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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   37165 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

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What exactly is the communist style 1984 propaganda dream that’s happening now? All I see is people making memes on twitter trying to pump up the likely candidate who they want to see win.

It just seems like typical political campaign stuff. Ignore your candidates flaws and pump them up as awesome. It’d be strange if that wasn’t occurring, a bunch of different partisans engaged in a mutual information war is what we would expect to see when looking at a representative democracy in an election year.

They are literally deleting and rewriting articles about Kamala being named border czar in 2021 and being ranked the furthest left senator in 2019. Its very much a "we were always at war with Eastasia"

Which is exactly what you’d expect partisans to do in a political campaign

This is just watering down the meaning of “1984” and “communist state” the same way the other side does with “Nazis”

You know, this kind of blatant rewriting of very recent history was not the norm 10, 20 years ago.

Back then people could convincingly lie. But now we're pretty squarely at "they know they're lying, they know we know they're lying, and yet they're lying".

My take is that we passed through a threshold with Covid and tore something that was already scratched in the 10s. Now people change dictionary definitions as a matter of course instead of making decade long efforts to build academic corpora to do it. It's not the same.

I think you’re right, but I do wonder how much we saw this sort of thing in other deeply polarized times.

Or if it’s unique to the particulars of our current media ecosystem.

Rewriting the past is a pretty central part of the media propaganda in 1984. This isn't some big stretch like calling Mitt Romney a Nazi is. I don't think one needs to wait for people to have rat cages appended to their faces to start making 1984 references.

“Some of the news organizations in our media ecosystem are partisan and have shitty practices”

….

“I don’t see the difference between the US and a communist state”

I mean come on.

Well I didn't write that part. But establishment media is getting far too close for comfort.

I haven’t personally seen any articles rewritten. Do you have any links

In addition to the Axios one zataomm linked, there is this one that govtrack deleted from its own website: https://web.archive.org/web/20200816001336/https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/kamala_harris/412678/report-card/2019

Link to the Axios community-noted tweet: https://x.com/axios/status/1816078350659494130

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