Moderate and centrist liberals and Democrats offer watered-down solutions to serious problems. Why should anyone vote for them?
Here’s what a Pitch Meeting at a Millennial News and Culture Website and App Looks Like
Moderate and centrist liberals and Democrats offer watered-down solutions to serious problems. Why should anyone vote for them?
22 Comments. Leave new
«[W]atered-ddown» ?!! Ted, were I dihydrogen monoxide, I’d consider that comment actionable and take you to court. But then, since you’re already engaged in one court fight, I’ll let you off with a warning – don’t ever again besmirch the name of third-most abundant molecule in the universe by mentioning it in conjunction with the politics of those people !… 😉
Henri
How is the King of Franco-Svenska today?
Migrants burning shit in your homeless alley or do you claim Swiss neutrality because of the Latvian hookers and their Romany pimps?
That bit of pomposity of yours gave me the “dihydrogen monoxide” farts.
What do the English call people like you, twat, tosser, munter….
Oh well doesn’t matter why restate the obvious.
All drug addicts at one point have used dihydrogen monoxide.
Everyone who has ever died has used dihydrogen monoxide.
If you dunk a politicians head into dihydrogen monoxide long enough they will die.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yi3erdgVVTw
Notice how quickly a Trump presidency emerged following the collapse of traditional, long-form journalism?
The current crop of 18- to 30-year-olds are the people born from 1988 to 2000. (These are the first wave of teach-to-the-test students: they can color in ovals and recite back facts.) Although this cohort has some very sharp people in it, most of them are just as naive, vapid, stupid, selfish, self-destructive, and impulsive as was my cohort of 18- to 30-year-olds. The difference?
My Gen Xer negatives were held back by societal mechanisms. Newspapers, for instance, restricted publication of nonsense because of the high entrance-to-market costs. You couldn’t write articles about breakfast (unless you wrote for the food section or the dining section). You didn’t have photos on the front page of simpleton after simpleton making fishfaces while flashing the peace symbol. The newspaper, itself, was a device that helped to focus the attention span. It was actually somewhat relaxing to read the paper. (Now? Omigod, read about these six weird tricks concerning superfoods that the government doesn’t want you to know about. Number four is a true jaw-dropper!) Another societal corrective? Education still worked to a degree. The internet hadn’t arrived yet. You had to do your own research. You had to find it, read it, consider it, and then express it in your own words.
So, we went from a cultural mechanism in which “news” could be consumed in a manner that left you feeling like you had done something. Now, the news is a constant stream of “infotainment.” Go to the New York Times right now–I don’t care when it is–and scroll down the page. Just read the headlines. Don’t you get a vaguely disorienting sensation from a barrage of information that ranges from, say, Trump’s latest constitutional crisis to something going on at the Metropolitan Opera to a story about a little girl who built a stack of Legos 87 yards tall to a story about a new variety of peach to a story about a murder of four members of the same family in a two-day period?
We are all CONSTANTLY being distracted and the people who are doing the best in this new economic world are the ones who encourage this sort of constant distraction. Twitter. Sure, it’s just a fun little thing for posting thoughts. Except that study after study shows that it makes people feel that they are living unsatisfactory lives compared to others and that Twitter (and bestie Facebook) helped to completely derail any concept of an objective truth during the election. So now we have the huge block of Trump supporters who believe any conspiracy that comes along and what’s energized them? Being able to connect to so many other people who think the same way they do. (And now that Alex Jones has been banned permanently from Twitter? They’re just going to get worse. “They banned him because the polito-pedos in Washington ordered it. Why? Because he WAS telling the truth. Better buy more guns!!! Number of the beast. Pizzagate!” etc.
The young people this time around are not going to manage the things necessary. Why? Too many of them lack the necessary attention span. They have been collectively shifted toward a “multi-tasker” mindset, and they think they’re on top of all seven things they’re doing. And they aren’t. By the time they figure out exactly how they got screwed, it will be too late. I hope the exceptional edge of the bell curve of their group can take charge and fix the world, but they’ve got a lot of tweets, selfies, and instragramming to push back against.
“Notice how quickly a Trump presidency emerged following the collapse of traditional, long-form journalism?”
You are kidding right?
The Trump team actually targeted areas they could win the Electoral votes.
I think looking at a voting map most of the US area was Red not blue.
Now how the fuck does the idiocy of corporate journalism create the genius of public vote targeting the Trump campaign used?
Your sentence has to be one of the stupidest statements I have ever read.
EWG,
I think you are missing the point I was trying to make. Or I wasn’t clear enough about it.
The current generation (although it has some very smart people in it) consists of a substantial majority of people who have diminished attention spans and a severe overdose of self-importance. For many, school was little more than a years-long series of training exercises to fill out bubble forms. (Google “New Math” for the prior version of this.)
In the past, limitations in technology prevented such traits from causing active damage to those people who had longer attention spans and lower amounts of self-importance. Now, thanks to Twitter and Facebook, the culture is morphing toward a rat-hits-the-lever mindset. People have emerged who will click refresh over and over waiting for someone they’ve never even met to click “Like” about the plate of food they took a photo of at lunch. OMG FOMO BOGO YOLO. There’s plenty of research equating this behavior to the sort of behavior drug addicts exhibit.
And if that’s all that Facebook and Twitter and the rest of social media did, it would be fine. But now they’ve been “repurposed” as “news” sources. Trump tweets something and everyone goes apeshitnuts about it. The Russians, the Chinese, or someone in Freedonia runs a disinformation campaign and monkey-flips-the-switch OMG did you see this about the five weird tricks for losing stubborn belly fat that the government doesn’t want you to know about? It’s jaw-dropping.
We used to have a marketplace of ideas where a few voices spoke about issues. You could go from stall to stall and listen and think. Now, we’re all crammed into a space with millions of voices, most of which we don’t know and can’t verify. Rumors are elevated to fact, those who challenge the rumor are called simpletons and dismissed, the challenge to the rumor-fact is held up as “proof” of a deeply hidden conspiracy (that only JedTinFoilHat666 was able to uncover), and the few voices still trying to have a rational discussion are simply drowned out by the collective noise.
Right now, the National Hurricane Center has five weather markers on the map of the Atlantic: remnants of Gordon in the U.S. Midwest; a yellow X, indicating a low-probability disturbance, to the west of the Bahamas; Tropical Storm Florence, which is about to become a Major Hurricane; Tropical Depression Nine, which is west of the Azores; and Tropical Storm Helene, which is just off the coast of Africa. It looks like a connect-the-dot diagram. But why talk about the climate when we can devote so much time and energy to Donald Trump’s misspellings on Twitter?
alex_the_tired
Dumbing the Genpop down has always been part of the plan.
Read this toon
http://highexistence.com/amusing-ourselves-to-death-huxley-vs-orwell/
Allow me an example. We have tens, if not hundreds of thousands living in homeless third world conditions in the US. We have trained our children to accept this and through the use of social media and becoming phonetards they removed empathy.
We have trained the populace to be thin so we can not telll the difference between the poor and starving and the common citizen. Same with tans.
At one point rich people were chubby and the poor thin, rich people were pale and the poor tanned.
Way back when Garry Web, who died by TWO self-inflicted gunshot wounds to the head, stated in None dare call it conspiracy the plan was to lower the US standard of living while raising the rest of the worlds.
Sadly TPTB were too good at their job and their own children, the heirs, turned out just as stupid as the masses.
We deserve what we have and worse.
EWG,
Yes, you are correct that dumbing down the genpop has always been a popular sport. I even point out that my generation (X) had its own period of naive simplicity and stupidity. But a huge slice of the Millennials represent a whole new level of this stupidification (or a whole new reworking of it).
They expect praise just for showing up. They think anything they come up with sharp and sassy. They overpay for things such as rent and basic foodstuffs, not because they understand the values involved but because they simply don’t understand economics at anything beyond a “mom and dad send me a check” mentality. They are not “interested” in the dull jobs and instead embrace a combination of the “gig” economy and sponging off momma and poppa.
In my Gen X’s time, we all saw quite clearly that a “gig” wasn’t some wildly innovative path to economic or spiritual freedom; it was simply a way to slowly starve to death. You took a “gig” as a last resort and desperately tried to get out of that trap.
Now we’ve got mustache-clad idiots jumping into Ubers all the time while they chomp down on an $8 cupcake made with quinoa and kale, acting like this is a viable method of existing. The only people making money off Uber are the people in charge: the drivers (sorry, the driver-partners) are actually losing money in the long-term off the “deal.” But try to tell a Millennial to take a cab. I hope you’re in the mood for a condescending lecture from someone with little life experience and no ability to explain the concept of the tragedy of the commons.
In a lot of ways, this huge slice of the Millennials looks a lot like a huge slice of the Baby Boomers. I look forward to seeing what it’ll look like in five years, when the gig economy has so effectively destroyed any notion of worker empowerment that we’re all living in favelas and the surviving Baby Boomers are still sucking up every penny they can steal. Rotsaruck finding artisanal kale burritos then …
@alex:
“this huge slice of the Millennials looks a lot like a huge slice of the Baby Boomers.”
… which looks a lot like a huge slice of the Gen X’ers … who also have a tendency to give condescending lectures on subjects in which they have less life experience than their audience.
😉
alex_the_tired
What I always remember was Punk Rock turning into “Danceable rock and roll”.
TPTB was stealing the message, was Elvis Costello’s message greater than the Clash?
Rebellion got sidetracked into disco.
Fuckwits all.
CrazyH,
Okay. We can argue this for the rest of time and neither of us will convince the other that they are wrong. Fine. But I will point out one thing: We Gen Xers KNEW we were getting screwed. And what did we do? We ended up with housemates for years, living in crappy housing, living off mac and cheese and Ramen noodles and so forth. And we were angry. Mainly, we were angry because we knew the old system worked. Our parents’ generation had homes and cars. College tuition? That was paid for by waiting tables. (You can find that meme online.) And that degree was practically a Wonka Ticket into the upward-bound trajectory.
We didn’t go off and buy “organic” food. We didn’t quit jobs because we got “bored” with them. We didn’t show up and expect to be given an executive position in eight months. We had attitude, and we had arrogance, but we also tempered it with a realization that we did not, in fact, have all the answers.
I see no similar majority trend from the Millennials. Some of them get it, sure. But, like I said earlier, let us see what happens in five years, when all jobs are “gig” based and no one can afford to live anywhere near where the jobs are because a 19th floor walk-up studio is $4,000 and has a clause in the agreement that forbids subletting, roommates or even pets.
Hey Alex – the thing is, I heard your exact, same, rant from many Boomers trying to hire Gen X’rs. “They don’t understand why they have to start at the bottom of the ladder” “They expect their jobs to entertain them” “They don’t understand why they have to be here at nine am” “they don’t respect the experience of their elders” etc, etc, yada, yada, ad nauseam.
The difference between me & thee is I’ve had a chance to watch the X’ers grow up to the point where they’re now complaining about the NEXT generation.
If Trump doesn’t destroy the planet, you’ll have that same opportunity with the Millenials. They’ll most likely make the same complaints about M+1 – let me know whether you find that as amusing as I do when the X’ers do so …
ahhh, newspapers. Luckily, the nearest big city still has a pretty fair paper, and I still read it every morning. It’s gotten slimmer over the years, unfortunately.
Biases and agendas have always been part of reporting. When there were only three TV stations they tended to keep each other somewhat honest. We lost that in the proliferation of cable & internet news. Hell, the news sites will let you create your very own bubble (“feed” … “subscription” …)
Even in the Good Ol Daze of real journalism, they still repeated presidential lies and ignored Isreal’s abuses against Palestinians. They’d suppress news detrimental to their advertisers … but twas still better’n what we have today.
“Even in the Good Ol Daze of real journalism”?
When was that?
Google up CIA and Journalism. Fuck even before that the US robber barons controlled the media.
Before that every government, king/queen/ruling body controlled popular opinion.
The only times they didn’t there were revolutions.
And those revolutions quickly removed ANYONE who questioned their agenda.
Ban people be that naive to think at one point there was truth, justice, and freedom?
The masses are stupid fucks who get everything they deserve.
The really smart ones either play the system on both the poverty and wealth ends or totally drop out. Like that guy who lives in a Nevada cave.
EVERYONE LIES ALL THE TIME.
EVERYONE WANTS TO SELL YOU THEIR NARRATIVE.
Fuck this shit, start listening to Woody Guthrie or the Blues. Then move onto Phil Ochs Love me I’m a Liberal, John Lennon’s Working Class Hero ( Wonder why Woman is the Nigger of the World doesn’t get any airplay these days), and Dylans It’s Alright Ma.
Maybe throw in the Doors Soft Parade.
Unless of course, you choose Socrates defense of government.
Then all is good.
@EvilDumCluck
> “Even in the Good Ol Daze of real journalism”?
When was that?
Well, judging from the context* that would be a time when newspapers were thicker, TV stations were fewer, and cable & internet news sites had not yet proliferated.
The astute student will note that the capitalization and punishment in the quoted passage implies a certain tongue-in-cheek quality to said context*
Nice play list, though. I’d add Jimi and Janis and Jerry; Muddy and Buddy and Billie and BB; Aretha and … uh … Alberta? Not that play lists have anything to do with the original context* but I do like my music.
——–
*context: “the post to which you replied”
CrazyH
“Nice play list, though”
Fuck me you missed the point. That was response was like comparing Strange fruit to Don’t worry be happy.
Load up those songs, toss in Johnny Guitar Watson’s Ain’t that a Bitch, Guthrie’s 1913 Massacre and play them in a row straight through.
There is a thematic message which punches you in the nuts.
It;s the very structure of social destruction defined. The Hypocrisy and mechanisms laid plain and in your face.
@EvilDumCluck
> Fuck me ….
Well, at least that’s something we can agree on
> … you missed the point.
Why, yes – we can agree on that as well. I totally missed the point of your incoherent rant. (Assuming it had one)
No, no, don’t bother to “explain” – I’ll just sit here in blissful ignorance.
I agree millennial-targeted media are awful, but can we really blame Trump on them? The people who laid down and let Trump walk over them weren’t millennials by a long shot.
Trump is the Id of America. The old superego, the ruling class, the bourgeoisie, are no longer taking care of business. They’ve been supplanted by wreckers, thieves, and fools. This has been true for some time, but it takes something as big as the USA a long time to fall down.
Those who don’t want to think get led by the nose, usually to a not very nice place.
You are a joke making that statement. For those of us actually paying attention to the election TPTB on BOTH sides hated Trump and spent a LOT of money to NOT have him elected.
The average joe was so pissed at decades, centuries, of shitty politicians they voted for Trump.
The same is true about TPTB on both sides attempting every type of dirty trick and liet to remove him from office.
Maybe you fucking missed this;
Speaking to Democracy Now, Mr Chomsky added: “Israeli intervention in US elections vastly overwhelms anything the Russians may have done, I mean, even to the point where the prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, goes directly to Congress, without even informing the president, and speaks to Congress, with overwhelming applause, to try to undermine the president’s policies – what happened with Obama and Netanyahu in 2015.”
In March 2015, at the invitation of then Republican House Speaker John Boehner, and assisted by Israel’s Ambassador to the US, Ron Dermer, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed the joint houses of Congress about the yet to be signed Iran nuclear deal. He did so without formally informing the White House, something said to have infuriated Barack Obama, whose administration would the following month join a seven-party agreement to limit Iran’s alleged nuclear weapons ambitions.
Or Glenn Greenwald;
Reacting to the op-ed, Greenwald tweeted that it focused largely on decrying President Trump’s deviation from establishment Republican orthodoxy, pointing out that it’s an “ideology he didn’t campaign on & that voters didn’t ratify.”
“We want the administration to succeed and think that many of its policies have already made America safer and more prosperous,” the unnamed official writes, yet “the president continues to act in a manner that is detrimental to the health of our republic.”
“Although he was elected as a Republican, the president shows little affinity for ideals long espoused by conservatives: free minds, free markets and free people. At best, he has invoked these ideals in scripted settings. At worst, he has attacked them outright,” the author of the piece continued.
The Rio de Janeiro-based journalist then eviscerated the official’s hypocritical characterization of the president as “anti-democratic,” while operating clandestinely within the White House as a member of an “unelected cabal” that “imposes their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency.”
The irony in the op-ed from the NYT’s anonymous WH coward is glaring and massive: s/he accuses Trump of being “anti-democratic” while boasting of membership in an unelected cabal that covertly imposes their own ideology with zero democratic accountability, mandate or transparency
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) September 5, 2018
Riddle me this fuckwits: Michael Moore and Bill Maher got on their knees to BEG Ralph Nader NOT to run against Kerry. Thus attempting to subvert Democracy and deny me my vote.
Michael Moore ignored the DNC Wikileaks e-mails proving an effort to stop Bernie.
Michael Moore is currently fucking over his exwife on alimony, close enough for their complex monetary arrangement.
Michael Moore’s current anti-Trump film is funded by Weinstein.
Why the fuck would anyone idolize Moore?
He is worse than any of those agony auntie SJW’s in this toon.
Plus he is VERY wealthy with some very lovely non-working class homes.
Just like Bernie.
Pound came to believe that the cause of World War I was finance capitalism, which he called “usury”, that the solution lay in C. H. Douglas’s idea of social credit, and that fascism was the vehicle for reform. He had met Douglas in the New Age offices and had been impressed by his ideas.[105] He gave a series of lectures on economics, and made contact with politicians in the United States to discuss education, interstate commerce and international affairs. Although Hemingway advised against it, on 30 January 1933 Pound met Benito Mussolini. Olga Rudge played for Mussolini and told him about Pound, who had earlier sent him a copy of Cantos XXX. During the meeting Pound tried to present Mussolini with a digest of his economic ideas, but Mussolini brushed them aside, though he called the Cantos “divertente” (entertaining). The meeting was recorded in Canto XLI: “‘Ma questo’ / said the boss, ‘è divertente.'” Pound said he had “never met anyone who seemed to get my ideas so quickly as the boss”
…
Tytell writes that, by the 1940s, no American or English poet had been so active politically since William Blake. Pound wrote over a thousand letters a year during the 1930s and presented his ideas in hundreds of articles, as well as in The Cantos. His greatest fear was an economic structure dependent on the armaments industry, where the profit motive would govern war and peace. He read George Santayana and The Law of Civilization and Decay by Brooks Adams, finding confirmation of the danger of the capitalist and usurer becoming dominant. He wrote in The Japan Times that “Democracy is now currently defined in Europe as a ‘country run by Jews,'” and told Sir Oswald Mosley’s newspaper that the English were a slave race governed since Waterloo by the Rothschilds.[109]
Pound broadcast over Rome Radio, although the Italian government was at first reluctant, concerned that he might be a double agent. He told a friend: “It took me, I think it was, two years, insistence and wrangling etc., to get hold of their microphone.”[111] He recorded over a hundred broadcasts criticizing the United States, Roosevelt, Roosevelt’s family and the Jews, his poetry, economics and Chinese philosophy. The first was in January 1935, and by February 1940 he was broadcasting regularly; he traveled to Rome one week a month to pre-record the 10-minute broadcasts, for which he was paid around $17, and they were broadcast every three days. The broadcasts required the Italian government’s approval, although he often changed the text in the studio. Tytell wrote that Pound’s voice had assumed a “rasping, buzzing quality like the sound of a hornet stuck in a jar”, that throughout the “disordered rhetoric of the talks he sustained the notes of chaos, hysteria, and exacerbated outrage”. The politics apart, Pound needed the money; his father’s pension payments had stopped—his father died in February 1942 in Rapallo—and Pound had his mother and Dorothy to look after.[112]
The broadcasts were monitored by the United States Foreign Broadcast Monitoring Service listening station at Princeton University, and in July 1943 Pound was indicted in absentia for treason. He answered the charge by writing a letter to Attorney General Francis Biddle, which Tytell describes as “long, reasoned, and temperate”, defending his right to free speech.[113] He continued to broadcast and write under pseudonyms until April 1945, shortly before his arrest.[114
Ted, could you try to see to it that that «go a whole month without using my cellphone» proposal gains wider currency ? Best solution to the current crisis I’ve yet heard !…
Henri