I BELIEVE should be stated

Tuesday, February 20, 2024 - 14:30 California/Arizona line

I DO BELIEVE there are people who can draw crowds to do self-destructive things. Cults, mobs, military, whatever you want to call them. Further, I think organizations can create messages / symbol patterns that convince everyday people to give up their lives for a cause without evidence. For example

I believe that the Japanese government / leaders of Japan, in 1941 was able to convince millions of people within Japan to attack the United States of America, attack Perl Harbor. These Japanese people believed their leaders without evidence to attack strangers from across the world that they knew little about in terms of factual truth, experience, and life. Yet these Japanese people were willing to remotely bomb from the sky and start a war against a distant people.

To some, this may seem obvious and pointless to declare that I believe this type of human behavior is possible. But I think it's exactly the kind of understanding of human behavior (self-awareness, education) that needs to be faced by humanity.

“One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.”

― Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark, 1995

I DO BELIEVE that Rupert Murdoch's HDTV Fox News television network can convince millions of everyday people to hate Mexican neighbors and hate their fellow Americans who disagree on interpretation of medical science during a pandemic in year 2020-2023. Without medical science evidence, Rupert Murdoch's media systems are able to convince people to reject authentic science and defense practices against a disease in favor of out-group hate.

I DO BELIEVE that advertising and marketing techniques of soda companies (Coke, Pepsi, etc), beer companies (Budweiser, Coors, etc) and fast food companies (Taco Bell, McDonald's, etc) are able to over-stimulate millions of media consumer audiences into self-destructive heart disease, diabetes, obesity, etc. I DO BELIEVE that the psychology industry / psychiatry industry in the USA, part of the USA's infamous medical health care system, largely does not address these advertising and marketing methods as a significant cause in over-consumption of processed foods. Predatory manipulative marketing and advertising to over-consume junk food has been normalized, malignant normality, in current times - year 2024.