The New American Politics thread

[wittynickname]

Originally Posted by AltaGuy

I think maybe I'd choose to vote conservative if these are my options.

Trump is the closest to a "conservative" as there is in this race.

A man who cheated on his first wife with his second, second wife with his third. Who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault. That's the guy who conservatives are throwing their support behind.

There is not a real "conservative" in this race.

[Makarov]

Originally Posted by AltaGuy

I think maybe I'd choose to vote conservative if these are my options.

Not to worry. Those aren't your options.

[Thor]

So it certainly feels like the independents will determine this election, people are so entrenched on either side that facts don't come in to play, just emotion.

I'm worried about Jill Stein and Gary Johnson taking too many people from voters that we need to stop Trumpf.

I also don't think Hillary will dominate Trumpf in debates, he has proven himself a bully and speaks over people constantly, if Hillary tries to do the same she will be seen as shrill, angry woman, so I think we are in trouble folks.

[the_only_turek_fan]

Originally Posted by nik-

The party does.

That party is a POS.

They should hire Stephen Harper and Jason Kenny on how to run a 21st century Conservative Party.

[Makarov]

Originally Posted by Buster

I'm sure you could come up with all sorts of examples of decisions that can be reduced to dichotomies.

- Invade Iraq. Or not
- bomb a building in Yemen, or not.
- support the nomination of X candidate for the supreme court. Or not.


etc etc.

I can't respond to this because I don't know what it means.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

Trump is the closest to a "conservative" as there is in this race.

A man who cheated on his first wife with his second, second wife with his third. Who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault. That's the guy who conservatives are throwing their support behind.

There is not a real "conservative" in this race.

That is true, but has nothing to do with conservatism. Trump answers to almost as few "conservative" check boxes as Hillary does. Saying he's "the closest thing to a conservative" is like saying I'm the closest thing to a fish posting in this thread right now because I can hold my breath underwater for the longest.

I would say Gary Johnson is the closest thing to a conservative in the race, despite being a libertarian (unless you're counting Pence).

[the_only_turek_fan]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

Trump is the closest to a "conservative" as there is in this race.

A man who cheated on his first wife with his second, second wife with his third. Who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault. That's the guy who conservatives are throwing their support behind.

There is not a real "conservative" in this race.

If Newt was his running mate, they would have had a combined 6 marriages on the ticket.

[the_only_turek_fan]

The first thing that the Republican Party needs to start doing is behaving like gentlemen.

The rest will follow.

[2Stonedbirds]

Originally Posted by the_only_turek_fan

The first thing that the Republican Party needs to start doing is behaving like gentlemen.

The rest will follow.

They tried that.

And like true gentlemen, they politely handed the nomination to Trump.

[Izzle]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

yes it would.

But in general don't have people on the conventions stage shame people and don't call them stupid. Don't stoop to Trumps level.

I missed the Dunham and Ferrera speech yesterday. Looked it up today and they didnt chastise anyone other than turnip.

Seth Meyers, yes. But it was also done as part of a comedy show.

Sarah Silverman's "you're being ridiculous" is chastising, but still true. The berner idiots were being idiots.

Still, all this shouldnt compel a rational person to vote for trump out of spite, no?

[Jacks]

Originally Posted by wittynickname

A man who cheated on his first wife with his second, second wife with his third. Who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault. That's the guy who conservatives are throwing their support behind.

You must really hate Bill.

Originally Posted by the_only_turek_fan

That party is a POS.

They should hire Stephen Harper and Jason Kenny on how to run a 21st century Conservative Party.

I think the dems are closer to our conservative party. Our Liberals are proabably closer to Bernie and our NDP would be considered granola eating nutbars in the US. Just my opinion of course.

[GirlySports]

i think Bernie is actually left of our NDP. Free everything.

[Senator Clay Davis]

Originally Posted by GirlySports

i think Bernie is actually left of our NDP. Free everything.

Bernie is right in line with the NDP, not to the left of it. If anything his record on guns puts him slightly to the right of the NDP. But he's not to the left of the NDP by any stretch.

[Lanny_McDonald]

Originally Posted by Buster

So the liberal bias in the media is acceptable because they are right?

No, there is no “political” bias in the media except that created by the likes of Fox News. Any bias which exists is evident because of the ontology of journalism itself. Journalistic practice was to ask questions and explore both sides of an issue. That is classic liberalism in action. This developed through organic means. That belief still exists in many of the traditional media outlets, as it is cultural, and cultural changes take time to change. Only the new media is free of these constraints.

Prior to 1987 there was legal requirements for mass media to present both sides of a story, and to go as so far as to provide equal time to explore both sides of an issue. The Republicans killed the Fairness Doctrine which afforded that very protection. If there truly was political bias in the media, why would those suffering from it the most kill that protection? Doesn’t make sense. Unless you had an ulterior motive for killing the Fairness Doctrine and removing the balance requirement.

The RW media was borne out of the killing of the Fairness Doctrine. Joseph Coors attempted to start a RW News station in the 1970’s, using satellite TV, but the balance requirements established in the Fairness Doctrine prevented him from doing just that. Ironically, he tapped Roger Ailes to start that project up as well. So fast forward through the initial conservative news startup (CNN) who had a business focus, and then to the birth of Fox News and their intentional focus on only the conservative perspective. None of this was organic. It was built from the ground up with ideological goals, not with the intent of properly informing the general public of the facts.

That's a very circular argument.

Not to anyone who actually understands complexity and nuance.

If you watch MSNBC/Maddow, The Young Turks, the CBC, etc and can't see the outrageous agenda at play, then your echo chamber is very strong.

You don’t have a clue about the echo chamber effect. Just because multiple media sources discusses an issue the same way does not make it an echo. The echo chamber effect is a result of a single story or opinion being repeated multiple times, or referenced by another party. The classic example of this was when Judith Miller got jailed for protecting her source in the leak of WMD in Iraq story. It turns out that the whole WMD story was a leak from Dick Cheney, which was picked up and repeated ad nasueum to the point where Cheney used it himself in one of his own speeches! That is the ultimate circular reference by the way! It is even worse when a personality has the ability to access multiple media sources and repeat their own opinion multiple times, giving the appearance of multiple voices sharing information when it is actually just one. This happens extensively in the RW media because all of the big personalities have access to Fox News, Hate Radio, a strong think tank organization, and a very large conservative blogosphere. That same infrastructure does not exist on the left.

And the current iteration of the Left, and its current obsession with Thought Crime and "social justice" might be the very opposite of Classical Liberal thinking.

Social justice is the basis of classical liberal thinking. Good lord.

Originally Posted by Buster

Nonsense.

Dichotomies can be useful, as policy decisions can regularly be reduced to dichotomies: do we raise taxes or lower taxes, do we make the government bigger or smaller.

Dichotomies are seldom useful when it comes to political issues, because those issues are complex and nuanced. Dichotomies cannot deal with these complexities and are actually the enemy of thoughtful discussion on finding solutions to big problems. I mean, you’d have to be an idiot not to agree with that? Right?

[CliffFletcher]

Originally Posted by New Era

The media has always had a liberal bias, in the sense of John Locke liberalism, because they were educated and had experiential learning on their side. Getting out of the studio or newsroom and actually seeing both sides of an issue first hand informed their perspective and gave the appearance of bias to some. I will also point out that no one went out of their way to create one side of the media to have a particular bias.

Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.

It's a stirring ideal. The problem is that it relies on correctly identifying who the afflicted are and who the comfortable are, in a culture where everyone feels aggrieved or threatened, where identity politics have encouraged people to lump huge and diverse groups together and assign labels to them, and where we tell people whatever they feel must be true.

The people who work in the media are drawn from a narrow slice of American society. Urban, educated, liberal, cosmopolitan, young, tech-savvy. The way many of their fellow-citizens live is as alien to them as how Uruguayans live. For every American who uses twitter there are two who do not even have internet access. Americans increasingly live in mutually-incomprehensible worlds.

Originally Posted by Makarov

I'm stealing this from someone (can't recall who I'm afraid) but isn't the standard for journalism "truth" rather than "impartiality"?

A thousand true things happen in a day. Which ones do you publicize? Who do you cast in the role of hero/victim and who do you cast in the role of villain/oppressor? Those are choices, and those choices are made to craft a narrative. In the U.S. those narratives have hardened into a binary, existential Us vs Them struggle.

The real world is not binary. But statistics and complex trends are not emotionally appealing. Nobody wants those stories. They're boring and hard to present. They don't sell. And the liberal media is just as guilty as the conservative media of crafting narratives that will sell to their audience.

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

Originally Posted by New Era

Social justice is the basis of classical liberal thinking. Good lord.

Not the way social justice is thought of these days. Similarly, when you say the media is classically liberal based on its ontology, you're equivocating. When he says that MSNBC and TYT have a "liberal bias", he really means a leftist bias. And he's right. I like Rachel Maddow, but there's no doubt she's no more impartial than Sean Hannity. MSNBC has attempted to get a niche market as the 24 hour cable news network for the Left, the answer to Fox. I don't know why you're spending so much time rebutting something so obvious.

[Drak]

Originally Posted by the_only_turek_fan

If Newt was his running mate, they would have had a combined 6 marriages on the ticket.

So much for the party of "Family Values."

[nfotiu]

Originally Posted by Senator Clay Davis

Proving yet again he's simply griffting out here, Trump just said several times that Tim Kaine did a terrible job in New Jersey. The people supporting him deserve to be totally duped and have him royally #### them over in the end.

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/0...m-kaine-226283

So he didn't just mis-speak the state name, he researched the wrong guy, and didn't even get the facts right on that guy.

The last line of the article made me smile:

Polling on Kaine's popularity in New Jersey, however, is hard to come by.

[MissTeeks]

Jesus:

[CorsiHockeyLeague]

I love how his last line about Putin there is "I hope he likes me".