> They need to figure out some way of monetizing those comments.
The people funding those sites are cleaning up with the votes they've bought in this way. The comments are the monetization.
The people funding those sites are cleaning up with the votes they've bought in this way. The comments are the monetization.
I might change my mind about all this if any of the actually-different young democrats who have forsworn such financing are actually elected this fall...
The Democrats are so mired in their internal politics and fear of having and identity they produced an agenda and candidate so weak they lost to a senile compulsive liar.
In some ways the US has merely been the vanguard of a trend.
I'm giving them the benefit of the doubt by staking the claim that they are doing this because they are a bunch of cynical bastards. You are making things worse for them by claiming they really are that stupid, and while I can't rule it out 100% it borders on the unbelievable.
But if you want to go down that route, be my guest, I do believe Robert Mercer knows what he is doing (just like Rupert Murdoch) and that the damage they are doing is intentional. It's pretty easy to mess with people's heads and there is an awful lot of that going on, if the visitors of those sites sincerely believe in the various levels of BS that are being peddled then some sort of shared blame would be appropriate.
I have similar feelings towards religious people and the perpetrators of religion: a failure of critical thinking skills leading to significant damage to the world, with a larger portion of the blame apportioned to the guys in charge (why is it always guys?).
You seem to have strong feelings against Breitbart. Why?
Sure, but that has nothing to do with the heady mix of garbage and conspiracy that the likes of Breitbart like to stir up in order to appeal to emotion rather than to ratio.
> You seem to have strong feelings against Breitbart. Why?
By trying to frame this as an emotional affair you've just killed my appetite for continued discussion. See, I am not going to let you goad me in the same way that Breitbart does to its visitors. It's cheap and in the end does not serve any purpose other than to derail the discussion. It's Schopenhauer 101.
Truth is a matter of degree, there is no black and white, so yes, it is hard to get to an objective truth when there are more than one participants to any discussion of a real life event. Witness the variety of stories you will get about a car accident that happened 5 minutes ago with several eye witnesses. You will get as many 'truths' as there are people. But a majority of them will usually agree on the bulk of the observable facts, even if individuals can be - and have been proven to be - spectacularly wrong.
But that sort of analysis does not pertain to the kind of bullshit that the likes of Breitbart will stir in with the soup to get the ratings up and the blood boiling.
Those are calculated efforts at inflicting maximum damage and to get people to respond emotionally rather than rationally. Think 'pizzagate' rather than 'blue vs turquoise'.
That's your problem right there. If your understanding of the world, history and your reading comprehension are such that Breitbart looks normal to you then I'm afraid I am out of options to convince you of the opposite, you will have to do some catching up.
We are talking about the same website I hope?
It's a non stop orgy of emotional button pushing with a complete lack of balance with respect to the reality on the ground. It's quite possible to lie with facts by selectively leaving out facts that support counter examples and those things that do not support your worldview. Breitbart is apparently good enough at this that it can convince people like you - able to string together a couple of sentences with more than two syllable words in it - that this is normal.
So, maybe it is possible that an intelligent and decent person subscribes to Breitbart, but it would require stretching 'intelligent' to the point of abstraction and 'decent' would not enter the picture by my definition of that word. Most decent and intelligent people that I know would be more than capable of seeing it for what it is: outright manipulation of public opinion for political purposes, so blatant that it is surprising it works at all.
If you feel it is normal then that is your problem, especially if you consider yourself to be intelligent and decent. Personally I like my news diet to be solidly grounded in reality, not a carefully made selection of facts to support certain political bumper stickers such as 'white is good, black is bad', 'immigrants are bad', 'America is great' and so on.
Remember too that history has a way of not looking too kindly on those that felt that obvious aberrations were perfectly normal and decent, when in fact all they were justifying was their own bigotry and biases. Time to figure out which side of history you want to be on, good luck, you'll need it.
I've never seen an article on Breitbart claim "black is bad" or "immigrants are bad." They are critical of illegal immigration, since it's illegal.
They are pro-American, but so am I since I am American. What's wrong with thinking America is great?
Why do people jump to this wild ideological attack? I don't see anywhere in the parent post that implied otherwise. If you feel that calling Breitbart and Rupert Murdoch out for what they are is a statement akin to "all conservatives are stupid or indecent", isn't that just instigating a flamewar for no reason, rather than responding to the post?
Why are you insisting that conservative people must support racist media outlets?