I remember when the U.S. news media obsessed for months about a couple of Haight-Ashbury hippies who tried to smoke the scrapings off a banana peel, so nothing they are grossly distorting nowadays really surprises me.
We've reached the final stage of media capitalism - when the company actively kills its viewers by telling them something they want to hear for ratings. The graveyard at the end of the universe.
This is Jim Jones at Jonestown on steroids. There are possibly two things going on here. Either these Republican Governors are the dumbest ever to be elected office or they are misleading their constituents for a larger goal. Could it be just to appease Donald Trump? Is the goal to use these gullible Republican voters as modern day Kamakaze for the purpose of continuing the pandemic? In this way it they can blame the Biden administration so that Republicans can win elections as soon as next year? If this is true or even a possibility, where is the narrative from the MSM? People are dying and Republican governors, House members and Senators, who all have been vaccinated, are sacrificing their own voting base for some larger political goal? It's sick! The Republican Party has become a cult and the press should be ashamed of itself for not honestly telling this story that will be studied for years to come.
And the msm enables these nihilists by continually telling us how ‘confusing’ the messaging out of the WH is about vaccinations et al. How about clarifying what’s true?
The Republican governor of WVa, Jim Justice, has repeatedly made strong public statements making his utter exasperation with the the anti-vaccine crowd crystal clear. He isn’t afraid he will hurt their delicate feelings, instead he has made very blunt statements excoriating the insanity of their claims yet the media has largely ignored him. The media should be showing Justice’s statements over and over rather than putting the spotlight on Republicans who are encouraging anti-vaccine sentiment.
Just the other day Justice said WVA was just going to keep “lining the body bags up”. At least I am seeing a lot more coverage of anti-vax people dying from Covid.
yes, unlike the Gov of TN, who appears to be afraid of his own shadow re: vaccines etc and refuses to offend the zombies, Justice openly mocks the right-wing conspiracies.
Off topic but today Glenn Kessler gave Kevin McCarthy just three Pinocchios for his insane lie that raising the debt ceiling in 2019 “ paid for everything in the Trump administration, plus seven months of this Biden administration.”
This is the same Kessler who once gave Bernie Sanders four Pinocchios for saying that Hitler once won an election instead of saying Hitler’s Nazi Party won, putting Hitler in power. It’s the same way Justin Trudeau or any head of a parliamentary government wins election.
It IS starting to feel like mob rule; families of public servants, et al are now regularly physically threatened when they don’t tow the lie/line, using fear, bullying to drive good and honest people from the political square. Who and when are the people in power going to address this head on? And when will msm do their due diligence and break out of THEIR bubble and do their job reporting on REAL news? Brainwashing and mob rule are afoot.
There was a story out of Idaho the other day - a hospital had signs vandalized with swastikas. The covid brainwashing now has people equating hospitals with Nazi death camps is my guess - and local law enforcement goes out of its way to say it can't be covid-related. I wrote it up here:
Here's an excerpt from my write up that picks up on something from 1954 that has become scarily relevant:
They’d Rather Be Right
In 1954 Mark Clifton and Frank Riley published a serial story about an advanced cybernetic device called “Bossy” that had been loaded with every provable scientific fact — and the ability to make correlations between them all. The story is set in an America where there’s a certain amount of paranoia (Cold War era after all), a nation losing its way, cynical media manipulation of a gullible public, a problematic celebrity billionaire, Academia under attack, and other things that are suddenly seeming very timely.
It was the second novel to win a Hugo award, and generated mixed responses at the time. The ‘science’ is used to drive the plot, which explores the nature of human rationality, intelligence, science, politics, and so on. It’s a “What If” story. The title “They’d Rather Be Right” comes from the essential dilemma in the story.
As the setup for the story has it, Bossy can answer any question for which it has sufficient information, and the answer will not be shaped by human bias; it will be entirely objective based on proven and provable facts. (Please don’t quibble about this — as I said it’s a what if story.)
Among the answers Bossy can provide is that it can direct a kind of medical treatment that can restore a person to perfect youthful health — effective immortality. There’s one hitch...
To be successfully rejuvenated, a person needs to undergo a kind of mechanical psychoanalysis that allows the body to rejuvenate itself by resolving all of the conflicts and contradictions within their thought patterns that affect them down to the cellular level — including strongly held beliefs that conflict with reality.
They’d Rather Be Right — and die is the reason the therapy will not work for people who refuse to give up their beliefs in the face of facts that they refuse to accept. We’re now seeing a real-world example of this taking place in real time.
As far as I know the book version, published in 1957, is currently out of print although used copies are out there. (I got my copy via the Science Fiction Book Club years ago.)
[Update: Several commenters found links to “They’d Rather Be Right.” Squeeze the Weeze found it in a Mark Clifton story collection. beverlywoods found it in an online lending library. RhodeIslandAspie found an e version online.]
Clifton and Riley were able to come up with a happy ending for their story. We still have to work on ours.
At what level should we hold the brainwashed responsible? They're the ones consuming the horseshit from Fox, trump, and other outlets. When do we start admitting that these people have shit for brains? They're not teachable because they're fucking dipshits. I'm from Kansas. I lived there for my first 54 years. I know republican voters. I know how to talk to them. If I didn't I would have had about 5 conversations my entire life. It seems to me that not just the majority, but all of the national media has never known an actual republican voter in their entire fucking lives. They don't care about facts. They don't care about policy. They only care about hurting the other. And they will never change.
From the people I know who have chosen — and “chosen” is the correct word — to believe the lies, they are doing it out of a need to feel superior, to “own the libs”, to paint liberals as delusional or even evil liars.
It’s about their ego and insecurity, not facts. They bought into the right wing propaganda years ago because of their emotional needs because it justifies what they subconsciously know are hateful beliefs. The right has given them justifications for their beliefs and talking points to use against liberals. The message is that you are the righteous, the “real Americans” and those people who criticize your beliefs (white superiority for one) are the bad guys. Those bad guys want to take your money and give it to those inferior people. The propaganda has made them feel so good about their hateful beliefs that they have kept consuming it even though doing so is now threatening their lives. It’s a lot like drug addiction.
The Republicans always play a zero-sum game: if they are winning, the other guy is losing; and subsequently, if they are losing, then the other guy must be winning.
If a Republican gets a vaccine, that person is helping the other guy to win. Every jab is a win for Joe Biden, and the GOP base cannot have that: it’s a loss for Trump.
It’s simplified, but I think that is how they see it.
When I was in school, we were taught the "who/what/where/when" and sometimes “how" questions that must be answered in a story, but the “why" was almost always left to editorial. This seems like editorial decision to not give rise to the why.
I’m not the only one who sees this: Robert Kagen, WaPo Sept. 24, 2021
"There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites, his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing Covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told a reporter."
In fairness, the fact that republikkkans didn't get behind these measures last year while Democrats did pretty well resolved it, since most of them would rather die than agree with a Democrat.
I am reminded, by the way, of last night's Ashley Parker tweet attacking Biden for not having a press conference, as BoJoke did. Fred Wellman had a terrific response. The DC political media brothel is alive and well.
It all goes back 50 years when the Nixon presidency was about to incinerate (metaphorically of course) the GOP. Then along came the roots of supply-side economics that eventually lead to the Reagan lie that "trickle-down" economics was the ultimate answer when it in fact was the beginning of the end of democracy.
When Reagan (illegally, IMHO) fired the unionized PATCO workers (air traffic controllers) it made the opposite of reality acceptable as reality and we're seeing the fruits of that (original) big lie today.
The Republicans spend like drunken sailors and run up the deficit when they're in power (when that DOES NOT matter) then when the Democrats get into power their canned cry is "what about the debt we're leaving for our children"? and the beat goes on, rinse and repeat... Then the next big lie the right touts as reality has more clout than the past ones because the (RWNJ) brainwashing becomes acceptable and the minds of the fooled go numb to facts and any form of reasoning.
Then you get what we have today... the truth is [nearly] worthless, except to those that still use facts and reason, not supposition, wishful "thinking", and gaslighting, and can come to a rational acceptance of facts and reality.
The Republicans would never have gotten away with their pretense of being the grown up, fiscally responsible party if the mainstream media hadn’t played along. The media couldn’t bring themselves to tarnish Ronnies image by pointing out his claim that tax cuts on the rich would pay for themselves was a fairy tale. They have ignored the fact that Reagan, far from being an economic genius, nearly tripled our national debt. The media obsessed about the debt when Clinton was in office but clammed up with he and the Dems raised taxes on upper incomes and not only balanced the budget but had a surplus that was paying down Reagan’s spending spree. When Bush opposed Gore’s idea of continuing to use the surplus to pay down the national debt and said we needed tax cuts, the media preferred Bush. Bush, like Reagan, blew up the debt. Paul Ryan came along with his fantasy budgets and the media crowned him a fiscal genius, not a fiscal fraud as he deserved.
All that plays along with exactly what I was saying... the truth is that the economy always does better when there's a Democrat in the White House but you'll probably NEVER hear that on CNN, MSNBC, and especially not on Fox Lies...
We do. The biggest problem with that is that most of the ones that are afraid of CRT know that it would include the fakeness/original lie (sin is merely a construct of this wishful "thinking") of all religions and they have given their whole lives to that lie and the racial inequities, the mass genocide on native Americans, and the lie that war is the answer to perceived terrorism when in fact it's these very people that are a much bigger (domestic terrorism) threat to democracy because they now realize that the continuation of this "experiment" of majority rule will leave them wishing their particular god WAS real so they could be raptured into the fantasy world of the Christian heaven, or that the Mormon 'magic underwear' would actually be real, and I wish I knew more about the so-called x number of virgins (do you really want to have sex with the inexperienced?) the Islamists dream of heaven involves... critical thinking answers these questions. Some people don't want real/factual answers. It crushes their (narrow) worldview. Unacceptable!
The Press Corpse ignores people like Eric and web pages like sorryantivaxxer.com because to them the Republican Party can do no wrong.
In fact the Press Corpse is every bit as guilty as the 24/7 Republican Brainwashing Machine, Facebook, Twitter, Right Wing Radio and Right Wing Pulpit Pimps are in killing people.
Not only are the “vaccine resisters” refusing the vaccine; they aggressively seek “remedies” such as intervectmin or hydroxychlorquine (probably mutilated the spelling of both).
It’s not just a negative there’s a dangerous positive aspect as well.
Is this the culmination of 60 years of “liberal media”?
But I still don’t see the goal of the brainwashing. What good to “corporate media” is it to kill the consumers? What gain to Republicans to kill their voters?
I greet this latest announcement from WaPoo with much trepidation. It sounds like they will be doing nothing more than ratcheting its execrable political coverage to eleventy under the guise of a more "robust platform footprint".
I remember when the U.S. news media obsessed for months about a couple of Haight-Ashbury hippies who tried to smoke the scrapings off a banana peel, so nothing they are grossly distorting nowadays really surprises me.
We've reached the final stage of media capitalism - when the company actively kills its viewers by telling them something they want to hear for ratings. The graveyard at the end of the universe.
it almost feels inevitable
This is Jim Jones at Jonestown on steroids. There are possibly two things going on here. Either these Republican Governors are the dumbest ever to be elected office or they are misleading their constituents for a larger goal. Could it be just to appease Donald Trump? Is the goal to use these gullible Republican voters as modern day Kamakaze for the purpose of continuing the pandemic? In this way it they can blame the Biden administration so that Republicans can win elections as soon as next year? If this is true or even a possibility, where is the narrative from the MSM? People are dying and Republican governors, House members and Senators, who all have been vaccinated, are sacrificing their own voting base for some larger political goal? It's sick! The Republican Party has become a cult and the press should be ashamed of itself for not honestly telling this story that will be studied for years to come.
it really is Jones territory….and the press is terrified to acknowledge it
And the msm enables these nihilists by continually telling us how ‘confusing’ the messaging out of the WH is about vaccinations et al. How about clarifying what’s true?
Is it horrible to say I am
ashamed of my country? It boggles the
mind to try to understand the hill these people (literally) will die on. I can’t believe they are my fellow Americans.
and *nothing* changes their minds, even when they watch their neighbors die
The Republican governor of WVa, Jim Justice, has repeatedly made strong public statements making his utter exasperation with the the anti-vaccine crowd crystal clear. He isn’t afraid he will hurt their delicate feelings, instead he has made very blunt statements excoriating the insanity of their claims yet the media has largely ignored him. The media should be showing Justice’s statements over and over rather than putting the spotlight on Republicans who are encouraging anti-vaccine sentiment.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/08/gop-west-virginia-gov-jim-justice-is-done-with-all-that-nonsense-vaccines/
Just the other day Justice said WVA was just going to keep “lining the body bags up”. At least I am seeing a lot more coverage of anti-vax people dying from Covid.
yes, unlike the Gov of TN, who appears to be afraid of his own shadow re: vaccines etc and refuses to offend the zombies, Justice openly mocks the right-wing conspiracies.
but it doesn't matter.
Off topic but today Glenn Kessler gave Kevin McCarthy just three Pinocchios for his insane lie that raising the debt ceiling in 2019 “ paid for everything in the Trump administration, plus seven months of this Biden administration.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2021/09/23/mccarthys-misleading-claim-that-2019-debt-ceiling-hike-paid-all-trumps-policies/
This is the same Kessler who once gave Bernie Sanders four Pinocchios for saying that Hitler once won an election instead of saying Hitler’s Nazi Party won, putting Hitler in power. It’s the same way Justin Trudeau or any head of a parliamentary government wins election.
https://www.vox.com/2015/8/28/9222535/bernie-sanders-hitler-election
Participation trophies don’t work, yet the beltway media keeps handing them out to Covid zombies because the zombies still crave them.
It is becoming increasingly difficult to deny Republicans resemble the hybrid of an organized crime syndicate crossed with a Lynch mob.
It IS starting to feel like mob rule; families of public servants, et al are now regularly physically threatened when they don’t tow the lie/line, using fear, bullying to drive good and honest people from the political square. Who and when are the people in power going to address this head on? And when will msm do their due diligence and break out of THEIR bubble and do their job reporting on REAL news? Brainwashing and mob rule are afoot.
There was a story out of Idaho the other day - a hospital had signs vandalized with swastikas. The covid brainwashing now has people equating hospitals with Nazi death camps is my guess - and local law enforcement goes out of its way to say it can't be covid-related. I wrote it up here:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2021/9/21/2053500/-Idaho-hospital-vandalized-with-swastikas-Care-to-speculate-why-Bonus-trip-to-1954-along-the-way
Here's an excerpt from my write up that picks up on something from 1954 that has become scarily relevant:
They’d Rather Be Right
In 1954 Mark Clifton and Frank Riley published a serial story about an advanced cybernetic device called “Bossy” that had been loaded with every provable scientific fact — and the ability to make correlations between them all. The story is set in an America where there’s a certain amount of paranoia (Cold War era after all), a nation losing its way, cynical media manipulation of a gullible public, a problematic celebrity billionaire, Academia under attack, and other things that are suddenly seeming very timely.
It was the second novel to win a Hugo award, and generated mixed responses at the time. The ‘science’ is used to drive the plot, which explores the nature of human rationality, intelligence, science, politics, and so on. It’s a “What If” story. The title “They’d Rather Be Right” comes from the essential dilemma in the story.
As the setup for the story has it, Bossy can answer any question for which it has sufficient information, and the answer will not be shaped by human bias; it will be entirely objective based on proven and provable facts. (Please don’t quibble about this — as I said it’s a what if story.)
Among the answers Bossy can provide is that it can direct a kind of medical treatment that can restore a person to perfect youthful health — effective immortality. There’s one hitch...
To be successfully rejuvenated, a person needs to undergo a kind of mechanical psychoanalysis that allows the body to rejuvenate itself by resolving all of the conflicts and contradictions within their thought patterns that affect them down to the cellular level — including strongly held beliefs that conflict with reality.
They’d Rather Be Right — and die is the reason the therapy will not work for people who refuse to give up their beliefs in the face of facts that they refuse to accept. We’re now seeing a real-world example of this taking place in real time.
As far as I know the book version, published in 1957, is currently out of print although used copies are out there. (I got my copy via the Science Fiction Book Club years ago.)
[Update: Several commenters found links to “They’d Rather Be Right.” Squeeze the Weeze found it in a Mark Clifton story collection. beverlywoods found it in an online lending library. RhodeIslandAspie found an e version online.]
Clifton and Riley were able to come up with a happy ending for their story. We still have to work on ours.
At what level should we hold the brainwashed responsible? They're the ones consuming the horseshit from Fox, trump, and other outlets. When do we start admitting that these people have shit for brains? They're not teachable because they're fucking dipshits. I'm from Kansas. I lived there for my first 54 years. I know republican voters. I know how to talk to them. If I didn't I would have had about 5 conversations my entire life. It seems to me that not just the majority, but all of the national media has never known an actual republican voter in their entire fucking lives. They don't care about facts. They don't care about policy. They only care about hurting the other. And they will never change.
From the people I know who have chosen — and “chosen” is the correct word — to believe the lies, they are doing it out of a need to feel superior, to “own the libs”, to paint liberals as delusional or even evil liars.
It’s about their ego and insecurity, not facts. They bought into the right wing propaganda years ago because of their emotional needs because it justifies what they subconsciously know are hateful beliefs. The right has given them justifications for their beliefs and talking points to use against liberals. The message is that you are the righteous, the “real Americans” and those people who criticize your beliefs (white superiority for one) are the bad guys. Those bad guys want to take your money and give it to those inferior people. The propaganda has made them feel so good about their hateful beliefs that they have kept consuming it even though doing so is now threatening their lives. It’s a lot like drug addiction.
The Republicans always play a zero-sum game: if they are winning, the other guy is losing; and subsequently, if they are losing, then the other guy must be winning.
If a Republican gets a vaccine, that person is helping the other guy to win. Every jab is a win for Joe Biden, and the GOP base cannot have that: it’s a loss for Trump.
It’s simplified, but I think that is how they see it.
When I was in school, we were taught the "who/what/where/when" and sometimes “how" questions that must be answered in a story, but the “why" was almost always left to editorial. This seems like editorial decision to not give rise to the why.
I’m not the only one who sees this: Robert Kagen, WaPo Sept. 24, 2021
"There was a time when political analysts wondered what would happen when Trump failed to “deliver” for his constituents. But the most important thing Trump delivers is himself. His egomania is part of his appeal. In his professed victimization by the media and the “elites, his followers see their own victimization. That is why attacks on Trump by the elites only strengthen his bond with his followers. That is why millions of Trump supporters have even been willing to risk death as part of their show of solidarity: When Trump’s enemies cited his mishandling of the pandemic to discredit him, their answer was to reject the pandemic. One Trump supporter didn’t go to the hospital after developing Covid-19 symptoms because he didn’t want to contribute to the liberal case against Trump. “I’m not going to add to the numbers,” he told a reporter."
In fairness, the fact that republikkkans didn't get behind these measures last year while Democrats did pretty well resolved it, since most of them would rather die than agree with a Democrat.
I am reminded, by the way, of last night's Ashley Parker tweet attacking Biden for not having a press conference, as BoJoke did. Fred Wellman had a terrific response. The DC political media brothel is alive and well.
Follow this thread in Centrism Fan account and see how Glenn Greenwald is priming the Press Corpse pump to slime Hunter Biden!
https://twitter.com/Wilson__Valdez/status/1440722873887301641?s=20
Love that account and follow on Twitter.
It all goes back 50 years when the Nixon presidency was about to incinerate (metaphorically of course) the GOP. Then along came the roots of supply-side economics that eventually lead to the Reagan lie that "trickle-down" economics was the ultimate answer when it in fact was the beginning of the end of democracy.
When Reagan (illegally, IMHO) fired the unionized PATCO workers (air traffic controllers) it made the opposite of reality acceptable as reality and we're seeing the fruits of that (original) big lie today.
The Republicans spend like drunken sailors and run up the deficit when they're in power (when that DOES NOT matter) then when the Democrats get into power their canned cry is "what about the debt we're leaving for our children"? and the beat goes on, rinse and repeat... Then the next big lie the right touts as reality has more clout than the past ones because the (RWNJ) brainwashing becomes acceptable and the minds of the fooled go numb to facts and any form of reasoning.
Then you get what we have today... the truth is [nearly] worthless, except to those that still use facts and reason, not supposition, wishful "thinking", and gaslighting, and can come to a rational acceptance of facts and reality.
Cognitive dissonance... mic drop!
The Republicans would never have gotten away with their pretense of being the grown up, fiscally responsible party if the mainstream media hadn’t played along. The media couldn’t bring themselves to tarnish Ronnies image by pointing out his claim that tax cuts on the rich would pay for themselves was a fairy tale. They have ignored the fact that Reagan, far from being an economic genius, nearly tripled our national debt. The media obsessed about the debt when Clinton was in office but clammed up with he and the Dems raised taxes on upper incomes and not only balanced the budget but had a surplus that was paying down Reagan’s spending spree. When Bush opposed Gore’s idea of continuing to use the surplus to pay down the national debt and said we needed tax cuts, the media preferred Bush. Bush, like Reagan, blew up the debt. Paul Ryan came along with his fantasy budgets and the media crowned him a fiscal genius, not a fiscal fraud as he deserved.
All that plays along with exactly what I was saying... the truth is that the economy always does better when there's a Democrat in the White House but you'll probably NEVER hear that on CNN, MSNBC, and especially not on Fox Lies...
We desperately need to teach critical thinking in schools.
We do. The biggest problem with that is that most of the ones that are afraid of CRT know that it would include the fakeness/original lie (sin is merely a construct of this wishful "thinking") of all religions and they have given their whole lives to that lie and the racial inequities, the mass genocide on native Americans, and the lie that war is the answer to perceived terrorism when in fact it's these very people that are a much bigger (domestic terrorism) threat to democracy because they now realize that the continuation of this "experiment" of majority rule will leave them wishing their particular god WAS real so they could be raptured into the fantasy world of the Christian heaven, or that the Mormon 'magic underwear' would actually be real, and I wish I knew more about the so-called x number of virgins (do you really want to have sex with the inexperienced?) the Islamists dream of heaven involves... critical thinking answers these questions. Some people don't want real/factual answers. It crushes their (narrow) worldview. Unacceptable!
The Press Corpse ignores people like Eric and web pages like sorryantivaxxer.com because to them the Republican Party can do no wrong.
In fact the Press Corpse is every bit as guilty as the 24/7 Republican Brainwashing Machine, Facebook, Twitter, Right Wing Radio and Right Wing Pulpit Pimps are in killing people.
It’s worse Mr. Boehlert.
Not only are the “vaccine resisters” refusing the vaccine; they aggressively seek “remedies” such as intervectmin or hydroxychlorquine (probably mutilated the spelling of both).
It’s not just a negative there’s a dangerous positive aspect as well.
Is this the culmination of 60 years of “liberal media”?
But I still don’t see the goal of the brainwashing. What good to “corporate media” is it to kill the consumers? What gain to Republicans to kill their voters?
What’s the point?
The point is that the Press Corpse is blaming these deaths on Joe Biden.
That's the plan. Bring Biden down. Period. And rinse/repeat with the next real Democrat in power.
I greet this latest announcement from WaPoo with much trepidation. It sounds like they will be doing nothing more than ratcheting its execrable political coverage to eleventy under the guise of a more "robust platform footprint".
More reporters would be better news than more editors. Reporters actually do work.
The good ones do, yes.