the_dunk_tank

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It's the dunk tank.

This is where you come to post big-brained hot takes by chuds, libs, or even fellow leftists, and tear them to itty-bitty pieces with precision dunkstrikes.

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HEY ASSHOLE! WHO WRITES THE GODDAMN LAWS!!! WHO VOTES ON THE GODDAMN LAWS!!! WHO ENFORCES THE GODDAMN LAWS!!! (hexbear.net)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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https://fxtwitter.com/NBCPolitics/status/1848865896967901410

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[–] [email protected] 54 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Among many good points that Adam Johnson citations-needed makes, I appreciate his repeated reminders that politicians aren't hapless captives of public opinion. They're capable of steering public opinion and do so on the daily (see the characterization of Hamas as baby-beheading sadists, or college protestors as Sieg-Heiling antisemites) just rarely to the benefit of anything good.

In a rare dub Joe Biden went on TV and forced Obama into supporting gay marriage. And wouldn't you know it, that worked out pretty well for them and the Democrats in the long run

[–] [email protected] 31 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I like the way Lenin refers to it as "so-called public opinion"

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

What text does he say that in?

[–] [email protected] 18 points 3 weeks ago

speech to the first comintern

“Freedom of the press” is another of the principal slogans of “pure democracy”. And here, too, the workers know — and socialists everywhere have admitted it millions of times — that this freedom is a deception while the best printing presses and the biggest stocks of paper are appropriated by the capitalists and while capitalist rule over the press remains, a rule that is manifested throughout the world all the more strikingly, sharply, and cynically, the more democracy and the republican system are developed, as in America for example.

The first thing to do to win real equality and genuine democracy for the working people, for the workers and peasants, is to deprive capital of the possibility of hiring writers, buying up publishing houses, and hiring newspapers. And to do that the capitalists and exploiters have to be overthrown and their resistance suppressed.

The capitalists have always used the term ‘freedom’ to mean freedom for the rich to get richer and for the workers to starve to death.

In capitalist usage, freedom of the press means freedom of the rich to bribe the press, freedom to use their wealth to shape and fabricate so-called public opinion.

In this respect, too, the defenders of ‘pure democracy’ prove to be defenders of an utterly foul and venal system that gives the rich control over the mass media. They prove to be deceivers of the people who, with the aid of plausible, fine-sounding, but thoroughly false phrases, divert them from the concrete historical task of liberating the press from capitalist enslavement.

—Lenin, Congress of the First Comintern