< looks around at Western countries with militarized police forces, brutal suppression of protest, and high incarceration rates >

“This is fine. Tankies are authoritarian.”

When you Google for “best whatever” and land on a reddit thread, take some time to look at the histories of the people commenting.

You’ll find many cases where the only post they’ve ever made was for that product, and cases where the person posting the question also posts in the comments with an answer, like they forgot to switch to alt accounts.

A lot of it is obvious SEO marketing nonsense. Trust nothing. The entire Internet is trying to scam you. Enshittification, indeed. This used to be a nice neighborhood before the capitalists moved in in the 90s.

When eating chicken wing flats, if you pry the bones apart you can slip them out and you’re left with a single piece of meat you can eat whole. You don’t have leftover bits in the middle of the two bones.

Also, keep nitrile gloves in your glove box or purse and use them when eating messy things like wings and ribs and cake.

You can hardly blame them. It’s a 24/7 onslaught of propaganda and it’s incredibly difficult to break out.

And even when I initially woke up out of it I frequently questioned my sanity. Is this real? Is this actually what’s happening? How can nobody else see this?

And then I wanted to go back to not knowing because of the incredible weight that knowledge puts on your shoulders, but it’s impossible. There’s no going back, at least for me.

It’s not just the news. It’s TV shows, movies, books, periodicals, commercials - even music. The oligarchs have massive influence over all of it and can manipulate the public at will.

There are six companies that control a very large percentage of the media consumed by Americans. They are all mega corporations. The media Americans consume is mostly corporate propaganda, and it’s invisible to us. It’s the water we swim in.

Whatever opinions the oligarchs want us to have are dictated to us.

It is not a coincidence that all our national political races come down to a wire, that we are divided almost 50/50. We are being intentionally divided so that we don’t unite and challenge the oligarchy.