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zk
ParticipantA fine article from the new York times on the alternate universe that viewers of right – wing media inhabit.
How can you have an effective democracy if the truth doesn’t matter? You can’t. Right wing media have made truth not matter.
Honestly, I think I’m ahead of the curve on this one. I don’t see a lot of agreement with my sentiment that right-wing media are destroying our country. I see significant agreement that they’re full of shit. But not much agreement that they’re destroying our country. I think that at some point, possibly before long, there will be more agreement on that.
Unfortunately, I think that agreement will only be among those who haven’t fallen for it, and that that won’t help much.
Participant[quote=FlyerInHi]
You’re blaming the right wing media for ruining the country. Why not blame the people who consume the media. Don’t they bear responsibility? [/quote]
Everyone bears some responsibility for their choices. But I don’t think the choices that Rufus makes are informed in the way that you think they are. Which causes you to think that he’s making such stupid choices that he should be cast off and left to fend for himself.
You and I seem to disagree whether it’s ok or fair or moral to take somebody who makes stupid choices (that don’t intentionally hurt someone else) and leave them for dead/sick/poor . Not sure we’ll ever agree on that.
So let’s focus on why Rufus is making the choices he makes. Do you agree that, if we could get Rufus to make better choices and become a more productive member of society, we’d all be better off? If so, why wouldn’t we try to do that?
Most of us depend on the media in some way. Virtually anybody who wants to stay informed and make informed decisions relies on the media. Finding out for yourself what’s happening in the world is next to impossible. What if it turned out that the NYT and WAPO have been lying to us this whole time? What if they were nothing more than propagandists who want us to vote for unions and big government? Now, Brian, you and I might have a couple of advantages that allow us to see that fox is propaganda and NYT is not. We’re intelligent and, probably due largely to the environment in which we were raised, we’re educated and we pay attention. We didn’t earn our brains or our environment. Those aren’t choices we made. We had them when we were born. Another reason that we believe the NYT and not fox is that we aren’t surrounded by people who believe fox and think NYT is fake news. Which, at this point in our lives, might be a choice. But how we grew up mostly wasn’t.
So, you add up what we were given, and chances were always that we were going to lean towards the NYT and disbelieve fox. Key word being “given.” If you were given less brains, a family that didn’t emphasize education, a culture that told you guns were great, liberals are pansies, NYT is fake news, and fox is the only station to watch, how do you think you’d have turned out? Heck, even if you were smart, there’s less chance of you coming out of that environment educated and somewhat aware of what’s really happening.
To expect people like that to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and escape their poverty without any help or education is to be every bit as mean and selfish as republicans. The only difference is which disadvantaged group you want to remain disenfranchised.
And one of the chief disadvantages that faces Rufus’s demographic is the fact that they’re being disinformed by right-wing media.
We’ve had this argument before. This exact same one. Which is why I kinda rushed through writing this post. I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree.
Participant[quote=FlyerInHi]ZK, i think we are a country of very smart people at the top, but mostly populated by dumb people. That wasn’t a problem in decades past because the world population was uneducated. It’s a problem now because China has more middle class than we have people. Then India, then Latin America, then Africa.
We keep our people dumb at our own peril. Absent government intervention, pure economics and pure meritocracy require that smart people live better than dumber ones. Simple as that.[/quote]
When you say “smart” and “dumb,” I’m deducing that you mean “educated” and “uneducated.”
If I’m wrong about that, you can disregard the rest of this post.
So how do you propose to educate the uneducated? If your past statements are any indication, you’d like to just leave them behind. That doesn’t work, in my opinion, for a couple reasons. Number one, we end up paying tons of money to support them, and our economy is worse off. Number two, they vote.
And which uneducated do you mean? While there are lot of uneducated rubes supporting Pinocchio L’orange and the craven republican congressmen who won’t stand up to him, there are plenty of college-educated people who have been manipulated into believing what fox propaganda is selling. So just a college education doesn’t necessarily work.
How do you get a college-educated, intelligent person who swallows fox propaganda whole to come around to seeing that it’s propaganda? How do you get an uneducated but intelligent person to come around? How do you get an unintelligent person to come around?
I don’t know the answers to these questions. I’m not sure there are viable answers to these questions. I’m not sure the lack of answers to those questions won’t lead to the end of the American position of leadership in the world, and to the end of American prosperity.
ParticipantIt’s even worse than I thought. Conservative ownership influencing local news. Here’s Jon Oliver’s piece on it:
So it looks like many local news outlets, and not just the ones in president pinocchio country, are getting biased news.
Participant[quote=no_such_reality]
I don’t know what they see. I get the irony, but really, this is just non-story. That’s the problem. Bang, bang, bang, beat the trite drum.I get it, he’s vain, a bully, fake newsies and for ___ sake can someone on his staff please slap the twitter feed out of his hand.
The media is harping on it, all the left leaning facebook groups and jumping and howling, but it’s just trite crap.
Yes, IMO he’s shaping up to be a miserable President and even worse representation of humanity, but frankly the way his opponents behave is leaving little assurance that they’ll be any better other than they won’t be a 70+ year old apparent bigot. It’d just be a different more PC tyranny.[/quote]
First of all, to say that it’s a non-story is to be willing to ignore further evidence that our president has flawed character, and to be willing to overlook his astounding hypocrisy. That kind of willful ignorance belongs in North Korea. Is it the scandal of the century? No. Is it a story? Of course it is.
But there’s also this: Left-leaning facebook groups are jumping and howling. Not the NYT or WAPO. They reported it in a straightforward manner, and WAPO connected it to President Dunning-Kruger’s long-established pattern of exaggerating his own merits. If Clinton were president and she pulled this stunt, it would be fox propaganda that would be jumping and howling. It would be the scandal of the century. And they sure as hell wouldn’t have ended their article with this, as they did with their article on president dipshit:
Ironically, though, Donald Trump has appeared on 14 bona fide Time magazine covers since 1989.
People think that fox propaganda is news. That’s the problem. That’s how we ended up with president snowflake, crying every time somebody tells the truth about him. And that’s how we’re going to end up poorer, sicker, weaker, and with less standing in the world. People believing the bullshit they hear on fox propaganda and voting based on what they’ve been manipulated and disinformed to believe.
ParticipantNestled in this story
about republicans being in danger of becoming the party of putin is this little nugget:
Behind their neglect are changing Republican voter opinions, which are becoming alarmingly more pro-Russian. According to a Morning Consult-Politico poll conducted in May, 49 percent of Republican voters consider Russia to be either an ally or friendly. Only 12 percent consider it an enemy. In 2015, only 12 percent of Republicans held a favorable view of Russian President Vladimir Putin, according to Gallup. As of February, that figure had jumped to 32 percent.
Honestly, does anybody think those numbers would be like that if it weren’t for fox propaganda? Does anyone think that if Hillary played the same cards that con man don has played regarding Russia that fox propaganda would’ve reported it the same? And that those numbers would look like that?
Right wingers are being taken for a ride, and they have no idea.
Participant[quote=XBoxBoy][quote=zk]I’m genuinely stumped as to why republicans are voting for this, and I’m extremely curious about it, and I hope somebody out there can enlighten me.[/quote]
The Republicans have got themselves in a bind on this one. It was easy and convenient when they were not in power to bad mouth Obamacare. It was even easier to rally their supporters with talk about how Obamacare was a mess, how they would repeal it, etc.
But now the tables have turned and the Republicans are in power and they have a simple choice. 1) Repeal and/or replace Obamacare or 2) Look incompetent and stupid for railing against a bad policy, promising to change it but then not doing so.
Obviously option 2 is a bad choice. You never want to look incompetent and stupid when you are in power.
Which leaves us with option 1, repeal and/or replace Obamacare. If they simply repeal Obamacare that’s going to be unpopular because many who make up their base are actively enjoying the benefits of Obamacare and if you take that away, that will be unpopular.
If you want to replace Obamacare, then you probably want to try and fix the problems in it. And that’s where things get really problematic. There are two issues with that. First are the ideological issues. Some Republicans are angry that the govt is now giving payments to pay for poor people’s health care. Ending that doesn’t play well in the news.
The second problem is that Obamacare forces people to buy health care. Which wouldn’t be so bad except in case you hadn’t noticed, health care costs have been climbing worse than housing costs in 2004. (Maybe that’s not technically correct, but you get the idea)
So the Republicans need to figure out a way to limit the cost of health care. And that is a huge issue that there is no good answer to.
So here’s the deal: The Republicans promised everyone they would repeal Obamacare and replace it with a great program that everyone would love. They used this repeatedly during their campaigning. Now they are in power they need to deliver on this promise. But there is no good way to do this.
So why vote? Well, they sort of have to. It’s like the political world has double dared them. But note that they are all scrambling for cover as they prepare to vote. No one wants to own responsibility for whatever gets passed.
The bottom line is that the Republicans will probably be hurt by the vote, but they’ll be hurt even more if they don’t vote. It’s a choice of the lesser of two evils.[/quote]
I’ll buy that. Thanks.
I get that there’s no answer to the health care problem that would make republicans look good (or even not bad). But why wouldn’t it be a less-bad option than voting for the current bill to write a bill that, while not perfect or even good, at least eschews huge tax cuts for the rich while at the same time not screwing quite so many poor people? I mean, are they really that beholden to rich donors that they’d rather look completely heartless while pissing off almost the entire country than piss off their rich donors? That’s not a rhetorical question. Maybe they’re not that beholden. I don’t know. I’m asking. Maybe I’m missing something.
Participant[quote=FlyerInHi]
It’s up to honorable people to shame them into submission.
[/quote]
You can’t shame somebody who thinks they’re right. And even if you could, I don’t think submission would be the result.
Participant[quote=spdrun]I support him, because after he’s done (if we survive without nuclear holocaust), he’ll make the GOP unelectable for the next 20 years.[/quote]
Don’t we wish. As long as they have fox propaganda and the rest of the right-wing propaganda machine, they’ll be fine. Seriously, if they can get this buffoon elected, they can get somebody like Kasich elected without breaking a sweat, even post-trump.
ParticipantI initially wanted to keep a running tab here on this thread of the ridiculous/stupid/ignorant/dangerous/bad-for-the-country/insane/foolish/unfathomable/selfish/infantile/paranoid/immoral/hypocritical things that con man don was doing – or trying to do – as president. You know, for posterity. So people could look back and remember just what it was like in this crazy time and just how consistently, terrifically horrible con man don was as president. I realized a day or two after he took office that I wouldn’t have time to do that. And it’s accelerated since then.
If anybody here has the ‘nads to admit that they still support our president, I’d be very curious to hear why.
Participant[quote=zk][quote=FlyerInHi] I do like his $1 trillion infrastructure spending, however.[/quote]
I do, too, depending on how it’s done.
If taxpayers pay private contractors, and those private contractors make $500 million in profits and pay minimum wage to all the workers, that won’t be so good.
If we’re able to pay a living wage to all the workers, that would put a lot more money into the economy (while fixing the infrastructure).[/quote]
Just as I suspected. Well, no, not exactly. Worse than I suspected:
Epic stupidity.
Participant[quote=FlyerInHi][quote=zk]Here’s another good article.
“Anti-science kookery.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/whys-gop-only-science-denying-party-on-earth.html
[/quote]Interesting that the article was written years before Trump. Republicans don’t just get to blame Trump. They bear responsibility for enabling an anti-science, anti-education culture.[/quote]
Concur. It’s even worse that the congressional republicans probably don’t actually believe that climate change isn’t human-caused. They pretend to believe that, and they try to sell it to their constituents, but they probably know better.
Con man don, on the other hand…
When he was running for president, before I knew much about him, I said to a friend, “this guy really has his finger on the pulse of the manipulated right wingers.” My friend said, “no, he is one of the manipulated right wingers.” It turns out my friend was right. I think trump actually believes the crap he reads on breitbart. I know, he used to be moderate to liberal on a few issues. He’s easily influenced, though. He is notorious for being susceptible to the sales pitch of the last person to talk to him. And with the king of the alt-right in the next office whispering in his ear all the time and with his frequent reading of breitbart articles and, astoundingly, infowars articles, he’s gone full-tilt, brainwashed, batshit-crazy alt-right.
And, as long as fox propaganda and the rest of the right-wing media are putting a positive spin on everything he does, the manipulated right wingers will continue to support him.
ParticipantHere’s another good article.
“Anti-science kookery.”
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/09/whys-gop-only-science-denying-party-on-earth.html
ParticipantI recommend this article, entitled, “How G.O.P. Leaders Came to View Climate Change as Fake Science”
Also, I would say, how G.O.P. followers came to that same conclusion.
With the help of a small army of oil-industry-funded academics like Wei-Hock Soon of Harvard Smithsonian and think tanks like the Competitive Enterprise Institute, [conservative activists] had been working to discredit academics and government climate change scientists.”
With think tanks and Harvard academics obfuscating the matter, it shouldn’t be hard to convince those who are already inclined to want to believe what republicans tell them – and, maybe more importantly, who are already strongly averse to anything that any liberals espouse – that climate change isn’t real. Especially those who aren’t climate scientists.
You (ucodegen)aren’t doing any original research. And neither am I. And I would wager that most or all of your charts and graphs and ideas originated with these oil-industry-funded academics.
If the consensus among scientists is that humans are causing climate change, and most of the resistance to that idea is political (from oil-industry-funded politicians and from republican loyalists, including right-wing media) and monetary (from the oil industry and their lackey academics), then it seems pretty clear to me where the truth lies.
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