The Trump era really broke something in people's brains. Politics started invading everywhere at a level much greater than had ever existed before. I don't go to work, watch sports, or share pictures with the intent to engage in politics.
It depends on whether you're willing to support an organization which also cares about other rights too. If you can stomach the defense of property rights, ij.org and pacificlegal.org both defend free speech rights alongside other rights.
The mainstream media did a great job of outraging liberals because whenever trump said anything even remotely controversial, it was covered nonstop until he said the next thing. I think a lot of people ended up being outraged for 5 straight years, and came to the conclusion that the idea of free speech is "a danger to our democracy".
Could also just be the fact that I was a young teen then with little care for the world beyond school and friends.
I don't know if recency bias plays into the Trump stuff feeling way more covered, or if it actually was, but I'm not sure media did particularly more this time around compared to last. Maybe it was just who the target audience for outrage was this time, instead of the amount of coverage.
Not really sure of my point, but food for thought to the lurkers I guess.
I have a very clear memory of a fox news headline disparaging obama for taking his jacket off in the white house, because apparently that was against the custom or whatever. And I thought, who cares, and it was then I knew that I shouldn't take fox seriously. But then, when trump was elected, I saw cnn spend a whole day talking about how trump got two scoops of ice cream and everyone else only got one, and had the same realization.
But I have to disagree with the idea that these stories were spread to the same degree. Go on twitter, go on facebook, go on snapchat - name a platform, and that platform will promote ideas against a republican significantly more than stories against a democrat. And you can argue that "that's just the algorithm" or whatever, but it is what it is, which is biased.
I had always rationalized this with the thought that these platforms had larger Democrat populations than Republican, which explains the broadcast bias. Maybe that is an incorrect assumption.
It's bizarre to simultaneously criticize them while also blaming them for setting your incorrect expectations. Should have listened to and read Lawfare.
It's also simply morally blameworthy to excuse the relevant behavior on the part of Trump and his associates, whether they were indicted or not.
It's just a shorter phrase than "ABC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, all late night comedy shows, SNL, and nearly all newspapers." It becomes a bit of a mouthful. It's the most neutral form of phrasing all of this media that seems to lean toward the same political party, though I'll accept recommendations if you have a better term.
> It's bizarre to simultaneously criticize them while also blaming them for setting your incorrect expectations. Should have listened to and read Lawfare.
It wasn't just my expectations, and I absolutely do expect news media saturation of a story to correlate with its actual relevance. Instead, they over-hyped and sold outrage day after day until the rubber hit the road. And then they just moved on. The idea that one should have simply ignored all the supposed journalists and reporting to read one guy's legal blog (???) seems bizarre to me. This is a very revisionist view of those 2+ years.
> It's also simply morally blameworthy to excuse the relevant behavior on the part of Trump and his associates, whether they were indicted or not.
I'm not excusing anything. I'm saying the media hyped this up as "Watergate times a thousand" over a two year stretch, and it ended up being nothing near that.
...and that's why it's a big problem when they spend 2+ years building up hype around a story whose ramifications are far less than we were led to believe.
I don't think there's a particular left/right/whatever bent to running this business model. It's just that there isn't a lot of news that engages people in this world, so you cannot sustain a 24/7 media empire unless you wrap them up in a conspiracy or create a false narrative that there's some evil group that their news is fighting against with the truth. Then, all of a sudden, some random person's Tweet about mixed sex bathrooms becomes an hour's worth of news to engage people with.
Not stopping the family separation at the southern border.
Sending bad medical advice and politicizing response to a national healthcare crisis with COVID-19.
Abandoning Puerto Rico after a devastating Hurricane.
Not offering a replacement for Obamacare as promised, instead only gutting the process to make it more expensive for people who still try to get insurance. Especially for not implementing a single payer healthcare system like the entire rest of the civilized world uses to offer much more efficient healthcare to the populace.
Not fixing the Social Security deficit.
Engaging in a trade war with China without an apparent exit strategy.
Agreed. The lack of accompanying service cuts really kept this from being as effective as it could have been.
> Abandoning Puerto Rico after a devastating Hurricane.
Yea, that was really bad.
> Engaging in a trade war with China without an apparent exit strategy.
I was actually pretty happy with how that went. A lot of progress was made, including stopping China from being able to abuse our own postal service to undercut local vendors on shipping. Before Covid hit, I was most looking forward to seeing continued progress there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18246130
> Sending bad medical advice and politicizing response to a national healthcare crisis with COVID-19.
I'm not going to go deep into this, but suffice it to say it was an election year and everything was politicized by everyone.
Everything below here is just maintaining the status quo. I wouldn't call any of these Trump specific.
> Not stopping the family separation at the southern border.
This is admittedly horrifying, however, the amount of people coming over the border without any identification combined with the potential for trafficking makes it a complicated problem to solve. Not solving it was also just maintaining the status quo.
> Not offering a replacement for Obamacare as promised, instead only gutting the process to make it more expensive for people who still try to get insurance. Especially for not implementing a single payer healthcare system like the entire rest of the civilized world uses to offer much more efficient healthcare to the populace.
Agreed and disappointing. It's also an incredibly hard problem to solve without turning the entire country upside down. Dangling the carrot is easier (for both parties).
> Not fixing the Social Security deficit.
Been a problem for years that neither party is willing to make the hard decisions to correct.
Which was typically the next day. Trying to follow the Trump White House was exhausting.
Trump knew how to play the media like a fiddle. Say something outrageous, get loads of coverage, before anybody has time to really think about it or offer rebuttals he says something else outrageous and the first statement is instantly old news and forgotten.
News organizations made huge profits while Trump was in office, and their ratings have slipped considerably since electing President Biden and especially since Trump was kicked off of Twitter.
To be fair, I bet you could measure the average interval of those events in hours.
I'm just tired of pretending any of it means anything anymore. Both parties won't fix the roads, both parties won't give us healthcare, both parties are pro-war. Why should anyone care who the president is?
Whether you are in favor or against, it's easy to argue that a whole lot of people care about that issue, and not only in purely theoretical grounds.
And that's just the topic of the week: A justice is, on average, going to be making rulings for about 30 years, and is probably going to be able to retire strategically, to be replaced by a like-minded judge. So even if it's just due to the power of electing supreme court justices, presidents matter.
So I don't think it's hard to argue that, because of Trump's presidency, we'll have a very conservative supreme court for, very likely, our entire lifetimes, while if Clinton had won, we'd instead have a liberal majority in the court for at least another 20 years.
Even without the abortion decision, the court will make a big practical difference to a lot of people. I think it's fair to expect wide sweeping decisions that would never have happened without Trump being able to build a 6-3 court.
i'm sorry, but what the supreme court DRAFT said was: "there's no constitutional right to abortion. also this should've been decided by representatives of the people".
i'm not sure why that's a bad thing -- supreme court justices should not legislate and, if abortion is such an important thing for one side of the isle, they should fight, tooth and nail, to get laws (actual laws, not flimsy decisions by non-elected officials) passed.
hell, even RBG criticized roe v wade -- https://www.law.uchicago.edu/news/justice-ruth-bader-ginsbur...
Lucky you?
edit: I'm getting downvoted, so here's a source: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politic...
We're in a much better place today because of heroes in our military
Conservatives have historically had problems with free speech when it came to things they view as contrary to "family values", and later on with Trump branding the press as "The enemy of the people". But in the last 5-10 years liberals have as well had a problem with free speech with things they determine is "hate speech".
So now there aren't many people left that support the cause of absolute free speech regardless of whether you agree or disagree, and we have the ACLU catering more towards liberal causes and less on free speech cases.
It was mass experiment in what specific types of rage they love subjecting themselves to, fueled by an ungodly amount of computational power, in order to prop up and expand a vast ad-delivery network that masquerades as news.
The daily rage was hugely profitable for all media participants and don't let them tell you anything different. The internet found its crack cocaine and us poor subjects are just tweaking for another hit.
They'll never let us chill out again, ever.