There's this thing in public opinion where whatever people are mad about, they also overestimate how common it is by like a crazy amount.
Off the top of my head people think we should stop giving away so much money to poorer countries. Ask them how much of the budget goes to aid, they'll say something nuts like 20% when it's actually like 1%.
I haven't done this experiment in person but I bet I'd get a pretty ludicrous answer if we asked what percent of us are trans.
And it'd be pretty easy to debunk too. "oh you think it's 10%? So count the next ten customers to walk in. You think you typically serve a trans customer before 9am, and never noticed it?"
"......uh well maybe not 1/10. Maybe more like 1/100".
Where this is all going: you can convince a person that they are off by a crazy large amount fairly easily but you can never ever convince a person they're wrong.
Does this mean convincing people to be less enthusiastic about their wrong opinion is more viable than getting them to abandon wrong opinions?
Next time my facebook coworker screeds on the mythical girl who identifies as a cat and carries a litter box to school, I'm going to test his estimates. I bet I can't change his mind but I bet I can get him to be quieter.
I live in one if the safest urban zip codes in the country, but when my father sees clients two counties over out in the sticks they act like there are roaving gangs of "thugs" that will eat, murder, and rape, in that order, any "real" anericans they can get their hands on. Like these people live in genuine fear with guns at the ready everywhere, dad has almost gotten shot on accident a couple times. These people are older and sit at home mainlining fox news and worse 24/7. And yes the crime rate is much higher outside the city. It is really bonkers how warped some people's view of the world is.
Most of my family is convinced there was a genuine civil war in 2020 where half the country broke off. They think California and Michigan and etc legit had a revolution and bombed their police stations and local governments and are now Mad Max style wastelands.
These people live in a paranoia hell of their own creation.
This is one reason why I am skeptical of the rights ability to actual fight any sort of organized civil conflict. Like I get that all Americans live in their own little epistemic bubbles, and that as a Marxist I am subject to my own biases and siloing, but I at least acknowledge this fact and TRY to have some material interaction with the real world. Like these people are fucking nuts, completely off in cloud coo coo land. Like the second they get their power grids knocked out I expect them to just tart fucking air holing each other out of sheer terror.
oh, no kidding. The organizational base of fascism in the US isn't like what Germany or Italy had, like disgruntled WW1 veterans or street gangs. The social base of fascism for Americans are white suburban guys in their mid 50s who own pool resurfacing businesses. There's no one to organize a conflict
The closest thing to a fascist civil conflict in recent American history was the January 6th capital riots and it was comically bad how disorganized it was. They didn't know what to do after meeting together, so it turned into a series of photo ops for their facebook feeds. One of the main organizers was arrested by the feds after the event, he was celebrating in a fucking Olive Garden. It's comical, the leader of this supposed revolutionary movement has to take a time out to get some unlimited breadsticks. And one of the main reasons they organized this thing? Someone roleplaying as a federal informant on 4chan.
The right lives and dies by their treats. They're infantilized beyond any capacity for mass movements. Oppression to them is when Applebee's tells them to wear a mask. Their social and economic theories are misspelled racial slurs typed under a Yahoo news article.