Was very confused, because I thought this was Rod Sterling from Mad Men for a minute.

Obviously, the crime wasn’t owning the gun. It was committing a Wrongthink while owning the gun.

If school house rock was composed by a sociopath.

But Reagan killed the Fairness Doctrine

I have mixed feelings about the Fairness Doctrine, because the practical consequence of the rule only ever seemed to give you a narrow “moderate liberal says X, moderate conservative says Y” corporately approved view. Hard to look at the modern media landscape and think to myself “Damn, if only we had more episodes of Crossfire to fix this”.

But yes, after the Fairness Doctrine, you saw an absolute flood of Rush-tier content that could blast uncontested bullshit all over the airwaves endlessly. The FCC went limp and allowed this to roll over the country.

I might also throw in the Telecommunications Act of 1996, which started a Katamari-esque consolidation of local radio and tv networks into the modern Clear Channel and Sinclair Media mega-monopolies. A big reason why Rush was a household name by the late '00s stemmed from all these local stations being force-fed his syndicated content, which was blasted practically 24/7 in rotation with a handful of other right-wing talking heads. This guy was cranking out three hours of content a day five days a week, and the shows would play back-to-back on a loop morning, noon, and night.

what if they’re a CEO?

the nature of their labor

WTYP. The most famous CEOs don’t work. They just exploit the work of others.

turning on the big Consent Manufacturing Machine

“You can GET RICH QUICK! with this ONE NEAT TRICK! if you’re willing to coughdo a huge bit of gray market work in a high risk industry for a very long timecough and then YOU’LL BE SET FOR cougha very shortcough LIFE!”

Friendly reminder that Drug Dealers Mostly Live With Their Moms and the average camgirls don’t do much better. This is a high risk, low reward industry operating in an informal economy with no labor protections that needs an enormous marketing budget in order to keep people engaged with it.

the police can’t really just let him get on a train

If they had, three people would have avoided bullet wounds and one of them wouldn’t be in the ER right now.

it’s not that crazy to taser a guy who just got onto a train

If you’ve ever ridden the subway in NYC, particularly during rush hour, the idea of firing a taser into a train full of people is absolutely crazy.

In both cases, it wasn’t the original message that kicked off the firestorm, it was a deliberate strategy put forward by billion-dollar presidential campaigns.

Nobody knew about the “eating my neighbor’s cat” post even after the debate. It took weeks to track down what Laura Loomer had whispered into Trump’s ear. Nobody considered the “Hillbilly Elegy had a chapter where Vance fucks a couch” tweet important until celebrities and politicians began retweeting it as a means of disgracing a weird conservative sex pest.

If there’s a rumor started by a smear campaign run out of an office in Moscow (and they’re even halfway competent in their execution) you’re likely only going to hear about it once it becomes the focus of some rhetorical exchange-of-fire on a top tier domestic social media celebrity or in a Senatorial debate. Even then, you won’t get to hear where it originated from until the polls have long since closed, in much the same way nobody got the details on the Comey indictment of Hilary or the Georgia election-steal attempt by Trump until it was too late.

It isn’t “one person” starting a rumor. Its an industry that feeds on rumors and is constantly regurgitating them to get your attention.

When aiming into a crowd of people? You’d have to be an exceptional marksman to hit your target. Of course, there’s the question of why you’re firing into a crowd to begin with.

going down to the creek to dip my toes in

creek is full of industrial runoff from the giant factory upstream

walk upstream to see the factory

How Memphis became a battleground over Elon Musk’s xAI supercomputer

xAI’s central focus is a tool called Grok. It’s an AI chatbot, similar to ChatGPT, that the company flaunts as “having a sense of humor.” Musk has called it the “most fun AI in the world.” It has fewer rules than other AI chatbots and has been known for creating controversial deepfake images, such as Mickey Mouse as a Nazi and Kamala Harris in lingerie.

The primary purpose of the Memphis supercomputer is to provide compute power for Grok.

…

The cancer rate in South Memphis is four times higher than the national average, according to a ProPublica report. And a 2020 University of Memphis study found the life expectancy here is 10 years lower than other parts of the city. South Memphis also has elevated asthma rates, and the American Lung Association gave it a failing grade for air quality. Experts say this is largely due to the neighborhood’s proximity to Memphis’ industrial zone.

Then because of that he threatened to kill them

They claim he made a threat. The article failed to print his side of the story for some curious reason. It isn’t printing any testimony from the bystanders, either.

Multiple people are still dead because they brought guns into a disagreement over $2.90, but the headline implies a lot more unreasonableness on the individual cops’ parts as opposed to the overall policy.

Cops will often lie about the danger of a suspect in order to justify elevating their use-of-force. That said, they weren’t that concerned by his unreasonableness when they deployed tasers into the crowd first. They didn’t switch to guns until they realized the tasers weren’t going to work.

The NYPD also loves to go after jaywalkers and vagrants, particularly when they’re interfering with the flow of street traffic.

Cars are King, baby.

Hillary wasn’t focused on the electoral college, she cared about beating Obama’s vote totals to “prove” she should have beat him.

She came up about 8M votes short from Obama’s big 2008 win. If she’d been aiming for that high bar, she missed it by miles.

Ironically, it was Biden who cleared it handily (with Trump coming in at historic-high second place) in 2020 thanks to mail-in voting boosting turnout nationally by nearly 20M votes. Of course, both parties immediately shut that shit down, lest Americans get used to the idea of convenient, accessible popular voting. The Trump/Biden Post Office under DeJoy has been dismantling the very idea of mail-in voting for the last four years.

I suspect 2024 turnout will be significantly lower across the board.

We need to get rid of all those people who haven’t understood American politics for decades

I totally disagree. We could use a lot of new blood, with people who aren’t resigned to the cynicism of the bi-annual election cycle. The folks who don’t simply submit to the psychic pressure of this heavily propagandized and chronically demoralized election waves are exactly the kinds of people who could break it.

Trump’s biggest triumph in 2016 was bringing out conservatives who had otherwise never voted. People who were too depressed by the duopoly to show up came out in droves during the GOP Primary to support their Big Wet Boy. That kept Ted Cruz out of the White House (which I’d argue would have been far worse for the country in the long run) in 2016.

Sander almost replicated the feat against Hillary that same year, but got kneecapped by a media that was hostile to the very idea of Socialism. But if you want any kind of progressive change in America in your lifetime, you need to see Democrats undergo the kind of change that the GOP has undergone, but from the left.

You need more people who aren’t consigned to voting Joe Biden mechanically every four years, even as he’s falling apart in front of your very eyes. You need more people who want to shake up the party establishment and vote out the rotten incumbents. You need people who actually believe what these candidates are saying, rather than accepting a basket of lies at face value and shrugging when the candidates fail to deliver.

But we can’t go into 2030 with a population of voters who just accept the status quo as the best they’ll ever do.

The race is significantly tighter than in 2016, at least per the polling. Mostly, people are excited because its such a vast improvement from the Biden polls that had Trump winning in a landslide.

But folks on Lemmy don’t realize how hard-in-the-paint rightwing talk radio is currently going for Trump. The degree to which “Haitian migrants eating your dog!” and “Venezuelan terrorists have seized a condo in Colorado!” rhetoric has inundated the discourse can’t be overstated. People are taking this shit seriously and sincerely thanks to the breathless bombardment of migrant panic stories crashing over the news networks like a tsunami.

If I didn’t know better, I might suspect there’s a collaboration among arch-conservative megadonors and media organizations to saturate news networks with this fearmongering. I can’t think of any instance in which a news network spewing anti-immigrant sentiment to whip locals into a panicked frenzy has ever happened before, or what the consequences were, but I’m sure that’s not what is happening this time and even if it is everything will be fine.

“How will we get by without all our financialized monopolies?!”

Idk, bro. Just keep doing what you’re doing, minus the extraordinary rents to your bloated bourgeois landlords, maybe?

Evidence of why the “Chris Rock solves gun crime” strategy won’t work.

If police really wanted to stop crime they’d be pouring over corporations accounting to find the stolen money.

Sounds like dirty authoritarian big government communism to me.

The way to build third parties is by reforming the democratic system state by state to have a ranked choice system

Spending decades to tinker with the mechanics of an election system that excludes 40% of the population via its baseline construction? Seems like you’re going to keep getting the same results.

What good is Ranked Choice Voting in a state like Florida, where 1.7M people are excluded through the state’s Felony Disenfrachisement system? FFS, the state voted on an amendment to reform Felony Disenfrachisement and the legislature just cancelled it out. Gerrymandering means you’ll never see a non-conservative state senate and you’re unlikely to see more than a moderate conservative occupy the Governor’s mansion.

That’s not a FPTP problem, its a problem of targeted state-wide ethnic disenfranchisement.

glances at the current state of the UK Labour party

It’s been known to work for a bit, but its also been known to collapse right back into the old two-party dichotomy. I think the hysteria around third parties baked into every election since the Bush Era SCOTUS-powered election theft in Florida is overblown, particularly when so much of the electorate lives in one-party dominant states. But I’ve also noticed successful outsider parties - the German Greens, France’s En March, the UK Liberal Dems - seem to embrace Corporationism as quickly as any of their German Christian Democrat / French Socialist / UK Tory peers.

And then there’s always this specter of fascism floating on the edge of the political establishment. Your Alternative for Germany, your National Front, and your UKIP create this existential crisis for liberal voters, such that they’re persistently terrorized into voting the “safe” centrist candidates in while ostracizing any candidate actually running on the things they say they want.

The Ruling Elite have the effective roadmap to keep the proles in line. Continuously finance a paper tiger on the right-flank of the election cycle. Make immigration a boogeyman issue that mobilizes the reactionaries within the state to turn out in droves. Then dangle a weak liberal as a release valve - a Starmer or Biden or Macron or Olaf Schultz - that nobody particularly likes, but the liberal-leaning base are told is “electable” because they can win the support of the conservative national media.

People are bombarded with this false choice - weak liberal or strongman conservative - decade after decade, all the way around the edge of the Atlantic, until the institutions these weak liberals are supposed to support are falling apart and the strongman conservatives can easily take over.

Its a doomed system.

Hey now, when Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines to take pot-shots into a crowd of protesters, he paid every toll and observed every traffic ordinance. How can you possibly compare Rittenhouse to this turnstile jumping barbarian?