Post #4146554

2026-07-27 16:59 UTC

@aptitude@mastodon.social @anolandria@mastodon.social I think a valid grant proposal could be written to study how semantic values are different in various political environments. There has long been development on the Right, across countries, to weaponize language. They have had some of the best memeticists and semantic linguists on the payroll for as long as I’ve been alive, and I’m an Old. Witness, for example, “Right To Life”, an absolutely brilliant bit of psyop. Fucking brilliant. The Right Wing has always had the capital to create PR.

Replies (1)

@rnd@toot.cat 2026-07-28 05:24

@MissConstrue@mefi.social @aptitude@mastodon.social @anolandria@mastodon.social one that i found particularly brilliant on the left is the idea of "a worker is entitled to all of their labor's value" on its face, sounds like an obvious statement, but in practice, it requires the entire economy to be made out of individual entrepreneurs, worker co-ops and/or other structures which imply participant ownership (and even then, it would only function metaphorically, as any one worker who actually takes all of their labor's value as profit and doesn't reinvest it into maintenance / repairs / etc. will find their workspace deteriorating) p.s. and it also implies either the non-existence of taxation, or the idea that the entire public sector also belongs to the people which, to be fair, is also not a bad idea on its face, but can be used maliciously, such as during stalin's soviet union, where theft of state-owned property (which was most of property at the time) was treated as a "counterrevolutionary" crime and punished excessively harshly

Open ##4285027