Dems still obsessed with decorum and pointscoring instead of substance:
What Mark Bray was doing before he wrote The Antifa Handbook:
One from my neighbourhood…
One of the longer-term consequences of this was the Indonesian invasion of East Timor.
About 1/3 of the Timorese died during the occupation. They were the people who’d sheltered Australian soldiers from the Japanese during the war.
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Some Twitterology:
A lot of the tweets I link to aren’t from Just Plain Folks. They’re from online activists; propagandists, in other words.
When, for example, Black Aziz Ansari starts posting liberal-baiting memes, it usually isn’t just because he’s cranky. It’s because he’s decided that the best move at the moment is to get his followers fired up against liberals, and spread messaging to sway undecided readers.
Similarly, I bit my tongue on most critique of the Dems in the months before and after the election, because unity seemed the best thing at the time. In the last month, I’ve loosened up on that, as it became obvious that the right wing of the Dems were never going to join the fight.
What I’m getting at is that there’s a meta level to read when you’re analysing propagandists. The good ones don’t post bullshit, but we do make choices about what to say, when to say it, and how to present it. Learn to read that level, and you get a much better idea of what they’re trying to achieve.
Anyway: the recent burst of liberal-targeted mockery and baiting on Twitter. The battle is on.
And it is escalating. The left is no longer just sniping at Clinton and the DNC; they’re going after the entire liberal establishment.
Which is why they have begun targeting the Obamas:
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Posting this just so I don’t have to search for it again later:
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Bernie (a) doing the right thing, and (b) attempting to repair his fuckup from early in the year.
What I like about Daniel Dale is that even though he is media, he’s still willing sometimes to pull back the curtains and show the ugly truth of the media’s role in manufacturing reality:
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I get that, but it’s still really hard. Like that tweet above by Krang T. Nelson about Trump deporting fewer people than Obama. That’s presently right. But arrests are way up. That they aren’t leading to deportations means that there are more people who are in contact for the first time with immigration. Those people can’t just be deported, they get detained and go through hearings. Probably otherwise law-abiding people, maybe people who got busted because they reported a crime or went to pick up their kids at school. So it seems really weird to be minimizing the very real fears and anxieties people have right now in order to go after ‘liberals.’ To me, it’s really hard to swallow the lack of nuance in the discussion about complex issues.
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I’m having trouble understanding how this is a clash between left and liberal. It’s usually the left which has picked up the principles and aspirations, if not the sheer hypocrisy. It’s usually the left defending life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, against wars, Stasis, immigration crackdowns, etc.
Holy fuck.
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Devil’s advocating a touch: most of the effect is probably people choosing not to have children in a toxic environment rather than a direct biological impact on fertility.
Mildly paranoid read on the Russian fake antifa story: it was deliberately manufactured by the right, because they knew that liberals would gleefully seize on it as a tool to slander antifa.
The antifa crowd spotted that as it was happening, but were unable to stop the Libs from taking the bait.
Same story for the Russian BLM thing and the Black left.
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I’ll get back to this later, but yeah: Twitter is not a medium that lends itself to subtlety and nuance. It’s a hugely powerful meme factory, but it ain’t a textbook.
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For some context on Oz/US relations…
Despite its musical shortcomings, this was quite a popular song in Australia:
And that was during the Clinton years.
Believe it or not, I’m actually an Americaphile by local standards.