Funny events in anti-woke world
- Thread starter Agema
- Start date
No indeed. But if democracy cannot deliver, or is not perceived to deliver, it is inevitable that people will lose faith in it.
So then is the problem that democracy is not delivering, or that people have developed unrealistic expectations of what the government can deliver?
I'll be honest, its a bit of column A and a bit of column B. What those bits add up to is going to vary from person to person but some folks do have this weird assumption that a government department can snap its fingers and shit will happen. But they're also failing some pretty basic deliverables too.
What @Gordon_4 said.
Still, Gen Z, Don't let yourself be ruled by absolute fuck heads, who don't give a shit about you. You are the ones making that choice and you will suffer regardless if you see it or not.
Hope it was worth it Trump supporters. This is what you and your anti woke grifters wanted. Your precious "god and savior" won't save you.
I do wonder whether a major problem is, well, basically current capitalism.
International finance runs a lot of the world. If they don't like what a country is doing, they can make it extremely unpleasant for a country to service its national debt, they can sink bonds, shares; drive a slow death by declining to invest in industry. Any government that oversaw this damage would risk defeat in the next election, and so on until a government arrived that was sufficiently pliant to international finance, or didn't need to give a shit (e.g. because it's cancelled democracy).
Countless times, it seems that governments with a potential interest in making major changes have run face first into this sort of reality check; or that they have neutered themselves in the first place to ensure that they are viewed as "credible". But the result is that they will not deliver the public's expectations, and in the long run, all they will do is self-destruct. And so it is that all over Europe mainstream right and left are in a state of collapse.
Here I get rather pessimistic. The outcome is going to be the far right. The far left may take power but will eventually hit the buffer of finance/business, and that will nothing left untainted except the far right, and they'll solve the problem by scrapping democracy. Perhaps one of the big attractions of Trump is that maybe he'll do so much damage via protectionism that it will ultimately restore more power to national governments and freedom to act.
Isn't "international finance" that runs the world behind the scenes and has power over nations literally an anti-semitic dogwhistle?
Only if you assume it's the Jews. Jews have been historically accused of all sorts of terrible things, many of which are terrible things that people have actually done. People unfairly blaming something on an ethnicity doesn't mean that the thing they're being blamed for isn't real.
It can be, but context is king.
For instance, here I'm not accusing capitalists of doing anything "behind the scenes", secretly conspiring. I'm saying this is fundamentally and overtly how the system works. If I'm also saying the likely end result is the far right, it's hard to imagine that's a desirable outcome for a secret Jewish conspiracy, given the prior record of the Western far right with Jews.
Well yes.
That is why people look at China just imprisoning all its tech billionaires and say "That is neat. In our country billionaires are untouchable". They obviously still not like how regular people are treated there, but the idea of a powerful gouvernment that anyone has to answer to amd against which money is powerless has some allure.
I wonder whether in a century's time, historians might be reflecting on the fact that China had the right idea about societal information control, not us.
In the 20th century, information largely went through gatekeeping processes - chiefly the traditional media (press, TV/radio). It's not that they weren't completely full of shit some of the time, and intruded a lot of their preconceptions and prejudices as influence, but it also meant that there were standards. Journalistic ethics were a thing, built up and promoted, and still to some extent are even if eroded by economics and circumstance. Where are we really, in a world of sheer chaos, where beliefs seem increasingly untethered to reality?
Elon Musk's contributions to European politics are aggravating. But contextually, is he any worse than that other naturalised American Rupert Murdoch, who for decades squatted on an outsize influence over British politics? In a way it reflects the changes in media that Murdoch's power is dying away as the internet swamps his old-school media, whilst Musk builds his on the new of social media boosted by bombast and spectacle. Arguably, Murdoch had more influence, although given Musk is openly promoting fascist adjacents, maybe Murdoch was less dangerous.
I am minded by Popper's paradox of tolerance: at some point, what happens when tolerance is confronted by absolute intolerance? Popper argues that implicit to any ideal, including tolerance, is self-preservation. It is okay to be intolerant to excessive intolerance. If the fascists can hijack free speech to gain power, from which point they will destroy free speech, then you can limit free speech. Or, I guess, limit the fascists by some other means, although that's potentially going to involve rather more in the way of humanitarian awkwardness. So, maybe China has a point. Information needs standards, and the free-for-all that the West has given itself is nothing but a basis to erode its peoples ability to make informed decisions.
Billionaires won't save us. Let's imagine that Trump created concentration camps and nerve gassed the undesirable undocumented and illegal migrants. Does anyone seriously believe that Musk, Pinchai, Bezos and Zuckerberg would publicly say a peep? Of course they wouldn't. In fact, even worse, more likely their firms would be offering tenders to run the camps' IT systems. They might bloviate their sanctimonious shit about free speech and so on, but they would throw anything and everything under the bus for their bottom line.
Should be wary of reporting that seeks to divide generations, especially by exploiting the olds fears of the younglings. Plus something've learnt through moving all over the place is words often mean different things to different people. Is why I try to avoid (not always successfully) relying on broad labels for self and others cos you honestly don't know what baggage the people you're hoping to communicate to are gonna filter that through. Some people hold a lot of baggage over something you assume is mild, and vice versa. Reactionary right wing press has been long skilled in exploiting this by utilising their monopoly of resources and infrastructure against opposition to flood mainstream information ecosystems with emotionally charged reporting that threads every ounce of negativity throughout whatever associated label, group title, person, ideology they fear gaining traction the most, effectively shaming uninformed voter blocs away from looking further into them. And it works. Every time.
Anymoo, talking of those 'save the children' lot...
Anymoo, talking of those 'save the children' lot...
I quite like the idea that pardons could be like laws or executive orders, where they can be cancelled or overridden.Anymoo, talking of those 'save the children' lot...
So, "Sure, the last POTUS pardoned you, but you're such a dick that the new POTUS has unpardoned you, so back to jail."
Any other celebrity wanna start sucking Trump's dick? Black or not. This is why I'm glad I never got into celebrity worship.
That was fast. I'm not surprised, per se, but I wasn't expecting that many that quickly. I was expecting violence against police, resisting arrest and child sex stuff specifically though. Figure at least one will get arrested again and try to pull Sovereign Citizen BS too.Should be wary of reporting that seeks to divide generations, especially by exploiting the olds fears of the younglings. Plus something've learnt through moving all over the place is words often mean different things to different people. Is why I try to avoid (not always successfully) relying on broad labels for self and others cos you honestly don't know what baggage the people you're hoping to communicate to are gonna filter that through. Some people hold a lot of baggage over something you assume is mild, and vice versa. Reactionary right wing press has been long skilled in exploiting this by utilising their monopoly of resources and infrastructure against opposition to flood mainstream information ecosystems with emotionally charged reporting that threads every ounce of negativity throughout whatever associated label, group title, person, ideology they fear gaining traction the most, effectively shaming uninformed voter blocs away from looking further into them. And it works. Every time.
Anymoo, talking of those 'save the children' lot...
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Expecting someone to be aligned with you on politics and absolutely every social issue because they made a media thing you enjoy always leads to disappointment. I never really understood celebrity worship (at least outside the specific context of the things they make) to begin with though. Good author writes good, good author is not necessarily the person to base your politics off of.
But it's the illegal immigrants who are the real danger, right, Republicans?
Good thing he didn't get a blanket pardon for the last 10 years, right?
It seems like a very natural by-product of social behaviour - creating a sense of camaraderie with others by conforming to common ideas and attitudes. In terms of celebrities, it makes sense that those who have amassed fame and power are then more influential.
Sure, celebrity worship is kind of stupid, but we probably need to be honest with ourselves that all of us are doing the exact same thing in principle. We're all giving undue favour to ideas that would not deserve it were we able to step back and separate the issues in question from our affinity with (or opposition to) parties involved. Thus I think we need to be very circumspect about criticising others on such things, as it risks a great deal of hubris.