General Politics Discussion [ARCHIVED] • Page 414

If anyone wants some cheap entertainment, turn on CNN. Corey Lewandowski is freaking out because nobody agrees with him that Trump shouldn't release his tax returns.

 

Black metal legend elected to Norwegian town council against his will

 

If Thiel gets his way, the USA can finally share in Europe's rich history of plutocrats who were possibly literal as well as figurative bloodsuckers.

 

this owns

 

xkcd: Earth Temperature Timeline

 

ya, we're boned

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/18/magazine/who-gets-to-be-called-a-patriot.html

When a black American protests the demoralizing practices of American government, there is always a white person eager to unfurl the welcome mat to Africa. This is where racism and patriotism tend to point: toward the exits. For some, we learn, being American is conditional on behaving like a grateful guest: You belong here because we tolerate your presence. We don’t yet appear to have settled the matter of citizenship — not even for our president, another black man backhandedly accused of harboring terrorist sympathies. We operate on the old logic that only members of the family are allowed to tell hard truths about the family’s flaws. And when black people speak about America, they’re informed that they do not actually have a seat at the grown-ups’ table and that they should be grateful to be around at all.

 

Donald Trump gave an interview this morning that should be shocking — but we’re numb

Seriously. Stop. Take a breath. Now imagine if Mitt Romney had run exactly Mitt Romney’s campaign but then suddenly in mid-September went on television and called Elizabeth Warren Pocahontas for no reason. It would have been huge.

This year, basically nothing. Trump being kinda racist is a dog-bites-man story. After all, just yesterday Donald Trump Jr. shared a white nationalist meme on Instagram. Trump lies all the time, so that’s not a big deal. In fact, he lies frequently about the essential core of his foreign policy, and his business dealings pose such obvious and flagrant conflicts of interest and ethics problems that lying about his stock holdings doesn’t seem like a big deal. And of course Trump doesn’t understand what he’s saying when it comes to monetary policy — monetary policy is complicated and obscure and Trump doesn’t know what he’s talking about on any other issue either.

Separately, one of Trump’s top policy advisers went on CNN this morning to denounce "this whole, you know, Trans-Pacific trade agreement with China."

The Trans-Pacific Partnership is not a trade agreement with China. It includes 12 countries and none of them is China.

The whole thing makes me nostalgic for the days when I would complain that political coverage was too focused on candidate gaffes rather than policy ideas. Trump has no policy ideas, so there’s really nothing to focus on. You could spend all day trying to explain why various utterances don’t really make sense, but if he’s putting advisers out on television to denounce an entirely fake trade agreement with China, pointing out that he’s also getting the finer points wrong hardly seems worth our time. The best we can hope for is that Trump’s actual gaffes do get covered.

But the truly scary thing is that Trump is redefining the concept of a gaffe out of existence. It turns out that if you just boldly repeat something often enough, it goes away as a story. We’ve become numb, as a society, to what Trump is doing. In the process we’ve normalized casual racism, intense personal insults as an approach to politics, and completely decentered the idea that elected officials should grapple with difficult policy questions. Half the crazy things Trump says or does barely merit a mention on Twitter, much less the front-page coverage they would have merited in previous campaigns.

 

Remember: Trump could shoot a guy in the street and still not lose voters. He set the bar of expectations.

 

The Real Bias in the Media Coverage of Presidential Campaigns

Years ago, John Zaller and Mark Hunt (full disclosure: Zaller was my graduate school mentor) reviewed decades of media coverage of presidential campaigns. Their aim was to measure how often the media itself initiated negative coverage of the candidates, rather than simply reporting on another candidate’s criticism. (Details of this collection can be found in Zaller’s unpublished book on media politics.) They were able to calculate the percentage of media-initiated negative coverage of every Republican and Democratic presidential candidate between 1968 and 1992.

The scatterplot below shows the percent of negative coverage of the presidential candidates, charted against the candidates’ Gallup approval ratings around Labor Day of the election year.

The most notable thing in this figure is the upward trend in the data. The more popular a candidate was, the more negative coverage he received. One interpretation of that might be that negative coverage was good for candidates, but that doesn’t seem very likely. The more plausible interpretation is that members of the media provide more scrutiny for candidates they expect to win.

This is a pretty reasonable bias to have. Good campaign reporters have limited time and attention. Why not have them spend more of their efforts dissecting the person more likely to become president? Why waste energy scrutinizing George McGovern, when he was so clearly going to lose?

 

Sugar industry secretly paid for favorable Harvard research

As nutrition debates raged in the 1960s, prominent Harvard nutritionists published two reviews in a top medical journal downplaying the role of sugar in coronary heart disease. Newly unearthed documents reveal what they didn’t say: A sugar industry trade group initiated and paid for the studies, examined drafts, and laid out a clear objective to protect sugar’s reputation in the public eye.

That revelation, published Monday in JAMA Internal Medicine, comes from Dr. Cristin Kearns at the University of California, San Francisco, a dentist-turned-researcher who found the sugar industry’s fingerprints while digging through boxes of letters in the basement of a Harvard library.

Her paper recounts how two famous Harvard nutritionists, Dr. Fredrick Stare and Mark Hegsted, who are now deceased, worked closely with a trade group called the Sugar Research Foundation, which was trying to influence public understanding of sugar’s role in disease.

 

Also: The NCAA pulled basketball games from NC. NC's GOP is going absolutely transphobic-bananas at the moment, and this may be the first time in 10 years the NCAA has been on the right side of any moral debate.

 

Pretty sure the sugar industry would like us to bottle-feed Mountain Dew to newborns

 

So when you call a senator "Pocahontas", get basically everything about the Fed/interest rates wrong, and call it not an independent agency, have your running mate deny calling David Duke "deplorable," lie multiple times on TV, have multiple talking heads lie for you and get called out, and then sit by while your supporters yell slurs and physically assault multiple at night ... that gets called: a quiet day for Donald.

 

2010: General David Petraeus faints during grilling over US in Afghanistan

 

The media is the ultimate enabler.

 

We're getting President Trump aren't we.

 

if it happens, this is how i said it would happen - he normalizes it, we accept it, it happens. we spent so much media time being like "how can we understand trump what a joke he is wow!" and not enough time like "man there are a lot of neo nazis in this country"

 

Tim Urban did a pretty awesome look at this too when he was doing his series on Elon Musk. Part 2

 

One of my professors graduated law school with Van Jones, so I was lucky enough to sit in on a seminar by him this evening and, I have to say, it was the best speaking event I've ever been to. The guy is brilliant and wise beyond anyone who I've ever listened to.

Some highlights of his talking points (that i can immediately recall-- it's been a 15 hour day so far, so I'm pretty out of it):

*He referred to the "disease" within the political left in this country amounting to an elitism that presupposes to know what's the interest of its political counterparts: the unwillingness to reach out and ask for help from persons with whom we do not politically or culturally identify instead of condescending to them. He was extremely critical of groups like Sierra Club and NAACP for refusing to fight oppression of rural whites, particularly those he worked with in the coal miners protests in Appalachia after their pensions were stolen after they'd all developed horrible lung and heart problems. In his opinion, by turning up one's nose at those oppressed communities, be they rural, white, male, Republican, or any combination thereof, the left is just priming them to be scooped up by a demagogue like Trump. His position was that, how could we, as advocates of environmental justice, assert to care about and want to help our special (specie-al) brothers when we cannot yet portend to advocate for our brothers. I fucked that up real bad.

*He conceptualized intersectionality as a large system of "blind spots" and "sore spots" between those of a socially advantaged strata and those of a disadvantaged one, and about the natural response to neglect one's own privileges (he spoke of how, while he was "one step down" as a black man, was also a step up in privilege as a heterosexual ("mostly ;) "-- funniest moment of the event--Christian-born man of economic means).

*One of my favorite quotes of the night: "counterargument is cheap, but counter-example is priceless." I.e. it is not one's job to change the minds of others, but to lead by example and recruit them organically.

*On "formerly" being a member of communist organizations: he still is more or less the same as before, and has not necessarily adapted his views to the mainstream: he has rather realized that in a civilization dominated by capitalist industries, it was best for him to empathize with others politically and, from a strategic standpoint, "build counter industries," such as an industry of green technology to counteract the industrial of fossil fuels, and an industry of solidarity and cooperative employment to combat the prison industry. He was rightfully somewhat dismissive of this trendy "radical left" kid who went up to the microphone to more or less toot his own horn and neglect asking a substantive question.

*This is a topic that has been reiterated by many speakers who I've listened to, but citing an anecdote about Samora Machel declining a multi-million dollar check from a European country whom he had solicited for aid against the Portuguese because, after waiting to have it translated, he found that the memo read "charitable donation," but he had asked not for charity, but for mutual aid towards a common purpose. Reminded me of the Galeano quote about charity being vertical, but solidarity being horizontal


It was a 3 hours event, but my mind is fried. Anyways, A+ for Van Jones as a speaker.

 

Former Texas official says he was told to drop Trump University probe

Republican Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton moved to muzzle a former state regulator who says he was ordered in 2010 to drop a fraud investigation into Trump University for political reasons.

Paxton's office issued a cease and desist letter to former Deputy Chief of Consumer Protection John Owens after he made public copies of a 14-page internal summary of the state's case against Donald Trump for scamming millions from students of his now-defunct real estate seminar.

 

This was shared by The Other 98% on Facebook. The comments are honestly disgusting. Mostly just people saying they are going to unfollow the page and how Hillary is trash. God forbid a liberal page posts one thing that goes in favor of Hillary, it's like the world is over.

 

Yes, it's confirmation bias, but I can't not see this now.