Right? It’s still the Jews? Really? WTF? East Indian Americans are rapidly outpacing “the Jews” in terms of elite professionalism, but it’s still all somehow about the Jews?

What planet do these people live on?

The short version is that it was about the transfer of power from hereditary nobility to a different elite consisting of wealthy merchants and “gentlemen” farmers. This transfer was already happening anyway throughout the British Empire, the Americans just wanted to speed it up and codify it.

Yeah, my Nancy Reagan does similar shit on the regular.

She’s nearly lived up to her namesake in the sense that she doesn’t really like anyone and is pretty strong on the “just say no” aspect of things.

I love her anyway in spite of her being a cold hearted bitch. In spite of all her great upbringing, she’s never met anyone she wasn’t prepared to scratch or swipe at, drawing random blood.

NATO needs a similar mechanism as well, but for similar reasons doesn’t have one either.

True, but it still amounts to a vote for Trump, due to the electoral college.

Newspapers were a very different beast in Jefferson’s day.

Yes it is. I guarantee you that someone who regularly reads a reputable major daily is going to be better-informed than 90 percent of the public. Your attitude is part of the problem too. The vast majority of Americans are functionally illiterate when it comes to news media and don’t have any idea of how to evaluate credibility and accuracy.

I mostly blame the Internet for trashing the signal-to-noise ratio, but I also blame our education system and the profession of journalism itself for not giving people better epistemic toolkits.

The Biden administration is quite possibly the worst administration I’ve ever seen when it comes to messaging, and I am in my 50s. Someday in the future someone will write a PhD dissertation on why they are so dysfunctional in this respect, but for now I just don’t get it. They are singularly inept when it comes to publicizing and taking credit for their wins.

The last week or so it’s been Too Much Too Young by The Specials. It was on the radio, once, last week and for no good reason I’ve been stuck with it since. Thanks brain.

As a longtime SAR guy --I’m in my 50s-- I always tell people to carry a gun in the backcountry if that’s what makes them feel safe, but just know that you’re far far far more likely to get in trouble from things like weather, terrain, rivers, meltwater, falling, exposure, hypothermia and just the elements in general than you are from any animal. The risk profiles aren’t even remotely close. This is true even in places like Alaska where almost everyone is armed. As far as I’m concerned, a gun is dead weight. Lose it and concentrate instead on carrying the ten essentials and knowing how to use them

Among the world’s economically developed democracies, it absolutely only happens in one nation. This is not up for debate; it’s an objective fact.

How we choose to address this fact is up to us, but being in denial about it is not a sane option.

It’s older than that.

Several things can be true at once. We don’t have to be all-in on one side or the other of the Snowden affair. I’ve never understood why people seem so eager to pick a team on this issue.

You have to be some kind of moron to think it would be a good idea for the president to start dictating prices to grocery chains. Unfortunately Lemmy is largely populated by idiots and delusional fools, so I expect this observation to be unpopular.

I think this guy is just fucknut crazy, not a terrorist per se. Either way though, it’s not a great look.

True, but it wasn’t always true. In the 1960s and 70s the far left was more violent. Not especially relevant, but it is interesting.

I don’t think Lemmy is ready to hear that kind of thing.

True, but not for the reasons that most people think.

Ok, the fact that you honestly believe this is how legitimate newsrooms work is both deeply disheartening and an indication of how little the average person knows about the news business.

Editors decide what gets published, not the editorial board which is an entirely different and unrelated body that traditionally has zero contact with the content side of things. In the business we say that there is a “firewall” between the editorial board and actual news content. The NYT or WaPo would have mass resignations of their reporters if either of their editorial boards tried to influence content.

Ownership is a bit different and obviously --as we know from the Murdoch empire-- can influence content, but in traditional operations they’ve always been very hands-off. It’s a fact, for example, that Jeff Bezos doesn’t care what the WaPo publishes and has no interest in it beyond as a business concern.

Editors do have control over content, but overwhelmingly they are concerned with doing a good job and furthering their careers and professional reputations. You’re completely misunderstanding the incentive structure in mainstream news media. Outside of the extremist advocacy journalism ecosystems --mostly but not only on the far right-- no one has any incentive to push an agenda and risk ruining their career by getting something important wrong.

Unfortunately advocacy journalism is very much a legitimate type of journalism, just ask Glen Greenwald, who I fuckin’ hate.