Trump: Whiny Loser or Mad Genius?

[imthedude]

I guess both? He did sell a lot of merch on the back of this scam.

 

[snoopdoggie]

I don't know how much time passed between the hijinks at the Capitol and his statement that they should go home peacefully. I thought it was the same day, January 6.

The only reason I can think why you'd ask such a question is to support the contention that Trump hoped a violent intervention by his supporters would somehow retain the Presidency for him. Let me say again, I think the man is an idiot and that American politics would be well rid of him, but I don't see evidence to support that he is dumb enough to think that an Arkansas viking was going to wrest control of the government by force and hand it to him. It's much more likely that he wanted his cockamamie Pence scheme to frustrate the electoral vote certification.

Trump told them to go home at least 2 hours after the violence and damage was already started. He was watching the whole thing and enjoying it until someone told him, ok maybe that's enough.

It was just a violent protest. They didn't want to take over the government. Those kinds of people are just a bunch of bums who just want to sit around and drink beer. Most of them didn't even shave.

 

[LazyBoy]

Trump told them to go home at least 2 hours after the violence and damage was already started. He was watching the whole thing and enjoying it until someone told him, ok maybe that's enough.

It was just a violent protest. They didn't want to take over the government. Those kinds of people are just a bunch of bums who just want to sit around and drink beer. Most of them didn't even shave.

That last part describes me to almost a T!

 

[Sybarite]

I don't know how much time passed between the hijinks at the Capitol and his statement that they should go home peacefully. I thought it was the same day, January 6.

The only reason I can think why you'd ask such a question is to support the contention that Trump hoped a violent intervention by his supporters would somehow retain the Presidency for him. Let me say again, I think the man is an idiot and that American politics would be well rid of him, but I don't see evidence to support that he is dumb enough to think that an Arkansas viking was going to wrest control of the government by force and hand it to him. It's much more likely that he wanted his cockamamie Pence scheme to frustrate the electoral vote certification.

Yes Trump did eventually ask his insurrectionists to go home peacefully that same day well after the fact, but he never condemned the rioters that day at all, which is really remarkable and telling given everything that happened. Apparently Republican House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy had a screaming match with Trump while it was all happening to do something more during the crisis than Tweet. Some of the things Trump DID say that same day it all happened included the following:

These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been so badly & unfairly treated for so long…. remember this day forever.... I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side... It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this, where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country. We love you, you’re very special. We’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know you how feel.

It's easy to say after the fact these were obviously just a bunch of dead end revolutionary wannabe cosplay yahoos, but amongst the rabble of white supremacists and anti-Semites were militia members, weapons and guys dressed in paramilitary gear and carrying zip ties. Who is to say if the mob had come across Nancy Pelosi or even Mike Pence what would have happened to them?

 

[snoopdoggie]

Yes Trump did eventually ask his insurrectionists to go home peacefully that same day well after the fact, but he never condemned the rioters that day at all, which is really remarkable and telling given everything that happened. Apparently Republican House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy had a screaming match with Trump while it was all happening to do something more during the crisis than Tweet. Some of the things Trump DID say that same day it all happened included the following:

These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been so badly & unfairly treated for so long…. remember this day forever.... I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side... It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this, where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country. We love you, you’re very special. We’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know you how feel.

It's easy to say after the fact these were obviously just a bunch of dead end revolutionary wannabe cosplay yahoos, but amongst the rabble of white supremacists and anti-Semites were militia members, weapons and guys dressed in paramilitary gear and carrying zip ties. Who is to say if the mob had come across Nancy Pelosi or even Mike Pence what would have happened to them?

Trump doesn't have any sense to follow Al Gore's example to accept the results. Al Gore won the election in 2000 by a country mile. He never started any riots. He accepted the fact that the election was ruled in George Dubya's favour even though it was false. You can't start wars and riots. Presidents and Vice Presidents are not above the law, even though the law is not always right.

 

[Sybarite]

Trump doesn't have any sense to follow Al Gore's example to accept the results. Al Gore won the election in 2000 by a country mile. He never started any riots. He accepted the fact that the election was ruled in George Dubya's favour even though it was false. You can't start wars and riots. Presidents and Vice Presidents are not above the law, even though the law is not always right.

Al Gore could have learned a thing or two from someone like Trump who never loses. Gore didn't even realize he could have done exactly what Trump was relentlessly pressuring Pence to do: just declare yourself the victor when they officially tally the electoral votes. Sad.

 

[MrBnH]

And now the reports of imminent protests/attacks on all the State Capitol buildings on Inauguration Day...........what next ??

 

[UsefulIdiot]

And now the reports of imminent protests/attacks on all the State Capitol buildings on Inauguration Day...........what next ??

Trump and his supporters may have now alienated police, who may now treat them the same way they treat BLM. Especially since one policeman died and several were beaten, also because of the embarrassment the police have for not handling the first riot effectively in spite of many warning signs, and embarrassment at the unequal way they have treated Trumpettes and BLM people. On inauguration day one scenario is: initial large and noisy protest from a large number of Trump supporters, a few individuals escalate, the National Guard respond with tear gas and pepper balls, most of the crowd melt away, some remain and get more serious, combat ensues, many are clubbed and arrested, some are shot and a couple die. Random explosions may occur around the city and country including the homes of Pelosi, Lindsey Graham, Jim Clyburn. It has been observed that many Trump supporters who were at the riot as still in Washington. What I hope instead is that before Saturday the FBI round up all of the remaining provocateurs before more harm is done.

What I would really like to see: when Trump visits "The Border Wall" to boast about his legacy tomorrow, thousands of people drop their pants and moon him, as well as line up and take turns peeing on the wall. A boy can dream!

 

[sy barite]

Yes Trump did eventually ask his insurrectionists to go home peacefully that same day well after the fact, but he never condemned the rioters that day at all, which is really remarkable and telling given everything that happened. Apparently Republican House Minority leader Kevin McCarthy had a screaming match with Trump while it was all happening to do something more during the crisis than Tweet. Some of the things Trump DID say that same day it all happened included the following:

These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots who have been so badly & unfairly treated for so long…. remember this day forever.... I know your pain, I know you’re hurt. We had an election that was stolen from us. It was a landslide election and everyone knows it, especially the other side... It’s a very tough period of time. There’s never been a time like this, where such a thing happened, where they could take it away from all of us. From me, from you, from our country. We love you, you’re very special. We’ve seen what happens, you see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know you how feel.

It's easy to say after the fact these were obviously just a bunch of dead end revolutionary wannabe cosplay yahoos, but amongst the rabble of white supremacists and anti-Semites were militia members, weapons and guys dressed in paramilitary gear and carrying zip ties. Who is to say if the mob had come across Nancy Pelosi or even Mike Pence what would have happened to them?

As usual, our opinions turn out to be as similar as our handles.

I guess I differ only in the degree to which it is supposed these morons who stormed the Capitol knew what they were doing. Maybe I flatter myself in believing I'm taking a dispassionate view of the whole thing, but I just can't see that they had any serious intention of revolting against the Government. In their minds, they were trying to right a wrong and were acting patriotically. They thought a show of numbers and enthusiasm would stop a legal proceeding. That's not a defense, but I think it is more accurate than what we see on the news--and more importantly I don't see how it's so different from what activists have done in the past, except for perhaps the number of people involved and the building they invaded.

Question for you, are you comfortable with the degree to which conservatives are now being openly censored in the U.S.? Every major platform has now banned the pipsqueak conservative version of Twitter, Parler. There are muffled reports today of Antifa marching in major American cities, openly armed, no report of that in the news. Is that a good thing because these people are anti-Trump? Just wondering where the outrage is for that.

 

[sy barite]

Trump and his supporters may have now alienated police, who may now treat them the same way they treat BLM.

I should, but just can't let regurgitations like this go by without comment. It is so illustrative of why I believe that even with all his faults, Trump is less of a threat to Western democracy than Biden and co., The notion the police treated Trump supporters more gently than BLM and Antifa is symptomatic of a few themes that run strongly through current political thinking. Do you even reflect before repeating such garbage? After almost a solid year of city burnings, businesses destroyed, people beaten, shot and assaulted all over the U.S. by BLM and Antifa protestors, do you know how many of the those protestors were killed by police? ZERO. Were they tear gassed and so forth...of course. They deserved to be because they were violent. For your information, tear gas was also used on January 6 and a woman was shot and killed by police. But facts like these simply don't matter in today's world. People mindlessly repeat the packaged narrative provided by the media, which is overwhelmingly on one side, and feel they've understood what's going on. Biden may as well have called every cop at the Capitol site a racist when he repeated this shameful accusation.

Matt Taibi explains this better than I ever could, It's a great little read and I'm happy to share it.

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections.

Repeat this info-sifting process a few billion times and this is how we became, as none other than Mitch McConnell put it last week, a country:

Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.

The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it.

Everyone monetized Trump. The Fox wing surrendered to the Trump phenomenon from the start, abandoning its supposed fealty to “family values” from the Megyn Kelly incident on. Without a thought, Rupert Murdoch sacrificed the paper-thin veneer of pseudo-respectability Fox had always maintained up to a point (that point being the moment advertisers started to bail in horror, as they did with Glenn Beck). He reinvented Fox as a platform for Trump’s conspiratorial brand of cartoon populism, rather than let some more-Fox-than-Fox imitator like OAN sell the ads to Trump’s voters for four years.

In between its titillating quasi-porn headlines (“Lesbian Prison Gangs Waiting To Get Hands on Lindsay Lohan, Inmate Says” is one from years ago that stuck in my mind), Fox’s business model has long been based on scaring the crap out of aging Silent Majority viewers with a parade of anything-but-the-truth explanations for America’s decline. It villainized immigrants, Muslims, the new Black Panthers, environmentalists — anyone but ADM, Wal-Mart, Countrywide, JP Morgan Chase, and other sponsors of Fortress America. Donald Trump was one of the people who got hooked on Fox’s narrative.

The rival media ecosystem chose cash over truth also. It could have responded to the last election by looking harder at the tensions they didn’t see coming in Trump’s America, which might have meant a more intense examination of the problems that gave Trump his opening: the jobs that never came back after bankers and retailers decided to move them to unfree labor zones in places like China, the severe debt and addiction crises, the ridiculous contradiction of an expanding international military garrison manned by a population fast losing belief in the mission, etc., etc.

Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in favor of shoving Trump’s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything else. To juice ratings, the Trump story — which didn’t need the slightest exaggeration to be fantastic — was more or less constantly distorted.

Trump began to be described as a cause of America’s problems, rather than a symptom, and his followers, every last one, were demonized right along with him, in caricatures that tickled the urbane audiences of channels like CNN but made conservatives want to reach for something sharp. This technique was borrowed from Fox, which learned in the Bush years that you could boost ratings by selling audiences on the idea that their liberal neighbors were terrorist traitors. Such messaging worked better by far than bashing al-Qaeda, because this enemy was closer, making the hate more real.

I came into the news business convinced that the traditional “objective” style of reporting was boring, deceptive, and deserving of mockery. I used to laugh at the parade of “above the fray” columnists and stone-dull house editorials that took no position on anything and always ended, “Only one thing’s for sure: time will tell.” As a teenager I was struck by a passage in Tim Crouse’s book about the 1972 presidential campaign, The Boys in the Bus, describing the work of Hunter Thompson:

Thompson had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and meaningless, the hopeless fatigue. When other reporters went home, their wives asked them, “What was it really like?” Thompson’s wife knew from reading his pieces.

What Rolling Stone did in giving a political reporter the freedom to write about the banalities of the system was revolutionary at the time. They also allowed their writer to be a sides-taker and a rooter, which seemed natural and appropriate because biases end up in media anyway. They were just hidden in the traditional dull “objective” format.

The problem is that the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction of politicized hot-taking that reporters now lack freedom in the opposite direction, i.e. the freedom to mitigate.

If you work in conservative media, you probably felt tremendous pressure all November to stay away from information suggesting Trump lost the election. If you work in the other ecosystem, you probably feel right now that even suggesting what happened last Wednesday was not a coup in the literal sense of the word (e.g. an attempt at seizing power with an actual chance of success) not only wouldn’t clear an editor, but might make you suspect in the eyes of co-workers, a potentially job-imperiling problem in this environment.

We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would:

not be aligned with either Democrats or Republicans;

employ a Fairness Doctrine-inspired approach that discourages groupthink and requires at least occasional explorations of alternative points of view;

embrace a utilitarian mission stressing credibility over ratings, including by;

operating on a distribution model that as much as possible doesn’t depend upon the indulgence of Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Innovations like Substack are great for opinionated individual voices like me, but what’s desperately needed is an institutional reporting mechanism that has credibility with the whole population. That means a channel that sees its mission as something separate from politics, or at least as separate from politics as possible.

The media used to derive its institutional power from this perception of separateness. Politicians feared investigation by the news media precisely because they knew audiences perceived them as neutral arbiters.

Now there are no major commercial outlets not firmly associated with one or the other political party. Criticism of Republicans is as baked into New York Times coverage as the lambasting of Democrats is at Fox, and politicians don’t fear them as much because they know their constituents do not consider rival media sources credible. Probably, they don’t even read them. Echo chambers have limited utility in changing minds.

Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension the politics business. They’d then be more likely to be believed when making pronouncements about elections or masks or anything else, for that matter. Creating that kind of outlet also has a much better shot of restoring sanity to the country than the current strategy, which seems based on stamping out access to “wrong” information.

What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end.

 

[Dongo]

"Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share."
That article, like other opinions be they printed or stated holds some truth but only some. As an old guy that fits into the "silent majority category" I pride myself on being objective and fair when forming subjective opinions. What I find astounding throughout the past 4 years is to me the obvious difference in social abilities and the contribution to, and concern for, the wellbeing of society in general between these two camps. This holds true in my mind for extremists groups right and left and those who's mental capacity limits their decision making.

 

[UsefulIdiot]

I should, but just can't let regurgitations like this go by without comment. It is so illustrative of why I believe that even with all his faults, Trump is less of a threat to Western democracy than Biden and co., The notion the police treated Trump supporters more gently than BLM and Antifa is symptomatic of a few themes that run strongly through current political thinking. Do you even reflect before repeating such garbage? After almost a solid year of city burnings, businesses destroyed, people beaten, shot and assaulted all over the U.S. by BLM and Antifa protestors, do you know how many of the those protestors were killed by police? ZERO. Were they tear gassed and so forth...of course. They deserved to be because they were violent. For your information, tear gas was also used on January 6 and a woman was shot and killed by police. But facts like these simply don't matter in today's world. People mindlessly repeat the packaged narrative provided by the media, which is overwhelmingly on one side, and feel they've understood what's going on. Biden may as well have called every cop at the Capitol site a racist when he repeated this shameful accusation.

Matt Taibi explains this better than I ever could, It's a great little read and I'm happy to share it.

The moment a group of people stormed the Capitol building last Wednesday, news companies began the process of sorting and commoditizing information that long ago became standard in American media.

Media firms work backward. They first ask, “How does our target demographic want to understand what’s just unfolded?” Then they pick both the words and the facts they want to emphasize.

It’s why Fox News uses the term, “Pro-Trump protesters,” while New York and The Atlantic use “Insurrectionists.” It’s why conservative media today is stressing how Apple, Google, and Amazon shut down the “Free Speech” platform Parler over the weekend, while mainstream outlets are emphasizing a new round of potentially armed protests reportedly planned for January 19th or 20th.

What happened last Wednesday was the apotheosis of the Hate Inc. era, when this audience-first model became the primary means of communicating facts to the population. For a hundred reasons dating back to the mid-eighties, from the advent of the Internet to the development of the 24-hour news cycle to the end of the Fairness Doctrine and the Fox-led discovery that news can be sold as character-driven, episodic TV in the manner of soap operas, the concept of a “Just the facts” newscast designed to be consumed by everyone died out.

News companies now clean world events like whalers, using every part of the animal, funneling different facts to different consumers based upon calculations about what will bring back the biggest engagement kick. The Migrant Caravan? Fox slices off comments from a Homeland Security official describing most of the border-crossers as single adults coming for “economic reasons.” The New York Times counters by running a story about how the caravan was deployed as a political issue by a Trump White House staring at poor results in midterm elections.

Repeat this info-sifting process a few billion times and this is how we became, as none other than Mitch McConnell put it last week, a country:

Drifting apart into two separate tribes, with a separate set of facts and separate realities, with nothing in common except our hostility towards each other and mistrust for the few national institutions that we all still share.

The flaw in the system is that even the biggest news companies now operate under the assumption that at least half their potential audience isn’t listening. This leads to all sorts of problems, and the fact that the easiest way to keep your own demographic is to feed it negative stories about others is only the most obvious. On all sides, we now lean into inflammatory caricatures, because the financial incentives encourage it.

Everyone monetized Trump. The Fox wing surrendered to the Trump phenomenon from the start, abandoning its supposed fealty to “family values” from the Megyn Kelly incident on. Without a thought, Rupert Murdoch sacrificed the paper-thin veneer of pseudo-respectability Fox had always maintained up to a point (that point being the moment advertisers started to bail in horror, as they did with Glenn Beck). He reinvented Fox as a platform for Trump’s conspiratorial brand of cartoon populism, rather than let some more-Fox-than-Fox imitator like OAN sell the ads to Trump’s voters for four years.

In between its titillating quasi-porn headlines (“Lesbian Prison Gangs Waiting To Get Hands on Lindsay Lohan, Inmate Says” is one from years ago that stuck in my mind), Fox’s business model has long been based on scaring the crap out of aging Silent Majority viewers with a parade of anything-but-the-truth explanations for America’s decline. It villainized immigrants, Muslims, the new Black Panthers, environmentalists — anyone but ADM, Wal-Mart, Countrywide, JP Morgan Chase, and other sponsors of Fortress America. Donald Trump was one of the people who got hooked on Fox’s narrative.

The rival media ecosystem chose cash over truth also. It could have responded to the last election by looking harder at the tensions they didn’t see coming in Trump’s America, which might have meant a more intense examination of the problems that gave Trump his opening: the jobs that never came back after bankers and retailers decided to move them to unfree labor zones in places like China, the severe debt and addiction crises, the ridiculous contradiction of an expanding international military garrison manned by a population fast losing belief in the mission, etc., etc.

Instead, outlets like CNN and MSNBC took a Fox-like approach, downplaying issues in favor of shoving Trump’s agitating personality in the faces of audiences over and over, to the point where many people could no longer think about anything else. To juice ratings, the Trump story — which didn’t need the slightest exaggeration to be fantastic — was more or less constantly distorted.

Trump began to be described as a cause of America’s problems, rather than a symptom, and his followers, every last one, were demonized right along with him, in caricatures that tickled the urbane audiences of channels like CNN but made conservatives want to reach for something sharp. This technique was borrowed from Fox, which learned in the Bush years that you could boost ratings by selling audiences on the idea that their liberal neighbors were terrorist traitors. Such messaging worked better by far than bashing al-Qaeda, because this enemy was closer, making the hate more real.

I came into the news business convinced that the traditional “objective” style of reporting was boring, deceptive, and deserving of mockery. I used to laugh at the parade of “above the fray” columnists and stone-dull house editorials that took no position on anything and always ended, “Only one thing’s for sure: time will tell.” As a teenager I was struck by a passage in Tim Crouse’s book about the 1972 presidential campaign, The Boys in the Bus, describing the work of Hunter Thompson:

Thompson had the freedom to describe the campaign as he actually experienced it: the crummy hotels, the tedium of the press bus, the calculated lies of the press secretaries, the agony of writing about the campaign when it seemed dull and meaningless, the hopeless fatigue. When other reporters went home, their wives asked them, “What was it really like?” Thompson’s wife knew from reading his pieces.

What Rolling Stone did in giving a political reporter the freedom to write about the banalities of the system was revolutionary at the time. They also allowed their writer to be a sides-taker and a rooter, which seemed natural and appropriate because biases end up in media anyway. They were just hidden in the traditional dull “objective” format.

The problem is that the pendulum has swung so far in the opposite direction of politicized hot-taking that reporters now lack freedom in the opposite direction, i.e. the freedom to mitigate.

If you work in conservative media, you probably felt tremendous pressure all November to stay away from information suggesting Trump lost the election. If you work in the other ecosystem, you probably feel right now that even suggesting what happened last Wednesday was not a coup in the literal sense of the word (e.g. an attempt at seizing power with an actual chance of success) not only wouldn’t clear an editor, but might make you suspect in the eyes of co-workers, a potentially job-imperiling problem in this environment.

We need a new media channel, the press version of a third party, where those financial pressures to maintain audience are absent. Ideally, it would:

not be aligned with either Democrats or Republicans;

employ a Fairness Doctrine-inspired approach that discourages groupthink and requires at least occasional explorations of alternative points of view;

embrace a utilitarian mission stressing credibility over ratings, including by;

operating on a distribution model that as much as possible doesn’t depend upon the indulgence of Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Innovations like Substack are great for opinionated individual voices like me, but what’s desperately needed is an institutional reporting mechanism that has credibility with the whole population. That means a channel that sees its mission as something separate from politics, or at least as separate from politics as possible.

The media used to derive its institutional power from this perception of separateness. Politicians feared investigation by the news media precisely because they knew audiences perceived them as neutral arbiters.

Now there are no major commercial outlets not firmly associated with one or the other political party. Criticism of Republicans is as baked into New York Times coverage as the lambasting of Democrats is at Fox, and politicians don’t fear them as much because they know their constituents do not consider rival media sources credible. Probably, they don’t even read them. Echo chambers have limited utility in changing minds.

Media companies need to get out of the audience-stroking business, and by extension the politics business. They’d then be more likely to be believed when making pronouncements about elections or masks or anything else, for that matter. Creating that kind of outlet also has a much better shot of restoring sanity to the country than the current strategy, which seems based on stamping out access to “wrong” information.

What we’ve been watching for four years, and what we saw explode last week, is a paradox: a political and informational system that profits from division and conflict, and uses a factory-style process to stimulate it, but professes shock and horror when real conflict happens. It’s time to admit this is a failed system. You can’t sell hatred and seriously expect it to end.

Matt Taibbi makes good points about the commodification of news and the siloing of audiences into different camps but falsely implies that all sides are equally culpable. I agree with him that there is much more punditry than actual straight forward news reporting. As for you, you are trying to make a straw man argument that I support everything that the left and BLM does and am against everything the right does. I am not. To repeat myself, the more power people and institutions have, the more responsibility they have whatever their affiliation or philosophy. Those who incite or commit violence and property damage/theft should face the bar of justice regardless of which side they are on. So far law enforcement in the US has come down hard against left leaning and BLM protesters, but have not been so tough with those who are right leaning. We will see if the events of January 6 will have an affect on police response to riots by the right wing this coming weekend.

Any movement attracts both well meaning people and trouble makers, as well as non-serious people. I was disappointed when I went to my first protest - it was a protest about increases in tuition, and since I was a poor student that was a significant issue to me. I soon realized that most of the kids around me just wanted to be part of a protest and did not care much about the issue. And some of them were looking for trouble and did property damage. About ten years ago I spent time with animal rights advocates (I love meat so I was really never one of them, but I have a lot of empathy for animals). Most are gentle people who are serious about their cause, some just like being part of a social circle/dating pool, some like to smugly think of themselves as being morally superior, but there are those who really want to get into confrontations. A few idiots would shout things at protests like "fuck the police", which made the rest of us cringe and then separate ourselves from them. This was so stupid, the police for the most part were helpful and protected us from other idiots who like to be confrontational. Whatever the movements are, people come into them with unprocessed emotional baggage and some of them try to co-opt movements for their own causes, personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Let us draw the line clearly: people have a right to protest and most of them did not try to storm the Capitol Building. But those who did must be held accountable as well as their leaders and provocateurs. All sides should be really careful not to align themselves with sociopaths. As for news reporting and social media, there are many many problems that will take years to resolve, and the will to do so is not really here yet.

 

[Hornet]

So Trump’s main bank for business Deutsche Bank said they’d stop doing business with him. Trump owes them $300 million in loans. Signature bank has his personal accounts and said take a hike.

Trump reportedly dumped by lenders Deutsche Bank and Signature

Signature Bank says President Donald Trump should resign after last week's riots and Deutsche Bank is also reportedly distancing itself from him.

www.marketwatch.com

I spit out my coffee when I heard this. Most banks won’t do business with the Trumps. Deutsche Bank has a reputation of being a much more shady/dirty bank (see the link) and now they are the ones cutting ties with Donny.

Deutsche Bank's 5 biggest scandals – DW – 11/29/2018

Espionage, money laundering and interest rate scams. Germany's biggest lender has a global reputation for scandal – and has paid hefty fines and expensive settlements to make up for its wrongdoings.

www.dw.com

 

[snoopdoggie]

Trump and his supporters may have now alienated police, who may now treat them the same way they treat BLM. Especially since one policeman died and several were beaten, also because of the embarrassment the police have for not handling the first riot effectively in spite of many warning signs, and embarrassment at the unequal way they have treated Trumpettes and BLM people. On inauguration day one scenario is: initial large and noisy protest from a large number of Trump supporters, a few individuals escalate, the National Guard respond with tear gas and pepper balls, most of the crowd melt away, some remain and get more serious, combat ensues, many are clubbed and arrested, some are shot and a couple die. Random explosions may occur around the city and country including the homes of Pelosi, Lindsey Graham, Jim Clyburn. It has been observed that many Trump supporters who were at the riot as still in Washington. What I hope instead is that before Saturday the FBI round up all of the remaining provocateurs before more harm is done.

What I would really like to see: when Trump visits "The Border Wall" to boast about his legacy tomorrow, thousands of people drop their pants and moon him, as well as line up and take turns peeing on the wall. A boy can dream!

Trump will leave behind an embarrassing legacy for himself. People, 50 or 100 years from now will be reading about him in the history books, that he couldn't accept defeat and started a riot over it that killed 5 people. It's too bad, because he had the best economy of the last 50 or more years. Things sure came crashing down in the last 10 months of his term. Shame, shame.

 

[snoopdoggie]

So Trump’s main bank for business Deutsche Bank said they’d stop doing business with him. Trump owes them $300 million in loans. Signature bank has his personal accounts and said take a hike.

Trump reportedly dumped by lenders Deutsche Bank and Signature

Signature Bank says President Donald Trump should resign after last week's riots and Deutsche Bank is also reportedly distancing itself from him.

www.marketwatch.com

I spit out my coffee when I heard this. Most banks won’t do business with the Trumps. Deutsche Bank has a reputation of being a much more shady/dirty bank (see the link) and now they are the ones cutting ties with Donny.

Deutsche Bank's 5 biggest scandals – DW – 11/29/2018

Espionage, money laundering and interest rate scams. Germany's biggest lender has a global reputation for scandal – and has paid hefty fines and expensive settlements to make up for its wrongdoings.

www.dw.com

I doubt he'll even get another TV show after all this.

 

[altaguetta]

False flag 2.0

https://twitter.com/x/status/1349186206303744001

 

[kittyhound69]

I doubt he'll even get another TV show after all this.

Hit him where it hurts. Fxing love it. He will be in jail soon enough.

 

[Magicmon]

The fact that people brought zip ties, guns, dressed up in army gear and had walkie talkies on shows this was not just a bunch of bums.

 

[Hornet]

The fact that people brought zip ties, guns, dressed up in army gear and had walkie talkies on shows this was not just a bunch of bums.

Don’t forget the Molotov cocktails and pipe bombs

 

[sy barite]

Matt Taibbi makes good points about the commodification of news and the siloing of audiences into different camps but falsely implies that all sides are equally culpable. I agree with him that there is much more punditry than actual straight forward news reporting. As for you, you are trying to make a straw man argument that I support everything that the left and BLM does and am against everything the right does. I am not. To repeat myself, the more power people and institutions have, the more responsibility they have whatever their affiliation or philosophy. Those who incite or commit violence and property damage/theft should face the bar of justice regardless of which side they are on. So far law enforcement in the US has come down hard against left leaning and BLM protesters, but have not been so tough with those who are right leaning. We will see if the events of January 6 will have an affect on police response to riots by the right wing this coming weekend.

Any movement attracts both well meaning people and trouble makers, as well as non-serious people. I was disappointed when I went to my first protest - it was a protest about increases in tuition, and since I was a poor student that was a significant issue to me. I soon realized that most of the kids around me just wanted to be part of a protest and did not care much about the issue. And some of them were looking for trouble and did property damage. About ten years ago I spent time with animal rights advocates (I love meat so I was really never one of them, but I have a lot of empathy for animals). Most are gentle people who are serious about their cause, some just like being part of a social circle/dating pool, some like to smugly think of themselves as being morally superior, but there are those who really want to get into confrontations. A few idiots would shout things at protests like "fuck the police", which made the rest of us cringe and then separate ourselves from them. This was so stupid, the police for the most part were helpful and protected us from other idiots who like to be confrontational. Whatever the movements are, people come into them with unprocessed emotional baggage and some of them try to co-opt movements for their own causes, personal gain and self-aggrandizement. Let us draw the line clearly: people have a right to protest and most of them did not try to storm the Capitol Building. But those who did must be held accountable as well as their leaders and provocateurs. All sides should be really careful not to align themselves with sociopaths. As for news reporting and social media, there are many many problems that will take years to resolve, and the will to do so is not really here yet.

I think I was quite specific in my criticism of your remarks. You repeated the idea that BLM riots were treated more harshly than the Capitol hill riot and I called you on that. But I am glad to hear that you don't support everything from the Dem side.

Both sides are just about equally culpable when it comes uttering falsehoods. The problem is that the Democratic side is almost wholly supported by the vast majority of media and ALL big Tech platforms. When you see one side being held to rule of law while we make excuses for the other, then obviously the side that's getting the short end of the stick is going to lose faith in media and make it's own "truth". The media could not have betrayed itself more completely than it has.