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Column: Donald Trump is president again. Did you feel the vibe shift?
Column: Donald Trump is president again. Did you feel the vibe shift?
Pre-Trump American conservatism was dedicated to a few fundamental propositions: limited government, cultural traditionalism, antiabortion politics, fiscal rectitude and free market economics. Now, I’m the first to concede the right often fell short of its ideals, but showing rhetorical fealty to the ideals was the binding firmament of conservatism. Those commitments still get some lip-service, but there’s no denying that on all of these fronts, loyalty to Trump is the more pressing litmus test. This has freed up Trump to move leftward on abortion, entitlements and economic policy generally.
Trump didn’t merely shatter the consensus on the right, he shattered the political consensus generally. Or maybe social media and those other trends were the battering rams and Trump merely benefited from the new landscape.
the bedrock assumptions about how politics “works” and the rules for what a politician can or can’t do, no longer seem operative. We’re all familiar with how his behavior has demonstrated that, but it’s also illuminated that the electorate itself is just different today. The FDR coalition is gone, the white working class is now operationally conservative, and the Latino and Black working classes are now seen as gettable by Republicans. The assumption that they are “natural Democrats” was obliterated in this election. Republicans have figured out how to talk to those constituencies.
#opinion#politics#culture#people/Trump#partisanship#trends
·latimes.com·
Column: Donald Trump is president again. Did you feel the vibe shift?
Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’
Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’
Identity is, for me, a point of departure for alliances, which need to include all kinds of people, from trans to working people to those taxi drivers that J. K. Rowling is worried about. Identity is a great start for making connections and becoming part of larger communities. But you can’t have a politics of identity that is only about identity. If you do that, you draw sectarian lines, and you abandoned our interdependent ties.
#politics#identities#culture#elections/2024#interviews#academic#discourse
·english.elpais.com·
Judith Butler, philosopher: ‘If you sacrifice a minority like trans people, you are operating within a fascist logic’
Judith Butler with a Pretty Damn Good Indictment of Identity Politics!
Judith Butler with a Pretty Damn Good Indictment of Identity Politics!
Almost every credible analysis of this past election points to several dominant issues: dissatisfaction with the economy generally and anger over inflation particularly, immigration, and the vague but profoundly powerful anti-incumbent sentiment that’s swept the entire democratic world.
“Woke” certainly didn’t cost Democrats the election, but the discursive and emotional conditions of the woke world are an albatross around the neck of liberal elites who heavily influence public perception.
you can’t build a political coalition through emphasizing difference, you can’t staple together certain minority identities while rejecting majority identities and win elections.
#culture#identities#elections/2024#partisanship#dems#opinion#politics
·freddiedeboer.substack.com·
Judith Butler with a Pretty Damn Good Indictment of Identity Politics!
The mainstream media will lose its last grip on relevancy
The mainstream media will lose its last grip on relevancy
A big chunk of Americans ignore news completely, or get it sporadically from TikTok, X, or YouTube. Rather than seeking it out, people are exposed to snippets of current affairs as part of curated news feeds, often from obscure or disreputable sources (only 3% of Facebook’s content is political news).
Meanwhile, the right has capitalized on the decline of legacy media, expertly curating a profitable and thriving ecosystem of podcasters, influencers, alt-tech platforms like Rumble, and media companies like the Daily Wire propped up by conservative billionaires and funders. Young talent is found in spaces like TikTok, developed and incubated in spaces like PragerU, promoted by other influencers, and amplified by social media spaces that prioritize conservative content.
No matter how liberal they are, left-wing billionaires are unlikely to support creators who advocate for socialism or the abolition of wealth hoarding.
Influencers are not bound by journalistic ethics or objectivity and are free to take funding from companies, PACs, and wealthy donors. They speak directly to the concerns of younger people, pushing populist messaging. Entry points into this right-wing ecosystem come through various forms of entrepreneurial hucksterism. Young people faced with high housing costs, dwindling job prospects, and inflation — regardless of what economic statistics say — seize on webinars and YouTube videos by people claiming that you can hustle and grind your way into economic success, whether through crypto, dropshipping, multi-level marketing schemes, or OnlyFans.
we now understand a lot about why false information spreads (it’s a combination of emotional appeal, partisan animus, and algorithmic amplification). But we are no closer to solving the problem at its center: How can we find common ground when we can’t agree on basic facts?
Moving forward, we should not be concerned with isolated incorrect facts, but with the deeply-rooted stories that circulate at all levels of culture and shape our points of view. The challenge for 2025 is to confront these deeper epistemic divides that shape how Americans understand the world; in other words, the ways we arrive at the knowledge that forms our perspective.
#internet#culture#trends#politics#social media#journalism#misinfo
·niemanlab.org·
The mainstream media will lose its last grip on relevancy
SCAM AMERICA 777
SCAM AMERICA 777
I got the sense that their entrepreneurial spirit had led them to the sort of scam that leads you to wear a shirt with a huge dollar sign on it alongside a number of similar young men willing to wear that same shirt, the type of scam that encourages you to work out with and find community among your new colleagues, the type of scam that answers the two dominant questions posed by the young American man in 2024: what will make this mean something, and how can I get rich as quick as possible?
I think young men have turned more conservative because “conservatism,” as it were, is the mode of politics that makes the most sense in Scam America, and these young men are the Scam Generation.
America has always been a nation of grifters, con men, and schemers; what’s different in Scam America is the scope and form. America in 2024 is not a fallen or crumbling empire; it is an enshittified product, a tired casino, a website losing ad revenue, a restaurant line full of private delivery drivers.
America is a casino now, and the young men voting for Trump are the sort of young men pounding free drinks at the blackjack table and toasting the pit boss. A vote for Trump is a vote for a cig inside, for another round, for the line to keep going up, up, up. Does that mean this configuration is permanent? Maybe, maybe not. Casinos are windowless so that you cannot tell the time; they pump in oxygen to keep you alert. They do this, of course, because their owners know that in time everybody loses. The young men of Scam America are not necessarily out of reach, but if the left wants any chance at swaying them, it should plan ahead to when party’s over and the hangovers kick in.
#culture#americanism#scams#politics#generations/genz#social media
·neverhungover.club·
SCAM AMERICA 777
Fight Theory
Fight Theory
Polls show that many of the policies enacted by President Biden are popular. His measures to reduce the cost of insulin and other drugs receive support from more than 80 percent of Americans. His infrastructure bill, his hawkish approach to China and his all-of-the-above energy policy, which combines expanded oil drilling with clean-energy subsidies, are popular, too. But voters obviously like some of his policies more than others. And an unusual pattern seems to be hurting Biden’s re-election campaign: Voters are less aware of his most popular policies than his more divisive ones.
Adam Green, co-founder of Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a Democratic-aligned group, blames what he calls fight theory. “It’s not enough to have positive messaging,” Green said. “Voters must see drama, clash and an ongoing saga in order for our message to break through a cluttered news environment.”
fights become the subject of political fundraising emails, activist campaigns, news stories and social media posts. Conflict attracts attention. The situation with Biden’s most popular economic policies — especially the reduction of medical costs — is somewhat different.
#politics#elections/2024#opinion#culture#narratives
·nytimes.com·
Fight Theory
The Manosphere Won
The Manosphere Won
Trump used these podcast appearances to both humanize and mythologize himself. He used them to launder his extremist positions through the pervasive can’t you take a joke filter that propels the Tony Hinchcliffes of the world to stardom. Most important of all, he used them to get out the vote.
in 2024, shouting to a few thousand true believers has nothing on being anointed by Elon Musk on X and a cadre of right-wing influencers with collective followings in the hundreds of millions.
What Trump and his team understood is that “the discourse,” to whatever extent that means anything anymore, no longer happens in op-ed columns or on The Daily Show or even on Breitbart, and hasn’t for years. Kamala Harris seemingly did not. She did appear on Call Her Daddy, a stratospherically popular podcast with an audience primarily comprising young women, and her campaign enlisted a number of influencers as surrogates. But she skipped Rogan, Lex Friedman, and other mainstream-adjacent marathon podcasts.
the world of conservative influencers dwarfs their liberal counterparts in both follower size and impact. In the same way Democrats never found their own Rush Limbaugh, they don’t have a Steven Crowder or a Ben Shapiro or even, so help us, a Tim Pool. There are Democrats with followings online, but the cumulative gap in people paying attention to what they say is several orders of magnitude wide.
#influencers#politics#culture#internet#social media#identities/masculinity#generations/genz#trends#elections/2024#people/Trump
·wired.com·
The Manosphere Won
How Trump's election win was driven by targeted communications
How Trump's election win was driven by targeted communications
The surrogates Trump assembled were able to appeal to the "frat bro or finance bro culture," says Janfaza, because "to them, many of these men who have built these companies, ecosystems and media platforms, show them a version of success to work toward." "The way that Trump was able to include many of these male figures in his cohort was very impactful," she added. "And while yes, Taylor Swift, Lady Gaga and Beyonce also have massive, massive audiences, we have to understand that the way young people are consuming their media and entertainment just looks drastically different than it did for prior generations."
#trends#culture#politics#platforms#social media#generations/genz#identities#politics/political-correctness#elections/2024#identities/masculinity
·axios.com·
How Trump's election win was driven by targeted communications
Wow. BRUTAL words for her fellow liberals from Democratic strategist on CNN:
Wow. BRUTAL words for her fellow liberals from Democratic strategist on CNN:

“I’m going to speak some hard truths...We are not be party of common sense, which is the message the voters sent to us...When we address Latino voters...as Latinx, for instance, b/c that’s the politically correct thing to do, it makes them think we don’t even live in the same planet as they do. When we are too afraid to say that, hey, college kids, if you're trashing the campus of Columbia University b/c you’re unhappy about some sort of policy and you’re taking over a university and you’re trashing it and preventing other students from learning, that is unacceptable. But we’re so worried about alienating one or another cohort in our coalition that we do not know what to say when normal people look at that and say, wait a second. I send my kids to college so they can learn, not so they can burn buildings and trash lawns, right? And so on and so forth. When we put pronouns after names and say she/her as opposed to saying, you know what, if I call you by the wrong pronoun, call me out. I am sorry. I won't do it again. But stop with the virtue signaling and speak to people like they’re normal. There is nothing that I'm going to say to Shermichael that I’m not going to say to your or I’m not going to say to somebody else. I speak the same language to everybody. But that’s not what Democrats do. We constantly try to parse out different ways of speaking because our focus groups or polling shows that so-and-so appeals to such and such. That’s not how normal people think. It is not common sense and we need to start being the part of common sense again. Joe Biden is not responsible for that, neither is Kamala Harris. That is a problem that Democrats have had for years. I’ve been banging the drum on this for I don’t know how — probably ten years on this. We need to get back to being the party of common sense that people look at us and say we understand you. We appreciate what you say because you speak our language. And, until we do that, we should stop blaming other people for our own mistakes.”

#politics#politics/political-correctness#discourse#elections#culture#elections/2024
·x.com·
Wow. BRUTAL words for her fellow liberals from Democratic strategist on CNN:
It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem
It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem
  • "Disorder" as distinct from crime, encompassing behaviors that dominate public spaces for private purposes (e.g., public drug use, homelessness, littering).
  • Despite decreasing violent crime rates in many cities, public perception of safety remains low, which the author attributes to increased disorder. Ex. retail theft, unsheltered homelessness, uncontrolled dogs, reckless driving, and public drug use.
Most conspicuous, in my experience, is the way that retailers have responded. It’s not just CVS; coffee shops seem to have gotten more hostile and less welcoming. This is, I suspect, because they are dealing with people who steal, cause a ruckus, or shoot up in the bathroom—disorderly behaviors that they have to deter before they cost them customers.
I increasingly think this is a more general phenomenon. Disorder is not measured like crime—there is no system for aggregating measures of disorder across cities. But if you look for the signs, they are there. Retail theft, though hard to measure, has grown bad enough that major retailers now lock up their wares in many cities. The unsheltered homeless population has risen sharply. People seem to be controlling their dogs less. Road deaths have risen, even as vehicle miles driven declined, suggesting people are driving more irresponsibly. Public drug use in cities from San Francisco to Philadelphia has gotten bad enough to prompt crack-downs.
Cities’ comparative advantage is agglomeration and network effects: concentrating people in one place can create innovation that yields ore than linear returns. But that only is possible if people have shared public spaces in which to interact. Community life, of the sort that makes cities worth living in, is harder to live in the presence of disorder.
A large share of disorder is generated by a small number of people and places—one drunk or one vacant lot, one uncontrolled bar or one guy shouting on the street, can ruin the whole experience for everyone else. Identifying these problem places and people, and remediating them—not exclusively through the criminal justice system—can bring disorder under control.
#public-life/crimes#public-life/third-spaces#ideals#stats#trends#americanism#community#culture#politics
·thecausalfallacy.com·
It's Time to Talk About America's Disorder Problem
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
That it was complicated, he now understood, was “horseshit.” “Complicated” was how people had described slavery and then segregation. “It’s complicated,” he said, “when you want to take something from somebody.”
He had also been told that the conflict was “complicated,” its history tortuous and contested, and, as he writes, “that a body of knowledge akin to computational mathematics was needed to comprehend it.” He was astonished by the plain truth of what he saw: the walls, checkpoints, and guns that everywhere hemmed in the lives of Palestinians; the clear tiers of citizenship between the first-class Jews and the second-class Palestinians; and the undisguised contempt with which the Israeli state treated the subjugated other.
The most famous of Israel’s foundational claims — that it was a necessary sanctuary for one of the world’s most oppressed peoples, who may not have survived without a state of their own — is at the root of this complication and undergirds the prevailing viewpoint of the political-media-entertainment nexus. It is Israel’s unique logic of existence that has provided a quantum of justice to the Israeli project in the eyes of Americans and others around the world, and it’s what separates Jewish Israelis from the white supremacists of the Jim Crow South, who had no justice on their side at all.
“It’s kind of hard to remember, but even as late as 2014, people were talking about the Civil War as this complicated subject,” Jackson said. “Ta-Nehisi was going to plantations and hanging out at Monticello and looking at all the primary documents and reading a thousand books, and it became clear that the idea of a ‘complicated’ narrative was ridiculous.” The Civil War was, Coates concluded, solely about the South’s desire to perpetuate slavery, and the subsequent attempts over the next century and a half to hide that simple fact betrayed, he believed, a bigger lie — the lie that America was a democracy, a mass delusion that he would later call “the Dream” in Between the World and Me.
The hallmarks of The Atlantic’s coverage include variations of Israel’s seemingly limitless “right to defend itself”; an assertion that extremists on “both sides” make the conflict worse, with its corollary argument that if only Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Jewish-supremacist government were ousted, then progress could be made; abundant sympathy for the suffering of Israelis and a comparatively muted response to the suffering of Palestinians; a fixation on the way the issue is debated in America, particularly on college campuses; and regular warnings that antisemitism is on the rise both in America and around the world.
the overall pattern reveals a distorting worldview that pervades the industry and, as Coates writes in The Message, results in “the elevation of factual complexity over self-evident morality.” “The view of mainstream American commentators is a false equivalence between subjugator and subjugated,” said Nathan Thrall, the Jerusalem-based author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning A Day in the Life of Abed Salama, as if the Israelis and the Palestinians were equal parties in an ancient tug-of-war.
For Coates, the problem for the industry at large partly stems from the perennial problem of inadequate representation. “It is extremely rare to see Palestinians and Arabs writing the coverage or doing the book reviews,” he said. “I would be interested if you took the New York Times and the Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal and looked at how many of those correspondents are Palestinian, I wonder what you would find.” (It’s a testament to just how polarizing the issue is that many Jewish Americans believe the bias in news media works the other way around, against Israel.)
American mainstream journalism, Coates says, defers to American authority. “It’s very similar,” he told me, “to how American journalism has been deferential to the cops. We privilege the cops, we privilege the military, we privilege the politicians. The default setting is toward power.”
in the total coverage, in all of the talk of experts and the sound bites of politicians and the dispatches of credentialed reporters, a sense of ambiguity is allowed to prevail. “The fact of the matter is,” he said, “that kid up at Columbia, whatever dumb shit they’re saying, whatever slogan I would not say that they would use, they are more morally correct than some motherfuckers that have won Pulitzer Prizes and National Magazine Awards and are the most decorated and powerful journalists.”
When I asked Coates what he wanted to see happen in Israel and Palestine, he avoided the geopolitical scale and tended toward the more specific — for example, to have journalists not be “shot by army snipers.” He said that the greater question was not properly for him; it belonged to those with lived experience and those who had been studying the problem for years.
On the importance of using moral rightness as a north star for pragmatic designs
“I have a deep-seated fear,” he told me, “that the Black struggle will ultimately, at its root, really just be about narrow Black interest. And I don’t think that is in the tradition of what our most celebrated thinkers have told the world. I don’t think that’s how Martin Luther King thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Du Bois thought about the Black struggle. I know that’s not how Baldwin thought about the Black struggle. Should it turn out that we have our first Black woman president, and our first South Asian president, and we continue to export 2,000-pound bombs to perpetrate a genocide, in defense of a state that is practicing apartheid, I won’t be able to just sit here and shake my head and say, ‘Well, that is unfortunate.’ I’m going to do what I can in the time that remains, and the writing that I have, to not allow that to be, because that is existential death for the Black struggle, and for Black people, as far as I’m concerned.”
#profiles#writing#politics#israel-palestine#culture#opinion#news
·nymag.com·
The Return of Ta-Nehisi Coates
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
“The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.
#politics#culture#opinion#elections#trends#misinfo#journalism#gop
·archive.ph·
Among America’s “Low-Information Voters” | The New Yorker
Three Telltale Signs of Online Post-Literacy
Three Telltale Signs of Online Post-Literacy
The swarms of online surveillers typically only know how to detect clearly stated opinions, and the less linguistic jouissance the writer of these opinions displays in writing them, the easier job the surveillers will have of it. Another way of saying this is that those who read in order to find new targets of denunciation are so far along now in their convergent evolution with AI, that the best way to protect yourself from them is to conceal your writing under a shroud of irreducibly human style
Such camouflage was harder to wear within the 280-word limit on Twitter, which of course meant that the most fitting and obvious way to avoid the Maoists was to retreat into insincere shitposting — arguably the first truly new genre of artistic or literary endeavor in the 21st century, which perhaps will turn out to have been as explosive and revolutionary as, say, jazz was in the 20th.
Our master shitposter has perfectly mirrored the breakdown of sense that characterizes our era — dril’s body of work looks like our moment no less than, say, an Otto Dix painting looks like World War I
#culture#memes#genres/shitposting#politics#writing#partisanship#internet
·the-hinternet.com·
Three Telltale Signs of Online Post-Literacy
Hate is the New Sex
Hate is the New Sex
These days hate has roughly the same role in popular culture that original sin has in traditional Christian theology. If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.
At the far end of this sort of rhetoric, you get the meretricious slogan used by Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign last year: LOVE TRUMPS HATE. I hope that none of my readers are under the illusion that Clinton’s partisans were primarily motivated by love, except in the sense of Clinton’s love for power and the Democrats’ love for the privileges and payouts they could expect from four more years of control of the White House; and of course Trump and the Republicans were head over heels in love with the same things. The fact that Clinton’s marketing flacks and focus groups thought that the slogan just quoted would have an impact on the election, though, shows just how pervasive the assumption I’m discussing has become in our culture.
what happens when people decide that some common human emotion is evil and harmful and wrong, and decide that the way to make a better world is to get rid of it?
The example I have in mind is the attitude, prevalent in the English-speaking world from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, that sex was the root of all evil.
I know that comparing current attitudes toward hate with Victorian attitudes toward sex will inspire instant pushback from a good many of my readers. After all, sexual desire is natural and normal and healthy, while hate is evil and harmful and wrong, right? Here again, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that people a century and a quarter ago—most likely including your ancestors, dear reader, if they happened to live in the English-speaking world—saw things the other way around. To them, hate was an ordinary emotion that most people had under certain circumstances, but sexual desire was beyond the pale: beastly, horrid, filthy, and so on through an impressive litany of unpleasant adjectives.
Make something forbidden and you make it desirable. Take a normal human emotional state, one that everyone experiences, and make it forbidden, and you guarantee that the desire to violate the taboo will take on overwhelming power. That’s why, after spending their days subject to the pervasive tone policing of contemporary life, in which every utterance gets scrutinized for the least trace of anything that anyone anywhere could conceivably interpret as hateful, so many people in today’s world don internet aliases and go to online forums where they can blurt out absolutely anything
The opposite of one bad idea, after all, is usually another bad idea; the fact that dying of thirst is bad for you doesn’t make drowning good for you; whether we’re talking about sex or anything else, there’s a space somewhere between “not enough” and “too much,” between pathological repression and equally pathological expression, that’s considerably healthier than either of the extremes. I’m going to risk causing my more sensitive readers to clutch their smelling salts and faint on the nearest sofa, in true Victorian style, by suggesting that the same thing’s true of hate.
Hate is like sex; there are certain times, places, and contexts where it’s appropriate, but there are many, many others where it’s not. You can recognize its place in life without having to act it out on every occasion—and in fact, the more conscious you are of its place in life, the more completely you acknowledge it and give it its due, the less likely you are to get blindsided by it. That’s true of sex, and it’s true of hate: what you refuse to acknowledge controls you; what you acknowledge, you can learn to control.
the blind faith that goodness requires amputation is so unquestioned in our time.
Human beings are never going to be perfect, not if perfection means the amputation of some part of human experience, whether the limb that’s being hacked off is our sexual instincts, our aggressive instincts, or any other part of who and what we are.
We can accept our sexuality, whatever that happens to be, and weave it into the pattern of our individual lives and our relationships with other people in ways that uphold the values we cherish and yield as much joy and as little unnecessary pain for as many people as possible. That doesn’t mean always acting out our desires—in some cases, it can mean never acting them out at all
#philosophy#culture#history#sex#politics#wellbeing#people/Trump
·ecosophia.net·
Hate is the New Sex
Opinion - The Era of Prestige TV Is Ending. We’re Going to Miss It When It’s Gone.
Opinion - The Era of Prestige TV Is Ending. We’re Going to Miss It When It’s Gone.
Emmy mainstays like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Better Call Saul” and “Succession” have all ended their runs, and the newer Emmy parvenus, such as the comedies “Abbott Elementary” and “Jury Duty,” while excellent, harken back to an earlier, mass-market era of television that was dominated by sitcoms and hourlong procedurals.
#prestige tv#tv#trends#culture#politics#entertainment#companies/hbo#companies/netflix#streaming
·nytimes.com·
Opinion - The Era of Prestige TV Is Ending. We’re Going to Miss It When It’s Gone.
Shitposting as public pedagogy
Shitposting as public pedagogy
through the lens of critical media literacy, I argue that shitposting exists as an online pedagogical technology that can potentially reorient the network of relationships within social media spheres and expand the possible range of identities for those involved. To illustrate this argument, I conclude with a close reading of posts from two Twitter accounts: dril, an anonymous user who has managed to inform political discourse through his shitposts, and the corporate account for the Sunny Delight Beverage Corporation. I describe how tweets from these accounts engage shitposts in divergent ways. In doing so, I contend that these tweets reveal shitposting’s potential for contributing to the democratic aims of critical media literacy education, but the appropriation of that practice by large corporations and individuals imbued with political power jeopardize that already fraught potential.
Beyond the narrow framing of previous literature that only considers the use of shitposting for social exclusion or as fascist propaganda, I argue for an encompassing approach to this discursive tool that embodies a polysemic and open-ended cultural politic.
The analysis presented here shows that the circumstances under which shitposts circulate hold significant information when trying to understand the potential of these texts within a critical pedagogy. Expanding this assertion to consider other discursive technologies, it follows that both public pedagogy and critical media literacy research must continue to examine not only media itself but how pieces of media circulate, considering both who (or what) this media circulates between and where in that circulation people can begin to challenge the digital milieu.
I contend that positioning shitposting as a uniform tool in terms of its politics within previous scholarship misrepresents the practice. Instead, shitposting can serve a multitude of pedagogical ends depending on how individuals and groups use shitposts.
shitposting represents one tool within this broader, holistic understanding of public pedagogy, albeit one that often manifests unintentionally. By producing turbulence within social media, shitposting can contribute to the public pedagogies of social media that mirror the goals of critical media literacy education. However, a deployment or engagement with public pedagogy does not guarantee a critically oriented outcome.
#academic#bullshit#culture#memes#internet#social media#politics#4chan
·tandfonline.com·
Shitposting as public pedagogy
‘Woke’ and other bogus political terms, decoded
‘Woke’ and other bogus political terms, decoded
See also "On Bullshit"
“The media” (or “mainstream media”): a meaningless phrase because there are countless very different media, which don’t act in concert.
“Gets it”: a social media phrase that is used to mean “agrees with me”.
Usually, though, people who claim to have been “cancelled” mean “criticised”, “convicted of sexual assault”, “replaced by somebody who isn’t an overt bigot” or simply “ignored”.
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind,” wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” (the complete guide on how to write in just 13 pages). He lists other “worn-out and useless” words and phrases that were disappearing in his day: jackboot, Achilles heel, hotbed, melting pot, acid test, veritable inferno. The same fate later befell words overused in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks: “heroes” (a euphemism for victims) and “greatest country on earth” (meaning largest military and GDP).
#language#rhetoric#politics#culture#partisanship#gop#dems#misinfo#foxnews#americanism#bullshit
·ft.com·
‘Woke’ and other bogus political terms, decoded
Paying to use a site that you can’t use anymore
Paying to use a site that you can’t use anymore
I think hardcore Twitter users have rose-colored glasses about the site’s coolness. The reason for its success, if you can argue that it was ever really successful, wasn’t that it was cooler than Facebook. It was because of its proximity to power. The reason it was so popular with activists, extremists, journalists, and shitposters was because what you posted there could actually affect culture.
The thing that ties together pretty much everything that’s happened on Twitter since it launched in 2006 was the possibility that those who were not in power (or wanted more) could influence those who were.
I subscribe to the belief that internet trends are defined by a ratio of laziness to social reward. Users will always do the laziest possible thing to achieve the maximum amount clout. So, if every platform becomes either a Twitter alternative or a short-form video feed, but all with their own unique requirements for virality, users won’t make individual posts for each. They will instead shotgun blast all of them with the same posts and bet on the odds that something will breakthrough eventually. Which means everything eventually just becomes a reuploaded video or a screenshot from somewhere else.
While trying to track down the actual hyperlink to a post I found a screenshot of on a closed social network I was struck by how on an internet full of closed platforms, broken embeds, and crumbling indexes, the last reliable way to share anything is a screenshot.
the camera roll is, at this point, the real content management system of the social web. This is something that TikTok realized faster than other platforms, with their downloadable watermarked videos that have now become ubiquitous on every platform that allows video.
My theory as to why New Yorkers were so allergic to independent content creators is because for all the tedious guffawing about being a city of hustlers, most of the people who live there crave, on some level, institutional legitimacy and influencers, by definition, don’t get it or really need it. It could also just be that New Yorkers hate tourists and content creators are, in some form, permanent tourists of their own lives.
I actually think the post-COVID New York TikTok boom is already cresting. I think once these trends become calcified enough to report on, they’re already on their way out. I also don’t think Gen Z TikTokers are driving rents up, but rather documenting its rise due to other factors, like landlords being able to blame TikTok hype to jack up their rents.
#platforms#twitter#faang#culture#business#politics#tiktok#internet
·garbageday.email·
Paying to use a site that you can’t use anymore
A. G. Sulzberger on the Battles Within and Against the New York Times
A. G. Sulzberger on the Battles Within and Against the New York Times
One of the things that’s misunderstood about independence is that it doesn’t require you not to have a theory of the case, right? My great-grandfather had a line that he often quoted: “I believe in an open mind, but not so open that your brains fall out.”
it? If you are a Democrat and you believe that Donald Trump represents a threat to democracy, is it then anti-democracy for an organization like yours, David, to produce reporting that raises questions about the actions, conduct, or fitness of President Biden?
Members of the Hasidic community criticized our reporting, and very loudly. They sent a letter to the Pulitzer committee raising all sorts of concerns. But it is also true that we heard from countless members of the community saying, “We needed this.” The implicit request of the critics is to suppress such reporting: “It may be true, but, because it can be misused, we don’t want it out there.” But, if we had suppressed the reporting, more kids would be deprived of education. That is the posture of independence.
The posture of independence is not about being a blank slate. It’s not about having no life experience, no personal perspectives. That is an impossible ask. That’s a parody of the long debate over objectivity. The idea of objectivity, as it was originally formulated, wasn’t about the person’s innate characteristics. It was about the process that helped address the inherent biases that all of us carry in our lives. So the question isn’t “Do you have any view?” The question is “Are you animated by an open mind, a skeptical mind, and a commitment to following the facts wherever they lead?”
The key isn’t being a blank slate. It’s not that you don’t have a theory going into any story. It’s a willingness to put the facts above any individual agenda. Think about this moment and how polarized this country is. How many institutions in American life do you believe are truly putting the facts above any agenda?
Let’s be absolutely clear: the former President of the United States, the current leader of one of America’s two political parties, has now spent the better part of seven years telling the public not just to distrust us but that we are the enemies of the American people, that our work is fake, manufactured. The term “enemies of the people” has roots in Stalin’s Soviet Union and in Hitler’s Germany.
Another dynamic inside our industry is that journalism, to some extent, has become an echo chamber. What do I mean by that? It’s been a while since I looked at your bio, but, if you are like many journalists of your generation and in my generation, you probably started at a local paper. That was the traditional path. And what was the day like for a journalist at that point? If you were a cub reporter, you were probably writing—As you were at the Providence Journal.You were probably writing one story a day to three stories a week somewhere. What were your days like? Every day, you were out in the communities you were covering. You were being confronted with the full diversity of this country and of the human experience. On the same day, you would talk to rich and poor, you’d talk to a mother who just had lost a son to murder, and a mother whose son was just arrested for murder, right?
Are you saying that’s changed? That reporters are just sitting in rooms in front of a screen? I don’t think that’s the case.Of course it’s the case! It’s the least talked-about and most insidious result of the collapse of the business model that historically supported quality journalism. The work of reporting is expensive. As traditional media faded, and particularly local media faded, and as digital media filled that vacuum, we saw a full inversion of how reporters’ days were spent. The new model is you have to write three to five stories a day. And, if you have to write three to five stories a day, there is no time to get out into the world. You’re spending your time writing, you’re typing, typing, which means that you are drawing on your own experience and the experience of the people immediately around you. So, literally, many journalists in this country have gone from spending their days out in the field, surrounded by life, to spending their days in an office with people who are in the same profession, working for the same institution, living in the same city, graduating from the same type of university.
The concern is that there’s also a widening gulf in the realm of information. Just as there’s an income-inequality problem in this country that gets worse and worse, there’s an informational divide. I’m not saying that A. G. Sulzberger can be responsible for it and make it all better with a stroke, but there is that problem.I disagree with the hypothesis. I think there is an information problem, but I think it’s about the collapse of local news. I think that that is an American tragedy, a dangerous and insidious force in American life.
broader thought about Opinion: I would just say, look, three years after that episode, do you feel that, on the Times Opinion pages, are you regularly seeing pieces from every side of the political spectrum on the abortion debate? On business and economic questions? Social and political questions? I think you do. I’d argue that, under Katie [Kingsbury, who replaced Bennet], you’re seeing more of them than ever. I think you see that she’s just hired another conservative columnist, our first evangelical columnist, also a military veteran.
Would you hire a Trumpist on the Op-Ed page?This is a question I’ve been getting now for six years, and it’s a really tricky one. It’s trickier than it sounds, and I bet you have a suspicion on why. It is harder than you’d think to find the Trumpist who hasn’t, at some point, said, “The 2020 election was rigged, and Donald Trump won the election.”I get it. But a huge number, tens of millions of people, either tolerate that point of view or believe it.Yeah. But independence is not about “both sides.”So you would not have a Trumpist who said that at some point writing on your Op-Ed page?We would not have anyone who—But you’d have guest columnists like Tom Cotton—We certainly would not have a columnist who has a track record of saying things that are demonstrably untrue.
In this hyper-politicized, hyper-polarized moment, is society benefitting from every single player getting louder and louder about declaring their personal allegiances and loyalties and preferences? Or do you think there’s space for some actors who are really committed just to serving the public with the full story, let the facts fall where they may?
#politics#journalism#culture#culture war#business/models
·newyorker.com·
A. G. Sulzberger on the Battles Within and Against the New York Times
The "myth of left and right"
The "myth of left and right"
So you just go through the whole range of policy issues, and there's nothing so essential to the right wing tribe today that it wasn't at some point considered part of the left-wing tribe, and vice versa. Since what the left and right mean are always changing, you can't move towards something that's constantly evolving in its meaning.
Adolf Hitler was a socialist and he's considered extreme right-wing. George W. Bush was the most radical expansion government president in my lifetime, and he's considered right-wing.
There is certainly a tribe that calls itself right-wing, there's no question about that. And there's a tribe that calls itself left-wing, no question about that. But what these tribes stand for is constantly evolving. So why don't we just throw out the terms right-wing and left-wing, and say Republican and Democrat. That would clarify so much, and get rid of the illusion that there's some kind of philosophical core behind what each party believes because that's simply not true.
People say, "well, the one issue is change versus permanence. Liberals and progressives and the left, they like change. And conservatives like to preserve.” It's just simply not true. Who was it that wanted to change the Roe v Wade decision? Who is it that wants to change tax rates to make them lower? Who was it that wanted to change Europe to create a thousand-year German Reich?
a few years back, [social scientist] John Bargh at Yale said, I've got it. I figured out what it is that divides liberals and conservatives. All conservative positions are about fear. If you're afraid, you're a conservative. See, that's why conservatives went to the war in Iraq, they were so scared of terrorists. That's why they created the Department of Homeland Security, they were scared, they were afraid. And they would say, giving up a little bit of our freedom is a small price to pay for security because we're scared. Ha! Got it, says John Bargh, I figured it out. That's what a conservative is. A fraidy cat. Scared.
It's as if we went to the grocery store and they were sitting out in the front with two carts of groceries for us and said, what do you want, Cart A or Cart B? Now, you'd probably pick the cart that had more of the products you like, naturally. We all would. That's how it is when I go into the voting booth. I pick Republicans sometimes, pick Democrats other times. Sometimes I'm just trying to balance power between the two. But what I try not to do is to pick the cart of groceries, and then after the fact delude myself that all of these groceries are related, they all share an essential characteristic, and make up a fairy tale about how they all are essentially, philosophically bound. That's what our ideologues and pundits in America today are doing. They're inventing fairy tales after the fact to try to explain why all these unrelated positions are related when in fact they are not.
So let's say you are strongly in favor of tax cuts. I would seek out the strongest possible argument for tax increases and what those might be. Maybe that will persuade you, maybe it won't, but at the very least you'll open your mind up a little bit more.
What if we had someone who said, I believe in the minimum wage, but in order to make my research more careful, and to find my blind spots, I'm going to bring in somebody to help me design the study to set out the falsification parameters, and so forth, who is against the minimum wage. And then we're going to work together and we're going to establish ahead of time what it will look like and then we're going to conduct the research.
#politics#gop#dems#culture war#culture#americanism
·readtangle.com·
The "myth of left and right"
The Trump verdict.
The Trump verdict.
"Questioned about the 2005 'Access Hollywood' tape, he actually defended his comments about grabbing women by their genitals without consent," Cevallos wrote. He said the rich and famous have been able "to get away with" that behavior, unfortunately or fortunately. "What part of that was fortunate, exactly?" Cevallos asked. Both moments "featured prominently" in Kaplan’s closing arguments, and both were evidence "that didn't exist before Trump offered them up on a platter."
Then I imagined if one of those women sued Clooney, took him to trial, and Clooney had to get deposed. During his deposition he reaffirmed that for "millions of years" rich and famous people have been able to grab women by their genitals and "unfortunately or fortunately" that is how it works. I imagined Clooney mistaking the woman accusing him of sexual assault for his ex-wife. I imagined him, during the deposition, being asked if he cheated on his first wife and saying, "I don't know." I imagined if there were two women willing to testify against Clooney in a trial, under oath, that he sexually assaulted them.
He has claimed on social media he and Carroll don't know each other and have never met, despite photographic evidence of the opposite — nevermind the corroborating fact Trump and Carroll were running in the same circles in New York City in the 1990s and 1980s.
#politics#legal#culture#gop#dems#news#people/Trump
·readtangle.com·
The Trump verdict.
Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means
Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means
“Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people.
Central to woke discourse is the substitution of older and less complicated versions of socially liberal perspectives with more willfully complex academic versions. So civil rights are out, “anti-racism” is in. Community is out, intersectionality is in. Equality is out, equity is in. Homelessness is out, unhousedness is in. Sexism is out, misogyny is in. Advantage is out, privilege is in
Well the things that are “in” certainly add, but I’m not sure those former things are actually “out,” even to “woke” people.
woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real
Woke politics are famously obsessive about language, developing literal language policies that are endlessly long and exacting. Utterances are mined for potential offense with pitiless focus, such that statements that were entirely anodyne a few years ago become unspeakable today.
The woke fixation on language and symbol makes sense when you realize that the developers of the ideology are almost entirely people whose profession involves the immaterial and the symbolic - professors, writers, reporters, artists, pundits.
Rather than calling for true mass movements (which you cannot create without the moderation and compromise the social justice set tends to abhor), woke politics typically treats all political struggle as a matter of the individual mastering themselves and behaving correctly
The structural problems (such as racism) are represented as fundamentally combated with individual moral correctness (such as articulated in White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which argues that racism is combated by white people interrogating their souls rather than with policy)
You combat homophobia by being gay-affirming. You combat misogyny by respecting women. You combat all social ills by relentlessly fixating on your own position in society and feeling bad about it. Nothing political can escape the gravity of personal psychodrama and no solutions exist but cleansing the self.
I’m sure many SJW-oriented people would disagree and argue that this is merely one of many tools that people need to employ to enact change. There seems to be an overemphasis on individual responsibility but that is likely because that feels more actionable than policy change. People are asking “what can *I* do to help?” Overreliance on this is faulty, yes, but I’m not sure I see anyone saying that personal responsibility and compromise/moderation/policy change are mutually exclusive
The fixation on emotions fits snugly in the assumption of the individual as the basic unit of politics. It also ensures that woke politics assume the possibility of a frictionless universe in which everyone feels good all the time.
Institutions are all corrupt and bigoted, so institutions cannot prompt change. Most people are irredeemably racist, and so the masses cannot create a just society.
Problems can’t be solved gradually through small steps over time, but only through revolutionary change, which itself will inevitably be blocked by the white-cis-male power structure. Everything sucks all the time, which incidentally justifies yelling all the time for people who enjoy yelling
Whether this is accurate or not I can’t deny that this is how the internet atmosphere feels, and it makes me feel bad/dismal about the state of things. I think the messaging behind Social Justice Politics needs to change and recognize how it looks to “the other side”
I’d rather woke politics win than conservatism. But I’d rather have a friendly forgiving plainspoken big tent civil libertarian socialist mass movement, personally. Trouble is, there is only woke and anti-woke. There is no escape.
#politics#culture#trends#academic#language
·freddiedeboer.substack.com·
Of Course You Know What "Woke" Means