https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hearst_Communications
Cosmopolitan and Esquire are Hearst. Not sure what the awful Teen Vogue
It is why fluff generally takes priority over anything more serious (e.g.: our deep ecological crises), beyond the most superficial nods.
I despair when I see the language of social justice perverted to attack anything sane as “privilege”. Besides all of us on the left losing such “privileges” as we have in order to check meaningless symbolic boxes will in no way raise up the people in truly dire situations or heading there. It effectively shuts people up in combination with the doxxing by the right.
And it helps those shady Welcome party types and publications like Politico, which are sleazily industry friendly in the worst ways, kick out all the babies in the (foul) bathwater as low priority along with the real fluff and bullshit.
I have lately stopped worrying about communicating in ways primarily aimed at appeasing the stupidest possible person who fakes offense or dissects stuff in a mutton-headed manner.
So much of it is just random morons online or pseudo-woke corporate consultants and they do damage and misrepresent serious activists like Briahna Joy Gray or Alec Karakatsanis fighting horrors like mass incarceration, without sleazy billionaire funded “police reform”. Prof David Golumbia talked about how disingenuous bad actors like Joy Buolamwini of the sleazy and Epstein connected MIT Media Lab are in that regard. Matt Stoller also gets that.
It is an unfortunate miscommunication between two honest types of left of centre fostered by these hucksters and charlatans who have waged a war on the human brain via the media for as far back as I can remember.
I can rarely read most of them without the same sensation as nails on chalkboard.
I grew up in a military household, but I have been moving left my whole life and it is easy to parse the wheat from the chaff. But one is uncertain how to proceed in societies where this alarming internet Idiocracy is now bleeding offline, which has to be stopped.
People like Yasha Levine are such good communicators. Because throwing stats at people is useless, when math and critical thinking have been separately torched. And math might be harder to start with.
Humans are probably born with a better intuitive understanding of math than we get. But it is embattled by this steady stream of mindless drivel that promotes cognitive dissonance since that is a positive state from the perspective of these avaricious looters to exploit.
The internet and most of our media I think were intended to dumb society down. Probably a subconscious calculation by these idiots more than conscious. I don’t really buy much into illuminati style thinking. Like the chick says in “Don’t Look Up”..I think it is worse than that..they may all actually just be that stupid at the top.
Lucien Greaves of the Satanic Temple wrote a piece I liked a while back that captured some of what bothers me. He is an interesting guy and the TST really does help women out with abortions. He seems cool.
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