Tony_Tarantula on 26/11/2017 at 22:29
Quote Posted by Renzatic
There is some truth to this, I think. There's no doubt that Russia did meddle in the election, but they didn't do it through hacking polls and or killing officials. They did it simply by exploiting us for what we are, preying on our greed, widening divisions through the most basic propaganda imaginable, and playing on our own paranoia. If we haven't long since convinced ourselves that The Other Side was the embodiment of purest evil, out to destroy the American dream, and take away our God given freedoms, the Kremlin's little social media experiment against us would've failed before it even began.
It's something of an irony that we, as a nation, are so easy to exploit because we believe we've all been exploited, because we
want to believe we've been exploited.
It seems to be even more basic than that: "lobbying" efforts by Russian businessmen to influence US foreign policy in a direction that's financially beneficial to their business interests by means of bribery to US elected officials and political insiders like Manafort. The only one we know about for sure was Uranium 1 but I'm sure there's a whole bunch of other shady shit for less high profile matters (things like contract awards, permits, etc) that Manafort, Kelly, and others were involved in. Unfortunately the US political system is so corrupt that this is business as usual.
So basically the exact same thing that almost every forum member has given a free pass to politicians for in the past.
Quote:
We burned our firewalls and we're so proud of it. We thought we could understand everything ourselves and we wouldn't need any professional journalists to explain it to us, to tell right from wrong and protect us.
And here we are, with millions of idiots, led by a leash.
Amazing. You're here openly advocating that people shouldn't think critically for themselves and instead blindly trust whatever power tells them to be true.
You just basically said "I wish everyone would just believe what corporations want them to without question".
The simple fact of the matter is that the "journalists" you're referring to are all large corporations, with the bulk of their equity owned by the 1% of the 1%, that get their cash from the advertising dollars from other large corporations and need to please government officials in order to maintain access. It's not a setup that's even remotely conducive to spreading the truth.
Think about how well having "professional journalists" to "tell right from wrong and protect us" worked out with the leadup into Nazi Germany (where quite a few journalists were convinced Hitler was a great guy), during the Cold War when every problem the US had was because of communists, during the 80's when Satanists were using daycare center and D&D to groom our children for rape, when Saddam Hussain was about to gas America any day with his chemical weapons, and in the early 2000's when Harvey Weinstein was a great guy
in spite of them having proof that he was a rapist, and so on.
I mean it's not as if (
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/aug/29/correspondence-collusion-new-york-times-cia) they openly work for and with intelligence agencies or anything like that.
Starker on 27/11/2017 at 05:54
Yeah, the delegitimisation of media is certainly another aspect of this. You just label all journalists as corrupt and/or incompetent and voilà, nobody can be trusted any more. Tony in particular is demonstrating the kind of whataboutism and FUD that works so well for this kind of purpose.
No, journalists don't know everything and they are not the ultimate authority on the truth, but from that it doesn't follow that they cannot inform people or that they don't uncover important things. And if they get things wrong, their jobs or even their careers are on the line, so it's not like they can just write anything they like. Unless they work for a tabloid or something, of course.
Kolya on 27/11/2017 at 07:44
If you need medicine, you go to a pharmacy. Because it's their job. They studied it and can spend all day doing it correctly.
If you think that's advocating "blindly trusting" someone and you can do it all much better yourself from random internet sources, then your distrust and hubris are showing.
heywood on 27/11/2017 at 14:14
I grew up pre-internet, when almost everyone got their news from network TV or daily newspapers. There were three commercial TV networks plus the public broadcasting service, and they were more or less government propaganda machines, kept in their place by the FCC. If you lived in a major metropolitan area, you had maybe three or four newspapers to choose from, one would be center-right, another center-left, one tabloid. In a small or medium-sized metro area you might have just one or two. The daily newspapers never really ventured far from the mainstream regarding national news, and the harder-hitting journalism was usually limited to local issues and interests. Radio news was just headline news, repeating every 30 minutes. If you wanted to seek out any kind of alternative news viewpoint, your best bet was periodicals. But there weren't many people who did that, and those who did only subscribed to one or two, choosing ones that reinforced their views of course.
In terms of mainstream news sources, not much has changed since then. They are all owned by a small handful of 5 or 6 megacorps, and they trade independence for access. They have to respect their employers' interests, and they report what their government sources want them to report else they are cut out of the loop.
What has changed is the ease of accessing alternative news and opinion. We can sit at our computers and survey the landscape of news and opinion, or suck down news directly from the wire services. That gives us the power to be more informed than ever before, but along with that comes the danger of getting yourself caught in an information bubble where your views are never challenged.
When it comes to news and information, most people are sheep. During the cold war, when the news media were more tightly controlled and opinion was more monolithic, most people were sheep to the voice of the state. Now we're sheep to the voices of our political party or ideology.
Starker on 27/11/2017 at 16:39
So stories like Watergate were just a random fluke then? If newspapers were nothing more than government propaganda machines, how come there have been so many stories that expose corruption in the government?
Renzatic on 27/11/2017 at 16:43
It depends on who they're exposing. If it's the other guys, I'll take it as gospel truth. My guys? Propaganda for sheeple.
Pyrian on 27/11/2017 at 17:09
Quote Posted by Starker
If newspapers were nothing more than government propaganda machines, how come there have been so many stories that expose corruption in the government?
Because the former is convenient for the right-wing narrative that the media can't be trusted - when it points out how corrupt they are.
Renzatic on 27/11/2017 at 17:38
If there are two words I'm sick of hearing these days, it'd be agenda and narrative. When someone strings them together in a single sentence, a'la agenda driven narrative, it makes me wanna SLAY AND SLAUGHTER EVERYONE!
And yes, any accusation that yee olde MSM is nothing but propaganda for Leftist Liberals is, in and of itself, propaganda.
Goldmoon Dawn on 27/11/2017 at 17:55
Quote Posted by Starker
And if they get things wrong, their jobs or even their careers are on the line, so it's not like they can just write anything they like. Unless they work for a tabloid or something, of course.
Of course. :p
Quote Posted by Renzatic
And yes, any accusation that yee olde MSM is nothing but propaganda for Leftist Liberals is, in and of itself, propaganda.
So, regardless of content, the MSM *is* owned and operated by the left.
Renzatic on 27/11/2017 at 18:05
Quote Posted by Goldmoon Dawn
So, regardless of content, the MSM *is* owned and operated by the left.
You speak of The Left as if it's a singular entity. It's not. Same with The Right. There is no monolithic political block in the US. It's more like a series of loose coalitions that tend to side with each other over certain issues. Like the Left will be pro-choice, while the Right will be pro-Life, Left for business regulations, Right for looser restrictions, etc. etc. etc.
The Alt-Right is about the closest you could get to that, but it's a fringe extremist subset of the Right, and tend to not be very friendly to anyone outside of their own circle, listing just about everyone from staunch Marxists to Reganite Republicans as their enemies. The only reason anyone pays them a single bit of attention is because of Donald Trump and his big fat mouth gets them hooting and hollering.