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.

  • Moonworm [any]@hexbear.net
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    8 months ago

    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.

    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.