Our general discourse has been so deeply and deliberately poisoned that people don’t pay attention to words broadly anymore. So many different foreign and domestic forces have worked so tirelessly to amplify the chaos and boost the worst takes on both sides of every social issue, that the general population of the US stopped paying attention. (The horrific 2024 exit-polling confirms this too.)
This is why people are latching onto character over policy, it’s why Trump retains power despite not having any clue what he’s doing and is just obviously being led around by his cabinet. It’s why we all seem to care a lot more about what our favorite internet streamer has to say about a candidate than AP our Routers or the evening news, because the words have been said so much that people stopped paying attention.
This is not a new, modern ploy either. The KGB and CIA both have written how to destabilize nations using these tactics as far back as the 50’s or earlier.
Who’s that kgb guy that runs Russia loves trump and had been accused of interfering with international elections. Has a bigger army of Internet bots than the army he fields?
I would wager that the army Elon employs is bigger. He deliberately monetized blue-check twitter accounts for high views and shares. Not much, just a few dollars a month, maybe a couple hundred dollars if you break some thousands of shares and views.
For the average American this is not worth the time and effort to stay on Twitter all day and night farming engagement, but for the average citizen of a place like India, this is a living. So now in addition to the Russian bot-farms, Chinese espionage orgs, domestic groups of angry incels employing bot armies, we also now have millions of people in countries like India, Philippines, Pakistan and other countries who have been holistically outsourced to push rage-bait and propaganda through US culture and conversation.
This has had a devastating effect on our domestic conversations. These people are probably fine, normal, decent people, but they have no stake in the USA’s future and are wrecking our present day so they get a meal tomorrow.
We have to start treating the information feeds in new ways. Namely, by turning them all off and spending more time in local communities and socializing to form protective groups and power blocs in our neighborhoods and cities. The most sensational bullshit someone reads online will not withstand peer-pressure to think critically and not act stupid.
Fascism is bad, communism is bad, socialism is bad. Leftists have successfully been labeled socialists and communists, why would the other side care about being labeled fascists anymore? They’re just words, meaningless abstractions now.
Right, but if you say to a Leftist “You are a socialist!” they’ll say “Yes, that’s correct”.
The MAGA hats aren’t owning the word fascism. They don’t know what it is. They know it’s bad. It’s something that happened in WW2. It’s something others do.
I’d link Michael Rosen’s “I Sometimes Fear” poem, but this administration did walk in saying exactly that, and half the people still didn’t connect the dots.
Yes, we know.
See, everyone knows that fascism is a bad thing. That has been taught in every school since the end of WW2.
It’s just a shame that most people never bothered to look up what fascism actually is, and it can be something your guys do as well.
Our general discourse has been so deeply and deliberately poisoned that people don’t pay attention to words broadly anymore. So many different foreign and domestic forces have worked so tirelessly to amplify the chaos and boost the worst takes on both sides of every social issue, that the general population of the US stopped paying attention. (The horrific 2024 exit-polling confirms this too.)
This is why people are latching onto character over policy, it’s why Trump retains power despite not having any clue what he’s doing and is just obviously being led around by his cabinet. It’s why we all seem to care a lot more about what our favorite internet streamer has to say about a candidate than AP our Routers or the evening news, because the words have been said so much that people stopped paying attention.
This is not a new, modern ploy either. The KGB and CIA both have written how to destabilize nations using these tactics as far back as the 50’s or earlier.
Who’s that kgb guy that runs Russia loves trump and had been accused of interfering with international elections. Has a bigger army of Internet bots than the army he fields?
I would wager that the army Elon employs is bigger. He deliberately monetized blue-check twitter accounts for high views and shares. Not much, just a few dollars a month, maybe a couple hundred dollars if you break some thousands of shares and views.
For the average American this is not worth the time and effort to stay on Twitter all day and night farming engagement, but for the average citizen of a place like India, this is a living. So now in addition to the Russian bot-farms, Chinese espionage orgs, domestic groups of angry incels employing bot armies, we also now have millions of people in countries like India, Philippines, Pakistan and other countries who have been holistically outsourced to push rage-bait and propaganda through US culture and conversation.
This has had a devastating effect on our domestic conversations. These people are probably fine, normal, decent people, but they have no stake in the USA’s future and are wrecking our present day so they get a meal tomorrow.
We have to start treating the information feeds in new ways. Namely, by turning them all off and spending more time in local communities and socializing to form protective groups and power blocs in our neighborhoods and cities. The most sensational bullshit someone reads online will not withstand peer-pressure to think critically and not act stupid.
Fascism is bad, communism is bad, socialism is bad. Leftists have successfully been labeled socialists and communists, why would the other side care about being labeled fascists anymore? They’re just words, meaningless abstractions now.
Right, but if you say to a Leftist “You are a socialist!” they’ll say “Yes, that’s correct”.
The MAGA hats aren’t owning the word fascism. They don’t know what it is. They know it’s bad. It’s something that happened in WW2. It’s something others do.
I’d link Michael Rosen’s “I Sometimes Fear” poem, but this administration did walk in saying exactly that, and half the people still didn’t connect the dots.