🤡 Shitting Bricks Down The Rabbithole 🤡

 Proclivities wrote:
They asked them not to publish obvious misinformation and told them to do some fact checking.  This is not a 'both sides' issue.

 Jiggz wrote:
ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox (as well as others) broadcast over airwaves as well as in the cable realm, though obviously few people probably access them using an antenna - if that was what you meant by the frequency spectrum.  
I don't doubt there was some push from the Biden administration to "influence" social media platforms.
It was the timing of the ousting of Colbert and Kimmel which clearly indicated coercion from the Administration and/or the FCC (to me).  Maybe they were parts of long-term plans but they were clearly spurred as reactions to comments from those hosts.  You may not agree, but as you said in a previous post, we can agree to disagree.
There was a lot of Twitter activity around January 6, Trump also Tweeted: "Big protest in D.C. on January 6th, Be there, will be wild!"  There are plenty of stories about that day, but there is ample evidence of "protestors" violently attacking and beating Capitol police.  All of that is another matter.
The "mysterious brick pile" stories are rumors which were debunked about five years ago.  Many of the rumors were even perpetrated by sources on the Left, alleging that police put them there to justify the use of violence.  Most, or all of them were at or near construction or renovation sites before protests were even planned - that's also another matter.
As you said in your previous post, ultimately we have more in common than we don't.

 Proclivities wrote: No apologies needed for the 'essay'...I appreciate the time it took to put your thoughts and opinions down. I apologise for the delay in responding to you.....ship-to-shore travel, air travel back home, reconnecting with the family, mowing the lawn and getting things in order back at home, and then seemingly being locked out of the website or the website being down etc. etc. etc....no worries, I have at least had time to think and reflect on what you have written.

I agree on your differentiation between online entities and airwaves, FCC etc, although I believe that ABC et al are cable channels and thus not, in my mind, entities using portions of the frequency spectrum, though I may be incorrect on that.  
To counter I would offer however that it appears that the Biden administration put enormous pressure on at least Facebook and Twitter to censor content - Zuckerbucks basically admitted this during his interview on Joe Rogan, and I believe Jack Dorsey said something similar before selling Twitter and the majority of employees let go by Musk when he took over were content moderators with direct lines of communication to federal employees tasked with censorship (see The Twitter Files). 
I am convinced that the Biden administration were heavily into censoring voices that disagreed or were counter to the narrative they wanted to push. I don't particularly blame Joe Biden for this - I don't think he knew where he was or what was going on most of the time he was President, despite the orchestrated flood of 'sharp as a tack, best Biden ever' nonsense that we were subjected to, which flip-flopped pretty soon after he departed the White House. 
This does raise the question of who was running the show but that is a different discussion.


In the time between reading your response, and this moment, I have heard things that I would suggest support my argument that pulling Kimmels show was a purely business decision. 
Kimmels show cost a hundred million dollars a year to produce, and lost around forty million dollars a year (which I consider a forty million dollar a year 'in-kind' donation to the Democratic party), and Kimmels contract was up for renewal at the end of this year. 
Apparently the network were losing ad revenue hand over fist from the regional and local 'Joe's Tyre Shop' class of advertisers, and despite being asked by Bob Eiger to walk things back, writers on the Kimmel show (who were trying to save their jobs) reported back that Kimmel was doubling down.....and so I am pretty sure that Disney took the whole Kirk comments/FCC thing as an opportunity to ditch the show and recover some of the their lost ground. 
I arrive at this position with the simultaneous understanding that podcasts, streaming etc have killed cable anyway, and the only people who still rely on cable for news and so on are older Boomer-types. See any Joe Rogan podcast getting millions of downloads and views or whatever, a few times a week, and Charlie Kirk TikToks getting an average 60 million views a day pre-2024 election; whilst Kimmel had what, 160k viewers at any one time? Fact check me on this, but I doubt that his numbers were anything like what any of the top, say, five podcasts get any day of the week.

The fact is that cable is dead, Morning Joe and CNN and The View etc are all gonna go the same way as Rachel Maddow, Don Lemon, the other little bald fella on CNN ( forgettable name) etc etc etc. and eventually probably Fox. 
The networks will use whatever reason or excuse or opportunity to get this done, and none of it is necessarily an attack on free speech. It is just business. 
The various owners of the various networks themselves are looking to offload the entire cable network proposition because...cable is dead, just like print, and the world has moved on from it.
It is not about an attack on free speech, or authoritarianism. 
It is about business, and the fact that basically the only folks relying on cable for information are old, set in their ways and invariably misinformed.
My worry is where Big-Pharma will advertise next when all cable is gone.

A little about free speech - the price of free speech is free speech, and the counter to free speech you don't like, are better ideas and arguments. 
Free speech does carry consequences, yes....yelling fire in crowded theatres and incitement to violence etc....but I think Pam Bondi is way, way, way out of line for even mentioning hate speech as being separate from free speech and she should lose her job over making that comment. It is everything Charlie Kirk and the entire MAGA movement is against. 
You may not like what I say, but calling me names, mocking me or deplatforming me will not shut me up. 
You only tear my tongue out because you are afraid if what I say, and that can only be because you do not have better ideas or arguments....so you are actually the authoritarian. Not you personally, but....you know what I mean.
I may not like what you say, or agree with you - but you have the right to say it.
I say all this coming from a place where free speech no longer exists, and believe me when I say that the old Joni Mitchell line of 'don' it always seem to go, that you don't know what you've got 'til it's gone.....' really rings true when free speech is taken from you.

Last month I was in lovely Oxfordshire, England - it's early Monday morning of a bank holiday weekend, and I am standing waiting for a bus. A dustbin-man - garbage collector - arrives to clear a bin next to me and I ask him about possible changes to the bus timetable, it being a bank holiday weekend, and say that I am not from the area and thus my question. 
The dustbin man, a fifty-something white guy with a lovely smile full of busted teeth, a real salt-of-the-earth Brit, replies that he can hear I am not from the area. 
I say 'yep, I am from South Africa'...he responds that he had thought that was the case but didn't want to say anything 'in case I was offended'....he was self-censoring himself over something as mundane as country of origin.
He was pretty relieved when I started laughing at how crazy that was, and his parting words were 'England is done for'....

Finally, Trumps tweets around Jan 6, his speech itself, were not inflammatory beyond that they called the election into question, and subsequent events support his claim. He did not incite violence. 'Peacefully and patriotically' were the words he used. Jan 6 commitee destroyed files and testimonies that would have exonerated him, and others. Jan 6 was not what you think it was. Listen to interviews with Jan 6 defendants who were there on the day, hear what happened, hear how they were literally framed, had their doors kicked in by armed FBI agents for merely being in the vicinity of the Capitol and didn't even enter the building....it was not what you think it was. 

I am not aware that school boards received death threats etc...I am not saying it did not happen, I am just not aware of anything like that having happened. I am aware that the Teachers Union drafted the document that Garland signed off on, designating concerned and yes, angry parents, as domestic terrorists. I have heard interviews of parents who were were dragged out of their homes in their underwear in the early hours of the morning by up-armoured FBI agents and dragged away whilst their teenage daughters stood by at gunpoint. What they did wrong was question curricula at school board meetings, and then start shouting to be heard after their mics were shut off. You won't hear them on MSDNC or ABC....these interviews won't support their narrative of 'Orange-man bad' and so you don't hear them. But entire organisations have been set up in response to these events, and they are scoring victories against the indoctrination of their kids.

The changes at DOJ, CDC, EPA etc were pretty much all promised during campaign events, and the majority of people voted for it. All of it is part of the promise to dismantle the deep state and the administrative state....and with it the Uniparty which has run your country for the past forty-odd years and are responsible for the state your finances are in, your health is in, your society is in.

America is much more than just slavery, or oppression of black people - you have more than that in your history - and better things - and America was not alone in the slave trade. 
No American or European or Brit jumped off a ship and trotted off into the jungle to go and capture some slaves.....they bought them, usually from Arab slave traders, who bought them from Africans who actually did the capturing. 
Africans always did and still do have slaves. 
There are more slaves today in the middle east than ever worked the plantations. What about that? 

I think that shifting focus away from black people purely as victims in museums etc might go a long way towards eradicating the victim mentality that cripples many of that group today. 
Shift the focus a bit in art, culture, discourse - focus on good things, better things, more positive things and achievements, and the mood in the country should inevitably follow.
What you think about you bring about, where attention goes energy flows......YMMV

ANTIFA....yes, agreed - on the ground they seem to have no organisatonal hierarchy or leadership. 
But even piles of bricks magically delivered to random yet somehow strategic locations a day or so before some chucking event cost money, someone ordered them....and that money came from somewhere, from someone.....and that money trail will reveal the organisational structure that always will and always must exist behind any organisation of this nature. 
On the ground - sure - apparently leaderless and organisationally flat.
But follow the money...you will find links to media, politicians, funders and donors....globally. 
Declaring them a terrorist organisation will enable that investigation, and if leads nowhere then you are right and I will grant you that...but I don't expect it.
Let's see....

I appreciate your response, and the time suck it takes to read this....keep talking to me.
What do we have in common?

And yeh....Nazare......it pumps gnarly and you will not catch me paddling out anywhere near there....

Have a grand week.....oh!...I have just been notified that my next trip to Italy is postponed because the vessel is delayed so I have a week to re-build an heirloom 1972 Sekio 5 with a new mainspring; scalp, scarify and re-seed parts of the lawn; and continue turning the tennis-court of a backyard into a vegetable garden ( about three inches of topsoil that I created but which lies on top of miles of heavy clay...dig buddy, dig!)....this has been real, I gotta get on with things!

Pumpkin spice flavored bronzed ball sacks are now widely considered to be a delicacy. And not just for billionaires anymore.

 Jiggz wrote:
  In many ways there are few differences between Kimmel’s show being “indefinitely suspended” and Trump and others being de-platformed or blocked by Twitter, but the major difference (to me) is that Twitter and other social media platforms are privately-owned business entities, who can decide who may or may not use their platforms, whereas it appears pretty obvious that Kimmel and Colbert were censored through coercion from Trump and the FCC – governmental entities. From the timing of those "cancellations", especially Kimmel, it was clear that it was far from just a “business decision”.  The FCC chairman’s veneration of it all but revealed his involvement with it.
  The First Amendment protects free speech from being “abridged” by the government; it does not protect it from decisions made by business entities - unless those entities are coerced or forced to do so by governmental entities.  I personally did not agree with what Twitter and others did during that time, but they expressed their reasons: spreading of disinformation, advocating or inciting violence, spreading of hateful or bigoted speech, etc. As far as I remember, Trump’s being removed from Twitter was primarily based on his tweets shortly prior to and after the events of January 6, 2021.  It can be argued that their reasons for other users were stretches in a lot of cases, and that what they did was essentially virtue signaling, but they are legally capable of silencing voices they may not agree with. The government is constitutionally prohibited from doing so.
  The accusations of Trump and his administration being “authoritarian” go beyond the recent silencing of late-night TV hosts. Things like trying to tell colleges what can or cannot be taught or who they can hire, removing or censoring history and social and scientific references from museums and governmental agency sites such as DOJ, CDC, NOAA, EPA, illegally freezing congressionally-approved research funding, etc.  His takeover of the Kennedy Center clearly reveals his intention on even controlling culture within the country, aside from his juvenile criticism of prominent musical artists and actors, his attempts to bully and/or punish broadcasting networks, firing the Librarian of Congress, gutting the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services, etc.  Still though, as brought up in other threads here, the reckless use of terms like "nazi", "fascist", etc. trivializes their true meanings.
  Garland never designated any group as “domestic terrorists” – such a legal designation does not really exist. His use of the term "domestic terrorism" in reference to that parents group protesting school curriculum, was due to the numerous death threats and other threats the members of that school board had been receiving, sometimes directly from members of that parents group, and other school board members all over the country also receiving threats
  Antifa has never been an “organization”; it is a loosely-organized group of individuals, who share some political opinions – the foremost one being their opposition to what they perceive as fascism. There is no membership; there is no “leader”. “Antifa” is a word that Trump has been disdainfully saying for years, despite the likelihood that he barely knows anything about them.
  Yes, the hypocrisy is heavy, as it always is with issues like these – from both sides. For example, in 2023, Republican Senator Cynthia Lummis cosponsored the Free Speech Protection Act with Senator Rand Paul to prohibit the government from directing online platforms to censor speech. Back then she said “If we let the Biden administration restrict our freedom of speech, there is no telling what other sacred freedoms they will come for next.”
  She seems to have changed her opinion this week: “Under normal times, in normal circumstances, I tend to think that the First Amendment should always be sort of the ultimate right, and that there should be almost no checks and balances on it."
  She added, "I don't feel that way anymore. I feel like something's changed culturally. And I think that there needs to be some cognizance that things have changed."

  Anyhow, sorry for the long "essay", but you asked a few questions that seemed to need detailed answers, not just bumper-sticker responses.  Have a good weekend and stay out of the waves at Nazaré.

 Jiggz wrote: 
Yes, an economic decision more than anything else.  Kimmel did say that he wanted everyone who voted for Trump to stop watching.  That is telling half your potential audience to fuck off.  Why would an "entertainer" say something like that ?  Jordon famously said that "Republicans buy sneakers, too".

Kimmel in the end was not entertaining, he was preaching offering his rants as fact, not opinion. The line between news and entertainment completely disappeared.  That is where he got in trouble.  That and ratings in the basement.  He wasn't John Stewart.  And Stewart's schtick isn't working anymore either.

Kimmel's free speech has not been impinged one bit.  He can still say anything he wants.  He just has to find another place to do it.  He forgot that he was an employee.  An employee that was costing his employer many millions of dollars in losses because of his personal decisions.

I have also reminded myself of how The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour ended way back when ...

 Proclivities wrote:


You are correct. Point well made...most of the world are not crazed left nor crazed right....I think you would see a classic bell curve. And yes, most of the people left of centre are not lunatics, certainly no more than most to the right of centre are not Nazis nor white supremacist homophobes etc etc.
What I do find interesting is throwing around the words fascist Nazi slave owners etc seems perfectly acceptable and prevalent, but that might just be the things I have seen.

You make a good point, we have more in common than we have differences.
We should be able to disagree agreeably.

A question...do you see much difference between kimmel et al being removed from the air and Trump, a sitting President at the time, being de-platformed from Twitter? I really want to know what differences you see and why? Steve Bannon, Del Bigtree, Dr. Naomi Woolf, the three Californian doctors discussing what they were seeing in the early days of covid, Dr. Robert Malone, The New York Post, I could go on and on.....why was their censorship acceptable and applauded, and now there is an uproar about Kimmel etc?
Why is this Dictatorship, fascist, authoritarianism....and the other wasn't?

Why were parents, speaking out against their young middle school kids being educated on butt-fucking their buddies at school board meetings, designated domestic terrorists by  Merrick Garland: but Antifa should not be designated so?

To me it looks like absolute, blatant and not-unexpected hypocrisy, but you would certainly see it differently.
Please explain it to me?

 R_P wrote: Not sure what Kamala is.
I don't think she knows either. 

 Proclivities wrote:
Most of the people left of center are just liberals with some "progressives" on the edge (including the Squad and Gramps Sanders). A far tinier section, sufficiently suppressed by the political system, includes Marxists and for example some anarchists.

The Right's rhetorical trick conflates all of them to paint "the left" as that tiny section. Hence Obama, Kamala, etc. are routinely called communists while they're at best pro-capitalist centrists. Similar to other liberal democracies where "the left" has been in decline for decades (by abandoning their social-democratic principles) and consequently politics have moved to the right.

 Jiggz wrote:

If what you imply were true, the results we see would be different. If not for gerrymandering and systems designed to appease slave holders your side would be losing even more. As it is you barely make it to power by the slimmest of margins and then try to claim a mandate.

At some point the majority that you are imposing your will on will tire of it.  

 Jiggz wrote:
Convenient how you use the term "crazed leftists" to describe anyone who is not right, extreme-right, or center-right.  The majority of the country are not "crazed" MAGA lunatics either, and the majority of people on the left are not "crazed" extremists, and they are certainly not "on the fringe" as you seem to want to assert.  The overall temper of the country may historically be "center-right", but not all all issues, as I'm sure you know.  Depending on the sources, Trump's approval rating is currently around 39-43%, with about 56% disapproving, so there's that.

 rgio wrote:


Okidoki,then! Believe what you want to believe, and enjoy watching your test pattern!
You guys just don't want to believe you are out on the fringe.....though it seems patently clear that you are!
But carry on!
Please?

 islander wrote:


Keep on losing, then! 
The majority of the country are not crazed leftists, from where I am sitting. They are centre-right to right.....but keep on thinking the way you do, please? 

 islander wrote:
It's not the affiliates.... They are simply running cover for the administrations threats... lest they be the next target.  

This is how autocracies work... you don't directly limit freedoms or speech... you reward those who do it for you.

 Jiggz wrote:
Your other stuff aside. If the country shifted so far right, how come the elections are still settled by a few percentage points of swing. And the republican candidate has failed to get a majority of the votes in all but two of the last 9 elections?

Unbunch your panties!

I think it is actually like this....all the affiliate stations that show the ABC/Disney content make bundles of cash from the local advertising in the smaller regions where the afiliate stations show the network content, and the networks take that cash..affiliate stations are where the money is for the networks.

The country has shifted towards the right, or MAGA if you like...well, you don't like but there it is....the country has shifted away from the left and the Democrap party...and the advertisers are bailing on the far-left looney tunes content that the networks are dishing up. 
And so, in a purely economic decision, the networks have had to pull the crap shows that the country does not like and don't watch in the main...see declining ratings of the shows and even whole channels under pressure.
You may like and take as gospel but you are a minority...see 2024 elections.

It's capitalism at work, market forces on display....nothing to do with censorship.

Kimmel et al can go start podcasts or something, or do like the twat Lemon from CNN and walk about the  streets wondering why people tell him he is full of shit when he asks what they think about this or that.

YMMV......

It would be a shame if ABC got flooded with calls at 972-373-8800 to ask them when they intend to allow people like Kimmel to exercise their 1st amendment rights.

 R_P wrote:

perfect

NSFW