What they say it will be: we're stopping the right wing from saying Clinton eats babies
What it will be: leftists keep saying that Biden didn't make america great again. they should be censored.
Someone please stop the world I would like to get off. This is clearly the stupidest of all time lines. If this didn't make me laugh I would be angry not at the American government but at the universe for insulting me with this low brow absurdity.
It's like liberals are deliberately seeking out the most dystopian fiction they can find and treating it like fuckin' blueprint....
Liberalism is when corporations can no longer sell a deadly consumer product in the flavor that I like.
Real leftists roll their own cigarettes to get the full value of their labor.
How? Consumption will remain legal. Legality never stopped a cop from putting a black man in a lethal chokehold for selling loosies anyway.
Got a link regarding possession and consumption bans or cop endorsements for the same? Sounds like alarmist bs without any evidence.
Except cops don't base their legality through consumption, they do it through distribution or intent to distribute, this is how Eric Garner got killed
So how about we don't champion laws that make their job easier
I can believe I need to reiterate that drug bans targeted to specifically hurt minorities are in fact bad.
Imagine not being able to justify a search for weed because everyone who smokes menthols carries rolling papers.
getting into debates after three days on the site
:thonk:
Reminder that Orwell wrote 1984 after working for the BBC and getting a first hand look at how the anglo media apparatus works
Brave New World always felt like the more prophetic dystopian novel, from the perspective of imperial core liberals. Everything is spectacle in media. Intoxicants both placate the masses and serve as a moral crisis to which we are forever fixated on solving. The institutionalized caste system insulates leadership from dissent by disguising nepotism as meritocracy. But the system self-perpetuates efficiently and exiles dissidents in such a way as to continuously provide stability forever.
1984 was just so much harder to swallow as a kid, because the perpetually collapsing economy and chronic human misery struck me as unsustainable. Like, how could a country that is on the brink of starvation and industrial collapse, with the majority of its workforce seemingly focused entirely on policing itself, possibly persist year to year? And yet... here we are. In a country where the next war is the only thing people care about, dissent is seemingly manufactured for the purpose of high profile prosecution, and the collapsing economy never seems to pry loose anyone in a position of authority.
Maybe 1950s UK just put the writing on the wall a little clearer for Orwell than 1990s America did for me. But I thought for sure we were headed into a neoliberal dystopia rather than a fascist one.
:p
I thought the neoliberals could maintain the flow of treats indefinitely. I did not expect them to go hog on military spending at the expense of the bread and circuses.
I'd say it's not even a "decay" but a symbiotic parallel existence. There's nothing incompatible about neoliberalism and fascim. We can have both (:agony-deep: ). Some of neoliberalism's core positions (e.g. privatization) came out of Nazi Germany. Neoliberalism covers the "economics" while fascism covers the outright and direct state violence (militarized policing and borders, surveillance, concentration camps, etc.).
Oh sweaty you can't just go posting Russian disinformation like this. That's how Putler wins.
I wish the article writer would stop freaking out. The government and 'private' media have always had incredibly close ties. The government is just getting worse at hiding it because, well, people care less. I mean even the 'misinformation song' has less than 3000 likes on Twitter, and maybe abit more engagement on TikTok, but that shit is small potatoes compared to the sheer overwhelming weight of lack of interest in politics.
The government and ‘private’ media have always had incredibly close ties.
The relationship changes from generation to generation, and the mechanisms by which the manipulation occurs shift alongside it.
We had something of a renaissance of "independent" media in the early '00s, even if the independence mostly meant Ron Paul dweebs and Daily Kos nerds posting rants on YouTube about how the government was lying to you. Now we're seeing a reversal of the trend and a re-consolidation of the internet media space in such a way that's causing those same dweebs and nerds to freak out.
I mean even the ‘misinformation song’ has less than 3000 likes on Twitter, and maybe abit more engagement on TikTok, but that shit is small potatoes compared to the sheer overwhelming weight of lack of interest in politics.
I don't know about "lack of interest". People seem as politically observant as ever. Infotainment is industrially produced and ravenously consumed. But with the repeat failures of the last few mass movements - everything from BLM to Jan 6th culminated in... Joe Biden running the country - there's a definite sense of helplessness and futility. We're all just caught behind glass, watching politics happen without any way to impact it.
Add to the frustration how everybody is in on the "Fake News" gambit, such that a warmed over Jon Stewart bit about government lies set to musical accompaniment just seems trite at this point. Ok, they're lying? So now what?
That's fine, but their reaction is incredibly indicative of their lack of historical knowledge.
The way I see it, it's about say, 20% of the population that engages with politics daily, electoral or otherwise. Sure there is enough to make a market out of the whole thing, but like random cat videos on the internet still get a 100 times more daily traffic than even the most popular political commentators. Again, it is small potatoes.
Maybe it is more than it used to be, it certainly doesn't feel like it. Almost all of my friends and family on any side of the spectrum have disengaged with politics to focus entirely on their careers, which is fine, as I have more or less done the same outside of my compulsion to be a nerd about this stuff. It certainly comes off as a lack of interest to me. The only other guy I know who cares about this stuff is an insufferably online liberal who is currently drowning himself Ukrainian propaganda.
The way I see it, it’s about say, 20% of the population that engages with politics daily, electoral or otherwise.
I don't know how you reached that number. Politics is like the weather. Every time it changes, you can find people talking about it. But also like the weather, people don't see much that they can do about it save taking personal precautions.
Almost all of my friends and family on any side of the spectrum have disengaged with politics to focus entirely on their careers, which is fine, as I have more or less done the same outside of my compulsion to be a nerd about this stuff.
I mean, I spent about a decade trying to engage with the Texas political system. I found it incredibly difficult to penetrate, with a very niche group of people mostly interested in taking your money and sending you on your way. But I never found a shortage of people trying to organize against, engage with, or challenge those in power at one time or another.
As to focusing on one's career, I don't think there's a clear distinction. My wife has made a career out of her political convictions, working for a non-profit legal aid clinic in an effort to help tenants fight eviction. I know a few friends who changed jobs - industries even - to pursue some social or moral conviction. In Texas, in particular, watching people drop out of the O&G industry to pursue something more fulfilling isn't unusual.
I am basing that off of general aggregate numbers of views of political content on the internet. Now, I'm being generous when I talk about 'daily political engagement', along with being generous when I say 20%. I'd say, on average either side, videos with any mainstream clout get about 300K views in a given day. Now, that being said, I guesstimate that that is probably a good tenth of actual political engagement. It likely is less. And I am counting culture war engagement as 'politics' which I probably shouldn't. If we stick strictly to labor, the percentages drop sharply.
Idk. I think things are slightly different in Wisconsin than Texas if you are not within the Madison, Janesville, and Milwaukee areas. It's good to hear, as that area is one huge political battle ground, but since the unions got fucked in the 00's, politics is focused almost entirely in the great lakes area, and everybody else is just trying to survive and suck as much money from large corporations and the state as possible. Not alot of non-profit jobs around here outside of the universities and hospitals. Maybe if I was more in that crowd I would have a different opinion, but I work with and am friends with mostly apolitical people (many of whom were engaged in either right wing or progressive campaigns).
That could change in the future, though you are right.
This is most definitely a decline, and a further attack on our collective mindset and liberty. I don't know about "freaking out" and no, it's not an attack that is out-of-line with other attacks we've experienced (e.g. the Patriot Act), but it is absolutely worth resisting.
It's also being blatant about it in kind of a new way (at least when considering recent U.S. history). It's not everyday the fuckin' Democrats actually admit they're embracing 1984 dystopian authoritarianism right to everybody's faces. So it's an opportunity as well. Point this shit out. Don't let it quietly settle around us without using it as a point of agitation and education.
Reuters is owned by a billionaire media mogul family lmfao
I have bad news, she's going to be sending you to a Gulag in about 6 months (not kidding). Shut your mouth around her - general good advice for people here. This ain't a game anymore, if you aren't among comrades (and be veeeeery careful if they are at all electoral or associated with the Den party) - Shut The Fuck Up!
We kid, but seriously you should be at least as careful around people who "seem to get it" as you do around people in general. Scary times are coming soon, don't want anyone thrown in jail like Eugene Debs when we get in WW3.
don’t want anyone thrown in jail like Eugene Debs when we get in WW3.
Don't want, but it'll unfortunately be necessary. Shutting up and hiding under a rock also isn't going to be much of an option. Resistance movements can't be 100% underground. That's how you get a century of union decline and a welcome to the threshold of human extinction.
Still, it's true we should carefully pick when we're going to make those stands. As Debs did.
Is this worth reading? Everyone's just shouting about Orwell and menthol cigarettes in this thread and I'm worried you all have been cursed or something
Is this worth reading?
It's very short. I'd say yes.
Also from a leftist author who has pretty good stuff about Ukraine and Russia and U.S./NATO involvement in it.
