US Politics |OT|

[Shadow1980]

konnichiwa said:

Gonna make it short, most people are not interested in it (anymore), the question is if the democrats would even bring it back if they are back in power, it is more a symbolic issue.  TLC became slop because viewers are more interested in the slop.  This is an issue everywhere,  Tiktok has an option to show you more STEM educational related content but people barely turn it on because they are more interested in AI Slop. Education being a mess is a Bipartisan and partly cultural issue.

That's exactly my point. That's why non-profit educational television should be a thing. Since PBS was not a commercial outlet depending on ad revenue, and instead got a good chunk of its funding from the federal government through the CPB, it could focus on things like education television for the sake of educational television. It never had to worry about ratings or ad rates or any of that and it was never subject to the whims of executives poring over the latest bit of market research in the hopes of finding the cheapest thing to produce that gets the most eyeballs. And that's a good thing. It insulates it from the network decay and general enshittification that happened with oh so many television networks. But now PBS & NPR have been sent to scramble to find revenue sources to make up the shortfall due to Trump killing off the CPB.

Not everything needs to be run on a for-profit basis!

SanAndreasX said:

When the only tool you have in your toolbox is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. The American approach to policing in a nutshell.

It's a common American approach to everything. There's this pervasive idea that violence isn't just a solution, not just the ideal solution, but the only solution. To everything. Have a problem? Hit it. Is it still a problem? You clearly weren't hitting it hard enough or often enough. Cooperation is to be enforced not through mutual trust and respect, but through fear. Fear of the omnipresent threat of outright physical force. The normalization of violence as the default method of conflict resolution begins in youth, where centuries of received "wisdom" has told people that corporal punishment is the best way to get children to comply. Pain, or the threat thereof, is simply assumed to be a sufficient incentive. Research shows that it is no more effective than other means, and can possibly mess you up mentally, but people will still argue "Well, my parents used corporal punishment to discipline me and I turned out fine!" Yeah sure, buddy. Combine that with culture of toxic individualism and we wonder why we have a country full of people who are willing to throw hands over the smallest slight, because they were taught that respect must literally be beaten into people.

Now step that mentality up to armed law enforcement and you have an entire group of people who have decided that any resistance to their authority must be met with violence, including lethal force if they feel the need to do so. And as we've seen over the years, they don't need much incentive to pull the trigger. They need even less incentive to intimidate and physically abuse people for no good reason. Again, they're like if someone gave the school bully a gun and a badge.