5819 replies to this topic

[Mike in STL]

No, California did not...

It was a handful of candy-asses on the SF school board... not SF, not SF gov't, and not the bulk of parents of kids in SF schools... but a *handful* on the school board who voted against naming anything in a way that anybody (including ignorant people) complained about... but, of course, that's not what Fox News told their viewers...

Why do you watch Fox News all the time? I mean, you must cause it’s in seemingly all of your posts. I don’t watch Fox News ever. Bill Mahr mentioning it on his show was my first hearing about it. You might have heard of him. Democrat, residing in California?

Anyway... Forgive me. San Francisco is [checks map] located in California. I should have been more specific. I’m pretty sure school boards are elected positions. It’s government. Good to know the kids going back to that school won’t have daily reminders of oppressors like...Abraham Lincoln? The Covid safety standards and returning to the classroom procedures will be half assed because the school board focused researching every little thing about everyone who has a name on a building instead of focusing 100% on kids safety, but hey, what do I know, not being woke enough I guess.

In all seriousness, slippery slope arguments are silly pertaining to cartoon characters. But when your talking about the school board removing Lincoln, a smart person would say, “what’s next?”, right? Important documents in American history have his name signed on them. Do they get taught in history anymore? These people approve textbooks, so what will our kids be learning if these are priorities? As Ricker said, how does this impact your life negatively? We’ll if I’m a parent with a child in a SF school, I’d be worried about where these peoples priorities lie that effect my kids. If these elected officials on the board of education continue their careers in government become a mayor, governor, congress person, will this agenda be pushed through on a much larger scale? It’s not silly to ask those questions. Far cry from “what about gun toting Elmer Fudd?”

Have you been to Philadelphia? I went a few years ago and did independence hall and the like. Right out front when you enter, near the Liberty Bell exhibit, there is a big sign, or graphic if you will, that basically says, paraphrasing, we know that everything these men did in this era is frowned upon today, regarding favoring only whites, males, and landowners. But these documents and artifacts are important parts of American history that shouldn’t be ignored. And some other stuff.

I think that’s very fair. Not erasing history, but also acknowledging the flaws and the time period. If just erasing names is the new standard, eventually I’m going to take my kid to DC and none of the landmarks will have names. It might actually just be called DC as well. They might have to drop the “Washington”.

[mweb08]

I do not agree with the school board removing Lincoln's name from the school. I think many others also disagree with it, even in San Francisco. 

 

Anyway, this goes to my point. Once something goes down the slope far enough, then argue it and you'll probably have a lot better argument than if you were defending Lincoln's counterpart in the Confederacy for example.

 

Also, yeah Mike you should not have said California cancelled Lincoln. That's a very inaccurate framing of what happened.

 

In regards to what you say in the last two paragraphs, I agree that important parts of American history should not be ignored. I do not think this is an example of erasing history though. I don't think it is even an attempt to do so. Attempts to do what they're doing or to remove monuments are decisions to no longer honor those people (again, I don't agree with this particular decision). When these decisions are made, they generally are not accompanied with an attempt to erase those people from history. If anything, it is often an attempt to continue to feature them and the issues surrounding them while reframing the way they are taught. In this reframing, we address these historical figures for both their strengths and flaws, both the rights and the wrongs. In other words, we treat them like real people instead of almost mythical heroes. If we had been doing that consistently we wouldn't see so many people get bent out of shape when things like this happen with historical figures that are far less deserving of having monuments and schools named after them than Lincoln, because they would already understand why they shouldn't be help up on a pedestal.

[Old Man]

Fox news, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, NBC, ABC, and so on and so on.

 

Easy to find fault with any of these. None of them are just reporting the news and letting us digest it and understand it.

 

Either they censor themselves and not show some news items that others are, or they slant it, but showing a 10 second clip to narrow down the viewpoint to what they are trying to prove.  Or, they knowingly mislead you by showing you wrong footage and putting a different label on it.

[DuffMan]

[russsnyder]

Pepe le Pew sucks. The cat was always depicted as scared. Unwanted male attention and stalking is a very real issue that women deal with all the time. The fact that a cartoon was made about this AND that was supposed to be funny is messed up. I always felt very icky while watching it. The character is super rape-y now and was super rape-y then.
Your comment uses "whataboutism" to minimize this and is a disappointing take.

The cat was scared.

However,part of the " joke" was the case of mistaken identity. Pepe thought she was a skunk because she got some paint on her back. Had she been a real skunk, he likely wouldn't have been rebuffed. I'm not dying on the cross of Pepe Lepew, but you can still watch him after you watch the disclaimer correct? If I understand it correctly, He was written out of Space Jam 2 because of his past indiscretions with the cat.

[RShack]

Or, they knowingly mislead you by showing you wrong footage and putting a different label on it.

 

Only one so-called news channel regularly does that... just one...  perhaps you can find an isolated incident elsewhere, but nobody else makes a habit of it...

[Old Man]

Only one so-called news channel regularly does that... just one...  perhaps you can find an isolated incident elsewhere, but nobody else makes a habit of it...

Im calling BULL XXXX.

 

I know you have an agenda against Fox. Im not too fond of them either.

 

But, I have seen way too many false and wrong stories across the news.

 

You are entitled to your opinion and I will stick to mine.

 

Neither of us can say anything that will make the other change their viewpoint.

[Nigel Tufnel]

Im calling BULL XXXXXX.

 

That seems like too many X's.

[Old Man]

That seems like too many X's.

Okay fixed it. LOL

[RShack]

Im calling BULL XXXX.

 

I know you have an agenda against Fox. Im not too fond of them either.

 

But, I have seen way too many false and wrong stories across the news.

 

You are entitled to your opinion and I will stick to mine.

 

Neither of us can say anything that will make the other change their viewpoint.

 

Wrong footage and putting a label on it, or describing it in a way that is intentionally false, so as to cause their viewers to believe something that is simply not true, as a generic tactic?  Really?  Only one of the major 3 does that. 

(I don't have enough experience with either of the two new channels to comment on them... I can only imagine...)

[RShack]

Here's the rant I frequently have about the two major news channels that do *not* habitually mislead their viewers...

 

They're just plain lazy and sloppy.  I watch a great deal of news (due to personal interest), and not a day goes by that I'm not aggravated by either MSNBC or CNN, and for one simple reason:  they'll say something that is factually not true. 

 

The huge diff between them and the Channel That Shall Not Be Named is that they do not do it in a way that is misleading... but rather is factually incorrect for no good reason, it's just about sloppiness.  They'll get a quote wrong... in a way that does not change the character of the quote, but is needlessly a misquote nonetheless.... or they will misstate a fact... again, in a way that does not mislead as to the implication of the fact, nor in a way that shifts the viewers understanding of what the fact means... but they just get it wrong because they didn't double check before they started talking...

 

There are a couple of people who rarely, if ever, do it... but nearly all of them do... the hosts of the show *and* the various talking head guest commentators *and* the network reporters who come on to report in the traditional way... all flavors of people who talk on those networks do it.  (Among the talking head guests, the ex-military types and the ex-FBI types do it far, far less than do other flavors of guest commentator.)

 

It's long since reached the point where my bride knows what I'm about to say... she'll be watching, or perhaps just reading a novel, not paying any attention to what's on the tube... and she'll hear me sigh or grumble... and she'll chirp up and fill in what I would otherwise be about to say, using the very words I was about to say: "It's  your f*cking job for chrissake!  You get paid to do this, and you got it wrong again!!!  If *I* know what you just got wrong, why don't you know it?!!!??  You're just a lazy lame excuse for a so-called journalist!!!"

 

As for their errors or slants:  Despite watching regularly, I have seen nearly nothing that is misleading, much less false in any meaningful way... it's nothing but lazy sloppiness, and what that sadly implies about our current news media... those channels emphasize stories they like, and they give more brief coverage to stories they don't... but that's completely in the tradition of responsible American journalism.  They do not lie, they do not fabricate, they do not mislead, they do not censor or omit coverage of factual stories with implications they don't like, and they *do* promptly correct any errors of substance.  But, sadly, what they regularly *do* do, which is not in the tradition of responsible journalism, is routinely commit needless and inconsequential errors due to nothing but slackness about minding the details. 

 

This is the kind of thing that Cronkite's generation of reporters would not abide.  There's no excuse for it, and I do not in any way defend it.  But it's in a completely different category of journalistic sin than what the Other Channel does to mislead and violate the trust of their viewers virtually every single day.

[You Play to Win the Game]

It was also in the law in Cronkite's generation to factually report the news, and on air personalities were journalists first, at their core. That isn't the case today. Every "news" source has an intense slant and spend most of their time radicalizing their home base.

This is intentional. The real enemy is the Military Industrial Complex, and Uber wealthy people who cheat the system, don't pay taxes, then turn socialist when a rainy day hits, asking for their bailouts. It's hard to fight that, when both major news outlets have spent multiple generations now radicalizing their people. So when someone points out issues that really matter, most people gloss over because they haven't heard that parroted by their trusted "news" source, all of which are run by greedy, self serving corporate interests.

[russsnyder]

It was also in the law in Cronkite's generation to factually report the news, and on air personalities were journalists first, at their core. That isn't the case today. Every "news" source has an intense slant and spend most of their time radicalizing their home base.

This is intentional. The real enemy is the Military Industrial Complex, and Uber wealthy people who cheat the system, don't pay taxes, then then socialist when a rainy day hits, asking for their bailouts. It's hard to fight that, when both major news outlets have spent multiple generations now radicalizing their people. So when someone points out issues that really matter, most people gloss over because they haven't heard that parroted by their trusted "news" source, all of which are run by greedy, self serving corporate interests.

Cable News outlets are part of the entertainment world. They have a twenty four hour cycle and are ratings driven. Hence, you have political pundits hosting the shows instead of journalists. The closest thing to the old school type broadcasters are the ones that are on the half hour network national news. They are generally left leaning, however,it's more of a straight news format.

[RShack]

Every "news" source has an intense slant and spend most of their time radicalizing their home base.

 

Yes, every news source has its slant.  It's impossible not to.  (Cronkite himself said it's a journalist's *job* to be liberal... and he good reasons for saying that... reasons that were not political, but rather were based in journalistic integrity.)

 

No to your assertion that every source's slant is "intense"... and claiming that they all "radicalize" their viewers is simply an absurd thing to say.

[You Play to Win the Game]

Yes, every news source has its slant. It's impossible not to. (Cronkite himself said it's a journalist's *job* to be liberal... and he good reasons for saying that... reasons that were not political, but rather were based in journalistic integrity.)

No to your assertion that every source's slant is "intense"... and claiming that they all "radicalize" their viewers is simply an absurd thing to say.

Agreed fully with the first paragraph.

And just because you're not susceptible to it, doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm not. I'm definitely right about this. And democrats not being able to acknowledge it is part of the problem. Fox News is way worse, but both do it. And they know it's harmful, but they both do it anyway.

[RShack]

Agreed fully with the first paragraph.

And just because you're not susceptible to it, doesn't mean I'm wrong. I'm not. I'm definitely right about this. And democrats not being able to acknowledge it is part of the problem. Fox News is way worse, but both do it. And they know it's harmful, but they both do it anyway.

 

If you think Dem's are radicals, you've lost your moorings...

[You Play to Win the Game]

A prominent poster who I respect a lot hit me up offline and convinced me radicalized isn't the right word choice. But is it right for the left media to still teach us to despise the other side? They don't persuade, they hate, basically. That was my point.

[You Play to Win the Game]

Maybe brainwashed would be the right word. Whatever that word is, it isn't right at all.

[RShack]

A prominent poster who I respect a lot hit me up offline and convinced me radicalized isn't the right word choice. But is it right for the left media to still teach us to despise the other side? They don't persuade, they hate, basically. That was my point.

 

We need to distinguish between (a) the things the far Right has done and (b) the people who have been misled into supporting those things.  The things the Right has done (and those who led them) IMO *are* hate-worthy and downright un-American.  The people who have been conned into supporting those things most certainly are not hate-worthy.

I think it is a fair criticism to say that the largely trustworthy news outlets have blamed the far-Right supporters for the wrongness while mostly ignoring the news outlets that abused the trust of those people via an organized propaganda operation aimed misleading them.  They have largely not pinned it on the news operations who misled them and lied to them, and instead blamed their viewers for having been misled and for believing the lies. I think the root cause of this originally is that they were unwilling to put the responsibility on the news operations who did it, mainly because the news people who worked there are members of the same TV-news club/clique/whatever and they're pals with some folks who work there.

 

On a more positive note, since Biden got sworn-in the tenor has very much been one of "We cannot be hostile to these people... we have to remember that we're all Americans, and we need to find ways to communicate with them in ways they can tolerate and hear... and lecturing at them and blaming them for having been lied to won't do that."   So, all in all, I'd say that's a sin that is in the process of being corrected.  They've always had a better tone than that offered by the untrustworthy news operations (who continue to set an overtly hostile "own the libs" tenor), and it is most certainly improving further to a more tolerant and understanding level.  I found it unwise before, but I think it's heading in the proper direction.

[You Play to Win the Game]

We need to distinguish between (a) the things the far Right has done and (b) the people who have been misled into supporting those things.  The things the Right has done (and those who led them) IMO *are* hate-worthy and downright un-American.  The people who have been conned into supporting those things most certainly are not hate-worthy.

I think it is a fair criticism to say that the largely trustworthy news outlets have blamed the far-Right supporters for the wrongness while mostly ignoring the news outlets that abused the trust of those people via an organized propaganda operation aimed misleading them.  They have largely not pinned it on the news operations who misled them and lied to them, and instead blamed their viewers for having been misled and for believing the lies. I think the root cause of this originally is that they were unwilling to put the responsibility on the news operations who did it, mainly because the news people who worked there are members of the same TV-news club/clique/whatever and they're pals with some folks who work there.

 

On a more positive note, since Biden got sworn-in the tenor has very much been one of "We cannot be hostile to these people... we have to remember that we're all Americans, and we need to find ways to communicate with them in ways they can tolerate and hear... and lecturing at them and blaming them for having been lied to won't do that."   So, all in all, I'd say that's a sin that is in the process of being corrected.  They've always had a better tone than that offered by the untrustworthy news operations (who continue to set an overtly hostile "own the libs" tenor), and it is most certainly improving further to a more tolerant and understanding level.  I found it unwise before, but I think it's heading in the proper direction.

Fair enough. I don't mean to create a false equivalency here. One is clearly much, much worse - I just wish things were much different, on both sides. I don't think things are going to end well here, and it's going to be soon. The worst has yet to come. I firmly believe that, and all of us are responsible.