• @[email protected]
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    2812 hours ago

    “Public opinion exists only where there are no ideas.”- Oscar Wilde.

    I think public opinion is overrated. Too many fools in the public. Just look at MAGA idiots in US.

    • Mayor Poopington
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      3711 hours ago

      I believe public opinion is fairly left leaning. Just looks how popular Bernie and AOC are. It’s just that corporate media discourse is very good at suppressing left wing views.

      • @[email protected]
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        3411 hours ago

        You can describe socialist and communist policies and people generally love them. You just can’t use those thought terminating trigger words.

        • @[email protected]
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          109 hours ago

          That comes from dishonest politicians and media, who twist things for their benefit. They frame certain acts like they are coming for your 2 chickens, when in reality, they are coming for a rich fucks’ 100000 chickens. Such people have a vested interest in fooling the people with 2 chickens. Hence, they campaign by equating such measures with ‘scary’ words like ‘communism’. Propaganda works. These kinds of tricks are bread and butter of advertising industry. So why not politicians and media?

          • @[email protected]
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            6 hours ago

            there is technique and whole ideologies and entire categories of political theory in the left all literally dedicated to taking control off oligarchs and implementing it with varying levels of irl success.

            there is more to the left of liberals and they address a bunch of these things.

            • @[email protected]
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              -12 hours ago

              In Nordic countries, they do have something along the line. Although it ended up being democratic socialism, which is left-center instead of far-left authoritarian.

              • @[email protected]
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                2 hours ago

                nordic countries exploit countries like mine for our natural resources and human capital in a brutal way. their capitalism just succeeds in neatly hiding away the suffering abroad. their government is not leftist, and that model is not sustainable for everyone to adopt.

      • @[email protected]
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        310 hours ago

        What I mean is taking the opinion of the public seriously. I mean, people believe in a lot of weird things and that includes me. As an example, lot of people are anti-vaxxers, that doesn’t actually make vaccines dangerous. Should their opinion matter? If so, how much?

        I think the quote is meant to consider that sometimes we must ignore public opinion and do what is right. But, I agree some nuance could be lost. But sadly, the quote has no context because it is from a list of quotes Oscar Wilde wrote. Maybe, we should supply our own nuance.?

        • @[email protected]
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          9 hours ago

          Public opinion has a pretty big influence on who is getting voted into public offices. Ignore at your own peril.

        • @[email protected]
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          39 hours ago

          Only works if you’ve got the “right” politicians in place. Right now there’s a guy in power doing just that in the US and you see what it looks like.