Steaming Ass

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  • Huh, I thought I replied to this the other day, but it has disappeared. Anyway, I agree that factionalism has become destructive.

    As for sentences being contradictory, how so? I don't use Fox News. That doesn't imply that I don't use other news sources.

  • I've lost the ability to get into the Halloween spirit, but I still can admire those who do.

  • @Bill said:
    As for sentences being contradictory, how so? I don't use Fox News. That doesn't imply that I don't use other news sources.

    As written. If you honestly don't know what happens at Fox News then you don't know what the media is doing. It's among the biggest outlets, and more than any other it sets the national conversation.

    I agree that factionalism has become destructive.

    The most destructive form of factionalism in the US is currently white nationalism.

  • @fenomas said:

    @Bill said:
    As for sentences being contradictory, how so? I don't use Fox News. That doesn't imply that I don't use other news sources.

    As written. If you honestly don't know what happens at Fox News then you don't know what the media is doing. It's among the biggest outlets, and more than any other it sets the national conversation.

    I don't watch Fox News. It's my understanding that The New York Times sets the national conversation.

    I agree that factionalism has become destructive.

    The most destructive form of factionalism in the US is currently white nationalism.

    Come off it. White nationalism is a small force in the US. Even Black Lives Matter is a bigger force.

  • White nationalists are a lot better organized than BLM.

  • edited October 2017

    @Bill said:
    I don't watch Fox News. It's my understanding that The New York Times sets the national conversation.

    Fox News is the most-watched cable channel, let alone news channel. The sitting president tweets about it daily, talk shows harp nightly about its latest capers. NYT is New York's second-largest newspaper.

    Come off it. White nationalism is a small force in the US.

    The FBI disagrees, as does noted leftist rag Military Times.

  • @Clme said:
    White nationalists are a lot better organized than BLM.

    BLM is more a hashtag than an organization. I mean, there's an organization, but if Bill can name three prominent members I'll eat my spare tire, rim and all, as the man says.

    • If they are inclined to terrorism, a few white nationalists can do a lot of damage. In terms of political power, though, they are a small force.
    • The New York Times is the newspaper read by all the other journalists, including television journalists.
    • Disparate groups get lumped together as "white nationalists." They believe different things, and none of them is large.
  • @Bill said:

    • If they are inclined to terrorism, a few white nationalists can do a lot of damage. In terms of political power, though, they are a small force.

    You haven't been paying attention, there's a fair argument that they swung the election. Whatever else, Trump's made it clear that he doesn't feel comfortable condemning them without asterisks.

  • It was a close election. There are fair arguments that lots of different things swung the election including Hillary not being black, the terrorist attacks on cops just before the election, and the Black Lives Matter riots.

  • And the NYT publishing a 10-12 day barrage of "her emails" articles, yeah. Good point, all is in doubt, so nothing is true. Trump could even have a foreign policy! Only God can know!

  • @fenomas said:
    Fox News is the most-watched cable channel, let alone news channel.

    That's the most depressing/discouraging thing I've read in a very long time.

  • @Rufus said:
    That's the most depressing/discouraging thing I've read in a very long time.

    Worry not, Fox isn't as influential as you think. My esteemed colleague, who's never seen it and has no idea what it does, will explain why.

  • I never said Fox wasn't influential. I said it didn't set the agenda. The New York Times does, (and has for generations).

  • edited October 2017

    What you said was that you had an informed opinion about mainstream US media and that you have no idea what Fox is or does. I told you those claims are contradictory.

    Honestly, think this through for a minute. The Republican party, which Fox News openly supports, currently controls the presidency, both houses of congress, 34 governorships and 32 legislatures. The Democrats currently control zip. If your claim that mainstream media (defined so as to exclude Fox for whatever reason) supports the Democrats, then it directly follows that Fox News is more influential than all other mainstream media combined, by definition.

  • edited October 2017

    Fox News may or may not drive American agenda and policy, but they cultivate the American culture with false narratives and a belief system not shared by the majority of Americans. They create a "squeaky wheel" of motivated people with cocked-up beliefs and poor critical thinking skills; that get people like Donald Trump elected.

  • Fox News is one news provider. Let us say, for the sake of discussion, that they are total Republican shills. I honestly have no idea whether or not they are.

    Now, whatever the position of Fox News, I can go to Google News and see the headlines collected from a whole bunch of news sources. I can see that the coverage leans Democratic intensely. The position of Fox News does not change that fact.

    If you want some actual numbers, look at this Pew study. Take a look at the sixth graph from the top, a pie graph stating that the coverage of Trump was four times negative to positive.

  • @Bill said:
    Take a look at the sixth graph from the top, a pie graph stating that the coverage of Trump was four times negative to positive.

    Where did you get the idea that unbiased coverage of Trump would be 50% positive? His newsworthy activities of late amount to floating the idea of revoking broadcasting license of unfriendly news networks, utter banalities about the NFL, and picking a twitter fight with a war widow. Coverage that's critical of such things doesn't "lean Democratic", it's just critical of Trump.

  • If you look at the way the press has been spinning things, it's clearly partisan. The bias used to be subtle most of the time, but with Trump the press is openly hostile. And by "Trump" I also mean his advisors, appointees, and adult family.

    I started purposefully paying attention to the political news, as opposed to just casually picking things up, when I was a senior in high school, so that would be 1982-1983. Since then, I've tried to keep at least half an eye on it. I have never seen anything like this state of affairs before.

  • edited October 2017

    I have to disagree. Again... Fox News. Also, the internet news sources that many members of the extreme right have been migrating to since Fox fired O'Reilly for 'all those lying liberal bitches that Soros hired' are all still running Hillary stories every single day.

    But even for the other TV sources... how else can they cover Trump being openly hostile to the press every single time he appears in public? By saying "Oh, the dear leader has made a valid criticism of us reporting what he says. We're all horrible. Please continue to mock our children and take away our licenses."

    I'm sorry to disappoint, but this is really a case of the actual facts being anti-Trump. If it were possible to keep his ass off of Twitter for a few weeks maybe things would calm down in the news and start to look better for him as people shifted to policy disagreements (or lack of policy guidance other than broad stroke speech declarations, as it were). But instead he keeps tweeting, and doing interviews on Fox News that are honestly nothing more than televised blowjobs-for-his-ego. (Seriously, Lou Dobbs and Sean Hannity couldn't make him cum faster if they stuck a finger in his ass).

    Please note I'm particularly biased at the moment since this two-faced crap-spewing liar has succeeded in cutting medicaid in a way that will directly impact my son (and, by extension, me) in a year or two.

  • edited October 2017

    @Bill said:
    I started purposefully paying attention to the political news, as opposed to just casually picking things up, when I was a senior in high school, so that would be 1982-1983. Since then, I've tried to keep at least half an eye on it. I have never seen anything like this state of affairs before.

    You're repeating yourself and ignoring everything said to you. There's never been coverage like this before because there's never been a president like this before. When he claims that stock market gains have probably wiped out our national debt, or says it's disgusting how the press "can write whatever they want", or when he says plainly untrue things about easily-confirmed subjects like tax and crime rates, over and over, week in and week out, how do you think an unbiased press should report those things positively? What silver lining is there to the president personally bickering with a war widow that the media is hiding from us?

    Honestly, don't bottle out here. Take a minute, work out what your answer to that question is, and post it. Don't tell yourself it's rhetorical and type out another post about how closely you follow the political news while managing to avoid knowing anything about the only organization the president watches or gives interviews to.

  • I hope the liberal media reports this Manafort thing in a way that's 50% positive to Trump.

  • We having members of the press acting overtly partisan. That is new. They have been partisan for decades, at least, but this is the first time they haven't bothered being subtle about it.

    By the way, the war widow thing was spun up by the press as another chance to attack Trump. Everything that the press says now has to be read carefully, because the arrangement of the presentation and the words used are chosen to make Trump look as bad as possible. Near the end of the article they might give the most relevant facts, but by then most readers have already moved on.

    You keep bringing up Fox News. So what? So Trump has one news organization on his side. That is irrelevant to what I've been saying. Eight out of nine news organizations are saying he's a fascist or Nazi.

  • edited October 2017

    Take a look at how the BBC and Yahoo present essentially the same facts. They are both presented in an anti-Trump way, but one is spun much more negatively than the other.

    Edit: This is relevant, and spun the other way.

    Edit: Today's Pat Buchanan column is of interest.

  • @Bill said:
    We having members of the press acting overtly partisan. That is new. They have been partisan for decades, at least, but this is the first time they haven't bothered being subtle about it.

    By the way, the war widow thing was spun up by the press as another chance to attack Trump. Everything that the press says now has to be read carefully, because the arrangement of the presentation and the words used are chosen to make Trump look as bad as possible.

    Those are all extremely subjective claims that somebody biased to like Trump would readily believe. When the doubting part of your mind asks the credulous part why it believes them, what is your answer? What evidence is there for them that would persuade somebody who doesn't already feel a strong gut instinct that they're true?

    Take a look at how the BBC and Yahoo present essentially the same facts. They are both presented in an anti-Trump way, but one is spun much more negatively than the other.

    They're articles about Trump aides being indicted - there is no "pro-Trump" way to present them. One is more sensationalist, sure, but considering it's sitting next to a headline about supermodels bringing back the scrunchy, I don't think that's a sign of any conspiracies.

    Edit: This is relevant, and spun the other way.

    It's also an opinion column by not-a-journalist.

    PS: you bottled it.

  • PPS: linking a column subheaded "The Left Unhinged" in your post about how the media is too liberal was a touch of class.

  • edited November 2017

    Thank you. I consider it an acknowledgement that the other side isn't free from bias. However, the two sides are nowhere near equal in size. The press is overwhelmingly liberal or progressive.

    By the way, your premise is incorrect. I'm not biased to like Trump. I don't have any particularly strong feelings about Trump. Remember, I'm the guy who stated (seriously) that he would support Carrot Top for president if he thought Carrot Top would control immigration. I'm not kidding when I say that I believe immigration is now an existential issue for the United States. This is it. If immigration doesn't get sharply reduced in the next few years, the United States will cease to exist in everything but name. The sole issue (except for nuclear war) on which I'm judging my support of Trump is immigration. I suggest you take any bias you detect in me in favor of Trump as evidence of your own anti-Trump bias.

    As for the BBC and Yahoo articles I linked, if they were neutral, they would have put right at the start of articles the information that the charges to Manafort were unrelated to the Trump campaign and to Papadopoulos were for lying. As it is, the BBC at least puts the facts in the middle. Yahoo, on the other hand, does its best to obfuscate the facts without actually lying.

  • @Bill said:
    By the way, your premise is incorrect. I'm not biased to like Trump.

    I didn't say you were biased to like Trump, because that would be speculating about information I don't have. I said that you made a bunch of claims that a person biased to like Trump would be credulous about - which is plainly true - and asked how you had convinced yourself that you're not just being credulous about them, and you didn't answer.

    I mean, you can tell yourself (and, less importantly, us) that you're not a duck all you like, but if you go around quacking all the time, and you're not willing to self-examine enough to figure out why, then the whole exercise is just a charade, isn't it?

  • @fenomas said:
    When I see each latest Trump idiocy, I sometimes wonder if Bill is still into him, and if so how he rationalizes it.

    The above quote was the start of this discussion. I have now told you several times over the last year-and-a- half why I supported Trump in the election. Calling me "into" Trump is something of a false premise. I supported Trump because he was the only candidate from the original vast slate who recognized the immigration problem.

    If Trump does something effective about immigration, I'll continue to support him. If he doesn't, I won't. It is as simple as that. So far, immigration has been reduced. Trump has three more years to get it down even farther.

    To be clear, if three years from now we are in a war with Iran, abortion is banned, Medicaid is eliminated, inner cities across the nation are rioting, and chihuahua dogs have been exterminated--but immigration has been rolled back to a hundred-thousand STEM doctorate-holders per year--I will consider it a worthwhile trade.

    Note well: I don't think any of those bad things are going to happen, although there might be some chance of a war with Iran. I wouldn't like it if any of them did happen. But I consider immigration now to be the number one issue, more important than war and peace.

    Do you see that there is no rationalization in my support of Trump? I don't have to like the man. I don't have to respect the man. I don't have to support any of his policies but one. If he gets immigration right, that is what matters to me.

    As for anything to do with the political proclivities of the press, it has been obvious for decades. My judgment of that issue was reached a long time ago.

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