I think it would be unwise for this site to start believing that they're all special little geniuses who actually are immune to propaganda because they're just so correct about everything all the time.

This site isn't populated by people that came to have perfect politics through their own unique virtue or intelligence. This site is made up of people that came to have varying degrees of counter-hegemonic politics because of the material and social conditions in their lives that alienated them from the dominant ideology of their society. Hexbear has no billionaires because billionaires wouldn't choose to be on Hexbear, not because Hexbears choose to not be billionaires.

Nobody here is better than anyone else, and none of you used superior innate individual will, virtue, intelligence, or wisdom to develop the correct ideas that everyone else chooses not to develop because they're too lazy, corrupt, ignorant, or stupid . This is just ordinary liberal exceptionalism.

"Propaganda" doesn't "brainwash" people because brainwashing isn't real. People voluntarily integrate ideas that make them feel better about their conditions and reject ideas that don't.

I think this is related to the concept of "different levels of wrongness." someone who says "2+2=4" is correct. Someone who says 2+2=5 is incorrect. But if someone else says 2+2=35, they're far more wrong than the person who says 5. Someone who says "2+2= Cat" is so wrong they are no longer talking about mathematics anymore. But then there's an answer like "2+2 = 22" which is also very wrong, but could indicate that the person doesn't understand the concept in question at all(in this case, addition) but is still trying to give a sincere and honest answer.

When talking to people who believe nonsense, we need to figure out how much nonsense, and how different from our own interpretation their understanding is. We shouldn't assume we have things right, the goal should always be to get "less wrong" and to help others be "less wrong."

you have material life dice rolls to start even asking questions

Just as mass propaganda of "everything is going great" hits a wall in the bottom part of society, "the everything is shit" hits similar wall in the owning part of society.

The idea of personal responsibility to do and be everything right is inherently right-wing, people are products of their conditions. We are no more intelligent than normal people, we just got the info and chances to think differently

Agency is not the same as Free Will. Agency merely means the "choice" happens internal to a being. A child has the agency to "choose" between a healthy snack and a cookie, but their behavior will largely be dependent on what they have been (actively OR passively) trained to do.

propagandeez nuts

Sorry, in my day-to-day Australian life, I repeatedly run into Soviet propaganda from 90 years ago and eventually fell for it. :(

Yes, I find the same goes for ads for example and addiction to social media etc. I'm not denying both are a problem in society but I don't like the assumption that everyone is equally affected by it or when people use it as a ready-made rationalisation for something im doing.

I also think your point can also be extended to say that generally right-wingers are also way more susceptible to it, even if to some extent we all are.

Us, we, the politically minded internet dwellers and the pmc/lanyard/neoliberal/boomer/chud/right wing psycho internet people are both hyper-aware of media. We're also hyper-aware of one another. We all tend to over-emphasize the importance of media (and therefore propaganda) in politics. That goes for traditional media like TV and new media like social media and podcasts.

Media has inserted itself as main method to know what's going on in the world for many people. That doesn't mean it's actually the only way or that it's the source of political action in the world.

Misinformation, data, propaganda, information, news, etc aren't as important to the way things are as it seems. It's not a battle between who gets to tell the story, it's the winners of the battle that get to tell the story and the winners are those who own the labor. There is demonstrable proof that illiterate, largely unread people can start and win a revolution. The question is whether that's true for the revolution to come. It'll be hard to say until it's over.

I can either understand why people in my life believe that Putin is Hitler 2.0 and it's our moral imperative to kill all Russians, and work against that narrative, or I can denounce them for having common brainworms that I (and most of this site) held until a few years ago.
Or are you talking about weirdos online?

The problem with change more broadly is that in order for someone to change, they have to WANT to change. I think a lot of people don't want to change. Change is scary. Change is hard. Change can end up being worse for the individual overall, it carries some risk. Many of us live in a society that largely pushes the idea that change and growth is bad, which is honestly the most insidious propaganda of them all. Folks have to take that first giant leap first and be willing to and open to change. Or they have to be forced into change via an upsetting of their material conditions.

Im immune to propaganda