deskthority

davkol wrote: (b) Because the e-mail controversy is rather underreported,

It was the main story in the US press for weeks, and keeps coming back up months later. It has been dramatically over-reported, by media outlets grasping at straws to invent a scandal. The scandal here, such as there is one, is that the state department and NSA were both too incompetent / lazy to get the secretary of state a modern option for a secure communications device, something which the white house and NSA apparently did manage to accomplish for the president.

As far as I can tell, the story was also extensively covered in international media, frankly far beyond what it deserved. I’m not sure where you think it was underreported.

fohat wrote:

chuckdee wrote:
What mass media are you observing? The MSM leans hard left, other than some few minority media (talk radio).
Fox could be said to balance it. If Fox wasn't bat shit crazy in a lot of its coverage.

I live in the US.

I had to Google the term "MSM" and it said "main stream media" which I would describe, these days, as right-center.
But, of course, my concept of truly neutral reporting is NPR, which the right-wing nut-jobs like to call "left-ist".

And yes, the Fox TV channel is absolutely bat-shit right-wing crazy and has been one of the major contributors to the insanity of American politics for decades, along with AM talk radio.

Sorry, I thought that MSM for mainstream media was a common nomenclature. As far as where the media sits, I suppose I should have framed it better. Are you just referring to political coverage, or are you referring to media as a whole (entertainment, news, and culture)? That's what I refer to when I say main stream media.

jacobolus wrote:

davkol wrote: (b) Because the e-mail controversy is rather underreported,

It was the main story in the US press for weeks, and keeps coming back up months later. It has been dramatically over-reported, by media outlets grasping at straws to invent a scandal. The scandal here, such as there is one, is that the state department and NSA were both too incompetent / lazy to get the secretary of state a modern option for a secure communications device, something which the white house and NSA apparently did manage to accomplish for the president.

Very much this. The e-mail scandal is on the same level as the birther scandal, i.e. they can't find a real scandal to pin on them, so resort to this. Very much like the whole Lewinsky waste of time, money, and resources.

It’s not down to the level of the birther scandal, which is 100% nonsense. The emails thing at least represents plausible real concerns about communications security related to US diplomacy, even if the response has been fairly misguided. Still, at this point it’s not worth reporting on further unless there’s some dramatic new development we didn’t previously know about.

You're just being partisan, spreading your own propaganda. Her email setup was much too professional to call it a mistake like a granny using an old version of Outlook. She evaded accountability and put state security at risk. That deserves a criminal investigation and possibly trial, and at the very least she should have been fired for premeditated gross incompetence.

chuckdee wrote: As far as where the media sits, I suppose I should have framed it better. Are you just referring to political coverage, or are you referring to media as a whole (entertainment, news, and culture)?

So which part is “hard left” exactly? Children’s cartoons? Sports shows? Hollywood movies?

Webwit: First, you don’t know anything about me.

Second, “premeditated gross incompetence”? How is that not an oxymoron?

All of your comments in this thread are tendentious, confused, and boring in their predictability. Go away.

The private email server is probably the only thing they have on her that cannot be dismissed instantly as nonsense.

On the other hand, my guess is that large numbers of high-ranking officials, world-wide, have private systems of various sorts off the official grid, and always have. Nixon was merely the first one to get caught.

If there was a viable planetary government, it could address issues like privacy and security. Otherwise, many people, organizations, and governments probably take fragmentation and balkanization as the best de facto defense of privacy.

jacobolus wrote: Webwit: First, you don’t know anything about me.

Second, “premeditated gross incompetence”? How is that not an oxymoron?

All of your comments in this thread are tendentious, confused, and boring in their predictability. Go away.

Classic ad hominem. How weak.

This thread is intellectually deteriorating. Now a clear logical fallacy. "Won't you stop talking about <insert issue here>, because <look at these other not relevant issues>." He failed to address the issue.

Webwit is right, I think i'll just lurk in the thread from now on. No one listens anyhow.

fohat wrote: On the other hand, my guess is that large numbers of high-ranking officials, world-wide, have private systems of various sorts off the official grid, and always have. Nixon was merely the first one to get caught.

This is also one of a similar kind.
Too lazy to look up the name of this one, but I call it the "What OJ's lawyer would have argued instead of if it doesn't fit, you must acquit if OJ had hired a cheap, shitty one" fallacy:

Judge: Does your client plead guilty, or not guilty?
OJ's lawyer: Guilty Your Honor. But why are we talking about OJ? There are many murders, many unsolved, why are we not talking about those? I don't understand. Forget about OJ.
Judge: Guilty. Life in prison. Have a nice day.

The Clinton email case is remarkably simple and for all to see if you are not partisan. If you work for a company as a small time manager where there is a rule you can only do company business by email from a company business address, and you hire someone to set up your own email server, to use for company business, and then you get caught and you won't release the email because it's confidential company business, and release it with much delay chunk by chunk, you get your ass fired and prosecuted.

The reason why Clinton got away with it is she's powerful, and too powerful to fail for such an issue. The rest is bullshit.

She did a naughty thing. All what remains for the Republicans and Bernie is to try to smear her with it. Don't expect too much. I suspect Bernie indeed uses an outdated version of Outlook.

webwit wrote: This thread is intellectually deteriorating. Now a clear logical fallacy. "Won't you stop talking about <insert issue here>, because <look at these other not relevant issues>." He failed to address the issue.

How would you want it to be addressed, and more importantly, why?

webwit wrote: Classic ad hominem. How weak.

Just to be clear. This is argumentum ad hominem: “You're just being partisan, spreading your own propaganda.”

This, while insulting, is not: “All of your comments in this thread are tendentious, confused, and boring in their predictability.”

I agree that this thread is a cesspool of ignorance and poor argumentation. You’re a leading driver of that though.

Still waiting for the counter-argument instead of "you suck".

jacobolus wrote:

chuckdee wrote: As far as where the media sits, I suppose I should have framed it better. Are you just referring to political coverage, or are you referring to media as a whole (entertainment, news, and culture)?

So which part is “hard left” exactly? Children’s cartoons? Sports shows? Hollywood movies?

All of the above? The media, for better or worse, influences society and policy, through less direct means than the political process. Look at the media even 10 years ago. Go back 20 years. Do you think that the progression of media has been towards a more conservative bent? Or liberal? (I dispensed the right and left, because it is misleading in a lot of ways for this conversation)

Movies etc. are indeed a liberal influence, for the most part, when it comes to equality. There's a wealth of powerful female and non-white characters now (just look at JJ's Star Wars). But the same can't be said for guns. Still a whole lot of shooting (even if stormtroopers are finally people too).

You've still got to look far to the left to find a movie that's anti-guns. Bowling for Columbine… and then what?

Even if anyone is able to "smear her with it", it's not going to be in time for this candidacy. The bottom line is very simple, she got away with it and any staffer in a regular or even higher position would have been fired or penalized. Of course it's a serious issue. No one seems to care much, even though the republicans were going out of their way making this an issue in the last months during the race. On the other hand look at Merkel, she used an unencrypted phone for years and it's now known that phone was hacked, she's not leaving office.

chuckdee wrote: How would you want it to be addressed, and more importantly, why?

Try the Internet to learn why in a healthy democracy the Secretary of State shouldn't work from a private email server.

chuckdee: “the media” has not become “hard left” in any sense. American cultural mores about e.g. homosexuality, drug use, profanity, etc. have changed, but this is not a right/left issue. Overall, American media has always been fairly pro-establishment and pro-corporate. Some topics which were previously acceptable in programming and advertising – e.g. overt racism, demeaning comments about women, promotion of cigarette smoking – are now less acceptable. By contrast, there is less and less media discussion or even acknowledgement of poverty, organized labor, class struggle, US imperialism, and so on, even in fictional television programming. It’s not too easy to make a singular judgement, because corporate “mainstream” media has never been particularly friendly to leftist causes or organizations.

As a whole, the media has moved slowly to the right in the past 40 years, along with American corporations, politicians, judges, and the society generally. But it has also gotten much more diverse and heterogeneous (or at least, the diverse parts are more accessible), and there are more unorthodox sources of information than before, especially on the crazy-fringe right, but we also have, to take one example, Democracy Now, and plenty of access to foreign media and online discussions of every sort. Semi-prominent left-of-center publications like The Nation continue to exist, but on the flipside, many local newspapers, alt weeklies, etc. have closed, and the way people consume media has shifted dramatically. Overall it’s hard to analyze in a simple one-dimensional way.

Muirium wrote: Movies etc. are indeed a liberal influence, for the most part, when it comes to equality. There's a wealth of powerful female and non-white characters now

This is empirically wrong, at least as a first-order approximation:
http://polygraph.cool/films/

seebart wrote: she got away with it and any staffer in a regular or even higher position would have been fired or penalized.

For anyone else, this would have never been an issue. It’s only an issue for Clinton because GOP partisans are hunting for a scandal, and couldn’t find anything better.

Regular staffers aren’t going to be questioning what technology they get to use. If they want to keep using a blackberry and the job doesn’t allow it, they’ll quit. The state department, and particularly the NSA, dropped the ball in a major way here. Clinton should have been more insistent that they figure out a way to get her a cleared device of a type she was satisfied with, and should have told them with more paper trail precisely what she planned to do as an alternative, but the failures here are larger than Clinton, and all the efforts to find emails which contained publicly widely known information that was later reclassified as “secret”, as a way to smear Clinton for including those in non-official emails, is a huge waste of attention.

Was Clinton’s email server setup somewhat reckless, and were the people she had running it technically incompetent: yes. Is that illegal? Probably not. Is there a vast conspiracy going on here? No.

Clinton makes me cringe, speaking as a technologist. But so do about 90 US Senators (especially fucking Dianne Feinstein, gah!), the vast majority of judges, the police, the military, school officials, hospital administrators, most business leaders, including those running technology companies, and most members of my own family.

I bet it would be an issue if his/ her superior found out and the data was sensitive enough, of course it would never become public. Sure, the GOP milked this as much as they could as to be expected.

webwit wrote:

chuckdee wrote: How would you want it to be addressed, and more importantly, why?

Try the Internet to learn why in a healthy democracy the Secretary of State shouldn't work from a private email server.

So in other words, you don't want to engage in conversation, and are just putting words to an internet argument?

Noted.

First of all, thanks for that link! I put it in my read later pins to go back and fully analyse later.

jacobolus wrote: Overall it’s hard to analyze in a simple one-dimensional way.

This I will fully agree with, and do agree it is more complicated than a simplistic liberal vs conservative manner (which as above, I will discontinue use of the right vs left, because they do a disservice to this conversation, in my opinion).

I suppose it comes down to the question: Is society affecting media (your hypothesis) or is media affecting society (mine). There's no simple way to judge this, as you point out. One is organic, and the other is planned. So I guess it comes down to your bent for believing that society is being manipulated. I don't think it is coincidental, nor organic. To detail the (admittedly scarce) empirical data that I do have would take us quite off topic here. But the statistics in that link in no way contradicts these conclusions. It's just looking at a different data point from a different angle.

Oh the media absolutely affect society. In America, the way we spend our time, the way we dress, our public holidays (as celebrated), what we eat, how we decorate our houses and what type of houses we want, our personal hygiene and standards for beauty, what schools we go to, what leisure activities we spend time on, where we go for vacations, etc. etc. are largely if not entirely a product of marketing. As a rough approximation, we are a marketing-led society dominated by consumerism.

This manipulation is driven by the search for short-term profits, though, and has nothing to do with “liberalism”, except insofar as some liberal causes can earn an extra buck.

jacobolus wrote:

seebart wrote: she got away with it and any staffer in a regular or even higher position would have been fired or penalized.

For anyone else, this would have never been an issue. It’s only an issue for Clinton because GOP partisans are hunting for a scandal, and couldn’t find anything better.

Regular staffers aren’t going to be questioning what technology they get to use. If they want to keep using a blackberry and the job doesn’t allow it, they’ll quit. The state department, and particularly the NSA, dropped the ball in a major way here. Clinton should have been more insistent that they figure out a way to get her a cleared device of a type she was satisfied with, and should have told them with more paper trail precisely what she planned to do as an alternative, but the failures here are larger than Clinton, and all the efforts to find emails which contained publicly widely known information that was later reclassified as “secret”, as a way to smear Clinton for including those in non-official emails, is a huge waste of attention.

Was Clinton’s email server setup somewhat reckless, and were the people she had running it technically incompetent: yes. Is that illegal? Probably not. Is there a vast conspiracy going on here? No.

Clinton makes me cringe, speaking as a technologist. But so do about 90 US Senators (especially fucking Dianne Feinstein, gah!), the vast majority of judges, the police, the military, school officials, hospital administrators, most business leaders, including those running technology companies, and most members of my own family.

Hmm, I have this feeling and am going to predict you are going to vote Clinton.

I am a registered Democrat, but I am deeply disappointed with the party. I don’t plan to vote for Clinton. In the upcoming CA primary, I will vote for Sanders, though I have serious misgivings about him as president. In the general election, I’ll probably vote (as a limp protest) for the Green or Peace & Freedom Party candidate, even though those are always a joke and I wouldn’t want them to actually get the job. If I lived in a more competitive state, I would vote for Clinton over Trump, because the latter winning would be a disaster of epic proportions.

I was cautiously optimistic about Obama’s campaign message in 2008, campaigning for him vigorously in the primary and general election, and I appreciated some of his accomplishments (e.g. while mediocre by world standards, the ACA is still a big improvement to the US healthcare system, improved relations with Iran and Cuba are a big step forward, he’s been okay on the environment, and in general he puts forward solid people as administration officials, judges, etc.), but am underwhelmed by his unwillingness to more strongly fight for fiscal policy as an economic tool, or hold financial institutions accountable for the financial crisis; I am deeply disappointed by his unwillingness to hold Bush administration officials accountable for war crimes, by his inability to follow-through on campaign promises w/r/t the Guantanamo prison, by his continuance of the the so-called war on terror, by his disgusting drone bombings, by his continued support for unlimited weapons spending and arms sales to various unsavory authoritarian regimes, and by his unwillingness to stand up to the Israeli state in a serious way; I think his education policy has been abysmal; he hasn’t fought enough to improve and repair basic US infrastructure; etc. He’s been hampered quite a bit by a totally intransigent, frankly childish, GOP, whose primary goals are to make government policy fail, and then use its failures as a reason to stop trying at all. The Supreme Court has also been terrible over the past 30 years, moving steadily rightward, increasingly supporting the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. Hopefully there will be a shift in the near future which can claw back some of the worst recent decisions.

Other than Obama, every recent Democratic party presidential candidate except Jimmy Carter has been simply terrible (Kerry, Gore, Clinton, Dukakis, Mondale, McGovern, Humphrey). They start to look okay only in comparison with the Republicans, who have been doing their best to destroy the country outright. History would look a lot different if Bobby Kennedy or Gene McCarthy had become president in 1968, instead of Dick Nixon.

OK, but then I don't understand why you don't agree it's simple to see she did something naughty with her own email server setup.