trump off the CO ballot

[stanky]

And if a better version of the bridge and the tent were available as a feature of welfare and health care, then people living a stress filled life they can't afford, might be tempted to quit their shit job, and go live at one of many sanctioned options. We can't have that. In fact, let's close up all the old loop-holes of freedom...like being able to make camp on Forest service land, or sleep on beaches without police hassle. This total package of this shitty version of Capitalism we're suffering through is a jealous master. If it finds someone living off fish in a river, they'll poison the rive and force you to get a job and buy their crap food. Of course, what can they do, given so many people now? We must stay the course and ride this train down until the wheels melt!

yeah x-mas. i managed to avoid all shopping this year. and everyone has left the hollow. must sound a bit 'bah-humbug' but it's actually the gift i asked for.

A gift to re-coger:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0F_TN8 ... Dissidence

(It's a clip of Debbie Wasserman Schulz grilling Matt Taibbi (one of the last of the real journalist-reporters) about free speech, I guess.)

she's part of the reason i've drifted from the liberal left world view. that she's still around is a wonder. Abandoning that bogus left doesn't imply a right-ward shift. Have had to shake that off a few times.

Deciphering political truth is demanding these days. There's a handful of real reporters around that i trust to be honest, but they are continually black listed from most media, and smeered if need be with b.s. accusations. Or worse, they're jailed or even killed. It's the season for dead journalists, globally. Their stories are the ones most likely worth seeing. The propagandized versions of the news are so rampant that we can use them, in a way, to find out what isn't true. Follow the sponsorship?

[President Bush]

I think she was pissed at him for his helping Elon Musk do his ¨twitter files¨.

[stanky]

Yeah, those were an embarrassment that the media (in general) used to smear the messengers rather than the message, which was that our Government was censoring social media content of certain political affiliation. That's a big no-no. But the focus was on Musk and Taibbi as the bad guys.
So similar to what was uncovered in DNC emails, which was a plot to destroy Bernie's chances, which they did, illegally, and without repercussions that i know of. Debbie was an instrumental player in that crime. Had to resign. Hillary reinstated her later to continue their anti-democratic ways.

That did it for me and the dems. I had high hopes briefly, as it appeared that Sanders would handily beat Trump. Bernie may as well have been assassinated. These days, he's irrelevant or seen as a traitor to his erstwhile donors. He may simply be trying to not get his family killed, or he's run out of steam. Now Biden is what is shoved down our throats. The dnc deserves what it gets, as young voters, as well as minorities, abandon that ship in droves. The only thing it has left is corruption. Wtf else is it selling? Just abortion access? Is that enough?
The one party system loves that one. makes no difference to that machinery, so, it's ideal as a carrot to let the illusion sort itself over. Sure, it's tragic to the victims, but either way it goes, not an issue that effects the bigger picture. There's a handful of such hot-button emotional issues that we love to focus on, while the big show goes on, unhindered.

As usual, the reporters are hassled. Taibbi had an absurd FBI visit; most networks won't go near him, ect.
Assange is still in custody for his role in giving people the truth. Snowden, still in exile.
Many lesser known reporters have been essentially silenced. It's bipartisan, this censorship. Possibly worse with the dems.

Hard pill to swallow if one was harboring fanciful feelings regarding the choices offered.
Like finding out your priest is a pedophile.

[President Bush]

dunno, looks to me like Taibbi´s not that much different than anybody else trying to make a buck, nobody´s perfect.

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/ ... les-errors

[President Bush]

stanky, it gets more interesting...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a597e6Wv_xg

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/meh ... defend-it/

[stanky]

dunno, looks to me like Taibbi´s not that much different than anybody else trying to make a buck, nobody´s perfect.

https://twitter.com/mehdirhasan/status/ ... les-errors

`i've seen that before. it's a smear by hasan, doing a really bad 'gotcha'. Spotting an error of mistaken significance. Taibbi explains it convincingly. Hasan since fired.

[stanky]

stanky, it gets more interesting...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a597e6Wv_xg

https://www.techdirt.com/2023/04/07/meh ... defend-it/

more of same. a bit of a dig shows who the hacks are. taibbi has a strong history of good journalism. As per the twitter files, Taibbi's partner in that reporting, michael shellenberger, has been getting around on various media interviews. Check him out if Taibbi bothers you. It's the reporting that matters, what was uncovered. It's uncomfy exposure, and as usual, the reporters must be character assassinated. While the message is ignored. Partisan government censorship is serious stuff. That it was targeted at the right bothers the left. They're supposed to be the good guys, but nah. They both suck.

[President Bush]

The youtube you posted seemed less convincing than the long interview of Taibbi I linked. I watched it twice.

I get it. Taibbi likes Elon Musk. But what was that Taibbi once said about journalists getting handed things? About not crossing that line?

What didn´t you like about the interview?

[stanky]

first, some links to another side of it:
https://www.leefang.com/p/msnbcs-mehdi- ... asic-facts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh9UzDH ... heGrayzone

Doesn't all this stuff stem from events in April? Being re-hashed?
as per Musk at his drama, not sure what he's up to beyond having fun being a celebrity these days. He seems to have turned on Matt T., accusing him of being on substack's payroll.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam ... _accusing/

Maybe i'm not up to date on this squabble, that's possible.
I am familiar with the tactics of msnbc and their ilk, in defending the Dems in their desperate need to assault any challenges to the basic narrative, which is that Biden good, Trump bad and 3rd party politics is to be ignored. It's the same tired narrative used by all the bland ex-comedians that dominate network shows like Colbert, Seth Myers; Jimmie Kimmel, Jimmie Fallon; Bill Maher, and a bunch of others, whom are handcuffed by their sponsors and their bosses. They avoid controversy, sticking to mocking Trump and co., which is easy enough to do, though after a while, feels more ,like a device to avoid news that might matter more.

Once one notices this predictable degree of avoidance of that which matters in both flavors (Fox, Msnbc) and also sees how the few journalists that challenge this M.O. are inevitably cancelled. Or worse. This even includes scholars like Noam Chomsky, whom you'll never see in the NYT or on NPR or any mainstream outlet. Snowden and Assange, of course, along with Chris hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, Aaron mate (and his dad) and others; all decorated journalists, now relegated to an 'underground' of more fringe internet shows.

My disillusionment of the Democrats is in no way an embrace of the other side of that coin. Like most lefty leaning liberal types, i already despised the right, from before Reagan. (Or even Nixon.) I've begun recognizing the propaganda infused rhetoric of both 'teams' as being essentially the same in their mutual dedication for avoiding relevant happenings that might upset their base or sponsors.

It's all the same sponsor! Let's call it "The Ramjac Corporation" in honor of K.V.

What is always lost in this, afaics, is the content of the exposures...whether it's Hillary's emails; Snowden's revelations on government lies and surveilance; Assange's wikileaks embarrassments to power, or Taibbi and others unveiling of the background censorship on social media. We tend to lose interest in that almost immediately in favor of some personal character assassination stuff. And that's damn frustrating and predictable.

Any exposure of so called left corruption, which is plentiful, is met with outrage, smokescreens, or the ever popular Russian interference.
It works, too. Who cares anymore, about how the DNC broke laws to destroy Sanders? Giving us Trump in the process. We dust ourselves off, and pledge our loyalty again, this time to an absolute farce of a candidate and platform.

Alternate voices, as usual, if they are given a mention, is only to destroy or mock them. Not new, of course. But how can we not notice this, and soundly reject it? Did no one notice, that even on NPR, Bernie Sanders was off-limits. And NPR is supposed to be non-affiliated with sponsors.
Now we see the same with RFK jr. For someone polling as high as he is, any mention of him by 'liberal' corporate sponsored media, is purely negative.

Funny that the anti-vax angle isn't working like they'd hoped, perhaps because reluctance to trust pharmaceutical's pandemic response is more wide-spread than a few fringe groups. It's now closer to a majority. The shallow labelling of critics as anti-vax or anti-semetic certainly doesn't help to change their minds. The opposite, really.

If Matt Taibbi, for whatever reason, has turned to shit after a stunning career of top notch reporting, and I missed it, I better catch up.
If otoh, msnbc and the like, are still dedicated to protecting their hopeless narrative at all costs, as the sponsors insist, then it's past time to dump that goo and move past it.
Or not.
And we get Trump or Biden. And nothing changes. It just gets worse.

I vote 'no confidence' in any easy to access news these days...unless it's generic news, like traffic wrecks and bad storms.

[President Bush]

first, some links to another side of it:
https://www.leefang.com/p/msnbcs-mehdi- ... asic-facts
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yh9UzDH ... heGrayzone

stanky, I never really paid much attention to any of this twitter files crap until you posted your youtube link couple days ago. I watched it and thought it looked like bullshit, couple guys repeating their outrage over a comment lacking any context and made by a grandstanding politician. It made me curious over what it was about.

Your first link refers somewhat to what Mehdi Hasan called Taibbi on in the clip I linked, though what your link disputes isn´t congruent to what Hasan said in my link. Taibbi admits error pretty quick, rest of that video you may have already seen...

https://youtu.be/a597e6Wv_xg?si=DLmyMogHoO9lC30m&t=992

Found this, where I think maybe that is all put more in context:

Taibbi had mixed up the timeline of the creation of the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP), the public-private project set up to monitor social media misinformation during the election, and had vastly overstated the number of tweets it had flagged for removal, from 2,890 tweets to 22 million—“Taibbi’s most consequential claim,” according to one commentator.

Most seriously, Hasan showed that in charging that the EIP “was partnered with state entities,” Taibbi had erroneously identified the Center for Internet Security (CIS), a private nonprofit—as the CISA, the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency. Adding an “A” to the end of “CIS” allowed Taibbi to make what Hasan called the “false claim” that the EIP was partnered with the government.

As the MSNBC chyron asked whether there was “proof of [a] censorship regime,” viewers were clearly left to think there wasn’t. Since then, Hasan has said that Taibbi’s false identification of the CISA “was key to his thesis.” In a widely circulated post, Techdirt charged that it had been “a key linchpin in the argument that the government was sending tweets for Twitter to remove,” concluding that “there remains no there there.” Various pundits have since repeated these points, charging the entire “scary censorship narrative” has fallen apart.

For many, this was a gratifying end to the saga: A media figure that many viewed as having gone over to the Dark Side of the conservative culture wars was taken down on live television. But reducing the matter to an episode of media comeuppance does a profound public disservice when, despite Taibbi’s errors, the convergence of social media censorship and the national security establishment is both very real and deeply worrying.

And Taibbi’s critics’ overstatements are themselves deeply misleading. Take the issue of the CIS and the CISA. While Taibbi mixed up the two in his tweet, the fact that the CISA works with the EIP isn’t remotely a “false claim”: The EIP itself openly says its “partnership with CISA began under the Trump administration.”

Meanwhile, though the CIS certainly isn’t a government entity, it’s also received a little under $250 million of US government funding since 2008—the vast majority of it from the DHS. By the CIS’s own admission, both its divisions on election security and broader cybersecurity, which work together, are funded by grants from the very same CISA in question. It openly calls its cybersecurity division a “government entity” and boasts members from “all 50 states, 49 state capitals, as well as hundreds of local governments, tribal governments, and U.S. territories.” The CIS’s president and CEO is a former US Air Force and Department of Energy official who sat on the Cyber Security Commission under Barack Obama, while its other executives and board members hail from government entities like the National Security Agency (NSA), the Pentagon, and of course, the DHS. It even has a handy infographic showing the close relationship between it and the CISA.

There’s no question that the CIS is a private nonprofit. But it’s one so intertwined with the DHS, and so deeply connected to the similarly named CISA, that the lines between private and government are awfully blurry.

https://www.thenation.com/article/socie ... rity-tech/

Doesn't all this stuff stem from events in April? Being re-hashed?
as per Musk at his drama, not sure what he's up to beyond having fun being a celebrity these days. He seems to have turned on Matt T., accusing him of being on substack's payroll.
https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam ... _accusing/

Maybe i'm not up to date on this squabble, that's possible.
I am familiar with the tactics of msnbc and their ilk, in defending the Dems in their desperate need to assault any challenges to the basic narrative, which is that Biden good, Trump bad and 3rd party politics is to be ignored. It's the same tired narrative used by all the bland ex-comedians that dominate network shows like Colbert, Seth Myers; Jimmie Kimmel, Jimmie Fallon; Bill Maher, and a bunch of others, whom are handcuffed by their sponsors and their bosses. They avoid controversy, sticking to mocking Trump and co., which is easy enough to do, though after a while, feels more ,like a device to avoid news that might matter more.

Once one notices this predictable degree of avoidance of that which matters in both flavors (Fox, Msnbc) and also sees how the few journalists that challenge this M.O. are inevitably cancelled. Or worse. This even includes scholars like Noam Chomsky, whom you'll never see in the NYT or on NPR or any mainstream outlet. Snowden and Assange, of course, along with Chris hedges, Glenn Greenwald, Max Blumenthal, Aaron mate (and his dad) and others; all decorated journalists, now relegated to an 'underground' of more fringe internet shows.

My disillusionment of the Democrats is in no way an embrace of the other side of that coin. Like most lefty leaning liberal types, i already despised the right, from before Reagan. (Or even Nixon.) I've begun recognizing the propaganda infused rhetoric of both 'teams' as being essentially the same in their mutual dedication for avoiding relevant happenings that might upset their base or sponsors.

It's all the same sponsor! Let's call it "The Ramjac Corporation" in honor of K.V.

What is always lost in this, afaics, is the content of the exposures...whether it's Hillary's emails; Snowden's revelations on government lies and surveilance; Assange's wikileaks embarrassments to power, or Taibbi and others unveiling of the background censorship on social media. We tend to lose interest in that almost immediately in favor of some personal character assassination stuff. And that's damn frustrating and predictable.

Any exposure of so called left corruption, which is plentiful, is met with outrage, smokescreens, or the ever popular Russian interference.
It works, too. Who cares anymore, about how the DNC broke laws to destroy Sanders? Giving us Trump in the process. We dust ourselves off, and pledge our loyalty again, this time to an absolute farce of a candidate and platform.

Alternate voices, as usual, if they are given a mention, is only to destroy or mock them. Not new, of course. But how can we not notice this, and soundly reject it? Did no one notice, that even on NPR, Bernie Sanders was off-limits. And NPR is supposed to be non-affiliated with sponsors.
Now we see the same with RFK jr. For someone polling as high as he is, any mention of him by 'liberal' corporate sponsored media, is purely negative.

Funny that the anti-vax angle isn't working like they'd hoped, perhaps because reluctance to trust pharmaceutical's pandemic response is more wide-spread than a few fringe groups. It's now closer to a majority. The shallow labelling of critics as anti-vax or anti-semetic certainly doesn't help to change their minds. The opposite, really.

If Matt Taibbi, for whatever reason, has turned to shit after a stunning career of top notch reporting, and I missed it, I better catch up.
If otoh, msnbc and the like, are still dedicated to protecting their hopeless narrative at all costs, as the sponsors insist, then it's past time to dump that goo and move past it.
Or not.
And we get Trump or Biden. And nothing changes. It just gets worse.

I vote 'no confidence' in any easy to access news these days...unless it's generic news, like traffic wrecks and bad storms.

Rest of your post I just quoted I won´t quibble at all with you. Nothing you are upset over is the least bit surprising to me, it is all par for the course these days.

Pretty much don´t give a shit about most of it, I never ever fucking watch television, have sworn off satellite radio news, silence is golden.

The lesson ought to be that receiving all your news from your favorite social media is like asking to get choreographed by internet algorithms. Can´t wait for AI to shake that up a little more.

Though the idea behind the narratives Taibbi came up with courtesy of Elon Musk... that the Deep State coerced twitter into fucking with the Trump campaign is still pretty funny. Maybe someday he can be good a writer as Michael Lewis.