Posts Tagged ‘Election 2016’


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By @anarchyroll

Do social media platforms or the people running them have a responsibility to the public or to the republic? Is it in the nature of the services to spread modern-day propaganda which has been repackaged as fake news? Are these mediums a cause for negative events or are they simply mirrors and microphones? Are they bringing the worst out of people and society? Or are they just the biggest magnifying glass in the history of the species?

Are these services really that much different from the mediums that came before them? Radio and television have the exact same purpose as social media services…..to sell ads and the information about the people who consume them.

There is no moral compass at play with Facebook, with Twitter, especially with Google or Instagram or Snapchat. They are capitalist enterprises with one reason for existing, to make money. So if one or all of the companies get offered a lot of money from a foreign country to run political ads during a presidential campaign, why wouldn’t they take the money and put the content on their platform?

Oh, the information was blatantly false? It was straight up propaganda from a foreign government? Yeah okay but, they paid up front. Money talks. In America the Supreme Court has literally said money equals speech.

If anyone thinks Facebook or Google has a moral compass or conscious, try and find out exactly what they’re doing with all that personal metadata they mine from everyone who uses their services and/or apps.

It is not just a little too late to have the “ so social media companies have a responsibility” argument. That ship sailed once the collective population decided we didn’t want our phones to be phones anymore. Once the companies realized they were able to tap into our collective dopamine addictions by turning what used to be a portable audio communicator into a slot machine that can fit into a skinny jeans pocket, responsibility went right out the window.

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Do casinos have a responsibility to their guests other than making them enjoy losing their wages? Of course not, the whole business model is built around taking money out of people’s pockets and into the casino safe. Well social media is the casino and our attention and personal information is the cash.

On top of all that, Facebook (which owns Instagram), Twitter, and Snapchat are publicly traded companies. So quite literally, their only responsibility is to maximize profits for their shareholders. Their collective interest in the health of democracy only goes as far as the stock market opening and closing on time.

Americans love social media. We also love seeing powerful people get yelled at in public by elected officials. Dogs and ponies are adorable, who wouldn’t want to see a whole show of them? Well we got the best of both worlds last week when lawyers representing the big social media players went to capitol hill and got a verbal spanking from some very angry public officials.

It was modern American politics personified. Verbal spankings, non answers, legislation proposed but not supported, visual aide charts, legal jargon, and pledges to do better in the future. The vitriol directed at social media is just a reflection of our collective anger at ourselves. We’re angry for thinking social media would be a tool for good and not just a tool to make money.

We’re angry at ourselves for being so readily fooled by fake news that we’re all to easily manipulated into believing are the real thing. We’re angry at ourselves because we thought the internet, and the web 2.0 that social media represents would make us more informed and more united. Instead it’s deepened our divide and by putting our preexisting confirmation biases on technological steroids.

Our elected officials can yell at high-priced lawyers all they want. Public berating is much easier than putting regulations into place. It’s easier for Facebook and Twitter to higher more lobbyists than more moderators to discern what is being put on their platforms, by whom, and for what purpose. It’s easier to apologize later than to do the right thing in the moments of choice. We know this. That’s why we’re not angry at social media for what happened during the 2016 election season, we’re angry at ourselves.

 

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By @anarchyroll

In his first weekly address, Trump made sure to speak to what he called the forgotten Americans. Do you know who those people are? If you don’t, you are apart of the problem, not the solution.

If you live in a major metropolitan city, with a job dependent on technology, an artistic mindset, a liberal paradigm: with no understanding or empathy for the old, rural, industrial, rust belt, baseball, apple pie Americana folks who have been left behind since the 1970s…then your faux rage, uproar, rallies, marches, and hashtag revolts are not only irrelevant, but also impetice for Trump’s re election.

Remember how galvanized the left was after eight years of republican rule in America. When two wars were stared. Stem cell therapy was disabled. Religion was prioritized over science. Then a mixed race gentleman ran for the highest office in the land with the potential to make history, The level of enthusiasm, effort, and existential encouragement to reach beyond the brass ring for annals of history was no longer a wet dream of ideology but a forgone consequence the rise of a political base.

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Empathy and compromise must be paid to the south and rust belt at some point. The former Confederacy has been guaranteed red on the electoral map for many generations now. The former manufacturing havens of the mid west have turned electorally red year by year. If the deep blue states of California and Illinois can have red governors multiple times over in recent years, then red states can change majors in the electoral college as well.

The Affordable Care Act has caught on quite well in the Bible belt and the new Pope says a lot of leftist things. Is there not common ground to be gained there?

Trump winning the elections defied many perceived norms. But one old school norm that holds true is that all politics are local. There must be focus paid to state elections. One vote doesn’t mean a whole hell of a lot in a national election. But in state, county, and township elections one vote can go a long way. There must be national emphasis paid to state elections. That may sound like a lot. But in the era of the never-ending news cycle and the unquenchable thirst for content of varying quality, a national spotlight paid to local elections is a natural fit. Think I’m stretching here? Watch a major sports network during an off-season or a preseason.

Solar power is creating more jobs than the coal industry. Legalized marijuana will be creating more jobs than the manufacturing sector. Both of those things scream common ground for liberals and conservatives. But can that common ground be found if we are all lost in the trees of pundit reactivity?

There is a decent percentage of people on each side who are lost. Too dug in the trenches of their side as if it will give them bonus points in this life or the next. But there are vastly more people who simply want a to live a happy life without hurting anyone. If everyone had more income than debt, only the freaks would care about getting rid of second amendment or transgender rights.

But that common ground must be diligently searched for through action and policy. Rhetoric and campaign promises are simply not good enough. The forgotten Americans have been left behind for almost half a century. Their anger is as justified as it is misdirected. Who closed the factories? Who outsourced the jobs? Who cut the aide checks? The answer is not liberal elites.

It isn’t ridicule nor parades that will convince the forgotten Americans about the wonders of social progressivism. It is a path out of poverty that involves a purpose. For generations politicians have leveraged social issues against economics to channel the angry attention away from the people who closed the factories and outsourced their jobs towards the sex, science, and sin of city dwellers.

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Getting angry or nasty and marching in the streets of major metropolitan cities does nothing but satisfy ego and social media content appetite. The actual work must be done in the broken rural communities of the country that have been so economically depressed and culturally starved for so long that they have become nationally infamous as centers for the meth and opium epidemics of the past decade.

So instead of trying to cram fringe left-wing issues down America’s throat from New York and LA, try putting boots, brains, and plans of action on the ground one flyover state at a time. The rust belt must be acknowledged and tended to. From factory towns to mill villages. These people need to be explained, then shown through action, a plan for sustainable economic success in the knowledge worker age. Until this entire section of the country, until these forgotten Americans are given a hand up from the other side of the aisle, transgender rights, environmental accountability, progressive income taxes, and marijuana legalization are all mere pipe dreams of a voting block too apathetic and naive to bring about the real change they publically pout about with placards and impotent anger.

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By @anarchyroll

Were you one of those “With Her”? If so, your consent and endorsement of documented sabotage, corruption and collusion of the Bernie Sanders campaign in the primaries is to blame for Trump’s presidency. Your protest of the general election result is as sad and pathetic as it is hollow and immature.

Your single minded, arrogant, elitist, sexist ideology that it was time for the first female president rather than the most qualified candidate with the best chance to win; is why we now have a climate change denier as leader of the free world.

You, thinking you know best and she knew best because of her gender allowed your rationality to be blinded to her historic unfavorablility rating. You wouldn’t listen to reason, you listened to your emotions. You endorsed a candidate being investigated by the FBI during her campaign. You locked yourselves in echo chambers of glad handing pseudo news to only be informed about what you wanted to hear.

You castigated a majority of your political base with rhetoric and hubris who desperately pleaded with you for months to side with facts and rationality rather than homogenized matriarchy.

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Even now, you refuse to look in the mirror and accept that you sabotaged your own best interest and the future of our country, our planet. Opting instead to literally cry, shout obscenities, and refusing to accept reality.

But why act differently now? You refused to accept the reality of who was the actual most qualified, democratic candidate, whose time had come was. The person who was drawing such huge crowds to hear them speak that the term revolution was placed upon them, rather than artificially formulated by political public relations sycophants.

Refusing to accept reality, instead demanding that fairytale of the princess becoming queen be (wo)manifested into reality. As for the signs, scandals, protests, polls, and investigations into your chosen one? Ignore them! Pretend they don’t exist! After all, you already booked the hotel lobby with the glass ceiling in Manhattan, why let something as pesky as pragmatic realities and facts get in the way of your sexist symbolism?

Your power hungry political penis envy has put a person who admittedly can’t take criticism in charge of mass surveillance and nuclear weapons.

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Now you take to the streets and shout not your president? If only your impotent protest placards could patch hole in the ozone layer that will only grow larger with a climate change denier in the White House.

Filming yourselves crying on your smartphone to post on social media? If only your tears could be used as medicine to millions who will loose insurance under someone who wants to repeal the Affordable Care Act.

Pride comes before the fall. Hillary Clinton and those “With Her” displayed not just arrogance but open contempt for and denial of disputing facts and figures that repeatedly pointed to her unelectability. In many cases she refused to comment or address negative facts and figures. Her supporters openly pled ignorance, were ignorant, or played the feminist martyr card when her nomination at the DNC convention received 3x the protest of Trump at the RNC.

And now your failure, your fall, is all of ours.

All of us who believe in climate change. All of us who believe healthcare to be a right. All of us outside the top 1% economic class who need government regulation of capitalism to ensure a more even/equal playing field. All of us, men and women must now endure half a decade of potential societal setbacks and draconian policies.

You sabotaged your own access to abortions and  potential to receive equal pay for equal work by tying yourselves to an anchor in the middle of the ocean. Then refusing to take the hand our potential savior, because he was an old white man.

Now because of your by any means necessary feminist fairytale, Donald Trump has got his hands on this countries balls. Or in this case, because of you, he has been given complete reign to grab the free world right in the pussy.

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ajclogo2By @anarchyroll

Few people, whether real or fictional, are as synonymous with America’s version of capatilsm as Gordon Gekko in the movie Wall Street.

“Greed is good” are words to live by for the people who try to fill the hole in the soul with copious amounts of money by any means necessary. That quote is the foundation of type of free market capitalism that brought about the 2008 Great Recession.

That economic collapse should was a very very big, very very loud, very very painful sign that we as a society have allowed greed to get out of control. It is one of the seven deadly sins for a reason. Wall Street and unregulated capitalism have transformed greed into the deadliest sin. Able to negatively impact the entire developed world with greedy actions of a relatively small percentage of the global population.

One of the ripple effects of the Great Recession has been the mainstream populous rise of what a generation ago would have been considered a fringe presidential candidate. Bernie Sanders through passionate speeches and a lifetime of walking the talk has risen like a phoenix.

Another ripple effect has been that greed is no longer good enough for the top 20% – .01%. The rich get richer no longer is a substantial enough metaphor. How do I know this? How can I be sure of this?

The fact that the real life person who inspired the fictional icon Gordon Gekko is publically endorsing Democratic Socialist Bernie Sanders for President.

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How can the inspiration for the phrase Greed is Good be endorsing a socialist for president? Because the unregulated greed thanks to the Clinton and Bush administrations has become something beyond excess and gluttony.