smooth

you know, this is bullshit and I don't see any reason to be any more eloquent than that given you couldn't give me the simple respect of reading my post without projecting your own view of what liberals say/mean into what I actually wrote.

And no, roachboy, I'm not going to slough this off as format issues, because it's repetative and consistently pointed out enough that if it did matter, that is if these people we correspond with did care enough to actually discuss matters rationally, then they'd take the time--the same time we take to read their poorly worded and logically flawed arguments ad infinitum--to at least try and get the gist of what we type out. But they don't, pure and simple, instead preferring to mischaracterize much of what is laid out...that said, I don't spend my time here any longer in the same way as you so I can appreciate your attempt to mediate what you probably recognize with the pragmatic shift to just let shit lie and so write it off as function of the structure of internet discussion rather than some personal defecit


That said, being as I've not been here in a while, I forgot one of the most important lessons I gleaned from this forum: a lot of readers here can't/won't handle more than short sentences.

so grade school it is, seaver:


I know intelligent conservatives
I know intelligent liberals
Neither enjoy the infotainment that passes for news from bill oreilly, hannity, or coulter shows.
Neither enjoy the infotainment that passes for news from franken-esqe sources.

Both seem to drink beers while ENJOYING Bill Mahrer or Daily Show-esqe poltical commentary.
Both seem to derive their NEWS from major newspapers, BBC, Weekly Standard, international sources, and etc.
Both like to watch and discuss TOGETHER merits of topics brought up in Charlie Rose-esqe interview formats, or even Chris Matthews types. Not so much so the Hannity/Colmbes or Oreilly type interview/shoutfests.

These people seem to comprise the minority of TV watchers.

The majority of TV watchers seem to me to be interested in ENTERTAINMENT.
These TV watchers consume the infotainment that is passed off as news, and these same people don't seem to have the time or inclination to get outside corroberation of what they see passed off as news.


/gradeschool mode


Now, if you want to conflate the notion that conservative handlers and participants on these show seem to enjoy shouting at one another and the viewers who enjoy that kind of shit are the same people voting for Bush--well, that's pretty much where I can just figure your analysis is batshit and you didn't pay enough attention to what I wrote.

Because the closest thing I guess I could be accused of writing toward that end was the notion that CORPORATE values trump truth values when it comes to mainstream entertainment. That the corporate domain is dominated by conservatives is no secret to me, maybe to you, but also that other conservatives leeched into the corprorate domain purely with the notion that they could turn the tide of the so-called culture war. And so they did and it appears are succeeding due to gaining popularity with people who were feeling disenfranchised. But maybe you fantasize that outsourcing jobs and fucking people's hardearned money off in economic schemes are dandy and popular positions. I happen to disagree and so I'm left thinking that the resulting political platform that melds populism with corporatism is at its core contradictory and strange.

Basically all I was saying was that corporate values allow subordinating truth to profit, whereas liberal values don't. It so happens that conservatives are in charge of huge chunks of corporate media right now, and the definition of conservatism is to retain power whereas the definition of classical liberalism is to deconsolidate power so perhaps that explains why these people are willing to engage in what I see are vulgar politics. The air america crew thought it best to emulate that, and I suggest that their audience thinks its no good in the same way that we thought the other side's was no good.

Given the growing illiteracy, obesity, and poverty issues in our modern society, I don't see why any of this would be particularly shocking to anyone.
That is, it seems to me that a growing segment of our population is content to forget their shitty days while consuming goods and ideas from something like a TV that they can control with an on/off button. And that's the extent of the conclusions I'd draw from that statistical data--nothing about their voting habits (other than to state that more often than not they DONT vote, rather than attaching them to any particular party or Bush as you put it), nothing about their intelligence (although their time seems at this point to be better spent than mine repeating myself to people in this thread), and certainly nothing about where these people live (except that I would venture the grandaddy of them all, Jerry Springer from whom all this shit seemed to sprout and was realized its popularity from, seemed to be rooted in "trailer trash" exploitation).

__________________
"The theory of a free press is that truth will emerge from free discussion, not that it will be presented perfectly and instantly in any one account." -- Walter Lippmann

"You measure democracy by the freedom it gives its dissidents, not the freedom it gives its assimilated conformists." -- Abbie Hoffman