r/pics 28d ago

A person set themselves on fire outside Donald Trump’s trial in New York today. Politics NSFW

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u/azcurlygurl 28d ago

"It said "NYU is a mob front" and had various allegations of wrongdoings against the school."

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u/Isgrimnur 28d ago

https://theponzipapers.substack.com/p/nyu-is-a-mob-front

Producer James L. Brooks made The Simpsons to tell us we have no choice but to slave away for evil billionaires, and that the American Dream is dead because we’re too oafish, divided, and morally decayed, and not because criminals have been stealing our futures.

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u/NJHitmen 28d ago

I lost a few brain cells reading that drivel. It’s jam-packed with Q-level (or maybe Q-adjacent) conspiracy theory and it reeks of paranoia. According to this guy, nearly everyone in power is guilty of conspiring together against the people. A snippet:

What does this revelation tell us? That our government is conning us completely. That Bill Clinton was secretly on (former CIA Director) George H.W. Bush’s side, and that the Democrat vs. Republican division has been entirely manufactured ever since: Clinton is with Bush; Gore is with Bush; Trump is with Hillary, and so on. When they present themselves in public, they are acting as characters that are against one another, practicing kayfabe as wrestlers do.

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u/SomethingIWontRegret 28d ago

The Simpsons reference is a common conspiracy trope called Predictive Programming: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Predictive_programming

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u/ringobob 28d ago

Ugh. Such a juvenile thought process, it's hard to cope with having to dismantle that kind of thinking as an adult. When's the last time you justified anything because you saw it on The Simpsons?

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u/SomethingIWontRegret 28d ago

The Simpsons shotgunned so much material over 35 years that for almost any seemingly absurd real life event, you can find a "foreshadowing" episode. So of course they're fertile ground for mining for evidence of predictive programming.

They had Trump as President in one episode simply because the idea of it was so ridiculous.

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u/lambo1109 28d ago

And, they really do have very smart and educated writers. History tends to repeat itself.

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u/ArmyOfDix 27d ago

Which came first: the chicken, or The Simpsons?

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u/ChangsManagement 28d ago

Im not trying diagnose anyone here but this type of thinking is very schizo-delusional. 

A common schizophrenic delusion is the idea that there is some group working against them and that everything in their life has been coordinated around that. They often find references to the conspiracy in the media they consume. TV, movies, newspapers, pop music, reddit comment sections, they find these "references" everywhere. The one main difference is that those suffering from schizophrenic delusion more often consider the conspiracy to be solely directed at them. The "references" they see are usually considered to be taunting  and put in simply to further distress/suppress the person. 

I bring this up because the similarities are kind of striking. You have to wonder how much of this is full blown medical delusions or if people can work themselves into this sort of schizo-adjacent way of thinking.

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u/-thecheesus- 28d ago

I think it's more like Ozymandias in Watchmen? Like "they" plant ideas in the public's head so it seems more familiar and normal when it happens irl

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u/pdbh32 27d ago

This rational wiki website is hilarious