• rosymind@leminal.space
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      1 year ago

      I feel like politicians are taking advantage of how short the average U.S. person’s attention span is. (Mine included)

      “LOOK OVER HERE” politician says, as they do a bad thing in the opposite direction

      “Hey, wait a minute…” Some people

      “HEY LOOK AT THAT GUY” politician to one of the people noticing

      And the heads just keep turning, the pitchforks keep coming out, and soon it’s a jumbled mess of misinformation, distraction, confusion and in-fighting.

      How do we even begin to fix it?

      • Restaldt@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Its not even about short attention span. Its a trick as old as time and right out of the fascist playbook.

        Gish gallop

        Nobody can keep up with all the bs

      • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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        1 year ago

        You can start by paying attention to who the bad guys are and remembering their names, or at least their party affiliation. The same ones turn up over and under most of the time, so it’s not as big a task as you would think.

        As for fixing the attention span of people who just can’t be bothered, I have no idea.

  • Bwaz@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    Well, duh. It’s not like you didn’t contribute to putting him in power you ass.

  • AutoTL;DR@lemmings.worldB
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    1 year ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:


    Donald Trump is “not a conservative”, the former Republican House speaker Paul Ryan said, but “a populist, authoritarian narcissist”.

    He was speaking to Kevin Kajiwara, co-president of Teneo Political Risk Advisory, in a podcast interview recorded in November but widely noticed this week.

    Voices on both sides of the main political aisle have criticised Ryan for not strongly opposing Trump when he ran for the Republican nomination in 2016, or through four chaotic years in the White House that ended in the deadly January 6 attack on Congress.

    Kajiwara asked Ryan how he thought history would judge Kinzinger and Cheney, conservative Republicans from Illinois and Wyoming who stood against Trump and sat on the January 6 committee before being forced out of Congress.

    Historians searching for the roots of Trumpism have generally looked to the 1990s, when another Republican speaker, Newt Gingrich, turned Congress into a scorched-earth battleground; to the rise of Fox News; or to opposition to Barack Obama, the first Black president, particularly through the Tea Party movement.

    Ryan, an economic conservative who was Mitt Romney’s running mate in 2012, continued: “There has to be some line, some principle that is so important to you that you’re just not going to cross, so that when you’re brushing your teeth in the morning, look yourself in the mirror, you like what you see.


    The original article contains 583 words, the summary contains 224 words. Saved 62%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!

  • circuscritic@lemmy.ca
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    1 year ago

    One of those things is not like the others.

    Populism, in the American context, was a proto-leftist movement with a “fuck the bankers” vibe. I believe it had the most traction during the depression with dust bowl era farmers, but someone can correct me if I’m wrong on that. Regardless, it was a popular bottom up political movement, which is why it’s been vilifed by the ruling class and media ever since.

    Yes, I know there are people who label themselves as right wing reactionary populists, but letting them freely co-opt that political movement is akin to letting the National Socialists co-opt a socialist movement.