Politics thread (USA Elections 2016) - Page 79

On June 23 2018 23:50 Stroggoz wrote: There is media that is owned by capitalists, (like NYT, FOX news, CNN, ect), and there is media owned by states (RT, Telesur, Aljazeera), and then there is media that exists outside of power structures, and is supported by donations. (Democracy Now, Real News Network). You can make predictions on what the news is going to be and who it's going to be favourable to.

Problem is most of the media/journalism that's deemed independent is anything but. The power structure is just concealed, in that you don't see where the donations are coming from and what script the person is reading from. It's also taking place within a multinational corporate environment most of the time, e.g. YouTube, which has a very strong and rigid power structure, and it has to follow the trends and whatever sells the most, they are not interested in reality (case in point, Tim Pool, aka "my hat is just my style" from a few posts up). If they are donation-driven it just gives the illusion that they are reporting things matter-of-factly to centrists/liberals who are not aware of the good news sources.

On June 24 2018 19:18 Loco wrote: Show nested quote + On June 23 2018 23:50 Stroggoz wrote: There is media that is owned by capitalists, (like NYT, FOX news, CNN, ect), and there is media owned by states (RT, Telesur, Aljazeera), and then there is media that exists outside of power structures, and is supported by donations. (Democracy Now, Real News Network). You can make predictions on what the news is going to be and who it's going to be favourable to. Problem is most of the media/journalism that's deemed independent is anything but. The power structure is just concealed, in that you don't see where the donations are coming from and what script the person is reading from. It's also taking place within a multinational corporate environment most of the time, e.g. YouTube, which has a very strong and rigid power structure, and it has to follow the trends and whatever sells the most, they are not interested in reality (case in point, Tim Pool, aka "my hat is just my style" from a few posts up). If they are donation-driven it just gives the illusion that they are reporting things matter-of-factly to centrists/liberals who are not aware of the good news sources.

I agree with you, the two that i cited i guess are exceptional because the journalists their put their principles above money. I don't think many rich people would donate money without conditions, since they don't share the the values with those on democracy now, and other similar news outlets.

On June 24 2018 03:08 Baalim wrote: pretty weird that you didnt mention wikileaks in the independent media that exist out of power structures since its by far the main one and the only that has hit the status quo so hard that Assange has been in hiding for many years now. The way you phrase that is as if you believed that the wealthy see no productivity in young black people so they imprision them and put them in slavery... instead of that simply being the result of state overreach with paternalistic laws that "protect the public from itself" like prohibitionism

The one's who benefit from mass incarceration are private prison corporations. They are making mad $$ off this. I don't see any paternalistic justifications over this, it's all about fear, mainstream crimonologists document that crime has gone down, but media coverage of crime has gone up, and the public largely thinks crime has gone up because of this. (polling has been done on the topic.) and new terms like 'superpredator' were invented by hack experts that go on the mainstream media when mass incarceration was rising at it's peak, under Bill Clinton.

So it has a dual effect of making people afraid that black people are gona rape their teenage daughter, and also making money for private prisons. Politicians have certainly capitalised on this with what's called 'penal populism', promising harsher sentences to get their party more votes.

I bet u anything that there is a strong correlation between people in safe neighbourhoods purchasing more security alarm systems as media coverage of crime increased.

On June 23 2018 23:50 Stroggoz wrote: There is no way Trump is going to have a positive effect on the media from what i can see; he has pushed 'the news' towards having the media focus on the crazy things he says. I think he smart enough to know that saying crazy things creates a spectacle which forces profit driven media to focus on such a spectacle. His antics have made the media a bit more superficial than they already were, driving it away from the important issues.

In a nutshell what I mean is that Trump lures the left media into a situation where they blindly attack him and he could easily defend himself and completely discredit them, meaning they would actually have to start using their brains and start doing some actual journalism at some point. Then again the whole situation right now seems quite absurd, it's like a zoo orchestra led by a monkey. I don't mean the media will be pushed toward unbias and truthful journalism, that'll never happen, the media is a huge instrument of control, how many people in a position of power would freely give that up or not aim to establish control over it? Unless something fundamentally changes in our social hierarchy and nature this will always work like that, information feeds have been manipulated since ancient times most likely.

Anyway him forcing them to the point of being even more superficial is whats fascinating, cause he will push them towards that rock bottom, which is quite needed at this point. It's pure absurdity and I doubt I only see that cause im cynical, left media has basically become a yellow media .. its that bad

because Mexico has 120+ million habitants and I dont see a rason why anybody in the working class simply not going to the US making 10x more money, how is that not obvious to you?

The thing is this - they already have tons of illegal immigrants and they absolutely need them. They will keep receiving new illegal immigrants unless the border patrol is quadrupled and given orders to shoot on sight. I'm not saying to make it legal to just go there for whatever reason or make it public that they're accepting everyone freely but to rather ease up the process. I'd also refuse to give any sort of financial aid to any new immigrants, but I'm going into details now, anyway the "immigration" problem of the USA seems like a complex topic, but it's not like they don't need the human resource...

Bulgaria absolutely needs illegal immigrants

Here's 11 million

Jesus Christ, Don't come to the US illegally. Pick a safe city in your own country. Couldn't give less of a fuck about some illegal alien kids.

lets also release all criminals from prisons a lot of them got separated from kids ...

On June 24 2018 22:52 Stroggoz wrote: Show nested quote + On June 24 2018 03:08 Baalim wrote: pretty weird that you didnt mention wikileaks in the independent media that exist out of power structures since its by far the main one and the only that has hit the status quo so hard that Assange has been in hiding for many years now. The way you phrase that is as if you believed that the wealthy see no productivity in young black people so they imprision them and put them in slavery... instead of that simply being the result of state overreach with paternalistic laws that "protect the public from itself" like prohibitionism The one's who benefit from mass incarceration are private prison corporations. They are making mad $$ off this. I don't see any paternalistic justifications over this, it's all about fear, mainstream crimonologists document that crime has gone down, but media coverage of crime has gone up, and the public largely thinks crime has gone up because of this. (polling has been done on the topic.) and new terms like 'superpredator' were invented by hack experts that go on the mainstream media when mass incarceration was rising at it's peak, under Bill Clinton. So it has a dual effect of making people afraid that black people are gona rape their teenage daughter, and also making money for private prisons. Politicians have certainly capitalised on this with what's called 'penal populism', promising harsher sentences to get their party more votes. I bet u anything that there is a strong correlation between people in safe neighbourhoods purchasing more security alarm systems as media coverage of crime increased.

Mass incarceration benefits private prisons corporations, but that is very different than saying "the wealthy" see no productivity in blacks so they put them into slavery, if you make 1M a year you do this? or 10M? or perhaps its just the people in private prisons in cahoots with the government?


You and Loco go on and on about media only pursuing profit, yet think they force feed fear or whatever into citizens... if the media sells fear is because the people are buying it, people dont "buy the paper" to see irrelevant shit, they want to see the apocalypse that is coming: "fascism is coming to america! Trump is literally hitler!. look at this ominous Trump standing next to a crying kid!"

On June 25 2018 10:50 maryn wrote: lets also release all criminals from prisons a lot of them got separated from kids ...

nobody suggested this, there is a difference between a criminal commiting a crime and a family fleeing poverty in search for better living conditions, these reductionist is idiotic and below the level of discussion of this thread gtfo

On June 25 2018 07:31 jax5466 wrote: Couldn't give less of a fuck about some illegal alien kids.

good for you buddy.

Adults who actually care about suffering and the human condition are having a dicussion you clearly are not fit to have

On June 24 2018 23:08 Spitfiree wrote: The thing is this - they already have tons of illegal immigrants and they absolutely need them. They will keep receiving new illegal immigrants unless the border patrol is quadrupled and given orders to shoot on sight. I'm not saying to make it legal to just go there for whatever reason or make it public that they're accepting everyone freely but to rather ease up the process. I'd also refuse to give any sort of financial aid to any new immigrants, but I'm going into details now, anyway the "immigration" problem of the USA seems like a complex topic, but it's not like they don't need the human resource...

The US has 300M habitants and has one of the highest birthrates of any developed country, it doesnt need migration, of course if you dissapeared all illegal immigrants their economy would collapse but thats not an argument that they need them, its an argument for what massive sudden changes do to an economy.

Countries rarely benefit from the migration of low-skilled poor people especially when your country offers a social safety net, naturally you will increase the load and its non sustainable, that is why I was asking Loco abou this anarcho collectivist utopia borders, because the only way to eliminates borders is if the state doesnt offer welfare.


The easier the process is the more migrants they will have, simple as that, but yes the process is retardedly slow and inefficient for deportation and legal migration, but that is the nature of the state, friction through bureaucreacy, so people who can contribute can't migrate legally, millions of illegals get through and the ones that get caught get mistreated horribly.

On June 25 2018 20:58 Baalim wrote: Show nested quote + On June 24 2018 22:52 Stroggoz wrote:   On June 24 2018 03:08 Baalim wrote: pretty weird that you didnt mention wikileaks in the independent media that exist out of power structures since its by far the main one and the only that has hit the status quo so hard that Assange has been in hiding for many years now. The way you phrase that is as if you believed that the wealthy see no productivity in young black people so they imprision them and put them in slavery... instead of that simply being the result of state overreach with paternalistic laws that "protect the public from itself" like prohibitionism The one's who benefit from mass incarceration are private prison corporations. They are making mad $$ off this. I don't see any paternalistic justifications over this, it's all about fear, mainstream crimonologists document that crime has gone down, but media coverage of crime has gone up, and the public largely thinks crime has gone up because of this. (polling has been done on the topic.) and new terms like 'superpredator' were invented by hack experts that go on the mainstream media when mass incarceration was rising at it's peak, under Bill Clinton. So it has a dual effect of making people afraid that black people are gona rape their teenage daughter, and also making money for private prisons. Politicians have certainly capitalised on this with what's called 'penal populism', promising harsher sentences to get their party more votes. I bet u anything that there is a strong correlation between people in safe neighbourhoods purchasing more security alarm systems as media coverage of crime increased. Mass incarceration benefits private prisons corporations, but that is very different than saying "the wealthy" see no productivity in blacks so they put them into slavery, if you make 1M a year you do this? or 10M? or perhaps its just the people in private prisons in cahoots with the government? You and Loco go on and on about media only pursuing profit, yet think they force feed fear or whatever into citizens... if the media sells fear is because the people are buying it, people dont "buy the paper" to see irrelevant shit, they want to see the apocalypse that is coming: "fascism is coming to america! Trump is literally hitler!. look at this ominous Trump standing next to a crying kid!"

a lot of the news media works like this: audiences are products, the market is advertisers. audiences are sold to advertisers. Advertisers want rich audiences sold to them, (no point in advertising to people with no money). TV is free, you usually don't have to pay anything to watch it. The media still does want a bigger, richer, audience to sell to the advertisers. So yes, that's why you get it focusing on the spectacles you mention. But historically the media with larger audiences have gone out of business to ones with smaller but richer audiences, since advertisers didn't support the former. This has been studied by some academic called james curran and is cited in the first chapter of manufacturing consent.

The media has both class interests to protect and money to make. There is cross share ownership between corporations so yes the super wealthy have common interests. The media would surely deliberately take a profit loss if it means protecting the class interests. A lot of what chomsky says has a popular demand but he never gets op eds in the new york times, for any topics related to politics and especially foreign policy. And that's for obvious reasons, it goes against the class interests.

I'm not sure if fear sells or not, I'm not sure if it has been studied, i suspect it does, but it wasn't part of my argument. I was saying I think the state locks black men up and it serves a purpose of making the public afraid. Which is a good way of controlling people, as has been known since aristotle.

Imo the whole war on drugs is about cleansing certain people from society that are superfluous to capitalism. Crack cocaine has a much harsher penalty than powder cocaine, basically the same drug. But notice also how the police never seem to raid wall street and put executives in jail on drug posession charges, but black men in the ghetto are. Crystal meth is largely used by poor white people that also don't serve capitalisms interests, but it is in fact a very similar drug to adderall; the high is indistinguishable according to neuoscientists. (they get drug addicts to take both). But adderall is used by students from well off families, so they aren't put in jail. In 19th century Britain, Gin was criminalized while whisky wasn't, the main difference being Gin was a drink of the poor while whisky was a drink of the rich. And yeah don't get me started on cannibas.

the state does not imprison black men to spread fear, and control people through fear, the government isn't run efficiently and machiavellianly at that level, quite the opposite, its too big, too dumb and fragmented to operate like that, it operates more like a headless chicken, black men are imprisoned because old dumb men declared "the war on drugs".

Crack cocaine is punished harsher than powder coke not because its a conspiracy, but for the same reason alcohol is legal and weed isn't, its because drug laws aren't rational but based upon the reflection of the ignorant perception of people, people saw crack was a worse drug than coke because they associate a teethless hobo sleeping on a bench with it, and coke with functional people, its not a conspiracy to imprison poor people.



On the subject of media, people being the product is a half truth, the product is the content that is designed to attract the most viewers as possible, hence they dictate the content (in this case fear), also wanting rich people to watch isn't necesarely ideal, it depends on what you are selling, the income of the person doesnt have much impact if you are selling coca-cola, if you are selling a house then it does, naturally a high earning person will have more value than a lower one, but it is also more expensive to capture so its not always the best strategy as a media to go for high earning viewers.

Drug laws have been designed with an agenda beyond 'how dangerous they look based on the deterioration of the user'. I recall nixon admin speaking quite openly about using weed criminalization to break up the anti-war / vietnam / hippie / black civil rights movement of the early 70s, and I'm pretty certain crack was targeted so harshly to enable them to deal with (black) gangs in the 80s, where drug use was the only thing they could target members based on. These aren't conspiracies, the first is confirmed and the second is perfectly rational (and reflected in 5g crack giving same punishment as a kilo of cocaine or whatever it was).

I agree that government generally isn't run Machiavellian like this. Especially in the US, politics are band-aids supposed to correct gross flaws, not control societal direction. (This is one of the most significant ways Trump represents something new for american politicians, even if I completely disagree with his preferred direction.)

Well yes and cotton industry was afraid of hemp and they lobbied to get prohibition but to stop anti-war advocates and target gangs is very different than "the wealthy want to slave young black men because they aren't very productive".

Hell I consider myself a misanthrope but not even I think that "the wealthy" want to literally slave people, and whats even more crazy is thinking that people are that mounstrous yet advocate for collectivism.

I don't really subscribe to the idea that the american judiciary system is designed to enslave blacks, I think that's an incidental consequence of other abhorrent policies. I definitely think racism is alive and well, and the american judiciary system is one of the primary examples of this, but I don't think it's deliberately enslaving black people. iirc only a fairly small percentage of american prisons are privately driven / profit based (they've still influenced policy and lobbied for 3 strikes and you're out etc, but for profit-prisons, as terrible as I think they are, are actually pretty low on my list of what needs fixing regarding the american penal system).

aside from that, no conflict between thinking some people are that monstrous and advocating collectivism. Removing / reducing hierarchical power structures would mean that monstrous individuals would not be able to attain enough power to inflict damage on a larger group of people.

various forms of collectivism also generally presume that there's a transition period where education focuses on installing a collectivist attitude. Not 'brainwashing', but stuff like focusing on cooperation rather than competition, highlighting effort rather than performance, promoting participation rather than winning. So it's presumed that selfishness is gonna be less of a societal problem. And I mean I accept that some degree of self-servitude is inherent in humans, but it's still largely cultural - murcans are more 'greed-driven' than scandinavians are

Agreed with your first paragraph.


The problem is that they didnt single out a few monsters, it was quite the opposite, it was painted with the broadest brush as possible, praphrasing, the wealthy want to slave young black males, if such thing were remotely true, if such a big portion of society were that mounstrous any concept of a collectivist utopia would be laughable, unless you have that blank slateism belief that people are absolutely plastic, but then you would believe two equally stupid things.

Its important to notice that the biggest power structure, the biggest corporation is the state, and its also the most corrupt and the less meritocratic, hence most world leaders could be described as psychopaths, most regular people with a conscience wouldn't sanction wars on profit or geopolitical influence, this is the structure and the people that need to go. The state is the ladder where the unscrupulous, the power-hungry and untalented rise to power.

This was covered by Reuters too.


Mainstream media have zero credibility, hopefully Elon Musk keeps his promise

all governments are run for the benefit of elite interests. elite interests in America, whether it's business or state elites, have designs to control the public. That's a large part of the functional role of public relations. We know this because they have been very open about it; they have written books on it, like the grand chessboard, or the numerous writings on their intent to control the public with PR/propaganda. I havn't really got any documents for the prison industrial complex where they outright explain their designs, but it would be consistent with the overall goals of state/corporations. The wealthy are not a big portion of society. When i use that term i mean elites-1% of the population or less. For the most part they share class values. Actors at the top of states and corporations have pretty similar values; since presidents are essentially bought with campaign finance, they really have to share the values of those who finance them. Again, it is rather obvious that the war on drugs is designed to enslave poor blacks since that's who the police are targeting. it's more about class than race really, though race is a big part of it. if a black guy lives in an upper middle class suburb, the police stay away from those areas, they arn't going to have any trouble if they go home and sniff cocaine every night[. I doubt that the state is too ignorant about the health effects of drugs. Most actors in the state are well educated. Neither is the republican party ignorant about climate change. Rex tillerson obviously knew about climate change being man made, his corporation knew that many decades ago.

I don't think rex tillerson claimed that it wasn't man made when he was SoS for a regime that claims ignorance though? He seems to have been much more guilty in this regard as ceo of a corporation than he was as a politician.

But no I think the war on drugs was designed to break up various movements that were seen as threatening to the state(us quo). Not to enslave blacks.