The News Thread

The media continues its aversion to calling things what they are. Epstein is accused of sex with "underage women". You mean children.

And of course the inference of calling "underage women" what they are, children, is that it wasn't "sex" it was rape. He raped kids.

NBC headline this morning: “New Jeffrey Epstein accuser: ‘He raped me when I was 15.’”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1028011

I don’t understand the point of making this a story about the media reporting inaccurately or some such.
 
NBC headline this morning: “New Jeffrey Epstein accuser: ‘He raped me when I was 15.’”

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1028011

I don’t understand the point of making this a story about the media reporting inaccurately or some such.

I don't know about avoiding rape, but the language has been mixed regarding "young women" vs "girls", although there's definitely a swing in the last day or so towards girls.....incidentally at the same time the media is trying to connect him to Trump. Not surprised.

If I type in "Jeffrey epstein clinton" I get zero returns on google (on the auto suggestions) as of just now. If I type in "bill" instead of clinton I get "Bill Barr" as the first option followed by billionaire, and thirdly I get Bill Clinton. On Bing I don't even need to finish typing Jeffrey Epstein and I get "Jeffrey Epstein Bill Clinton" as the first option after just Epstein's name. Bill Clinton pops up as the 5th and 7th items respectively on duckduckgo just by typing in Epstein's name. If I type in only Epstein's name in Google, I get stuff like "news" and "net worth" and "wife" as options, and nothing about the current charges/drama. Yes, Google is curating.
 
  • Like
Reactions: CiG
When I type 'Epstein Clint' into google, all I get is 'prepare to be penetrated by a migrant.'


There's no conspiracy on this. Lots of people are googling all imaginable combinations of Epstein + Trump, Clinton, your mom, etc, and the suggestions are changing rapidly as a result. Suggestions have changed here since yesterday, and that's from algorithms, not some puppet master.

The things google suggests don't always make sense. For a couple of years, the #1 suggestion when typing 'Angela Merkel ist' into Google was 'Angela Merkel ist mir egal' (I don't care/give a shit about Angela Merkel), and now it's Angela Merkel is He-Man (Angela Merkel ist he man).
 
  • Like
Reactions: Einherjar86
There were also rumours that Wiki had been whitewashed the day after the whole Epstein story broke. Haven't cared enough to look deeply into any of it, but there is this Tweet that contains some screenshots.

I wouldn't put anything past the neoliberal media, this dude has the potential to bring down a lot of establishment stooges.
 
There were also rumours that Wiki had been whitewashed the day after the whole Epstein story broke. Haven't cared enough to look deeply into any of it, but there is this Tweet that contains some screenshots.

I wouldn't put anything past the neoliberal media, this dude has the potential to bring down a lot of establishment stooges.

What do you mean by neoliberal? It has a pretty specific meaning, but gets used sometimes as a sort of catch-all for things the left disagrees with. First time I've seen it in this sort of context though.

edit: as for the Wiki page, don't forget that it's open, and that partisans on both sides can change it, including those who want to create false conspiracies. That twitter feed ain't exactly what I'd call, uh, impartial.
 
Globalist, corporatist, anti-precariat (especially if white/middle American), shills for the DNC, toadies for Clinton types etc.

Gotcha, though I'm not sure I'd agree with it. Liberals, after all, were the 19th century pro-property rights free-traders who wanted to limit the scope of government, while neoliberalism typically advocates for a strong state to protect internationalized property rights and the free movement of goods, even if securing that 'free movement' meant using military force. The Third Way DNCers a la Clinton certainly fit under that category, but I wouldn't say they exemplify it. Reagan and his trade/foreign policy for that designation, or Bush for that matter -- and I write this with the understanding that one can be neoliberal and neoconservative at the same time. Loaded too within neoliberalism is a generalized skepticism of the effectiveness of democracy in securing stable governance, with advocacy for strong executive and judicial arms of government, whereas DNC 'shills' would experience a boon if more democratic reforms were made to the American electorate system.
 
  • Like
Reactions: CiG
Not sure how my definition conflicts with your explanation here. I agree with everything you're saying, but I'm speaking specifically about the media so when I say they're DNC shills I just mean that they do all they can to play the defence for DNC insiders and establishment politicians within that structure. This isn't just about anti-Repub bias either, that's to be expected, it's about the way they treat outsiders on the left like Bernie for example, or more recently Tulsi and Yang.

Neoliberals love to fearmonger about the right, but the people they fuck over the most are independent leftists and progressives.

Neocons and neolibs are the scum of the earth.
 
Not sure how my definition conflicts with your explanation here. I agree with everything you're saying, but I'm speaking specifically about the media so when I say they're DNC shills I just mean that they do all they can to play the defence for DNC insiders and establishment politicians within that structure. This isn't just about anti-Repub bias either, that's to be expected, it's about the way they treat outsiders on the left like Bernie for example, or more recently Tulsi and Yang.

Neoliberals love to fearmonger about the right, but the people they fuck over the most are independent leftists and progressives.

Neocons and neolibs are the scum of the earth.

It's more about nuances in usage. 'Neoliberal media,' for example, seemed strange. This would perhaps be a good designation for, say, Fox News before Trump (and to large extent after Trump as well), because much of their reporting is unapologetically ideological and pro-free trade. Perhaps maybe National Review, The Freeman, and, to a lesser extent, Reason could also be labelled as such, but otherwise, I don't think that 'neoliberal' is the best, most pertinent, or most accurate adjective to choose for who you're attempting to negatively denote.

The sentence that's highlighted, I highlighted because I don't think the first clause is historically accurate, and it's only presently accurate if you consider Trump to be the full embodiment of the Republican party. The Republican party is still the unabashed neoliberal party, as they have been since the 1970s, and Republican members of the Senate and House are fighting Trump's protectionist policies tooth and nail. The Democratic party first became potentially culpable of the neoliberal charge in the 1990s, when the party was pushed to the right by Clinton (the same phenomenon was witnessed in supposedly left-wing governments in Britain and Germany in the early 2000s). Bill Clinton is himself a neoliberal, but he normalized trade relations with China with the support of the Republicans in Congress, and with Democrats vehemently opposing it. Democrats were again quite skeptical of the free trade agreements put together by Obama (party leaders aside), whereas Republicans were largely in support of it.

I'll admit that now we're in a stranger place since Trump's gone and shit in the punch bowl, causing many Democrats to oppose anything Trump supports and vice versa.

I'm just quibbling about small fries. I think we're otherwise on the same page on this.
 
I’m not sure about the media, but “neoliberal” doesn’t describe “the left,” which is where I think BO took major issue. Neoliberalism is an economic outlook that is usually associated with Reagan and Thatcher—so, not leftist at all. It doesn’t make sense to say that neoliberals fear monger about the right because they are the right (if by right we mean republicans).

“Neoconservative” means something different than “neoliberal but republican.” They’re not parallels of one another.
 
  • Like
Reactions: viewerfromnihil
New Democrats are the party rot, and the very people who I'm describing. Gore, the Clintons, Obama, and all the lesser figures who tend to mirror their ways of thinking. These are the neoliberals, and these are the types of Democrats the establishment media tends to shill for and cover for - thus neoliberal media. Perhaps an imprecise use of the term by me, but no less imprecise than claiming that neoliberals can't fearmonger about the right because they are also right. Neoliberalism hovers around the center. Neoliberals tend to fearmonger about protectionists, nationalists and libertarians (ie anybody to the right of their capitalist-centrism).

Also, I don't necessarily agree that The Democratic Party is leftist in the first place, perhaps only by US standards.
 
I specifically said “if by right we mean republicans.” Neoliberalism was defined by the policies of Reagan and Thatcher, and continued with the Bushes. It’s not inaccurate on my part because neoliberalism has defined American republicanism.
 
Sure but as Obama said, if he were around in the 80's he'd be a moderate Republican. Is it really unfair to describe people like him, Clintons, Gore etc as neoliberals?
 
New Democrats are the party rot, and the very people who I'm describing. Gore, the Clintons, Obama, and all the lesser figures who tend to mirror their ways of thinking. These are the neoliberals, and these are the types of Democrats the establishment media tends to shill for and cover for - thus neoliberal media. Perhaps an imprecise use of the term by me, but no less imprecise than claiming that neoliberals can't fearmonger about the right because they are also right. Neoliberalism hovers around the center. Neoliberals tend to fearmonger about protectionists, nationalists and libertarians (ie anybody to the right of their capitalist-centrism).

Also, I don't necessarily agree that The Democratic Party is leftist in the first place, perhaps only by US standards.

It doesn't hover around the center though. It hovers over the right, over the money, and over legal/economic disciplines in academia. There was a time when it was a far-right idea. It still is. The difference is, centrist democrats who make it to the top -- the 'shills' as you refer to them -- and they accept market ideology as a part of their world view, whereas a large portion of republicans since the 1970s take it as the key stone to human development in all circumstances, and libertarians fwiw are literally the embodiment of neoliberal market ideology. This is still the case today, despite Trump. That's why I'm taking issue with the use of the term. You're calling some people, well media, who accept portions of market ideology ideologists when there are much better examples of ideologists out there to choose. Neoliberal isn't a derogatory term, like you're fashioning it. It's an ideology. It's like you're calling somebody a communist because they support health care subsidies, just as a comparative example.
 
google modifies their search results to show you what they think you want to see
it's profiteering, obviously

duckduckgo says that its algorithm is a "pure" search, no modifications, no censoring, etc