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Propaganda is Everywhere

August 21, 2023


In a recent bout of thoughtlessness, I dared to respond to a George Takei post, that spoke of voting "not being a marriage" - presumably, in the interests of convincing leftists that it's really totally completely fine to support a centrist. Of course this is complete hypocrisy, given Mr. Takei's (and most liberals) tendency to consider people who voted for Trump to be equally terrible, if not worse, than Trump himself, despite this supposed "not a marriage" take on voting.

I can kind of understand this position if you consider only Democratic candidates - after all, it is quite safe to disconnect yourself from the average Democrat's in-office accomplishments, as there are few to actually speak of (how's that Roe v. Wade replacement going, guys?) - but I'm not willing to give either group this big of an out. You want to hold Trump voters personally responsible for Trump, well, you had better take personal responsibility for your own politicians too, and everything they've done, or failed to do.

You voted for Hillary in 2016? All the blood she's spilt is on your hands, too. Hope that's okay.

That's not the point though. The worst aspect of this experience was that it happened on Mastodon - which is supposed to be different from other social media. On the one hand, it's quite easy to control your timeline by following and blocking those who you actually want to listen to; on the other, any old Democratic propagandist can start up an account on one of the big sites that are essentially impossible to reasonably de-federate from, as they have substantial numbers of interesting users you would lose as well, and thus the big site serves as a vector for NAFO and other types of centrist bullshit.

The most infuriating thing about it is, doing things the "old-fashioned" blog and RSS way, it was nearly impossible for propagandists to show up on your feed without your prior consent, and while Masto is clearly a little better about it than, say, Twitter was, it's still not good enough. We need a fully-decentralized web where every user has their own instance, and thus complete personal control over what they see, and who sees what they post.


Categorized as: Personal | Politics | Site



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