Also sign up for BlueSky. Encourage your friends, celebrities, popular writers, thinkers--people who are fun and interesting to follow to sign up. Let it become the true marketplace of ideas, fun and breaking news that X once was.
The News Literacy Project, www.newslit.org, is a great organization that supports the goals you mention in your last bullet point. Their focus is media literacy in K-12 education, but for adults, they also create materials responding to specific misinformation that you can share with other adults in your life. (I agree that it is difficult to convince people they are relying on bad information, but I think it is worth doing for someone you are close with. You just have to keep in mind that it's a long-term endeavor, because media literacy is a set of skills and not an idea you can learn in one day.)
I believe supporting media literacy education is the No. 1 most effective thing we can all do to combat the issues you have identified here. Empowering people with media literacy skills addresses the problem at its root instead of hacking away at individual branches.
I’m a producer for a public radio show and I recently produced a show with a politically mixed couple. They’d been together for over 40 years. One was a democrat, the other was a conservative-leaning independent who voted for Trump in this election. They talked about how they have COMPLETELY different news sources and thus were constantly operating with a different set of facts. After our interview with them, my host told them about this self-described unbiased newsletter which offers arguments from the left, right and center along with supporting facts. I haven’t read it myself but the couple lit up. They seemed genuinely excited to have a shared news source. It’s called Tangle and was featured a recent episode of This American Life about the same issue of politically mixed couples. Maybe more news options like this is another solution!
You've clearly read and absorbed Hans Fallada's scorching novel Little Man, where an everyday citizen in Hitler's Germany circulates postcards against fascism, at great personal risk. Your idea about the # campaign in toilet stalls is a brilliant update. Let's get that bathroom flyer campaign going. I'm in!
I left post-it notes about voting on inside doors of bathroom stalls this fall only to see them almost immediately taken down by cleaning staff. In a few cases, while at a writing conference, I put the notes up and then went back to check an hour later and they had been removed. So I'm not sure whether this will work, though I like the gonzo spirit of it all.
Anyone looking for an excellent read while we bide our time until Rebecca's novel comes out should check out Rachel Maddow's "Prequel." If you think we're close to falling down the fascist rabbit hole now (and we are), it's not our first close call.
I have long felt it was essential that the phenomenon of Trump be understood through a sociological lens. In my opinion, Trumpism is a direct result of the internet, not because it supplies misinformation endlessly into any number of silos, but because the sheer mass of information it disgorges has reinforced the overwhelmed feeling among a huge segment of the population that the world is spinning faster and faster and they can't keep up. They want to go back to a time where they felt they understood their lives, and the world -- this Manichean simplicity was Reagan's appeal (compared to the subtler "malaise" nuance of Carter's complicated world). Then came the internet, the incomprehensible hugeness of climate change, the loss of the certainty that you would do better than your parents, the disorientation of gays in the military, getting married, and then, impossible-to-understand trans people. So Trump strolls in and happens upon the slogan of MAGA, which distills his message down to: "I will make your accidents of birth feel like accomplishments again." What I didn't understand at first is how his charmless, bombastic and fact-free delivery was a plus, not a minus. It's because it reflects the balkanized thinking of Overwhelmed America. I call it the "Ideology of Incoherence." And here on the left we keep throwing coherence at them, and can't understand why it doesn't work. So to the degree that simplicity might be more effective, I agree with the idea behind your approach. But practically speaking, it doesn't seem workable.
I don't really have any grand solutions, but I do feel like great sociological shifts go both ways. I think his supporters will have to face the cold reality of economic mismanagement that leads to a recession (can't blame Biden for that), a tax burden that doesn't get any lighter, and empty grocery store shelves caused by mass deportation (not to mention, no one to wipe Dad's ass in the nursing home.). Also, women in their lives who can't get abortions and sometimes die from that lack. The consequences of climate change will get worse and worse - that the scariest of all. While we're waiting for them to finally “get” that it is real, it will probably become irreversible (although it probably is already.) Technology MAY come to the rescue, but can't count on it.
We do have one advantage they don't have. On this side of the political spectrum, we think far more creatively -- there are so many more artists among us, after all. This we must continue to do. So notes in bathrooms is a good start, lets keep up the original thinking. Blue-state secession may be where we need to go - certainly withholding our tax receipts from the federal government would be very smart leverage. As much as I hate guns, I'll sure as hell buy and use one before I let them take me to Buchenwald 2.0. There are far worse things than dying on the barricades.
Thank you. I also have been spending the past year in the late 1930s, in Detroit, home of the infamous Fr. Coughlin, the radio priest, and that other anti-Semite, Henry Ford. Looking forward to reading yours.
I don't have any action suggestions, other than speaking up for immigrants, refugees, everyone whose rights or existence are under imminent attack, for books, for what you truly believe, in whatever venues, large or small, you may find yourself. It turns out that most good people wish they would speak up, but don't, or don't always. Sometimes I speak, sometimes I hold my peace. It's hard, but rewarding.
Also sign up for BlueSky. Encourage your friends, celebrities, popular writers, thinkers--people who are fun and interesting to follow to sign up. Let it become the true marketplace of ideas, fun and breaking news that X once was.
The News Literacy Project, www.newslit.org, is a great organization that supports the goals you mention in your last bullet point. Their focus is media literacy in K-12 education, but for adults, they also create materials responding to specific misinformation that you can share with other adults in your life. (I agree that it is difficult to convince people they are relying on bad information, but I think it is worth doing for someone you are close with. You just have to keep in mind that it's a long-term endeavor, because media literacy is a set of skills and not an idea you can learn in one day.)
I believe supporting media literacy education is the No. 1 most effective thing we can all do to combat the issues you have identified here. Empowering people with media literacy skills addresses the problem at its root instead of hacking away at individual branches.
I’m a producer for a public radio show and I recently produced a show with a politically mixed couple. They’d been together for over 40 years. One was a democrat, the other was a conservative-leaning independent who voted for Trump in this election. They talked about how they have COMPLETELY different news sources and thus were constantly operating with a different set of facts. After our interview with them, my host told them about this self-described unbiased newsletter which offers arguments from the left, right and center along with supporting facts. I haven’t read it myself but the couple lit up. They seemed genuinely excited to have a shared news source. It’s called Tangle and was featured a recent episode of This American Life about the same issue of politically mixed couples. Maybe more news options like this is another solution!
I just heard that on TAL -- it was fantastic!!
You've clearly read and absorbed Hans Fallada's scorching novel Little Man, where an everyday citizen in Hitler's Germany circulates postcards against fascism, at great personal risk. Your idea about the # campaign in toilet stalls is a brilliant update. Let's get that bathroom flyer campaign going. I'm in!
I left post-it notes about voting on inside doors of bathroom stalls this fall only to see them almost immediately taken down by cleaning staff. In a few cases, while at a writing conference, I put the notes up and then went back to check an hour later and they had been removed. So I'm not sure whether this will work, though I like the gonzo spirit of it all.
Sorry to hear, though not surprised. If I saw ill-informed posters in a bathroom, I'd certainly want to rip them down.
Anyone looking for an excellent read while we bide our time until Rebecca's novel comes out should check out Rachel Maddow's "Prequel." If you think we're close to falling down the fascist rabbit hole now (and we are), it's not our first close call.
I have long felt it was essential that the phenomenon of Trump be understood through a sociological lens. In my opinion, Trumpism is a direct result of the internet, not because it supplies misinformation endlessly into any number of silos, but because the sheer mass of information it disgorges has reinforced the overwhelmed feeling among a huge segment of the population that the world is spinning faster and faster and they can't keep up. They want to go back to a time where they felt they understood their lives, and the world -- this Manichean simplicity was Reagan's appeal (compared to the subtler "malaise" nuance of Carter's complicated world). Then came the internet, the incomprehensible hugeness of climate change, the loss of the certainty that you would do better than your parents, the disorientation of gays in the military, getting married, and then, impossible-to-understand trans people. So Trump strolls in and happens upon the slogan of MAGA, which distills his message down to: "I will make your accidents of birth feel like accomplishments again." What I didn't understand at first is how his charmless, bombastic and fact-free delivery was a plus, not a minus. It's because it reflects the balkanized thinking of Overwhelmed America. I call it the "Ideology of Incoherence." And here on the left we keep throwing coherence at them, and can't understand why it doesn't work. So to the degree that simplicity might be more effective, I agree with the idea behind your approach. But practically speaking, it doesn't seem workable.
I don't really have any grand solutions, but I do feel like great sociological shifts go both ways. I think his supporters will have to face the cold reality of economic mismanagement that leads to a recession (can't blame Biden for that), a tax burden that doesn't get any lighter, and empty grocery store shelves caused by mass deportation (not to mention, no one to wipe Dad's ass in the nursing home.). Also, women in their lives who can't get abortions and sometimes die from that lack. The consequences of climate change will get worse and worse - that the scariest of all. While we're waiting for them to finally “get” that it is real, it will probably become irreversible (although it probably is already.) Technology MAY come to the rescue, but can't count on it.
We do have one advantage they don't have. On this side of the political spectrum, we think far more creatively -- there are so many more artists among us, after all. This we must continue to do. So notes in bathrooms is a good start, lets keep up the original thinking. Blue-state secession may be where we need to go - certainly withholding our tax receipts from the federal government would be very smart leverage. As much as I hate guns, I'll sure as hell buy and use one before I let them take me to Buchenwald 2.0. There are far worse things than dying on the barricades.
Thank you. I also have been spending the past year in the late 1930s, in Detroit, home of the infamous Fr. Coughlin, the radio priest, and that other anti-Semite, Henry Ford. Looking forward to reading yours.
I don't have any action suggestions, other than speaking up for immigrants, refugees, everyone whose rights or existence are under imminent attack, for books, for what you truly believe, in whatever venues, large or small, you may find yourself. It turns out that most good people wish they would speak up, but don't, or don't always. Sometimes I speak, sometimes I hold my peace. It's hard, but rewarding.
Rebecca, you never fail to amaze me.
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Thinking on this.