DL Open Thread Sunday, Feb. 23, 2024

I’ll be filling in for El Som this week, and if you’re looking for stories about Fascism on the March, you’ll have to look elsewhere for the links. I won’t support news organizations that report every foul emission from the mouths and pens of these people while failing to headline the fact that most of their proposed actions are illegal. Were they to frame the stories that way, instead of treating these actions as legitimate, we wouldn’t be having the monthlong national freakout that has reduced a lot of liberals to quivering puddles of fear.

Both Donald Trump and Elon Musk got where they are by baiting the media like the big, stupid beast it is. Trump, of course, would lie about the color of the sky if he thought there was a buck in it, and the media, which lies to itself about being objective, has never pushed back sufficiently – or, back when it would have been the smart thing to do, ignored him completely. It failed to do so because, like Trump, there were bucks to be made in feeding people the empty gruel of celebrity coverage, and they covered Trump like a celebrity instead of asking – just for example – why no government agencies were investigating him for the money laundering he was so clearly involved in.

Musk, too, got himself covered as a celebrity, and was even more obvious about what he was doing. He’s been lying about self-driving cars for almost a decade now – they’re always and forever six months around the corner – and every time bad news about one of his poorly run companies was about to hit, he offers up that or another similar lie to deflect attention. Like Trump, his motivation in buying this election was to avoid answering to the law and losing the lucrative government contracts that make up a big portion of his companies’ revenues.

The for-profit media is a major part of the problem. For instance, GOP congresscreeps are getting reamed at town hall meetings in their gerrymandered Republican districts, where even federal workers who fucked around are finding out that no, billionaires don’t give a fuck about you. Wall Streeters, who are far from liberal, are issuing dire warnings about economic collapse (I notice that “recession,” a constant prediction under Biden, hasn’t been mentioned though one is obviously coming). Media reports these stories, but buries them under whatever illegal threat the Muskmen made today. Every time you click, you support their agenda.

So what should you do? First, get off whatever social media you use that automatically feeds you a doomscroll. Even people who don’t read or pay attention to “the news” are subjected to it by algorithms that are programmed by propagandists in service of fascists. Even if you quickly scroll past the propaganda, it’s been processed by your brain. That’s how advertising works – repeat it often enough and people subconsciously internalize it even if they’re consciously rejecting it. Boycott these sites for a week and see if your mental state doesn’t improve. If you think you can’t live without them, think back 15 years, when you lived without them just fine. You can live without them just fine again. I know because I’ve been living just fine without them all along.

Beyond that, quit dreaming up doomsday scenarios about what might happen, or at least, quit airing them to liberal audiences on liberal chat boards like this one. Do that and you’re doing the fascists’ work for them.
—————————————————————————————————-

Spotlight Delaware interviewed new Education Secretary Cindy Marten, who warned that she can’t just apply the methods she used to improve test scores in San Diego schools to Delaware. Of more concern to me, because it sounds like preemptive excuse-making, was this paragraph:

She also said she agrees with Gov. Matt Meyer’s position that the state needs to follow many of the recommendations from the American Institutes for Research, which most notably called on Delaware to massively increase its education spending by as much as $1 billion annually.

Let’s state the obvious: Increasing the state budget by 20% – not the education budget, the entire budget – when revenue is expected to drop isn’t just a non-starter, it’s a ticket to One Termville. You wanna know why? I’ll quote the state report:

For the 2022 school year, there were 12 [traditional] Delaware school districts [out of 16] that had a majority-minority student population. Capital, Christina, Colonial, Red Clay, and Seaford all have a minority student population above 65%.

Delaware is one of the bottom five states nationwide in percentage of students in traditional public schools – 25% of students are in either charter (11%) or private (14%) schools, and the private school percentage is among the highest in the country. The constituency for increasing taxes by $1 billion is politically insignificant.

On a related note, El Som assures me that Dave Lawson isn’t as dumb as Lumpy Carson, but that’s hard to believe when the 78-year-old Lawson says incredibly dumb shit like “If it were up to me, your [Department of Education] budget would be half of what it is today.”

I’m sure his constituents would love to be taxed locally instead of statewide because (checks figures) Kent County has the lowest per-capita income in the state and so would suffer the most by having the state funding cut by half. That’s the sort of well-thought-out policy prescription downstate morons get by electing downstate morons to represent them. It’s also why there are so many downstate morons.

The floor’s yours.