Donald Trump and US politics

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鬼殺し wrote:

Immediately dismiss anything that isn't centre somehow.

This would only make sense if a left bias and a right bias were equivalent. A cursory glance at the issues will tell you that this isn't so. When acceptance of basic science like anthropogenic climate change and evolution make an organization left-leaning, that bias is simply a bias towards reality.

When two sides are perfectly equal, a lack of bias is reasonable. When one side is batshit insane, a lack of bias makes no sense. "Reality has a liberal bias" started as a joke. As the right veered ever further into insanity, it became more and more true.

Don't fall for the fallacy of the middle ground. Like with round earth vs. flat earth, real moon landing vs. fake moon landing, or living Elvis vs. dead Elvis, there is one reasonable position and one wholly unreasonable position.

Not all biases are bad. If you disagree, I can offer you a peanut butter sandwich, a shit sandwich, and a quarter. Do you have a strong (and rational) bias against one sandwich, or do you simply want to flip to see who gets which?

Reuters and WSJ are pretty good publications. I trust them a fair amount.

I definitely trust WaPo less than apparently others trust them. I haven't seen one less-than-comically slanted article out of them in the last year and a half. They got bitten by the Trump mind virus hardcore.

Meanwhile Jennik still thinks I read and/or promote right-wing rags. I guess I better agree with him before he starts digging into my post history to uncover my real name and post it like the CNN acolyte he is.

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Jennik wrote:

The Washington Post, like nearly every other other news organization the right deems "fake news," has journalistic integrity and follows standard ethical practices.

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The Washington Post, like nearly every other other news organization has journalists and follows the DNC standard narrative. There's a fundamental difference between legitimate news and the propaganda machines of the left that prey on the weak minded and lazy. There's a reason even CNN, formerly one of the most respectable news outlets, subliminally slides ISIS in their slogan:
thIS IS CNN. Very few organizations on the left adhere to common sense or human decency.

FTFY

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pneuma wrote:

Meanwhile Jennik still thinks I read and/or promote right-wing rags.

I don't know where you get your copious amounts of misinformation. You clearly parrot right-wing propaganda points, though. Even your "Trump mind-virus" nonsense is straight out of T_D. Holy shit, a news organization is reporting about the most inept and corrupt president and administration in American history! Mind virus!

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pneuma wrote:

I guess I better agree with him before he starts digging into my post history to uncover my real name and post it like the CNN acolyte he is.

See, this is the sort of dishonest, counterfactual bullshit I'm talking about coming from the right. There's no rational reason to believe I'd give a fuck about who you are, much less try to find out and post your information, yet you say that ridiculous bullshit anyway. We've also established I'm no fan of CNN, yet you call me a "CNN acolyte."

Do you honestly not care if what you say or believe is true? I take care to make sure the things I say map to reality. You clearly can't say the same.

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鬼殺し wrote:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/

Like or not, this still does the job. Immediately dismiss anything that isn't centre somehow. So for conservative, you have WSJ, Washington Times, etc...for liberal, WaPo, the Atlantic. For just-the-facts-maam, Reuters is still pretty acceptable. This way Fox News, Breitbart, Mother Jones, Common Dreams, etc...not even a talking point.

I don't trust your website either.

I didn't test this rule enough, but it seemed that you could get accurate categories from MBFC by shifting their categories 1 to the left. Salon is gibbering mad far left, categorizing Feminist Frequency as merely "left" is generous, PolitiFact is center-left enough to bias its factchecking, Breitbart is center-right, and everything right of that -- like Daily Stormer and /pol/ -- is not considered worth listing by MBFC staff. Most importantly, and I can't stress this enough: Wikileaks is literally as devoid of bias as humanly fucking possible. When you hear the claim "Wikileaks is center-right," the immediate proper mental response is "oh, so you're center-left then."

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鬼殺し wrote:

All you need to do is look at the way headlines are worded to get a gauge on where a publication stands most times.

Guess that's why Wikileaks doesn't word (outside of announcements). They just dump raw data.

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鬼殺し wrote:

The larger issue with news and veracity/verisimilitude is that while you may want 'just the facts', the real task is in interpreting them in a relevant manner. That was, and still is, the media's job, because the rest of us aren't or shouldn't need to be immersed in that world to stay healthily informed. We have houses to build and businesses to run and books to write and kids to raise and so on and so on. That's how it should be, and in my daily experiences it still is that way. I don't know too many people with enough free time and free head space to do you what you lot do every day. And that's fine -- like I said, priorities.

So while the destruction/end of the so-called biased MSM is a godsend for those of you with the time and interest to do your own digging (divorcees with limited child visitation times, for example), for the average person with their own lives to live it's a nightmare they're not even aware of. And again, who can blame them? Aint nobody got time for that, as was once famously said.

First off, I spend every single day with my kids. For over two years now.

Second, the destruction of mainstream media is not the permanent destruction of media. It is a chance at rebirth, a chance to rebuild without the admittedly moderate but perniciously consistent left-bias we see now. Alternative media already shows a dominant center-right bias, and when a merge happens I predict a comfy balance of left and right bias.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

Most importantly, and I can't stress this enough: Wikileaks is literally as devoid of bias as humanly fucking possible.

This is how you stay willfully trapped in your delusions. I'm confident I've actually explained this to you personally in one of these Trump threads. Evidently reason never penetrates, but maybe an observer can learn something from this.

Wikileaks is right-wing propaganda. Let's say they have information on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We can say this because, during they election, they did. They had information on both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Do you recall their steady barrage of releases related to Hillary Clinton, timed specifically so as to do as much damage to her as possible? I certainly do. I'm confident you recall this as well.

Do you recall their steady barrage of releases on Donald Trump? Of fucking course you don't, because Wikileaks is right-wing propaganda.

Wikileaks has an agenda. They pick and choose what and when they release so as to do the most damage to the groups and people they hate.

If that doesn't sound biased to you, I'll give you another example of this same tactic. This is one the right has been using for decades.

Go through the crime statistics for the last four years. Pick out all the crime done by black Americans. Put that on a sheet. Pick out all the crime done by Somali immigrants. Put that on another sheet. Write articles about how terrible and dangerous black Americans are. Write articles about how terrible and dangerous Somali immigrants are. Take care not to include statistics about other groups, since that would add context and hurt your cause of demonizing these specific groups.

Picking and choosing specific information to release in order to paint a very slanted version of reality is horribly biased. That is Wikileaks' MO. To claim that they're "literally as devoid of bias as humanly fucking possible" is to be so distanced from rationality that I've completely given up on reason ever getting through to you. Hopefully someone else can learn from this.

August of 2017 might be recorded as the date the ground shifted under the feet of defenders of constitutional liberty and freedom of assembly in the United States. The nation’s newspaper establishment is now providing a public platform for normalizing the claim that the Constitution’s protections for freedom of the press and freedom of speech are inadequate weapons for winning the fight against a “rising tide of racism,” and therefore, violence may not only be justified, it may be the only moral alternative. Thus sayeth the lords of “Antifa,” the newly respectable priests (and armed enforcers) of vigilante justice.

On Sunday, August 27, the Denver Post gave front page status on its weekly “Perspective” opinion section to a Project Syndicate column by Australian writer Peter Singer. Project Syndicate is a Bill Gates and George Soros-funded newspaper syndication service based in Prague. Professor Singer asks this question in a bold headline: “Is violence the way to fight racism?”

In seeking the answer to this ominous question, Professor Singer does not marshal quotes or arguments from John Stuart Mill, Louis Brandeis, or Ruth Bader Ginsberg. He instead quotes favorably only one authority, the “Antifa” crusaders who have been heavily involved in the violent “counter-protests” in Charlottesville, Berkeley, San Francisco, Phoenix, and elsewhere. The mission and business of Antifa are to disrupt and terrorize rallies, speakers, and events it chooses to label as right-wing, racist, neo-Nazi, or just plain unprogressive. Last weekend in Berkeley, 100 black-clad and masked Antifa terrorists brutally attacked the 1000 peaceful participants in a “Rally Against Hate” at Martin Luther King, Jr., Civic Park.

On his journey through the Alice in Wonderland world of Antifa’s angry rhetoric, Singer feigns some skepticism about violence as an effective strategy against the far-right but nonetheless sympathizes with Antifa’s neo-Marxist rules of engagement: Because the proponents of racism and “hate speech” are by definition irrational, they are therefore not amenable to rational persuasion based on facts and reasonable arguments. Thus, opponents of racism need not and should not engage them in debate. Instead, racism must be opposed and defeated by violent means.

Anyone with half an education in 20th century Soviet and Maoist techniques of oppression will recognize this as a totalitarian argument to silence dissent. It is reminiscent of the Marxist-Leninist use of psychiatry as a tool for declaring political dissent illegitimate. If you do not love communism, you are obviously insane and need to be either “reeducated” or removed from society and placed in confinement. To the Antifa gang of leftist thugs, arguing with anyone they designate as hatemongers and racists is a waste of time; they need to be silenced — permanently.

The argument that the First Amendment is antiquated and ill-suited to fighting racism and bigotry is reminiscent of the teachings of that neo-Marxist cult figure from the late 60s and 70s, the German “Frankfurt School” entertainer, Herbert Marcuse. His innovative theory of “repressive tolerance” rationalized and incentivized the rise of ideological intolerance in academic circles, but until very recently we have not seen its totalitarian fruit being marketed in the public square.

Something of aconfession to be made: I didn't write this. Well, this paragraph, obviously, but the rest is by Tom Tancredo. I just wanted to make sure y'all actually read it. But I digress.

Implied but not discussed explicitly in the Singer column is the logically related question, “Is violence the way to fight other enemies of social justice — like sexism, climate change denial, Islamophobia and other irrational, dangerous thought crimes?” The answer in the eyes of the radical left Antifa activists will likely be the same: Yes, it’s time!

This justification by the political left of the threat and use of violence to block opponents’ freedom of speech has been ascendant on university campuses for a generation, with little effort by university authorities to safeguard free speech or to punish student and faculty disrupters. Now we are reaping the whirlwind of this misguided toleration as leftist violence spreads to our streets, public parks and conference halls.

It is hardly mere coincidence that this Peter Singer opinion piece was given top billing in Colorado’s leading newspaper only one week after the New York Times published a similar piece, “The ACLU needs to rethink free speech.” Since racists and neo-Nazis are benefiting from free speech, true friends of liberty must restrict who can benefit from such freedom.

Thus begins the official legitimization — or “normalization” — of the rejection of the First Amendment’s protections of freedom of speech in the name of “fighting racism.” And who will be empowered to decide what groups and what forms of speech are forbidden the protections afforded civil libertarians? Why, our nation’s idealistic social justice warriors, of course— intense warriors like those found in the ranks of Antifa, Occupy Wall Street, and Black Lives Matter.

Not to be outdone, the national office of the ACLU announced a few days after the Charlottesville riot that the ACLU will no longer go to court to defend the First Amendment rights of protesters if they are exercising their Second Amendment right to carry a firearm. No firearms were discharged in Charlottesville, but that’s only a footnote.

And so, in this tumultuous “summer of hate,” the Denver Post has joined the New York Times in providing the soapbox and microphone to the voices popularizing these new rules of engagement in the public square. If you are not on the “right side” of a contentious political issue, beware. Woe be unto the defenders of liberty when the mainstream media begins to marginalize you as an antediluvian agent of oppression.

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Jennik wrote:

Wikileaks is right-wing propaganda. Let's say they have information on Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. We can say this because, during they election, they did. They had information on both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

Do you recall their steady barrage of releases related to Hillary Clinton, timed specifically so as to do as much damage to her as possible? I certainly do. I'm confident you recall this as well.

Do you recall their steady barrage of releases on Donald Trump? Of fucking course you don't, because Wikileaks is right-wing propaganda.

Assange has been asked repeatedly about the difference there, and essentially, he has said that Wikileaks does not republish information that is already out there. He also stated that Wikileaks had nothing more embarrassing to Trump than what was already available.

The emails have been verified by numerous sources. Try shooting the messenger all you want, but the info Wikileaks provided is accurate. Eventually, many people in Hillary and Obama's circle, perhaps even Barack and Clinton, will be prosecuted and sent to prison for their litany of crimes.

Now, if you have some unpublished secret info on Trump that you think is newsworthy and can be verified, send it to Wikileaks and see if Assange puts it out or covers it up.

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ScrotieMcB wrote:

No firearms were discharged in Charlottesville, but that’s only a footnote.

More alternative facts. https://twitter.com/ACLUVA?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.gq.com%2Fstory%2Fcharlottesville-shooting-video

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鬼殺し wrote:

https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/ For just-the-facts-maam, Reuters is still pretty acceptable. This way Fox News, Breitbart, Mother Jones, Common Dreams, etc...not even a talking point.

lolwut

Reuters is a ~ultra~biased left-wing fake news source. They have been caught making up facts/stories out of pure cloth, and they slant every. single. thing. they. release. with a decidedly anti-American slant.

They are often among the least trustworthy sources of news aggregation/reporting on the planet.

Also, Fox News/ Sky News/ News Corp is owned by a nice guy, but operated by ultra-liberal America-hating brothers, one of the brothers' wife is seen with Hillary Clinton on the daily.