Not only all of the above, but for Paul in particular, a genius who was in the midst of one of the largest creative highs of his entire career. I mean, some of the snippets of ‘half-baked’ songs he plays are songs that will figure well into his solo/Wings career. I honestly don’t know how you can come out of watching Get Back with anything other than admiration for human creativity as personified by Paul McCartney during this amazing month that got captured on film.
I mean...it kind of depends. As a history buff, I love the French plantation scene in the long version of Apocolypse Now Redux... I totally understand why it was removed from the original theatrical release, though. I think director cuts tend to play to the more 'hardcore' fans of a piece, and sometimes serve to make the work less accessible to more casual viewers.
Full stack dev checking in (Django on the backend, Angular on the frontend). Also have no difficulty with modern development (web or otherwise) despite having cut my teeth on 8-bit BASIC. ;)
I mean...based on what? We have more stuff, that's for sure. Our healthcare (when we can afford it) and nutrition is probably better and more consistent. Are we any happier? I'm not sure.
I honestly believe that if you remove social media from the equation, there is zero doubt that modern life makes you happier. There are so many awesome things you can do nowadays with modern tech, you have practically unlimited entertainment. But now you also have on-demand comparison, and as they say, comparison is the thief of joy. The sooner society realizes that social media is the REAL thing that is making people unhappy, the better.
"...you have practically unlimited entertainment."
This is a tangent, but I feel like I enjoyed things more when I didn't have practically unlimited entertainment. Video games before the digital era with Xbox Game Pass, PSNow / PSPlus, etc were limited to a few games that you bought and really invested in. Videos before streaming where you were limited to what was sitting in Blockbuster or in your physical collection. Music was limited to what the radio was playing (which you had no control over) or what you had in your tape/CD collection. Because physical media was something of an investment, it sort of led to a sort of 'automatic curation' that's much harder with having just about every game, movie, tv show, and album at your fingertips.
Maybe it's an age thing, but now I have 'back catalogs' for all of this stuff, and there's a constant feeling of 'missing out' if you choose one thing from your unlimited supply over another thing. It's exhausting.
I guess I just don't care enough about whether or not a person, party, or politician has contempt for me. Whoever has the policy that will be best for the country and the population overall. (With the understanding that my best interests are not always the best interests of the overall country / population...)
Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, and Rachel Maddow have all used "No one could honestly believe that what we say is really true" as an argument in legal proceedings against them.
The specific details are Maddow was talking about a journalist from another network(OAN), and said something like "This person is literally paid by the Russian government to produce news stories". Maddow's team argued that it isn't slander because no reasonable viewer of her show would take that statement to be truthful despite the confident/clear language it is expressed in.
Krauss was in fact working for OAN and Sputnik at the same time and Sputnik is funded by the Russian government. Maddow even won attorney fees in that case. Rouz is a propagandist; quotes in the decision amply demonstrate that.
Quoting the appeals decision, The challenged statement was an obvious exaggeration, cushioned within an undisputed news story.
Equating Maddow’s exaggeration with Jones and Carlson is just rank bothsiderism.
If they actually are on the payroll, how is it an "obvious exaggeration" to say that they are getting paid by the Russian government? If something is demonstrably true, why would one need to hide behind the "No reasonable person would believe this to be true" defense?
Because that is the threshold question of any defamation case [1]. OAN lost that case and re-lost on appeal. Then in awarding Maddow attorneys fees, the court was saying OAN shouldn't have even filed the suit in the first place.
The question for you, the original question, is why would you consider her shorthand argument based on fact equivalent to what Alex Jones does?
Because when you're defending a lawsuit, you lay out multiple lines of defense. What we said was true, but even if it wasn't true, we had good reason to think it was, but even if we really didn't have good reason, we're just entertainment. That way you're not doomed if the court accepts some convoluted argument that what you said wasn't actually true.
As loathe as people are to hear "both sides", 'The Left' absolutely does this as too. They just use different names and insinuations to communicate the same point, that sources presented by the other side is not to be trusted.
Remember when Biden claimed that COVID-19 was invented by the Republicans to make his presidency look bad?
Remember when Obama refused to acknowledge that Trump won the presidency and when CNN aired nonstop coverage from conspiracy theorists claiming that the entire election was fraudulent?
Remember when Obama claimed months in advance that any election in which a Democrat lost was necessarily fraudulent, and then incited a mob to take over the US Capitol building during the electoral vote count? And then when Obama refused to authorize the national guard to prevent US senators and house representatives from being taken hostage?
You're damn right -- they're both totally the same.
This is very likely to devolve into a partisan squabble, so I don't want to keep going back and forth on this. I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility. If I pick only one example, it looks like I'm not prepared and have nothing substantial to counter with. If I list multiple examples, it will look like I came here prepared for a fight as a right wing partisan. How do you want to proceed, if at all?
Can you cite an example of left-wing news outlets playing "fast and loose" in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy and incited mass violence?
Even if you think the investigation into Trump's ties to Russian influence was unjustified, it relied on democratically-elected representatives to impeach him, and it never undermined the rule of law itself.
I'm sure you can find examples with lesser consequences, but given the stakes, are those really relevant here?
It's easy to dismiss all such disagreements as being boiled down to partisanship, which is why it's more useful to look past the actions and focus on the outcome.
Violent rhetoric from politicians and their supporting news outlets has real consequences, and in this case the actions of one side are resulting in the potential for mass vigilante violence:
From Ethnic antagonism erodes Republicans’ commitment to democracy[1]
About half of all surveyed Republicans agreed with these points:
1. The traditional American way of life is disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save it.
2. A time will come when patriotic Americans have to take the law into their own hands.
3. Strong leaders sometimes have to bend the rules in order to get things done.
4. It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people will vote for anyone who offers a handout.
>"in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy"
What does this even mean? This is way too vague and nebulous to ever get a grip on. I'm guessing you're talking about members of House/Senate contesting the results of the election, which they had a right to do, and followed the constitutional procedure for. You could also say this relied on democratically-elected representatives and wasn't undermining the rule of law.
>"and incited mass violence?"
Again, what qualifies as "mass violence"? I assume you're alluding to January 6th, which I hardly consider "mass violence" as it was very much localized and was over within a few hours. Surely the summer riots are more deserving of a term like "mass violence", no?
If we're talking about vigilante violence / decentralized intimidation, Maxine Waters told people to harass Trump staffers: "“They’re not going to be able to go to a restaurant, they’re not going to be able to stop at a gas station, they’re not going to be able to shop at a department store... The people are going to turn on them, they’re going to protest, they’re going to absolutely harass them.”"
As for your four bullet points, I am confident you can get the same kind of result (eroded faith in Democracy) by tweaking the questions to appeal to the sensibilities of people on the left. Just imagine flipping a few them by asking if a liberal agrees with "The rights of women and minorities are disappearing so fast that we may have to use force to save them" and "It is hard to trust the results of elections when so many people have been victims of voter suppression".
>What does this even mean? This is way too vague and nebulous to ever get a grip on.
No, the idea that democracy is undermined when citizens are told that their elections are no longer valid or trustworthy, and when politicians no longer respect the results of those elections, is actually very clear and straightforward. The legitimacy of those in power is upheld by the legitimacy of elections. Take away the latter, and what remains is tyranny.
>Surely the summer riots are more deserving of a term like "mass violence", no?
We're talking specifically about lies told by the media that resulted in mass violence. So, no.
>Maxine Waters told people to harass Trump staffers
Remember, we're speaking now in terms of actual outcomes. You'd need to point to demonstrable mass violence that resulted from her comments.
>I am confident you can get the same kind of result (eroded faith in Democracy) by tweaking the questions to appeal to the sensibilities of people on the left
I'm sure you've got a great imagination, but what counts is evidence. Given your confidence, surely you can find a study or poll somewhere to support that hypothesis. And given the vast sums of money behind right-wing think tanks and PACs, I would not expect such studies to be wanting for funding.
“When do we get to use the guns? ... That's not a joke. I'm not saying it like that. I mean, literally, where's the line? How many elections are they going to steal before we kill these people?”
>"You could simply have said, "I can't come up with any examples," and skipped all the rambling text."
This attitude is part of the reason why I didn't feel the need to paste a bunch of links. Not only am I certain you'd dismiss them as biased interpretations, you didn't even pick up on the fact that I was disagreeing with his premise. And, that I did provide an example with Maxine Waters calling for Trump Administration staffers to be harassed in public.
> Can you cite an example of left-wing news outlets playing "fast and loose" in a way that literally jeopardized the foundation of US democracy and incited mass violence?
Protests summer 2020? There was a huge surge covid a month after those protests everywhere in USA, even though it was summer and covid should have been low as everywhere else in the world during summers. All of the left wing politicians and news outlets scrambled to try to discredit this or hide it or find any flaws in that connection, but the connection is crystal clear. Those protests lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
>Those protests lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths.
This sounds like an opinion disguised as fact. If that wasn’t your intention then you’ll need to show peer-reviewed evidence of at the very least a strong association between those two outcomes.
Moreover, we’re specifically talking about lies perpetrated by the media that led to mass violence. The George Floyd protests weren’t fomented by media lies — you can go ask a poor black American if you want to know what’s going on.
You start off with a premise that is not immediately obvious. You claim right-wing news outlets are jeopardizing the 'foundation of US democracy', but most right wingers would counter that democracy is not the foundational value of the United States, but rather, individual rights, that even democracy is subservient to the rights of the individual. For example, no matter how many people would vote for such an ability, a modern 'right winger' would reject the notion that the people should be able to buy others. Your insistence that democracy is being eroded by the right, is easily countered by most conservatives that individual liberty is being eroded by the left, and they can easily point to the coronavirus lockdowns which seem neverending, obviously overreaching, and -- given the vaccine -- also unnecessary. They can point to multiple examples of what they see as having their rights trampled over, such as being forced to participate in events they have moral concerns with, while facebook and Amazon and other large companies apparently have every right to kick off those they agree with from their multi-billion dollar platforms.
So the counter to your claim that the right is undermining democracy is that the left is undermining civil liberties.
>...most right wingers would counter that democracy is not the foundational value of the United States, but rather, individual rights, that even democracy is subservient to the rights of the individual...
That's a good point, but consider the following:
Civil liberties don't exist in a vacuum -- their definitions arise out of conflict among members of society. I.e., the individual, alone in nature, has no need for them. One of the functions of a government is to protect those liberties, especially among those in the minority.
Without trusted elections and therefore a sound democracy, elected officials have no legitimacy. Without a legitimate claim to power, they become tyrants, and the state loses its moral authority to uphold one person's civil liberties against another's. There is no longer any social consensus backing those decisions.
I don't disagree with your description of right wingers saying that individual rights are foundational rather than democracy. I will point out that neoconservatives just spent $6T trying to export democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan rather than individual rights. Indeed, there is no second amendment in the Iraq constitution which we wrote.
Neoconservatives are not a meaningful cohort in the gop at this point. The nomination of Trump was the end of that chapter.
I think most people agree that Afghanistan And Iraq was a terrible idea. At least all the young conservatives do.
And I honestly think we shouldn't read too much into foreign policy. Both parties are happy to support all kinds of regimes that follow all kinds of anti democratic or anti individual rights ideologies, so long as it's in their perceived best interest of America.
> I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility.
I mean, sounds like an excuse to not participate.
The question seems quite black and white.
We have a few classic lies:
* Obama is a Muslim from Kenya
* His wife is transgender
* Climate change is a hoax
* COVID is a hoax
* Climate change is a hoax
* There is not enough pollution in the world
* The Democrats are Communists
* The Democrats run an occult pederasty wing through Twitter
* Trump won the 2020 election
All of these are widely believed by Conservatives and all of these have been widely spread by Conservative speakers.
Can you find even one comparable lie to any of these spread by prominent Democrats (not some random Twitter account)?
"> I was ready to cite examples of the left playing fast and loose with the truth but I sense it will just create hostility.
I mean, sounds like an excuse to not participate."
Actually, I was exactly right. I'm sensing some hostility from you right now and I'm making the mistake of engaging when I should just let it go.
>"Can you find even one comparable lie to any of these spread by prominent Democrats (not some random Twitter account)?"
So on the one hand, the laundry list you gave is acceptable as "widely believed by Conservatives", but I have to provide counterexamples that are only restricted to "prominent democrats"? You also don't qualify what 'widely believed' means, so I can just as easily claim that people on the left widely believe other falsehoods. If it is so bad that some conservatives agree with the idea that "Democrats are Communists", is it not exactly the same thing as Democrats believing that "Republicans as Fascists"? This is a widely believed view by Progressives.
I'm not here to chuck a laundry list of "lies" at you. Quite frankly I see something like "Trump’s false or misleading claims total 30,573 over 4 years" and I roll my eyes. Am I seriously expected to believe that number is anywhere close to accurate? I dare say the majority of those are subject to interpretation, which we will not be doing here.
Likewise, it isn't the left's fault that conservatives routinely do deny real reporting on real events that actually happened as being reported by a liberal bias.
Is this really still an issue? I have a feeling that 'collecting music' (with the intent to listen to it) is probably something that only Boomers, Gen-Xers (myself), and older millenials still do.
(The (strange) exception being vinyl, and I suspect that a fair amount of the albums that get purchased don't actually get played. The records are really more 'collectables' than an actual means to listen to music for many people...audio funko pops, if you will...)
I've got a hard drive full of FLAC rips of my CD collection, which I listen to when I'm at the computer working. (I think I have about 600 discs.) I have plex serving the FLAC files, so I can listen to my music collection on my devices, but other than at the computer while working, I never do.
In the car and away from the computer listening is almost entirely music streaming services, with titles downloaded to my phone when I know I'm going to be somewhere with spotty internet.
My wife is 100% Spotify. My daughter (12) uses streaming services or youtube (!) to listen to music.
Streaming music services like Spotify are a little different. The issue is really with services like Amazon Prime and Apple Music where you're paying for each song but don't really 'own' it. With the older paid music services when I bought a song I got a regular .mp3 that I could use anywhere I wanted and owned for life. With these new services we're not buying a song, we're just renting it for the same price.
Songs quietly disappear from Spotify and YouTube all the time. I guess it's "solved" by never owning the songs in the first place, and accepting they're ephemeral.
This. If you have a long playlist on Spotify, check out how many of your favorite songs are gray because reasons. I don't understand why they can't sell rights globally to every streamer and be done with it.
Hrm. We have Apple Music and Spotify. As I mentioned, my wife and kiddo use Spotify and have never complained about music gone missing, but my experience with Spotify is probably a few years out of date.
I use Apple Music and only have about five playlists which are sizable. I haven't seen any music go 'grey' in any of them (I just checked). Some of that might be that my music tastes arent' particularly obscure, some of it might be Apple Music's licensing relationships with the record labels.
CDs are currently the best bargain in music at the moment. I can hit a thrift store and find about 10 discs that I'm interested in. Of those, about 5 are usually in mint condition, which I buy for $1-2 a piece. If there's a disc that I'm really* interested in, I can usually pick it up on eBay or Discogs for $3-5, shipped. It's almost always me looking through the discs which tend to be about 10% CCM, 15% country, 15% classical, and about 60% rock. There's always at least one other guy sifting through the Lenny Dee, Herb Albert, and Lawrence Welk records that are all that remains of a thrift store vinyl section these days (though I think Herb Albert is becoming harder and harder to find... :P ).
* We get Spotify for free with our phone contract, but I prefer the interface / integration of Apple Music on my phone.
I've had songs disappear/reappear and I don't notice until it comes up on a discover/radio and I realize it isn't marked as liked anymore.
I imagine it's due to licensing fuckery, but you'd think they'd keep track of the song in your favourites and reinstate it later.. infuriating. I got part way through writing a script to periodically check what has disappeared earlier this year, maybe I should go dust it off
> As I mentioned, my wife and kiddo use Spotify and have never complained about music gone missing, but my experience with Spotify is probably a few years out of date.
Probably depends on the region. There are plenty of japanese songs suddenly gone from my spotify playlist, probably because the labels decided to pull out from spotify. I never see that happen on western songs on my playlist.
Spotify by default does not show unavailable songs. Unless you've enabled the gray-out option and you make your own playlists, it's easy to live blissfully unaware.
"I have no interest in setting up a bunch of engineering equipment to listen to a bunch of 60-70 year olds broadcast their uncensored perspective on things."
That was my take on it, too. I have one cheap Chinese radio in a box somewhere, but I got rid of all of my decent radios a few years back. I can just imagine what our local repeater devolved into during the Trump years. :/
The once-a-month meeting at the Village Inn was filled with laments about how there were no young people involved, but the repeater was filled with conversation that no young people would possibly want to be a party to.
I've discovered that it's unpopuler to point this out, but a big problem with amateur radio as a hobby is the current hobbyists involved.
I'm a ham mostly for disaster comms, I only occasionally participate in the monthly nets and almost never engage in random chitchat.
But I do join the annual disaster drills as well as try to help out with special events (like long distance runs or bike rides), but those aren't as numerous as they used to be because a lot of the cellular dead zones are covered, so race volunteers just need a cell phone.
Is that a good reason to give them a pass? By that reasoning, you probably shouldn't mind if you're out eating and someone walks up to you and just takes your plate of food for themselves. Honestly, it's probably not in the top ten of problems you deal with in a month or week.
