- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- politics@beehaw.org
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Along the same lines, but not to this level:
A few years back, we had a family member who is at a very extreme end of the political spectrum give my kids a book set that they “saw in a facebook ad” that said it was all about wholesome family values. It was called the “Tuttle Twins.”
Not knowing what it was, we started reading them with our kids. The first book we read was fantastic(we read out of order). It talked about pencils, and followed the entire supply chain. Very informational, entertaining, and educational. It wasn’t until the 2nd book, and on that the agenda crept in. Funny how when they talked about crime, all of the cartoons of criminals were diverse. When they talked about landscapers and gardeners, they were all depicted as hispanic. It kept getting worse and worse. Talking about education being corrupt, about how much immigration impacted people, and tried to justify a lot of things. We stopped reading early on, but I browsed them all to make sure I wasn’t imagining it. Then I googled them, and I realized how bad the propaganda was.
If you just want the cool pencil story, it’s lifted from this:
For the record I’m a very pro-market dude who still thinks Friedman was wrong on some very serious issues, but it’s an amazing example of supply chains and interdependence that deserves to be shared, regardless of your views.
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/67tHtpac5ws
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
That made me look the up, yea sounds like insane propaganda
Disgusting. They won’t be happy until slavery is brought back.
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And the thing of it is, the white conservative racists want slavery back because they think it’ll apply to black people. But little do they realize that big capital wants slavery back, too, and big capital will be all to happy put everyone into slavery, including white conservatives.
They’re all too happy to point out that white people were slaves too elsewhere in the world so that makes our slavery somehow not racist… They’ll then hold these same beliefs as you state.
Ignorance really is bliss huh…
Also ignoring that the various types of “white slavery” were in fact very different than the chattel slavery employed against African people. The kind of slavery we practiced in America treated (black) people as literal property. Including their own children, who could be born into slavery.
I’m not sure ignorance is the right word. “Willful disingenuity” is what leaps to my mind, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue quite as easily.
Malicious ignorance.
They want the working class working for slave wages.
Slave wages? Wages? Haha good one
Bold of you to assume they want the working class to have any wages at all. Remember spending scrip at the company store?
You move 16 tons and what do you get…
It’s not racist if they’re fine enslaving white people too!
How I imagine the defense of slavery will be proffered.
It’s already what they argue. They argue that slavery was world wide and of every race so it’s not racist and it’s totally ok that we once had it…
That doesn’t change the fact that American slavery was one of the worst slavery businesses ever (and the bar is pretty low), hand in hand with the Arab slave trade
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It is back via convicts and our prison system
That implies it ever left. The 13th amendment “outlawed” except as punishment for crime. Guess how many new laws and crimes were invented after that amendment was created.
It also really highlights how big selective enforcement is in this country, and puts that higher arrest rate for black suspects into perspective.
Correct: It never really left.
These videos are approved to be shown to children in Florida.
I am honestly scared for the next generation of children who believe that slavery wasn’t that bad, and whatever other bullshit Prageru preaches
That generation of Floridians is going to be seriously messed up. This could be a real problem (or maybe Florida will be destroyed by the Climate Crisis before it manifests, who knows).
At this point I expect Florida to undergo an apocalypse, ordinarily I wouldn’t be so dramatic, but they are literally using radioactive material to make roads
What’s ironic is that the decline of Florida will probably lead to their government throwing money at corporations to build there. The corps will bite, but they’ll need intelligent and skilled workers to actually run their business. They aren’t going to find that in Florida. They’ll have to woo people from outside of Florida to move there, which will be a tough sell. If they can’t get enough people, the corporations will leave too, and Florida will become so bad that liberals in neighboring states will be weighing the ethics of refusing Floridian refugees.
Let’s say though that the corporations do manage to find workers from elsewhere. Those workers will live in newly constructed luxury homes with brand new, reliable infrastructure. They won’t bother with places outside of their bubble unless they also become gentrified. This would create a demand for workers in these new, fancy places. And so, Floridians will find themselves either serving an outsider upper class, or taking orders from outsider managers and senior workers. They’ll become a servant lower class to an upper class of other Americans.
Don’t get me wrong, this is fucked up, and it’s going to hurt the common folk, not the politicians who deserve it. It’s tragic.
They’ve got enough money that they can make the climate problems in Florida everybody else’s problem, unfortunately.
And when they turn crazy because they won’t know what to believe anymore, Republicans will blame drag queens for that.
The divide between those who eat this bullshit and those who were responsibly raised will be fucking wild. Like think about that one dude in your life that hadn’t heard about ‘X’, a thing that’s common knowledge, and how baffling that was but now it’s nonstop bafflement with a certain percentage of population.
You mean kind of like science deniers like flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, climate change deniers and regular people?
The divide already happened.
It’ll be like the “States’ Rights” people, but infinitely worse. Being raised in the south, you’re taught that the civil war was over states’ rights, not slavery. That slavery was just the one that historians tended to latch onto, because it’s the most inflammatory topic and makes the south look bad.
And if you’re a good student and don’t bother to question that, you’ll enter the adult world believing that the south wasn’t fighting for slavery.
I mean, the war didn’t start because the North wanted to end slavery in the South…
It started because the federal government wouldn’t force northern states who had abolished slavery to return escaped slaves to Southern states.
The part about abolishing slavery nationwide didn’t come up until the war was going on, and that was more an economic sanction than anything else.
So it really did start because of state rights, it’s just it was the northern states fighting for that and the Southern States wanting a federal government that was willing to force states to do stuff.
Then it’s weird that all the articles of secession for all the states that seceded mention slavery right at the top.
… States rights to do what?
You have to admit the language used in your last paragraph is pretty telling
States’ rights to act as a sanctuary for escaped slaves. Did you not even read the comment you replied to?
I’m not sure about that. I think it was more started on the fact that it was clear the Republicans at the time were aiming not to abolish slavery but to stop its expansion. Which in political terms means slave states were basically fucked as more states were introduced. Many people see Bleeding Kansas as a prelude to the civil war because it was about seeing if a new territory will be pro or anti slavery. Like yes the southern states were hypocrites about states rights but from their perspective* however skewed that was. The threat of anti slavery was expanding while those who were sympathetic to it were losing power in house and senate. So secession/war over slavery was inevitable, it was merely a can the founding fathers sort of kicked down the road for others to figure out.
Like, I get the idea that they thought ending slavery outright would shortly follow, but that was easily 50+ years away. By seceding and then initiating an attack on the US, all they did was bring about the end of it more decisively and quickly. If they hadn’t overreacted, things would’ve stayed the same for an unfortunately long time.
I wouldn’t say fifty years. I mean there were 2 states added to the US in 6 years from 1861 (Nevada and Nebraska, I am not including West Virginia since they wouldn’t have existed in a non civil war scenario). I think they saw it as a beginning of the end for them and their oh so loved “WaY Of LiFe” so they struck out when they were in theory at their strongest.
Was definitely taught that…
Even given some garbage about how Lincoln only came up with ending slavery late in to keep England out of the conflict… and that he regretted it.
Do you have a word or words that you’ve said more times than any other during the past few years? Because I do, and it’s “I’m so glad I never had kids”
I get that we need more people raising children on purpose to help guide them into being productive* members of society, but I’m not trying to subject my kids to that. So sorry, y’all on your own. I’ll keep voting for schools and shit.
*Productive as in a decent person, not productive for an employer or church or something
I think this article( and by extension you guys) are misrepresenting the pragerU clip. All its said was at the time, slavery was prevalent across the globe and it was “no big deal” for their societies of their time.
Who is to say that we arent going to look back and treat the prison system the same way or we would classify terminal online as slavery to corporations. Obviously slavery was inhumane but the people at the time didnt see it that way.
A large number of people did see it as inhumane.
Also, right before that part they further normalize slavery, which often involved intermittent torture to keep them in line:
Being taken as a slave is better than being killed, no?
Just to be clear, slavery is 100% legal in the United States if it is punishment for a crime. Read the 13th amendment. Many people already see the prison system as an abhorrent extension of slavery. Legally speaking, it literally is.
Also, Christopher Columbus was tried in Spain and imprisoned for his atrocities in America. There was never a point in time where slavery was unanimously accepted. Institutional racism was born because enslavement between two equal humans is so clearly wrong. Slavery was so clearly a big deal that one party needed to be dehumanized to justify it.
Why may it have been considered “no big deal” at the time?
Because the people who thought that way believed that the people being enslaved were literally sub-human.
So the question is still why is it relevant in any context whether slavery was considered acceptable at the time?
It was normalised across the globe throughout human history. That is, I suppose, a valid point. Although I would say it’s a pretty big deal that it was normalised across the globe throughout human history. And of course, there’s more slaves today than there was during the entire period of the Atlantic slave trade, which is horrific and barely discussed.
Slavery is still rampant worldwide and is involved in the production of many goods that end up on us soil. How do you feel about your smart phone and cheap gadgets?
Is that seriously supposed to be some kind of “gotcha”?
Does that mean you believe slavery is morally justified, or did you type out that post from your typewriter? Gottem
people who own slaves rarely think what they’re doing is wrong, especially because it benefits them so much. the slaves, on the other hand, rarely see it the same way.
abolitionist movements and slave revolts go back to Ancient Rome and before. Ever heard of Spartacus? wow…
How do you feel about the fact that slave labor was most certainly involved in the production of your smart phone, somewhere along the supply chain?
Obviously slavery was inhumane but the people at the time didnt see it that way.
You can’t think of a segment of the population that did see it that way? The people who were enslaved, or abolitionists perhaps?
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No lol there were abolitionists before Columbus’s voyage. People have always been capable of grasping how evil it is. They intentionally chose to ignore that aspect of their perception to maximize their profits.
Well, didn’t the clergy with a medieval mindset actually fight for natives’ rights? Think of Bartolomé de las Casas
I think it was quite a big deal to the slaves, even at the time.
And also for the kingdoms that relied on selling them to stay afloat. They all ended up falling in the 19th century
I do not agree with your interpretation whatsoever, but to argue that slavery was “no big deal” at the time is also factually invalid.
Oh look, the education system is already working as intended.
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Child and marital rape were “no big deal” across the globe for thousands of years. Should we teach that to children as well?
Well, if we want to contextualise some periods it should. Like, imagine someone told you 40 year olds married 14 year olds without giving you the context of the period
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I’m gonna start keeping a whip in my glove box for such an occasion. Slavery was no big deal? Clean my fucking interior.
It’s better than being killed after all
No wonder US propaganda is a matter of study subject in schools in Europe
What country is Europe?
The one with the Eiffel tower
Nah that’s the country of Paris, which is like right next to China, idiot
Found the Floridian.
?
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I went in with the same expectation, but holy-fucking-shit that is some WILDLY racist and delusional propaganda bullshit.
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Despite the name, PragerU is not an academic institution and does not hold classes, does not grant certifications or diplomas, and is not accredited by any recognized body.
Pretty fuckin’ stupid for that video to say that the US began the conversation on ending slavery when the Haitian revolution began in 1802.
You know, among all of the other fuckin’ stupid things in that video.
facts obviously don’t matter to these people
It was famously already a well established argument by the time of the drafting of the US constitution. The southern states were deathly afraid their ability to keep slaves would be taken away, which was basically the entire driving motivation behind almost everything they did.
Conservatives have infested the planet, spreading their diseases of deception, manipulation, bigotry, homophobia, racism, misogyny, antisemitism and xenophobia.
It is inappropriate to do business or keep relationships with conservatives. Do your part to fight conservatism. Exclude them from your daily life.
You do realize mindsets like this are a significant contributor to the political division we see today, right? This is not the way.
Instead of shutting them out of your life and trying to cancel them, try to educate. Show them why certain views are wrong and show them the outcomes of their beliefs. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
I have spent a lifetime trying to reason with conservatives. I have learned that they cannot change their foundational opinions. Changing one’s mind is not a quality of a conservative.
Every act of bigotry, racism, xenophobia, homophobia, antisemitism and misogyny comes from conservatives. They are famously anti-science, anti-medicine and anti-worker. Yet, you say I am the one creating division. You are clearly wrong on this one.
So you plan to solve this by isolating yourself? I’m just trying to understand why you’re thinking the way that you are.
I am not isolated in any way. In fact, I’ve never felt more free since openly recognizing and excluding people who espouse harmful ideologies. The friends and family I keep now are vastly superior in quality to the mix of questionable motherfuckers I allowed into my circle in the past.
I was born and raised in a conservative lifestyle. I’ve been around conservatives my whole life. I recently retired from an industry infested with conservatism. I kept my mouth shut for a very long time, trying to give them some benefit of the doubt. But they have always proven themselves to be exactly as vile as they claim to be.
When the pandemic hit, I found I had fantastic excuses to easily remove most conservatives from my life. After the pandemic, I have continued that trend and my stress is truly the lowest it’s been my whole life.
I don’t mince words when dealing with conservatives. I am not interested in debates or changing their minds or keeping relationships with them. They chose their enemies, I did not.
In advising others to disown conservatives, I am inviting normal people to work past and around conservatives rather than wasting valuable time trying to go through them. Conservatives will not change. They will never stop being bigots, misogynists, xenophobes, racists and homophobes. They will never be pro-worker, pro-science or pro-education. The very few of them that can change in any small way already have.
Conservatives genuinely delight in the misery of others, so engaging with them is not a worthwhile endeavor unless it is to put them in their place. Disowning and excluding them is a healthy way to move forward and find progress with higher quality people while avoiding the harmful, dangerous and inappropriate bullshit that comes from conservatism.
I hope that has cleared up my position for you in some way.
No, the political division we see today is because the christofacists have realized they lost their shitty “culture war” and are hellbent on destroying democracy and hurting the people they hate. Don’t blame the victims. That bullshit is fucking obnoxious. Just hold hands with the people who want to strip away your rights and human dignity and everything will be great!
Enough of this free market of ideas rhetoric, we know that a debate isn’t truly what the fascists want, what they want is a smoke screen they can use to hide behind and pretend that their ideas are just as legitimate as anyone else’s. Even though weather one prefers chocolate or vanilla should be a matter of opinion, not whether or not the Jews should be going back to camp, because they definitely should not. Anyone who wants to argue otherwise is quite literally a fascist.
There’s no both-sides-ism in this. Those who wish to believe the ‘positive aspects’ of slavery would just as well cut your throat as well as mine. If you keep sticking one hand on a hot stove and smacking your neighbor with the other cause you’re in pain, the problem is not your neighbor, it’s YOU
@MrSnowy
Instead of shutting them out of your life and trying to cancel them, try to educate. Show them why certain views are wrong and show them the outcomes of their beliefs. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Because for a lot of people “they don’t care”. They think that they’re strong and you’re weak and they can get away with what they want to do because you literally can’t stop them. From their perspective, trying to “reason” with them just shows how weak and powerless you are. A lot of fascists think like this and it’s why people trying to convince them never quite seem to make headway. Also, they know that weak people object to their views, but, again, they don’t care.
Exactly, when compromise is ‘weakness’ negotiation has already failed. Guess how humans interact when negotiation fails? Violence. So the only way to negotiate with a fascist is with violence, it’s the only language they respect and understand. There’s a reason the only good Nazi is a dead Nazi.
Bold of you to assume conservatism wasn’t literally the norm everywhere. It’s called conservative (wants to conserve) for a reason.
I’m not saying progress is bad, but thinking it was the starting point until the conservative demons spread out the entire globe is quite delusional
PragerU is a think-tank, not a university.
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You’re just proving that you’re immature and can’t have intelligent discussions about it.
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When the people in your think-tank have shit for brains…
A white Christian nationalism propaganda factory.
every day, i lose more and more faith in humanity
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Conservatives won’t be happy until they’ve depicted Moses as a villain who deprived the pharaoh of his hard-earned Jewish slaves.
and how “beneficial” that would be compared to what they tried to do last time…
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Prager is to “University” as North Korean is to “Democratic People’s Republic”
I don’t understand PragerU… they put out all of this fascist propaganda, but they still have this video up on their YouTube channel that spells out in no uncertain terms that the cause of the civil war was slavery and the south’s want to defend a “morally repugnant institution”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcy7qV-BGF4
Is this just the one thing they keep out there to point at and say that they’re “fair and balanced”?
Here is an alternative Piped link(s): https://piped.video/watch?v=pcy7qV-BGF4
Piped is a privacy-respecting open-source alternative frontend to YouTube.
I’m open-source, check me out at GitHub.
That’s the video they point at when they say the Democratic Party was the party of slavery.
They’re just hypocrites.
Historically, it was the democratic party pre 1960s that were the defenders of slavery. Lincoln was a Republican at the time of the Emancipation Proclamation, and the ideologies basically switched around the time of the Civil Rights Act.
The ideologies did not switch. The Republican party was more appealing to Protestants, was largely anti-union, etc many other things, but largely was the party of “individualism”. The Democratic Party has always been more interventionist- but started to ideologically evolve after FDR. Barry Goldwater and certain other Republicans opposed the 1964 Civil Rights because they argued it was federal overreach. This attracted some Democrats who just went with what ever party they saw as letting them keep being racist, as for actual politicians who switch IIRC Strom Thurmond was the only one(but I may be wrong). But a big part of the “switch”(Carter won in the south the first time, Bill Clinton won a few states in the South, Reagan won traditionally blue areas) is that anti-government interventionism(especially after Reagan) switched from being a more urban thing to a more rural thing. Thats not to suggest that a lot of Republicans didn’t pitch their policies in a way to appeal to voters(who may be racist), they did. But the ideologies of the parties didn’t swap. Republicans stayed more or less the same, Democrats evolved.
I mean yes its a technicality but its also a pointless argument seeing as most political parties aren’t the same after 100+ years. Hell even in a span of 20 years, it is quite crazy to see progress since for a while the democrats basically avoided the whole lgbt topic entirely but now is one of its “pillars” for party ideals.
Exactly, just as conservatism has changed and gotten more extreme in the last 40ish years. My point though is that far too many people treat the political parties as constant throughout their history, and it’s worth pointing out that modern iterations of a given party are a stretch from even 20 years ago, almost to the point that they’re different parties entirely today.
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Damn, PragerU was a different place 8 years ago.
They just sell content to education institutions, nothing more, nothing less. They don’t care what that content is for or against, only that someone finds it valuable. It’s not about being “fair and balanced”; it’s about playing both sides to make as much money as possible.
I mean their founder guy or whoever did a rant about how it’s ok for siblings to fuck and that inbreeding isn’t real, just to give you an idea of what kind of people they actually are…
Honestly Youtube sucks. I get flagged for “supporting criminal gang activity” because I had a video about Randy Stair that didn’t even paint him in a positive light, most youtubers have to say “unalive” because mentioning death gets them demonetized yet PragerU can just straight up say we need to re-enslave black people and the response is “aww shucks”
The problem is that social media companies have completely capitulated to fascists, with absolutely zero attempt to put up a fight.
Everyone knows, and I mean literally everyone, that if the rules were enforces fairly on social media then something like 60% of conservatives would have to be banned. They regularly say things that are openly racist, sexist, and incite violence on the reg.
But social media companies only care about money, and to make money they want as many people as possible to show up. So while they know these cesspools exist on their platforms where people say the most heinous shit imagineable, they tolerate it because it makes them money and avoids the big fascist rage party if they fairly enforced their rules.
The fucked up part is, I have been banned or suspended from a few social media platforms for completely innocuous reasons. Which is just frustrating when I get a 3-month band on Facebook for racism for making a self-deprecating joke about being white, but white supremacist groups are allowed to just openly operate and the people who gave me death threats for being transgender “were found not to be in violation of policies”
Right before the API changes I got a 1 week ban from reddit for “report abuse.”
I reported a post on r/Ukraine that SHOWED A BEHEADING. When I reported that shit it was a full on, uncensored beheading video.
Apparently that’s “report abuse” for some fucking reason. But the antisemites who sent me blatant racism? Not enough to bet them banned.
That’s what got me banned but theh decided to make it permanent
I fucking knew it… Read the headline and came to the comments thinking “it’s definitely that shithole PragerU isn’t it…”
Conservatives LOVE projection and they use their victim complex as ammunition. “Libz own the colleges and indoctrinate our youth so it’s totally fine now to have our own propaganda university teaching real history!”
I hate PragerU so much…
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Shouldnt it be illegal for them to call themselves a university? Its kinda like if i would call my hypotetical tea shop a hospital
It’s a goddamn pasta sauce.
the title is from he article— I didn’t pick it! (Rule 1)
Would simply changing
conservative universitytoPragerUnot be more context/more descriptive? I can’t even see it being called editorializing if it’s more accurate.
Beat me to it lol. Recognized the art style immediately.
