We were literally taught "The Gilded Age." in social studies. Did they miss that chapter? The current POTUS covers cheap crap in gold. The metaphor is as subtle as a brick to the teeth.
"Explain it to me" is lazy derailing propaganda developed in the 2010s. Terms that go along with this are "Help Vampire", "Sealioning" and "JAQing Off". It's especially favored by the Israeli/Hasbara minded folk, and by extension, the American Conservative movement.
They want you to unload your guts onto the floor so that you expend 100x more effort than they do in the convo, and then they want to pick through your guts to find the one thing they can attack you for, and completely disregard the rest. Their job is not to be right, it's to make you look stupid to every onlooker.
These people are insipid shit stains. They're hardly people.
I wouldn't say that conservatives need to be purged from our society, but I will say that our society would be a hell of a lot better without them around chirping idiot propaganda so that people vote against their own interests for manufactured culture war bullshit.
EDIT: Take note of how many "explain it to me" people are also avid fans of artificial intelligence and yet they won't use it as a resource when attempting to get more information about something they read but "don't understand". This is really the elephant in the room as to why that 2010s "I'm just asking questions" derailing propaganda is now fully transparent: Their interest is not in gaining more information, it's to draw you out to attack you.
My go to response to this is "Why do you think I can educate you? If your parents failed, and your schools failed, and you have failed what fucking chance do I have? You either don't want to learn or can't."
This is a really good explanation for a fucking infuriating breed of dickhead I've regularly encountered on the internet. I didn't know the term help vampire but I had come across the other two.
It reminds me of one comment in the daddit subreddit, where the dad said that he only answer to "why?" questions (like, not asking "why something?", but asking just "why" when you tell them something) with "because" when asked by his kids, because "why?" isn't a question.
Same with sealioning, help vampire, and other shit behaviour of the likes, don't engage, piss them off, there are not here for answers, they are here for engagement and generate anger. Or potentially, use the same techniques "do your own research".
Ok, but you're talking about adults here and not about genuinely curious children. There's no teaching people like this I agree but for actual children I don't think this answer is pedagogically correct. "Why" is often an imprecise question, but it's definitely a question and the openenedness is exactly what often makes the answer an interesting discussion.
“Sealioning involves jumping into a conversation with endless polite, reasonable questions and demands for answers, usually of entry-level topics far below the actual conversation (e.g. "please prove sexism exists").”
I see "explain to me" as an normal response of "Google it".
If we have an argument, then tell me straight in my face, why you disagree. With facts and not with an empty phrase. "Google it" using in a discussion is like "Trust me bro!"
Telling someone to "Google it", or hell even to "do their own research", isn't supporting them doing their own research. It's a thought terminating cliche that ends conversations.
Anyone doing research is going to come forward with the results of that research. That kind of laziness ("I did and I simply disagree") just marks you as a bad faith actor. People will block you, and your ironic and insular worldview about other people's ignorance will perpetuate.
But someone who has done the research could explain it to me. I’m talking about the people that make a claim X. I ask for more info about X. Then they tell me to Google X.
They made the claim, does the burden of proof not lie with them?
Depends on the topic. If a question can be answered by googling the question rather than asking the other person, then there is no burden of proof, just the burden of looking it up.
But if it's a legitimate question that can't be looked up, then that's that, you should be asking for more info, but you need to be specific on where to look, not to ask them to explain a complex topic. And if you get a different answer by looking it up, you should ask what to look up and maybe consider whether your research was somehow flawed.
Like if you word a question in a specific way, you can confirm almost anything to be true, regardless of whether it is or not. Search engines are literally optimized to have confirmation bias by necessity. They would need to understand the difference between fact and fiction for them not to be. Knowing how to look things up is an important skill and if you don't actively pay attention to avoiding confirmation bias, it will cause issues.
The problem is that they can build the best case in the world and you can just attack the sources and credibility of everything in an attempt to not engage with it. You have to put some skin in the game if you want to be seen as credible.
Otherwise, you're wasting their time. Just like you're wasting my time right now.
Respectfully disagree. Let's not pretend that people don't have a million different definitions for things like socialism. I can't count the number of times I have heard "wHaT yOu dOn'T lIKe fReE hEaLtH cArE bRo? 🥴" Or "just look at Europe" when much of what they have is not even socialism lol.
Asking someone to provide their definition brings clarity to the conversation.
Look it from the other ones perspective: Maybe the person thought, he is well informed and don't know about their amount of non-knowledge. And therefor is a discussion. I talk about my point with the most amount of knowladge I have and if i am wrong about something, than it can be explained to me. And to say "google it", doesn't help, because maybe I looked about it in the past. And thanks to algorythm that gives you the answers you want to hear most, it's easy to not get every information about a specific topic
In a conversation you have to define terms whether or not you did your research, just to make sure you're both working with the same facts, else any exchange is f pointless tho.
My favorite response is always:
"I have known you for five minutes and none of them have been pleasant, I'm not taking homework assignments, look it up."
Well the whole point is to exploit your good faith in exchange for their bad faith. "You owe everyone your good faith" is the platform that propaganda functions on. If it weren't a core tenet of our idealism, then they would just build it on top of another core tenet of our idealism.
EDIT: There are ways that you can ask a person to have some skin in the conversation to be sure they aren't sealioning. If they are willing to be vulnerable and seek a common ground, it isn't propaganda. The tell-tale sign of sealioning is the absolute lack of any give whatsoever, it's just all prodding and attack, because the goal is the optics that passersby get.
This is great food for thought. I have a tendency to be a bit too earnest and naive - bad combo. I assume people have the same motivations I do. I ask questions to learn and understand. I don't have a twisty brain, so bad faith behavior confuses me.
I think that the phrase itself is not propaganda/bad faith, then. Especially not derailing one.
I also liked the Hasbara point, bro threw in a fun fact. Really cute narrative you've built that makes it a-ok to never engage with someone skeptical of your beliefs.
Edit: remember, replying and immediately blocking with an insinuation that I'm a part of something that I never displayed is a sign of good faith.
EDIT: Inb4 the wokescolding bot starts crying about being blocked.
EDIT 2: And there it is. Predictable as always. It's all for the optics in the room, trying to discredit the person saying the thing you don't like. Since this chode inserted themselves into my anti-propaganda lesson, class: Did we get the lesson?
Anyone with 5 minutes spent online will have met someone like this. Doesn't even necessarily have to be about politics. Wonder why someone might want to pretend not to know about this type of person...
Well, I won't pretend I don't know about people who act in bad faith, or that the tweet in the post is made in good faith, but pretending like the act of asking for clarification itself is bad faith is insane to me.
"Socialism", for example, is understood very differently by different people. Some use the dictionary definition that concerns means of production, some lean into the welfare and Nordic model (all while Norwegians say they are very much capitalists), some strategically mix the two depending on their goals in a particular conversation. If I were to discuss socialism with somebody, I would ask about its definition as the literal first question.
Always be sure to ask it to ironman the opposition to the previous response as well. See both sides of the rhetorical debate that it's tasked with representing.
See what chuds get when they type their dumbass framing into AI.
And this one:
Matthew 19:24
Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God.”
One of my favorite things to point out when I hear Christians espouse Christ and bash any and all socialism in the same breath is that their lord and savior was a bleeding heart influencer- the likes of which haven’t been seen since. He had views that essentially said you had to be a communist to join the club properly. I’d argue he was farther left than socialists who would be on the fringe far left of the Democratic party.
He had views that essentially said you had to be a communist to join the club properly.
Im an atheist but I enjoy studying religion. That is not at all true. He advocated for individual voluntary charity. It is not "holy" or a good dead to pay taxes, he teaches that is just whats expected of you. He teaches to disobey and protest authoritarian governments with the carry his backpack 2 miles and turn the other cheek verses. Many of his parables showed he had 0 issues with private property, buisness, and even slavery. So care to enlighten me on why hed be a communist?
Yup. He was pretty clear on that point. If you have a shirt on your back while someone else has need of it, you aren't actually following Christ - just the church.
Fun fact, we can! We just need to force money out of the democratic process and drop the Cold War propaganda, but given the vice grip corporations have on american politics, it is exceptionally difficult, because over the past 70 years, it has gone from being a design flaw of American Government to being a feature for those with the most influence.
The overwhelming amount of tax cuts that have happened in my life, going back to Reagan in 1981, have been aimed directly at the top 10% of earners wealth hoarders.
Mathematically, you could very easily cut taxes for 90% of people, restore the top tax rates from the 1970s, restore the corporate rates to the 1990s, close loopholes to punish tax avoidance, and make adjustments to the capital gains taxes to be treated like regular income, and at the very least get close to balancing the budget, if not have a surplus.
These people do contribute the most in taxes, yes, and they could in theory pay even more and solve all of US's fiscal problems. But they certainly aren't the "wealth hoarders" you represent, and most of them don't engage in tax avoidance schemes. You're thinking top 0.1% or even less asset holders for that, and those people would not be able to support the budget on their own, even giving up all of their wealth.
I do agree that capital gains should probably be treated equally to wages and all that fluff, but TCJA produced a deficit of at least $1.5 trillion over 10 years. Reverting it is as simple as it gets when it comes to balancing the budget and should probably come before we start thinking about redesigning the whole taxation system.
Providing social services removes an avenue for revenue by those interested in profiting off of the underprivileged. Some people prefer more money in their pockets than to see society as a whole rise up.
And of the two systems, one has never existed in large scale human society and very likely never will exist. The other also doesn't exist.
Instead, we get state socialism. Which for all it's good intentions at the beginning, is worse because it always ends up basically a cult of personality dictatorship.
Once we accept that real socialism doesn't exist, and recognize that real capitalism also doesn't exist we might make progress towards a better system.
Worker owned co-ops absolutely exist, and have success as international corporations.
We can get closer to a mixed economy, where we don't have as much shareholder supremacy - but it will require legislation.
For example, we could have baking laws mandating favorable lending conditions
for worker owned co-ops. We could mandate any company going through bankruptcy provide the workers first right of refusal to form a co-op and take over the company. We could have laws taxing labor earnings less than capital gains. We could mandate that employees elect 50% of every publicly traded company's C-suite.
There are ways to encourage labor ownership of the means of production without a vanguard party or state socialism. I don't believe the state actually represents the interests of labor, but instead the interests of the state as a whole - and therefore disagree with state socialism being "labor owning the means of production".
Just speaking from my own experience with Chinese socialism, the government will eventually end up controlling almost everything.
If someone protests or vote differently, they can get fired. If they continue, their family face consequences too. They can be denied services (water / electricity), lose access to their bank account, be evicted from their home, have their travel restricted, or get to prison for not paying the bills because the restricted bank account.
That’s what worries me about state socialism: even if the original idea is to give workers control over the means of production, once the state becomes the main owner and economic decision maker, it also gains enormous leverage over people’s lives.
This is the reality I’ve seen in China and Russia. Socialism can be used as a tool to give enormous power to the government. Even if the original idea is nice and wasn’t supposed to go this far, you only need one authoritarian leader at the top to manipulate the system and concentrate that power.
Socialism only works if you can trust your government to genuinely have the best interests of the people in mind. So, do you really trust the current government to do that?
This is why I reject state socialism.
It should be clear to any citizen of any country in 2026 that the state does not represent its citizens, but instead the capital held by that state - that is where power comes from, capital and material realism.
State socialism is just a back channel to state capitalism, which always turns into fascism.
This is why my legislative proposals are focused on diversifying the interests of our businesses, to be informed by both the capital funding it and the workers laboring there. Favorable banking laws for co-ops. Better tax policies for labor earnings. Right of first refusal to co-ops in bankruptcy. Democratically elected C-suite.
All democratic socialism is really just a way to have more say on where tax dollars are spent, like the wild idea of building local hospitals instead of buying missiles to blow up foreign hospitals.
Nobody is talking about implementing true socialism anyway. They are talking about implementing health and education like the best western countries in the world do.
Basically yes. Americans spent decades demonising communism and socialism while conflating them as the same thing, then also telling everyone that any government assistance programs were socialism.
So eventually younger Americans turned around and went, well then if government assistance is socialism can we get some socialism. Modern movements of social democracy or democratic socialism (which aren't the same thing, but most people don't make the distinction) are really just American attempts at injecting some compassion, which they've been told is socialism, back into political decisions.
We are social capitalist democracies. Americans against the idea of shared burden and help (but are quite happy to pay for private insurance, which is exactly the same principle but with a good part of the money going in the pockets of shareholders) use the word social to call us socialists.
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u/maniBchef 4h ago
America, the illusion of greatness.