unpublished comment: https://old.reddit.com/r/FluentInFinance/comments/1jnduq7/hence_the_cycle_continues/mkkom7x/
Content of the forbidden comment:
I love people trying to still use the old classics cause it really helps show people how fucking crazy shit is right now.
That's why we are where we are in 2025. People adore this shit, the Twitter behavior of a Apple iPhone meme addict leading the nation appeals so much to the audience. People who hate Trump adore mocking Trump. That's the heart of the Russian information warfare that started in March 2013. Which you can't link or even quote here on Reddit front page topics because the spam filters (and/or anonymous no-identity Kremlin participants) are manipulated by Russia too (and not just this platform). You can't get Americans to escape it because they don't even realized absurd mockery is the foundation of the whole Kremlin techniques. People love it and adore when others act stupid, which MAGA was the first to go way off the deep end of anti-intellectualism in 2015, when it was 18 months into the Russian media invasion.
I dont know enough about the context of the Reddit thread to say this or that, but I absolutely agree with the sentiment of this comment. Its the kind of New Yorker/ NPR listener/ Rachel Maddow smugness and obsession with "gotcha" moments, where the one claiming the "got" was actually the one being had.
Another expression is how any time we brought up criticism of Biden, or Harris, about how their approach was losing the election; the victims of this brainworm took that criticism to mean support for Trump. They took the advocation that what Democrats were doing was actually going to lose us the big game, to mean that by pointing that out someone wanted Trump to win.
They're broken, inside. In their minds. They seem to "know" the direction they need to go in to improve the situation, but they are incapable of making a decision that results in a better outcome. They're culturally committed to a path of failure.
When conformity enforcers overwhelm diversity generators, all of us are in trouble. Spartans--fundamentalists, militia groups, fascists, and ultra-nationalists--can freeze the machinery of collective mind. A shutdown of urban diversity devastates that exercise of collective acumen we call an economy. Christian Fundamentalism has been shown by the research of sociologists Alfred Darnell and Darren E. Sherkat to retard the learning of children raised within its grasp. Darnell and Sherkat sum up a common Fundamentalist attitude in the following words: "No schooling is better than secular schooling." Then there's the paralysis of thought which outright battle brings. When World War I erupted, Sigmund Freud was horrified by the sudden "narrow-mindedness shown by [even] the best intellects, their obduracy, their inaccessibility to the most forcible arguments." Such closings of the mind may explain why authoritarians are prone to ignore it when their approaches flop. They often goose-step from one year to another rigidly glued to backfiring ways.
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
Chapter: The Kidnap of Mass Mind
Page: 203-204
Howard Bloom
Published: August 14, 2000
"We're losing doing the things the way we were doing them. If you advocate us doing anything differently, you are against us."
In mental disorders, that is called "Executive Function" - which I suffer from greatly when fighting the Kremlin information warfare. The irony is not lost on me that the psychology industry calls it "Executive Function" and that's the executives in the White House they are manipulating.
Peer pressure, advertising, marketing, propaganda, union busting - all tend to converge on using techniques to manipulate this area of the mind and overwhelm it or cause disorder of some kind.
Look at the techniques from year 2014 onward that Russia used to manipulate mental function of people regarding pandemic / vaccination / defense against diseases: Many posted both pro- and anti-vaccination messages to create "false equivalency", the study found. It examined thousands of tweets sent between 2014 and 2017. Vaccination was being used by trolls and sophisticated bots as a "wedge issue", said Mark Dredze from Johns Hopkins University. "By playing both sides, they erode public trust in vaccination, exposing us all to the risk of infectious diseases," he said. ... "A significant portion of the online discourse about vaccines may be generated by malicious actors with a range of hidden agendas," said David Broniatowski from George Washington University. The researchers reviewed more than 250 tweets about vaccination from accounts linked to the St Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA). In February the agency was named in a US indictment over alleged election meddling. The IRA tweets used polarising language and linked vaccination to controversial statements about race, class and government legitimacy, the researchers said.