Remember there is c/documentaries! You might find something good there too.

Taken for a Ride - The U.S. History of the Assault on Public Transport in the Last Century - This documentary takes a look at the old public transport system of Los Angeles and follows the step-by-step process by which it was dismantled by General Motors. IMO it’s a good one for seeing a concrete example of the actual steps that privatization can take – GM bought the streetcars after a campaign calling them inefficient/run down etc., then after buying them, let them degrade in quality and service, then replaced them with a supposedly superior bus system. Then they allowed the buses to give poor service, ultimately promoting individual cars over buses and highway expansions as the solution to traffic congestion.

Former CIA Agent John Stockwell Talks about How the CIA Worked in Vietnam and Elsewhere - This interview clip is only 15 minutes long but gives a very concise and specific example of how the CIA manipulates the media by having contacts with reporters and passing them a mixture of true and false stories, basically coming up with bullshit and fake photos that will go viral and spread CIA talking points while the “source” of the information becomes more and more obscured as the story is passed around different news agencies, as well as how the CIA have funded the production of countless books, whose authors were allowed to write whatever they wished as long as they included this or that specific point, and that these authors have gone on to have solid and respected careers in academia.

Cybersocialism: Project Cybersyn & The CIA Coup in Chile - From what I recall it gives a good overview of what happened in Chile. In my opinion, due to Chile’s case being so well-documented, it’s a case which people without a lot of background knowledge can start to learn about the process of CIA coups from and how it relates to protecting the interests of the bourgeoisie. A viewer of this documentary can then start applying that knowledge to many other cases where a similar pattern comes up (country tries to nationalize industries/resources which are in foreign imperialist hands => economic loan denial/asset freezes/sanctions are implemented by the imperialists & opposition groups and terrorists in the country are funded & coups are orchestrated by the imperialist power.)

The Human Face of Russia - Simply, lots of footage of everyday life in 1980s USSR. As I recall, it was a foreign group going there to film and fact-check about the living standards and learn about various political and social activities of the people. IIRC it was a pretty calm and positive documentary, a good one if you need some time away from more heavy and upsetting topics.

The Weight of Chains - About the breakup of Yugoslavia.

The U.S. School That Trains Dictators & Death Squads - About the School of the Americas.

Gaza Fights For Freedom - About the Great March of Return.

The Lobby - Four-part undercover investigation into Israel’s covert influence campaign in the United States.

/c/socialistmusic: “A subreddit dedicated to sharing and appreciating music that is socialistic either in nature or in spirit.”

/c/tankietunes: “The music must apply to one or more of these categories: Communist Propaganda Music … Music from Socialist countries … from an anti-capitalist group supported by MLs … anti-capitalist songs and artists (real ones not grifters like Tupac, make sure of that), or music that is absent of politics entirely(shaky one here, don’t toe the line) like classical or instrumentals, and remixes of the previously listed items … You must put the Name of the song, and artist on the title (in that order).”

Personally, I like the simple rules of socialistmusic, which seems like if it has a socialist vibe (“in spirit”) you can post it. While it’s totally fine with me that tankietunes has such specific rules, it led me to personally not post there as much.

I do like having a catch-all socialist music sub for things like songs from labor union and civil rights movements, because sometimes those can be enjoyable or historically interesting, likewise for mainstream songs and anarchist songs and others which just strike the poster as socialist “in spirit” even if it wouldn’t qualify for tankietunes’ rules.

Edit: Just to clarify, I’m not making arguments for or against anything specific, just trying to lay out my initial thoughts.

Not sure of my favorite but check this out

Lyrebird mimics construction sounds

With Whom are Many U.S. Police Departments Training? With a Chronic Human Rights Violator – Israel

Baltimore law enforcement officials, along with hundreds of others from Florida, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, California, Arizona, Connecticut, New York, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Georgia, Washington state as well as the DC Capitol police have all traveled to Israel for training. Thousands of others have received training from Israeli officials here in the U.S.

These trainings put Baltimore police and other U.S. law enforcement employees in the hands of military, security and police systems that have racked up documented human rights violations for years. […] Public or private funds spent to train our domestic police in Israel should concern all of us. Many of the abuses documented, parallels violations by Israeli military, security and police officials.

Israeli forces trained cops in ‘restraint techniques’ at Minneapolis conference

Officers from the U.S. police force responsible for the killing of George Floyd received training in restraint techniques and anti-terror tactics from Israeli law enforcement officers.

In a chilling testimony, a Palestinian rights activist said that when she saw the image of Derek Chauvin kneeling on Mr. Floyd’s neck, she was reminded of the Israeli forces’ policing of the occupied territories.

Neta Golan, co-founder of International Solidarity Movement (ISM), said: “When I saw the picture of killer cop Derek Chauvin murdering George Floyd by leaning in on his neck with his knee as he cried for help and other cops watched, I remembered noticing when many Israeli soldiers began using this technique of leaning in on our chest and necks when we were protesting in the West Bank sometime in 2006.

“They started twisting and breaking fingers in a particular way around the same time. It was clear they had undergone training for this. They continue to use these tactics—two of my friends have had their necks broken but luckily survived—and it is clear that they [Israel] share these methods when they train police forces abroad in ‘crowd control’ in the U.S. and other countries including Sudan and Brazil.”

Socialist Constitution of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (2019) - DPRK’s constitution on Wikisource

DPRK Socio-Economic, Demographic and Health Survey 2014. - Survey co-authored by the United Nations Population Fund and the DPRK’s Central Bureau of Statistics (Related: UNFPA summary of DPRK census population data from 2008).

North Korea’s Surprisingly Robust Healthcare System - Article in Global Asia

ProleWiki page on DPRK - ProleWiki page giving info on DPRK

For a point of view from a DPRK author, this book: Modern Korea: The Socialist North, Revolutionary Perspectives in the South, and Unification.

For a ML point of view: ProleWiki page on DPRK. There are also pages on south Korea, Korea, and the Korean War.

For a Korean diaspora and activist perspective, of people who travelled to DPRK multiple times on delegation trips: KEEP: Stories from North Korea episode on The East is a Podcast. Also Nodutdol’s zine, Sanctions of Empire (there is a link to PDF on that page if you click the zine cover image).

For a south Korean leftist/left-leaning/peace point of view (try machine translation if you don’t know Korean, my apologies for not knowing an English one for this): “Understanding North Korea” article series by Tongil Times, especially their 북현대사 (“North Modern History”) series, and “North Korea through the constitution” series by Sovereignty Research Institute.

I imagine it’s because of this: Nuclear-capable US B-52 strategic bomber touches down in S. Korea for first time

The article I linked above is from south Korea’s main center-left liberal paper. It comments this:

An American B-52 strategic bomber capable of carrying nuclear weapons was scheduled to land at a South Korean air base on Tuesday. This marks the first time a B-52 has ever landed at a South Korean air base, and is seen as a warning directed at North Korea in response to its growing nuclear and missile capabilities.

Considering that the B-52 is capable of dropping nuclear bombs while in flight, there’s little military utility in landing at an air base in South Korea. However, the strategic bomber does have considerable significance on a symbolic level, underlining the US’ commitment to extended deterrence against North Korea’s nuclear threat.

Considering that North Korea has warned about the potential outbreak of nuclear war each time US nuclear-powered aircraft carriers or strategic bombers are dispatched to the Korean Peninsula, it is likely to have an even more dramatic reaction to a US strategic bomber landing in South Korea for the first time.

Notable also is that under south Korea’s current conservative Yoon administration, the new appointee (since June) to Minister of Unification is a north Korea hawk who wants nukes for south Korea:

Notably, as Kim Young-ho is a hard-liner on North Korea who has argued for the overthrow of the Kim Jong-un regime and has stressed that South Korea should arm itself with its own nuclear weapons time and time again, critics point out that his appointment dulls the value and meaning of the unification ministry, which should carry out unification policies aimed at North Korea.

Yang Moo-jin, a professor at the University of North Korea Studies, commented that Thursday’s personnel appointments “signal the launch of a ‘ministry of confrontation’ or a ‘ministry of North Korean absorption’ that aims to unify [Korea] through absorption via antagonism and confrontation rather than a unification ministry seeking peaceful unification through dialogue and cooperation.”

The atmosphere within the ministry as it welcomes outside figures for its two chief positions is uneasy. One official told Yonhap News that “it seems like the unification ministry is being demanded to completely change its organizational identity, such as what it does, its approach, and the mindset of its members.”

As things fell through under the previous president, Moon, who was a liberal but who made some peaceful cooperation efforts with DPRK, and Trump, who made talks with DPRK but then threatened them, and piled on sanctions without lifting them when DPRK made efforts toward appeasement, and now Yoon came in who is a conservative and USA stan and major anti-communist who is promoting a NATO-like alliance in Asia and having war exercises and military parades etc., DPRK basically has stepped back from appeasement efforts at this time, strengthening ties with its other neighbors, and instead not shying away from making criticism when threatened with “decapitation drills” from the US and conservative Yoon regime (whom large numbers of south Koreans have been protesting and calling to resign due to his warmongering, among other things).

I am also learning details about this so I will just share what I’ve been looking at. Some of these I haven’t fully read yet, so keep in mind I am just showing you the same things I am learning from in the moment.

How Palestine Became Colonized - Video/documentary overview by Empire Files

Palestine, Israel, and the U.S. Empire - Audiobook released by Liberation School, looks like episodes 3-9 probably deal with what you’re asking; I haven’t listened to it yet

Palestine 101 - Series of history articles by Decolonize Palestine

Deconstructing and debunking Zionism - Another article; I haven’t read it all yet, I just skipped to the section “What are the origins of Zionism?”

Gaza Fights for Freedom (2019) - Documentary

How Palestine Became Colonized (2016) - Documentary

Massacres were indispensable to creation of the Israeli state - Article

Letter from Gaza: ‘We prefer to die standing than to give up’ - Article

Electronic Intifada - Journalism outlet

Palestinians get killed when they do nothing, they get killed when they protest peacefully. Western libs continue to fund and ignore the deaths of Palestinians regardless. Palestinians are being murdered en masse now for those who have taken up arms, but their reality has been that they are murdered en masse regardless anyway, because the plan is to remove them (edit: that is to say, “responding” to their resistance is just a pretext, an excuse to kill/remove Palestinians will always be found, no matter what the narrative around it is). Some random liberal who openly admits not knowing much about the situation and refusing to support Palestinian liberation because an organized resistance is too scary for liberal bystanders to think about really means nothing to Palestinians. Westerners, settlers, liberals can debate all they want about it and be sad that Palestinians aren’t dying more quietly and politely, but it’s a basic reality that people who are being oppressed are going to resist. And when your plan is to remove a people and you silence and kill off and ignore all of their peaceful resistance efforts (of which there always have been and are many, but it’s ignored), all that remains is organized militant resistance. If you remain ignorant of it now or only care to genuinely listen to one side then you truly do not give a fuck about stopping violence, you just want to keep having dance parties next to concentration camps.

I’m not going to respond further but good luck in learning, I hope you mean it.

Similarly, the SS man Josef Blösche rode through the Warsaw ghetto at times on a rickshaw powered by a Jewish prisoner, on which occasions he would use the vehicle as a platform to test his marksmanship and shoot Jews either on the street or those standing at their windows.

What the goddamn fuck

I suggest studying some Korean history and reading the works of DPRK’s leaders and other DPRK authors directly and over time you can form your own evaluation of what they believe and why they have implemented particular policies at various times. I don’t have time to write more on it at the moment but you can find some of Kim Jong Il’s views on Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, socialist construction, and Juche here.

The “patsoc” ideas which promote patriotism in the imperial core and reject decolonization are much different from the socialist patriotism which is anti-imperialist and decolonial. DPRK does uphold socialist patriotism, which is regarded as part of its internationalist duty of completing the Korean revolution by focusing the majority of its attention on Korea, to make sure their revolution is successfully carried out, and which is specifically against promoting national chauvinism, and rejects racism.

DPRK’s emphasis on looking inward for solving its problems and on self-reliance come from Korea’s specific conditions. Specifically, Korea has been a battleground for world powers for much of its existence and historically had strong ideological currents of subservience to larger powers influencing its politics, which posed obstacles for progressive/revolutionary movements in Korea since feudal times and into the modern era. After DPRK was formed, it also had to deal with the issue of different influential strains of thought among socialist countries, including its powerful neighbors, Russia and China, during the Sino-Soviet split. The opening of China and the fall of the Soviet Union led to further inner debates. DPRK’s emphasis on focusing on its own conditions is a necessity for it to avoid dogmatically following other states’ lines and thus committing errors in its own revolution, not a blanket rejection of foreign ideas.

I am still learning about Songun, but from what I have read so far, it seems to have its roots in the Cuban missile crisis where US aggressions were ramping up, and finally came to the fore as policy during the Arduous March, when the US was trying to use the economic upheavals after the fall of the Soviet Union, with the US attempting to end DPRK by intentionally starving its people to death. It was determined that in order for Korea to complete its revolution and defend socialism, it would be necessary to heavily prioritize defense due to DPRK being under constant mortal threat from imperialism. Edit: Also, with DPRK’s more recent nuclear developments, I believe the policy of Byungjin (parallel development of military and economy) has returned to the fore, though I may be wrong about that. I’d appreciate being corrected if someone knows.

I recommend this essay on ProleWiki, The Cleanest Farce: How “Experts” Distort the DPRK, and the page about Juche which has sections about Juche’s relationship to dialectical materialism and to Marxism-Leninism specifically. Tl;dr is that ML is seen as a correct revolutionary idea but that it, being very old by now and being formulated in the world’s first successful socialist revolution, it lacks certain concrete details about socialist construction in the present day and also (naturally) has a different context than Korea’s revolution. Therefore it is regarded as a basically correct idea for revolutionaries to follow, but that following it dogmatically is an insufficient application of it, and all countries will need to forge their own path to suit their own conditions as they are confronted with the task of socialist construction and defending the revolution in the present conditions. Juche takes the dialectical materialist view of the world, and it is just dealing more with how people can have a certain attitude and point of view to successfully carry out revolution.

I learned Esperanto when I was pretty young. Although I wouldn’t regard it as the right candidate for the purpose of being the world’s second language, I’m definitely glad I learned it. By knowing Esperanto as a kid/teen from the imperial core, I ended up casually chatting with people from China, Iran, and central Africa (mainly Burundi, Republic of the Congo and Democratic Republic of the Congo), regularly listening to radio programs from Cuba, China, and Poland, and seeing lots of Esperanto art and culture that had been made in the Soviet Union. It really did introduce me to a lot of different perspectives that, at the time, I didn’t realize were basically censored where I came from. And of course in general I met people from many countries. I would say that in any random conversation or community, I mostly met people from Europe, Brazil, and China.

The usual criticisms of it are pretty much valid in my view. However, just taking it as one language among many rather than pushing it as “the” solution for a world auxlang, I think it’s worth studying a bit if it intrigues you. I’d say another valuable thing I learned by being in the Esperanto speaking ‘sphere’ since a young age is that I really saw what kind of things it takes to get people organized to do something, what it takes to popularize an idea, and what kind of stuff absolutely does not work for getting people to believe or do something (there’s a lot of that in Esperanto communities lol). It’s also interesting to watch the development of the language, because it is a living language that grows and changes on its own at this point, while also having a regulating body, and a ton of highly opinionated idealists arguing constantly about this stuff. In that sense I find it an interesting window into how people manage and conceive of development in things. Finally I think it’s an instructive case in observing the growth and development of an auxlang, which could aid future, improved projects in that vein.

Having studied a few different languages, I will say that in my opinion, Esperanto lives up to the claim of being easy to learn. If you speak a Romance language it will be especially smooth sailing. When I have spoken with people who learned it from a completely non-European language background, they said it took a while to learn the vocabulary and that the pronunciation was difficult in some regards, but it was otherwise easy compared to natural European languages, which I would guess is owing to its lack of irregularities in grammar and spelling, its flexibility in grammar, the lack of demand that people have a particular accent, and the lack of strict collocations.

A lot of people dislike it that Esperanto lacks certain cultural things that natural languages have. IMO that kind of comes with the territory of learning a constructed language. Personally, I think it’s fun, as it creates kind of a playful/creative atmosphere. Esperanto serves as more of a tool or vehicle for sharing cultural things than as a deep well of culture in and of itself.

Like most things, the Esperanto community is full of liberals. This becomes somewhat balanced by the community itself being focused on trying to meet people from other countries and the community having a general curiosity for the world and wanting to do cultural exchange. But you will find many liberal and some reactionary opinions flying around in Esperanto communities. The idea/original “plan” behind Esperanto was pretty idealist (although I do think conlangs can have very real, useful applications worth exploring), so the community has a bit of that in its veins.

Personally, I am happy I learned it. I don’t use it frequently these days, but I do enjoy listening to a few songs, and I’ll always be happy about the friends I made, or to randomly run into someone else who speaks it and have a chat. Is it something I highly recommend? No, not really. But if it interests you, I think it’s something fun to do, and you’ll meet new people, and may find chances to travel or work using the language if you really look (you’d be most likely to find work in Europe or China using Esperanto if you managed to do so).

Final note: You can take a VR tour of an Esperanto museum in China here. I thought it was pretty cool.

Knowing how the wheel of history spins now has given us the ability to predict it and therefore the power to take our destiny into our own hands and shape history after our desire.

I’m not an expert and still in the process of learning about this, but I would say your understanding of it here more or less lines up with my understanding from what I have read so far.

As I understand, Juche dismisses the idealist world outlook as groundless and also rejects mechanical materialism, and holds that the dialectical materialist view is the scientific view of the world. However, it is considered that merely holding a dialectical materialist view does not automatically cause people to start using it as a tool to change the world to humanity’s benefit, which is the question that the Juche idea is mainly concerned with: defining and promoting humanity’s role in changing the world, and increasing peoples’ consciousness of this role. As I understand it, Juche promotes the concept that humans (as a collective whole) not only can but should center themselves in changing the world to benefit them, within the real scientific limits of the world, i.e. with the knowledge of the laws of nature and society which operate independent of human’s will. This is seen as a necessary attitude in humanity’s emancipation from oppression, as simply having a dialectical materialist view does not necessarily cause people to start acting on humanity’s behalf even if it does give them an accurate scientific view of reality’s motion.

Texts about Juche seem to primarily focus on asserting that it is correct for humans to center their own needs in how they shape the world, and also focus on discussing humanity’s historical pursuit for independence and methods of preserving that independence when it is achieved through progressive revolutions, with the primary focus now being the struggle to end imperialism and capitalism and to defend and evolve socialism, in order to remove exploitation from society and continue on humanity’s path to pursuing independence from all restrictions, both natural and social, overcoming them with a methodical and scientific understanding combined with an attitude of intentionally centering human needs and desires in the way humanity consciously shapes the world.

If someone sees something wrong with my understanding, please let me know. I am still in the process of learning about this.

Yes, the US is purposely starving the world.

Yep. I doubt you’ll care to read the following but I’m putting it here for others to see.

The United States is the world leader in imposing economic sanctions and supports sanctions regimes affecting nearly 200 million people. … Targeted countries experience economic contractions and, in many cases, are unable to import sufficient essential goods, including essential medicines, medical equipment, infrastructure necessary for clean water and for health care, and food. … While on paper most sanctions have some humanitarian exemptions for food, necessary medicines and medical supplies, in practice these exemptions are not sufficient to ensure access to these goods within the targeted country. (Center for Economic and Policy Research)

It’s well known that sanctions are ineffective for pressuring governments, but very effective at waging siege warfare by starving and killing ordinary citizens by disease and infrastructural failures. Continuing to use sanctions in this way and to this extent, when this is well known, is definitely “purposely starving the world”. An independent expert appointed by the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights said in 2019 that US sanctions violate human rights and international code of conduct and can lead to starvation. Why does the US continue to be the world leader in imposing sanctions, increasing its use of sanctions by 933% over the last 20 years, when this is well known? It’s because they know the effect, and they’re doing it on purpose.

We can also look at some US internal memorandums from before it was more politically incorrect to talk about starving people in other countries. In 1960, U.S. officials wrote that creating “disenchantment and disaffection based on economic dissatisfaction and hardship” through denying money and supplies to Cuba would be a method they should pursue in order to “bring about hunger, desperation and overthrow of government” in Cuba.

In other countries, we see a pattern of US officials and US-backed institutions purposely denying aid and loans to governments they don’t approve of, and then suddenly approving aid and opening up loans when a coup brings a leader they’re happy with into power. When Ghana was requesting aid under an administration that the West’s bourgeoisie didn’t like, U.S. officials said this: “We and other Western countries (including France) have been helping to set up the situation by ignoring Nkrumah’s pleas for economic aid. The new OCAM (Francophone) group’s refusal to attend any OAU meeting in Accra (because of Nkrumah’s plotting) will further isolate him. All in all, looks good.” The “situation” they were helping to set up was a coup they knew was going to happen. After a US-friendly coup took place, suddenly it was time to give the “almost pathetically pro-Western” government a gift of “few thousand tons of surplus wheat or rice”, knowing that giving little gifts like this “whets their appetites” for further collaboration with the US. You will find the same song and dance in numerous other countries, Chile being a well-documented example, if you simply look for it.

The US imposes starvation and depravation of other countries on purpose, using it as an economic wrecking ball, then pats itself on the back for giving “aid” to the countries which have been hollowed out by such tactics.

The loans which magically become available to countries that meet the US approval standards are not so pretty either, as a former IMF senior economist said, he may only hope “to wash my hands of what in my mind’s eye is the blood of millions of poor and starving peoples”, there not being “enough soap in the world” to wash away what has been done to the global south through the calculated fraud of the IMF, whose tactics are designed to accomplish the same kind of goals as the sanctions are–to prevent the economic rise of any country but the US by wrecking its competitors economically, tearing apart their local manufacturing capacity and transforming them into mere resource extraction projects, redirecting their agricultural industries into exports to make sure they reach a level where they are more reliant on imports to feed themselves, and reliant on foreign aid which is ripped away whenever they do not do what the US approves of or make friends with who the US wants them to.

I refer to #3, why don’t they just do it then?

This is what secondary sanctions and the US’s various protection rackets have always been designed to prevent, which has definitely been a powerful tool for them, but it seems with the rise of the new non-aligned movement and de-dollarization its becoming a less successful one and we can see countries “just doing” what they want more and more while the US leadership waves around, as usual, more sanctions and military threats in response.

Saw this interview on Fox News back in the day between right-libertarian Ron Paul and conservative pundit Bill O’Reilly. In this interview O’Reilly is trying to warmonger about Iran and then Ron Paul is like “Well I’m not scared of them, I see the Iranians as acting logically and defensively, considering we used the CIA to overthrow their government in the 50’s” and then O’Reilly goes into turbo damage control mode and starts yelling over Ron Paul about how “We don’t need a history lesson” and tries to continue his warmonger rhetoric while Ron Paul keeps saying “I’m trying to tell you it’s our own policies of overthrowing governments that are causing terrorism to increase” etc.

Basically this conversation was a moment where the contradictions of U.S. foreign policy and imperialism and the inner conflicts of the right wing got accidentally exposed on the main conservative TV network and they tried to sweep it under the rug real fast. Seeing how Ron Paul, the only person I ever heard on TV saying the US should leave the Middle East, got completely smeared and regarded as a total joke and disregarded by everyone, got booed and side-eyed/cringed at in a debate for explaining the logical steps that led to 9/11 and for quoting Al-Qaeda’s reasons, showed me something about how things work.

Anyway, thanks Ron Paul for making me a communist lol

Undecided people are generally the most willing to really listen.

Once people begin down a path of having an opinion on something, it becomes harder to change their view. This is because of mechanisms in the brain that automatically activate when we make difficult choices, mechanisms that serve to resolve cognitive dissonance. As the abstract of this study states: “A choice between two similarly valued alternatives creates psychological tension (cognitive dissonance) that is reduced by a post-decisional reevaluation of the alternatives.” In other words, when we see two options that both seem somewhat reasonable, but must choose only one, we experience cognitive dissonance. The brain kicks in to resolve this dissonance, creating positive associations with the choice we made and creating negative associations with the choice we rejected.

What happens when we encounter dissonance-generating information about the choice we now prefer, our brain once again tries to solve the dissonance, by becoming less responsive to information that doesn’t conform to one’s already held beliefs, with certain areas of our brain failing to activate when we encounter dissonance-inducing information (such as disagreement or facts that go against our position). To put it simply, we respond very actively and positively when something confirms our beliefs (resolving dissonance), and respond somewhat negatively or impassively when something contradicts our beliefs, or even double-down and tune out dissonant information, to a degree that is measurable on brain scans. (Here is a thread I made about this a while back.)

I am not an expert on psychology or neurology, I just decided recently to study up on experimental psychology and neurology regarding things like decision-making, confirmation bias, forming opinions, etc. and soon I want to do some study into what happens to people psychologically/neurologically while in cults, as well as other organizations such as religions or political parties. My reason for doing this is to become better at communicating with people who have really entrenched themselves in a certain stance and have a fact-repellant mechanism going on. So far the main thing I have seen mentioned alongside studies into this kind of thing, is that because people are more responsive at a neurological level, to agreement, it is a decent strategy to begin such arguments by agreeing with them in some way, and I imagine it’s also a good strategy to give people room to deal with their cognitive dissonance as it is generally a subconscious mechanism that actually makes it measurably harder for them to respond to facts. However, I know from experience it’s very hard to be patient enough to do this, especially when the person is being combative or holds a very bad position, so I understand simply not engaging with ideologically entrenched people and focusing more on undecided people (which is generally what I do, and I think it is worthwhile and effective for people to do so).

However I hope that in the future, through a scientific understanding, I can develop a strategy for reaching people who are not just the middle, “undecided” types but that can also reach toward more ideologically entrenched people when I do run into them and have the time and energy needed to deal with their dissonance response on a case-by-case basis.