US Politics Mega-thread - Page 8989

On October 14 2017 01:26 Mohdoo wrote:


Consider how many of these sub-par rural folks blame big government for their low wages and inability to support a family.

On October 14 2017 02:24 LegalLord wrote:
The US is a country where you can buy out of the shittiness of government with sufficient money, e.g. some of the best healthcare in the world is available to moneyed individuals. I assume those will weather the storm of a shit healthcare system.

Obamacare is a stopgap. It is not a sustainable long term solution. It will die eventually, but unfortunately the folk in power can only make worse. But it helps the most vulnerable individuals at the cost of everyone else and that can't last forever.

On October 14 2017 02:36 Plansix wrote:
That is the basic concept of insurance. The system prior to the ACA was just as broken and would be super broken if it was in place today.

On October 14 2017 02:33 Yurie wrote:


Isn't that the basic idea behind a centralised healthcare system? The masses pay for the high costs of the individual. It is a lottery since most people lose money on it but you don't know the result until the drawing at end of life.

On October 14 2017 02:50 Plansix wrote:
Single payer is a long way off and won't work if states continue to fuck with the system in an effort to destroy what they see as goverment healthcare.

Edit: Trump said we get to say "Marry Christmas" this year. Because I was waiting for the government's approval on what to say.

On October 14 2017 03:03 Mohdoo wrote:
The whole war on Christmas thing is brain dead, but people getting whiny about someone saying Merry Christmas is also brain dead. Perhaps even more brain dead. You have to be mind bogglingly shitty to correct someone to say "actually, I don't celebrate christmas"

On October 14 2017 03:04 IyMoon wrote:


The war on christmas isnt that people care that you say merry christmas... It is that some people who say merry christmas lose their mind over someone saying happy holidays

In late 2014, The Daily Dot called attention to an obscure Facebook-produced case study on how strategists defeated a statewide measure in Florida by relentlessly focusing Facebook ads on Broward and Dade counties, Democratic strongholds. Working with a tiny budget that would have allowed them to send a single mailer to just 150,000 households, the digital-advertising firm Chong and Koster was able to obtain remarkable results. “Where the Facebook ads appeared, we did almost 20 percentage points better than where they didn’t,” testified a leader of the firm. “Within that area, the people who saw the ads were 17 percent more likely to vote our way than the people who didn’t. Within that group, the people who voted the way we wanted them to, when asked why, often cited the messages they learned from the Facebook ads.”

At The Atlantic, we ran a series of experiments that showed, pretty definitively from our perspective, that most of the stuff that looked like “dark social” was, in fact, traffic coming from within Facebook’s mobile app. Across the landscape, it began to dawn on people who thought about these kinds of things: Damn, Facebook owns us. They had taken over media distribution.

Why? This is a best guess, proffered by Robinson Meyer as it was happening: Facebook wanted to crush Twitter, which had drawn a disproportionate share of media and media-figure attention. Just as Instagram borrowed Snapchat’s “Stories” to help crush the site’s growth, Facebook decided it needed to own “news” to take the wind out of the newly IPO’d Twitter.

Through this messy, chaotic, dynamic situation, a new media rose up through the Facebook burst to occupy the big filter bubbles. On the right, Breitbart is the center of a new conservative network. A study of 1.25 million election news articles found “a right-wing media network anchored around Breitbart developed as a distinct and insulated media system, using social media as a backbone to transmit a hyper-partisan perspective to the world.”

Breitbart, of course, also lent Steve Bannon, its chief, to the Trump campaign, creating another feedback loop between the candidate and a rabid partisan press. Through 2015, Breitbart went from a medium-sized site with a small Facebook page of 100,000 likes into a powerful force shaping the election with almost 1.5 million likes. In the key metric for Facebook’s News Feed, its posts got 886,000 interactions from Facebook users in January. By July, Breitbart had surpassed The New York Times’ main account in interactions. By December, it was doing 10 million interactions per month, about 50 percent of Fox News, which had 11.5 million likes on its main page. Breitbart’s audience was hyper-engaged.

As more details about the Russian disinformation campaign come to the surface through Facebook’s continued digging, it’s fair to say that it’s not just the state that did not switch on its self-defense mechanisms. The influence campaign just happened on Facebook without anyone noticing.

As many people have noted, the 3,000 ads that have been linked to Russia are a drop in the bucket, even if they did reach millions of people. The real game is simply that Russian operatives created pages that reached people “organically,” as the saying goes. Jonathan Albright, research director of the Tow Center for Digital Journalism at Columbia University, pulled data on the six publicly known Russia-linked Facebook pages. He found that their posts had been shared 340 million times. And those were six of 470 pages that Facebook has linked to Russian operatives. You’re probably talking billions of shares, with who knows how many views, and with what kind of specific targeting.

On October 14 2017 03:04 IyMoon wrote:


The war on christmas isnt that people care that you say merry christmas... It is that some people who say merry christmas lose their mind over someone saying happy holidays

On October 14 2017 03:03 Mohdoo wrote:
The whole war on Christmas thing is brain dead, but people getting whiny about someone saying Merry Christmas is also brain dead. Perhaps even more brain dead. You have to be mind bogglingly shitty to correct someone to say "actually, I don't celebrate christmas"

On October 14 2017 03:12 Mohdoo wrote:


It might be my overexposure to far left bullshit as a result of living in Portland, but my understanding is that there is some group of people who see businesses or whatever having a blanket statement of "merry christmas" as imposing Christian ideals or culture on people who do not subscribe to those beliefs.

However, the right then takes this and says "We, as a group of millions need to unite against this like 5000 people". It's just another example of the entire right uniting against some small group of people being offended. But this group of people getting offended by "Merry Christmas" really does exist. It is basically the same group of people wildly insecure with their heritage. Far left groups of minorities get so insecure that any little detail that reminds them they are a minority is met with extreme resentment and revolt.