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“Boring” “Unlikeable” “Stiff”
“Can sit down and have a beer with him” “Tells it like it is” “I like him ‘cause he’s not a politician”
I wouldn’t be too hard on the electorate, although I 100% agree with the problem description and that counter-educating them out of being duped by these framings is important. But they didn’t come up with the framings. There’s a whole ass science of how to resonate with people emotionally and produce behaviors you want, and professionals have been studying it for over a century now to sell toothpaste and beer and deodorant, and it works. It’s actually one of the primary focuses of hard scientific study in our society, much much more so than addressing climate change. And so, when they turned that whole machine in favor of particular candidates and against other candidates, it’s not surprising that it worked on a whole fuck of a lot of people.
Now let’s start to talk about how “I could NEVER vote for a genocide” and “Here comes the biggest election of our lifetime, just like every other one before that 🙄” fits into that framework…
I mean, idk if it’s really necessary to educate the voters out of being able to recognize demons wearing human skin.
Why not just run good candidates?
What constitutes a "good" candidate? As someone pragmatically anarchist/communist, pretty sure were gonna have very different concepts.
I mean, my ass is out here trying to get .world to vote psl, but for the democrats a good candidate looks like someone who doesn’t wander off when meeting with the g7, can give a coherent interview without literally asking for their handler, doesn’t have a storied history of creating all the problems the American people experience on a daily basis, is capable of holding their own in a debate with trump (not easy!) and just basically isn’t a fucking McKenzie pod person.
They don’t a bench that covers those positions, but that would be good for them.
is capable of holding their own in a debate with trump (not easy!)
Well that’s certainly notable
Trump has decades of experience working a crowd and flipping the script on people. No matter what you think of him as a candidate or as a person you gotta admit he’s a formidable stage presence.
Notable-er and notable-er. Have you seen his interviews from any point in the last 5 years or so? For example he has a noticeable habit of getting up and walking out because they're not going how he wants them to go.
This thing you're saying is a very unusual thing to say or believe for pretty much any observer of American politics outside a very specific segment. I am fascinated by this. Tell me more. Can you give me an example e.g. of him flipping the script on someone?
He pretty famously made all the other republican candidates look terrible in the republican debates in the lead up to the 2016 election. I’ll get a specific example of flipping the script but I’m surprised to have to pull up receipts for what he’s universally acknowledged for.
Liberals are always willing to call trump a catty blowhard bully but when someone says as much using clearer, more neutral language it’s suddenly something to be dug into.
The man knows how to work a crowd and has genuine comedic timing even in his advanced age. You don’t have to hand it to him to recognize his strengths.
I’m surprised to have to pull up receipts for what he’s universally acknowledged for
genuine comedic timing even in his advanced age
Again: This is not a totally unusual view of Trump among American people. But for someone who's planning to vote for the PSL, who is familiar with ins and outs of flaws in Biden's policies and wants to talk about insulin price caps and universal health care, clearly cares about and follows news... and yet, somehow, to have this wrong a view of Trump like they just never happened to run across a Trump interview that happened since 2016, is weird. It's incongruous. It's a view that's exclusive to people who live in one particular type of media bubble only, generally speaking.
How about this, though. From your history:
If you don’t feel disgusted by this enough: the Biden regime shut down the insulin price cap faster than it shut down this program.
There is only one specific type of media where you might have picked up the impression that something like that was plausible (seen the concept of "insulin price cap" without the corresponding information that Biden was the one that enacted it.) Actually even more specific than the type of media diet that might have given you the idea that Trump is a good debater.
Where'd you learn that the Biden regime shut down the insulin price cap? Want to link me to a story about it? I'd love to learn more. You can educate me on the truth about the Biden regime so I'll realize I should vote third party, and save the country.
My not totally unusual (I can't help but notice that youre dancing around saying "accurate") view of trump is incompatible with leftist politics and also wrong somehow?
go ahead and come out and say what you want to say about that instead of making innuendos.
Snopes on the biden regime shutting down the insulin price cap. that article will go on to say that it was just a temporary pause for two months while the biden regime figured out what trump regime executive orders to allow to continue and that executive order 13937 wasn't going to take effect for another two days.
the snopes article hasn't been updated since january 25th 2021, but here's afp fact check with the details that the executive order 13937 wasn't ever "unfrozen" and implemented and was ultimately rescinded by hhs under biden in october of 2021.
as for the media bubble I live in, it's called knowing a diabetic who gets insulin on part d.
Did you read the whole AFP fact check? You really should. The Snopes article was written mid-“freeze”, so it wasn’t in a position to comment on the fact that Trump’s rule such as it was actually was enacted. Also, the AFP article talks about Trump’s order being pretty small in scope (would have applied to 1 in 11 people who needed it) and not funded from the POV of any individual FQHC, and wasn’t legislation, leaving it in unimplemented limbo even after Biden unfroze the order a short time later, until Biden passed actual legislation which did actually implement a price cap for all Medicare recipients, in the IRA.
Both Trump and Biden took steps to limit out-of-pocket costs for insulin, as did policymakers and legislators at the state and federal levels. But the posts mislead in claiming that Biden reversed Trump's actions.
The cost cap went into effect in 2021 and was unchanged when Biden took office.
The Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which Biden signed into law in August 2022, requires all Medicare Part D plans and certain Medicare Advantage plans to eliminate the deductible for "covered insulin" and cap the co-payment at $35 per month. The measures went into effect January 1.
"What's happening with the Inflation Reduction Act is an expansion of the Trump administration's Part D model, and an improvement in the sense that it's no longer just a voluntary program, but required of all Part D plans," Cubanski said.
What I am innuendo-ing is that you are repeating right wing propaganda here of a pretty low caliber - which would actually be very difficult for you to have absorbed unless you are:
- Exposed to right wing media like Fox News and social-media propaganda (the AFP fact check goes into some detail about an Instagram post that makes this nonsense claim)
- And, more crucially, not up to speed on actual news, which would have conveyed the story “Trump falsely claims he was the source of the insulin price cap” and not the propaganda version. If you were aware of any news outside the conservative bubble you would have known the conservative telling of it is false.
I.e. you making this mistake is incompatible with you consuming any media diet other than a purely conservative media diet. I.e. I am saying that there is strong evidence that you are a fake leftist, and all this support for voting third party because Biden isn’t left enough and you like all good leftists are not going to vote for him, is exactly what it looks like i.e. lies coming from a person whose actual political alignment is pro-Trump.
It’s possible I guess that you are a real PSL supporter who just happens to watch almost all Fox News, or gets their news from Instagram propaganda and latched onto this one thing because it is anti Biden, or something like that, but that seems unlikely to me.
You’re seriously referencing a cropped video from Fox that removed the skydiver Biden walked over and gave a thumbs up to as wandering off. Stop acting like you give a fuck about the country you are so intentionally trying to undermine with your ignorant bullshit.
okay, pretend i made reference to one of the other times joe biden was obviously not present at some event.
pick your favorite.
Tell me you've never had a lengthy conversation with someone who gets all their political news from Tiktok without telling me etc
You could literally nominate a chocolate milkshake or a dead squirrel and they wouldn't know the difference if they saw some meme videos that said chocolate milkshake is gonna lower gas prices
So if you believe people aren’t capable of choosing leaders why do you support democracy?
Like a lot of the founding fathers, I think a strong and honest press is one of the key features of a democracy, and without that, it won't function, and people being able to vote won't do a damn thing to prevent the whole thing from turning into tyranny
And hey! Look at our media!
And hey! Look what kind of government we have, oh no oh fuck
That was kind of my point about the whole thing: That skillful manipulation of the voters happens, and has ruined the country pretty thoroughly. I don't think the answer is to turn away from democracy, but I do that think that fixing the media so that people have some semblance of an accurate picture of what's happening is an absolutely urgent issue right now.
It seems a tad ahistorical to suggest that biased media is in any way new.
If anything we are now living in an era of choice where we can choose which approved narrative we’ll take in as opposed to being subject to the local hearst papers outlook.
If control over media gives so much power though, why not change who has that control?
Hm
I mean you’re not wrong. The US spent most of the previous two centuries wandering around the world killing and enslaving anyone who made them nervous or unprofitable while the whole “honest” media wrote a never ending stream of stories enthusing about how nice it was that the price of bananas was going down
Then when the internet came along we replaced that with an absolute explosion of viewpoints some of which are honest, some of which are just lazy and pointless, and some of which are manufactured propaganda which shows a remarkable level of effectiveness
But… if you wanna tell me that that’s not the pure step backwards I described it as, I won’t say you’re totally wrong about that tbh
Regardless of all that, yes, I still think making it work effectively and honestly is as important now as it ever was
If media is used by a tiny group to control what people think and new technology allows the same tiny group to reach people with more granularity, is it really a move “forwards” or “backwards”?
If you believe that media is a part of functioning democracy, who should be in control of it?
By “Media” I mean everything. Newspapers, TV, social media, anything that lets people know what’s going on in the world
It used to be like a few thousand independent editors all across the country, then with TV and corporate consolidation it dwindled to basically just 1 corporate viewpoint, now with social media and the internet I think public opinion is more or less up for grabs for whoever wants to spend the most money to influence it (not that different from the later stages of the TV era tbh)
For quite a while now media has been out of “control” of any single grouping; basically that was one of the big advantages of the internet era. But the disadvantage is that real journalism costs money, and modern newspapers don’t have a good business model to stay alive and do it, and modern social media isn’t really configured to be able to keep out propaganda viewpoints, and so the public narrative winding up de facto “in control” of whoever puts more money and effort into distorting it.
I don’t think we should go back to where anyone can have “control” necessarily but it would be nice if real journalism could make money again to be able to do the investigative aspect, and if normal person social media (for the opinion aspect and sharing-news-stories aspect) was community operated and resistant to deliberate propaganda
Best answer I can come up with to your question as I see it
When is a community organization, say the black panther party, judged to be putting out deliberate propaganda that social media needs to resist?
So. That’s why I say community operated, and that the internet was a big step forward whatever its flaws. I wouldn’t consider the Black Panther viewpoint to be propaganda, and yet I think there’s been a pretty consistent consensus from newspapers to TV to modern corporate social media that if the Black Panthers’ viewpoint is on your front page one day, then that’s a problem and we’re gonna have to fix it and probably someone’s getting fired or at least moved around.
How community operated social media can determine the difference between somebody in Akron who thinks Joe Biden is a bum and wants to say so, and somebody managing 59 accounts through a VPN each of which keeps up a steady stream of content including a healthy dose of “Joe Biden is a bum and I want to say so,” I honestly have no idea. In a perfect world, to me. the social media software would contain the judgement that:
- the Black Panthers would not be propaganda
- an honest Trump supporter would not be propaganda
- the guy in Akron would not be propaganda, and
- and the guy with 59 accounts would be propaganda.
How to implement that though, I don’t really know.
Because to do that we need a supermajority in the Senate and no Liebermans, Manchins, or Sinemas. The tools we have to fix things are as broken as the things we need to fix.
Those things didn’t change any of the last times some party had a supermajority. What makes you think some new supermajority would be any different, or that republicans or democrats are any different now?