Media Bias

[pErvinalia]

Keep vigorously ignoring the blue-anon conspiracy the WaPo got caught doing. Wouldn't want to have to admit that Trump was right, eh?

Conspiracy, eh? Got any proof of that? Of course you don't.

[Joe]

We certainly become aware of the latest conspiracy theory in a timely fashion. I wonder if this service is provided gratis, or if there is some quid pro quo.

[Hermit]

It looks like they fabricated the quotes, pretending there is an 'anonymous source' to blame.

The source exists. It is Jordan Fuchs, Georgia’s deputy secretary of state. She got the information of what Trump said second-hand from Frances Watson, the person the former president talked to during that phone call.

If I had not seen all those photos of you here and on other sites I would really be of the impression that you are a Qanonbot someone decided to embed in this forum.

[Brian Peacock]

I never heard Cunt criticising the media over the bowling green massacre.

[Cunt]

Or perhaps the lefty view of this is skewed, and there aren't any Republicans here to help you understand.

Of course I may have missed them.

[Hermit]

If he isn't a stockholder, he is being sensitive to them. That's ok, as I said, it's for good reason.

More of the sly, sarcastic insinuations, imputing motives to others for malicious reasons. Continuing on this path may not end well.

Oh. I see. Our member from Yellowknife meant "sympathetic" or something like it, when he wrote "sensitive". Nice one, Daggles. Here is what I wrote about them earlier:

Shareholders keep baying for their dividends. Too much is never enough for them, and right now is not soon enough.

While fire sales were welcome topups for budgets, most of them, including Keating's sales initiatives were ideologically motivated. Keating's electoral campaigns were actually based on his claim that he could run capitalism better than the conservatives. Hence his bargain basement sale of the Commonwealth Bank (which has now become one of the four chief culprits fleecing hundreds of millions of dollars off its customers, including dead ones, for services that were not provided) and Qantas (which used to win the safest global airline award year after year, but since maintenance contacts have been outsourced to foreign businesses keep having bits of its airliners falling off or exploding). Power plants were supposed to reduce electricity bills after privatisation. What happened instead was that prices increased faster than before the selloffs.

None of that is particularly surprising for two reasons. Firstly, the superior efficiency of privately run enterprises turned out to be fictitious. Secondly, privately run enterprises had to add a profit margin to the already existing overheads.

I have personal experience of this when the St George Building Society was sold, becoming the St George Bank. Having had a savings and a mortgage account with that institution at the time, I received a letter promising that the new outfit will, unlike all the other privately (that is shareholder) owned banks, it will never introduce account keeping fees, and I will always be greeted by a friendly face from the other side of the counter.

A year or 18 months later account keeping fees were introduced and the smiles of the bank's staff had disappeared. They were replaced by stressful looks because staffing levels had been drastically cut across the board, leaving the remainder struggling to cope with their workload. I mentioned those broken promises to the bank manager of the Oatley branch one day while negotiating a mortgage on another property. Her reply? "Well, yes." she sighed, then continued. "We had not reckoned on the pressure by the shareholders to increase the profit margin."

Businesswise, the St George Bank was quite successful. It swallowed some smaller banks, eventually becoming one of "the big six" in Australia. Then Westpac swallowed it. Westpac turned out to be the worst offender of today's "big four", all of which were involved in the shearing of the flock scandal the Banking Royal Commission reported on in gory detail last week.

I need to mention that St George was never a government-owned institution. It was a community, not-for-profit one, growing quite nicely for decades until the board of directors somehow became stacked with personnel which decided that making it a private enterprise owned by profit-seeking shareholders was "a good thing". Account holders were offered a carrot in the shape of small parcels of shares, the size of which was determined by the number of accounts they ran with the building society, and the number of years they held them. The bulk of the shares were sold via IPO. Of course those small parcels finished up on the open market before long, to be snapped up by the bigger fish, and they were the rapacious profit seekers. St George is not the only community owned service provider that died in that manner. Would you like to me to tell you about NatMut? The NRMA? I had personal experience with them too, and the result was the same. My bet is that the Bendigo bank will fall victim of the greedy fuckers before long too. We never seem to learn from the past. Big business keeps winning at the expense of ordinary folk. Stupid us.

Although my view of shareholders cannot be described as sympathetic by any stretch of the imagination, I am in fact a stockholder - indirectly and involuntarily. A proportion of all superannuation funds is invested in shares. I am a member of one of them.

[Cunt]

Yes, which would make one an advocate, even if reluctantly.

It's like my being in favour of free speech, despite the fact that people's feelings WILL be hurt.

[Hermit]

Yes, which would make one an advocate, even if reluctantly.

Not.

ad·vo·cate
noun
noun: advocate; plural noun: advocates
/ˈadvəkət/

a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular cause or policy.

[Cunt]

I understand you think you don't, but it depends on your usage of that word.

For example, I think everyone who uses armed security (or armed cops, or armed army) to protect themselves, is 'pro-gun', and if they say they aren't, they just use 'pro-gun' differently.

[Hermit]

I understand you think you don't, but it depends on your usage of that word.

The common usage of "advocate" is: "a person who publicly supports or recommends a particular cause or policy." Indirectly and involuntarily owning an unknown number of shares via a superannuation account does not qualify as public support or recommendation of shareholding.

For example, I think everyone who uses armed security (or armed cops, or armed army) to protect themselves, is 'pro-gun', and if they say they aren't, they just use 'pro-gun' differently.

I am in favour of cops, defence personnel and some people working in the security being armed. This does not mean I am in favour of privately owned assault style weapons with large capacity magazines or handguns.

[Cunt]

'assault style weapons' is a great phrase. Lots of emotive power, almost no description there.

A biased media could use it to manipulate the emotions of those ignorant of firearms and assault knives, assault armbars and assault pets.

[JimC]

'assault style weapons' is a great phrase. Lots of emotive power, almost no description there.

A biased media could use it to manipulate the emotions of those ignorant of firearms and assault knives, assault armbars and assault pets.

Bullshit. We've gone over this before. It is perhaps a loose phrasing, but it is shorthand for semi-automatic rifles, typically .223 calibre, with 30 round magazines. Perfect for killing people in large numbers at short and medium range. Banned for private use in civilised countries, freely available to nut jobs in the US.

[Cunt]

lol

And how many nut jobs have them, vs how many are used illegally?

You know what, it isn't about that anyway. If you believe in the right to own property, and to defend ones own life and property, we are in the same place, but with only trifling differences between our positions.

[Hermit]

'assault style weapons' is a great phrase.

Don't know about the "great" bit, but the expression does distinguish between military assault weapons, which can be switched to fully automatic and weapons that have the same look and functions except for the fully automatic one.

[Hermit]

And how many nut jobs have them, vs how many are used illegally?

That's a difficult ratio to figure out, but Australia's murder/homicide rate is about one fifth that of the USA and killings by police about one twentieth. Also, the number of people accidentally shooting themselves or others in the USA is alarming, especially when it is toddlers doing the shooting. I could not find any reports of accidental shootings or killings in Australia during the past few years. I venture to say that if private gun ownership were the same in Australia as in the USA, the differences would be smaller.

...defend ones own life and property...

We don't live in a war zone, Daggles. Locking doors is our preferred method of defending life and property. It works very well too.

We don't need this: