numb3r_5ev3n (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2025-03-15 11:49 am
numb3r_5ev3n) wrote2025-03-15 11:49 am
Some videos for today.
Bernie Sanders, on the CR vote yesterday:
Sen. Bernie Sanders: NOBODY Should Have Voted for the Terrible CR.
In this video, Senator Sanders references Citizens United, and the billionaire class as "the 99%," which is rhetoric we were using in the Occupy Movement.
One of the things which has become clear to me in the years since Occupy is the likely reason why the media kept telling people "Occupiers have no unified message, they don't even know what they're protesting, they're just angry college kids throwing a Millennial Tantrum" (even though in reality we we came from all ages and walks of life.)
And that's because if they told people we were protesting Citizens United, they would have had to explain to their viewers what that was. Or it might have encouraged them to research it for themselves. And the billionaire owners of those news outlets didn't want that. And that messaging worked on the viewing public.
Like a lot of people yesterday, I called all of the senators who were rumored as planning on voting "no" and spoke with staffers or left messages where I could. But the bill passed anyway. Which drives home Senator Sanders's assertion that change isn't going to happen there. It's going to happen with us, in our communities. Because of us. But we do need to primary every Democratic Senator or Representative who doesn't understand that this is a war for the heart and soul of the nation.
Two (from Wisecrack) Citizens United was part of a scheme going back to the 1970s, engineered to hand control of America back to the billionaire class, and usher in the return of the Gilded Age. This is something that a lot of us have been saying for years, and it was a big reason why we were so opposed to Citizens United.
We got ourselves out of the Gilded Age by protesting, by organizing, and by striking. And the groundwork for this is being laid right now as we speak.
Three (also from Wisecrack) The Soviet Strategy Fueling America's Decline. How the Soviet tactic of hypernormalization is being employed against us by the billionaire class.
I've posted before on this blog about how a major thing that 9/11/2001 did was that for many people it threatened to the fake reality bubble we were living in: the one that says we were an invincible, untouchable, exceptional "shining city on a hill" disconnected from the rest of the world, and superior to it. And how MAGA wants to cling to the sense of hypernormalization that we for the most part had been living in since WWII. Because that bubble told them they are special and entitled just for being white and American (and yet everyone else who is trying to get them to face reality are supposedly "the elites.")
This is why MAGA seems so willfully delusional, and why it's so entrenched. They know it's fake: but they're in a war against reality, and they have been for their entire lives. They want the bubble back, and they want it stronger than ever. And they believe they're winning.
There have been three points at which the American Hypernormalization Bubble should have popped completely: Vietnam, 9/11, and the recent Covid 19 pandemic. But instead, these inflection points have caused these people to double down and to freak out from cognitive dissonance, rather than come to terms with the fact that they were living in a false paradigm.
Back in 2004, a Bush aide (long rumored to be Karl Rove) mocked reporter Ron Suskind, claiming:
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
And this kind of thinking is why a me and a lot of my friends IRL were calling ourselves "Redpills" back during the Bush years (and back before the Livejournal Matrix Cult) before a lot of shitty incels and transphobes misappropriated the term. We had self-substatiated ourselves out of hypernormalization, and were trying to live in reality.
But it does seem like this is exactly what Donald Trump is doing now. He's just acting, and we're just witnessing him do it. This is what a lot of 4channers mean when they talk about "Chaos Magick," btw. They straight-up believe that the Hypernormalized Bubble they are helping to maintain is creating the reality that the rest of us are living in. And they really think they get to define reality for the rest of us.
But seriously: how much of history has been ruined by people who were just fighting to stay in their hypernormalized bubble?
As Gwen Snyder and other Leftists over on Bluesky have been saying, we need to be the thing that pierces the "unreality bubble" that we want to see in the world.
I say it's time for those of us "here in reality" to act to create our own future.
EDIT: from Paul Warburg: Why is America Intentionally Destroying its Global Influence? This is a fantastic video in which Paul Warburg explains, in very simple language, why Donald Trump's foreign policy is bad for America.
Sen. Bernie Sanders: NOBODY Should Have Voted for the Terrible CR.
In this video, Senator Sanders references Citizens United, and the billionaire class as "the 99%," which is rhetoric we were using in the Occupy Movement.
One of the things which has become clear to me in the years since Occupy is the likely reason why the media kept telling people "Occupiers have no unified message, they don't even know what they're protesting, they're just angry college kids throwing a Millennial Tantrum" (even though in reality we we came from all ages and walks of life.)
And that's because if they told people we were protesting Citizens United, they would have had to explain to their viewers what that was. Or it might have encouraged them to research it for themselves. And the billionaire owners of those news outlets didn't want that. And that messaging worked on the viewing public.
Like a lot of people yesterday, I called all of the senators who were rumored as planning on voting "no" and spoke with staffers or left messages where I could. But the bill passed anyway. Which drives home Senator Sanders's assertion that change isn't going to happen there. It's going to happen with us, in our communities. Because of us. But we do need to primary every Democratic Senator or Representative who doesn't understand that this is a war for the heart and soul of the nation.
Two (from Wisecrack) Citizens United was part of a scheme going back to the 1970s, engineered to hand control of America back to the billionaire class, and usher in the return of the Gilded Age. This is something that a lot of us have been saying for years, and it was a big reason why we were so opposed to Citizens United.
We got ourselves out of the Gilded Age by protesting, by organizing, and by striking. And the groundwork for this is being laid right now as we speak.
Three (also from Wisecrack) The Soviet Strategy Fueling America's Decline. How the Soviet tactic of hypernormalization is being employed against us by the billionaire class.
I've posted before on this blog about how a major thing that 9/11/2001 did was that for many people it threatened to the fake reality bubble we were living in: the one that says we were an invincible, untouchable, exceptional "shining city on a hill" disconnected from the rest of the world, and superior to it. And how MAGA wants to cling to the sense of hypernormalization that we for the most part had been living in since WWII. Because that bubble told them they are special and entitled just for being white and American (and yet everyone else who is trying to get them to face reality are supposedly "the elites.")
This is why MAGA seems so willfully delusional, and why it's so entrenched. They know it's fake: but they're in a war against reality, and they have been for their entire lives. They want the bubble back, and they want it stronger than ever. And they believe they're winning.
There have been three points at which the American Hypernormalization Bubble should have popped completely: Vietnam, 9/11, and the recent Covid 19 pandemic. But instead, these inflection points have caused these people to double down and to freak out from cognitive dissonance, rather than come to terms with the fact that they were living in a false paradigm.
Back in 2004, a Bush aide (long rumored to be Karl Rove) mocked reporter Ron Suskind, claiming:
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.
And this kind of thinking is why a me and a lot of my friends IRL were calling ourselves "Redpills" back during the Bush years (and back before the Livejournal Matrix Cult) before a lot of shitty incels and transphobes misappropriated the term. We had self-substatiated ourselves out of hypernormalization, and were trying to live in reality.
But it does seem like this is exactly what Donald Trump is doing now. He's just acting, and we're just witnessing him do it. This is what a lot of 4channers mean when they talk about "Chaos Magick," btw. They straight-up believe that the Hypernormalized Bubble they are helping to maintain is creating the reality that the rest of us are living in. And they really think they get to define reality for the rest of us.
But seriously: how much of history has been ruined by people who were just fighting to stay in their hypernormalized bubble?
As Gwen Snyder and other Leftists over on Bluesky have been saying, we need to be the thing that pierces the "unreality bubble" that we want to see in the world.
I say it's time for those of us "here in reality" to act to create our own future.
EDIT: from Paul Warburg: Why is America Intentionally Destroying its Global Influence? This is a fantastic video in which Paul Warburg explains, in very simple language, why Donald Trump's foreign policy is bad for America.
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