You’re perpetuating the casual bigotry of low expectations again, Armando.
These people, faced with deadly enough traps, will be forced to rise to the occasion. Their natural, imbecilic instincts will be allowed to flourish, and they’ll be murdering themselves by the truckloads. And if someone continues to survive the traps, maybe we just need to face the tough question, “Does this person REALLY deserve to die?”
I mean, sure, it’s all well and good to say that everyone deserves death, but the reality is that a horrific death is something that sometimes you need to work for. Nowhere in our constitution does it define a tortuous demise as a god given right.
Seriously; Futurama ramped right up to 11 and almost never let off the gas.
Even my favorite TV comedy of all time, Community, didn’t really hit its stride till episode 3 (where Abed makes a documentary about his parent’s divorce). Although that episode’s one of my favorite pieces of television ever made . .
Something you will never see on CNN or the major networks- an example of critical journalism. Now, Reid is obviously anti-Trump, but does that change the facts?
Apparently Fox took the nothingburger meme to an entirely different level.
Comment from a different forum:
If you were wondering how the “liberal media” is going to bothsides this story this push notification I just received on my phone from WaPo gives a good clue:
The Washington Post
Mueller probe shakes both parties with Tony Podesta, whose brother led Hillary Clinton’s campaign, leaving his lobbying firm.
I did it because I didn’t feel like the frequency of Trump’s dishonesty was being sufficiently communicated by mainstream media coverage,” Dale wrote by email. “Reporters were doing a decent job calling out his deception on Twitter, but if you were just to read their final story or watch their final segment on the evening news, the lying wouldn’t usually make the cut – the story would be ‘Trump talked health care today’ rather than ‘Trump said 20 false things today.’ I wanted to focus on the dishonesty itself, as I thought it was its own story.”
Another day, another news outlet treating the Trump campaign’s “collusion” with Russia as an unresolved question. Here’s why that’s absurd.
In 1980 someone stole debate prep papers from Jimmy Carter, sent it to the Reagan campaign and Reagan used the inside info to his advantage.
It turned into a big scandal, drawn out years into Reagan’s presidency. There were congressional investigations, DOJ got involved, etc.
They called it Debategate. You can even read about it in The Failing New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/1983/07/16/us/reagan-aides-say-only-one-protested-use-of-carter-notes.html
Twenty years later, something similar happened, when the Gore campaign received videotaped debate prep stolen from George W. Bush.
Except memories were longer then, and so instead of cheating, the person who received the tapes had his lawyer send the package to the FBI.
You can also read that story in The Failing New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2000/09/14/us/the-2000-campaign-the-debate-gore-aide-receives-then-lets-go-of-hot-potato.html
The main similarity between the two stories is that Reagan and Gore were judged by what they did with the goods after they received them.
These would have been much different stories if the thieves had approached the Reagan and Gore campaigns in advance…
…and asked whether the materials would be useful.
The story would have be that Reagan aides had connived with thieves to sabotage Carter’s debate performance.
But this is precisely what members of the Trump campaign did on multiple occasions, but with Russian spies.
The spies asked “would this stolen information be helpful to you,” and the Trump campaign said yes. Or “I love it!” if you prefer.
The cooperation could be more extensive and run deeper, but it’s well documented at this point.
So far as we know, the stolen information was only put to “use” by publishing it online.
But that doesn’t negate the fact that it was done to sabotage Clinton, and at Trump’s behest.
It’s easy to imagine other, more involved forms of collusion. But that doesn’t make what we know less definitive.
And that’s why I think media hedges–“possible collusion,” etc.–have outlived their usefulness, and aren’t actually informing news consumers.
The end.
It would be really damning if they ever found Trump’s campaign asking the Russians to provide them with certain information. But Trump’s campaign was probably too stupid to even know what to ask for, so I doubt that will happen.
There’s enough information in the public record alone to demonstrate that at a bare minimum the trump campaign attempted to co-operate with Russia for damaging information on their political opponent. Probably safe to assume the Mueller investigation knows far more than the public at this point.
As an aside, most media have phrased it “tried to get dirt on Hillary Clinton.” Note how the tone changes if instead they said “The Trump campaign sought to conspire with an adversarial foreign government to damage their American political opponent.” Both are technically accurate, but one lessens the impact (albeit unintentionally. Probably.)
The MSM, and especially the New York Times, did this to Gore, Kerry and went turbo mode against Clinton.
And as Lemieux observes, the same will most likely happen again in 2020
From LGM: The Clinton Rules Still Apply
The most important “news outlet” that pushed the false implication that donations to the Clinton Foundation were linked to the approval of the Uranium One deal, although Clinton had no authority over the deal and there is not a shred of evidence that she was involved in any way, was…the New York Times. Their refusal to acknowledge their mistake is why they keep making the same mistakes. And don’t kid yourself — they can do the same thing to any Democratic nominee in 2020. Donald Trump is going to produce a lot of material to create a need for fake balance so that “nobody can say we aren’t being aggressive on this,” after all.
For those that only read sentences in paragraph form:
The NYT Nazi fluff text is only further proof that, at a fundamental level, large segments of the US intelligentsia do not appreciate the existential crisis now facing their republic. In short, they’re not actually concerned — and they really should be. You can only really write pieces like that if you’re convinced that the violence which these extremists represent, and engineer, will never touch you. Likely because you’re white, wealthy, and mobile and they’ll probably target vulnerable, static “minorities”. The form is very familiar to me from the Balkans.
It was rampant during the 1990s: Karadzic gave interviews to Western media every other day, there’s hours of footage. In the meantime, he was murdering thousands. But hey, dead Bosnians are so “other” and his English was great. Now the fascists are in the US, they’re in the UK, they’re in the EU and sober ur-journalists roll their eyes at the alarmists who tell you that the normalization of extremism, illiberalism, and violence never ends well — not even in established democratic regimes. But trust your gut: trust that sick, queasy feeling you’ve had for months, trust your anxiety, and trust the fear you see in your neighbors eyes.
All is not well, and everything won’t be OK. Not unless both ordinary citizens and responsible politicians act today. Don’t go down the road where the normalization of hate speech leads to (more) deaths and then tit-for-tat reprisals. That’s when the wheels truly fall off and no think people piece will help then. And we’re too close to that as it is. Closer than the NYT can admit. /xx
(Another tool to go along with Threadbare to summarize twitter threads: Spooler )
