Via mastodon (alt text on the other side): https://deacon.social/@JulieB/111805263164082967
this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2024
1517 points (97.4% liked)
tumblr
3434 readers
853 users here now
Welcome to /c/tumblr, a place for all your tumblr screenshots and news.
Our Rules:
-
Keep it civil. We're all people here. Be respectful to one another.
-
No sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia or any other flavor of bigotry. I should not need to explain this one.
-
Must be tumblr related. This one is kind of a given.
-
Try not to repost anything posted within the past month. Beyond that, go for it. Not everyone is on every site all the time.
-
No unnecessary negativity. Just because you don't like a thing doesn't mean that you need to spend the entire comment section complaining about said thing. Just downvote and move on.
Sister Communities:
-
/c/[email protected] - Star Trek chat, memes and shitposts
-
/c/[email protected] - General memes
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
The "spending" isn't nearly so much the issue as "what its being spent on".
We've got billions of dollars flowing into the media market so that Libs-of-TikTok and TurningPointUSA dorks can churn out reaction videos at an industrial scale. Meanwhile, we're privatizing PBS/NPR and downsizing all the journalist departments at the national news agencies, because its more important to generate profit for stakeholders than to do the thing these organizations ostensibly exist to do.
The material that's being produced - consumer ready mass media - is being degraded thanks to the sheer volume of money that's redirected from large publicly accountable news organs to independent vanity projects with ultra-wealthy sugar daddies.
You can play the same game with the education system, the energy grid, mass transit, fucking groceries. The very price of an egg is dictated by whether or not some fuckwads at Tyson want to pocket a fatter dividend by downsizing the department that monitors for bird flu outbreaks.
What money is spent on matters quite a lot. Spending $300 a week on groceries, and $2000 a month on rent or a mortgage is a lot different than paying $2000 for a new watch, and $300 for new shoes just because they're designer. But I do agree with your point. There's a lot of money changing hands behind the scenes to the detriment of poor people as well. My comments weren't a disparagement of or dismissal of this problem, it just didn't acknowledge that because I see a lot of people who want to blame a chosen few individuals, ignore a chosen few individuals who are just as problematic for the same reasons, and never come close to recognising that the system is rigged or understanding that the system is extremely broken.