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When I was in college, I had an intro English writing class where the teacher would pick a controversial essay from a major publication every week, and you had to post your response to it on the class message board. And then we would all talk about it in class the next session.
Even though the prof would pick a wide range of stances, sometimes literally 180 degrees opposite opinion pieces on the same topic, every single week, 95% of the class would respond by agreeing with what the article said.
It felt more like a social psych experiment than a college class. A lot of people seriously just get their entire ideology from the last thing they read or heard or saw on TV 5 minutes ago.
I think you are right, that contributes to it to a degree, but I would also say that doing this over and over in an educational setting (i.e., not being taught actual proactive critical thinking) probably conditions you to do the same thing in non-grade-motivated settings in "real life".
I'd be interested in seeing some kind of study on this, because my first instinct is to say the students in an intro class probably have an easier time agreeing with any given piece of information in front of them. Articulating a response is more effort. Since they truly don't care either way, they go for the easiest route that will get them the grades.
Not to stereotype, but I only ever saw college students have informed, complex ideologies if that ideology was also their chosen academic pursuit, like polisci or philosophy students.
That's super interesting and I think that this is how a lot of effective propaganda works. If you hear a particular narrative over and over again it becomes that last thing you just heard.
I guess the good news is that people are open to having their minds changed (at least young people are) if you provide them a with a new viewpoint and tools to deconstruct those narratives that we are being spoon-fed
I got kicked out of model un for being anti semitic. Just mild criticism of Israel for being on the human rights council. I was pissed because mun sucks and the chairman made some dumb joke at the expense of the Palestinians. The Israeli delegate was a black dude from London who thought it was hilarious that I would go completely off topic to shit talk Israel.
MUN was such a hotbed of psychopaths, neolibs, and students who just wanted to go get drunk in the city, which was a huge bummer for someone genuinely enamored with the idea of a supragovernmental organization dedicated to peace and improving the conditions of people everywhere. I did end up staffing for a conference and learning a lot about how an organization could actually function well with an emphasis on its values and effective methods for communication and conflict resolution though.
we’re still Americans
Reminder that it's liberalism to call the Proud Boys white supremacist, it's like saying African members of the Roman empire are Roman supremacists.
The nature of being citizens of a fascist slave empire is multiracial and intersectional
The difference here is that unlike post-Columbian chattel slavery, Roman chattel slavery wasn't based on a racial caste system that positioned European Romans above the African and Asian ones. In fact, the northern Germanic Goths, Celts, and "Barbarians" probably would have been lower on their social hierarchy for most of Roman history than most MENA Romans (except maybe Jewish people, and the early Christians before Constantine started the process of introducing elements of the very pagan Sol Invictus cult into Christianity).
I'm dumb but everyone else I know is somehow dumber, the country is doomed
Was it only a couple weeks ago you learned about the number of civlians deaths caused by American forces since 2001? It's in the hundreds of thousands. Women and children included. And we've displaced millions more from their countries and cities.
I'm not sure how anyone can learn this and not realize how absolutely turbo fucked the MIC is
Americans are the most brainwashed people on the planet. There's a quote in a book I recently read that sums it up pretty well, I think: "Nazi propaganda rarely leaves such a strong impression as the American propaganda does, that those who spread it, truly believe in what they're saying. If the Nazis used lies to achieve their political goals, the American politicians truly believe their own lies."
remember the time the US Congress came literally 1 vote away from passing a constitutional amendment banning flag burning? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flag_Burning_Amendment
When I was 16 we had a class in school when we discussed a documentary about a protest. Some of the protestors were violent/threw stuff at the cops, and the police went absolutely berserk and started hitting and locking people in. One cop even shot live ammunition at the protestors but missed.
I remember doing both-sides-ism and wasn't this mainly the fault of the protestors? I guess I became smarter since then, in hindsight I don't know what I was thinking. Just a weird pro-authority reflex
American civil religion, baby! We tossed nationalism, religion, and commerce into the proverbial melting pot and they are now inseperable in our minds
In my rich white public high school it was called controversial. Even as a young lib I never understood why.
I promise, it's mostly indoctrination/Cold War cultural osmosis, and the stupidity is merely secondary if it's even present. This shit gets actively drilled into most USonians from early childhood and has to be consciously unlearned by anyone who isn't Black or Indigenous. Often it takes coming to a university or workplace with a lot of non-US citizens and spending years listening to perspectives of people coming from many other parts of the world to even notice their own ideology and biases, never mind making the conscious decision to reject the shittiest parts of US culture and ideology. This is of course one of the reasons why reactionaries hate universities for "turning" their kids into socialists and progressives, and why the US immigration enforcement infrastructure actively screens out would-be immigrants they think might be too "subversive". Somehow even the most neoliberal and boot-lickingest grad students on visas manage to effortlessly or even accidentally punch multiple holes in the US exceptionalism worldview just through a few minutes of casual conversation about economics, healthcare, or geopolitics, because the US is just that deranged for those looking in from the outside.
The first amendment is only for the freedom of Nazi sympathizers to organize and run over people. It doesn't apply to leftists. /s but it's actually true in practice
