I have been meaning to get this, and its follow on videos, out there since November. It’s pretty clear to me what Biden has to do to ensure that Donald Trump does not find his way back to the white house. I’m sure it’s not surprising that I think foreign policy is key to this. I’m biased for sure. But it really does seem clear to me that ending the forever wars isn’t just the right thing to do, but it’s also the best way for Biden to achieve political success. It’s just such low-hanging fruit politically speaking.
So how do we bring about change in 2018? It may seem like I’m doing advertising for MSNBC with today’s video, but I assure you I’m not. It’s about trying to take a chunk of media that serves a purpose and put it in front of more people. This may seem petty and small, but I really don’t think it is. In fact, I think it’s this kind of “media hacking” that can actually bring about change in the modern day.
It’s common for people to be hopeless about the way things are going. “Whatever, we’re all screwed!” is often the prevailing attitude. We’re all at the mercy of insane government institutions and the media that gave us our reality TV president. One of the central messages of this channel is that that approach is nuts. In fact, we’re in a better place than we have ever been. In the United States at least, we’ve got a 230 year old system that provides all the tools we need to change things for the better. The weird social media / news / politics ecosystem that is evolving now is tremendously disconcerting, but it also provides new opportunities. We wouldn’t have ended up with Trump without the internet. But would we have ended up with the speedy adoption of marijuana legalization, gay marriage, or the (painfully slow) fall of mass incarceration without the internet? It’s not all disaster.
If we do solve the problem of the US forever war, it’s going to be by using these new social media tools in combination with the older tools of the US political system. I have no idea what that’s going to look like. But I think the experiment that is today’s video is worth trying. Last March, when the senate was debating a resolution that could have ended the war on Yemen, I urged people to call their congresspeople. This is just another approach to the same goal.
Man, Timing can be awkward sometimes. My programming choices tend to be pretty free from influence of outside events. If something important happens, I’ll react to it, usually with a live video, but other than the 2016 US election and Brexit vote, I rarely tune my content towards things that are happening. I decided to finally address the Mueller investigation with today’s video, simply because my thinking on it matured to the point that a video became possible. I’m talking about Mueller investigation this week, because I finally thought I had something worth saying about it…
What I didn’t expect when I wrote this a couple weeks back, was it coinciding so directly with the Putin-Trump summit. And I certainly didn’t expect Trump to put in the performance he put in yesterday. I think the reaction to Trump’s mealy-mouthed and sycophantic approach to Putin is a bit over-blown, but only a bit. It was pretty pitiful to watch, and if you’re more invested in myths of US virtue and power than I am, it must have been especially painful. The reactions, both from my friends, and from social media have been pretty intense. The folks who have always been convinced that Trump is a Russian tool are now adding to their ranks. It’s kind of an odd environment to be releasing a video skeptical of the Mueller investigation into, but hey, that’s what I’m doing! Can’t wait to see how it goes…
