Donald Trump and US politics

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TheAnuhart wrote:

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Xavderion wrote:

When a meme becomes real life. Nine second video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_S97kgzfHd0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJeugIJFXas

Fuck I almost died laughing.

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Xavderion wrote:

Fuck I almost died laughing.

I just thought I'd add it as this wasn't necessarily a loony lefty v saney righty.

It's full on loony, bipartisan :D.

We'll never really know the context.

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鬼殺し wrote:

Fuck, DL. you just couldn't wait for me to finish, could you? Thanks. Not.

Sorry.

Didn't know there was more to come in the already written portions, will check back on the latter part later. It will be awhile before I have time to really look at more. Your reply so far gave me some food for thought. When I next get a large block of free time, I think I will look into his past business dealings and court cases and see what that shows in relation to his current activities and claims.

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DalaiLama wrote:

I think I will look into his past business dealings and court cases and see what that shows in relation to his current activities and claims.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkUFUkvNYAQ

Good watch. Was buried for years due to lawsuit threats. From child to his downfall in the 90s (early naughtys?). I'd like to see it continued.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

I didn't actually mean the horse's mouth; I meant more like Kripp, but political discussion. An era where one neckbeard with high-speed internet, a decent computer, a webcam and a microphone — and pretty much nothing else — has more editorial reach than Bill O'Reilly. Because better content, produced cheaper. A much more egalitarian press. In that sense, Trump's tweets are the press releases of the future.

You speak of crusade and of schism. This is the core conflict: television-based corporate-owned news versus the rise of the independent social media press. With the full realization of the Internet's potential to disseminate not just a narrative, but a comprehensive marketplace of narratives, corruption can no longer hide behind corporate-spawned propaganda with impunity. Oh, it can fight back, it can shill and try to compete in the marketplace of ideas... but it will lose.

Its defeat is inevitable.

This would bother me a lot less if it weren't for the fact that any asshole with a webcam and a microphone can make shitty youtube videos, and the fact that from my experience, the "new media" is a load of hot shite. Seriously, when I look at the kind of things posted around here, the right-wing douchebags posting "news" on youtube, it reminds me first and foremost not of actual news sites, but far more of Rush Limbaugh - crass, rude, angry, and above all dishonest. The internet is basically fundamentally opposed to the concept of quality control, and I'd like to think that even the worst cable news networks weren't shitty enough to pass around a blatantly dishonest story like "Pope Francis endorses Donald Trump". You can talk about a comprehensive marketplace of narratives, but this marketplace has already failed us pretty fucking hard, with possibly disastrous results.

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You speak of healing the rift, of reconciliation. There won't be much. Television is in its death throes. Those who made themselves dependent upon its perpetual existence will adapt or perish. The Internet is the superior technology. This does not bode well for the lesser technology. To the victor go the spoils.

You might mourn this. You might miss the days when everyone just trusted Walter Cronkite and Tom Brokaw. But you do realize that such nostalgia is roughly equivalent to mourning the loss of black-and-white movies or the audio cassette, don't you?

No, it really isn't. It's more like if they came out with technology that supplanted the DVD, that occasionally and without reason spliced a much, much shittier movie into the middle of the one you were playing. The reason people trusted Cronkite and Brokaw is because they were ostensibly trustworthy newsmen. They got into the business of journalism because they believed in what journalism could do. They had a reputation to uphold, for themselves and their parent companies, and they took that responsibility seriously. Do you think Steven Crowder takes any such responsibility seriously? Joe Rogan? Beqa Latsabidze? The fuck they do.

Do you really think the alternative media is all right-wing? Check out Sane Progressive on YouTube sometime. Or Ben Rubin or H.A. Goodman or probably a whole bunch I've yet to discover. Heck, even two of my favorites, Styxhexenhammer666 and Lionel Nation, although they have a rather clear fondness for Trump, are clearly not blindly in love; they limit their expectations. Centrists, maybe?

Yes, the mass marketplace is opposed to "quality control" and "curation" and other euphemisms for censorship. As it should be. The only control mechanism necessary is a comment section where dissenters are free to bring counter-arguments to the table. No one is saying you must trust what you're told by anyone. The beauty of the system is its self-regulation without compromise of freedom of expression.

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鬼殺し wrote:

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

The beauty of the system is its self-regulation without compromise of freedom of expression.

And here I thought La La Land was just a movie.

Talk about stretching a joke to fit. You must have been waiting days for an opportunity.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Do you really think the alternative media is all right-wing?

I'm well aware that it isn't. I used to watch The Young Turks. I got better. That doesn't fix the problem. I'm really not coming at this from a partisan perspective - although it may seem that way, because this is objectively a bigger problem on the right than on the left. But even if it weren't, bullshit from the left and bullshit from the right does not somehow cancel out. I'm pretty sure you know this.

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Yes, the mass marketplace is opposed to "quality control" and "curation" and other euphemisms for censorship. As it should be. The only control mechanism necessary is a comment section where dissenters are free to bring counter-arguments to the table. No one is saying you must trust what you're told by anyone. The beauty of the system is its self-regulation without compromise of freedom of expression.

That would be all well and good if the important, valuable, smart commentary rose to the top. If the marketplace of ideas did its job in filtering out the crap and elevating the diamonds. It doesn't. It utterly and completely fails to do so.
Just from spheres I run in, or at least used to run in, last I checked in on the whole "youtube atheism community", the most popular atheist channels on Youtube belonged, respectively, to a self-righteous MRA douchebag who shouted not-particularly-enlightening things into the camera, and a self-righteous MRA douchebag who shouted not-particularly-enlightening things into the camera and also occasionally did interesting science stuff. The really good content - your C0nc0rdances and Potholer54s and ThereminTrees - was certainly up there, but not nearly as prominent as this raging asshole.

And, as pointed out earlier, fake news (by which I mean what the term originally meant, not the bastardization that calls any news network with a hint of biased coverage "fake news") actually edged out real news on facebook in the months approaching the election. You can call "quality control" "censorship" if you want, but the fact is that if you tune into NPR, you will not find blatant falsehoods broadcast over the air. The same cannot be said about the "new media". At all. In any way.

And if it were just something like "People prefer Ancient Aliens glurge over actual history", it wouldn't be such a big deal, but we're talking about where people get their information, and what ideas people take on in their lives, and how they go about evaluating sources, and that shit matters. That last one particularly, when you consider how hard the right wing has worked to discredit any news source to the left of fox news to the point where someone on the right and someone on the left can't even have a reasonable discussion without someone jumping in and saying "Snopes/Politifact/NYT/<insert literally any source this side of conservapedia here> is biased", while simultaneously citing sources like the Daily Caller, which are bad not because they're right-wing, but because they're really, really dishonest.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Do you really think the alternative media is all right-wing?

I'm well aware that it isn't. I used to watch The Young Turks. I got better. That doesn't fix the problem. I'm really not coming at this from a partisan perspective - although it may seem that way, because this is objectively a bigger problem on the right than on the left. But even if it weren't, bullshit from the left and bullshit from the right does not somehow cancel out. I'm pretty sure you know this.

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Yes, the mass marketplace is opposed to "quality control" and "curation" and other euphemisms for censorship. As it should be. The only control mechanism necessary is a comment section where dissenters are free to bring counter-arguments to the table. No one is saying you must trust what you're told by anyone. The beauty of the system is its self-regulation without compromise of freedom of expression.

That would be all well and good if the important, valuable, smart commentary rose to the top. If the marketplace of ideas did its job in filtering out the crap and elevating the diamonds. It doesn't. It utterly and completely fails to do so.

Just from spheres I run in, or at least used to run in, last I checked in on the whole "youtube atheism community", the most popular atheist channels on Youtube belonged, respectively, to a self-righteous loudmouthed MRA douchebag who shouted not-particularly-enlightening things into the camera, and a self-righteous soft-spoken MRA douchebag who shouted not-particularly-enlightening things into the camera and also occasionally did interesting science stuff. The really good content - your C0nc0rdances and Potholer54s and ThereminTrees - was certainly up there, but not nearly as prominent as this raging asshole.

And, as pointed out earlier, fake news (by which I mean what the term originally meant, not the bastardization that calls any news network with a hint of biased coverage "fake news") actually edged out real news on facebook in the months approaching the election. You can call "quality control" "censorship" if you want, but the fact is that if you tune into NPR, you will not find blatant falsehoods broadcast over the air. The same cannot be said about the "new media". At all. In any way.

And if it were just something like "People prefer Ancient Aliens glurge over actual history", it wouldn't be such a big deal, but we're talking about where people get their information, and what ideas people take on in their lives, and how they go about evaluating sources, and that shit matters. That last one particularly, when you consider how hard the right wing has worked to discredit any news source to the left of fox news. It's gotten to the point where someone on the right and someone on the left can't even have a reasonable discussion without someone jumping in and saying "Snopes/Politifact/NYT/<insert literally any source this side of conservapedia here> is biased". Usually this is done while simultaneously citing sources like the Daily Caller or Breitbart as legitimate, which are bad not because they're right-wing, but because they're really, really dishonest. That's also a problem the "new media" is not making any better.

Breitbart is really dishonest? That'd be news to me. I scan the site regularly enough, and I think I remember catching a sum total of one outright falsehood.

Now, the Breitbart comment sections, well, that's something else. That's not moderated and it's... well, it's interesting.