Thus far, your main argument against mine is that I’m the one making it. They got a name for that, its some Latin thing about ads for homos. Not quite up on that fancy stuff, has something to do with logical phalluses.
No, I don’t think that. I think that most Americans regard the EC (if they think about it at all) as an antiquated remnant of a simpler time, and not really a problem so long as it is merely a ritual for formalizing what truly matters, i.e., the will of the voters. Which is not a problem so long as that is what it does. As a means to negate the will of the voters, that is whole different kettle of piranha.
(I have heard it said that this was the whole point of the thing, that the Founders were disposed to keep all real political power in the hands of businessmen and gentleman farmers. You know, people of substance, with “skin in the game”. That the Founding Fuckups grew to accept universal suffrage so long as they kept the means to negate and void that will of the people. To trump it, so to speak.)
Perhaps so, even likely. However, my point was not hanging out in some future space, but in the here and now, that they would have already gone away.
That part I do believe in. Because, you know, they are, and have been for many years.
That’s the point - liberals believed that they would control the narrative, and they tried to do it in large part by looking down their noses at anyone who was going to vote for Trump. They wanted to control the narrative, they thought they controlled the narrative, all the polls told them that they were controlling the narrative. The voters in states like Wisconsin and Michigan and some others thought otherwise.
Something like two million black voterswho voted for Obama didn’t bother to vote this time. What was that you were saying about not being able to hold onto minorities?
Shodan, what you wrote reminds me of a saying, “Don’t mock the alligator until you have finished crossing the stream.”
In this election, many Democrats felt that demographics had already turned the tide in their favor and that they could begin mocking the alligator - white working-class fly-over America - and still win. The truth is that that demographic super-majority hasn’t set in yet and perhaps won’t until the year 2030 or so. As a result, the alligator bit them.
They should have waited several more election cycles before mocking the alligator.
So your theory is that Trump got elected and now has rising favorability ratings because “national media” is less dominant and now there is competition from talk radio and Fox News? Are you able to appreciate the incredible irony of that statement?
Let me spell it out for you. To “talk radio” and “Fox News” you can add “Internet sites like Breitbart, WND, Newsmax, and chain emails from your crazy uncle”. What do all these sources have in common? They promote right-wing causes, yes, and they are also, at best, outrageously unreliable with very little relationship to reality and frequently just outright fake news. I quoted in another thread a New York Times editorial from the early days of World War II praising the balanced perspective and well-informed outlook of the American public compared to almost any other country in the world. Those days are long gone, because too many people pay less and less attention to responsible media reporting facts and too much attention to fake news media reporting bullshit. And somehow, you think this is a good thing!
“I believe it because I know it’s true” has never been a very persuasive argument. It’s even less persuasive when you’ve just finished arguing that bullshit news sources like Fox News and talk radio are a great way for people to get information.
Only slightly more than half of eligible voters tend to vote in most national elections, and IIRC black voters are more inclined than average to be affected by the sense of disenfranchisement that discourages voters in general. I’m not surprised, however, that many more came out to vote when Obama was running than came out this time. Are you?
For sure! Why, I can’t even remember all the times I’ve heard Joe Biden sneering at ordinary folks in that elitist Delaware accent of his. Hell, can’t remember any of them!
Bricker started a thread some years ago that showed the difficulties of establishing left-wing bias. Somehow exactly the same sort and level of evidence that proved conclusively that FoxNews was biased did not have the same effect when proving the MSM were biased in the other direction.
“I don’t believe in something, and you can’t make me!” is also not very persuasive, and it summed up the cited thread pretty well.
The Democrats were very surprised. They thought, and BigT thought, that one party could hold onto minorities. Turned out not to be the case.
I am a republican who despises Donald Trump. It keeps running through my head what if he does succeed monetarily? What kind of example would this set for ethics? If he succeeds using ethical strategies I am all for it but so far I just don’t see that coming.
Wasn’t it because he tried to compare the antics of one network against the carefully selected picks across the board of all he deemed to be “MSM”? It fell apart because he couldn’t find any single network on his arbitrary list as bad as FoxNews.
I think the rise in Trump’s popularity is due primarily to two things:
One, he’s showing that “he’s a man who gets things done” as Paul Ryan in the parlance of Paul Ryan. He’s filling his cabinet at a rapid pace, turning Trump Tower into unending stream of powerful and accomplished personages, making diplomatic forays, and cutting deals with various companies to keep/create jobs in the U.S.
And two, people are learning that he’s not the wacked-out lunatic that the left was so eager to paint him as during the campaign. He’s showing a willingness to meet with and consider the points of view of people like Al Gore and Rahm Emanuel, and to mend fences and perhaps even make good use of former adversaries such as Mitt Romney.
He is behaving much more like the Donald Trump I had come to know and admire prior to the campaign. I didn’t vote for him, and came this close to voting for Hillary despite how much I detest her, because of some of the things he was saying and because I felt I had no real idea what he’d do once in office. But I’m feeling more comfortable and more encouraged as time goes by. And I’m beginning to get a glimmer of him as a genuine uniter and as someone who might wind up routinely accomplishing things politically that most people would say are impossible.
Left-wing media bias and Fox News’ (the tv version) bias are two different animals. Fox’s bias is obvious and constantly out there for all to see. The MSM bias is pernicious and exists alongside other, more straightforward news reporting which makes it less of a continuous drumbeat in favor of the left. Prior to Trump’s nomination the MSM at least made a pretense of trying to be objective, even though everyone but liberals could easily see through it. But with Trump they took the position that he was such an ‘ist’ and guilty of so many ‘isms’ that they could finally throw off the cloak of objectivity and go after him full bore.
And that, in conjunction with many other areas in which liberals have overreached, has played a significant role in the fact that Donald Trump is now the President Elect of the United States.
Well, see, he does things like that…and then he turns around and gets into Twitter wars with a labor union leader, or SNL. He shows moments of possible maturity, but (just like during the campaign), he still reverts back to his petulant, thin-skinned persona.
Keep in mind that there’s almost always a method to his madness. Yes, he may appear thin-skinned and petulant on the surface, but you can believe those tweets are working to serve him in ways that aren’t readily apparent.
Based on all of the reports which came out, over the course of the campaign, from people who’ve known him for decades, I think there’s one of two possibilities:
He really is thin-skinned and petulant, but he’s generally gotten away with it until now.
He’s constructed a public persona that is so different from his real person, and so carefully maintained over 30+ years of public life, that even the late Andy Kaufman would have been impressed.
I think a lot of the people who are demanding hard evidence of left-wing media bias are missing the point; people can sense something even if it’s been intentionally made subtle.
Suppose a woman is sitting at a bar and she sees that a man a few yards away keeps glancing at her, but glancing away every time she catches his eye. He also is playing with his smartphone and she suspects - but can’t prove - that he is surreptitiously taking photos of her. Finally this guy just has a shift look and wears a fedora and just gives this creepy vibe.
You could tell her, “You have no hard evidence that he is a creep. Everything he’s done technically has an innocuous explanation.” But she would be creeped out anyway.
Saying that the MSM hasn’t given obvious clues of bias, therefore there isn’t enough evidence of bias, will not do away with that creeping feeling of bias or favoritism that people sense. People have a spidey sense with regards to bias, just like they do with sports officiating. Explanations of “plausible deniability” won’t win them over. People are very attuned to things of this sort.
That gets into another debate. But the point is, to win votes, you have to win over people’s feelings, not just their facts. You can argue facts all day but if you don’t make people feel good about you, or give them a “right” feeling about your side, they won’t pull the lever for you in that voting booth.
Same for the media. The media can claim that it hasn’t shown indicators of bias (“Where? Show us where we were biased. Specific examples please”) but this isn’t the SATs, this isn’t a bar exam, this isn’t trial in court. If people sense that the MSM is biased, then the political party for whom people sense that the MSM is biased in favor of, will pay a price at the polls. Just like how people naturally tend to root against a sports team if they sense that the refs favor them (whether the refs actually do or don’t, or whether the refs make that favoritism subtle or not.)
And it certainly helps if there is a spirited campaign to shout “MSM!” and “LEFT WING BIAS!!!” at every opportunity…and do nothing but repeat the message even louder when asked for evidence, right? Fuck facts-Propaganda rules!
“Facts” aren’t just limited to the big obvious things, they show up in thousands of little subtle cues as well. Many years ago, *Newsweek *ran an edition in which the cover photo of George W. Bush was…well, a rather ugly one. It was, in fact, ugly enough that the Letters to the Editor section the following edition featured a reader’s comment about *Newsweek *specifically choosing such an unsightly photo of Bush for its cover. The magazine, surely, had thousands of other Bush photos it could have chosen from but specifically selected this one. To say, “*Newsweek *is biased against Bush because they picked an ugly photo of him” sounds ridiculous, but to many people it struck an inner chord and they latched onto it as evidence that the media was prejudiced against Bush.
Also, relatively little human communication is actually in the words itself. Tone of voice, facial gestures, etc. can all convey preference for one political ideology or opposition to another.