Friday, December 27, 2024

Iraq snapshot

Friday, December 26, 2024.  The Water Cooler Set declares the death of non-FOX "NEWS" cable channels while not understanding the changing media landscape, lived reality is about to hit MAGA hard, and much more.



Let's kick things off with Amanda Marcotte (SALON):


In the face of Vice President Kamala Harris losing the presidential election to Donald Trump, the punditry's focus has been almost exclusively on asking how the Democrats couldn't beat a relentless liar with 34 felony convictions and a previous attempted coup under his belt. Everyone has a different theory about Harris' "messaging," with every critic inevitably arguing that if she had just talked more about their pet issue, she would have won.

Another option, however, is to listen to what swing voters who backed Trump said about their decision. That would seem the wisest choice, but to be fair to people who don't want to go there, hearing these people out is a truly miserable experience. What quickly becomes evident about the median voters in an American focus group is how profoundly opposed they are to even the most basic factual information. On the contrary, it's a community with a pathological aversion to reality, where people compulsively react to anything truth-shaped with hostility, running as hard as they can toward disinformation. They are addicted to BS. Of course they voted for Trump, the country's most reliable dealer of their favorite drug. 
This may sound ungenerous to these voters, but only if you've been sparing yourself the torture of engaging their actual opinions. If you hold your nose and dive in, it's startling how much the typical swing voter is allergic to facts. It's not just ignorance, but overt hostility to anything that smacks of veracity. Such as the Trump voter who insisted to the New York Times that Democrats are "lying about pregnancies," by conveying factual information about abortion bans. Or the one who falsely believed "so many people just walk right across the border and get free housing, free food." Or the one who was excited that "Trump brings a Robert Kennedy Jr. or a Tulsi Gabbard and Elon Musk." Or the one who said the  "Democratic Party [is] going after average people who disagreed on Covid, who disagreed on school boards, who disagreed on boys playing in women’s sports," which is just a way to complain about liberals who criticize him on social media for saying things that aren't true. 
Sarah Longwell's "Focus Group" podcast ended the year by interviewing Joe Rogan fans who voted for Trump for the first time this election. It was a smart choice, and not just because Rogan's endorsement likely pushed Trump over the top in a shockingly close election. Rogan's audience perfectly illustrates the way the firehose of disinformation online — his conspiracy theory-hyping podcast has over 16 million followers — has pickled the brains of so many otherwise normal people. Most of the people Longwell interviewed couldn't go two minutes without coughing up a conspiracy theory. Everything is a shadowy plot, from the COVID-19 pandemic to the guy who shot Trump in Butler, Pennsylvania. The straightforward details of the shooting of UnitedHealth CEO Brian Thompson came out after the arrest of Luigi Mangione, and yet these voters refused to believe the banal facts. Some are wallowing in theories that Mangione is a patsy, or that the shooting is a psyop. The truer any information was, the more they rejected it. 


MAGA is stupid.  There's no reason to pretend otherwise.  When we'd get a MAGA uber drive in whatever state we were campaigning in last fall, their ignorance regarding how a tariff works wasn't the only thing that came up.  There was so much more stupidity.  

We noted on recently and a lot of people e-mailed asking what was I talking about.  Roseanne Barr gave a big speech that people on the YOUTUBE left and 'left' mocked -- it did deserve that -- but didn't really seem to understand.

Roseanne, in her speech, was talking about Donald Chump as a savior to children -- I'm blocking the speech -- in my mind -- because it's so painful to watch someone who should know better fall into lies.

And I know Roseanne so I know how she fell in.  Things didn't make sense to her, she smokes way too much pot, her sleep is always erratic meaning she's often up all night reading conspiracies on the internet and taking them as truth and praising God that he's seen fit to enlighten her and now it's her job to enlighten others.

While he was in office from 2017 through 2021, she honest believes -- because of lies on the internet -- that governments -- including the US -- are part of some world sex slavery system for children and that Chump fought that.  He was the savior of children.  

These people have been taken out of the real world and plopped into crazy land.

And if you speak to them -- and we spoke to several nut jobs especially when we were campaigning in South Carolina -- you'll find that they base this on internet liars and on the corporate media system.

Internet liars should be obvious, they're spreading it.

Why did the nut jobs also point to the corporate media.

In their minds, the corporate media proved that this lie was true.  How so?  We would be told that back in 2016 when Hillary Clinton and others were accused of running a children's slave trade out a pizza place in DC, the media was all over that and calling it a lie and blah blah blah. 

But, we would be told, notice how they don't say a word about the slave trade Trump is fighting!!!!!

That's proof that it's real!!!!

The media doesn't have the time to respond to every nut job on RUMBLE.  But they need to start responding.

It's no fun.  I get that.  In the last four years, I think we've noted four liars on RUMBLE.  They're disgusting people and life is frankly too short for me.  But the media needs to be covering it regularly.  When they do not call it out, it leads already deluded people to become even more irrational and more delusional.  

I spoke about this in a post-election analysis and one person noted that if outlets have time to assign journalists to the Taylor Swift beat and the Beyonce beat, they certainly have time -- and money -- to cover the underbelly of the internet that spreads one lie after another and never gets challenged.

I'm not in the mood to sugar coat.  MAGA lives pathetic lives.  There's the economy, yes.  But it's so much more than that.  They are pathetic.  And they need to whine and scapegoat.  So they target women and people of color who are not their enemies but whom they see as getting ahead while they're sinking.  And the resentment builds and they need some unifying theory to explain why this is going on.  So they latch on to conspiracy theories while looking for a con artist to rescue them.

"He's a convicted felon!" doesn't matter to them when they're embracing the lie that governments -- including our own -- are participants in global sex trafficking of children and only Donald Chump can save us!!!

They delude themselves and if the lies aren't being addressed by the corporate media, they read that as an admission that the lies are true.

We're probably all doomed, to be honest.  Even MSNBC is bringing on crack pots to normalize Chump.  We almost posted an MSNBC segment -- I don't know who the host was, some woman -- due to the title but I paused and thought, stream it first.  I did.  I then deleted it -- I do the evening and overnight posts here at least four hours in advance.  I studied poli sci -- undergraduate and graduate.  I am well aware of the hypothesis that a madman can bring security to a multi-polar system in some ways.  Their Republican guest was trying to make that argument but didn't know that argument.

Chump's lunatic statements about grabbing this country or that?  That's now how even a madman brings security.  Those statements only inflame international relations.  And lead to no options are off the table assertions from other crazy leaders of other countries.

But that's what we got on MSNBC. 



Instead of doing what they should be doing -- exposing lies and taking on crackpot notions -- they are bending to him.

And it's stupid for democracy but it's also stupid for business.

The ratings are in free fall!

This is what those pushing changes at CNN and MNSBC insist.  

Historically, this is the month when ratings go into free fall.  Why?  Few care about politics in the holiday season.  Interest tapers off following a general election.

There is a lesson to learn and that was provided by MORNING JOE which, post-election, began fawning over Chump and saw their ratings drop significantly.  The smartest thing MSNBC could do would be ditch that program. The fawning broke the trust the viewers had for the hosts and then the hosts screaming and yelling at viewers about how people are too stupid to understand what they -- Joe and Mika -- were doing and all that other garbage.  It's really the most harmful program the network has.


Ratings keep being mentioned.  Ratings aren't everything or the only thing.  MORNING JOE is also down on streaming -- which, let's remember, is where everything's headed.  Like it or not, that's where it's headed and it's how news and public affairs programs are increasingly consumed.


Take out THE FIVE and FOX "NEWS" is not doing well in streaming.  MSNBC is doing much better and has many segments that go over 70,000 views -- some well over that. Take out THE FIVE and you're not seeing a lot of hit clips on YOUTUBE for FOX when it comes to streaming in the last 24 hours.  You're dealing with a lot of 14 thousand and 40 thousands.  Their biggest streamer in the last 24 hours is 135K for the story about how Russia might have shot down a plane.  MSNBC has three videos on that topic and the one with the largest streams is at 221K.  CNN covered that as well and their YOUTUBE clip is at 459K.

FOX "NEWS" will from this day forward most likely always have higher viewers because their viewers are older and are youngsters who hit old age early (there's a reason it's called conservativism).  But, so sorry all you idiots who keep insisting that these are the worst times for cable 'news' that's not FOX, that is not accurate.  

The landscape changed some time ago -- long enough for MODERN FAMILY to have done a joke about it and have Hayley explain that her generation gets their news watching a video at the gas pump -- and all the media observers this month and last acting as though FOX "NEWS" is the big success and the business model of the future?  That's just not true.

That should have been in Ava and my piece.  In "Raison d'être (Ava and C.I.)," we noted the liars.  We didn't note the lazy.  Lazy people do no research and run with conventional wisdom and that harms us all.  


And while this nonsense has gone on, no one's really challenged it.  The Water Cooler Set is what Ava and I have long called these lazy idiots.  Many have print experience.  You're seeing the impact the internet is having on broadcast and cable and not one of these conventional wisdom idiots can think back to how the internet changed the figures for newspapers?  How the audience shifted to outlets websites and not printed page.  The consumers want to consume when they want to.  They don't want to be dictated to or tied to a schedule they didn't make.

But instead of talking about how consumers are taking in public affairs programs and news stories, we're getting garbage that among the oldy crowd (elderly and those born old), FOX "NEWS" is a success!!!  When in fact the streaming on YOUTUBE says otherwise.  And you pull segments from THE FIVE out of the mix and FOX "NEWS" is an embarrassment in terms of streams.

By the way, here's the CNN video on Russia that beat MSNBC and FOX "NEWS."


 

Donald Trump has promised to cut energy costs, but an expert said some of his policies might end up hurting his own supporters.

The price of natural gas looks likely to jump despite record-high production, which could undermine the president-elect's campaign pledge, and political analyst Leah Wright Rigueur told CNN that energy costs are largely outside the government's control.

"I think, you know, the secretary of the interior, I think the secretary of energy both understand that or the newly appointed, the nominated secretaries understand that," said Rigueur, an assistant professor of public policy at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. "What is more interesting, I think right now is the fact that under [president Joe] Biden, these kind of energy policies, particularly under the Inflation Reduction Act, have actually been deeply beneficial to red states and blue states, but in particular red states, in some cases rescuing manufacturing, rescuing energy production, rescuing all kinds of industry, and so there is a push amongst Republicans, particularly Republican congressmen, to keep those acts and to keep those things in place."


As much as the press actually doing their job could help educate voters, the reality is that lived experience is about to educate a lot of people over the next four years. 

Jessica Corbett (COMMON DREAMS) notes:

Adding to alarm over U.S. President-elect Donald Trump's immigration plans, his "border czar" toldThe Washington Post in an interview published Thursday that the administration plans to return to detaining migrant families with children.

Tom Homan, who served as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump's first term, said that ICE "will look to hold parents with children in 'soft-sided' tent structures similar to those used by U.S. border officials to handle immigration surges," the Post summarized. "The government will not hesitate to deport parents who are in the country illegally, even if they have young U.S.-born children, he added, leaving it to those families to decide whether to exit together or be split up."

Since Trump beat Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris last month, migrant rights advocates have reiterated concerns about the Republican's first-term policies—such as forced separation of families—and his 2024 campaign pledges, from mass deportations to attempting to end birthright citizenship, despite the guarantees of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

Homan—who oversaw the so-called "zero tolerance" policy that separated thousands of migrant kids from their parents—said: "Here's the issue... You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position."



And then there's Elon and other idiots.  



 


Their statements are outraging even MAGA.  Educating MAGA now in the way that the media failed to do in the lead up to the election.  Charlie Nash (MEDIAITE) notes:


 Former Republican presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy received heavy backlash on Thursday after he suggested that Americans were not being hired because they were mediocre.

After Ramaswamy and billionaire Elon Musk came under fire from prominent Trump supporters on X, formerly Twitter, for supporting H-1B visas over the training and hiring of American workers, Ramaswamy defended his position in a post which accused the United States of suffering from a culture of “mediocrity.”

 
The following sites updated:






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