Due to a loss in the family I'm going to be away from my desktop and won't have my usual routine, so those posts are on hiatus until I get back to the usual day-to-day.

(Needs subscription or free account registration, of course. This is the NYT)
(on edit: h/t to Celerity in reply #7 for the non-paywalled link: https://archive.ph/Sotjd)

The story is from last month, so maybe I missed it back then, but it popped up in my twitter feed and I recognized a name (and the subject matter made a "same name, different guy" situation highly unlikely), our own NewHendoLib.

https://twitter.com/nytimes/status/1508428987009314821

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/16/realestate/tomato-growing-tips.html

Uploaded to YouTube Feb 24, 2022

There's a lot of nicknames for that group which riff on the similarity between "Oath" and "Oaf", but I'd like to promote using a phrase that says exactly what they are (and which highlights how their reality is the precise opposite of what they claim to be):

Oath Breakers.

The fact that the Right has poured billions into creating their own overlapping, complimentary media systems and the center-Liberal-Left has not. Local wingnuts can take an activist slogan (like, say, "defund the police" ) and pass it around and up the chain that has a specific mission to bash Democrats. Within days, that slogan is touted nationwide as being the Democratic Party's central organizing principle, and Mainstream Media will take its cue from the Right

What do we have our our side? Where to our opinions get repeated and amplified? Beyond forums like this?

Right wing outlets often have sugar-daddies supplying seed money, keeping them going for years before they turn a profit, if ever. The Washington Times lost between 1 and 2 billion dollars (~$100 million/year) before it had a profitable year decades after it was founded. It spent that time circulating right-wing talking points to congresspeople and Washington media, so it was worth the investment. Meanwhile, on our side, "Air America was a disaster" because a good idea was organized by a grifter, and then a couple of amateurs tried to salvage it and failed. So despite people who'd been on it becoming more prominent in political analysis and commentary (Rachel Maddow, Al Franken), the take-away for people who can fund things was that dedicated liberal media is a doomed venture.

People like to bash RT, and have damn good reasons for doing so, but how many as why it was a thing on the left in the first place? Why was there no channel that could be home for liberal-lefty voices? So when the Vlad Channel popped up in the 2000s, it was a place where people could talk about domestic injustices and cover the Bush administration the way it deserved. After all, Vlad's fine with criticizing America, and the subject matter was something that needed criticizing. The obvious editorial choice was more and more criticism.

And since editorial policy rested ultimately in Vladimir Putin's hands (else you fall out a window), ramping up criticism, amplifying every bullshit claim about the Obama administration was only encouraged. Would the same have been true if it had been a domestic channel? Or, better to say, one of many domestic channels?

So yes, while we need to work on our megaphone skills, we need more than that in the face of the Right's F5 Tornado of Fantasy And Horseshit.

Insist Republicans speak English Only. Real English, not that weird conservative dialect they have with Calvinball rules for definitions.

Podcast. 57 min. You can probably skip to the ~14:40 mark.