That is why for decades news organizations resisted the push for their papers to do "fact checking."
All news outlets do some form of fact checking—sometimes it’s under the name of “fact checking”, and sometimes it’s that thing called journalism. Hell, fact checking is Journalism 101: If someone says it’s raining and someone else says it’s sunny, your job isn’t to report both sides—your job is to look out the window.
If you get a "fact check" wrong its libel
A “fact check” could be defamatory, but only if it’s a clear lie told knowingly and with malice. Otherwise, it’s protected speech, no matter how much your sorry SovCit ass wants to believe otherwise. Go to a lawyer who knows what they’re talking about and won’t fellate your biases, and they’ll tell you pretty much what I told you—albeit with more legalese.
Someone who works for a media site partly or fully financed by Russia or any other country is not automatically a liar, an automaton, or a propagandist.
From the article: “The OAN reporter, Kristian Rouz, also worked for Sputnik, the government-controlled Russian news outlet.” This is not under dispute. Hell, OAN didn’t even dispute that fact in its lawsuit. To believe Rouz is a propagandist for the Russian government isn’t a huge leap in logic.
Maddow claimed that the OAN person was. That was a smear. That was pure defamation … claiming someone is a Russian agent simply because they did reporting for Sputnik is defamation
It was a legally protected opinion based on the fact that Sputnik is controlled by the Russian government—and the courts have said as much.
Instead of celebrating corruption in the judiciary, why not support justice.
We do support justice around here. That’s why most of us here are in favor of the courts dismissing this obvious SLAPP with prejudice. No justice is served by allowing OAN to refile the same claims with a slightly different coat of paint and starting this process over again.
Because you know.....they coming for you one day.
That sounds like a threat. Did you just make a threat against Techdirt writers? Because that could be legally actionable.
Crack down on defamation and smears.
I’m sorry Dear Leader didn’t get to “open up the libel laws” so that anything negative said about people you like/defend/bootlick for can’t be considered legally actionable~. You have my sincerest sympathies~. It really is an absolute shame~.
We agree with the district court’s conclusion that the broad context of Maddow’s show makes it more likely that her audiences will “expect her to use subjective language that comports with her political opinions.”
That doesn’t mean what you think it does. It means that the courts concluded that Maddow viewers expect her to use “subjective language” that expresses her specific opinions. None of that says she is a liar, or that she doesn’t present facts, or—as you claim—that the courts believe “nothing she ever says can be taken as fact”.
Your attempt to prove your point has failed. Learn to read court rulings in a way that doesn’t fellate your biases.
I agree with the court that opinion shows are opinion.
Opinions can be (and often are) based on facts. The courts haven’t said otherwise. And OAN didn’t even challenge the actual factual statement upon which her opinion was built. OAN only challenged the opinionated statements—and the courts ruled that those opinions are protected speech. It never said “nobody can believe Rachel Maddow when she presents an actual fact”; if you could cite any part of the ruling that explicitly does say that, you’d have done so by now.
My problem has always been with people like you who proport that opinion shows are fact
Rachel Maddow’s show is absolutely an opinion show. But when she makes factual statements, those aren’t opinions. And as I said, OAN didn’t challenge her on the factual statement she made—only on the (legally protected) opinion she expressed.
how hard news and "fact checkers" have hid behind the protection of opinion when sued for defamation
A claim of defamation has—and should have—a large hill to climb. “Hard news” outlets and “fact checkers” would disappear if it were easy to sue such entities for defamation. Don’t hate the players; hate the game you can’t win without effort.
The court is saying that nothing Rachel Maddow ever says can be taken as a statement of fact.
Please show me the exact direct quotes from the ruling that explicitly say what you claim the ruling says. Please note that the quotes must be explicitly clear about what they’re saying; they must have no other reasonable interpretation(s) besides “nothing Rachel Maddow ever says can be taken as a statement of fact”.
Allow me to de-wordify that other comment for you, then.
The court dismissed OAN’s lawsuit with prejudice because the suit lacked merit. Anything Maddow said that was a statement of objective fact wasn’t contested by OAN. Anything she said that was a statement of subjective (and hyperbolic) opinion was also protected speech. OAN couldn’t prove her opinion was defamatory—and wouldn’t have done it regardless of how many times it might’ve tried, hence the “with prejudice” dismissal.
The court is saying that there is no circumstance when Maddow can every be taken as fact.
The court said Maddow provides both news and opinion on her show—which is the truth. It would’ve explicitly made the claim you say it did—at any point in the ruling—if it had intended to make that claim. Your reading of the ruling is wholly incorrect and likely informed by an ignorance you refuse to admit.
It is possible for a site to be biased, and yet the thing that they are biased against may still experience high engagement, despite their best efforts to shape a different outcome.
That would only explain how left-leaning content ends up being somewhat popular on Facebook in spite of the attempts by Facebook to bias the site in favor of conservative content (for whatever reason).
Anyone can write it. But only FB is in a position to put their thumb on the scale.
No, they really aren’t. Any site can bias its algorithms and moderation and such in favor of one type of content or another. Your issue isn’t that Facebook has its thumb on the scale—your issues are that Facebook is popular and Facebook seemingly has a left-leaning bias (despite the evidence that says otherwise).
I have a fairly simple explanation for why things are the way they are
A simple explanation isn’t always the right one. I could say that COVID-19 exists because “some asshole in China willingly unleashed a new plague”; that may be a simple explanation for the pandemic, but it is my no means the correct one.
It reinforces the idea that I am biased, and correct.
Saying you’re correct doesn’t make it so. Saying you’re biased, on the other hand… 👀
Democrats control larger states which gives them greater opportunity to gerrymander.
Don’t those larger states have more “urban centers”, which you yourself said are Democrat-controlled? 🤔
Plat maps are non-partisan. Many of those communities are hundreds of years old. You started thinking these communities are arbitrary, they are not.
Planning districts around “communities” instead of county lines and other non-partisan factors is gerrymandering—because that kind of planning is how you end up with the gerrymandering party picking and choosing which “communities” get the power to vote for who represents them. For Republicans, it often means districting in a way where “communities” that aren’t majority-white don’t get in the way of conservative power grabs.
We have an representative republic. Our communities vote for who we want to represent us in government.
Gerrymandering makes sure those “communities” only elect one party instead of offering a free and fair election that any party can win. If a given district still leans in one direction or another after non-partisan districting, so be it. But the “communities” approach is partisan; let’s not pretend otherwise.
We don't vote for political parties we vote for people.
I feel confident in saying the majority of Americans vote for political parties, even if they’re voting for different candidates inside the party. Our politics are fractured into such partisanship by design—an “us vs. them” zero-sum game. To believe otherwise is to believe nonsense.
I’m not beholden to the Democrats, but I vote Democrats down-ticket every time. For whatever flaws a Dem candidate has, they’re not trying to actively and knowingly hurt marginalized peoples (or curry the favor of people who will). As a queer person, that shit matters to me. I’d wager a bet that such things matter to a hell of a lot of other queer people…if I took sucker bets, that is.
We might get a candidate who transcends those partisan lines every once in a while. But that is a rarity these days. The lines in the sand are drawn; we know where and on what issues. The average citizen is left to figure out who will cause the least harm to the most vulnerable among us. Given the state of Republican politics these days—the cozying up to anti-vaxxers and maskholes and racists and misogynists, the continual attempts to control women’s bodies, the refusal to enter the 21st century in regards to LGBTQ civil rights, the “own the libs” grievance politics that underpins modern Republican policy—my vote will always go to the Democrats, even if I don’t like their candidate (coughbidencough).
You flat out steal community representative by zoning your community into theirs because you have spare votes.
Just so you know, I don’t support gerrymandering even when it benefits the Democrats. All district maps should be drawn using non-partisan factors—and that doesn’t include “communities”.
But if you think that’s not how Republicans do their gerrymandering, maybe look up GOP-gerrymandered maps and figure out how the hell they’re doing that shit. I guarantee it isn’t based on “communities”…or, at least, not the “communities” you want to think they’re using.
Again they shouldn't be zoned together in the first place.
For what reason shouldn’t they be zoned together if they’re in the same county? For what reason should the city essentially be its own district and everything else gets to be a separate district? For what reason should states essentially be districted such that rural and suburban areas receive more representation in government (by virtue of having more districts dedicated to them) than the “urban areas” where a large number of citizens live?
Just because republicans control more state governments does not mean they have more gerrymandered districts. Its very hard to do much gerrymandering in Iowa, Montana, West Virginia etc.
Have you considered that maybe it’s hard to do gerrymandering in those states because they’ve already been gerrymandered and nobody has the power to undo the damage? Have you pondered whether the parties in charge are unwilling to concede the point and reëxamine their districting maps? Have you thought about how this was the plan by the Republicans the entire time, since Democrats tend to focus on the national-level races and largely ignore state- and local-level races that Republicans treat as absolutely vital to its long-term survival?
You don't even know what plat maps are. That means you have never owned your own property.
Neither have a lot of other Millennials. Your point is irrelevant and intentionally inflammatory.
You are a man-child!
I’m reporting you to the FBI for posting NAMBLA propaganda on a public-facing website that children can view (you sick fuck).
The easiest way to handle this is not to define “sexual activity”, but to instead define specific acts that can’t be displayed—e.g., saying “you can pose naked, but you can’t show yourself masturbating”.
No, that is what’s being done—hell, gerrymandering is all about picking and choosing which communities to put in a district for a naked partisan advantage. That’s how you end up with maps where voting districts don’t even remotely resemble anything fair or logical.
They dont do it nearly as bad as the democrats do and they don't really have to.
Please provide proof that Democrats gerrymander to a worse degree than Republicans. A court case saying an explicitly Democratic gerrymander was done for nakedly partisan powergrabbing would be an ideal start.
If we proportioned districts by local community boundaries
Please define “local community boundaries”.
Democrats self select. They prefer to live in ideologically homogeneous communities.
If they do it, so do Republicans. Projection, thy name is Chozen.
If you apportioned as intended
According to whose intent—yours, the GOP’s, God’s, or someone else’s? Be specific.
If your community is ideologically homogeneous and extremely left-wing you get an extremely left-wing representative.
You don’t seem to have a problem with things being the other way around, seeing as how you’re all but begging on your hands and knees for that sweet, sweet “community districting” to be poured into your mouth. I mean, it’s like you said: “If we proportioned districts by local community boundaries republicans wound never lose the House.”
That dis[en]franchises whatever 2 districts your district was cut into to spread your vote around.
Congratulations, you understand gerrymandering. So why aren’t you against it when Republicans do it? For what reason aren’t you calling for non-partisan redistricting with neutral, objective, non-partisan criteria that won’t seek to disadvantage any given political party? (“Community boundaries” doesn’t count.) You’re whining your ass off about Democrats and gerrymandering, but last I checked, Republicans—the party that is slowly losing its sole major voting base to both the march of time and demographic changes—are doing the same damn thing and you’re seemingly delighted by the fact. Hell, “community boundaries” might even be a dogwhistle for “boundaries that keep conservative white people as the largest demographic in a district so they keep to get running the show”.
The guy who lives in the city art district cant represent the suburban soccer mom. But this is how democrats zone their districts.
By this logic, the suburban soccer mom can’t represent the artist in the city. Your plan for “community boundaries” districting would likely give her that power anyway. Hell, that’s exactly how gerrymandering works.
Large portions of the suburban community are disenfranchised.
Again: Please provide proof that Democrats gerrymander to a worse degree than Republicans. A court case saying an explicitly Democratic gerrymander was done for nakedly partisan powergrabbing would be an ideal start.
The big problem is that OnlyFans built its value partially (if not near-entirely) through sex workers. OF choosing to kick out those who made the company as valuable as it is now will destroy a lot of that value immediately. When Tumblr formally began its porn ban, its traffic—and thus its value—dropped practically overnight. The same will happen to OF, and nothing besides reversing the ban will prevent this fate.
The alternative, is that MasterCard/Visa, Discover, and American Express basically can dictate what you can and can't spend money on.
Taken to the logical endgame, this would ultimately mean payment processors could essentially control what speech is or isn’t “acceptable” on the web. That’s a far more frightening notion, and it’s not one I see a whole lot of people raising, mostly because of the porn angle.
there’s likely som[e] people out there that actually using stuff on that … list in such a way
The list wouldn’t exist if conservatives didn’t actually use the language in the way they do. As satirical as the list is, like much satire, it is deeply rooted in the truth.
Feel free to show evidence I have.
Did I say you did? (No. No, I did not.)
thanks to evidence you provided (among others) that wasn’t generally linked to by news sites, left or right, I have reason to believe a small minority may have had intentions beyond being heard
Yeah, uh…the “hang Mike Pence” chants weren’t some well-hidden secret for months after the fact. Pretty sure even MSNBC was playing footage of that shit as soon as it could.
Bleach.
Context.
Positive statements about white supremacy.
I never said he made such statements. I said he avoided making unequivocal hardline denouncements of white supremacy and its adherents. And that’s true: Whenever asked to denounce groups like the Proud Boys, he either equated them to some other group (e.g., “very fine people on both sides”, mentioning the violence from “all sides”), offered a weak enough condemnation that even his cult of personality didn’t believe him, or—in regards to the Proud Boys themselves—told them to “stand back and stand by”. Donald Trump couldn’t risk losing the support of groups like those, even if he couldn’t openly accept their support, because losing that support meant losing votes.
Incidentally, the GOP is much the same way: While Republicans may denounce white supremacy, their actions—e.g., using loaded language to spread racist ideas, protecting Confederate monuments—speak louder than words to the racists. The GOP may not openly accept the support of white supremacists, sure…but they’re not actively trying to destroy the image of the party as a safe haven for those assholes, either. (Especially in the South.)
I’m a literalist. I take things at face value. I don’t live in a world always worrying about what something may mean other than what was said.
Then you either can’t or willingly refuse to understand the idea of dogwhistle politics, in which case your whining about people not being as literal-minded as you is both irrelevant and pathetic.
Neither one of us know what Clinton would have done.
Irrelevant. Hillary Clinton was never president.
How’s the Biden situation working out?
For the bit of good he’s done as president, the rest is frankly a shitshow. But at least he’s not a fascist like your Dear Leader and his authoritarian acolytes. (Always remember that you voted for an American fascist—twice.)
I’m no fan of Joe Biden as president. I knew he was going to be, at best, a middling centrist dipshit even before I cast my vote for him. (I would’ve preferred Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren. C’est la vie.) He and his administration could be doing a better job on a lot of areas, not the least of which is immigration. That said: I don’t regret my vote for him because…well, for starters, I have that privilege, but also because he isn’t trying to turn the United States into an authoritarian Christian theocracy. In no way I can think of is the Biden administration actively trying to intentionally worsen the state of the union. Compare that to Trump and his administration, which undid environmental regulations and broke ethics rules and stole a Supreme Court seat from Obama and attacked trans people and did many other things that tried to actively worsen the country—if not for everyone, then for the people conservatives thought were supposed to be harmed.
Maybe my constant stating that I say what I mean and don’t use “subtext” would be enough for you to eventually stop saying I mean something I didn’t say.
You can mean something other than what you say without actually trying. That’s how subtext works: Usage transforms the meaning of a word/phrase independently of any dictionary definition. The word “globalist” is largely seen by anyone who isn’t an anti-Semite as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle precisely because it’s been used as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle to that much of a degree. Hell, your precious insistence on “states’ rights” as a leading cause for the Confederacy is a dogwhistle—though you’ve already implied that you’re too ignorant to realize that.
Before you make your counterargument: Yes, it is possible that someone can see a dogwhistle in a word or phrase that isn’t intended by the speaker to be one. That said, plausible deniability is a key feature of political dogwhistles. That’s why a fair amount of people who are fucking tired of conservative bullshit are on what you might call a “heightened alert” for conservative dogwhistles—they’ve been trained by experience to expect it from conservatives more often than not.
You’ve never pointed out to a far right position I’ve supported.
Well, for starters: “I support fences, laws, and walls.”
maybe most of your complaints aren’t far anything?
You’re unwilling to confront even the idea that American became a hellscape for millions of people under the leadership (such as it was) of Donald Trump.
Oh, and fine people. I a) don’t buy your ‘but he meant’ and b) 100% oppose anyone damaging any monuments.
Of course you don’t, because you’ve done the mental gymnastics necessary to avoid the idea that he was referring to the actual white supremacists who were the actual majority of the actual protestors who were actually protesting the proposed removal of monuments dedicated to a white supremacist nation-state.
I oppose the idea in general, but monuments to the Confederacy are monuments which my stance looks the other way on—because in places with large Black populations, essentially telling those Black people (and their allies) that monuments for an entire goddamn country devoted to enslaving their ancestors can’t be moved because it would upset white feelings (which is really what most of that shit comes down to in the end) sends a message that they have no other alternative but direct action if they want those monuments gone.
Art is art. History is history.
Then put the statues in a museum. The only reason to have a statue honoring a Confederate in a public place is to honor the cause upon which the Confederacy was born: white supremacy.
And one can admire a general’s military prowess without supporting their cause.
No, you…you really can’t separate the two. Such an approach whitewashes history by removing context. I mean, what the fuck is the point of celebrating their military prowess without reflecting on what they were using that prowess to accomplish? Doing that shit for Confederate generals would be little better than celebrating the prowess of Nazi generals without mentioning the cause for which the Nazis were fighting.
I accept that he called for repeal and replace.
So do I. Your problem is that you’ve never been able to admit that Trump never had an actual replacement plan ready. You’re always going on about “repeal and replace” as if he did.
That he’d sign a repeal alone is a down side.
The fact that you’re this weak in your criticism of Trump’s lack of a replacement plan for the ACA is basically confirming everything I’ve said about you lacking the balls necessary to criticize Dear Leader.
But you’ve brought that up before and I said the same thing.
No, what you kept saying what “it was always repeal-and-replace”, as if Trump had a replacement plan ready for when the ACA was (supposed to be) undone. He didn’t. His plan was always to repeal Obamacare and maybe get around to replacing it with something meaningful if he felt like doing that. (Spoilers: He didn’t and he never will.)
The context is quite clear to anyone who listened to the discussion or read the whole paragraph.
Yeah, it is: After someone else brought up the fact that household disinfectants (including bleach) can kill the COVID-19 virus on non-porous surfaces, Donald Trump pondered shortly thereafter about whether injecting people with such disinfectants could be a potential treatment for COVID-19, despite the fact that many of those disinfectants (including bleach) are toxic—often fatally so—to human beings.
That is what happened. That is a documented and verifiable fact; video and transcripts of that moment exist. Bitch about how people like me use exaggerated shorthand to cut to the chase of Trump’s suggestion all you want. The actuality of the moment is impossible for you to deny unless you really don’t understand the concepts of context and cause-and-effect.
I have plenty of criticism.
No, you don’t. You have simple statements that don’t meaningfully address the criticisms of Donald Trump. I could tell you that Trump nominated a former oil lobbyist to be the Secretary of the Interior—a man who was also a key figure in rolling back protections of the Endangered Species Act—and you wouldn’t have shit to say about what that decision meant for environmental protections (several of which were rolled back during the Trump administration). You’d probably say “sucks, but not a big deal” or some shit.
When I say you don’t meaningfully criticize the Trump administration, that’s what I mean: You don’t, and you don’t seem willing to, engage with criticisms of Trump and his cronies on a substantive level. You’re not willing to dig deep into why the things he did might be problematic for anyone who isn’t a Trump supporter; you either deflect with whataboutism/partisan mockery or simply go “meh, not a big deal” and move on. Do you even care about the things Trump did in office that objectively made life worse for Americans—like, say, the trans military ban? Because if you did, you would engage with the criticisms and lean into understanding why people feel that way instead of dismissing those people as “ultra-libs” or “far left radicals” or whatever partisan insult you’re using this week.
I can understand why people are pissed at Biden for how his administration is handling immigration—on both sides of the aisle, might I add. I don’t think he’s doing a good job of it, either; no one in his administration seems to have a clear plan for how to control immigration while treating migrants and refugees with any kind of humanity. (Neither do I, but that speaks less to the complexity of the issue and more to my general ignorance of it. An immigration policy wonk, I am not.) But depite voting for Biden, I’m willing to step up and say that he shouldn’t be continuing the usage of the concentration camps at the southern border (or elsewhere in the U.S.). I’m willing to ask that he and his administration look at finding ways to both streamline the immigration/naturalization process and give Dreamers the full path to citizenship that they deserve. I’m willing to engage with the criticisms and use them to triangulate my position on Biden, on immigration, and on my political ideology in general.
(I’m also willing to say the U.S. should stop fucking around in Central and South America because that’s a big reason for immigration from those areas. But that transcends any given presidential administration.)
I’ve never once seen you do what I just did for Biden and immigration with any substantive criticism of Old 45 on any issue, inculding his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. That you’re either unwilling or unable to do that is your problem; I can’t and won’t solve it for you.
On the post: Ninth Circuit Affirms MSNBC's Anti-SLAPP Motion Against OAN Network's Bullshit Defamation Lawsuit
Can’t it be both?
On the post: Ninth Circuit Affirms MSNBC's Anti-SLAPP Motion Against OAN Network's Bullshit Defamation Lawsuit
All news outlets do some form of fact checking—sometimes it’s under the name of “fact checking”, and sometimes it’s that thing called journalism. Hell, fact checking is Journalism 101: If someone says it’s raining and someone else says it’s sunny, your job isn’t to report both sides—your job is to look out the window.
A “fact check” could be defamatory, but only if it’s a clear lie told knowingly and with malice. Otherwise, it’s protected speech, no matter how much your sorry SovCit ass wants to believe otherwise. Go to a lawyer who knows what they’re talking about and won’t fellate your biases, and they’ll tell you pretty much what I told you—albeit with more legalese.
On the post: Dominion Sues Newsmax, OAN, And The Head Of Overstock.Com For Election-Related Defamation
fuck off, SovCit, your logic is no good here
On the post: Ninth Circuit Affirms MSNBC's Anti-SLAPP Motion Against OAN Network's Bullshit Defamation Lawsuit
From the article: “The OAN reporter, Kristian Rouz, also worked for Sputnik, the government-controlled Russian news outlet.” This is not under dispute. Hell, OAN didn’t even dispute that fact in its lawsuit. To believe Rouz is a propagandist for the Russian government isn’t a huge leap in logic.
It was a legally protected opinion based on the fact that Sputnik is controlled by the Russian government—and the courts have said as much.
We do support justice around here. That’s why most of us here are in favor of the courts dismissing this obvious SLAPP with prejudice. No justice is served by allowing OAN to refile the same claims with a slightly different coat of paint and starting this process over again.
That sounds like a threat. Did you just make a threat against Techdirt writers? Because that could be legally actionable.
I’m sorry Dear Leader didn’t get to “open up the libel laws” so that anything negative said about people you like/defend/bootlick for can’t be considered legally actionable~. You have my sincerest sympathies~. It really is an absolute shame~.
On the post: Ninth Circuit Affirms MSNBC's Anti-SLAPP Motion Against OAN Network's Bullshit Defamation Lawsuit
That doesn’t mean what you think it does. It means that the courts concluded that Maddow viewers expect her to use “subjective language” that expresses her specific opinions. None of that says she is a liar, or that she doesn’t present facts, or—as you claim—that the courts believe “nothing she ever says can be taken as fact”.
Your attempt to prove your point has failed. Learn to read court rulings in a way that doesn’t fellate your biases.
Opinions can be (and often are) based on facts. The courts haven’t said otherwise. And OAN didn’t even challenge the actual factual statement upon which her opinion was built. OAN only challenged the opinionated statements—and the courts ruled that those opinions are protected speech. It never said “nobody can believe Rachel Maddow when she presents an actual fact”; if you could cite any part of the ruling that explicitly does say that, you’d have done so by now.
Rachel Maddow’s show is absolutely an opinion show. But when she makes factual statements, those aren’t opinions. And as I said, OAN didn’t challenge her on the factual statement she made—only on the (legally protected) opinion she expressed.
A claim of defamation has—and should have—a large hill to climb. “Hard news” outlets and “fact checkers” would disappear if it were easy to sue such entities for defamation. Don’t hate the players; hate the game you can’t win without effort.
On the post: Ninth Circuit Affirms MSNBC's Anti-SLAPP Motion Against OAN Network's Bullshit Defamation Lawsuit
Please show me the exact direct quotes from the ruling that explicitly say what you claim the ruling says. Please note that the quotes must be explicitly clear about what they’re saying; they must have no other reasonable interpretation(s) besides “nothing Rachel Maddow ever says can be taken as a statement of fact”.
I’ll wait.
On the post: Ninth Circuit Affirms MSNBC's Anti-SLAPP Motion Against OAN Network's Bullshit Defamation Lawsuit
You lack reading comprehension.
Allow me to de-wordify that other comment for you, then.
The court dismissed OAN’s lawsuit with prejudice because the suit lacked merit. Anything Maddow said that was a statement of objective fact wasn’t contested by OAN. Anything she said that was a statement of subjective (and hyperbolic) opinion was also protected speech. OAN couldn’t prove her opinion was defamatory—and wouldn’t have done it regardless of how many times it might’ve tried, hence the “with prejudice” dismissal.
The court said Maddow provides both news and opinion on her show—which is the truth. It would’ve explicitly made the claim you say it did—at any point in the ruling—if it had intended to make that claim. Your reading of the ruling is wholly incorrect and likely informed by an ignorance you refuse to admit.
On the post: NY Times And Washington Post Criticize Facebook Because The Chicago Tribune Had A Terrible Headline
That would only explain how left-leaning content ends up being somewhat popular on Facebook in spite of the attempts by Facebook to bias the site in favor of conservative content (for whatever reason).
No, they really aren’t. Any site can bias its algorithms and moderation and such in favor of one type of content or another. Your issue isn’t that Facebook has its thumb on the scale—your issues are that Facebook is popular and Facebook seemingly has a left-leaning bias (despite the evidence that says otherwise).
A simple explanation isn’t always the right one. I could say that COVID-19 exists because “some asshole in China willingly unleashed a new plague”; that may be a simple explanation for the pandemic, but it is my no means the correct one.
Saying you’re correct doesn’t make it so. Saying you’re biased, on the other hand… 👀
On the post: Investigation Of ShotSpotter's Practices Is Raising Questions The Company's Angry Statement Really Doesn't Answer
That level of specificity can only mean that lawyers were involved. And we all know lawyers never lie~.
On the post: Devin Nunes' Deposition Goes Off The Rails, As He Keeps Suing (And Actually Gets A Minor Victory In One Suit)
Don’t those larger states have more “urban centers”, which you yourself said are Democrat-controlled? 🤔
Planning districts around “communities” instead of county lines and other non-partisan factors is gerrymandering—because that kind of planning is how you end up with the gerrymandering party picking and choosing which “communities” get the power to vote for who represents them. For Republicans, it often means districting in a way where “communities” that aren’t majority-white don’t get in the way of conservative power grabs.
Gerrymandering makes sure those “communities” only elect one party instead of offering a free and fair election that any party can win. If a given district still leans in one direction or another after non-partisan districting, so be it. But the “communities” approach is partisan; let’s not pretend otherwise.
I feel confident in saying the majority of Americans vote for political parties, even if they’re voting for different candidates inside the party. Our politics are fractured into such partisanship by design—an “us vs. them” zero-sum game. To believe otherwise is to believe nonsense.
I’m not beholden to the Democrats, but I vote Democrats down-ticket every time. For whatever flaws a Dem candidate has, they’re not trying to actively and knowingly hurt marginalized peoples (or curry the favor of people who will). As a queer person, that shit matters to me. I’d wager a bet that such things matter to a hell of a lot of other queer people…if I took sucker bets, that is.
We might get a candidate who transcends those partisan lines every once in a while. But that is a rarity these days. The lines in the sand are drawn; we know where and on what issues. The average citizen is left to figure out who will cause the least harm to the most vulnerable among us. Given the state of Republican politics these days—the cozying up to anti-vaxxers and maskholes and racists and misogynists, the continual attempts to control women’s bodies, the refusal to enter the 21st century in regards to LGBTQ civil rights, the “own the libs” grievance politics that underpins modern Republican policy—my vote will always go to the Democrats, even if I don’t like their candidate (coughbidencough).
Just so you know, I don’t support gerrymandering even when it benefits the Democrats. All district maps should be drawn using non-partisan factors—and that doesn’t include “communities”.
But if you think that’s not how Republicans do their gerrymandering, maybe look up GOP-gerrymandered maps and figure out how the hell they’re doing that shit. I guarantee it isn’t based on “communities”…or, at least, not the “communities” you want to think they’re using.
For what reason shouldn’t they be zoned together if they’re in the same county? For what reason should the city essentially be its own district and everything else gets to be a separate district? For what reason should states essentially be districted such that rural and suburban areas receive more representation in government (by virtue of having more districts dedicated to them) than the “urban areas” where a large number of citizens live?
Have you considered that maybe it’s hard to do gerrymandering in those states because they’ve already been gerrymandered and nobody has the power to undo the damage? Have you pondered whether the parties in charge are unwilling to concede the point and reëxamine their districting maps? Have you thought about how this was the plan by the Republicans the entire time, since Democrats tend to focus on the national-level races and largely ignore state- and local-level races that Republicans treat as absolutely vital to its long-term survival?
Neither have a lot of other Millennials. Your point is irrelevant and intentionally inflammatory.
I’m reporting you to the FBI for posting NAMBLA propaganda on a public-facing website that children can view (you sick fuck).
On the post: OnlyPrudes: OnlyFans, The Platform For Sexually Explicit Content, Says No More Sexually Explicit Content (Except For Nudes)
Sorry I missed this comment chain the first time around. That said: I agree with bhull 100%, who probably put it better than I ever could.
[copypastes bhull’s comment for later study] 👀
On the post: OnlyPrudes: OnlyFans, The Platform For Sexually Explicit Content, Says No More Sexually Explicit Content (Except For Nudes)
The easiest way to handle this is not to define “sexual activity”, but to instead define specific acts that can’t be displayed—e.g., saying “you can pose naked, but you can’t show yourself masturbating”.
On the post: Devin Nunes' Deposition Goes Off The Rails, As He Keeps Suing (And Actually Gets A Minor Victory In One Suit)
No idea why I got signed out before posting this, but yeah, this one was mine.
On the post: Devin Nunes' Deposition Goes Off The Rails, As He Keeps Suing (And Actually Gets A Minor Victory In One Suit)
No, that is what’s being done—hell, gerrymandering is all about picking and choosing which communities to put in a district for a naked partisan advantage. That’s how you end up with maps where voting districts don’t even remotely resemble anything fair or logical.
On the post: Devin Nunes' Deposition Goes Off The Rails, As He Keeps Suing (And Actually Gets A Minor Victory In One Suit)
Please provide proof that Democrats gerrymander to a worse degree than Republicans. A court case saying an explicitly Democratic gerrymander was done for nakedly partisan powergrabbing would be an ideal start.
Please define “local community boundaries”.
If they do it, so do Republicans. Projection, thy name is Chozen.
According to whose intent—yours, the GOP’s, God’s, or someone else’s? Be specific.
You don’t seem to have a problem with things being the other way around, seeing as how you’re all but begging on your hands and knees for that sweet, sweet “community districting” to be poured into your mouth. I mean, it’s like you said: “If we proportioned districts by local community boundaries republicans wound never lose the House.”
Congratulations, you understand gerrymandering. So why aren’t you against it when Republicans do it? For what reason aren’t you calling for non-partisan redistricting with neutral, objective, non-partisan criteria that won’t seek to disadvantage any given political party? (“Community boundaries” doesn’t count.) You’re whining your ass off about Democrats and gerrymandering, but last I checked, Republicans—the party that is slowly losing its sole major voting base to both the march of time and demographic changes—are doing the same damn thing and you’re seemingly delighted by the fact. Hell, “community boundaries” might even be a dogwhistle for “boundaries that keep conservative white people as the largest demographic in a district so they keep to get running the show”.
By this logic, the suburban soccer mom can’t represent the artist in the city. Your plan for “community boundaries” districting would likely give her that power anyway. Hell, that’s exactly how gerrymandering works.
Again: Please provide proof that Democrats gerrymander to a worse degree than Republicans. A court case saying an explicitly Democratic gerrymander was done for nakedly partisan powergrabbing would be an ideal start.
On the post: Sensitive Data On Afghan Allies Collected By The US Military Is Now In The Hands Of The Taliban
See, this is what happens when you get involved in a land war in Asia.
On the post: OnlyPrudes: OnlyFans, The Platform For Sexually Explicit Content, Says No More Sexually Explicit Content (Except For Nudes)
The big problem is that OnlyFans built its value partially (if not near-entirely) through sex workers. OF choosing to kick out those who made the company as valuable as it is now will destroy a lot of that value immediately. When Tumblr formally began its porn ban, its traffic—and thus its value—dropped practically overnight. The same will happen to OF, and nothing besides reversing the ban will prevent this fate.
On the post: OnlyPrudes: OnlyFans, The Platform For Sexually Explicit Content, Says No More Sexually Explicit Content (Except For Nudes)
Hey, Koby: You’ve been asked a question. You gonna answer it?
On the post: OnlyPrudes: OnlyFans, The Platform For Sexually Explicit Content, Says No More Sexually Explicit Content (Except For Nudes)
Taken to the logical endgame, this would ultimately mean payment processors could essentially control what speech is or isn’t “acceptable” on the web. That’s a far more frightening notion, and it’s not one I see a whole lot of people raising, mostly because of the porn angle.
On the post: Dominion Sues Newsmax, OAN, And The Head Of Overstock.Com For Election-Related Defamation
The list wouldn’t exist if conservatives didn’t actually use the language in the way they do. As satirical as the list is, like much satire, it is deeply rooted in the truth.
Did I say you did? (No. No, I did not.)
Yeah, uh…the “hang Mike Pence” chants weren’t some well-hidden secret for months after the fact. Pretty sure even MSNBC was playing footage of that shit as soon as it could.
Context.
I never said he made such statements. I said he avoided making unequivocal hardline denouncements of white supremacy and its adherents. And that’s true: Whenever asked to denounce groups like the Proud Boys, he either equated them to some other group (e.g., “very fine people on both sides”, mentioning the violence from “all sides”), offered a weak enough condemnation that even his cult of personality didn’t believe him, or—in regards to the Proud Boys themselves—told them to “stand back and stand by”. Donald Trump couldn’t risk losing the support of groups like those, even if he couldn’t openly accept their support, because losing that support meant losing votes.
Incidentally, the GOP is much the same way: While Republicans may denounce white supremacy, their actions—e.g., using loaded language to spread racist ideas, protecting Confederate monuments—speak louder than words to the racists. The GOP may not openly accept the support of white supremacists, sure…but they’re not actively trying to destroy the image of the party as a safe haven for those assholes, either. (Especially in the South.)
Then you either can’t or willingly refuse to understand the idea of dogwhistle politics, in which case your whining about people not being as literal-minded as you is both irrelevant and pathetic.
Irrelevant. Hillary Clinton was never president.
For the bit of good he’s done as president, the rest is frankly a shitshow. But at least he’s not a fascist like your Dear Leader and his authoritarian acolytes. (Always remember that you voted for an American fascist—twice.)
I’m no fan of Joe Biden as president. I knew he was going to be, at best, a middling centrist dipshit even before I cast my vote for him. (I would’ve preferred Bernie Sanders or Liz Warren. C’est la vie.) He and his administration could be doing a better job on a lot of areas, not the least of which is immigration. That said: I don’t regret my vote for him because…well, for starters, I have that privilege, but also because he isn’t trying to turn the United States into an authoritarian Christian theocracy. In no way I can think of is the Biden administration actively trying to intentionally worsen the state of the union. Compare that to Trump and his administration, which undid environmental regulations and broke ethics rules and stole a Supreme Court seat from Obama and attacked trans people and did many other things that tried to actively worsen the country—if not for everyone, then for the people conservatives thought were supposed to be harmed.
You can mean something other than what you say without actually trying. That’s how subtext works: Usage transforms the meaning of a word/phrase independently of any dictionary definition. The word “globalist” is largely seen by anyone who isn’t an anti-Semite as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle precisely because it’s been used as an anti-Semitic dogwhistle to that much of a degree. Hell, your precious insistence on “states’ rights” as a leading cause for the Confederacy is a dogwhistle—though you’ve already implied that you’re too ignorant to realize that.
Before you make your counterargument: Yes, it is possible that someone can see a dogwhistle in a word or phrase that isn’t intended by the speaker to be one. That said, plausible deniability is a key feature of political dogwhistles. That’s why a fair amount of people who are fucking tired of conservative bullshit are on what you might call a “heightened alert” for conservative dogwhistles—they’ve been trained by experience to expect it from conservatives more often than not.
Well, for starters: “I support fences, laws, and walls.”
You’re unwilling to confront even the idea that American became a hellscape for millions of people under the leadership (such as it was) of Donald Trump.
Of course you don’t, because you’ve done the mental gymnastics necessary to avoid the idea that he was referring to the actual white supremacists who were the actual majority of the actual protestors who were actually protesting the proposed removal of monuments dedicated to a white supremacist nation-state.
Then put the statues in a museum. The only reason to have a statue honoring a Confederate in a public place is to honor the cause upon which the Confederacy was born: white supremacy.
No, you…you really can’t separate the two. Such an approach whitewashes history by removing context. I mean, what the fuck is the point of celebrating their military prowess without reflecting on what they were using that prowess to accomplish? Doing that shit for Confederate generals would be little better than celebrating the prowess of Nazi generals without mentioning the cause for which the Nazis were fighting.
So do I. Your problem is that you’ve never been able to admit that Trump never had an actual replacement plan ready. You’re always going on about “repeal and replace” as if he did.
The fact that you’re this weak in your criticism of Trump’s lack of a replacement plan for the ACA is basically confirming everything I’ve said about you lacking the balls necessary to criticize Dear Leader.
No, what you kept saying what “it was always repeal-and-replace”, as if Trump had a replacement plan ready for when the ACA was (supposed to be) undone. He didn’t. His plan was always to repeal Obamacare and maybe get around to replacing it with something meaningful if he felt like doing that. (Spoilers: He didn’t and he never will.)
Yeah, it is: After someone else brought up the fact that household disinfectants (including bleach) can kill the COVID-19 virus on non-porous surfaces, Donald Trump pondered shortly thereafter about whether injecting people with such disinfectants could be a potential treatment for COVID-19, despite the fact that many of those disinfectants (including bleach) are toxic—often fatally so—to human beings.
That is what happened. That is a documented and verifiable fact; video and transcripts of that moment exist. Bitch about how people like me use exaggerated shorthand to cut to the chase of Trump’s suggestion all you want. The actuality of the moment is impossible for you to deny unless you really don’t understand the concepts of context and cause-and-effect.
No, you don’t. You have simple statements that don’t meaningfully address the criticisms of Donald Trump. I could tell you that Trump nominated a former oil lobbyist to be the Secretary of the Interior—a man who was also a key figure in rolling back protections of the Endangered Species Act—and you wouldn’t have shit to say about what that decision meant for environmental protections (several of which were rolled back during the Trump administration). You’d probably say “sucks, but not a big deal” or some shit.
When I say you don’t meaningfully criticize the Trump administration, that’s what I mean: You don’t, and you don’t seem willing to, engage with criticisms of Trump and his cronies on a substantive level. You’re not willing to dig deep into why the things he did might be problematic for anyone who isn’t a Trump supporter; you either deflect with whataboutism/partisan mockery or simply go “meh, not a big deal” and move on. Do you even care about the things Trump did in office that objectively made life worse for Americans—like, say, the trans military ban? Because if you did, you would engage with the criticisms and lean into understanding why people feel that way instead of dismissing those people as “ultra-libs” or “far left radicals” or whatever partisan insult you’re using this week.
I can understand why people are pissed at Biden for how his administration is handling immigration—on both sides of the aisle, might I add. I don’t think he’s doing a good job of it, either; no one in his administration seems to have a clear plan for how to control immigration while treating migrants and refugees with any kind of humanity. (Neither do I, but that speaks less to the complexity of the issue and more to my general ignorance of it. An immigration policy wonk, I am not.) But depite voting for Biden, I’m willing to step up and say that he shouldn’t be continuing the usage of the concentration camps at the southern border (or elsewhere in the U.S.). I’m willing to ask that he and his administration look at finding ways to both streamline the immigration/naturalization process and give Dreamers the full path to citizenship that they deserve. I’m willing to engage with the criticisms and use them to triangulate my position on Biden, on immigration, and on my political ideology in general.
(I’m also willing to say the U.S. should stop fucking around in Central and South America because that’s a big reason for immigration from those areas. But that transcends any given presidential administration.)
I’ve never once seen you do what I just did for Biden and immigration with any substantive criticism of Old 45 on any issue, inculding his handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. That you’re either unwilling or unable to do that is your problem; I can’t and won’t solve it for you.
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