WideNine

I can get behind the notion of more responsible reporting of left-leaning media outlets, but that cuts both ways. Folks can also acknowledge the dangerous partisan slant and conspiracy spreading of conservative outlets like FoxNews, Breitbart, and others. As responsible citizens we need to better understand what is "news" and what is "sensationalism" driven by the desire to promote clicks and ad revenue. That means taking some time and precautions to be critical thinkers and to allow for fact-checking. Whether it is a CNN article irresponsibly stirring racial tensions with attention-grabbing news headlines that seem geared towards encouraging and fomenting racial division while generating ad revenue and clicks, or FoxNews encouraging folks to irresponsibly rise up against valid pandemic precautions. Both of these I would consider poor examples of true news reporting and should convince folks to focus a bit more on objective or at least moderate left or right leaning news platforms, and to be sure to fact-check against the more slanted media outlets using those more objective outlets. Regardless of how shabby an organization is in actually responsibly reporting news, a free press is imperative for a democracy and should be protected. We should never fall prey to blanket statements that lead towards or imply the need to restrict or censor the press... that is the road that all dictators take to control their populace. If you want to censor a news media outlet, then you can exercise that right by simply not visiting or consuming their product. The hypocrisy of the US towards other nations and their dictators censoring and attacking the free press: https://www.state.gov/the-united-states-condemns-the-ortega-regimes-attack-on-the-free-press/ The late John McCain on media attacks and censorship in the US by Trump: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-trump-mccain-idUSKBN15Y07R Why Trump attacks any media that does not support his agendas: Foreign policy experts and political scientists have observed this technique of removing trustworthy sources of information, and have noted it is one regularly employed by despots. Brian Klaas, the author of The Despot’s Accomplice: How the West is Aiding and Abetting the decline of Democracy has argued that president Trump is using the same techniques as authoritarian leaders. Writing for Vice, Klaas stated: First, in order to roll back democratic checks, despots must blur the lines between truth and falsehood. This makes it difficult to ascertain who to trust in times of crisis. Second, but relatedly, Trump is doing what despots do best—attacking the media for actual accurate reporting. The aim is to discredit the traditional sources of information, and leave citizens unsure who to trust, and what to believe.The disorientation allows the governing class to remain in power, with their power unchecked by scrutiny. It does not matter if the public does not believe the nation's leader, what matters is they don't believe the voices contradicting the leader, either.

Paranoid fantasies? Like the responsible, scientific, and fact-based approach Trump and the GOP took acknowledging a pandemic and the precautions Americans should take to avoid spreading it and causing more people to become sick and/or die? Covid-19: 11,400,796 US Cases 249,187 Deaths 157,319 Average New Cases per day. Really listen and hear where Trump is taped actually acknowledging (privately) that the virus is dangerous and tricky because it is transmitted through the air. Listen to the several instances of Trump downplaying and mocking the basic precaution of mask-wearing. Politicizing the most basic precautions that US citizens could take against spreading the virus mocking wearing masks that are proven to cut down on transmission of the virus through the air. True leaders lead by example. The sad reality from front-line healthcare workers about folks that believed the lies about the harmless nature of the virus and gasp their last breaths in disbelief that the virus has killed them. I have a good friend, Jim who is an emergency RN in MN. I would not mock him being a nurse as he is also a badass black belt and has to regularly subdue guys that are off their rocker on drugs or just mentally unstable. I used to think he had the coolest job ever as he was also one of those who flew in choppers when a patient needed an emergency air-lift. I was talking to his wife last week and she wants him to quit because he has been working 7 days a week and double-shifts for months because of Covid-19. By the time folks get to their ER it is pretty bad. She says he is just burnt out from all the deaths, not that he had not seen death before but it was never this constant depressing rate he is seeing now. Lastly, to borrow from that other text: For the time is coming when people will not endure sound teaching, but having itching ears they will accumulate for themselves teachers to suit their own passions... 2 Timothy 4:3

The Clinton campaign itself did not file suits, but they did sign on to suits brought by the Green Party. I was fact-checked on this by another poster who had some credibility and he or she was right. BUT, I would argue that it was not comparable to this effort to undermine an election result with the social media propaganda, it did not preclude Clinton from formally congratulating Trump on his win, it was not used as a justification to withhold the transition process and information flow to the President elect. My opinion is that signing on to that lawsuit was just a way to vet close results; which could have been the messaging from the Trump campaign sans all the irresponsible conspiracy messaging and attacks against our democratic voting institutions.

The RAND Corporation did an interesting study on why Russia employed a "firehose" approach to their disinformation campaigns. It basically found what many of us have seen proven out. That first impressions are very difficult to change. For instance, you take a serial lying conman and paint him as a benevolent victim of some deep state conspiracy using a barrage of deep fakes and falsehoods, that first impression is ingrained. We have seen this play out here. Where no amount of fact checking or evidence to the contrary can sway folks. They would rather create a fantasy view of the world and an echo-chamber shared by others who are duped where their beliefs will not be challenged. https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PE198.html

Yes, they did.

Huh? Ridiculous assumptions and interpretation of the dialogue here. First, not a liberal. Just smart enough to know that Trump is a serial lying and embarrassing orange carnival barker that some Jersey swamp barfed up. Second, every time you try to have an intellectually honest discussion backed by reputable sources and facts, the slow-blinkers in their MAGA hats run away. The most intellect they can usually muster is a laughing emoticon and maybe some generalized liberal slur.

Says the guy who loves Putin's orange piglet. The way he was sucking up to Putin, silent on Russia offering bounties on our servicemen in Afghanistan, and who did the Russians want to win the 2016 election? ...and the Q-Anon Trump cult nuts call us communists.

It was a killer and I am amazed that our defense pulled his butt out of the fire on that series, but in close games he has to get more consistent. There have been a few times where I have seen him drop it right within the 10 yard marker and if our coverage kept running they would have had a good chance to pin our opponent. Usually our coverage guys pulled up buying the catching fake by the punt returner rather than knowing where the ball was. Can't be easy though, tracking down a 50 yard punt and running all that way down the field fighting off the guy jamming you while getting a bead on the punt and where it is heading - not an easy role to do at max speed.

Seriously? OK, then that took some nads to just go for it as your center and guards would not be blocking worth a damn.

I do... seemed like the only guy that had any competitive spark left in his uniform. Thanks for the PTSD memory.

That was some trickery, waving his arms around yelling at his guys to hurry up and to get set and showing the universal spike signal then the keeper for the score. Nice.

Allen still struggles with bringing his eyes down to the free man underneath, he is stubbornly anti-check-down and it is an odd problem to have with so many past Bills QBs afraid to chuck the rock. Still Allen needs to improve upon seeing those outlet guys that are just shallow of the sticks because it is a win to get a fresh set of downs to live and try to score again. I was trying to figure out the robber concept that Peterson was playing. In another post I had mentioned that he seemed to be playing more like a free safety at times, but the analysis by Kubiak shed some light on that. I was thinking it was just veteran savvy coming off his man or abandoning his zone much like White did in our prior game, but it appears that coming off his man was by design with how they were covering Diggs. It is another growing experience. Daboll had given Allen some ways to beat the two-deep zone looks, but those ways of bringing guys free with that deep post or with crossing routes are susceptible to that robber concept and Allen who has a tendency of staring down his receivers will have to remember to discipline himself again to look off the robber/FS or go somewhere else with the ball. You can kind of see the chess match of defensive strategies that teams are throwing at Allen. If we had a running game worth a spit, it would not all be on his shoulders every game and it would force those safeties to play closer to the line or teams would have to sub in their heavy-nickel type packages. If we cannot run against 4-man fronts and Allen is forced into one-dimensional games where he is throwing into 2-deep zone coverage against teams with quality defensive backs, interceptions will happen. Daboll has to figure out a way to better disguise running plays - I currently feel we are somehow telegraphing our runs and teams do seem to be subbing in their run stuffing personnel on downs where we run. I like it when we start out empty with Singletary or Moss lined up as receiver then motioning them into the backfield. I think it will help our team better understand how they are playing run with their zone packages. Also, we have to tip our hats to Arizona's defensive coach for that robber concept, timed blitzes, and they even had that odd stacked defensive line look over Ike's guard spot that stuffed our runs to Dawkins side that have been pretty productive for us. Some things to work on over their bye.

And that is where? Still in the past where it will remain unchanged. The Bills were one of 10 teams that passed on Mahomes. How many other teams would want a draft do-over if they could predict the future of all the players coming out and not just Mahomes, there are players scattered all over the league who would jump up to the top of a revised draft board... sounds like something someone could do for a what-if fantasy project, but meaningless as far as reality goes. It is amazing to me how many times this senseless past draft critique gets dusted off and recycled to bash the Bills organization. The same Bills org that has gotten us into the playoffs year after year and currently has us in the hunt for the AFC East top seed with just about half the team limping around in bandages.

That second fake for the TD was vs. Addison I believe, and both he and Hughes were left on an island with two players to defend. Either the RB has a clear inside gap to take it to the house or you ignore the RB and take Murray. I would prefer they just hit Murray either way if it is 50/50, but the Bills may want to take a look at that "stacked" defensive line formation the zona used to nullify our run game. They at least need to have someone attack that gap/RB between our wide DE and the DT, leaving Murray to the DE, but we wont see another QB like that for a while, but some lessons to take away from this game. Peterson played more like a FS than a DB often coming off his man or zone to undercut Allen's passes. He is a savvy player who noted that we would run a receiver shallow, then a deep post from the other side of the field over top to beat their zone. He came off his shallow zone and faded back watching Allen's eyes and made the pick. By the time Allen got that pass off it was too late. Our team is decimated by injuries, yet did enough to win, but in the end their Hail Mary gambit worked. You are right. It happens, and our team gets a well-deserved bye to heal and think about what they can improve.

No he did not. He may have invented the word "email" in 1978 for an application he built at Rutgers.....maybe, but this guy reeks of self-promoting con. General concensus is that email as a technology was formalized by Engineer Ray Tomlinson Engineer Ray Tomlinson sent the first network email in 1971, choosing the '@' symbol to separate the name of the sender from the address of the host computer. As technologists and Web historians have written, the true history of email is one of repeated, organic iterations of fundamental systems, much of which took place years before Ayyadurai’s work. A paper by historian Thomas Haigh of the University of Wisconsin, chairman of the Special Interest Group on Computers, Information, and Society, and published on the SIGCIS website, describes versions of electronic mail dating back to the 1960s with features such as “to,” “cc” and “bcc” fields that became part of a “binding standard” in 1977, prior to Ayyadurai’s work at Rutgers. A December 1977 Rand Corp. paper by engineer David Crocker, commissioned by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, identifies “electronic mail” as “one of the earliest and most popular applications of the ARPANET” and includes sample emails virtually indistinguishable from modern messages. Haigh writes that Queen Elizabeth II became the first head of state to send electronic mail in 1976, Jimmy Carter’s campaign team used electronic mail for internal communication that year and by 1978, email was sufficiently widespread that the first spam went out inadvertently to 600 users that May.

I have absolutely zero fear of team Trump spending GOP and MAGA dollars on lawsuits that have little to no chance of changing the vote. His GSA appointee should be told to certify the current results to allow transition teams to work. That certification is a formality and is how it always works...unless you have someone whose ego is so bloated he would harm the nation to spite his wounded pride that more folks legitimately think he is a bad President than those who think he is a good one and voted accordingly. The certification to allow transitional information does not replace the electoral college certification of election results. Each state certifies their results, the electoral college meets and cast their state votes and all those need to be cast by Dec 23rd. Jan 6th Congress meets and the ballots are counted and on Jan 20th the President Elect is sworn in as President. Slow-walking that GSA cert process is dumb, and referencing the Bush v. Gore recount as a precedent is equally stupid as it was only contesting Florida and over a few thousand vote margin. Not comparable to the election loss Trump just had, but spite and revenge has always been his stock and trade. Just because someone chooses to ignore something does not make it disappear or make it false. Be that a pandemic, or a foreign government interfering with your country's elections and targeting your campaign. And anyone that critiques Obama's DOJ, yet turns a blind eye to William Barr to the fact that he believes in Presidential autocracy has lost credibility. Over 1100 former DOJ officials spanning both Democrat and Republican administrations signed a petition for his removal. You MAY think having a President who is above the law is a good thing for your beloved Trump, now imagine your nightmare Democrat holding that office with the powers that Barr prescribes sans any checks below: Thus, as a matter of constitutional law, Barr concluded that Congress is without any power to bar the president from “[exercising] supervisory authority over cases in which his own conduct might be at issue.” It followed, according to Barr, that the whole idea of a prosecutor within the executive branch operating beyond the president’s direct oversight—even a special counsel like Mueller—was a constitutional nonstarter. So the president’s recent statement that he has a “legal right” to interfere in criminal investigations just repeats what Bill Barr has told him.

And thanks for proving my point with your slacker "der-t-der" 😄 response.

One can "feel" fraud happened, but if Trump does not have a shred of evidence that can stand up to the most cursory of judicial review it amounts to just being angry that you lost. The legal "process" (if you can call this desperate barrage of empty legal filings a process) can procede without impeding the normal transition of information and key reporting to the President Elect. Trump received the courtesy of briefings while green party legal filings contesting his 2016 results wound their way through court and were eventually dismissed. https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/judges-increasingly-frustrated-trumps-legal-claims-2020-election/story?id=74211479 https://www.politico.com/news/2020/11/13/trump-legal-team-cases-dropped-436492

I always wondered how far many Trump supporters can think ahead. Many seem to be stuck in tweet-sized reality and logic incapable of thinking and forming an intelligent argument. Their response to a valid argument is often incoherent name-calling or the laughing emoticon which I think is their go-to when they just come up blank. Take the "China virus". This was a blatant marketing attempt by Trump to deflect blame of his handling of the virus response by simply stating the virus origin. Is there blame to be ascribed to China? Certainly, they were not transparent about the nature of the virus or how deadly it was, how easily transmitted between humans, and allowed commerce to continue spreading it beyond their borders before sounding the alarm. The WHO was IMO lax in their rebuke of China's handling. But for the sake of a patriotic argument for the Parlor conspiracy folks let's say that China created the virus, or was looking at ways to weaponize it. What do you feel an adversary learned about the US response to a weaponized virus? Was the US smart? Were we prepared? Were we united in our efforts to combat the spread? What role did the leadership of Trump and the GOP play in our ability to respond well to the threat? If I was an adversary I think I would have learned a lot that would make me feel that the US is not very smart, prepared, or willing to make small sacrifices to curb a biological attack. America was not Great under Trump and the GOP leadership - we were vulnerable.

Thanks for reading. Not that I am tired of hearing the circular name-calling and baseless conspiracies, but yeah... I wanted to "post outside the box" for a change.

MAGA be all like this.

Just off the beaten Biden and Trump path. We sometimes treat the Supreme Court with so much deference, but in 1896 it was still common practice to hold sailors as indentured slaves with open-ended contracts. Sailors seeking to escape were rounded up by any local constabulary and returned to ships in chains and released to forced-labor again once far enough out to sea. The Arago four is the story of 4 seamen who tried to escape their plight and the case was brought by the sailors union to the Supreme Court where it shockingly lost on an 8 to 1 vote https://supreme.justia.com/cases/federal/us/165/275/. The justices tied themselves in knots quoting harsh maritime laws from other nations that basically amounted to slavery and even ancient Greek maritime practices. Also, much like plantation owners of the South, they used arguments that dehumanized sailors as the chattel or property of their captains - a sub-species of human lacking the intelligence to manage their own affairs. "Seamen are treated by Congress, as well as by the Parliament of Great Britain, as deficient in that full and intelligent responsibility for their acts which is accredited to ordinary adults, and as needing the protection of the law in the same sense in which minors and wards are entitled to the protection of their parents and guardians." A rather ironic direction for the Supreme Court to take with the Civil War not that far back in the rear-view. Of course the one dissenting opinion from Justice Harlan was a doozy as he lambasted the other justices and rightfully predicted that they would open the floodgates for the South to create the same kind of open-ended contracts and forced labor agreements with no "out" clauses for those recently freed from slavery, which would usher in a whole new thinly-veiled era of American slavery anew. It did, and the whole debacle of judicial overreach and democratic mismanagement was finally overturned in 1915. https://www.newsbreak.com/oregon/astoria/news/2101660278483/offbeat-oregon-arago-four-decision-literally-declared-sailors-enslaved

Trump has been printing off stimulus checks (yes folks, that is a socialist practice) like hotcakes over the course of his pandemic bunglement and the slow-blinkers buy the GOP McCarthyism argument they dusted off and tore out of their 50s playbook. Joseph McCarthy - Republican He is known for alleging that numerous communists and Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the United States federal government, universities, film industry,[2][3] and elsewhere. Ultimately, the smear tactics that he used led him to be censured by the U.S. Senate. The term "McCarthyism", coined in 1950 in reference to McCarthy's practices, was soon applied to similar anti-communist activities. Today, the term is used more broadly to mean demagogic, reckless, and unsubstantiated accusations, as well as public attacks on the character or patriotism of political opponents.[4][5]

People fear echo chambers that allow fear to fester into radical acts.

Some dumb is not curable. Trump's followers are approaching the flat-earth and alien autopsy realm of gullible. Just ignore them.