Philosophy Discussion Forums | A Humans-Only Club for Open-Minded Discussion & Debate

[Sy Borg]

Nice try, no cigar.

All of the groups you mention come under a single heading - irrational partisans. Many people don't care about the tribes. They care about policies. They might care about economic policies that don't pander to short-term thinking. Others care about social policies that are fair and make sense. Others care about safety and social cohesion. Others care about opportunities.

The mainstream media, and those whose minds are controlled by the mainstream media, do not acknowledge this vast group of relatively objective people because they don't fit neatly into their little socio-political boxes.

I was responding to your statement about the category you mentioned “the far left” and pointing out that they do not “champion corporate interests” as you stated. Maybe you were referring instead to the Democratic Elite like Harris, Obama, Clinton, etc. They do champion corporate interests.

In my experience, most American voters to not use the “social policies” stances of candidates as a factor when voting. Most American voters either follow the corporate media like CNN and NYT or Fox News which provide propaganda and not policy information.

While many follow social policies that their corporate masters tell them to follow via their mouthpieces in the mainstream media, many others have contempt for the games being played and just want sensible policies, not short term or bandaid fixes, but actual attempts to do what governments are supposed to do, reduce to ability of powerful players to distort the market.

It's pretty outrageous when you think about it, how media outlets don't so much report on issues but tell people how they should be thinking about those issues.

It strikes me that "mainstream media" became a perjorative just as the networks lost huge market share and newspapers lost huge circulation numbers. I mean who younger than retirement age watches national broadcast news or reads a daily newspaper? Essentially no one. Oh and "fake news" became a thing at the same time. Coincidence?

Why focus on the culture wars? That's bread and circuses. The fact is, we have all been mislead for a long time, over and over, and that conditioning is apparent in most posts on this thread, advocating for short term fixes to systemic problems.

[LuckyR]

I was responding to your statement about the category you mentioned “the far left” and pointing out that they do not “champion corporate interests” as you stated. Maybe you were referring instead to the Democratic Elite like Harris, Obama, Clinton, etc. They do champion corporate interests.

In my experience, most American voters to not use the “social policies” stances of candidates as a factor when voting. Most American voters either follow the corporate media like CNN and NYT or Fox News which provide propaganda and not policy information.

While many follow social policies that their corporate masters tell them to follow via their mouthpieces in the mainstream media, many others have contempt for the games being played and just want sensible policies, not short term or bandaid fixes, but actual attempts to do what governments are supposed to do, reduce to ability of powerful players to distort the market.

It's pretty outrageous when you think about it, how media outlets don't so much report on issues but tell people how they should be thinking about those issues.

It strikes me that "mainstream media" became a perjorative just as the networks lost huge market share and newspapers lost huge circulation numbers. I mean who younger than retirement age watches national broadcast news or reads a daily newspaper? Essentially no one. Oh and "fake news" became a thing at the same time. Coincidence?

Why focus on the culture wars? That's bread and circuses. The fact is, we have all been mislead for a long time, over and over, and that conditioning is apparent in most posts on this thread, advocating for short term fixes to systemic problems.

Short term fixes to systemic problems are encouraged by 2 to 6 year election cycles in the presence of tribalism. Misleading information is the methodology, not the cause.

[Lagayascienza]

lagaya

Well said, Gertie. The other day I heard Trump calling Harris and the Democrats “socialists and communists”. But the Democrats are only slightly less to the right than he is. There is no true social-democratic party in US politics, just a few individuals like Bernie Sanders. And the situation in the UK mirrors that in Australia. The great Australian Labor Party is now no more than a name. Trade unionism is all but dead. The workforce has been casualized on low wages without any job security and the real wages of working-class people have been falling for decades. Publicly owned assets have all been privatized – sold off to big corporations who price-gouge the public with little or no oversight by government. Neo-conservatism in politics now reigns supreme - backed by the billionaires, and the monopolistic corporations which the own. They own everything including the mainstream media which serves up right-wing “infotainment” to masses, and any view that is even slightly to the left of far-right is ignored, ridiculed or demonized. Centrism in politics is dead almost everywhere in the world. This is the hole the West has dug for itself and it’s difficult to see how it can ever get out of it. And it’s not just the West. The same model of capitalism and corporatism now rules in Russia, China and most of the rest of the world. All wealth is sucked up to the oligarchy at the top. The rest are consigned to ever worsening wage slavery. Under these conditions the American dream and the Australian dream are just pipe dreams.


And, further to my post above, the mega-corporations that own now everything, now also track everything we do online and everywhere we go. Visit just about any website and take a look at the cookies and trackers. Even our geographic locations are tracked via our smart phones. And people are completely exposed on Facebook and the like. Just as left and centrist positions in politics are now impossible, so individual privacy is now dead.

We are all reduced to data cogs in the wheel of quasi-monopolistic capitalism which grinds on relentlessly pumping wealth upwards to the few. I’ve stopped using meta and Google search engines because of their tracking and targeting, and if I weren’t so old and arthritic and could still go browsing in real bookstores (which I used to love doing), I’d ditch Amazon’s Kindle.

If this is how the world ends then I’m not going to miss it much. I feel for the younger generations, the vast majority of whom will never own anything, not even their privacy. Brave New World.

I'm sorry to hear it's much the same in Australia lagaya, not surprised though.  You make good points about how the billionaires and  corporations own the new social media too.  They have our information, and can use it to personalise manipulation  much more effectively to serve their own interests, and that of their advertisers.  Musk buying himself Twitter and the cesspool of Right Wing bigotry and conspiracy he's fostered lays it bare.

I remember watching an interview recorded years ago with playwright Dennis Potter who knew he was dying.  It's a remarkable interview if you can find it.  One of his comments back then which has borne out was that we are changing from a nation of Citizens to a nation of Consumers.  This strikes me as true across the wealthy democracies, even the language of free public services is now about Customer and competition -  the notion of public service is  being corporatised.  Personnel became 'Human Resources', now in the same category as non-human resources like staplers and computers.  Our role is to serve the economy, not for the economy to serve us.

We see it with the BBC too, which is supposed to be our one news outlet which doesn't serve corporations.  It's remit was to be independent of government and commerce, to ''Educate, Inform and Entertain''.  Of course it's impossible to be completely unbiased, but that was its mission.  Now it's run like a business, which has to compete with other news sources, which it does by following the narratives set by the other media, the right wing Daily Mail being the most influential.  It should be our bastion against those vested interests, and a source of unspun facts, which is why the Right hate it, but it's slid into the morass. 

As for Trade Unions, Thatcher did for them here.  I was a Union Rep long after that, and subsequent Labour government did little to put things right.  Even though the Labour Party was founded by the trade union movement to give ordinary working people a voice in Parliament. 

It all looks pretty dire to me too.

Cheers, Gertie.
I've never done Twitter but, from what I read, after Musk bought it and renamed it X, it became an echo chamber for racists and the far-right and its profitability has declined sharply.

BTW, I saw that interview with Dennis Potter many years ago. It has stayed in my mind. What he said was prescient. He would be appalled too see what the world has become over the last 30 years or so. Especially at what the Beebs has become.

[Sy Borg]

Why are you commenting on Twitter/X if you have never used it? The stock price dropped sharply after it was purchased but it's rising rapidly. It is increasingly becoming a go-to source for information because people can get material that's suppressed by mainstream media. It's stock price will be increasingly plenty as people lose faith in the manipulations of traditional news sources.

The Guardian is an echo chamber. So are the ABC, SMH and Sky. They all angle for their target audiences. That's my issue with mainstream media today - they don't just report news, they tell you how you should think about it, either covertly with sly angles and suppression of key material or, increasingly, they overtly tell people what they should think.

Meanwhile, X has all sorts - both left and right extremists, plus plenty of apolitical material.

And the BBC was never fair dinkum. They protected Jimmy Savile for 50 years, to the great cost of hundreds of young victims, and they were never called to account for it.

[Lagayascienza]

When Twitter was taken over and it's name changed to X it was in the news all the time on all the outlets. I read what was said about it, including by former users. If it is enjoying a resurgence in users, advertising revenue and profitability, then I guess that will make Musk happy.

Of all the Australian news media, I find the ABC and the Conversation provide the most balanced and reliable reporting. The rest I wouldn't bother with. Although I do take a peek at the Guardian now and then.

I agree that the BBC was remiss in the Jimmy Savile affair. He was a predator of the worse sort who the BBC should have investigated long ago. But no organization is perfect. The BBC used to provide balanced reporting and it made great docos and TV series. From what Gertie says it is unfortunately not the respected institution it once was.

[Pattern-chaser]

I'll check out the link, thanks. It sounds spot on.  Except I now think Blair and Starmer are True Believers, not just cynically playing politics to get elected.  Blair was literally campaigning against Corbyn, when he knew it meant keeping the Tories in power, because they are ideologically closer to him.  Starmer, I don't know if he's just a careerist, or if he's the same, but the proof is in the pudding.  He woos Tories, accepts them into the Labour Party, and expels Leftists.  He takes away pensioners' heating allowance and chooses to keep our poorest children outside the welfare safety net.  Rather than tax the rich and corporations. What do you think?

True Believers? True Tory Believers? Blair, and now Starmer, are the closest we've had to Warlord Thatcher, although neither of them have yet equalled the Crimes Against the British People that Thatcher managed, using the police and the army to militarily defeat British workers and our unions.

I have a nasty feeling that it is no longer possible to present a Socialist alternative to the British voter. The Establishment, particularly the billionaires, along with the media, social and otherwise, will not allow it, and they have the power to prevent it.

[Pattern-chaser]

The fact is, we have all been mislead for a long time, over and over, and that conditioning is apparent in most posts on this thread, advocating for short term fixes to systemic problems.

OK, let's be clear. Can you describe the way(s) in which we have been "misled", and the nature of the "conditioning" that we have all succumbed to?

Short-termism has been around for quite some time. Capitalism favours getting your profit ASAP, not investing for a long-term dividend. Is it only this that you comment on, or is there more?

[Gertie]

I'll check out the link, thanks. It sounds spot on.  Except I now think Blair and Starmer are True Believers, not just cynically playing politics to get elected.  Blair was literally campaigning against Corbyn, when he knew it meant keeping the Tories in power, because they are ideologically closer to him.  Starmer, I don't know if he's just a careerist, or if he's the same, but the proof is in the pudding.  He woos Tories, accepts them into the Labour Party, and expels Leftists.  He takes away pensioners' heating allowance and chooses to keep our poorest children outside the welfare safety net.  Rather than tax the rich and corporations. What do you think?

True Believers? True Tory Believers? Blair, and now Starmer, are the closest we've had to Warlord Thatcher, although neither of them have yet equalled the Crimes Against the British People that Thatcher managed, using the police and the army to militarily defeat British workers and our unions.

I have a nasty feeling that it is no longer possible to present a Socialist alternative to the British voter. The Establishment, particularly the billionaires, along with the media, social and otherwise, will not allow it, and they have the power to prevent it.

Right, the vested interests which control most of our sources of information did a great job of making a real Leftist Labour unelectable, partly by claiming Corbyn was unelectable, which they treat as a truism. Maybe they're right, maybe on a fair playing field the Left can't win, it's unlikely we'll ever know. But the risk that they might win is what drives the monstering, and the distractions of the tribal 'Othering' in place of policies - which amount to not much more than three word slogans. That's enough apparently, we've become such a dumbed down and compliant electorate.

Your link was great btw, thanks!

And in today's news -

The Far Right Israeli government are now bombing Lebanon's capital city.

And Austria's Far Right party won the most seats in their General Election yesterday

Austria’s main parties are preparing to begin tense wrangling to form a government amid warnings about the country’s democracy after the far right’s watershed victory in a general election in which angry voters punished centrist incumbents over migration and inflation.

On Sunday, the anti-Islam, Kremlin-friendly Freedom party (FPÖ) scored its strongest result since its founding after the second world war by former Nazi functionaries and SS officers with just over 29% of the vote. The outcome surpassed expectations and beat the ruling centre-right People’s party (ÖVP) by nearly three percentage points. The centre-left opposition Social Democratic party (SPÖ) turned in its worst-ever performance with 21% while the Greens, junior partners in government, sank to 8%.

Exit polls showed that the 13-point gain for the FPÖ since the last parliamentary election in 2019 came thanks to strong support among younger voters. Amid deep frustration with the cost of living and angst about immigration, the hard right clearly won among Austrians under 34 with 27% of that demographic, and even more decisively with the 35-to-59 set on 37%. The FPÖ profited as well from festering resentment over Austria’s strict measures during the Covid pandemic.

- Guardian

[Mo_reese]

When Twitter was taken over and it's name changed to X it was in the news all the time on all the outlets. I read what was said about it, including by former users. If it is enjoying a resurgence in users, advertising revenue and profitability, then I guess that will make Musk happy.

Twitter maybe more that other social media has exposed the war crimes of the US in relation to the Israeli genocide and expanding war. Prior to Musk's purchase, Twitter saw up to date posts showing the atrocities in Gaza. At that time there was a large presence of progressives posting there. Almost immediately after Musk took over the reporting on the extermination of the Palestinian people in Gaza (and now the West Bank) dropped dramatically. Also, Musk started posting his support for Trump and the Right Wing and against the Democratic administration. Whether voluntarily or otherwise, the progressive posts dwindled.
It's extremely important for the Wealthy Elite Class to control the information available to the non-Elite. They completely control the US media and appear to be working to control the social media.

When the US illegally invaded Iraq and killed over half a million people, the Wealthy Elite had a rock solid control of the media. The NYT was a major propagandist winning awards for doing such a good job misleading the public. When info was leaked about the torture and other atrocities, those doing the exposing were severely punished and not those guilty of the crimes and not those falsely reporting.
“X” reflects Musk's agenda which doesn't seem to be to help the people.

[Sy Borg]

The fact is, we have all been mislead for a long time, over and over, and that conditioning is apparent in most posts on this thread, advocating for short term fixes to systemic problems.

OK, let's be clear. Can you describe the way(s) in which we have been "misled", and the nature of the "conditioning" that we have all succumbed to?

Short-termism has been around for quite some time. Capitalism favours getting your profit ASAP, not investing for a long-term dividend. Is it only this that you comment on, or is there more?

Price controls and rent freezes off the top of my head.