• 6 Nov 2024, 9:40 p.m.

    and so it begins

    An amazing amount of white women possibly up to 48% voted for him. Glad to see it is going to work out well for them...

    Chicago: Not surprised.

  • 6 Nov 2024, 9:47 p.m.

    After a night riddled with anxiety and not feeling well at all when I woke up, I decided to take the day off. Which sort of worked out as my daughter was ill at school and I had to pick her up.
    I’ve decided to fuck social media off for the foreseeable (I have barely any Facebook presence other than a work related group) and bailed on Twitter almost entirely after Phony Stark began destroying it.
    I’m going to be as positive and affirming as possible for my kids (my own kids and my students) in an effort to make the world marginally less of a shit show.
    And people really need to stop beating those lower down (financially and educationally) as being his core followers. There are plenty of the rich, successful and educated willing to hold their nose if it means it stays in the trough.

  • 6 Nov 2024, 10:40 p.m.

    I understand your point...but there's a difference. Those keeping their nose in the trough have been doing so from a position of privilege for centuries......pretty much ever since religion died as an effective control mechanism, and pretend democracy threatened empowering the lower classes.

    That constituency absolutely knows that they have to do extreme things to keep the masses confused and directed against each other. Once they turn their ire on the mega rich, the mega rich are fucked. There aren't enough to fight their corner. So that power and wealth devotes much of it's power and wealth, to pass on it's power and wealth. The constituency amongst the haves, even if not the project driving haves, still have much to lose, and don't have the numbers.

    In the modern world, with access to instantaneous worldwide communication, it has become almost impossible to maintain control through division. With social media they have found their way (and we are decades in to an U.S. intelligence community collaboration with tech companies...that tech bro's are at the heart of the conspiracy is not some uncoordinated accident). This is actually documented by researchers in the field (online data mining and use, and the collaboration between the intelligence community and the tech companies), by the way. Not imagined.

    Anyway, you have a series of overlapping control methods, often in conspiracy, to perpetuate an unfair and control of otherwise dangerous (to existing privilege and wealth) populations. Church, Aristocracy, Fuedelism, Media (fascists own most publishing, and have long been desperate to kill the public service broadcasting). The modern communications age presented a problem. People could find out the truth quickly if they organised. Luckily it also provided opportunity. The techniques developed destabilising various regions of the world, could now be deployed on a widespread global basis almost instantaneously without any leg work. Computing allows automated algorithmic spreading of propaganda. This divisive trope doesn't appeal to you? We can soon push you another one until we find your hot buttons.

    It still requires a degree of stupidity for ordinary people to focus their gaze only down the rabbit holes. Although an understandable level given the effort put into it.

  • 7 Nov 2024, 1:59 a.m.

    Seriously? Which particular policies that you have understood and done some reading around do you think are a problem and indicative of a party that wants to trans the kids?

  • 7 Nov 2024, 5:02 a.m.

    I've no idea on the actual policies etc. But that's the point isn't it? Hardly anyone does, but if people think though false reporting, social media stuff etc that is the policy then fiction overcomes fact.

  • 7 Nov 2024, 5:47 a.m.

    The point, imho, is that "we" at least are supposed to be able to tell the difference, so yes it matters.
    Full term abortions, mandatory kids transing, white erasure, migrant crime... it's all bs.

  • 7 Nov 2024, 5:47 a.m.

    What.. so if ignorant people make shit up, and people believe the made up shit.. it’s the fault of the people who didn’t make shit up that the people who did get all the power?

    It’s one thing to say ‘well that happened’.. because it did.. but it’s not especially helpful if someone is trying to work out why, precisely, someone thinks that the made up shit isn’t made up (or, if applicable, some is open to finding out that actually it wasn’t so made up).

  • 7 Nov 2024, 7:13 a.m.

    I guess others might have proper insight into this, but I always get the impression that anti-immigration sentiment is rarely stronger than amongst second and subsequent generation immigrants themselves. It sure-as-shit rings true in Australia.

    Feels like a lot of online white lefties who don’t actually socialise with any ordinary immigrants are having trouble understanding this. Trump promising to deport millions of people from Latin America isn’t actually a turn-off amongst an awful lot of people from there.. who genuinely don’t think he is talking about them. Even though he is. They don’t pay enough attention to the details of what is being said and who it is being said about, but they get the message and they’re find with it.

    Not that white people aren’t the bulk of the problem, obviously. Latin American voters didn’t win it for Trunp. But that they didn’t all get together to beat him should be as surprising as a lot of folk seem to be finding it.

  • 7 Nov 2024, 9:28 a.m.

    I've read again what I wrote and struggle to see how I said that?

    If I did then what I meant was aligned with what you are saying, essentially there are enough people making shit up and enough people believing that made up shit to win an election.

  • 7 Nov 2024, 9:36 a.m.
  • 7 Nov 2024, 9:52 a.m.

    It's not one person leading making stuff up. It's not a random bunch of people making stuff up. It's a coordinated campaign utilising the techniques the Russians developed in south America, expanded because of the reach of modern social media. This is to achieve an unexpressed objective against the interests of the majority of people.

    This is pretty much the textbook definition of conspiracy. It goes some way towards explaining why so much effort has gone into demonizing conspiracy theories (and promoting idiot conspiracies to devalue their currency), when all manner of equally bonkers stuff is promoted straight.

    It's to devalue the effect of people standing, pointing and shouting 'conspiracy' at the actual conspiracy. If when those of us who do make others think 'idiot flat eathers' then that's job done.

    Nevertheless, is all there. You can research first hand accounts from defectors in the seventies recounting the Russian south American destabilisation campaigns. The post-9/11 collaboration between the U.S. intelligence services and the social media companies is a matter of record. As is the work of researchers in the field demonstrating the power of data harvesting in manipulating the wants and needs of consumers/marks. All the dots are there, on the page in front of us. The accusation of stupidity comes from the inability, or unwillingness, to join those dots using infant level drawing skills.

    It amazes me that people can acknowledge that supermarkets utilise the knowledge from your store card purchases, and movements around the store to the goods you want, to position the location of items in such a way as to guide you in new directions, and to new purchases..... But not be able to paint the numbers and see that social media manipulation operates on the same principles.

    Still. People. Never underestimate their capacity to be stupid. Nor their unwillingness to look, if they don't want to see.

  • 7 Nov 2024, 11:41 a.m.

    I saw an interview with John Major recently. It was interesting, not least because he was an eloquent speaker who I may have disagreed with on lots of things but who looks like a giant of statesmanship compared to the current crop of politicians. Anyway, he was talking mostly about the decline of the Conservatives and highlighted the lack of traditional Tory MPs from the forces and from business, which he felt had damaged their position, and also flagged for Labour concerns that their replacement of genuine working class people with experience of working class conditions with university graduates and their more theoretical identification of "social issues" had similarly depleted their standing. I think there is something in this with the current divides. The infatuation with keeping people in full time education to 18 and then for most 21 and the reinforcement that you need to get a degree to get on and not having one means you are something lesser, cuts people off from what they can see classified as the "elites". These people with degrees then calling them racist and stupid just reinforces that divide. In reality standard mass education doesn't suit a lot of people and is also wasted when we need people with practical skills. A move to strengthen different routes for young people into real work and a genuine valuing of people doing both skilled and unskilled front line jobs might help close some of the gap that exists between the different social groupings that sit well below the billionaires.

  • 7 Nov 2024, 11:49 a.m.

    That's only really going to have any substantial impact if there's some real work to go to.

    Currently what the UK looks like to young people is: Deny young people the opportunity to find interesting well paid work, or to accumulate any assets. Find various ways to remove the assets from the generation ahead of them. Apart from the really rich people, obvs.

  • 7 Nov 2024, 12:06 p.m.

    There have been many articles about Tim Walz's position on this subject. Admiral 'Rachel' Levine wanted to abolish the minimum age for gender corrective surgery.
    But of course it doesn't matter what I believe as I'm not an American voter, but I believed it could be an issue for American voters.

  • 7 Nov 2024, 12:36 p.m.

    There's a massive leap from changing a policy so people have an option of surgery open to them earlier to Trump's you drop your kid off as Jimmy and he comes back Jane without your permission

  • 7 Nov 2024, 12:41 p.m.

    The decline of the West is obviously a complicating issue that further pushes people to populist soundbites.