I found this reply unreasonably funny
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Sweaty MAGA meme
[ ] hate Muslims
[ ] hate Jews
I am told that I should bless her recovery, and I’ll admit that I struggle with that.
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[ ] hate Mexicans/central south Americans
[ ] hate all Asians.
[x] all of the above
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So sad to think that after all the Jews have been through, they are going to miss out on salvation because this broad has a few reservations. Can’t catch a break.
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We’re well beyond a time when these people tried to maintain any semblance of ideological consistency. The new version of this meme is just the MAGA guy mashing all sorts of buttons that would seem mutually exclusive but nothing matters anymore.
Yglesias tweeted about this article last week. He thinks the author has it right. It’s about the increase in political hate over the last ~20 years. The writer considers the likely causes and evidence for each.
Cliffs:
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Liked the article, but while Fox News is the first and most important, I think they sweep Social Media under the rug too quickly. I don’t think it’s only Fox News at this point, it’s a disease that’s spread everywhere. They are the progenitors though
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Yeah. Fox was here first but at this point Fox and FB feed off each other. Drum gives multiple examples.
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Yeah, I think the biggest issue with the article is the over-emphasis on the year 2000 as When Things Went Wrong. The author grants that legitimate government malfeasance (and not just media propaganda) are legitimate ways in which public trust in the government would fall, citing Watergate and Vietnam. I dunno, bros, can you think of some shady, unpopular wars and legitimate government malfeasance in the mid to late aughts that might have contributed to a distrust in government also?
Seems to me when we would have had the biggest propaganda-fueled distrust in government would be during the Obama years, in which case Facebook and Fox were both thriving cesspools of lib-hate at the time.
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https://twitter.com/marceelias/status/1425571726998609928
Good news guys!
So you don’t have to click a breitbart article, this the crux:
Riemer told Breitbart News that Republicans have learned much from what happened in 2020 after seeing what the Democrats did in a months-long tumultuous and coordinated push from long before Election Day until weeks afterward filled with mail and absentee voting, drop boxes, a lack of ID and signature matching requirements all combined with kicking poll watchers out of counting rooms, and massive funding surges from leftist big tech moguls like Mark Zuckerberg who funneled hundreds of millions of dollars into state and local election offices nationwide through popup nonprofits he and his wife established. The Republicans, as such Riemer said, recognize now that elections are not fought in just one day but over a longer period of time — election day has become election season in other words — and Riemer said Republicans are responding by standing up a permanent structure to fight back.
The comments are pretty hilairous thought. Breitbarters hate hate hate the R establishment. In their mind the R establishment is losing to Dems on purpose because of cuck globalism or something.
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Social Media Brain is a hell of a drug. Hopefully the WAAF “They’re in on it” crowd here can see some of that in themselves.
Dude the Manchin phone call with the big donors already got leaked. Just shut up already before someone feels compelled to compare your palate to your political takes in a really unkind way.
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I think the other thing that the author failed to consider was looking only in one place. Fox News is pretty much only in America (although granting that Murdoch has a lesser reach in Australia and the UK), but Facebook is everywhere. And maybe not everywhere is quite as bad as here, but it seems like right wing radicalization is happening everywhere. The article about the German nurse giving people saline instead of the vaccine is what got me thinking along these lines. That’s not Fox News. That’s Facebook. But if you want to point to the feedback loop between Fox News and Facebook as being what’s unique here and why it’s that much worse, I think there’s a good case for it.
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There’s a major flaw with the entire basis of the article in the way it’s focusing on US-centric causes to explain US-specific issues. These are global trends. We are not special.
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I think a few issues are getting conflated here. The article starts off by asking why American politics is so heavily polarized and there I think Fox News, exacerbated by social media, makes the most sense. I think you’re on shakier ground blaming Fox for erosion of trust in government, or the rightward lurch of global politics.
Here you get the same conspiritarding and to some extent the rightward shift on politics, but even on a platform like Sky News Australia, which is very much the local equivalent of Fox News, you don’t see the idea that the Labor Party and their voters in general are evil or plotting to ruin the country. You get talk of “radical leftists” and certainly The Greens and their voters in general might get painted as lunatics, but trying to paint Labor as hell bent on ruining Australia is a non-starter, even on hard right media.
As for why this is, maybe Sky News just haven’t been doing their thing long enough. But I also think the wedge issues aren’t really there. Abortion is a non-issue. The right here are not generally particularly religious. Labor essentially conceded the illegal immigration issue to the Right. There was an attempt to turn moving Australia Day (as similar to Columbus Day there are concerns over celebrating Australia’s colonial history) into a culture-war issue but it’s all pretty half-hearted. It’s possible compulsory voting helps too, as “get out the base” is never a viable strategy. The battle is always winning swing voters.
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I think that the ideological sorting of the two parties, so that all Democrats are to the left of the most liberal Republican and all Republicans are to the right of the most conservative Democrat, has led people to no longer be able to think of a “good” member of the opposition party, so that it has become much easier to see the other party as Other.
Democrats just need to be better at Othering in order to win.
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Seems obvious in hindsight that these massive social media sites would become info battlegrounds.
Imagine if, starting tomorrow, every account was required to be vetted for identity confirmation. Everybody getting doxxed. Sounds Orwellian but I’m starting to think it’s an inevitability and that the end results will be so much worse if left in their current state.
Imagine how many bots and foreign actors there are.
I hate that I even just posted this. Guess it’s why homesteading is my answer to everything.