This 2015 sentence-become-meme was brilliant, but I want to modify it for the Age of Information Corruption. I'd say a lot of voters thought 1) they are leopards 2) they were voting for the Leopards Will Save Us Party... 3) didn't read the news coverage of the face-eating details.... There's gonna be schadenfreude/I told you so going forward. But while a lot of people voted for the punitiveness of the idiot-criminal, a lot of people didn't have a clue what each candidate was offering.

"as no-fault divorce became the norm in state after state, domestic-violence rates dropped by some thirty per cent, suicides among women dropped by as much as sixteen per cent, and the number of women murdered by their partners dropped by ten per cent." newyorker.com/culture/the-le… I'm hoping that all the wives who are being bullied and intimidated out of their voting rights strike out for freedom and equality--aka leave the bullies-- after the election and meanwhile vote against misogyny.

Decontextualization, leaving out vital information, isn't quite lying, but it's at least cousin to it. Here's a Washington Post piece on declining Black voting rates in Wisconsin that can't talk about voter suppression. 1/7 washingtonpost.com/nation/2024/10… "The causes for the drop in turnout are complex, experts say" in the Post story. Here's a bombshell piece by @AriBerman about voter suppression (primarily impacting Black voters) in Wisconsin and how it basically won the state for Trump in 2016. 2/7 motherjones.com/politics/2017/…

With its unparalleled resources and relentless thirst for truth, the New York Times has made an investigative journalism breakthrough late in the campaign: Trump is old. Who knew? Some say you could have added up the numbers, which added up to...old. But Biden was using up all the oldness in the room, according to the NYT, so there was no oldness left over for the other guy. Only now can the shocking truth be told: Trump old.

css.seas.upenn.edu/new-york-times…

The word looting is an incendiary term for petty theft, and it's used to make protecting private property and not human life a central concern in a disaster. Most only needed food, water, medicine, and supplies like diapers and clean clothes in the absence of any other way. 1/4 They're often altruistically foraging for others, including babies and the elderly. So I'm sorry to see a local sheriff threatening to murder people--that "shoot to kill" against shoplifting just adds to the troubles and fears in a desperate time. Poster from 1906 SF quake. 2/4

Mainstream errand boys like Tapper routinely turn Trump's lurid accusations, delusions, and smears into "legitimate questions" with which to task his opponents. It's another form of normalized bias that needs naming.

https://twitter.com/thegreatgig8/status/1838680895101739090

Here it is again. Any rubbish that comes out of Trump's mouth must be treated as serious discourse, any smear must be smeared further, by people who call themselves journalists.

https://x.com/Newsweek/status/1838704180829008033

It's rare that we hear what the threats of mass deportation from Trump and Vance really look like. Thanks to Isabela Dias of Mother Jones for this picture of it. motherjones.com/politics/2024/… "The nation’s undocumented immigrants grow and harvest the food we eat, construct our homes, and care for our young and elderly. They pay billions in taxes, start businesses that employ Americans, and help rebuild in the wake of climate disasters."

This summer's presidential election campaigns would make an unbelievable fiction, with the plot turns, the media hounding Biden while protecting Trump, the rapturous reception of Harris and then Walz, the spectacular sourness of JD Vance, the defection of top Republicans..... But it's fact, and one of the protagonists--arguably secondary villain--is the mainstream media that has done such a poor job of conveying key parts of it. If democracy dies in darkness, they're pulling down the shades and peddling murk.

One of the most pernicious lies Trump has been repeating unchallenged for at least five years is that mothers and doctors are committing infanticide and this is part of what abortion rights includes. Here he is in August, courtesy of @JessicaValenti : 1/7 Here's @DanaBashCNN letting it slide, with thanks, in the June 27th debate (from the transcript): 2/7

On tears: a thread. Certain kinds of beauty make people weep, the moments “when hope and history rhyme,” the arrival of the long-awaited, the revelation of a pattern in the universe that is also... the revelation of your own power of making and perceiving order, and sometimes just extraordinarily intense beauty, including moral beauties—justice done, truth honored, order or wholeness restored.

This is a furious, precise dissection of several dozen of the main things wrong with the mainstream media. Here's a piece of it but read the whole thing.

https://twitter.com/meredithshiner/status/1825879664532795729

It's so good I have to share another piece of it. A whole lot of America clearly wants a divorce from the punditocracy, which is lost in a mirror world of their own cliches and assumptions.

It is freaky that the WaPo's story today about Trump maybe getting a $10 million illicit payment from Egypt's dictator is not making much of an impact--and that the same is true for the CNN version reported in 2020. Massive corruption has been normalized, at least for one man....

The Post also reports: 'Over the course of his presidency, Trump shifted U.S. policy in ways that benefited the Egyptian leader, a man he once called “my favorite dictator.”' washingtonpost.com/investigations…

The press is the shark and is jumping the shark at the same time. The New Yorker ran an interview with @BernieSanders who praised Biden extravagantly and expressed confidence Biden could win. The New Republic regurgitated it as an attack on Biden.
The New Yorker: Compare actual words with NR headline: "You’re right—sometimes he doesn’t put three sentences together. It is true. But the reality of the moment is, in my view, he is the best candidate..."

There is a strangely popular maneuver whereby people surrender the power they actually have to claim a power they absolutely don't. These pseudo-prophets pretend they know the future and thereby give up their power to participate in deciding that future. The election will be decided by voters, and on the one hand grassroots organizing and activism to turn out the vote are crucial here. On the other, the media have lost their collective mind and are doing their best to get you (talking to democracy's defenders here) to give up.

I am not usually one to offer diagnoses of people I’ve never met, but it does seem like the pundit class of the American media is suffering from severe memory loss. Because they’re doing exactly what they did in the 2016 presidential race.... theguardian.com/commentisfree/… Sometimes I wonder if all this coverage is because the media know how to cover a normal problem like a sub-par candidate; they don’t know how to cover something as abnormal and unprecedented as the end of the Republic. So for the most part they don’t.

In the wake of the 2016 election, historian Timothy Snyder reminded us with his first rule for surviving authoritarianism: "1. Do not obey in advance." I would add to that "do not surrender in advance." Do not surrender prematurely. Do not surrender maturely, for that matter.

A common response to mention of renewables is a denunciation of mining for battery materials by people who don't seem to notice that fossil fuel is also mined/extracted -- on a scale that dwarfs everything else. This pits them against the energy transition.... The attitude that somehow renewables are problematic while ignoring altogether the colonial/ environmental/ human rights impact of ff and other ff impacts such as climate chaos seems like a real transition obstacle.

My friend Harriet reminded me that Easter is the anniversary of when the three women went to Christ's tomb and found he wasn't there, and angels explained what happened, but the apostles didn't believe them. Somehow that aligns nicely with this holiday whose English name is really that of a pagan fertility goddess. "Eostre, also called Ostara or Eastre, is a Germanic goddess associated with spring and the dawn." Thus the rabbits and eggs and generally fecund springtime themes.

They're coming after your birth control, your same-sex marriage, your no-fault divorce, your queer or trans kid, your state's child labor laws (if they didn't already overturn them) in the next phase of Make America 1858 Again. And of course abortion.

The 2024 election is in essence a referendum on whether to swap out our flawed democracy for white Christian Nationalist authoritarianism. Note the rights for embryos but not for children here.

I cancelled my New York Times subscription this morning. I'll miss the recipes. p.s. You don't have to like Biden to dislike a newspaper fawning on a clown who wants to be a dictator.

I guess they're proud of how they did in 2016.

How to comment on social media
1) do not read the original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking them for not mentioning anything they might've mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. 2) Remember that any statement can be condemned for not including all other statements, aka o.p.'s concern about saving the whales is only a sign of his/her/their indifference about some other issue.