The all-encompassing nature of mass media is relatively new to the human experience. By and large, humans throughout history have only been immersed in the “news” of their family and their neighbors. News, in the regional, national, and global sense, was a triviality ridden into town on the back of a camel, a donkey, or a horse. It wasn’t until the 19th century that reliable, near-real-time national media coverage was normalized through national daily newspapers. It wasn’t until the mid-20th century that the nation, and later the world, was shrunk down and neatly packaged in a tiny box in every family’s living room. That growing scope of awareness, combined with the growth of media titans created what is now known as the “mainstream media.”
Run aground
These days, the power of the mainstream media wanes. Internet-based alternatives have exposed people to stories that the mainstream media deemed “unfit to print.” Gaffe after gaffe has eroded the trust society once had in the mainstream media. However, Rome didn’t fall in a day, nor will the mainstream media. Their power to craft narratives still exists, and is still quite powerful.
What power does the media hold over society and voters?
There are essentially two theories about the level of power the media holds over their customers. The Agenda-Setting Theory asserts that media can set the cultural agenda. They can’t control what people think, but they can control what people think about. For any observant consumer of media, this is obvious. It’s quite curious how Confederate statues that have been standing for a century are all of a sudden a “crisis.” People in the real world are talking about racism because the media has been hammering on the “alt-right nazis” incessantly for months. On the other hand, hardly anybody is talking about the looming debt ceiling issue? Of course, once the Nazi crisis subsides, the debt ceiling will become front-page news, and Trump will be “leading from behind” and “holding the American people hostage” and a dozen other focus group tested insults with no substance.
That leads into the second theory, the Framing Theory, which asserts that media can alter people’s opinions on topics by “framing” the issue in a way that lends toward one conclusion. In the past, subtle framing was required. The media would put a “thumb on the scale.” These days, the “mask has slipped,” and media sets a whole body-positive intersectional feminist on the Progressive side of the scale. Framing can work in many ways, but two of them are the favorites of mainstream media outlets. “Telegraphing” is the use of value biased terms and phrases in the description of an issue, subtly (or not so subtly) telling consumers who the “good guys” and the “bad guys” are.
For example, let’s contrast CNN’s coverage of Trump’s struggles getting the wall funded with the Telegraph’s coverage:
Two articles from two news services. Both critical of Trump. CNN sows dissent between GOP leadership and Trump. The Telegraph highlights Trump’s lack of leadership on getting the wall built. CNN’s framing of the issue furthers their narrative that “even the right-wingers think Trump’s unhinged.” It fuels the “fractures within the party” narrative that is tied to the “Trump’s unhinged” one.
In contrast, The Telegraph is pushing the narrative that Trump is a loose cannon, and can’t actually get anything done. The “impotent president” narrative is disfavored in US media right now (because he needs to be seen as a potent purveyor of racism given the crisis du jour), but in the UK media, the “impotent president” narrative is king.
Media is showing that the Framing Theory is correct. They can not only set the agenda, but they can also influence the beliefs of their consumers. People are seeing Nazis under their bed, and the media are the ones who are fueling this hallucination.
Narrative Crafting Tactic #1: “Scientific” “Credibility” through “Experts” and “Studies”
Mad Scientist
Many people can see right through the transparent BS of a commentator spewing their unsupported opinions. Only the true believers are swayed by an emotional screed (pathos… speech 101). However, a well-sourced and dispassionately asserted scientific truth is compelling to a neutral audience (logos… again, speech 101). The media have leveraged this to the utmost, using “experts” and “studies” to push their social and political goals in a way that compels the neutral audience. As libertarians, we tend to be skeptical of the BS social science journalism that ends up filling a 30 second segment at the end of the nightly news. However, the disease is much more widespread than that.
Let’s do a case study. I’ve pulled a random health article from CNN.com.
Babies are being put to sleep unsafely according to a STUDY!!!!!
(CNN)Despite a 23-year campaign urging that babies be put to bed on their backs, only 43.7% of US mothers report that they both intend to use this method and actually do so all the time, according to a new study.
This sounds like an epidemic!!! Well, let’s go to the study:
RESULTS: Of the 3297 mothers, 77.3% reported they usually placed their infants in the supine position for sleep
Wait, what?? What’s the difference here? Well, the devil is in the details.
Only 43.7% of mothers reported that they both intended to and then actually placed their infants exclusively supine.
So, this article is based on the fact that mothers only usually placed babies on their back, but didn’t always do so. In order to warrant an article in the health section of an esteemed news outlet like CNN, the risk from babies sleeping on their stomachs must be enormous!
There were about 3,700 sudden unexpected infant deaths in the US in 2015, according to the CDC. SIDS account for 1,600 of those while 1,200 are due to unknown causes and 900 were due to accidental suffocation and strangulation while in bed.
Douchebag Frat Bro and the Federal Reserve Chairman
1600 babies per year (39.4 deaths per 100,000 live births) isn’t a lot, and it’s not clear how many of those babies would have survived if they slept on their back (and how many of those SIDS babies were sleeping on their back). See, SIDS is not particularly well understood, so it’s quite unclear how safe or unsafe babies are by sleeping on their backs. Even assuming that EVERY. SINGLE. SIDS. DEATH. was because the baby was on their stomach instead of their back, babies are 0.039% safer than they were when mothers were less concerned with their baby’s sleeping position. Yet somehow, the title of the article SCIENTIFICALLY asserts that MOMS ARE ENDANGERING THEIR CHILDREN by putting them to sleep unsafely.
This is but one way that media crafts a narrative by abusing scientific studies to push a social goal or undercurrent (in this case, it’s the insufficiency of mothers in taking care of their children without TOP MEN overseeing them). This doesn’t even get into the perverse incentives between government bureaucracy, the media, and university social science departments.
In Part Two, I’ll discuss Narrative Crafting Tactic #2: “Contributors” and other talking heads as intellectuals.
“but in the UK media, the “impotent president” narrative is king.”
And probably a more accurate take on the current administration.
God damn excellent article. Looking forward to part two. You truly are the thinking man’s garbage dweller
New line on business card.
Just got on the plane to ft Lauderdale. Word on the ground is that gas stations are dry and lines are long. We don’t have hours to waste waiting for gas but we can’t make it down and back without it.
I am flying into a war zone.
God speed. Hope everything ends up OK.
Good luck
Good luck, man, we are praying
Good luck. All the way up in orlando the grocery stores are running out of the basics.
I should be trying to get some more sleep but I’m too nervous. My father lands 2 hours before I do. I am hoping he can find some gas before I land. Fuel is going to be the make or break of this mission. If we can score at least 5 gallons plus a full tank I think we will make it. 10 would be ideal.
I said it yesterday – shit can be replaced. If your gut says bail, listen.
Good luck!
Do you have cash? I would think that could be very critical to making things happen.
Yup. Last time I was without power for two weeks, all the credit card machines were down. Cash became king.
No, and that’s something I should have thought of prior to this point. Oh well can’t think of everything.
Don’t feel too bad. I picked up some last minute stuff this morning and left the charcoal under the basket. went back 10 minutes later and they were sold out. Can’t do it all.
*shrug*
There are ways you can make cash pretty quickly…
Im not gay but gas money is gas money. Paging Jesse.
“Eh, I gotta get to where I’m goin’ – what do I care if I take a shot in the mouth?”
Vhyrus, I’m not sure if you saw when I wrote it yesterday or the day before, but consider that your tow vehicles are going to get MUCH worse gas mileage while sitting in traffic. Probably not so much down to the Keys, but definitely so on the way back.
At the time, I recommended a few five gallon cans and fill those up before you head down there. I doubt there will be much if any gas along your way.
Can you just take whatever insurance is going to give you for those things? Alternately, as Irma looks like she may be tracking up the East coast of Florida instead, would it be possible that your boats may not even be damaged? As they’ll be on the left side of the storm, where the winds, rain, and surge will be lighter?
I had thought that you could get into the fishing boat, and run west deep into the Gulf with the jet skis towed or own the deck of your vessel. I doubt you’ve the bunkerage to get far enough away though and jeez, what if you run out of fuel with Irma bearing down on you?
Well, if nothing else, he needs to livestream it for our entertainment
*cringe*
We won’t go unless we have fuel. we technically have 24 hours of wiggle room but that cuts dangerously into our time table. The storm models are tracking farther east, but I would rather get the vehicles onto the mainland. My parents have no insurance on this house. I have to save whatever I can from it.
I wish you both well. It will certainly be an adventure.
Traffic has gone completely to shit here in Houston, as several of the normal North-South routes remain underwater. Even my glorified golf cart of a Prius’s gas mileage has gone considerably down from where it should, from all of the stop and go. Yeah, a hybrid is supposed to like that, and I’m still getting about 35-40, but it’s still a lot less than normal.
I have to imagine a U-Haul towing stuff is going to experience the same thing. Good luck to you both.
The new European run seems to suggest that the Keys may get a much lighter hit than I was expecting. http://weather.unisys.com/ecmwf/ecmwf.php?inv=0&plot=4p®ion=a
Not so good for E. Florida and the S. Carolina coast though.
Hope you find the gas you need and get to a safe place well before the whirly-thing hits.
Take care. Hope it works out for you.
Good luck. Make sure you have a few extra pairs of socks.
And a towel.
Do you know how hard it is to find raincoats in Phoenix? The woman at walmart looked at me like I was insane.
Did you try REI (seriously)?
Sportsmans had ponchos at a reasonable price. I picked up 2.
That’s a bit far for me to drive to. I’m surprised you couldn’t find a poncho at Wally World, but you may have been dealing with an idiot.
Take a tip from a proto-punk rocker on this – Hefty sacks and duck tape. They’re far more portable, and can be repurposed.
Although probably unavailable at a duty free.
To answer your question, I have never attempted to buy a raincoat here. I normally pull my ABU APEX jacket out of retirement if the situation warrants a raincoat.
I dare you to fly dressed in a Hefty sack with a duct tape swastika.
He’s going to FL. There are probably three others on his flight wearing that right now.
*scratches chin*
true…
I didn’t know that Air Berlin flew that route.
They’ve been flying to Orlando for about a year now(*).
(*) won’t be flying much longer
Vhyrus, what is your size and email?
Jeez, BM, even for Glibertarians, I think you guys need to get a room!
Lol, my work has rain coats. I don’t swing that way… NTTAWWT. Sorry all da gays but this tub of lard is hetero unless you have tentacles.
*lights HM signal*
Yay! Someone was paying attention. HM doesn’t have tentacles…
Good luck. I pray y’all stay safe
Good luck Vhyrus, we shall pray to Odin for your victory.
The whole idea is to misuse statistics and the opinion of “experts” to give the preferred narrative technical authority such that any dissent is illegitimate. They do this by misusing experts and statistics in the ways described in this article to make it seem like an unclear issue is settled by technical expertise. Then they also claim technical authority over questions of value and moral authority. Global warming is a great example of both of these. First, they totally misrepresent the science and technical expertise involved to make it seem like the issue is settled when it is anything but settled. Then, they misuse technical authority to answer value and moral questions related to it. Even if you do believe that the science regarding global warming is “settled” that doesn’t mean you can’t object to the proposed methods of dealing with it. Whether we deal with global warming by trying to prevent it or trying to adjust to it if and when it happens is a value question and something that climate science can only inform but not decide. The media doesn’t like that and wants its preferred narrative of central control and socialism to win. So it pretends that climate science determines that issue in the same way it can a technical question. So suddenly anyone who thinks destroying the fossil fuel industry and replacing it with nothing isn’t just wrong, they are a science denier.
Here’s what drives me up the wall about the climate change shit: they tar you as “anti-science” for disagreeing with mainstream climatologists. But science is not a group of human beings; science is a mode of thinking that encourages asking questions and looking at things from different angles. In fact, I think the real anti-science viewpoint is the one that says, “this is what scientists in this particular field believe right now, so nobody is ever allowed to disagree”.
Absolutely. There is nothing more “scientific” than questioning and expecting concrete, verifiable and correct predictions about the real world. Yet, anyone who does that and points out the lack of such in climate science is the one who is called “anti science”.
The whole “consensus” shit really drives me crazy. That is straight up Marxist and Fascist bullshit. There is a famous story about how the Nazis pressured several hundred German scientists to sign a petition denouncing relativity as degenerate and false “Jewish Science”. When asked about it and the number of signatories Einstein responded: “if it were true, they would only need one person to sign it.” That perfectly sums up the bullshit of appealing to “consensus”. Consensus is just another way of saying “politics”.
The AGW cultists despise the scientific principle. Anyone that claims a scientific consensus is a fucking moron. Scientific consensus is a dangerous idea for the advancement of science. Ask Copernicus, Galileo, and others that were held hostage by the scientific consensus of their day. If there is anything scientific worth noting about the AGW cultists and what they peddle, it is that the vast majority of supporters in the scientific community peddling the usual collectivist political solution to a problem that clearly would require engineering ones, are people that prostituted themselves to a political ideology for dollars from government establishment types that have as an agenda the expansion of government and government power. These assholes are basically parroting what the people dispensing the cash want to hear. Of course the only scientists with an agenda however are those not financed by government, and then especially if they question the orthodoxy.
Until global warming came along Climate Science was a backwater field. The best minds in science in the 20th century went into physics and medicine and computing and things like that. They were not out studying hurricanes and looking at tree rings. So here you have all of these fair to Midland minds working in a back water field making okay money and getting none of the publicity, wages or glory that the better minds in fields like physics or material science or computing or biomedical research were getting. No one ever won the Nobel Prize for reconstructing the medieval warming period or coming up with that fascinating data from those Antarctic ice cores.
Along comes the global warming cult and all that changed. Suddenly, you could get grant money for virtually anything so long as you linked it to global warming. Climate Scientists were speaking before Congress and getting super sweet gigs at the UN and other places in the global industrial NGO complex. And the whole gravy train depended on AGW not just being true but being catastrophically true.
And somehow we are supposed to think that the field’s complete embrace of the theory and its ruthless expulsion of anyone who dissented was the result of real research and data and not fraud and confirmation bias. Really?
“Along comes the global warming cult and all that changed. Suddenly, you could get grant money for virtually anything so long as you linked it to global warming. Climate Scientists were speaking before Congress and getting super sweet gigs at the UN and other places in the global industrial NGO complex. And the whole gravy train depended on AGW not just being true but being catastrophically true.”
Cant peddle the shift to limit freedoms and choice and perpetrate theft on a grand scale that these scumbags in government want to justify if they tell people nothing is wrong. Especially since to them the problem is that you should not have all those pesky rights and freedoms (you always make choices that favor you and not them), and get to spend your money in ways they don’t like.
The government only pays for results that justify the expansion of power. The moment scientists started taking money from the government, science was forever corrupted. It was just a question of how much and how fast it happened but it was going to happen.
And yet the cultist tell me the only work that’s tainted by money is the work being done by anyone not getting money from government, especially if they are getting it from big oil..
Mediocre or stupid fucks peddling bullshit government agents with a ton of tax payer dollars to piss away want to hear, faking data, using models that would never pass the smell test in any other field because of how biased and failure prone they are, and outright ignoring real and already established science so they can blame man, however should never be questioned.
“fair to Midland” *eyelid starts twitching*
Are we done towing the lion, and moving on to something new?
Other than that; this is great comment John. 100% dead on.
Yes it is “fair to middling”. But I think the improper version has become so common as to change the rule.
Except they’ve managed to position themselves as the ‘Galileo’ fighting irrational forces – i.e. skeptics aka deniers.
Same thing with Antifa claiming to be like war heroes fighting Nazis and fascists.
That’s the left’s usual fantasy of being plucky, determined outsiders rebelling against the stodgy conservative establishment for the good of mankind. They’re LARPing revolution. It takes a special kind of thinking to consider yourself a beleaguered, desperate minority AND the standard for common sense and socially-acceptable ideas at the very same time.
Double standards and all that…
When asked about it and the number of signatories Einstein responded: “if it were true, they would only need one person to sign it.”
I can’t begin to tell you how many AGW conversations I’ve been in where I’ve told the person I’m arguing with “Look, I’m open to your convincing me I’m wrong. If I am, I’ll happily apologize and you won’t hear another peep of doubt out of me on the topic. Just show me actual evidence and not polls.” It’s amazing how quickly the conversation degenerates into them insulting me, calling me a science denier, and saying I don’t give a damn about anyone or anything just as long as I’m okay.
They have nothing to convince you with other than the fervor of their faith. You daring to challenge them on that is heretic to them, and why they react the way they do. Have no doubt AGW is a fucking cult.
Have no doubt AGW is a fucking cult.
True. But, here I am essentially inviting them to convert me and the sum response is a temper tantrum.
They want to convert by force: not by reason. And they despise you for showcasing that.
Oh, that’s the time when the ‘go cash your Exxon check’ makes its entrance.
I see we’ve been talking to some of the same people.
And it’s usually just for pointing out holes in their arguments or having the temerity to question their ‘settled’ beliefs wondering if the trade-offs are what’s claimed or worth it.
By screaming we have to do something now is not fucking scientific or rational thought.
They absolutely need to do something now before you either catch on that they are full of shit or whhat they are doing is anathema too freedom and liberty…
I do every quarter when the dividend arrives.
Actually, it just goes into my account, but you get the idea.
For the most part, you’re *not* disagreeing with mainstream climatologists. Take a close look at all those names on the petitions. Most of them are from areas of expertise that are, at best, somewhat related to Earth Science, and in some cases, meteorology.
Increasingly, however, “the consensus” is meaningless, not because the typical signatory doesn’t know anything about climate science, but that the typical signatory can’t draw any conclusions about climate science because the data has been fabricated. Signing petitions on the basis of the data as we have it today has exactly the same standing as a petition to affirm the existence of the Tooth Fairy.
I’m constantly confronted by warmists because in my day to day life, I hear this AGW shit day-in, day-out, and my position is now as it has always been. That if there is warming, then quantify it and provide a projection based on data that has been developed via models that have reliable, untainted data AND is calibrated against reliable, untainted base data. And therein lies the problem. We don’t have very much of the latter, and no matter how well-meaning today’s band of climatologists are, they’re basing their research on a combination of their data – which I’m prepared to concede MIGHT represent well-sampled and homogenized data, collected and collated using respectable mechanisms – but correlated against broke-assed, gerrymandered, and outright fictional base data.
That’s no mechanism for developing a reliable scientific model, and that’s why this is a religion and not science.
Even if you had that, it still would not be good enough. Suppose we had a model that predicted the world average temperature in say 2025 and we got to 2025 and it was right. That wouldn’t settle the issue at all. A correct prediction doesn’t rule out the possibility that you got lucky. Moreover, the data set is so large and the relative variation in temperature of even the worst doomsday predictions small, it is incredibly unlikely any model, even a valid one could predict the exact global temperature at a given time and there are so many variables and unknowns there would be no way to tell if it was really correct or just getting lucky even if you had good results over several decades, which we don’t have and are nowhere close to getting.
Moreover, any given rise in temperature has to be significant to be relevant. Well, what is a significant rise in temperature as opposed to just a normal and natural variation? The only way you can know that is if you know past temperatures well enough to say with some certainty what is and is not a natural variation. Then when you get warming that is above the natural variation, you have some strong though not conclusive evidence something unnatural like man made CO2 is causing it. But, our understanding of past temperatures is speculative at best and nowhere near complete enough to allow us to say what is a natural variation.
Astrology has more scientific rigor than anything the AGW priesthood peddles.
A ‘natural variation’ would include massive mantle outgassing as was (probably) experienced many times thru’ geologic history, probably to an excess of 10e5 ppm in the late Cambrian, dwarfing current levels of CO2, without the benefit of the patriarchy, the industrial revolution, the Koch brothers or even mammals.
Speaking as a trained geologist (and hence, my authority is obviously absolute here), I still argue the point on a philosophical level. If you don’t know where you are, because you can’t figure out where you’ve been, you can’t make a reasoned decision about where you want to go, and you can’t even map a route, Once you can establish a reliable baseline for the past, then the rest becomes methodologically possible; indeed, without it, you can’t even determine whether ANY action is going to be beneficial, or even neutral.
I completely agree. You cannot explain the behavior of a complex system unless you have complete knowledge of that system. Without complete knowledge, you can never rule out an unknown factor that explains your results rather than your theory. We have very little understanding of how the climate actually works. And what we do have almost entirely consists of people using global warming as an explanation for data without having a full understanding of the system. It is one giant exercise in confirmation bias.
Even if the community stumbled across a model that actually did work, they have almost no reliable baseline data with which to validate the model.
I mean, you’d think a responsible community of scientists (true scientists, even) would devote their efforts to obtaining a reliable baseline set of data, since the set they’ve been using – and continue to use – has been revealed to be hopelessly compromised.
But that would be a responsible scientific community, and reliable data isn’t that important.
Data is only valid if it has been fine tuned to produce the result that the people peddling this shit want…
That’s my biggest problem with the left.
They have an emotional concern to a ‘social problem’ get behind whoever backs them up and expect to form public policy not concerned at all it may be on a faulty premise.
It’s the same with ‘income gap’. We don’t know what causes it or to what degree it’s manipulated and so on.
But there they are – angling for ‘more taxes on the rich’ as if that’s the answer.
Like we usual, we’re good at determining there’s a problem but horrific at analyzing the data or knowing what to do about it.
Climate change happens. We know this. However, we don’t know if it’s man-made (never mind climate has fluctuated and been volatile for billions of years) to the degree it’s claimed but this is the point by which they want to settle and make laws around.
It’s irrational and bound to fail.
In between those cracks lie the ‘middlemen’. The shysters out to crack a profit off the fears and uncertainties. Enter assholes like Gore, Nye and even Soros.
It’s Progressivism. It’s rooted in the origins of the movement in the 19th century, and it’s connected to things like social Darwinism, the invention of sociology, generally the idea that science has a moral component, the moral component drives the science (IOW, the purpose of scientific study is to support moral goals), and the calling of a scientist (understood to include students of social or political science) is to use their expertise to guide society towards a higher, more moral place.
Science is a tool for them. It’s not a tool for acquiring a deeper understanding of the world, or for analyzing evidence–Progressives don’t believe in objective truth–it’s a tool for validating and supporting their ideological goals, and one of those ideological goals is the acquisition of power in the hands of those best educated and most capable of using it. Guess who that is.
As a fellow GEOLOGIST I completely agree.
also, engineers are a-holes.
Hey now.. I resemble that remark..
I’ve never spoken to a Climate Change!11! person who wasnt a total progressive commie in every other aspect. Seriously.
Me either. Funny that.
It’s funny, too, how they all perceive themselves to be too smart and logical to be religious.
AGW, with its apocalyptic world ending calamitous predictions, replaced old time religion and the whole revelations predictions of end times. But of course, only the morons that still believe in old time religion are stupid fanatics unable to science much…
The earliest Progressives were mostly either fire-and-brimstone preachers or the children of devout Evangelicals. Seriously. That’s why you see these people treating stuff like AGW as if they were preaching at a tent revival. It’s baked into their tradition.
What about Ron Bailey?
They do this by misusing experts and statistics in the ways described in this article to make it seem like an unclear issue is settled by technical expertise. Then they also claim technical authority over questions of value and moral authority.
And, of course, this naturally gives rise to a particular breed of experts to work with them. Their work might not be that good, technically, But, they know how to make their conclusions pop. And they’re always there to give a good snippet. More importantly, they aren’t bothered by fusty old things like scientific uncertainty, relevance to scale or intellectual consistency over time. They don’t mind taking trshmnstr’s data and announcing that bad baby laying is responsible for 1,600 INFANT DEATHS A YEAR!!
One of their other tricks is to hide a small percentage by talking about its increase rather than its actual value. So, they will say things like “your risk of X doubles by doing Y”. That sounds so serious. Your risks are doubled. We must do something about this national crisis right? Yeah, sure we should until you realize that your risk was one in a hundred thousand to start with.
My favorite example was when the Boston Globe actually had an article out claiming all the dudes in Boston would soon be sporting tits because of the estrogen in the city water system. It was not until I followed it to the study that I found out that we where worrying about parts per billion, and you needed to consume some 30K gallons of that water to get the equivalent of one dose of estrogen treatment.
Except those changes can often be not statistically (not only practically) different from zero. I’ve been shocked at the number of studies that publish results like this.
that is a good point. If the chance, to begin with, is small enough, even doubling it won’t be statistically significant. But hey, “study finds X doubles chances of Y” makes for a great headline.
8 people died in 2012 from neo-Nazi attacks. 16 died in 2016. So in the age of Trump, you’re twice as likely to have a Nazi kill you.
Or as the news would have you believe: “You’re twice as likely to be the fatal victim of a Nazi attack in the age of Trump.”
Nevermind you’re more likely do die from an aneurysm while trying to push out a big fart. Or 100x more likely to get accidentally electrocuted while changing a light bulb.
Nevermind you’re more likely do die from an aneurysm while trying to push out a big fart.
Wait…what?!?
When you gamble, you sometimes lose… Stinky pants!
8 people died in 2012 from neo-Nazi attacks. 16 died in 2016.
How many of those weren’t gang-related or happen in prison?
And which they know from a sample size of exactly one year. And everyone knows that the number of Nazi attacks is a otherwise constant only effected by the election of Trump and never otherwise subject to normal random variation.
I would add that this is what power mongers do and have always done. Appeals to authority (God, police, scientists) are always a sham – but they work because they also appeal to laziness. Probably the only time US journalists were expected to disregard authorities and actually try to get real facts and data was during the Viet Nam War era. By the time the Soviet Union collapsed journalism had evolved back to its original lazy, authoritarian ways.
The woman holding the microphone is super cute. She is not a classic beauty, but damn is she cute.
Agreed weeaboo.
Trap
It’s not gay if you don’t check first.
Yes, she can set my agenda anytime.
I am ready to sign up for her narrative anytime she asks.
Love you long time?
I think I’m just the expert for that study.
Too cute for alt-text.
That’s not a microphone.
So…a fat bitch?
I’m still finding hard to believe people can’t see what the Media is doing. I have a whole shop full of teamsters that like to throw shade at me via an article from CNN or NYT or fucking Facebook for that matter.
I think they do. This kind of nonsense is having less and less effect on the public. The problem is that the media is taking the credibility of science down with it. There are some things, vaccines for example, that are settled and the experts are right. People are becoming less likely to believe experts and science in all cases thanks to the media’s constant lying and misuse of it. And that is a very bad thing for society.
Not to mention the “scientists” who stifle debate on climate change. The whole campaign/business of climate change is detrimental to fixing any problem but their wallets.
A whole bunch of nincompoops have stayed in the money by producing the exact results that the government agencies looking for calamitous predictions to help them justify grand theft and expanded tyranny, have wanted.
Know what I am saying?
I am not sure how eye opening the experience was or if she will think more critically about the news, but my wife’s friend was at Charlottesville (one of the non-Antifa left wing counter protesters) and was appalled by the reporting of the event. In her words, the media reports were nothing like what happened. Many times they were lies. Maybe there are other things the media doesn’t report truthfully.
My wife responded with a nice way of saying nah, you think. I think my wife also referred her friend to listen to a Tom Woods issue about Cville. I should try to remember to ask if the friend listened and if anything else came out of her friend’s epiphany.
Hopefully, your wife’s friend doesn’t wind up suffering from Gell Mann Amnesia.
“Maybe there are other things the media doesn’t report truthfully.”
if you assume they practically always get it wrong unless it is live, you will be spared a lot of bullshit.
Black Science Guy Shakes His Damn Head
i can’t even tell wtf he’s moaning about, whether its science or philosophy-education he thinks is so poor.
I’m fairly certain he’s virtue signaling to the IFLS crowd and moaning about those who might disagree with him and the consensus.
“Everyone except those who agree with me (and by me, i mean ‘liberals’) are badly educated”
yeah, that’s probably the subtext
He’s just sayin’…. absolutely nothing.
No wonder that their priority isn’t to foster scientific debate, but stifle any and all attempts at an actual conversation with verified data, following the scientific principle, and demanding that when the hypothesis presented about the new Gaia end of times fails, and fails miserably, the people that peddled it drop it and go back to the drawing board.
You know, someone who has been directly shown to fabricate quotes and speak ignorantly on subjects he knows nothing about may need a little more self-reflection before he lectures others on how ‘facts become knowledge’.
Still going to peddle that idiocy about Columbus’ voyage being an example of ‘public scientific funding’, or is that not woke anymore?
All you need to know about noted confederate general, Christopher Columbus, is in Howard Zinn’s factually inaccurate book “A People’s History of the United State”.
Tyson’s position on Columbus is hilarious because the scientific consensus at the time, and the Spanish crown specifically had advisers point this out to them, was that the distance to India was far too long for a voyage and the result would just be Columbus and his crew dying from starvation or dehydration before reaching land.
Columbus’ argument came from a position that argued that the world was actually smaller than the scientific position of Eratosthenes due to…quotes from the Bible. So it’s the exact opposite of what Tyson. Doesn’t stop him from peddling it.
To be fair, the consensus view on the size of the earth was probably better than Columbus’s.
It definitely was, my point is more that Tyson holds up Columbus’ voyage as some profound example of what benefits public funding for science research creates. When it reality it was the exact opposite, Columbus rejected the commonly held (and fairly correct actually) scientific view of the period, had to fight against it constantly in order to receive funding, and stumbled onto a discovery based on his religious views.
Another example of this (and I’ll be fair, this is probably mostly Seth MacFarlene’s doing) was his moronic narration of the new Cosmos series. There’s a ton of historical ignorance spewed all over the first episode when they discuss the Middle Ages and Renaissance (admittedly Sagan was not innocent of this stuff either). There’s scenes where Tyson will ominously claim that ‘science and knowledge…declined’ while showing a picture of a spooky Gothic cathedral.
Well, ok, that cathedral’s design actually shows a significant advancement of mathematics and engineering, but we can’t let actual history get in the way of your masturbatory fairy tale.
But people didn’t believe in the all might state back then!
I was really looking forward to that show, but by the third episode the smug was getting painful, so we quit watching it.
Some Cathedrals actually doubled as astronomy observatories. They’d track the movements of the moon and constellations across the floor. The specifics are lost to me now, but I remember watching a show about one Cathedral specifically there they had markings on the floor specifically for this. The narrator said it was not uncommon.
He doesn’t care. So long as you continue to pay any attention to what he says, even if it is subtle mockery.
Why the fuck does anyone take Tyson seriously as a scientific authority, anyway. The guy has been out of science and running a glorified amusement park ride (albeit a really fun one) for a long time.
This is great stuff, thanks.
^ I came here to say this ^
Speaking of approved narratives
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2lfwoc1f6vc
The government compared a baker who refused to make a wedding cake for a ‘gay wedding’ to a ‘Nazi’ or a ‘slave holder’. Where are the ‘socially tolerant’ people to defend the baker’s dissenting culture? I roll my eyes every time people identify themselves as ‘socially tolerant’, because these people are typically the most intolerant people you will ever meet. They are tolerant about groups favored by the New York Times, but will use the strong arm of the state to silence any and all dissenters. Sorry, Gay Jay, but you’re not ‘socially tolerant’, you’re just a culture warrior and so are your cosmo brethren.
I find most libertarians to be both socially tolerant and judgmental. Most non-libertarians are both intolerant and claim to be non-judgmental.
I guess what I would say is that claiming to be ‘socially tolerant’ is a ruse. These people are not tolerant- they are virtue signalers. Gone is the dichotomy ‘do whatever you please, as long as you don’t harm anyone and I don’t have to pay or be forced to accept it’. Now it is ‘I swear to God if you don’t bake that Nazi cake, I’ll make the holocaust look like a joke’. ‘Tolerance’, authoritarian style.
It’s the distinction between Socrates with his equalitarian and individualistic intellectualism and Plato with his indoctrinating style and philosopher-kings.
Socrates claimed to be a searcher of truth, Plato claimed to be the possessor of truth.
Interesting. I never thought about the contrast between the two. I’ve always read more about the contrast between Plato and Aristotle and how the Church’s embrace of Aristotle probably held back Western Civilization for centuries (St. Aquinas couldn’t be right about everything).
Popper goes into depth on the difference between Socrates and Plato, and specifically how Plato corrupted the image of Socrates, in The Open Society and Its Enemies.
I’ll have to read it.
Don’t we only know about what Socrates said through Plato, though? Or are there other sources? I was always led to believe that Socrates never wrote anything.
TOSAIE is an excellent, but heavy read. It took me a number of months to plow thru’ it.
Socrates is the perfect example of history being written by the winners – hint – he lost. But Popper’s work establishes (reliably, I think) that Socrates held a far better philosophy of the proper nature of the relationship between the individual and the state than Plato did.
Aritophanes, Xenophon, and Aristotle as well. although not as extensive as Plato. Popper’s argument is that Plato perverted Socrates’ ideas through his representation of Socrates in The Republic.
Thanks for the info. First I’m going to finish my Eric Hoffer book then move on to Popper
Somebody made one of those guys drink a cup a poison, so YMMV.
You won’t believe how many people I’ve pissed off by noting, “There used to be a big sign, pained alongside the FDR Drive that said, ‘If you don’t like gay marriage, don’t get gay married’. I rather appreciate that sentiment. When did things shift from that to ‘Fuck you! Bake me a cake’?”
Exactly
Gay marriage vs. gay wedding.
One of those involves a government contract to define a relationship between two people.
The other is a objectively meaningless ceremony to celebrate one person entering into slavery to another. And if you don’t celebrate with us, you should go to jail and have your livelihood destroyed.
It’s easy to be tolerant of views or people already tolerated by the general culture. It’s the ones who defend those society sees as fiends and rapscallions that are actually socially tolerant.
The meaning of tolerance has been warped. It actually means to accept things/lifestyles you find distasteful – you don’t approve of them, but you accept that people have the right to live how they want to live and you all go about your business in peace. As used by the contemporary left, however, tolerance has come to mean rabid, enthusiastic endorsement.
To flesh it out a bit further…..let’s say you’re a devout Christian who believes homosexuality is sinful. Despite your aversion to homosexuality, you are tolerant of it – you accept that there are people attracted to the same sex and take a live and let live attitude towards gay people. However, you would rather not, say, attend a gay pride parade. You don’t object to such a parade taking place, you just have no interest in participating yourself. That’s a perfect tolerant position. It also will get you labeled as a horrible hateful bigot by the SJW crowd.
Exactly. SJW’s keep demanding “tolerance” when they largely already have it. What they really want is “acceptance” and they have no right to demand that from anyone.
What they want is for anyone that dares challenge their orthodoxy to shut the fuck up.
There are essentially two theories about the level of power the media holds over their customers.
I look at the media this way: “The media thinks it will make money doing this” and “the media thinks it will make more money in the future by doing this.”
Why we ever looked at the media as objective observers and not profit driven entities is beyond me. Follow the money.
I think it is more than making money with these people. In fact, you find a lot of low wattage idiots flocking to thinks like communication and media because they want to leave their mark on the world by changing things for the better. In this case the better they pursue always amounts to tyrannical collectivism inflicted on the masses by a credentialed elite class managing from the top down that they were indoctrinated with during their credentialing stint.
What you’re talking about is the “money in the future” part. The market would punish their “do goodism” a hell of a lot faster than the corrupt university credential system has. Look at Youtube. Even with Google putting its thumb on the scale, alternative media is thriving. Whether or not they move to another platform is irrelevant at this point. They can’t shut them all down without destroying their company.
For better or worse, alternative media is not locked in a room with Google. Google is locked in a room with alternative media.
Which is a more powerful force: Wanting to see something or Not wanting a total stranger to see something? I know where I’m putting my money.
The Chinese government types sure as hell keep trying hard to make others not see what they don’t want to be seen. granted, they don’t succeed all the time, but they succeed far too much.
China doesn’t have 1A. All the more reason it’s a great hill to die on.
I’d also include coverage saturation. Billy drowns, gets one mention locally, maybe makes regional news on a slow day.
Billy gets shot by classmate. Gets mentioned day of shooting, day of arraignment, day of funeral, day of trial starting, day of judgment, day of sentencing, day a corpsefucking legislator announces “Billy’s Law” and is carried locally and regionally, and some of those mentions will get national coverage.
Conclusion – guns bad and rampant problem. Drowning deaths are tragic, but very rare.
Great article, trashy.
It’s been said many times, but damn, you people are interesting.
All my kids slept on their tummies. We tried sleeping on their backs but they didn’t have none of that.
Every doctor visit –
Dr. “Is Chips Jr. sleeping on his back?”
Mrs. Chips “yes”
Hah! Same.
Me: “Kid won’t sleep – just cries and cries.”
Mom: “Flip him over onto his tummy.”
Me: “No way! They said he has to sleep on his back.”
Mom: “Please. I raised five kids. All of you slept on your stomachs and no one died. Flip him over.”
So I did and the little shit went right to sleep and slept great from then on. Dr. visits went just as you describe.
If you were to disclose the truth they would probably accuse you of child abuse, which is why most people avoid even correcting this idiotic perspective…
I left my sleeping son in the car on an unseasonally cool morning last week while I brought the dog in to the groomer. It felt a little weird. CPS has not stolen the kid…yet
The fact that i would disappear as soon as I woke up and didn’t make it back home long after dark during my young years would have today resulted in my parents being accused of child abuse..
Okay, that’s it. If I ever have children they’ll be put to sleep submerged in saline tanks with breathing apparatuses strapped to their faces.
Monsters!
It’s probably right there in the FA, but…
It seems to me nobody really cared about “national news” until the federal government’s
reachgrasp extended into such a vast portion of people’s lives that it became impossible to ignore or escape. If the Mongol Horde is a thousand miles away, you keep plowing your fields. When they’re massing on the hilltop, it’s time to pay attention to what they’re up to.Terrific article.
I know saying “Gamergate” around most normal people is like saying “Benghazi” around lefties, and generally produces a mass-groan of “nothing good came from that, please don’t”…
…& i myself only paid peripheral attention to it at the time, but Sargon did a number of good videos where he documented networks of relationships between ‘social justice’ activists on social-media, various left-wing academic groups, government agencies, and media organizations.
in particular what was interesting were the academic ‘media labs’ – places where you basically had Sociology PhD’s mixing with social-media researchers… and they were rife with papers/projects about how narrative-formation can be built and solidified in the new media landscape. basically, “tactics for twisting people’s brains in a given direction”.
and most of these academic groups had overlapping members with activist organizations for various social-justice causes. and they’d circulate ‘best practices’ among each other on how they should go about things
what you found in their documents were explicit recipes for
a) define goal
b) GIN UP STUDIES DESIGNED TO DELIVER DATA WHICH SEEMS TO SUPPORT THAT GOAL
c) seed studies will allies in activist groups
d) activist groups seed studies with media
e) media then publishes headline claims of studies, and interviews people from academia in part c) and activist groups in part d) who provide quotes affirming the study results, creating the appearance of public-debate and objective validation of the core-idea
f) constantly circulate the media articles on social-networks and crowd out any possible other arguments
g) congratulations! you’ve just established the new conventional-wisdom
And this isn’t some conspiracy-theorizing at all. Its actually how the entire lefty-media/sjw activist network functions. its not even remotely hidden, either. they have bloody conferences where they outline this shit and measure their own success.
basically, the one beneficial aspect of Gamergate was that a lot of this stuff was aired out in the open, and a lot of young people got a look at “how shit actually works”
and, not coincidentally, many of the alt-right/alt-light people took a cue from all this, and realized that they could in fact use similar tactics themselves, albeit far more clumsy.
anyway, thought it might be relevant to mention that its pretty obvious by now that “stage B” – where academic studies are literally designed for the purpose of furthering a narrative – is a real thing. 90% of the “rape culture” bullshit relied on exactly that. Climate change relies heavily on it. Any popular issues that you see being pumped by “NEW STUDY SHOWS”-headlines may be based in that sort of narrative-crafting exercise.
It is effective in part because most people do not care to look beyond the headline. In fact, I would argue that most people will give the benefit of the doubt to the media simply because they have a hard time believing that a group could be so intentionally mendacious and misleading.
However, once that benefit of the doubt is gone, it’s not coming back for a very long time. The leftists in the major media are effectively setting fire to what little credibility they have left, and they’re taking the credibility of a number of institutions with them.
its really more subtle than that. Its not really mendacious – its that ‘media’ people are constantly bombared with PR from activist groups, and many are sympathetic. they try and be skeptical, but the best they can do is ask a few tough question, then publish the activist’s story with some modest qualifiers (see: Robby’s “to be sure”)
Every reporter is only as good as their sources, and modern reporters don’t even have sources – they have social networks. and if the social-network develops a consensus, then all their stories are going to revolve *around* that consensus. It doesn’t even require being ‘dishonest’. it just requires them participating and validating the narrative.
this is how 90% of the media end up talking about the same stories without actually even coordinating. Its not a system that requires some secret puppetmasters behind it all; its just the product of back/forth between a small crowd of ‘influencers’ and their pals in media.
Journolist treaded the line between mendacious and merely incompetent pretty closely.
then publish the activist’s story
They don’t have to publish anything. They publish this stuff out of pure laziness – the PR hack did most of the work for them. They’re happy to publish stories that elicit sympathy, as long as they don’t have to do much work.
Again, I don’t think this is anything new, I think most of us are of a certain age where what we initially were exposed to from news outlets was during an anomalous period of the 60’s and 70’s where journalists had a healthy skepticism of government. But for the most part news outlets have usually tried to attract eyes and ears via sensationalism. When Murdoch took over the NY Post, there was a huge cry from “journalists” about how awful it was and how it would tarnish the profession. But they all eventually adopted the same methods.
most people will give the benefit of the doubt to the media simply because they have a hard time believing that a group could be so intentionally mendacious and misleading.
Honestly, I don’t think most of them are that intentionally mendacious and misleading. Sure, there are plenty who are. But, that can ultimately be a self-fixing problem. The problem is that they really do live in a bubble and they really aren’t nearly as smart as they think they are. As I pointed out yesterday (wrt Welch), even a smart, insightful journalist is maybe a two standard deviation intelligence. They really don’t have the wherewithal to come up with brilliant new insights, but generally to repeat insights that are given to them. But, for all their talk about diversity, the only diversity they really encounter is demographic diversity. They go to the same schools, read the same books, have the same career trajectory, live in the same neighborhoods in a few select cities, get fed the same sources. They can’t spot the mendacious liars in their midst because the mendacious liars are simply telling them what all of their background and social network tells them is the truth, anyway.
“Honestly, I don’t think most of them are that intentionally mendacious and misleading.”
I concur here Bill.
and really, if you look at that formula…
…the only thing that has changed/is new is the social-media aspect
what it provides is speed, and a mechanism for measuring how effective tactics are, and then repeating the ones that work.
maybe also a means to identify people who object to the narrative, and a mechanism for socially-isolating/ostracizing them
Gamergate was also useful in illustrating the collusion among media types, since most of the gaming media ran almost the exact same story about how horrible gamers are within a day or so of each other.
as noted above (12:21) it doesn’t even require direct ‘collusion’. its just a consensus that emerges from journalists’ very narrow social-media networks. someone makes (what seems a) compelling argument in their network, and whammo = it gets echoed.
It may not be direct collusion, but it functions the exact same way.
yes. i just think calling it collusion ends up making people miss the effect of how new-media often produces exactly this kind of ‘instant consensus’
Milo’s big breakthrough was publishing info on GamesJournolist and digging in deeper. In that specific case (slew of “Gamers are Dead” articles) collusion definitely happened.
networks of relationships between ‘social justice’ activists on social-media, various left-wing academic groups, government agencies, and media organizations.
Se, also: Environmental Protection Agency
If you want instant credibility, use a reporter with an English accent. Everybody knows that reporters with English accents are smarter, and we have the studies to prove it.
This is precisely why Glibertarians gives me a sad.
If you could hear my manly, patrician patois, you’d always be more persuaded.
I figured you sounded more like Brad Pitt in Snatch
If you could hear my manly, patrician patois
So you’re the guy reading out the articles on BBC Pidgin?
Also, if you are going to make a historical movie about ancient Rome, you should use actors who speak with an English accent for some reason that no one really quite understands.
Makes a lot of sense actually if you use upper and lower class English classes to stress the differences in language between the patricians’ classical Latin/Greek and the plebians’ Vulgar Latin.
As if the Queen’s English (as you people of the commonwealth would call it) is representative of the patrician class. Also, I think even the patrician class spoke vulgar Latin by the time of the late Republic and early Empire.
Everyone understands that the Claudians all spoke with RADA accents.
It’s just a known thing.
Nope, to do so would be seen as a rejection of patrician values, particularly in the Republic.Cicero’s work alone shifted patrician Latin away from that of the ‘commoners’. There was a continued distinction even until the late Empire between people who merely ‘spoke Latin’ and those who ‘had good Latin’.
Received Pronunciation (i.e. to you Americans “why those upper class Englishmen talk all faggot-like”) is actually pretty similar to the rhetoric and oratory development of Latin in the patrician classes of the Republic.
My God, you Canadians and your unseemly love for the English
Unseemly and unrequited – it’s not as if the English think of Canadians any more highly than they do of us. All colonials receive at least mild disdain.
You’re free to make your own Roman period pieces where everyone in the upper classes talks like southern gentlemen while all the plebs speak like swamp Cajuns.
(Please make that I really want to see it)
JT, how about Boston Brahman for the Senate and Southie for the Plebs?
No, no, please god no – the last thing the world needs is more Bahston accents, particular poorly-executed movie accents.
I’m with Chipwooder here. Boston Brahman accents make me want to punch people. It’s one of the reasons I can’t watch Buckley for long.
Or New York accents – Cicero sounds like Franklin Roosevelt and the plebes sound like Joe Pesci.
Midwest: Coen Bros Fargo accent vs. “Da Bears!” Chicago accent.
That tends to be how they handle any foreign characters in historical movies – the Soviets in Enemy at the Gate, for instance, or the Germans in any number of WWII movies. It’s funnier, though, when characters speak English amongst themselves in foreign accents, like the Russians in Hunt for Red October. Except for Connery, of course, who never bothered to try to sound anything but Scottish.
Even when he was meant to be an immortal Spaniard?
One of the most awesome, ballsy casting decisions in the history of movies.
There can be only one Connery.
Yup, or an Irish Chicago cop, or an American college professor, or an English spy, or a South African big game hunter, etc etc.
Or a doctor who discovers the cure for cancer in some remote jungle in South America
But he lost it!
Spanish->Black Irish->Celtic->Scottish
Yeah Enemy at the Gate’s use of English is just retarded.
Ditto for that Valkyrie movie with Tom Cruise, where all the ‘good’ Germans speak in American or English accents.
Which is also funny – have them sound American or English, whichever, but they should be uniform. Either everyone sounds American, or everyone sounds English. A mishmash of different accents is just silly when they’re all supposed to be German.
Oh yeah?! Ever hear someone from Hamburg talk to someone from rural Bavaria?
Well, sure, just as a bloke from Manchester will sound different from a gent from London, or a good ol’ boy from Mississippi will sound very different than a Bostonian. It’s just more jarring to hear accents that the viewer knows represents different nationalities.
And then there are the Swiss, who don’t even speak German….
You mean like Piers Morgan?
The one I think is really hilarious is John Oliver, because he speaks with a shitty lower class Midlands accent that is not reflective of ‘high intelligence’ outside of the U.S.
I think that Oliver’s shitty accent is the least of the reasons why nobody in their right minds should pay attention to the loathsome, smug little weasel,
It’s his words that do not reflect “high intelligence.”
If the MSM wants to earn any credibilty back with me, they should start with hiring more Mexican WeatherGirls
Two enormous thumbs up.
Up what?
anywhere the gorgeous Mexican weather girl wants it
Just the thumbs?
CONCHITA!
I’m going to state the obvious:
CNN female anchors > Fox News female anchors
Too many bleached blonde hair. All cable news is unbearable at this point, though. Between Fox’s ‘Yay, Trump!’ lineup and CNN’s ‘Literally Hitler’ block, we need Mexican weather girls to save us
Carol Costello. Yum.
I’m going to go Erin Brunett
Erin Brunett would be a great porn parody name.
Yanet Garcia.
Why should the people listen to you?
From a prenatal class about 2 years ago (Labor Day weekend, in fact).
Not back sleeping is the 4th biggest factor in SIDS. But it isn’t PC to recommend the first 3.
The 3 biggest factors, in some order, were being poor, parents smoking, and something I forget.
Apparently “Dont be poor” isn’t considered good advice.
Don’t be poor, probably more equates to don’t live in a place with high amounts of mold growing in the building.
#3 was probably no cats. ha!
total non-scientific thought on SIDS, run a fan in the room and get air circulating.
Apparently “Dont be poor” isn’t considered good advice
Are you kidding?!? That’s the best advice.
My soul is impoverished. Does that count?
You don’t have a soul, so no.
He is a ginger???
I meant he is a glib, which is incompatible with having a soul. SugarFree’s writing does that.
Had souls.
*stares out window*
AH. Yes. SF done near kilt muh soul.
No, he just toughened it up.
Like one of Hillarelder’s psuedo-vaginas.
Milieu control. Know it, understand it, love it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milieu_control
To what extent will (establishment) Republicans go to in order to get Democrats back in power? Ladies and gentlemen, John McCain:
I have my own solution to Democrats if they want to “end” gerrymandering: make a better agenda. Court new voters with those improved positions. Watch the districts change all by themselves.
I don’t want to be a dick about a sick man, but are we sure he’s still in his right mind? The husband of one of my former co-workers had this exact same kind of brain tumor and he basically lost his mind for the last year of his life. Personality changes, memory problems, mood swings etc.
Didn’t Barry Goldwater turn a bit daffy in his final years as well? A big before my time, I was in elementary school then, but I seem to recall hearing that before.
You’d think that someone close to him might say that the greatest service he could still do for the nation, is to help the politician who will follow in his footsteps and continue the great McCain political legacy.
He could take a deep breath, and commit himself to preparing Cici Velasquez for high office.
I had to look her up. Woof.
I just looked her up. Well done, sir:
Also, of course they don’t mention that she’s on their TEAM until the last paragraph.
She go to the box, she feel shame.
Doesn’t matter if it is related to his illness. He is dangerous now.
He’s ALWAYS been dangerous.
Replacing him with a run-of-the-mill, democrat welfare cheat with political ambitions would have represented an improvement 20 years ago, let alone now.
That’s the thing. For the last 20 years he has run against Democrats that appeared even more unacceptable than him.
It’s not being a dick, he should have resigned as soon as he got his diagnosis. Factoring in his advanced age he’s fundamentally unfit for duty, and the fact that McCain doesn’t recognize this just shows how much he doesn’t respect the position he’s in or the American people in general.
On top of all that, when you know the clock is ticking, wouldn’t you want to spend your last few months with your family? He’s just another power hungry permanent swamp-dweller.
Not if you wanted to take that one last chance at cementing your legacy by crafting that one, last piece of transformative legislation.
It’s a problem many of us have, this drive to have people do our will, even when we are dead. It’s troubling, and we need to keep reminding ourselves that these people are not like us.
Has the possibility his family would prefer he spend his final days on the hill complaining about Trump been raised here?
I don’t think we’ll be worrying about him for much longer. The longest anyone has ever survived that diagnosis is about 5 years and even if he makes it that long, he’ll be too far gone to be running around Congress long before that. If he even makes it a year and a half, he’s luckier than most.
I fear that he will do the RBG and live for 10 more years out of pure spite. Pure evil tends to linger well past the supposed expiration date.
A plebe like you should know his place and shut his mouth. McCain, believing that he is a member of the aristocracy, expects to hold that position even after he dies.
In terms of how destructive this guy has been/has tried to be towards individual liberty, he’s in a class few have descend to. It would just be him and Chuck Schumer, Joe Biden, and a few others.
I would take Biden over McCain every day of the week. Biden, to me, at least could be open to persuasion.
Sounds like Hilary 12 months ago.
Freedom of association protections….hmmm
Do progs support these now?
Only if it benefits them electorally.
Way to represent the people of ARIZONA, dipshit.
Fuck that noise. Wisconsin’s districts still look like geometric shapes. Anybody talking about gerrymandering who isn’t calling attention to Maryland is full of shit.
OT: De Blasio completely rips off the mask.
https://pjmedia.com/trending/2017/09/05/biggest-obstacle-to-progress-private-property-says-bill-de-blasio/
Hasn’t he basically been an open Pinko his entire life? If there ever was a mask, it was basically made from cheap, clear plastic and melted the instant “Bigot!” came into office.
Forget it, Zenome, it’s GothamTown.
Does he own any? He could start by giving all of his earthly belongings to the poor.
Heh. Let’s all get on the bandwagon
Reparations for poland
Time to start minting those trillion-dollar coins that Krugnuts suggested ….
Unless Merkel can pronounce Witold’s last name correctly.
Witek
I thought you had to get him to say in backwards? That’s how Superman always defeats him.
What is a gerrymandered district anyway? Seems pretty subjective…seeing how congressional districts cover land areas of x amount of people. It isn’t proportional representation
If the left wants to do better in the house don’t pack themselves into small urban areas where they win 85 15
It’s a lot harder to find dead voters out in the sticks.
Here are some examples.
It’s hard to justify convoluted district boundaries like that unless there’s some commonality in land-usage (or of course, electoral habit). If it wasn’t for gerrymandering, the democrats at the moment would have even less representation in congress, but yet we see redistricting regularly undertaken under Republican aegis, and yet deals are done. Personally, I use this as evidence of political collusion more than of political collegiality, but that’s just me.
I agree some are egregious but others not really sure as population density varies within a state and a congressional district is for x amount of people so by default some are going to look a little out of place
Also based on your link it would appear the dems accuse others of what they are doing
This is news how? One of their most powerful weapons, other than lying and stealing, is projection..
“If it wasn’t for gerrymandering, the democrats at the moment would have even less representation in congress”
I have seen this first hand. I do not anymore, but previously I lived in CO-7 which would have gone R if not for post-census redistricting that pulled some areas of very conservative unincorporated Jefferson County into CO-1. CO-1 used to be conterminous with City and County of Denver (Cook PVI D+A Gazillion). The areas they pulled in were reliably R, but far less than the Gazillion D voters already in the district; the lost voters in CO-7 pushed it from from toss-up to safe D.
Fucking slideshow list.
I am glad to see that somebody called attention to my fucked up state’s absurd district boundaries. Everybody is going “OMG the Republicans are doing all the gerrymandering” while the Maryland state legislature’s Democratic supermajority flips the bird to anyone who doesn’t vote for Democrats.
“What is a gerrymandered district anyway?”
If it favors the agenda of the other team or obstructs the fast growth of government power, it is gerry mandered?
Mander, I hardly know her!
(rimshot)
I have a lot of acquaintances on the Left who bitch and moans about the GOP supposed gerrymandering but stays quiet whenever I bring up that Michael Madigan gerrymandered the shit out of the districts in Illinois to maintain his party’s grip on power. If the Democrats benefited from gerrymandering, they wouldn’t say a fucking thing about it.
Their only principle is they must get their way and obtain power
I think that what pisses me off the most. They make themselves out to be the morally principled group in politics but will blatantly switch their position whenever it benefits them. And the best part about is when you call them out about it, they lose their shit.
It is projection.
The statement it weren’t for double standards they would have none isn’t really true
Everything they support has one principle….obtain power
The principled position on gerrymandering would be this: “It’s OK, understandable, and constitutional when both parties do it, and in order to get back in control of power we need to take a good look at ourselves and improve our message and agenda.”
Actually they would defend it, like they do voter fraud and illegal immigration.
This. For a long time, the Donks controlled both houses of Congress and a majority of state legislatures, and they honed gerrymandering to a high art. They didn’t remotely care about it as an issue until they started losing their grip on power.
For example….back in the early 1990s George Allen was seen as a rising star in the Virginia GOP (hard to believe now, but true then). The Dem-controlled Assembly thought they could kill two birds with one stone by redistricting popular (to the point of rarely being opposed by a Dem candidate) GOP Rep. Tom Bliley’s 3rd district into a majority-black district by giving the conservative Richmond suburbs that were Bliley’s home base to Allen’s 7th district. The 3rd district, being 70% or so black, would now certainly belong to the Democrats while Allen would likely lose in to Bliley in a primary. Allen instead decided not to run against Bliley in the 7th district, and instead ran an underdog campaign for governor and won a shocking victory over the sitting Lt. Gov Mary Sue Terry.
That redistricting, conducted by the Democrat-controlled General Assembly of 1991, turned this map, which didn’t have any obviously ridiculous boundries, into…
…..this monstrosity. The 1st, 3rd, and 7th districts were ludicrous.
The first district comes complete with its own dong.
No, if the Left wants to do better in the House, change the agenda. I’ve thought about for the past year about eventually running as a Democrat in my deep-blue House district with a secretly libertarian platform (with a focus on stuff that I think young Bernie-ites would like, such as marijuana legalization, civil liberties, Audit the Fed, ending the local ABC, lowering the drinking age to 18, etc.). I think something like that would be appealing to both urban and rural America. I could also say that I support single-payer, but I want to see a state like California pass it and see how it works for 10 years before I sponsor a national bill (then when CA inevitably goes bankrupt and asks for a bailout, I can point to my constituents the mess and say “See what I mean about testing things out? Clearly it doesn’t work!”)
Just go full Bernie on campaign and then do libertarian in office.
I mean gov acts as a bait n switch anyway
I’d rather not, mainly because I can’t call myself Young Bernie without breaking out laughing and crying. On the other hand, isn’t it a good tactic to run on a philosophy that you can call your own?
I would agree but politics is full of scum and sociopaths
If the Democrats and the Left are good at one thing, it’s never learning from their past mistakes. They honestly believe that they need to prog harder and insult the people who they want to support them. They can never wrap their minds around the idea that perhaps their agenda blows and resort to conspiracy theories on why they lost.
See my tweet I posted from
Dem rep
That sounds like a plan.
The KY supreme court requires minimizing of dividing political boundaries.
Well, at least counties.
There are still plenty of gerrymandered districts, especially among counties with multiple districts, but it prevents the worst abuse.
KY supreme court
I’m sure they’ve let bigger things slide.
Expert = someone who agrees with me politically
Study = getting the right result so I can get more funding
Does anyone else remember the crisis a while back where children were eating laundry pods? What happened to that? Oh yeah, they found a new and scarier crisis. I hate these people.
This is not just a leftist phenomenon. Look at the work CATO does on immigration sometime. I understand that they support immigration and open borders. I don’t think that is an unreasonable position. And I certainly don’t blame them for arguing that open borders are good for the country. Where they lose me is when they torture the data to come up with some “study” that shows that endless access to cheap labor somehow never hurts native American worker and that the laws of supply and demand somehow don’t apply to the labor market. If you think lowering wages and making a tight job market is a price worth paying for immigration, fine. Maybe you are right about that. But don’t piss down my leg and tell me it’s raining by pretending that there isn’t a price to be paid for immigration, which is all they ever seem to do.
Their other favorite trick is to use the difference in immigrant welfare and incarceration rates to native rates as evidence for the benefits of open borders. Ah, no. That is evidence that the current immigration system is letting the right people in the country. It says nothing whatsoever about the benefits or drawbacks of letting in people who are not getting in legally now.
Never really understood comparing crime rates of natives to illegals. Those are added onto each other….it isn’t one or the other
Comparing them with legal immigrants is valuable in that it tells you if your immigration system is doing a good job at keeping criminals out. Comparing it to illegals is pretty pointless. You can’t commit a crime in the US unless you are here to do it. So even if the crime rate is lower for illegals, which it is not, that wouldn’t justify opening the border.
My 2 biggest issues with open borders is that they are given welfare and other benefits right away. That’s not sure of legal immigrants, they have to prove they can support themselves. 2nd, most of the immigrants coming in are hostile towards libertarian ideals and many are voting/being encouraged to vote illegally for Democrats.
Yep. And we know govt won’t keep their promises about no welfare
And CATO pretends that those issues don’t exist. I would love to get rid of the welfare state as much as anyone. But the fact is that it is not going anywhere and its existence greatly complicates the nation’s ability to have open borders. Instead of confronting that reality and making realistic choices, people like CATO just pretend that them not supporting welfare makes some kind of difference. “I don’t like welfare either” is not a sensible response to “if we have open borders, it will cost us more in welfare benefits than it is worth”. Yet, Cato and others act like it is and that they are somehow not responsible for the effects of the policies they support because PRINCIPLES!! or something.
Adam schiffs role for the dems
Go on teeveee all the time to talk Russian collusion but then say you can’t say cause investigation and classified
The purpose of this is to keep Russian narrative alive with no actual substance
The purpose of this seems to be making sure everyone knows that non-members of the establishment will be prevented from being able to function. Elect establishment agents for the office of the presidency or else face chaos and obstruction. And that is coming from both parties.
God, he’s also THE ONE local news in LA always talks to if they need the current DNC talking point. He’s such an insufferable tool.
Yep
The Russian narrative is dead, Jim.
D congress critter is so reality based…no narrative what so ever
https://mobile.twitter.com/RepGutierrez/status/905412181474369536
This guy is a fucking idiot. He represents the Congressional District next to mine in Illinois and I thank Bob for that. Everything that he spews out of his mouth is idiotic and it’s a wonder that he keeps on getting elected.
Oh and speaking of gerrymandering look at his district map. You can’t tell me that this isn’t gerrymandered like a motherfucker: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Illinois%27s_4th_congressional_district#/media/File:Illinois_US_Congressional_District_4_(since_2013).tif
Who was the dem congress critter from Illinois that said any biz with a russians means you are doing it with Putin thus is treason
Guitierrez is a POS.
I thought racial gerrymandering was deeply wrong and unconstitutional…”NO, shut your mouth! That’s a Democrat, they love ethnic minorities!”
omg, that electoral map is hilarious. NO GERRYMANDERING HERE nope
I can’t even get angry. The Illinois Dems are incredibly blatant when it comes to their corruption but yet will forever maintain majorities in the state’s legislature.
Well forever is a long time. Enough population losses in Chicago (and they’re already happening), and the political environment will slowly become more sane again. Just look at what happened to Michigan last year; it’s just a cyclical thing. Cities grow, crazy leftists move in. Cities collapse, crazy leftists move out.
Yet the total number of crazy leftists never goes down…
I think our divided country is really a lot smaller than portrayed and is due to D.C. Media who are pot stirrers. The division is relegated to those who consume their content and are obsessed with politics first and foremost
I think most people are normal and nothing like the idiots the media wants to pretend inhabit the country. They are always talking about how things like the Houston floods “bring out the best in America”. No. Things like that force the media to take note of how normal and decent most people are.
My parents who are card carrying union Democrats actually like Trump. One of their many criticisms about Obama was that he cared too much about perpetuating the culture war and not paying much attention to the average American.
I have to believe that at some point most people either have or will look at Trump as President and say “WTF is the big deal?”. Regardless of whether you think he is a good President or like him as a person, it is impossible to argue that he is some uniquely bad President or some kind of grave threat to the Republic. He just isn’t. Nothing Trump has done in office is particularly radical or outside the acceptable bounds of what Presidents do. All his worst critics can do is bitch and moan about his tweets and how he is mean to the media. Well, so what?
The media and partisan reaction to Trump boil down to one giant “how dare he!!” fainting fit. They never have a single real criticism of his policies or actions. It is forever about how he violated the various courtly rules of Washington. And at some point that is going to start to wear pretty thin with most people if it hasn’t already.
They hate him because, unlike the GOPe, he doesn’t care what they think of him, what they say about him and he will call them out for being blatant partisans. In that way, he is a true threat to their power.
A huge indicator that they have nothing substantial on him is the so called Russian scandal. You barely hear anything about it now, but yet a month or two ago, all you heard was how he possibly colluded with the Russians to win the election.
One of the best things about Trump being elected is his exposing the establishment for the pieces of shit that they truly are. All they care about is their power and prestige and the fact that he campaigned on taking that all way from them made him their enemy.
The ideological division is real, but it’s a lot mellower than what the MSM wants to think. Most normal people like get over minute little cultural divisions and disagreements when dealing with each other. Even at the universities, no one but the most fervent zealots care that I voice different political opinions than them.
Yea agreed.
I am what once was before the NEOCONs took over the brand a pretty straight up conservative. I hold a lot of views that progs can’t stomach. And I live in the most Democratic county in America the last time I looked. Yet, I get along fine with my neighbors and have made several life long friends since moving here. All of them are way left. We somehow get along. I think most people do. The media and activist community on both sides is filled with petty, sad, broken people who work through their neurosis by fear and loathing regarding politics. Most people are not like that.
The hubris of the dems was amazing especially considering they wanted trump
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4858306/Obama-told-Hillary-ve-got-24-hours-loss.html
You know, the only question in my mind is – how many fucking autobiographies are we gonna get?
The only comfort is that if she’s spending all this time with a ghost writer, whining, she’s not out politicking.
I hope she runs again
The Democrats were too stupid and arrogant to see the similarities between the Bernie supporters and the Trump supporters. I know a several Bernie supporters. And while their politics and economic views were appalling, they did understand that the entire political class was corrupt frauds. Even if they couldn’t admit it in so many words, they knew that the media and the Democratic Party had sold the country a complete fraud in Obama and that Hillary was everything that was wrong with this country. They and the Trump supporters were in pretty close agreement about what was wrong, they just drastically differed on what to do about it, though they agreed a bit more than you would think.
When you realized how similar the two groups really were, it wasn’t hard to see that Hillary wasn’t a shoo in and that Trump likely had a better shot than your typical Republican, whom both groups hated. Add the two groups up and you have a whole lot of pissed off and disaffected people. That is not good for Hillary, who was basically running as the anointed successor to the incumbent and the choice of all right thinking people in Washington. Bernie wasn’t just a bunch of loyal Democrats getting their leftist on before returning to the fold. It was a real expression of anger and dissatisfaction with the governing class in this country. And the Democrats just fixed the primaries to make sure Bernie didn’t win and acted like it wasn’t really happening.
The thing is trump is more moderate than any of the GOP candidates yet portrayed as right wing extremist
He ran on no cutting ss and Medicare, wants family leave and child care tax credits
I always laughed my ass off at TOS and the enormous case of the vapors they had over Trump. For years they had been claiming the GOP needed to lose the culture war and social conservative stuff and just run on economic issues and reducing the size of government. So here comes Trump, a guy who is pro abortion, pro gay marriage and seems not to care about social issues at all and rather than being happy about that, they lost their collective minds. It is not that I would have expected them to like or support Trump. Trump is not and never claimed to be a libertarian. But Trump was no less of a libertarian than any other GOP nominee and in fact was more of one in some ways. There was no rational justification for their collective freak out over Trump. There just wasn’t. They should have been nor more upset or dismissive of Trump than they were of McCain or Romney or any other Republican nominee. Yet, they lost their minds over him. It was absurd.
Of course there was a rational reason. The cocktail circuit.
One of the excellent reasons they should have kept their operation out of the DC Social Circle.
Exactly. And he has been a libertarian I think with the federal agencies and admin state (size)
Also taxes
And let’s be realistic. Look at the subsequent resumes of all the former Reason contributors and staffers, and summarize their subsequent positions, ideologically. Very few (none?) went authoritarian-right, and precious few stayed individualist,
That tells you all you need to know. Reason is, to be a little ungenerous – an incubator for people whose devotion to individualism is less than absolute, and whose proclivities are often somewhat leftist.
They always turn out to be leftists once the mask slips. They really are just lefties pretending in order to get a paycheck.
I don’t really like classifying Trump as either a moderate or conservative. He’s quite unique relative to history IMO. The thing about him was that his campaign wasn’t trying to run to the left or right of anybody: it was instead “they are the establishment, I’m not tied to any of them!” and I will figure out my platform as I go along. It was legitimate populism all the way down to his Tweeting.
Eh I don’t know about populism which I thought doesn’t really mean anything since if you look at the definition the entire dnc platform would apply
He is a mixed bag for sure
I don’t define populism in political terms, because the MSM just uses it to refer to “things that Trump likes that we don’t like”, but rather in terms of campaign strategy. Think about how he spent only a fraction of what Hillary did, but made up for it with free advertising, grassroots support, and portraying himself as anti-establishment.
It was non-ideological. A big reason Trump won the election and especially the nomination was that people were sick to death of ideology. The country had just had 8 years of George Bush trying to save the world in the name of democracy followed by 8 years of Obama’ progressivism. People were rightfully tired of ideology. The biggest reason Trump voters gave for supporting him was that they felt he cared about their problems. The implication of that was that other candidates didn’t and only cared about themselves and their ideology. In a country sick of ideology and nasty partisanship a message of “I am going to make a deal and get things done” and “I am going to put America first” had real resonance.
You really can’t overstate how stupid and out of touch, the GOP and especially the conservative establishment were. Those idiots spent the entire primary campaign accusing Trump of not being a real Republican and not being a “conservative” thinking that was going to hurt him. No, being a Republican and being a conservative at the expense of everything else was not popular. All accusing him of not being that did was make Trump more popular because that is what people wanted.
I think that a lot of the smarter conservatives, like in the Freedom Caucus or the old Tea Party movement, know this and instead are trying to tie constitutional conservatism to being on “the Trump Train”, even if it doesn’t 100% tie to what Trump campaigned on. They see him as a vehicle to making their ideology cool and don’t bitch about how Trump isn’t a “real Republican”. As long as the Left stays in the “RESIST!” category, I could see that actually leading to more libertarianism in his agenda. I heard from somewhere that even Kushner is trying to help fundraise for the Freedom Caucus now.
Ha. Bill could read the tea leaves. Not a great person, but a fantastic retail politician.
So the ny ag is suing the federal govt for not engaging in executive overreach with daca anymore and having congress do it
Let that sink in
Just a Dem doin’ what Dems do; principals over principles, process is king, party uber alles.
He doesn’t expect to win, he just wants to bog them down in court.
This is why I’d love to see the USAG’s office RICO OFA, Antifa and Open Societies Foundation. You won’t win, but you’ll tie them down in the legal process forever.
I think they are doing just that
The rico thing
RICO OFA, Antifa and Open Societies Foundation. You won’t win
I wouldn’t be so sure. Prove that (a) Antifa intended to engage in violence and (b) OFA and Open Societies knew about it and provided material support, and I think you’re just about there. Its more complicated than that, but the interlocking web of mutual support that NGOs like these provide for each other is practically a RICO “enterprise” right off the bat. Mix in a few predicate offenses (arson is one, hint hint), and there you go.
So much overreach, we are finally getting the reach around?
So we have in one corner
1. Trump collusion maybe and obstruction
And the other
1. Awans
2. Dnc emails who did it?
3. Antifa rico
4. Hillarys sham email investigation
5. Fusion gps
6. Obama spying on opponents
Should be fun. I don’t think trump would get hit with these so mainly for the dems
The GOPe wanted and expected Hillary to win. They claim to be all about morals and values and the true conservatives
But they wanted her to win so they could whine about big gov but have an excuse never to deliver anything conservative while living the high life
They hate trump cause he expects them to live up to their promises and actually do work they campaigned on
They don’t want to accept the responsibility that comes with governing. Governing requires making choices and living with the consequences. That is not a good role for them. They are much better at talking out of their asses about things and pretending that they are one Republican victory away from salvation. They have the intellectual and moral maturity level of a dim witted high school debate team.
One of my Republican college acquaintances worked on the Hill for a couple of years and used to see first hand how the GOP caved to the demands of the Obama White House and constantly worried about getting the approval of the MSM. He also worked with Paul Ryan who at one time was a staunch fiscal conservative who actually wanted to cut the size of government. I guess as he explained it, Ryan saw that him having principles did him no favors so he slowly got on the establishment train and is now Speaker of the House.
The GOP are a bunch of gutless cowards who sold their principles a long time ago for the allure of power and given the chance to be responsible and actually do some liberty increasing stuff, they pussied out.
Dr. Jerry Pournelle had an excellent essay along these lines.
I’m no expert, and I haven’t read any studies, but it looks llke I am going to help foot the bill, again, for idiots who chose to live in Florida and the east coast despite knowing the risks.
Yup. Infuriating. Build what you want where you want, out of your own pocket, and buy the insurance you want, out of your own pocket, and I don’t care. That’s not the way it works, though.
The narrative framing was on full display right after the Charlottesville incident.
“White supremacists, racists, KKK members, neo-Nazis, cis-hetero white male shitlords, and other assorted members of the Forces of Evil clashed today in Charlottesville with … um… counterprotestors, yeah… in a horrible display of totally one-sided violence.”
Love
NYT, WaPo, USA Today, etc., etc.
I liked how CNN demanded to know why Donald Trump wasn’t controlling the weather.