251–260 of 270 posts
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Perhaps I'm misunderstanding but does this not potentially incentivise political organisations running their opposition's ads (it's probably feasible to do so in such a way that they don't really reach anyone) and then reporting the infractions and thereby getting their opposition punished?
These are "simple" solutions--i.e., not good ones.
Simple solutions: * Block all political ads all the time. * Require all political parties, and their PACS, to register as a known Advertiser account within the system. Any time an ad runs, and regardless of the source, the associated party will be heavily penalized with a removal of their non-paid content. There needs to be ramifications for their abuse of the platform. Being that Facebook can't charge them a fine, p…
Completely banning political ads puts incumbents at a huge advantage. Emerging challengers don't have nearly as much free organic distribution, so they need to buy ads to build momentum and expand their reach. Even in the current US presidential election, Biden has 3.2 million Facebook followers while Trump 31.7mm on his personal page and 6.3mm on his presidential page. Without paying for ads that extend your audienc…
Sadly, we cannot trust our political leaders to simply do the right thing. To the contrary, we need to have these types of discussions in an effort to govern the government. :(
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It's precisely because there was 100 years in between that no Reconstruction Republican woke up and voted for Goldwater. You think things can't change over that time frame you haven't been paying attention to the last fifty years, or even twenty.
MLK was a Republican BTW.
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It's precisely because there was 100 years in between that no Reconstruction Republican woke up and voted for Goldwater. You think things can't change over that time frame you haven't been paying attention to the last fifty years, or even twenty.
So they started voting for the people responsible for the KKK and Jim Crow laws thinking they were going to making things better? Honest question, are you high or just incredibly naive? Secondly, in 1860s republicans freed the slaves and in 1960s they passed civil rights despite democrats voting against it. Thats 100 years of progress so what are you talking about? What did the democrats do other than burn crosses? E…
Kennedy and Johnson were Democrats. The House and Senate were both Democratically controlled.
Saying that Republicans passed civil rights because there were 18 Southern Bloc Democrats who fought it in the Senate is just lying about the facts.
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I'm not sure, you'd have to ask someone who's asking Trump to denounce something he's clearly committed to. I'm asking about conservative groups who have denounced it. I have some faith that conservatism is not aligned with Trumpery.
For godsakes the Republican party freed the slaves and voted for the civil rights act. It's the democrat party that should have to denounce it's history... except they let people like Ralph Northam continue to govern despite being photographed in a KKK hood. And before you start say "Oh the great switch" the part that's never explained by that bs theory is how one day people who had been fighting for civil right woke…
Civil Rights Acts, many of them, starting in the 19th century; sure, and all that was great. But after that the Republican Party decided to seize on the rift created in the Democratic Party when LBJ also backed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which was essential to it being passed into law, because Republicans didn't have a veto-proof majority backing it) to subsequently, starting particularly in the 1968 Presidential election and continuing thereafter, to target the white racists (particularly concentrated in the South) that were disenchanted with the Democratic Party on that issue, in order to make sure that that split wasn't temporary as it was when the Dixiecrats revolted over Truman's integration of the military. And to do that, they started pandering, and have ever since, to the racism of the disaffected group they were courting.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's precisely because there was 100 years in between that no Reconstruction Republican woke up and voted for Goldwater. You think things can't change over that time frame you haven't been paying attention to the last fifty years, or even twenty.
MLK was a Republican BTW.
That's quite plausible. I'd expect that most American Southern Blacks (outside the South the parties were quite different and the issue is more complicated) that identified with a major party between the founding of the Republican Party and the Republican Southern Strategy of the late 1960s and beyond, which King was murdered too soon to be influenced by, were Republicans.
The parties of today, despite sharing the same names, aren't ideologically the same parties as when King was alive (or, a fortiori, any earlier time), though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's precisely because there was 100 years in between that no Reconstruction Republican woke up and voted for Goldwater. You think things can't change over that time frame you haven't been paying attention to the last fifty years, or even twenty.
So they started voting for the people responsible for the KKK and Jim Crow laws thinking they were going to making things better? Honest question, are you high or just incredibly naive? Secondly, in 1860s republicans freed the slaves and in 1960s they passed civil rights despite democrats voting against it. Thats 100 years of progress so what are you talking about? What did the democrats do other than burn crosses? E…
No, the people who still supported the KKK and the ideology behind Jim Crow laws switched major parties, if they were associated with a major party, from the Democrats to the Republicans between the late mid-1960s and the mid-1990s, because of disaffection with the Democrats (initially particularly President Johnson) backing civil rights, but also because the Republicans started actively campaigning to their racist interests to leverage their disaffection with the Democrats.
In some cases, the people switching parties were literally the same people who had bolted temporarily from the Democratic Party in the 1940s over Truman's integration policies, but who had come back because they had no other major party to go to, and their own separate party had failed. (Strom Thurmond, the Dixiecrat Presidential candidate in 1948, is a notable, highly-visible example.)
And as this process continued it was self-reinforcing, because the more White supremacists left the Democratic Party for the Republicans, the stronger the Democratic support for the interests White supremacists opposed could be.
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> I wonder if my general impression of the entire system, is similar to your impression of Donald Trump: ~a complete joke, no respect whatsoever. I can easily appreciate how people disrespect Trump, but I cannot appreciate when those same people respect the general state of politics in the US. That's my general impression of the entire system too, but I still think Trump represents a radical departure from even that.…
> Disrupting that with no replacement waiting is a short path to a completely failed state. This is one potential outcome, and in a banana republic I may even agree that it is the most likely outcome. But the USA is a lot more robust than it appears, and I feel highly certain that the (largely manufactured) polarization that we observe is actually quite shallow. My concern is that if we throw Trump out and elect yet…
> I continue to believe that the chaos Trump sows acts as sand in the gears of the powerful
Arbitrary chaos tends to benefit the powerful, as they're able to take advantage of it. For example I had been hoping that the pandemic-induced economic slowdown would have unwound the debt treadmill by a bit. Instead the powerful just had the government print money to prop up asset prices. Meanwhile Main St continues to suffer.
> My concern is that if we throw Trump out and elect yet another insider, we will immediately resume the former status quo...lip service towards the genuine problems in the world, and plenty of catering to powerful corporations and the military industrial complex
From what I can tell, Trump has not stopped the sabre rattling and foreign military interventions. How are things better by not even paying lip service? Don't mistake upsetting specific individuals with upsetting the overall system.
> exposes the media and other politicians for the propagandists they are
He may call them for what they are, but his own reality distortion field prevents him from gaining any high ground. I had been working to keep an open mind on this, putting aside the media's complaints about Trump, and trying to see what he was actually doing (eg I appreciated when he scrapped the individual mandate). Covid itself was my breaking point, as it was an objective threat that he just rejected dealing with. I (still) agree the media is a giant propaganda operation, but in 2020, I listen to them over Trump.
> What's missing is, the people that have woken up don't know what to believe, or believe in. The West has no vision for the future, other than the same old bullshit story politicians of both sides of the aisle have been selling people for decades (as our military lays waste to 3rd world countries over completely manufactured pretenses, while the media runs cover for them). We need a new story, and it has to be at least fairly true, and plausible, and acknowledge the real barriers to achievement, rather than making up a whole bunch of fantasy land fake problems.
I agree with this in general. But IMO Trump looks like yet another conspiracy red herring rather than a productive path forward.
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> Much of the problems I see aren't advertising in the traditional sense, but viral content from sketchy sources. Define a credible source? We know for a fact all the major news outlets edit photos, often don’t use their own reporters, write sensational articles (actively stretching facts). No, I don’t think we can say what is a “sketchy” source. Unless we start wanting Facebook to moderate truth (or just accept the…
This can’t be stressed enough. It used to be footage or images were verified or were from a photo or video journalist on the ground. Now they use recycled footage and images either through laziness, incompetence or maliciousness to drive a narrative. This is from “reputable” networks. And not to lessen the complaint about excessive use of force by police, but very often the context preceding a confrontation is delibe…
The use of undisclosed recycled footage to accompany news coverage is older than television. Its not a new phenomenon.
(What's recent is the degree to which media critics have the ability to detect, identify the source of, and, through alternatives to the media that are doing it in the first place, publicize findings about such misleading use of imagery. You are experiencing it being harder to get away with, and mistaking that for it being a new thing that it is happening.)
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Disrupting that with no replacement waiting is a short path to a completely failed state. This is one potential outcome, and in a banana republic I may even agree that it is the most likely outcome. But the USA is a lot more robust than it appears, and I feel highly certain that the (largely manufactured) polarization that we observe is actually quite shallow. My concern is that if we throw Trump out and elect yet…
This is interesting. I wish I were writing your comment. It seems like we're coming from a similar place but have much different read on the present situation - you're optimistic. > I continue to believe that the chaos Trump sows acts as sand in the gears of the powerful Arbitrary chaos tends to benefit the powerful, as they're able to take advantage of it. For example I had been hoping that the pandemic-induced econ…
It depends where they're positioned. If they're on solid footing, agreed. But if they're 100 feet up on a highwire with no safety net, not so secure.
> From what I can tell, Trump has not stopped the sabre rattling and foreign military interventions.
It's a subjective call, but the only sabre rattling I've heard much from is Trump. It's when the media starts acting in unison (like when Trump suggested pulling troops from the middle east), that's when my ears perk up.
> How are things better by not even paying lip service?
I believe Trump in all he does demonstrates how illusory our political system is, and how closely it is joined at the hip with the media. He's managed to get plenty of serious people to say very silly things, intentional or not, and I think a lot of people are starting to catch on that there is a curtain on the stage, and that there are in fact things going on behind that curtain. This is a stark contrast to Obama, who was an absolutely brilliant performer, like the David Blaine of politicians.
> He may call them for what they are, but his own reality distortion field prevents him from gaining any high ground....
Here I completely agree. Very often I cannot help wondering if he truly is as incompetent as people say, because sometimes it sure seems like it (covid, particularly opposing masks!!!??, the debates...all sorts of examples). At the very least, he is highly inconsistent. I imagine he is hyped up on amphetamines most of the time as well, which likely takes its toll some days, so perhaps that helps explain his truly incompetent days.
> But IMO Trump looks like yet another conspiracy red herring rather than a productive path forward.
Sometimes for a new forest to grow, you have to burn the old one down. Mother nature operates in mysterious ways.
But even if Trump can successfully derail the system, he is in no way a man with a vision for a new one that serves everyone's interests - "Make America Great Again" minus the bad stuff would be a huge improvement over now, but it is still fundamentally flawed, and I don't see a lot of people lined up with better stories.