A controversial proposal from U.S Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to let bird flu naturally spread through poultry farms is raising alarms among scientists – who say the move could be inhumane and dangerous.
A controversial proposal from U.S Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. to let bird flu naturally spread through poultry farms is raising alarms among scientists – who say the move could be inhumane and dangerous.
Hitler came to power because the treaty of Versailles devastated and humiliated germany. what the fuck are historians going to point at in the US that lead to the rise in fascism? fucking gamergate? The self-inflicted 2008 crisis?
Wasn’t it Obama making fun of trump at the WH Correspondent’s dinner? Thanks, Obama. /s
Capitalism
What historians will point to in my opinion are two key point in modern American history that unleashed the decent into madness.
After 9/11 you could slap a US flag on basically anything, shout patriotism and make a shit load of money while being thanked for it.
Then it just rolled on.
Don’t forget the importance of the Citizens United ruling, which gave the green light to funnel unlimited amounts of corporate money into campaigns, reaching a crescendo in this past election when the world’s richest man bought himself a President.
CU and the lack of federal public funding for elections (by which I mean the state funds the campaigns of those who want federal offices) basically resulted in the US political class ending up fully in the pocket of the corporations.
That’s what absolutely destroyed our ability to elect anyone other than what the corporate doners want, and thus you end up with nothing but corporate-friendly politicians, and thus a whole bunch of people who have no problem with facism and well, here we are.
Reagan was in place thanks to the Southern Strategy begun a decade or so earlier to ensure a voting percentage for the GOP and religious right no matter what. There are unfortunately many other “turning points” throughout US history where we could have gone a different route but chose this one, usually because “it’s always been this way” mentality.
9/11 helped but by that point Christian nationalists had already spent the 20 years since Regan tying patriotism to faith.
Losing the Cold War. America wasn’t beaten militarily, but brought down via foreign propaganda. (It also hit the UK, with Brexit, and other countries with similar harmful things going on domestically to them.)
Livejournal was one of the earliest “modern” social media sites (for those who didn’t experience it, it was like a longer-form tumblr–longer text posts, fewer images), and it was sold to a company in Russia in the early 00s. I remember scratching my head as a 20-something about why the servers kept going down, then I learned that intellectuals in Russia had taken it up as THEIR social media and due to politics “on the Russian” side it was getting DDoS’d.
I was still too young to connect the dots then, or understand what all that really meant (hindsight is always much better, isn’t it?) but basically they perfected control via social media first on their own people, probably trawled through all the content of the original LiveJournal users posting in English, then perfected using what they learned there on later social media sites.
And because Americans A) thought the Cold War was over, and B) have a bit of a head-scratcher conundrum when it comes to free speech because it’s valued so highly and nobody likes censorshiop, nobody did anything or even realized anything was happening until the harm was already done.
Personally, again with hindsight, I think company-designed social media algorithms that just suggest content to you as “trending” or whatever should be illegal (and block buttons should be mandatory). Users should have to be forced to follow, one by one, the content they want to subscribe to.
Having “trending” algorithms that have no transparency in what they show or boost allows malignant actors to game the algorithm.
If you force people to follow others based on word of mouth or reblogs from their actual friends, and give people a way to solidly block someone that’s easy to find and instant to use, it will cut a lot of the bullshit down. People will be somewhat less inclined to fall down wells of stupidity. It won’t completely stop it, but people are lazy and if you don’t dangle shit in front of their nose many will go off and do something else instead of putting in the effort to find something horrible.
It’s interesting that you mention LiveJournal, because a lot of early internet feminists were there.
I’ve been wondering if part of the strategy has also been infiltrating feminist communities, and if they would have started learning there.
“Trans exclusionary radical feminists” always existed, but they were very much on the fringe. The only time the “men are invading lesbian spaces!” crowd would speak up was around Michfest (“womyn’s” festival or when Mary Daly (prominent 70’s academic TERF) died.
So it was a pain point that could be targeted. They use essentially the same propaganda now that they do on the right - that trans women are all sexual predators and perverts trying to get access to women. The “feminist” innovation is that they can be somewhat empathetic to “self hating gays” = straight trans women or “poor little girls deceived into mutilating their bodies by the patriarchy” = trans men. But it is supposed to be conversion therapy for us all.
Now, they dominate a lot of feminist discussion spaces. We have self identified “progressive feminists” who spend all day seething at random blogs which keep a Google alert on “transgender + rape.” Same sources that right wing nutjobs share on Facebook.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s also a response to the effectiveness of #metoo. Trolls will pretend to both be trans people and TERFs (to post creepy goony shit or send sexual/death threats). There are bad actors in the conversation, whether they are Russian trolls or American basement dwelling weirdos.
Well stated, thisis the conclusion i have come to as well. We lost an information war we did not know we were fighting.
We only didn’t know because this type of authoritarianism requires an ignorant, sedentary, and fearful populace and so we’re not taught the crucial skills it would take to resist as we waste away and treat each other and ourselves like shit, because what we are taught is a zero-sum, individualistic, hierarchical way of life that teaches us the system is perfect and we’re not doing it right if we don’t get the results we want, and fools us into perpetuating harm in a self sustaining, cyclical manner. It’s very sad but all the more reason to try something new. It seeps into everything, it’s quite literally a death cult.
This is solid analysis. Aside from your proposal about banning opaque algorithms, we also don’t really appreciate how powerful it is for any one human to be able to talk to millions of other humans at the same time is (as social creatures). It pathetically shrinks our world view so that it feels like we’re constantly talking about the same 10 people, when there’s so much more of your life that involves the people you work with, the people in your community, your local politics (like who’s deciding the new garbage truck schedule type stuff) that is completely absent from our online discourse.
I’d also say that the marketing and advertising industry has accelerated misinformation, distrust and overconsumption. I see about as few ads as I can figure out how (I know this because whenever I look at someone else’s experience of the same apps and services I use I can’t believe what I’m seeing), and yet I still manage to buy things, hear about things I’m interested in, and research and find out about new products. I spend money in the economy. We literally do not need this industry.
I have also seen friends " youtube feeds" and they are full of videos that I have seen for years and recognized as absolute garbage instantly and never watched, loaded with advertising in the form of “shorts” or a 15 minute commercial for electric scooters (most likely made by amazon, id be curious to know who funds these so called “content creators”) cloaked as a “review of the top 10 best e scooters of 2025” … And rage bait bull shit.
I have tried to explain to these same people how advertising works and that they may be falling victim to the scam.
They immediately get very defensive (I may be a little abrasive in my approach but I should be grabbing their shoulders and shaking the shit out of them while backhanding them across the face.) and they say something like " well you watch youtube videos blah blah". I explain that while I do watch them I am searching for the video and rarely watch anything that I am not actively searching for to gain knowledge about a project in the real world ; that I am hip to how these apps are designed to keep suckers engaged and even change the way a person thinks.
I remember as a kid being fascinated by some advertising, the color schemes , music etc and realizing how powerful they were. That stupid double mint gum commercial is to this day seared into my brain , it will probably blip across the screen when my power gets pulled.
Advertising is a game of minute, magical calcuculations that when done right are imperceptible and like 3 card Monty or the shell game are very good at separating a dummy from their bread.
An overwhelming portion of the public are just receivers awaiting their next mission and they do not want to know any better and get angry when you point it out. Thinking or having curiosity about anything is just not their bag anymore. Advertising is truly evil because if it did not exist the natural tendency wouldn’t be blind consumption.
This is very well-stated, and what I was driving at.
Regan had a huge hand in the downfall of the US.
A multitude of issues have contributed to this, the creation of fox News, allowing our entire manufacturing sector to leave the country, and then ignoring the poorest and most vulnerable people’s issues, misinformation, social media, state actor disinformation campaigns, and probably a bunch of stuff I haven’t mentioned. Pick your favorite.
The pandemic, the inherent flaws of an antiquated two party system, malicious individuals controlling all major social media platforms, an overworked and undersupported population, low education standards. Idk I’m German and have never been over but from what I can tell it’s very complex. And while many of my fellow Europeans like to give Americans shit online right now the truth is most of us are one or two unfortunate elections away from a similar scenario. Whatever it is that’s driving people apart isn’t exclusively an American problem.
healthcare, and lack of job prospect in many stems field as a undergrad. almost no help in getting people into wet lab work outside of your degree, since it is the most important part of the degree
This is the scary part. The entire world seems to be shifting right again. I think a lot of it how easy misinformation and disinformation is to spread with the ubiquitous social media now, but like you said, it’s complex, and there likely isn’t any single factor contributing to this.
Just to chime in on Covid - I think that was a symptom caused by a lot of underlying problems, and not a cause. Granted it had its effects, but under a rational leadership from the US I don’t think we would have seen what we did ever get that far. The topic here (bird flu), measles, etc. are an example of how they are more of a fever indicator from a deep infection we’ve had for decades and just pretended things were fine. Hell, the failure of Reconstruction after the Civil War is the ultimate example of that bandage over a festering wound.
On the global stage, it’s the explosion in communication tech with little to no oversight. It’s not even the first time is happened in the last century. Radio, newspaper, television, whenever there’s a new, faster way to disseminate information we collectively forget how important it is to regulate that shit before something bad happens. That, plus regulatory capture weakening the limits on already existing information platforms.
I can at least tell you why people vote Trump. All right here:
How Half Of America Lost Its F**king Mind
Posted that many, many times, but it’s important enough to post forever. As true now as it was in 2016.
I’ve been on both sides of what the author is talking about, seen and experienced everything he touches on. Give it a read, it’s important.
“They hate every part of capitalism without hating capitalism” comes to mind a lot
Yeah and it’s a good piece, but there’s a huge hole or two in the reasoning. Namely that rural areas are aiding and abetting the forces that beat them down despite clear and rational evidence - in abundance - to that fact.
They’ve given up on reason. They’re hoodwinked, bamboozled, conned, and every other synonym despite clear facts and science.
And cities bad is not new, but it’s also where their hero lives. So ?
Also the thing about cheering for assholes is kinda thin.
I think it’d be better to make these arguments through the media trump voters consume. That’s the underlying mechanic of his argument anyway.
That tracks, it’s Jason Pargin. He’s the king of oversimplifying an argument and then hammering it into the ground, but it’s always at least entertaining.
Careful, that’s how I used to hear Joe Rogan described.
There’s a pretty wide fucking chasm between Jason Pargin and Joe Rogan, but I take your point. Honestly I’m not sure it’s necessarily a bad thing, the left could use a Roganesque figure; especially one who isn’t afraid to call people on their bullshit rather than buy into it.
What I don’t get is the bit at the end where it explains that Trump can be the guy they root for even though he is literally a smarmy big city elite who only goes to church for photo ops, doesn’t pay his workers, etc. And the article is like, don’t you root for Tony Stark and left-leaning talk show hosts, because they target the people you don’t like?
And I’m like, no, honestly, those guys are insufferable. I need someone to explain why anyone likes them.
Also I grew up in a right-leaning area and I didn’t understand their values any better when I was a kid, honestly. At least as a little kid I was religious, but when I got to high school and started asking tough questions at church it became obvious that our supposed religious leaders didn’t have satisfactory answers to questions like “It would be immoral if I had the power to stop evil and didn’t use it, why isn’t it immoral for God to allow evil to exist?” So then I stopped being religious, too, which pushed me further out of their subculture.
(I guess some of my actual values aren’t popular almost anywhere; I’m a pacifist anarchist which is fairly uncommon. So there has to be more to why people end up the way they do than where they live.)
Yeah, that all checks out.
But their way of living is dying because that’s what happens with industrialization. It’s not exactly something people can fight. It’s been happening for a loooooong time.
Like there aren’t many, if any, ways to prevent it from happening either.
this is a good one, thank you
yeah, but also you-know-who.
Spiraling wealth inequality that even the Democrats refused to acknowledge or fix, let alone the Republicans.
Democrats tried to fix it a bunch of times. Citizens United kept lobbying alive, Public Option healthcare (which would have made it almost imposible for private healthcare to compete) lost by 1 independent senator, Republicans keep getting elected to write the tax laws as they expire.
It’s not from lack of trying by the DNC.
Capitalism has a tendency to eat everything it can. This includes the political system. The US is just ahead of the curve in this.
In retrospect, I think the rise of smartphone-based, algorithm-driven social media circa 2012 will be seen as the information-age equivalent of lead poisoning that quietly brainrotted society. It greatly increased the power and reach of disinformation and radicalizing propaganda while destroying the ability of mainstream news sources to moderate or even alert people to the damage being done. There’s a staggering gap in attitudes between people who get their news from social media apps vs. newspapers or even cable TV. And so much of the maliciousness is below the surface, distributed across millions of unique newsfeeds and “for you” pages that the public writ large has very little insight into. If some shell company were airing neonazi recruitment ads on national television, people would be shocked and outraged, but slip it into the feeds of vulnerable people and you can poison an entire generation with hardly anyone noticing until it’s too late.
do we outlaw the use of recommender systems in entertainment products then? what does a better future look like
Well
Everything else that happened in those 90 years, AND racism because a whole bunch of lazy buttholes couldn’t have slaves anymore.
Propaganda. Made hand-held and ubiquitous.
Deep rooted insecurity and lack of critical thinking.