Let me start with a question. Please answer it without thinking or searching on the internet: when was the Trump-Kim summit?
Did you say “a few months ago”? Maybe a “few weeks ago”? Well, the correct answer is “last Tuesday”, barely more than a week ago. Why do you feel like it was ages ago? Because by the last weekend, the US media – like they were given marching orders – stopped talking about it and started talking about one and only one thing: migrant children in cages.
There was absolutely no reason for this media attention:
- The issue wasn’t any new, here are the same cages filled with migrant children in 2014
- The issue wasn’t big. They talk about 2000 children being separated, while about the same number of kids are murdered every year in the USA, and being murdered is surely worse than being in cages.
- The issue wasn’t strange or extraordinary: every country puts children into institutionalized (“cages”) foster care temporarily if their caretakers are in jail or cannot be identified, which is the case with immigrants without papers. Here are the child cages of Canada.
Do you remember the scene from 1984 when the speaker announces that “we were always at war with Oceania” and the activists tear off the old posters that were placed there before the war? This is exactly what happened. By organized media and social media action, the ones who control the US press created an alternative reality for anyone who cared to listen to them. They convinced their sheep that there is a huge, new, immediate problem that needs their undivided attention.
I don’t discuss possible reasons, just the phenomena itself. The clockwork precision along with perfect unison. There wasn’t a single dissenter who would point out the obvious problems listed above or even focus on something that actually matters, like the North Korea treaty or even the Inspector General report.
This case completely reinforced my earlier belief that “free press” is a myth, every journalist is someone’s paid propagandist, therefore upkeeping the facade is worthless or even harmful. In Putin’s Russia at least you know who’s lying to you through the media.
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PS: Melania Trump responded with the best IRL shitpost I’ve seen in my life:
Didn’t you just showed why that happenes? By posting this you joined the same media chorus. You posted about Kim’s summit too. When big news happen everyone wants to get in on it, or just lemmings jumping off the cliff.
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I know, right? It’s boggling. Don’t forget that the correct answer is four.
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Using and exaggerating human shortcomings for purposes of social commentary has been a mechanism used by media outlets since before 1984 was even written. That use has now been employed by special interest and marginalized groups with the same cause and effect. The outcome from all of this is that truth and facts no longer matter. It’s about feelings more than truth. Or at least someone’s twisted version of what the truth should be.
1984 was written in 1944 and published in 1949. The year 1984 was 24 years ago now. Just exactly when are we suppose to reach the level of dystopia as indicated in the book?
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Correction: 34 years ago*
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@Anon: it’s normal that everyone wants to discuss big news. But now everyone is discussing something completely irrelevant and trivial.
@Smokeman: Welcome to the Inner Party, comrade Smokeman!
@Noguff: never, because people are rising up against it. Majority of the population doesn’t believe the media and votes Trump/Putin/Orban… despite they screech in unison.
@Noguff: no, it was 24 years ago and anyone daring to claim 34 is an agent of Goldstein!
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“free press” is a myth
Exactly this. it is hard to find profit-unrelated information. Also it is very hard to trace and fact check. no software no tool. as if that this is of common interest, well and obviously there is no money in such tracing software.
The same phenomena also is used right now with the EU copyright law passing EU-parliament two days ago (20.06.). You don’t hear about it in (nato)mass-media. This proposed directives (dictated to EUs memberstates) doesn’t just have the now somewhat socialistmedia hyped “upload-filter”, no, it has more and it is more Orwellian than Orwell ever could have imagined.
Same goes for GPDR. But it seems that WorldCup soccer game and other things like rape or cat videos are more news worthy.
not only is “free press” a myth, leaks and blowing the whistle also seems very streamlined these days. Obviously a good move from a information war standpoint because you subvert legitimate information.
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Trump gets the news to go exactly where he wants it to go. The detention policy has been going on for more than a month yet didn’t show up until after the Korea talks had dropped off the news cycle and Congress just happened to be debating an immigration bill.
Trump wanted concessions on immigration so he dropped a dead cat on the table in the form of child detention. The press turned up and the Democrats were forced to make it an issue. Trump demanded it was for the Democrats to fix, got them to drop opposition to some immigration policies in exchange for him reversing a specific action he was never bothered about in the first place.
It classic Trump. Troll your opponent, forcing your them to react and get something you want in exchange for undoing the thing they do not like.
The jacket is another dead-cat. Photos of crying children making bad optics. Wear an jacket that people will look at and comment about instead.
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@Dobablo: the media could choose to just tell the truth: “children were always locked up when caught illegally entering and they are held in somewhat rigid but safe and professional conditions, just like it happens everywhere in the World”. They choose to cover it like it was the greatest problem ever. I’ve never seen Rachel Maddow cry on Aleppo where more children died in a week.
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As pointed out, you are actually spreading more of your own inaccuracies, therefore being part of the problem. The video you link from 2014 is of unaccompanied minors, not separated minors. Also, the 2000 children dying from crime is not quite relevant. Crime is hard to control. But separating kids is an intentional act by the government and can easily be changed. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but if we can stop doing it, that would be better. It’s exactly the same as when a natural disaster strikes and kills a few hundred people as opposed to a terrorist attack. The attack is taken much more seriously and should get more news coverage because it was an intentional act which is likely to continue unless something is done.
Moreover I would say that your outlook is Putin’s dream. Publish so many lies that no one believes anything anymore and truth is worthless. If you want to give up on the truth, that is your decision. We do still have free press in the USA, a press that is accountable primarily to the consumer, and while different networks do promote different stories, for the most part there is an effort to report accurately among the major outlets. Different people have different political slants, and that is why different networks promote differently. This is not so bad, better than what is happening with media in Russia, and there really is no comparison between the two.
But sure, there are probably more pressing stories to report, and I am sure someone is reporting them, and eventually the news cycle will correct itself.
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@eatenbyagrue: children were always separated from criminal parents. If you rob a bank, you won’t see your kids. No one is upset about this, then why would anyone be upset that border violators get the same treatment.
The unaccompanied/separated minors is a technical detail if someone cares about the well-being of children. The child suffers the same, so if they’d care a bit about the children, they’d already created a helping foster parent system for “caged kids”. If someone would be genuinely outraged that children are alone and in cages, there would be articles for years about those horrible gangs that smuggle and exploit the unaccompanied children and there was none. If nobody cared about unaccompanied children, then nobody should be caring about Trump making some children “unaccompanied”.
Crime is not hard to control: all you have to do is catching criminals and put them to jail … which is exactly what Trump is doing.
What is see is the exact opposite of free press, a perfectly controlled propaganda machine, one that Kim Jong Un would rightfully envy. It’s indeed accountable primarily to the customer … who is the guy buying the ads and not the people who consume for free. No one actually pays to watch Rachel Maddow. Advertisers keep her running. You are not the customer, you are the product being sold.
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The difference between 2018 pics and 2014 pics with children in cages is that in 2014 these kids were not separated from their parents. Theses kids came without parents and had to be taken care of and were put under guardianship as no parents or adult relatives were available.
Separating children from their parents and claiming that this was a “democrat’s” law, while it was a policy instated by JEff Sessions by order of President Batshit is a breach of international human rights laws.
This may seem ok for a Hungarian computer geek, for people who have kids and a conscience, this is outrageous and many people and companies have reacted brilliantly!
And I can also understand why you and President Batshit have a problem with that: It is the duty of a free press to monitor the actions of those in power and to drag their actions into the public light so that people can judge this decision.
And just look how fast he switched his position on this matter and how fast he signed an EO ending his own policy after having said that the democrats needed to vote for his walls or else these hostages and pawns would never be released…
Oh, btw, there is still the football world cup taking place in Russia 🙂 This had a lot more coverage in Germany than Batshit batshitting again, and the fact that tariffs were put in place today…
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@Smite: since every children comes from a parent, the 2014 children were also separated from their parents by somebody at some point.
If separating children from their parents is outrageous, then the same journalists had been outraged over whoever did that. But they completely ignored them back then. They were still ignoring the 10K + children who were sitting at the same cages right now as “unaccompanied” and no one was outraged over whoever separated them from their parents. The media wanted to be outraged over Trump for some bullshit reason.
“Trump” also separated about 100K American children from their parents when they went to jail since Trump was elected. Nobody cared.
Yes, Trump caved. This is why I withdrawn my support to him, because I realized that he caves. He is weak. I’m so glad that my PM Orbán is not weak and we already have a fence (so we don’t separate anybody from anyone, no one gets in) By the way I’m not sure he really caved here, because his new EO is bullshit, it’s clearly against the existing laws and lawsuits are already being filed and will most likely be struck down. If that happens he can do two things:
* just let every immigrant with a kid (which may or may not his) enter the country unchecked
* return to “separating”
If he does the second, he is indeed an unworthy politician who throws his nation under the bus for some publicity. But one can hope.
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Smite:
Seriously? So all Central America has to do to bring the US literally to it’s knees is produce a surplus of kids they don’t care about and ship them north.
Caring about kids is a luxury. And it’s a luxury you should be stingy about doling out. YOUR kids? That’s rule 1! Hell yeah! Everything you can do, you should be doing. Your neighbor’s kid? Sure, if you can help without hurting rule 1 too badly, and you like your neighbor, you should. Then there’s kids in other states… Kids in other countries? They have their own parents and neighbors. The amount you can actually care in this set of relationships is exponential smaller in nature the farther along it goes. Anyone who CLAIMS to care about kids on the far end of that spectrum as much as they care about their own kids is lying or delusional.
The PROPER way to handle a border is to close it. If someone wants to emigrate, they need to start that process in whatever consulate the country they want to emigrate to has in the country they live in. The WRONG way to do it is to start the process at immigration, which is where you wait for people to just randomly show up and then try to deal with it. The exception to that is if you need a LOT of immigrants, like during the period when the US was building it’s industrial base and needed loads of workers. The rational course for the US now is to limit emigration to a set amount and deny all unregistered immigration. There is even a term for that… “Illegal immigration.”
Unfortunately, humans are stupid, and in the gestalt, can’t process the majority of what they see rationally. So they digress to memes and “authority figures” to direct their actions. This puts them at the mercy of any group organized enough to apply the Hegelian Dialectic for their own gain. And, as we segue between Western Civilization’s golden age and the approach of it’s twilight, we’re seeing a lot of that. What we SHOULD be doing is make the distinction between “Legal emigration” and “Legal immigration.” The phrase “There should be no such thing as illegal immigration.” is stupid, and shows an utter lack of rational analysis. The phrase SHOULD be: “there should be no such thing as illegal emigration.” meaning a country should NOT prevent you from trying to leave by force of law.
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@Smokeman: stop being political. The post isn’t about immigration itself or if separating kids is right or wrong. The post is about the media coverage of the event.
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When almost all journalists are “liberal” they can publish whatever they like and not worry about the consequences of being called out on their bullshit.
Right now it’s all owned by a very few people who are all united against Trump. The very few exceptions like Fox are owned by the opposite and aren’t much more honest either, just biased in the other way. These TV stations aren’t there to make profits, they are propaganda tools subsidized by everybody who needs an opinion popularized.
This is why TV stations are dying out. Their viewership ratings are laughable and the average age of consumers in 60s. They are just brands at this moment living on the past glory.
It’s been the same story for the last 2 years and it doesn’t do anything anymore. The outraged will stay outraged and will screech and holler in their little echo chambers while normal people ignore the noise. Trump won the elections despite all of this happening, after all.
It’s the repeat of communist Europe media: everybody knew they were liars so they just filtered the news appropriately. The people learned to look around for information and ignore the propaganda.
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@Gevlon
There’s a huge difference between the government doing something, and anyone else doing something. If nameless parents from Central America send their kids unaccompanied across the border, being outraged at them has no meaning. We don’t know where they are, who they are, or where to send the kids back to. This recent border situation was entirely engineered by a “zero tolerance” policy change. In this case, the government is specifically separating children from a family for the express purpose of trying to deter more illegal immigrants – so the taking of children is a feature, not a bug. Huge difference.
As for why we’re talking about this rather than the NK summit? The NK “deal” is a nothing-burger. We walked away with nothing, and NK walked away with a halt to training exercises and endless photos of Trump saluting NK soldiers. The significance of it is actually less than zero if the brinkmanship with China is not a ruse, but in fact a trade war we blundered into – our sanctions are meaningless without pressure from China on NK.
Free Press isn’t about being free from any influence, it means the government does not actively try and shut down unflattering stories. We’re in an age though, where attacking factual stories with cries of “fake news!” undermines the entire edifice of objective reality. No one trusts scientists, studies, or experiments anymore, and instead fall back on whatever theories make them feel better about themselves. You have seen it happen with your World of Warships data, and yet you’re still aligned with the Trump/Bannon/etcs of the world who have weaponized misinformation.
We have a Republican president presiding over a Republican Congress and conservative-majority Supreme Court blaming the Democrats for “causing the family separation crisis” and yet it’s the Press that’s 1984 here?
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@Azuriel: It’s not nameless parents send their kids into the unknown. It’s criminal gangs transporting them to use the boys as murderers and the girls as whores. They are in the USA and can be targeted.
The “NK deal is nothing burger” itself is a much more worthy topic than 2000 caged children. It means that there is still serious chance of nuclear exchange. Criticizing Trump over NK nothing burger is valid journalism.
It’s not Trump who attacked the edifice of reality. He wasn’t anywhere where the weaponised fake news started. “Patient zero” was the non-existent nukes of Saddam, a joint venture of the warmongering government and the totality of the news industry. You might recognize this particular fake news monger: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l471370YiqY
About 200K !!! Children died because of it. No one cared. No one cared about the Libyan of the Syrian children, despite being massacred by the same US government. Then suddenly they started to care about 2K children who are given food, shelter, health care, just can’t hug their mommies.
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All of kids? Most of the kids? Some? You are a numbers guy, what are the numbers? Once we have numbers we agree on (if that is ever possible), we can perhaps have a discussion on what is an acceptable false positive rate for government separation of families.
Yes, the Iraq war was horrible and built on a lie. But neither Mueller, Clinton, nor anyone else is responsible for what the Trump administration says every day, officially, from Day 1. The objective lies are so bad we have an adage of “don’t take him literally, take him seriously,” for a President. Just this week Trump claimed he couldn’t do anything about the border policy he enacted, and yet here we are at the end of the week, Executive Order signed, and it’s Democrats who are at fault somehow when Republicans have full control of all branches of the government.
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@Azuriel: again, the post isn’t about kids or wars, but about the media. Yes, we have no idea about what happens with unaccompanied children, because THE MEDIA DIDN’T SAY ANYTHING ABOUT IT. I literally had no idea that there are unaccompanied children crossing the US-Mex border, because such problem is unknown in Europe (our “unaccompaned children” are 20-30 years old males who lie for asylum).
I believe Trump lies constantly not because he is worse than anybody but because he is like anybody. Always everyone lied. He stands out only because he says different things than the other liars. As long as everyone said the same lies, people without information thought it’s the truth. Now it’s obvious that *somebody* is lying. I believe most cases it’s not Trump who lies.
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Azuriel: Trump Derangement Syndrome is a terrible disease.
Trump “lies” a lot but those are either figures of speech, boasting, hyperboles or just errors. Unlike every other politician, with decades of experience in mouthing platitudes, he actually says meaningful things. This means he will be wrong rather often, just like every normal person.
What Trump doesn’t lie about are his goals and promises as a politician. He is trying to reduce immigration, he is trying to build a wall, he is working for American manufacturers, he is tougher on trade – exactly as he promised in his campaign.
What’s more, due to human language shortcomings and the need for interpretation, everything can be interpreted as a lie, given enough context. Journalists are masters in language and they take his statement out of context all the time, deliberately. Just like when they did it with him calling immigrants animals when there was no doubt whatsoever that he referred specifically to MS-13 who deserve it in every way.
Of course, the Democrats are at fault. They have been promoting illegal immigration for decades. Trump is simply enforcing the law just as he promised in his campaign. The people voted EXACTLY for what he is doing right now.
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@Stawek: even if we limit “lie” as “broken promise” and ignore other false statements (like the one that parents of the korean war victims thanked him for bringing their sons home), he has quite a lot of those:
– he offered compromises that included amnesty for illegals
– he signed the omnibus that doesn’t contain funding for the wall
– he bombed Syria
– he sent extra troops to Afghanistan
He is far from being great or honest. He is of course better than Clinton or Paul Ryan or McCain or Graham or Pocahontas. But the other side lying their ass of is no excuse for us to do so or to absolve “our” liars.
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Another thing that is conveniently left out of most of the coverage, here in the U.S. is the fact that a large percentage of the children that are being separated from their “families” are not, in fact theirs, nor are they children. It is a common practice for those attempting to cross the boarder illegally to bring a young person with them. Having a youth with them allows for the false claim that they are just a family looking for a better life, when in fact the youth has been placed with the “family” in order to gain entrance into the U.S., only to be later recruited or used by the growing gangs. The past policy would allow, even if detained at the boarder, for the child to be released into the U.S. after a short 20 day detainment. When interviewed, many of the young children have openly stated that the people they came with are not their family.
Furthermore, their are many reports of these “family members” when perused, dropping the children and running. They know that the child will be picked up by the authorities.
The truth is, this is not a mass migration of families, as the biased U.S. media would like people to believe. If it was then why is the largest group trying to gain entry unaccompanied children.
https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/sw-border-migration
This is an attempted invasion of current and future gang members.
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/jun/21/30-of-border-children-have-gang-ties/
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You are comparing Trump to some utopian omnipotent and omniscient politician. He can’t do everything he wants, the compromises he took look like something he had to take. I believe he is making his best effort to realise his campaign promises, which is all you can ever ask a politician to do.
By the way, there will be some form of amnesty because it is impossible to deport the 15M+ illegals already in the States, some of which have been living there for decades. As long as it doesn’t entail further immigration it looks like imperfect yet inevitable future.
Bombing Syria was a mistake, most likely, but not a major policy error. If he believed, briefed by his own intel agencies, that Assad used chemical weapons then his reaction was somewhat understandable.
I don’t think Trump is a liar any more than your average man, which is not to say that he always tells the truth. Everybody boasts or use hyperboles, it’s just the normal way of speaking. The press listens to every single conversation and amplifies the ones where he said something remotely untrue.
An example question: “should we stop illegal immigration?” Trump will answer yes or no. Hillary, on the other hand, would answer along the lines “Illegal immigration is a serious question that requires serious efforts to understand. We cannot make hasty decisions that may affect millions of people. We will create a special task force to assess the situation and come up with the best solution going forward, taking into consideration all the myriad issues that arise from undocumented workers”. Of course, as any politician knows, the best course of action is to not make any statements nor decisions, so as to never be responsible for anything. Trump isn’t a trained politician so he will be responsible for many errors and mistakes, but at least he can be held accountable for his words.
I believe the Democrats will get routed in midterms, along with anti-Trump Republicans. This will open the legislative which is now completely locked down by Democrat filibusters. We will see then if he was serious about his promises.
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@Stawek: not being omnipotent is excuse for failure, not compromise. He could just delete DACA on day one and judges reinstall it. Not his fault. Him not even trying: his fault.
Bombing Syria was an absolute violation of his promises. What Assad does at home is not Trump’s business. Also, if he believed the CIA after they declared him Putin’s puppet, he is a special kind of fool
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