31 Surefire Ways To Make Me Lose Interest In Your Thoughts About The World

Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):

Every day I interact with all sorts of people from all around the world and all across the political spectrum, and I learn a lot from those conversations. Over the years, though, I have learned that there are many people who just aren’t going to have anything worthwhile to say, because their worldviews are too clouded with confusion and bullshit for them to offer a lucid perspective on much of anything.

There are signs I look for to show me whether someone is not worth the time and energy it would take to interact with them, which allows me to use that time and energy more productively. Here they are in no particular order.

Easiest ways to make me lose all interest in everything you have to say:

1. Support Trump and the Republicans

2. Support Democrats

3. Ignore Gaza

4. Talk about “antisemitism” like it’s a major problem that needs to be urgently prioritized

5. Blame the world’s problems on “the Jews”

6. Still buy into the “Hamas uses human shields” narrative in the year 2025

7. Regurgitate empire propaganda about how bad and evil China is

8. Babble about “Russian propaganda” as though it’s a major problem in the west compared to domestic western propaganda

9. Unquestioningly buy into the official narrative about whatever nation or group the empire happens to be targeting on a given day

10. Try to convince me that this time the empire is telling us the truth about the Evil Dictator who needs to be regime changed

11. Parrot Pentagon propaganda about Iran

12. Demonstrate an unwillingness to counter-research against your own biases

13. Regurgitate lies about communism which even a tiny amount of research would quickly debunk

14. Act like Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was a completely unprovoked act of aggression to which NATO powers were an innocent passive witness

15. Focus primarily on sectarian infighting and social media drama instead of on fighting the empire

16. Pour energy into culture war diversions

17. Shit on trans people

18. Demonstrate an inability to distinguish between smart conspiracy theories and dumb ones

19. Promote dumb conspiracy theories when the culprit is garden variety capitalism

20. Have literally anything whatsoever to do with QAnon

21. Believe Trump is a Russian agent

22. Believe everything the TV told you to believe about North Korea

23. Support US military interventionism anywhere on earth

24. Support any of the obvious US regime change plots in Latin America

25. Automatically assume the mass media are always telling the truth

26. Automatically assume the mass media are always lying

27. Side with the powerful

28. Support and defend any billionaire for any reason

29. Support and defend Israel for any reason

30. Support and defend the western empire for any reason

31. Show signs that you have outsourced your responsibility for understanding the world to any pundit, political party or ideological faction instead of finding out what’s true for yourself.

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