jimmydoreisalefty

“The ultimate test of a society’s freedom is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens; it’s how it treats its dissidents.” - Glenn Greenwald

Since Kamala Harris’s catastrophic electoral defeat last month—the first time since 2004 that the Republican candidate has gotten the most votes in a U.S. election—a lot of criticism has been focused on the campaign’s message. That criticism is warranted, and long before Election Day, this publication had been among those warning that Harris was failing to effectively counter Trump’s populist appeal. But a campaign is not just a candidate and a message. It is also an organization, one with a budget and staff that makes decisions about actions that can be taken to transmit the message and convince people to turn out for the candidate. And any election postmortem needs to analyze Harris’s operation in addition to her words.

The New York Times, for instance, has reported that even as the Harris campaign splurged on celebrity-filled events (including paying Oprah’s production company $1 million), in Philadelphia, many of the field offices “were filthy and lacked basic supplies like tables, chairs, cleaning products and printers, staff members said,” with city campaign staffers “being forced to raid the campaign’s better-stocked suburban offices or to raise money independently.” That is when they even had field offices, and in many predominantly Black neighborhoods “campaign staff members were operating out of public parks, grocery-store parking lots and church basements.” A volunteer told the Times: “There were no yard signs, there was no visibility, there were no T-shirts… There was nobody handing out literature. There were no bumper stickers. There was no sign that we were in the fight of our lives in the most important city in a presidential campaign.”

Even when there were T-shirts, they could be slapdash (one box of them said “Harriz-Walz”). A “get-out-the-vote bus tour for [Pennsylvania’s] Black mayors” had its funding pulled without explanation. The head of a pro-Harris group “recounted frantic campaign staff members in Philadelphia, Detroit and North Carolina calling him in the final weeks of the race to say they did not have enough money to provide food or water to volunteers.” In Georgia, a county party chair “said the Harris campaign’s get-out-the-vote operation had been nonexistent, even as he had pleaded for resources.” Black staff members reportedly felt that the Black vote was being taken for granted, and when they aired their complaints in a post-election call, Harris’s deputy campaign manager “told staff members that talking to the press would ruin their career prospects.” There appears to have been racism in the allocation of resources, with the campaign deliberately choosing to more heavily fund operations in white suburbs and neglecting Black urban centers. (Perhaps on the theory that the Democrats had already successfully appeased Black voters by selecting a Black woman.) Organizers “said they were told not to engage in the bread-and-butter tasks of getting out the vote in Black and Latino neighborhoods” and instead were turned “into glorified telemarketers.” As a result, Harris staffers resorted to going rogue and setting up their own unauthorized operations in a desperate attempt to get out the Black vote.

Some of this seems to have been simply bad decision-making. Harris made the same error that Hillary Clinton did in 2016, deploying resources in states like Texas that she was clearly not going to win that could have instead been used in states she desperately needed to win. “We spent money in stupid ways because we had a really bad strategy,” a former DNC consultant told Puck. They even bought an expensive TV ad in Florida, a state Harris knew she wouldn’t win, just to “troll” Donald Trump. Other aspects make the Harris campaign look like little more than a multi-level marketing scheme. For instance, they spent “$111 million in online ads seeking donations,” in other words ads asking for money to pay for more ads asking for money! I was struck over this campaign season by how many texts I got just pleading with me urgently to SEND MORE MONEY. I never did, even though I did not want Trump to win the election, because I had zero confidence that the money would actually end up being spent on anything useful. Turns out, this lack of confidence was fully justified, because your donation might well have gone to a drone show production company, or Oprah’s staff, or to pointlessly build a set for a podcast (which reportedly cost $100,000 yet had “cardboard walls,” raising the question of who got the money), or just toward sending you even more texts. What it did not go toward, apparently, was adequately funding field offices in Black neighborhoods.

...All they know how to do is demand money and spend it on nonsense, like a big light-up sphere or a concert with celebrities. It is not quite a scam on the level of Bernie Madoff or the crypto industry, but it is certainly a kind of fraud, because it relies on convincing good people to part with their money, thinking they are paying for one kind of thing when they may in fact be paying for something they wouldn’t want to fund if they understood where the money goes. It’s deceptive and wrong, and I suspect we haven’t heard the last of the damning reports about how spectacularly this campaign failed.

P.S.: Sabby Sabbs discussed this article, so I decided to share it with y’all.

Stuart Thompson has monitored right-wing media since 2020. He watched 47 hours of video on Rumble for this article.

As soon as President-elect Donald J. Trump won the presidential race, influencers on Rumble, the right-wing alternative to YouTube, flooded the platform with a simple catchphrase: “We are the media now.”

The idea seemed to capture a growing sense that traditional journalists have lost their position at the center of the media ecosystem. Polls show that trust in mainstream news media has plummeted, and that nearly half of all young people get their news from “influencers” rather than journalists.

If Rumble was the media now, I wondered what it would be like to consume an all-Rumble diet. So on Nov. 18, about two weeks after the election, I deleted my news apps, unsubscribed from all my podcasts and filtered all my newsletters to the trash. And for the next week, from early morning till late at night, I got all my news from Rumble.

...they fixated on a cast of perceived enemies to blame for America’s troubles — from Democratic politicians to TikTok personalities to Republican adversaries.

Just a few hours into the experiment, it was clear that I was falling into an alternate reality fueled almost entirely by outrage...

I received a statement from Tim Murtaugh, a representative for Rumble who was also Mr. Trump’s communications director for his 2020 campaign. He said: “The New York Times and its fellow legacy media outlets have lost their monopoly on deciding what information people can have, so of course they’re rushing to attack Rumble, a key alternative in the news marketplace.”

‘You’re going to become part of the show.’

After watching Rumble nonstop for days, I realized this very article was likely to fuel its own cycle of outrage on the platform. But I was surprised when that happened before it was even published.

I wrote to everyone mentioned in the article to ask for their perspective about Rumble and its popular shows, but few replied. Instead, people like Russell Brand, the former actor turned political commentator, took one of my emails and made an entire segment out of it. Mr. Bongino called me “public enemy No. 1” and claimed my story would focus on Rumble’s fringiest voices in a bid to get the site banned.

“Don’t ever email us,” he warned. “Don’t. Because you’re going to become part of the show.”

Mr. Pentland, the co-host of “The Roseanne Barr Podcast,” posted the email I sent him to his X account. Rumble’s chief executive reposted it, then Elon Musk reposted that to his more than 200 million followers.

P.S.: Glenn Greenwald discussed this article, so I decided to share it with y'all.

Sam Mohawk, a Boeing employee of 13 years, claimed some factory workers took flawed airplane parts from storage and installed them on airplanes in order to keep production moving. Boeing and other aircraft manufacturers have dealt with staggering supply-chain issues since the pandemic.

“There’s so much chaos in that factory that there’s a desperation for parts because we have problems with our parts suppliers,” Mohawk told CBS News in an interview published Sunday evening. “In order to get the plane built and out the door in time, I think, unfortunately, some of those parts were recycled back onto the airplanes in order to keep building the airplane and not stop it in production.”

“Guerra” es una canción en la que Residente primero personifica la guerra y suena aterrador, tal como es la guerra. Luego Residente se pone del lado bueno y humilla a la guerra:

"La guerra es más débil que fuerte"

"No aguanta la vida por eso se esconde en la muerte"

[The war is weaker than stronger

It can't handle life, so it hides behind death]

Durante su viaje por el mundo, Residente pasó por Osetia y Georgia, y para llegar a estos países tuvo que pedir permiso. Residente dijo estar un poco asustado porque era una zona de conflicto e ISIS opera en los países próximos a estos.

El conflicto armado se conoce como Guerra de Osetia del Sur de 2008.

Residente logró algo asombroso en este tema. Él combinó los tambores de Osetia, el panduri de Georgia y las voces Chechenia. Países en conflicto tocando juntos.^[[1] https://genius.com/Residente-guerra-lyrics]

“Multi_Viral” is a song written and performed by René Pérez (lead singer of the duo Calle 13’s) and Julian Assange (WikiLeaks founder); Rene Perez traveled to the Equatorial embassy in London, where Julian Assange is a political refugee, in order to write the lyrics of the song. The song was also composed and written with the collaboration of Tom Morello (guitarist of Rage Against the Machine) and the Arab-Israeli singer-songwriter Kamilya Jubran; additionally Calle 13’s fans contributed through twitter.

“Multi_Viral” addressed current global issues, such as social movements in Latin America and Spain and information manipulation in the media. The song attempts to be a criticism to the unreliable information that the media distributes, as well as to speak up for freedom of speech and access to reliable information. René Pérez attempted to create a song that would create awareness about current social issues; yet, he also wanted to provide and encourage pacific solutions. He wanted to convey a political message relevant to most, if not all, countries in a way that would call everyone’s attention and that would be accessible to most people. Due to this, parts of the song are written in different languages, such as Spanish, French, Arabic, and English.^[[1] https://genius.com/Calle-13-multi-viral-lyrics]

Both billionaire parties have carried out horrific attacks on immigrant workers. Barack Obama was dubbed the “Deporter-in-Chief” and continues to hold the shameful record for the most deportations in history. Trump has promised to beat that record by launching a mass deportation campaign, including the possibility of workplace raids, which would be a dangerous attack on workers and the labor movement. Both parties continue to send billions to fund endless wars and the genocide in Gaza.

Rank-and-file union members need to get organized around a fighting strategy to take on these two capitalist parties and end their anti-immigrant attacks. Sign up below to join the WSB Labor Caucus Sunday, December 1 @ 5 pm ET / 2 pm PT!^[[1] https://www.workersstrikeback.org/events/dec-2024-labor-caucus]

Link to signup: https://www.workersstrikeback.org/events/dec-2024-labor-caucus

On Strike provides news & analysis from a working-class perspective, putting forward a strategy to take on the billionaires and their political servants, and win.

We don’t run any ads and we don’t take corporate money. We rely on support from working people like you, so SUBSCRIBE NOW to On Strike and BECOME A MEMBER of Workers Strike Back: www.workersstrikeback.org/join

On Strike is a production of Workers Strike Back, which was launched by Kshama Sawant and other working people in 2023 to spread the lessons of her decade as a socialist City Councilmember in Seattle, where she led movements to win historic victories like the first major $15 minimum wage, the Amazon Tax for affordable housing, and landmark renters’ rights like the first-in-the-nation ban on winter evictions. Workers Strike Back is building a movement across the country to fight for things like a $25/hour minimum wage, free healthcare and quality affordable housing for all, an end U.S. military aid to the Israeli war machine, and an end the genocide and occupation in Gaza. We’re organizing to build Jill Stein’s independent, pro-worker, antiwar Presidential campaign & to begin laying the foundation for a new party for working people.

Tags: R&B, Pop, Art Rock, Trip-Hop, Samba-Reggae, Pop Rap, Contemporary R&B, USA, In English, Dance Rock, Dance, Pop-R&B, Singer-Songwriter, New Jack Swing, Industrial Rock, Axé, Dance-Pop, Politics, Protest Songs, Pop-Rock]

The fourth single off Jackson’s album HIStory, this is one of Michael’s most controversial songs of all time and was accused of being anti-Semitic. The song is a plea against racism and a call for powerful people to stop ignoring human rights. However, some interpreted these lyrics to have the absolute opposite meaning of Jackson’s intent. Jackson denied this later, and was offended his lyrics could be interpreted that way.^[[1] https://genius.com/Michael-jackson-they-dont-care-about-us-lyrics]

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/22083381

"Am I delusional? Keep tellin' myself that it's all good"

“5AM” by Lil Baby captures a deep exploration of the struggle between material success and emotional fulfillment. The song reveals the artist’s introspective journey as he grapples with the consequences of his achievements, his relationships, and his mental state. While he celebrates his wealth, he simultaneously confronts the feelings of loneliness and discontent that can accompany such success, creating a relatable narrative many listeners can resonate with.

In the verses, Lil Baby reflects on conflicting emotions tied to his rise as an artist. The line “How you managed to get everything you want and still ain’t happy?” highlights the irony of wealth, suggesting that even after attaining material desires, true happiness remains elusive. He speaks about losing part of himself, indicating a sacrifice of personal identity in the face of fame and fortune, particularly with the line “Half of me done died, the other half alive.” This duality emphasizes the struggle for balance between his past life and current reality. The mention of his grandmother’s wisdom reinforces the notion that challenges are inherent to things worthwhile, while comments about love and betrayal illustrate the complexity of relationships that often suffer under the weight of ambition. Furthermore, his references to survival instincts and his upbringing in the hood ground his experience in a broader cultural context, where resilience is vital for success.

Overall, “5AM” serves as an honest reflection on Lil Baby’s journey through fame, illustrating how success does not equate to fulfillment. His lyrics encapsulate a blend of vulnerability and toughness, as he examines personal loss, emotional challenges, and the weight of expectations. The song effectively resonates with anyone navigating the complexities of life and ambition, pointing towards the idea that true happiness may lie beyond wealth and status.^[[1] https://genius.com/Lil-baby-5am-lyrics]

"Am I delusional? Keep tellin' myself that it's all good"

“5AM” by Lil Baby captures a deep exploration of the struggle between material success and emotional fulfillment. The song reveals the artist’s introspective journey as he grapples with the consequences of his achievements, his relationships, and his mental state. While he celebrates his wealth, he simultaneously confronts the feelings of loneliness and discontent that can accompany such success, creating a relatable narrative many listeners can resonate with.

In the verses, Lil Baby reflects on conflicting emotions tied to his rise as an artist. The line “How you managed to get everything you want and still ain’t happy?” highlights the irony of wealth, suggesting that even after attaining material desires, true happiness remains elusive. He speaks about losing part of himself, indicating a sacrifice of personal identity in the face of fame and fortune, particularly with the line “Half of me done died, the other half alive.” This duality emphasizes the struggle for balance between his past life and current reality. The mention of his grandmother’s wisdom reinforces the notion that challenges are inherent to things worthwhile, while comments about love and betrayal illustrate the complexity of relationships that often suffer under the weight of ambition. Furthermore, his references to survival instincts and his upbringing in the hood ground his experience in a broader cultural context, where resilience is vital for success.

Overall, “5AM” serves as an honest reflection on Lil Baby’s journey through fame, illustrating how success does not equate to fulfillment. His lyrics encapsulate a blend of vulnerability and toughness, as he examines personal loss, emotional challenges, and the weight of expectations. The song effectively resonates with anyone navigating the complexities of life and ambition, pointing towards the idea that true happiness may lie beyond wealth and status.^[[1] https://genius.com/Lil-baby-5am-lyrics]