*Reminding my audiences that I will never "unleash unique and engaging content with (the) AI Content Generator" because I believe that critical thinkers and artists should be the eyes and voices of genuine human beings. Television and social media commercials for AI use in business, the arts, and education are lies and manipulation. AI and the surge of data centers will not serve humanity, our precious natural environment, nor democracy and freedoms well.
Today's topic is about knowing what words mean and how opportunistic propagandists can form meanings to further their own interests. Let's start with "socialism".
In his Substack article, The Truth About Socialism that Republicans and Corporate Dems Don't Want You to Hear, critical thinker and writer, Thom Hartmann, explains
As we've said in these blogs many times over, Americans are very good at simply repeating each other and their favorite podcasters. Americans lack critical thinking skills, problem-solving creativity, and the perseverance that genuine curiosity and learning requires. Therefore, they rely on research bias and personal comfort when choosing what to read, where to find the information, who to listen to, and how to analyze what is said.
As Hartmann says, we are not even sure what we dislike about socialism except that someone we do like told us to be afraid of it:
"Strip away the scare word and what’s left is far more truly and anciently American than frightening: a country where a person who works forty hours a week, no matter how complicated or how humble that work might be, can afford a home and a car, take the family on a vacation every year, put the kids through school and college, see a doctor without going bankrupt, and retire with dignity.That’s the entire “radical” program that Republicans, corporate Democrats, and our billionaire oligarchs are so flipped-out about.
Americans have wanted those things for a very long time. More than a hundred and twenty years ago, Teddy Roosevelt stood up and called it the Square Deal: a fair shot for the worker, the consumer, and the “honest businessman” against the trusts and the railroad barons who’d swallowed the economy whole.Franklin Roosevelt built the scaffolding of it with the New Deal, Lyndon Johnson finished the second story with the Great Society, and for about three decades we actually had it..."
Women could change Americans' ambivalence about socialists and socialist policies. Women experientially know what giving, nurturing, helping, sharing, and cooperating truly means. We've been taught from childhood to be nurturers, doers, empaths, and givers.
And even though the men in our churches and offices and sport clubs and schools tried to push us toward believing that givers are weak in character and takers are strong in character, we learned early that these were lies. Many of us played along to protect ourselves. Many of us raised voices of defiance and resistance and faced cruel consequences. But we persisted because women are strong. And strength does not always culminate in a prize.
Perhaps -- the new democratic socialist movement that many Democratic and Independent voters are drawn to will not outlast the Right Wing Fascist onslaught. But let us remember at least one important fact from our history -- that movements are temporary but the leaders and impacts are both immediate and lasting. Look at the periodic surges in Black resistance movements. Black resistance has outlasted every white male-dominated movement since 1865. What matters most is whether the movement has truth in it.
The Republican party has no interest in building a democratic society, much in less in building a society that empowers women, minorities, diversity, empathy, service, unions, workers, and voters. The party must by necessity demonize the term "socialist" and those who want to build a democracy on policies and institutions that serve The People.
#Resistance