Sometimes I think Rand's strident atheism is the only reason the Objectivist Party isn't the major right-wing party in the US.

This isn't a transcript of the podcast I was referring to. That argument is much more measured, I guess because he's on somebody else's show. For reference, what I was talking about is roughly minutes 25-31 of this podcast.

https://theintercept.com/2017/07/12/...er-and-don-jr/

This is generous to ikes but I think it's about accurate.

I listened to him on Intercepted this morning and I actually think a lot of what he said was reasonable except - and this is a huge ****ing except - it's like he didn't even notice the part in the Trump Jr. emails where it said "this is part of Russia and its government's efforts to help your father" or whatever. He was like "well this Russian lawyer is just a Russian person, blahblah, allegedly Kremlin connected" and just blowing right by the part where Don Jr. thought he was meeting with this person to get information from the Russian government, which is obviously massively important. Greenwald pretends it doesn't exist. That part of it is inexcusable.

His & Scahill's takes on Maddow seemed about right.

Disclaimer: I have not yet read DVaut's wordbombs, need to work up some energy first.

Assuming I'm understanding your point correctly (and I may not be), I think this connection between globalism and the Free Market Of Fake News is pretty tenuous. Like, if only we instituted protectionist trade policies earlier, our internet tubes between Siberia and racist Americans wouldn't have been as open and unclogged as Chinese supply chains are to Apple? How on earth are those things connected? One is trade policy, the other is the very nature of the internet.

Pretty sure we've tried this here before but we need to MpiGA.

https://twitter.com/republicofmath/s...53769632137216

Onion

Is the pi thing Onion?

Turnbull did an interview advocating for govt access to encrypted communication.

http://www.pm.gov.au/media/2017-07-1...-qc-and-acting

This was one attempt to fiddle with pi in US

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indiana_Pi_Bill

Coming to terms with the fact that some huge proportion of the people I worked with and spent time with were actually willfully stupid partisan racists has almost completely changed the way I look at the world. The fact that there's a bunch of "liberals" out there that are still clinging to the fantasy that these people aren't those things is so ****ing irritating.

Alright so if so many people are terrible intractable racists and liberals are such buffoons for believing they can be won over what solution would Fly and JT217 suggest? Rounding them up and forcibly re-educating them?

bring back school prayer, ldo

I might respond more to your essay later, I don't have time right now. I will just say that Russia did not figuratively hack our election. It's not a figure of speech or a metaphor.

Clearly the only alternative to owning them by their own logic.

Facebook and Google having huge duopoly power in dominance of media industry and advertising is not necessarily the 'very nature of the internet' or the technology. That the eyeballs of lots and lots of Americans and the fact they get alot of news from Facebook is not the nature of the internet, that's Facebook's market position. Do we break up Facebook? Not necessarily. If the question is unthinkable and just considered the natural order of things, though, that's a victor for the memetics of laissez faire capitalists. It wouldn't be an unthinkable proposition 75 years ago.

In the 1940s, it was illegal to broadcast editorials on the radio. By the 1950s the FCC backed down and simply required that to have a TV or radio license, any coverage of controversial issues of public importance had to do so in a manner that was honest, equitable, and balanced. Licenses could be revoked (and were revoked), for instance, if news coverage was seen as too favorable to seregationists and racists. Modern people see that and find it absolutely unthinkable; the government can regulate that? Yeah, it did. We don't even have the statutory infrastructure to regulate much of anything on the internet because it came of age during the time when the forces of deregulation and laissez faire attitudes were ascendant. I'm not suggesting it's all bad, but it's the reality. So am I suggesting we become North Korea and put the internet behind a government approved walled garden or whatever? No. Is trade protectionism the answer to the problem of cheap propaganda? Not that either.

But the embrace of globalism, free trade and laissez faire attitudes about regulation wherein things like the Fairness Doctrine become Stalinist censorship -- and THEN decry the results -- that's the hypocrisy and incoherence. Alternatives exist, we could be more thoughtful about the problem, we could have regulators lean on Facebook and Google, or pass some regulations like the Fairness Doctrine -- or or use government authority to protect and promote vibrant public debate. We don't, we leave it to unencumbered market forces, and that's a choice, and it's fealty to free trade and libertarian assumptions that do it. Thems the breaks when you embrace that. I'm not suggesting we have easy answers here; see my free speech analogy and Klan parades above. That's not a call to ban Klan parades; simply recognizing that we have a deep, systemic commitment to free speech and that means Klan members can march around. Similarly, embracing deregulation, free trade and globalism means we can import cheap Russian propaganda just as easily as we can import cheap Ikea furniture or whatever. That's not a hack. That's not cheating. That's our system; that's how our modern media ecosystem works, how our modern economy works. Some of the propaganda may even be state sponsored, just like we import commodities like oil where the trade is coordinated and organized by state-sponsored intergovernmental organizations like OPEC. If we feel hamstrung to stop it, if we feel we lack the imagination to stop it, it's largely because we're really deeply embraced the principles underlying capitalist orthodoxies.

Facing reality doesn't require me having a solution, for one thing. A problem doesn't go away if you can't solve it!


And like, uh, shut the **** up with that strawman ****. Corbyn and Sanders didn't ****ing run on re-education camps.

Well, the big issue is that the bad actors here might have been Russian-affliated hackers, but

1) They didn't need the Trump campaign to do anything(there is a non-zero chance that this entire story boiling out is actually the Russians acting out to reign in Trump, to flex their blackmail powers)

but

2) They absolutely needed the mainstream media to breathlessly cover every ****ing leak like it was the Pentagon Papers

and a real serious evaluation of the editorial judgment failures by the Failing New York Times and the Clinton News Network here would shake some of these people to their ****ing core.

The solution is a politics based on material outcomes rather than tribalism--the abolition of capitalism.

The deeper problem is that the left lacks ANY strong propaganda network, and the democratic process has been completely sabotaged.

Pretty sure it means you don't have a POLITICAL POINT, though.

leave them behind and work on getting the people who don't vote on board

in other words: don't move right, move left.

Can't do that. The Democrats are too busy conceding everything as their opening position to prove how reasonable they are.

Speaking of racists, a 7 year old kid in our neighborhood asked our black babysitter if she was a crackhead recently.

And on the off chance that liberals ever win a meaningful election again, actually do things that rebalance political and economic power away from white segregationists.

What do you think free college was for? Nyuk nyuk.

If it were remotely true then making the election and political debate about issues other than racism would be a given.

but it's so ludicrous to consider people in such simplistic terms (liberal or otherwise) that no conclusions follow from it.