David RobertsI know I've said this a trillion times but I have to say it periodically to keep from going insane:
The right ran a huge, well-funded, & ultimately successful campaign to completely take over political media & the infosphere more generally. This is by far the most important political development...
... of that last half-century, upstream of virtually any other problem that you can identify, and yet in mainsteam political discourse we *never talk about it*. It's the biggest, most salient political fact of all, just sitting there, looming, and no one fucking speaks it aloud.
Every day, I talk to earnest liberals who describe to me, in great detail, problems that have resulted from this ... but they won't name the cause! "Turns out, all the sudden the public is obsessed with trans girls trying to play sports." Oh? Any thoughts about why? Any at all? No? No thoughts?
"The public has lost trust in government and come to think that everyone involved is corrupt."
Oh? Interesting. I guess they just concluded that through their own comparative study of gov't efficacy? Or was it something else? Thoughts? Anyone?
This problem -- the RW takeover of media -- is like fucking Voldemort or something. He Who Cannot Be Named. People seem to think they'll burst into flame if they discuss it. It's baffling. I've accepted that I'm going to live & die without ever understanding why this is.
Minotaurs at Work@volts.wtf Because it sounds like a conspiracy theory, even if it's a provably correct one. It's also pretty hopeless, those who hoard the most wealth are not going to advocate for its redistribution (the foundational belief of the left wing), are they? It's difficult not to fester in the conclusion that, in a capitalist system where wealth defines success and reach, the right wing will always win. Without the Eastern Block, they're not even afraid of a Workers' Revolution anymore!
@volts.wtf Every accessory issue, whether it's trans people or pizzerias, is simply a way to get the working class to fight something that isn't the owning class. Ford did this in the 20th Century by promoting antisemitism amongst its workers so that distrust and infighting would trump any unionisation effort. Minorities as sacrificial lambs for the protection of the malignant owners of the world. But once you start delving, it's so difficult to have any hope, so I usually avoid it.