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.

More from Matthew Sheffield

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.
ALL
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
Advertisement
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
Thread: People love to rag on Nate Silver for his arrogance & they should, but he's merely an example of a larger issue that the web has made it easy to draw inferences from data without knowing the context in which it lives. 1/x

Alexander Pope's warning that "a little learning is a dangerous thing" has never been more true than an age in which we can obtain information about anything without being able to understand it.

Having data doesn't mean you can use it.

Western society has a very significant problem that expertise in one area is often conflated with expertise in others.

Men are the main culprit. We have been socialized to think we know more than we do. There are many studies showing this. Here's one:

Not only do men think we're smarter than we are, we also overestimate our own attractiveness:

Male overconfidence has lots of negative implications for society. The biggest is that too many men in media have amassed followings by speaking confidently about subjects they don't understand.

Nate Silver finds Donald Trump appalling, but his shtick isn't all that different.
LIFE

More from Society

Prateechi \U0001f6eb\u2708\ufe0f\U0001f6e9\ufe0f
Prateechi 🛫✈️🛩️...
@BahuRaani
#Bookmark this

|| Geography and Astronomy ||

of “EARTH” according to Indian ancient scriptures

I repeat “Untold Unsung now Unearthed”

RT and spread the knowledge.

Slightly long thread but you’d be amaze. Go through entire thread carefully.


It is hoped that you have not forgotten that Svayambhuva Manu had a son named Priyavrata. Priyavrata had ten sons. Their names were Agnidhra, Agnivahu, Vapushmana, Dyutimana, Medha, Medhatithi, Bhavya, Savana, Putra and Jyotishmana.


Medha, Agnivahu and Putra had no desire to rule. They were not interested in material pursuits and became hermits.

Priyavrata divided the earth amongst the remaining seven sons. Thus it was that the earth came to be divided into seven regions or dvipas.


Agnidhra ruled over Jambudvip, Medhatithi over Plakshadvip, Vapushman over Shalmalidvip, Jyotishman over Kushadvip, Dyutimana over Krounchadvip, Bhavya over Shakadvip & Savan over Pushkaradvip


Agnidhra, the ruler of Jambudvipa, had nine sons. Their names were Nabhi Kimpurusha, Hari, Ilavrita, Ramya, Hiranyavana, Kuru, Bhadrashva and Ketumala.

Agnidhra divided Jambudvipa into nine regions (varshas) and gave each of his sons a region to rule over.
ALL , SOCIETY , MYTHOLOGY
UN Watch
UN Watch
@UNWatch
Wow! Rare moment of truth at the UN as Miss Iraq Sarah Idan calls out Hamas terrorism, antisemitism taught in Muslim countries, and biased media.

THREAD: "Two years ago, I represented Iraq at Miss Universe. I posted a photo with Miss Israel on social media..."


"I was told to remove it and forced to denounce Israeli policies. I received death threats. Since then I can no longer return to my homeland.

Why did the Iraqi government fail to condemn the threats, or allow my freedom of speech?"

"The issue between Arabs and Israelis goes beyond policy disagreements. It’s deeply rooted in the belief systems taught in Muslim countries, which are anti-Semitic."

"Sadly, hatred & intolerance are reinforced by biased media. When I watched the news last month, why did they never report that the Hamas terrorist organization fired nearly 700 rockets at Israeli civilians in one weekend or that Hamas used Palestinians in Gaza as human shields?"

"Why do they never condemn Hamas for initiating the attacks? Instead, they only show those killed by the response, in self-defense, and blame Israel."
SOCIETY
Advertisement
The Sharing Scientist
The Sharing Scientist
@ScienceShared
Unless we pass laws which support people to enable them to self-isolate properly, any improvements to test & trace will have marginal impact and cases will simply spiral out of control once again as we ease lockdown in December.

A short thread on what we can do and why 👇
1/


Improving the currently poor rates of self-isolation is actually the key point, which many scientists, politicians, & commentators do still seem to be missing.

This requires good public health communication, proper support for those who need to self-isolate, & trust.
2/

Massive testing and tracing will only significantly reduce
transmission if positive cases isolate effectively. Yet
currently fewer than 20% of those who should isolate are fully adherent.

I don't think I need to explain why it's so critical to improve these rates.

3/

Survey data shows intention to adhere to test/trace/isolate behaviours is higher than self-reported adherence: whilst 76% of people intend to share contacts, only 50% of people correctly recognise symptoms &
just 12% get a test, 18% isolate, & 11% of contacts isolate properly.
4

Self-reported ability to self-isolate
is three times lower in those who earn less than £20,000 per year or have less than £100 saved.

5/
SOCIETY
Seleeah_Writes\xa9 #EndSarsBrutality#
Seleeah_Writes© #EndSa...
@Asipita6
THE ABA WOMEN'S RIOT

Are you asking yourself who these women are? Majority of us wouldn't know them because we've been busy learning about Mother Theresa and the Fraudulent story of Mary Slessor.


In the morning of November 18th 1929, A man called "Emereuwa", Upon the directive of his boss okugo the warrant chief in Aba District walked into the compound of a widow called "Nwayereuwa", ordered her for a cencus of all her livestock and household.

The widow, Nwayereuwa knowing the census will determined how much she will be taxed by the British colonial government. She shouted on Emeruewa, "was your widowed mother at home counted?". An angry exchange ensued. Nwayereuwa resentfully rushed down to the town and market square,

consulted other disgruntled women, with palm frond, they mobilised other women. And that marked the beginning of one of the greatest resilience, rebellion and

uprising the British imperial colonial rule ever faced in Nigeria and Africa in general, called "The Aba Women's Riot" otherwise known as, "The Women Who Went To War".
SOCIETY
John Leksander
John Leksander
@JohnLeksander
Pretty much a love letter to the farmers in Wisconsin directly from my website:

I'm not a politition so I'm not going to mince words. I am not a democrat or a republican I consider myself a Christian Viking & the party name I will use is the party of "We The People". I am

absolutely disgusted with politicians that have the "Israel first" mentality instead of America first. I will not do anything for special interests, nor will I accept money from AIPAC or big Pharma.  I will work for YOU the Legal American Citizen. We need to get rid of & hold

accountable these bought off satanic perverts in office and stop the madness. Wisconsin should be a leader in agriculture thus I'll make efforts to kick Bayer/Monsanto out of our state with their glyphosate & round up ready seeds and find ways to hold them accountable for the

destruction & damage they've already caused. I want all of our small business up & running and the churches open. I'm absolutely against mask mandates nor do I want people vaccinated with this abhorrent DNA altering experiment. I think marijuana should be legal & hemp used to

detoxify our farmland. I want the fluoride removed from our water & the spraying of heavy metals in our skies stopped. I want criminal justice reform and to stop the incentives for populating private prisons. I'm pro constitution as it was written. Wisconsin should be a leader in
SOCIETY

You May Also Like

Simon DeDeo
Simon DeDeo
@SimonDeDeo
One thing that goes unremarked about Wikipedia: the vast majority of the content was written over 12 years ago—which means (given turnover) that the editors dominant today were not directly involved in that creation.

Put another way, the editors who built the dominant nodes in this network...


...have little overlap with the ones who made this much more recent managerial flowchart.


Internet time runs at hundred-fold speed—the difference between the people who painted what's in the Uffizi, and the people in charge of keeping those paintings from deteriorating. Very different tasks, and (one presumes) very personalities as well. @PaulSkallas?
ALL
Robin Berjon
Robin Berjon
@robinberjon
Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details): https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.
TECH
Advertisement
JayneshKasliwal
JayneshKasliwal
@JayneshKasliwal
ULTIMATE GUIDE TO 21 and 200 Moving Average
SUNDAY THREAD 🔖
A trend Following System That will Help You Improve Trading immensely.

RETWEET AND SHARE 🔄
@kuttrapali26 @AmitabhJha3
#stocks #StockMarket
1/n

Moving averages
EMA and SMA
1. Exponential Moving Average (EMA) is similar to Simple Moving Average (SMA), measuring trend direction over a period of time.
2. However, whereas SMA simply calculates an average of price data, EMA applies more weight to data that is more current
2/


21 EMA : SHORT TERM TREND
1. Calculates the Average Price of past 21 days
2. A stock above 21 ema is in strong momentum , which will give pullbacks to 21 ema again and again.
3. Stock above 21 ema should never be shorted so as to stay with the trend
3/n

3. A stock which moves 10-15% above 21 ema will be too extended and hence will generally pullback
Stocks take dynamic support on 21 ema
4. You can Short only if its too extended like 15 to 20% from 21 ema ( Not advised )
#ADANIPOWER:
#pnbhousing
4/n


1. Whenever 21 ema is sloping upwards its called uptrend
2. Whenever 21 ema is sloping downwards its called dowtrend
3. Whenever 21 ema is sideways its called consolidation
⏫Buy in uptrend
⏬Sell in downtrend
Examples:
5/n
MOVINGAVERAGES , MOVING AVERAGE 20021 , ALL
Jaya_Upadhyaya
Jaya_Upadhyaya
@Jayalko1
MEENAKSHI AMMAN, MADURAI (TN)
#bharatmandir #navratri2021

A paadal Petra sthalam where Shiva took the form of Sundareswarar (the handsome one) and married Devi Parvati (Meenakshi).
Devi is also known by the name Angayarkanni (mother with the beautiful fish eyes).
@GunduHuDuGa


Devi Meenakshi emerged from yagna fire as a 3 year old girl when Pandyan King Malayadwaja and Kanchanamalai were praying for a child.
It is said that Devi was born with three breasts and there was a prophesy that her superfluous breast would melt away when she met her husband.


Devi ruled over Madurai and captured Indralok. She went on to capture Kailasha. When she saw Shiva, her 3rd breast disappeared and she realised that Shiva would be her consort.
The divine marriage was attended by all Devas and Sri Vishnu (as her brother) gave her hand to Shiva.


It is said that Indra found a swayambhu lingam at Kadamba Vanam. He placed it in Madurai where the kshetram stands. Here, Shiva is seen on the vehicle of Indra.
The Golden Lotus Tank is said to be the place where a golden lotus blossomed for the puja performed by Indra.


The Meenakshi Thirukalyanam festival is celebrated in the Chithirai month to mark the divine marriage of Meenakshi Amman. The festival includes a procession where Meenakshi and Sundareshwara travel in a chariot and Sri Vishnu gives away his sister in marriage to Shiva.
ALL
Vibhu Vashisth
Vibhu Vashisth
@VIBHU_Tweet
ANCIENT BHARAT WAS CALLED VISHWAGURU, AND IT REALLY DESERVED IT.

India had a well developed education system centuries before the westerners arrived and called us uncivilized. Education was always given a great importance in Indian civilisation since times immemorial.


Ancient India had the Gurukulas and Ashramas as the epicentres of the knowledge and enlightenment. Bigger Gurukulas served as the centres of higher education called universities. Besides these universities, temples also emerged as the major learning centres.

Studying the Holy Scriptures, character building, personality development, responsibilities towards self,family and society,discipline and preservation of the ancient culture and heritage were the key embodiments of education.

This kind of education system made ancient India, a centre of knowledge all over the world. Many foreign students came to India for education and India was called the 'Vishwaguru'.
Takshshila and Nalanda were the two prominent universities of ancient India.


But were these only Universities of ancient India?The answer is 'No'.Let's learn about these gems of our education system that flourished across ancient India & be proud.

NALANDA UNIVERSITY
This was the oldest university of ancient India.Situated in Nalanda distt. of Bihar...
ALL