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[Brentai]

 

[Royal☭]

In Communist Russia, they use to just print propaganda straight from the government with no fact checking as though it real news.  I'm glad we have a fair and free journalism in this country run by billionaires who business interests run counter to the government, so they're always providing balanced, considered arguments against any malfeasance.   Whoo!

I'd like to know, as I am meeting some conservative friends later and I want to conserve my outrage.

A true liberal conserves nothing.

[Norondor]

conservative friends

... i'm... sorry, i don't quite follow.

[Friday]

I consider them misled and do my best to show them, gently, because they really are misled since birth, generally, that their assumptions about gays and abortion and etc are incredibly fucking retarded beyond all possible belief.

I mean, I know this sweet girl, married to a really sweet friend of mine from way back, and she's about the nicest goddamn person you could ever know. I mean she's the type of girl who will cry over anything even remotely sad. She's always thinking about others and wants to help the world and cries over just about anything sad.

She was raised pretty hardcore Christian and loses her shit if anyone says the word "evolution" around her. She also considers homosexuality a disease, and abortion a sin. She's real nice but not very smart, she believes these things because her less nice and less smart family did nothing but force them down her throat for her entire life.

People just have to be shown the way. Any way. Show them a bad way and they'll go down it, because they don't know the difference. Sure, some people are capable of striking out on their own because they've got brains or willpower or wisdom or all three. But you can't hate someone for repeating what their mother told them, or their father told them, or their entire goddamn social network told them; they parrot their teachers because it's all they've ever been told.

Do I have the urge to lock her and her husband up in a room and brandish guns while I rage about how goddamn fucking hypocritical it is to profess being a Christian who loves others and at the same time be prejudiced against gays and ex-mothers? Yes. But all I'd do is scare her. And like I said she's a nice girl and apart from her upbringing and her beliefs therefore I really love her to death.

(also yes I know you were 75% joking as usual, but I do think it's possible to be friends with people who don't share your beliefs and I'm sure you have friends likewise or maybe not maybe you are a fucking communist you red bastard)

Also holy goddamn shit I have been reading too much fucking Steinbeck and it is starting to show in my writing

[Brentai]

Again, 100 is the average IQ by definition.  And in my experience, that's not enough to be able to distinguish between right and wrong for one's own self.

[Friday]

Hell I know people who are really fucking smart and they really believe in some really stupid shit

I just wrote really three times in the same sentence

Fuck you, Steinbeck, I am not writing about labor camps and so I do not need your simpleminded cadences to convey the proper downtrodden atmosphere

[Norondor]

Again, 100 is the average IQ by definition.  And in my experience, that's not enough to be able to distinguish between right and wrong for one's own self.

Actually i think the average is up to 110/120? by now? Flynn Effect, etc.

And no, i don't have anyone i would consider both a conservative and a friend in my life. My mother's a conservative, and while i make small talk with her, i despise her for her beliefs, heart and soul. She voted for McCain on the strength of the fact that Palin was his running mate, and she wanted to see a woman in the white house. I told her that Palin was objectively pro-rape and had single-handedly destroyed Wasilla and she neither cared nor changed her vote. I hate her for this.

Why do i think like this? Because there IS a culture war going on, and, unwitting or not, they are the footsoldiers. They carry the torch for the ultra-wealthy and the intolerant. I have gay friends. I have poor friends (i myself am way, way below the poverty line). I have friends who are teenaged mothers. Conservatives, even the ones who smile nicely and say sweet things and feel bad about bunnies who get hit by cars, want my friends, and me, and most of you, to die.

Or, put another way: there's a point when stupidity becomes malicious. After around a decade of environmental, economic and human destruction on an incredible scale, if someone's unwilling to rethink their beliefs -- or if they really think that people like me and you are traitors -- then in the end i must concede that we really don't have as much in common as it might first seem.

[SCD]

Transportation:  I wish to point out that the Economist Group seems to be doing well.  As per a year ago, they went over and beyond their expectations for revenue.  This year as their CEO steps down, it is still sunshine and lollypops.  Privately owned news papers are starting to fail, there is no doubt about that.  You can say the same about some state-sponsored news organizations.

The press has been a bit thick with journalists who do not accomplish much anything, following the path of dozens of others.  Expect those sorts to be weeded out by market forces.  

[Romosome]

Again, 100 is the average IQ by definition.  And in my experience, that's not enough to be able to distinguish between right and wrong for one's own self.

Actually i think the average is up to 110/120? by now? Flynn Effect, etc.

Before someone else has a chance to answer this and be a dick about it, 100 is literally average by definition.  It's a bell-shaped curve with 100 at the center, so if we all became amazing future cyborgs that can computer pi in our sleep, the average for our crazy future society would still be 100.

People are fit to the curve, not the other way around.

[Brentai]

Thanks, Romo.  I was going to be a dick about it.

That said, you could make the argument that today's 100 is yesterday's 110, which may or may not be true.  It all depends on whether or not the people of yesterday understood what "be definition" means or not.

Oops, guess I was a dick anyway.

[Romosome]

I don't understand what "be definition" means either.

 

(that was fair game)

[Brentai]

Clearly you're not smart enough.

[Norondor]

ok yes true i was just saying

[Royal☭]

Or, put another way: there's a point when stupidity becomes malicious.

You don't say.

[Doom]

And that playboy article was primarily fucking google detective work. Show me some examples where they have the funding to cross-reference all the crazy shit you see in Abu-Ghraib or Watergate for a more historical example.

That's my point, though. Money helps. News can benefit from business. But it's not like the two will live and die together.

Hell, I can't get most foreign news without looking because the US just doesn't care and covering a stalemate or losing war is depressing to Americans I guess.

Also I'm not up for "all amateurs" either, and hell we both agreed that by sheer inertia any internet amateurs can become as vaunted as professionals. I just think that with a reform to The News as a professional body we can get a huge benefit while those happy amateurs get their thing done.

[Brentai]

I'd like a clarification of who we're even talking about here.  Do you guys think the AP is going to disappear anytime soon?

[Doom]

Hopefully.

[Friday]

Noro, I understand what you're saying and your position. I am sick of intolerance and hate, even covered by a thin veneer of kindness towards those whom the intolerant deem tolerable.

My friend doesn't want ex-mothers and gays to die. If she did, she wouldn't be my friend. Anyone who wants another person to die is pretty much someone I wouldn't consider as a friend. Conservatives (or anyone) like that deserve to be despised.

On the other hand, she and I will never be good friends precisely because of her idiotic views, forced on her or not. I have attempted a few times to discuss things with her, because I feel that people generally can be brought around to the correct way of thinking about issues if you approach them without hatred in your heart.

She's a footsoldier, yes, I'll agree with that, even though she was pressed into service. But I've always thought it was better to win a solider over to your side than simply kill them in your pursuit of victory.

I'm not saying FUCK YOU NORO, YOU SHOULD HAVE CONSERVATIVE FRIENDS. It's fine if you hate your mom, I hate my mom, and she's a liberal, so you're certainly allowed. Your mom, if it's true that she voted McCain entirely because he picked a female VP while ignoring the actual personality/thoughts of said female VP, sounds like a retard of the nth degree who deserves to be ridiculed for her idiotic sheeplike mind.

Let me clarify my position: I despise the ideas in the head of my friend(s), I like the person. You can make an argument that they are one and the same, and you would not be without merit. But (I hope/believe) sometimes ideas can change, sometimes a person can realize they were wrong. I have to believe this, (despite all evidence to the contrary) or else, well, I probably really will just start shooting people.

My hatred of ideas is not restricted to conservative ideas, either. Just throwing that out there to show that I despise people's ideas if they are wrong, period. I'm mostly liberal with a few exceptions (gun control and the death penalty being the largest two that come to mind, I have had long discussions about both these issues with my liberal friends) so a lot of the time what I oppose ends up being conservative, but not always. I fucking vomit whenever a liberal blithely shits out more gun control rhetoric, and I will argue the point with them until I'm blue in the face. (I also vomit whenever a conservative shits out the other side of the gun control rhetoric, so there you go.)

Noro, the fact is, I can't think of a single issue I've ever disagreed with you on that I can remember on these boards, unless this one counts. I'm sure we could find something, but I'm just saying for the most part I am right there with you on the radical side of things.

there's a point when stupidity becomes malicious.

I agree. It's a sad truth, but truth nonetheless.

[Bongo Bill]

You probably won't get through to him, Friday; he seems to honestly believe that conservatism is about exterminating all dissent against theocratic corporate slavery. What you're proposing will sound to him like bringing a dictionary to a gunfight.

Good journalism is expensive. At the very least, you'll need people to go to far-off places and/or perform excruciatingly boring research in order to publicize important but inconspicuous facts. The sheer quantity of important facts out there means that journalism cannot help but be a Lots Of Money Undertaking.

The main questions that present problems with the future of traditional news media are:

• Many customers prefer news that is banal and sensational rather than important or even accurate
• Many customers prefer their news to be presented from an editorial context that other customers do not share
• Many customers seem to prefer to get their news from free online mirrors of individual articles
• It's not yet clear whether it's possible to make that kind of money from this kind of enterprise using the Internet
• Anti-competitive trends in both the production and the distribution of journalism means that it is very easy to subtly manipulate reporting and very few alternatives to turn to in order to punish the sources that engage in this

There is a certain, almost poetic tension between the nature of the world and the requirements of a market. Although multiple political interpretations are possible, there is just one single sequence of events. Multiple providers of the same facts would be an inefficient redundancy. But without that redundancy, there is nothing to stop the political interpretation from coloring or supplanting the basic reporting of the fact.

As in science, the availability of the basic unbiased fact is important; it does not matter as much whether it is consumed with a liberal* garnish of editorializing, as long as it is built upon an accurate and verifiable account of the event. Editorializing is cheap; most people with an opinion will give it to you for free. It seems to me that the big weakness of journalism in general has been that the revenue stream was tied to the finished product - the facts plus a particular context, rather than the facts independently. The actual consumer of news is buying facts plus context, rather than just facts, and they are buying it from the producer of the context, who produces local facts in-house buy buys national and world facts from someone bigger.

The Internet means that nobody can charge for context any more, which means that context providers can't make a business out of buying facts. Which means that fact providers are in big trouble. How to ensure that people still get facts? I don't know.

*used in the quantitative rather than political sense; please forgive my wordplay

[Norondor]

Honestly i was actually conservative-by-association until my third year of high school.

I don't think that all conservatism is like that. I think that the heads of the american conservative movement -- both the religious and economic branches of it -- have that endgame in mind, and there's no dissenting moderate voice within the Republican party, as anyone who seeks to climb the ranks has to kiss Limbaugh's ring to get anywhere. I notably think this because as in all things i am right -- note the backlash within the party against absolutely anyone who goes along with anything that anyone on the left says, does or thinks. I am similarly frustrated that the left has no powerful media outlet, no discipline, no battle plan to win the war for hearts and minds. They think that people know, care, or can be made to care about the truth -- that minorities (even ones who hate other minorities, the stupid fuckers) need legal protection against exploitation, supply-side economics is so much bullshit, etc. -- and they aren't right, not at all.

And your icy-cold burns aside, i am trying to be part of the solution, in my own way. The party heads of the right have been smearing liberals for a long time simply by out-crazying us, and having enough control of the media zeitgeist to be able to decry all positions left of theirs as total madness. It's to the point that "liberal" itself is a swear-word. The gradual slide to the right has to be countered by an opposing force pulling left, and we have nothing like that -- We have people like Michael Moore being compared to Mann Coulter, for the love of god. Kazz already pointed it out, but without extremists on the left there is no way to tell what leftist positions actually are sane.