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Read the rules in the OP before posting, please.In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up! NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action. |
On October 29 2015 03:08 Plansix wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2015 03:03 Introvert wrote:
The reporting of the WSJ is notorious for being more liberal than its editorial page.
Come on politically savy posters, you are supposed to know this type of thing! More liberal than the NYTs? Seriously, this scale is garbage and just trying to shove round pegs into square holes.
I'll just say that that freakonomics post is not the first time the WSJ has been described as far left. Actually now that I think about it, I had a professor once who made that exact point. And she was a hardcore leftist. She rated them as "incredibly liberal" or something like that.
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On October 29 2015 03:12 Introvert wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2015 03:08 Plansix wrote:On October 29 2015 03:03 Introvert wrote:
The reporting of the WSJ is notorious for being more liberal than its editorial page.
Come on politically savy posters, you are supposed to know this type of thing! More liberal than the NYTs? Seriously, this scale is garbage and just trying to shove round pegs into square holes. I'll just say that that freakonomics post is not the first time the WSJ has been described as far left. Actually now that I think about it, I had a professor once who made that exact point. And she was a hardcore leftist. She rated them as "incredibly liberal" or something like that.
My main problem with the scale and discussion is mostly the endless need for the US to reduce the complex political landscape into this binary state and scale for easy use. That there is this meter we can create that will tell us exactly what news source meets the standards of our political beliefs. And with this scale, show who avoid bias "the best" and therefore is most trustworthy via math. Square pegs into round holes.
And then it is cited as evidence to invalidate a report based solely on who published it. Fuck the report itself and its merits and flaws, that shit is complicated. Lets use this scale from another site to prove that NYT is bias and therefore report is invalid. The entire discussion started by someone trying to invalidate a major publication as propaganda because discussing the points in it was to difficult for them.
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The conversation started with a discusion of Citizens United and what counts as "press." In that case the ensuing discussion seemed entirety warranted, as this would be one of the major issues with a different ruling.
Every knows the NYT at the least leans left, so in a sense we are arguing over details. But someone wanted some sort of quantitative analysis, though to me that seems ill-fated.
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On October 29 2015 03:27 Introvert wrote:
The conversation started with a discusion of Citizens United and what counts as "press." In that case the ensuing discussion seemed entirety warranted, as this would be one of the major issues with a different ruling.
Every knows the NYT at the least leans left, so in a sense we are arguing over details. But someone wanted some sort of quantitative analysis, though to me that seems ill-fated.
And the statement that they are propaganda is hyperbolic at the least. Unless we change the definition of the word.
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On October 29 2015 02:19 Wegandi wrote:
Boehner and Ryan have always been moderate-establishment types. The "rightest of the right" in the late 90s and early 00's was always people like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul the paleo and libertarian wings of the party - both parts of the party that Ryan and Boehner were very far from. Similarly, people like Steve Stockman who had recently come back were in that vein.
Up until the he took the Speakership, Boehner was a 94 rating by the American Conservative Union. That's over 19 years of voting. That puts him in the top 1/3 of all republicans. Ryan gets a 90. Ron Paul by comparison is way down the list at around 83. Stockman is a 92.5. Buchanan has no voting record to go off of.
You are right that they both are "establishment" and will vote the party line when called to which brings those ratings down, but their rhetoric and policy proposals were, up until the Tea Party wave, among the most conservative in Congress. In any case, there is no justification for calling them RINOs or liberals. And yes, you can always find white nationalists and militia-types to the right, but in terms of actual "been elected" candidates, their conservative credentials are pretty solid.
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On October 29 2015 03:03 Introvert wrote:
The reporting of the WSJ is notorious for being more liberal than its editorial page.
Come on politically savy posters, you are supposed to know this type of thing!
Chomsky did say "they're the only ones who tell the truth" in the Manufacturing Consent movie
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On October 29 2015 03:38 frazzle wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2015 03:03 Introvert wrote:
The reporting of the WSJ is notorious for being more liberal than its editorial page.
Come on politically savy posters, you are supposed to know this type of thing! Chomsky did say "they're the only ones who tell the truth" in the Manufacturing Consent movie
Chomsky's reasoning was that businessmen needed to make risky decisions with actual money. They couldn't afford to get bad advice in service of some biased ideology (contrast with business news for plebs on CNBC or Fox Business). Even if the businessmen wanted to hear something to soothe their biases, they had too much money on the line to enjoy such calming banter. So WSJ had to put out verifiably accurate news if they wanted to cater to businessmen.
//One wonders how true this is post Murdoch.
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On October 29 2015 04:16 CannonsNCarriers wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2015 03:38 frazzle wrote:On October 29 2015 03:03 Introvert wrote:
The reporting of the WSJ is notorious for being more liberal than its editorial page.
Come on politically savy posters, you are supposed to know this type of thing! Chomsky did say "they're the only ones who tell the truth" in the Manufacturing Consent movie Chomsky's reasoning was that businessmen needed to make risky decisions with actual money. They couldn't afford to get bad advice in service of some biased ideology (contrast with business news for plebs on CNBC or Fox Business). Even if the businessmen wanted to hear something to soothe their biases, they had too much money on the line to enjoy such calming banter. So WSJ had to put out verifiably accurate news if they wanted to cater to businessmen. //One wonders how true this is post Murdoch.
Actually, my mistake, I think it was the Financial Times he said told the truth. But he does think the financial press is better than the rest of the press - "My impression in general is that the business press is more open, more free, often more critical, less constrained by external power and external influences".
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Yeah, but calling the WSJ more liberal than quite a few things on that list is ridiculous. If you have a shiny new methodology or whatever built on a bunch of *solid* underlying assumptions, you still have to perform a sanity check on the results.
If your qualitative results come out wonky and look kinda weird, it's much more likely there's either a flaw in your data, your analysis or both than you discovering a previously unknown truth about the world.
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On October 29 2015 03:36 frazzle wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2015 02:19 Wegandi wrote:
Boehner and Ryan have always been moderate-establishment types. The "rightest of the right" in the late 90s and early 00's was always people like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul the paleo and libertarian wings of the party - both parts of the party that Ryan and Boehner were very far from. Similarly, people like Steve Stockman who had recently come back were in that vein.
Up until the he took the Speakership, Boehner was a 94 rating by the American Conservative Union. That's over 19 years of voting. That puts him in the top 1/3 of all republicans. Ryan gets a 90. Ron Paul by comparison is way down the list at around 83. Stockman is a 92.5. Buchanan has no voting record to go off of. You are right that they both are "establishment" and will vote the party line when called to which brings those ratings down, but their rhetoric and policy proposals were, up until the Tea Party wave, among the most conservative in Congress. In any case, there is no justification for calling them RINOs or liberals. And yes, you can always find white nationalists and militia-types to the right, but in terms of actual "been elected" candidates, their conservative credentials are pretty solid.
The ACU is a neo-con institution. If you want a more representative score for things (and especially the so-called "far right") you'd use scorecards like Club for Growth and New American.
http://www.thenewamerican.com/freedomindex/
http://www.clubforgrowth.org/scorecards/
Besides, like I said earlier how you define these things is so nebulous. "Conservatives" in the 30s were libertarians. Anti-War, Anti-New Deal, Pro-civil liberties, etc. In the 80's they were defined by religious lunatics, the drug war, foreign wars and interventions, etc. Anyways, Boehner and Mr. TARP Ryan are establishment to their cores and have always been.
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*golfclap*
A massive Pentagon surveillance blimp broke free from its tether in Aberdeen, Maryland, outside of Washington, Wednesday. The $2.7 billion blimp -- technically an "aerostat" in the Joint Land Attack Cruise Missile Defense Elevated Netted Sensor System (JLENS) program -- is floating somewhere above Pennsylvania, The Baltimore Sun reported.
According to CNN, two F-16 fighter jets have been deployed from an Air National Guard base in Atlantic City to track the blimp. NORAD is also working with the FAA to make sure it does not get in the way of other air traffic.
Source
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I can’t decide if I care about this thing or think people are idiots because satellites and the internet exist. If the government really wants to take photos of me, they got all the options.
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MANCHESTER, N.H. — Hillary Clinton does not favor abolishing the death penalty, she said on Wednesday morning, but she does back a review of the policy as it once again becomes a topic of national conversation.
“We have a lot of evidence now that the death penalty has been too frequently applied, and too often in a discriminatory way, so I think we have to take a hard look at it,” Clinton said in response to an audience question here at Saint Anselm College, some of her most extensive comments on the topic in years.
“I do not favor abolishing it, however, because I do think there are certain egregious cases that still deserve the consideration of the death penalty, but I’d like to see those be very limited and rare, as opposed to what we’ve seen in most states,” she added.
Clinton has not weighed in extensively on the issue during the 2016 election cycle, though her main primary opponent, Bernie Sanders, has long stood against capital punishment. Clinton said while running for the Senate in 2000 that capital punishment policies had her “unenthusiastic support."
Source
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If people want to criticize the methodology they should at least know what it is. I read the paper and so I'll sum up.
The basis of the rankings is how both the press and congressmen use citations from different sources, specifically different political think tanks. The conservative/liberal score of different legislators is known based on voting records and has already been quantified. The researchers chose a spread of about 20 different legislators across the spectrum and analyzed all/a lot of the information that they put into the official record during congressional sessions, and pulled out the frequency that they cited different political thinktanks. They then did the same analysis for the newspapers. Then they could correlate the frequency of citations in the NYT and see what legislator had a citation profile that was most similar. This gives the basis of the ranking system. It's a bit more involved in the details, but that's the main thrust.
Obviously there are criticisms about the methodology but it's a valid and scientific and more importantly it is quantifiable. I would guess that not many hear have actually read all those newspapers or even a large number of articles from more than 1 or 2 of them and so the knee-jerk reactions are based on reputation and not even on anecdotal evidence.
edit: I don't care much if you have different opinion than me, but man does it irritate me when people criticize something they don't even bother to take the time to understand.
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I'm criticizing the fact that the result they produced is hardly a good indicator of the kind of bias the site was talking about, meaning that evaluating bias through this methodology is flawed. Like I said, arguing that the NYT is more biased in favor of the liberal viewpoint than Fox News is with regards to the conservative viewpoint is laughable.
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Lets not even get into the fact that claimed that: "Aside from the fact that many intelligent people can see that a lot of the NYT articles are in fact blatant propaganda" shows further argument as totally disingenuous and not based in reality. And evidence you provided didn't even back up the claim you were trying to make.
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On October 28 2015 21:56 oneofthem wrote:
obviously the existence of 'free' media that influence elections is not an argument against reining in campaign financing, but when you really get down to it, the so called Main Stream Media and for that matter the Party system is still decent at filtering out pure lunacy. like it or not there are a great number of loonies on either left and right in this country and yet advocates of the ideal money free public financed campaign system (assuming no official corruption, which means less gating power for govt and thus more or less free entry system of ideas) tend to imagine a well ordered public sphere of ideas as a result.
I think the loonie centrists are the most terrifying of all of them. I do not feel at all made safer by the "moderating influence" of mainstream electoral politics. That's what scares me the most.
On October 29 2015 05:34 kwizach wrote:
I'm criticizing the fact that the result they produced is hardly a good indicator of the kind of bias the site was talking about, meaning that evaluating bias through this methodology is flawed. Like I said, arguing that the NYT is more biased in favor of the liberal viewpoint than Fox News is with regards to the conservative viewpoint is laughable.
the idea that there are two viewpoints,"liberal" and "conservative," is part of the propaganda
On October 29 2015 04:57 ticklishmusic wrote:
Yeah, but calling the WSJ more liberal than quite a few things on that list is ridiculous.
when you look in the encyclopedia under liberalism it says "see WSJ"
On October 29 2015 02:19 Wegandi wrote:
This forum is an echo chamber for people on the "progressive" scale for all sorts of ridiculous claims about the GOP and the "right" (which seems to be so nebulous as to make it useless just like terms like "left" and "center"), like the above, to advance whatever preconditioned viewpoints and outcomes regardless of fact. The GOP sucks as much as the Democrats, but the partisanship on this forum is laughably bad.
LOL. The center of gravity on this forum is very conservative.
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Its actually funny how conservatives/libertarians see the AVERAGE forum on the internet as extremly liberal... Someone should take the time and show them all the "Breitbarts" and stuff like that for the left. The ones that look as strange to "normal" people as the stuff they themselves like to link on the other side of the political spectrum.
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On October 29 2015 05:05 Wegandi wrote:Show nested quote +On October 29 2015 03:36 frazzle wrote:On October 29 2015 02:19 Wegandi wrote:
Boehner and Ryan have always been moderate-establishment types. The "rightest of the right" in the late 90s and early 00's was always people like Pat Buchanan and Ron Paul the paleo and libertarian wings of the party - both parts of the party that Ryan and Boehner were very far from. Similarly, people like Steve Stockman who had recently come back were in that vein.
Up until the he took the Speakership, Boehner was a 94 rating by the American Conservative Union. That's over 19 years of voting. That puts him in the top 1/3 of all republicans. Ryan gets a 90. Ron Paul by comparison is way down the list at around 83. Stockman is a 92.5. Buchanan has no voting record to go off of. You are right that they both are "establishment" and will vote the party line when called to which brings those ratings down, but their rhetoric and policy proposals were, up until the Tea Party wave, among the most conservative in Congress. In any case, there is no justification for calling them RINOs or liberals. And yes, you can always find white nationalists and militia-types to the right, but in terms of actual "been elected" candidates, their conservative credentials are pretty solid. The ACU is a neo-con institution. If you want a more representative score for things (and especially the so-called "far right") you'd use scorecards like Club for Growth and New American. http://www.thenewamerican.com/freedomindex/http://www.clubforgrowth.org/scorecards/Besides, like I said earlier how you define these things is so nebulous. "Conservatives" in the 30s were libertarians. Anti-War, Anti-New Deal, Pro-civil liberties, etc. In the 80's they were defined by religious lunatics, the drug war, foreign wars and interventions, etc. Anyways, Boehner and Mr. TARP Ryan are establishment to their cores and have always been.
Talk about propaganda, lol, "The Freedom Index". Gotta make sure you rate high on that one.
Of course terms like liberal, conservative, rightist, leftist are ham-handed, loaded, even propagandistic terms themselves. Your use of "Neo-con" is totally loaded with assumptions and means one thing to you and something somewhat different to me. I myself take umbrage at being called a liberal or leftist because my view on things were not arrived at through identification with a group, but rather issue by issue considering the merits. I haven't had the pleasure of reviewing your post history, but I'm going to guess you have been much more concerned with nuances in the definitions of terms used to describe "the right" than you are with those same nuances for "the left". That is fine. I accept being called liberal or left and move on. In the context of short posts like these you can't waste too much text defining any topic, you have to use a common term and hope the baggage the term carries, and the subtle connotations it has for every different audience, aren't too far off so as to fail to get across the gist of your argument.
The gist of my point had been that a few years ago, Boehner/Ryan were considered pretty solidly right of center. I was wrong to call them the rightest of the right. Since that time a John Birch society style, radically anti-govt, pro-gun, often isolationist branch of the right has seen an ascendancy to power after being marginalized for decades. So, basically a large tract of philosophical space that had previously been sparsely populated has been legitimized and seen its influence grow dramatically at the expense of the right-of-center. Meanwhile on the left, I don't think there has been much change. So now there is what seems to us more on the left this crazy situation where folks like Boehner and Ryan are called out as RINOs. You may not see this as out of bounds since you see yourself occupying this previously sparsely populated philosophical space, but to the rest of us it seems pretty off base.
You may take issue with some of the terms I am using, or that the space was sparsely populated, or whatever. But you see the point, right?
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On October 29 2015 06:09 frazzle wrote:
Talk about propaganda, lol, "The Freedom Index". Gotta make sure you rate high on that one.
I have sat through presentations by social scientists which use the "Freedom Index" as a way to "measure the amount of Freedom in a country." I just sort of sat there being astounded. Social scientists are idiots.
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EPT
