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Post by Kimby on Mar 13, 2020 19:29:51 GMT
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 13, 2020 19:50:34 GMT
Slightly off topic, but I am very happy to have a shitload of candidates from which to choose for the municipal elections in France on Sunday.
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Post by fumobici on Mar 13, 2020 23:15:22 GMT
Easy peasy, the aggressive paywalls are new in the past year. the NYT still allows 10 article reads a month (may that number go down), while the Washington Post paywall has gone crazy aggressive just in the last couple of months. Because Jeff Bezos, the world's richest man, needs our $10 a month. Right. I was a NYT subscriber (Sunday paper edition) for years, but back then I was pretty right-wing so I naturally never saw their now obvious political bias.
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Post by onlyMark on Mar 14, 2020 6:21:51 GMT
Previous experience then. Ok, that's the answer.
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Post by casimira on Mar 14, 2020 12:43:48 GMT
Biden's gonna take it away in Orleans Parish anyway. It's kind of a relief for me personally in that the poll's location is in the cafeteria of a retirement home and if held on the original date we would likely have to relocate. That would be a major hassle for me because I am the poll commissioner in charge and the people at City Hall redefine inefficiency.
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Post by spaceneedle on Mar 14, 2020 20:44:22 GMT
My mistake on the Super Tuesday thing Kimby. Things here are so weird right now that I can’t even remember what day it is!
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 14, 2020 21:09:01 GMT
Actually, most of the articles that I read called it "Super Tuesday II."
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Post by Kimby on Mar 14, 2020 21:48:11 GMT
That must be a continental thing. I listen to and read a lot of news and never heard it called that. (Is next Tuesday Super Tuesday III, then?)
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 15, 2020 1:07:16 GMT
The media seems to have become far more interested in their bottom line than in neutral reporting of events. They GAVE us President Donald J Trump by giving him tons of free publicity, and they gave us the 2 Dem candidates we are left with by reporting the debates and primaries as if they were a horse race and they were the odds-makers. Entering this thread late, as I've been distracted by things in my 3D life. And I'm quoting Kimby to get back to the question of journalism, which I think most of us understand no longer exists in its pure sense, to which she alludes in her quote above. I have a running mild disagreement with a friend of mine over newspaper news vs. tv news & pundits. I prefer to read the news and to read enough of it to try to extract the plain facts from whatever slant is put on them, whether consciously or not by the various papers. The slant is there for all to see and for us to see past it. As a functioning adult, I'm capable of not swallowing something whole just because it's in the papers. From my perspective, Biden and Trump are both right-wing nutjobs I could never support so the fearmongering that I must vote "blue no matter who" doesn't and cannot work on me. If Biden's the nominee, I'll vote Green party again, I really like their platform. Well, that's true about Trump, but I would say that Biden is no more than a core-less political entity whose current success is due to the fact that he's a familiar quantity. As you know from the last election, Fumobici, I totally disagree with you about sitting the election out, so won't revisit all of that here. Yes, the Democratic Party is nothing more than "Republican Lite", and yes there are some good and sincere people in the Green Party. That said, there is something deeply, creepily wrong about Jill Stein and her jack-in-the-box appearance as a spoiler at crucial moments. I'm grateful for the paywalls erected around the NYT and WaPo insofar as it quarantines me from contact with their billionaire agitprop political content. I hope they build their paywalls so high and unscaleable that only paid subscribers are ever exposed to it. Both papers have many good writers on staff, but when it comes to the subject of politics, they are not remotely objective and with their reputations they can do a lot of damage if people read it expecting objectivity. I most certainly do not expect objectivity from the NYT or WaPo on politics or most anything else. Exactly, LaGatta! As stated above, I read those papers, in fact pay to read them, in order to extract facts or at least to find arrows leading to where the facts might be. I also read left-leaning or leftist outlets for the same reason. The bottom line is, we have to read everything on high alert to any manipulation embedded in it, and the outlets of the left are just as guilty of manipulation as the NYTimes and Washington Post. But it behooves us to know what's in the mainstream media and even *gag* the less-loony right-wing press in order to understand where fellow voters get their POVs, plus the more informed we are, the more we're in a position to refute people parroting media misinformation.
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Post by Kimby on Mar 15, 2020 3:50:55 GMT
Bixa, you do realize right wingers consider WAPO and NYT to be left-wing rags, don’t you?
Funny that you consider them right-leaning.
Media trackers put them near center or slightly left for reporting, further left for editorial content.
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Post by Kimby on Mar 15, 2020 3:55:30 GMT
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Post by Kimby on Mar 15, 2020 3:57:13 GMT
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Post by bixaorellana on Mar 15, 2020 4:45:47 GMT
Actually, I never said they were right-leaning. I call them "mainstream press" because they reflect what is currently considered the middle in our culture. And I believe the accepted term for the NYTimes for those of a Foxist bent is "liberal rag", which to me sounds like a piano piece by Scott Joplin.
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Post by patricklondon on Mar 15, 2020 6:07:09 GMT
Confusing the Economist's "liberalism" with left leaning positions is a mistake. There's a transatlantic difference, I think. AIUI, "liberal" in the US usually means something much closer to European "social democrat". And within Europe, "liberal" can cover a spectrum (depending on local political and cultural history) covering "centrist", "localist", "anti-clerical" to "pro-business/small state" (that last might also be spun off as "neo-liberal"). If that spectrum has a common thread, it's around anti-authoritarianism and internationalism.
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Post by bjd on Mar 15, 2020 7:35:13 GMT
I was interested to see the NY Times Opinion columns as left-wing in the first graph above. When I used to subscribe to the International Herald Tribune, later the Int'l NY Times, I found a lot of their oped writers pretty right-wing (not nut job right, but certainly on the right of the centre).
Indeed, the "centre" line is probably not in the same place for all of us, depending on where we live and what we usually read and hear.
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Post by lagatta on Mar 15, 2020 12:38:29 GMT
Jacobin would be very pissed off to be called "liberal". I'm also surprised to the Economist (which is well-worth a read) being called "liberal" in the USian sense.
Since Canada has a social-democratic party (NDP) and there is an alternative left party in Québec (Québec solidaire)people on the left don't call themselves "liberals". That would refer to the Liberal Party, centrist or left on "social" issues, but not much different from the centre-right in terms of economic policy (though the Conservatives more recently moved right under Harper, who was the boreal Tony Abbott - the two were partners in ecocide, like Trump and Bolsonaro nowadays, partners in all that is evil).
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Post by casimira on Mar 15, 2020 13:02:26 GMT
Fascinating charts.
Thanks for posting them Kimby.
I will have to examine them a bit closer when time allows.
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Post by fumobici on Mar 15, 2020 15:40:14 GMT
The problem with this sort of graphing is that liberalism in the time of late-stage capitalism is classified as "left" as long as the ruling class oppressors and authoritarian, war mongering government are multi-racial "woke", and use the right idpol pronouns. When you crawl out of the nutty US bubble and look from a more objective global perspective, it's clear that anyone who opposes universal healthcare as a citizens' right (or passive-aggressively asks "how you gonna pay for that?", while never asking that same question about wars, an obscenely bloated military, or corporate bailouts) is an extreme right-wing radical. I reject that nutty US bubble view, and I'm not falling for its toxic narrative.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 15, 2020 16:23:54 GMT
I agree that the graph is from a totally mainstream American point of view, but of course that is its target audience, so it is probably mostly valid in that context. But you have to start somewhere, even if it is just to get people to argue.
Like some others here, I am a bit surprised at how some of the formerly conservative publications have drifted to the left over the years, but I am unsure whether this is because the general drift of the United States in the last 50 years (or more) has been mostly to the right. Some of these publications have perhaps remained stable while the landscape moved around them. I know that when CNN first started, I considered it to be totally right wing, but as politics evolved over the years, I would have to agree that it is more to the left now.
And even though I consider The Economist to be solidly right wing, I still think it is an excellent publication for in-depth reports. I even subscribed to it for a couple of years, but I had to let go simply because there were too many interesting things to read and I kept falling too far behind week after week.
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Post by Kimby on Mar 15, 2020 16:37:04 GMT
Actually, I never said they were right-leaning. I call them "mainstream press" because they reflect what is currently considered the middle in our culture. And I believe the accepted term for the NYTimes for those of a Foxist bent is "liberal rag", which to me sounds like a piano piece by Scott Joplin. I lost a detailed response to this when my phone went to sleep, but will say briefly that a. I confused bixa’s contrasting NYT/WAPO with left-leaning sources with thinking she meant the main-stream sources were right-leaning. My bad. b. I NEVER watch cable news - except on airplanes when I flick between CNN and FOX to compare how they are tilting their reporting - c. In the US, liberal = left, conservative = right and the 2 major parties are pretty much wedded to those labels.
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Post by fumobici on Mar 16, 2020 4:17:13 GMT
I have to admit that Joe Biden had a good debate vs. Sanders tonight. I was surprised, he looked on top of it.
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Post by Kimby on Mar 16, 2020 4:24:41 GMT
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Post by bjd on Mar 16, 2020 7:19:52 GMT
In any case, given how fast things are evolving, it's impossible to know where things will be by November. On the other hand, Trump might try to use any excuse to stay in power (like Putin!) if it looks as though he will be beaten in an election.
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Post by casimira on Mar 16, 2020 13:11:19 GMT
I have to admit that Joe Biden had a good debate vs. Sanders tonight. I was surprised, he looked on top of it. I didn't listen to the whole debate but what I did hear, I agree that Biden sounded more coherent. And, I too, was surprised. Biden's announcement of appointing a woman to be his running mate should he be the nominee will surely give him a boost.
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Post by htmb on Mar 16, 2020 13:25:58 GMT
In the second to the last debate, when there were still several candidates in the running, I thought Biden sounded like someone’s old, feeble uncle, propped up in a corner at a family reunion, spouting out stories of the past from time to time when he could get in a word. Then, the next night, I listened to him at a solo town hall meeting on CNN and, without all the shouting from other candidates, he seemed to be extremely coherent, empathetic, and engaging. It appeared he really connected with the audience and addressed concerns and questions in a direct and personable manner. I was certainly glad I’d watched the town hall because it gave me a dramatically higher opinion of his cognitive abilities.
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Post by kerouac2 on Mar 16, 2020 13:29:24 GMT
Maybe he is one of those people with hearing problems who gets lost if more than one person is speaking at the same time.
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Post by Kimby on Mar 16, 2020 14:20:25 GMT
Biden has a lifelong but well-managed stutter. If you don’t know this fact, his verbal contortions (to avoid a problem word or sound) can sound like cognition issues. He is not demented, but listen to Trump to hear what cognition loss sounds like.
Vote Blue no matter who. But glad that Joe Biden is appearing more presidential to some of the doubters.
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Post by htmb on Mar 16, 2020 16:51:24 GMT
I've long been aware that Biden has a speech problem and have heard him talk about it in interviews and town halls. That’s not what I’m talking about. I do think Kerouac may be on to something that would make perfect sense to me.
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Post by casimira on Mar 16, 2020 17:48:20 GMT
Biden has a lifelong but well-managed stutter. If you don’t know this fact, his verbal contortions (to avoid a problem word or sound) can sound like cognition issues. He is not demented, but listen to Trump to hear what cognition loss sounds like. Vote Blue no matter who. But glad that Joe Biden is appearing more presidential to some of the doubters.Please don't put me in that camp because I posted he seemed more coherent. Big difference in sounding more coherent and appearing more presidential.
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Post by Kimby on Mar 16, 2020 19:23:11 GMT
I wasn’t singling anyone out, casi.
But too many people these days are questioning Biden’s cognition. Yes, even in the age of Trump, we have people picking on far more capable people for far less obvious failings.
Biden is not and never will be a silver-tongued orator like his old boss, Obama. Joe, on his worst days, seems to have been born with a silver foot in his mouth!
I think he should just ‘fess up to this, and go on to say something like, “but I know things and how to DO things and more importantly I will put good knowledgeable (and moral) people in my cabinet and other appointed positions.”
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