great writeup in the Baffler from Tarence Ray of the Trillbillies about the great political stunt of our age, The Devil's Milkshake, and all the people flooding to Ohio to drink (or at least appear to be drinking) maybe-contaminated water.
Then Eve, Being A Force
- she/her, zie/zin/zir/zirs/zinself
- www.patreon.com/StormingtheIvoryTower
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in reply to @SamKeeper's post:
i think this is an interesting article, but it stumbles a bit when it says
The point isn’t to give you actionable information about what’s going on. If it was, public officials would just do that, instead of histrionically parading around in front of the cameras to show off the sacrifice they’re making.
given that the surrounding sections of the article are about how little trust the people have in the government, why would these prople trust the "actionable information", especially in cases where the information is "everything is back to normal" or "there never was a problem to begin with"?
Do you suppose there's a causal relationship between the reflexive distrust and the serial dishonesty, or does it only ever go the other way where you gotta lie to people because they're dumb and so crazy?
it's not dichotomous. some people distrust the government for legitimate reasons. some people distrust the government for illegitimate ones ("they're putting 5G microchips in the vaccines"). or both.
my point is that the article is good at pointing out the spectacle of the devil's milkshake, but stumbles when it tries to articulate what government officials should be doing instead, because in many cases either they are doing that, or doing that would probably mostly only work on people that would be convinced by the spectacle in the first place.
I mean, everything is very clearly not back to normal, and nobody in power is inclined to articulate what specifically is and isn't safe out there (or even find out themselves really), and in my lifetime I've heard maybe one guy in power give an honest assessment of whether you should be more worried about the sloppy chemical depot down the road or ISIS blowing up the Walmart but sure the dumb sheep can't handle the truth and they're probably all qanon so who's to say whether that's good or not
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