The majority of online content more and more resembles the standard CNN / Fox News stuff, but with packaging that's familiar to Millennials and Zoomers.
Other than the occasional niche reference, it all boils down to:
Here's why standard conservative politician #5443 is the devil / a saint, and here's why standard liberal politician #5444 is the devil / a saint.
Here's why everything our side does is based and good, and here's why everything their side does is cringe and evil.
Here's niche alt-left or alt-right packaging, but neolib / neocon content.
The Millennials and Zoomers who consume this slop for 8 hrs a day or more, are just as insane as the Boomers. This means that content creators must must work hard to keep them on the addictive treadmill forever, by keeping their minds in a perpetually heightened state of arousal / reactivity.
This means endless doses of, among other things, self-righteousness ('think of the kids, all those dead innocent African children slaughtered and abandoned mercilessly'), victory and triumph ('MAGA for the W, suck it leftists'), doom and gloom ('climate change or COVID or AI will collapse society in X years'), utopianism ('AI will save us, conscious robots by 2025 err I mean 2030'), action / excitement ('watch evil brown terrorists get blown up, watch Trump supporter get confronted by ANTIFA'), and so on.
The broader pattern is that the left-wingers jerk themselves off to how wonderful and empathetic and sensitive they are, while behaving like insane psychos and torturers, and the right-wingers jerk themselves off to how powerful and strong they are, while being impotent idle cucks.
Political Science Theater 300, where you watch debate-club kids and gay nerds attempt show business, high drama, etc. And with a little bit of pro-football or the MMA thrown in, since they're covering real-world politics after all.
Super-intense in the short-term, boring and forgettable and embarrassing to be a part of in the long run.
Since the only real goal is to WIN WIN WIN at all costs, there are no standards for what gets said, it's just anything goes, and the highest-paid and most visible writers are those who can come up with the best insults, state their ignorant / clueless / insane views in the most confident way possible, and misunderstand and misconstrue and pigeon-hole the other side as hard as possible.
I was never interested in joining debate clubs in high school, and I'm not impressed with the online version as an adult.
Given how dissatisfied mainstream audiences are becoming with the mainstream, it's even more disappointing and underwhelming to turn to the 'new' outlets that are replacing them and see the same level of fakeness, the same-old slop mindlessly regurgitated and presented as new (just don't check the expiration date), the same 'debates' that were out-dated in the 2000s and are even more ridiculous now, etc etc etc.
Fortunately, the novelty is starting to wear off, and the emotional intensity is a lot lower than last year (not a high bar to clear, and due to exhaustion among the various fighters), so there's less to exploit on both fronts.
Going forward I think this stuff will simply become more and more irrelevant, confined to a niche group of slop-enthusiasts, while the masses simply tune it all out as irrelevant.
The fact that they've all converged on similar slogans and positions (I talked about this with the whole Fuck Around, Find Out thing, but it applies to others too) is a sign that it's all being financed, funded, or directed by some kind of misinformation-countering campaign. Maybe funded by the private sector, maybe funded by the public sector, who knows.
ReplyDeleteNo way they could come up with something like that on your own, as gay and lame as it is, and repeat it together. It was made in some lab, and then spread from there.
I don't see how these people could get paid to post 24/7 otherwise, especially when the stuff they're posting is so lame and boring.
Plus the fact that the opinions they've converged on are unrepresentative of the population as a whole, but super-representative of the neolib / neocon establishment currently in charge.
In some cases they have the EXACT same enemies as the DoD-- how many Americans or Euros are itching to fight wars in Yemen or Iran?
If your views on foreign policy are the same as Lindsey Graham, and your views on trade are the same as George Bush, it doesn't matter how many based racist slurs you use, what anime girls you put in your profile, or anything else: it's all fake & gay, and will be treated as such by the increasingly cynical consumers.
Before lecturing the masses on their sins, political commentators and experts and propagandists / shills should first tell us how much they're renting out their mouths for, so we can judge them ourselves, and ideally they should also leave us the phone # or contact info of their masters, so that we can contact them directly rather than dealing with midwit middle-men bootlickers.
ReplyDeleteThis kind of censorship seems to have started during the 2010s, and then escalated to a whole new level during the 2020s, especially the year Biden was 'elected'. That's when the fakeness and censorship went from in the background and noticed by perceptive people and somewhat subtle to outright, flagrant, done in the open, and so on.
ReplyDeleteIt's a dual scheme where they go after the top and the bottom, in order to control all information within the system.
They send legions of bots to infest the comments sections on YT and Reddit (mainly the political ones, but extending to some social or other issues that threaten their agendas). They're easy to spot because they're all super-enthusiastically in favor of the Establishment's positions, which most people don't like, and because they rely on the same tired recycled phrases-- not a lot of originality within the CIA these days.
Any dissenting comments get deleted, banned, downvoted-to-oblivion, hidden by the algos, etc.
Then with the bottom taken care of, they go after the top by buying off the top-tier and most visible content creators, so they all repeat increasingly watered down talking points.
Of course since they don't want to make the whole thing too obvious, they still allow them to use slurs or say taboo things or whatever, but if you focus on what's being said (the substance, rather than the packaging) it becomes quite obvious.
I'm going to try and post more of my comments in this one thread, rather than create more and more posts. Every once in awhile if I say something I think is worth summarizing in general I might repeat it in a post, though.
ReplyDeleteForget slurs or taboos against drugs or sex or whatever, racism, and so on: 'collapse' is the real taboo, a concept they're all afraid of admitting or even acknowledging on social media and the related podcast-phere etc.
ReplyDeleteThis is because now that the American nation and broader Empire has begun to openly break down-- and not in a subtle hidden way but in an open disastrous-failure way-- the reality is too frightening and scary to admit for the people who make up the commentators on social media, since it produces too much cognitive dissonance for their brains to handle ('everything is better', 'we're making so much progress', etc).
So they just try to block it out of view, by shifting to lame copes about eternal superiority, genetic triumph, AI utopianism, or taking hallucinogenic drugs, or what have you, since these all allow them to keep the thing going rather than admit that it's doomed.
It's the approach of someone becoming more old, impotent, and resigned to failure, but who needs something to tell himself in order to prop up his self-esteem. Not literally "old", since many of them are in their 30s and 40s, but in the sense of out-of-date, clueless, etc.
The historical case is very straightforward, and has been discussed before, which is why reviewing it is so boring and tedious.
The Romans, British, Spanish, Russian / Soviet Empires all enjoyed moments of tremendous scientific and cultural production, extensive military conquests, and so on for decades-- some of them even had troops on multiple contents, and the world's reserve currency, like we do now.
Yet every empires declines, becomes decadent and selfish, and then collapses into anarchic civil wars, fragments, and is succeeded by a much more limited assortment of states, instead of the big massive over-extended system.
The British, French, Russians, Spanish etc were no exception, no matter how genetically superior or scientifically / technologically advanced, and nor will America.
The US dollar is going to collapse, and so will the massive overextended US Army.
ReplyDeleteWhen you have to print more and more money just to keep the whole thing going-- aside from being a glaring sign of weakness and fragility-- it also destroys the value of your currency, leading to inflation. However since everyone in the economy has become super-dependent on money-printing, there's no answer except to do more of the destructive behavior, and then the whole thing gradually becomes more and more worthless.
The Imperial Army is in a similar situation. It bankrupts the nation-- most empires wind up bankrupting their core nations in order to keep going-- but aside from that it's actively losing on multiple fronts and showing no signs of de-escalating, winding the whole thing down, surrendering or at least negotiating. Far from it-- they're desperately lashing out to salvage their reputation!
This whole desperate attempt is doomed, and so they will lose harder and harder, encouraging more and more nations to seize the opportunity and kick them out. As that accelerates, the public rapidly loses trust in the whole concept of military ventures, so they run out of troops and political support at home, while fighting more and more wars abroad-- recipe for collapse.
That doesn't mean Americans won't have a currency to use or an army to protect them in the future-- they will, but the future system will resemble the modern-day French or Spanish or British system (not their peak in the 1600s-1800s). It will be much smaller and far less influential. The flip-side is that it won't vulnerable to a massive collapse, doom-loops, etc like we're seeing right now.
NATO certainly won't be around, nor will the American bases in the M-E, or the huge stock market and its zombie companies however.
Given how young America is, we also don't know if it I'll split up into multiple states the way the Soviets did or remain more unified like France. There might be several armies, and several currencies, instead of just one-- that remains to be seen.
In America and Britain, right-wing parties are totally useless, so worshiping them is profoundly retarded-- they have to actually deliver the results in order to be worth defending, and they haven't (and for decades now), which is why it's indifferent to me if they're replaced by left-wing parties that can do better on populism, nationalism, and immigration.
ReplyDeleteThe way the right-wing works in the Anglosphere-- Peter Hitchens had a good description of this somewhere-- is that there's mucho texto and mucho speako about family values, the flag, patriotism, the nation etc on the campaign trail, followed by off-shoring industry, hauling in migrants for cheap labor, and wasting trillions on foreign wars, once in office.
Not only are they useless in terms of fighting terrorism, or deporting immigrants, they are deeply in bed with the forces that support both of these things-- their greatest partners and supporters are mega-corporations looking to cut costs, as well as the Saudis and the jihadist Gulf Arabs in the M-E.
This is why social-conservative priorities like protecting children from the breakdown of the nuclear family, preventing degeneracy or drug use, etc never happen under them (things have gotten far worse than ever before, if anything) while on the other hand they work overtime to keep the minimum wage as low as possible, lower income taxes, and so on and so forth.
It's just a fake globalist party, but with right-wing symbols rather than left-wing ones.
If anything they're more like the mirror image of the woke leftists who put on Che Guevara shirts and LARP as communists and environmental warriors, while living in some of the most neo-Victorian ultra-capitalist cities on Earth.
When every single one of your actions is hyper-libertarian, your stated beliefs are irrelevant.
There's also something deeply and profoundly retarded in the way they strut around.
ReplyDeleteIt's as if they think wearing blue jeans, or taking pictures of themselves with the flag and the bible and their dogs, or paying lip service to family values, or going to church, somehow makes them conservative.
Aside from the fact of how degenerate, pro-divorce / sleeping around, etc they are in their own lives, I mean (and which is well-known by now). It's also deeply insulting to the audience, treating the average American like a drooling retard.
'Well, he's standing next to an American flag and a church on his Instagram, plus he says stuff about religion, so he must be conservative.'
Sure thing, and that must be why they just off-shored even more jobs to India, since there's nothing more deeply conservative and traditional than dismantling your country's entire industrial base. Impoverishing America, so the corporate scum can keep its addiction to higher profit margins going for another round-- the Founding Fathers would be delighted!
These people are about as smart and perceptive as the liberals and leftists who look at the do-nothing government programs that have all grown and grown and grown, and say things like,
'Well it's run by experts to solve COVID or fight climate change, so clearly that's what they're doing, and so they deserve another billion dollars to keep doing it.'
Yeah, sure they are-- it totally isn't some giant bureaucratic scam, and that's why all these problems have all been solved so neatly and impressively by the techno-experts who've made a wonderful living off of fighting them.
Note to autistic morons: if something is sold to you as being X, it's never about that (usually the opposite).
It many ways, it's the return from the dead of the clueless experts, know-nothing pundits, and Intellectual-Yet-Idiot types we thought had been banished permanently during the Trump-Bernie years, but who have cynically re-adapted themselves in order to keep the thing going for the new era of online media consumed by Gen Z and Millennials rather than Boomers and some Gen-Xers.
ReplyDeleteThese are the people who have managed to be on the wrong side of every major issue, over the course of the past two decades, and yet they still insist on ordering everyone else around and throwing around labels like 'conspiracy theorist' and 'disinformation' instead of humbling themselves and taking some responsibility for their mistakes, like real competent adults would.
On the right, these are the MBA and managerial types who whine and complain about government programs that cost billions, but went on to spend trillions on 'bringing democracy' to Iraq and Afghanistan, funding extremist jihadists in Syria for the same reasons, now arming neo-Nazis in Ukraine, and on and on, without ever realizing the contradiction.
They are also the same types who worship corporate profits, and who believe that as long as 'the line goes up' for a handful of executives and managers, everything will work out fine.
They pretend to be in favor of the 1950s, and old-fashioned goold old American values, but under their rule we have actually gone back to the 'good old days' of the Gilded Age and Civil War era, where things that wouldn't have been dreamed of even 30 years ago become more and more common.
Widespread normalized corruption and rent-seeking, unaccountable oligarchs, assassinations and political violence, hyper-polarization resulting in the inability to plan anything in the long run or even make sensible decisions in the short-term, nonexistent or degraded infrastructure and public services, bums and vagrants and widespread substance abuse, and so on and so forth.
Somehow they can't connect the symptoms to the obvious underlying disease, it's all being blamed on Venezuelans, random foreigners, the Chinese, or other random foreigners, rather than the decadent and greedy elites.
On the left, their equivalents are the ones who believe in sending everyone to college, as if that will magically create good jobs, instead gradually destroying the value of a college degree.
ReplyDeleteThey also think more studies = more knowledge, more data = more insight, and support "evidence-based" policies, yet all they've done is generate a tremendous amount of pseudo-intellectual noise, obfuscation, and borderline fraud, while the actual value of the various scientific disciplines collapses.
These are the same geniuses who "solved" the 2008 recession by not holding a single individual or institution accountable and then smugly dismissed anyone with a brain warning about the consequences as a conspiracy theorist, out of touch, Boomer / 'so 201_', and so on.
Under neoliberalism, we've devolved from having a society of owners, producers, and problem-solvers to a dysfunctional system with lifelong perpetual renters, consumers (of slop), and more and more problem-causers.
ReplyDeleteWe've replaced the mind-set of figuring out and implementing simple solutions to complex problems, with one of taking more and more things that work (and are relatively simple) and turning them into super-expensive & complex systems that don't work.
And we've replaced bottom-up tinkering and experimentation and humility with hubris and delusion.
Then when you point out that the emperor is wearing no clothes, and that these billion / trillion dollar things DON'T WORK (like higher ed, AI, the military, big pharma, etc) they get mad at you for noticing that it's broken, and expecting it to work, rather than taking responsibility.
The only "new media" figure I'm even remotely sympathetic to is Tucker, and even then he was a million times better when he was on Fox-- whereas now I almost never listen to him, even if I probably agree with him on most issues.
ReplyDeleteWhen Tucker was on Fox, he had to work under a time limit and address normal American audiences. Now that he caters to hyper-online NEETs (just right-wing, rather than left) there is no focus on anything: everything is meandering, going on for hours and hours on random issues, random subjects, and so on and so forth.
The shut-in NEETs are also obsessed with obscure theories and terms that mean nothing whatsoever to normal people, so the subject matter has also changed from issues that impact everyone (inflation, foreign wars, elite corruption, endless homeless vagrants, etc) to these niche boring topics.
And Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, Vance, etc (and their equivalents on the left)-- absolute clowns, people who would've been sidelined when Trump or Bernie were running as real populists, but are now jumping on because it's all fake and gay, and so they can confidently do the same old routines that are decades old at this point.
Blue-collar workers, the legions of alienated Americans, disaffected voters... do not give a fuck about whatever gay drama there is between debate club nerds, lawyers, and podcasters LOL. Trying to present this slop as cutting edge, when it would have been sad in the 2000s and is even more offensive now, is deeply embarrassing.
I also read some of Noah Smith's content, not because I agree with anything that retarded faggot says, but because it's useful to know what your enemy is planning. It's the same reason I used to listen to a lot of Nasrallah's speeches, it was a very insightful and anti-biased source for whatever the Pentagon was planning in the M-E region, usually presented in a very clear and direct manner.
ReplyDelete(Of course this was back when we had an actually open Internet, whereas after 2020 they started banning all the usual suspects including pro-Russia accounts or anyone giving you an honest view as to who we were backing in the region and locking more and more interesting stuff behind annoying paywalls.)
That's how you can tell that their main plan is industrializing India, which he posts and tweets about constantly. This isn't to help India (LOL), but simply because it's a country with tons of cheap labor, amenable to exploitation, whereas China is increasingly expensive to operate in due to rising living standards among the former sweatshop workers. China is also becoming more and more independent and even hostile to the interests of the Pentagon, and therefore it must be "punished" by having the factories withdrawn and sent to more compliant subjects (which also include Vietnam and Indonesia, in that region).
Trump's tariffs on India were simply Russia derangement syndrome (fake), just trying to punish them for buying Russian oil, but otherwise not at all interested in protecting American industry and American jobs from being destroyed even further by the greedy oligarchs.
And of course, as usual, the same NGO-funded leftist crowd that loves to preen about the destructive effect of climate change is also tacitly in favor of industrializing India, or at least makes sure to never mention it.
Somehow I doubt emissions will fall once every domestic industry is located in a country with no environmental regulations whatsoever (just look at the state of their cities), but pointing this out would go against the elitist agendas on both sides, so the pathetic Millennial losers will shut up about it and instead demand we implement some retarded tax on the already poor middle and working classes in 1st world countries.