Ha, (i saw your sarcasm hash at the end there, continuing that) - It’s almost like caring about a statistical fact and relaying it into a statement is completely negating!
I much prefer FOX News for its lack of subjective articulated completely UNEMOTIONAL pressure.
The problem I have is assuming that emotion negates facts or logic. That is some grade A bullshit if you ask me. And it’s often misogynistic since it’s assumed (against all evidence to the contrary) that men are always driven by logic and women by pure emotion.
For some of us, reality makes us angry because it’s such bullshit. People using “logic” to dismiss people who are angry because of issues like systemic discrimination are merely trying to dismiss the larger issue of systemic discrimination.
totally, @anon61221983 — Ironically, it’s considered personal growth as a cis-male to learn to speak your feelings, or connect to them. So it’s psychological projection (self-loathing) to complain about others having access to use them.
Prior to the 24-hour news cycle, having an opinion was considered an evolution of learning a fact, not something that disproves knowing a truth.
Can we get a simlar thing for the UK?
This default that our country is ‘the best’ and that anyone disputing that is unpatriotic/terrorist is so incredibly toxic…
Right? That’s sort of one of the flip sides of this misogynistic thinking - men are demeaned for having emotions, often to the point of it hurting them, even physically.
Yep…
Rosey Grier and Marlo Thomas spared a lot of Gen X cis-males that bad head trip.
Not all gen x cis-males, sadly.
Something I saw recently in the discussion of $15/hr minimum wage was someone who I would have called a neoliberal previously comparing it to France and Germany and saying we could do as well as them with about $13, but “this is America” and America can do better. And I was thinking about how I’m very aware of the form: “This is America; therefore [great thing] can be done,” but it feels like a long time since I’ve heard people using it.
American exceptionalism, I thought, was supposed to be about America being exceptional, but in the healthcare debate it always seems to be about America being an exception. I thought it was supposed to be confidence but it just seems to be an excuse. (I have to say, the day Biden announced that America had a goal of vaccinating every teacher up to grade 12 by end of March I almost teared up and I’m not even American. It’s a great look when America takes that sense of greatness and does great things with it.)
ETA: Which is my criticism of the original video. I wish it leaned more heavily on the “we’re great and we can do better than this.” Just because I think that’s a more effective message to Ameircans.
the shorter oed reminds of the hitchhikers guide to the galaxy. the entry on earth was “mostly harmless” but got edited down to just “harmless” to save space.
This sickness – “cancer of the heart,” Kenneth Rexroth called it – goes so far back that we have to conclude it goes all the way back to the beginning, to those first European settlers who stepped on these shores and began the process, both cultural and psychological, of living in fear and calling their reaction to that fear freedom. The United States is psychotic: delusional, incapable of discerning reality from our fantasies (fantasies of greatness, of fear, of violence – violence we imagine is inflicted upon us and which we gleefully inflict upon others – and fantasies of release, redemption, and rebirth), and increasingly angry as our repeated attempts to force our fantasies upon the world fail.
In the early '90s, I wrote a speculative essay in which I argued “The United States No Longer Exists,” that if, as Archibald MacLeish said, “America was promises,” then the promises had all been broken, and, as Burroughs said, “the bare lies shine through,” and it was time to imagine something else, a new beginning, a new project which would jettison the Puritanism that had poisoned this nation from its start. I think we still have that option, time has not yet run out, but we are very near the brink.
Yup. That’s just fine. But why go farther and say “America Sucks?” Why? Why argue it suck vs it doesn’t suck? That’s where you start unnecessarily painting yourself as anti-American. Which is how you start to lose more people in the middle. It’s a step that gains you nothing and shoots yourself in the foot.
You take their model, maybe even improve it, and run with it. Yeah, I should have been more clear when I said “compare.” What I meant was making a comparison to show America “sucks” vs “hey, here’s a cool way we could do things.”
Framing things as an opportunity instead of problem really does help motivate people. For example, we have an opportunity to live in a cleaner, healthier world vs climate change is gonna destroy us. Both are true. One is more likely to encourage people to stick their heads in the sand.
I don’t think there has ever been a single movement for social change that hasn’t been condemned for putting people off by how abrasive they were, turning off people who might support them if only they put their tone the right way. I’ve never seen any examples where it was clear that would have helped and lots where it wouldn’t, and yet somehow you still keep seeing this same complaint.
Stop tone policing. You want to try winning over some people without pointing out their mistakes, please go do that. But don’t ask everyone else to stop being honest, we already know it doesn’t help.
Watching videos like these is difficult for me because I already know that America is a shitty place to live if you’re not part of a privileged group or lucky (or both), being reminded of that for so long via the news and social media nearly every day tanks my mental health multiple times each week, and the fact that we have years of not decades of work ahead of us in hard work to make it a good place to live for everyone, if not merely better, also helps sink any optimism I may have on this day or that. I understand these videos that the Gravel Institute are putting out are meant to counteract what PragerU is trying to do, that they’re trying to shift younger people leftward politically and get people who may not know how bad it is to actually see how bad it is and convince them to do get active and do something about it. If they want the video to be entirely about how America’s redeeming qualities are slim to nonexistent, with no “There are some bright spots, and here’s what they are”, that’s their prerogative. Ending the video like they did, just going right to the credit to their Patrons with no talk of bright spots or ‘buts’ about what’s improving or what we have accomplished, that’s a gut punch that can get people really thinking. I commend them for that.
The last twenty seconds where the embedded links come up for people to donate, go check out the channel in full, and the only video they chose to link to in that embed talks about why America throws the poor in prison, that’s a gut punch on top of a gut punch. I don’t like that; I think they should’ve put a link to one of their videos like “How Socialists Can Win Elections”, which is the video they uploaded a couple of weeks before this one, or “How Socialists Solved The Housing Crisis”, as a link at the end of the video instead, and much earlier in the credits before people potentially click away. They could have also linked to the paper they worked with the People’s Policy Project to create, “The Leisure Agenda”. They should create a video about that paper sometime in the near future, too, while they’re at it, and put that as a link in multiple videos of theirs.
My opinion is that they shouldn’t trust YouTube’s recommendation algorithm to surface the two videos they’ve made about how things can be made better. Presenting themselves as “Our channel is a mix of emotional appeal and facts and we’re not endlessly pessimistic nor are coldly clerical/academic” by creating a video like this that pulls no punches, and then linking to a wholly different video in the credits that’s more “Hey, there is some hope here/here’s what we can do” would have been a better choice.
Like, there has to be a way that progressives and left-wing organizations can thread that needle to tell people “Things suck, but there’s hope and better days at the end of it if we fight for change” without appearing like they’re sugarcoating out of fear of upsetting the people they want to convince.
There isn’t. There is a long history of tone policing against progressives, and it makes it clear the needle always moves to where the thread isn’t. It’s just a cheap way to somehow shift blame from our opponents onto us, like I wrote here, and we waste our time thinking it’s what we should be doing instead of standing up for what’s true and what’s right.
Because for more than half of us, it objectively does suck. Who is your audience? The people who desperately need us to get better or the people for whom the system already works, who are already catered to? It doesn’t suck for them - because they are the beneficiaries of the broken system. For the most part, they made it that way. And no pretty package is going to make them change it for the better.
Because, in comparison to other OECD countries, it’s the truth. Because it’s the opposite of the lie the people of the middle have been told continuously since the 1980s, that America is still the Greatest Country on the Earth. It’s time for hard truths, and “America sucks” is one of them.
The American neoliberal default has resulted in a grifter in the White House, a right-wing populist movement and insurrection, and a bungled pandemic response that needlessly cost 100s of thousands of lives. Growing inequality and the effects of climate change are still ahead of us. All the coddling approaches of the past, all the attempts not to offend members of the Party of Demonstrable Bad Faith and their media shills*, haven’t slowed things down one bit.
It’s time to tell the margin-making middle, still complacent in the fantasy that conservatives and Libertarians wove around them, to snap out of it. If they don’t soon, the “solutions” will be the kind of violence and chaos that no-one in that middle – and no-one here for the most part – will want to see.
Also, if you’re going to wring your hands about the message, consider the messenger. There’s a reason these harsh truths tend to be delivered by comedians, whether it’s David Cross or George Carlin. But perhaps you expressed great “concern” over the latter back in 2005, as well.
[* who, I guarantee you, would condemn this video as “anti-American” even if the phrase that gives you the vapours wasn’t used]
Maybe the mistake is to think of USA as a developed country. It may be rich, but that doesn’t mean that the country has the same attitude of other rich, stable, western countries. Think of it instead as a massive Singapore, developing and rich, where industry and natural resources drives wealth, and the workers strive to enter the ownership economy. Such workers don’t want barriers to wealth, or distribution of wealth. And they certainly don’t want to share once they get it! To understand the USE, try to think of the USA not as the 20th century USA of the American century, but as the 19th century USA, whose engines surprised the world, but who needed the cheap labor of the european underclass.
people have apparently already forgotten the lesson of Jimmy Carter telling the country to wear a sweater. USians don’t respond well to pessimism. One theme I heard from just about anybody who voted for Reagan was simply that his message gave hope and optimism that people hadn’t felt in years (yeah, I know, don’t yell at me, just reporting). Heck, do a “new dawn in America” campaign that is more diverse showing people leading happy lives because they can afford health care and there are clean streets because we housed the homeless. It’s that American Can-Do Spirit!
Comedians who want to tell harsh truths use comedy as a disarming technique to make people more receptive to those harsh truths. The video that Cross narrated for Gravel was less a stand-up routine and more an animated infographic to tell people the truth about how shitty America is. Comedians like Carlin understood that the way the message is packaged and sent out is important. The Gravel Institute can do better than they did here.
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