Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I assumed my great-grandfather had papers, but maybe not. How would they get into the country on a boat from Europe without papers?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I expect graft, but people also jumped off boats.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

DYK how your grand-mother arrived? My grandfather came on a ship from Hamburg, and got to St Louis. I assumed he said up the Mississippi, but maybe he got off the ship in New York and took a train.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I'm fine with women in power, but not these women.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

NYC not sure how she got in though. There is an intense play about Itie immigrants in the 50s sneaking in. My g-pa was here with papers so he might have. Greased some wheels.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I always assumed my ancestors didn't really need any "papers" back in the 19th century and before, although somewhere we have my great-great-grandpa's discharge papers from the Prussian army.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

There weren’t probably, especially for a German. My gpa got to NYC in 1922. The knucklehead dumped his Iris citizenship* and became US immediately. He sent for my gma in 1928. Problem: in 1924 Congress passed a law essentially stopping all Italian immigration. I don’t know she was w/o papers, but she was dirt poor and most people that did get in were w/o.

*I know because if he was still an Italian when my mommy was born I could get Itie dual citizenship and an EC passport. My mom remembered helping her mom study for the citizenship test test so I was hopeful gap might have waited a bit, but he didn’t. And the country is so patriarchial that my Gmail doesn’t matter.

This post for Hank's pleasure.
 

Re: This post for Hank's pleasure.
 

This i don't get. it's a real ad for a movie?

Re: This post for Hank's pleasure.
 

Sometimes I'm not really sure I understand the kids these days, but I believe there is a thing where people use the Photoshop or its functional equivalents to change the words on images of stuff, and I believe that the green background of those Grinchy billboards make an ideal canvas for that sort of artwork.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I love the comments to pieces like that. Sure, they’re cheap giggles, and yes, they paint a depressing picture of the average American’s intellect. But I like cheap laughs, and I’m comforted — I can still lose a whole lotta brain cells before I’ll be average.

Re: This post for Hank's pleasure.
 

I don’t wish to make the perfect the enemy of the quite good, but there’s also the 4K Americans wasted, and that $3 trillion cost. Maybe a footnote?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

It was actually hard to be here illegally for a long time. But I had a relative who managed it during the revolution. He was impressed into the British navy and then jumped ship. If the Brits every found him, he would have hung, but how would they have known who he was, anyways? The natives welcomed him and taught him Dutch.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Hey Sebby, whoever wrote this forgot the part where Pelosi explains the media is just doing what the Democrats want them to do:

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

So you think the media shouldn't report on this guy's nonsense? The Dems would like for the media not to cover him? You can't mean that- covering his shit geeks up the Dems masses.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

You make a good point -- there is no middle ground between wall-to-wall coverage, repeating his nonsense, and not reporting on him at all. Therefore, the media shouldn't cover him at all.

Funny how all of the coverage of the caravan of invading immigrants in Mexico just stopped after Election Day. Just like the Democrats planned it!

eta: There is an interesting discussion to be had about what the media does right and wrong covering Trump. Happy to have that conversation. But as a starting point, Sebby's view that the media are doing the Democrats' bidding is totally insane.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

The media loves to trash Trump. And it does.

The media can love Trump for ratings and simultaneously be biased toward Democrats and against Trump.

You’re arguing there’s no such thing as bad press. That’s a different point than noticing the obvious left bias of the media.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

No. The media and Democrats are rather stupid in their strategy. The dumb Ds go on TV and scream and yell about everything Trump does and the media uses it for ratings. It’s a symbiotic relationship of idiots playing into Trump’s hands.

The Ds and the media think they’re helping to take down Trump in doing this. The media very much thinks it’s doing the Ds bidding.

It’s really fucking stupid.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

24 news repeats what news it has for 24 hours. Here's where I learned it- the DC sniper news- we would hear there's a new shooting and put on a news station- the news would repeat what little news there was over and over- THEN repeat the history of the sniper's prior shootings. That there is 24 coverage of anything is not proof of anything, other 24 hour coverage is stupid.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Every individual politician wants air time, and many will say what they need to to get it. Because it helps them get reelected.

The amazing thing is that people watch hours and hours of shows delivering the same agitprop on a loop, when they could, for example, read any number of good more detailed articles on a topic, like, say, ISIS in Syria, or even just turn to the cooking channel and learn more about Syria through its food than they ever will through Fox News.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I don’t think cable news viewers desire to learn, particularly Fox viewers. They desire tribal reinforcement. It’s demented.

I used to read NYT and WSJ in total daily. A few years back I took Taleb’s advice and started reading more books and long form in depth articles and following news only occasionally (feed on phone, perused here and there). I feel I’ve missed nothing and gained much.

My sole guilty pleasure: a little Morning Joe on Sirius. They get decent guests and tend to be centrist. I also watch Zakaria now and again. I like his calm assessments of issues.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Yup. A more insidious analogue is online clickbait news. If I see “Here’s what you need to know” in a headline, I refuse to read further.

Buzzfeed is a uniquely atrocious sinner in that circle of miscreants. That that site is considered news proves our decline is moving at a pace multiples of what we assume. (Breitbart’s ascension to “sorta news” closes that argument, for different reasons, with a mic drop.)

I’d address Upworthy, but it trips me from rational to enraged. Everyone involved in it, everyone who likes it, is guilty of crimes against evolution and humanity in general.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Yes, everything is at it was in 2008 and nothing has changed. :rolleyes:

It's important to think about how and why Breitbart and Infowars became sorta news, which is directly related to your irrational belief that the mainstream media does the Dems bidding.

It still exists?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I’m missing your first point. Are you defending Buzzfeed as a “news” outlet?

As to your second point, Newton’s 3rd Law.

Upworthy does still exist. Not only as a site, but in its revolution changing how all sites now tailor headlines as clickbait.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

You see wall-to-wall coverage of an invasion of the US by a caravan of poor Hondurans walking through southern Mexico, right before an election, and you see bias against Trump. It's amazing that someone who is so proud of being a free thinker is can be so oblivious to the power of the way things are framed and the recurring narratives that the media repeat.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

If you think this you are an idiot.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

So there's no editorial judgment involved at all. The caravan of immigrants was news before Election Day, and then it just wasn't news. Sure, that must be it.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

In 2018, yes, Buzzfeed is an actual news outlet that employs actual reporters who report actual news. No less so than tv news, for example. Perhaps even more so for some of their reporters.

It was not whenever you formed your opinion, apparently.

Yes, wild, racist, right wing conspiracy sources found their way into conservative news sources solely as an equal and opposite reaction to whatever lefty thing exists only in your imagination.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

And how much how the media reports it is being dictated by the current occupant of the White House.

The man is a disaster seems completely uninformed about any question of policy, but he has been masterful in his manipulation of the media.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Maybe Trump stopped talking about it, so no one was? I don't know, i don't watch the news. What i do watch is you veering further and further towards crazy town- and you were already going that way before you took this hard turn.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

You're intentionally (I think) conflating intent and effect. The majority of the press is left leaning. That is not up for debate except among the ludicrous, so I'm not entertaining any silly comeback on that. A majority of these people really believe they are helping to take Trump down by reporting incessantly negative stories about him. Their intent is to harm him.

However, the effect is much different. By giving Trump so much airtime, they've created a monster that sucks up all attention 24/7, which delights, galvanizes, and possibly expands his base.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

I've read Buzzfeed, and Buzzfeed is shit. But you are free to hold a different opinion.

The Left lost its mind after the 2000 election. The discourse became insane. Consequently, when Obama took office, the right had a similar reaction (also because he was black, so the racists came out of the woodwork). Following Obama, Trump capitalized on the right's anger, got lucky and won. And in typical action/reaction fashion, the left went completely batshit crazy once more.

If a D wins in 2020, it will be the right's turn to attack everything the govt does once more.

It's a tennis match of increasingly irrational competing tribes.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

No. You clearly haven't had adequate personal exposure to political journalists.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

It was news on Fox because Fox is now GOP Base TV. They fed their tribe a pile of shit about a caravan of families being filled with terrorists.

It was news on MSNBC because editors there thought they could use it as a Trump shaming story. They could argue to their tribal viewers that he was both a liar (using the caravan as a political stunt to gin up votes) and that he is cruel (the caravan is filled with harmless refugees).

The story worked for neither outlet. They just preached diametrically opposed narratives about a made-up non-event to their tribal viewers.

The story had zero impact on the midterms because voters had already locked in their positions long before this craven BS story was crafted by Trump and picked up by the media.

The only possible winner here was Trump, who succeeded in getting more free airtime for no good reason. But since his goal with the story was to create GOP voter turnout for the midterms, and he needs more free airtime like a moose needs a hat rack, one can't really say he won anything for his propaganda efforts. The only comment that fits, on this story and with so many others like it, is Everybody Invested in it Lost.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Where in there is the mainstreaming of Breitbart and Infowars?

And in what way is the left "completely batshit" right now?

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

What's the hard turn? That Trump is a master at getting the media to talk about the things he wants them to talk about? That's the reality we have all been living for about three years now.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

What "incessantly negative stories" about him? WTF are you talking about?

The man lies constantly. We all know that. I bet no one here bothers to read the stories about how whatever he has said most recently is wrong. But the press repeats what he says credulously, giving him the benefit of the doubt, so the occasional debunking has little effect.

Boy, it's almost like any bias on the part of any individual reporters doesn't really matter.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Since Bush's election, this Democracy or ours has been busted.

We're at a bizarre place today where everybody's in Crazytown. You can't even talk about politics with anyone anymore, and I'm not sure you should. Everybody's strident about everything. Everybody's got a grievance. Everybody wants you to agree with them and is upset if you don't. Sure, they'll say they're willing to listen to those who disagree. But that's lip service. They're only listening for the purpose of finding a flaw in what you've said with which to attack you.

You can't even talk about politics as sport anymore. If you criticize someone's party's strategy, you're criticizing its substantive planks.

People are rubbed raw and emotional, and I don;t think many of them understand how much of it is caused by people manipulating them - things like 24 hour news. And we now realize how irrational and tribal people are by nature.

I have learned one thing in the past few years, however. It is probably easier to manipulate educated people than non-educated.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

Political journalists tend to be centrists. But the idea that their individual political leanings makes any real difference, or is near the top of the list of things that affect the media environment, is silly, and it itself a relic of the way conservatives constantly work the refs.

Re: We are all Slave now.
 

It was all over all of the mainstream outlets, like the NYT and WaPo, because once the conservative media are talking about something, it's news (in Hank's objective sense of course) (there's no phenomena like that on the left, because there is no left-wing equivalent of Fox News or Breitbart). The story had a huge impact on the elections, because the point was to turn out the base and to keep the media from talking about the number one issue to voters, which was healthcare, or trade wars, or other things that non-partisans care about.

Congressional elections are a zero-sum game. It is not possible for everyone to lose.