The News Thread

[Talos of Atmora]

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[HamburgerBoy]

To be fair, the war on drugs is more responsible for the various problems that plague Mexico than anything else.

 

[Talos of Atmora]

https://heatst.com/gaming/brianna-w...ress-to-defend-earth-from-falling-moon-rocks/



How did I miss this?

 

[CiG]

http://archive.is/DnEUQ

STUDENTS are showing signs of extreme radicalisation as early as Year 5, including threatening to behead teachers, bullying peers into reading the Koran and even demanding the Syrian flag be put up in the classroom.
Documents obtained by The Daily Telegraph reveal how frightened teachers at Punchbowl Public School have resorted to making formal complaints over fears of religious violence inside the classroom.
It’s also understood at least three teachers have taken stress leave, received counselling or been paid compensation because of bullying from Islamic students.

They were placed in “time out” where they “began audibly chanting the Koran in Arabic”. The concerned teacher says they “could give no explanation of their behaviour”.

An earlier incident that year says a “group of boys stood around a girl and called her horrible names like dog”.

Revelations of the disturbing reports come as a former teacher at the school at the time, who has asked to be known only as Mrs A, revealed her nightmare experiences, including death threats from Islamic students.
Mrs A said she was forced to leave the public education system after students in Year 5 threatened to kill her family. She claims multiple complaints to the Department of Education were simply dismissed.

 

[Dak]

Irony is a Freudian psychoanalyst writing about about the problematic nature of making things up.

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/03/20/opinion/trumps-method-our-madness.html

 

[Einherjar86]

There's a difference between making things up in order to mislead, and making things up in order to interpret.

Not to defend Freudian analysis, but aligning it with Trumpian misinformation is a total red herring.

 

[Dak]

I think that the intent in both cases is to accomplish goals and make both the authority figure and the target audience feel better. It's conjecture that Trump intends to mislead vs being misled or misinformed himself.

 

[Einherjar86]

I think that the intent in both cases is to accomplish goals and make both the authority figure and the target audience feel better. It's conjecture that Trump intends to mislead vs being misled or misinformed himself.

That doesn't bestow upon him the analytical acumen of a Freudian analyst. He just regurgitates what makes him feel good. If Freudian analysis does anything, if definitely doesn't aim to make its patients "feel better." Offering interpretive analyses for psychic symptoms doesn't set out with the goal of placating analysands.

 

[Dak]

new moon landing would be almost no step for mankind, while finding liquid water on Europa would have been the next giant leap

space exploration is the last thing trump would do imo, however building intergalactic weapons to defend the US from alien invasions is probably a top priority. or maybe just make the aliens build a forcefield for us.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/amph...227b94-0e4d-11e7-aa57-2ca1b05c41b8_story.html

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump signed a bill into law Tuesday that updates NASA’s mission to add exploration of Mars and authorizes $19.5 billion in spending for the U.S. space agency for the current budget year.

That doesn't bestow upon him the analytical acumen of a Freudian analyst. He just regurgitates what makes him feel good. If Freudian analysis does anything, if definitely doesn't aim to make its patients "feel better." Offering interpretive analyses for psychic symptoms doesn't set out with the goal of placating analysands.

A flippant but probably not far off criticism would be that psychoanalysts set out to make Freud feel better.

 

[Einherjar86]

Haha, well Freud's not feeling much of anything these days, so...

 

[CiG]

Fantastic comeback.

 

[Dak]

Just because Freud is not manifest doesn't mean he isn't latent.

 

[CiG]

Nietzsche "God is dead."
Fraud "God is dad."

Still one of my favourites.

 

[Einherjar86]

Nice Freudian slip in that post too.

 

[Einherjar86]

This is a very well-written piece (and a long one). I don't usually go to Vox for news, but my wife sent this to me and I thought it was really good.

Long story short, does it make sense to expect journalists to be unbiased when reporting on a White House (and, increasingly, a party) founded on the premise that media is fake?

Short answer: no, it doesn't.

http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/3/22/14762030/donald-trump-tribal-epistemology

At a deeper level, healthy journalism relies on the basic institutions and norms of liberal democracy — on transpartisan authorities capable of establishing a common bedrock of facts and rules. As we’ve seen in other democracies around the world that succumb to autocracy (think Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela), the decline in institutions is both cause and consequence of authoritarianism.

As journalist Melik Kaylan puts it, “no ‘normalization’ happens under the corrective effect of institutions. Rather, institutions themselves get eroded.”

If it is premised on the integrity of transpartisan institutions and norms, then how can journalism be neutral toward a political movement that rejects them? How can it be neutral toward the preconditions of its own existence? In doing so it can only negate itself.

Extending this to academia, how can an institution premised on the integrity of specialization and professionalization be unbiased toward a White House that disbelieves the parameters of specialization and professionalization?

Short answer: it can't.

 

[Dak]

This feigned position of neutrality prior to being attacked is 100(and ten)% bullshit. Media in general, whether it's CNN or Breitbart, have always had their partisan bents, but now you throw on the pressure of individual article performance(see included link below), and you wind up with nonstop clickbait directed by extremely partisan presentation of every possible minute twisted detail. Add on to that a poorly educated but highly credentialed public and you have a recipe for an inflexible social fabric which means traumatic ripping at every point of stress.

https://www.theatlantic.com/technol...ruined-the-internet/519795/?curator=TechREDEF

In short, almost all the media I read is completely terrible from a more (not perfectly) rational point of view. The Trump administration is not wrong in who they vilify - they just are sometimes wrong in not casting a wide enough net and on the reasoning. Obviously this is because they aren't using anything approaching an objective view. But the protesting media doth protest too much.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

I disagree Pat. I'm fine with reporters calling out Trump on lies and misinformation, but that doesn't give them an excuse to continue the routine partisan bias they've been practicing since long before Trump appeared on the scene.

 

[Einherjar86]

This feigned position of neutrality prior to being attacked is 100(and ten)% bullshit.

I disagree Pat. I'm fine with reporters calling out Trump on lies and misinformation, but that doesn't give them an excuse to continue the routine partisan bias they've been practicing since long before Trump appeared on the scene.

I really don't think either of you have completely internalized what's happening here.

The point doesn't have to do with journalists "feigning" neutrality or advocating bias on their part.

The point is that even the most honest and accurate reporting on legitimately found information will not be perceived by the current administration as anything but misinformation. The point of that article has less to do with justifying bias on the part of journalists and more to do with criticizing the expectation of neutrality in the current political climate.

Neither of you seem to appreciate the epistemological clusterfuck that Trump's administration promotes. And also, Grant, it has been going on long before Trump. I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you--because it makes no sense to demand of reporters a completely unbiased approach when the political institutions that are intended to protect them end up actively undermining them. A neutral approach would, as the author suggests, be the equivalent of negating their own enterprise.

The article isn't trying to advocate journalistic bias or pathos one way or another. It's simply saying that we live in a moment when it's completely irrational to expect journalistic neutrality.

 

[zabu of nΩd]

You're making Trump a major premise of your argument, but implying that your argument still holds without Trump in the picture, which doesn't make sense. What examples of pre-Trump hostility against the media do you think justifies this bias?

I don't see how politicians created the conditions for widespread mistrust of the news industry. I'm inclined to believe the industry brought it upon themselves by choosing to engage in partisan politics.

To illustrate how far back this bias goes, and how it can have origins independent of the conditions that led to the current political climate:

A study cited frequently by those who make claims of liberal media bias in American journalism is The Media Elite, a 1986 book co-authored by political scientists Robert Lichter, Stanley Rothman, and Linda Lichter.[46] They surveyed journalists at national media outlets such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, and the broadcast networks. The survey found that the large majority of journalists were Democratic voters whose attitudes were well to the left of the general public on a variety of topics, including issues such as abortion, affirmative action, social services, and gay rights. The authors compared journalists' attitudes to their coverage of issues such as the safety of nuclear power, school busing to promote racial integration, and the energy crisis of the 1970s and concluded firstly that journalists' coverage of controversial issues reflected their own attitudes and education, and secondly that the predominance of political liberals in newsrooms pushed news coverage in a liberal direction. The authors suggested this tilt as a mostly unconscious process of like-minded individuals projecting their shared assumptions onto their interpretations of reality, a variation of confirmation bias.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_States#Liberal_bias

 

[Einherjar86]

It's not my argument, it's the article's--and the author mentions several notable pre-Trump episodes that contributed to this dilemma.

Abolition of the CBO, rise of FOX News, conservative talk radio (like John Ziegler, which the article mentions), etc. These things came about in response to journalism that reported on stories that republicans didn't like. To say that this is the result of partisan reporting is nothing more than assumption; and my assumption is that most of what you're going off of is recent left-wing news that exhibits vitriolic left-wing bias. This isn't how journalism always was, and much right-wing media came about as a coordinated response to facts that made republicans look bad, basically.