Wookienopants wrote:

I think that may end our relationships.

Meant to say as well … while I understand completely, I’m sorry to hear that Wooks. Never a good thing to end a friendship, especially with family.

Trump wrote:

I used to love London as a city. I haven’t been there in a long time. But when they make you feel unwelcome, why would I stay there?

Proud as punch right now.

Fucking hell. I'm sorry to hear that wookie. Maybe someday life will give him a lesson to wake him up a bit to the world around him and how the "problems" facing the NHS are years of underfunding and budgets stripped to the bone and beyond, not "millions of immigrants". Fucking hell.

@Wookie Man, that's tough. My brother-in-law has a similar attitude and it's really difficult to be around because he's constantly vocalising his stance on such issues, via whatever story is on alt-right news outlets, and seems to get a kick out of the resulting arguments it causes.

It's hard to bite my tongue at times but I've realised he has no intention of changing his views or accepting contrary evidence so I just let him talk himself out or walk away. Don't really have the option of cutting ties, which I'd do in a heartbeat.

Thing is we've been close mates for nearly 30 years. I don’t want to end a friendship of politics like this so gonna work on accepting his different views as something I likely won’t change.

Thing is, he’s lived a very sheltered life and is an avid daily mail reader. He’s also never needed the NHS and neither has any of his immediate family so he doesn’t really see the value in it as a system.

I’m not making excuses for him but I can see why he might have those views based on his personal experiences.

He’s still wrong

Fucking hell Wookie, you’re a better man than me. Mind you, everything he’s stated as ‘fact’ is pretty easily disproved - particularly the whole ‘health tourism’ bollocks.

Yup, deep existential dread is pretty much my default setting on my bad days.

That experience with Irish gypsies has opened your mind to other cultures, right?

If you can’t control people by force, and you can’t in nominally democratic society, then propaganda and media management becomes your chosen weapon.

Murdoch’s been a rogue agent for years, taking the generally working class readers of his main weapon (The Sun) and focusing their attention away from the people who actually make their lives so shitty (business, capitalism, the free market, their bosses, the ruling classes, the politicians who patronise them whilst generally loathing them and their unwillingness to work themselves into an early grave for someone else’s profit margin) and onto scapegoats instead - dem immigrants, the EU, political correctness, lefties, Muslims, benefits claimants etc.

It’s very appealing to people who feel they have little control over their own lives. “Things are shit, but it couldn’t be because the structures of our society itself are shit, it must be that some other people somewhere are messing it up for me/us...”

When you step back and think on it, it’s ridiculous - who has more power in society, those at the absolute bottom or those who run the show? What costs us more, large scale corporate tax avoidance or single mothers claiming forty-quid a week? But the tabloids take that anger and depression their readers feel and direct it towards people who, in the main, had little to do with organising society and making the big decisions that affect us all (generally turning the frustration towards some poor defenseless sub-strata of society).

“It was these bastards, they ballsed it all up, we’d all be millionaires now if it wasn’t for them...”

Absolutely. And it’s hard to argue against what is now a thoroughly culturally ingrained belief system.

And, trying to bring us back to the thread topic a little … America has headed rapidly in the same direction but via television news instead of the printed press. Adding the Internet to the mix has really sped up their descent into madness.

hunk wrote:

It's gerrymandering at its finest.

I agree with most of your post, but gerrymandering has a specific meaning around redrawing voting districts to make them more favourable. This isn’t gerrymandering, although the GOP (and, to a lesser extent, the Dems) are guilty of that too.

There has always been targeted and microtargeted marketing. The ‘new’ thing with digital/social techniques is the lack of accountability – the ability to anonymously send tailored messages to specific demographics, and the lack of ability to track sources and spending on that. When you really think about it, how is that different to sending campaigners door to door in the old days? Nobody checked what they were saying to people, or who paid them to say it. It’s not really new, it’s not magic, it’s just newly efficient and newly effective.

Combine gerrymandering with covert targeted fake news/propaganda at known undecided voters over fb/CA and your winning odds increase exponentially. Especially if the other side (the progressive 'left') doesn't have a clue as to what's going on and is technologically in the dark..

They really really need to be teaching about manipulative advertising and media in schools IMO, if they aren't already. Fucking horrible scary stuff.

GurtTractor wrote:

They really really need to be teaching about manipulative advertising and media in schools IMO, if they aren't already. Fucking horrible scary stuff.

I do.


Forgive the Comic Sans. It’s there to help a student with dyslexia.