/politics/the-eu-and-the-us-may-be-at-odds-but-is-the-animosity-real/ Fact-based, well-reasoned perspectives from around the world Thu, 17 Jul 2025 14:17:23 +0000 hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.9.4 /politics/the-eu-and-the-us-may-be-at-odds-but-is-the-animosity-real/#comment-40407 Sun, 13 Jul 2025 07:49:04 +0000 /?p=156464#comment-40407 A lot of important truth here. At the core, industrial capitalism and democracy are incompatible. But we’re fed the lie that they are natural bedfellows. Gramsci was right: “the vast majority of people either lack the time or the cognitive capacity to pick up the implied messaging or delve into secondary information rails.” But unlike in Gramsci’s time when peasants and factory works literaly lacked both leisure time and education, the advent of the abundantly supplied consumer society — inducing habits of hedonistic indiviualism — has effectively limited and maybe even annihilated a leisured population’s “cognitive capacity.” And, yes manufacturing consent has now become a science as well as a strategic discipline for both government and business.I’m not sure it’s about “intercepting” thoughts, however. Rather, it appears to be more about preventing any kind of structured thinking from being widely shared. Let it play out freely on alternative media and then ignore it! The next step is to brand all forms of coherent thought as too complex to merit spending our “precious” consumer time on.

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