When the state posts a “meme,” it is testing your right to reality

If an official account can darken a face, rearrange features, add tears, and then shrug, “just a meme,” it is not joking. It is rehearsing domination through images, converting power-in-common into power-over by humiliating a citizen in public. @The initial asymmetry between agent and patient in interaction generates a 'power-over' relation that is the principal occasion for violence, understood as the diminution or destruction of the other’s power-to-act and, at its extreme, the annihilation of self-respect through humiliation.

What collapses next is not only taste, but attestation: the fragile trust by which we say, “this happened,” and “this is who did it.” Suspicion then becomes permanent, and the only answer is competing testimony, not a shared world. @Attestation is intrinsically fragile and vulnerable because it operates without ultimate foundations, is fragmented by the polysemy and contingency of the question ‘who?’, and is permanently exposed to suspicion, which can only ever be answered by a more credible counter‑attestation, just as true testimony has no recourse against false testimony except another testimony judged more reliable.

A democracy survives conflict, but not the sabotage of the very evidence by which conflict stays answerable.