You gotta get your political fun while you can ’cause it doesn’t last forever.
“Donald Trump will never be President of the United States”
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Category Archives: Media
Malicious censorship on the net by Twitter and Facebook
I tried to open the following article on twitter via my mobile phone – Details of Ocasio-Cortez’s Ties To George Soros Revealed – and this is what came up:
Warning: this link may be unsafeThe link you are trying to access has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful or associated with a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service. This link could lead to a site that:
- steals your password or other personal information
- installs malicious software programs on your computer
- collects your personal information for spam purposes
- has been associated with a violation of Twitter’s Terms of Service
Learn more about unsafe links
Ignore this warning and continue
I get something similar when I try to open up links to Rush Limbaugh.
Twitter, with 100% certainty, was not worried that my password would be stolen, that malicious software would be installed, or that personal information was being collected for spam purposes. They just wished to deter me from going to the website and reading the article that had been posted.
If they are a common carrier, any and all of this should be seen as an infringement of our right to free speech. Same again for Facebook, Google and any other purveyor of personal views. The phone company cannot decide whether to connect me to someone else based on their judgment over whether I should be allowed hear what other want to say to me or what I have to say to others. Same again that a common carrier should just carry and not offer their judgements.
If it is not illegal to say it, then it should be illegal for them to prevent someone from saying whatever it is.
All that then comes with this: Facebook has TRUST ratings for users – but it won’t tell you your score.
Earlier this year, Facebook admitted it was rolling out trust ratings for media outlets.
This involved ranking news websites based on the quality of the news they were reporting.
This rating would then be used to decide which posts should be promoted higher in users’ News Feeds.
It’s not clear exactly what users’ ratings are for, but it’s possible they may be used in a similar way.
But Facebook hasn’t revealed exactly how ratings are decided, or whether all users have a rating.
You’ll just have to trust them.
“Censorship is a very dangerous thing and absolutely impossible to police”
If it’s not illegal to say something then it should be illegal for a public utility like Twitter or Facebook not to permit something to be said on their platforms. PDT has now bought in himself. Naturally the following is not from a mainstream American news source:
Wherein we find:
President Donald Trump has accused social media companies of ‘totally discriminating against Republican/Conservative voices.’
‘Speaking loudly and clearly for the Trump Administration, we won’t let that happen,’ the president tweeted early Saturday morning.
‘They are closing down the opinions of many people on the RIGHT, while at the same time doing nothing to others.
‘Censorship is a very dangerous thing & absolutely impossible to police.
Those on the other side, had they any understanding of the pillars on which our freedoms rest, would be sickened that their leaders do not say the same, but then again, if they did, they wouldn’t be the far left loons they are.
Same story also discussed here. And to which may be added this:
ROBESPIERRE LEARNED TOO LATE: First Amendment Rights and the Lesson of Robespierre
So, with Twitter and Facebook “social justice” mobs, it’s not too much to say that we’ve got another reign of terror, in which people can be driven from public life and have their lives and livelihood destroyed by the Robespierres of the mob. When someone protests that their First Amendment rights have been violated, the common answer is that these are private companies. But “first amendment rights“ is something that’s become a convenient shorthand for the natural rights of free speech that the First Amendment exists to protect from government interference. The right is not provided by the First Amendment, it’s guaranteed — however imperfectly — against the government by the First Amendment.
The media have a perfect right to be liars and fools
But others then have a perfect right to call them liars and fools when they are. So what are those liars and fools doing now: Almost 350 news outlets to publish editorials denouncing Trump’s ‘dirty war’ on press.
Nearly 350 news organizations are set to publish editorials on Thursday pushing back against Donald Trump’s attacks on the media and defending freedom of the press.
The publications are participating in a push organized by the Boston Globe to run coordinated editorials denouncing what the paper called a “dirty war against the free press”.
As of Wednesday morning, 343 publications had pledged to participate, said Marjorie Pritchard, the Globe’s deputy managing editor overseeing the opinion page….
Ad nauseam and etc. These people are beyond irony, but preaching to their own choir as they do, and living in their own bubbles of ignorance, they are astonished at the very first major politician who has pointed out how vast media bias has become. No one outside the left will now trust anything written in the press or reported on the news as a straight, down the line, factual and balanced report about anything. Not even the weather; specially the weather. Everything is filtered through the story-line perspective of the day. Take this from that same article:
Trump has stepped up his attacks on the media in recent weeks. At a rally in Pennsylvania, he pointed out the journalists covering the event and derided them as “fake, fake, disgusting news”. The White House barred a CNN reporter from covering a public event after she asked Trump a question.
Here’s the more complete story, and you have no idea how hard it was to find even this.
Why would you believe a thing they say without confirmation from some other source? This, however, is how they see things in the same article.
“It is not the press’s job to save the United States from Mr Trump. It is the press’s job to report, delve, analyse and scrutinise as best it can and without fear,” the Guardian’s editorial says.
“Mr Trump’s insults and incitements are a calculated danger to that, and to the respect, civility and dialogue that should exist between the press and its readers. The Guardian stands with the US press in its efforts to maintain the objectivity and the moral boundaries that this president – like so many others in much more dangerous parts of the world – is doing so much to destroy.”
Such sanctimonious blather is really hard to take, especially after eight years watching these same media types fall dead when dealing with PDT’s far-left predecessor of a president. “Report, delve, analyse and scrutinise” – delusional themselves, as is anyone who can read this stuff without laughing.
It’s not just their lies, but what they ignore
All picked up today.
CNN Caught Putting Socialist on Panel to Pretend He’s a Disillusioned Trump Voter
Left Working Furiously To Bury Feinstein Spy Story
Media Silent: Linda Sarsour Connected to Terrorist Training Compound in New MexicoLOL: ABC Stages Fake Scene With Actors Harassing Leftist At Restaurant To Portray Libs As Victims
Terrorist Truth Is Scarier Than Fiction, But The News Media Yawns
You didn’t want to know anyway, but if you did want to know you are an obvious sociopathic racist oppressor so they are absolutely right not to let you find out.
AND THIS JUST IN: Newspaper calls for war of words against Trump media attacks. On the left, even idiots get to call the plays.
A Boston newspaper is proposing a coordinated editorial response from publications across the U.S. to President Donald Trump’s frequent attacks on the news media.
“We are not the enemy of the people,” said Marjorie Pritchard, deputy managing editor for the editorial page of The Boston Globe, referring to a characterization of journalists that Trump has used in the past. The president, who contends he has largely been covered unfairly by the press, also employs the term “fake news” often when describing the media.
The Globe has reached out to editorial boards nationwide to write and publish editorials on Aug. 16 denouncing what the newspaper called a “dirty war against the free press.”
And from my dealings with the people who read these papers and watch the ABC, it is clear that they are desperate not to be informed and literally do not want to know. It’s a sickness, and may yet be a sickness unto death for our way of life.
Quality journalism
I turned to the opinion page in The Australian and for a change four articles that not only could I read through to the end, but could agree with them all. In alphabetical order with a representative quote from each.
From Nick Cater: Australians won’t fall for a bandana republic.
The republican movement has its work cut out. Before it can get around to replacing the Queen it apparently has to remove its hapless spokesman.
From Pauline Hanson: Our dry, fragile continent can’t sustain current immigration levels.
Governments, both Liberal and Labor, argue immigration is good for the economy, but economist Judith Sloan, writing on these pages recently, says immigration benefits special interest groups. She says the economics of immigration are clear. In the short term, immigration reduces per capita income, and in the long term per capita income gains are modest, but these calculations ignore the congestion costs, house prices and the loss of amenity.
From Ian Plimer: Repeat after me: carbon dioxide is good for us.
Climate policy is underpinned by two fallacies. The first is that human emissions of carbon dioxide drive global warming. The second is that future climate can be predicted from computer models.
From Judy Sloan: Compromised NEG could be worse than doing nothing.
But here’s a tip: don’t believe the hype about the NEG. Designed by experts with particular agendas, it’s a dog’s breakfast that could be worse than doing nothing. Anyone who believes in the modelling-based predictions of future price reductions — $550 cuts to households’ annual electricity bills — also believes in the tooth fairy.
Alas, tomorrow it will be Savva, Richardon, von Onselen and some Labor member of the shadow cabinet, but in the meantime, this is as good as it gets.
Yes Virginia, there is fake news
Just saw this: NEWSEUM APOLOGIZES, YANKS ‘FAKE NEWS’ SHIRTS…
Reminded me of my own visit to the Newseum in Washington a few years back in which its largest display – as I recall – was of this which is an out and out lie. Fake news to its back teeth.
“YES, VIRGINIA, THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS”
Eight-year-old Virginia O’Hanlon wrote a letter to the editor of New York’s Sun, and the quick response was printed as an unsigned editorial Sept. 21, 1897. The work of veteran newsman Francis Pharcellus Church has since become history’s most reprinted newspaper editorial, appearing in part or whole in dozens of languages in books, movies, and other editorials, and on posters and stamps
PHOTO GALLERY
THE EDITORIAL
DEAR EDITOR: I am 8 years old.
Some of my little friends say there is no Santa Claus.
Papa says, ‘If you see it in THE SUN it’s so.’
Please tell me the truth; is there a Santa Claus?VIRGINIA O’HANLON.
115 WEST NINETY-FIFTH STREET.VIRGINIA, your little friends are wrong. They have been affected by the skepticism of a skeptical age. They do not believe except they see. They think that nothing can be which is not comprehensible by their little minds. All minds, Virginia, whether they be men’s or children’s, are little. In this great universe of ours man is a mere insect, an ant, in his intellect, as compared with the boundless world about him, as measured by the intelligence capable of grasping the whole of truth and knowledge.
Yes, VIRGINIA, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no VIRGINIAS. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished.
Not believe in Santa Claus! You might as well not believe in fairies! You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. Did you ever see fairies dancing on the lawn? Of course not, but that’s no proof that they are not there. Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders there are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, VIRGINIA, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! Thank God! he lives, and he lives forever. A thousand years from now, Virginia, nay, ten times ten thousand years from now, he will continue to make glad the heart of childhood.
Joe McCarthy and the Deep State
The term “McCarthyism” makes a come back in The Oz. But like everywhere, they use McCarthyism as if it had been a bad thing. But before I go on, let me remind you of my review of Diana West’s astounding book, American Betrayal. If you haven’t read it and are interested in some historical perspective on the Fake News Industry, along with the reality of the communist menace in the 1950s, this is a primary source. Here’s the conclusion from my review, and this was written in 2014 before the phase “Deep State” was ever mentioned by anyone:
As a result of reading West’s book, I now look on the United States as a big dumb ox, led around by a cabal of its enemies whose intent is to take the beast out to slaughter. It is a very large beast and will not go quietly. But given what you will learn from this book, you will be in some despair in trying to work out what can be done. This is a very troubling book which I nevertheless encourage you to read.
Much of the point of the book is that Senator Joe McCarthy was absolutely right about the infiltration of communists inside the American Government back in the 1940s and 1950s. Ever heard of Alger Hiss? The mere tip of an iceberg which has only grown in size since those days then when at least Americans would have been ashamed to admit in public that they were socialists. As for today’s Australian, first there’s this: Voters stick by the teflon Donald where the author somehow thinks that is a bad thing. In his inane fact-free report, he writes:
To establish why the Trump base has proved so resolute, it is instructive to turn back to a much darker period in American politics; to McCarthyism in the early 1950s. There is a direct and decisive link between that period and now, in the person of Roy Cohn. Cohn was a trusted adviser to the junior Republican senator for Wisconsin, Joseph R. McCarthy. Cohn was also an influential mentor to Trump, who learned from Cohn’s street-fighting ways how to win in the New York property markets.
McCarthy was a demagogue for whom the truth was of little or no consequence. A practitioner of the brutal smear, he elevated US postwar concerns about Soviet communism into hysteria, claiming there were red agents everywhere in Washington, DC.
McCarthy’s principal weapon was the unsubstantiated allegation of treason directed at respected and leading figures in the Truman administration, including General George Marshall and secretary of state Dean Acheson.
McCarthy’s recklessness, including ruthless manipulation of the new medium of television, eventually led to a bipartisan censure in the US Senate, with senator Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of future US presidents, prominent among McCarthy’s critics. The censure was carried on bipartisan lines 67-22.
But, as Jon Meacham notes in his masterly new work, The Soul of America, in the national opinion poll immediately following, some 34 per cent of Americans still believed McCarthy was on the right track. McCarthy’s base support was cultural and religious, unmoved by elite opinion. The same may be said of Trump.
Must say, I remain unmoved by elite opinion, idiocy through and through. And then there’s this: Intolerance spreads as cultural wowsers shut down ‘dangerous’ debate although in this instance the author is on the right side of the divide, but once again invokes McCarthy. He is discussing the efforts made to shut down Lauren Southern’s presentations in Australia.
Social media and reporting of it in mainstream news are producing intolerance not seen since anti-communist senator Joe McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee in the 1940s and 50s.
The free-thinking rebelliousness of the 60s grew out of a backlash against McCarthyist repression of what was regarded as seditious activities, literature, plays and movies inspired by communism to undermine American values.
The usual shallow ignorance. Senator McCarthy was a Republican and his focus was on foreign policy and the State Department. The House Un-American Actitivies Committee was in the House of Representatives and was dominated by Democrats. More to the point, McCarthy would have been on the same side of the free speech issue as us.
Knowing more about McCarthy and how he was dealt with by the media and even some Republicans are lessons that still need to be understood.
Bad economics in one lesson
Sitting on a million dollars of capital and he still thinks the economy is driven by spending.
Reflexive ignorance across the media
ADDED ON: Old Ozzie mentioned in the comments that the Russian President had spoken about a Western assault on Christianity and traditional values in 2013 – just before anti-Russian troubles began, so I went looking to see what he meant, and there below in the vid is what I found. Not at all what you might have expected.
ORIGINAL POST
Thank you for noting the typical far left media bias at the ABC, Rafe, but what can you expect? The ABC is just reflex ignorant as this article today on Venezuela provides one more example: IMF: Venezuela’s inflation on track to top 1 million percent which comes via the ever-unreliable Associated Press. Heaven forbid they should mention that socialism has had anything to do with it. Instead, their authority on the nature of the problem is no less than the President of Venezuela himself:
Socialist President Nicolas Maduro often blames Venezuela’s poor economy on an economic war that he says is being waged by the United States and Europe.
Maduro won a second six-year term as president despite the deep economic and political problems in a May election that his leading challenger and many nations in the international community don’t recognize as legitimate.
Two of the most uninformed sentences you are ever likely to find, specially designed for those who want to hide themselves from reality. It is even possible that the ABC knows better, but the last people to actually try to explain it are the ones who want the same kinds of economic management in Australia.
But this media ignorance continues everywhere. Trump Derangement Syndrome is a sickness that will do us all in and if we are not very careful put an end to Western Civilisation within a generation. The latest bit of TDS is from Troy Bramston in a column as empty and unhistorical as it is possible to be: Putin could never have suckered Reagan like Trump the chump. I will merely make the obvious point that when Reagan was president, Russia was the Soviet Union and when Reagan met with the Soviet President he was dealing with the core ideological issue of the time. As it happens, I supported Reagan then just as strongly as I support Trump now, and for much the same reasons. Russia is no longer communist, so perhaps it is time to bury the hatchet. Bramston doesn’t like Trump, but so what? He is like virtually every other media type, with nothing to add to the conversation other than empty rhetoric. Here are a few of the comments on the column at The Australian, starting from the top and working my way down. There are plenty more like these, and in fact I never came to a single comment that supported him.
So the writer was in the meeting between Trump and Putin!! I’m sick to death with this type of article. No wonder many of us no longer trust the media.
Oh my Lord … talk about Trump Derangement Syndrome writ large. This column should be compulsory study for journalism students in what NOT to write. There are so many falsehoods and opinions masquerading as fact that no-one could even begin to deconstruct it! Truly shameful, Oz.
What was Trump to do about funding 70% NATO, May’s feckless indecisive dithering over Brexit, the Steele dossier fraud, the FBI, CIA stacked with anti Trump activists, the Muller witch hunt, an irrational left wing media and the list goes on and on. But the best thing he’s done for the US is to get out of that crippling Paris Agreement. If only we had a Trump here.
Sorry Troy…..that days of journalists cherry picking factoids and creating an ideologically charged narratives are over. In this digital world, we are on to you, and what you have tried to run here I know not to be true.
Typical Trump basher. Ignorant of American history and even more ignorant of the American voter. Donald Trump’s supporters don’t care who he’s nice to or how many mistakes he makes as long as he drains the swamp. That’s what they hired him for. He has done exactly what he said he would do when on the campaign trail. That is why people like the writer of this article don’t like him. Donald Trump is not one of them. He is his own man. God Bless Donald Trump.
Mr Bramston, you and many others in the media and political elites will no doubt continue to pile on President Trump but be aware his supporters are as strongly behind him as ever and while his press conference in Helsinki was clumsy, it had no negative effect on his support in America. In fact the more they pile it on, the stronger Trump’s support may get. No doubt you also predicted with absolute certainty that Trump would never beat Hillary, and that Hillary calling Trump’s supporters “deplorables” would have no meaningful impact as well? Hmmm
Engaging in a bit of hyperbole, Troy. The EU is still in place, so too NATO, ANZUS and the rest. Unfortunately for the UK, Australia and the US, so is Theresa May. The fact that some passengers are told to pay up is not a bad thing. The fact some countries taking advantage of trade rules to the detriment of the US are told that must change is not a bad thing. That Trump talks to Putin is not a bad thing. Now, if Kim Jong Un does not deliver on his side of the bargain in Singapore, let’s see how Mr Trump responds. At that point you will be in a better position to see whether Mr Trump was wrong to give talks a chance. But if Rocket Man is sliding from his agreement, I’d be looking to see what role China has been playing in sabotaging any agreement.
“We are witnessing a fracturing of the Western liberal order and a decline in US global leadership”. Wrong Mr Bramston, what we are witnessing, thanks to Donald Trump, is a worldwide draining of the swamp and the hopefully the decline of the United Nations and the European Union from taking over our countries.
I’ve not read this article, looks like more Trump bashing. I’m sick of these stories/analysis by people that can’t wait to criticise, when the end of the event in nowhere in sight. Hoping and praying for failure. Can’t you wait to see how it unfolds?
Awesome news filtering in today that the great US President is considering revoking the security clearances of former top Obama era officials. They all conspired against him and need to go now and quickly. Whilst Bramston pummels the keyboard listing all the petty things Trump has done, little does he know that after Iran is fixed, the Federal Reserve will be next on the agenda. There’ll be plenty of time for Troy and his globalists friends to write angry articles about Trump – waaaay into the future as they observe, from the sidelines, the glorious wonders of the swamp getting drained!
Law of Markets 