I remember my gran going this way in her later years. The fact that she lived in Wigan, still today over 90% white, didn't seem to register.
Was saying to @ska invita only the other day, one of my neighbours who was an occasional drinking friend seems to have gone big with his Musk, Sharron Davies, and Together Dec support. He's an engineering consultant, same age as I (just under 50), PhD, otherwise usual guy. This can only have developed through the pandemic and spending a lot of time on his twitter and social media.
The inheritence tax on farms is now being linekd to WEF, you will own nothing and be happy, conspiracy tropes. I actually disagree with the IT on working farms as it goes but it's an area attracting the far right and other wackos.
Far-right groups plan to hijack farmers’ protest in London against tax changes
Extremists including Tommy Robinson associates latch on to event but organisers say they want it to be nonpoliticalwww.theguardian.com
A council scheme to make the pavement wider on a town centre road in the town where I live in (and thereby reducing the number of on street parking spaces) has been jumped on by some of these types as part of the 15 minute city agenda.
I was having a quick drink with these two blokes from the Wirral on Friday . One doesn’t read any news , just what his mate tells him and the other doesn’t read or listen to the MSN. One of them announced that his son had told him that his mate had told him that ‘ immigrants are fiddling the tests to get into the local secure mental Heath unit in order to get a place to live which pushes local people to the back of the queue ‘
Yes, there's a history of media studies, for example, being treated as a kind of joke subject all through the period when people were getting their information from newspaper, radio and television. Is that idiots being idiots, or did the commentators who turned it into a joke fear that people might critically analyse their commentary? Bit of both probably.
yeah ive been hoping this is just a generational shift and the kids coming through would know how to navigate all this instinctually and self regulate as a community of peers....take the piss out of each other for falling for dumb crap......but then you see how particularly polluted this young generation is with all this and that hope goes out the window
I've got teenage kids and this is coming in at school.
I've often said I wish there was a word or phrase that summed up 'I am not supporting this person or idea but I'm trying to explain why you are wrong about this it/them in this context'.
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Yes, now at a point where if I walk away from any sort of political conversation and they don’t say at least one batshit hot-off-the-algorithm talking point then I am surprised, esp with the younger lads at work.
Yes, there are a lot of people sounding like they know what they're talking about, but at the end of the day, who the hell are they?
There’s also problems of “shared consensus” and shared narratives. These do still happen to some degree but I don’t feel as fruitfully. The grand irony I suppose that we have never been so connected yet so isolated into camps. We kind of used to know what the person who walked past us in the street consumed in regards media or could hazard a guess at least, now god knows what they are consuming - so a “shared reality” in that sense is fragmented. The social media companies don’t give a fuck about any of this. I wouldn’t be that bothered if they all vanished tbh.
