Right-wing media disinformation and irrational fear caused Dems to the 2024 elections

[Hardkill]

Leo was absolutely spot-on when he said in his blog that the internet brain-rot political ideology would likely kill the Democratic Party as we know it along with many other related factors:

 

Had it not been for those factors, then Harris/Walz and the Democratic party would've won.

If this problem doesn't get solved before it's too late, then the Democratic party and progressives are never going to win back control of the White House or Congress. 

 

Edited 8 hours ago by Hardkill

[Eph75]

@Hardkill

Turn it towards yourself and ask how the internet brain rot might have infected yourself, where irrational emotional responses is the go to strategy to reinstate a sense of rightness and superiority over that which you perceive as being absolutely wrong.

This doesn't really have to do with Democrats or Republicans.

It has to do with you.

Therapy might be part of the solution, emotional training and management, stepping outside of the context of things and try look at thing in a less biased manner (albeit still subjectively biased). 

Maybe most importantly not to act on impulses. 

And, don't forget to breath.

Meditation neatly fits into that mix.

But then again, what really is you ego agenda in all of this/such "messiness"? 

That's not really a question you need to answer, but something to contemplate.

And yet, you're not really interested on really working on that, are you? 

(another question not to answer) 

Just pause. 

[Hardkill]

4 minutes ago, Eph75 said:

@Hardkill

Turn it towards yourself and ask how the internet brain rot might have infected yourself, where irrational emotional responses is the go to strategy to reinstate a sense of rightness and superiority over that which you perceive as being absolutely wrong.

This doesn't really have to do with Democrats or Republicans.

It has to do with you.

Therapy might be part of the solution, emotional training and management, stepping outside of the context of things and try look at thing in a less biased manner (albeit still subjectively biased). 

Maybe most importantly not to act on impulses. 

And, don't forget to breath.

Meditation neatly fits into that mix.

But then again, what really is you ego agenda in all of this/such "messiness"? 

That's not really a question you need to answer, but something to contemplate.

And yet, you're not really interested on really working on that, are you? 

(another question not to answer) 

Just pause. 

Yeah, I will meditate a lot more.

But the right-wing media needs to be destroyed. Otherwise, we won't have a country anymore.

[Talinn]

Just accept that massive change is coming and live your life, everything has a swing and a counterswing.

[Eph75]

@Hardkill

Actually no, free speech as to the degree it fits into the law is needed. Starting to filter out what does not match own world view is not the way to go. We're already seeing that, and that alternative media will be the solution to maintain opposite perspectives. 

That doesn't mean that toxic BS and conspiracy thinking won't be in the mix, but what it will help people over time to think for themselves and train themselves to view things more critically than being spoon fed with whatever shows up within one's own ideological sphere. 

There is angled news on both sides. If you think Dem media is not angling, cutting and pasting and otherwise controlling to push the narrative that keeps the people they cater to entangle within that very sphere of ideology, you are in need of a rude awakening. 

Of course, that goes the Republican direction too. 

Pause emotions and just consume more diverse perspectives in a effort to try to see where those are coming from.

The rude awakening will be, if able to handle letting go of biases, that those perspectives are equally valid based on the relative point from where that are created.

They only become "bad" when enforcing a different frame of reference onto mismatching perspective, causing the categorization "bad" to occur. 

What ensues is emotion, frustration, hate and "they being retarded", also mind concocts catastrophy as the only and inevitable outcome as a result. 

Thus, pause, breath, be curious. 

You won't me infected by doing so, you might just be cured from the current infection that keep you stuck in this neither pleasent not constructive place of mind. 

Edited 8 hours ago by Eph75

[Hardkill]

Btw, even Van Jones, who is a well-respected mainstream media commentator from CNN, also said that unprecedented misinformation caused Harris and her party to lose:

 

[zurew]

2 hours ago, Eph75 said:

That doesn't mean that toxic BS and conspiracy thinking won't be in the mix, but what it will help people over time to think for themselves and train themselves to view things more critically than being spoon fed with whatever shows up within one's own ideological sphere.

Except the exact opposite thing that happened and happens in real time. People cant engage with facts and by allowing conspiracy theories what you end up with is creating completely alterantive realities - so much so that people cant  actually be reached anymore and there is no common ground anymore.

Right now half of the republican still thinks the 2020 election was stolen. There is literally no substantial argument that could make them think otherwise. No amount free speech will fix this. But more free speech where all conspiracy theories freely go or even intentionally fed by the platform will make people even more radicalized and not less.

Quote

https://edition.cnn.com/2023/08/03/politics/cnn-poll-republicans-think-2020-election-illegitimate/index.html 

In January of 2022, 67% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said they thought Biden’s win was not legitimate; that had been as high as 72% in CNN polling in the summer of 2021.

 

[Bobby_2021]

5 hours ago, Hardkill said:

But the right-wing media needs to be destroyed.

Your priorities are all messed up man. And you are all over the place except doing self-reflection.

The right-wing media ecosystem has organically evolved from the bottom up. You cannot destroy that. With the exception of twitter, all the popular media are overseen by leftists, liberals and progressives. Yet right wing ideology is spreading like wildfire. Why? 

You cannot control it, unless you want to face the bigger backlash. Censoring Joe Rogan will lead to even more backlash, which will make him even more popular. 

 

This is what went wrong:

 

Edited 2 hours ago by Bobby_2021

[Eph75]

3 hours ago, zurew said:

Except the exact opposite thing that happened and happens in real time. People cant engage with facts and by allowing conspiracy theories what you end up with is creating completely alterantive realities - so much so that people cant  actually be reached anymore and there is no common ground anymore.

As long as we stay with this being a shared phenomenon, which it is, it's a human phenomenon, and not something exclusive to Republicans.

And it takes time. The opposite, censor perspective has already proven to not work and grows the opposition, those attempted to be censored, stronger.

Might even be that Trump has manifested as impossible to critique based on there being a lot of misinterpretation, fueling the whole engine, making it immune to that which is fair critique. 

Human systems if anything is messy and should not be taken lightly men being meddle with. 

 

[zurew]

20 minutes ago, Eph75 said:

As long as we stay with this being a shared phenomenon, which it is, it's a human phenomenon, and not something exclusive to Republicans.

Yeah but your "both siding" doesn't work when we get into specifics. Again, half of the republicans deny the result of the 2020 election even after all the lawsuits, they deny climate change , they collectively believe in a bunch of conspiracy theories.

You cant make a similar case for the left. The two side different and not even close. When someone brings up insane lefty positons , most of those wont be held by the majority of the lefites, they are hold by extremely fringed twitter kids - on the conservative side though, thats not the case.

It needs to be acknowledged that the two side operates differently when it comes to epistemically engaging with facts and the world. As long as we pretend that both sides are the same, we won't be able to solve things.

20 minutes ago, Eph75 said:

And it takes time. The opposite, censor perspective has already proven to not work and grows the opposition, those attempted to be censored, stronger.

It doesn't work in that it wont persuade already radicalized people in changing their beliefs and opinions but Im not convinced how it doesn't work for people who aren't  already bought into a bunch of conspiracy theories and on people who aren't radicalized yet.

At the very least - not amplifying the fuck out of ragebaits and conspiracy theories would be a good start to slow down radicalization.

Edited 2 hours ago by zurew

[zazen]

1 hour ago, Bobby_2021 said:

The right-wing media ecosystem has organically evolved from the bottom up. You cannot destroy that. With the exception of twitter, all the popular media are overseen by leftists, liberals and progressives. Yet right wing ideology is spreading like wildfire. Why? 

You cannot control it, unless you want to face the bigger backlash. Censoring Joe Rogan will lead to even more backlash, which will make him even more popular. 

This is what went wrong:

 

It’s similar to grass roots resistance like in Palestine. They can’t and will never destroy it unless they resolve the foundational issues.

Good YouTube watch btw. As always, few of us on the forum have been right in our assessment of Israel, BRICS, Ukraine and this political shift right.

Elon literally just wants to go to Mars, but the government got in the way, including a woke mind virus that got in the way of him and his own child. He just dealt with the establishment like some side quest whilst running multiple large companies - legend.

 

Edited 1 hour ago by zazen

[Ves]

Democracy requires some foundational prerequisites to be true in order to work effectively. People need to have accurate and high-quality information available to them, and they need to be able to make sense of this information in a high-quality way. Having massive amounts of pure garbage flooding all social media platforms undermines the first prerequisite. The fact that most people have a low capacity for high-quality sensemaking (for various reasons: education, tribalism also fueled by social media) undermines the second.

Russia knows this, and this is why they pay people like Tim Pool and Dave Rubin to spread tons of garbage for no other purpose than to sow discord and undermine our democracy. The idea of free speech has become weaponized to allow massive amounts of disinformation and propaganda to spread. People, say Dave Rubin, will say things like "the marketplace of ideas," because people superficially love the idea of this. Then they use it to continue to spread tons of garbage everywhere.

It's obviously hard, though, because you also can't just start banning certain types of speech. If you try to ban misinformation, more than half of the country freaks out. If you don't ban it, they continue to be poisoned and the quality of the country slowly crumbles. The only way out is some kind of cultural enlightenment, I think, but this doesn't seem like a real possibility either when people are arguing about whether or not hurricanes are made by the government.

I believe this issue will only continue to get worse in the future. The only positive shift that comes to mind is that I have a vague memory of some fairly popular podcasters recommending people to heavily cut down on their social media intake or to stay off of it, but I don't think this is enough.

[Scholar]

36 minutes ago, zazen said:

Elon literally just wants to go to Mars, but the government got in the way, including a woke mind virus that got in the way of him and his own child. He just dealt with the establishment like some side quest whilst running multiple large companies - legend.

He is a transphobic narcissist who literally bullied his own daughter, and you are celebrating him. Unreal.