Progressive Politics

Sure, no violation of freedom of speech by the letter of the law. Mission accomplished I suppose.

But instead we have structures and institutions funneling inconvenient opinions and lived experiences into the fringe - bit by bit - so that they may fizzle in silence.

And on an interview with the veneer of "regular people's opinions", why is this particular opinion being met with repulsion? Why would a journalist seek an opinion and determine this guy's isn't the "right opinion"? Why would an interviewer who is working as a professional chase a vapid discussion about nostalgia?

I would say that freedom of speech as an ideal extends beyond just the law, and that if there is value in getting someone's opinion "on the street" there is something to be said to them sharing views on predatory capitalism.

Yeah, it's not like the FCC (a government agency) has been caught multiple times directly pressuring corporate media to toe the party line, or else. O wait...they actually have been

He was literally asked a question and they were trying to stop him from answering because it didn't go along the corpo line.

It's not that they figured out the problem independently but were too stupid to come to a rational solution. It's that their propaganda sources know these are problems and are proactively introducing them and providing nutty solutions so when they're raised naturally the issue will both validate the conservative end goals and be vaguely idiotic to the liberals.

"Every accusation is a confession" is real, even for things that seemed kind of outlandish like the elite pedophile cabal. I'm seriously concerned that the various baby blood and baby cannibalism conspiracy theories also aren't just creative fiction by addled minds.

Its because right wing media is own by fascist billionaires who feed them disinformation while defunding their school districts, leading to them being unable to think for themselves and buying the outright lies as fact.

It's also because these problems are multifaceted, layered and complex and generally don't have simple solutions.

They often gravitate to a "solution" that they "understand" and right wing politics have been pretty good at promoting those "solutions".

I think Cory Doctorow does a good job of explaining this when he talks about Naomi Klein's book. They both call it a "mirror world" of political beliefs.

Qanon's obsession with "child trafficking" is a mirror-world version of the real crises of child poverty, child labor, border family separations and kids in cages. Anti-vax is the mirror-world version of the true story of the Sacklers and their fellow opioid barons making billions on Oxy and fent, with the collusion of corrupt FDA officials and a pliant bankruptcy court system. Xenophobic panic about "immigrants stealing jobs" is the mirror world version of the well-documented fact that big business shipped jobs to low-waged territories abroad, weakening US labor and smashing US unions. Cryptocurrency talk about "decentralization" is the mirror-world version of the decay of every industry (including tech) into a monopoly or a cartel.

It's easy to be convinced by that type of logic. I used to be heavily into cryptocurrency because I saw the failure of capitalism to protect us from corporate consolidation and monopolies, so I assumed "this system that decries centralized authorities must be better."

They were only half right though. It's true corporate consolidation was a problem, and the centralization it brought causes issues, but the reason that consolidation happens is because of capital, which crypto is very much not against, and heavily supports, through tokens that give you ownership over a share of all the income a protocol generates, even if that protocol could run just fine indefinitely on-chain without paying you a fee.

People slowly accumulate more wealth, more voting power, and eventually control how these "decentralized" protocols operate.

In the same way, MAGA thinking has the same problem, where they'll correctly identify an issue or motive, but entirely misjudge what the cause of it is, will fight the wrong enemies (or worse, support their true enemies), and only later will they realize things have just kept getting worse.

I think its more republicans point their fingers and say "these immigrants and woke people are responsible for your problems, so we need a giant fascist prison camp system to fix it" knowing full well it will make things worse.

Many democrat politicians do this thing where they try to make the answer as obtuse as possible to deflect their donors from blame so they mostly just sound like Nancy Pelosi when she said something like "the problems are very bad but their causes are very good", the causes there being corporate donors that largely prefer republicans but also fund democrats to a lesser extent.

Republicans are willing to point their fingers at people and blame them for people's woes which at least suggests a solution, even if its a full lie where they're just blaming the victims or full absurdity like Elon Musk blaming George Soros for things (a guy who has like 2% of elon's wealth and his political spending in politics is dwarfed by elon's buyout of twitter alone)

Uhhhh, this is who she works for. There is a legitimate financial reason not to say “I’ve got nothing to contribute, but you have the next 15 seconds.”
This is why she is a class traitor.

They're aren't implying that it's because of those things. They are saying as an individual who has undoubtedly been subject to those systemic abuses is makes it all the more stomach turning that they'd be a cog in perpetuating it.

I’m glad fiction helped you see the modern problems with class traitors.