Imagine a racially diverse Black Gospel choir, dressed as nurses wearing Covid masks, singing a Christmas anthem celebrating global neo-liberal capitalism, on a human face, forever.
Sure no one “watches TV” anymore. They “consume content” from Youtube on their smart phones. But the content comes from the same TV companies.
Content, on a human face, forever.
Some people like to read. So there is the New York Times, and other AP newspapers, and the second and third tier of “online magazines” and blogs that comment on the first tier, and the nth tier bloggers that react to them (this is where the “dissidents” live.)
They call it “the Attention Economy.” “Attention points” – “data” – are the same as money now, there’s a highly efficient market for “site traffic” and ads.
Right-wing conservatives, especially the libertarian types, all believe this is a “free market” but you can see what happened to even fourth-tier blogs when they started actually succeeding in a “free market” – they got shut down and censored at the first sign of trouble. Not by the government – by Capitalists.
All the fourth tier and lower bloggers ever did was comment on what the “mainstream media” did, because that is all people know.
It’s still a broadcast media and allowing trolls to comment is about as two-way as it gets.
If I were the Dictator, the very first thing I would do is send troops to occupy the offices of Banks and Media companies. Control those two – they are the same institutionally – and you control the society.
All the Second Amendment types will shoot whoever the Media tells them to shoot and whoever the Banks pay them to shoot.
Mao was right. I’m having a harder and harder time seeing how the Communists were wrong about anything.
Banned Hipster 
How much do the ads on this website pay you?
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@H. Frod
MW said he was making something like $30 a week from his old blog, and this was without him really even trying to market it or anything. He was just an interesting writer that attracted a few hard-core fans – myself included.
I obviously don’t make anything because I’m not even signed up for it.
But I have big plans to do the Online Grift at some point. I assume I’ll posture as a political partisan, perhaps a progressive Democrat, as soon as another Republican becomes President.
If that ever happens – if the Republicans are truly no longer a national party, I can grift the disenfranchised conservatives who tend to be extremely gullible.
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MW?
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@parallelplace
MindWeaponsInRagnarok, the old blog.
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I foresee a very lucrative career of soulless grifter overlordism in your future.
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what was Mao right about?
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@chezgr@y
What was he wrong about?
Despite all of the terrible aspects of Mao’s rule, before Mao China was a third-world nation, occupied by foreigners. After Mao, it was well on its way to becoming a world power. Of course, it truly only started to come into its own after Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms.
Mao’s maxim that “political power grows out of the barrel of a gun” is of course not just completely true, but almost trite, which is why it needs to be restated from time to time.
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The communists didn’t care to mention how much the Avant-guard of the Proletariat would charge for its leveling services.
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“Avant-garde” – that deserves a spell in the gulag.
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@bob saffron
LOL
I think people misunderstand Communism. Obviously, it was never “really” about leveling and of course never about “the workers” owning the means of production, or anything.
Instead, Communism was a semi-scientific method of staging a coup/revolution and running a state. It was clearly successful in many cases.
This is why America’s Communists can use the Communist tactics of elections and coups and propaganda while dropping the now-defunct rhetoric that may have appealed to workers in the Industrial Era of large factories and displaced rural populations.
“Cultural Marxism” has worked just as well, without all of the economic disruption.
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Cultural Marxism turned out to be true genius. They have utterly transformed America in 55 years, and the destroyers of our culture are celebrated as high status by the most educated among us.
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