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BiggerBoat posted:This stuff really does permeate the language, through osmosis alone and by way of sheer repetition, and that bugs me more than anything. Someone brought up "how to debate a conservative" earlier in the thread, but every time I do it, I hit a brick wall of impenetrable false information that they have accepted as abject fact and the conversation ends there. They're getting this information from somewhere and a lot of them should know better, but they don't. I've found that there is a lot of truth to the saying that "you can't reason someone out of a position that they didn't reason themselves into". In my experience, you can make a bit of head way if you are really meticulous about presenting facts and examples. But eventually you hit a brick wall of some sort of belief that isn't really based on anything that can be counter-argued in a rational way. For Republicans, these brick walls are often abortion and other religious beliefs, national defense, and the deification of the constitution and capitalism. That is the point where no matter how much proof you have, the Republicans are irrefutably on the right side and everyone else is on the wrong side. And since the Republicans hit on so many disparate areas of policy, even if you finally score a rhetorical victory on one policy, they'll just fall back to supporting the Republicans on some other policy. Much like few religious people rarely lose their faith through a couple well reasoned debates, and mostly through personal and introspective moments of clarity, the American 2 party, heavily tribal, political system only gets converts through a similar fashion. They either stick with the one they are born into, or pick a side while going though their young adult existential crisis. Not to sound defeatist, but debating people about these things is largely a waste of time. No matter how tactful you are, it inevitably ends up confrontational because you are trying to destroy their world. You can see in people's eyes when cognitive dissonance hits, and how quickly after that they will get nasty at you to assuage that unpleasant feeling you inflicted on them. As another poster noted, every generation is more liberal than the last in the long run. If you want liberal views to win out in the long run, do what you can to promote the long standing trend of kids leaving rural (and now often suburban) conservative echo chambers and get more exposure to the real world. It may not create an army of dyed in the wool socialists. But I'd rather deal with a college Libertarian, who has dropped every republican platform except for "I like money", than the kid who never left Kansas or Mississippi and honestly thinks a milquetoast Democrat like Obama wants to take their guns so he can force gay abortions on persecuted white Christians.
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Oct 18, 2012 22:52
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User 173692 posted:This is completely true. Another interesting thing to think about is what fights the left is actually winning and how they are doing it. Gay rights is something major that has changed and there's been a bunch of different arguments for it. Gay rights is a winner because rich people (and distinguishing it from reproductive rights: rich men) can be homosexual just like anybody else, more than any other reason. It gets plenty the money and opposition to it only originates from the religious wing of the right rather than the business wing.
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Oct 18, 2012 22:55
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BiggerBoat posted:Someone brought up "how to debate a conservative" earlier in the thread, but every time I do it, I hit a brick wall of impenetrable false information that they have accepted as abject fact and the conversation ends there. They're getting this information from somewhere and a lot of them should know better, but they don't. This is the heart of it, I think. People keep saying that the Left does a bad job at direct personal appeals, and I think that's true. I don't know if we need to stoop to the GOP's level, but we absolutely do need to understand and counter that sheer mass of wrong information. The right wing media seems to have mastered the art of turning lies into truths for their viewers. Even people who are otherwise quite intelligent have fallen prey to them. There are people I know and respect who somehow manage to absorb these lies as absolute truths. My own father, an incredibly intelligent man, has told me point blank that he sees Obama as a member of the radical left. It's such demonstrably false information that spreads like a miasma throughout the Republican party. When I was a senior in high school, I was in a program devoted to studying politics and the Constitution and debating about those topics every day. We worked the polls, organized community projects, and generally devoted ourselves to being active citizenry. I got so much out of that program, and so did every participant I've ever met who went through it. I think that if such a thing was required of all students, if everyone who went through secondary education was forced to just be active citizens for a single year, our country would be much better off. (Of course, that was the year that everyone was shrieking about pork barrel spending, which the program's funding depended on, and thus all funding to the program was cut at the end of that year.)
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Oct 19, 2012 00:08
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UberJew posted:Gay rights is a winner because rich people (and distinguishing it from reproductive rights: rich men) can be homosexual just like anybody else, more than any other reason. You've completely missed my point. That the money from rich white gay men was involved in funding the messaging behind a shift in opinion surrounding homosexuality is irrelevant to what I'm trying to point out, which is that the messaging worked and it is worth scrutinizing how it worked. What I'm suggesting is that part of how it worked is by changing the exemplar brought to mind when talking about homosexuality. It's only when people start to call to mind an exemplar of a group that they can empathize with that they'll start to be willing to extend rights to them. The American poor is absolutely poisoned as far as image goes, and when they're mentioned the main association brought to mind is black, inner city, and terrifying to white Republicans. No one in this election cycle, or in politics in general talks about helping the poor because the vast majority of Americans unfortunately just won't sympathize with that image of the poor. This wasn't always the case, but when you've associated mythical figures such as welfare queens and lazy welfare recipients with the term then that's what people will bring to mind when you talk about it. No one wants to consider themselves poor, partly out of pride, but also because their image of who "the poor" are is negative and very specific. Here's a bit from Daniel Kahneman's Thinking Fast and Slow which is an excellent read for some of the biases about how we make decisions in general: Daniel Kahneman posted:
If the left wing media were to have a goal, it should be to rehabilitate the image of the people it is trying to help. No matter what sort of argument or demonstration you're making, you won't get any traction if the group you are trying to help has been completely stigmatized by the right wing media. You'll never win arguing points, or compelling people to extend rules such as non-discrimination as was tried with acceptance of homosexuality. People have to want to help, and they'll only do that if they can empathize with the people you're asking them to help. This is what I'm saying was done for gay rights (with the help of rich white gay men, sure), but this is also what's going to have to be done for poverty as well.
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Oct 19, 2012 00:16
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How Darwinian posted:You've completely missed my point. They have to whitewash, style, tonsure and extreme-tv-makeover all the poor huddled masses let in by the statue of bigotry who didn't get the message of bootstraps not being issued at Ellis. Huh.
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Oct 19, 2012 00:28
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HMDK posted:They have to whitewash, style, tonsure and extreme-tv-makeover all the poor huddled masses let in by the statue of bigotry who didn't get the message of bootstraps not being issued at Ellis. Huh. No, they just need to undo the damage of an entire group of people being reduced to a untrue hateful caricature. Is it hard to understand that when people think about the poor they can't bring to mind every single person at or slightly above the poverty line in America? They bring up an image of a person they've been conditioned - by the Republican establishment since Reagan - to believe is representative of the everyone who is poor. When you think of Republican you get a certain archetype of a person in your head. Same with when you think of a Democrat. Same when you think of a chair for that matter. Those images don't need to bear a relation to what actually exists in the world, and people's images of the poor by and large don't relate to the reality in any way whatsoever. But that's the point, and that's what needs to be addressed because that's one of the underlying things that welfare queen myths have accomplished. I'm really sorry if that's not coming through clearly. I'm not talking about physically going around and gussying people up like you seem to think. And I don't think that's at all what's happened with the gay community either. But people's image of the group has changed nonetheless.
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Oct 19, 2012 00:42
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How Darwinian posted:You've completely missed my point. Really it's just that we're talking past each other. The image for gay people is presented effectively because there is money in it. There is no magical liberal media that has the ability to change it outside the introduction of money and political influence. quote:The American poor is absolutely poisoned as far as image goes, and when they're mentioned the main association brought to mind is black, inner city, and terrifying to white Republicans. This is intentional. On 'both sides'. quote:If the left wing media were to have a goal, it should be to rehabilitate the image of the people it is trying to help. No matter what sort of argument or demonstration you're making, you won't get any traction if the group you are trying to help has been completely stigmatized by the right wing media. There is no left wing media. For that matter there is no "right wing media" as some sort of ideologically pure entity. There are the wealthy and influential individuals capable of dictating policy in favor of their wealth and power to the entirety of 'the media'. There are subjects where they can disagree (and this is where gay marriage fits into the picture!) but agree on the vast majority of things and market forces drive them to non-coercive collusion. The false picture of the media as having a left wing and a right wing that are at war with one another is just another part of the business model. Kahneman's a very good read, but on this subject you should read Manufacturing Consent. e: I think I should make clear that I'm not saying that you're wrong in any particular, but rather that it is irrelevant because there is no power that exists to change how it is done. It is an effect of the system (precisely because creating an image and then an unconvincing argument against that image is spectacularly effective, as you say!), not a cause. atelier morgan fucked around with this message at 00:47 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 00:43
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UberJew posted:Really it's just that we're talking past each other. The image for gay people is presented effectively because there is money in it. There is no magical liberal media that has the ability to change it outside the introduction of money and political influence. I agree, and I think you just bridged the gap between me and How Darwinian.
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Oct 19, 2012 00:56
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:
I think this is a good point and it should be noted that right-wing AM radio and suburbia have a very holistic relationship with each other. Not only are the suburbs echo chambers by design, but the drive/commute to work is a natural fit for right-wing dominated AM radio, which just strengthens and reinforces the overall conservatism of its suburban listeners.
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Oct 19, 2012 01:11
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UberJew posted:Really it's just that we're talking past each other. The image for gay people is presented effectively because there is money in it. There is no magical liberal media that has the ability to change it outside the introduction of money and political influence. I understand what you're saying, and I'm glad we've figured each other out. Left wing media was probably a bad choice of words as I already knew, and this thread has pointed out repeatedly, that there isn't an ideologically motivated left wing media. So I guess none of this is feasible as part of some wide reaching strategy because there is no motivation and no backing to implement it. I was going to type something up about how maybe this could help on an individual basis for changing beliefs, but that's not really true because then you'd just be creating exceptions with whatever examples you can bring up. Still though, the 99% was about as close to what I'm trying to suggest as I've seen, and it really did work for awhile as a method of shaking up the image of poverty. But then inevitably the media set in and now the term is tarnished by association.
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Oct 19, 2012 01:20
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BiggerBoat posted:I've seen this come up a couple of times and these ads aren't exclusive to conservative shows. Lifelock and gold are staples on Al Gore's channel also and all over the left wing talk shows. Glen Beck's ad even ran on Stephanie Miller's show for a long time. The biggest issue with the gold people, boner pills, lifelock etc. is that they will advertise absolutely anywhere, and actively seek out talk stations since they tend to have more commercial inventory than other formats. Even if Stephanie Miller's audience is wired differently than your average Dittohead there's enough overlap as "Talk Radio Listener" to make it more than worth their while. Plus Bill Press, Miller, Ed Schultz, and Thom Hartman are all syndicated by the same company as Dennis Miller and Neil Boortz and others, so there's going to be a lot of overlap from the sales side. What's amazing is the "Do not air during" lists for most of the large national advertisers. Even before Sandra Fluke the list of advertisers that forbid their spots to run in or adjacent to certain shows has gotten amazingly long. A decade ago it was usually just Howard Stern alone, but now it's pretty much every national right wing host, morning shock jock, and the additional "and other controversial programming" catchall. As more shows ended up on those lists, that opened the door for more...interesting advertisers to fill the void. My all time favorite were he ads from 2004 or so selling new Iraqi currency to "invest in America's success", odd you don't hear those anymore.
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Oct 19, 2012 01:32
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UberJew posted:There is no left wing media. For that matter there is no "right wing media" as some sort of ideologically pure entity. There are the wealthy and influential individuals capable of dictating policy in favor of their wealth and power to the entirety of 'the media'. There are subjects where they can disagree (and this is where gay marriage fits into the picture!) but agree on the vast majority of things and market forces drive them to non-coercive collusion.
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Oct 19, 2012 02:22
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UberJew posted:and market forces drive them to non-coercive collusion. Wait, a fuckin' minute. What the hell? How is being forced being NOT forced? HMDK fucked around with this message at 02:36 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 02:33
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BiggerBoat posted:Someone brought up "how to debate a conservative" earlier in the thread, but every time I do it, I hit a brick wall of impenetrable false information that they have accepted as abject fact and the conversation ends there. EgoEgress posted:I don't know if we need to stoop to the GOP's level, but we absolutely do need to understand and counter that sheer mass of wrong information. ... It's such demonstrably false information that spreads like a miasma throughout the Republican party.  If it's false or wrong then it's not information, it's a falsehood at the very least.Thom Hartmann's book Cracking the Code is all about the wonderful concept of tuning liberal concepts to appeal to conservatives' ethos and pathos. Interesting.
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Oct 19, 2012 03:00
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SpaceMost posted:Marxism is at its weakest when it's this reductive. That seems pretty accurate to me, i'm not sure why it's reductive? Obama and Romney might have differences gay marriage, or even Iran (this is actually an area they have quite a bit of difference) but UberJew is right. None of them are going to stop jobs being exported to China, or institute some New New Deal, or regulate the finance industry properly. And he’s also right in that there is no left wing media in America. I’m elsewhere in the world but get NPR on my local radio station and far from being some bulwark of rational, humanist sanity, they just talk about loving smartphones the entire time.
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Oct 19, 2012 03:15
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SpaceMost posted:Marxism is at its weakest when it's this reductive. Well yes one line from a post in a thread where it isn't the actual subject of discussion is pretty reductive! HMDK posted:Wait, a fuckin' minute. What the hell? How is being forced being NOT forced? In an excessively short response: because it is simply a natural effect of market causes, not some cabal forcing people to act. It is a very detailed subject and that's why I suggested a book to read on the subject.
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Oct 19, 2012 03:56
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Johnny Tranh posted:That seems pretty accurate to me, i'm not sure why it's reductive?  ) conspiracy, they aren't there yet. It's disingenuous to lump Fox in with MSNBC or CNN at this point. You can make the claim that the end result of both their agendas is enforcing a cultural hegemony, but Fox is currently A-Okay with making GBS threads on domestic civil rights (marriage equality, police brutality, etc...) while the other networks are much less extreme on the domestic front. I won't defend any major network on interrogating foreign policy.I think it's a weak argument to claim - at this point - that there is neither a left or right wing media, except in a very abstract sense. Or maybe even in an Objective sense. But when you look at the ideology of, say, MSNBC versus Fox, MSNBC may not help to solve the root problems that are inherent in the Capitalist model, but it will make life better for a majority of Americans than Fox would. It can get very abstract beyond that point -- the idea that MSNBC (and similar "left" media) is only a market force that exists in the vacuum left by an overly-right wing Fox, but have fun explaining such high-level concepts to anyone who isn't already a Marxist or an abstract thinker. I don't disagree with UberJew, I just think the idea is too abstract to be meaningful if the immediate problem is convincing LimbaughFan1990 that they are being fed bullshit. If I had to choose between current evils, I'd still choose CNN or MSNBC or NPR. e: As an aside, if you have to choose an allegiance between (say) Fox or NPR, I don't consider some theoretical Marxist third-way to be an alternative. It's the same reason I'd argue that voting third party is essentially Accelerationism Lite, whether you're a Libertarian or a Leftist. That third way is absolutely something to work towards but, in the mean time, real decisions need to be made based on real options. There will never be a Lenin-who-gets-it-right; change will be incremental one way or the other. e2: When I said "weakest" I meant in terms of its ability to affect change. unlimited shrimp fucked around with this message at 04:43 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 04:28
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Why are the Fox & Friends hosts so creepy?
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Oct 19, 2012 07:46
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Goatman Sacks posted:One of the things she likes to complain about is lazy people, because she has time to homeschool her children while working THREE JOBS! (those jobs are the radio show, running a blog, and being a right-wing parrot on CNN, for a total of maybe 20 hours a week?) I worked at a public library reference desk for a while in deep-red Arizona. Of all the homeschoolers I met, only one didn't horrify me with her total intellectual insufficiency for the task. (And she was only doing it because her son had been zero-toleranced out of the school district.) What I'm saying is, odds are, she is ruining her kids.
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Oct 19, 2012 07:57
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UP AND ADAM posted:Why are the Fox & Friends hosts so creepy? Because they're the typical TV "talking head" stereotype writ large. They've been chosen for their gig because they are without a doubt 100% willing to shill whatever talking points their bosses want them to push, and in some cases quite eagerly at that. They've got just enough personality to make them agreeable to the average viewer, so they go away thinking "well that nice Gretchen Carlson made some good points about <insert the latest Republican conspiracy theory here>."
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Oct 19, 2012 09:28
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nachos posted:I think this is a good point and it should be noted that right-wing AM radio and suburbia have a very holistic relationship with each other. Not only are the suburbs echo chambers by design, but the drive/commute to work is a natural fit for right-wing dominated AM radio, which just strengthens and reinforces the overall conservatism of its suburban listeners. I wonder how much geography plays a role in this as well. A lot of rural, very red states are just giant land masses of nothing, and if you've ever driven through some of them, all you can get on the radio is either a church program or some form of Limbaugh talk. I wonder to what degree this helps make those states do solidly red. The more I think about it, whoever made the comparison of preacher sermons was spot on. edit: Let's see what we have today.  I wonder what Obama said? quote:In an appearance taped today for The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, President Obama was asked if communication between government personnel had failed to provide "the optimal response" to the Benghazi attacks. Obama replied in part: "If four Americans get killed, it's not optimal. We're going to fix it. All of it. And what happens, during the course of a presidency, is that the government is a big operation and any given time something screws up. And you make sure that you find out what's broken and you fix it." BiggerBoat fucked around with this message at 14:09 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 13:47
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His response was rather cold, but then John Stewart actually kept saying Optimal before the question. I bet John Stewart is kicking himself right now as he's given the news cycle 3 days before the debate for a talking point. Here's my point on why as a liberal we lose, because when it comes down to it as a person as a individual there's lines that liberals won't cross. That's why you don't see a incredible liberal media despite what people believe, they're not. MSNBC is to a degree the closest you get. The reason being is because Right Wing and Conservatives have no trouble using everything available to them to justify their actions and to spread basically mistruths for their agenda. You just won't see that from a true liberal or left wing organization such as NPR, they don't create whole stories from cloth. As it's against a fundamental principle of a being a liberal is to not decieve. It's not a core element of Conservatism to lie, it's a core goal that the means justifies the ends though in conservatism, a great example of this is the War on Terror as well as the use of torture.
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Oct 19, 2012 16:17
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hotgreenpeas fucked around with this message at 02:21 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 18:03
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OK I haven't actually seen this discussed which seems a rather large hole in discussions about the Right Wing Echo chamber. What you are seeing in the media is the end result of a well financed and long running effort by a small group of rich assholes that was began in earnest after LBJ thoroughly stomped Goldwater in '64. At that time these rich old white guys decided that something needed to be done to change the public perception of business and capitalism. They determined the need to rehabilitate conservatism by financing the development of a intellectual base to counter what saw as an unfair bias by "liberal" academia using the political philosophies of Leo Strauss as ideological foundation. This resulted in the creation of Right Wing think tanks such as the Heritage foundation and Cato institute to provide a home for their "intellectuals" as well as supporting friendly academics by providing jobs and opportunities once they graduated as well as funding various expansions and departments in universities to promote their world view and develop intellectual arguments in support of that world view to provide it with legitimacy. They also groomed and financed politicians who were capable and interested in promoting their ideas. This is actually a pretty decent read on the subject. Unfortunately I don't have most of my primary source material here since it's actually in old fashioned book form at home but this link gives a decent run down on how this mess evolved. http://www.governmentisgood.com/articles.php?aid=9&print=1 What it comes down to is that the right wing echo chamber is a part of a large well financed movement to destroy the New Deal and Great Society programs and unshackle the rich from civic responsibility and being held accountable for their misdeeds. I suggest a great amount of caution when viewing right wing media (or any mass media to be honest), the one field of science that the right most certainly believes in is cognitive science or as they prefer to refer call it "Public Relations" which is to cognitive science what mechanical engineering is to physics, or perhaps more accurately weapons engineering since PR is about pushing harmful ideas rather than positive ones as the beneficial application of cognitive science would be psychology and psychiatry. As such they are very adept at manipulating peoples thinking through the use of memes, imagery and framing to capitalize on the various cognitive biases that undermine our ability to process information in a rational manner. This is not controversial as Molly Ivins used to say "their ain't no vast right wing conspiracy, it's right out in the open!" so feel free to do your own research on this stuff. There also isn't much active collusion involved, there doesn't need to be the backers and primary actors in this thing each do their part to perpetuate the machine by acting in their own perceived self interest. It's reinforced by the way organizations promote since managers and executives tend to promote those they like and people tend to like those who agree with them. So while you have some intentionally blatantly biased organizations such as FoxNews which was created specifically to be a propaganda device other media end up following in line on many of the ideas simply due to their own corporate interests. Suggested reading would be George Lakoff's Moral Politics, Barry Glassner's Culture of Fear, David Harry Bennet's The Party of Fear: From Nativist Movements to the New Right in American History.
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Oct 19, 2012 18:31
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The think tanks might provide the ammo, but it is the talking heads that actually fire the gun by broadcasting those views. Without Fox News and talk radio, the think tanks would be like a newspaper with no paperboys. But now, the Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute have a way to get their propaganda right into homes and cars. Not only that, but in a format that will never be critical of them.
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Oct 19, 2012 19:48
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This is a fantastic article thank you for providing it.
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Oct 19, 2012 20:18
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Beowulfs_Ghost posted:The think tanks might provide the ammo, but it is the talking heads that actually fire the gun by broadcasting those views. It's all a part of an integrated strategy. The think tanks do more than just provide the ammo they provide the strategies, talking points, and pundits to send on the news circuit. They were able to do this even before Reagan eliminated the Fairness doctrine that opened the floodgates for purely partisan broadcast networks. Getting rid of the Fairness doctrine was a huge part of really revving up the Echo chamber but the ground work was laid by the think tank eggheads appearing on the News hour and other political round table type shows. Where they were able to take advantage of that same fairness doctrine to spread the poison that eventually lead to it's elimination. Of course at it's core it was all because of the massive financial investments of people like the Koch and Coors.
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Oct 19, 2012 21:59
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I'm pretty conservative, politically, and my view on conservative media is that there are different gradations of media. There's stuff that's high on fluff and polemics and low on actual content and there are articles and such that, in my opinion, have a good amount of content. I believe talk radio has the worst signal to noise ratio with far more "Obama Sucks!" than say, the Cato Institute. Although conservative, I love looking at issues from all sides and am good friends with a few committed liberals and we enjoy (mostly!) discussing politics. My dad, on the other hand, gets his news almost exclusively from talk radio. Over the years, my positions almost seem "liberal" to him because his news diet over long years is almost exclusively is "Lefties are satan". I agree pretty wholeheartedly that people seek out their own points of view and even if they want to, have a difficult time looking for media that doesn't fit their per-conceived notions or support already held viewpoints. I have to force myself to get out of the Drudge / Washington Times / National Review whirlpool much like my liberal friends who I discuss politics with have to get out of the DailyKos / Washington Post / ThinkProgress circle. A good article on "confirmation" or "myside" bias is here. One of the interesting effects, in my opinion, of myside bias is that people will remember facts and figures that support their position and not remember facts and figures that support their opponent's. After the 2nd Obama / Romney debate, I discussed it with a lefty friend and I remembered all of Romeny's landed punches, he remembered Obama's. Each of us knew the other side scored points, but couldn't remember what they were. Lastly, a question. Is there a liberal media news aggregation site that's like Drudge? Moral_Hazard fucked around with this message at 22:16 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 22:14
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MoraleHazard posted:Lastly, a question. Is there a liberal media news aggregation site that's like Drudge? Huffington Post and Salon.com come to mind, though they're not nearly as influential amongst liberals.
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Oct 19, 2012 22:24
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Zeroisanumber posted:Huffington Post and Salon.com come to mind, though they're not nearly as influential amongst liberals. Over the years, Huffington Post has become a go to source for a lot of liberal talking points. They are probably as much a household name to liberals as Drudge and Breitbart are to conservatives. I would probably add DailyKos is that sort of crowd though, as a talking point producers that doesn't filter out much of the fringe.
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Oct 19, 2012 23:21
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How Darwinian posted:That the money from rich white gay men was involved in funding the messaging behind a shift in opinion surrounding homosexuality is irrelevant to what I'm trying to point out, which is that the messaging worked and it is worth scrutinizing how it worked. What I'm suggesting is that part of how it worked is by changing the exemplar brought to mind when talking about homosexuality. It's only when people start to call to mind an exemplar of a group that they can empathize with that they'll start to be willing to extend rights to them. I'm sorry, but I despise this post. Why do I despise this post? Mostly because I think 'empathy' is not the solution, and in many ways part of the problem. The example of the rich gay man is a good one. When you at the end write "with the help of rich white gay men," it'd probably be more accurate to add "and in the image of (respectable) rich white gay men." The problem is that the markers of homosexual depravity or whatever -- the reasons people cite for being unsympathetic towards gays -- are all the things that arose mostly as a response to criminalisation of homosexuality, the non-recognition of gay relationships, public disapproval, etc. ('look, they screw in public bathrooms! What sickos!'). Your example of the poor is a good one, but misses the horrifying twist that exactly the reasons people cite for despising the poor are because of the conditions of their impoverishment, and the conditions created to get them there. When you point out the predominant image of the poor is of 'scary' inner city blacks (gang-bangers, addicts, the chronically lazy, and so on), does that then mean then that we need to convince people that 'oh no, there are actually conservative, conformist WASP children living in poverty who you should feel bad for?' (Who of course refuses government aid, never shoplifts, etc. -- remember the right-wing's response to the murder of Trayvon Martin was to produce a school suspension and a few smoked joints as proof he doesn't deserve our empathy.) I'm not accusing your of being a racist or a homophobe or whatever, my point is just to say that in many cases what should motivate empathy is exactly what is cited to deny it. I'm reminded of the 'Occupy is back' thread, where posters complained about the smell of the homeless discouraging people, as if it conditional on encouraging empathy for the homeless was that that people don't see the conditions they're reduced to, and so can imagine an ideal homeless person to sympathise with instead (who presumably smells like fresh roses and lavender). If you start this empathy poo poo about the poor with a right winger, you'll inevitably fall into this deadlock: how many are gangbangers? How many are 'welfare queens'? Is such-and-such sufficiently a gangbanger or welfare queen? The answer will inevitably have to be somewhere in the middle. And then it becomes a question of whether there's enough 'good guys' to be empathetic to. (And it of course goes without saying the response is not -- which I've disgustingly seen so-called 'progressives' pull -- to grow to disdain wealthy gays as being one step off the dreaded White Anglo-Saxon Male. The joke here is exactly what would make gays empathetic to the right -- being these conservative family figures -- disqualifies them from the empathy of 'progressives' who fetishise the homosexuality as transgressive and so on.) Kieselguhr Kid fucked around with this message at 23:42 on Oct 19, 2012 |
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Oct 19, 2012 23:38
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Sulphuric Sundae posted:I got an HD radio a couple years back, and the local AM news station had a nicer-sounding HD broadcast. Hearing Rush rant in crystal clear stereo instead of fuzzy and muffled AM was actually kind of unnerving. One of the few with HD Radios - I have one in my car, and whenever I go under an overpass it blends to analog fuzz. I work for a 50,000 AM talk station that runs many of these horrible programs (Gallagher, Huckabee, Dave Ramsey, etc), and the only reason we run them is because the syndicator (Dial Global, Premiere & Cumulus) PAYS us just so that their spots get cleared in a major market. Conservative talk radio breathed new life into am 20 years ago, but now that entire generations have grown up hating AM, their lease on life is getting short. And simply switching to FM won't solve it - Rush on FM doesn't do any better with the money demos (25-54 M/F) than on AM. Straight news gets great ratings on FM (WTOP in Washington DC, KCBS in San Francisco, WBUR in Boston to name a few). That's why you hear ads for gold, health care, Life Lock, and other barely legal companies on all these programs. FWIW, not many people who work at the station believe anything they are saying - it's just business. The fact that Rush and the rest of them can't young up the demos gives me a small glimmer of hope for the future - and by the same token WNYC in NY gets better ratings than WOR/WABC in the money demos. Time is not on their side, but Clear Channel/Cumulus are just willing to run this type of programming to grab whatever cash they can till the ad agencies quit buying. In the meantime, I just have to resist the urge to dump the transmitter plate current whenever we are off the bird...
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Oct 20, 2012 01:38
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bigtom posted:One of the few with HD Radios - I have one in my car, and whenever I go under an overpass it blends to analog fuzz. I'm 33, and even the republicans that I know who are my age mostly listen to NPR. Of course, NPR is pretty non-partisan by comparison to the programs that we're talking about in this thread. Also "Science Friday" is the poo poo, and even conservatives recognize that.
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Oct 20, 2012 02:39
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One trend that's freaking me out as I think of it is that future Republican leaders will be growing up listening to Fox News, rather than simply using it to air their views. You can sort of see it in the 2010 Tea Party. While Republicans during the Bush years and before just sort of used stuff like abortion and gay marriage as bait for their base, the new guys will actually do everything they can to stop it. Not to mention all of the idiots who decided to vote against the debt ceiling increase after they got what they wanted anyway because Glenn Beck or whoever said that it means borrowing more money from China. Especially now that the Kochs criteria for backing candidates are "has a pulse" and "will do whatever I say." Dr Christmas fucked around with this message at 02:51 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 02:43
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I hope we can have a little discussion of the online portion of the right wing media empire in the U.S. The websites of the various broadcast entities we've already discussed (Rush, Beck etc.) Drudgereport Breitbart.com and affiliated sites Dailycaller American Thinker American Spectator Foxnews I'm surrounded by righties and when I pull up browser histories of work computers I often see stuff like the above in there. Throw in also: Foxnation "bloggish" sites like freerepublic.com etc. Edit: Websites are the one political media where I think you can make a good argument that the left has as much firepower or possibly even more than the right. Zwabu fucked around with this message at 02:57 on Oct 20, 2012 |
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Oct 20, 2012 02:54
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Dr Christmas posted:One trend that's freaking me out as I think of it is that future Republican leaders will be growing up listening to Fox News, rather than simply using it to air their views. You can sort of see it in the 2010 Tea Party. While Republicans during the Bush years and before just sort of used stuff like abortion and gay marriage as bait for their base, the new guys will actually do everything they can to stop it. Not to mention all of the idiots who decided to vote against the debt ceiling increase after they got what they wanted anyway because Glenn Beck or whoever said that it means borrowing more money from China. While that's going to be terrible look on the bright side; that same generation will be the first not to have grown up mired in the paranoia and fear of the Cold War. As a boogeyman Terrorism is far less traumatic than the spectre of nuclear holocaust.
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Oct 20, 2012 02:54
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My mom loves Dr. Laura and calls herself an anti-feminist. She was born in 1958 and truly believes that gender issues were all worked out by the end of the 60s. She doesn't vote anymore, but she has only voted for Democrats and Ross Perot, and considers herself "socially liberal". It literally makes my blood feel cold. People will really lie to themselves, to their extreme disadvantage, for disgusting reasons.
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Oct 20, 2012 03:32
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Speaking of which, my girlfriend's parents complain about "being told what to think" after watching Rachel Maddow on MSNBC for a few minutes, then switched to O'Reilly of all things. O'Reilly, running a segment on how the recent anti-Romney women's rights ads are actually sexist because they try to reduce women to single issue voters and actually there are no gender issues because these two post-menopausal rich white blonde women say so, you see?
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Oct 20, 2012 03:51
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UberJew posted:While that's going to be terrible look on the bright side; that same generation will be the first not to have grown up mired in the paranoia and fear of the Cold War. Look at popular post-apocalyptic fiction...we just can't suspend our disbelief for nukes anymore. Kids are gonna see the new Mad Max movie and be like "Wait, what's going on? Are there zombies or something?"
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Oct 20, 2012 03:54
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| # ? Apr 26, 2024 15:41 |
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Why does the Fox News  BIAS ALERT only feature bias towards Romney?
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Oct 20, 2012 05:23
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