Mainstream media Bias

Discussion in 'Political Discussions' started by Phdtobe, Oct 3, 2016.

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  1. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member


    From Director, DHS

    Your post is nonsense, Oliver. Not you or anyone in the Hardy household is being monitored. Have we yet to kick in your door at 233 Elm Street, Oliver? Of course not.

    However, considering your concerns, we offer you the opportunity to visit our 'retreat,' in Mosul, Iraq, to meet our little friends. All expenses paid.

    Sincerely,
    Da Director
     
  2. me again

    me again Well-Known Member

    Using fingerprints as a security measure to access an iPhone is an example of trending biometrics.
     
  3. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member


    Offering to the world a digitized pattern of my fingerprints seems not a good idea.
     
  4. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    "The joke's on you -- I unlock my phone with a toeprint!"
     
  5. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member


    Yes, Steve, and your nails could use a trimming.

    And...they now take footprints of babies.
     
  6. me again

    me again Well-Known Member

    For the convenience of unlocking your phone (each time you need to use it), you must be barefoot all the time -- or you wear flip flops everywhere -- and you don't live where it snows.
     
  7. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Heh, I'm a pretty dedicated flip flopper, even when I'm in the D.C. area. For example, I actually will wear flip flops in the snow, until it accumulates more than two or three inches. Fortunately that's rare here.
     
  8. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    Well, some time has passed and a lot has been said by and about Colin Kaepernick. Where do we stand now?

    Kaepernick supporters call for NFL boycott | Fox News
     
  9. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

  10. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member

  11. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    He still isn't signed.

    Football teams don't like what they call "distractions". And Kaepernick is nothing if not that.

    But I think that what keeps teams from signing him is less the political angle than the football angle. Kaepernick wants to be a starter and wants to be paid the big bucks that NFL starters earn. If he was even willing to sign as a backup, Kaepernick would insist on an opportunity to compete for the starting job. And at this point, going into the regular season, all the teams are pretty much set at starting quarterback. They don't want to bring in a guy who will threaten their present starter.

    I think that many teams feel that Kaepernick is a one-trick-pony and that NFL defenses have figured him out. And they worry that making effective use of him would require entirely different game plans and perhaps even different personnel. Kaepernick hasn't exactly set the world on fire his last few years on the 49'ers.

    The way I heard it, the Ravens were worried that Flacco was going to miss some of training camp, so they basically wanted to bring in a training camp arm on a short term contract. I doubt if that was anything that Kaepernick wanted to do.

    But why would the Ravens signing him entice you to cheer for them, if you aren't already a Ravens fan?

    The New York Police Department has a current authorized uniformed strength of 34,450. So "nearly 100" would seem to represent less than 1/3 of one percent of the NYPD's officers. Not very overwhelming.
     
  12. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    To support someone who was brave enough to take that sort of stand.

    That's true. But it's a start.
     
  13. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    There are stands and there are stands. Some are better than others. If a white player publicly supported the Ku Klux Klan or came out as a neo-Nazi, that would take bravery, given the almost certain reaction. It wouldn't be a good stand though, no matter how brave it was. What people stand for matters.

    And Kaepernick's decision to politicize the game of football (and to disassociate himself from the United States), just because he was getting in touch with his black side (he's mixed race) and growing out his afro, was a bad stand. In my opinion, all it showed was his own adolescent self-centeredness.

    The beauty of football is that it is one of the only things left in this post-modern world where we all come together, that we all have in common. Rich and poor, blacks and whites, Democrats and Republicans, men and women... all to cheer for the same team, in solidarity, in oneness. Whites cheer for black players, blacks cheer for white players.

    It's one of the few remaining places in life where we aren't divided in hatred by our differences. It's one of the few places left that still uncontaminated by identity-politics.

    And the country itself, and its symbols, are another of those places. Ideally we can (or could until the last few years) still think that no matter what our skin color, national origin or political allegiance happens to be, are all still members of one single national team that includes and embraces all of us.

    That's exceedingly important to me. If we overturn that, if we are all going to divide up into hostile angry factions with nothing in common that unites us, then we have reached the final reductio-ad-absurdem of incessant, never-ending identity politics. If that ever comes to be (and we are very close right now, so many people are pushing so hard) it will essentially mean the end of the United States and everything that it once stood for.

    It's not "brave", it's just self-involved and short-sighted. Adolescent. One man's high-schoolish concession to his own individual feelings of alienation. And to the extent that it's picked up by the left-media and turned into a cause, only further damaging things that we all (formerly) identified with and (maybe in some cases) loved.
     
    Last edited by a moderator: Aug 22, 2017
  14. 03310151

    03310151 Active Member

    Kap also converted to Islam. A religion that to this day still enslaves Africans. Not the brightest bulb in scoreboard is he?


    Sit, kneel, piss on the flag, whatever. Those are the best displays of the freedom that we have in this country anyway. Another it's not doing what you think it's doing "movement".


    That I'm hearing about this is telling, since I can't stand football or many of it's "fans".
     
  15. decimon

    decimon Well-Known Member


    I don't follow sports but football looks to be much a freak show.
     
  16. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Colin Kaepernick Converts to Islam?

    You were saying?
     
  17. SteveFoerster

    SteveFoerster Resident Gadfly Staff Member

    Until the last few years, seriously? So the problem is not that "the team" does not, in fact, include and embrace all of us, it's that some people have the temerity to disrupt your happy illusion by pointing it out?
     
  18. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    I've never heard that.

    I think that his beliefs and attitudes are expressed by the prison-style tattoos that cover his entire body except his face. Many/most of them are Biblical. The theme seems to be social alienation, along with the idea that he serves a higher power that somehow makes his self-imposed social isolation righteous.

    His chest reads "Against all odds". His back is an elaborate battle scene between angels and demons. His left arm reads, "Though an army besiege me, my heart will not fear; though war break out against me, even then I will be confident." (Psalm 27:3) His right arm reads, "You armed me with strength for battle; you made my adversaries bow at my feet" (Psalm 18:39). He kisses his tattoos when he 'Kaepernicks', and says that part of the meaning of his doing it is showing that he doesn't care what other people think.

    Super Bowl 2013: Colin Kaepernick’s tattoos more than skin deep – The Mercury News

    All in all, the guy seems hugely self-involved and involuted. He used to show that when he constantly wore his headphones and tuned everyone else out inside and out of the locker room.

    There's a difference between not being arrested for peaceful (if unpopular) speech or behavior on one hand, and being applauded for it on the other. The former is a Constitutional right, the latter needs to satisfy a higher ethical standard.

    I see Colin Kaepernick in much the same way that I see somebody wearing Ku Klux Klan robes or a brown shirt and a Nazi armband. Each example might be the exercise of Constitutionally protected free political 'speech' (however symbolic), but none of these are things that I feel deserve my applause.
     
  19. Kizmet

    Kizmet Moderator

    If I could try to channel Bill Belichick for a minute, the only reason CK doesn't have a job is because it is a huge distraction from the main focus of professional football, which is to win games. Anything that substantially distracts from that goal is seen as a negative. NFL teams have hired dog murderers, wife beaters and any number of drug users but only if 1) they stopped all that stuff and minimally repented, and 2) if they were talented enough to warrant the hassle. I'm guessing that all this was an unintended consequence for CK. I'm guessing he didn't think he was signing his retirement papers when he took that knee. But that's essentially what happened. It's just a risk/reward equation, isn't it? I don't t think it's a morality issue with any of the teams. I really don't think they care about that part of it. They just don't want the hassle. If CK were better at his job it might shift the factors in the equation but right now it's clear that teams would prefer to take either some young kid without the baggage or some old guy who has lost a few steps but knows the dance.
     
  20. heirophant

    heirophant Well-Known Member

    Hi Kizmet, I agree pretty much with your post #59.

    Many of the team owners, GMs and coaches probably don't like all the "news" media attention that just about every off-the-field quirk of Kaepernick's would attract were he on their team. They fear that his "me-against-the-world" demon-fighter persona might poison their locker rooms and make their teams less coachable.

    Jim Harbaugh did very well with him, but Harbaugh is just as quirky and psychologically peculiar as Kaepernick and their personalities kind of meshed. I think that Harbaugh perceived something in Kaepernick that others didn't see and that's why he drafted Kap. Kaepernick was always a Harbaugh project, Harbaugh was always his mentor and kind of father-figure and Kaepernick's career floundered when Harbaugh was fired. Other coaches can't be expected to have that necessary magic touch.

    All in all, they fear that his impact in the locker room (as the most important player on the team, the team's ostensible leader) would be a huge distraction for multiple reasons. But I agree that they could overlook that pretty quickly if they really thought that they could win with him at the helm. (That's what NFL football teams are all about. I tried to say the same thing in post #51.)

    But Kaepernick isn't just quirky as a man, he's quirky as a football player. In his style of play and in his career progression (if you can call it that) I see him as being very similar to RG III. RG III doesn't have anything like the same chip-on-his-shoulder attitude and political baggage, but he's a scrambling quarterback from college that plays in much the same way. Both Kaepernick and RG III looked like world-beaters when they hit the league, with Kaepernick reaching the Super Bowl and RG III being Rookie of the Year. Both looked like prototypes of 'The Quarterback of the Future' and the media gleefully dubbed them as such. But NFL defenses quickly adjusted to their style of play, which isn't uncommon in college. Neither quarterback performed well in the pocket, showed the ability to make all their reads or all of their throws, or find open receivers.

    And what do we see? Jim Harbaugh, the 'Kaepernick whisperer', was fired because of his own psychological inability to get along with the 49ers' owner and front office. (He certainly landed on his feet at Michigan.) That had nothing to do with politics, apart from office politics perhaps. The quarterback most similar to Kaepernick, RG III, is still unsigned, though he hasn't become a political cause and presumably isn't being shunned for political reasons. And we have Colin Kaepernick, who seems to attract a hurricane of media attention wherever he goes. Football teams don't like that and consider it a distraction.

    RG3 Needs a Miracle to Save His Career, but Who Will Catch His Hail Mary? | Bleacher Report
     

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