Betty Sue makes $286,000 per month on Etsy. She started with nothing, and now she’s filthy rich.
Come on, man. The chances of that happening to the average person are close to zero. Stories like this give people unrealistic expectations.
Gotta keep the American dream alive.
Give people hope.
People with hope don’t revolt because they still have something to lose.
Wouldn’t want a class war brewing.
“Bread & circuses” is an ancient protocol, and hasn’t been absent from any government policy since the invention of bread, beer, etc. #TheMoreYouKnow
The irony is that far right IS actually people revolting
They’re doing it wrong I think
They rage in favor of the machine Rage Against the Machine rages against
Yo dawg…
They are in favor of printers?
It’s pretty common that angry revolutionaries are used by another rich bastard to get into power by usurping the movement. The classic “meet the new boss, same as the old boss.”
Rules for Rulers
The rulers change, but the rules do not.
CGP Grey is a treasure
The guys who they need to be revoting against are the ones telling them who to hate…
Left has similar falacies.
Not sure. I mean, yeah, the racist fascist narcissistic dementic monster doesn’t looks like the ideal candidate in a democracy, but if your intention is to fuck the system that fucked you, while giving you a feeling of superiority, it looks like a perfect match. For too long, the difference between the Democrats and Republicans was cosmetic at best, some are pragmatic but some just want to fuck the system.
Well, they certainly are revolting, I’ll give you that.
More that they are generally revolting people.
It isn’t ironic that they are revolting people, though…
The peasants are revolting… They certainly are!
-Monty Python
The chances of that happening to the average person are close to zero.
That’s the whole point. People don’t watch the news to hear “dog bites man” they watch it to hear “man bites dog”.
No one wants to watch a 2-3 hr long movie about someone’s regular Tuesday at the office they want to watch something that doesn’t happen everyday like an adventure, the perfect couple meeting, or the world ending.
Fair enough
Warhol, Kaufman, et al’d like a word.
Neither of those people were ordinary in any way tho.
As directors, etc., but sure.
To pacify you by convincing you that you could be next, as opposed to you are regularly fucked by the rich.
“Momentarily embarrassed millionaires” is the target market, yep.
People are more likely to accept an inherently flawed economic system if they thing they have any chance of “beating” it. Stories like this, although actually very rare, help reinforce that narrative.
I have had someone tell me that they’d rather live in an economic system “like we have in America” where people have a chance at rags to riches, than a system “like Germany, where the social safety net means the average person doesn’t have a chance at making it big.”
If anyone ever tells you wealthy people are intelligent, don’t believe them.
Yep, many also think they’re exceptional, and so they’ve convinced themselves they’ll be the exception.
Capitalist propaganda.
“Aspiration” to be more precise, it’s one of the ways capitalists convince large segments of the public that they’re temporarily embarrassed millionaires, who just need to pull their bootstraps up hard enough, and they will make it, like the people in the programme did (conveniently they never address things like racism, sexism, queerphobia, ableism, and other barriers that many people have to face just to survive, never mind thrive, and the fact that all of these barriers are artificial and created by people who benefit just as much from dividing society up and pitting us against each other, as they do from selling us rags-to-riches bullshit to get us to work harder to make them money).
I’ve never understood “pull yourself up by your bootstraps,” which is impossible. No matter how hard you pull, you can’t, say, jump a fence. The rich are inadvertently telling poor people that becoming rich by working hard is impossible.
I think that’s the point, just like with “a few bad apples”, the original intent of the saying has been subverted to help those in power keep the rest of us down (if you just do this impossible thing, you’ll be just like us! Why don’t you just do that impossible thing already, you useless lazy bastard? And so on. It’s part cognitive dissonance to make themselves feel like they’re “self made”, part gaslighting convincing us we’re just not trying hard enough).
I think it may be subtle way to say fuck you
Gotta keep that dream alive. Besides, why would I want to tax the rich when I’m this close to being rich myself! /s
People like to read those stories because it gives them hope it also happens to them. Media print stories that you want to read, that’s how they make money.
Other stories people like to read: how to world is going to shit (evolutionairy important to prepare to survive), what someone that’s familiar to you did (evolutionary important to be social to work together to survive), stories about how someone else did something stupid (complaining about that toghether gives yoh a sense of belonging) and stories about how a pet cat was retrieved (tickling that instinct to care for others again).
As you can see, media is looking for stories that tickle your most basic insticts and needs, because they know that’s what you will be interested in, making you read their stories so they can make more money.
Welcome to capitalism, you are the product.
Filthy capitalists, giving people what they want!
Indeed, instead of what they need. It’s like only giving sugar to your kid to eat instead of vegetables, because that’s what they “want”. Oh wait that’s actually what happens as well
That only confirms my hypothesis that leftists don’t want a system of governance, but mom and dad…
I just want the climate not to collapse.
the hell are you doing on lemmy then
First of all, the vast majority of media cares only about crafting and publishing stories that people want to read, instead of stories that people should read. Think about clickbait articles. Their purpose is to get people to read the story and therefore give them money (either by seeing ads, buying a physical magazine/newspaper, or signing up for a paid subscription), as oppised to actually informing the public about things they should know
Second, capitalism needs the working class to think that they can get rich too if they just work hard, and thus people spend their lives working because they’ve been told that they can get rich. Allow me to illustrate:
Isn’t that the case with all news? When a self-driving car kills a person it’s newsworthy but the million times it doesn’t is not. By definition the event needs to be something out of the ordinary for it to spark the interest of most people.
They use sensationalism to make things sound worse than they are.
They selectively report information, leaving out details that don’t fit their agenda.
They use misleading headlines, knowing that people often only read the headlines. They use words like “horrifying,” “catastrophic,” and “viral.”
They manipulate charts, graphs, statistics, and photographs.
Balanced reporting isn’t balanced if it pits a scientist against a conspiracy theorist.
Its Capitalist Propaganda.
Its the US version of Arbeit macht frei
Work sets you free. Something like that.
Yes, reporting on a success of an individual is practically the same thing as openning the gas valve… Jesus F. Christ !
It’s the bullshit of hard work will result in success and money. The bullshit propaganda of ‘built out of their garbage’ its so easy anyone can do it, if only you work hard enough. And if you are not a successful independently wealthy individual you didn’t work hard enough and you are to blame, not the system that’s designed to keep large segments of society poor for the benefit of the rich.
It’s the bullshit of hard work will result in success and money.
That’s funny, because it’s not the liberal leaning folks who glorify the hard labor.
Neither do conservatives, they vilify labor
Communists and fascist are the conservatives on my side of the planet though. They both appeal on “the good old times, when the world was right”. Both equally glorify physical labor and fight against the intellectualism.
If they are conservative they are not communist
Sensationalism sells.
Because people will read them?
Nah everything is a conspiracy.
Keeps the poors content
For-profit media sells whatever makes them the highest profits. (Those who won’t, make way to those who will, or remain in obscurity e.g. how many people have even heard of Ian Danskin of Innuendo Studios.)
They will sell anything it seems, with little to no regard for facts. Then they leave it to you to determine the lies of omission, while hunting for the real truth, i.e. to do the true work of journalism. But usually unpaid, painstakingly, and again you’ll never be able to share that message by virtue of being in conflict with the for-profit sources. Or if you do, who would even understand you, especially among the sheeple who either cannot and/or also will not bother to read anything at all.
Some people like Jon Stewart have railed against this for decades… but he lost, and it’s worse than ever before. Adjust your expectations accordingly. This is the world.
Massive corporations own the media along with the likes of Rupert Murdoch. If you don’t dig deeper, you will only believe what they want you to believe. The talking heads on TV are not journalists; they are paid actors reading whatever they are paid to read. Modern news is entertainment no better than the National Enquirer.
Exactly that. Which ironically doesn’t mean that everything that they say is false… but it does mean that everything that they say is suspect.
We need a billionaire to swoop in an save us. Which won’t happen, so we need a grass roots effort from the ground up to save us. Which won’t happen so we need a spaghett monster or god to save us. Which won’t happen bc e.g. the Christian God allows free will hence consequences… so we need aliens to save us. Which won’t happen bc they do not exist - that we can demonstrate.
It is a lot easier to destroy than to create, and it will require enormous efforts to maintain constant vigilance to know things in the future, in this our mis- and worse yet dis-information era.
