le_nelson_mandela_face posted:yeah this is an excellent point, but i would say it's more a way to signal power within the bourgoisie itself. the graspers and the climbers still learn the right manners, go to the right schools, learn about champagne, dress up and go to the society parties, etc. despite their wealth, they're in a position where their reputation still matters, possibly to the continuation of their wealth, but at least to their social standing. the millionaires. but then you have those who do not need to do any of that shit. from Steve Jobs' wearing a sweater and jeans to Trump's bloated crassness, they are signaling that they are so wealthy that they are beyond the rules of high society, which of course high society resents (He Is Breaching Our Norms)
The thing is, because of mass media, this has a massive and disproportionate effect outside of the bourgeoisie among those with no direct proximity to it, a desire to enjoy its benefits and a belief that joining that class is within their grasp, which is a lot of people in places like the U.S./UK and even outside of them in many urban centers around the world.
The methods of exploiting those people have had to change, and have changed, because the internal layering of the bourgeoisie is invisible to them; they see the rich & famous on TV, and they appear to act like boors as a natural aspect of their status as winners. Forms of exploiting people's frustrated desire to move between the classes now have to follow the backwards causation established in the minds of the exploited: that acting that way is a prerequisite to joining the bourgeois class rather than a demonstration by its most prominent members of their status relative to their intra-class peers.
The failure to publicly own the most effective parts of the center-right-to-far-right machine led to the devastating decline of Trump's party peers in public image, if not in political power, and ultimately, Trump's primary successes and his public image as candidate and president owe much more to Bill Clinton than to Gingrich or any other prominent Republican in the recent past, so much so that to mention it seems banal, though that's only true in hindsight.
Gingrich is a good case to consider in contrast, though I never mentioned him in that piece that I can remember: an absolute sleaze in his private life but at least moderately skilled at (and dedicated to) concealing it from the public, he converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult to try to paper over three divorces and make himself media-eligible for the presidency in 2012, but by the next election, he'd joined Trump's campaign, and his wife is now, in a confrontational move by the White House, the official ambassador to the Holy See. However, Gingrich himself couldn't manage to secure a cabinet position (it's ridiculous to accept his claim that he didn't want one given his life history). His approach to public image, once the most important guiding light in Washington on the matter, has absolutely nothing to offer the current ruling class; even when he began to publicly promote Vince-Foster-style conspiracy theory about the Democrats, he was so late to the game that I don't think he even convinced anyone that he really thought he had something significant to gain by doing it, let alone that he actually believed any of it. He just seemed like he was occupying his time in a way acceptable to his social peers, like a retiree who takes up model trains that no one else cares to see or hear about.
Even though the Republican Party's power base has not changed much at all, the media image that led them to believe they could (or should) sink Trump as strategy against Clinton now belongs in the Mesozoic, and even the Clintons themselves didn't seem able to detect that. But it's that exact same boorish power-move image matched against it that overcame it, just stripped of the ultimately superfluous propaganda lines of the DLC Democrats.
Edited by cars ()
cars posted:so now it's out in the open that there was indeed a coordinated effort by a FBI "secret society" (their term) after election day to undermine Trump through the agency. *takes his W* yes and i thank you
is there more to this than the text message from fox news? the only thing i've seen recently was this piece on naked capitalism - https://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2018/01/cia-bull-glenn-simpsons-russia-shop.html
rather poorly written but the gist of it is that the steele memo may have have been cooked up by the cia to be fed to the fbi as a pretext for an investigation.
Trump team considers nationalizing 5G network
A PowerPoint slide says the play is the digital counter to China’s One Belt One Road Initiative meant to spread its influence beyond its borders. The documents also fret about China's dominance of Artificial Intelligence, and use that as part of the rationale for this unprecedented proposal.
There’s even a suggestion that America’s work on a secure 5G network could be exported to emerging markets to protect democratic allies against China.
“Eventually,” the memo says, “this effort could help inoculate developing countries against Chinese neo-colonial behavior.”
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:speaking of nerd fascism i just made the fine denizens of YCS so mad their admin stepped down after they threatened to blackmail him into banning me using screencaps of their own racist misogyny
they traded you for samememe, which i suppose is a kind of troll beyond the grave
Belphegor posted:I'm still unclear on the connotations of the chicken-in-net emoticon
Meursault posted:The chicken in the net emoticon means you want to get the chicken and you're putting the net on him to get him.
ffs cmon.. 
Meursault posted:The chicken in the net emoticon means you want to get the chicken and you're putting the net on him to get him.
Thank you.
This video matches any episode of Vanderpump Rules or Real Housewives: Atlanta (2018 season) IMHO
-your old pal Belphy
HEH, i guess trickle down economics works after all
*hops in car, narrowly avoids hitting potholes and a homeless man before speeding off into the sunset*
cars posted:UPDATE: Trumps an old fat dumb guy who sucks. He is President of the United $naKKKe$ and he sucks
never printed out a post until now
Edited by le_nelson_mandela_face ()
le_nelson_mandela_face posted:i wonder how conservatives square the idea that the liberal government is baying to take over everything when its leaders are constructing elaborate frauds to justify not taking over things in defiance of popular will
no surprises here, many of them live in such a closed bubble that they're never exposed to anything that would let them notice. they get all their information from Fox, Breitbart, Rebel Media and the like, and are well trained with plenty of excuses to dismiss any cognitive dissonance. they're incapable of understanding anything about what the exhausted and fractious left is actually like because they have elaborate blinders that won't let them even see it. and those who do know better have no good reason to burst that bubble.
These poor folks earnestly believe that anything outside of neocon orthodoxy moves in complete lockstep with homogenous politics and strategies, the more intelligent ones might believe that "centrists" exist as unwitting dupes of the former. This is why you get things like people believing antifa is a singular paramilitary organization with a global command structure that people belong to and take orders from, they're all indoctrinated into their politics by the mysterious liberal professor, everyone who shows up to a protest is a Professional Activist paid for and coordinated by the infinite coffers of Soros, every single leftist reads, owns, and lives strictly by the principles of Rules for Radicals (a book that passed by the left mostly unnoticed and got far more attention from rightist media,) etc.
You can have political conversations with people like that who trust you, family and coworkers, they invariably think every position and goal you'll describe is perfectly reasonable as long as you describe it carefully avoiding any key words they're primed to oppose. So for example you can talk about the need for workers to be able to collectively bargain with their employers for better rights, the callous greed of bosses, the injustice of wage disparity and rentier monopolization of the means of production, as long as you never mention Unions by name. You can talk about the actual real demands and policy positions of feminist and LGBTQ activists and they'll tell you "that would all be great, if only those queer feminazis would come around to the way you think!" Everything goes swimmingly until you spell out for them "I'm a leftist" and then they get incredibly confused.
The tragicomedy of the whole thing is that all of these cartoonishly naive beliefs are reflections of their own prechewed politics: their news is bought and dictated by the Kochs and their ilk, their protests are bankrolled by fraudulent astroturf organizations, they buy or pay lip service to flavour of the month hype books en masse.
Our opposition is so uncreative and lazy that it struggles to smear us with anything remotely relevant and resorts to just talking about itself.
jesse farrar's troll tweet about drowning conservatives made it onto fox news which basically would make it a historically successful troll, except fox editors definitely knew it was a joke/troll and they just didnt care, because if they can use it as red meat for their broken brained viewers then it's useful to them and whether it's a joke becomes irrelevant. obviously on a micro level the "i love to work at the post office in columbus ohio and throw absentee ballots voting for trump into the trash" joke is funny, especially when it makes some random dumbasses mad, but when it gets weaponized to feed into the persecution complexes of millions of braindead conservatives that joke isnt funny anymore
actually it's still funny that theyre talking about jesse farrar on fox news, it's just that, also, it's bad.
.@charliekirk11: "You have liberal 'journalists' literally advocating that the world would be a better place if conservative students are killed... They literally want us dead." pic.twitter.com/T9KSYiA075
— Fox News (@FoxNews) February 9, 2018
Edited by ilmdge ()
ilmdge posted:obviously on a micro level the "i love to work at the post office in columbus ohio and throw absentee ballots voting for trump into the trash" joke is funny, especially when it makes some random dumbasses mad, but when it gets weaponized to feed into the persecution complexes of millions of braindead conservatives that joke isnt funny anymore
they can make up whatever dumb shit they want to do that though, it won't make a shred of difference if leftists stop making jokes. people should be careful because this kind of shit can be used to single out and ruin their own lives, but that's a whole other basket of eels