I’ll take it. Normal people are finally starting to overtake the idf influence operatives flooding world news
I think they massively overplayed their hand with the beheaded babies thing. Genocide Joe getting caught lying about it was devastating (btw no way that staffer who said he never saw the pics still has a job, right?). I think Blinken was sent out there to do damage control but by then the spell was broken.
Like, anyone who wants to believe the beheaded babies thing will continue to do so. But for everyone else, within the span of like 48 hours it went from being this thing everyone thought was true to a meme once they realized how absolutely silly the claim was (and that Biden straight up lied about it).
The White House retracted many bold statements from Biden like him recognizing Taiwan as a country before the White House reiterated that they recognize the PRC as the only China lol
there's no way that guy is actually presidenting
just like with trump i'm 100% sure he gives some terrible orders and people under him just decide to not obey, going "sure grandpa your order worked wonderfully, as you can see" and showing him fake graphs and shitty photoshops
Feinstein and Trump sort of gave us a peek behind the curtain there
The Deep State (that is, the underlying bureaucracy of the US government that persists regardless of who is elected) quite clearly runs the country. Every elected official is just putting on a show so that people think they have a say in what happens in their "democracy".
Edit: I done messed up and confused strategic ambiguity with other ambiguity re. the status of the One China Policy in recent times. Thanks to immuredanchorite for the correction.
The White House does not recognise the PRC as the only China though, they adhere to the One China Policy which acknowledges the status quo of competing claims by the PRC and ROC over Chinese territory and Taiwan province.Them backtracking Biden's gaffes wrt the status of Taiwan as a country is only to retreat to the ambiguous ground of 'One China' they currently operate under.(honestly, I'm not entirely sure I've even gotten it correct in terms of how the USA defines its One China Policy because they deliberately keep it vague to allow themselves maximum freedom to engage with the ROC as though it were a sovereign government. All I know is they wouldn't go so far as to say the PRC is the only China, that would be seen as too much of an endorsement of the PRC's own 'One China' policy vis territorial integrity and governance)I could be wrong, but you might be confusing this with "strategic ambiguity" which afaik is keeping the PRC and ROC both guessing about how far the US will take its intervention. The "one china policy" wasn't ambiguous, it was a necessary step in order to create normal diplomatic relationships with the PRC. But once the US had normalized diplomatic relations with the PRC, it effectively said, "There is only one chain and the PRC is the legitimate government that we formally acknowledge." That is why all of these recent state visits between politicians in the US and Taiwan is so inflammatory. The US is only supposed to have "unofficial" ties to any other "government" that is supposed to represent China.
Thank you. Yes, I seem to have gotten the two mixed up and further reading supports your comment. The concept of my country's own One China Policy was raised recently when a former PM visited Taiwan and this has muddied the waters a bit. It's been a long weekend :/
Then they will just up the propaganda game.
The more horrific shit they make up, the easier it is to sway to enlightened centrists
it's gotta be played carefully. if it comes out as obviously false too quickly, people learn to ignore the source. if they learn years later, they stay pliable to atrocity propaganda. the IDF got too brazen with it so once people cottoned on to it just days after, while the news was visceral and fresh, the whole news cycle flipped on them while they were in the early stages of a genocide.
The fact that there are pro-Palestine rallies less than a week after is already proof that this isn't like 9/11.
is already proof that this isn't like 9/11.
Well, at least not Israel's 9/11.
I've seen a huge support push for Palestine in all of this, it feels like the media is trying it's damnedest to drum up support for Israel and young people are not having it.
r/TrueAnon showed a poll that said 41% of Americans had a negative opinion of Israel. Maybe that’s not a plurality but if 15-20% are undecided/no opinion, then that means there’s as many people who have a positive view as a negative one.
The world was a different place back then. Back then, your parents, your church, your local friends, the mainstream media were basically all your sources of truth for local events. If you had any contacts that countered the main narrative and ideology of the US, they might have been silent out of fear or perceived as cranks.
Now we're in a post-truth era. If 911 happened in 2020, we'd still invade the middle east soon after. Our naked emperors would just be a lot more shameless about it.
Liberals will face cognitive dissonance that can largely be redirected by the suite of genocide apologetics developed for Israel/the rest of empire over the last several decades. It will be interesting to see how much it can excuse. Obviously it can already excuse a "slow" genocide and apartheid. I'd love to see liberals worn down over the period of a week but I think the path ahead will be escalations and liberals finding new excuses for "defending" the Zionist occupiers.
9/11 was an attack from another country, far away, who believe in a religion people weren’t taught about in schools.
Hamas’ attack was from within Israel. Two very different things on a surface level. To some degree I understand why Americans largely felt the way they did after 9/11. The was Zionists feel is very different, and genuinely evil
Maybe real opinions are starting to poke through the consent manufacturing machine?
Israel has found the limit of the blank check the imperial core gave them for revenge.
Killing a journalist and bombing fleeing refugees is crossing the line for people whose sympathy was already wearing thin after a week of relentless air strikes and cutting off food and water.
turning a big dial taht says "war crimes" on it and constantly looking back at the audience for approval like a contestant on the price is right
They're excited about the idea of retributive violence, but the reality of the IDF killing noncombatants as the point of such violence is lost on them. They see themselves as the Main Characters and those that they side with must be intrinsically good and not do bad things.
Yeah, Isreali retaliation is not very griffindor. Not very griffindor at all
I’ve been somewhat surprised at the gap between media + politicians and what real opinions I’ve heard here. I haven’t heard or seen anything except pro-Palestine opinions (albeit tepid) from my social group, it seems like people needed a few days to realise that it was acceptable to voice support for Palestine and they weren’t going to be called terrorist supporters.
I can't recall the term for it, but I remember reading about this idea of a sort of pseudo belief system we all subscribe to simply because we think everyone else does. We don't know how many other people are faking it, and certain things that seem ingrained in society, like support for Israel or capitalism, might actually be much less supported than we think, but everyone is afraid to come out about it because of the risks on certain topics like that.
I recall that concept from the time of the Obergefell decision. Everyone seemed to think that there was a majority consensus against gay marriage. But once it was actually a reality nationwide, it was surprising to see how shallow that opposition was, and that actually most people were just fine with it. I wonder if there is any possibility of a flip/flop in support for Zionism vs Palestinian liberation... does the average American really care all that much about supporting Zionist colonialism? Or, if presented with minimal pushback, might they just flop over and basically just say "oh, I guess maybe the Palestinians deserve some political rights"
my guess is the average (non-evangelical, non-zionist) american gives exactly 0 shits about what happens in israel but finds the treatment of palestinians distasteful so they would be willing to support palestine if they didn't think they were going to be labelled anti-semites for the trouble.
I've seen support for Israel among the mainstream political sphere throughout my life, but I think you're right in that even people with support for Israel aren't extremely invested in it aside from radical Evangelicals. It was easier for the propaganda machine to discredit Palestinians and minimize the horror of Israeli attacks in the past, I don't know how a reasonable person could see any coverage going on today and think the IDF are the good guys. Even if they were right overall in their claims to the land their actions are clearly horrific.
Last time I talked to my dad he said he was sad thinking about old people who were killed and survived the holocaust. Yes very sad but I stopped him by saying Israel uses white phosphorus and kills civilians indiscriminately. I think most normal people can at least see Israel isn’t good. The power players of the world are the ones doing damage control and cheerleading.
is our only hope because cnn and nbc heads are living in a manufactured reality
I see it in my family. My dad is not an idiot, but we have a lot of disagreements about politics recently, and the main difference between him and me is his underlying faith in the system. He believes that the system we live under is fair and just, the people in charge are competent and acting in good faith, and if bad actors enter the picture (orange man) the system will correct itself.
He can believe this because the system greatly favors him, a well-educated, wealthy white family man in the European suburbs. We have clashed a few times in the past few days over the Gaza conflict, and while he's usually a debate lord who will argue until the heat death of the universe, this was the first time he told me to "just drop it", to just stop talking about it. He didn't wanna hear it.
Yesterday the topic was brought up again, I specifically talked about how shockingly one-sided our newspaper coverage was, how in 4 entire pages dedicated to the conflict, there was not a single mention of the Palestinian death toll. I talked about how Israel bombed the evacuation routes, how their defense minister referred to Palestinians as "animals". And my dad's reaction was different. Before, whenever I talked about how our newspapers were indeed doing propaganda when everything was about Ukraine, he basically scoffed at me as if I was some conspiracy crank. But yesterday, he admitted that the coverage was biased. He couldn't deny it anymore. He was still justifying it (We're German, so apparently we owe some debt to Israel), but his conviction was noticeably shaky.
I often compare my family to the Park family from Parasite, blind to systemic injustice around them, taking the luxury of civility for granted, complete faith in a system that has always favored them. They don't want to know when the system is lying to them, they want to believe that what the newspaper says is fair and true, because if it isn't, it would mean that their life of luxury might not be fair either. They want the news to protect them from their own empathy, but they can only deny reality for so long when confronted with it because they're normal people, not monsters.
Israel is going too far for the propaganda apparatus. We are empathetic beings at our core, we cannot stand to see others suffer and the pictures, videos and stories from Gaza are too visceral for even the most detached, brunch-loving liberals to ignore. This isn't Russia vs Ukraine, where a foreign superpower is invading another nation and the nuance lies in complex geopolitics, this is one of the most advanced military forces in the world bombing hospitals in a region deprived of food, water and medicine. The system is overplaying their hand by standing with Israel, and while this won't turn my parents into communists, they are coming closer to accepting that their beloved system is in the wrong here, that the system lied to them, and I will remind them of this in the future.
"Moralists don't really have beliefs. Sometimes they stumble on one, like on a child's toy left on the carpet. The toy must be put away immediately." - Disco Elysium
I will never not stop using this accurate as quote that perfectly describes redditors to a T
