BF2S Forums Presidential Election 2016

shh, the media is LIBERAL bro!

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

Cybargs wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

All major American media institutions are conservative. MSNBC may talk about higher taxes on the wealthy but you will never hear them suggest worker ownership over corporations or suggest corporations be nationalized for the good and profit of the public.

Most workers only want ownership of companies that's already successful. Try recruiting people at the start up level and paying them with paper clips and shares.

If people want ownership of their companies, they can buy shares if they want (if it's publicly traded).

virtually every single start up i've heard of offers employee shares.  It's one of the biggest incentives to working for a start up.

But then again, cybargs is missing the whole idea of workers owning the means of production.  Just buy shares like everyone else!

Those are generally the entrepreneurs and those willing to take risks that are willing to not get paid for x months/years for a share until the day you hit an angel investor.

It's a bit hard to do that when you have a family and bills to paid.

@cybargz thank you for the insight

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

Jay wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

All major American media institutions are conservative. MSNBC may talk about higher taxes on the wealthy but you will never hear them suggest worker ownership over corporations or suggest corporations be nationalized for the good and profit of the public.

Because such positions are completely childish and most people that have left their 20s (or academia) recognize this and have abandoned those beliefs long ago. That said, what the fuck are you talking about? There are still major media outlets championing the Venezuelan government and chalking up the current shitshow in that country to the fall in the oil price, as if the fundamental structure of the economy was otherwise healthy.

the current shitshow in that country is directly related to the fall in oil price though.  The fundamental structure of the economy was that it was built upon a single source of income - that being oil.  The shitshow is literally because their one commodity dropped significantly in price.

Jay, how is the media liberal?  I hear this stuff all the time, and it's just such a stupid comment.  The media doesn't promote social justice and egalitarianism.

Sure, political programs on MSNBC and such have lefty political commenters.  That sort of thing didn't really exist until Fox News came around.

Partially. Oil is their biggest export, but they've done just about every possible thing wrong. If you want to use your oil wealth to actually help your people, you follow the Norway model. You take the money, you set it aside and you invest it in your future. Venezuela went and nationalized all foreign investments. They broke up the large farms which were mostly foreign owned and redistributed it, Soviet style. They instituted price controls and quotas. Now 75% of the farmland in the country is abandoned and the people are starving and sitting in hours-long lines to buy bread (when it's available). What little that is available is stolen by the military and the police and smuggled across the border to Columbia where the price controlled stuff is sold at a vast profit. And now they're dealing with hyperinflation on top of it all. It's a case study in why Marxism-Leninism is an intellectually bankrupt ideology.

That's because that's what a majority of society thinks (sympathy for LGBT rights, stronger banking regulations, etc), not because the media companies are trying to cram it down our throats.  They report on what's popular - that is how they sell ad time, after all.

"Most people that work in the media tend to view themselves as bohemian types".  Ok, yeah sure whatever.  That bohemian Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper.  So shabby-chic!

KEN-JENNINGS wrote:

That's because that's what a majority of society thinks (sympathy for LGBT rights, stronger banking regulations, etc), not because the media companies are trying to cram it down our throats.  They report on what's popular - that is how they sell ad time, after all.

"Most people that work in the media tend to view themselves as bohemian types".  Ok, yeah sure whatever.  That bohemian Keith Olbermann, Rachel Maddow and Anderson Cooper.  So shabby-chic!

I hate David Brooks but he wrote a pretty good book called Bobos in Paradise that describes the mindset of what he calls the Bohemian Bourgeois.

As for your initial statement, are those positions popular natively or are they popular because they've been the dominant theme pushed by the media and in academia? It's a chicken and the egg kind of statement.

Okay, so you agree that they are things that are put into practice and not just an idea among academics. I have never heard anything on MSNBC or CNN suggesting we do any of this stuff.

Higher income taxes and a mixed system healthcare scheme are not bravely leftist ideas. Even fascist groups support higher income taxes to support their members and healthcare systems to promote social growth. Eisenhower and Cold War republicans were okay with high taxes to support their ideological war against global communism. Really leftist ideas like changing laws regarding how corporations are structured, requiring joint ownership with the state, high taxes on capital gains, price controls for basic necessities, nationalizing natural resources and more are leftist ideas that do not get debated on television.

Debt relief and the option to refinance student loans through the financial services market are not far left ideas. Leftist don't even trust big finance. A leftist idea would be to nationalize all colleges in the U.S. and move to a totally publicly financed system like they have in Norway. No one suggest that not even Bernie since those Harvard and Yale graduates on CNN don't want their schools to become open to the masses.

Last edited by SuperJail Warden (2016-08-04 19:20:29)

Jay wrote:

the conservative response to that would be "suck it up, you took out the loans, deal with the consequences of your actions rather than trying to make other people financially responsible for fixing your mistakes. We're not your mom.".

You didn't have the balls to take out a loan.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Higher income taxes and a mixed system healthcare scheme are not bravely leftist ideas. Even fascist groups support higher income taxes to support their members and healthcare systems to promote social growth. Eisenhower and Cold War republicans were okay with high taxes to support their ideological war against global communism. Really leftist ideas like changing laws regarding how corporations are structured, requiring joint ownership with the state, high taxes on capital gains, price controls for basic necessities, nationalizing natural resources and more are leftist ideas that do not get debated on television.

Debt relief and the option to refinance student loans through the financial services market are not far left ideas. Leftist don't even trust big finance. A leftist idea would be to nationalize all colleges in the U.S. and move to a totally publicly financed system like they have in Norway. No one suggest that not even Bernie since those Harvard and Yale graduates on CNN don't want their schools to become open to the masses.

For someone that mocked the political compass as being too complex in favor of the simple left-right axis, you sure are being a pedantic twit. American media is left of center, not hard leftist. Stop being stupid.

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Okay, so you agree that they are things that are put into practice and not just an idea among academics. I have never heard anything on MSNBC or CNN suggesting we do any of this stuff.

Mao was genius when he got the peasants to make backyard steel. GG buddy.

There are very very very few enterprises that have an economic need of government intervention for it to reach a certain economy of scale.

Jay wrote:

uziq wrote:

Jay wrote:

You're right, but he's not "the media" per se, he's a reality star.

The National Review had a good article today on the conservative echo chamber: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/4 … servatives and, as they point out, a lot of it has to do with the blatant bias in most media sources turning people who lean conservative away. They point out that social media driven content tends to be overwhelmingly liberal, but personally, I feel that has more to do with the sweatshop wages that only a just-out-of-school journalist would accept. Youth = Liberal by default.

novel thesis. the media is liberal at all levels, though, not just the interns running shit listicle websites and haranguing twitter opinion pieces.

education correlates with liberal beliefs. well-educated metropolitan elites on both coasts comprise most of your 'national' media.

meanwhile middle america sits back and watches the apprentice and duck dynasty.

both are 'the media' as a cultural institution. one is the educated professional aspect and the other is lowest common denominator's entertainment.

Education correlates with liberal beliefs because academics are liberal, not necessarily because their opinions are factual.

I never said they were objectively correct or 'factual'. I said that education correlates with liberal belief. it makes sense that, in a western liberal democracy, those who are products of the system's higher echelons of learning and professional life will reflect broadly liberal-democratic beliefs. that's what ideology is. the apparatus of state and civic institutions are there to produce good citizens. a good and educated citizen in a place like America is naturally going to reflect a liberal mindset, if not being actually educated with a liberal humanist education in a formal sense, too (your Harvard-Yale theology colleges, your liberal arts colleges, your law schools, etc.)

you write about academics as if they're a cult and not basically a civil servant employed by the state and in parallel private arrangements to produce good subjects/workers/conscientious citizens. I know academic campuses at their more insular and scholarly ends can produce Marxist and theoretical cults, which is par for the course (what are Marxist critiques of liberalism if not a ne plus ultra of liberal education?), but academics taken as a class of people are not this aberrant and anomalous cult with their own strange beliefs. they are liberal and progressive and democratic because the society cultivates that broad ethos.

Last edited by uziq (2016-08-05 10:09:51)

Jay wrote:

SuperJail Warden wrote:

Higher income taxes and a mixed system healthcare scheme are not bravely leftist ideas. Even fascist groups support higher income taxes to support their members and healthcare systems to promote social growth. Eisenhower and Cold War republicans were okay with high taxes to support their ideological war against global communism. Really leftist ideas like changing laws regarding how corporations are structured, requiring joint ownership with the state, high taxes on capital gains, price controls for basic necessities, nationalizing natural resources and more are leftist ideas that do not get debated on television.

Debt relief and the option to refinance student loans through the financial services market are not far left ideas. Leftist don't even trust big finance. A leftist idea would be to nationalize all colleges in the U.S. and move to a totally publicly financed system like they have in Norway. No one suggest that not even Bernie since those Harvard and Yale graduates on CNN don't want their schools to become open to the masses.

For someone that mocked the political compass as being too complex in favor of the simple left-right axis, you sure are being a pedantic twit. American media is left of center, not hard leftist. Stop being stupid.

You got it backwards. I make fun of the political compass test for being too simple. I only see the media being liberal in relation to cultural issues not much else. The whole dismantle the government thing you consider to be center right is bizarre and uniquely American that it distorts the whole economic conversation.

Saudi Arabia is a very conservative country but even they are investing a lot of money into building new infrastructure and educating people for more advanced jobs while cutting down on waste.