Feminism
(media.scored.co)
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Or if, like, nobody gives a shit about goals or questions around here and the whole point is just to say weird shit and blow off steam, like it's all just sort of a play we're putting on or something.
I guess I just don't fully know where I am, yet.
Every time the franchise is expanded, the electorate becomes easier to manipulate, until we reached the current state where democracy is indirect rule by media owners.
I'm in Canada and we're well past that point. Our democracy is now ruled by hostile foreign nations who've realised that we're too indiscriminate to protect ourselves from outside manipulation. We don't even have a government anymore; our parliament is now just a forum for India and China to decide who gets which parts of our country.
If you're looking for the historical period where the electorate was the dumbest and most easiest to manipulate - that's almost certainly 1870-1900. The Gilded Age. That was the period where, at least towards the end, virtually all media was handed straight down to the public by exactly two men: Pulitzer and Hearst. And they didn't give a flying shit about truth - only power. Everything was sensationalism and misinformation, and no rational voice could even carve out a big enough slice of the media market to make itself heard. And the presidents of that age - Grover Cleveland, William McKinley - those pathetic excuses for presidents weren't even really in charge of anything. They were straight-up corporate puppets.
And that's twenty years *before* women's suffrage.
If anything, today's "media owners" are completely losing their grip on the culture. Nobody trusts anything they read, and the media landscape is totally fragmented. Probably the man making more of our cultural decisions for us than anyone else right now is Ryan McInerney - and hardly anyone even knows who he is.
The problem was the big cities that made local political involvement impossible. That's where the newspapers were sold and that's who could be convinced to politically agitate for things of which they were completely ignorant. Hence women's sufferage.
Today is far worse by comparison because *most people still trust the media* despite it being totally incoherent. They will write an article arguing that we need to actively fight to eliminate "rape culture" in the West and, in the same piece, argue *for* importing people from an actual rape culture, because "all cultures are equal". At least, back in the day, you'd have a coherent narrative, even though you had to pick your bias.
Edit: on further consideration, even assuming that media today has the same cultural influence it did back then, I still think it's better to have two polar biases controlling media than having one orthodox bias controlling both sides because, with two, people can still pick which reality they prefer and support it. Neither are correct but at least the worst one is rejected.
With a single acceptable bias, voting does not matter. We saw this during the Lockdowns. Trump proposed injecting everyone with a radical, untested medical treatment and, even though they say they hate him with a passion, the Left jumped right on board simply because that was the orthodox bias. We did this obviously stupid thing because it's what the corpo/media/world government wanted, not because it was what any of *us* wanted.
If we'd had the "lock grandma in the attic with an IV drip of Covid Cure" party and the "this is a Chinese bioweapon and we need to nuke them" party, at least we'd have a choice, even if it's not a good one.