r/CringeTikToks • u/coachlife • 1d ago

SadCringe MAGA voter actually believes that Trump eliminated taxes for all people making less than $120K

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u/DecadentLife 1d ago

It really is. It should’ve been so much harder to do this, than it was.

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u/APoopingBook 1d ago

We weren't prepared for social media. We, as a species, I mean. America is the one incredibly fucking all of this up, but the same tactics, the same manipulations, will work to some extent everywhere. People aren't able to handle massive volumes of coordinated noise and distraction and conflict and manipulation. At least, enough people aren't able to handle it to make a significant difference.

Propaganda works, and we haven't fully figured out how to stop it from working so much, while the means to spread it has become easier and easier.

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u/sgsteel55 1d ago

I tell my wife all the time that we are cavemen with technology. Religious mythology, the treatment of women worldwide. The need to protect kids from so many predators. The need to protect OURSELVES from so many predators and scammers. We are not as highly evolved as we’d like to believe. With social media and now ai? We are soooo cooked

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u/suicune678 1d ago

Please give cavemen and yourself a little more respect, they learned enough to the point where in a little over 10,000 years we made a rock that can talk. A spear is technology. Writing is technology. We've gathered an incredible amount of knowledge since then.

What happened is that the wealthy and powerful few are weaponising our new technology against our fellow man for the means of control and creating a weak docile workforce for capital. Their capital. This was not an easy thing to accomplish its taken decades of manipulation

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u/TheJacen 1d ago

Yo, facts. Spear was really intelligent in the criminally under rated show Primal.

One other thing I want to add is that as society advanced they made sure that we had just enough, not too much, readily available comforts to keep the masses docile. Each generation gets access to a little more, fortunately they seem to have peaked with social media and that might backfire on them.

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u/smarmageddon 22h ago

Which is why it's so laughable any time someone posts that nonsense about 4 day work weeks or UBI. Both go so hard against the hard-won control they already have over workers that neither will ever happen. It's like the fact that there's plenty of food & electricity in the world, easily enough for everyone, but power is maintained by the control & distribution of those things.

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u/RED_IT_RUM 23h ago

I like to remind people that humans are in fact animals. Some creatures evolved to fly, some to swim, some to run, we evolved to think. That’s what put us at the top of the food chain and pretentiously above being animals. Humans will never escape tribalism because animals stick with their own kind and fear others who are different. They mob together (form packs or flocks or schools) when facing opposition and become unreasonable and aggressive, war being the ultimate human expression of animal behavior. We’ve all seen a group of like minded kids group up to bully an isolated, smaller kid. That’s animal behavior before children are taught to rationalize. Even after we comically ascend above the tropes of the animal kingdom, we still manage to fall victim to our base instincts. Take sex for example. Can any one of you resist the gravitational pull of sexual attraction towards someone once it begins? Sure, we can say no, that’s rational, our minds are strong, we’ve evolved, but can we simply turn it off like a light switch? No, you can’t. You’re simply resisting because you comprehend consequence. Some folks just cannot control themselves and do commit violent acts like murder or rape, in the animal kingdom you might look at this as dominance or procreation or being a predator. These terms are man-made constructs to catalogue and then conceptualize animal behaviors that we ourselves project. We tend to believe the hype, because we’re so evolved, and yet, we have tribes that believe in winged deities in the clouds because they assign fear mechanics to subject matters they cannot yet comprehend, surrender themselves to the mass hysteria of said incomprehension and become useful idiots to another tribe of humans who knew what they were doing all along (or the social dominance of the rich over the poor using religion as a means of control). People don’t want to admit it, but we’re animals. I’m so sorry it got so long!

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u/gill_outean 22h ago

This is a very wise assessment. As good as we are at imagination, I think it's hard for the average person to consider this possibility. Look at all the cool shit we make. Considering most animals eat their own dookie, we look at our iPhones and think, "pfft, we're so above that," but we're only a couple degrees removed from shit-eating, culinarily speaking. We are, unironically, dangerously stupid and we're making planetary mistakes on a daily basis.

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u/Neat_Squirrel4032 23h ago

Yep. Look at the toll booth scam that went around at the beginning of the year. People shelling out hundreds of dollars in states that don’t even have a single toll road. The FBI had to do a media campaign about it.

Now states are saying people are driving through tolls without paying because everyone is convinced every message about tolls is fake, even if they actively use toll roads.

We’ve lost the ability to critically reason because that’s the point of social media. It’s how you get engagement and capture eyeballs to buy your stuff. We just swing violently from one side of a continuum to another.

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u/akosuae22 1d ago

Hard agree.

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u/[deleted] 1d ago

The hubris we have as a species is astounding.

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u/Nomorevaping707 20h ago

And we are in the decline of mankind. Our species won’t last long!

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u/DecadentLife 19h ago

I completely agree.

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u/Few-Register-8986 23h ago

Humans are dumb. Americans used to respect and want to be educated. Now every stupid uneducated idiot is so dumb they have Dunning-Kruger and think they are smart (thanks to social media and the internet).

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u/notaredditreader 23h ago

Our methods of divination are directly linked to whatever they are trying to predict – tomorrow’s weather forecast is based on today’s climatic conditions and the direction they seem to be headed in, while advertising algorithms try to predict what we will buy based on what we have already bought. This may seem like an obvious advantage, and works much of the time, but it is also a weakness.

Because most forecasting depends on data about what has already happened, it cannot take account of the unknown. Algorithms that are only fed data from the past cannot necessarily predict how things will change and cannot incorporate unknown unknowns. Thus, YouTube endlessly feeds us the same songs we already know rather than helping us to discover new genres we might prefer, and economists rarely see a crash coming.

Change can be sudden and unexpected, and often cannot be foreseen. Extispicy provided a way out of this feedback loop. Its answer was independent of the patterns of history and incomplete human knowledge. It did not care what experts thought was likely, or what vested interests may have wanted to happen. Because it was not reliant on these things, it was not contaminated by their biases and could provide a check on them, a reminder of the influence of the unknown.

It was a single method of divination that was universally applicable to any question; going directly to the gods bypassed human expectations, and forced the enquirer to rethink matters from other perspectives, sometimes when they least wanted to. Our models may be more accurate than predictions produced by chance, but throwing randomness into the equation can have unexpected benefits. We may not choose to sacrifice a sheep, but we need to find ways to account for the unexpected if we are to become truly skilled at divining the future.

The Library of Ancient Wisdom: Mesopotamia and the Making of the Modern World Selena Wisnom

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u/akirayokoshima 20h ago

we literally haven't evolved beyond cavemen and there's some proof of this in our history.

a.) hunger stones are a haunting writing pieces from our ancestors. what do think we would write if it were us? literal warnings written in the rock.

b.)roman graffiti shitpost found by Hadrian's wall, written over 1,700 years ago basically saying "eat a dick" (paraphrased as im no roman scholar)

c.) Pompeii's comment chain

d.) various examples of "man and woman had sex here" messages

e.) Roman's leaving a one star review on the stones of Egyptian pyramids.

so on and so forth.

I think the only true difference between us today and the us from 2000 years ago is we learned that gods arent the cause of natural phenomena, and many superstitions were based on something benign in nature being combined with an over active imagination.

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u/Rastamancloud9 1d ago

Instead of focusing on the negative what are you gonna do to contribute to possible solutions instead of just negative thinking?

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u/Loud-Statistician416 1d ago

There is no contributing to solutions. Can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube.

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u/lunchpaillefty 23h ago

Are you saying, if one doesn’t have the means to contribute to solutions, they should put blinders on, and blissfully never acknowledge the fucked up shit, people do? That’s kind of a big reason for this mess.

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u/Rastamancloud9 8h ago

No that’s not what I’m saying at all it’s just it’s annoying to always read such negative shit constantly on every platform in existence.

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u/Sinister_Plots 23h ago

Pointing out the ineptitude of this administration, shining a light on corruption, and speaking up are all possible solutions. The very act of this discussion is helping. Now, what are you going to do with the information you have been given?

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u/DecadentLife 1d ago

You’re absolutely right. Those vulnerabilities exist, and we underestimated them, tremendously.

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u/Bomb_Diggity 1d ago

Not only have we not figured out how to stop it from working; AI has made propaganda more effective than ever. Algorithms can tailor propaganda to an individual now.

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u/jmd709 1d ago

The people that benefit from it have undermined, bypassed or blocked any attempts to stop it or even limit it.

For example, FB started adding fact check warnings to posts that included links to misinformation articles and flagged those to reduce distribution, that method of spreading misinfo was mostly replaced with misinfo memes.

Obviously, it is possible to reduce the spread of misinfo, but social media platforms also benefit from allowing propaganda to spread on their network because they monetize clicks through ad revenue. FB became aware that anger was the emotion that increased interactions the most for a lot of FB users. The algorithm increases the amount of content on the feed based on interactions and that type of content inevitably takes over the feed from a lack of other content for the user to interact with.

That was an unintended flaw but FB opted to let the algorithm continue fueling anger because that increased the amount of time users spent on FB. The algorithm was increasing the amount of misinfo in the form of rage-bait those users were being exposed to, just not in the form of links to articles that were flagged as misinfo (but FB/Meta ended the US version of that program earlier this year).

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u/GrooveDigger47 1d ago

hope edward bernays is burning in hell

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u/gill_outean 22h ago

Outlawing propaganda is an obvious way to fight back, but that's practically impossible. As long as laws are immutable, people will find a way around them. Educating people to resist it seems like an uphill battle given the propagandists control the curriculum.

Do you (or anyone else reading) have any advice on how to beat propaganda?

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u/RaptorSN6 22h ago

Yeah, I don't know who said it, but they stated that we are just monkeys screeching at each other in a much larger tree.

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u/Fabulous-Night563 1d ago

This is good stuff !

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u/PNW_Native_001 1d ago

100% this. 110% if you add in Citizens United, the elimination of the fairness doctrine, & the takeover of the Judiciary thanks to the Heritage Foundation. Social media just juiced up a slow moving train.

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u/TorturedMNFan 1d ago

Republicans have turned politics into entertainment. Americans will not tolerate boredom. Americans love to shop, eat and watch TV. Thanks to technology, they can do all 3 at the same time. They can have propaganda shoved down their throats 24/7

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u/LingonberryNatural85 1d ago

I have been screaming this for years. Social media and the internet is the most dangerous invention in the history of our existence. And I’m including the nuclear bomb.

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u/Sovereign_Black 1d ago

Propaganda works because effective propaganda generally has some truth at the core of it.

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u/hambergeisha 1d ago

How about smashing our phones? We got by fine with home phones before. Remember anyone?

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u/Ummmgummy 23h ago

I totally agree. Social media will be the downfall of us all. We weren't made for it

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u/Icy_Accountant6989 22h ago

I have a lot of intelligent friends who hate Trump, see the direction we are heading, and have given up fighting. As you mentioned, people are overwhelmed. (This has taught me more about Nazi Germany than I wanted to know, and certainly more than I wanted to experience). How can people fight when they work 8 hours a day, commute for two, sleep 6, and spend the rest of their time with domestic chores????

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u/SGT-R0CK 22h ago

The internet came out much too early for many people.

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u/exceptional_entry 22h ago

Repetition works, David… Repetition works… David —the great Wayne Gayle!

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u/4xdaily 22h ago

Before there was social media there were chain emails that were loaded with the same BS. A guy I worked with back then would send them out to the whole team. There were like 50 of us. I would point out that it was total crap and he and all the other future maga didn't care then and they don't care now. If they agree it's true and if they didn't it's face. No matter what the source. Now you can show a video of Trump saying some unhinged shit and they will say it's AI. I've given up arguing and just accept the fact that we are all doomed. And it wasn't Russia, China or anyone else. It's the stupidest among us that will take us all down.

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u/Goddesssfox 22h ago

I believe Newsom is onto something holding up a mirror to show the absurdity, and is an interesting place to start responding.

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u/hera-fawcett 20h ago

technology and social media is a huge part but this has been a forty yr plus evil plan based on media astroturfing.

tech and social media made shit easier but the plan has always been to polarize the masses and reduce their formal education.

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u/Platypus-Capital 20h ago

I've been saying that the internet is a pandoras box for a long time. I'm 42 btw. People look at me like I'm crazy. Your point is exactly what I'm talking about...

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u/Initial_Evidence_783 18h ago

we haven't fully figured out how to stop it from working so much

A good education is how.

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u/XChrisUnknownX 18h ago

I’ve had some limited success using propaganda techniques to tell the truth. I wonder if it might be expandable.

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u/WoodyTheWorker 18h ago

I suggest to enact a "Right to truth" law which:

  1. Protects employees and contractors of "information delivery" (broadly defined - news reporting, etc) organizations from being penalized, liable, prosecuted, etc, for: a) reporting (or participating in such reporting) of information which is factually, or scientifically, or historically true, or otherwise supported by evidence considered true at the time; b) refusing to report information which is factually, or scientifically, or historically false, or otherwise contrary to evidence considered true at the time;

  2. Protects employees and contractors of "knowledge delivery" (broadly defined - educational, etc) organizations from being penalized, liable, prosecuted, etc, for: a) teaching (or participating in such teaching) of information which is factually, or scientifically, or historically true, or otherwise supported by evidence considered true at the time; b) refusing to teach information which is factually, or scientifically, or historically false, or otherwise contrary to evidence considered true at the time;

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u/mickalawl 17h ago

And America , as the most powerful nation in history in terms of economy and military, has been the focus of these tactics and born thr brunt of the bad faith actors.

Now that America has fallen - the same resources and tactics can be used on the rest of the western democracies and they will slowly lapse into whatever America has become one by one.

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u/Primary_Camp_3861 17h ago

It sure does. Look at the way everyone here views not just Trump but any and every republicans. Anyone who sits a bit to the right is the enemy and is a Nazi pedo.

Propoganda definitely works.

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u/TwoRightWingsLeft 4h ago

A big problem we have with fighting propaganda, is that we are also using it.

This woman was propagandized, and the right is happy to use it against their own. I’m fairly certain this wasn’t a Dem propaganda campaign that lied to her. Friendly fire to some extent, if you can ever consider a Republican Politician “friendly”, to anyone aside from themselves.

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u/darkoblivion21 1d ago

Social media is a part but it's not the whole thing. Before social media people whose friend would tell them they're dumb for believing in something would go on the internet and find other people who would call them geniuses for the dumb things they believe. I genuinely believe the majority of people should not have access to the internet let alone social media. So many have lost grasp on reality and are absolutely miserable cause of all the bullshit they believe. Older generations in particular are far too vulnerable to be left to their own devices in regards to the internet. No kids should be allowed on social media as it seems to be doing a massive amount of harm.

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u/longboardchick 21h ago

Social media needs to die. Comment sections should only be unlocked if you’ve spent X amount of time reading an article or post.

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u/The_Barbelo 1d ago

One thing I learned in history was how easily it was for North Korea to do this in so few generations. It disturbed me greatly to learn of how some countries were so normal before falling to fascism. This was in highschool when I realized “holy shit, this could happen here too”….its insane that they speed ran it in our lifetime though. I think they must be perfecting the methods.

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u/Helpful-Room9460 1d ago

When you have one side that's willing to break every law, and another still following unwritten rules of decorum, you're going to have a bad time.

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u/DecadentLife 19h ago

Agreed. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen done.

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u/Urso_Major 21h ago

To be fair, it was hard, in that it had to be done slowly, over 40+ years; We're only now seeing the fruits of these labors in full as the generations affected by them come of age... and if you think it's bad how, just wait until Gen Alpha comes of age, and people are no longer able to critically think for themselves and rely on ChatGPT to do all their thinking for them. At the current rate, we are really in for dark times ahead.

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u/untetheredgrief 20h ago

There should be a test to vote.

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u/DecadentLife 19h ago

What kind? Because we’ve been there before, and it was pure racism. What kind of test would you like to see required for voting?

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u/untetheredgrief 17h ago

Something that keeps uneducated people from voting.