All-purpose news and politics thread: Two Steps Beyond!(Part II)

[numberthirty]

The same thing happens to me. It's funny because I seem to get WAY more conservative ads than liberal ones despite the fact that my viewing habits are probably the opposite. I wonder if just more conservatives are spending money to get their ads on You Tube?

Speaking of Owen's Pager U clip, I've seen it and the hypocrisy of it cracks me up. She CONSTANTLY plays the black card. Anyone who criticizes her is a racist, CNN is racist, MSNBC is racist, democrats are racists...It just astounds me that her fans don't see through her obvious BS.

To me, it seems like that is an essential element of the bigger picture. Have her there just to yell "Racist!".

She doesn't even make the arguments that would be vaguely credible(NBC/MSNBC letting Tamron Hall go to keep Megyn Kelly).

[PwrdOn]

Candace Owens says that wearing a MAGA hat is like the new punk rock, it's rock and roll.

She also claims that black people are leaving the democrats in droves now. Even if you think we should, where exactly is this happening?

If you really think about it though, the analogy between the alt right and punk rock is actually rather apt. Both were movements of, by, and for middle class white people who interpreted the dullness and blandness of their everyday lives with actual socioeconomic repression. And both sought to express their frustration via thoroughly unoriginal acts of rebellion that mostly involved screaming nonsense as loud as possible, all while being cheer led by the very people they were supposedly rebelling against because America needs constant assurances that white masculinity is in fact alive and well.

And honestly, I don't hate punk music, I've listened to plenty of it before and I can totally get the appeal, but let's not pretend like it was ever some kind of genuine social movement that was going to be the catalyst for any real change, especially knowing what we know now.

[Panfoot]

The same thing happens to me. It's funny because I seem to get WAY more conservative ads than liberal ones despite the fact that my viewing habits are probably the opposite. I wonder if just more conservatives are spending money to get their ads on You Tube?

I have almost totally video game or bad movie related videos in my youtube and no matter how many times I dislike/not interested in an ad, I still get a "Rick Scott is great!" or "Gillum is a crook!" ad every. single. time. Outside of election time is still a noticeably high bit of Trump ones too.

[ed2962]

To me, it seems like that is an essential element of the bigger picture. Have her there just to yell "Racist!".

She doesn't even make the arguments that would be vaguely credible(NBC/MSNBC letting Tamron Hall go to keep Megyn Kelly).

I'm not sure I've ever heard her even promote issues that conservatives believe in. Her act is bash democrats whether her claims make sense or not.

[ed2962]

If you really think about it though, the analogy between the alt right and punk rock is actually rather apt. Both were movements of, by, and for middle class white people who interpreted the dullness and blandness of their everyday lives with actual socioeconomic repression. And both sought to express their frustration via thoroughly unoriginal acts of rebellion that mostly involved screaming nonsense as loud as possible, all while being cheer led by the very people they were supposedly rebelling against because America needs constant assurances that white masculinity is in fact alive and well.

And honestly, I don't hate punk music, I've listened to plenty of it before and I can totally get the appeal, but let's not pretend like it was ever some kind of genuine social movement that was going to be the catalyst for any real change, especially knowing what we know now.

If we go back to the late 70's England punk rock was actually was more of a working class thing. I'd almost argue that Punk rock and hip hop sort of parallel in the sense that both started as fringe musical movements embraced by working class youths, but once the record companies figured out how to make money from them, they became completely co-opted by the mainstream.

[aja_christopher]

If we go back to the late 70's England punk rock was actually was more of a working class thing. I'd almost argue that Punk rock and hip hop sort of parallel in the sense that both started as fringe musical movements embraced by working class youths, but once the record companies figured out how to make money from them, they became completely co-opted by the mainstream.

TB: Let's talk about "Travels in Nihilon." Where did this song come from...?

AP: The song is really about traveling through the land of nothingness. It's a song about a con -- that enormous con of Pop Culture and the con of religion.

TB: What brought that out of you? Why were you feeling bitter or betrayed?

AP: I was at an age where I did rather get swept up in the whole Punk/New Wave movement. I foolishly thought, "Hey, this may be the turning point for music! Maybe this is truly where everyone can be involved -- it's like a democratizing or Year Zero thing -- everyone can make music if they want to. There are no preconceptions, you don't have to be a great musician. Fashion is blown out of the water because you can wear anything you want."

It was the last time I think I truly got swept along by my optimism. It wasn't the optimism of the movement as such. It was a time in my life where my optimism was being mirrored by these new possibilities. I was in a band that was starting to go places, the world was looking up for me, I was at a good age, I was experiencing a kind of a movement where I actually felt like this might be my gang, you know?

And very, very quickly, I could see that people were using it for the same old reasons! The same old, selling-you-the-dumb-clothes thing. Punk was about you making your own clothes, but very quickly it became about how you had to have just the right thing to wear, and the right thing was expensive. I don't know, I saw through a lot of the fake political stuff, too -- which is one reason I never got into The Clash. I just found them hokey on the politics front. At least the Sex Pistols were just having a mess about, they were just having fun -- but with The Clash it was just this forced street politics, and I never took to that. I'd much rather have a band like the Ramones, which were more like a happening or something. That's not the right word, but you know what I mean.

So, this was at a time where I did actually get swept along with it, and I quickly saw that it was extremely cynical, and it was exactly the same as what it was supposed to be replacing. There was too much industry involved -- too fake, too controlling. It was so commercially driven.

So, I actually think this song is about my enormous disappointment and my feeling that it was all a con -- the music, the fashion, and hey, let's throw religion in there as well, while you're at it! There's no Jesus come and gone! There may not have been one in the first place. It's just a con, and it's time for us to wake up."

http://chalkhills.org/articles/XTCFans20080629.html

[ed2962]

I have almost totally video game or bad movie related videos in my youtube and no matter how many times I dislike/not interested in an ad, I still get a "Rick Scott is great!" or "Gillum is a crook!" ad every. single. time. Outside of election time is still a noticeably high bit of Trump ones too.

I'm sure some of the ads are just randomly generated based on demographics. For instance, I sometimes get ads for home improvement stuff even though I live in an apartment. Youtube knows I'm a middle-aged male and that's who stereotypical buys those things, so I guess that's why I get those ads.

[Tendrin]

he didn’t turn up on it by the time the primary rolled around[/URL]. Odds are decent he’ll be in prison and/or getting mental health evaluations by the time the 2020 elections roll around, and we’re hoping that his political ambitions come to an end.

Ahahahaha. I remember when I posted this guy. I was wondering when you were gonmna get to him.

[InformationGeek]

Another mass shooting, this one going really under the radar.

An altercation between two families at a toddler's birthday party in Texas led to a shooting that left four men dead and one injured, authorities said.

Police responded to reports of a shooting at a 1-year-old's party in Taft on Saturday, said Sgt. Nathan Brandley of the Texas Department of Public Safety.

Police are looking for two suspects they believe were involved in the shooting, he added.

[Malvolio]

The same thing happens to me. It's funny because I seem to get WAY more conservative ads than liberal ones despite the fact that my viewing habits are probably the opposite. I wonder if just more conservatives are spending money to get their ads on You Tube?

Speaking of Owen's Pager U clip, I've seen it and the hypocrisy of it cracks me up. She CONSTANTLY plays the black card. Anyone who criticizes her is a racist, CNN is racist, MSNBC is racist, democrats are racists...It just astounds me that her fans don't see through her obvious BS.

I usually get local ads, but I get them for both Democrats and Republicans. Maybe it's because I download clips of Bill Maher and Jon Oliver, but I also occasionally download clips from FOX News.

[PaulBullion]

[ed2962]

I usually get local ads, but I get them for both Democrats and Republicans. Maybe it's because I download clips of Bill Maher and Jon Oliver, but I also occasionally download clips from FOX News.

I've been getting a lot of CRTV ads lately

[Mister Mets]

Andrew Sullivan, not a Trump fan, considers what he's accomplishing, and where he's succeeding.

But as the months tick by, there’s a decent case that Trump’s proactive accomplishments are beginning to add up as well: a huge tax cut, two Supreme Court justices, wholesale deregulation, renegotiation of NAFTA, isolation of Iran, and a broader reboot of bilateral nationalism on the world stage. But I’m not talking merely about policy — he has also shifted the entire polity more decisively toward the authoritarian style of government. In this respect, yes, the Trump administration has indeed accomplished much more than many of us want to believe.

The addition of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court is the latest “win.” The successful nomination — however tortuous, however unpopular, however saturated in drama — achieved several things at once. First, it justified the evangelical and pro-business right’s Faustian bargain with Trump. Along with Gorsuch, Kavanaugh cemented a 5-4 majority for the right on the court for the indefinite future — more quickly and decisively than any Republican had hoped for. If Hillary Clinton had won the presidency, in stark contrast, we’d be looking at a 6-3 liberal tilt by now. That’s a huge, huge payoff for what looked at one point like a major gamble for establishment and religious Republicans — and there could be more vacancies ahead.

Second, it showed that the broader Republican coalition isn’t completely dead. The over-the-top tactics of the Democrats and the mainstream media in turning a Supreme Court hearing into an epic battle in a newly energized gender war may have riveted Democratic women and galvanized a younger generation … but it also brought moderate Republicans and Trumpers together again. When confronted with the rhetoric and ideology of the social justice left, NeverTrump conservatives came temporarily back to the fold. I felt it happening to myself.

Worse, there was evidence that some of the culture war issues the Democrats are relying on may not be so win-win. Yes, a focus on sexual assault and harassment in the workplace and elsewhere is important in its own right — and it strongly resonates with suburban women who may decide the midterms. But it can also energize conservative and moderate women in defense of what they see as threats to their own husbands and sons; it can further alienate more traditional working-class men from the Democrats; and it could cement a worrying shift among young white men toward the GOP since 2016.

The Kavanaugh-Ford showdown also helped upend the overly simple view that women somehow form a monolithic bloc, all united around “women’s” issues, with those issues being defined by the left. In fact, partisanship and tribe trump gender, and always have. Women are no more a single ideological bloc than men, as a majority of white female voters proved in the 2016 election, when they voted for the gross dude over the feminist icon. (One of the really eye-opening parts of Jill Lepore’s new history of the United States, These Truths, is her account of how indispensable women were to the construction of the conservative movement.) These cultural fights, after all, are dynamic. They can rebound on you. If you’d predicted that the Kavanaugh hearings would have been a net-plus for the GOP a couple of weeks ago, people would have deemed you crazy. Today? Not so much. By November, who knows?

Now put this in the broader context of Trump’s sole legislative achievement: his massive, budget-busting tax cut. For many mainstream Republicans, this is what they live for. It will be hard to reverse. Which is to say it’s a further justification for the GOP’s going along with populist authoritarianism. No, the tax cut hasn’t proved an electoral godsend, unless you factor in its positive, short-term impact on economic growth. But it sure has helped reconcile the old GOP to the new one.

On the foreign front, the key issue motivating the evangelical and activist right is Israel. And Trump has delivered resoundingly. The embassy move to Jerusalem, the tearing up of the Iran deal, the love-in with the Saudis (even to the point of acquiescing to the likely torture and murder of a journalist), the “peace plan” which would consign the Palestinians to an archipelago of Bantustans, and the additional bullying of the Palestinians (shutting down their Washington embassy; cutting hundreds of millions of dollars in aid, including for hospitals and schools), are all above and beyond any previous administration’s fawning. It’s a neoconservative dream after eight years of Obama. Heck, it’s neocon nirvana.

Then there’s simply what hasn’t happened. Last week, the New York Times published an exhaustive, magnificent, detailed evisceration of Donald Trump’s long and outrageous business career. It revealed extraordinary levels of tax avoidance and outright fraud; and it demolished the central argument of Trump’s own career and candidacy — that he is a brilliant, self-made man. The populist striver, the tribune of the little guy, this marvel of American meritocracy, was earning $200,000 a year as a 3-year-old. More to the point, his entire business was propped up by daddy for as long as daddy was alive. We knew some of this already. But this was the definitive demolition of a myth that had made Trump’s presidency possible.

And nothing happened. No one cared. The polls budged not an inch — and in fact, showed a small boost for Trump. Yes, the news cycle was dominated by Ford-Kavanaugh, but still. This kind of takedown should take over any news cycle. And yet it is now as distant a memory as that once world-stopping op-ed by an anonymous senior Trump official in the New York Times. It makes you wonder whether the possible eventual publication of Trump’s tax returns — even if they are riddled with corruption and impropriety and illegality — would make any difference either. In a liberal democracy, the press is supposed to be a key player in holding the powers-that-be to account. And here you had the best newspaper in the world, dismantling the central myth of a presidency in a Pulitzer-worthy investigation … and it made not the slightest difference.

We’ve also seen the rather successful reframing of the Mueller probe. Trump’s absurd counter-narrative — the real collusion was between the Clintons and Russia! — has given the right some way to handle the reality of an otherwise disastrous scandal. Missteps by McCabe and Strzok and now Rosenstein have been exploited mercilessly. The shock, moreover, for the rest of us, has worn off, and the accumulating details and countless subplots have blurred the picture. Mueller will likely give us nothing before the midterms, and Trump has already signaled that he will try to get a new attorney general thereafter, when the probe could get downsized, or simply withstood — or even leveraged for political gain in the 2020 campaign.

The Republican senators likely to be elected this fall will, if anything, be even more pro-Trump than their predecessors. Corker, Flake, McCain: all gone. The House GOP will have been transformed more thoroughly into Trump’s own personal party, as the primary campaigns revealed only too brutally. And if by some twist of fate, a constitutional battle between Congress and president breaks out over impeachment proceedings, Justice Kavanaugh will be there to make sure the president gets his way. All of this is far, far more power for Trump than any of us would have predicted, say, three years ago.

[Kirby101]

If you considered a nation without a Rule of Law and policies that will bring ruin to the country succeeding.

[Adam Allen]

The same thing happens to me. It's funny because I seem to get WAY more conservative ads than liberal ones despite the fact that my viewing habits are probably the opposite. I wonder if just more conservatives are spending money to get their ads on You Tube?

Speaking of Owen's Pager U clip, I've seen it and the hypocrisy of it cracks me up. She CONSTANTLY plays the black card. Anyone who criticizes her is a racist, CNN is racist, MSNBC is racist, democrats are racists...It just astounds me that her fans don't see through her obvious BS.

Ya, I guess because I'm not used to getting political ads, my only real thought was that they must be spending a lot of money to just throw commercials everywhere, at the moment!

And I didn't finish watching the "the black card" thing, because that whole idea is idiotic. It's based on the often stated but obviously untrue idea that accusing someone of racism is some kind of master stroke, which they can't defend against and which gives you an automatic win. This is clearly not true, because people who are accused of racism (and are even really racist) just continue to do absolutely fine at whatever they're trying to do, regardless. Trump, Hannity, Fox News in general, Republicans in general -- all accused of racism all the time, and you don't ever really see it hurting them. There is no effing "black card".

It's similar to Trump's thing about Kavanaugh, where it's supposedly such a scary time to be a young man. Well, Kavanaugh was confirmed for the court despite the allegations against him ... does this mean the scary time is all over? Besides that, Trump himself had allegations against him, and still became president. Honestly, I feel like the stuff about how scary it must be, to be a young man in today's world, has been going on to some degree even as far back as when I was in college in the early 90s ... and, frat parties and binge drinking and associated sexual assaults have continued through all the past decades. So ya, I remain unconvinced that men are just helpless against the terrible power of feminists, in today's world.

I'm sure some of the ads are just randomly generated based on demographics. For instance, I sometimes get ads for home improvement stuff even though I live in an apartment. Youtube knows I'm a middle-aged male and that's who stereotypical buys those things, so I guess that's why I get those ads.

Right, the general sense that ads are just generated on demographics is what made these stand out, to me. Usually, I'm able to kind of see, "Oh, because I seem interested in X, I'm getting ads for Y..."

In this case ... yeah, I guess you could say I watch political content, but more entertainment, really. And, definitely not on the conservative side, either way. Which again makes me think, I guess just election season? Time to ramp up ads everywhere, and just hope for the best?

I usually get local ads, but I get them for both Democrats and Republicans. Maybe it's because I download clips of Bill Maher and Jon Oliver, but I also occasionally download clips from FOX News.

If I've watched any "conservative" videos, I'm sure it's by accident.

You know, I used to buy into the idea that you need to get your information even from "the opposing view", if you want to be really informed/objective ... the problem with that is that some sources, like NPR, really are already trying to be objective, regardless of whether they are considered "liberal" ... but, Fox News really isn't even trying. You don't end up with a balanced view, from exposing yourself to both. If you don't realize how very far from center the one is, you can only end up skewed.