[jiggawatts]

Propaganda is a very effective tool. People internalise it to the point that it becomes a part of their personal identity, and it becomes a part of the ambient societal discourse. It's like the air you breathe. You don't even realise that you're breathing until someone tells you that you are.

Conversely, it is trivial to identify foreigners influenced by propaganda. You see the effect, but are not subject to the cause. It's like seeing a fish in a body water. You immediately think to yourself: "There's a fish in the water", but the fish doesn't think it's swimming in water. If you could ask it somehow, it would ask: "What is water?"

PS: There are quite a few topics like this where if you ask any American, you get some specific propaganda in response, but if you ask literally anybody else on the entire planet -- the other 96% of the human population -- you'll get slow blinking and maybe a "wtf!?" instead.

E.g.: Iraq caused 9/11, gun control, states-rights, and publicly-funded ("free") healthcare.

All three of them are very heavily propogandised for decades now by very-well funded lobby groups... in the US. Elsewhere people are like: "No, the Saudis did!", "Illegal!", "Wat!?", and "Of course!"

[fragmede]

proof that humans are just stochastic parrots as well

[salawat]

Sigh. I'm fully aware the propaganda of which you speak. Thank you very much. Yes, I know it's origins. No, it is not the stem of my dislike of these systems. Please stop trying to reduce it to "crazy American Red Scare mumbo jumbo".

I have spent decades watching the ways human beings interact with and use computers. I've made it my life's work to pick apart technological systems and how they have been applied to societal problems, and what the various outcomes are.

It is a fact that automation which removes dependence on other humans acts as a power multiplier to it's owner. It is a fact that as we remove more individual actors from things, decisions will be skewed more and more to the extremes of the component actors of the system. It is a fact that since the industrial revolution, and the introduction of industrial business machines, the acts of artifice and processes we are capable of creating have become more and more capable of facilitating industry fuelled process pipelines capable of generating great casualties. The last century having some very shining examples of how things can go wrong, and the bloody U.S. from 2016-2020 having gone through it's first brush with a certifiable psychopath in the Chief Executive seat.

I have had the everloving shit scared out of me, and much of my naive techno-optimism knocked out of me. I've now had a shining example of "what could a smart psychotic, amoral person do with this system" added to my "should I make this system?" calculus.

I look at cases of "everything is just fine..." non-U.S. posters entertain, and I just end up affixing "for now. Your psychopath in charge just hasn't come up yet.

India has it's Modi. China jas Xi. Putin's saber rattling again. Britain is chasing itself through fear into becoming what Orwell had nightmares of more and more every year. I listen to elders who think that "oh, just trust everyone else", that I then half to clean up the mess of afterward when their implicit trust in others ends up being violated.

I wish my misgivings were as easy to cure as innoculation to Red Scare propaganda. That was easy. I saw through that before getting out of middle school. This is much harder. My generation hasn't faired well in managing to build trust or emotional stability which scares the crap out of me for the odds of not leveraging technical advancement to unmake something beautiful that ultimately I still believe, or try to believe in. I love the American Experiment. I want to believe we are by and large good, virtuous, and comparatively enlightened people capable of maintaining a government that places as a priority maintaining a state of Liberty without degenerating into a mess social control mechanisms laying around waiting for the sufficiently motivated and intelligent psychopaths to pick up and orchestrate.

So again, sorry to bust your bubble. I could write volumes on this topic, but I don't feel like letting this degenerate into rambling anymore than it already has.