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SURRENDER TO THE DIVINITY OF DONNIE! AND AMERICA! MAY SURVIVE THE CRIMES OF OBAMA'S WIFE
It seems to me that in America today, one extreme wants to tear down the system for a socialist paradise and the other extreme longs for an America that never was. Neither will happen. Socialism doesn't realize that wealth is created by the hard work of individuals and the collective would rather bring everyone down to the mean rather than incentivise the exceptional. And the mean gets lower. Capitalism doesn't realize that survival of the fittest will mean that many will suffer and die.
MOST of us cluster around the middle. The Agenda of most Americans is to live peacefully and thrive.
It's the media and the powers that be that are separating us into two camps. It's the media and the powers that be that are making this separation more and more violent. They don't want to "reduce political polarization" they want to perpetuate it while furthering their, not our, agenda.
Agreed 99%.
Withholding 1% in case i misread something
Onvacation saysIt seems to me that in America today, one extreme wants to tear down the system for a socialist paradise and the other extreme longs for an America that never was. Neither will happen. Socialism doesn't realize that wealth is created by the hard work of individuals and the collective would rather bring everyone down to the mean rather than incentivise the exceptional. And the mean gets lower. Capitalism doesn't realize that survival of the fittest will mean that many will suffer and die.
MOST of us cluster around the middle. The Agenda of most Americans is to live peacefully and thrive.
It's the media and the powers that be that are separating us into two camps. It's the media and the powers that be that are making this separation more and more violent. They don't want to "reduce political polarization" they want to perpetuate it while furthering their,...
Yeah but 99% of the extremism is coming from the left these days. You have to look really hard to find a few right-wing-extremists or in this country. Most have moved to the center and occupied the place of the original liberal bourgeoisie, which effectively are todays conservatives, while the left has a renaissance in whacking off to Marx.
The important questions:
1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?
The important questions:
1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?
Patrick saysThe important questions:
1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?
1. Propaganda pushed by the mainstream media. Essentially Democrats running major news organizations starting with the Clinton News Network and George Clintonopolous running ABC’s nightly broadcast.
2. Tar and feather “journalists.”
"Kansas Should Go F--- Itself", review of a new book by Thomas Frank called The People, No
Author Thomas Frank predicted the modern culture war, and he was right about Donald Trump, but don’t expect political leaders to pay attention to his new book about populism...
Frank published What’s the Matter with Kansas? in 2004, at the height of the George W. Bush presidency. The Iraq War was already looking like a disaster, but the Democratic Party was helpless to take advantage, a fact the opinion-shaping class on the coasts found puzzling. Blue-staters felt sure they’d conquered the electoral failure problem in the nineties, when a combination of Bill Clinton’s Arkansas twang, policy pandering (a middle-class tax cut!) and a heavy dose of unsubtle race politics (e.g. ending welfare “as we know it”) appeared to cut the heart out of the Republican “Southern strategy.” ...
Every gathering of self-described liberals back then devolved into the same sad-faced anthropological speculation about Republicans: “Why do they vote against their own interests?” ...
Frank explained the Republican voter had thrown support to the Republicans’ pro-corporate economic message in exchange for solidarity on cultural issues, as part of what he called the “Great Backlash”:
While earlier forms of conservatism emphasized fiscal sobriety, the backlash mobilizes voters with explosive social issues—summoning public outrage over everything from busing to un-Christian art—which it then marries to pro-business economic policies. ...
for the chattering classes, this thesis was enough. What they heard was that the electorally self-harming white Republican voter from poor regions like the High Plains was motivated not by reason, but by racial animus and Christian superstition.
For a certain kind of blue-state media consumer, and especially for Democratic Party politicians, this was a huge relief...
The Kansas title alone spoke to one of Frank’s central observations: while red state voters might frame objections in terms of issues like abortion or busing, in a broader sense the Republican voter is recoiling from urban liberal condescension.
That Democrats needed Thomas Frank to tell them what conservatives fifteen miles outside the cities were thinking was damning in itself. Even worse was the basically unbroken string of insults emanating from pop culture (including from magazines like Rolling Stone: I was very guilty of this) describing life between the cities as a prole horror peopled by obese, Bible-thumping dolts who couldn’t navigate a Thai menu and polished gun lockers instead of reading.
Republicans may have controlled government at the time, but when they turned on TV sets or looked up at movie screens, their voters felt accused of something just for living in little towns, raising kids, and visiting church on Sundays. What’s the matter, they were asking, with that? ...
Frank ripped the political strategy of Clinton Democrats, who removed economic issues from their platform as they commenced accepting gobs of Wall Street money in a post-Mondale effort to compete with Republicans on fundraising. Gambling that working-class voters would keep voting blue because “Democrats will always be marginally better on economic issues,” New Democrats stopped targeting blue-collar voters and switched rhetorical emphasis to “affluent, white collar professionals who are liberal on social issues.”
...as Frank put it, “What politician in this success-loving country really wants to be the voice of poor people?”...
Republicans, meanwhile, were industriously fabricating their own class-based language of the right, and while they made their populist appeal to blue-collar voters, Democrats were giving those same voters—their traditional base—the big brush-off…
Working-class voices disappeared from the press and earnest movies like Norma Rae and The China Syndrome gave way to a new brand of upper-class messaging that reveled in imperious sneering and weird culture-war provocations...
In an America where the chief sources of one’s ideas about life’s possibilities are TV and the movies, it’s not hard to be convinced that we inhabit a liberal-dominated world: feminist cartoons for ten-year-olds are followed by commercials for nonconformist deodorants; entire families of movies are organized around some transcendent dick joke…
In Frank’s home state of Kansas, voters reacted by moving right as the triumvirate of news media, pop culture, and Democratic politics spoke to them less and less. “The state,” he wrote, “watches impotently as its culture, beamed in from the coasts, becomes coarser and more offensive by the year.”
Perceiving correctly that there would be no natural brake on this phenomenon, since the executive set was able to pay itself more and more as the country grew more divided, Frank wondered, “Why shouldn’t our culture just get worse and worse, if making it worse will only cause the people who worsen it to grow wealthier and wealthier?”
We have the answer to that now, don’t we?
(Trump's) stump act seemed tailored to take advantage of the gigantic market opportunity Democrats had created, and which Frank described. ...
workers’ share of GDP hit the lowest levels in American history in 2011 and stayed there, as inequities stemming from the Obama “recovery” became a “quasi-permanent development.” ...
Also: the word, “populism,” became a synonym for plague or menace. Post-Trump and post-Brexit, pundits tended to use the term in tandem with other epithets, e.g. the “populist threat.” For Frank, a liberal intellectual whose breathless admiration for the actual Populist movement of the 1890s had been a running theme across two decades, this must have stung. ...
F.D.R. himself was a genteel aristocrat, but battered as a Russian agent – one Chicago Tribune cartoon showed his hands covered with the “red jam of Moscow” – and his followers were described as a mob of “sentimentalists and demagogues” who wanted to “take away from the thrifty what the thrifty or their ancestors have accumulated.” His followers were “people of low mentality”
Now anti-populism was taken up by a new elite, a liberal elite that was led by a handful of thinkers at prestigious universities … In short, the highly educated learned to deplore working-class movements for their bigotry, their refusal of modernity, and their borderline madness. ...
the message of anti-populism is the same as ever: the lower orders, it insists, are driven by irrationality, bigotry, authoritarianism, and hate; democracy is a problem because it gives such people a voice. The difference today is that enlightened liberals are the ones mouthing this age-old anti-populist catechism. ...
The average blue-state media consumer by 2020 has ingested so much propaganda about Trump (and Sanders, for that matter) that he or she will be almost immune to the damning narratives in this book. Protesting, “But Trump is a racist,” they won’t see the real point – that these furious propaganda campaigns that have been repeated almost word for word dating back to the 1890s are aimed at voters, not politicians. ...
After 2016 it became axiomatic that the Trump voter, or the Leave voter, was – without exception now – a crazed, racist monster.
New York Times instructing white liberals to cut off their relatives (by text, incidentally) until they donate to Black Lives Matter, or a CNN tweet instructing “individuals with a cervix” to start getting cancer screens at age 25, or to widespread denunciations of Mount Rushmore as a “monument of two slaveholders” when visited by Trump, after those same outlets praised its “majesty” just four years earlier.
These stories are as incomprehensible to Middle America as the pictures of MAGA fanatics going maskless and dying of Covid-19 to own the libs are to blue-state audiences. Yet both groups are bombarded with images of their opposite extremes, with predictable results: we all hate each other.
randomized news link aggregator that doesn't show the media outlet reporting until you click in. I think that's half the battle. A leftist won't read a FOX or Brietbart article if they know the outlet. Same with many conservatives and CNN and other liberal network. If you could somehow strip the graphics and branding, that would be even better. People are only going to sources they believe to be true. And then don't even question those sources anymore. Media has failed and is ultimately the biggest enemy of the day, and by a long shot.
Maybe there should be a site which never shows the source. But then, even "randomized" articles would overwhelmingly favor Democratic points of view, because they are the large majority of sites and reporters. Alternatives tend to come from small sites.
Patrick saysMaybe there should be a site which never shows the source. But then, even "randomized" articles would overwhelmingly favor Democratic points of view, because they are the large majority of sites and reporters. Alternatives tend to come from small sites.
You're likely correct with it being left leaning as a random aggregator. Could be a community page that people input a site they like and it becomes part of the "news crawl" or whatever you'd call it. I'm fine reading plain text as well. Flashy sites are that way for a reason, to distract from the actual content.
I just want information. Like during the impeachment, the segments I did watch were on C-SPAN. Not CNN or FOX. During breaks it's all partisan bull shit on either network. I just want to hear the information and come to my own conclusion. That's why I'm going to try and dig more into people links and data ...
If they would run out of UE benefits quickly they may change their minds faster, although I have seen more lefties than I thought coming around and joining in into the Newsom and Breed recall efforts.
mell saysIf they would run out of UE benefits quickly they may change their minds faster, although I have seen more lefties than I thought coming around and joining in into the Newsom and Breed recall efforts.
As much as they want to politicize a virus, they cannot continue unabated another 3 months. It's impossible. No one gives a flip about it except a tiny fraction of a minority saying it's deadly and put your mask on. What they've failed to realize is that deaths are down and most people are wearing masks in appropriate situations. You've got what you wanted. Now what? It can't be economy. We're not at war with anyone. Considering this HUGE GLOBAL pandemic, we're in decent shape.
A vocal minority doesn't like ONE person. That's really what this is all about. Really sad to let one person influence your life so much that people want recession and death to "try" and make one pers...
The important questions:
1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?
Yup. Remember Bush Derangement Syndrome?
The important questions:
1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?
Patrick saysThe important questions:
1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?
It all started with the GWB election. The first four years of Bush's term was met with a media hissyfit as well.
“Elected on a promise to slash taxes and crack down on freeloading ‘welfare queens,’ Reagan depicted government as wasteful and minimized its capacity to help people, ideas that survive today. Reagan also dealt a blow to organized labor by firing the striking air traffic controllers, and appointed Antonin Scalia, still the Supreme Court’s most conservative jurist.”
...
“Reagan’s weakening of the social safety net by dismantling longtime Democratic ‘Great Society’ programs arguably vexes his critics the most. By persuading Congress to approve sweeping tax cuts for the wealthy while slashing welfare benefits and other social services like the federal housing assistance program, Reagan was blamed for a huge surge in the nation’s poor and homeless population.”
— Beth Fouhy in an AP story headlined: “Many Still Troubled by Reagan’s Legacy,” June 9, 2004.
In both 1996 and 1992, the public said Bill Clinton was the media favorite (59% for Clinton, 17% for Dole in 1996) and (52% Clinton, 17% George H.W. Bush in 1992). In an online Harris Interactive survey from October that posed the question differently, 36% said the media favored both candidates equally, but almost four times as many said the media favored Obama over McCain (34% to 9%).
It was riveting. In his first solo press conference, President Donald Trump spent much of the hour berating the media for what Trump called anti-Republican bias and its relentlessly negative “tone.”
It’s about time. The liberal media has long been sticking it to Republicans.
In October 1992, during the presidential race between President George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, Investor’s Business Daily found that over 90 percent of the economic news in newspapers was negative. At the time, the economy was well into a recovery, on its 19th consecutive month of growth. Yet much of the business news was sour.
The next month, November 1992, Bill Clinton won. Investor’s Business Daily found that suddenly only 14 percent of the newspapers’ economic news was negative, a dramatic decline in negativity and upswing in positive economic news.
Patrick saysThe important questions:
1. How did the division get so deep?
2. What can be done to bring people back into closer agreement?
It all started with the GWB election. The first four years of Bush's term was met with a media hissyfit as well.
Are either of those goals even possible?
What is political polarization? DuckDuckGo gives the definition:
It seems to me that in America today, one extreme wants to tear down the system for a socialist paradise and the other extreme longs for an America that never was. Neither will happen. Socialism doesn't realize that wealth is created by the hard work of individuals and the collective would rather bring everyone down to the mean rather than incentivise the exceptional. And the mean gets lower. Capitalism doesn't realize that survival of the fittest will mean that many will suffer and die.
MOST of us cluster around the middle. The Agenda of most Americans is to live peacefully and thrive.
It's the media and the powers that be that are separating us into two camps. It's the media and the powers that be that are making this separation more and more violent. They don't want to "reduce political polarization" they want to perpetuate it while furthering their, not our, agenda.
Remember what we are not talking about.