Tbf, society used to have “news”, and many people are slow to realize that while the media still call themselves by that name, they no longer live up to that truth. i.e., not everyone who is blind is purposefully ignoring the truth - there is a whole spectrum of people in the middle.
As the New York Times’ coverage of the Israeli Genocide has made obvious to even the blindest most tribalist of people, the “liberal” media was and is just as hard spouting propaganda as the far-right one.
Personally I think that the decay from Journalism into “Opinion Forming” in the traditional more liberal Press long predates the Fox-News Age and their destruction of the trust in the Traditional Press for temporary political gains of “their side” created the prime conditions for the rise of the made-up-outrage “Press” that so well fits the modus operandi of far-right populism and hence fed and was fed by made-up-outrage far-right populist politicians like Trump.
I mean… not equally though, unless you mean in the sense that both are incorrect. Liberal media in particular always tried to at least make their BS sound like it wasn’t nonsense, as opposed to e.g. MTG’s Jewish Space Laser rants. I appreciate the effort that goes into making a chart when I am lied to, rather than just some short pithy saying - it’s the effort that wins my heart! :-P (/s btw)
I have heard it said that the only true way to spot a counterfeit message is to know the real thing backwards and forwards so well that nobody can pull a fast one on you when they try to sell you short (or long). e.g. we know that 1+1=2, but if Democrats tell us it is =11 whereas old-school Republicans say that it is =-100000000000000000, newer ones say that it is the sqrt of stfu, and the most modern ones of all have already shot your mom and fucked your dog, and hold everything else you hold dear hostage until you tell them that you LIKED it… then who is to blame the most if you did not know the answer in the first place?
The answer, I believe, is that MOST of the blame goes to the people who did the WORST attrocity(-ies), but at least part of it falls onto us, for letting it happen.
Therefore I do not blame older liberal media, or at least not nearly so much as I do what followed that got significantly worse. Though yeah, I do put some of the blame onto it as well, ofc.
More important is what we do in response to it all?
People used to believe in the Press - it was what is called an Authoritative Source.
What the breaking of Trust in the Press - the greatest most influential of Autoritative Sources - did was create an environment were most people don’t believe in Authoritative Sources, hence were each individual - ignorant, untrained in analytical thinking, with neither the time, the access or the knowledge to trully dig down on a subject - is on his or her own to figure out what is true and is not.
This new environment didn’t just open the doors for the likes of Fox News, it openned the doors for Anti-Vaxing, Russian interference, countless Internet conspiracies and an Era were Politics is essentially professional scam artists managing scams - the damage is way vaster than merelly their some sleazy manipulative “news” pieces.
I absolutelly blame them for that: for the sake of momentary political gains for their team, newsmedia which for decades were trusted and respected broke the entire Trust Hierarchy and created the conditions for chaos and what looks more and more like Fascism.
The other side, that of assholes being assholes, is nothing compared to the betrayal by those you trusted.
I have likened it to an immune system: fighting bacteria is way easier than fighting cancer. The ratio of sizes of Bacterial cells to Human cells is like a football to a football stadium, and their surfaces look extremely different, nor do bacteria even so much as try to blend in to look like their host cells (though they do put out a slimy coating to obscure their origins in the more general sense). So when the human immune system sees non-human cells somewhere they shouldn’t, like inside your anatomical tissues, it goes all-out WAR on those bitches, and just obliterates everything.
In contrast, cancer cells not only look like, but they actually are YOUR CELLS - they are YOU! With just one tiny little alteration, hardly worth noticing, in that they no longer pay attention to the signals to halt, cease & desist growing anymore. They do what they fucking want, when they want, how they want, and never mind that their actions will (not offer “a chance of”, but a 100% certainty guarantee) kill themselves, it will also kill the organism as well, essentially taking it down with it. So all that “foreign detection apparatus”, which can eliminate bacteria, mold, non-human eukaryotes like amoeba, nonliving particles like dust, also the in-between stuff like viruses, none of that helps, when fighting against cancer.
And that hasn’t even begun to get into HIV, where those immune processes are themselves subverted… when the police refuse to police the police, then how can the work of policing happen? (answer: it does not, and the body dies, far more often than not, unless some external intervention can prevent that outcome)
There is a reason why people say that the only party slightly less worse than Republicans are Democrats. Although that might have something to do with the whole “2-party” system…:-P - but it does convey that neither party aim to be correct, so much as to just win. Also, whatever happened to just being “Americans”? Like, regardless of what party put you into office, once you get there, don’t (or rather, shouldn’t) you belong to the citizenry at large and need to represent all of your people, even those who voted for your opponent(s)? So like a Senator would represent a single state’s interests, and a President or Supreme Court Justice would represent the entire nation’s at large, etc. Enshittification is not just a term for capitalistic corporations, but applies to society at large - i.e. whatever higher functions were once meant to happen, have now been subverted by more basic lower processes like greed and corruption and such.
Which makes sense - entropy doesn’t decrease for simply no reason (although that said, an open system does have quite a bit of wiggle room to play around in), and Maslov’s hierarchy of needs tends to revert to the lower, more basic ones when necessary, the higher ones only opening up when the lower ones are already met.
How all this relates to what you said: people are stupid, and more importantly short-sighted. When the people entrusted with something become no longer worthy of that trust… that is the most dangerous thing of all to the survival of an organism. On the other hand, what are we going to do about it - just sit back and watch it die? For my part, I promote video sources such as Innuendo Studios, Kurzgesagt, Crash Course, etc. that have acted to step up in the wake of the demise of trust in our “official” media, but ofc there is no magic bullet, no one-solution-fits-all that is going to solve the enormous scope of the problem (and if there were, it would likely be taken out by an aggressive competitor or malicious actor, so would not last for long). Meh, oh well, I’ve made my peace that I cannot hold out even the remotest hope that it can all be solved, yet I still do my part b/c that is all that I can, and therefore must, do.
Well, having lived in a country with actual Proportional Vote, I would say that the “just win” mindset is derived from the two party system you get in First Past The Post representative allocation systems like the US, probably with a pinch of the higher aggressiveness of baseline American culture.
That said, I don’t think the aggressive “just win” posture we see reflects them being different, quite the contrary: it’s Theatre for the masses because the two sides of the Power Duopoly are too similar, so lots of posturing with loud disagreements serves to both keep their own tribe (the people whose relation to politics is similar to their relation to sports: they have chosen a “team”) inspired and acting as unthinking supporters and keeping the rest of people thinking there is true competition when there really isn’t. This is why most of the fight is happening in the Moral field (stuff like LGBT rights) rather than anything to do with Power, Wealth and Quality Of Life - in the things that matter the most for those politicians both parties think the same, leaving only the things they don’t genuinelly care about as the field in which put one a very loud, very dramatic theatrical play about how difference they are.
By the way, I liked your idea of using “enshittification” for Society and Politics and I hope you don’t mind if I use it in my own posts.
Personally my own approach to help change things is to go around pointing the inconsitencies out to get at least some people thiking about it. I’m also a member of a small political party in the country I lived in and was also in one back when I lived in Britain (though there it’s a lot like the US and, frankly, at best things will need to get a lot worse before people are pissed of enough to change them).
I understand what you are saying, and in the past I would have agreed with you, except for two more recent alterations. Nothing is ofc all entirely one way or another, everything is on a continuum, and so even those alterations are based upon the backdrop of… yes, what you said: “political theater”.
First, looking not at the words that candidates say but rather at their actions following the election, politicians from the 70s, 80s, and 90s were as you describe. e.g. George W. Bush, despite running on the “conservative” ticket, was a progressive! And Hillary Rodham Clinton was the most pro-war, pro-big business Democrat that I have ever even so much as heard of. What you are saying used to be true, back in the day. Say whatever you need to in order to get elected, then go about the real business at hand, of getting shit done.
The first change though was the Tea Party (e.g. Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, there’s a whole list if you expand the right-hand show/hide boxes on that wikipedia page link). They got radicalized somehow, and replaced the old-guard who actually knew how to compromise, instead doing things like sending letters overseas to sabotage ongoing negotations (I am not a lawyer, but looking up the old-timey definition, the word “treason” literally includes exactly that scenario as part of its definition!), and ofc the imfamous “shutting down the entire government” trick, holding the budget hostage until and unless they get their way - not the “American” way, no not that, but their way specifically b/c that is all that matters to them. Obviously prior Republicans had done all that this new breed were also looking to do, but the difference seems to be in the degree of obstinancy, and the eagerness to immediately knaw off the USA’s own legs just in order to spite the head - like for them, it is not the absolute last, final choice, but rather their second choice every time. They have done more filibustering, more blocking, more obstructionism than any modern party in the history of anyone alive in the USA (I have heard), and fun fact: even the Congress that functioned during the Civil War managed to pass more bills than a Congress involved with the Tea Party (obviously due to a technicality, where the southern democrats left in a huff, leaving the northern republicans to pass whatever they wanted free of interference:-P). Thus began the major Power Creep trend of modern obstructionism & enshittification - yes please feel free to use as you like, b/c if the shoe fits…:-D
But even before that trend could either snuff itself out or be subsumed by more old-guard politicians who actually want the government to be functional, the Alt-Right started to rise to power. This new breed… seems less concerned with “getting their way”, and more about simply burning everything to the fucking ground. Donald Trump has moved beyond obstructionism, to the point where if he does not get his way, a literal (if horribly inept) coup attempt was tried, and it remains to be seen if he, or one of the other followers of that movement will start a literal, actual, physical Civil War. e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene has literally called for this - in a not-joking manner.
This is far past theater is what I am saying, yes in the past it was that, but now, at this point, we are well past that. America could literally fall as a democratic nation - and most experts (I have read) seem to agree that some kind of “constitutional crisis event” is imminent in the next 5-10 years. These people are far past playing around.
Kudos for being part of the solution where you are at. Similar to the UK, where I don’t know what could possibly reverse the effects of Brexit - that damage seems irreparable and permanent, it only remains to move forward from here on out and try to avoid further harm (in that case, not the end of a nation, but metrics are already revealing that it ushered in a sharp decline of its prominence?) - in the USA I don’t know what can be done to save it from its self-inflited injuries, given how many people seem hell-bent on ending it.
At a minimum though, it seems like it would have to begin with education, since currently the major differences seem to be about alternate sets of “facts” - e.g. does the COVID vaccine work, or does it rather harm you, making boys infertile, etc.? “Trust” in the media has been lost, in large part b/c literal pastors/priests/ministers have been promoting politics from behind their pulpits, thus mixing in the messages from religion to the point where it is becoming more of a “christian holy jihad” war than a logically-reasoned one where both sides are attempting to “get their way”. For that, pointing out inconsisties might help, but even then, people seem to already KNOW that they are wrong, and yet simply do not care.
Like if you look at Trump, there is simply no way to honestly call him “God’s man” (plus, if anyone who is placed in charge can be that, then why wasn’t Obama “God’s man” too?), but there seems to be a sense of “even though that’s not fully true, still supporting him is the right thing to do regardless”. A LOT of people seem to value “argument by authority” over what they see literally with their own eyes. And I get it: these matters - economics, geopolitics, treaties, climate change, pandemics - they can get quite complex, and many just want daddy to take care of them. Which in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc. they legit did do! B/c the interests of the wealthy happened to align with the interests of the nation overall - other countries were bombed by Germany and the USA was riding high, so its success meant their own personal success too, plus all the engineers & scientists were creating wonderful new gadgets that were fun & helpful too. However, with globalization and automation that alignment is no longer true, and they are instead taking whatever they can get, seemingly with an exit strategy in place to sit back and watch as climate change happens and the world simply burns.
It seems extremely short-sighted to me - especially if a nation such as the USA could bend its enormous might towards literally halting or even reversing the effects of climate change? But, such thinking is a remnant of past days, and now multi-national corporations such as Alphabet and Apple and Meta are more powerful than the US government itself, so it seems that they now see it as a competitor and are at least allowing, sometimes rooting, occasionally even participating in taking it down. e.g. FaceBook’s sources of “alternative facts” helping to shatter the, as you pointed out, already quite brittle remaining trust that people had in the news media.
This is all a lot, but I hope it has been an interesting read? :-D
Well, I think that church pastors replacing the Press as authoritative sources is not at all unexpected, though I don’t think that’s part of the cause of loss of trust in the Press, I think it’s in part a consequence and in part something that already happenned.
My home country - Portugal - was Fascist until 1974 and the Fascist Regime used the Church (which around here was 100% Catholic) through the perceive authority of priests, to tell people what to believe in matters that were social, economic and even political rather than religious, especially in the northern part of the country. This was especially easy because most people were either illiterate or close to it.
It’s funny that you mention the Tea Party: For some years now I’ve been convinced that we live in the time of the fall of Ideologies, in that the fully defined Ideologies from the early XX century that included visions for how the country should be, keen awareness of how Power works, their own specific folklore of visual elements and even specific language (say: the overuse of “proletariat”), and other such things, such as Fascism and Communist, were pretty much dead and buried in the West by the mid/late XX century and were replaced by the “laisser faire” of neoliberalism which doesn’t really has a vision for the future, is all about The Economy never about Power or People (even though it’s definitelly about Money being the one and only Power, though that’s not how it sells itself) and is sold to us very much as a hands off “que será, será” way of managing a nation.
What we’ve seen in the late XX century and onwards was the rise of Politics being done using Marketing - saying what people want to hear, moment by moment, using techniques from Marketing to determine what to say and measure impact (such as focus groups), changing what’s said if people change in what they want to hear (hence said politicians often being accused of flip-flopping), all of which to obtain powder and use it I ways that have nothing to do with what voters wanted. This is still how to this day the Democrat Party works and ditto the modern Labour Party in the UK (aka New Labour).
I think the Tea Party was a reboot of traditional ideology in the US and I actually think the Republicans are at the moment the only party with an actual ideology (not a good one, but one none the less).
Mind you this doesn’t mean it’s not still theatre for the politicians involved (maybe circus would be a better word), it’s just that their beast is as much theirs as it is the crowd’s and they’re forced to give the crowd what it wants, which started as something they’ve convinced the crowd they wanted but then the crowd took it, made it its own and changed it (look at the whole anti-vax movement for COVID which is pretty senseless and how things like anti-mask which is even more senseless came out of it).
I think Republican politicians are just as fake as Democrats, but they’re ridding a bull, not controlling a donkey with the promise of carrot and at times the use of a stick like the Democrats, so you get a lot more loud circus from the former and at times they are dragged into things far beyond what they wanted.
Last but not least there is a true market of ideas within the present day Republican party and the politicians competing for attention in that market are each doing it by trying to be more loud and outrageous that the rest. Meanwhile the Democrat party has used procedural tricks internally to make sure a handful of people control who gets the top positions, so there is no markt of ideas in there hence the party keeps being led by bland politcians who use techniques from Marketimg to control public oerception and voters.
And yeah, I think that, like in Britain, things will go too far and the US will end up doing something it cannot undo. Then again I think the US has been in a post-imperial decay path since the 80s, same as inevitably happenned to all nations that were once great powers.
I do not know much about those, as I do not have any special-purpose devices that can receive those signals. Do they not also follow the “if it bleeds, then it leads” mantra? e.g. did they report when Biden “betrayed” the railway workers by preventing them from striking at the busiest time of year (Christmas 2022), and if so did they also report when Biden spent MONTHS of effort after that to get those workers basically every single thing that they had asked for from their employers if they had been allowed to go ahead with their strike? B/c the for-profit media definitely did the former, though conveniently forgot all about the latter, despite how crucial such info as “how the current President is doing” and “whether the current President lives up to his promises” are to the upcoming election this year.
But even if the only fact that I knew about public radio and TV at all was that they require special devices to access them, they still seem to me to be handicapped, even if differently than the for-profit media sources.
Anyway, what percentage market share are public sources compared to private ones? To use the Fediverse as a readily-accessible example since anyone who reads this is definitely here (hehe, by definition:-P), how many news stories shared in some community such as [email protected] are from “public” sources? If all that needs to be done to save journalistic integrity would be to create a new Lemmy community, and put public journalism onto it, then I will definitely subscribe and be a big fan of it! Though I doubt it is anywhere close to being as easy as all that… :-(
Even my absolute favorites of all time - e.g. Jon Stewart - still does it. It is the nature of the game, which we hate rather than the playa. :-(
Though in his case, some of it he does b/c it is necessary, a lot is rather tongue-in-cheek, and anyway he seems to be aware and definitely tries to use his power as responsibly as he can. Also, it may be hate-boning to e.g. watch a politician say something like “never in my entire life have I held this position”, then 2s later watch a different video showing that same politician a few years before where they espouse precisely that position that they later claimed that they never had - like yeah, it produces a “reaction” in us, but like… shouldn’t it, to watch such a blatant and bold-faced lie?
The difference, imho, is that he doesn’t do such things purely for the sake of that reaction, and instead uses that reaction as the vehicle to convey his point, which is that that politician is a bad person, and should be replaced by someone who may perhaps be less bad. And, hate-engendering as it may be, it is also The Truth so… there’s that. Which stands in stark contrast to e.g. Alex Jones who also tries to engender hate, but not using Truth, and instead rather for the sake of personal profits.:-(
But… he’s old! And not perfect!!! So obviously, we should stay home and see how much better our lives will be under Trump when it’s his last (legal) term and literally what keeps him out of prison… Duh.
Okay, while I think the other person’s complaints are unreasonable and dishonest, I really need to answer this sincerely, because it’s genuinely important that people understand.
Ways that American democracy can be improved:
Eliminating lobbyists
Capping how much money can be spent on political campaigns
Capping individual donation sizes
Capping donation frequency
Implementing a cardinal or ordinal voting system (such as approval or single transferable vote)
Making voting more accessible
Removing the possibility of gerrymandering
Outlawing political parties
Making voting mandatory
Several other things who’s scope mean they probably don’t count (like better education, which would help citizens perform democracy better, but also clearly falls outside the scope of the list) or that I am otherwise forgetting.
Edit:formatting.
Edit2: I never intended to answer “who” because that question doesn’t have a single answer; the president can’t do those things, and it’s silly to expect them to.
Despite his age, Bernie Sanders is still the most qualified person to be president. He would get more done and made election reform a focus of his campaigns.
I love Sanders but he couldn’t do all of that. He also supports Ukraine but is willing to sacrifice Ukrainians and Ukraine territory in a squabble over money to support Ukraine. This weakens democracy and strengthens Putin’s resolve to continue plowing through Ukraine.
Not only did they not answer the question of “who”, they instead listed off a wish list of things no president is able to do unilaterally. Like, those are all good things, but blaming the current incumbent / candidate for not doing those is a completely ignorant take (if not intentionally moving the goalposts).
We need better civics lessons both in K-12 and maybe some kind of adult education classes.
The only unilateral goal in the meme was destroying “democracy” because Trump instigated January 6th. Everything else was a goal that required bipartisan support.
The problem isn’t that we don’t have solutions. The problem is that, collectively, we don’t have the will to implement them. It’s like effective Climate Change policy or Covid policies. At best, we’re getting half measures because people rather have their popcorn and circuses than saving their children. Biden doesn’t represent a solution, he represents a theater of a solution.
he’s the worst dipshit that could be running here, sucking up all the support for the smallest permissible ‘better’, when you have enough bipartisan issues to get support from both the left and sane-right if you ran anyone else. biden is not defending democracy; he’s dangling it over a cliff with Donald trump at the bottom.
Neirher West nor Stein would do anything different. In fact both of them want to give in to Putin and weaken democracy world wide. Who could do it better?
anyone. else. literally anyone on my block, including many of the pets.
and if ‘west’ and ‘stein’ wouldn’t do anything different than biden, they’re shit too. your whole argument is that the entire democratic party is worthless, that none of them have any virtue to counter trump, just the exact same calculated amount of vice less, the smallest amount so we can say they’re not quite the same, following them down the intellectual lacuna, using them as a wind break?
that seems like a party I’m literally never going to vote for.
Yeah I’m pretty close to seeing if I can block the whole instance, right now I’m all blocking certain communities. (I was banned from worldnews.ml for saying NATO was a defensive treaty lol.)
Anyone that says Biden isn’t doing anything is blind.
Or most likely not reading truthful news.
Tbf, society used to have “news”, and many people are slow to realize that while the media still call themselves by that name, they no longer live up to that truth. i.e., not everyone who is blind is purposefully ignoring the truth - there is a whole spectrum of people in the middle.
As the New York Times’ coverage of the Israeli Genocide has made obvious to even the blindest most tribalist of people, the “liberal” media was and is just as hard spouting propaganda as the far-right one.
Personally I think that the decay from Journalism into “Opinion Forming” in the traditional more liberal Press long predates the Fox-News Age and their destruction of the trust in the Traditional Press for temporary political gains of “their side” created the prime conditions for the rise of the made-up-outrage “Press” that so well fits the modus operandi of far-right populism and hence fed and was fed by made-up-outrage far-right populist politicians like Trump.
I mean… not equally though, unless you mean in the sense that both are incorrect. Liberal media in particular always tried to at least make their BS sound like it wasn’t nonsense, as opposed to e.g. MTG’s Jewish Space Laser rants. I appreciate the effort that goes into making a chart when I am lied to, rather than just some short pithy saying - it’s the effort that wins my heart! :-P (/s btw)
I have heard it said that the only true way to spot a counterfeit message is to know the real thing backwards and forwards so well that nobody can pull a fast one on you when they try to sell you short (or long). e.g. we know that 1+1=2, but if Democrats tell us it is =11 whereas old-school Republicans say that it is =-100000000000000000, newer ones say that it is the sqrt of stfu, and the most modern ones of all have already shot your mom and fucked your dog, and hold everything else you hold dear hostage until you tell them that you LIKED it… then who is to blame the most if you did not know the answer in the first place?
The answer, I believe, is that MOST of the blame goes to the people who did the WORST attrocity(-ies), but at least part of it falls onto us, for letting it happen.
Therefore I do not blame older liberal media, or at least not nearly so much as I do what followed that got significantly worse. Though yeah, I do put some of the blame onto it as well, ofc.
More important is what we do in response to it all?
It’s all about Trust.
People used to believe in the Press - it was what is called an Authoritative Source.
What the breaking of Trust in the Press - the greatest most influential of Autoritative Sources - did was create an environment were most people don’t believe in Authoritative Sources, hence were each individual - ignorant, untrained in analytical thinking, with neither the time, the access or the knowledge to trully dig down on a subject - is on his or her own to figure out what is true and is not.
This new environment didn’t just open the doors for the likes of Fox News, it openned the doors for Anti-Vaxing, Russian interference, countless Internet conspiracies and an Era were Politics is essentially professional scam artists managing scams - the damage is way vaster than merelly their some sleazy manipulative “news” pieces.
I absolutelly blame them for that: for the sake of momentary political gains for their team, newsmedia which for decades were trusted and respected broke the entire Trust Hierarchy and created the conditions for chaos and what looks more and more like Fascism.
The other side, that of assholes being assholes, is nothing compared to the betrayal by those you trusted.
Yup.
I have likened it to an immune system: fighting bacteria is way easier than fighting cancer. The ratio of sizes of Bacterial cells to Human cells is like a football to a football stadium, and their surfaces look extremely different, nor do bacteria even so much as try to blend in to look like their host cells (though they do put out a slimy coating to obscure their origins in the more general sense). So when the human immune system sees non-human cells somewhere they shouldn’t, like inside your anatomical tissues, it goes all-out WAR on those bitches, and just obliterates everything.
In contrast, cancer cells not only look like, but they actually are YOUR CELLS - they are YOU! With just one tiny little alteration, hardly worth noticing, in that they no longer pay attention to the signals to halt, cease & desist growing anymore. They do what they fucking want, when they want, how they want, and never mind that their actions will (not offer “a chance of”, but a 100% certainty guarantee) kill themselves, it will also kill the organism as well, essentially taking it down with it. So all that “foreign detection apparatus”, which can eliminate bacteria, mold, non-human eukaryotes like amoeba, nonliving particles like dust, also the in-between stuff like viruses, none of that helps, when fighting against cancer.
And that hasn’t even begun to get into HIV, where those immune processes are themselves subverted… when the police refuse to police the police, then how can the work of policing happen? (answer: it does not, and the body dies, far more often than not, unless some external intervention can prevent that outcome)
There is a reason why people say that the only party slightly less worse than Republicans are Democrats. Although that might have something to do with the whole “2-party” system…:-P - but it does convey that neither party aim to be correct, so much as to just win. Also, whatever happened to just being “Americans”? Like, regardless of what party put you into office, once you get there, don’t (or rather, shouldn’t) you belong to the citizenry at large and need to represent all of your people, even those who voted for your opponent(s)? So like a Senator would represent a single state’s interests, and a President or Supreme Court Justice would represent the entire nation’s at large, etc. Enshittification is not just a term for capitalistic corporations, but applies to society at large - i.e. whatever higher functions were once meant to happen, have now been subverted by more basic lower processes like greed and corruption and such.
Which makes sense - entropy doesn’t decrease for simply no reason (although that said, an open system does have quite a bit of wiggle room to play around in), and Maslov’s hierarchy of needs tends to revert to the lower, more basic ones when necessary, the higher ones only opening up when the lower ones are already met.
How all this relates to what you said: people are stupid, and more importantly short-sighted. When the people entrusted with something become no longer worthy of that trust… that is the most dangerous thing of all to the survival of an organism. On the other hand, what are we going to do about it - just sit back and watch it die? For my part, I promote video sources such as Innuendo Studios, Kurzgesagt, Crash Course, etc. that have acted to step up in the wake of the demise of trust in our “official” media, but ofc there is no magic bullet, no one-solution-fits-all that is going to solve the enormous scope of the problem (and if there were, it would likely be taken out by an aggressive competitor or malicious actor, so would not last for long). Meh, oh well, I’ve made my peace that I cannot hold out even the remotest hope that it can all be solved, yet I still do my part b/c that is all that I can, and therefore must, do.
Well, having lived in a country with actual Proportional Vote, I would say that the “just win” mindset is derived from the two party system you get in First Past The Post representative allocation systems like the US, probably with a pinch of the higher aggressiveness of baseline American culture.
That said, I don’t think the aggressive “just win” posture we see reflects them being different, quite the contrary: it’s Theatre for the masses because the two sides of the Power Duopoly are too similar, so lots of posturing with loud disagreements serves to both keep their own tribe (the people whose relation to politics is similar to their relation to sports: they have chosen a “team”) inspired and acting as unthinking supporters and keeping the rest of people thinking there is true competition when there really isn’t. This is why most of the fight is happening in the Moral field (stuff like LGBT rights) rather than anything to do with Power, Wealth and Quality Of Life - in the things that matter the most for those politicians both parties think the same, leaving only the things they don’t genuinelly care about as the field in which put one a very loud, very dramatic theatrical play about how difference they are.
By the way, I liked your idea of using “enshittification” for Society and Politics and I hope you don’t mind if I use it in my own posts.
Personally my own approach to help change things is to go around pointing the inconsitencies out to get at least some people thiking about it. I’m also a member of a small political party in the country I lived in and was also in one back when I lived in Britain (though there it’s a lot like the US and, frankly, at best things will need to get a lot worse before people are pissed of enough to change them).
I understand what you are saying, and in the past I would have agreed with you, except for two more recent alterations. Nothing is ofc all entirely one way or another, everything is on a continuum, and so even those alterations are based upon the backdrop of… yes, what you said: “political theater”.
First, looking not at the words that candidates say but rather at their actions following the election, politicians from the 70s, 80s, and 90s were as you describe. e.g. George W. Bush, despite running on the “conservative” ticket, was a progressive! And Hillary Rodham Clinton was the most pro-war, pro-big business Democrat that I have ever even so much as heard of. What you are saying used to be true, back in the day. Say whatever you need to in order to get elected, then go about the real business at hand, of getting shit done.
The first change though was the Tea Party (e.g. Ted Cruz, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, there’s a whole list if you expand the right-hand show/hide boxes on that wikipedia page link). They got radicalized somehow, and replaced the old-guard who actually knew how to compromise, instead doing things like sending letters overseas to sabotage ongoing negotations (I am not a lawyer, but looking up the old-timey definition, the word “treason” literally includes exactly that scenario as part of its definition!), and ofc the imfamous “shutting down the entire government” trick, holding the budget hostage until and unless they get their way - not the “American” way, no not that, but their way specifically b/c that is all that matters to them. Obviously prior Republicans had done all that this new breed were also looking to do, but the difference seems to be in the degree of obstinancy, and the eagerness to immediately knaw off the USA’s own legs just in order to spite the head - like for them, it is not the absolute last, final choice, but rather their second choice every time. They have done more filibustering, more blocking, more obstructionism than any modern party in the history of anyone alive in the USA (I have heard), and fun fact: even the Congress that functioned during the Civil War managed to pass more bills than a Congress involved with the Tea Party (obviously due to a technicality, where the southern democrats left in a huff, leaving the northern republicans to pass whatever they wanted free of interference:-P). Thus began the major Power Creep trend of modern obstructionism & enshittification - yes please feel free to use as you like, b/c if the shoe fits…:-D
But even before that trend could either snuff itself out or be subsumed by more old-guard politicians who actually want the government to be functional, the Alt-Right started to rise to power. This new breed… seems less concerned with “getting their way”, and more about simply burning everything to the fucking ground. Donald Trump has moved beyond obstructionism, to the point where if he does not get his way, a literal (if horribly inept) coup attempt was tried, and it remains to be seen if he, or one of the other followers of that movement will start a literal, actual, physical Civil War. e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene has literally called for this - in a not-joking manner.
This is far past theater is what I am saying, yes in the past it was that, but now, at this point, we are well past that. America could literally fall as a democratic nation - and most experts (I have read) seem to agree that some kind of “constitutional crisis event” is imminent in the next 5-10 years. These people are far past playing around.
Kudos for being part of the solution where you are at. Similar to the UK, where I don’t know what could possibly reverse the effects of Brexit - that damage seems irreparable and permanent, it only remains to move forward from here on out and try to avoid further harm (in that case, not the end of a nation, but metrics are already revealing that it ushered in a sharp decline of its prominence?) - in the USA I don’t know what can be done to save it from its self-inflited injuries, given how many people seem hell-bent on ending it.
At a minimum though, it seems like it would have to begin with education, since currently the major differences seem to be about alternate sets of “facts” - e.g. does the COVID vaccine work, or does it rather harm you, making boys infertile, etc.? “Trust” in the media has been lost, in large part b/c literal pastors/priests/ministers have been promoting politics from behind their pulpits, thus mixing in the messages from religion to the point where it is becoming more of a “christian holy jihad” war than a logically-reasoned one where both sides are attempting to “get their way”. For that, pointing out inconsisties might help, but even then, people seem to already KNOW that they are wrong, and yet simply do not care.
Like if you look at Trump, there is simply no way to honestly call him “God’s man” (plus, if anyone who is placed in charge can be that, then why wasn’t Obama “God’s man” too?), but there seems to be a sense of “even though that’s not fully true, still supporting him is the right thing to do regardless”. A LOT of people seem to value “argument by authority” over what they see literally with their own eyes. And I get it: these matters - economics, geopolitics, treaties, climate change, pandemics - they can get quite complex, and many just want daddy to take care of them. Which in the 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, etc. they legit did do! B/c the interests of the wealthy happened to align with the interests of the nation overall - other countries were bombed by Germany and the USA was riding high, so its success meant their own personal success too, plus all the engineers & scientists were creating wonderful new gadgets that were fun & helpful too. However, with globalization and automation that alignment is no longer true, and they are instead taking whatever they can get, seemingly with an exit strategy in place to sit back and watch as climate change happens and the world simply burns.
It seems extremely short-sighted to me - especially if a nation such as the USA could bend its enormous might towards literally halting or even reversing the effects of climate change? But, such thinking is a remnant of past days, and now multi-national corporations such as Alphabet and Apple and Meta are more powerful than the US government itself, so it seems that they now see it as a competitor and are at least allowing, sometimes rooting, occasionally even participating in taking it down. e.g. FaceBook’s sources of “alternative facts” helping to shatter the, as you pointed out, already quite brittle remaining trust that people had in the news media.
This is all a lot, but I hope it has been an interesting read? :-D
Well, I think that church pastors replacing the Press as authoritative sources is not at all unexpected, though I don’t think that’s part of the cause of loss of trust in the Press, I think it’s in part a consequence and in part something that already happenned.
My home country - Portugal - was Fascist until 1974 and the Fascist Regime used the Church (which around here was 100% Catholic) through the perceive authority of priests, to tell people what to believe in matters that were social, economic and even political rather than religious, especially in the northern part of the country. This was especially easy because most people were either illiterate or close to it.
It’s funny that you mention the Tea Party: For some years now I’ve been convinced that we live in the time of the fall of Ideologies, in that the fully defined Ideologies from the early XX century that included visions for how the country should be, keen awareness of how Power works, their own specific folklore of visual elements and even specific language (say: the overuse of “proletariat”), and other such things, such as Fascism and Communist, were pretty much dead and buried in the West by the mid/late XX century and were replaced by the “laisser faire” of neoliberalism which doesn’t really has a vision for the future, is all about The Economy never about Power or People (even though it’s definitelly about Money being the one and only Power, though that’s not how it sells itself) and is sold to us very much as a hands off “que será, será” way of managing a nation.
What we’ve seen in the late XX century and onwards was the rise of Politics being done using Marketing - saying what people want to hear, moment by moment, using techniques from Marketing to determine what to say and measure impact (such as focus groups), changing what’s said if people change in what they want to hear (hence said politicians often being accused of flip-flopping), all of which to obtain powder and use it I ways that have nothing to do with what voters wanted. This is still how to this day the Democrat Party works and ditto the modern Labour Party in the UK (aka New Labour).
I think the Tea Party was a reboot of traditional ideology in the US and I actually think the Republicans are at the moment the only party with an actual ideology (not a good one, but one none the less).
Mind you this doesn’t mean it’s not still theatre for the politicians involved (maybe circus would be a better word), it’s just that their beast is as much theirs as it is the crowd’s and they’re forced to give the crowd what it wants, which started as something they’ve convinced the crowd they wanted but then the crowd took it, made it its own and changed it (look at the whole anti-vax movement for COVID which is pretty senseless and how things like anti-mask which is even more senseless came out of it).
I think Republican politicians are just as fake as Democrats, but they’re ridding a bull, not controlling a donkey with the promise of carrot and at times the use of a stick like the Democrats, so you get a lot more loud circus from the former and at times they are dragged into things far beyond what they wanted.
Last but not least there is a true market of ideas within the present day Republican party and the politicians competing for attention in that market are each doing it by trying to be more loud and outrageous that the rest. Meanwhile the Democrat party has used procedural tricks internally to make sure a handful of people control who gets the top positions, so there is no markt of ideas in there hence the party keeps being led by bland politcians who use techniques from Marketimg to control public oerception and voters.
And yeah, I think that, like in Britain, things will go too far and the US will end up doing something it cannot undo. Then again I think the US has been in a post-imperial decay path since the 80s, same as inevitably happenned to all nations that were once great powers.
I mean, public radio and tv exists.
I do not know much about those, as I do not have any special-purpose devices that can receive those signals. Do they not also follow the “if it bleeds, then it leads” mantra? e.g. did they report when Biden “betrayed” the railway workers by preventing them from striking at the busiest time of year (Christmas 2022), and if so did they also report when Biden spent MONTHS of effort after that to get those workers basically every single thing that they had asked for from their employers if they had been allowed to go ahead with their strike? B/c the for-profit media definitely did the former, though conveniently forgot all about the latter, despite how crucial such info as “how the current President is doing” and “whether the current President lives up to his promises” are to the upcoming election this year.
But even if the only fact that I knew about public radio and TV at all was that they require special devices to access them, they still seem to me to be handicapped, even if differently than the for-profit media sources.
Anyway, what percentage market share are public sources compared to private ones? To use the Fediverse as a readily-accessible example since anyone who reads this is definitely here (hehe, by definition:-P), how many news stories shared in some community such as [email protected] are from “public” sources? If all that needs to be done to save journalistic integrity would be to create a new Lemmy community, and put public journalism onto it, then I will definitely subscribe and be a big fan of it! Though I doubt it is anywhere close to being as easy as all that… :-(
Still, your point was worth mentioning.
Radio and television aren’t really considered specialty devices.
What’s “radio”? Television is the old word for “app” right?
Now we have hate boner political infotainment. It’s disgusting.
We need a free press, but we need to figure out how to deal with those that take advantage of their status… In this case, all of them…
Even my absolute favorites of all time - e.g. Jon Stewart - still does it. It is the nature of the game, which we hate rather than the playa. :-(
Though in his case, some of it he does b/c it is necessary, a lot is rather tongue-in-cheek, and anyway he seems to be aware and definitely tries to use his power as responsibly as he can. Also, it may be hate-boning to e.g. watch a politician say something like “never in my entire life have I held this position”, then 2s later watch a different video showing that same politician a few years before where they espouse precisely that position that they later claimed that they never had - like yeah, it produces a “reaction” in us, but like… shouldn’t it, to watch such a blatant and bold-faced lie?
The difference, imho, is that he doesn’t do such things purely for the sake of that reaction, and instead uses that reaction as the vehicle to convey his point, which is that that politician is a bad person, and should be replaced by someone who may perhaps be less bad. And, hate-engendering as it may be, it is also The Truth so… there’s that. Which stands in stark contrast to e.g. Alex Jones who also tries to engender hate, but not using Truth, and instead rather for the sake of personal profits.:-(
He sure is sucking zionist dick really hard. Some would say too hard.
Hey guys I found this book written by god that says trump tower is mine. Think the us government will back me?
How much capital do you have?
Listen, give me the biggest loan you can manage. I’m good for it.
I would trust you with my life
Oops too big to fail now.
But… he’s old! And not perfect!!! So obviously, we should stay home and see how much better our lives will be under Trump when it’s his last (legal) term and literally what keeps him out of prison… Duh.
Look, I know the opposition is worse in quite literally every conceivable sense, but BOTH SIDES! Ha, take that, LIBS!
“saving democracy” tho; lol. if he wanted to do that, why the fuck is he running again?
edit: that feels more like ‘dangling democracy over a trumpian abyss to jack off his own geriatric ego’.
He’s certainly not destroying it.
Oh, yes, the only two options. Death or life support. No way to improve it.
How could someone improve democracy and who would it be?
Edit: weird that I would be down voted for asking who and how to improve democracy.
Okay, while I think the other person’s complaints are unreasonable and dishonest, I really need to answer this sincerely, because it’s genuinely important that people understand.
Ways that American democracy can be improved:
Eliminating lobbyists
Capping how much money can be spent on political campaigns
Capping individual donation sizes
Capping donation frequency
Implementing a cardinal or ordinal voting system (such as approval or single transferable vote)
Making voting more accessible
Removing the possibility of gerrymandering
Outlawing political parties
Making voting mandatory
Several other things who’s scope mean they probably don’t count (like better education, which would help citizens perform democracy better, but also clearly falls outside the scope of the list) or that I am otherwise forgetting.
Edit:formatting.
Edit2: I never intended to answer “who” because that question doesn’t have a single answer; the president can’t do those things, and it’s silly to expect them to.
Unfortunately, I don’t see how any president can do any of those. The best he can do is appoint competent justices and try to persuade Congress
So in this case, expand the Supreme Court? And at least mention these issues at all?
Correct; the president can’t do those things, hence why the other commentor’s complaints didn’t make sense. I was answering the question of how.
Then why is Biden being credited with SAVING DEMOCRACY?
You didn’t answer who. Who is so much better than Biden that they would be able to do all of this.
Despite his age, Bernie Sanders is still the most qualified person to be president. He would get more done and made election reform a focus of his campaigns.
I love Sanders but he couldn’t do all of that. He also supports Ukraine but is willing to sacrifice Ukrainians and Ukraine territory in a squabble over money to support Ukraine. This weakens democracy and strengthens Putin’s resolve to continue plowing through Ukraine.
Remember how I said the other commentor’s complaints didn’t make sense?
So are you saying there isn’t someone who could do all of that?
Not only did they not answer the question of “who”, they instead listed off a wish list of things no president is able to do unilaterally. Like, those are all good things, but blaming the current incumbent / candidate for not doing those is a completely ignorant take (if not intentionally moving the goalposts).
We need better civics lessons both in K-12 and maybe some kind of adult education classes.
Too many people’s expectations of our government are way too high. We can’t even feed hungry children in school, how are we going to outlaw lobbying?
The only unilateral goal in the meme was destroying “democracy” because Trump instigated January 6th. Everything else was a goal that required bipartisan support.
https://daily.jstor.org/lawrence-lessig-how-to-repair-our-democracy/
Great, a usual list of improvements but you didn’t answer who. Who will be so much better than Biden and would accomplish this?
Lawrence Lessig…
The problem isn’t that we don’t have solutions. The problem is that, collectively, we don’t have the will to implement them. It’s like effective Climate Change policy or Covid policies. At best, we’re getting half measures because people rather have their popcorn and circuses than saving their children. Biden doesn’t represent a solution, he represents a theater of a solution.
He isn’t running.
he’s keeping anyone else from saving it. anyone whose chances are more than ’questionable’.
How is he not saving it from Trump?
he’s the worst dipshit that could be running here, sucking up all the support for the smallest permissible ‘better’, when you have enough bipartisan issues to get support from both the left and sane-right if you ran anyone else. biden is not defending democracy; he’s dangling it over a cliff with Donald trump at the bottom.
Neirher West nor Stein would do anything different. In fact both of them want to give in to Putin and weaken democracy world wide. Who could do it better?
anyone. else. literally anyone on my block, including many of the pets.
and if ‘west’ and ‘stein’ wouldn’t do anything different than biden, they’re shit too. your whole argument is that the entire democratic party is worthless, that none of them have any virtue to counter trump, just the exact same calculated amount of vice less, the smallest amount so we can say they’re not quite the same, following them down the intellectual lacuna, using them as a wind break?
that seems like a party I’m literally never going to vote for.
Then who? Do you have any specific person in mind?
About as blind as Biden is to Palestine.
Right, he is totally supporting genocide of the Palestinian people.
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I notice the .ml communities are, how to say it, “I’m 14 and edgy”.
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Yeah I’m pretty close to seeing if I can block the whole instance, right now I’m all blocking certain communities. (I was banned from worldnews.ml for saying NATO was a defensive treaty lol.)
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