BC SOCIETY
Saved by @jay_millerjay

Thread: Rush Limbaugh and the conservative Id

On the day of his passing, it's worth doing a brief retrospective on how Rush Limbaugh's personal life almost perfectly paralleled American conservatism...

 One thing that's not commonly known about Rush Limbaugh is that he began his career in sports, doing sales for the Kansas City Royals baseball team. That's significant because much of the tribalism and dumbed-down rhetoric in American TV news directly came from sports media.
Television journalism in its earliest days was a fantastic product with real investigative reporting, no filibustering live interviews, and no soundbites. This began changing in the 1970s when ABC Sports president Roone Arledge was put in charge of ABC News.
Limbaugh tried to be a conventional FM deejay but kept getting fired because his personality was too abrasive. After working with the Royals, he began a small political talk show for a Sacremento station. The Reagan repeal of the Fairness Doctrine made his show possible.
Rush Limbaugh's Sacramento show started in 1984 (he replaced Morton Downey Jr) and after 5 years, he was picked up by ABC Radio which was trying to copy some of the sensationalism that ABC News television had started. It was a perfect fit.
While Rush Limbaugh's uneducated background (he flunked out of college according to his mother) brought him some regular-guy cred, his style of saying anything to trigger liberal outrage wasn't his invention. In fact, William F. Buckley started the trend in the 1950s.
Buckley's first book, God and Man at Yale, was hundreds of pages of him trying to cancel atheist professors. He wrote a second book with Brent Bozell Jr. dedicated to defending the disgraced Joe McCarthy. He even once threatened to punch a liberal commentator (on ABC, fancy that)
Rush Limbaugh merely updated the Buckley shtick, adding parody songs, conspiracy theories, & guttural insults of political figures.

Limbaugh's show was a hit among fundamentalist Christians who'd raged for decades that their beliefs were mocked. Rush was their equalizer.
Republican elites were overjoyed at Limbaugh's emergence as a national figure. Buckley saw a kindred spirit and almost immediately befriended Limbaugh as well. Rush was invited to the Bush 41 White House as an honored guest.
Talk radio was different in its earlier days. In the 80s and 90s, it almost exclusively was a megaphone for GOP politicians, lending them air support against the evil Democrats.

But this changed over time as the hosts were courted by the extremists who run right-wing DC groups.
The blowout of Barry Goldwater in 1964 made some conservatives like Buckley realize that Americans would never want to eliminate the welfare state. He, Goldwater, and Reagan became somewhat more moderate afterwards. But the true believers like Brent Bozell Jr. became crazier.
After working extensively with his brother-in-law Buckley, Brent Bozell broke things off as he began realizing that the US would never adopt the Christofascism that he wanted. In 1965, he literally moved to Spain to live under the dictator Francisco Franco.
But Bozell wasn't content to leave America alone. He started up a far-right Catholic magazine called Triumph & a Christian Proud Boys group called "Sons of Thunder." In 1970, he was arrested for using giant crucifix as a battering ram and weapon against police.
Despite never being popular with the public, the far right has always been lavishly funded by billionaire business magnates who hated the government & wanted Christian supremacy.

The conservative establishment bought off talk radio and turned it much more extreme than it began.
Rush Limbaugh was never particularly religious himself but he knew where the audience was and where his fat-cat friends were. So he never spoke up about their Christian nationalism and intolerance. And he continued embracing whatever radicals that came along.
As @Mr_JamesLandis noted in 2016, that even included embracing the then-new "alt-right" movement which was trying to meme nazism into American politics. I don't think Limbaugh really knew what he was doing then, but he indisputably was a fan at first https://t.co/gXZhM4ywKa
Because conservatives so utterly succeeded at canceling moderates in the GOP, Rush Limbaugh and other established talk radio hosts were always under constant pressure to move further and further right since there is no energy in the center of the Republican party.
Also like so many in the far-right establishment, Rush Limbaugh refused to think ahead past his own demise and so he failed to raise up a successor, even as he knew he had terminal cancer. His program will likely have no future at all, leaving many stations with lost revenues.
Limbaugh's refusal to think deeply about his own legacy and future program were of a piece though. His career represented the conservative Id killing the conservative superego. It's why there are no Republican policies on much of anything domestically. All that's left is rage.
The 1/6 Capitol attack was eerily foreshadowed on Rush Limbaugh's 11/20/20 program when a man called into the show and in tears told Rush that he had nothing left in life and was willing to die for Donald Trump
To the end of is days, Limbaugh never once acknowledged what he was doing to his audience, that he had fed them a diet of hate and never offered them an actual way forward. He never wondered why the candidates he supported were never able to achieve the things they both wanted.
My friend @LeslieVryenhoek has a great short podcast series talking about how Rush Limbaugh warped her parents' minds with decades of brainwashing. It's worth a listen to get a look inside the mind of talk radio fans. https://t.co/IqXwGBurBT
OK this thread is long enough. If you want to read more about the GOP's endless cycle of radicalization, I wrote a piece about it in Salon that might be of interest: https://t.co/Elm4t3E2AB
PS: I had forgotten to mention that Limbaugh's ABC intersections continued later on in his career when he briefly served as a Monday Night Football commentator https://t.co/ezw7t5bs8F
Oh and it's also worth adding that in the 1990s, Rush Limbaugh hosted a syndicated television talk show. His executive producer was Roger Ailes, who put what he learned into Fox News shortly thereafter.

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Matthew Sheffield
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Thread: Meaning and loss in American conservatism

I've written a lot about how Christian supremacism (expressed and implicit) is the underlying objective of most Trump supporters but the psychology of American conservatism is very important in its descent into madness.

We're seeing it manifested heavily in the present moment as Trump and his followers are forced to contemplate the loss of the presidency but it's important to realize that losing is the psychic core of the U.S. right.

Trump's repugnant demeanor and prior history of political moderation is what made him so reviled by conservative activists and donors in 2015 but his angry victim complex so deeply resonated with the GOP base that this is why he won the primary.

American conservatism has been obsessed with death and loss since it emerged in the 1940s. The utter humiliation of Herbert Hoover and the rapid growth of federal spending and regulation under FDR was an existential moment for the corporate barons who started the U.S. right.

The rise of explicitly atheist Marxist-Leninism was also immensely triggering of long-time fundamentalist fantasies of persecution and death before the return of Christ. Most Christians don't see John's Apocalypse as a literal text but fundamentalists do.
GOVERNMENT
Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
For the past 6 years, I & a few other journalists have been trying to get the mainstream press and political elites realize the major danger posed by the radical right. Unfortunately, moderate and liberal elites deluded themselves into thinking that conservatism wasn't a cult.

There is no secretly powerful "Republican establishment" that will fix things. There are thugs, deluded people, and there are quislings. There is no one else in the GOP. Instead of focusing on the radical right's danger, editors wanted stories about Trump tweets.

Instead of calling out the dangerous radicalism of the GOP, television debate shows and opinion pages invited the enablers of fascism to speak and write about how we all needed to give powerful insane people the benefit of the doubt.

Unlike Trump, who walled off the White House months ago into a fortress, Nancy Pelosi did not take the terrorist threat seriously enough to demand better security. She has the budget and the authority and did nothing similar. Now, fascists are on the floor of Congress.

Of course, it is Trump who bears the responsibility for this but the Capitol Police have totally disgraced themselves by not fortifying the building the way that the Secret Service did to the WH.

This is the view of numerous congressional staffers of both parties.
JOURNALISM
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Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
Conservatives love to complain that everyone is against them: professors, journalists, intelligence officers, social media companies, and so on.

I used to as well until I considered that maybe having problems with everyone else isn't their fault, it's yours.

I was reminded of that realization when I read this important NYT article about how Facebook keeps weakening news source quality controls because conservative content gets disproportionately effected by them.

Unfortunately, this great piece of reporting by @MikeIsaac, @sheeraf, & @kevinroose didn't mention the greatest challenge in AI news signal processing: Humans can barely separate conservative & far-right content. Which means computers can't either.

This techno-semiotic conundrum originates from the fact that in the US, because there is no moderate conservative tradition, the gravitational center of the right is far removed from the political center.

More plainly, this means that almost all the energy and organizing on the right exists on the far right.

This is not the case on the US left where there is a strong moderate tradition capable of organization and force projection. Ask Bernie Sanders if you disbelieve.
POLITICS
Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
Thread: Conservative Policy and the Trump Presidency

On the last full day of the Trump administration, I think it's useful to examine why he accomplished so little legislatively. TLDR version: American conservatism has almost no policy program.

The most important thing to know about conservative politicking is that people do not vote FOR Republicans, they vote AGAINST Democrats.

The GOP is dominated by a minority of far-right activists and wealthy donors who have views that their own voters don't support.

American conservatism is premised on the twin ideas that the New Deal & Great Society were immoral and that God himself created America and that we should honor this creation by establishing full Christian supremacism in which LGBT people, atheists, and Muslims have fewer rights.

Because God created America, this means that conservatives believe in essentially no domestic policy of any kind. If it wasn't literally in the Constitution, then the feds shouldn't be doing it is their opinion.

This is not, however, how things used to be in the GOP.

For much of its history, American conservatism was a sort of intellectual parasite on the Republican party which was run by a mix of moderates and liberals. They actually had domestic policies. Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon had many policies that actually helped America.
TRUMP
Matthew Sheffield
Matthew Sheffield
@mattsheffield
As a former conservative activist and journalist, it has been so frustrating to see my former compatriots spreading wild and unchecked claims about "voter fraud." @jacknicas of the NYT took a deep look at claims of "dead" people in Michigan voting. Link in next tweet.

While examining claims made by right-wing activists who are not credible individuals is a thankless task which elite media editors despise, this is vital and important work in this age of fake news. Here's the link:

As the co-creator of NewsBusters, the most prominent anti-media website, I was part of a decades-long tradition of complaining about media elites being "unfair" to conservative views. There is still much to that argument, but eventually I saw that I was missing context.

What I did not realize until I began expanding my work into creating actual media and reporting institutions such as the Washington Examiner (I was the founding online editor) was that U.S. conservatives do not understand the purpose of journalism.

This became evident to me as I saw that conservative-dominated media outlets were MUCH more biased than outlets run by liberals. The latter had flaws that arose from a lack of diversities (note plural) but they operated mostly in good faith. That's not how the former operated.
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@IND_RwandaRadio
Nearly a year ago, the Tablighi Jamaat controversy took over India’s media. Around 3,500 foreign nationals had visited India to attend the Tablighi Jamaat event at the Nizamuddin Markaz Mosque in Delhi.

With the lockdown being announced on March 24, 2020, several attendees had moved to different parts of the country to attend smaller gatherings in local mosques.

Around 960 foreign nationals were held at quarantine and in states like UP, Jharkhand, Maharashtra, Karnataka, etc. were sent straight to prison.

There was an outpour of Anti-Muslim bigotry in much of Indian news media with this event where it ramped up its demonisation of the community.

For weeks, the attendees of the Tablighi Jamaat event were named the “super-spreaders” of COVID and in several cases, Maulana Mohammad Saad was called a terrorist and “the maulana of death”.
SOCIETY
Noah Smith
Noah Smith
@Noahpinion
1/OK, data mystery time.

This New York Times feature shows China with a Gini Index of less than 30, which would make it more equal than Canada, France, or the Netherlands. https://t.co/g3Sv6DZTDE

That's weird. Income inequality in China is legendary.

Let's check this number.

2/The New York Times cites the World Bank's recent report, "Fair Progress? Economic Mobility across Generations Around the World".

The report is available here:

3/The World Bank report has a graph in which it appears to show the same value for China's Gini - under 0.3.

The graph cites the World Development Indicators as its source for the income inequality data.


4/The World Development Indicators are available at the World Bank's website.

Here's the Gini index: https://t.co/MvylQzpX6A

It looks as if the latest estimate for China's Gini is 42.2.

That estimate is from 2012.

5/A Gini of 42.2 would put China in the same neighborhood as the U.S., whose Gini was estimated at 41 in 2013.

I can't find the <30 number anywhere. The only other estimate in the tables for China is from 2008, when it was estimated at 42.8.
SOCIETY
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Evan Sparks
Evan Sparks
@EvanSparks
So, as the #MegaMillions jackpot reaches a record $1.6B and #Powerball reaches $620M, here's my advice about how to spend the money in a way that will truly set you, your children and their kids up for life.

Ready?

Create a private foundation and give it all away. 1/

Let's stipulate first that lottery winners often have a hard time. Being publicly identified makes you a target for "friends" and "family" who want your money, as well as for non-family grifters and con men. 2/

The stress can be damaging, even deadly, and Uncle Sam takes his huge cut. Plus, having a big pool of disposable income can be irresistible to people not accustomed to managing wealth. https://t.co/fiHsuJyZwz 3/

Meanwhile, the private foundation is as close as we come to Downton Abbey and the landed aristocracy in this country. It's a largely untaxed pot of money that grows significantly over time, and those who control them tend to entrench their own privileges and those of their kin. 4

Here's how it works for a big lotto winner:

1. Win the prize.
2. Announce that you are donating it to the YOUR NAME HERE Family Foundation.
3. Receive massive plaudits in the press. You will be a folk hero for this decision.
4. Appoint only trusted friends/family to board. 5/
SOCIETY
Jo Luehmann
Jo Luehmann
@JoLuehmann
We live in a society that misunderstands boundaries and consent. Most people think the former is about just saying no, and the latter is about sex. And while that’s a part of it, they are about agency, autonomy, respect and interpersonal relationships.

1/

Unsolicited advice without consent is crossing a person’s boundaries. Even if the advice is good advice, even if the person giving the advice is a pastor or a parent, even if the advice is important. Most people aren’t talking about their life so that we may solve it.

2/

It is an honor to be trusted with someone’s life story*, with their thoughts and their challenges, with their struggles and their musings. But it is not an open invitation to try and solve their problems, control their behavior, tell them what to do.

3/

For a group of people that speak often of free will and claim to follow Jesus, Christians are some of the worst at boundaries and consent in general, and advice giving in particular. Think about how many sermons are not sharing spiritual truths, but just giving advice.

4/

Think about how much pastoral counseling is just advice giving. Think about the many books that tell you how to parent, how to be a good wife, how to be a good Christian, how to... and how much of it is general advice as though our lives were interchangeable?

5/
SOCIETY
Miss iCy Cold
Miss iCy Cold
@Credible_Intel
OK winger wonderland story time boys & girls.

1. Sleet stops, it's warming up, neighbor decides get out & drive, probably after seeing some truck drive down our residential road (4-wheel drive). Neighbor has new SUV push button start, 2-wheel drive, which is NOT THE SAME THING.

2. So anyway, they back out of their garage & then pull forward down their driveway. The driveway is flat, but it's also a really really long driveway that goes from the back of the house down the side of the house. This will be important later.

3. They make it down the driveway just fine, so now super confident this will go well.

They pull out on our little residential road and start driving.

Mother nature is laughing her ass off right about now.

4. I should mention the roads through our little subdivision don't have curbs or sewers. We're basically out in the country so they just slope roads so the run-off goes into a ditch at the side of the road.

5. So anyways, their SUV starts to slightly fishtail. They haven't gone far at this point. So, they stop, and the SUV, although stopped, just ever so slowly slides to the side of the road and ends up half way in the ditch & almost tipped over.
SOCIETY

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...(1648-1663) as a scarf-bearer.  The post ‘scarf-bearer’ or ‘Soladhara Barua’ is considered as a part of the incumbent king’s personal staff. Owing to his military training Lechit was appointed "Ghora Barua", Supdt. of the Royal horses. When Chakradhwaj Singha became king..


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