Re: <nettime> Digital leftism in a globalised world?

[Flick Harrison <flick@flickharrison.com>]

> On Jan 28, 2017, at 14:29 , Morlock Elloi <morlockelloi@gmail.com <mailto:morlockelloi@gmail.com>> wrote:

> The 'left' discourse has been divorced from the reality for almost a decade, since the mixed race president got into the office. This cognitive dissonance was required to imagine the progress.

“I’m right, and you don’t seem to agree, therefore cognitive dissonance.”  Can we please bring this discussion to a level higher than Scott Adams? ;-)

Besides, the right seems to be taking cognitive dissonance all the way to the bank.  “I hereby declare this crowd larger.  Signed, President Donald Trump.”

> Everything became a meme, a notion, an idea, easy to contain, direct and bend. Instead of propaganda being manufactured by the state, the whole swaths of population willingly took part in it. Many of the loud ones got paid.

I played a multiplayer video game today and was surprised to find the chat console filled with racist crime “statistics” being spread that way, referring of course to “n***er crime.”  Talk about the whole population writing propaganda.

By calling Obama a mixed-race president you are meming with the white supremacists, though you probably think you aren’t.  Sidelining his blackness doesn’t work, that’s why people like him don’t bother trying.  He identifies as black, and it’s his blackness that energized the KKK and the far right into action.  Hillary’s womanness is the next thing that drove them bonkers.  If you think this is a side issue, I will hazard a guess you are a white male.  I also guess you think that #BlackLivesMatter is just a meme.  It isn’t.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/us/politics/03census.html <http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/us/politics/03census.html>

Whiteness matters to Trump and his followers. What macro-economic explanation - other than the random alliance-chages a la 1984 - for Trump to swing against major-partner China and in favour of struggling Russia?  Does personal enrichment really cover it?  Well, why let Asians off the hook to colonize Africa and compete with the Panama Canal and spend all our energy containing our fellow whiteys in Eurasia?  Even Israel can still fit into the co-antisemites’ foreign policy because Russia considers Israel a “Russian-speaking country” and damn are they convenient for weeding out muslims.  This Great White Alliance is an angle no one seems to have explored yet, but it seems kinda obvious to me.  Then again, maybe people are afraid to give Trump ideas.
 
And to go a step further - why wouldn’t the alt-right forces ruling Russia be happier to deal with a racist, misogynist bully than a black man or a woman?  Why not find a partner to declare all Muslims terrorist (except the bloodthirsty puppets in Chechnya, and the strictly-secular thugs running Turkey)?  Hey, those anarcho-feminists in Rojava are brown, they’re probably terrorists too!
 
> It's hard to wean off that. Just look at the panic when the reality refused to follow the doctored polls.
 
In any case, this stuff about doctored polls is overblown.  The US election, for instance, closely resembled the polls in early November.  The problem was the quickly-changing terrain, and the slim margins of the swing-states, not inaccurate polling.  Same thing with the Canadian election - it looked close, but with the hijab issue blowing up, and then the NDP flip flop on balanced budgets, a major Tory corruption trial unfolding in real time, the Alan Kurdi image hitting the front pages, the public broke for the Liberals very late.  To this day the poorly educated wrongly use our election as another example of the wrong wrong polls.

http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/canadian-election-2015-poll-tracker <http://news.nationalpost.com/news/canada/canadian-politics/canadian-election-2015-poll-tracker>

And:

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/ <http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-real-story-of-2016/>

>  The real shock, and the end to the cargo cult politics will come when the new masters start laying off the obsolete propaganda machine.


God help us when there’s not even an MSM to tell us whether Trump is even really still alive or not, and all there is left are competing propaganda blogs pulling alternative facts out of their buttholes all day.

> Twitter is cheaper.


Nobody cares how much it costs.  The National Post, our right-wing national paper, stayed afloat for years despite losing money.  It’s very useful to have a credible mouthpiece for corporate viewpoints.  Pushing the convo nets big.

-- 
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* FLICK's WEBSITE: 
http://www.flickharrison.com <http://www.flickharrison.com/>
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