation zero compromise Don't attach yourself to a system of favoritism not even hate them if you must leave this hateful greedy self entitled solipsistic world behind of for good
Not a new phenomenon. Proverbs has a fee sayings about ignoring fools.
when the fools own the press how can you ignore them?
I wonder if long heated discussions are people just posting ai outputs. If they're not bots anyway.
I used to post walls of text along with links backing up my arguments back when I was naive. Nowadays I don't give a fuck.
Respect!
From the same starting point I 'm becoming more like that, but it's a fight.
The fools also upvoted this. The perfect meme.
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