Maya S. Trojan

Almost assuredly.

I worked in local television news media for a decade in the early 2000’s.

It’s worse than that: we just don’t even teach these people how to be actual journalists.

I remember working in production, catching a new, state-level important story, with court documents proving as much. I printed it and put it on the desk of several reporters. The producer refused to run the story because they “didn’t see the story on the AP Newswire.” In other words they refused to run the story until a major network ran it first. Three weeks later they ran the story after someone else ran it first.

Recall, I worked in production. I wasn’t a newsie. I had better news instincts than these fucking clowns who went to school for it.

It’s just rubes saying “yes daddy I’ll do whatever you tell me” all the way down.

The alternatives are the left under a very unpopular candidate and the right under an extremely unpopular candidate.

Oof, so you’re about to enter the arena the US did in 2016, huh? Reminds me of Clinton vs. Trump.

(Not to say that Mrs. Clinton is in any way a “leftist” politician but Democrats get a pass as being “left” because of our abysmal education over here. The thread is that they were both deeply disliked by large sections of the voting populace, leading to even worse outcomes.)

The French political class is absolutely terrified of increasing taxes on the wealthy, because it is afraid wealthy people will leave the country en masse. It is the only realistic way out of the mess, though.

I guess all the new rich people moving into New York City isn’t enough proof to them that the wealthy actually like where they live and their whole “we’ll pull up and leave!” is the biggest load of horseshit.

ALSO I would love for these governments just to fucking call that bullshit for what it is, and if they try to fucking leave because of taxes take every fucking penny and piece of property they own in your country and tell them to get fucked and figure it out when they get where they’re going but they’re not taking the wealth they built in this country with them.

It’s due to the cult of individualism and a media-ecosystem that re-enforces the “only a single strong man can save the world” idea with endless superhero movies, TV shows, and the like. Doesn’t even have to be superheroes, honestly. Anything where magically problems are solved by the actions of one person.

It has everyone in this mode where they won’t organize not only because they don’t know how but because the lone-hero narrative is so deeply ingrained in the culture (going as far back as The Lone Ranger) that Americans struggle to think outside that narrative. “Organizing” is literally a foreign concept to 99% of us.

Source: Am American. I try to talk about parallel systems and building new governance from the bottom up but literally all anyone wants to do is “buy guns” like that solves anything. Organizing just to take care of each other is too big of an ask apparently, let alone organizing to risk your life for the betterment of society. We can’t even get organized when there isn’t a functional risk to society.

EDIT: Also my personal pet conspiracy theory is that “group projects” in elementary and high school are designed to make people think working in groups is pointless since it’s a group grade and one person can just bail on doing anything… Yeah, because we incentivize bailing as a culture. I wonder why kids are so primed to do it.

They should really be blaming a capitalist system that places zero value on the past.

Like house flippers who remove all personality from houses and turn them into drab, grey, “modern” bullshit that nobody actually likes except losers who don’t have taste of any sort.

The state views inability to control it’s populace as a “failure” because the states we have enabled to become our modern governance have stopped actually giving a shit about their actual constituents and consistently roll out the red carpet for the rich and corrupt. Loss of control is a failure, real democracy is a failure. The real issue is they clearly (and the media as well) don’t have the same goals as the people they lord over.

Sounds a lot like protests in the USA. Minneapolis remembers black umbrella man setting the AutoZone on fire, giving the cops a chance to regroup, and became something the media focused on and it wasn’t proven he was a white supremacist agitator until later… and the news had moved on by that point and that was mostly only covered by smaller publications. New York Times wasn’t about to give an expose about how right wing agitators helped the police have a police riot. Not once did our media refer to it as a “police riot” even though beating the living shit out of angry citizens because you murdered an innocent is a police riot.

I wish I could disagree with you but it seems US voters are so fucking stupid and racist that immigration in a country halfway across the world is enough to get them angry and motivated to vote.

I scanned the reddit frontpage today like I occasionally do to see if there’s any news that hasn’t hit the Fediverse yet… and let me tell you, the propaganda bots are out in fucking force because I saw numerous videos of the French protests where it was black masked jerks harassing individuals, stealing, looting. Of course it was in the “usual suspects” of subs like /r/publicfreakout.

At least three posts within the first two pages of results on reddit when you’re not logged in that are nothing but videos and comments dragging the entire protest.

There is a concerted effort to make the claim the students never cared about education, they just wanted to criminally wreck everything. I don’t know who, but someone with a lot of money is pushing this narrative hard.