Counterpoint: the problem with the Stasi was not that it might show you annoying adverts for cat blindfolds.
(I mean, honestly, at what time in the last four years was this anyone's biggest worry?)
The numbers of people that watch Fox News just dwarf the numbers of people who are poisoned by Facebook.
This claim seems unsustainable. There were 2.5 million viewers of Fox News in 2019. Facebook currently has 2.7 billion users.
There was definitely a convincing series of links recently, which are too long for the margin I mean but I have to go swim I mean but I have to go teach.
In TFA there's a comment from me, a bit more than 4 years old, to the effect that while some people are actually interested in cattle cars (for undocumented people) a great many more are interested in cheering for someone with the brass to say "cattle cars" in public. That's where we are right now with "martial law."
There were 2.5 million viewers of Fox News in 2019
I am sceptical that it reaches only 1% of Americans and I wonder if a decimal point is missing.
6: I checked multiple sources and they all agree. The numbers fluctuate, and they went up in November 2020 to over 3 million, but it's definitely in that range.
Fox does usually come up as the most watched cable news network, but almost no one watches cable news anymore.
That's because we're all spending so little time in dentists' waiting rooms now.
That's what happens when you refuse to advocate using violence to overturn the election results. Your audience goes away.
That's what happens when you refuse to advocate using violence to overturn the election results. Your audience goes away.
They claim 80 million cable and satellite subscriptions; I suppose it's possible only 1 in 40 subscribers ever turns the channel on but I would think that many might occasionally tune in by accident. I think the 2 million number might be an average over a measure of how many people watch some programme at any one time.
Facebook users are reported as Monthly or Daily Active Users (MAUs or DAUs) - it's the count of how many individuals logged in at all, even once, over a month or day.
I'll get around to reading the article, but the excerpts make it look pretty dumb.
The common thread is the need to be opposing establishment power. Since Brexit has become a legal fact, Brussels can no longer be the great bogeyman of oppression. A new oppressor has to be found and resisted. That is a project for perpetual opposition, not for the creation of a fascist state.
In Hitlerian fascist rhetoric, were the Jews hated for their powerlessness and ineffectuality, or was it because they controlled the government and finance?
And why is a new oppressor required in the UK? What will keep the old one from continuing to serve that function? Donald Trump (and A. Hitler and others) did just fine without admitting that they constituted the establishment. My guess, and of course I'll defer to our UK experts, is that "Brussels" was never the villain in reality as much as "immigration" was. And there are still going to be enough immigrants in the UK to hate, and inevitably there will be enough (real and imagined) influence from Europe to have it continue to be the enemy.
The neo-fascists don't need a real enemy. They need Emmanuel Goldstein.
I always find these discussions of the alt-right (or whatever you want to call it) unsatisfying because everyone who wants to call them fascists makes a weak case, as do the people who want to say they aren't fascists. They are what they are, and Donald Trump is not not a fascist.
I will eventually read the linked piece, though.
Why do they need my dentist? He's fine, but I'm sure many are as good.
The number of people engaged in the Fox worldview, whether through social media content or friends or family passing it on, is probably a lot larger than the average viewership of Fox News.
Also viewership of 2 million is not the same as 2 million unique individuals.
I wonder what percentage of Facebook users are getting the propaganda stuff.
I mean, the really bad propaganda.
Fox vs Facebook: https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/11/facebook-fuels-toxic-content-but-fox-news-is-still-the-superspreader/
Satisfyingly comprehensive knockdown of one of the recent Kraken lawsuits by the federal judge in Detroit. 11th Amendment, Mootness, Colorado River Abstention, Lack of Standing, Laches, asking for relief beyond the power of the court. Lots of good material there for the 6th Circuit -- which will also get to think about whether her order denying a tro is even appealable.
I suppose this will only validate the "anti-elitism" offered by the Cult, but that's just more bullshit. They don't care about "elites" any more than they care about "socialism" -- they're all in for spending vast amounts paying farmers for damage caused by dumb trade policy, but not a penny for health care for poor people of color. If, in his capacity as Circuit Justice for the Sixth Circuit, Justice Kavanaugh stayed this pending cert, they'd be cheering the elite.
Um, yes, so was just reading the excerpts and increasingly thinking that this must be bollocks, and then I clicked through and it's Rafael Behr, shoe guy.
Not much of a historian and do not have a very large hinterland (of reading) to draw on, but do tend to think that the US is currently _lucky_ to have a large and powerful military that is at the same time conscientiously neutral and refuses to be drawn into a GOP orbit. The ethics classes at Westpoint paid off, or something.
Whatever the right diagnosis is, I do not think that the 'pah, mere clicktivists' angle is very convincing.
If there's a hidden downside to encouraging violent, armed men to be more violent and armed, we're in trouble.
Re-read the Behr piece. There are lines in it that you'd tend to agree with: yes, "the acid of cynicism" might undermine democratic institutions, there is polarisation on the internet, and history does not repeat but does rhyme, etc.
Weimar Germany is the go to comparator, perhaps because it's the archetype of a Grade A, solid, developed nation sliding into something awful. Although some of the narrative I've read suggests that the Bismarckian settlement - Imperial Germany - represented an undercooked nation, with not enough democracy, not enough of a middle class, and hence already plenty of its own angst. In the end, by Weimar, with a failed war on top to set things back, there were not enough people to stand against anti-democratic forces, and too many people (i.e. the civil service, the Heer) willing to either shrug or help the fascists along. Numbers are the backstop, and the insurance against totalitarianism is to allow (or help) sufficient numbers of people to develop.
In any case, not at all sure you'd ever expect the US to go fascist like Germany did, as a unitary entity; instead, you'd tend to see a civil war fault line re-emerging? Grand think pieces struggle to make their grand generalisations, I guess.
13: yes, I think that anti-immigration feelings drove Brexit and still do; they made Brexit mainstream enough to swing the referendum. There were 'very real concerns' people in my local Labour party (Battersea) - a fairly cosmopolitan urban group - in the years leading up to the referendum, although that died back pretty quickly once the monster started to become visible.
Well, Weimar was already breaking down institutionally, right? President appointing chancellors with nothing like a parliamentary majority to rule by decree?
Spain immediately before Franco is a better analogy.
23 last -- Sometime between now and next Monday, this outfit will send a communique threatening the end of life on earth unless we ditch federalism and empower Trump as leader for life.
26. Ortega y Gasset's Revolt of the Masses written about the mindset that supported Franco is a clear guide to how Trumpies think. The intense hatred of knowledge, the self-righteousness that turns into a victim's mindset at the first perceived slight, it's all there.
Wasn't Rafael Behr one of those guys who was much more afraid of the totalitarian specter of Corbyn than of the Tories in the last two elections?
The Speaker of the New Hampshire House(R) just died of Covid-19. He'd only been in office for a week.
I was reading the Wikipedia page on Revolt of the Masses, which has this sentence that struck me:
Ortega states that the mass-man could be from any social background, but his specific target is the bourgeois educated man, the señorito satisfecho (satisfied young man, or Mr. Satisfied), the specialist who believes he has it all and extends the command he has of his subject to others, contemptuous of his ignorance in all of them.
I read this discussion site called Hacker News to keep up with technology news. The site regular strays into politics, and the above quote describes 100% of the comments there.
Is this the same thing that had him talking about "el hombre de carne y hueso"?
I had to read that aloud in Spanish class in college. I made my first, and second best, Spanish joke by saying "carne y queso."