• 38 Posts
  • 51 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2023

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  • I’m not trying to have a discussion about electoral politics.

    I’m pointing out that the American window of respectable political discourse is shifted dangerously to the right, and that gives fascist candidates like Trump a foothold, while Eisenhower Republicans like Bernie Sanders are popularly viewed as extremists.

    The Democrats should not be viewed as saviors in this situation, they are complicit in the fascist collapse of the United States political system. It may survive this election, but the catastrophes created by capitalism can’t be solved by capitalist solutions. As long as the political system is incapable of real democracy, authoritarian populists will always be a threat.

    One of the disgusting aspects of Trump’s rise to power is the rehabilitation of former Republican presidents’ legacies. Once faced with a terrible enough alternative, George Bush looks less like the terrible monster he was to those who allow themselves to acclimate to the new normal.

    Imagine Trump is defeated, disgraced, and jailed. Do you think the vacuum he leaves in the political system will remain unfilled? What if that space was filled by a more competent fascist? Will people look back on Trump the way some do at Bush and say, “It’s true he was a fascist, but at least he hardly got anything done.”




  • Voice of America is the official propaganda broadcaster of the United States Government. It was founded during WWII and its role was increased as a weapon to promote capitalism in 2nd and 3rd world countries during the cold war. While its feed is mostly Reuters and other centrist corporate news outlets, the focus of its original journalism is now is on Africa, where the CIA is concerned that US concerns on the continent are being overshadowed by Russian and Chinese influence.

    MBFC rates this propaganda outlet as ‘least biased.’ The role of a flak organization in the propaganda model is to center corporate and government views and push voices critical of it to the periphery. This is harmful to democracy.





  • Five@slrpnk.nettopolitics @lemmy.world*Permanently Deleted*
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    23 days ago

    Voice of America is the official propaganda broadcaster of the United States Government. It was founded during WWII and its role was increased as a weapon to promote capitalism in 2nd and 3rd world countries during the cold war. While its feed is mostly Reuters and other centrist corporate news outlets, the focus of its original journalism is now is on Africa, where the CIA is concerned that US concerns on the continent are being overshadowed by Russian and Chinese influence.

    MBFC rates this propaganda outlet as ‘least biased.’ You can help keep Lemmy from becoming another propaganda outlet for the United States and capitalism by calling out this bot and learning about the true biases of news organizations.





  • What do Wikipedia editors think about MBFC?

    Can you show me an example of them getting a site’s bias wrong? I’ve had misgivings about that site from the moment I discovered it, but I’ve yet to see any evidence of them being categorically wrong. – ᛗᛁᛟᛚᚾᛁᚱPants

    I think it’s more a matter of MediaBiasFactCheck having an implicit bias of its own - a tendency to center its political compass on the United States and a tendency to weigh editorial on the US heavy compared to international editorials. A perfect example is this: The Epoch Times is notoriously inaccurate with regard to reportage related to China. It’s also pretty virulently right-wing. However, it’s not run by actual fascists, which by US standards probably makes its bias right-center rather than extreme. Its’ anti-China bias isn’t that much more galling than that of Foreign Policy - which the website erroneously calls a least-biased source. As somebody who used to hate-read FP mainly to find out what American imperial actions to get angry about in any given month, until their pro-American bias became too sickening to handle, I find that a little bit questionable to say the least. But I have to measure everything through the terrifying funhouse mirror that is the American Overton Window.

    – Simonm223


  • I support opening up vote logs to moderators in their own communities. Voting records add useful context to the nature of the exchanges happening, eg. if two people are having a back and forth, but neither is downvoting the other, it contextualizes the disagreement as less hostile.

    I don’t think it’s a good idea to give every new user the burden of using that information responsibly. A minority would use it to retaliate, stalk, and harass, and there would be too many of them to reasonably hold them accountable.