this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2024
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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.
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.
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:
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.
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:
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.
This is one of the reasons I don’t actually like the afp article. The part you quoted saying it went into effect is from a health insurance lobby think tank employee, and later on the article goes on to say that actually it was never implemented and no one got cheaper insulin from it because congress, the insurance companies and drug manufacturers complained and got hhs to rescind their ruling on its implementation in October of 2021:
Quoted here:
The extent to which I see Fox News is about an hour or so a year waiting in my local mechanics office to pay for some repair. I’m exposed to msnbc much more frequently every time I visit my neighbors and some family who always seem to have it on when I come by.
I haven’t claimed that trump is the source of the insulin price cap and in my other response to you in the branch of our conversation about how you define propaganda I imply that the industry’s assent to some sort of price cap after Covid is actually behind it, not either party regime.
Now on to the personal attacks:
Feel free to call me whatever you like. I explained that my understanding of this issue comes from being close to a person who receives insulin through part d and would have (they claim and I have no reason to dispute, considering it would mean revealing their income) benefited from eo 13937, not from some media campaign.
When I call some scratched liberal a fascist, it’s because they say something like “well, I have to support the genocide with my vote because trump will do it here!”. I’m paraphrasing, but my point is that what seems like a contentious personal attack from me (fascist!) is actually based directly on the things they’re saying (I’d prefer people are genocided abroad rather than at home!).
When you call me a pro-trump fake leftist it’s because of innuendo and assumption. I told you explicitly why and how I know what I know, that it’s due to personal experience, not media exposure, yet you still in the comment directly responding to that one badjacket me by implying I watch the bad media.
Come on, that’s a deeply unserious tactic to deploy and is especially offensive when you’re trying to have a conversation about propaganda in another branch of this very conversation!
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:
How to implement that though, I don’t really know.
To compare it to a previous era of media, would you say that someone wheatpasting a bunch of flyers everywhere is propaganda in the same way that the person with 59 accounts is?
I take issue with defining propaganda as only that kind of amplifying a point of view through technology, because that’s a really limited definition that doesn’t fit with the last two hundred years of use and one that almost seems to point at smaller organizations more than large ones but I’m willing to dive into it anyway.
This is a fascinating conversation
Wheatpasting is great. To me, the difference is twofold. Roughly speaking, you could say:
Like I say, I am fascinated that you don't see a problem with running a large number of accounts to create the illusion of popularity of a certain viewpoint, without it needing to be a persuasive enough viewpoint to gain popularity on its own
I brought up wheatpasting specifically to bring this point up, you said methods that produce more influence based on the monetary input are propaganda. Would you say that lobbying is propaganda? Would you say using any technology (such as wheatpasting) beyond yelling in the street is propaganda?
The reason I ask that last one is because that technology, the printing press, the paste and brush, cost money and produce a lasting effect.
Would you say that the way the Washington post and New York Times exercise editorial control over reporting about Gaza is propaganda?
I never said that I don’t see a problem with running a large number of accounts, we’re talking about weather it’s propaganda, not weather it’s problem or bad.
Ha. Let’s try again.
Does that clarify my categorizations?
I have trouble treating even the afp article I linked you to as having a relatively low amount of bias despite the reality that it presents more of the story than even the debunking site snopes does. The reason I don’t like it is that the article itself is very clearly trying to lessen the importance of trump regime eo 13937 (I think that’s the number. I don’t tend to open up a million tabs to verify everything and just type off the dome) to rebut actual republican propaganda about it.
Even though it has the information in there, I don’t like having to turn to counterpunch type stories to chase down proof of the basic facts that I saw play out.
Of course, there’s a real kernel of truth to that propaganda and while I don’t think that trump should get credit for the insulin price cap (which is why I didn’t say it!), I think that’s where you’re getting the idea that my completely factual claim from some other thread that the biden regime shut down the trump regimes price cap before they shut down the cia antivax disinformation campaign.
And I understand why you might be inclined to view things that way. It takes either sober minded and clear eyed assessment or naked cynicism to recognize that eo 13937, however flawed, was fundamentally a good thing and allowing people to suffer for an extra two years by walking it back and not funding it, allowing the drug companies complaints to hhs to result in its ultimate rescintion, while including an expanded version in a giant contentious bill is a fundamentally bad thing.
A clear eyed assessment would simply recognize these things as they are and a cynical minded outlook would see the history of the insulin price cap as a feather industry had assented to years before and both parties had been trying to claim for a while.
The point of all this is to say: it really seems like your gauge for propaganda is more of an us versus them scale than one that has a clear definition.
Our trustworthy, objective media, their cynical propagandists.
Cool
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?