NotPhil ·
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NotPhil · 4132 days ago · link · · parent · post: FOX calls Westboro Baptist Church "Left Wing Cult" ·
Fox News, mainly, just exploits a mind-set which existed long before Fox News was around. It certainly does do propaganda effectively, but its effects are limited to those who are predisposed to see things their way in the first place. I think that some of us don't understand that when they say things like "liberal" or "left-wing," they aren't using those terms to mean the same thing that we mean. For them, these terms mean "the Others" or "the Dangerous" not "liberating" or "progressive." So they can say that Westboro Baptist Church is left-wing and really understand that to be the case. There's no sense of irony or double-talk. I know this is the case because I belong to a public-speaking club that had several Tea Partiers in it. I heard them (mis)using terms like "liberal" so often that one day, when I was in charge of the impromptu-speaking portion of our meeting, I showed them the dictionary definition of the word "liberal" and then asked them to speak about the concept using the term that way. Not only could the Tea Partiers not do so, try as they might, they also disbelieved that the term was defined that way in the dictionary. It's one of the things that's so strange about public discourse in America. We're speaking past each other, in part, because we aren't even using the same language as each other, even though it may sound like it.
I suspect our entire economic system will one day come to been seen as one of the most perverse attempts at social engineering we've ever foisted on ourselves.
No-liability ownership of imaginary legal properties called corporations required to compete with each other for growing profits by chewing up resources at a rate that's created the greatest mass extinction since the Cretaceous period. Pollution from industrial processes that threatens entire oceans and the climate of the whole planet. Sweatshops populated by people working around the clock for starvation wages who churn out disposable, meaningless, goods which we end up burying in the ground after a few days or years. Middle class debt slaves running around and around in a rat race to avoid bankruptcy. Colonization, warfare, and coerced "free trade" treaties to force the system on everyone on the planet and create bigger markets. Our economics has to be the most depraved thing to come out of the Enlightenment.