caitlin speaks about elections and politics;

It’s time for another US presidential race where populist factions on both sides spend a few months angrily decrying the establishment before voting for candidates in the general election who will fully serve that same establishment.

I think this is just the norm now. Public discontent with the US political status quo is now so great that there’s going to be a new “Hey kids, you can vote your way into revolutionary change!” feature built into every presidential election. 2012 was the end of a political era.

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The biggest misconception about politics is that political differences have any meaningful existence at all. Everyone’s herded into two mainstream factions who both serve the interests of the powerful, while those few who can’t be herded are marginalized into political impotence.

And I am of course mainly talking about the English-speaking world here. The global south has real political diversity of real consequence, and has real differences from the status quo politics of the US-centralized empire. But within that empire, political differences are effectively illusory.

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I feel like maybe we didn’t make a big enough deal about that revelation the other day that the US government now has so many institutions dedicated to “perception management” and regulating “disinformation” that it created a new agency within the ODNI to oversee all of them. I mean everyone made a lot of noise about the DHS’s “disinformation governance board” last year, and rightly so, but as a whole this seems way more egregious in terms of government interference in human communication.........more.......