• Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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    5 months ago

    This still sounds like victim blaming to me. It should be the job of the opposition to these candidates to educate the public about what they’re voting for. Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.

    • shikitohno@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      I would have more sympathy for them if these were new issues, but they’ve been perennial problems for more than three decades at this point. There comes a point where it’s either willful ignorance, or being so woefully stupid you probably ought to be declared a ward of the state and get a minder to make sure you don’t get caught off guard by your own saliva and drown in it.

      Like, it’s utterly stupid on its face. If you have the right to vote, you’re struggling to afford to keep a roof over your head, yet you keep voting for the politicians who block the very affordable housing that your continued ability to live in your community depends on because it’ll let the “wrong kind of people” move in, or “dilute the character of the neighborhood” and bring down property values, yet you cannot understand how this is voting against your own interests without someone breaking it down for you, you make a very compelling case for the shortcoming of democracy with universal suffrage. Even then, these are topics that have been gone over to death

      Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.

      Emphasis mine, but the public has been told over, and over, and over again. At what point does it stop being everyone else’s responsibility that they just don’t want to hear it, or are willing to ignore it if it hurts someone else?

        • shikitohno@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          At this point, you’re just being disingenuous. Like, where have you been? Two seconds searching will give you article after article after article on this very topic. This has been a subject of public commentary since before people fell for trickle-down economics, and to pretend otherwise is to be entirely dishonest.

          • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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            5 months ago

            So… things they’re supposed to read when they’re uninterested in reading in sources they wouldn’t trust.

            Let me know when Fox News tells them about it.

            • shikitohno@lemm.ee
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              5 months ago

              So…when they won’t read articles on the topic and won’t listen to news coverage outside the very media that’s designed to convince them to vote against their own interests, it’s still other peoples’ fault for not educating them, somehow? That is just willful ignorance on their part. That’s like saying nobody has tried to educate young earth creationists on the Earth being older than 6,000 years, because we just have articles in text books and scientific journals they don’t trust, but really, we need to get it into the bible for them to read.

              Also, way to move the goalposts there. We went from

              Blaming the public for voting against their best interest when no one’s telling them that’s what they’re doing is a little silly.

              to, “Well, yeah, someone asked them to read, and people they don’t like tell them, but you need to get the media empire that convinces them to vote against their interests in the first place to tell them that’s what’s happening, or else it doesn’t count.” At what point are good faith efforts enough for you, when these people aren’t interested in them to begin with? Do we need to strap them into one of the rapid-learning machines from Battlefield Earth and just shoot the knowledge straight into their brain?

              • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                5 months ago

                Yes, it is other peoples’ fault for not getting them out of the media bubble they have been put in all their lives, starting with the parents who raised them. You’re expecting the cult member to free will themselves out of the cult. That’s not how it works.

                • shikitohno@lemm.ee
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                  5 months ago

                  You cannot endlessly blame other people for failing to undo that indoctrination. They need to be open to at least considering other view points, you cannot enter their mind and flip a switch for them. Either way, that’s an entirely separate matter from your original claim, that nobody has told these people.

                  • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldM
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                    5 months ago

                    I don’t think you understand what indoctrination is if you think most people can get themselves out of it.