“I Ain’t Reading All That; Free Palestine”
The meme enrages Israel supporters because Israel apologia depends on mountains of verbiage to spin obvious atrocities as reasonable and appropriate. At some point the kids noticed this was happening, and started dismissing all the narratives.
…Without mountains of narrative, all you’ve got is a nonstop deluge of raw video footage depicting the blatant genocidal criminality of Israel. No narrative overlay is required atop a video of a baby beheaded by Israeli military explosives. It stands on its own. You’d only need narrative to explain why the footage of the headless baby doesn’t say bad things about the side that’s dropping the bombs.
…Manipulators understand that they can use narrative to promote material agendas if they can get people to believe those narratives, and it enrages them when people handwave away the narrative and stick solely with the raw data of material reality. If you’ve based your life around trading empty narrative fluff for real material resources and gains, having your narratives dismissed can feel like holding a huge pile of currency that suddenly got devalued to zero. Of course the manipulators would be upset about this.
Ra ra me tribe good, you tribe evil!
Is that better?
That’s about the level of intelligence I get when I make actual arguments. Much better.
If only there was some way to influence people into taking political discourse and educating themselves about complicated topics more seriously. Maybe we could even write something advocating for that on a public forum.
But where would we find the people who need to see this message? Maybe in a highly upvoted meme post that lionizes willful ignorance?
What you fail to understand is that when you’ve dedicated hundreds of hours of sincere effort trying to take down a wall and realize you’re no closer now than you were at the beginning, you just step back and look at the people bashing their head against it and say: “Hey, this isn’t working. It might not be worth the effort.”
So hey, it’s not worth the effort, free Palestine.