Re: Will America make it to see 250? Serious question.

quozzel

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Jul 4, 2022, 9:05 AM

That's the thing. The digital reality does not match the AFK - which is "away from keyboard", for Miura's sake - out in the real world.

We do not hate each other AFK nearly as much as our various media agencies continuously assert. The problem any form of media - be it social, be it cable news, be it whatever - has is, they all need eyeballs, and they've systematically resorted to more and more visceral emotional issues to attract them. It used to be: "if it bleeds, it leads"...since then, the networks discovered something sells even more than blood: outrage. And hoo, boy, do they shovel it on thick, jam it right into our eyeballs each and every day.

The problem is, what we keep seeing is, this digital alternate reality does have bleedover into the real world. We saw it on 1/6. We saw it in those BLM riots, or the riots that break out every time a person of color gets shot by the cops, seemingly. That stuff is toxic and it does hurt us, collectively.

I am starting to get a sense prolonged exposure to extreme forms of media is having increasingly less effect over time. People are getting wiser and more inured to the rhetoric and our cultural immunity to it is growing. The disaffected cynical middle definitely seems to be growing, not shrinking - party membership is declining in both parties, with more and more people describing themselves as "independents" - and that's interesting...because even as the far left and far right seem to be getting more and more strident they're also losing membership. A growing number of us are tired of the incessant Woke noise on the left and the angry MAGA noise on the right. Increasingly, the attitude a lot of us have is the same as tired parents dealing with kids who will not get along: "I DON'T CARE WHO STARTED IT, I JUST WANT QUIET!"

People - well, more people, anyhow - are getting wiser to the populist Woke BS being pushed by CNN/MSNBC (though CNN, under new president Chris Licht, is at least trying to clean up its act after the Jeff Zucker sh!tshow...hopefully it will stick and they won't go back to chasing ratings) and the angry MAGA populist drek being shoveled by Fox...even as, strangely, the extremes of either party seem to get fringier every day.

If there's hope, it's there, IMHO. My hope is that the impact all this polarized media has on us is akin to what happened to us with COVID...savagely bad at first and for a long time after that...but then morphing into an endemic disease we can at least function with and not an actual pandemic as our collective immunity grows.

That's my hope for America. And this zero-sum two-party thing clearly isn't working anymore...generally speaking, when something isn't working for long enough, people do eventually try something else that does. I personally wonder if 2024 is the year the independents finally stand up and say: "you know, you guys are not getting it done, let's try something else."

That's my hope anyhow.

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All the comments above about online/cable media are right on. Politics has turned into entertainment for many people and the harsher and more cruel the better on line. Talking with a neighbor, that shid don’t fly. We’ll have to practice neighbor politics to survive.

It takes two parties to make this work. 30 yrs ago when Rush got going, everything was the Dems fault…they’re all stupid, commie, ignorant fools out to destroy America. Right media has been saying that since the early 90s and ratcheted it up for the 2016 election cycle. Republicans have always had a better long game in modern politics and that shid worked last time around. Got lucky enough to seat 3 justices and now we have a court legislating by removing rights instead of confirming them. That’s a big problem in our history, it will create another reckoning and it will not be pretty.

The religious fervor that is now popular is frightening. To have congressmen openly denouncing separation of church and state, a populist governor encouraging public school teachers that the founding fathers ideas about separation of church/state are misunderstood and legislating what they can and can’t teach. That is phugged up and the result of a successful long game of marrying religion to political doctrine, gerrymandering, and now the ubiquitous challenge of all elections win or lose. This destroys the fabric we weaved for nearly a quarter century.

To survive we need to practice neighbor politics, turn off the twitterbiches and extreme medias because it is now mainstream not in theory, but in practice. Practicing extremism is like hitting a bomb with a hammer, how many whacks do you get before it explodes.

Will America make it to see 250? Serious question.