Today on Volts: a podcast discussion with journalist @amywestervelt about corporate disinformation, the men who developed the PR industry in the 20th century, & the many, many ways that industries like fossil fuels are still jerking us around. A fun one! volts.wtf/p/volts-podcas…
After you listen to the podcast, check out Amy's new project, Rigged, an utterly fascinating collection of original documents & stories about the birth, development, & ongoing health of the public relations (er, propaganda) industry.
rigged.ghost.io//
One bitter irony that becomes clear when you understand the scale of corporate PR: all the products & habits that right-wingers now cling to as authentic indicators of heartland culture (the fast food, the SUVs, the guns) were engineered for them by PR.
They freak out about corporate diversity training videos but it never seems to occur to them, "gosh, here in America, a car-dependent, processed-food-dominated, consumerist lifestyle w/ shitty unreliable health & child care is the *only one available*, wonder why that is."
No force in US life does more to constrain the freedom of voters -- more manipulatively, with less consent -- than corporations & their PR flacks. We live in a grubby, isolating, unhealthy matrix designed by greedy fucks & rarely even identify them, much less push back.

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More from @drvolts

27 Oct
I read this piece by @hankdeanlight and, contra the headline, it's NOT obvious. I'm still baffled by Sinema. I get that she's nakedly ambitious & willing to abandon people & switch positions if she thinks it will get her ahead. What I still don't get ... politico.com/news/magazine/…
... is why she thinks what she is doing now is going to serve her career. She is destroying the very parts of the Dem plan that are *most supported across party lines*, for reasons she refuses to articulate. She's going to battle on behalf of rich people. That's not popular!
People are talking about her leaving the party & running as an independent, but why would anyone in the world think you can build a candidacy on "I successfully protected corporations & rich people from taxes"? I'm not seeing the savvy politics here.
Read 6 tweets
26 Oct
"Local parents should control curriculum" sounds like a universal principle. But remember: reactionaries use such principles instrumentally, to achieve their proximate interests. If "local parents" started pushing progressive curricula, the principle would vanish like smoke.
I know I send variants of this tweet every day, but it's important. I see progs argue, "you say [universal principle X], but that implies [consequence Y]," as though reactionaries will be tricked by logic in to supporting something other than their immediate tribal interests.
If [universal principle X] supports immediate tribal advantage, they will proclaim it (& in some sense, *believe* it). But if X goes against immediate interests, they'll abandon it in a heartbeat in favor of some other principle (which they'll *also* believe in the moment).
Read 5 tweets
26 Oct
This is whiny, morally craven bullshit -- a very specifically *Republican* form of whiny, morally craven bullshit.
It is extremely characteristic of reactionaries, when faced with a collective problem, to *immediately* fear being taken advantage of.

Another approach might be: let's lead! Let's be heroes. This thing is going to hurt us all, so we're going to step up no matter what others do.
Thing is, you could show Manchin data about the investments China is making in clean tech. You could try to refute his point about unfairness empirically. But it's *not drawn from empirical evidence*. The reactionary's feeling of being treated unfairly is primary, pre-verbal.
Read 6 tweets
26 Oct
I guess from within my climate policy bubble I had concluded that the case against coal is airtight & universally accepted. Apparently not.

But y'all, as I used to say back in the 2000s: coal is the enemy of the human race. There is no viable scenario wherein it lives on.
In the (IMO) unlikely event that CCS tech is developed & scaled up enough to be meaningful, it will still be hella expensive. We're going to put it on industrial facilities (for things we don't know how to decarbonize) & biomass power plants (for negative emissions).
There is NO scenario in which it makes any sense to attach it to coal plants. The parasitic load immediately eats a third of the power, rendering the remaining power expensive AF (& coal is already expensive). Plus you still live with the environmental & health ravages ...
Read 7 tweets
25 Oct
That's it -- the last remaining policy in the BBB Act that actually restrained fossil fuels. Now the bill is exactly what Manchin wanted: a bunch of subsidies for new stuff; zero punitive policies to wind down old stuff.
Sure enough, it's another body blow to the emission reductions in the bill:
Worth saying: there is NO path to the US hitting its climate targets that does not involve rapidly shutting down all coal power plants & sharply reducing methane leaks. None. This isn't a subject of reasonable debate. Manchin is rendering Biden's stated target unreachable.
Read 7 tweets
25 Oct
We (left-leaning nerds) are also in collective denial about how people experience harm/benefits. It has almost nothing to do w/ objective reality, ie, the actual # of deaths. Everything is mediated & experienced through a filter of culture.
There is a fact -- 40,000 Americans die in car wrecks each year -- but in & of itself, the fact doesn't *mean* anything. Is that a high number or low? Are those deaths avoidable or inevitable? Are they the drivers' fault or policymakers' fault? Is it a crisis or a nuisance?
Libs love saying they care about "facts." They love saying shit like, "the science says we have to do X." There's so much naive realism out there. The thing is, the facts ("science") don't tell us *anything*. They don't speak for themselves. Our entire experience of them...
Read 6 tweets

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