this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

There's about 1/3 of us, I call them the "idiot army", Hillary called them "deplorable". I think it's just an artifact of the normal distribution of critical thinking skills and character traits like empathy.

I don't believe these are "bad" people so much as easily taken advantage of and mislead (by the actual bad people) into being useful. I think one of the things MAGA has done is activated this group, that's why I call them the "idiot army", Republicans (e.g. Bannon) learned how to activate this group more effectively and explicitly than groups had in the past.

Some things act as human sieves and can be used to identify your victims (like how spam is geared to make the less gullible of us delete them but the more gullible might respond). If you're a right wing political operative, these techniques can also be used to identify and manipulate those who could useful towards your goals.

You gotta think like an evil genius.

For us, we should realize that for this group, things are never going to click. Instead, we should be looking toward how we can thrive despite 1/3 of us being idiots. Identify techniques to prevent bad actors from using this 1/3 to gain power.