https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-musk-ai-feet-video-resistance-humor-rcna193861

February 28, 2025

In fact, resistance to the second Trump administration appears to be leaning more heavily on humor than it did in his first term. For now, at least, humor may be their most effective tactic.

While the "resistance" to the first Trump administration was centered on massive rallies, knitted hats, and threads about "game theory," the current one is more about biting wheatpaste posters and goofy internet humor.

 

I think these are all signs of people adopting Twitter-thinking Tweet-behaviors more and more, becoming like Elon Musk.

I think the entire population, all of We The People, lack fundamental understanding of Fox News HDTV and Twitter media ecology.

1. "My dad predicted Trump in 1985 – it's not Orwell, he warned, it's Brave New World. The ascent of Donald Trump has proved Neil Postman’s argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was right." ... "It was that the audience was being conditioned to get its information faster, in a way that was less nuanced and, of course, image-based." more in the !BackTo1985@lemm.ee Lemmy community on this subject.
2. December 31, 2024. New Years Eve 2014, more than a decade ago: "BBC's Adam Curtis On The "Contradictory Vaudeville" Of Post-Modern Politics" ... "He came originally from the avant-garde art world, and those who have studied his career, say that what Surkov has done, is to import ideas from conceptual art into the very heart of politics. His aim is to undermine peoples' perceptions of the world, so they never know what is really happening. Surkov turned Russian politics into a bewildering, constantly changing piece of theater."

 

Under Surkov governing methods of "Contradictory Vaudeville" politics, adding more mockery and absurd and surreal humor is the very root cause of how Donald Trump got into the White Houses along with Elon Musk in 2025.

It is the very failure of a society to study the works of Neil Postman from 1985 that has lead us into a situation where people have completely misunderstood what HDTV Fox News does to people, and doing more of it on social machines, adding more memes is adding more gasoline to the bonfire of goodness and comprehension.

Since year 2013, the entire population of the USA has taken humor, absurd behavior, surreal contradiction to mean intelligence and understanding, when it is entirely the opposite. Only a few hundred people in the entire nation seem to understand what 340 million people are not getting, Neil Postman's 1985 theory.

“In America, everyone is entitled to an opinion, and it is certainly useful to have a few when a pollster shows up. But these are opinions of a quite different roder from eighteenth- or nineteenth-century opinions. It is probably more accurate to call them emotions rather than opinions, which would account for the fact that they change from week to week, as the pollsters tell us. What is happening here is that television is altering the meaning of 'being informed' by creating a species of information that might properly be called disinformation. I am using this world almost in the precise sense in which it is used by spies in the CIA or KGB. Disinformation does not mean false information. It means misleading information--misplace, irrelevant, fragmented or superficial information--information that creates the illusion of knowing something but which in fact leads one away from knowing. In saying this, I do not mean to imply that television news deliberately aims to deprive Americans of a coherent, contextual understanding of their world. I mean to say that when news is packaged as entertainment, that is the inevitable result. And in saying that the television news show entertains but does not inform, I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” ― Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business, 1985 !BackTo1985@lemm.ee

 

"I am saying something far more serious than that we are being deprived of authentic information. I am saying we are losing our sense of what it means to be well informed. Ignorance is always correctable. But what shall we do if we take ignorance to be knowledge?” - 1985, Neil Postman