One Nation, Desensitized
This is an important perspective. The meme-ing of our cruelty. Using exaggerated images or cartoonish portrayals of our depravity is steeped in a long history of propaganda. The ubiquity of social media makes it even more common and easy to promote.
From the article:
“Attempts to sanitize and popularize state violence through mass media and popular culture go back far further than the edgelords manning the Twitter controls at ICE, of course. During the Holocaust, cartoons envisioning Jews as rats were meant to provoke loathing and disgust, linking them with disease and contagion—something to be cast out of the body of society. Supporters of Rodrigo Duterte, the Philippines’ past president, helped popularized his brutal and deadly drug war through what Buzzfeed News called ‘a never-ending meme-driven propaganda campaign.’”
Mother Jones: The Official Voice of the US Government Is Cruel, Gross, and Weird. What Is That Doing to Us?
Our Toxic War Machine
This could have been a Seymour Hersh piece from the ‘70s. I’ve said it before, The Baffler writers are next level. This kind of writing is a lost art but so vital.
From the article:
“Two months before, after ten years in which he was unable to condemn the war, Anderson finally wrote that America had ‘outlived’ its welcome and become ‘toxic’ to the Afghan people. It was time to go. His change in opinion was caused by the news that a soldier named Robert Bales had walked off his post in Kandahar and murdered sixteen Afghan civilians. In a detail Anderson failed to mention in his report on the massacre, Bales was an ordinary infantryman who was at the time providing security for a special operations base under the command of special operators. A military investigation later found that those operators were getting trashed on drugs and alcohol at the time of Bales’s massacre, with Bales drinking before starting his rampage.”
The Baffler: Pipe Hitters: America’s special operators bring the war home
Monkey See, Monkey Do
Employers don’t need much of a reason to lay off workers in the best of times. But this is a new twist that I never thought of before. The top reason given for planned layoffs in the corporate sector is “DOGE Impact.” Like, what the fuck does that even mean? So because some South African ketamine tweaker took a chainsaw to federal agencies for two months means employers have license to do the same?
From the article:
“So far this year, employers have announced plans to cut more than 800,000 jobs, the highest number since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. The so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which has eliminated thousands of federal jobs, was the number one reason cited by employers for their planned job cuts. Experts estimate that DOGE’s actions may end up costing the United States billions of dollars.
“DOGE Impact remains the leading reason for job cut announcements in 2025,’ the report says. ‘An additional 13,056 cuts have been attributed to DOGE Downstream Impact, such as the loss of funding to private non-profits and affiliated organizations.’”
Truthout: US-Based Companies Announce Record Number of Impending Layoffs
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