American politics 2016: Lawyers, Guns, and D-Money

"The rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better. There's no doubt a president with the gifts of Lincoln or Roosevelt might have better bridged the divide, and I guarantee I'll keep trying to be better so long as I hold this office."

I didn't watch it cuz I have shit to do in the evenings and this is really minor but what a weird thing to say - Lincoln presided over a civil war and was murdered, he was hardly a conciliatory figure. And the right-wing has always completely and utterly loathed (and continue to loathe) FDR, who was just better at outmaneuvering his opponents.

i'm with you on this ZS, fighting this sort of mindcontrol marketing is a worthy cause

xpost
lincoln presided over a civil war, but he may have been the only thing that kept the country together in the end. source: Lincoln by george lucas
i imagine by "Roosevelt" he was allowing some of the people in the room to think that he might have been referring to Teddy.

i was watching as he said that bit. it's hard to guess at his intentions but at the time he said it, the subliminal message to the audience (congress) seemed to be "even IF lincoln or roosevelt [insert presidential hero here] were president right now, they'd have difficulties bridging the divide too because all of you are insane"

the white house partners with youtube and amazon to do the same thing?

I totally hear you, but I'm asking if you were watching the address on the White House channel on YouTube. If you were, then I think that's just as acceptable as it would be for Youtube/user/satansatansatan to show the video with goat horns superimposed on everyone.

i feel you karl. that shit makes my skin crawl. complete lack of media literacy education here in the 21st fucking century doesn't help re: other people's lack of response.

powerpoint in general is a plague but that's for another thread.

oh, i got you! sorry, i misunderstood. i'm not totally sure, i just clicked over to youtube and clicked the first thing that said State of the Union. i imagine it was probably on their white house channel, you're right. ok. so that's a little less creepy to me. i remain creeped out by the amazon video version of it, though.

I dislike the incorporation of memes into the state of the union mainly in terms of aesthetics: I think they look ugly

charts look like they're playing to the vox media crowd

i have to admit i laughed when they put they made the chart fullscreen and hid obama behind it

http://i.imgur.com/gFMF16H.png

sorry I wasn't around last night but if you didn't think Nikki Haley was blasting Trump with both barrels during that speech, you need to listen to it again; you also need to read this:

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/onpolitics/2016/01/13/nikki-haley-donald-trump-republicans-2016/78729616/

i have to admit i laughed when they put they made the chart fullscreen and hid obama behind it

"We've created so many jobs they're poking me in the nose!"

karl i didn't see that but it certainly does look distasteful

basically because government still appears to exist in a no-frills-communication zone, rhetorically, so any steps outside that to what otherwise looks like a standard corpo voxpost infographic technique appear to be highly manipulative.

especially the photos.

damn just look at all those jobs

basically because government still appears to exist in a no-frills-communication zone

see, that's the thing, because i think in other areas they've already made the leap. they have a social media presence and their communications team has clearly been trying to develop new ways to put the administration and their policies in the best light. and all of that seems...predictable and not too revolting. i mean, if you go to the white house website or their instagram or whatever you'll already find a bunch of that. and if you go to the websites of the more comm-savvy congresspeople you'll find the same thing.

so i'm not sure why it seems so creepy when they apply the same PR gloss to the STFU SOTU, which is an annually scheduled slice of PR from the govt. i guess, again, it's just that it spread out beyond the official white house channels and out into what i presumed would be a relatively nonpartisan source, Amazon. i guess the creepiest thing is the intuition that amazon would do the same exact thing to support a republican president. it's the cooperation of corporations and the state to deliver PR super weird, so obvious that they don't even bother to conceal or distract from it. yes yes, that's always existed but the audacity of it seems to herald a new era of sleaziness

DJP otm. The idea that either speech was "all about Trump" is ludicrous. That whole line of thinking is just a way to deflect attention from Obama's points about political disfunction or to obscure the obvious racism in Haley's speech

I grant you that IF it were on NBC, that would be troublesome. But I watched NBC all evening and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

As pplains noted, lots of people put self-praising videos on YouTube. And lots of people use Amazon as a means of disseminating their stuff - Trump and Carson sell their books through Amazon, for example.

Everybody wants to present their policies and accomplishments in the best light; that's part of being a public official: tell us what you've been up to and what you're doing with our money.

Is the main objection that it's slickly produced? (So it wouldn't be creepy if it looked like shit?) Is the main objection that it looks like PowerPoint (so it would be okay if it looked like it was done in Illustrator?) Is the main objection that it's emotionally manipulative? Well, that's bound up with how humans try to persuade one another of stuff.

Government agencies' websites and newsletters typically talk about the good they're doing and minimize problems. Some of them look crappy, some don't. My congressperson sends me a mailer every once in a while that says "this is what I've been doing." It looks okay. Of course it's cherry-picked and of course it's biased in their favor. That the mailman delivered it to me does not imply government endorsement of every message therein (any more than the mailman delivering National Review, or whatever, would imply endorsement).

Is the main objection that it's emotionally manipulative? That it shows Obama hugging kids? Well, that's bound up with how humans try to persuade one another of stuff. Of course it's PR. Lots of things are PR; we shouldn't be mad at them for being done well as opposed to being done poorly.

erg, sorry for the repeating ramble

yeah but PR looks like a shortened form of propoganda

Is the main objection that it's slickly produced? (So it wouldn't be creepy if it looked like shit?) Is the main objection that it looks like PowerPoint (so it would be okay if it looked like it was done in Illustrator?) Is the main objection that it's emotionally manipulative? Well, that's bound up with how humans try to persuade one another of stuff.

...Is the main objection that it's emotionally manipulative? That it shows Obama hugging kids? Well, that's bound up with how humans try to persuade one another of stuff. Of course it's PR. Lots of things are PR; we shouldn't be mad at them for being done well as opposed to being done poorly.

no on all of those. it's this:

I grant you that IF it were on NBC, that would be troublesome. But I watched NBC all evening and this is the first I'm hearing of it.

As pplains noted, lots of people put self-praising videos on YouTube. And lots of people use Amazon as a means of disseminating their stuff - Trump and Carson sell their books through Amazon, for example.

so you're implying that there's a difference between Amazon and NBC when it comes to whether or not they should be required to be nonpartisan. NBC has a journalistic responsibility to not be a loudhorn for the administration. but with amazon, it's ok, because they also sell stuff? see, that's where i get creeped out, because the lines between "journalism" and corporations selling shit have become so blurry. on one hand, streaming services like Amazon video (and other services like Netflix, youtube) is becoming the main way that a lot of people access media. imagine the parallel experiences of two people - one watching shows on NBC all day, the other watching shows on netflix/amazon all day. They have largely the same experience, they watch their shows and there are ads here and there. Then at 8pm, the president comes on. NBC shows the relatively nonpartisan version, while Amazon shows the propaganda version, without even stating that it's propaganda. see the problem? Amazon sells shit, but so does NBC, and they both have many, many other interests besides. streaming services are becoming more like standard news outlets for many people, while media conglomerates are starting to become more like the streaming services in some ways. everything is blurring together. and in the midst of it, you have some of the media outlets amplifying the administration's message. i dunno. this is weird to me.

i don't think NBC has a responsibility to do anything really.

"then we've already lost..."

/FakeObiWanQuotes

call me old fashioned, but i think major media outlets DO have the responsibility to uphold at least the barest threads of journalistic integrity. and if amazon is going to serve up video to millions of people and get more and more powerful every year, they should be held to the same standards.

call me old fashioned, but i think major media outlets DO have the responsibility to uphold at least the barest threads of journalistic integrity.

Wake me up when they stop being an official propaganda arm of the Catholic Church every spring and winter.

The churlish part of me is thinking that anyone watching the State of the Union address on Amazon deserves all the propaganda in the world but I don't think you're raising any invalid points here.

TV networks sell Washington as democracy. Period.

sure, but i'd replace the 'period' with a 'period period period' because there's still a spectrum of wrongdoing, and it irks me to watch everything slide toward the awful direction. also, things can always get worse. until we're all sitting around watching our 1984 telescreens, they can get worse. (and even after that, things can get worse because what if those telescreens could spray bug spray in your eyes)

the amount of room on the down side is only bounded by human extinction

things can always get worse, and do.

passed up the infomercial last night in favor of a western about amputations and cannibalism, which rather produced the same themes with more entertainment.

I assume you mean Bone Tomahawk?

They are both showing the propaganda version - it's the SOTU speech!

xp yes, just a few walkouts at MoMA when the cannibals, well...

I got enough of a rundown from jjj to realize that this movie isn't one I should seek out but it sounds great in the abstract

it's fine if you hide your eyes for 20 seconds, just like with reaction shots of Mitch McConeell.

that movie was directed by a guy who used to write for Metal Maniacs

yes, he went into his metal history in Q&A and seems to be a John Ford hater, but i liked the film nonetheless

also from a political angle, given that the antagonists are a Native "lost race" that might be politically queasy, he had two of the white principals condemn "manifest destiny" and "bigotry," which seems like a high proportion in a white-guy search party of four in the 1890s, but i understand it.

anyway back to propaganda:

What made Obama’s soliloquy especially maddening was his suggestion that big money has overwhelmed politics because because Americans just aren’t trying hard enough:

"Changes in our political process — in not just who gets elected, but how they get elected — that will only happen when the American people demand it. It depends on you. That’s what’s meant by a government of, by, and for the people."

In fact, U.S. citizens have demanded “changes in our political process.” Activists delivered over one million signatures to the White House telling Obama to sign an executive order on dark money. A similar petition set up via the White House website’s system has passed the 100,000 signatory threshold requiring a response (which the Obama administration has yet to produce). Twenty-seven senators, including Minority Leader Harry Reid, and over 100 members of the House of Representatives have asked Obama for such an executive order. Even Gene Sperling, former director of Obama’s National Economic Council, has said it’s “important and needed.”

But Obama has steadfastly refused to act.

https://theintercept.com/2016/01/13/obama-delivers-more-pretty-words-ugly-inaction-on-money-in-politics/

yeah i hear you Karl Malone. i didn't watch it in any version but i get what you're saying. there is something about the deadpan blahness of C-SPAN aesthetics that has always given me hope that we could someday become a country that approaches politics and policy more or less like that all the time. like my fantasy of publicly-funded elections looking kinda like that: flat, shot-on-video footage of people talking in rooms with ugly lighting and no makeup, with audible coughs and sips of water. not saying that would miraculously make us a real democracy or w/e but it would definitely be a positive change.

shifting over into really slick aesthetics is jarring, yeah, although i guess you could imagine that (if the audience were more media-literate or critical) it would make visible the pageantry that's always been there with these things. not as much pageantry as say, the nominating conventions - but still. the meme-ready graphics and charts and shit, especially in a "they fly at u face" sort of way where it's not like you can sit and read the scale of the chart or the explanation of what it's measuring, just CHART HERE IS CHART, BELIEVE!!!... yeah, that does feel more propagandistic. blah.

a transmission from 2018 just appeared in my inbox

http://i.imgur.com/q1G06IM.jpg

(there really was a splitscreen last night of obama with the statue of liberty)

but in my paranoid future, NBC is now some sort of subsidiary of NetflixVerizon, who made a deal with the Cruz administration to stream national addresses

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/kim-davis-sotu-jim-jordan_56957017e4b05b3245dadc0d?ref=yfp

kinda funny - gives every impression that she's interested in milking her "celebrity"

@tinyrevolution
This guy Obama feels so strongly about money in politics, he should really run for president

also, Tony Kushner's husband (good film writer) is kind of a lib idiot

@MarkHarrisNYC
Add up Obama's progressive accomplishments 2008-16 versus the accomplishments of everyone for whom he isn't progressive enough. He wins.

or you could go to someone whom you cite often who's not a lib idiot and whose conclusions line up with mine almost as well as drone rockets did on al-Awlaki:

Despite all of that, here in 2016, the Affordable Care Act is still law, as is marriage equality, and so is the right to be gay and a soldier. Wall Street is still regulated better than it was in 2008. The president has moved the country further toward a policy to combat the climate crisis than anyone thought he could. He has moved boldly—and alone—on the issue of this country's insane attachment to its firearms. And he has redefined for all time the concept of a lame-duck president as a president with no more fcks to give. As Michael Grunwald shrewdly points out, if you listen to the Republicans on the campaign trail, they mostly complain about all the stuff that the president has managed to accomplish.

He has had to be more of a wartime president than he wanted to be. The drone war—and its consequences in both the short and the long term—are his alone. Sooner or later, some of the kids he's sending back to Central America are going to end up dead, and that will be on him, too. The surveillance state is still alive and well in the United States and Edward Snowden is still alive and well in Moscow. He can't close the prison at Guantanamo because Congress won't give him the money to do it.

He has been as progressive a president as our stunted, money-drunk politics allows, and that's been enough. Has he disappointed me? Yes, which gives him something in common with every president of my lifetime.

yeah i don't like him in that mode. expect more.

DEMAND more.

except, as you know, it's all fucking over.

He has been as progressive a president as our stunted, money-drunk politics allows

self-fulfilling horseshit

we're kind of perpetually fucked until we somehow manage to reconcile mid-term elections with the presidential elections in order to get movement on the actual process of legislation

it's kind of bullshit we even refer to them as "mid-term" when the makeup of the legislative body is more important than the president, who has executive power but functionally can't introduce policy beyond handing it to the party representatives in congress and making bold speeches