Implanting Bill Gates's Micro-chips In Brains For Over 20 Years!

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Adder

Remember when he cited Cernovich? Good times.

I didn't know who he was. But I do know what the Columbia Journalism Review is. Read that report and argue with it.

By the way, given your views on China's idiotic handling of Covid, which were shit upon here by many people (and have put that country's economy in the shitter), shouldn't everything you offer include a disclaimer?

Author's reasoning may be deemed suspect by most.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Did you just call me Coltrane?

I think he's off his fucking rocker.

I've been acquainted with (not friends) a number of people who've been close to him. Nearly every one of them is also more than arguably nuts. He's a hurricane of lunacy who attracts the most demented misfits imaginable. Try to think of a room full of G. Gordon Liddys. Deeply weird people. One of his besties grew up down the street from me... Totally cuckoo pants. Three dollar bill, and an irredeemable pervert. Lots of well heeled gun nuts in the mix, too.

Establishment Rs who've butted heads with his people walk away disturbed. Not because he's a scary would-be Mussolini... Because neither he nor anyone around him has any judgment, long term planning skills, or a clue wtf they're doing!

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Did both you guys get laid off or retire or something?

Or something, yes.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

More globally: https://www.cjr.org/special_report/t...ent-part-1.php

If you read this thread at all honestly, Yoel Roth of Twitter is telling Baker the Post’s story does not violate guidelines. In the face of this, Baker holds, tenuously, to the proposition, “We don’t know… it might be hacked.” https://twitter.com/mtaibbi

You’ve dealt with media. As have most of us here. Lying to media is easy if it’s not securities stuff. Who cares? No duty is owed. That’s where Baker came down on this: Plausible deniability. That’s all one needs.

It was the smart play for him. But not necessarily the smart play for Twitter? So it must be asked… Who was he really serving? Not Roth, who disagreed.

How It Started. You started out with the proposition that we are facing authoritarianism on the right and left.
How It's Going. You say a former in-house lawyer at Twitter, a guy previously at the FBI, made a bad decision.

As I said previously, content moderation at Twitter was a thankless and lousy job. Occam's Razor gives you all sorts of ways to explain why they got stuff wrong without resorting to conspiracy theories about ex-FBI agents taking over Twitter from the inside.

ETA: The Post’s Twitter page was blocked for 16 days, not one.

OK, whatevs. You still managed to find out about it, a point you keep trying to avoid.

And… Please show me Twitter’s banning of links to the NYTines’ story about the stolen portion of Trump’s tax returns. Link please.

Please refer to what I said above about administering Twitter's moderation policies.

Look, you can’t win this. Just fucking let it go with this understanding: There is a rule, and I get it it, among many “gatekeepers” that any and all means must be employed to stop Trump and his brand of authoritarian populism. Ends justify means.

I have already won. It's like you're arguing that no one can win the Indy 500 because one of the leaders has a hydraulic problem. Um, OK, but there are many, many other cars in that race. You may not like Twitter's former editorial direction (join the club, it's a big one), but it is one of many, many, many media outlets.

It's the height of obliviousness for you to argue that media gatekeepers are trying to stop Trump this week, with NBC just having given him a chance to lie, uncorrected, on Meet The Press. NBC acknowledges he lied lots, but it and Kristen Welker couldn't respond live, so the damage is done. If Biden did a fraction of that lying, there'd be a shitstorm, but the media do not know how to respond to Trump's brazen, constant lying, and they love the traffic the draws.

But stop pretending there’s not a double standard.

Read harder.

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Are there double standards? Sure. (For example, if Joe Biden said crazy things that Trump says all the time, the media would completely flip out, and rightly so. Trump says them and it's not news.) Does that mean the left is authoritarian? No.

People...’d be more receptive to the truth: “Yeah. We in media love him as a carnival act for ratings and clicks. But we are allowed to do Whatever It Takes after we’ve made our money to try to stop him from ever acquiring power again.” That’s at least economically defensible.

Do you really think major media are run by some sort of conspiracy? I sure hope not.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Do you really think major media are run by some sort of conspiracy? I sure hope not.

I’ll tackle the rest later. But this low hanging fruit has to be picked before pungency.

From Gore Vidal to George Carlin, to many others, the retort to your allegation one making my point is trafficking in conspiracy theorizing is:

I’m not. And one needn’t do so, as there are no conspiracies. Like actors act alike and complement each other.

In simple terms, it works in an appallingly simple fashion. A few thousand people who took too much poli-sci, had parents with enough enough bucks that they could pursue journalism, and lacked enough common sense to realize their progressive professors were charlatans, filter into the media ecosystem. They all think alike, speak alike, and reinforce each others’ unlettered understanding of how things work and ought to work. The entirety of academia is polluted with these losers who’ve never made a payroll and believe they know, and ought to profess to others, how everything should work.

They’re idiots, and they spawn idiocy in their wake, filling institutions with people who’ve never been required to meet metrics but think their sheltered views acquired in education and media confer a higher form of knowledge.

It happens on the right as well. But not as effectively or anywhere near as often as it does on the left.

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s collective self-reinforcing ignorance of the actual. An “ism.”

But people like tribes. They want to belong. Progs to the left, MAGA to the right, stuck in the middle with who? Not you.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I’ll tackle the rest later. But this low hanging fruit has to be picked before pungency.

From Gore Vidal to George Carlin, to many others, the retort to your allegation one making my point is trafficking in conspiracy theorizing is:

I’m not. And one needn’t do so, as there are no conspiracies. Like actors act alike and complement each other.

In simple terms, it works in an appallingly simple fashion. A few thousand people who took too much poli-sci, had parents with enough enough bucks that they could pursue journalism, and lacked enough common sense to realize their progressive professors were charlatans, filter into the media ecosystem. They all think alike, speak alike, and reinforce each others’ unlettered understanding of how things work and ought to work. The entirety of academia is polluted with these losers who’ve never made a payroll and believe they know, and ought to profess to others, how everything should work.

They’re idiots, and they spawn idiocy in their wake, filling institutions with people who’ve never been required to meet metrics but think their sheltered views acquired in education and media confer a higher form of knowledge.

It happens on the right as well. But not as effectively or anywhere near as often as it does on the left.

It’s not a conspiracy. It’s collective self-reinforcing ignorance of the actual. An “ism.”

But people like tribes. They want to belong. Progs to the left, MAGA to the right, stuck in the middle with who? Not you.

If you want to have a conversation about the ways in which the media is warped, I'm down. You're complaining about the way the world was fifty years ago, when there weren't many newspapers or TV stations in most places. That world is long gone, and media is a competitive business, with a very immediate grasp of how many viewers or readers each story gets. The idea that media is full of people who haven't been required to meet metrics, is laughably wrong, and dates you like a dinosaur.

Your model of media bias completely misses the interests of ownership and management and their role in shaping coverage, as if the people who run media conglomerates just hand over the keys to the shop to lefty Ivy graduates. CNN took a big lurch away from the left because Christ Licht answered to libertarian billionaire John Malone. I would wager that you don't notice things like this because they don't irritate you.

[sebastian_dangerfield]

If you want to have a conversation about the ways in which the media is warped, I'm down. You're complaining about the way the world was fifty years ago, when there weren't many newspapers or TV stations in most places. That world is long gone, and media is a competitive business, with a very immediate grasp of how many viewers or readers each story gets. The idea that media is full of people who haven't been required to meet metrics, is laughably wrong, and dates you like a dinosaur.

I fully understand why you'd take that position. It does seem nuts. But you underestimate two things:

1. The strength of the ideological bent among those entering media (can't really call it journalism anymore);
2. The pervasiveness of the low risk economic model I'll call "serving the silo."

Regarding 1, media, particularly legacy media, is and always will be an industry the yeoman of which are idealistic. It's creative, and it attracts people who are either ego or ideals driven to have their voices heard and make a difference. The kids who just want the filthy lucre go into finance. The recent upheaval in the industry with the advent of social media and the internet isn't undoing that mindset.

Regarding 2, Roger Ailes proved at Fox that it is better to create a silo and grow it than serve unbiased news to a broader audience. While CNN struggles trying to stay in the middle, Fox and MSNBC have devoted cults of viewers behind them. It's simply lower risk/higher dependable revenue to find a rabid audience and feed it what it wants to hear than offer contradictory choices. Fox owns the conservative audience, so there isn't much inroad to be made on that side. This is why MSNBC moved hard left rather than take on CNN. In doing so, it grabbed and now owns the progressive audience. CNN is stuck with a weird audience of people like me (I still like it and think it's the most honest).

Your model of media bias completely misses the interests of ownership and management and their role in shaping coverage, as if the people who run media conglomerates just hand over the keys to the shop to lefty Ivy graduates.

They can't help but hand the keys over to that crowd because that's the only crowd that can afford to get into media. Legacy media is a shrinking pie and the pay gets smaller every day.

CNN took a big lurch away from the left because Christ Licht answered to libertarian billionaire John Malone. I would wager that you don't notice things like this because they don't irritate you.

Licht proves my point better than almost any example. He tried to eliminate the lefties of the network and ran into severe opposition. They simply would not have a libertarian at the helm, and they threw a hissy fit over it until he was canned.

He also should not have done the Trump town hall as he did. Giving Trump a platform is fine. He's a Presidential candidate. But giving him a series of softball questions as they did, which was a naked attempt at the "get ratings from Trump, then kneecap him later" strategy so often employed was unwise. The man does not deserve fawning of any kind. And that was commercial crassness at its worst.

[Hank Chinaski]

FMK

Boebert
Palin
Melania

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

FMK

Boebert
Palin
Melania

Spoiler








K Melania. I ain’t putting my dick anywhere near where his has been.

Palin is getting old but I think she is less nuts than the B so I’d marry her and F Boebert.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield

I fully understand why you'd take that position. It does seem nuts. But you underestimate two things:

1. The strength of the ideological bent among those entering media (can't really call it journalism anymore);
2. The pervasiveness of the low risk economic model I'll call "serving the silo."

Regarding 1, media, particularly legacy media, is and always will be an industry the yeoman of which are idealistic. It's creative, and it attracts people who are either ego or ideals driven to have their voices heard and make a difference. The kids who just want the filthy lucre go into finance. The recent upheaval in the industry with the advent of social media and the internet isn't undoing that mindset.

Regarding 2, Roger Ailes proved at Fox that it is better to create a silo and grow it than serve unbiased news to a broader audience. While CNN struggles trying to stay in the middle, Fox and MSNBC have devoted cults of viewers behind them. It's simply lower risk/higher dependable revenue to find a rabid audience and feed it what it wants to hear than offer contradictory choices. Fox owns the conservative audience, so there isn't much inroad to be made on that side. This is why MSNBC moved hard left rather than take on CNN. In doing so, it grabbed and now owns the progressive audience. CNN is stuck with a weird audience of people like me (I still like it and think it's the most honest).



They can't help but hand the keys over to that crowd because that's the only crowd that can afford to get into media. Legacy media is a shrinking pie and the pay gets smaller every day.



Licht proves my point better than almost any example. He tried to eliminate the lefties of the network and ran into severe opposition. They simply would not have a libertarian at the helm, and they threw a hissy fit over it until he was canned.

He also should not have done the Trump town hall as he did. Giving Trump a platform is fine. He's a Presidential candidate. But giving him a series of softball questions as they did, which was a naked attempt at the "get ratings from Trump, then kneecap him later" strategy so often employed was unwise. The man does not deserve fawning of any kind. And that was commercial crassness at its worst.

I think your description of who gets hired into media companies is wrong. But even if it were right, it fails to account for the fact that the entry-level inmates are not running the asylum, though much of what you say above tacitly acknowledges that. For example, your point about "silos" shows the media coverage is shaped by the way that different outlets make business decisions about how to position themselves. Back in the day, when the means of publication (printing presses, television licenses) were expensive, there were few outlets and they generally tried to serve mass markets. The means of production have gotten much cheaper, outlets have proliferated, and many of them compete by targeting categories of consumers. Fox and MSNBC have done that, and so did CNN under Licht. All of this means there are a variety of media outlets doing different things, not a hegemony with one voice dictated by progressive hires from schools you don't like.

Licht's tenure at CNN illustrates this. He got the job because a rich libertarian billionaire bought CNN and wanted CNN to broadcast stuff that better fit his rich libertarian views. (This is a poor market move, in that rich libertarians are a vanishingly small share of the market for views, but a common move by media companies, which are often bought by rich people.) Licht fired a bunch of people with left-of-center views, which of course served pour encourager les autres, and CNN's coverage has noticeably changed. You completely ignore the facts that people got fired and coverage changed, which completely disproves your point. Licht got canned not because anyone was throwing a "hissy fit," but because he didn't know what he was doing and it wasn't working. This article in The Atlantic is the definitive account.

When he took the helm of CNN, in May 2022, Licht had promised a reset with Republican voters—and with their leader. He had swaggered into the job, telling his employees that the network had lost its way under former President Jeff Zucker, that their hostile approach to Trump had alienated a broader viewership that craved sober, fact-driven coverage. These assertions thrust Licht into a two-front war: fighting to win back Republicans who had written off the network while also fighting to win over his own journalists, many of whom believed that their new boss was scapegoating them to appease his new boss, David Zaslav, who’d hired Licht with a decree to move CNN toward the ideological center.

One year into the job, Licht was losing both battles. Ratings, in decline since Trump left office, had dropped to new lows. Employee morale was even worse. A feeling of dread saturated the company. Licht had accepted the position with ambitions to rehabilitate the entire news industry, telling his peers that Trump had broken the mainstream media and that his goal was to do nothing less than “save journalism.” But Licht had lost the confidence of his own newsroom. Because of this, he had come to view the prime-time event with Trump as the moment that would vindicate his pursuit of Republican viewers while proving to his employees that he possessed a revolutionary vision for their network and the broader news media.

You seem think that if CNN's ratings had been up, Licht would have been fired anyway. I guess you can believe that if you want to, but that's not how the world works.

[Icky Thump]

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime...ced50573&ei=19

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Icky Thump

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime...ced50573&ei=19

Now do Feinstein.

[Icky Thump]

Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop

Now do Feinstein.

Ahh yes, appoint her to the federal bench.

[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Icky Thump

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime...ced50573&ei=19

Back in the 90s she was on a panel where I argued. She was a good judge. And it was hard to tell because of the robe, but I think she had nice tits, not Boebert nice, but still.

[Tyrone Slothrop]

Originally Posted by Hank Chinaski

Back in the 90s she was on a panel where I argued. She was a good judge. And it was hard to tell because of the robe, but I think she had nice tits, not Boebert nice, but still.

Not a fan of the silicone, though.