Being bullied implies powerlessness and victimhood. If you actively seek an environment where you believe you will be bullied, you are a masochist. If you feel bullied here on the blog, you can easily and immediately remedy the situation by going away.
I don’t feel kindly towards imaginary victimhood.
Clarissa's Blog 
Apologies to you, Clarissa, from me if I, however inadvertently, stirred the can of worms that eventually opened the floodgates that led to this post of yours which I at first could not understand. It was only when I went back to the What really happened post that I could make sense of it.
The whole thing is bizarre to say the least, but as I’m a guest here, I understand I have a duty not to contribute to any huffs, conniptions or other types of fits and tantrums.
Surely, however, the equivocation and misunderstanding tell us something about people who comment on this blog.
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“inadvertently, stirred the can of worms”
I would say don’t beat yourself up… some people are addicted to being offended. If it wasn’t you they’d find something else to have the vapors about. It’s not worth walking on eggshells around them. Be yourself, let them get their fix and ignore the dramatic recitations and incantations they get involved in as they celebrate their victimhood.
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Exactly. Anger is an internal deflecting-and-self-protecting state looking for an external target. People who are entertaining that state (for reasons of their own) go looking for targets for that anger. It distracts them from other, primary, internal sources of pain: stuff like grief, despair, humiliation, helplessness, even physical pain. Anger’s easier.
But that means no amount of conciliation on the part of the target can change the state of anger, because it’s not the source of the anger. As long as the source remains unstated, unacknowledged, and unexamined… nothing can touch it.
That’s the difference between being able to disagree and be friends and still have an interesting discussion and appreciate them as people, and… deliberately seeking out and hanging around someone you disagree with so you can have a target for your anger.
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No, that’s OK. It’s not on you, Avi. People are lonely and they attach emotionally to complete strangers. One can point them to their dysfunction hoping that they would notice the lack in their lives and fill it. But it doesn’t always work.
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@art lover
Is the “flying monkey” comment addressed to me? What is a flying monkey and how do you know that I am one? Genuine question: I’m a speaker of British English and am not familiar with such a term.
[Oh, and to clarify, I am not offended, in case it is an offensive term. You are entitled to offend me, even if I don’t understand why.
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Flying monkeys are characters from the Wizard of Oz that were in service of the Wicked Witch of the West: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winged_monkeys
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Same way I feel about the anchors on Fox. You hate the “media” so much you created your own — which is now the largest watched in the country. Talk radio had taken over the heart of the young. You have the richest man (baby) in your circle. Yet you won’t stop crying of victimhood and bullying every single day. It gets tiring.
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Who is “you” here? Who on this blog created Faux News? Last time I checked that was a creature of Rupert Murdoch, a globalist like all the rest, who saw that right-leaning people were:
A) an untapped market, ripe for exploitation.
B) beginning to escape the propaganda containment net, and needed something that made them feel good about themselves, in order to reel them back in.
I don’t know anybody under 70 who listens to talk radio, and I live in a deeply conservative region. Are things that different where you live?
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Weren’t we all talking about Joe Rogan a few days ago here? That’s what I mean by “talk radio”. Rush Limbaugh is gone, along with that analog era.
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Ah. In the internet age, Joe Rogan is what’s referred to as a “podcast”.
A podcast is an internet-only phenomenon, usually downloadable as an .mp3 file, often to an app so that you can download several, and listen to them later, like in the car, or while working out.
He also releases video of his shows on YouTube. As far as I know, his podcast is not available anywhere on radio. Thus the confusion.
Podcasting is not skewed any particular direction politically or genre-wise (you can find pretty much any political view there). Back when I had to get through a bunch of long drives, I listened to tons of them on gardening, science, history, finance, health, music, all sorts of things. It does not have the same implications as “talk radio”. Thus the confusion.
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““podcast”
I think of podcasts as primarily/entirely audio, that you can listen to them but don’t have to watch anything.
I guess that’s theoretically true of Rogan but I have the idea that a lot of people watch him as well (I could be wrong of course as distasteful as that idea is….).
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Yeah, he’s YT as well, but he calls his show a podcast, IIRC. Lots of people (self included) primarily just listen to it, but I think his video audience is larger. I wonder if he started out, way back in the beginning, as more of an iTunes download, and it has morphed over time.
I feel like with Rogan in particular, there’s a need in the mainstream/oldmedia to dismiss and belittle him, *because* he’s one of the biggest media phenomena in existence right now, and what he’s doing is not friendly to them. There’ve been a couple of attempts to shut him down, and so far, his clout’s won out.
I expect he’ll be bought out or blackmailed into compliance eventually. But so far… like him or not, he’s got an astonishing reach, and does seem to be breaking containment from the propaganda machine. Fascinating to watch– not so much Rogan, who makes a good living playing “some dude in a sweatshirt”– as the fact of the show itself, and its relation to the archaeo-media, the new media, the internet, different age cohorts… he’s a sociological phenomenon. “Some dude in a sweatshirt” turns out to be more appealing to more people than anything whatsoever on CNN, FOX, MSNBC… that’s gotta sting.
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“more appealing to more people than anything whatsoever on CNN, FOX, MSNBC…”
They did it to themselves by deskilling journalism* in the name of profit and turning journalism into the purview of well-connected fail children. Around 10-15 years ago a blogger did background checks on the authors of various pieces in the NYT and none had degrees in journalism and all came from well-connected families.
That’s not a model for producing anything the public (except the most gullible and sheltered) wants….
*deskilling professions in order to cut pay is a mainstay of neoliberal ‘thinking’….
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I did not know that.
It explains so much.
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“Joe Rogan a few days ago here? That’s what I mean by “talk radio””
I wouldn’t call him talk radio at all (nb I’ve never listened to more than a couple of minutes at a time). He’s a youtuber (I know he has other outlets but that’s how most people find/listen to him AFAIK).
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I created nothing. And beyond the Kamala interview, I haven’t watched Fox News in years. This obsession with Fox News, as if it could outweigh the entire media apparatus that lies you in the most egregious ways is a cope. In the USSR we at least had the dignity to despise the propagandists.
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My inlaws have the same obsession with FOX news. It’s the weirdest thing. We don’t even have a TV, but because my views are somewhere to the right of theirs, they assume I watch FOX news. It’s MSM. Which I avoid whenever possible.
Is this some sort of leftie propaganda talking point?
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It’s their defense mechanism for not wanting to accept that their media re lying to them. Whenever you point out the existing censorship, they turn on the “Fox News” spiel on cue. It’s almost funny because they are like trained poodles.
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It really does feel like some sort of conditioned reflex. Say the trigger word, and out pops the conditioned response, right on cue. Is there a way to deprogram that, or… I dunno, derail the programming in order to reach a real human being in there? It feels a bit like being stuck in an electronic telephone menu. Some of them, you can punch “0” a bunch of times and get a human, others it’s some other secret juju like *9#, and some of them seem to be absolutely impervious to any attempt to get out of the script.
We got “fox news” and “talk radio” in the space of a minute. It’s preprogrammed responses from, like, 2005? Do they ever update?
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Old Reader
“It gets tiring.”
What gets truly tiring, is virtually every other mainline media responding with not only identical wording but even entire identical phrasing while supposedly covering the actions or statements of one political party. Not only tiresome but frightening, that is not journalism, that is propaganda.
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It’s impossible to explain to some people why censorship and propaganda are bad. They don’t see themselves as complete human beings, so they are fine with the idea that somebody else will control their access to information. They was to feel sheltered and protected and be told what to do and to think.
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I’m slogging my way through Jacques Ellul’s *Propaganda* at the moment. It is one of the most terrifying things I have ever read.
Comparing notes on what you say about propaganda from living in a former soviet country, and what Ellul says… is a weirdly congruent thing. Lived experience and technical exposition, like hand in glove.
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I used to have this book until a far-left fellow stole it from me back at Yale. 😁😁😁
I wish more people paid attention. Propaganda strategies have been studied for decades. It’s actually really predictable at this point. There’s really no reason to remain in ignorance and get hooked by every old trick.
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Yeah, it was published in 1965. Extrapolating to the age of internet while reading is interesting.
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Evergreen:
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Exactly. People have to make an effort to go on a blog. They could simply… not make the effort. Problem solved!
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