People feel that their quality of life is going downhill and the propagandists presented an easy scapegoat to distract from the rich.

She’s amazing, Jeph outdid himself with her expressions!

unless he goes to war with us and wins.

That’s not what “direct” means. Abortion isn’t going to be outlawed in my country because Trump becomes president, unless he goes to war with us and wins.

Part of the issue is that Europe largely relies on US media - e.g. there isn’t really a European or French/German/Polish/… equivalent of Reddit or Twitter (unless you count the national Lemmy and Mastodon servers, but those are pitifully small compared to Reddit).

He also hates trans people, worker’s rights and free speech.

It’s gotta hit harder if you’re directly affected by the outcome.

Lots of these predictions were actually quite horrible. e.g. flying cars would be so much worse than regular cars in so many ways.

“Many of you will die, but that is a sacrifice I’m willing to make!”

If I wrote comments like I chat in a grocery store queue I’d never write a single comment.

Agreed, though I think that he doesn’t quite fit the definition of “celebrity” considering he did two terms as a state governor.

No numbers for “A celebrity’s position on a politicial issue has positively affected my opinion of him/her”?

And IMO, considering all the other groups that are trying to sway voters and how close elections tend to be (and how polarized politics are in the US), these numbers aren’t that bad. And the way advertising/propaganda works, they don’t necessarily have to sway people in a way that the people directly notice - it’s often enough to keep repeating a point to keep it in people’s consciousness.

“white” is an increbibly malleable category, anyway. At one point, the Irish (who are generally even lighter-skinned than the English due to higher percentage of gingers) were considered non-white. Nowadays, most people would consider Italians and Spaniards white, and there’s quite a few hispanic people who both look white and consider themselves white (due to being descended from European immigrants). There’s a similar dynamic in India, southern Indians are often darker than ‘black’ americans while many north Indians could pass as southern europeans.

Why write “the” as “ð” instead of “ðe”?

It benefits rich people, since they have less contact with the ‘unwashed masses’ this way. On top of that, many invest in real estate.

God isn’t real, but if he was real he’d be a dick.

I wouldn’t be so sure about that. We definitely got a lot of social progress from technology, but it’s plain to see that social media gets massively abused for reactionary propaganda (not entirely unlike radio and print have been abused to further authoritarian ideologies in early 20th century). IME, in recent years people have been getting MORE cold and brutal, more willing to assault random people for being the wrong sexual orientation, they started assaulting EMTs, firefighters and train employees in significant numbers, and people have been outright murdered for telling them that they should wear a mask.

And every appliance becoming “smart” seems to further the corporate desire for planned obsolescence and making people unable to repair their belongings, along with massively increasing security risks and possibilities for mass surveillance.

IMO, we’re moving backwards right now, with significant risk of losing the progress of the last 50 years.

Good luck ignoring social media nowadays. Whether you use them or not, you live in a society that does use them and you are impacted by its consequences.

And good luck trying to buy a new television that isn’t “smart”. Even cars are getting like that.

Yeah, and the amish aren’t exactly a positive example in terms of personal freedom, especially for women and queer people. Though those were never their goals anyway, so a more modern luddite community might be nicer to live in.

Cyberpunk authors have been introducing progress-hostile/‘go back to the past’ movements and factions since the 80s, arguably it’s older than cyberpunk-style technology itself (cyberpunk-style technology definitely being a thing that already exists, arguably since the www-internet but nowadays with VR, AI and electronically enhanced prostetics we’re definitely getting into the flashier stuff). And remember that the cyberpunk genre paints the future as bleak, in terms of how the common people live most cyberpunk worlds are clear downgrades compared to the actual 1980s.

And e.g. the amish rejected the industrial revolution.