Sure, people who tune into Faux News are predisposed to favor Republicans in general, including Trump. But once they get there, they get a totally different set of news than the rest of us do. Over the past week or so, for instance, on Fox, it’s been “Health care bill? What health care bill?” They can’t defend it, so they’ve chosen to simply not cover it.
On the one hand, I can’t help but think that would’ve been more effective without “they’re” and “quite”. On the other hand, I’m genuinely curious about “shothole”.
Yeah, it’s a pretty important article. Also, a relevant (and similarly long) followup by Scott Alexander. This one really is unreasonably long, so I’ll just make a quick excerpt or two:
Roberts writes that “the right has not sought greater fairness in mainstream institutions; it has defected to create its own”. This is a bizarre claim, given the existence of groups like Accuracy In Media, Media Research Center, Newsbusters, Heterodox Academy, et cetera which are all about the right seeking greater fairness in mainstream institutions, some of which are almost fifty years old. Really “it’s too bad conservatives never complained about liberal bias in academia or the mainstream media” seems kind of like the opposite of how I remember the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The way I remember it, conservatives spent about thirty years alternately pleading, demanding, suing, legislating, and literally praying for greater fairness in mainstream institutions, and it was basically all just hitting their heads against a brick wall. Then they defected to create their own.
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The moral of the story is: if you’re against witch-hunts, and you promise to found your own little utopian community where witch-hunts will never happen, your new society will end up consisting of approximately three principled civil libertarians and seven zillion witches. It will be a terrible place to live even if witch-hunts are genuinely wrong.
FOX’s slogans are “Fair and Balanced”, “Real Journalism”, and “We Report, You Decide”. They were pushing the “actually unbiased media” angle hard. I don’t know if this was ever true, or if people really believed it. It doesn’t matter. By attracting only the refugees from a left-slanted system, they ensured they would end up not just with conservatives, but with the worst and most extreme conservatives.
Because the first one doesn’t exist. It’s fictional! There aren’t any poll aggregators that say 60% disapprove (AFAIK). Hell, there are hardly any individual polls that find disapproval that high. I looked through RCP and couldn’t find a single one. 538 has one by National Opinion Research Center back on June 8-11 and several by icitizen before that. That’s why I called GIGObuster out for cherry-picking. He was citing a couple of outliers, and ignoring the bulk of the polling evidence that shows that roughly 40% of Americans approve of the job President Trump is doing and ~54% disapprove.
Of course, none of that data tells us how much the approvers or the disapprovers actually know what he’s doing to base their approval or disapproval on.
I see what you’re getting at now. I wasn’t looking closely at the various polls. Still, @54% disapproval (and getting worse based on recent events) seems hardly a ringing endorsement.
Excellent! And yes, it’s hardly a ringing endorsement (that is exactly what I was referring to when I said “that’s certainly nothing to brag about”), which makes GIGObuster’s decision to cherry-pick outliers even more bizarre: It wasn’t necessary. His point would have been (almost) as strong if he’d picked a more representative set of polls.
I don’t really get what you’re arguing. Is your position that Trump is doing a “good job” and that for some bizarre reason the entire world doesn’t see it?
This is the problem with partisan politics. People get so entrenched with their “side” that they are willing to support a giant dildo.
The worry I have for the public is that you can’t have conservatives and liberals in one table collaborating with issues without one side throwing (metaphorically) a molotov at another side. Mostly liberals against conservatives. It’s not just local, it’s turning worldwide too. I was chatting with a guy who’s from Canada regarding a party that is going to election and he put me (metaphorically) at gun point looking for my opinions despite me wanting to back off from it.
I really don’t want to have a situation where a guy holds me up and asks me about my political opinions (although that’ll hopefully never happen), and if I answer incorrectly I get a beatdown. I’m a peaceful voting citizen of this country.
I think you are missing that indeed others do notice that what you are going for remains a nitpick, that was also acknowledged but somehow you are ignoring it. One gets the impression that since it is a straw that can be pulled it continues to be. In any case, the point I made stands (and I noticed that already too) whereas we are talking about a 6% difference, the levels of support for Trump are historically low when compared to other presidents.
And history points to the likelihood that lower numbers of support for Trump will be there in the future.
Clearly. Because it sounds like you are nitpicking individual “cherry picked polls” while ignoring the vast overwhelming evidence that Trump is the worst president in history.
And unfortunately I feel that this is a trait common to Conservatives for many topics. Like if you can nitpick the edges of the scientific communities stance on climate change, it somehow invalidates the entire argument.
Are you familiar at all with Rush Limbaugh? He has been launching molotovs by the dozens on a daily basis for 25 years. No? How about the latest ad by the NRA?
What’s the evidence? That liberals really hate him? We’re only six months in, so it’s probably a bit premature to judge his record, but so far the economy seems fine, he hasn’t made any disastrous foreign policy blunders, his agenda is working it’s way through the courts and Congress, albeit rather slowly. He’s not particularly popular, but that’s not the same as being “the worst president in history” by any stretch.
It’s a general trait that one finds in all situations where someone is obliged to spin a counterfactual argument. If the facts aren’t on your side, you’d better be good at spin!
To be clear, I don’t claim that this is a characteristic of conservatism, or any other honest ideology. It’s a characteristic of dishonest self-serving cults completely divorced from reality, which is what Republicanism has become in recent years.
Climate change is just one of dozens of examples of outright reality-denial. A few of the brighter ones (and it’s only a few) have started backing away from the “it’s all a hoax” line (though the guy they voted in as president, his Energy Sec and EPA head are all still onside with that, as are many Republican Congresscritters). Instead we get “we might accept that fossil fuel burning is having an effect, BUT …” followed by a lot of obfuscation about degree of certainty, ability of climate accords to make any difference, imaginary hyperbole about mitigation costs, etc.". Really, good old James Inhofe (R, Oklahoma) summed up this view best: “only God can affect the climate”, which is code for “we don’t intend to do a damn thing about it”. And these are the folks progressives are supposed to conciliate? :rolleyes: