Political Theatre category archive
It’s All about the Benjamins 0
Bob Molinaro, sportswriter extraordinaire, checks a fact:
Facebook Frolics, Mining the Depths Dept. 0
Will Bunch critiques the minecraft:
Follow the link for thoughtful and considered discussion of what happens when forces of deception and disruption prey on ersatz patriotism.
“Nonsense Debt” 0
Josh Marshall looks at the developing war within the Republican Party between the absurd and the absolutely crazy, witness the recent Alabama primary victory of Judge Roy Moore.
Marshall suggests that Republicans have done it to themselves. (Unfortunately, they are poised to do it to the rest of us, also.)
Here’s a crucial bit; follow the link for the rest (emphasis added).
This is the crux of the issue. Last spring I said the Trump phenomenon was a product of what I termed ‘nonsense debt‘. Republicans had spent years pumping their voters up on increasingly extreme and nonsensical claims and promises. This worked very well for winning elections. But it had also built up a debt that eventually had to be repaid. Concretely, they were making claims and promises that were either factually ridiculous, politically unviable or unacceptable to a broad swath of the voting public. Eventually, you get elected and need to produce. By definition that’s never really possible: both because the claims and promises are nonsensical and unviable but also because a politics based on reclamation, revenge, and impulse is almost impossible to satisfy through normal legislative politics.
Image via Job’s Anger.
Twits on Twitter, Do the Math Dept. 0
An Oxford University study reports that the use of Twitter to spread lies was immense. A snippet:
Nationwide, an average of 25 percent of election-related tweets contained material from established news organizations, the researchers at the Oxford Internet Institute wrote. However, they said, “a worryingly large proportion” of tweets about the election – as much as 57 percent in West Virginia – came from junk news sources, as well as Russia’s state-owned television network and the transparency group WikiLeaks, which published unverified stories.
In the election’s three decisive states, the researchers found that fake and junk news constituted 40 percent of the sampled election-related tweets that went to Pennsylvanians, 34 percent to Michigan voters and 30 percent to those in Wisconsin. In other swing states, the figure reached 42 percent in Missouri, 41 percent in Florida, 40 percent in North Carolina, 38 percent in Colorado and 35 percent in Ohio.
The Professional Is the Political 0
Responding to a Wall Street Journal article whose author wistfully yearns for the good old days of “apolitical” big time sports, Justin Levin points out that such times exist only in Never Never Land. He explains why the national anthem is played before every pro baseball and football games (hint: it was a politicized decision). An excerpt:
Pete Rozelle, the commissioner of the NFL, and Spike Eckert and Bowie Kuhn, the commissioners of baseball, worked to put their sports on record in support of the Vietnam War, while laboring to silence those in the game who disagreed. While many believe that before the protests of the last year, the national anthem and other patriotic elements of sporting events symbolized unity, they are actually remnants of this campaign to interject sports into a bitterly divisive political debate.
Facebook Frolics 0
Image via Juanita Jean.
Afterthought:
One element of the reports about the use of the Facebook/Twitter/”social’ media to spread fake news lies that has received less attention than it deserves is the stupid on the receiving end–the willingness of some persons to believe stuff that just ain’t so. If you see a questionable story, just how difficult is it to search the web to find whether it can be sourced from legitimate news sites?
Sovereign Failure 0
E. J. Dionne takes a deep look at Donald Trump’s U. N. speech and finds it to be an incoherent (quell surprise!) mess.” Here’s a snippet:
But Trump was so selective and inconsistent in his application of sovereignty that the concept itself had collapsed before he finished. If sovereignty is the highest principle, what justification does he have for threatening to destroy North Korea (which asserts its sovereign right to nuclear weapons)?
How can he suggest intervention against Venezuela simply because we disapprove of its governing system? Trump’s criticism of Venezuela was clearly based on the idea that some things actually are more important than sovereignty.
A Picture Is Worth 0
This pretty much sums up my feelings about the international image of the U. S. since Donald Trump’s U. N speech:
Via Job’s Anger.
Facebook Frolics 0
Josh Marshall ruminates about Russian impulses. A snippet:
But maybe it didn’t have to.