Skip Navigation

PhilipTheBucket

@ PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social

Posts

517
Comments

1321
Joined

7 mo. ago

Moderating

Left News Wire ibbit.at

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.
Jump
6

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago
I feel like this is some kind of friendly fire because the tankies got you all spun up to look for enemies lol
There's a specific point I am answering here:
Some journalists will call any policy even slightly to the left of neoliberalism “socialist”. This is done because the red scare taught Americans that socialism and communism are evil ideologies, despite Capitalism having a much higher death count - think of all the kids dying mining conflict minerals for our iPhones in Africa.
Example, please
There's a separate conversation about what are the issues that no big media in the US is willing to talk about, and how that list was in the year 2000 versus today, but that isn't this conversation. I'm literally just answering examples for point number 1, because it definitely is accurate that some (emphasized) journalists (to use the word a little bit loosely) will cover any middle-of-the-road normal Western democratic policy as "socialism" because they are wildly capitalistic. I feel like you are responding to some different point than that here, which again is fine if you want to talk about that, but it's separate from this conversation. Right? Doesn't that make sense?
Edit: To answer your specific question, no I don't think that it is universally true that the media unanimously refused to say anything good about social security or Obamacare. I do think that it was pretty much universal that they refused to say anything good about universal health care in the mid-1990s when Clinton was trying to do it, which led to its defeat. That's sort of my central thesis in some of my other comments here, that up until about 2000 big business had a total monopoly on media in this country which led it to be pretty easy for them to defeat anything to the left of Thatcher or Reagan that tried to rear its head. When Obama tried again in 2008, they had maybe about 60% control, which was enough to lead a lot of people to hate Obamacare even up to the present day but their control had slipped sufficiently that he was able to do some weakened and distorted version of health care without it being just completely vetoed by the insurance companies because of their and their friends' control of media.

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Aren't you a little bit curious about what the answer might be?

If you don't know the answer, I can help provide it. Maybe it might spark some kind of curiosity on your part...

(I feel like you're not trying very hard to engage productively here lol)

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

I'm saying that those are things that were described as "socialism" to scare people away from supporting them (the point #1).

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So what's your answer?

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Sounds like you're incurious

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Feel free to answer the question. "Tankie" is by absolutely no means a conflation with all socialists or leftists. Tankies are right-wing, which is why we don't like them.

Again, feel free to answer the fairly basic question, IDK how you can refuse to do that and preemptively accuse any and every listener of being obviously incurious about the answer. You have no idea who's reading this who you now have the opportunity to make a sensible argument to.

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Example, please

Obamacare, social security, medicare for all, et cetera

Democrats are left wing, every policy stance they hold is progressive barring some foreign affairs politics.

This I definitely don't agree with. We don't have universal health care and we couldn't get the first iteration of the IRA because the Democrats don't agree with those things (among many other massively mainstream ideas) because they are left-wing policies which will anger their donors. The only left-wing people in American politics are random isolated hotspots like Bernie or AOC who constantly have a target on their back in the media as a result.

The Republicans are far worse than the Democrats, and oppose those fairly basic left-wing policies rabidly and unanimously instead of only being wishy-washy about them enough so we don't have them, but in almost any Western democracy, the Democrats would be the right-wing party, and a lot of the problems we have are because the vast majority of Democrats are complicit in all sorts of crimes against the people.

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Nothing of this indicates that it's in any way urgent. That was my point. The closest it comes, way way down after it's talking about some flowers maybe doing some weird things, is:

A warming of 3.5 degrees, according to experts, would cause widespread climatic and environmental dislocations, producing more extreme weather, raising the global sea level, causing precipitation patterns to change and shifting climatic and agricultural zones.

Doesn't sound too bad. What Gore said, during the election while the press criticized him for it and later when he found financing for a platform of his own, was:

There are good people, who are in politics in both parties, who hold this at arm's length, because if they acknowledge it and recognize it, then the moral imperative to make big changes is inescapable. ... unless you fix the biggest damn crisis in the history of this country.

Tony Blair's scientific advisor has said that because of what's happening in Greenland right now, the maps of the world will have to be redrawn. If Greenland broke up and melted, or if half of Greenland and half of West Antarctica broke up and melted, this is what would happen to the sea level in Florida. This is what would happen to San Francisco Bay. A lot of people live in these areas. The Netherlands, one of the low countries. Absolutely devastating.
The area around Beijing that's home to tens of millions of people. Even worse, in the area around Shanghai, there are 40 million people. Worse still, Calcutta, and to the east, Bangladesh. Think of the impact of a couple hundred thousand refugees when they're displaced by an environmental event. And then imagine the impact of a hundred million or more.
Here's Manhattan. This is the World Trade Center memorial site. And after the horrible events of 9/11, we said, "Never again." But this is what would happen to Manhattan.

All emphasis is mine. I just picked random stuff from his movie's script. That's the reality. I think people still don't really grasp it, because the "business as usual" malpractice press got replaced with getting your news from Facebook instead of being replaced with something better, but it is at least possible to broadcast that message to a mass audience now without having to finance your own movie. In 1999, it wasn't, and the news was refusing their duty to as the only ones who could do it.

2mo ago

sick em rex

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

There is a crack

In everything

That's how the light gets in.

-LC

2mo ago

sick em rex

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

I don't think the dog bit the cop because the cop was being the aggressor. Dogs are fine with being aggressors or "their people" being aggressors, it's the whole job of police dogs and they love the fuck out of it. I think probably the cop was being an asshole and the other guy was not, and also, it's a dog, and so doesn't completely know what's going on but knows that its job is to bite people. And so, here's an asshole! I'll bite him, that's my job.

(K9 handlers are supposed to prevent this type of thing, but the world is not a perfect place in execution)

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

See, the thing you have to understand is, they're not interested in that question. They're trying to "win." That's why ad hominem is so important: They can just say you're bad-faith, and then strut off victorious. It's actually a disadvantage if they engage factually.

Why that is, is an exercise for the reader...

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Yeah, Noam Chomsky is openly siding with Russia’s invasion, isn’t he? “A Stronger NATO is the last thing we need” he said.

Yeah. He went off the deep end once he got elderly and his viewpoint of the world ossified. It doesn't invalidate his earlier scholarship, though.

(Also, his support for Russia is overblown by the disinfo machine. Mostly what he's saying in things that I have read is that NATO and the West have done ten times worse than Russia is doing in Ukraine right now, so the freakout is a bunch of hypocrisy, which is of course completely accurate. The disinfo likes to spin it like he's saying Russia is the good guys, which isn't at all what he's saying. But yes, I also think he's missing the central point in Ukraine because it doesn't fit with how he likes to look at things.)

Even then, he’s been a prominent figure and part of the available media in the USA for a very long time, so clearly an example of not being censored.

Well... the US doesn't have state-sponsored censorship like most socialist countries. That part is true. My point, and I think the OOP cartoon's point, is that because our media is capitalist, it was more or less impossible before non-big-business media developed out of the internet for certain messages to get out. I do think that's a fair point. Just the fact that one academic was able to get one counterculture message out (and generally be regarded by 100% of the external political spectrum as a terrorist as a result) doesn't invalidate that to me.

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Here's an example of what I'm talking about:

https://www.nytimes.com/2000/11/03/us/2000-campaign-environment-favorite-issue-gore-finds-himself-2-front-defense.html

Just a bunch of shit, from beginning to end. Not a whisper of the idea that this might actually be an emergency. In fact, it's kind of treated as a liability for Gore that he keeps saying that it is.

About as good as it gets is this:

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/library/national/science/121898sci-global-warming.html

... which, even if we're not going to take any points off for "While there are dissenters who believe the warmer climate can be explained by normal variation," doesn't really address even to the slightest degree why this kind of thing might actually be important let alone a globe-spanning catastrophe.

That's what I mean about why Gore had to make his own movie. The media was simply violently opposed to the idea of telling anyone the truth about it, limiting itself to sometimes making a grudging acknowledgement that maybe some of the most basic facts about the present might be true, with nothing at all indicated about what it meant for the future.

Okay, your turn. Where's the newspaper article where they made it clear that it was an emergency? You said anyone could find them without any trouble, so it should be easy.

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Those were all popular ideas before the advent of the internet.

I'll ask you the same thing I asked Diplomjodler: Show me one article in the mainstream press that simply reports the objective truth that Al Gore is right about global warming.

They were "popular" ideas, sure. What I'm saying is that the media's unanimous opposition to them was very effective at preventing them from getting real traction by distorting the thinking of a lot of people in the country. For example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clinton_health_care_plan_of_1993

The effort also included extensive advertising criticizing the plan, including the famous "Harry and Louise" ad, paid for by the Health Insurance Association of America, which depicted a middle-class couple despairing over the plan's complex, bureaucratic nature.[18][19] Time, CBS News, CNN, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor ran stories questioning whether there really was a health care crisis.[20] Op-eds were written against it, including one in The Washington Post by conservative[21] University of Virginia Professor Martha Derthick that said,
"In many years of studying American social policy, I have never read an official document that seemed so suffused with coercion and political naivete... with its drastic prescriptions for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals and you and me.[22]"

The 1994 mid-term election became, in the opinion of one media observer, a "referendum on big government – Hillary Clinton had launched a massive health-care reform plan that wound up strangled by its own red tape".[31] In that 1994 election, the Republican revolution, led by Newt Gingrich, gave the GOP control of both the House of Representatives and the Senate for the first time since the 83rd Congress of 1953–1954, ending prospects for a Clinton-sponsored health care overhaul. Comprehensive health care reform in the United States was not seriously considered or enacted by Congress until Barack Obama's election in 2008, and the U.S. remains the only developed country without universal health care.

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

A little of column "I don't know what 'nominally' means," a little of column "Under no circumstances do I plan to address your question head on, I'll start up some tangential nonsense instead."

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

I'm going to need you to look up "ad hominem" in the dictionary, it's not just for internet insults

Also let me know if you find one of those climate change articles or anything

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Noam Chomsky wrote a bunch of books about the free press's coverage of geopolitical issues and one of his biggest points of emphasis was how the whole spectrum of permissible debate was basically indistinguishable. That's why I used Israel as one example.

I think you'd be hard pressed to find even a single newspaper article in the run-up to 2000 that was willing to simply say plainly that Al Gore was objectively right about climate change and what a fucking emergency it was, for example. It was always represented as a "debate" and his absolutely voice-in-the-wilderness diagnosis was a "viewpoint." He had to make a whole movie of his own to be able to speak plainly about what was going on, because literally no one in the news was explaining what needed to be explained about it. And that was all after counterculture news started to get a little bit of early traction on the internet and puncture the monopoly a little bit.

It is almost impossible for people who grew up post-internet to grasp how constrained the news in the pre-internet era was. It sounds like we're making it up, like of course it couldn't have been like that.

2mo ago

Tankies tell me the "capitalist media" is hiding the truth from me. Asking what, specifically, is a bannable offence.

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

Two things are happening, I think:

It's not anymore, but the cartoon when it was printed was pretty accurate. Before the internet, it used to be functionally impossible to run across anyone who had any kind of platform anywhere in the US who thought that universal health care was a good idea, or that Israel was anyone other than the good guys, or that publicly funded elections would fix 85% of our problems. Or that global warming was a problem. The magnitude of the catastrophe-on-purpose that resulted from that distorted media is still with us to this day. It's why we still don't have a functioning health care system, for example, because everyone in Washington's picture of the world froze in around 1995 when their brains reached the age where they stop making new worldviews. I actually don't think it's fair to blame that on capitalism specifically, since powerful people seizing the methods of media and distorting them to prevent the people from figuring out what's going on is a pretty universal problem in any economic system, but it is certainly accurate and in the US it takes the forms of capitalism (and is still going on today, just in a different form; it's why no one published the whistleblower's warning about the US invading Venezuela for example.)
What the .ml contingent means by posting that is that the capitalist press is hiding the truth that Ukraine started the Ukraine war, that Biden was the biggest threat to world peace and it was therefore important not to vote for Kamala, and so on. They're adopting a time-honored very effective propaganda technique of reversing the roles, and then screaming the role-reversed framing of reality with so much vigor that it's hard for anyone within the bubble to point out that the truth they claim is being censored is readily available to literally everyone, and that they are the ones constantly banning people who don't agree with their carefully curated worldview. Because EVERYONE KNOWS and then they get an inch away from your face and start aggressively repeating what it is that everyone knows.

2mo ago

Smartest tankies put their heads together to understand Bernie's post, and determine that Maduro is cool and Bernie is a fascist

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

You're close. Tankies are supportive of anything that lines up with the state-sponsored propaganda they consume.

They might "think" Trump will at least bring peace, during the election as a reason to not oppose him. They might hate Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, but love particular Russian-aligned US politicians who are ten times more "problematic" or pro-empire than those ones (or other particular ones they also do extensive hand-wringing about.) It's why they all support Maduro, it's why they hate Ukraine but support Palestine, it's why they love software like Lemmy but hate software like Wikipedia, it's why they are worried about green energy in Europe which isn't "practical" but also hate Biden because he didn't support clean energy enough, and so on and so on. Their collection of anecdotes and arguments is pretty much a perfect match for the Russian disinfo machine and there is literally no other thought process I can come up with that arrives at such a specific and self-contradictory assemblage of stances.

They're just dim enough to get taken in. What proportion of them are true disinfo posters, and what proportion are genuine people who are simply dim enough to get fooled and so self-select themselves into the community, I have no idea, although I would love to be able to find out somehow.

2mo ago

USA's backed coups in South America

Jump

PhilipTheBucket @piefed.social 2mo ago

You just gotta scroll up a bit. Nicaragua and Guatemala were in the 80s, absolutely the stuff of nightmares ten times worse than what Trump is doing. We almost certainly sponsored an attempted coup against Hugo Chavez in the early 2000s, and a successful one in Honduras under Obama.

You're not wrong that Trump is a horrifying new chapter. It is testament to the semblance of humanity that the US State Department slowly developed post-2000 that, yes, Trump is a return to a much more barbaric and brazen time of US foreign policy, with worse surely on the horizon. But we never really stopped being the bad guys, we just got a little more subtle and less overtly violent about it, until now.