US Politics, February 2018: Our country was founded by geniuses, but it’s being run by idiots

Chris Hayes is the only one I can stand on MSNBC,

same

sorta back on topic -- as alt-righties (not entirely ironically) call 2scoops (in muddled homage to frank herbert) "god emperor", while indie-lefties cavil about powerless MSNBC

xpost

White guy reporter/writer/commentator Chris Hayes is the only one I can stand on MSNBC, which gets me in trouble with Reid fans.

he also pretty openly (and usually pretty ineptly) courts weird/left twitter a bit, which I always find funny. (never actually seen him on the teevee)

xps you guys come on this is not the same as christians are authoritarians. why wouldn't that apply to ANY monotheistic belief system (and many others)?

"off topic" is a good thing in this thread everyone, keep it up

https://78.media.tumblr.com/f7c6b7ada959b6058b410a9692026da2/tumblr_mtcs9zINSL1qc52lxo2_r1_500.gif

in this totally on-topic post about politics, i make a point about MSNBC but also///

why wouldn't that apply to ANY monotheistic belief system (and many others)?

yeah, it would apply to a lot of belief systems. not all. i specified christianity because it's the religion i'm most familiar with, and it's the dominant religion of the united states. i didn't name others because if i did, the question would then become "why did you name only a, b, and c, when it also applies to x, y, and z?"

///and that's why the 2018 elections are going to be important, imo

she is probably one of the least terrible really but man I don't know how anyone can watch that shit for more than 3 minutes

― Simon H., Saturday, February 10, 2018 2:05 PM (forty-seven minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

me too. i will leave rooms/sit in uncomfortable bits of airports, etc. to avoid it. i signed up for yelp to complain about a doctor because they had cable news on in the waiting room.

https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2018-02-09/has-anyone-seen-the-president

Fox News fills both screens. Bannon enters, takes one look at the scene and says, “Can we change it to CNN? My brain already hurts.” He advised a president who couldn’t take his eyes off cable news, but he himself detests it. “I can’t watch a second of it,” he says. “Zero.”

I don't see a lot of daylight btw Chris Hayes and Joy Reid/R Maddow, they are all (imo understandably) excitable atm but going way, way deeper into weeds of Trump stuff than any of their TV peers. Feels like some ppl have a misplaced expectation of sobriety from 24 hr cable news. (Maddow for her part has refused on principle and w/ some consistency to take Trump twitter bait and lead with what he's doing as opposed to saying. Considering the medium she is doing a great deal of detailed and original reporting on Russia in particular.)

Like when she literally listed all the Russians going to Davos?

(KM my reflex in response to your claim upthread had to do w/ knowing a great many Christians among friends and family who would be horrified to find themselves associated w/ any predilection for authoritariansm based on their religious beliefs)

if you recognize god as the highest authority then you have a conundrum to deal with about how to relate to any and all human authorities; for some christians historically this has manifested as anti-authoritarianism, or at least ambivalence about the authority claimed by whichever human authorities they do acknowledge.

indeed

I don't see a lot of daylight btw Chris Hayes and Joy Reid/R Maddow, they are all (imo understandably) excitable atm but going way, way deeper into weeds of Trump stuff than any of their TV peers. Feels like some ppl have a misplaced expectation of sobriety from 24 hr cable news. (Maddow for her part has refused on principle and w/ some consistency to take Trump twitter bait and lead with what he's doing as opposed to saying. Considering the medium she is doing a great deal of detailed and original reporting on Russia in particular.)

I'll disagree -- Hayes is the better reporter and the superior TV personality, whereas Maddow can't say a sentence without repeating it as if it were a pop hook ten times. I'll grant that Hayes isn't doing much reporting these days.

1. american evangelical "christianity" is a heresy. orthodox christianity is an outgrowth of classical platonic philosophy and is as worthy of respect as islam and judaism

2. MSNBC russophobia seems like an adjunct to 1000% justifiable GOPhobia imho and i say ring them alarm bells joy / chris / rachel / lawrence / etc. fuck the republicans

3. i'm drunk already

The narcissism of huge “but im _high information_ and different”ses.

i'm fine with no reporting if this is reporting

jfc pic.twitter.com/9E1waQU9cj

— Kate Aronoff (@KateAronoff) January 24, 2018

chris hayes is the best of this lot by a long way.

xxp Alfred I agree Hayes in the superior TV personality and that Maddow can be insufferablly repetitious like she's visiting me in a nursing home or something. Still I appreciate the legwork going into her reporting.

hayes is great. and people sometimes forget he was a really good writer, too, before he was a tv personality. his pieces at the nation were always some of the best writing they published

I will say I did like this

https://thenib.com/the-good-war

A Colony in a Nation is excellent.

That list above obv scans as inflammatory and superficial if you infer from it that she is claiming a smoking gun. If however you are following the plot it is a not-unhelpful reminder that these oligarchs continue to move foreign policy, with the context having shifted since Trump. No harm no foul AFAICT, aren't there bigger fish fish to fry?

Maddow can be insufferablly repetitious like she's visiting me in a nursing home or something

real life lol

If however you are following the plot it is a not-unhelpful reminder that these oligarchs continue to move foreign policy

aren't there bigger fish fish to fry

yeah, maybe we can finally figure out if this trump guy is bad or not. verdict in on that yet?

IDGI do you guys not see a qualitative difference btw off-the-rack Goldman Sachs-purchased presidency and blackmail-vulnerable to a foreign interest?

with FOX news dominating plebe-american political discourse (underwriting distraction from epochal climate change, the suffering and death of the under-insured, and the squandering of the intellectual potential of the financially disadvantaged) how better might supposedly countervailing MSNBC position itself? just curious!

Running stupid shit like a list of Russians attending a meeting of the global oligopoly to hear even dumber TED Talks is a distraction to the things that actually make Trump & co evil and dangerous (which are the same things as every Republican since 1964).

relying on corporate media to act as a "countervailing force" to systemic rot in is folly

lol delete "in"

who's relying on corporate media? it/they can be part of a solution. or not. but whatever -- focusing on the tactical deficiencies of ideological allies instead of directing fire at "conservative" assholes is maybe not a winning tactic

libs are not my ideological allies lol

lol!

It's not mutually exclusive - plenty of "fire" is directed at right-wing assholes. Given that this is ILX, not much need to constantly refer to the torture of Fox News, we all agree they're evil and awful.

leave the bullies alone. let's attack the nerds. usa

leave the bullies alone

around here heaping scorn on FOX News is just preaching to the choir so it doesn't really change anyone's mind or alter the position of 'the bullies' even the tiniest fraction.

TED Talks is a distraction to the things that actually make Trump & co evil and dangerous (which are the same things as every Republican since 1964).

This is just patently wrong. The President of the United States is suspected of *personally* (not in the form of corporate-friendly policymaking or even political Iran-Contra-style subterfuge) laundering money for a criminal enterprise in charge of a hostile foreign power. Maybe someone in Kiev or Bialystok can better explain the difference?

If someone not compromised by a foreign power were in office enacting the same ghoulish foreign and domestic policies (since that is GOP orthodoxy), would you really sleep much easier? (Maybe you would, actually.)

The Maddow segment with that screencap amounted to less than one minute of air-time at the very end of her show that night! It was meant as a joke

what was the joke

not that kind of joke

The punchline was something like “a lot of Trump administration officials are going. I wonder who they're going to hang out with?...”

admittedly not a very good joke

The joke was that Trump was not expected to pay any of them to pee on anything.

I'm in stitches over here

lol

Big news for voting rights in Washington state: Automatic voter registration easily passes after Democrats regained their Senate majority last November. Likely to become law with the House & Gov. Inslee's approval https://t.co/SlxoOauFGH

— Stephen Wolf (@PoliticsWolf) February 10, 2018

If someone not compromised by a foreign power were in office enacting the same ghoulish foreign and domestic policies (since that is GOP orthodoxy), would you really sleep much easier?

If someone were in office who wasn't openly devoted to the idea that the unrestrained law enforcement power of the United States government was properly to be used as a tool to punish political enemies, yes, to be honest, I would sleep easier. I truly do not see this as "the same thing" as what other lousy Presidents would do, or in recent history have done.

Bush II certainly did. Doesn't get much more recent than that for lousy Presidents.

I was gonna say, wtf. also obama was pretty good at punishing whistleblowers iirc

but I guess it's mostly an issue of decorum for many