Sunday, July 28, 2019
Thursday, July 18, 2019
Weaponized Bullshit
In this post
seven years ago, I waxed philosophical on the transition of “spin” into “outright
lies.” Naively, I thought “pants-on-fire
lies” of the variety heavily peppered into the 2012 presidential contest was as
bad as it was going to get.
Of course, it wasn’t. Now, we have outright propaganda. We have a POTUS who manipulates his faithful
with daily blasts of idiocy from his Twitter fingers, whose handlers have come
to understand that this tactic is so powerful that they have developed a staff
of propagandists who blast right-wing talking points out through the President’s
Twitter account.
Yes. It’s propaganda. That is where we have taken ourselves. Free press?
Truth in reporting? Investigative
journalism? Speaking truth to power?
Nah. Why deal in all THAT
high-brow bullshit when you can have Propaganda Wars?
Propaganda. Weaponized bullshit.
The Right Wing have been cultivating
that for decades. Certainly since the
rise of Rush Limbaugh and his ilk.
And then, along came a
presidential candidate that was the absolute personification of weaponized
bullshit.
How can we be shocked that
Republicans have embraced and lined up behind the vapid, egocentric,
drug-addled charlatan who will give voice to ANY outer-limits slur, conspiracy
theory or playground-bully taunt that will increase his ratings?
It was certainly not a great
leap beyond the political “reality” they’ve been crafting for decades.
And we were blind, naïve and
really, really stupid not to see it coming.
The question now is, what are
we going to do about it?
Sunday, July 14, 2019
Friday, July 5, 2019
Thursday, July 4, 2019
Let Freedom Ring?
Let freedom ring?
Oh, we LOVE our freedom in the USA.
Freedom to hate.
Freedom to bully.
Freedom to amass and hoard more riches than anyone could
ever need, and to keep those resources firmly out of the hands of people who are
desperate for them.
Freedom to spread lies painted as “news.” Freedom to label actual news as lies. Freedom to prey on the uneducated, the ignorant,
the gullible, and the just plain stupid.
Freedom to spit “I
got mine. Go get your own!” into the
faces of our neighbors in need.
We want all the freedom we can gather for ourselves, and if
I get mine by taking some of yours away, that’s just the law of the jungle.
We want freedom, but we don’t want any of the responsibility
that comes with it.
We want freedom, but we don’t want to exercise it with
compassion.
We want freedom, but we want to ignore the history, the
education and the sacrifices of those who wrote those freedoms into our system
of government. At a very different time,
in a very different world.
THIS….this brand of freedom that we stockpile and glorify in
21st-century America….
This freedom will be the end of us.
If it hasn't been already.
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