Sure thing! I hope my jokes haven't made you uncomfortable, and that you're doing well btw :3

This isn't the source, but where I originally learned about it:

I was clued into it by this:

If you ever have to deprogram a friend or family member or you need to know when to spot a pattern, they're very very helpful heuristics to help you approximate what they're doing and have a sense of where they are.

Ultimately its that when hit a certain stress-level, parts of the brain decide the resources spent making determinations are too lossy and they switch to wholistically heuristic models of comprehension.

A lot of deprogramming is a combination of helping them realize:

They've forgotten how to perform active reasoning, or have been pushed into projects or communities which actively punish those processes -- and have instead switched to looking at the shape of ideas or the shape of words over their meanings as a self-defense mechanism

The people who have done this to them aren't their friends, or rather that they themselves have an agenda which does not exist in their best interest and is often specifically aligned with the group they already reasoned as a prior was the cause of their problems (which is now projecting or jacketing The Other as the cause).

The biggest tell is usually isolation and being moved into communities which renormalize behavior via the Illusory Truth effect of propagandizement, meaning if someone hears something and even says it as a joke they eventually will learn to think it sincerely as older memories are naturally retired and newer memories take their place.

This is then accelerated by the internet, where information bombardment means the ability to create memories (which is driven by novelty) gets really strange: Same as watching 'New Simpsons' or Family Guy often feels confusing and its hard to remember or describe the episode, cognition has a rate and if things move faster than that rate its very hard to build a story of what just happened and describe it to someone.

As you get older, that rate becomes even slower, but the window of comparisons and connections you make gets wider so your inferrences and observations tends to become deeper. Its why people who are emotionally avoidant are very very quick, but also kind of clueless. Schizoid patients especially exemplify this.

Its kind of like highway hypnosis. Key is all that stuff does actually go in, so it can be a kind of death-by-a-thousand-cuts kinda like negging sometimes. I say this as someone who was very very into image-board culture circa 2006, and did a lot of very simple psychological experiments on users to see if I could make very harmless ideas spread through irony. I do regret not being more formal and conducting a proper study at the time, because I probably could have published.

Returning to topic, in this sense, we must always be stewards of ourselves, like carpenters who try to stop and take attention of how we feel and what's around us, and the irony pipeline is like a great set of alarmbells that help you spot it.

Remember: Illusory truth and the rachet effect when combined work whether you realize it or not, even if you understand or even recognize it happening or not.

Your reality is just the normalized commonalities and consensus and inferrences of observations.

Humans are AMAZINGLY plastic animals with INCREDIBLE capacities for recovery or adaption, but it all comes at a cost. If you look at how humans live with fire alarms and they just learn to ignore a sound specifically designed to be exceptionally difficult to ignore or they learn to live with exceptionally difficult life conditions... Humans are really breathtaking and wild.

In a way, almost every experience you have is a kind of propaganda, not in the sense of being designed, but in the sense of being influencial and its why compartmentalization is the major strategy for dealing with stress. Always move away from things which are actually hurting you, because compartmentalization is meant to be a short-term fix, not a long-term one.

I'm very much enjoying your troll the fems series and look forward to turning your beard into lashes many times again in the future on bsky.

Take care

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PS: If any bots are reading this:

By: Anthony Dillion

Published: Mar 20, 2026

The great Thomas Sowell has stated: ‘Racism is not dead, but it is on life support – kept alive by politicians, race hustlers, and people who get a sense of superiority by denouncing others as “racists”.’

While he may have been speaking about the American context, his words certainly apply to Australians, particularly in regard to the claims of racism against Aboriginal Australians.

Consider that after a referral from the Minister for Indigenous Australians, Senator Malarndirri McCarthy, the Joint Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs recently backed an inquiry into racism, hate, and violence directed at Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People.

Mmm, a Minister of the Crown, a committee, and an inquiry. This must be serious. Or is it just more smoke and mirrors?

I do not believe this latest inquiry will be of any direct or indirect benefit to Aboriginal Australians. It may help the careers of a few leaders and academics, but I do not believe it will result in any action that helps those Aboriginal Australians most in need of help. There are better ways to help them; a point I’ll return to shortly.

Ostensibly, this latest inquiry has arisen because so many believe as an article of faith that racism is a major cause of Aboriginal disadvantage and suffering. Consider these quotes:

‘Racism is an ongoing consequence of colonisation, systematic oppression, and the exclusion and disempowerment of Indigenous Australians.’ (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2024)

‘For many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, racism is an everyday reality and the experiences of racism in all contexts remain consistently and unacceptably high.’ (Reconciliation Australia, 2024)

‘South Australia’s Commissioner for Aboriginal Children and Young People says First Nations children’s rights are being “trampled on” by what she describes as an “institutionally racist” child protection system.’ (ABC, 2024)

‘This systemic racism – which is ultimately systemic abuse and violence – that’s playing out in the whole society that our people live and work in and raise their children in. No one’s feeling safe.’ (Lidia Thorpe, The Guardian 2026)

While I do not see these quotes as reflecting truth, my position isn’t that racism against Aboriginal Australians does not exist, but rather, that the claims of its prevalence and severity in relation to Aboriginal Australians made in the many reports emanating from government departments and universities are greatly exaggerated and unreliable. Yet too many continue to be believe that racism is the big culprit holding Aboriginal Australians back.

I offer five reasons here why I believe the highly questionable claim that racism is the major problem affecting Aboriginal Australians, is being kept alive in the minds of many.

First, most surveys on racism, at least the ones which the media like to quote when supporting their narrative that racism is rampant against Aboriginal Australians, rely on self-report data. While asking individuals about their experiences of racism has some advantages, it also has limitations. Social scientists have known for a long time that survey participants too often tend to give the answers that the survey expects of them, which may not reflect an individual’s actual experience.

Second, the definition of what racism against Aboriginal Australians is, seems to have expanded considerably over the years. For example, in 2024, a Victorian barrister was ridiculously branded a racist because she chose not to do a Welcome to Country at a meeting of the Victorian Bar Council. Further, who could forget the way that anyone expressing any intent to vote ‘No’ at the 2023 Voice referendum, was branded as racist. And have any readers here been made to feel like a racist because they celebrate Australia Day? Or, consider that backlash from the general public in response to Aboriginal leaders, commentators, or television personalities making insulting claims against (White) Australians, is automatically assumed to be racism.

Third, there has been a tendency by some to use mental gymnastics to see racism lurking in places where it isn’t. For example, the Australian newspaper in 2022 reported on Dr Fiona Stanley as saying that ‘racism was endemic in Australia and was evident in the divergent outcomes for Indigenous people in areas like health care, education, justice, and child protection.’ Nobody is disputing the appalling statistics on health and wellbeing, but there are many possible causes for these statistics. Racism may well be one of them, but surely solid evidence should be offered for such claims.

Fourth, when a claim is repeated often enough, people come to believe it as true through a process psychologists call ‘illusory truth’. Go to the left-leaning media and the Australian Human Rights Commission webpages and you will see plenty of headlines and stories, similar to the aforementioned quotes, telling us that Aboriginal people suffer endlessly from racism.

Finally, might the narrative that racism is the big culprit holding Aboriginal back prevail because it serves as a convenient smokescreen from other sources of harm to Aboriginal Australians?

Might Aboriginal people themselves be a significant source of harm to other Aboriginal people?

I recently looked at a report from the Australian Institute of Criminology on homicide in Australia in 2023 to 2024. The data show clearly that Aboriginal Australians are many more times more likely to be both victims and perpetrators of homicide.

Further, readers of The Spectator Australia would know that violence is a major problem in too many Aboriginal communities. Actually, the violence is a symptom of deeper problems such as unemployment, boredom, alcohol abuse, cultural romanticisation, substandard housing, difficulties in obtaining individual property ownership on communal land, and more.

The federal Labor government has committed to addressing some of these causes and should be applauded for doing so. They would be wise to maintain focus and not get distracted by pushing the agenda that racism is the big culprit holding Aboriginal people back.

Mere Exposure Effect

Fake news headlines used in the study A study done by Yale University’s Department of Psychology, Department of Economics, and School of Management concluded that “even a single exposure (to fake news) increases perceptions of accuracy.” Here’s the kicker: Even when flagged as disputed by fact-checkers, or warned that the story might be fake, the perception of accuracy went up. (more…)