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Yeah, if we could harness the energy that Americans' use to run away and hide from Clinton's history, we'd have world peace, probably. /s Does nobody remember

by mmjaa 8y ago

Yeah, if we could harness the energy that Americans' use to run away and hide from Clinton's history, we'd have world peace, probably. /s Does nobody remember the wars this woman started, in her reach for power? Are we really going to ignore the victims of her involvement in American foreign policy? This is the danger of the whole "mah Russian Trolls!" narrative - the trolls might actually be telling the truth about a few things (i.e. America really is run by a hidden oligarchy of families networked throughout the military-industrial-pharmaceutical complex), and .. because "mah Russia!", we end up reinforcing the very actors who need to be eradicated from the scene. This is very dodgy territory. I can only hope that the average citizens' heavy dependence on "being told what to think by an authoritarian figure on TV" is going to be weaned as this proceeds ..

seivarden 8y ago
No, the average citizen's heavy dependence will just shift to "being told what to think by a viral video on YouTube". That's what we're seeing here, by the way.
- mmjaa 8y ago
  What I'm seeing is "authority fatigue". Nobody really trusts their authority's views any more. And I think that's a good thing, personally. Not sure that I'd agree that Youtube is the best source of it, but yeah - its high time the Western world learned to think for itself, anyway. Maybe this is progress?
  - iamben 8y ago
    Except the western world (or a large part of) will never think for itself. They just replace one voice with another that seems more credible and removes the need to think and analyse. Thinking is hard. Getting your 'facts' from the guy with 200k subscribers (he must be legit, right?) on YouTube. That's easy. Politics, science (I mean, go look at people talking about chemtrails or flat earth), whatever. There was a paper about this that made the front page of HN a few weeks back. Was a good read if you can find it. I'm with you though. It's all a bit of a mess. Perhaps politicians have always been such self serving, blowhard scumbags - but until the internet and quick, global discussion was so ubiquitous we just didn't notice en mass.

by mmjaa 8y ago

seivarden 8y ago

No, the average citizen's heavy dependence will just shift to "being told what to think by a viral video on YouTube". That's what we're seeing here, by the way.

mmjaa 8y ago
What I'm seeing is "authority fatigue". Nobody really trusts their authority's views any more. And I think that's a good thing, personally. Not sure that I'd agree that Youtube is the best source of it, but yeah - its high time the Western world learned to think for itself, anyway. Maybe this is progress?
- iamben 8y ago
  Except the western world (or a large part of) will never think for itself. They just replace one voice with another that seems more credible and removes the need to think and analyse. Thinking is hard. Getting your 'facts' from the guy with 200k subscribers (he must be legit, right?) on YouTube. That's easy. Politics, science (I mean, go look at people talking about chemtrails or flat earth), whatever. There was a paper about this that made the front page of HN a few weeks back. Was a good read if you can find it. I'm with you though. It's all a bit of a mess. Perhaps politicians have always been such self serving, blowhard scumbags - but until the internet and quick, global discussion was so ubiquitous we just didn't notice en mass.