News

This comment should be highlighted.

As if the American electorate was ever really informed at large to begin with. I've been hopeful that we're seeing the start of a new age of enlightenment like the one that preceded the French revolution. But if the source of knowledge becomes detestable (enshitification of the internet) it may be slowed or stopped all together.

Nothing will meaningfully improve until the rich fear for their lives

Repealing the Fairness Doctrine was a very bad move.

I'm in this camp as well. I followed the news closely the entire Trump administration and through the Biden administration, and despite knowing everything this prick had done the American electorate either shrugged it all off or didn't follow any of it and reelected his ass.

Nothing positive came of me knowing about Trump's every bowel movement via crappy media posts. Many voters didn't even know Biden had dropped out of the race.

I don't think the "Trump is good for ratings" media outlets anticipated this reaction of ours, but the nightmare scenario of a second Trump term has already arrived and the media -- if they had any effect -- aided him in his return to power. I'm through with clicking on the bait and pretending that "democracy dies in darkness" and subscribing to the same newspapers that help push right-wing narratives in an effort to appear unbiased.

Edit: I am, however, subscribed to a number of things via RSS to stay informed without being part of their clickbait games. I cannot recommend enough people going back to RSS.

Yep, it's not enough to be realistic instead of pessimistic.

Like, people need to be aware the current system is just a ruse, but it also needs to come with a plausible way out so people don't just give up and disengage.

But if they do, you can't shout them into re-engaging. That just drives them away further.

You convince them that it might be different this time. Not even the guarantee, just a semi plausible chance that things could improve if they re-engage.

As you pointed out all this is widely studied in sociology, it's not some secret knowledge no one has. There's just no money in it, so sociologists can't influence the parties when both parties use donation amounts as the only metric when picking leadership.

There's a couple good picks for the DNC election on 2/2/25, but there's a very good chance the double down and vote based on who brought in the most donations. If they do that, we need to mobilize a third party asap for 2028.

Lemmy gets better once you filter out:

Trump says
Trump wants
Trump demands
Trump claims
Trump will
Trump threatens
Musk says
Musk wants
Musk demands
Musk claims
Musk will

...that way you don't have to see the media frantically reporting on every stupid word vomit as if no lessons were learned over the past 10 years. Ragebait headlines is part of the problem, and I will take no part in it.

That's true. They should consider limiting it.

Can confirm.

Source: I work in elder care.

"We" didn't do this. News outlets are not elected. Cable news was packaged and proselytized in the 80's and advertising revenue has never let it go away. Lazy political campaigns glommed onto a captive audience and continually underfunded grass roots organization for media buys. That became it's own industry and here we are.

However, at no point were any of these decisions made by the population at large. We didn't all get together and collectively decide, hey let's really fuck up our media diet and incentivize our most reactive take on an issue to further politicize the holidays and vaccines. This was done to us. It'll take a lot of work to undo, if it ever gets undone.

I didn't have any part in that, and I don't know anyone else that did either.

Yep, this country wasn't over when Trump got elected either time. He's a symptom of this country's death in its current form under the current constitution.

Reagan was the deathblow, this has just been leftover momentum, that appears to have finally waned. From Trickle down, to legalized bribery, to conversion of their former opposition party into neoliberal corporate bribe takers, to ending real news in favor of corpo serving propaganda like "climate change is a hoax to sell books, CONSUME" on and on.

Trump's authoritarian rise is just akin to vultures helping themselves to the corpse. This country has been little more than an oligarch exploitation piggy bank for half a century.

Yes it would be painful, but we'd need to tear it down and start over, as the core constitutional mechanisms for change have been circumvented through intential propaganda to sow division and protect the sociopathy of our economy from the citizens it hurts and murders for private profit. But we won't out of cowardice, so climate change will do what we're too social opiate addicted and fearful to do in a couple decades when it will hardly matter anymore.