You can. But you need to engage them one on one, and you need to find out what's important to them, what frustrates them, and why. And then build on that. It takes empathy, and not faked empathy. It's not a short conversation, like asking someone to donate to Greenpeace on a sidewalk in Brooklyn. It's deep canvassing.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 8 points 11 months ago (2 children)

"A lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth can get its pants on."

One-on-one might be effective, but it can't scale. There's no hope for the most heavily propagandized country on Earth that doesn't start with an end to the incentive to lie for profit, I.E. Capitalism.

[–] HelixDab2@lemm.ee 0 points 11 months ago (1 children)

It does scale, but it doesn't scale directly.

For the most part, people change based on relationships, not raw information. In general, you can't counter a belief simply by presenting overwhelming information. (This is one of the only areas where Trump is a savant; he's actively fostered a parasocial relationship with his cultists. They believe that they have a strong social relationship with him, so they're inoculated against information that's critical or negative of Trump.) What this means is that ideas can be contagious, and can spread through relationships. If you are able to use you relationship with your parents to help them understand why e.g. Trump is terrible for the country, then they can, in turn, spread that to their friends.

While I appreciate your desire to abolish capitalism, in the case of fascism, it's not money, but power that's at play. Even if you eliminated all profit motive, people would still shill for Trump because they think that they can get some kind of benefit that isn't necessarily monetary.

[–] knightly@pawb.social 1 points 11 months ago

Money and power are equivalent, hence my identification of the problem as Capitalism. Billionaire-owners who can afford to run a propaganda machine as a loss-leader are also to be abolished.