Watching the NYT on this insane gaslighting crusade makes me way more forgiving of the shitty social media cultures I’ve been involved with and complained about, because it’s VERY clear journalists have worked themselves into the same kind of reality-agnostic fervor that we all do in the crab bucket
difference being that a lot of the people pushing this idea that Biden is somehow a decrepit zombie, not a disabled man with a disability he’s had his whole life who’s being ratfucked,clearly stand to gain from getting him to resign and/or lose, personally and in terms of shield from Trump reprisals
So basically the media are Poasters now, they have Poasters Madness, and they’re acting like Bluesky nerds, and that’s horrible. The media has never been good, but this is seriously a new Yellow Journalism era, it’s so transparent, and also it’s just so insanely depressing
Like they literally have just decided the President being old is a crisis! They kept saying it was an issue! Everyone knows! Then they picked on random body language and the fact that *Trump is intimidating in person* to just… make it the case that the fact we all know about his age is a CRISIS
this is a transnational fuckery. I don’t even have to, for instance,be trans/concerned with our rights to know that the author of HP posting really long rambles about her opinions of what fetishes cis men have and how the secret trans agenda relates&this being a UK election issue is manufactured
Like “Keir Starmer must agree with JK Rowling on what a woman is, on election night! It’s what matters!”is obviously insane, just like “the incumbent President should just quit”!These are both factually insane claims!
I think that journalists and their social networks are spreading various kinds of delusion and obsession, and that coupled with the perverse incentive of bad and prurient news selling worse and young generations turning to the *also horrifyingly delusional* TikTok etc is fucking a lot of stuff
I don’t expect people to be kind or altruistic or nice; that’s the sort of thing that always pleasantly surprises me when and if I see it in the world
I do expect people to display more rationality and resistance to manipulation than we’re seeing here
I got one guy in a chat in particular who’s just so far gone in the doomerism it’s super toxic actually. It’s like Lord Halifax on steroids shit. I would 100% kick him out of a battle if we were in one together. Off the line immediately stuff.
This is a really apt comparison, having watched in dismay for years as UK media just talk themselves and the major UK parties into ridiculous transphobia, for absolutely no legitimate reason.
