/furi/ - Yaff

There are a whole lot of Nazis throwing obfuscation, lies and distraction to deflect from the fact the Musk did a whole-ass sieg heil salute. Multiple times.
His facial expression and the full clip make it unambiguous and undeniable.
A common deflection is people posting memes of screenshots of dem leaders taken when they had their arms in a certain position. They never, not ever, post the full clips these screenshots are taken from because that would give the game away too soon. These people did not make a Nazi salute.
Why do they post these images, do they think we are stupid? Do they think anyone would ever fall for such obvious dishonest malarky?
No, they are doing that as a tactic to fatigue you, to wear you out, to make you angry.
It's pocket sand. The goal is to try and play to your emotions and to stop you from repeating the truth: Musk made a sieg heil Nazi salute, multiple times and with his whole chest.

>>3766593

It's called gaslighting. Don't trust your eyes… You didn't see what you think you saw!

>>3766643
The opposite of "gaslighting" is not critical thinking, it's called "validation". It's taking your ball of cognitive bias and running with it further than you ever would on your own. Instead of making you doubt yourself to suppress the truth, it's amplifying and feeding back on the false ideas they want to push to the point that they eclipse the truth.

It's saying "Yes, you're right, that IS a Nazi salute you just saw, never doubt it!". It's playing on your existing prejudices and tendency to explain things according to your present biased understanding of reality, and then exaggerating it in the same direction: Musk is an asshole, so of course he just sieg heiled a crowd of fascists, because he is a fascists, and nothing anybody can tell you can prove otherwise. I mean, isn't it obvious?

It's like the deeply religious seeing god in every mote of dust, which serves to further validate their belief in god that makes them see god in every mote of dust. If someone is on the brink of such belief, you simply egg them on until they fall completely into it – that's "validation".

>>3766656
You’re describing a psychological phenomenon where cognitive bias is reinforced rather than challenged, leading to a self-perpetuating cycle of belief. This kind of "validation" as you define it isn’t just about affirming someone’s perspective; it’s about amplifying their biases to the point where alternative explanations become unthinkable.

A few questions to dig deeper:

1. Do you see this kind of validation as a deliberate tactic used by individuals or media outlets, or is it more of an organic process that happens within echo chambers?


2. How do you think people can protect themselves from this kind of reinforcement without dismissing valid concerns?


3. Would you say this process is more dangerous than gaslighting, or just a different kind of manipulation?


4. Have you noticed this pattern being weaponized more in recent years, especially with social media accelerating feedback loops?



Your point about religious belief is interesting—do you think this "validation" operates similarly in ideological and political spaces, where reinforcement creates an almost faith-like certainty in one’s own perspective?

>>3766663
1. Both
2. If you really want to believe in something, you will fall victim of it automatically. The fundamental problem is blue-eyed idealism - or the lack of IQ to notice that you're being played.
3. Doubting yourself is not contrary to critical thinking, so gaslighting is not directly depriving you of the tools necessary to counteract gaslighting. Validation is more dangerous because it denies the need for self-criticism.
4. It's always been there.

To coin a term similar to "gaslighting", validation can be appropriately called "spotlighting". After all, you know what happens when you shine a very bright spotlight onto something? If you look into it, your eyes become dazzled and blind to everything else around the spot. Even if you tried to look somewhere else, you would only see darkness, so your eyes naturally turn back to the spotlight and the object that is deliberately illuminated by the person holding the light projector. To regain your normal vision, you would have to deliberately look away from the light for long enough that your eyes re-adjust.

What this is saying is, the person who is doing the spotlighting is trapping people within the narrow confines of the spotlight. It's like when you run across a deer on the highway at night: the animal will attempt to run in front of your car even if it means death to them, because your headlights are so bright that the road in front of your car is literally the only thing they can see and the only place where they think they can go; everything else is just a pitch black void.

In the context of the original version of "gaslighting", a person was observing that the gas lights in a room were dimming out when another person in another room lit up their lights. The other person wanted to hide the fact that they were present, so they convinced the first person that they were just imagining the lights dimming.

If the other person was "spotlighting" instead, they would say "Yes, I've seen it too - the gas lights do tend to dim down sometimes - I wonder why that is?". When the first person offers an explanation like, "Oh, it could be because the furnace starts heating up and takes all the supply", to which the first person replies: "Oh yes, the furnace! It's been quite cold recently so the heating is turning on and off. Oh the pipes in this neighborhood are so bad that when the guy next door starts cooking, my stove almost dies out!"

You put a spotlight on the convenient explanation that the person already finds plausible, that isn't the truth, and then turn up the brightness so all the other answers are too dim to be seen in contrast.

>>3766663
> in ideological and political spaces, where reinforcement creates an almost faith-like certainty in one’s own perspective?

This is not only the case, it has been proven by study to be the case. When you counteract an ideological certainty with contrary information, people tend to increase the strength of their original conviction as they reject the new information. Intelligence has nothing to do with the matter: smarter people simply find more elaborate means to reject the truth while dumber people just go "la la la".

A rather large discussion to just say “liberals are pussies.”