"And anyone who thinks the evil is all or even mostly on the other side is willfully blind."

Most people I know on either"side" think that. I have become a lone wolf. I can't have a conversation with people because they are so entrenched and won't ask critical questions of their own side. Like what really happened in Louisville, Kenosha, or now Wauwautosa?

And besides that, why is all this bad stuff happening in Wisconsin, including a huge spike is covid-19 cases? Why did I move here from peaceful Minneapolis? Oh, wait....

I can't say I've managed to have any good conversations. I can't honestly say I've tried all that hard, either, though.

"I have become a lone wolf. " I hear you. To some degree it's just my nature. No, rather, to a great degree.

I'm surprised that you would take Vox's view as dispositive, if you do. It's one-sided at very best. Some of it is just basic smear stuff: blaming Trump for stuff that is at most loosely associated with something he said. The discussion of the Tree of Life shooting is a particularly egregious example. Some of it's just plain old disagreement which, in a pattern all too common among young journalists, is treated as illegitimate, such as the claim that associating covid-19 with China is "racist." In short, same old Democratic rhetorical techniques.

One thing has become a sort of litmus test for me in determining whether a source is reliable: "He also failed to condemn white supremacist and white nationalist groups that organized in Charlottesville, Virginia. "

That's simply not true. Vox goes on to sort of half-correct that statement but still gives the false impression that Trump was speaking of "very fine people" among the neo-Nazis, when he was plainly talking about the participants in the Confederate flag controversy. Yet Democrats repeat the falsehood--"Trump refused to condemn neo-Nazis"--continually.

Trump's words are pretty horrible on many occasions. But he has condemned racism and white supremacy quite plainly multiple times. Anyone with a minimal interest in truth ought to consider that in trying to arrive at a fair judgment.

I know someone who was sitting peacefully in a park with her small children and was menaced by a man with a baseball bat in the name of Black Lives Matter. Blaming the BLM movement at large for that would be on a par with a fair amount of what's in this piece.

All in all it's an example of the attribution of most of the evil to the other side which is what I deplore.

By the way, this is exactly why ideological people tend to ignore or dislike Lasch. He was very forthright about calling a spade a spade no matter which side it fell on. (Which is, of course, a mark of a true prophet).

I curious as to whether any of you have looked at the Proud Boys website.

I wanted to know if they are really white supremacists, (especially after I found out that their leader is Black/Puerto Rican), and I don't think they are. I obviously don't agree with everything they say, and they are crude in a 12 year old boy sort of a way, but I do think they may really be "good people" who are just trying to defend what is right in their opinion. The thing I found most interesting thing on their website was an

  encounter with Whoopi Goldberg

BTW, I have come across several videos of Whoopi Goldberg in the past year or so that have really impressed me because she is trying to discourage the kind rhetoric you are talking about.

AMDG
AMDG

Trump will say and do whatever benefits Trump, period. He is a nihilist and doesn't care about anything else. Nothing he does would surprise me. If he did a 180-degree pivot and declared himself a Democrat I would not be surprised. A second term would be interesting, but perhaps not very good for the country.

Meanwhile the peace-loving radical right plots to kidnap Democratic governors, which would seem to be moderately more extreme than anything mentioned above. Although perhaps that is all fake news?

The party that protects the rights of gun-owners is the one with a problem, to me. And is actively plotting to take away the health care of people, with no replacement plan in place. The rest is just white noise.

There are still individuals on the progressive side of politics who are able to reason, but on the whole I think Leftism = Marxism and is the main danger to our whole civilisation. While I don't think conservatives are without fault, I don't think they are the danger to society. I daily expect a hot civil war in the USA. I think you have had a cold one for years. The Left is ideologically totally intolerant. I don't think that's true at all for any conservatives.

So, if you're right about the Michigan plotters (I haven't followed the story), this is in fact an example of "fake news." Not the incident itself, but the ideological angle. The press does this again and again: put out an inaccurate story, which then becomes fact in the minds of some large part of the population. The people who point out the inaccuracy never reach most of those.

In any case for Whitmer (sp?) to blame Trump personally is a little crazy. My understanding is that there are a *lot* of people in Michigan who have been really angered by her over-reach in shutting things down for covid.

"Liberate Michigan", "Liberate Minnesota", "Liberate Virginia" - all Trump tweets. The press are doing their job covering an unhinged president.

That seems quite unlikely.

The only reason I ever chime in politically is because all of you think the far left is worse than the far right, and I occasionally get annoyed. I know I'm wasting my time. To me both extremes are equally awful, so the constant iteration of "no, it's the progressives, they are horrible!" is just ludicrous.

The press is pretty bad, I admit. But the left press is no worse (and I think far better) than say, Tucker Carlson or Sean Hannity. I mean, really.

I just read the newest Bob Woodward book. I hesitate to ask, but what do all of you think of him? To me he always comes across as a real reporter just looking for the facts. I even thought he made his protagonist (perhaps antagonist?) seem not so horrible. But in the end his last line was something like, "He is not the man for the job."

Louise: "on the whole I think Leftism = Marxism and is the main danger to our whole civilisation." I basically agree, but I don't think it's the old hard Marxism. It's more like a vapor or miasma that affects people who have no idea. They just get misty-eyed at "Imagine" and never connect it with a murderous ideology.

I just want to say that I am really happy for KH that she got an opportunity for a free half hour campaign ad.

Well, if it's called mansplaining when a man is condescending to a woman, what is it called when a woman condescends to another woman in the same way?

Change of subject

When I was in high school, I was in the Journalism club for three years. It was pretty much like a class, and I probably remember more that I learned there than from most of my real classes. The one thing that was constantly drilled into us was OBJECTIVITY. It was a journalist's job to relate the unbiased facts. Opinion was for editorials alone. I thought this was a great and noble thing, and so the entire lack of objectivity, and the incessant spin on every sentence of the "news" drives me insane.

I think that that view of the purpose of journalism much have reached its zenith at about that time. Certainly early journalism wasn't like that, and sometime shortly after that it began to wane. I never connected that with Woodward and Berstein, in fact I never really thought about it before, but maybe they had something to do with it.

At any rate, another thing that amazes me is that so few people seem to care that the media is so biased in one direction or another. They don't seem to see any value to objectivity. Defeating the "other side" seems to be all-in-all.

Well, I guess they are shocked and outraged when the "other side" misleads the public, but their side--not so bad.

AMDG

The complaint re lack of objectivity goes back a ways -- this, in "How did Republicans learn to hate the news media?", perfectly captures my father-in-law in the 1960s:

When Donald Trump slams journalists, which he does chronically and with gusto, I’m reminded of the times my father, a deeply conservative Republican, would rant at the TV set when stories aired about urban riots, civil rights protests, campus revolts, and the Vietnam War.

To him, the media were a bunch of lefties cheering on dysfunction and bent upon wrecking America. When CBS’s anchor Walter Cronkite delivered his usual sign-off, “And that’s the way it is,” Da would shout: “That’s the way it isn’t, Walter.”

It’s certainly true that the complaints about media bias go way back. And that some of the complaints were unjustified. But also that some of them were. Walter Duranty! All three of these can be true at the same time. The CJR article is remarkable for its inability to see that. It’s the same self-satisfied mentality that has kept so much of journalism from seeing its problems. At this point the bad behavior is so obvious that the denials have become “who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?”

The truth about the Covington Catholic incident would never have been known if a group of nutty people having their own protest had not been recording the whole encounter.

I notice that the author is fairly old. He would have been trained in the old standards and may not realize the extent to which a lot of his younger colleagues view their jobs very differently: to be “change agents” in pursuit of a better world, which for them is by definition a more politically progressive world.

That was supposed to be "less as fact-seekers".

Those are three pretty great movies, Robert!

I used to date a guy that took movies VERY SERIOUSLY. He never laughed at them-not even the comedies. He always saw the suffering behind the humor.

Then we went to see Butch Cassidy, and he laughed so hard he almost knocked me out of my seat.

I liked the movie a lot, and Bill remembered liking it too, but when we watched it a few years ago, we thought it was boring. I don't think we finished watching it.

This has happened with several things since we started streaming stuff. Old TV shows especially.

I think I read All the President's Men right after I read the book, and thought the book was better-as almost always is the case.

I do really like Princess Bride. It makes me laugh just to think about it.

AMDG

The original? We have watched those from time to time, and enjoyed them.

AMDG

Always a good plan. Yes, I mean the original TZ.