It’s definitely true that Biden is hurt by Musk/CCP platforms amplifying anti-Biden memes that are then recirculated by New York Times reporters, though one’s exact interpretation of that may vary. https://t.co/Yn8tiRDirG
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 12, 2024
I think one of the defining features of the current media landscape is that Biden being in office has been much worse for business than Trump ones.
Of course in life nobody ever responds to incentives but it’s an interesting business fact. https://t.co/bfKOEvveai
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 12, 2024
Astead accosts random strangers, demanding to know whether they don’t think Biden is ‘too old’. Sure, sure, whatever, fella, they reply, edging towards the nearest exit…
(Pity of it, I remember Astead doing good reporting during the BLM protests, but when the NYTimes hires you, hate-click money spends just like the honest kind.)
Yglesias — ‘When Trump wins, so does the media’:
…The two best journalistic niches during Trump’s presidency were scoopy reporting, with the goal of obtaining new anecdotes that re-confirmed people’s belief that the orange man is bad (we recently had a good one of these about Trump’s visceral disgust at the sight of disabled veterans), and columns that elegantly restated liberals’ visceral disgust with Trump. These are totally fine styles of journalism; I’ve consumed a lot of both and tried my hand at some of the latter, but neither happens to be my personal forte. In terms of my own sense of professional fulfillment, the best parts of the Trump years were the relatively “normal” ones covering ACA repeal and TCJA. I think I’m good at that kind of thing, and while I think it would be bad for America if Nikki Haley or Mike Pence beat Joe Biden, I do think those outcomes would be fine for me since they would run businesslike administrations focused on implementing right-wing policy, and I could write about that.
For most people in the media, though, the incentives go the other way…
For-profit enterprises tend to be good at aligning their work with the goal of making money, or else they’d find themselves going out of business. Reporters work for editors, who work for higher-level managers, who report to executives, who are accountable to boards and shareholders. The job is to cover the campaign for maximum revenue and minimum expense, not to inform the public — and if doing a bad job of informing the public puts Trump back in the White House, that is objectively not a bad thing from the standpoint of ratings, ad sales, and subscriptions. And rather than whining about the media not having “learned its lesson,” I think Democrats need to say more clearly that business is business and Trump winning is good for business…
The fact that he was saying this way before it was supposedly every where is a 🚩 https://t.co/u0JyDOyjB4
— Clean Observer (@Hammbear2024) June 12, 2024
Astead may be especially getting fed these memes because of how Twitter and TikTok serve content to specific users. Their algorithms probably grok that a guy who posts a lot about how old Biden is probably wants to see those memes.
— Thomas (@tcstephenson818) June 12, 2024
Sidebar: TikTok’s not going anywhere, at least before the election, but…
GOP China hawks have convinced themselves that this is going to work out great for their cause, but I personally am skeptical.
It will help reporters land better book deals though.
— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) June 12, 2024
Yglesias, again:
… More broadly, though, we lack a media ecosystem that’s friendly to pragmatic progressive politics. There’s a very active and successful conservative media that’s good at promoting the right’s best issues. There’s a left-leaning commercial press that fundamentally cares more about making money than about wielding their influence constructively. And there’s a pretty effective left media contingent that serves as a kind of enforcement arm for activists. That leaves a void to be filled.
But for now, the reality is that Trump is good for business and the coverage is going to reflect that.
War for Ukraine Day 840: Russia Attacks Kyiv & Kryvyi Rih
Damien
In all seriousness, the media is one thing, but the fact that we have an entire epistemological ecosystem that is dedicated to carving you off from any reasonable conflicting views, then spoon feeding you confirming information that makes you feel good and extreme oppositional views that make you angry, with as little possibility as they can manage of any new or different ideas breaking in is far, far worse.
Because once you’re in that silo, they can push anything on you, tailored to sway your views most any which way they want. My atheist friends get TikToks about how Biden’s too beholden to religion; my gay friends get things about how Biden’s too soft on trans rights; and because I don’t belong to it I get served objectively pro-Trump bullshit.
It’s by far the most worrying thing to me.
Baud
Agree. We actually lack media that treats mainstream liberals as a market.
Also, what @Damien said.
Baud
Anyway, there’s no getting around the need to be better media consumers, which means disciplining ourselves not to fall for outrage bait. The propagandists don’t just use straight anit-Biden content. They’ll often use despondency and doomerism to persuade people to give up. Plus a host of other manipulative messages.
WereBear
@Baud: Yes, but that’s not going to happen. If we were all functioning adults past the age of 25, this wouldn’t be an issue.
But we are not.
Currently re-reading a favorite true crime, Too Pretty To Live: The Catfishing Murders of East Tennessee (2016) by Dennis Brooks. The author prosecuted a double murder based on a shared imaginary world created by mentally ill — or at least sense-challenged — people.
How much more vulnerable are we when the senseless stuff comes from places we’ve been trained to trust?
We can’t even agree on reality. Thanks to Fox News and tRump creating imaginary dream worlds for very troubled people.
Baud
@WereBear:
It’s not going to happen perfectly. We can be better than we are. I think we’re better now than we were a few years ago.
OzarkHillbilly
I however, excel at being worse.
WereBear
@OzarkHillbilly: It’s how we blech, not that we blech!
Baud
@WereBear:
I blech, therefore I am.
WereBear
@Baud: Yes, because WE can learn things! In addition, we have far more Reality Testing Tools than the average red state denizen.
Over the years I’ve distanced myself from friends and relations who couldn’t get out of their own delusions. Because they were hurting both of us as a result.
I have an unusual perspective since I was raised in the South, by Midwestern parents, in a place and time where my personality was not the kind they had me slotted into. And there were no others.
Plus, I “wasn’t from there.” So even my striving to fit in would always have a potential loophole to abuse me with. Which is a fundamental in authoritarian societies, from whatever source.
I was lucky. I had no web to keep me there. I had help getting out. Because I learned, moving from a small town to a red state city… that there isn’t as much difference as I had hoped to get. Everyone there tends to be from smaller and redder towns.
So they can still get “tattled on” if they try to live their own lives. And all the tattlers are looking for ways to undermine the competition.
Red states = crabs in buckets because actual achievement is never enough, and often, shows up failsons and faildaughters.
To live your own life you need eccentric license money.
matt
So Astead has switched from being a class struggle reporter to being a pro-ageism reporter.
Rusty
Our culture and economic forces are continuing to fragment and isolated us from each other. We don’t belong to organizations or groups at many where near the rates we did in the past. We don’t belong to bowling leagues, we don’t belong to churches, and post pandemic we don’t even go to a work place as often. There are forces that want to atomize and fragment us, the individual is weaker than the group. (And we have less close friends, particularly men) Once isolated we are easier to manipulate, fed by algorithms and negative forces a diet of manipulative messages. We are fighting strong cultural forces with negative economic and political interests to what we believe. It’s no wonder this election is such an uphill battle.
Baud
@matt:
Not the first person to sell out.
Baud
@Rusty:
A lot of those traditional groups were conservative forces in their own right though.
But I agree that they do want to isolate us in order to manipulate us. It’s a reason they always push wedge issues and the idea that nothing is good enough to support.
eversor
@Baud:
The problem is that there are dozens of types of mainstream liberal and it varies. In my area a “mainstream liberal” is an educated (at the right schools of course) suburban professional couple making six figures each. Fiscally conservative and socially liberal. Affordable housing is great, but not next to them. NYT, WAPO, NPR are all telling them shit they already think. Crime is up because there are tent cities downtown that are growing. They are the Ken’s and Karen’s of NIMBY land. The consultants, those in finance, those in tech, those in defense, those in law. Make sure all things are means tested to hell and back.
The fact that these papers cater to them isn’t shocking. The party does as well. From Schumers “we gain suburban voters for every working class we lose”, to Pelosi’s “200k is middle class and not much money” to Clintons “more billionaires support me and blue states have all the wealth” it’s clear the party see’s them as the mainstream. Or at least what they want to be the mainstream of the party.
Maybe Biden and AOC/Crocketts that are getting elected can change that.
Baud
@eversor:
I agree about the diversity of liberals, but not much else.
Hildebrand
Time to get Michelle Wolf’s White House Correspondents Dinner speech trending again.
brantl
@Baud: He’s right to the extent that it seems everybody stopped talking about the poor, and Dems only talk about the middle class. It seems like the Rethugs have dragged the Overton Window to where the poor have fallen of the face of the earth, and we’re letting them.
Baud
@brantl:
I don’t remember any time in recent memory when we talked about the poor extensively. The framing switches between middle class and working class or some derivative of those terms. And that’s just marketing anyway. The policies we push have gotten better, not worse, for those at the bottom end.
ETA: Sadly, I think the people who dislike the poor the most are those who are just above the poor.
moonbat
@brantl: Biden may not talk about the poor in his stump speeches that much but he’s done more to help them than any other president in my lifetime. That’s another thing people don’t realize about Biden because they’re so focused on his age. He’s sneakily effective at enacting liberal priorities.
K-Mo
I don’t get this vitriol for Astead Herndon. Yeah he doesn’t seem to understand how the internet works and he has a weakness for storyline reporting, but it’s neither untrue nor fundamentally his fault that a lot of voters think Biden is too old
Princess
@Damien: Yeah, I agree. It’s really scary. I don’t know how we co-exist as a society when we all live in different epistemological silos. I can tell from your list which of my friends are spending too much time listening to their kids who are listening to Tik tok.
And make no mistake, we in here are not unaffected. I’m not going to point fingers but there are certain messages that rile some of us up or make some of us feel happy. You can tell pretty quickly if someone in your circle is not getting the news from, um, the news.
Baud
@K-Mo:
I don’t follow him, but I don’t think people are blaming him for what voters think but for obsessing about that story, which has been done to death.
satby
@Princess: and it’s pretty noticeable.
moonbat
How ironic if the products spawned by the invention of the World Wide Web which was promised to be THE democratic, liberating force of our age turns out to destroy it.
Thanks, Al Gore!
Baud
@moonbat:
It may destroy us, but I think the web has also made the liberal side of the polarization better.
When the media helped Bush beat Gore, that was largely pre-web for most people.
ETA: Or pre social media. You had things like the Drudge Report, which is what the media relied on before Twitter.
HinTN
@WereBear:
Nominated! Are you listening, WaterGirl?
What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?
The issue with all those memes is that they do sink in with normies a little. When I was home for Christmas I got together with my best friend from highschool. He’s pretty much apolitical but hates Trump, and he wanted Obama back. He said “he’s worried about Biden falling all the time. I was like what’s he talking about? But it’s those memes and constantly circulating video clips of the same couple of incidents.
As far as the media goes if they want to be about the bottom line then can they pleas drop the self importance schtick? Like you’re either vital defenders of free speech, democracy and an informed public or just a bunch of corporate hacks chasing clicks.
It’s also extremely frustrating that the left still can’t counter program the right wing media ecosystem 40 years on from Fox News and Rush Limbaugh. Also we’re like 15 years on from the Russian influence campaign and can’t be bothered to implement countermeasures. Still flat footed on both counts
satby
Biden has been a transformational president for good; probably the best in my lifetime and I’ve been voting for 50 years. His age and experience have been key to his success, and we should push that point too. People always want a doctor, mechanic, or plumber with decades of experience, but suddenly in politics we want amateurs?
moonbat
@Baud: I was trying to make a sadly sarcastic funny. Guess I should have //ed it.
While all the algorithms may have figured out we all want to hear what we already believe, I think they may have overplayed their hand based on the anecdata I hear from my students who are unplugging more and more. More than reinforcement, people want novelty and having slight variations of the same thing shoved in your face every day gets boring.
Baud
@satby:
Couldn’t agree more. This election is about credibility for me. Are we just a bunch of whiners or do we actually believe the stuff we’ve been saying my whole life?
Another Scott
I think that most of us eventually learn that TV, movies, Twitter, TikTok, NextDoor, political ads, etc are not real life.
I still remember the infamous episode of Trading Spaces where Hildi glued straw on the wall of one of the traded rooms – of the people who had allergies.
Some of the most important skills we can learn are 1) to figure out when someone is trying to sell us something and get money from us, 2) understanding when we are being lied to and manipulated for whatever reason, 3) recognizing that beautiful words and music and images can be used for very bad purposes.
I’m not expecting great words of wisdom about moderating consumption of modern media from people who depend on daily (or hourly) “engagement” from masses of readers… There are only so many hours in the day. People need to put down the media crack pipe and do something else.
Thanks. My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
OzarkHillbilly
I don’t know what eccentric license money is, but I’m pretty sure I never had it. Despite that lack I never had any problem living my own life. And it was a good one.
gene108
@eversor:
A lot of people like liberal ideas, in principle, but when implementation may directly impact, such as affordable housing near a wealthy neighborhood dragging down property values or consolidating a couple of school districts to cut costs and improve integration, can create resistance.
I don’t think most be people really understand how other people can struggle.
Baud
@moonbat:
There will always be a need to adapt. In a way, with AI, you really won’t be able to trust what you see or hear, and that get people to become wiser about propaganda. Or the opposite.
I have been pleased that more people seem hip to what the NYT is all about.
SFAW
@satby:
Except Murdoch, Ailes (may he RIH), anyi-vaxxers, Rethugs, etc. (incl. Russia and China, now) have tried to turn science and expertise into something suspect, all in service of destroying American democracy.
I won’t say that decades-long effort is the worst thing that they’ve done — mainly because there are so many evil/vile things, it’s useless to try to rank them — but it’s in the Top Ten. [Destroying the reporting of objective truth was another goal of theirs, they started it in at least the 1970s, and they’ve largely succeeded.]
OzarkHillbilly
I blame DougJ.
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
He deserves a Pulitzer.
moonbat
@Baud: Me too. Speaking of overplaying your hand: “Only WE, the newspaper of record, can determine whether the POTUS is the senile dotard we’ve been telling you he his for the last three years!” Sort of gave away their game.
K-Mo
@Baud:
Fair enough. It’s a boring story but if you want to know what people sound like who are very uninformed, caught up in their own narrative, etc., he’s out there recording it.
Another Scott
@Another Scott: Now watch this!!1
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
@K-Mo:
There are diverse groups of people like that. The media always normalizes the ones that make Dems look bad. See also undecided voters who blame Biden for Dobbs, etc.
gene108
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
Liberals, the Left, progressives* or however you want to describe people who share our views do not respond to the same triggers conservatives have to get hooked on a certain type of media.
Rush came up during the backlash wave against the Civil Rights and women’s rights movements, and some of his earlier shows were about things like “remember when we could be proud of what the flag stood for, and not have some feminazi yell at us about the tyranny of men?”
It resonated with a lot of white dudes who grew up with notions of the cowboys and settlers taming the uncivilized West, while being attacked by savage Indians and other bits of lore slanted to put white culture and deeds above others.
Since the Russian influence campaign is aimed at helping Republicans, and Congress bring closely divided, it’s impossible to really get anything concrete done on it.
Republicans know Russian interference helped get Trump elected and led to the most conservative federal courts in decades.
Baud
@moonbat:
Yes, that was amazing in the level of gall.
wjca
The whole point of being sneakily effective is not talking about it, so that people won’t realize. Massively irritating to liberals who aren’t paying close attention, of course. But helpful when one is trying to win an election where the electorate is the one we actually have.
SFAW
@OzarkHillbilly:
Isn’t that the money that you use to get a Clown Car driver’s license? If it ain’t, then I don’t know.
Baud
@SFAW:
It’s when you can afford to throw away money on a cyber truck.
Betty Cracker
@Baud: DougJ does deserve a Pulitzer! I love how he’s making inroads into popular culture with high-profile shout-outs.
lowtechcyclist
@What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?:
The problem is, that takes big money. And for obvious reasons, extremely rich people mostly are on the right – they don’t want government taking their money or interfere with their means of acquiring more and more of it. I don’t know how you grassroots an alternative media system.
OzarkHillbilly
@Another Scott: too f’n funny. thanx.
SFAW
@Baud:
I was going to ruminate about whether it’s just Pinche‘ Sulzberger, or the entire FTFTFNYT executive board, but realized it’s immaterial.
OzarkHillbilly
@Betty Cracker: He gets quoted more than… than… than the NYT!
SFAW
@Baud:
As I said: Clown Car. Of course, in this case, it has the added benefit of being “conceived” by a (very wealthy) Clown.
Eunicecycle
@Another Scott: THAT’S what I want from social media! So sweet!
moonbat
@wjca: Agreed. I keep waiting for the tipping point. That point at which all the things we told ourselves we couldn’t have because our electorate is what it is are a reality because of our sneaky president. Like a high speed rail line, a new power grid, significant progress on climate change, taxing the rich motherf***ers who are trying to emmiserate the rest of us at a level they deserve.
SFAW
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think it would be the height of fun (for varying versions of “fun,” I guess) if President Biden were to get interviewed by DougJ.
Biden could always claim that DougJ seems to be able to channel the FTFTFNYT, and so he thought “what’s the diff?”
Baud
@SFAW:
My only regret if that were to happen is that I wouldn’t be able to give Biden more than one vote in the election.
Sure Lurkalot
An algorithm doesn’t distinguish between a duty to inform or a motive to inflame and doesn’t care about whether what it spews is fact or feeling. It’s a ghost in the machine and thrives on human ennui and laziness.
It’s going to take a lot of effort and will to change the present trajectory of how we learn and discern.
SFAW
@Baud:
Maybe if you registered as a Rethug? Since they seem to be the only ones able to commit voting fraud.
ETA: OK, technically, maybe it should be “try to commit voting fraud,” since they seem to get caught a lot.
comrade scotts agenda of rage
@satby:
This is thousand times. I think we (and Biden) have benefited greatly by his age when finally getting the job. Plus, as Charlie Pierce pointed out a dozen years ago, he loves this stuff.
prostratedragon
Article on adult bullying, by Nancy Levine Stearns. Vital reading these days.
cmorenc
@gene108:
I had my personal encounter with the conflict between my social and political values vs my practical situational interests when the Wake County NC (Raleigh) school board proposed redistricting my two then-elementary age school kids from the school that was only a 5 to 10 minute, safe unsupervised eight-block walk from home, to another school a mile and a half away that required traveling along and also crossing a couple of very busy commuter streets to get to. I found myself at the next School Board meeting joined by an army of angry parents from my local neighborhood, and found myself taking a turn speaking my allotted minute or two to the board, which speech included the menacing words: “we vote, and you can count on us showing up the upcoming school board election”. The school board ended up backing down out of shipping our kids elsewhere rather within walking distance of the nearby elementary school.
The school board’s purpose in the proposed redistricting of our neighborhood was racial balancing – and to come up with the proposal affecting our local neighborhood, some cartographer using census data had manipulated district lines to make racial balancing work. The irony was that our neighborhood school already had a significant minority racial portion – because kids from other neighborhoods with a much higher % of minorities and more challenged socioeconomics were being bussed to our school from a couple of miles away, in the interests of racial balancing, and the parents from our neighborhood were fine with sharing our school with the bussed-in minority kids. But that left the Board with the problem that the school they proposed shifting our kids to was um…a bit oversampled with minorites, without shifting some kids from predominately white neighborhoods in. Which we stopped them from doing, because we wanted our kids to be able to safely walk to the nearby school, and not put up with the PITA of porting them a mile and a half to and from school every day, or else making them ride a bus.
lowtechcyclist
@comrade scotts agenda of rage:
He’s a rare bird who is really good with people and cares deeply about them, AND is deeply enough into the nuts and bolts of policy that he can be the architect of policies that really help the people he wants our system to help, AND knows our politics and the players well enough to get an amazing amount of legislation through Congress despite an incredibly narrow majority.
That really is a very rare confluence of talents in one person, and we’re incredibly lucky that he’s been our President for the past few years. Even if the future of democracy wasn’t depending on this election, it would still be extremely important to get another term for him.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
The MSM has always been full of shit and pro-conservative/authoritarian, The whole NYT “Dewy beats Truman” headline, not mention the NYT having Hitler and Stalin fan bois on it’s staff in the ’30s.
O. Felix Culpa
@Baud:
True, based on my limited data points. Several solidly liberal but normie friends are now receptive to my critiques of the NYT and WaPo (and other allegedly liberal MSM). Before they would be horrified and quick to defend if I suggested that the NYT etc. were less than perfect. We grew up in the Pentagon Papers and Watergate era where those papers were heroes. My friends are slowly, but finally adjusting their priors, just as many of us presumably had to do.
oldster
Thanks, Anne Laurie, for making use of sharp insights from Yglesias. Some people condemn everything he does, but I think he offers good value on many issues.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
I love how you just blow off Pelosi is able to get 200+ lunatics in the house to work together to pass laws than enact actual progressive polices because she is guilty of a thought crime.
Ken
It’s not entirely clear if that ended in the 30s, or at all.
satby
@Another Scott: THAT was freakin precious!
What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?
@lowtechcyclist: We do have some oligarchs on our side. Biden holds high dollar fundraisers and people give. And I don’t think Limbaugh started out with “big money” – I can’t imagine it would take that incredibly much funding to get an AM radio show that pushed the narrative we want pushed. That’s the main function of the RW media relative to mainstream – it gets people talking about “the crisis at the border” or “is Biden so old” and then because “people are expressing concern” the mainstream media feels like they have to cover it. And just by covering it, even though their angle may be different than the Fox News angle, it still gets people talking about what the RW wants them to be talking about.
Instead we’re always fighting against a headwind.
Raoul Paste
There’s plenty of sensationalist copy to be made by telling the truth. Reporting on Trump‘s imbecilic behavior, ruinous policies and personal depravity would fill volumes.
But that doesn’t serve the interests of the obscenely rich
O. Felix Culpa
The folks I know who are worried about Biden’s age, are worried about it because they fear he will lose the election because other people are worried about it. In other words, they don’t think his age affects his performance as president–quite the opposite–but they think his age will negatively affect votes. And bought-and-paid-for shills like Herndon are doing their best to reinforce that perception, and therefore electoral outcomes. The “I’m just asking questions” shtick is transparently dishonest.
ETA: Especially when those questions ever so curiously don’t include the Felon, whose similar age (and possible dementia) should put him in the same category of “concern.” On steroids.
Sure Lurkalot
Here’s an enlightening and frightening thread about what’s going on in France now, replete with about faces, back stabbing and realignments of people, parties and positions.
https://nitter.poast.org/RnaudBertrand/status/1801114239572328663#m
Another Scott
@Enhanced Voting Techniques: Nit – The [Truman] newspaper was the Chicago Daily Tribune.
Cheers,
Scott.
Starfish
Damien at comment 1 is correct.
Yglesias complains about the Twitter Nazi bar while sitting in the Substack Nazi bar.
I am not sure about this obsession with Astead. There are other people holding much deeper anti-Biden views than the “Biden is old” anti-Biden view.
But I am not sitting here AMPLIFYING them in an effort to renounce them because I know that quoting all their nonsense is amplifying them.
I am more like “meh, we are voting for the old dude because if we don’t the Supreme Court is going to be the new Nazi bar, if it isn’t already.”
K-Mo
@Baud:
i don’t know. A lot of those people make Republicans look bad IMO. Lots of right-wingers railing about the high unemployment rate, and making the most convoluted arguments for why they support Trump even though he’s a blatantly dishonest criminal.
BTW I agree with the posts above noting that Biden’s presidency has been a ginormous success on substance. But so many people are voting based on an ephemeral sense of image. I’ll never understand the people who fall for the parody of hucksterism come to life that is DJT, but there sure are a lot of ‘em.
Anne Laurie
We know, from his past work, that Herndon *can* do better. If he chooses to do worse (presumably because that’s what his employers are rewarding him for), then he deserves to be called out!
Captain Obvious has a skill set: calling out the obvious biases that ‘smart, committed’ thinkers sometimes fail to notice (or at least remark). I don’t have to agree with everything he says to think it’s useful when he plays ‘Boy Who Points Out That the Emperor Is Nekkid’!
O. Felix Culpa
Anecdotal observation again, but folks in my circle hardly ever talk about Biden’s age any more, now that the primaries are effectively over. He’s officially the Dem candidate, and people are moving forward with that fact.
Starfish
@oldster: Matt went to Substack, and they gave him an advance to be there. Before this happened, the writers there were more diverse, and then people asked “Why do white bros get all the advances?” and the people in charge of Substack said very stupid things.
Sometimes, when Matt writes things that piss off everyone, I wonder “Is his subscriber count down? Is he trying to piss off everyone so that people spread his message further as they react negatively to it?”
Substack is where you can go to get your Nazi newsletters.
RevRick
@SFAW: There’s a huge chasm between the way conservatives and liberals think about humanity. Conservatives begin with the assumption that people are fundamentally bad, evil even. They believe that absent an outside threat of punishment, we’d all be killing, raping, stealing every chance we got. Liberals, on the other hand, believe in a basic goodness of people. We believe that we want to do good, and life circumstances can warp that goodness, so our task is to find ways to counteract or at least ameliorate the damage life has done, whether the origin is poverty, lack of education or bad parenting. At the extreme, this can lead to us falling for woo-woo. Conservatives, however, see the solution as finding a strong hand to keep people in line.
We often look at conservative women incredulously for their willing dismissal of “boys will be boys” terrible male behavior, but if you start from the assumption that people are rotten, then the solution is accommodation to that situation. But then that assumption lies behind every accusation conservatives hurl at liberals. We may say we believe in human goodness, but that’s, for them, just a nefarious strategy to wield power over them.
TBone
@prostratedragon: thanks for sharing that!
Uncle Cosmo
And you know why? Because they see themselves in those faces. They know with gutwrenching certainty that one or two misfortunes can dump them and everyone they care about into the slough of despond
And OTOH, if those just above the poor want to improve their lot, they know they won’t do it at the expense of people who have far more wealth and power. Their only chance in a zero-sum dogeatdog society is to take stuff away from those with even less power. Which is yet another reason they loathe those Others who they believe are being unfairly helped by the more powerful, and hate even more those with more wealth and power who are favoring them. Y’think mebbe?
Melancholy Jaques
@Baud:
Back in those days, the Republicans would blast fax the political media and they in turn would simply print whatever the got. Also, the Republicans had a secret toll-free number that they would call and hear a recording of the talking points of the day. Crude by today’s standards, but it was very effective.
lowtechcyclist
@prostratedragon:
Thanks for passing this on – it was a very worthwhile piece to read in many ways.
Starfish
@cmorenc: Oh no. Now we are into critical race theory.
Can you imagine if white children were bussed to black schools?
Black children are inconvenienced for racial balancing, but white ones never are. Why is that?
Derrick Bell wrote about bussing.
Miss Bianca
@satby:
THIS. I remember people I thought were otherwise sensible conservatives all crowing in 2016 about how Trump “wasn’t a politician” and that somehow made him uniquely qualified to be POTUS. And I remember responding something like, “so, if you need surgery, you’re going to hire a plumber to work on you, right? After all, who needs experience! The plumber is going to be cheaper! It’s an ADVENTURE, people!”
Don’t remember getting an answer to that one. And all those people had gone strangely quiet by 2020. Not sure what they’re thinking in 2024, they’re back to posting horse pictures on FB.
Geminid
Virginia’s Congressional primaries are next Tuesday, June 18. I’ve been following two Democratic primaries for open seats currently held by Democrats: the 10th, where a large field includes 3 state Senators and a former Speaker of the House of Delegates, Eileen Filler-Corn. They hope to succeed Rep. Jennifer Wexton, who is fighting a severe and progressive neurological disease.
Abigail Spanberger is retiring from her 7th CD seat, and retired Army colonel Eugene Vindman seems to have the inside track. Vindman is a prodigious fundraiser.
Reps. Spanberger and Wexton flipped Republican seats in 2018, along with Elaine Luria in the coastal 2nd CD. Luria lost her 2022 reelection race to Republican Rep. Jen Kiggans and has passed on a rematch.
This disappoints me as a Democrat, but I can understand why Ms. Luria would want to step back from public life. Luria entered the Naval Academy at age 17, and after graduating served 20 years before she retired and immediately jumped into a campaign for Congress. I hope she and her family are having a good summer.
Democrats Missy Cotter Smasal and Jake Denton are competing for the nomination to face Kiggans. Like Luria and Kiggans, Smasal is a retired Navy officer. A number of local politicians including Senator Louise Lucas endorsed her when she entered the race last September, and the DCCC names her to its “Red to Blue” program this winter.
Jake Denton’s full name is Jeremiah Denton IV, which may ring a bell. Denton’s grandfather was a Navy pilot held prisoner by North Vietnam for 8 years. Admiral Denton later served as a Republican Senator from Alabama.
News reports describe the Smasal/Denton race as an amicable one, with the contenders aiming fire at Kiggans and not one another.
wjca
So, are you saying that they did not plan to bus your kids the same way they were already bussing the black kids?
Because if they weren’t, your complaint would seem to be on that lack. After all, with busses, the distance and busy streets along the way would seem to be non-issues.
Starfish
@Starfish: The correct answer to this would be to properly fund the schools that all the minoritized students are in. But unfortunately, people pound their fists on the table about their tax dollars instead of doing that.
Proper funding could mean different resources than those needed at other schools.
During the pandemic, we learned that schools are providing social services in addition to schooling. Embrace that and have really good social services there.
Tony Jay
++++JACKAL NEWS++++JACKAL NEWS++++
Miss Bianca
@SFAW: I’m with you on this one. DougJ sit-down with President Biden!
PJ
@Starfish: You can’t discuss a problem without talking about the problem. The people who are already anti-Biden aren’t going to vote for Biden no matter what. “Biden is too old”, however, may get many voters to stay at home. It’s important because much of the mainstream media, including the NYT, and including Herndon, wants Biden to lose because that would be better for them personally. They haven’t been able to successfully attach a real scandal to Biden, so “Biden is too old” will have to do. With enough constructive criticism, is Herndon going to wake up and realize that the way he reports and sees the world – and the way Twitter and TikTok and his bosses at the NYT want him to see the world – is to only look at stuff that confirms what he already believes? Probably not, but the fight against BS is a daily struggle, and to ignore it is to give in and lose.
RevRick
@PJ: If those in the mainstream media believe that it would be better for them for Biden to lose, they are complete and utter fools.
JustRuss
+1. Schools in poorer areas should have more resources than those in wealthier districts, but I don’t know how we make that happen.
JustRuss
Why? Trump makes them money, and that’s what matters. They are not going to bravely report the truth about his regime. THEY DON’T CARE. They just want click$.
lowtechcyclist
@What Have the Romans Ever Done for Us?:
If I were worth, say, $200 million, I’d feel comfortable dropping $250K at a fundraiser if I thought a race merited that. But that isn’t oligarch money, and it isn’t start-a-new-news-outlet money. We need a real oligarch, someone who’s worth tens of billions, for that.
I don’t think our people are the sort to listen to someone talk for hours on AM radio, and I think the barriers to entry would be higher than they were in 1987 due to consolidation of ownership. (I remember when one owner was limited to seven TV stations and seven radio stations, and not more than one of each in a given media market. Long time ago in a galaxy far away.)
If there’s a way to do it on the (relatively) cheap, starting a cable channel is probably the best bet. If Newsmax and (until recently) OANN can be on cable in most media markets, why not a solidly liberal channel?
opiejeanne
@cmorenc: OMG! We went through the exact same thing with our school board, to the point where a friend and I went door to door and counted kids who actually lived within one threatened area, and the school they wanted to sendthose kids to was about 2 miles away, across several very big, busy streets.
They wanted to send another larger block to a school that was already crowded at 700 enrolled and was 4 miles away, but we’d get no bus service. I mean, kids who lived right across the street from our school were going to be diverted to one of two other schools. The ultimate goal of the board may have been to eventually shut down all of the schools with enrollment under 600 for easier administration of the district, except for that other school that had been the original HS, near downtown and was now their crown jewel. That school had been rehabbed and restored to its 1870s glory (mostly on the outside) for an elementary school, and they wanted some white kids to bolster the dropping enrollment. It was below 300 at the time and mostly minority kids. That line would have diverted a total of 20 kids, 50/50 white and minority. Our school was more than 60% minority at the time.
The board also claimed it was because of a space issue at our specific school, that in 5 years our little school of 450 would be overwhelmed by a wave of new students that were being conceived at that very moment, even though the neighborhood was long built out in the 20s and 30s, there was no vacant land for new housing, and most of the houses were owned by people whose kids had moved on to HS or college. They were taking a national survey/prediction and trying to apply it to a very small neighborhood but it took a while to get this info out of them. They were manipulating statistics and percentages, and I nearly went cross-eyed until I wrote it down and saw the errors in the math from their statistician. Ours wasn’t the only school that was being affected, and when they held a town council they had to hold it in a gym because so many people attended.
The board tried to undermine us by inviting the objecting PTA presidents to their meetings, and then switching them to start at 6:30am, thinking we wouldn’t show up. We did, and one president made us Space Cadet t-shirts that we wore to the first meeting. The board was not amused.
We won because my friend asked them a pointed question about the lines they were drawing, which ran down alleys behind some houses, but cut several in half at the ends of these alleys. She asked how they’d determine where those kids went to school and they said they’d go into the house to see where the kids’ bedrooms were. That made it into the local newspaper and it was so laughable that they finally backed down. Five years later the school was not overwhelmed when all of those imaginary kindergarteners appeared, but we did get a family of 5 Romanian children, K-5, refugees, who spoke no English when they arrived, but quickly learned every swear word the 4th and 5th grade boys knew.
matt
@K-Mo: There’s a pattern in his work, should you choose to perceive it. This idea that he’s just being victimized for noticing facts is an incredibly puerile concept of how press works. Does propaganda exist? Gawrsh, I have no idea, never heard of it.
RevRick
@JustRuss: Becoming propaganda news organizations will not save them. It will destroy their business.
And if they think that they will gain clicks, they won’t. The 2025 Project won’t allow them any space to generate clicks.
Ramona
@Another Scott: that is adorable! I guess some dogs recognize themselves in a mirror!