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creating this problem was a major goal of the conservative media apparatus over many years. it was a space that enabled the right to borrow something from marxist ideology critique and stand it on its head: the right boiled ideology critique down to a simplistic forumla that relativized all information sources by claiming that all of it is equal in that all of it is political--and by "political" they meant "not conservative"---so it followed from there that the right would argue, not that conservatives needed to read critically what information they encountered (why do that?) but instead that since all information as political, and since, in the fantasyland of the american extreme right, conservative viewpoints were marginalized, that it followed that conservative political propositions built into the information itself can function to legitimate information provided to the conservative faithful.
this has created a real problem around agreement as to the legit-ness of any given information source.
and it has had the desired effect: cutting conservatives off from information streams that would provide it with problematic information, replacing them with other streams that do not.
so it follows that political conversations across positions end up being hamstrung more often than not.
in my more paranoid moments, i think this was a good part of the point of this tactic relating to information.
i dont really know what to do to address this. the meta-debates about information sources are endless in here, and they do not seem to get anywhere because even if you crush any number of sources in the course of a debate, you never get to the dispositions that informs their usage.
but this is a direct consequence of choices made by the conservative media apparatus aimed at opening up a space for its own brand of reactionary infotainment to be taken seriously (somehow).
it is very strange.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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