Bruh you've gotta use vague signals and let the think tanks work with journalists to manufacture consent first.
Yeah, DeSantis should be good at this, sadly...
I'm way more worried about this Facist than trump.
Trump talks bigly but is not very effective.
DeSantis is not charismatic at all but I think he would be effective at what he attempted to do.
I used to be very certain about the "Desantis is the effective fascist we warned you about" thing but more and more his buffoonery comes out, and I don't think he'll be president. That said, he's being pretty effective in Florida despite his buffoonery.
It's also a good illustration of the failures of Liberal Democracy. I think Florida is like 51% red 49% blue.
A major problem with DeSantis is that he'd have more support from the military and the intelligence community than Trump, which is a massive problem if the GOP ever tries a more serious coup than Jan 6. I also think he's an actual true believer when it comes to racism and transphobia. Trump uses these strategically, DeSantis seems to have a real, burning wish to exterminate people.
Desantis is lagging Trump by 40 points. That could obviously change between now and '24, but he doesn't seem to have the juice for this.
The US has been waging unprovoked war on Latin America since before WW1.
The only thing new about this is that this irredeemable piece of garbage is stating the quiet part out loud.
This is literal insanity.
Are they going to put Mexican Americans in internment camps next?
The United States already runs multiple concentration camps on the border.
Sorry but they're called 'Migration Storage Facilities' not Concentration camps by the trustworthy newspaper The New York Times. This obviously means they're not concentration camps.
Probably not this time, a big part of why Japanese-Americans were put into interment camps was because Californians wanted their farms.
I'd never considered this, but of course it came down to economics- weird how often massive crimes against humanity come down to some bourgeois thief wanting to take more for themselves and willing to do anything to do it.
Just did a little reading on it, they stole 400 million (1942) dollars worth of farmland from Japanese-Americans, which is like 7 billion adjusted for inflation, and basically just gave them to agribusiness corporations.
Yeah they don't tell you in school that white Californians lobbied hard for Japanese Americans to be robbed of all their land and property, and it's a big part of why their lands weren't restored to them after the war. Like western expansion never really stopped.
I think they'd be somewhat more likely to use various schemes to enslave Hispanic migrants and citizens, given how vital Hispanic migrants are to American ag.
No, but the risk of deportation is probably going to increase, including for citizens
dude I get the jist thats been the plan the whole time
They've already got concentration camps full of south and central Americans all over the country.
Certain groups in the US have been building up to this for a while. They genuinely do want a war with Mexico. They've been trying to use drugs as an excuse to do it.
Here is an excellent video going into this when it all started to get quite serious and AMLO (mexican president) started to aggressively fight back against it: https://youtu.be/3dw1pcDoewY
He's also called the american media sphere trying to build up to this fascistic "hitlerismo", comparing american media to goebbels.
This removed talks about Iraq like he did something there. He was a fucking lawyer 😂.
Posing as a human rights lawyer and illegally aiding in the torture of POWs at Guantanamo is the best way of forming a valid opinion on Iraq!
Wasn't he the lawyer in charge of coming up with legalese to justify torturing people?
Well, he did use his position to gain the trust of gunatanamo prisoners and when they told him what was particularly stressful to them, he passed that info on to make conditions worse for them. Like, a prisoner would tell him "we usually pick the vegetarian option because we think the meat here isn't halal" and a week later, no more vegetarian food option. Things like that. There's also a pretty harrowing account of how he oversaw hunger-striking prisoners being force-fed. People screaming and throwing up and shitting themselves in agony and he stood next to that and laughed. I honestly believe that if he didn't join the navy to live out his murderous sadism, he'd be a serial killer with a collection of human body parts in his basement. Guy's a complete fucking monster.
Does the "Presidents approval rating increase during wartime" thing occur if you just loudly state "I'm gonna do a war if elected"?
It increases their approval rating with the military industrial complex lobbyists funding their campaigns, I'm sure.
Exactly. Wat is a very profitable business, and I'm sure Northrop and Raytheon would love some more revenue.
Historically you have to campaign as being against the war but then promptly set about the business of creating a war once in office
Remember when Trump said in order to win the war against ISIS you also need to "take out their families"?
unfortunately he was just stating US policy there - Obama infamously drone bombed a wedding. one of the things that makes him appealing to his base is that he takes these facts (or presumed facts in other cases) and says them straight up without hiding it behind sophistry.
Yeah, the way the US picks targets to murder is like algorithm moderated vibes. It's really sick.
Obama also liked double tapping ambulances. IE dropping a missile, waiting for first responders and neighbors to show up, then dropping another missile.
Nothing is more American than invading other countries and murdering their people.
He heard they had pudding
ShowEdit: apparently I'm a Russian bot lmfao
Can we keep Russian memes out of politics please? it's such a load of bullshit, it contributes nothing to the discussion and memes have been pushing propaganda since the first trump election. I really wish we (lemm.ee, but really everyone) would defederate from hexbear, it's such a cesspool
That's Ron Desantis's face imposed the famous painting "Saturn Devouring his Son". The son has been replaced with pudding to reference the time Ron ate a cup of pudding with his fingers.
Appreciate the description. Whats your take on why only hexbear users are replying to me?
we don't have downvotes and we have an anti-lurker culture. so if we see a bad take, we reply. in this case you've thoroughly confused us with this "Saturn Devours his Son" is Russian take.
Can you not keep your culture inside your instance and stop disrupting people's conversations elsewhere?
Wow, so you support authoritarian measures to destroy other cultures. OK tankie.
We can if people stop this "everything i don't like is a Russian botnet" bs, i mean come the fuck on, do you seriously believe Russia is the only actor out there doing online propaganda? What do you think the CIA is for? Or the psyops branch of the USAF that was posting so hard an Airforce Base got an award for being the town most active on reddit? Or all these reactionary foundations like the Alliance Defending Freedom or the Heritage Foundation? The state-sponsored ones like the National Endowment for Democracy? The PR departments of oil companies spreading climate change denial? And that's just a small part of who's engineering public opinion in the US, wait till you see the shit the multitudes of European governments, parties, corporations and churches get up to, or the Gulf states with their vested interest in keeping fossil capitalism going. Yes, the Russian government obviously does that as well, as do private actors in Russia like Vladimir Yakunin and Konstantin Malofeyev who both sponsor queerphobic and mysogynist groups all over the EU, but if you think that Russian disinfo campaigns are the only game in town, or even make up a plurality of disinfo funding, or that propaganda extends only to things you personally disapprove of, you need to wake the fuck up and realize that your view of the world is a dumbass James Bond movie from the 1980s.
Yes, because you're federated to Lemmy.ml, it doesn't make this community your instances community.
If you don't want to federate with Hexbear go make an account on an instance that isn't federated with Hexbear. You have the tools to solve this yourself and you aren't using them
It's not about posting, it's about the standard of posting, lots of it isn't engaging with conversation, but just posting silly emoticons.
some people express themselves with emotes. others express themselves with paragraphs of texts. a picture is worth a thousand words.
but yeah, no, none of us can control how people choose to express themselves.
Well, yeah, we can, that's why these sites have mods and rules about submissions and comments and why people are asking for something to be done about your users.
mods aren't going to remove things that don't break the rules. if you want to add a rule to your instance banning picture embeds, go for it.
Oh yeah you kind of need to spend some time on hexbear to understand our emoji culture. It must be completely incomprehensible to outsiders, but for us it might as well be hieroglyphics.
You have no answers to why Saturn devouring his son as Ron devouring a pudding is somehow perceived as Russian.
we will find you and bother you for your bad opinions
Our posting power is high and we are online a lot
We're terminally online in ways you people wouldn't believe.
Before Spez shut us down we were I think the third most active site on Reddit by posting velocity, after an NBA sub with 2.3 million people. We post in a completely different way that most online communities.
I know you won't care, but to anyone else curious what I mean when I specified "Russian"
https://www.wired.com/story/russia-ira-propaganda-senate-report/
I'm aware of the existence of Russian "meme warfare" though I think its effect on politics in America is severely overstated.
But uh, how is this meme that you're complaining about a "Russian meme". Or are you just under the delusion that all political memes are Russian or something? How is making fun of Desantis for the pudding thing something Russians would do?
I dont know for fact, but I treat any political meme like it might. This combined with it not being relevant to the discussion would make me prefer to just not have them at all
I appreciate your comment though, it challenged assumptions without being egregious
I dont know for fact, but I treat any political meme like it might.
I don't really think this is a rational or particularly healthy stance to take on political memes. I can maybe understand if your stance was just "keep the worldnews posts serious", though I'd disagree with that too. But saying that you're trying to avoid Russian influence by avoiding memes is... idk. Doesn't really make sense to me. Political memes aren't inherently Russian.
You also have to consider Russia's like, motives here. I don't really see a reason for them to want to make pudding jokes about DeSantis.
I appreciate your concern, but can assure you I'm mentally healthy
you totally might be, but the bare fact that you had to say this to someone today should probably prompt you to reflect a bit about all this friend
They're mentally healthy for a westerner
Which is so rabidly racist and xenophobic that they're calling out random memes for being Russian as an insult
I’m gonna push back on this fam. It’s peak
libshittery to internet diagnose someone with mental health problems as a way to "critique" their positions. We’re not about that shit.
I specifically didn't diagnose them or say that, their behavior and assumptions seem deranged to others and I wanted to get that across, not imply they are mentally ill
So you refuse to use or enjoy ANY meme that is political? Because supposedly your countrymen are so stupid that they got swayed by foreign memes into voting for trump?
That is a line of reasoning I guess.
The weirder thing is is that I checked their post history and they said they're conservative, though based on their fear of Russian memes I'm guessing a Never Trumper? Weird.
How about the part the only hexbear user I looked into history for was tied to Russia?
look into my history, I wanna know what my connection to russia is
I'm sure you think you found evidence of a Hexbear user's "ties to Russia" but I promise that Hexbear is just a bunch of leftist shitposters. Your fear of Russian influence is not healthy nor tied to reality. I'm not even concern trolling here, I'm genuinely concerned for your mental health. This paranoia is not healthy.
I've worked for major social media companies for a majority of my career and understand the impacts they can have, I can assure you my concerns are healthy
I'm not a huge fan of leading questiond, maybe just say the point you're trying to make?
Fair enough.
All the major social media companies I'm aware of are based in Silcon Valley, IE the United States. I'm not saying that foreign governments don't try to astroturf them, but surely companies based IN america are more likely to be heavily influenced BY American influences (corporate and government)? And surely you should be more afraid of having your opinion influenced by propaganda from the people who actually hold the power over the platform, than from foreign governments trying to infiltrate the platform? Surely you should be more afraid of the powers that be that are actually close to home for you?
This is my thing with people that are afraid of Russia or CPC influence. I'm not a Christian, but I do think that Jesus had a really good damn point when he said "take the beam out of your own eye". Focus on whats going on in your own neck of the woods.
Its like the "TikTok harvesting data for the Chinese government" controversy, why are we worried about that when American social media companies are harvesting our data right here at home. What rational reason do I have to be more afraid of a foreign government than the one I actually live under the power of?
ETA: Porkroll Posadist (the one with the arthur clenching fist PFP) made a really good post about this here: https://hexbear.net/comment/3714293
A company based in the country of operation is incentivized for that country to be financially successful. A foreign government isn't, unless it's to their advantage. I'm not afraid of foreign interference, but I think there's aligned goals in supporting a company in your own country. I agree influence could happen both in and out of the countries, and all sides of the political spectrum
A company based in the country of operation is incentivized for that country to be financially successful.
Seems like you should be able to test this theory in the real world by observing how corporations approach paying taxes
What part of my reply to you gave you the impression I wasn't able to read your comment?
You're fundamentally wrong about the nature of one of the things you're comparing. Now that I've explained the subtext of my comment do you have anything to say to that point?
is there anything else that you refuse to do because russians potentially do them as well?
Sure, we can joke about this but consider, that if I or anybody I know thought like that we simply wouldn't discuss politics at all. As that's something that liberals and fascists also do.
So you've watched enough american media to believe that political memes are something that Russians do, and that they totally destroyed american democracy with those memes? Well, I've seen more than my fair share of NAFO and americans online making memes about how non westerners should all be genocided. That won't keep me from making fun of a fascist like Ron DeSantis with a meme.
Because you're afraid that you could be swayed by foreign memes as well?
I dont know for fact, but I treat any political meme like it might. This combined with it not being relevant to the discussion would make me prefer to just not have them at all
Bro first of all it dont really matter what you want. Second of all it dont think its really healthy to assume any political meme you see is of russian origin lol thats bizarre and incredibly weird
I'm really genuinely curious as to what the "Russian meme" you're referring to is. The pudding finger thing?
The 4chaner pretending their meme magic was invoking ancient gods seem like they have a closer conrction to reality than whoever wrote that. Unless im an idiot and its satire in wich case great bit.
US institutes could get their point across a lot better if they didn't hide all their propaganda behind paywalls.
All I can read is the first paragraph.
Yo for real tho what are you talkin about? Is this russian meme?
Maube russia sjpuldnt br funny then, how about tjat finnyman?????????
Psychopathic, how can a politician like this have any popular support
Because some people are also psychopaths or who prefer authoritarian leadership.
If your analysis stops at "some people [enough to sway some elections] are just born wrong and are bad people," it isn't a very good analysis.
The problem isn't that people are "psychpaths", it is that they live in an environment where they are told that Hispanic people are a threat, that caravans are "invading" the US to pillage it, and that an invasion like meatball Ron here is proposing would effectively be a counteroffensive.
It's worth looking at how that environment is produced too. There's a need for cheap labor in agriculture, laundry, hospitality and textile industries that dovetails well with the US's history of anti-mexican racism (grounded in the need to dehumanizing indigenous people to steal their land as well as the US-Mexico war).
By controlling people's movement through the border regime, we can make them willing to take sub-minimum wage jobs, while also keeping Mexico poor through lopsided trade agreements like NAFTA and low level insurgency achieved by escalating the drug war and flooding the country with weapons.
In this context of US oppression of Mexicans, it becomes necessary to dehumanize them to justify the violence. This is where fox news comes in. Hell, even CNN plays a role by creating categories of migrants some good and some bad, and playing them against each other while justifying border control (think about the rhetoric about dreamers vs drug smugglers).
To change this environment, we either need to undercut this propaganda by organizing white and brown workers together, or either take back control of media from big business or make our own media with similar reach.
Absolutely, I was just trying to be brief because of it being on lemmy.ml, where an anticapitalist text dump might understandably be seen as a derailment. Still, I should have included more of the "why," so thanks for your contribution.
This isn't even an anticapitalist text dump on my part, just basic US history and sociology. If you're drawing anti capitalist conclusions from it, that's on you.
lemmy.ml is nominally leftist, so an anticapitalist text dump is in-bounds, I believe
Oh it's more complicated than that, but getting in to the psychology of fascism involves a lot of typing and there are more articulate authors who have already explained it at length.
it is that they live in an environment where they are told that Hispanic people are a threat, that caravans are "invading" the US to pillage it
They already hated
brown people long before that.
These people don't have to be told a damn thing. They suspect the worst of the best, the best of the worst, and when it comes to 'others' they have nothing but scorn, even if it's completely baseless. It seems to be a kind of narcissism.
"Good people can't be good because I look bad by comparison. Bad people are good because I look good by comparison. Other people don't look like me at all and so we must assume the absolute worst..."
To be fair though, I don't know how we can sustain illegal immigration of low income workers.
The people who support him don't know he said this.. They literally don't know shit about these people and only watch Fox news which wont air this
Yeah, no, they know, whats why they like him
Do you think its some sort of fluke so many fash adjacent politicians are popping up more and more?
I'm reminded of their support for that random Democrat from Hawaii. Turns out she was anti gay and pro intervention.
Tulsi Gabbard is actually a member of a fringe cult that schismed of off the Hare Krishnas, she and her weird cultist dad have switched parties a few times to try to maneuver themselves into positions of political power to advance the cults material interests and ideology. They're super anti-LGBT and anti-Muslim.
She's also an intelligence officer in the US military.
An incredibly untrustworthy person.
The DeSant!s supporters I know think it's, quote, based that he wants war with Mexico.
"They aren't sending their best" used to be mask-off messaging that seemed too far.
This is why Trump will win. Trump maybe dumb, but he's not that stupid to go around telling peoples he gonna invade this and that.
the guy decided to run against a religious icon, and now he's eating so much shit it's incredible
If society as we know it putters along for a few more centuries there's a significant chance that
actually becomes the focus of a new religion.
you can't convince me the Mormons won't deify Donald Trump centuries after they are the only american group to survive the climate wars. his hair is the same color as their golden tablets that aren't real.
Yeah at first I laughed at the idea, but ngl, thinking about for a minute or so it actually seems possible
Apparently some Evangelicans are already abandoning Jesus for being a wimp and a liberal.
Honestly this is the least shocking thing they could do, terrible yes, but I'm honestly surprised that they haven't in the last few decades.
Also this definitely coincides with Mexico nationalizing their resources, right?