#Not the same large scale consent manufacturing machine that's been doing that job our entire lives

[maeamian]

Saw a post claiming that the Biden memes on here are why Joe Biden is generally not getting as much criticism as he probably should for the bad parts of his agenda, and some offense, but it really seems to me like that doesn't pass the sniff test at all and maybe if you believe this you need to go log off and get some outside air.

#Are we sure it's the memes #Not the same large scale consent manufacturing machine that's been doing that job our entire lives #Well okay my entire life the fall of the Fairness doctrine is where a lot of this stuff gets worse in particular #As well as the post Watergate belief of conservatives that this CANNOT happen to them again #But not the post-watergate belief that they needed to let it not happen by not doing bad shit #At any rate if I were a gambling man I'd put my single crisp US dollar bill down on 'the media' before 'the memes' #For starters 'websites the Biden VP memes circulated on' and 'websites with the best overall impression of him' don't correlate at all #I don't think I can remember any pro-Joe posts in the primaries on this website #But this website is also where I saw the vast majority of my Biden memes #Even still the most love I see for him on here right now is like 'You're gonna have to vote for him again because he'll be the nominee' #I just would like to see a lot more evidence for the memes theory before I believe a much mroe straightforward theory #That the institution of the presidency holds an undue reverence especially in the national press #and as such regularly goes under-questioned and under-critiqued during pretty much every administration of my lifetime #The meme just doesn't seem even remotely powerful enough to move the same amount of belief comparatively #If nothing else it's an absurdly online model of US politics that fails to account for a bunch of other factors #For God's sake they're fawning over GW Bush and his artisitic endeavors and that dude needs to be in the Hague #And I don't remember any pro GWB memes on here to justify that #So something else beyond the memes may be at play here #I really just don't see that the model has any upside whatsoever as an explanation of things #It doesn't explain anything better than more coherent and fleshed out theories of politics #But also does explain several things worse or not at all #Full disclosure there are Biden memes in this blog's history #But the way I feel about him currently is literally entirely unrelated to that #If you wanna look at them and go 'we probably could've and should've known better' I'll give you that #But not 'because of the long term impact it has had'