Il Douché and His Discontents: The 2016 Primary Voting Thread, Part 4

i thought rehm retired. maybe she just announced it?

@mtaibbi Matt Taibbi
The election is about to turn into a giant Jerry Springer episode, w/different camps throwing chairs at each other.

Avi Bueno
‏@JasperAvi
@mtaibbi You have no idea how literally true that is, since @marcorubio was just accused of stealing a NH man's gf:

https://twitter.com/JasperAvi/status/709411291593576448

that's the nicest thing anyone's said about marco rubio in months

read that as a NH man's gif

o/u on whether the girlfriend is actually a hollowed out pumpkin

this is kind of hilariously boring
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftf-i5_qFpw

God help me, but the way Marco handled his heckler made me like him a little. Which is only the case because Trump, but still.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/13/upshot/the-geography-of-trumpism.html

^^ interesting but mistitled i think. this is where it gets interesting:

The 10 Variables Most Closely Linked to a County’s Support for Donald Trump
A correlation of 1 means the variable is a perfect indicator of Trump support.* Negative correlations are shown in red.

(For no good reason, in my head I call it the "Ream Diane Show.")

this is kind of hilariously boring

now eventually you do plan to have dinosaurs, on your, on your

wow @ christie as lickspittle interlocutor

wait -- a three-hour clip?

it's full.

xp No silly, it's only two hours long! But not a lot happens for the first hour - Trump and Christie come out past the hour mark, in the middle of Folsom Prison Blues.

lol:

"we win with evangelicals so big-league ... we won the evangelicals. we've been winning them all over. it's been amazing, the relationship. it's been-- well, i'm a good christian, i'll tell ya." [applause] "i'll tell ya. i'm a good christian. i'm a believer." [cheering]

adam i don't remember where you live

Atlanta, where we are blessed with identical NPR programming on two different FM frequencies ever since GPB ripped off a bunch of college students

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CdhpIWXWAAA6la9.jpg

i'm not even sure the context of that, but i am laughing like a lunatic right now.

Adam, do you think tonally and editorially NPR and FOX are similar? Do you think Sanders and Trump are similar too?

― The burrito of ennui (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn), Monday, March 14, 2016 12:29 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

tonally of course both are completely different. both are comfort food for their respective markets. i don't think Sanders and Trump are similar, in fact the only reason i joined that convo is bc you brought up NPR using that line. it's typical of the soft liberalism of NPR.

i'm probably always using the wrong terminology here. my personal politics are far far left and i think the US in general is a right leaning nation and that includes NPR.

so what you really meant was that both media sources - while being totally different in tone, content, purpose, and coverage - are equally popular with their target markets. thx for the insight.

like I never would have guessed that they had different audiences, each totally dedicated to them! incredible. where do you come up with this stuff.

hey i just do it for the privilege of getting insulted on a daily basis by strangers. it really makes life worth living.

what are your personal politics? i get the sense of them as an amorphous discourse constantly shifting to the left in any given situation but w/ not fixed coherency. when you say NPR is right-wing, do you mean in the sense that any kind of reform or amelioration of the excesses of capitalism ultimately serve to reify its institutions and therefore only a full revolutionary agenda is sufficiently left-wing? in that sense as eephus says sanders is also right-wing since he's a reformer. or do you mean that any organization that considers right-wing positions as within the tent of legitimate speech is itself right-wing? but surely any real commitment to freedom of speech must agree that the right possesses that freedom as well.

i think the US in general is a right leaning nation and that includes NPR.

if we're shifting from disagreement to LOL NO DUH ADAM than okay but it's not like this is wrong, except maybe in its definition of "the US" (elite manufacturers of the_conversation vs the giant confused population that still wants single-payer)

*then

My personal politics are isolationist and socialist. i think we need to spend all the money we are investing in fighting and unwinnable war in helping the people that actually live here.

NPR can say whatever they want and it's a free country and I don't see why you brought that up. But i can call them corporate shills without having to defend against you imagining I want a complete revolution of the entire media structure.

i think the US in general is a right leaning nation and that includes NPR.

this is compared to other Western democracies. for instance national health care. or not dropping nukes on other countries.

you can call them whatever you want but i don't understand why you'd call them corporate shills

or not dropping nukes on other countries.

are you saying we shouldn't have nuked Japan in WWII

put two countries side by side.

one dropped a nuke on another country and firebombed its civilian population.

another did not.

which one is more right wing.

i think it's safe to say that fascist-era japan was more "right-wing" than any era of the united states

you can call them whatever you want but i don't understand why you'd call them corporate shills

― Mordy, Monday, March 14, 2016 2:18 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

because i listened to NPR during the health care debates.

if we're talking about civilian deaths then yeah Joseph Stalin is Ronald Reagan

Imperial Japan more right-wing than WWII-era US, no contest

xxp

we have a thread fyi Hiroshima: necessary?

yeah that's a good thread

do we have one on nagasaki

put two countries side by side.

one dropped a nuke on another country and firebombed its civilian population.

another did not.

which one is more right wing.

the fascist one that built gas chambers for undesirables but couldn't get their hands on the bomb?

ok those are bad examples. that is a problem i have, i try to make a point and pick bad examples that then get picked at and before you know it i am arguing a point that is far removed from what i originally wanted to say. then i get called out for being inconsistent or incoherent.

but come on. the official approval of torture. the NSA spying. the drone program. the invasion of Iraq. a militarized and armed police. a higher prison population than China.

Todd Palin in snowmobile crash

Caribou Barbie cancels Trump FL appearance

but come on. the official approval of torture. the NSA spying. the drone program. the invasion of Iraq. a militarized and armed police. a higher prison population than China.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau)

None of these things is explicitly right wing.

there are plenty of right-wing elements to the US, and to the extent that NPR reflects a broad swath of political opinions one could say that they are participating in a right-wing discourse (though i think that's a silly simplification). but the reason you're getting picked at is because you are inconsistent/incoherent. i have yet to understand why you consider NPR right-wing except that apparently during the healthcare debates you were listening and didn't hear anyone talk about single payer (I definitely did), or bc it is a radio station in the US and the US once dropped nuclear bombs on Japan.

i don't think NPR is right wing lol.

you can be a left wing corporate shill look at Hillary

i think "___-wing" is being bandied about a bit too freely in this discussion. but this is an idiotic discussion

ok i don't think there's enough of a 'there' there to really engage on this. i understand your pov. xp

single-payer didn't get a lot of attention because most ppl in the legislature weren't willing to back it - it would periodically get floated and then stripped out and was something of a political football, cf. Pelosi vs. Weiner. I don't really think NPR's "right-wing coverage" or whatever you think it was had any impact on this at all tbh.

xp

the u.s. has drifted right on economic questions (thus also many social questions) at least since the 80s and probably since the crest of the civil rights movement; "left-right" dyads (in elections, on talk shows) that in other places or other times would be right-right ones have gradually redefined the center; and the Mainstream Liberal Media including npr has followed this shift, which does not make them totally worthless as news organs; i understand exhaustion with these ideas because they're all pretty well understood in this company but they're not wrong

but come on. the official approval of torture. the NSA spying. the drone program. the invasion of Iraq. a militarized and armed police. a higher prison population than China.

― AdamVania (Adam Bruneau), Monday, March 14, 2016 6:28 PM (1 minute ago)

well obviously all of these things are bad but all of them have also been criticized for violating traditional american principles in some fashion: iraq was an unprecedented preemptive war, torture violates the ban on cruel and unusual punishment, nsa spying violates the fourth amendment, etc.