Gina Carano is ignorant AF, but cancel culture is really getting ridiculous

The BBQ Pit
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Your opinion might be changed if you looked into a popular website called Natural News. It is jam-packed full of articles and ads for products supposedly good for “natural healing”. At the same time it’s a hotbed of pro-Trump fervor, insane conspiracy theories and screeds about “fake President” Biden and the Democratic “brainwashed bio-puppets” in the Senate. According to NN, wokeism will “destroy civilization” and most Americans are mentally ill because of 5G, glyphosate, toxic vaccines, fluoridated water etc.

Granted a lot of these delusions are shared on the far left, but the site definitely caters for the most part to pro-Trump, far-right loons.

I was going to make fun of that small-town West Texas mayor who just resigned after ranting on Facebook about weaklings who complain about power outages in his area, suggesting that they need to get off their asses and fend for themselves (survival of the fittest, you know).
However I won’t, since we haven’t yet conquered world hunger, and social media is a Tool of the Elites to distract us from issues that really matter. :frowning:

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Right wing asshole Alex Jones might well be America’s single biggest salesman of that kind of horseshit.

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I definitely agree there was magical thinking involved. Magical thinking seems to run rampant among Trump supporters. It reminds me of religious fervor. When I was a child I was a member of a Pentecostal church. Extreme black or white thinking, paranoid delusions, and an irrational sense of power and control imbued by God. God gave them the power to perform miracles, cast out demons, and defeat imaginary enemies. It’s all too familiar.

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Liberals are suckers for “natural healing” stuff, conservatives are suckers for “the miracle drug that the fat cats don’t want you to know about.” Both sides are stupid for essential oils. Mike Huckabee turned a few bucks on a company hawking biblical miracle cures.

In our market, RW talk radio was way ahead of the curve on colloidal silver, coconut oil, zinc. In fact, zinc seems to be a frequent flyer everytime the right-wing grifters want to tart up some of their other patent medicine. I was totally unsurprised that they went ass-over-elbows for hydroxychloroquine, and punched it up with “ya gotta take it with ZINC”

But, y’know, Gwyneth Paltrow has those jade vagina eggs, so :man_shrugging: whatcha gonna do

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My opinion is that the conservatives weren’t always this gullible, it’s a fairly recent phenomena and it coincides with a couple of things.

One is that conservative media, especially NewsMax, figured out to monetize their voter base. This 2012 article lays it out nicely - it’s a long article, and the first section (about Romney’s mendacity, how the world has changed since this was written), isn’t reflective of where the article is heading. Seriously, you should read this if you haven’t come across it - I’ve posted it before.

The other is that Republican politicians, most notably Orrin Hatch and Mitch McConnell, successfully gutted any semblance of regulation on the nutritional supplement industry.

Which set the stage for a perfect storm of grift, leading to shit like this.

And let’s not forget the classics, an early entry from the grifter king — Trump pee vitamins

And they did the same thing with political campaigns, which are now primarily money-making operations.

Conservatives are more susceptible than liberals because they’ve been groomed to be gullible. They’re the marks.

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I think if they were pushing some crazy and dangerous idea about him being assassinated, and blaming someone specific. Or maybe about him not being dead but in a bunker with Trump where they operate a weather machine alongside the Proud Boys, to make winter weather delay vaccine distribution and cause the Biden administration to look bad.

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It would depend on what their job was and exactly how and where they expressed the opinion but there are cases where I think it would be absolutely justified.

If you had a certain type of position with a conservative company…like sales executive or public relations or star of a hit series they produce, and you crudely or repeated expressed a liberal opinion in a public forum visible to clients…absolutely. If it was expressed politely and the company asked you to stop expressing it and you didn’t, absolutely.

That’s the catch to most really good jobs, in a sense they are 24/7. When I had a good job, my contract had provisions allowing me to be fired for my personal conduct outside of work. If you are hired to star in a hit TV show, it’s not unreasonable for the producers of that show to expect you to project an image consistent with their values offstage. It’s one of the burdens of having one of the best jobs in the world, and if it was too onerous of a job requirement, then she should lose her job.

Now, if you are a coal miner or work in a chicken processing plant, you might deserve more leeway in your conduct outside of work. But, with some jobs, controlling your Twitter fingers outside of work is part of the deal.

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Speaking of grifting con-artists… Perpetual asshat Ryan Holiday has a tell - all book in which he exposes his moral bankruptcy by talking about how he was paid to perpetuate false news stories that demonized the left. He says he tried to sell propaganda stories demonizing the right, but the left wouldn’t buy it. So maybe there’s something to your idea.

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Sling-shot… hit those (R)s either end…?
( Oh, you’ll here an odd sound if you get a bullseye…)

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My point is that being a sucker or falling for disinformation is not a Republican/Democrat thing. The kinds of things Republicans fall for may be different, but people on both sides of the aisle are susceptable.

Perhaps the most dangerous misinformation of my life has been the multi-decade attempt by mostly left-wing groups to demonize nuclear power and terrify the public to make it politically radioactive, and left-wing lawfare that tied up nuclear projects for decades to drive up the cost. We are paying a huge price for that now. Left-wing environmental groups tried to kill the Cassini mission, for God’s sake.

And there are a lot of people on the left who still think Communism is a good idea, despite a century of evidence that it is destructive, evil nonsense… You have to be an utter fool to believe Communism is a good idea in the 21st century. That or be evil, I guess. No ideology racked up a larger body count in the 20th century.

Democrats are currently fooling around with snake-oil economics like Modern Monetary Theory, and think a $15 national minimum wage is a good idea despite reams of evidence to the contrary.

Shall we get into the bullshit people like Louis Farrakhan spout off? Crazy antisemitic conspiracy theories are common among a certain wing of the left.

John Podesta and Harry Reid were both UFO nuts, and both were high ip in Democratic circles. Podesta still is. He’s going to get to the bottom of Area 51 any day now.

A large number of people on the left thought Mumia Al-Jamal was a political prisoner, and ‘Free Mumia!’ signs were a constant component of left-wing marches for years. Likewise, “Hands up, Don’t shoot!” was based on a lie, but no one cared.

Then there’s the left-wing bullshit being taught to kids in school. My kid had to watch ‘The Story of Stuff’, made by ex-Greenpeace activists, which was anti-scientific tripe from beginning to end (“Remember kids: Toxins in equals toxins out! That’s why your pillow will give you brain cancer.”). Tought in fucking schools.

Trust me, I see the crazy on the right. It comes through my facebook feed constantly. But the split in gullibility isn’t along Republican/Democrat lines - rather, it seems to be more about a combination of low education/information coupled with extreme partisanship, and often promoted cynically for political reasons. And there’s plenty of that on both sides. Humans are rationalizing creatures who have a large capacity for believing what makes us feel better whether it’s true or not. And scammers and political activists use that whenever they can.

From your side it probably seems like it’s all Republicans. That would likely be a result of the filtering effect of only listening to the other side when it’s a nut who has been picked for the purpose of casting the other side in the worst light possible. If all you get are stories of Republican craziness, you will come to believe that all or most Republicans are crazy.

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I don’t think it’s “bothsideism” to concede that there has been some lunacy pushed from the left too at times.

However, as a moderate myself it seems like lately the majority of it is coming from the right.

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If you see it, then get typing it. Not this phony “I see plenty of”. I’ll wait.

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Disney, though…I lived near Anaheim and know a number of people who’ve worked at that park. Disney is super, extremely careful about its image. They utterly micromanage their park employees–what you can wear, what you can say, what you can’t say, how you make gestures–all to avoid breaking the illusion of The Happiest Place on Earth for the guests. Fond memories of a friend telling me how they had to make the “come here” gesture to avoid all the various obscene hand gestures from different parts of the world that could be misinterpreted.
Disney is that nitpicky. I’m surprised it too that much to get Carano fired.

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As I already said, natural levels of human gullibility and stupidity aren’t a Republican/Democrat thing. Where the Republicans are disproportionately prominent is in artificially enhanced levels of gullibility and stupidity. It’s mainstream conservative media and high-profile conservative figures who are promoting the idiotic and the crazy, at levels that on the Democratic side are manifested in a much smaller fringe.

A pathetic effort at bothsidesing, like most of the rest of your post. Left-wing anti-nukery has not been anywhere near as dangerous, by any rational measure, as right-wing denial of climate change and other important scientific facts (even if you don’t count the dangers of right-wing lying to promote wars and insurrections).

The rest of your bothsidesing is hilariously feeble:

Remember, folks, these are what Sam_Stone is suggesting as functionally equivalent to national Republican political leaders and media constructing elaborate lies about stolen elections and encouraging mobs to attack the US Capitol.

Not to mention all the following:
Over 70% of Republicans still believe, on the basis of zero evidence, that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen.
Over half of Republicans believe that COVID escaped from a Chinese lab, and 44% of them believe that Bill Gates intends to use COVID vaccination to implant microchips in people.
Nearly one-third of Republicans believe the QAnon conspiracy theory about prominent Democrats and “Hollywood elites” participating in a child sex trafficking ring that Donald Trump is trying to stamp out.
Nearly 70% of Republicans still think that anthropogenic climate change is either not a problem or at most a minor problem.

And on and on and on and on. Equally pernicious baseless bullshit, about everything from Mexico paying for a border wall to claims that some notable Democrat is a murderer and/or a lizard alien, is being peddled 24/7 by mainstream Republican politicians and media outlets.

Trying to trivialize all this catastrophic, nation-threatening insanity by pretending that it’s comparable to some Democrats wanting Mumia Abu-Jamal released from prison just illustrates how deeply degraded the right-wing intellect has become.

I’m sure you do, but you’re just too brainwashed to see how much more massively influential and powerfully destructive it is than the corresponding crazy on the left. Because the right has openly embraced media and movements that are deliberately encouraging their stupidity and gullibility, to a degree exceeding by orders of magnitude any such phenomena on the left.

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If there weren’t so many Republicans believing such crazy things, and so many high-profile Republican leaders actively promoting such crazy things, we wouldn’t be seeing anywhere near so many stories of Republican craziness.

If you want Republican craziness to be less prominently displayed in the media, then get to work among your fellow conservatives trying to persuade Republicans to be less crazy. The traditional conservative gaslighting approach, where you encourage right-wing radicalism while simultaneously trying to persuade Democrats that left-wing radicalism is the real problem, is not reliably working anymore.

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“A large number of people on the left thought Mumia Al-Jamal was a political prisoner, and ‘Free Mumia!’ signs were a constant component of left-wing marches for years”

You can’t even get his name right.

Second, I’ve lived in the greater Philadelphia area for a bout thirty years and in the city of Philadelphia for twenty. I’ve observed members of MOVE and a few idiots calling for Mumia’s release. 90+% of us on the left wing believe ‘Abu Jamal’s trial may have had some problems. But, he shot officer Daniel Faulkner and a 100% fair trial would have found him guilty.’

  • The City Paper once published a lettter raging against the paper’s ‘hidden left wing agenda’. The editors responded 'What secret agenda? We are quite open about our left wing agenda! . And they were. I picked up the term Mumidiots to describe MOVE and other Mumia supporters from the City Paper.
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How do you know they are Republican supporters?

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I’m guessing Broomstick is tipped off by their MAGA hats and Trump t-shirts?

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Bill and Hillary Clinton murdered dozens of people for various reasons.

Seth Rich was murdered because he knew too much about the DNC

Joe Scarborough murdered his intern about 20 years ago.

Ted Cruz’s father was involved in JFK’s assassination

Windmills cause cancer

Climate science is a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese

Ukraine and the DNC interfered in the 2016 Presidential Election.

There were truckloads of illegal ballots for Joe Biden delivered to voting centers in black communities throughout swing states.

Dominion and Smartmatic voting machines were rigged to switch votes to Joe Biden. Pretty much every hostile power (except, oddly enough, Russia)

And that’s a very “off the top of my head* incomplete list of not just conspiracy theories that conservatives commonly believe, but conspiracy theories that have been foisted onto the public in massive doses by the then sitting Republican President of the United States of America.

These are not things a few minor Republican political figures believe. This is not some random teacher forcing your kid to watch some film pushing nutritional woo. This is misinformation and disinformation that has become so prevalent that probably 35% of the American public, all of them conservative, really believe it.

Yeah, I know some Democrats believe wacky stuff. Anytime you get a group of 100 million people some of them are going to believe wacky stuff. A few prominent people may even believe wacky stuff. But it embarrasses us when prominent people believe that stuff. We try to shut them down, not amplify it.

That’s probably why I never heard the one about John Podesta and Harry Reid believing in UFO’s until I read your post. My reaction to that was “if it’s true that’s disappointing. I hope they keep it quiet, it doesn’t make the Dems look good”, not “John and Harry say there are UFO’s and they have evidence so it must be true. Let’s tell everyone !”

It’s really gotten that bad, at least in the US. It’s not the crazy beliefs themselves, it’s the amplification and monetization -profiteers made millions off STOP THE STEAL. It’s the grift.

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Yet somehow it was a Republican President pushing chlorohydroxine.

Tell me when Biden start pushing bullshit like that, or when prominent left wing pundits start up their own line of supplements – then we can revisit your both-siderism bullshit.