#inequality in media

[politijohn]

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[iirulancorrino]

The Green brothers are doing effective altruism better than maybe 95% of people who identify online as effective altruists.

[political-us]

[gw85]

Rep. Crenshaw says he'd "kill" Tucker Carlson in hot mic moment

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[azspot]

The best solution [to media concentration in the hands of the wealthy] would be to change the legal framework and adopt a law that truly democratizes the media, guaranteeing employees and journalists half the seats in the governing organs, whatever their legal form might be, opening the doors to representatives from the reading public, and drastically limiting stockholders’ power.

Thomas Piketty

[iamonlyhereforthefreefood]

People act like they're going to be the next CEO shooter when they can't even stop doing hauls from Shien. Like some people want a revolution but can't even do small stuff like practicing boycotts.

[fulminatethesun]

"Dont punish people for asking questions" "I am brainwashed!" "Nobody taught me-" at some point ignorance does become insulting I think

[the-most-humble-blog]

🩸 YOUR BODY, YOUR CHOICE—BUT WHO GAVE YOU THE RIGHT TO END HIS BLOODLINE?

They chant "my body, my choice" like it's a spell that erases all consequences.

They act like a fetus is some parasitic inconvenience, instead of half of another human being’s legacy. They pretend the father’s genetic stake, lineage, and say in the matter is non-existent.

🚨 NEWSFLASH: When you end a pregnancy, you don’t just erase your potential child. You erase his son. His daughter. His bloodline. His future.

🔪 THE LOGIC GAP NO ONE WANTS TO TALK ABOUT

1️⃣ The child is made of TWO people. But only one gets to decide life or death. 2️⃣ A father who wants his kid has zero rights. He can beg, plead, offer everything—it doesn’t matter. 3️⃣ A woman can abort at will. But if she keeps it and the father isn’t ready? Enjoy 18 years of forced financial servitude.

So let’s get this straight:

If she wants it and he doesn’t? Too bad, pay up.

If he wants it and she doesn’t? Tough luck, it dies.

If he even suggests she keep it? He’s controlling.

WTF is going on here?

🩸 A MAN’S BLOODLINE ISN’T JUST “HER DECISION”

This isn’t about forcing women to have babies. It’s about acknowledging reality: 🩸 That baby is his DNA too. 🩸 That baby is his future generations. 🩸 That baby is a life that only one person gets to judge as disposable.

If women can demand full control over reproductive choices, then why are men still financially responsible for children they don’t want?

And if a man has zero say in whether his bloodline lives or dies, what does that say about “equality”?

💀 THE UGLY TRUTH: MODERN ABORTION CULTURE ISN’T ABOUT CHOICE—IT’S ABOUT POWER

✅ Women get to decide if the baby lives or dies. ✅ Men get to suffer the consequences of her decision, no matter what. ✅ A man's desire to be a father is irrelevant unless she says it isn’t.

But sure, “body autonomy”… As long as it’s his bloodline getting flushed because she isn’t ready.

That’s not choice—that’s tyranny in a uterus.

💀 REBLOG if you see the double standard. 💬 COMMENT if you think fathers should have a say in their child’s life. 🥩 LIKE if you believe a man’s bloodline isn’t just disposable. 🚀 FOLLOW for more brutal truths, cultural dissections, and the cost of unchecked power.

[politijohn]

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[alwaysbewoke]

[political-us]

Meta approves bonuses of up to 200% of company executives’ salaries a week after laying off 3,600 employees

[gw85]

Rep. Crenshaw says he'd "kill" Tucker Carlson in hot mic moment

[jensorensen]

Man of the People

The commentator David Brooks -- who has made a career out of piously trolling liberals for their supposed decadence and lack of morals -- posted a photo on Twitter with the caption “This meal just cost me $78 at Newark Airport. This is why Americans think the economy is terrible.” Pictured in the photo were a hamburger and French fries with what appeared to be a fairly large glass of whiskey. Social media users quickly identified the restaurant in question, and the owner chimed in to confirm that the food portion of Brooks' meal cost around $18, with rest of the tab being liquor.

Help keep this work sustainable by joining the Sorensen Subscription Service! Or become a patron on Patreon.

[benjaminallhope-fulltimemind]

Just a reminder that corporations aren't your friends and will abuse you to the greatest possible limits. They will cut you for taking days off or parental leave, they will slander you and defame you to dampen backlash.

[jcmarchi]

Insights into political outsiders

New Post has been published on https://thedigitalinsider.com/insights-into-political-outsiders/

Insights into political outsiders

As the old saw has it, 90 percent of politics is just showing up. Which is fine for people who are already engaged in the political system and expect to influence it. What about everyone else? The U.S. has millions and millions of people who typically do not vote or participate in politics. Is there a way into political life for those who are normally disconnected from it?

This is a topic MIT political scientist Ariel White has been studying closely over the last decade. White conducts careful empirical research on typically overlooked subjects, such as the relationship between incarceration and political participation; the way people interact with government administrators; and how a variety of factors, from media coverage to income inequality, influence engagement with politics.

While the media heavily cover the views of frequent voters in certain areas, there is very little attention paid to citizens who do not vote regularly but could. To grasp U.S. politics, it might help us to better understand such people.

“I think there is a much broader story to be told here,” says White, an associate professor in MIT’s Department of Political Science.

Study by study, her research has been telling that story. Even short, misdemeanor-linked jail terms, White has found, reduce the likelihood that people will vote — and lower the propensity of family members to vote as well. When people are convicted of felonies, they often lose their right to vote, but they also vote at low rates when eligible. Other studies by White also suggest that an 8 percent minimum wage increase leads to an increase in turnout of about one-third of 1 percent, and that those receiving public benefits are far less likely to vote than those who do not.

These issues are often viewed in partisan terms, although the reality, White thinks, is considerably more complex. When evaluating infrequent or disconnected voters, we do not know enough to make assumptions about these matters.

“Getting people with past criminal convictions registered and voting, when they are eligible, is not a surefire partisan advantage for anybody,” White says. “There’s a lot of heterogeneity in this group, which is not what people assume. Legislators tend to treat this as a partisan issue, but at the mass public level you see less polarization, and more people are willing to support a path for others back into daily life.”

Experiences matter

White grew up near Rochester, New York, and majored in economics and government at Cornell University. She says that initially she never considered entering academia, and tried her hand at a few jobs after graduation. One of them, working as an Americorps-funded paralegal in a legal services office, had a lasting influence; she started thinking more about the nature of government-citizen interactions in these settings.

“It really stuck in my mind the way people’s experiences, one-on-one with a person who is representing government, when trying to get benefits, really shapes people’s views about how government is going to operate and see them, and what they can expect from the state,” White says. “People’s experiences with government matter for what they do politically.”

Before long, White was accepted into the doctoral program at Harvard University, where she earned an MA in 2012 and her PhD in 2016. White then joined the MIT faculty, also in 2016, and has remained at the Institute ever since.

White’s first published paper, in 2015, co-authored with Julie Faller and Noah Nathan, found that government officials tended to have different levels of responsiveness when providing voting information to people of apparently different ethnicities. It won an award from the American Political Science Association. (Nathan is now also a faculty member at MIT.)

Since then, White has published a string of papers examining how many factors interact with voting propensities. In one study focused in Pennsylvania, she found that public benefits recipients made up 20 percent of eligible voters in 2020 but just 12 percent of those who voted. When examining the criminal justice system, White has found that even short-term jail time leads to a turnout drop of several percentage points among the incarcerated. Family members of those serving even short jail sentences are less likely to vote in the near term too, although their participation rebounds over time.

“People don’t often think of incarceration as a thing they connect with politics,” White says. “Descriptively, with many people who have had the experience of incarceration or criminal convictions, or who are living in families or neighborhoods with a lot of it, we don’t see a lot of political action, and we see low levels of voting. Given how widespread incarceration is in the U.S., it seems like one of the most common and impactful things the government can do. But for a long time it was left to sociology to study.”

How to reach people?

Having determined that citizens are less likely to vote in many circumstances, White’s research is now evolving toward a related question: What are the most viable ways of changing that? To be sure, nothing is likely to create a tsunami of new voters. Even where people convicted of felonies can vote from prison, she found in still another study, they do so at single-digit rates. People who are used to not voting are not going to start voting at high rates, on aggregate.

Still, this fall, White led a new field experiment about getting unregistered voters to both register and vote. In this case, she and some colleagues created a study designed to see if friends of unregistered voters might be especially able to get their networks to join the voter rolls. The results are still under review. But for White, it is a new area where many kinds of experiments and studies seem possible.

“Political science in general and the world of actual practicing political campaigns knows an awful lot about how to get registered voters to turn out to vote,” White says. “There’s so much work on get-out-the-vote activities, mailers and calls and texts. We know way, way less about the 1-in-4 or so eligible voters who are simply not registered at all, and are in a very real sense invisible in the political landscape. Overwhelmingly, the people I’m curious about fall into that category.”

It is also a subject that she hopes will sustain the interest of her students. White’s classes tend to be filled by students with many different registered majors but an abiding interest in civic life. White wants them to come away with a more informed sense of their civic landscape, as well as new tools for conducting clean empirical studies. And, who knows? Like White herself, some of her students may end up making a career out of political engagement, even if they don’t know it yet.

“I really like working with MIT students,” White says. “I do hope my students gain some key understandings about what we know about political life, and how we can know about it, which I think are likely to be helpful to them in a variety of realms. My hope is they take a fundamental understanding of social science research, and some big questions, and some big concepts, out into the world.”

[cthulhucultrevivalunit]

The City: Moloch’s Playground

The City: Moloch’s Playground By Batzrov

The City, a concrete Moloch, grinds everything into its maw. Nature, a Quaint Memory, is replaced by simulacrum of life…

A labyrinthine grid of towering phantoms and choked arteries…

This monstrous theme park isn't built for human flourishing but for the production of docile consumers. What are we but passive spectators in this fabricated spectacle, where our desires are prefabricated. Beneath its flickering neon signs, we are reduced to cogs in a machine that consumes us all.

In the suffocating sprawl of the postmodern metropolis, we are bombarded by a cacophony of stimuli, a relentless assault on our senses…

The individual is transformed into a observer who is forever consuming the next exhibition… You are always moving but never truly engaging.

“The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of his existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life.” Georg Simmel

The city thrives on superficial interactions, fleeting connections that leave us lonelier than before. We drift amidst a multitude of anonymous faces, each equally replaceable. Meaningful bonds are sacrificed at the altar of efficiency.

Community has faded, replaced by the cold indifference of the crowd…

The human spirit withers in its place, hollow shells…

Towering skyscrapers pierce the sky... monuments to alienation.

Here, architecture isn't an expression of human ingenuity but rather a tool of control, which channels our movements with cold precision of a factory. The urban landscape is a technocapitalist construct, perpetually reshaping itself to absorb and neutralize any form of resistance. it constantly adapts to quell dissent. Even the most defiant graffiti tag is eventually commodified, its subversive message absorbed into endless stream of frenzy.

The city imposes forced coexistence of strangers, where the density of population paradoxically breeds isolation. The insatiable quest for economic growth fuels a deepening rift between the haves and have-nots further splintering any semblance of community solidarity. The urban landscape, governed by inflexible zoning regulations and balkanized neighborhoods, institutionalizes a geography of inequality that mirrors and perpetuates social inequalities.

The City is a machine that devours time and spits out anxiety...

The city promises connection but delivers only isolation...

The subject walks here with a shadow not of their own…

The panopticon is no longer a building but the very fabric of the urban existence… Subject becoming both prisoner and guard. Self censorship and performative conformity becomes survival strategies.

In Moloch’s Depths human existence is nothing more than a statistical abstraction.

We are drawn to Moloch, this devouring entity like moths to a flame, helpless to resist its siren song of novelty, of excitement, of endless possibility. Blinded by its bright lights and pulsing energy we chase its promises. But soon we find that this was a trap a mechanism of capture, for in Moloch’s depths we are consumed, digested, and spat out. It Feeds on human life, draining it of its vitality, its creativity its very essence.

And yet, we are complicit in our own consumption. We are willing participants in the city’s game of survival. We are eager to sacrifice our own desire, our own dreams our own lives on the altar of Moloch. We are co-conspirators in our own enslavement.

Thrumming with a death drive disguised as progress…

Concrete canyons birthing steel serpents…

We are PLAGUE CARRIERS, spreading the disease of MEANINGLESSNESS here…

Lights might never dim here, souls certainly will…

A sea of faceless others…

Dreams are devoured, commodities spewed out in their place…

Subway tunnels echo with the screams of forgotten souls…

A haptic meshwork of decaying futures and nascent dreams…