Propaganda doesn’t totally rob people of agency free will (more accurate term), if it did this site wouldn’t exist. People do have the capacity to develop critical thinking, skepticism, and a basic curiosity about the world that allow them to develop some resistance to propaganda.
You can hold people accountable for failing to even attempt to do this.
Everyone loves saying “built different” as some oh so fucking brilliant retort.
I don’t think anyone is “built” anything, but people do often end up as impasses where they go one way or another, and one way is bad and the other is good. Some people choose to go one way and ended up here, others went the other and ended up in
Again this all just loops around back to hard determinism where we really can’t judge anyone for anything. Hitler was just a smol bean what had doomed by fate.
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It’s a meme meant as a retort. Anytime someone says you can judge someone for something they “meme” “oh so you’re built different?”
Yeah I was born superior, which is why I didn’t lite that cat on fire like the other kid from my middle school did. Clearly thinking bad people are bad makes me a fucking Nazi.
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Honestly I don’t know wtf people in this thread want me to conclude here.
Like if we follow the logic some people are presenting, Israelis who put out lawn chairs to watch children in Gaza be bombed to death are no more morally wrong than someone who marches against genocide, nobody is better than anybody, we are all just victims of our upbringings.
Thing is if this is your view I can fucking respect that. But nobody on this fucking site actually behaves like that, any time anyone posts about, for example, Israelis putting out lawn chairs to have a laugh at genocide, we talk about what awful psychos they are. I show up and say “yup they are awful psychos and we can condemn them as such, we are better than them” oh NO NO NO NO! I could have been just as bad as them, we all are the same you see.
I don’t fucking get it.
“those people are awful psychos and we’re better than them” is reductive and ineffective at explaining both why they’re doing what they’re doing, and why it’s bad. It’s also, crucially, the exact language they would use to explain why it’s right and good for them to exterminate the population of Gaza. Posting about how much better you are doesn’t improve material conditions for anyone in Gaza, but it might make you feel better about (forgive me for making statistically likely demographic assumptions) living in a white supremacist settler colony benefiting from generations of human slavery and the genocide of an indigenous population.
If you believe a person is bad because they do bad things, then the person can change with the action. A person can stop doing bad things, and thus stop being a bad person. If you believe a person does bad things because they’re bad, then the only solution is to kill them.
I believe that the genocide in Gaza is bad, and the solution is to stop the killings and allow the people of Palestine to return to their homes. I don’t believe the solution is to exterminate the “bad people” until only the “good people” are left alive, which is basically how the Zionist occupation government would describe its official policy toward Palestine at this point.
I do actually believe this, more or less.
It doesn’t mean that I never oppose people or find them loathsome and vile. I have desires for the world that are in opposition to a lot of other people’s desires; many of my desires require certain people to stop behaving in a certain way, sometimes en masse. If I want to work to bring about the world that I desire, I should do what is necessary to effect it. This is, at the practical level, the whole of my morality. Where it comes from and the exact nature of my ethics is another matter, but does include a belief that people are not intrinsically arranged on a Manichean axis of good and evil. I understand hatred, contempt, etc. as second-order positions. For me, I don’t find them particularly useful. What I am concerned with is a primary goal, essentially, general human welfare. I believe that communism is the best, perhaps only, mechanism (politically speaking, to achieve this and therefor view it as a tool toward that end. I really don’t care what people deserve and who is virtuous or wicked; to me, all people deserve to be safe and happy. Often people inhibit other people to be safe and happy and these inhibitions should be removed, by whichever means are most expedient while remaining conducive to long term goals. This is, of course, not simple in its practice, but it is the guiding principle from which my positions follow.
It’s fine if you’re working through your understanding of philosophical determinism, but shaping your understanding of the world around “I want to judge other people, what helps me most easily facilitate that?” isn’t a very stable base on which to build egalitarian politics. Ask yourself what you’re trying to accomplish by judging people. Is it making yourself feel better, or is it making other people better? If it’s the latter, have you found it to be effective in your own life? Have you found your life to be improved primarily through being shamed and judged by people “better” than you? Have you found others receptive to your shame and judgement, and grateful to you for improving their lives in that way?
If you’re trying to change someone’s mind, it’s difficult to be successful if you don’t understand how and why they came to believe what they believe. If your answer is just “they believe stupid things because they’re stupid”, then you have a built in excuse for not trying to change their mind. You can’t do it because it’s impossible. You’re smart, they’re dumb, and that’s just the unchanging natural order of the world.
That’s a belief system that’s effective at making you feel better about the status quo, but not very effective at changing it.