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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Honestly, if I wasn't sidetracked by trying to get an employment and studding to pass a few public office position tests, I'd coming back to the skeptic projects and conspiracy debunking works.
The sheer stupidity, hoaxes and amount of conspiracy theories and thinking this election resurfaced is ridiculous.
Inter arma enim silent legesSo, John Oliver decided to rip into Johnson and Stein. The gist of it is stuff we already knew: their policies are totally unworkable (on the level of Trump's wall) and they've got major personal issues.
I did learn however that Stein is a terrible singer-songwriter, and that Johnson has some interesting feelings regarding mountains...
Politics is the skilled use of blunt objects.So The Economist has somethings to say over why Trump's accession aren't that much of a surprise. Right wing sensationalism was bound to breed the audience that would throw itself at Trump.
The Economist: The business of outrage
Some Americans are getting rich by pushing politics to extremes
ONE of the gentler quips uttered by the writer and thinker H.L. Mencken was that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public. By the same token, nobody ever went broke overestimating the anger of the American people. The country is in an unusually flammable mood. This being America, there are plenty of businesspeople around to monetise the fury—to foment it, manipulate it and spin it into profits. These are the entrepreneurs of outrage and barons of bigotry who have paved the way for Donald Trump’s rise.
The very first of them was Rush Limbaugh who, back in the 1980s, transformed himself from a disc jockey into a radio commentator. Mr Limbaugh shook up the ossified talk-show format by dispensing with the tedious call-ins and adding anarchic humour. Soon an army of “ditto-head” followers hung on his every word. He has 13m regular listeners and hundreds of imitators, ranging from national stars such as Sean Hannity to local ranters.
The second entrepreneur of outrage was Roger Ailes, a Republican operative who teamed up with Rupert Murdoch to build Fox News. Mr Ailes took talk radio and added TV production values and 24-hour news. Mr Ailes has now left Fox News following a sex scandal. But his formula—outspoken conservative pundits (such as Bill O’Reilly and the ubiquitous Mr Hannity) plus serious journalists—continues to produce results. Fox is the highest-rated cable-news channel but is also respectable enough to host presidential debates.
The internet produced a new crop of outrage merchants. Matt Drudge got in early with a quirky website that published material the mainstream press deemed too hot to handle. Then 9/11 and an outpouring of patriotism gave another boost to the conservative blogging industry. But the most successful of the internet generation was Andrew Breitbart. He started in journalism working for Mr Drudge, then helped Arianna Huffington set up her website and put the two experiences together to launch Breitbart News—a no-holds-barred website that spends at least as much time attacking liberal institutions as it does commenting on daily news. Mr Breitbart died of a heart attack in 2012, aged 43, but found an equally hard-edged successor in Stephen Bannon.
Messrs Limbaugh and Breitbart were quintessential examples of Clay Christensen’s “disruptive innovators”. They discovered a vast, underserved market—people who were interested in the news but who had little in common with the Ivy League university-educated liberals who dominated regular news outlets such as NPR. Mr Limbaugh used a technology that was supposed to be dying—AM radio—but which allowed him to communicate with his followers as they drove to work. Breitbart News built an audience of millions without backing from a bigger media company. Contrary to what Marshall Mc Luhan, a media scholar, said, what mattered was not the medium but the message.
The message that flew off the shelves was outrage. Messrs Limbaugh & Co divided the world into two camps—hardworking Americans struggling to make a living versus liberals bent on taking them for a ride. They railed at limousine liberals who preached one thing and did another. They reserved particular venom for internal traitors—RIN Os (Republicans in name only) and (soft) squishes—who were constantly selling them out in return for establishment kudos. Mr Limbaugh summed up the outrage entrepreneur’s formula for success in a single phrase: “What the hell is happening out there?”
Fury can easily turn into bigotry. Mr Limbaugh called Sandra Fluke, a student who campaigned for free contraception, “a slut”. And, like drug addicts, outrage junkies require ever stronger fixes to achieve the same effect. Breitbart News, in particular, has excelled in pushing boundaries. It has employed undercover “journalists” to get people to say shameful things. It specialises in publishing items of “click bait” that have little factual basis but create an image of a world gone wild. It has provided platforms in its comment section for members of far-right hate groups who rail against immigration and Jews.
The outrage industry has clearly reached a milestone with Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. Mr Trump’s training for his reinvention as a politician was the show “The Apprentice” on NBC. He won the hearts of 13m Republican primary voters by recycling conservative media hits such as “build a wall” and “ban all Muslims”. He tried to rescue his troubled campaign by drafting Mr Bannon as his chief executive.
There are big bucks in bigotry
The question in American politics is whether the milestone is the end point or another marker on a long road. Many Republicans reckon the outrage industry is a mortal threat to their party, landing them with an unelectable candidate for what should have been a winnable election. “They’re in the hate business, they’re a bunch of nuts,” Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s chief election strategist, said on CNN about Breitbart. The formula may not last. The audience for talk radio and Fox News is ageing. Advertisers are reluctant to be associated with toxic content. Several mainstream brands fled Mr Limbaugh’s show after his “slut” remarks.
Yet anyone who thinks the outrage boom is finished is likely to be disappointed. If Mr Trump wins the election, America will discover what it is like to be run by the entrepreneurs of outrage. If he loses, he may turn his presidential campaign into a media empire, encompassing 24/7 Trump TV and more. Conservative media will still have the doings of the Clinton family to help propel profits from all those who hate them. And foreign markets beckon. Breitbart News has opened offices in London, and is producing a stream of stories about Islamic terror attacks, the refugee crisis and Brexit. It plans to expand into Belgium, Germany and France. Whatever happens on November 8th, Mr Trump’s presidential campaign signals that there is worse to come.
edited 17th Oct '16 8:02:50 PM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesHuffington Post, but they got the right sorts of talking heads this time: The People Who Know How To Actually Rig An Election Say Trump Is Wrong
It’s called How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative. And in it, he explored the dirty tricks that occur in the dark corners of American democracy, including the one he engineered in the 2002 New Hampshire Senate election that landed him in prison for three months. So if anyone knows whether there’s a kernel of truth to Donald Trump’s assertion that the current election is being rigged for Hillary Clinton, he does.
“It’s impossible,” Raymond said of rigging a presidential election. “The stuff he is talking about, it is ridiculous ― if it wasn’t so dangerous.” But Trump’s claims are dangerous: They’re “an existential threat to the republic.”
Mark Braden has worked in the legal trenches during close electoral contests. For a decade, he was chief counsel at the Republican National Committee. He also was chief counsel to the Ohio Elections Commission and election counsel for the Secretary of State in Ohio. So if anyone would know whether Trump has a legal basis for arguing that the election is rigged, he does.
“Nationally to do it, in the sense of trying to do some national conspiracy, is fantasy,” Braden said. “Our system works extremely well, and election fraud, though it occurs, isn’t a significant problem in the United States.”
Braden and Raymond are among a growing number of Republicans who have begun airing concerns with the conspiratorial tone that their party nominee has adopted about the election. It’s a list comprising primarily GOP operatives and lawyers, with only a scattering of lawmakers so far.
Their fear is that Trump’s claims will cause damage that far outlasts his candidacy ― which seems increasingly likely to come to a crashing end on Nov. 8. Trust in the legitimacy of elections is a bedrock of American democracy. What Trump is doing, they fear, is taking a mason’s chipper to it.
“He is doing more damage than he realizes,” said Raymond. “What Donald Trump is doing is he is committing ‘republicide.’ He is killing not just the Republican Party but the republic.”
Braden has a theory on why Trump is going down this road: The real estate mogul has never run for office before. So he is unfamiliar with how elections work and lacks “respect for the system and the institutions.”
To that point, Trump certainly seems to have an antiquated view of what actually happens during elections. Recently, he contradicted his own surrogates ― who have insisted that his talk of a “rigged election” is solely about the overwhelmingly negative media coverage he is facing ― by directly arguing that Democrats will engage in shenanigans “at many polling places.” Before that, he strongly insinuated that voters in inner cities would use illegal methods to get Clinton elected.
“He is in the wrong century,” said Raymond. “This isn’t Boss Tweed. I cut my teeth in New Jersey, and the legends and lore was they would sit back and wait to see what margins they needed in Jersey City and they would make results come in late. ... But that doesn’t happen anymore. It is just not the technology anymore.”
To get a sense of just how hard it would be for a candidate to rig a presidential election, I asked both Braden and Raymond how they would go about it. They came up blank.
As Braden noted, Clinton would have to send a huge number of people to a huge number of counties ― pinpointing in advance where the critical margins might be ― while simultaneously keeping the Trump monitors in the dark and avoiding the type of irregularities that could be detected when the vote was counted. Even then, there could be recourse in the form of a recount.
“The system itself has earned and deserved the trust and belief that it is fair. Because it is. The winners win and the losers usually lose,” Braden said.
Raymond had more of a bare-knuckled operative’s perspective on how an election could be stolen (let’s just say it involved paying people with money and various forms of barter to go and vote). But his advice to Clinton was not to even try, since the votes bought would not be determinative and there were better uses of her cash.
“I would instead just give money to Donald Trump and tell him to tweet more,” Raymond said.
Both men stressed that elections aren’t flawless. There are sporadic errors and attempts at corruption. But those instances happen predominantly at the local level and only rarely have affected state races. Presidential contests in the modern age aren’t the type of thing that can be hacked by one side or the other. And for Trump to argue otherwise is dangerous.
“What I wish is that Donald Trump would focus his campaign on what he is going to do if he gets elected and the bad things that Hillary Clinton would do if she got elected, and not attack the system,” said Braden. “The better angels, I’m hoping, get to his ears about the importance of the system because, in the end, any democratic system is pretty fragile and it is based upon trust.”
And because the man needs to feed the narrative he's built, he's blaming voter fraud on "illegal immigrants" too
.
“There is tremendous voter fraud. And how Republican leadership doesn’t see that is beyond me,” Trump told Fox News before a Green Bay, Wisconsin, rally.
“So many cities are corrupt and voter fraud is all too common,” Trump said a short time later from the stage.
He went on at length, citing a Washington Post blog post by two political scientists who estimated that there were enough non-citizens (but not unnecessarily undocumented immigrants) who voted in 2008 to have affected the outcome of the Senate race in Minnesota, won by Democrat Al Franken, and the presidential race in North Carolina, won by President Barack Obama.
But that post, based on a longer article in the journal Electoral Studies, was quickly and roundly criticized for relying on data from an online survey in which respondents chose to participate, rather than a random sampling typical of scientific polls.
Trump has for weeks been claiming ― without evidence ― that the November election will be stolen from him through improper voting “in certain areas,” referring, he acknowledged, to large cities like Philadelphia.
Trump’s assertions have drawn rebukes from even Republican elections officials, and have caused some of his allies to try to restate his allegations as more general warnings of something that might happen or, in the case of his running mate Mike Pence, as a criticism of the news media for favoring Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton.
But Trump continues to insist that significant voter fraud is occurring today. In a tweet Sunday afternoon, Trump wrote: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary ― but also at many polling places – SAD.”
He followed it up Monday morning with this: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!”
Trump has long blamed undocumented immigrants for many of the country’s woes, from taking jobs away from American citizens to committing a disproportionate number of violent crimes. He opened his campaign in June 2015 by claiming that Mexicans coming across the border illegally were rapists and criminals and has promised to deport the 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country.
Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
edited 18th Oct '16 5:45:41 AM by Krieger22
I have disagreed with her a lot, but comparing her to republicans and propagandists of dictatorships is really low. - An idiotRight Wing Outrage is less lucrative now than it was even 5 years ago. Glenn Beck's network is teetering on the brink of oblivion, Sarah Palin's was a failure to launch. You have to have a fair bit of business and media acumen to get it right and be more than a flash-in-the-pan. I saw the article mentioned Clay Christensen, well, Fox News and Limbaugh were innovators in their day, tapping a blue ocean of red-blooded American rage, but that's very much a red ocean space right now, all the more because their primary demographic is old white men, an economically overserved group that's also shrinking.
There's still room to succeed in the space as Breitbart has shown, but it's far away from the days when Limbaugh became a superstar just by demonizing liberalism in front of a microphone.
I'm looking at the voters guide provided by my local paper/news site, the Idaho Statesman, and one feature is their response to particular questions, one of which, in the case of the US Senate, is "do you support your party's presidential nominee" and state who they plan to vote for and why. What struck me is that the incumbent Republican, Mike Crapo, managed to not actually answer the question.
For the House, the choices are Raul Labrador (R) James Piotrowski (D) and an independent listed only as "pro-life". Labrador doesn't have responses to any of the questions available. As far as supporting Clinton, Piotrowski seems to fall into the "not a fan but she's the best choice for stability" camp. Pro-Life calls her a socialist crook and answers a question about the public's faith in congress with a claim that "We need members of Congress who will impeach the President and Federal judges when they exceed their Constitutional authority"
edited 18th Oct '16 6:44:41 AM by sgamer82
His current insistance on voter fraud might be a way to legitimize (indirectly) restricting voting rights for minority populations.
Wasn't there a big story a little while ago about how some law created by Republicans was in effect preventing thousands of black citizens of North Carolina from voting by creating a bunch of weird criteria for voting?
Eliminating voting on Sunday after mass when Black people go vote, requiring them to have a certain piece of ID (that wasn`t asked of anyone else) before allowing them to vote, etc.
Altough, the other explanation might be that he can sense a change in the wind and wants to find a way to explain away an imminent loss. "Voter fraud" is a convenient excuse for a man who doesn't want to admit that his political gaffes might have lost him the election.
EDIT: The law in question was law 589, signed in 2013 by governor Pat McRoy.
edited 18th Oct '16 9:38:44 AM by GutstheBerserker
I have another question, was all this transgender bathroom stuff even a Thing before McRory started passing laws against it? Or, at least, was it making any headlines anywhere that anyone knows of? Because I don't recall ever hearing about it as a big thing until then.
Side note: Whatever you feel about his taking his stances on these issues, it strikes me as criminally negligent to keep them, to fight to keep them, when they're so clearly causing problems for the state you govern. Reputation aside, hasn't North Carolina's economy taken a huge hit from this mess due to s many events and organizations declaring NC persona non grata?
edited 18th Oct '16 7:02:51 AM by sgamer82
There's a particular lobby group crafting and pushing the bathroom bills
and I guess in NC in particular it's a counter reaction to attempts at getting laws passed to expand LGBT rights
.

Also, I hate sites that only identify articles by title and not with an internal ID that acts as a permanent link.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"