FoxNews

[Jason]

People are probably better off reading/watching/listening to the major networks, the smaller internet sites, and talk radio and then figuring sh*t out for themselves from there. Neither side is going to give a 100% unbiased report.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

Rachel Maddow is a huge joke. I never knew how bad she was really until 2010. During the midterms some scientist or professor from a west coast university was running as a republican for the house. I saw her "interview" takedown piece of him being passed around and I was really surprised what a smarmy little pos she was to him.

As a professor he had put out a newsletter for years. In one place, in the 80s or 90s, this guy had written a few paragraphs offhand in his newsletter saying basically, "the scientific community has more or less agreed the hiv causes aids. I feel as if political motivations have maybe led to this hypothesis being accepted more quickly than was prudent as recently these specific studies X, Y, and Z have raised some challenging questions for this hypothesis." I remember then the final line was something pretty close to "ultimately it will only take a single paper to settle the matter".

I was really disgusted how the last line was being deliberately misinterpreted, as if to say "and *this* is that paper", but it's clear he wasn't considering his newsletter to be a scientific paper, he was simply saying more research was needed. Which I don't care how politicized and tumultuous the aids issue is/has become, that's a fucking good thing. Period. It's what science should always be doing every day regarding every piece of information it believes it knows.

In this interview she just constantly interrupted him, and then when he complained about being interrupted, she actually had the gaul to start mocking him for not understanding satellite delay by saying he "didn't understand the speed of light" or something like that. Even taking that delay into account there's no question she was interrupting him though, and just being generally rude and dismissive.

This video was proliferated across the internet by smug, asshole liberal democrats, who patted themselves on the back and jerked one another off about how smart and progressive they all were, and how republicans were all so woefully regressive and bad.

...

I would say, that was the exact moment I consciously abandoned leftism and turned my back on the democrats for good.

I don't trust any journalism. I like al jazeera well enough for their fairly balanced coverage, but dislike the opinions of their editorial staff a lot. zerohedge is great. Hyperbolic, somewhat too eager, and not to be trusted (like all economic news) when it comes to concrete predictions certainly, but really perceptive and intelligent from a pure econ standpoint. I check drudge report sometimes as well, but in general there is no single news website I really trust or endorse.

I agree with a lot of what you're saying with two exceptions. For one, I disagree with your conflation of leftism with democrats. Democrats, as far as I am concerned, are far from leftists. Second, while I am skeptical of most journalism, I wouldn't say that I "don't trust any journalism." Some journalism is more trustworthy than others. I think we should be far more skeptical of journalism that is organized by elite interests than journalism that works to present an alternative to the mainstream point of view.

[Dunderhead]

People are probably better off reading/watching/listening to the major networks, the smaller internet sites, and talk radio and then figuring sh*t out for themselves from there. Neither side is going to give a 100% unbiased report.

I wouldn't even go so far as to include the major networks in that. As someone who followed the Paul campaign last time around it was an eye opening experience to see exactly what game they were playing painted in such a revealing light. Maybe there's a host here or there who will run a piece every once in a while of some substance, but in general I'm no longer able to really even trust them for coverage on anything anymore.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

People are probably better off reading/watching/listening to the major networks, the smaller internet sites, and talk radio and then figuring sh*t out for themselves from there. Neither side is going to give a 100% unbiased report.

I agree with a lot of this too. Actually, I would say that looking at the mainstream news is crucial, not because it is particularly accurate but because it probably unintentionally reveals the truth more than any other area of journalism. Hence:

As someone who followed the Paul campaign last time around it was an eye opening experience to see exactly what game they were playing painted in such a revealing light

[Dunderhead]

I agree with a lot of what you're saying with two exceptions. For one, I disagree with your conflation of leftism with democrats. Democrats, as far as I am concerned, are far from leftists. Second, while I am skeptical of most journalism, I wouldn't say that I "don't trust any journalism." Some journalism is more trustworthy than others. I think we should be far more skeptical of journalism that is organized by elite interests than journalism that works to present an alternative to the mainstream point of view.

I'm not conflating them really. I see the democratic party as the primary instrument of leftism in the united states. And the democratic party as an entity controls leftists and distorts the sentiment and agenda they share, subjugating them to its own aims. I had given leftism a pass up until that point *because* of the nice face the mainstream gave it. When I rejected the democratic party and dissociated myself from the popular leftists I was no longer able to excuse anything.

I've read Kolakowski's "Main Currents of Marxism", as well as the "Black Book of Communism", and believe me, I am beyond sympathy for leftism. I studied econ undergrad at Uchicago and I simply do not respect Marx as an economic thinker. My primary intellectual interests today are with German Idealism. I'm very interested in Herder, the true founder of the social sciences, and have studied the dismantling by Kant of his proto-Marxist student with a lot of interest. I also think Schiller's Aesthetic Education preempts and frankly annihilates Marxist revolutionary sentiment.

I'm just not a leftist, and it's honestly not simply a matter of me not understanding things well enough.  

[Jason]

I agree with a lot of this too. Actually, I would say that looking at the mainstream news is crucial, not because it is particularly accurate but because it probably unintentionally reveals the truth more than any other area of journalism. Hence:

As someone who followed the Paul campaign last time around it was an eye opening experience to see exactly what game they were playing painted in such a revealing light

I'm somewhere between you and Fish on the mainstream media; it's just one piece of the puzzle and inevitably is a sort of backhanded way of getting the actual story.

[Bean Bag]

Alex - seriously, I never said Limbaugh was a journalist. I was recommending him to Rocky Raccoon as a good place to start, since all his supposed "journalist" were weeny liars, pretending to be journalists.  My point was that Limbaugh was man enough to admit who he is, i.e.; not a journalist. Rocky's folks cowardly pretend they are journalists so as to benefit from the cloak of objectivity that being a journalist affords.

The same goes for the John Stewarts and Steven Colberts.  Except they insulate themselves with the cloak of "I'm just a comedian, so the joke's on you if you took me seriously!". As everyone said, you really should get info from multiple sources and get some perspective. That was my recommendation to Rocky.

[Dunderhead]

The same goes for the John Stewarts and Steven Colberts.  Except they insulate themselves with the cloak of "I'm just a comedian, so the joke's on you if you took me seriously!". As everyone said, you really should get info from multiple sources and get some perspective. That was my recommendation to Rocky.

I've slowly noticed Jon Stewart becoming gradually more jaded. His coverage of Paul and his somewhat hostile interview with Maddow were pretty refreshing but I really get the impression from stuff like that that things have...started to become less funny for him...

[Chocolate Shake Man]

I agree with a lot of what you're saying with two exceptions. For one, I disagree with your conflation of leftism with democrats. Democrats, as far as I am concerned, are far from leftists. Second, while I am skeptical of most journalism, I wouldn't say that I "don't trust any journalism." Some journalism is more trustworthy than others. I think we should be far more skeptical of journalism that is organized by elite interests than journalism that works to present an alternative to the mainstream point of view.

I'm not conflating them really. I see the democratic party as the primary instrument of leftism in the united states. And the democratic party as an entity controls leftists and distorts the sentiment and agenda they share, subjugating them to its own aims. I had given leftism a pass up until that point *because* of the nice face the mainstream gave it. When I rejected the democratic party and dissociated myself from the popular leftists I was no longer able to excuse anything.

I've read Kolakowski's "Main Currents of Marxism", as well as the "Black Book of Communism", and believe me, I am beyond sympathy for leftism. I studied econ undergrad at Uchicago and I simply do not respect Marx as an economic thinker. My primary intellectual interests today are with German Idealism. I'm very interested in Herder, the true founder of the social sciences, and have studied the dismantling by Kant of his proto-Marxist student with a lot of interest. I also think Schiller's Aesthetic Education preempts and frankly annihilates Marxist revolutionary sentiment.

I'm just not a leftist, and it's honestly not simply a matter of me not understanding things well enough.  

Not surprising, I do disagree with some of this. I will go through this rather systematically.

I see the democratic party as the primary instrument of leftism in the united states. And the democratic party as an entity controls leftists and distorts the sentiment and agenda they share, subjugating them to its own aims.

As far as I understand “left” and “right” as value judgements, they are largely related to basic economic principles. Left and right largely comes down to where one stands on the issue of ownership of means of production. If we are to really reduce the political spectrum, I think we could correctly say, as reductive as this might be, that the left is largely a space occupied by those who believe that the means of production should be commonly shared and the various ways that could happen, while the right is a space for those who are in favor of various flavors of private control. We could nuance this further and suggest that a more moderate left wing position or center-left position is one commonly understood as a “social democrat” which is largely labor-oriented and politically represented as such in various places, such as Canada with its NDP party. Even this moderate position is unrepresented in the United States.

For the most part, the Democratic party (especially since the onslaught of neo-liberal reform in the 1970s) have largely, like the Republican party, represented the interests of big business and private industry. This is why Big Business can just as easily support the Democrats, and have. In the 2008 election, for example, private industry significantly supported Barack Obama, just as they historically supported Clinton. The Democrat support for Big Business has been reflected in policy as Democratic presidents since Carter have largely succeeded in pushing for massive deregulation and the destruction of labor groups and overseeing the growth of the gap between the rich and poor as a result. Carter may very well have been the “dove” of American politics in the 70s but if that’s the case, it truly shows just how constrained political ideology was in the United States at the time, given that it was Carter’s administration that oversaw the radical slashing of social welfare programs and expansion of the US military. Furthermore, Democratic policies like NAFTA, GATT, Obama’s 2008 rescue of the business world whilst largely ignoring the needs of the population, reinforce what is perfectly obvious, that the party is mainly interested in serving the interests of the wealthy elite who control the country. The Democrats then, like the Republicans, have mostly been the primary instrument of the corporate world and work primarily to oppose leftist values and beliefs.

I've read Kolakowski's "Main Currents of Marxism", as well as the "Black Book of Communism", and believe me, I am beyond sympathy for leftism

Well, again, this is a value judgement but I find both books you mention to be fairly appalling works of scholarship. Take the Black Book of Communism, for example, which uses almost exclusively non-Communist examples in its tally of deaths that it attributes to communism. Take, for example, the Soviet Union, which is one of the most egregious examples. The Soviet Union was, of course, neither communist nor Marxist. In fact, on the contrary, the Bolsheviks who took leadership after the revolution took the position of being anti-Marxists and were stridently opposed by the mainstream Marxists of the era. So great was Lenin’s loathing for the leftist position that he even wrote a whole book on the subject, wherein he referred to leftism as an infantile disorder. Just like you, Lenin was openly “beyond sympathy for leftism” both in words and in practice, the latter being shown in his immediate destruction of workers’ councils upon taking power. The fact that Soviet power is still associated with Marxism and communism is a real tribute to the propaganda systems of both Russia and the United States – a propaganda system that is perpetuated by the texts you mention above.

I studied econ undergrad at Uchicago and I simply do not respect Marx as an economic thinker.

There is a lot that I disagree with Marx too (and I would never call myself a Marxist) but this is somewhat beside the point. The point that I disagreed with had nothing to do with your feelings about Marx but with your conflation of the Democratic party and leftism.

[Chocolate Shake Man]

I agree with a lot of this too. Actually, I would say that looking at the mainstream news is crucial, not because it is particularly accurate but because it probably unintentionally reveals the truth more than any other area of journalism. Hence:

As someone who followed the Paul campaign last time around it was an eye opening experience to see exactly what game they were playing painted in such a revealing light

I'm somewhere between you and Fish on the mainstream media; it's just one piece of the puzzle and inevitably is a sort of backhanded way of getting the actual story.

Make no mistake, I by no means believe that it should be the only source of information that one goes to. I just mean to say that the mainstream media may be the best source for the truth, not because they tell you the truth, but because they unintentionally reveal so well the intentions of the people who own the country, given the way they present stories, the basic assumptions to truth they make, etc. To be honest, and he can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that Fish and I are in agreement when it comes to mainstream media so it may be difficult to occupy a space between us. As an actress said to the bishop.

[Bean Bag]

The same goes for the John Stewarts and Steven Colberts.  Except they insulate themselves with the cloak of "I'm just a comedian, so the joke's on you if you took me seriously!". As everyone said, you really should get info from multiple sources and get some perspective. That was my recommendation to Rocky.

I've slowly noticed Jon Stewart becoming gradually more jaded. His coverage of Paul and his somewhat hostile interview with Maddow were pretty refreshing but I really get the impression from stuff like that that things have...started to become less funny for him...

I would guess it's based on the increasing credibility he's received as a "serious" venue for politicians to appear on.  But... as I see that all Leftists are simply angry people at their core, I believe he's going to struggle with this.

To continue my cynical rant... I believe this was the point all along.  Yes, there is a studio audience, jokes, laughs and an "applause sign"... but that was never the crux of it.  I saw the Daily show show as the replacement of the Left's "ole' stiffs."  The Peter Jennings, Dan Rathers, Tom Brokaws -- the so called "serious journalists."  Their audience is dying off so enter Jon Stewart.


Basically, I think Limbaugh transformed political discussion and the role of "anchorman" by making it entertaining.  So now the Left is trying it with Stewart.  Of course "the Left" has had cultural and political messages planted throughout all of their news, films, TV, music and entertainment for decades... but they've really got a lot riding on Jon Stewart as playing anchorman.

[Bean Bag]

People are probably better off reading/watching/listening to the major networks, the smaller internet sites, and talk radio and then figuring sh*t out for themselves from there. Neither side is going to give a 100% unbiased report.

I wouldn't even go so far as to include the major networks in that. As someone who followed the Paul campaign last time around it was an eye opening experience to see exactly what game they were playing painted in such a revealing light. Maybe there's a host here or there who will run a piece every once in a while of some substance, but in general I'm no longer able to really even trust them for coverage on anything anymore.

...and then there's political campaigns.  The media actually dug up a story on how Romney left his dog on his roof or something?  I'm still not over that.  Yet no one was interested in Obama's horrific record as President, much less the fact that he was associated with some creepy leftist in Chicago, or that his college records are sealed, etc. etc. etc.

We learned that Rick Perry once visited a ranch or club or whatever, that back in the 1970s had some racial graffiti or something painted on a rock?!  WHAT?!?!    But no one could be bothered to see if Obama's parents/grandparents were Communists?  

And what about George Stephanoplousolusuous's infamous Obama Campaign-planted question to Romney in the debate "Do you think we women should have the right to birth control pills?"    A week later, Obama Campaign begins their WAR ON WOMEN campaign.  Smoooooth.

HACK ALERT! HACK ALERT! HACK ALERT!

That's one of the reasons we should be so scared of the NSA spying thing.  Sure, none of us may have political aspirations... but what about our nephews, friends and/or grand daughters?  If they were to EVER run against the establishment... don't think for a second that they won't dig up private phone records or emails or whatever.


I, George Stephanaopploiushousous, will see to it that you NEVER take our power away.

[Heysaboda]

Check out this pic... no surprise that it's "Faux News"... LOL 

[Rocky Raccoon]

Rush Limbaugh is the worst example, everything out of his mouth is hate speech.  I'm a feminist and I don't take misogynists seriously.

[Bean Bag]

Rush Limbaugh is the worst example, everything out of his mouth is hate speech.  I'm a feminist and I don't take misogynists seriously.

try it for two weeks.

[Jason]

Rush Limbaugh is the worst example, everything out of his mouth is hate speech.  I'm a feminist and I don't take misogynists seriously.

l love that term, "hate speech".

Rushed Limpballs is entertainment and should be taken as seriously as such. He's paid to be a jackass and people buy the game.

[Rocky Raccoon]

I don't care what he is, the way he treated Sandra Fluke should have gotten him fired.

[Jason]

I don't care what he is, the way he treated Sandra Fluke should have gotten him fired.

His advertisers didn't leave in great enough numbers to necessitate such a reaction. For the record, I did not agree with him on Fluke as far as the "slut" message. Otherwise, she needed to do like every other American - pay for her own birth control.

[Rocky Raccoon]

I don't care what he is, the way he treated Sandra Fluke should have gotten him fired.

His advertisers didn't leave in great enough numbers to necessitate such a reaction. For the record, I did not agree with him on Fluke as far as the "slut" message. Otherwise, she needed to do like every other American - pay for her own birth control.

She wasn't making a case for herself personally, she was making a case for all women.  Birth control isn't just used to avoid pregnancy, there are women who need it for other health reasons.  You don't think they deserve to have their insurance cover that?

[Bean Bag]

this is why i created the sep. of church n' state thread...

 

[Rocky Raccoon]

this is why i created the sep. of church n' state thread...

 

I don't think birth control has that much to do with separation of church and state.  I mean, if people don't believe in birth control for religious reasons, that's fine.  Guess what?  Nobody's forcing them to use it.  It's that simple.

[Jason]

I don't care what he is, the way he treated Sandra Fluke should have gotten him fired.

His advertisers didn't leave in great enough numbers to necessitate such a reaction. For the record, I did not agree with him on Fluke as far as the "slut" message. Otherwise, she needed to do like every other American - pay for her own birth control.

She wasn't making a case for herself personally, she was making a case for all women.  Birth control isn't just used to avoid pregnancy, there are women who need it for other health reasons.  You don't think they deserve to have their insurance cover that?

It depends on the insurance company. It's not a matter of what is "deserved", either. Health care isn't a right.

[alf wiedersehen]

Edit: I apologize, Bean Bag.

[Rocky Raccoon]

I don't care what he is, the way he treated Sandra Fluke should have gotten him fired.

His advertisers didn't leave in great enough numbers to necessitate such a reaction. For the record, I did not agree with him on Fluke as far as the "slut" message. Otherwise, she needed to do like every other American - pay for her own birth control.

She wasn't making a case for herself personally, she was making a case for all women.  Birth control isn't just used to avoid pregnancy, there are women who need it for other health reasons.  You don't think they deserve to have their insurance cover that?

It depends on the insurance company. It's not a matter of what is "deserved", either. Health care isn't a right.

It should be though.  I think we can all agree on that.

[Mike's Beard]

I'm usually against handouts but I'd rather pay towards stopping an unwanted child being conceived than having to pay towards it's upkeep for the next 18 years.