Lawyer versus Businessman; Presidential styles.

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JUst as your position reflects a bias, and both sides are not right.

You have shown explicitly? you mean categorically?

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I don't believe that is so after seeing so many others refuting your position.
Regarding proving your sources as biased, no I'm not that far into it and just make the odd peak into the politcal forum.
I have seen enough though, and read enough to understand that you hold a position that is highly doubtful and questionable at best.

 

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Is that how you spin the assessment of her Iraq War vote - liberal angst? A refusal to "fly revolutionary colors"?

The "problem" was that Hillary Clinton is a rightwing corporate friendly conservative authoritarian, with a political base in the corporate wing of the Democratic Party, who has not only failed to represent the liberal mainstream of the Party but has undermined it both actively and passively throughout her long and well-documented career.

From the reflexive, a priori, and poorly justified rejection of the majority Dem (and majority American public) supported single payer and public options in the various health care bills over the decades, to her defiance of the majority of the Democratic Congress in the Iraq War Powers vote (the pivotal, gut check, which-side-are-you-on vote of our lifetime), to her rightwing maneuverings and compromises around the various financial and foreign trade regulations and treaties, to her bandwagon approach on libertarian social issues such as gay marriage and sound governance issues such as CO2 emissions and GMOs and combination issues such as drug laws, she has failed the liberal cause in American politics consistently and almost without exception.

Locking down the Democratic nomination well in advance of actual campaigning, via DNC backroom machinations and apparent voter and campaign manipulations later, was just a flash point.

 

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You seem to be missing the point again. If you paid more attention to my critique in general, you would have a better idea of what I mean.

You really should have paid attention.

We ended up winning a little faster than I anticipated. The Democratic Party did its part, in the end. I'm actually rather quite impressed; once we had a way, they all started lining up. And then it was over, and they were all lined up.

If we could have won the revolution at any point along the way, we would have.

What Democrats need is an idea of how they're going to win.

I know, I know, that's just so annoying, isn't it?

Your analyses are unreliable as long as you're wallowing in straw men.

It would probably help if you would shake loose from your libertarian self-obsession long enough to recognize that pitching libertarianism to my liberalism just isn't going to impress me.

Yeah, don't tell me about gay marriage. Democrats weren't going to win that fight in Congress, and don't pretend otherwise. And like I said, two Scalias and no Kennedy.

There's a reason so many voters are willing to buy into the basic Democratic bargain. It's because we've known for decades we don't have the numbers to win outright. There's a reason we had Blue Dogs. There's a reason Bill Clinton conceded the Reagan economy in order to win the White House. Check in with your history, dude. Your basic libertarian critique might help you feel better, but it doesn't seem to recognize what people are actually doing.

 

The first(sentiments) was a direct response to your previous....and was asking for your personal perspective.

The second: Brexit
I think that a significant percentage of the brexit vote was a no vote for the status quo, a no vote for the the current government's policies, a no vote for globalization. It has spawned many requests for referendums in other eu countries.
ergo-------------"wild card" ( joker is a wild card)
If Trump were to get that percentage of "no" votes, how many would that be? What percentage of the electorate wants to vote "NO"?

Mean?
Nothing really:
Just questions.

 

No. You are refusing to address my posting.

Short version: Hillary Clinton has been an obstacle, not an asset, to the liberal (libertarian left) agenda. Consistently. She has never been on your side, even, with the exception of a couple of authoritarian matters (gun control, especially) in which you have abandoned basic principle.

What does it take to get that simple, obvious fact - easily verified by even a cursory review of her many years in the political arena, and on full public display in this latest campaign - through the koolaid haze?

It's got nothing to do with whether she deserves a vote in the next election - Trump would be a disaster. But there is no point in creating fantasies in which that politician is likely to metamorphose into an effective liberal - a New Deal, sound foreign policy, rigorous corporate curbing, socially somewhat libertarian head of State. She's almost certain to appoint reasonable Supreme Court justices, she's probably going to handle China and the Middle East and the coming crunch in Obamacare with something other than the total incompetence of any Republican available, she will continue the slow and basic rehab of the Federal bureaucracy so miserably trashed by W&Co. That has to be good enough.

Don't try to sell obvious falsehoods, in other words. They don't help. The only people who will drink the koolaid already have.

Capitulation is not bargaining. Quitting is not losing. Clinton is a major part of the reason "we don't have the numbers" - she helped see to that, she provided some of the numbers on the other side. That was a bad thing to do, ok?

This "basic Democratic bargain" you think you've been making has brought us to the brink of privatizing an increasingly and incrementally pared back Social Security. Is that going to be yet another one of those things "we don't have the numbers to win outright"?

 

Of course not. At least the translations to German of these two words denote very different things.

Numbers count in stupid democratic elections, not in the search of truth.

BTW, the content of the example I have quoted has not been questioned. Except if you do not count joepistole's unargumentative namecalling "questioning".

Follow the link. Oh, I have seen, the Western free press has managed to hide the evidence, which at that time was available for free at http://www.news.com.au/national/ful...-17-minute-video/story-e6frfkp9-1227444629703 behind a paywall, or possibly removed it completely. So, given that the truth is hidden again, you can now believe the consistent lies of the Western media about it - last but not least, because all this is consistent now.

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Sorry, it is not doubtful or questionable, it should be clearly rejected as false, without discussion, by a True Believer of the Western mainstream!!!!!111!!

 

What's the matter comrade? Are you feeling oppressed by the truth and democracy?

 

You are of course right that the "NATO press" - an inaccurate term - often publishes coherent falsehood, as if organized. That does not mean that you are able to evaluate those falsehoods consistently, or that you even aware of the lies of the "Putin press" (which has no better track record, and has been borderline ludicrous in some matters such as the military annexation of Crimea). There is some doubt on that score, as your visible mode of source evaluation has been to balance sources you assume to be equivalently corrupt as if discounting them all equivalently, and in that process you have been completely fooled by some stuff familiar to any informed American (very crude and simple anti-Clinton deceptions, racist propaganda and historical revision).

The ignorant and misled, the bigoted and reactionary, the neoConfederate heirs of the Birchers and the Klan and the Reagan Revolution (marked by the first big Islamic jihadist victory - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Beirut_barracks_bombings - as well as 9/11) and the T Party Morning In America;

is indeed a large number of voters in the US, and poses a threat to us all. One problem is that they don't have any clear idea what the bad status quo is, and they are probably voting "Yes" rather than "No". If Trump gets all their votes he can win, much as W&Cheney did in 2000. That would be a bad thing, yes?

 

Of course I'm not infallible. But about Crimea I have followed the sources quite accurate, and the Runet (Russian internet) was quite accurately informed and much more reasonable than the Ukrainian side. For example, I have known already from 28. 2. that there is Russian speznas in Crimea - from openly pro-Russian sites. And therefore I have looked carefully at what was officially told about this. And I have seen nothing more than avoidance to openly acknowledge this presence - but even this not in a really serious form, more in form of jokes about journalists too stupid to formulate their questions, like Putin's famous "uniforms you can buy in any military shop", which the NATO press has presented like a denial.
And, don't worry, I know some questions where the Russian media lie as consistently as the American ones. And this is, by the way, a reason why I do not plan to live in Russia or so.

You have completely misinterpreted my approach as "balancing". The classical Soviet time "reading between the lines" techniques do in no way work by balancing. They are able to extract information even from propaganda sources if only propaganda from one side is accessible (which was the classical problem of that time). Here, for example, by translating from biased propaganda language to neutral language. As well, conclusions from denial of something work nicely. Once something is denied, one knows that the propaganda of the other side makes such claims - even if you do not have access to them.

Once propaganda from the other side is available too, the job becomes, of course, much easier. But there is no balancing involved. To take 50% from that side and 50% from the other will give you only a combined stupidity. Extracting truth works in other ways. For example, detecting what is told by one side, but not told, not questioned by the other side. Because this is the propaganda version of admitting something.

 

It was an observation, not an "interpretation".

Whatever "techniques" you think you are employing, they don't work for you when you encounter propaganda from the standard American fascist sources. (Or should I say "rightwing corporate militarized authoritarian"?). You have proved incapable of extracting information from them, and a patsy for their manipulations.

You have to be able to recognize propaganda in the first place, and even more critically: differentiate it from information. You go haywire by taking legitimate, factual information and treating it as propaganda, to be balanced against the "other side's" propaganda; and also by taking obvious propaganda and extracting "information" from it without enough of a base in reality to realize you are being conned - that your "techniques" were anticipated by clever propagandists.

And that is how Trump obtained his voting base - organized for him over about fifty years of trial and refinement by the finest marketing professionals the world has ever seen.

 

Just for fun, about the quality of the Western press, in this case NYT: http://www.moonofalabama.org/2016/0...-johnson-failed-with-four-major-mistakes.html

It cannot be an observation, because I do not use any balancing. Possibly a hallucination?

If my method works or not is a different question. It is, of course, only a method to extract useful information from sources which intentionally try to hide useful information, so that by its very nature it will sometimes fail. But you give only claims, no evidence, thus, your "support" does nothing to improve the situation. Essentially, your recommendation is simply not to read sources you hate, and to believe you about which sources are bad. This is a recommendation you can try to give your own children, but I doubt even they will follow.

For a scientist, this would be the most stupid recommendation - scientists try to use all sources of information which are available. Recommendation about techniques to improve the extraction of information from propaganda sources would be welcome. But you give none. Instead, phrases like the following:

suggest that you subscribe to a worldview with a binary division into "factual information" and "propaganda", which may be helpful for children to get a first orientation but is otherwise nonsense.

 

We may have a semantic problem with the word "balancing" - it's my term for the way you handled (for example) the climate change matter: propaganda from both sides, compared and contrasted according to the imagined interests of its imagined sources. Where you ran into trouble was in mistaking a large body of scientific information for propaganda by advocates of governmental expansion.

Not so. I have, for example, repeatedly and consistently recommended to you that you obtain contextual information and a background of factual knowledge, before classifying material as propaganda and employing any such "techniques". It doesn't matter what techniques you use if you don't know whether or not you are dealing with propaganda in the first place, and I recommended that you avoid making such assessments in matters of which you are ignorant.

Since I obviously don't, and you have done exactly that with the Clinton stuff (where you took propaganda for fact), the climate change stuff (where you took fact for propaganda), and the civil rights in America stuff (where you did both), where do you suppose I think you got that idea?

At any rate: We have the matter of Trump, and the HillaryHate media manipulations. The key there is that they aren't coming from Trump.

 

But this is in no way an accurate description about what matters for me. I may have opposed some of your illusions that one side of the discussion presents "a large body of scientific information" - where you ignore the problem that without freedom of science - and there is none in circumstances where scientists have to care about getting new jobs every two years or so - scientists have to care about their next position, and to reach one they have to publish as much as possible in fashionable mainstream directions. Which introduces a large bias in favor of the establishment (which controls the grants) into science itself. Moreover, it completely ignores the problem of choice by science journalists. We have discussed this in regard of the question of completely missing information about positive consequences of increasing temperatures. That you choose to ignorance these two problems is your choice, not my problem.

And you obviously do not get the point that there is nothing similar to a balancing. Recognizing a bias of a source in no way forces one to ignore the source, and even not to give its information some low "weight" in some balancing process. For example, the bias of the climate science in no way means that I reject the scientific results they present. It means I reject the resulting overall picture "climate change is horror". Because I know (because I have recognized the bias) that there are a lot of positive influences too - an increasing temperature is, in particular, better than a similar decreasing temperature. So, the overall picture the media present, given that they report only the negative facts, in no way describes reality, even if I 100% agree with every particular fact they report.

A triviality.

Wrong. Good techniques for extracting information from propaganda sources are able to extract information from reliable sources too. So, in fact these techniques can be used also to distinguish the degree of reliability of sources - even if this is not their main point, because the technique to identify, somehow, "reliable" sources and ignore all others as unreliable is a very bad technique.

I do not know on which scrap heap you get your ideas. But here we have a clear case of projection. In the Clinton case, I have extracted videos from propaganda sources. That the videos themselves - even if cut our of context - are facts you have not even disputed. You have the right to dispute my interpretation of these video facts, but this does not make them fake videos with actors presenting themselves as Clinton. In the climate change stuff, I did not question scientific facts themselves, I have questioned mainly the choices which of them to present in the media (as well as the choices of scientists which of them are worth to be studied). But you follow the "propaganda vs. facts" scheme, and project it, and interpret my behavior as if I would think the whole Clinton videos or the Clinton joke came from objective, reliable sources (lol) or that the particular results of many climate scientists have been inventions without any base, pure propaganda.

That you follow with kindergarten scheme of "propaganda vs. facts" follows, btw, from your own text. Because I can take "propaganda for a fact", or reverse, only if there is a clear distinction between them, and you have been able to identify them correctly. These are the assumptions you have to presuppose, else your accusations simply do not make sense.

This does not mean that one cannot distinguish more or less reliable sources. The point is that it is always useful to identify the general bias of a source, and its weaknesses related with them. So, even obviously propagandistic sources can give reliable information about some domains. Say SOHR in the Syrian case is a horrible propaganda source, and whatever is against Assad or Russia from SOHR one can simply ignore, completely, total White Helmet scrap. But their information about the actual frontline - who has taken which village - is not unreliable at all. Not completely neutral, but much more reliable than other islamist sources.

 

I was fully aware of how your misinterpretation and rejection of the large body of scientific information presented to you was based on exactly that, and I pointed out that your bad judgment in the matter was (as usual) rooted in ignorance exacerbated by propaganda feeds you failed to allow for ( you didn't "extract", because you lacked the information necessary).

To whit: You apparently have no idea who is doing and publishing the most important and most disturbing research in the field (hint: not adjunct instructors and grad students on two year appointments), you don't understand the actual financial and professional pressures on real life "science journalists", you have no clear notion of the nature of the "establishment(s)" actually involved, you draw a complete blank on the history of this media issue, and in your ignorance you parrot the bs familiar to me from the propaganda feeds of the Heartland Institute and other extravagantly well-funded and well supported denialist media sources.

I chose to address both those problems directly, in the context of decades of awareness of both of those matters. I pointed out to you that neither one justified your rejection and misinterpretation of the findings of climate change researchers. I also pointed out that you seemed to lack basic information in several areas of your posting, such as why pole-ward migration of tropical organisms would be bad news far more often than good news (there isn't nearly as much good news missing as you seem to think, and far more deceptive claims of good for news that isn't good than you seem to have noticed).

Then you have no excuse at all. What appeared to be happening (in the climate change stuff, especially) was misinterpretation and misled rejection of scientific research findings caused by your handling them as propaganda feeds from a political "side". That you were handling them as propaganda feeds from a political side we know, because you told us.

The problem is that you did not "extract" the videos. You watched them, perceived them, in a context provided and evoked by the clever propagandists, who took advantage of your ignorance to con you into the "interpretation" they intended.

I recommended to you that you develop better awareness of the scale and nature of your ignorance, and avoid attempting to "extract" information from sophisticated American propaganda sources when you don't have the basic information you need to prevent such manipulations. That's as helpful as I can be.

You can make that error - which is frequent in your posting, as in the sentences I just quoted regarding the Clinton videos (where you take what you think you see in a video to be "fact") - regardless of the nature of the distinction, or my ability to identify propaganda feeds.

The relevance of all this is in the free pass it gives to Trump. When reality has been discarded, and the world interpreted as a collection of competing propaganda feeds, Trump gains lot of ground.

 

I have given you some quite neutral arguments - the bad situation with freedom of science given the extremal job insecurity for scientists, as well of the simplest way of distortion of truth by omission by journalists given the political influence. Fine if you are fully aware of these arguments. Not so good that you simply ignore them, and use your universal but content free answer "you are stupid and ignorant".

Fine, but it would be nice if you would, in this case, correct these errors, and present evidence that I'm wrong. A "you don't understand" is certainly not sufficient for this purpose.

Of course, and I have accepted this argument, not only useful animals and plants migrate North, but bad animals and plants too. Anyway, the tropical forest contains more useful animals and plants than the North pole. So I have reason to doubt that if one takes into account everything pole-ward migration of tropical organisms would be more bad than good news.

Of course. And I need no excuse. Don't forget, it is (until you present hard evidence) only your fantasy where I'm completely stupid and incompetent and unable to identify propaganda and so on. joepistole and PhysBang may like this, but who cares?

Except that I have not rejected any particular scientific research finding you have presented.

Which is, I have to repeat, is quite a triviality. In political discussions, there are no unbiased sources. Even scientists are not unbiased. One has to recognize their bias, and make conclusions. Biased scientists behave very differently from biased journalists, and I have explained the differences: They avoid research where they know the outcome would be politically unwanted. They hide the politically most unwanted parts inside the papers, so that the politically incorrect percentage of the text decreases in the following order: 1.) The inner parts of the paper, 2.) Introduction and conclusion 3.) Abstract 4.) Title. But, on the other hand, they seldom lie. Journalists are a different species - at least some of them, if not the majority, even love to lie.

You have an exaggerated image of the ability of such manipulation to reach the aims. They have an effect mostly on people who do not care. Once this is usually a great majority (remember about rational ignorance?) such things reach their aim - statistically. But to think that they always reach them is stupid. In particular, in this case I was - given that I have made the error of not checking the context before posting it here, allowing you to make a minor point which you need so much that you repeat this already hundreds of times - quite angry about those who have made this out of context cut. And despite this prejudice I have, reconsidering the video, concluded that this does not change the point that this person is a maniac. So, no, these propagandists were not clever at all, their cut out of context was easily detectable, and, moreover, completely unnecessary, because the content itself discredits Hillary enough.

Which is, I repeat, essentially anti-scientific: To throw away information. Therefore I don't follow it.

Reality is, unfortunately, not immediately accessible to me. I have never had a meeting with Trump. All I have is what various media give me. All of them are suspect to be propaganda. So, at best I can reformulate your thesis in the following way: When the thesis that anti-Trump-propaganda described reality has been discarded, Trump will, of course, gain some ground. The same triviality holds for every anti-Propaganda, be it anti-Putin or anti-Obama, anti-pedophile or anti-gay, anti-semitic or anti-white. The point being? Sometimes it is nice if bad people gain something - like a criminal a just penalty instead of torture to death. Not?

 

Dudes, why even read this guy? His response to being given evidence is always something like, "Where is the evidence?"

 

Most of media sources in America, tends to slant left. The main stream is not one place but covers a range of media places in print and TV. One exception is FOX which leans right. What that means is, it is easier to avoid one thing; FOX, than it is to avoid many things; the spectrum of the main stream media. The left's POV and its media propaganda is harder to avoid.

If someone on the left hates right wing propaganda; FOX, they can avoid most of the right leaning propaganda by shutting off FOX. The people on the right do not have the same ease and flexibility, since the left is spread out over a wider area and not concentrated in one place. FOX does so well because it is all the eggs in one basket. The left has many baskets, none with many eggs.

Most of the places you look for news, if you channel surf, do not portray Hilary and Trump with the microscope. Trump is targeted for slips of the tongue or antics, but Hillary is not subject to the same scrutiny of minutia. This tends to make Trump appear like a cartoon character. It also allows, real problems for Hillary, to be glossed over. This comes back to defense lawyering and the initiative of the client. If the drug lord is able to put a hit on the only witness, he can help himself become innocent by the law. Trump is a witness for the prosecution.

The polls are showing the propaganda is not working as well the widespread leftist media is hoping. People can see the bias not only in the political establishment but also in the media. People on the right have the advantage of stumbling onto leftist media, as they channel surf. They tend to get a better balance from which to see the truth. Those on the left avoid FOX and get only one side as their channel surf. The result is the right is turning out. The leftist who avoids FOX only see their own propaganda, by default, so there is internal doubt. This may well result in low voter turn-out.

 

Given the severity of Fox News's and other right wing entertainment sources right wing bent, anything would be left. So that ain't saying much.

Do you have any evidence to back any of that up? Right wing media is more than just Fox News. The so called "mainstream" media are often supportive of America's right wing for fear of being charged with bias e.g. this notion of balance, if you report X amount of bad stuff about Republicans you have to report an equal amount of bad stuff on Democrats even if you have to fictionalize the news e.g. Hilary's emails.

Except that's just not true. This gets back to my previous paragraph. You are trying to force a false equivalence. The two political parties are not equal, and the media shouldn't be required to balance the scales with fictional reporting. The facts are the facts. The news shouldn't be fictionalized as Republicans demand in order to make Republicans look better.

Well the "leftist" media, anything to the right of Fox News and right wing talk radio and blogoshpere, isn't leftist. It's just the mainstream media. How many right wingers channel surf? Not many. Most are devotees of Fox News are other Republican entertainment sources. I view Fox News, I listen to right wing entertainment and I'm not a right winger. I don't avoid Fox News or any right wing source. When they have interesting things to say, I'm interested. When they just want to dump shit to feed the mushrooms, I'm not interested.

Right wing media preys on the mans basest instincts to advance the interests of a few. Mainstream i.e. liberal media doesn't. There's the difference.

 

If you lack information, recognize the implications of that, is the recommendation.

I'm faced with demonstration after demonstration of the effectiveness of such manipulation - notably, on you.

Focus: one has to recognize their bias. One cannot recognize bias without information.

You have provided a good example of that, in getting the source and direction and nature of the common bias in climate change research reporting almost completely wrong, and substituting for it a misleading description of that bias familiar to me from the media manipulations of the Heartland Institute and the American Enterprise Institute and similar sources of disinformation.

No, you don't. You have a large area of ignorance in the relevant fields (biology, ecology). You need information, before you can have reasons to doubt things.

It is scientifically valid, in fact fundamental, to avoid coming to conclusions without information. You are not throwing anything away when you avoid making errors and false assumptions.

Which the candidacy of Trump well illustrates. The entire body of "respectable" US political media has been making assumptions about the Republican Party and its voting base that did not rest on information (which was available in all manner of lefty and liberal venues, but denied as "biased"). Now they have a phenomenon that seems to mystify them - Trump's nomination and subsequent growing popularity. And they are flailing. That's dangerous.