I feel like the word propaganda gets a little misused. There’s so much negativity attached to it, but propaganda at it’s core is media that tries to persuade someone. So media trying to undo misinformation about COVID is also propaganda.

You are suffering from several fallacies.

1. “Unless you can be the best, it’s not worth trying”

Fortunately, the world doesn’t operate this way. There are people who are mediocre, and sometimes poor, at playing football professionally or other professions. Your line of thinking would lead to only one person playing football at a time, the person who is the best at it, and everyone else should give up.

2. “Meritocracy is real and the only determining factor of success”

While meritocracy is a nice thought, that the best inevitably rise to the top, it’s not necessarily true. Just as there’s circumstances that keep talent from succeeding, like financial background, biases against people, and luck, those things also can lift up the less talented. There’s many celebrities that aren’t as talented at acting as someone stuck in a small town.

3. “I trust OP’s assessment”

As far as you know, op could be wrong. Maybe the kid plays great and OP is too critical, you don’t know. This could be a critical mistake on OP’s end, and making the kid give up doesn’t help regardless.

4. “hard work doesn’t mean success, innate ability is the only thing that matters”

If this were true, no one would need to practice anything. You said Mozart succeeded because of his mentoring, but then argue for people having lack of natural talent leading to failure.

5. “my back story is relevant”

It was also tempting to throw in the argument of verbosity. But your shoulder injury, or that some people are incapable of physically doing things, isn’t relevant. The kid is physically capable of playing football. It’s a false equivalence.

6. “the kid will have the same level of ability at 16 forever”

You presume that this kid will only have the ability he is at, and that even with training, won’t get better. This ties into your belief in natural talent a bit, but it’s still pretty foolish to assume professional football players play at the level they did at 16, so it’s also foolish to assume that 16 is where this kid will peak.

7. “the kid achieving the dream is the most important thing here”

This is where you missed the the bigger picture. There’s more on the line than just success at football, there’s a whole relationship at stake, and a kid’s mental and emotional health.

So that all said, look at it this way. There’s four scenarios that could’ve taken place, with four factors. Kid gets encouraged, let’s shorthand that to E. Kid gets discouraged, D. Kid succeeds at professional football, S. Kid fails at professional football, F.

ES is obviously the best. Kid gets support, becomes professional football player, everyone’s happy.

EF is disappointing, but salvageable. The kid gets the attitude of not giving up and at least Dad has his back. Maybe he tries something else after not making the cut, and has a great career at something he’s able to do, but at least he tried. He’s not going to be able to try forever, but he can at least try something new with a solid foundation.

DS is a tragic hero. Kid gets there but doesn’t have a great relationship with Dad. Success is tainted by bitterness, and every win is to prove Dad wrong. Doesn’t have a great relationship with Dad, and probably has a lasting issue because of it.

DF is the worst possible outcome, and at this point it’s the most likely. Kid has an even worse issue with Dad, dreams are crushed, and he grows up bitter and resentful. He’s taught to not try for anything he’s interested in, and lives a life of miserable mediocrity.

It’s my opinion that it’s better for parents to encourage their children in their dreams, because the success rate is probably higher and at the very least they get the support they need to try something different. It’s almost never a great idea to discourage a child because that leads to resentment and lethargy.

You aren’t saving anyone by telling them to give up. That’s a decision they should make on their own. This is even more true for a child who is still developing who they are and how they see the world.

How? You’re saying it’s better to tell your kid their dreams suck and they shouldn’t try? What a great parenting strategy.

When you punish a person for dreaming his dream, don’t expect him to thank our forgive you.

He’s right, you don’t believe in him, and if he’s not great at football even though he’s living with a pro, that shows me how little you value him. He could be great but what are you doing to help him get there besides crushing his dreams?

If you want to salvage this relationship at all you need to apologize and do everything you can to support him. Training, encouragement, the works.

It’s better that he tries to achieve his dream and have to do something else than to have it crushed out of him by his own father.

You’re ignorant of the world around you to a degree that must take quite a bit of mental effort. The mental gymnastics you’re constantly doing must be a strain. If you honestly think that no one has ever been arrested nor killed by the police for doing things legally you’re delusional.

I don’t owe you shit for answers, especially if you’re already going to act like I’m making this up. You’re coming out the gate not taking me seriously so why should I give you any respect, much less enough respect to answer your questions? Go fuck yourself.

Well, I hope you die in a fire. I’ve got real people who are in real danger, danger I see in person and not just as a hypothetical, and it’s bullshit that you’re trying to pretend it’s some sort of delusion. I’ve had to deal with literal Nazis threatening to shoot people and you’re trying to play any reaction to that as some media based trickery? Eat shit.

Yeah my guy I’m pretty sure we’re one “this election was cancelled Trump is president for life” legislation away from it being official.

Ok so everyone wants one, right? Feels like it’ll be dramatic and big and change and fix everything, even if it gets violent.

But there’s problems with that, not only in execution but also results.

One problem is the US is massive. It would take almost as much planning as a moon landing to effectively organize a protest that large, even if you only do the continental 48 states. Some of those states alone are as large as some European countries, some are larger, so the size alone gets in the way of things.

Then you have the problem with getting all the people protesting to agree to a cohesive protest. Where to protest, what to protest specifically about, and to have a solid list of demands. Trying to get that amount of people to agree on anything alone would be huge. Like my mother says, it’s like herding cats.

And then there’s the matter of getting that info out there. Occupy wall Street and BLM did have a comprehensive list of demands but the media pretended they didn’t. Almost all media is owned by like, six corporations, so even getting the instructions for that protest would be incredibly hard. And lest people forget, those media companies are final, so most of the media in other countries hearing about this will have just as much information surpression and do already. So it would be incredibly hard to get a comprehensive plan, demands, and instructions out el to everyone.

Also don’t forget that we have the technological spying that didn’t exist before. Cameras are everywhere. Not only in your phone, but on almost every street. People even put those Ring doorbells on their homes and that company sells it’s video footage to the police, and doesn’t turn off, so any protest could be monitored and nipped in the bud. We have whole agencies devoted to surpressing protests and entire handbooks in infiltrating them.

Then there’s logistics and provisions. Most Americans can’t afford to travel, much less take a week or two off of work, or a month, to protest long term. We can barely afford to keep ourselves fed with what we’re getting paid, and if we were protesting in one specific location, most of us couldn’t take the time to get there much less afford to. We have to feed the majority of almost an entire continent in one location for an extended period of time.

And if it was one specific location, the hospitals, hotels, grocery stores and restaurants would be so overwhelmed that they couldn’t handle everyone.

Speaking of hospitals, if, as in when, the police and military attacked the protest, most people could never afford the medical treatment to be able to get patched up, much less their lives saved.

And speaking of the police and military, we have the most militarized police force on the planet. Our police don’t have just batons, they have live rounds of ammunition and full on tanks. And they are more than willing to use them on civilians, especially in protesters. Look up Blair Mountain and the Kent State shooting. Not only could this crush a protest, but people would have to be ok with the idea they would very likely die.

And our prison system, being for profit, would salivate at the idea of getting more slave labor en masse, and the current administration is more than happy to detain people over trivial things. So everyone would have to be ok with life imprisonment if they didn’t get shot.

On top of that, not everyone is on board. About a third to a half of the country is in favor of what’s happening and have a cult around Trump and Musk. A lot of people voted for this and are in favor of it, because they really, really hate the liberals, Democrats, gays, minorities, etc. There’s a whole media pipeline for this that they listen to, especially young people who normally are the type to protest this stuff. So there would be resistance from civilians on top of not everyone being in favor of the protest.

Then there’s the problem of what that protest would actually accomplish. Even if you pulled it off, because of the supply issues, it would be short lived. Maybe a week or two, being surpressed by the military and police, and demonized in the media. The oligarchs would simply wait it out. It wouldn’t enact long term change, even if everyone could agree with what they want changed in the first place. So it might not be effective even if it was pulled off.

And the primary opposition party, which should be doing anything, has adapted a strategy of self preservation. Concede to the fascists for now, bide your time, then come election season tell everyone that you are the better and only choice (because winner takes all so they are the only alternative) and hope for a blue wave in four years. Can’t make any changes if you’re not in power, so do what you can to keep it now and believe that if things get bad enough now people will come crawling back. So very little actual support for a protest would come from on top.

And then, if we look at history, a lot of rebellions needed other countries to support them in order to be successful. Most of them had outside influence from other major powers. The other major powers right now are either in favor of the government, turning fascist themselves, or if they did intervene would risk starting a war with the US which has the biggest military in the history of humanity. So not a lot of help would come from the outside, if any.

So while we also would like a massive protest, there are huge issues in the way of effectively pulling it off.

So what’s been happening has been local efforts. You might not hear about town hall protests or stuff in individual state capitals in other countries, but those smaller fires are burning. There’s been economic protests, like the backlash against Tesla and the no buying day, which apparently was started to get people to dip their toes into a national protest. There’s been a lot of smaller community organizing, which hopefully adds up. I think and hope there will be more individual direct action, perhaps more Luigi strategies on specific individuals, as things get worse. Maybe more guerilla tactics, French resistance style efforts, are what is going to happen rather than a massive protest.

Tldr: We ARE doing stuff here. We hate this more than anyone. The change will have to come in less exciting ways than a big, national rebellion, so sorry you’re not getting as much of a spectacle, we’d like that, too, but there’s a lot of prep work that would need to be done to pull it off that needs to happen first. We aren’t sitting by and letting this happen, and we are working towards fixing things.

Wow it’s like two things can be true at once or something

Dude this comment was sad.