I'm Reminded Of An Old Joke

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Soon-to-be Ex-President Trump has tweeted that more people voted for him than any other President in history.

I am reminded of an old joke.

An American and a Russian compete in a two-person race. The American wins easily.

Pravda (old Soviet news organisation...Their equivalent of Fox News) reports on the race. Russian athlete comes second, American is next to last.

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Daphne Xu's picture

Apparently even Reagan and Gorbachev did this routine when they met (not verbatim):
Reagan: Here in the US, everyone's allowed to criticize me.
Gorbachev: That's true as well in the USSR. Everyone's allowed to criticize you there, as well.

With elections, as with everything: He who hacks last hacks best.

-- Daphne Xu

Pravda <==> CNN

CNN is Pravda USA not Fox News. Even Fox was negative on Trump slightly more than 50% of the time and their primary anchor [Chris Matthews] is a registered Democrat. Whereas CNN's and MSNBC hiring policy is "CONSERVATIVES NEED NOT APPLY!!!!!!" and they along with the other 4 networks were over 95% negative on Trump and what do you want yo bet they will be 95% positive on Idiot Joe!!!!

Nicole Wallace

Someone should tell Nicole Wallace that she is no longer a conservative.

She would be surprised.

There are anchors on CNN I will not watch. There are anchors on MSNBC I will not watch. There are anchors on FOX I will not watch. There are anchors on all three I respect.

Watch the next few weeks as these people show their true colors.

Jill

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

I checked out her bios

She is a never-Trumper, has formerly inhabited the left-most extents of the Republican party, was dropped from The View because she would't argue with her friends the hard-lefties on the show thus depriving it of the conflict necessary for ratings, and says she has left the Republican party.

If Nicole were surprised to be told she was not a conservative, you would be the only two.

That Would Make Bush Incompetent

She was communications director for him. The Bush Whitehouse would not have had a lefty in that critical position.

A lot of people have left the party of Trump. That doesn't mean they're not conservative.

Jill

Angela Rasch (Jill M I)

We need to remember what Pravda was

crash's picture

We need to remember what Pravda was in the USSR. Pravda was the official newspaper of the communist party when the Soviet government was the communist party. Neither Fox nor CNN have that distinction. Both are commercial, capitalist companies serving the interests of their boards of directors. Comparing them to Pravda of the Soviet era is hyperbole at best and inflammatory at worst. CNN, Fox, NBC, CBS, ABC and the rest exist to make a profit for their shareholders. They do this by attracting an audience and selling time slots to advertising firms as directed by their boards of directors.

Your friend
Crash

It's the Age of Hyperbole

laika's picture

With everyone shouting to be heard over everyone else we've upped the rhetoric to ridiculous levels. Being asked to don a mask for the safety of others upon entering a store is an assault on our fundamental American liberties, the first dangerous step on the road to a police state! Politicians whose beliefs would hardly have raised an eyebrow in the 1970's are COMMUNISTS if they're liberal, and FASCISTS if they're conservative, unless it's the other way around... People who engage in hyperbole ARE THE EVIL CLOVEN-HOOFED MINIONS OF SATAN!!!!!
~hugs, Veronica

Mask comment

Total nonsense. No constitutional rights are involved. The law constrains and controls our actions in dozens of ways every day. Got a car? You have to have a driver's license. Is it registered with the state? Do you have your compulsory liability insurance?

Go to a restaurant and sign on the door says "No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service." That sign is required by the city/country health dept. Another sign says "Maximum Occupancy - XXX People. By order of Fire Marshal."

Those are just a few examples of how our behavior is constrained by laws and rules, the same as the mask laws. Yet you don't hear people (except maybe a few nutballs) screaming about their constitutional rights being violated.


"Life is not measured by the breaths you take, but by the moments that take your breath away.”
George Carlin

Rights circa 1942 London...

Andrea Lena's picture

"I'm sorry, Archie, but you need to pull your shades down - it's a bloody blackout, you arse!"

"Oh sod off, Davey! What harm could it cause! I ain't afraid of no bleedin' Heinkel!"

"Well, maybe you're not scared, but when you leave your lights on, you just made targets of everybodys' flat in yer row!

  

To be alive is to be vulnerable. Madeleine L'Engle
Love, Andrea Lena

You tell them!

You tell them!

I never stop at red lights! Don't forget to shoot your guns in the air as you're driving through the intersections! LETTUM KNOW YER A COMIN'!!!

~Taylor Ryan
My muse suffers from insomnia, and it keeps me up at night.

"fundamental American liberties"...

is a much larger scope than than Constitutional Rights. The Bill of Rights even says that the Constitution does not enumerate nor limit the rights the people have, which may or may not be recognized in the law from time to time.

Some jurisdictions implementing mask laws may lack statutory authority or simply interest to enforce quarantine orders, but will masking. Arguments continue about their utility, which is overstated at best.

You have the Constitutional Right to freedom of speech. This is enforced when you use the phone, mail (not e-), or appear on the radio or tv.

You do not have the right on Google (including gmail & YouTube), Facebook, or Twitter. This is due to what is called the section 230 carve-out, which makes the Internet platforms immune to the restrictions and liabilities which apply to publishers and common carriers. Until this is fixed, everything you get from them is heavily skewed to the left.

It has been reported that Google ran a test in the election of 2018 to measure how much they could sway political opinion and electorial results. Allegedly, they concluded about 30%. If this is true, democracy is over, as no national and few statewide elections are that decisive. Regardless of how much it really is, it was fully active in this most recent election, and showed.

US Newspapers

It's true that none of the major news agencies in the US is a government mouthpiece, and likening them to Pravda or Izvestia or TASS is highly misleading.

However, they do have their biases.

Fox News (and all Murdoch news sources) in particular has an obvious "party line" and all news reports have to toe that line. For most of Trump's presidency, Trump could do no wrong and whatever he said was truth, so it was effectively a mouthpiece for the Trump administration. That has, however, changed somewhat in the past month or so.

The rest of the mainstream media has tended to more or less report things the way that the people in power want, even when they know it's false. (The motivation is that if they don't uncritically parrot what the government says, they'll lose "access" to government officials.) The New York Times in particular is known as the "establishment" newspaper, at least in the northeastern USA. In the US, when the mainstream news media start openly disagreeing with the government (e.g., when Walter Cronkite came out against the Vietnam War), it means the government is in trouble.

In Britain and Europe, nobody expects newspapers to be unbiased; some newspapers are more blatant with their biases than others. Television channels are run by the government, so TV news is unlikely to be critical of the government, which is a kind of bias, but they're not government propaganda organs the way the Soviet-era news media were, either.

not sure

Maddy Bell's picture

where you got the idea that UK and EU TV is run by the government, whilst each country does have a national broadcaster eg the BBC, all the other channels are commercial and under their own ownership bias. It does not always follow that the BBC et al always support the government stance, they don't, they were quite ambivelant about Brexit for example.


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Madeline Anafrid Bell

Comrades - Old shootka (joke)

(Disclaimer, this joke at least 50 years old, so maybe things are now different; Please enjoy the joke, and don't quibble on current accuracy...)
---
Comrades! In TASS (the news agency) there is no PRAVDA (truth), and in PRAVDA, (the other news agency) there is no TASS (news).

Some Известия

I believe it was Izvestiya (Известия), not TASS. Isvestiya was the name of another newspaper and translates as "news"
And "Pravda" (truth) was the other newspaper, not a news agency.

So it ends up being something like (showing off my bad Russian):

В Известиях нет Правды, В Правде нет Известий

or,

"In Известия (The News) there is no truth (Правда),
in Правда (The Truth) there is no news (Известия)"

All of the above

Maddy Bell's picture

just goes to prove that the Divided States of America have nothing uniting them other than mistrust and hate of 'them', whoever 'them' are.


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Madeline Anafrid Bell

All of the above is why ...

I sometimes dip into BBC & Aljazeera, very rarely, Russian Times (https://www.rt.com/news/) to get an 'outside of USA' view. And there is always Google.

I am one of those (perhaps rare) Americans who knows there is a World outside of the USA.
---
Side note: A Native American museum's guestbook asked my name, etc., plus tribal affiliation. I put down "European Colonizing Invader". :(