I still remember the so-called Greatest Generation and Silent Generation falling in love with Reagan, combined with Baby Boomer hedonistic indifference, resultng in liberal Democrats getting ripped to shreds at the ballot box. As an adapt-or-die reaction to Bernie-style Democrats getting electorally decimated in the 80s and 90s, the Democratic Party shifted to the center… and republicans got batshit insane with AM radio and 24-hour propaganda television.
Recent history has showed me in real time how it takes several elections to smash something down… or build something up. Yet there are too many people who seem to believe that one single election is a magic wand that can cure every goddamned evil in politics and society. And if they don’t get what they want, they don’t vote again, or they tune out entirely - “there were elections? I didn’t notice” - constantly putting Democrats in a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” situation.
Case in point of Democrats getting bold: LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law, and the country got Nixon twice. Democrats lost the entire south electorally for generations, to this day and beyond.
Also, Democrats have to deal with hysterical and/or opportunistic right wing shitheads who abuse their power to sabotage every policy proposal, or even the normal functioning of the government at every level, pointless government shutdowns that paralyze the entire apparatus, including day-to-day essentials like teachers and park rangers.
Fascist bastards who enjoy flirting with visions of dictatorship… as long as they’re the dictator. Who are constantly looking for ways to subvert democracy. Nixon, Cheney, the orange intestinal parasite.This is the math Democrat politicians have to work with whenever making a far-reaching decision.
Complicating the hellish job even further, there’s all those fickle, cherry-picking oh-so-pure voters who demand being catered to instantly and get their “knowledge” from twitter, a noisy drag on the equation.
Since the 90s, the right wing bastards have perfected the dark art of exploiting 24-hour mass media to keep people rabidly ignorant, to divide and conquer with a “politics for idiots” mantra that bOtH pArTiEs ArE tHe SaMe LoL aMiRiTe.
I saw it all happen in real time.
I get this every time someone says “both sides are the same!” Like, I’ve watched who’s started basically every major military conflict in my life, who keeps cutting taxes for the rich and who keeps gutting social programs that would benefit the poor, who keeps trying to remove rights and prevent others from getting the rights they’re owed, who’s tanked the deficit and brought this country to near financial collapse multiple times, etc.
It’s like accelerated around politics in general though. People will still foam at the mouth about how all of the accusations against Trump are just a psyop to bring down their one true god. Meanwhile, he’s standing there holding a selfie cam like “what’s up my true believers, I totally did every single thing they said and I’d do it again twice with your mother and Jesus himself watching.” People out there still saying Trump isn’t a rapist after not only a court of law found him to be one, and -literally everyone has heard a tape of him telling you exactly how to do sex crimes.- But it’s like that for everything. Republicans are just straight up saying shit right into the microphone, and then 30 seconds later pretending like it’s never happened.
LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act into law, and the country got Nixon twice. Democrats lost the entire south electorally for generations, to this day and beyond.
Does Georgia mean nothing to you? 😭 We trying.
Hi Atlanta! We pray for you. 🙏 But the rest of your state is owned by fuckheads.
Damn, what a summary of the last 50 fucked up years of American politics
I find the opposite more annoying. If your memory of those events is accurate there’s plenty of things to point to to back it up.
But then you have older people like my father who…I don’t know, something has completely rewritten their memories of significant events to the point where he claims many things happened differently than verifiable recorded history. It’s impossible to argue with that because of him seeing me pointing out that’s not true as an attack and accusing him of lying.
My favorite was arguing with a much older (late 70s) friend of my dad’s about how Obama ruined the economy and stock market, and when I told him that was objectively not true and the GFC was in full swing well before Obama was even elected, he was like “I know because I owned stocks and stuff, how would you even know?” Even when I pulled up a graph of the S&P 500 and showed the days he was elected and sworn in, he just said “Oh, that can’t be right, the graph must be wrong”. Showing the DOW and other composites from multiple sources did nothing to convince him. He was absolutely positive his retirement fund was doing great up until Obama was elected.
Yes Jerry, I’m sure that the entire stock market was just wrong, and it’s not the fact you consume nothing but FOX News and will only refer to the 44th president as “The N*gger” potentially causing a bit of bias.
Sounds like it’s time to stick him in a home
What would you think if your parents say it’s time to put you up for adoption every time you get into an argument? What a fucking weird thing to get upset over and think of throwing your parents away just because of an argument
What a weirdly aggressive comment, calm down. It’s a comment section on the internet, don’t get so emotional.
Or maybe someone rewrote the books. I’ve long had a suspicion a lot of the Mandela effect is just people with long memories who missed the propaganda rewrite.
I really hope this is just missing the /s at the end.
But in case it isn’t…
Which is more likely? That all the media outlets have gone through all of their records and replaced them with different records and all the books out there have been trashed and replaced with new books saying different things and the internet has been scrubbed of all of the real stories and photos and replaced with fake ones? Or that a few misguided people, who weren’t paying very close attention in the first place, misremembered an event?
I find it strange that people somehow mistrust all of the news and history of today but think the very same news sources and historians of the past were somehow accurate.
The news is written in a hurry. History is written with perspective. Both are drawing upon the same sources in the modern era except the history has more time to cross reference them. It is only natural that we get a better, clearer version of history as time and research is allowed to work on it.
I’m convinced humans have some kind of natural inherent fetishization of “old knowledge”.
If it happened outside of living memory they somehow knew more or had special magical knowledge we just don’t understand or can’t interpret from our perspective. The older, the more true people can be convinced that it is.
As if there is some kind of “platonic ideal” of thoughts or ideas from which all others are derived from, where the further back something back it is, it MUST be more true
Honestly it doesn’t seem to take very long at all. I watched live as the insurrectionists attempt to overturn democracy in the US during their failed auto-coup on January 6th less than 3 years ago.
Though there was some “it’s not real” talk in the immediate aftermath the idea that it was a false flag, antifa, not an insurrection, not a big deal, just tourists having an afternoon scroll, etc. seems to be growing.
I wonder why the “left wing radical Democrat antifa operatives engaging in a false flag attack to make Trump look bad” marched under banners with Trump’s name, admitted they were doing it for Trump, in some cases ran for office on the Republican ticket, and are actively being protected by Republican politicians.
Pretty astonishing when the whole thing was basically live streamed. I member watching it as it happened
It was a near immediate campaign to convince people not to believe their lying eyes and ears. I think deep down, the spin doctors know that they’re lying though.
Oh, is it time for that Sartre quote again?
“Never believe that [they] are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. [They] have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.”
My “favorite” lecture from young people is the one in which they berate me for “stealing content” by not watching ads on YouTube.
I have a vivid memory of YouTube being a platform where normal people could share videos of their kids and pets or other fun random low quality but entertaining things
YouTube has increased the amount of ads that used to be standard by about 1000%. You used to get about 22-26 minutes of actual content per 30 minutes of viewing. On YouTube it’s about 2 minutes of advertising per 0.5-3 minutes of viewing. The majority of the things I watch on YouTube are short 30 second videos to see specific things, but Google seems to think it’s okay to show me 2-3 minute long commercials before letting me see the 30 second blurb telling me the foot pounds per square inch I need to apply to my brake calipers before I can finish my brake change job. This is even more annoying now that Google doesn’t surface this type of information on regular websites, where I can just quickly read the spec.
TLDR: fuck Google and fuck ads
I don’t understand why they think we care if we’re stealing content regardless. I pirate movies and TV shows, but they don’t whine about that, in fact, most will approve of it. Why draw the line at YouTubers?
They often say that we’re screwing the person who runs the channel. In reality, I’m willing to bet my left nutsack that they make a fuckton more from the occasional donations than from ads, once Google, MCNs, and the government take their share.
Pretty sure most YouTubers and streamers will tell you exactly that. Sponsorships and brand deals make them way way more
Because they think that they’ll be YouTube superstars one day, and we’re stopping them
On the other hand, there’s my dad defending Apartheid with the defence “you weren’t there”. The whole rest of the world from the time seemed to agreed with me, too, Dad.
I also seem to remember black South Africans being opposed to apartheid - and they were certainly there.
Memories are worse than research
People are adamant that unpaid days off in the 90s meant people had to work without pay
I was telling someone much younger than myself that airports didn’t always completely suck to go through. I explained how the TSA wasn’t a thing and the experience was closer to getting on a bus or a train pre 9/11.
He had a hard time wrapping his head around it because he’s never experienced it.
Made me feel very old.
As a post 9/11 adult, moving to a place with really good and smooth flowing train infrastructure made me so frustrated with the stressful and unnecessary security theatre of airports worldwide
Especially since it’s just theater. It’s just to make you feel fucking oppressed. Fuck!
Reminds me of the time I got a quiz question wrong; who was the first Man on the Moon.
I wasn’t born, but everything I’ve ever read said it was Neil Armstrong, so that’s what I answered.
The idiot quiz master said it was Buzz Aldrin (the second man). In disbelief, I tried to educate them of their error, only for the rest of the room, mainly boomers, to tell me I was wrong. Including one guy in his 80s who said “It was definitely Buzz. I watched it when it happened. I remember it well”.
I asked him “who said the famous ‘one small step for man’?”
Him: “Ahh yes, Now that was Armstrong.”
Me: “Surely Buzz would say those words if he was the first one out. I mean there is literally video of the event. You even watched it live”
Him: “Yes, it’s Armstrong in the video. But Buzz was definitely first out. Who do you think was holding the camera?”
