What are the implications of people clustering in Sean Hannity's America, or Rachel Maddow's?
“There are fewer people in the middle. And so politics becomes less about solving our problems anymore. It's about cheering for our side. And so we're stuck.”
Its completely awful - and made worse by the fact that they're so smug about it.
I'll drop my roomate off at work sometimes and I'll throw on NPR for like the 5 min car ride and there's a decent chance I'll be mad before we get there.
He's a normie and probably thinks I've lost it.
But I do get a kick out of exclaiming "lets see what the goddamn liberals are up to" as I tune in to the station though.
The worst part about NPR is the smug assuredness it gives it's listeners that they are actually the most enlightened politics understanders. At the very same time NPR won't question pretty much any state talking points until far into the future when it was obvious the decisions the US state made were awful.
I say this as someone who listened to NPR nonstop on my way over from being a staunch religious conservative. It's real bad looking back.
That's the secret to NPR: ingroup membership. It doesn't represent the country because that's not its job. NPR's job is to reassure liberals that they're part of a big tribe that's always right. Feels-good-man.jpg
Liberal analysis is just “too many partisan politics” and “America is so divided”
Divide Americans into socioeconomic categories, not political tribes
- Pete Buttigieg, 2027
The best part about NPR is when they say the programming couldn't be possible without you, the listener, and ... our corporate sponsors such as Amazon and Facebook
32 MM in Accounts Receivable, 100 MM in Investments...yeah, I'm sure the 20 dollars Deb Sue sent them is what's helping them move forward
111 MM IN CORPORATE SPONSORSHIPS, damn near HALF of their operating revenue, another 89 MM coming from station fees and such (gleaning all of this from pg 17, Financial Statements)
Yeah I love those seasonal pledge drives they do for local stations. "Hey we need 100k and we're only at 25k with 3 hours left. Oh? What's that? We got a mystery donor who is going to match up to 50k? Wow, talk about finding money under the sofa cushions!"
I don't blame people who want to move out of Chud Country, but NPR's analysis is the most naïve nonsense.
I have to say they're accidentally right in that a Sean Hannity head and a Rachel Maddow head both are living in the spectacle, in the culture war, in the floating signifiers, and are not reachable by material politics there
None of the people who think like this have accomplished anything.
NPR's political commentary should come with a warning: CAUTION—WHAT YOU'RE ABOUT TO HEAR MAY CAUSE ENLIGHENED CENTRISM AND OTHER FORMS OF BRAIN CANCER
I once had a friend tell me that NPR is trustworthy because "they show all sides of an issue." I asked how often the program had on Communist/Marxist speakers. He couldn't give any examples and immediately changed subjects to how Lenin was a bad, bad man
I remember one time a priest said stealing bread to eat is not immoral. The npr host pmc had a harvard guy on to talk out it. I got on and managed to talk about eating veterinary pills because I couldn't afford food and medicine and the host seemed shaken to the core and made a twitter poll about it. I hope I scarred that man for life.
The first-past-the-post aspect of American government has directly led to a fallacious model of "seesaw politics" that persists in most people's minds to the present day.
not totally wrong, it's just that there's been a gorilla sitting on capital's side of the seesaw for nearly a century
Neither side of the American seesaw is the working class.
The working class is the tires underneath each party's end, that they kick off from.
I like NPR because on Sunday nights they play old timey radio serials like Johnny Dollar, and The Shadow.
Even if you accept the framing of this argument, I think that if Republicans were actually offering solutions to America's problems, I'm sure huge numbers of big D Democrats (the voters, not the politicians and party leaders) would support them.
The problem is that the only political program they have is blood for the blood god, skulls for the skull throne.
I still remember during the midterms when someone compared Bernie’s Populism to Obama’s 2008 populism and the host sounded like she was about to stab the dude haha
