We've been trying to tell yall for years. For anti capitalist? Socialists? All manners of leftists? Biggest enemy has always and will always be liberals.
Actually it's capital. But it's true that Liberalism is the wiggly fun-house slide to capitalism and fascism no doubt.
Liberalism is capitalism. They are intrinsically and indivisiblely linked. The liberal revolutions were capitalist revolutions.
He said capital, not capitalism. Aka, those with money.
which political establishment just passed legislation to obliterate the social safety net
Yes liberals who are simultaneously all-powerful and weak.
I believe they are using it in the sense of economic liberalism. What today we just call capitalism. Encompassing Republicans, national Democratic leadership, and those that larp as anarchist or libertarian while being capitalist.
Libertarians are capitalists who hate the state and like drugs.
So just capitalists really.
libertarians are republicans who got tired of being taken seriously.
A libertarian is a man who can throw a dart at a map and tell you the age of consent where it lands. His eyes light up if it lands in international waters.
I mentioned Zohran to my aging mother (who lives in a suburb, and cannot vote in NYC elections). She was like, "You didn't vote for him did you? He's a communist"
We decided not to go into details right then, but it's wild what a deep, emotional, response the idea of "communism" evokes. I don't know what she even thinks it is.
You know those experiments Pavlov did with dogs that made them salivate to the sound of a bell (because they associated the sound with food)? Boomers essentially had that but the trigger is the word communism and the response is aversion / disgust.
They didn't have the internet back then so mainstream media could essentially control mainstream thought.
I don't know what she even thinks it is.
She thinks it's the enemy.
That type of response has nothing to do with politics or even reality, it's just "us vs. them". People attribute everything they think is evil to "them".
(It's not just communism hate. Because anyone who knows what it is, know that he isn't one.)
That reminds me of the woman who declared that she couldn't vote for Barack Obama because he was a Muslim and an atheist.
People were more or less helping each other back in the 50's after the war. The money boys got worried about that and Joseph McCarthy, along with Donald Trump's mentor, Roy Cohn, started a communist witch hunt which eventually got out of hand. The communist stigma remained.
Judith Miller, a former reporter for The New York Times, was a key figure in reporting on Iraq's alleged weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) prior to the 2003 invasion. Her reporting, particularly her exclusives citing Saddam Hussein's possession of WMDs, were prominently used by the Bush administration to build the case for war. Miller later acknowledged that her reporting relied too heavily on sources connected to the Bush administration and that she didn't adequately consider dissenting views.
Because they are capitalists
Maybe look into where they get their funding. Follow the money to the truth, just expect to be disgusted when you find it. On a related note, go back and watch HBO's the Wire to see why real systemic change doesn't happen.
After Bidens debate performance they published 80 articles in 2 weeks about it...
Should they not have? Should they have continued to pretend that the president was lucid when everyone saw him bragging about how he finally beat Medicare?
How many of the articles were apologia?
Because it's a shit-tier rag that's consistently skewed in favor of a few special interests - involving apologizing constantly for one that is currently blowing kids up on our dime. I honestly cannot understand why anyone would give this rag any credence since they drummed us into a war in 2003.
Just being charitable here (to be clear I agree with you) - but I think a big contributor to a lot of folks taking these old media organizations more seriously than they should, is how batshit insane the rest of the media ecosystem has gotten.
That combined with the kind of...legacy of trust, for these old "household name" ones? It's hard for us olds to update our mental models in a deep way. I was raised thinking it was a respectable outfit - I know, for sure, that I don't trust them or like them at all today. And yet every time I see "New York Times" my subconscious goes "ah, yep, one of the good ones". Brains are dumb and annoying.
This is absolutely the case - it takes time to destroy credibility for a large institution considered a "paper of record". And it makes it really easy for them to just "forget" to include certain pieces of information that drastically alter a story's narrative. The BBC is also hugely guilty of this kind of manipulation, with the ceaveat that the truth of it is in plain sight - the BBC is literally a government-run propaganda organ! But hey, you get a bunch of sober sounding people wearing professional costumes to talk to a bunch of "experts", get a bunch of reddit bot farms to post well researched science/tech articles to build a foundation of credibility with your professional classes, and then you start slipping your real content in between the fill. Many people will be trained to accept facts from that environment at that point, and it takes effort to keep on top of it all.
What's made things so egregious recently is that this approach only works when everyone's half asleep. Hypnotized, if you will. In the context of more and more people being forced into an activist stance by their ethics, morals and in most cases and sadly more importantly (to them) personal situations, it isn't a good approach, because people who are already active will be distrustful and less likely to accept their "content" at face value. From there, it all kind of unravels.
It's a peacetime control tooling for a sleepy, well-fed, soft population. When things get hard and the reality most people lives is wildly discordant with the "facts" they are shown, it generates friction and resentment. Populism is the result - left or right. Our elites made a very bad bet thinking they could step down this path rather than New Deal-ing their way out of it, because they are already losing control of the situation. The hysterical screeching about Mamdani - in particular kirsten gillibrand's racist tirade - is what it looks like when they panic, stop maintaining the mask and you see what's underneath.
It's a bunch of magic tricks that the audience just worked out, the bunny rabbit getting pulled out of the top hat is falling to bits and scaring all the children. And all the women. And all the men.
It's this and other factors. The real enemy of the neolibs was not communism. The real enemy was and still is the social democracy. The welfare state that protect everyone is what they want to abolish. Mamdani is for lots of people the image of this social democracy. If he wins, they lose. If he wins, he put the social democracy back on track. They are afraid of that.
Can't stop to read now but I'd wager some politicians are to scared of trump and his supporters to allow real left wing populism
Almost precisely backwards.
Fascism happens when people cry out for change and it's denied. If obama hadnt betrayed us all in 08, if sanders hadn't been ratfucked in 16, we wouldn't be in this mess. Fascism is enabled by fear of the left, by alienation from your own interests, by irrational hate, by self loathing, by hopeless faceless rage when the actual causes of your displeasure are unspeakable.
Imagine where the world be on climate policy if al gore hadn't been cheated and you guys might not have ended up in the middle east for so long and nasty stuff like the patriot act might not have been passed
Yeah that would be cool. I'd really rather live in that timeline.
Instead we are in this one. Where ratfucking after ratfucking of the people's desire, making their cries unspeakable, has lead us to fascism.
Its one of the reasons ill never vote for a dnc politician. They brought this shit into the world.
The Democrat Party is dead to me for exactly this reason.
All they had to do was take office after being elected
Such a well-written article. Lots of emotion, but it's incredibly right on.
Pointing out, debunking, and spreading awareness about state- and company-sponsored astroturfing on Lemmy and elsewhere. This includes social media manipulation, propaganda, and disinformation campaigns, among others.
Propaganda and disinformation are a big problem on the internet, and the Fediverse is no exception.
What's the difference between misinformation and disinformation? The inadvertent spread of false information is misinformation. Disinformation is the intentional spread of falsehoods.
By equipping yourself with knowledge of current disinformation campaigns by state actors, corporations and their cheerleaders, you will be better able to identify, report and (hopefully) remove content matching known disinformation campaigns.
Same as instance rules, plus: