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[Sheb]

Holy shit.  Obama actually commuted Chelsea Manning's sentence.  She'll be released on May 17th.  I honestly did not think he would do this.  I guess he just had to cowardly allow her to be tortured while he waited until the last few days of his term, so it wouldn't effect his time in office.

And... apparently Assange had recently said he would agree to extradition if this happened?

So, who want to bet on whether Assange will break his word?

[Reelya]

Spoke too soon, see edit.

[Sheb]

I love the facepalm photo they found for the article.

[PanH]

Well it will be interesting now for Assange. Perhaps Assange made that promise on the belief that it would happen when hell freezes over. So the ball's in his court. But Assange has a better chance now that Trump is in charge though, seeing as Assange was pretty much in Trump's corner for the whole election.

EDIT: It seems that Assange has backtracked and said that the clemency offered was "unsatisfactory" so he's not going to let himself be extradited after all.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/julian-assange-wikileaks-hand-himself-chelseas-manning-commute-barack-obama-extradition-sweden-a7532706.html
What a complete joke of a human being.

I wouldn't move if I was Assange. Releasing some data that helped Trump is not enough. Trump said that Manning deserved the death penalty, so if I were Assange I wouldn't get on the same continent as Trump. Trump is going to be much harsher on whistleblowers than Obama.

[Baffler]

Someone calling themselves the US press corps have written an incredibly condescending open letter to Trump.

Such a colossal amount of self-importance is amazing. It's like they are trying to beat the Donald at his own game.

We will strive to get your point of view across, even if you seek to shut us out. But that does not mean we are required to turn our airwaves or column inches over to people who repeatedly distort or bend the truth. We will call them out when they do, and we reserve the right, in the most egregious cases, to ban them from our outlets.

We credit you with highlighting serious and widespread distrust in the media across the political spectrum. Your campaign tapped into that, and it was a bracing wake-up call for us. We have to regain that trust. And we’ll do it through accurate, fearless reporting, by acknowledging our errors and abiding by the most stringent ethical standards we set for ourselves.

Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...

Hahaha... Heh. I'll believe it when I see it. It's amazing how simultaneously aware and unaware they are of the criticisms levied against them.

We’re going to work together. You have tried to divide us and use reporters’ deep competitive streaks to cause family fights. Those days are ending. We now recognize that the challenge of covering you requires that we cooperate and help one another whenever possible. So, when you shout down or ignore a reporter at a press conference who has said something you don’t like, you’re going to face a unified front. We’ll work together on stories when it makes sense, and make sure the world hears when our colleagues write stories of importance. We will, of course, still have disagreements, and even important debates, about ethics or taste or fair comment. But those debates will be ours to begin and end.

This one is interesting though. I mean, the 4th Estate has already pretty much collectively decided that they don't like Trump, but until now they've tried to at least maintain some facade of objectivity. I suppose we can prepare for 4 years of Closed Ranks.

[Reelya]

It's the media's job to be hostile and untrusting of the administration. That's got to be balanced with honesty, but the last thing you want is blind faith in official pronouncements. Obviously hostile such as repeatedly asking "is the president from Kenya" isn't the type of "hostile and untrusting" I'm talking about. That's just distracting the public from real events.

Trump's threatening to use this thing "access" to control the narrative, such that there's a competitive game in which anyone who isn't completely sycophantic doesn't get to cover politics. That's actually scary, and is something I definitely think the media should be assholes about rejecting.

[SalmonGod]

Well it will be interesting now for Assange. Perhaps Assange made that promise on the belief that it would happen when hell freezes over. So the ball's in his court. But Assange has a better chance now that Trump is in charge though, seeing as Assange was pretty much in Trump's corner for the whole election.

EDIT: It seems that Assange has backtracked and said that the clemency offered was "unsatisfactory" so he's not going to let himself be extradited after all.
http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/julian-assange-wikileaks-hand-himself-chelseas-manning-commute-barack-obama-extradition-sweden-a7532706.html
What a complete joke of a human being.

I wouldn't move if I was Assange. Releasing some data that helped Trump is not enough. Trump said that Manning deserved the death penalty, so if I were Assange I wouldn't get on the same continent as Trump. Trump is going to be much harsher on whistleblowers than Obama.

It's cringe-worthy that he's backed out... but it's also hard to disagree with this.

[McTraveller]

Collectivism works only if everyone is happy enough with the collective decision. As soon as it's not unanimous, or people start harboring resentment, it starts falling apart.  Or maybe more subtly: if a certain portion of the population doesn't get their way for a minimum percentage of the time, it will start to fall apart.  I don't know what that percentage is, but basically: If you *never* get what you want in a compromise, you will start not-caring about the collective - or worse.  At some point it even starts to feel like a loss if you do get your way, because it feels like pandering instead of honest compromise.

So in order for a collective to work, each member probably has to get their way some large portion of the time - maybe 90%?

Gets mathematically difficult when the population gets too big - this is why I suspect humanity would be better off if we reduced the maximum number of people covered by any particular governing group.  History suggests the maximum sustainable number is likely in the 1s or low-10s of millions, not the 100s.

[Reelya]

Well you can substitute "Democracy" for "collectivism", or basically any other situation where one person's decision affects other people, and all those same things are true. Any time there's a decision that affects more than one person, you're going to get conflict. Every philosophy of organization is about how to resolve that conflict. So the problem with that general statement that "Collectivism works only if everyone is happy enough with the collective decision" is that it really doesn't tell us anything specific about a particular type of group organization that's not true of all groups in general, by definition.

Define what you mean by a collective first, what decisions it's making, how those decisions affect the members, and exactly how that's any worse than e.g. Representative Democracy.

For example a town council in a representative democracy might elect a mayor every 4 years, and that guy has basically dictatorial power in between the elections. And that's supposed to lead to less contentious decisions than e.g. a "collective" style direct-democracy where each citizen gets to vote on all major decisions? Clearly, with Representative Democracy, the guy can pass laws that are unfavorable to literally 99% of voters, as long as the other candidate is unfavorable to 99.1% of voters. Direct Democracy at least guarantees that each individual issue had 50.1% public support.

So "collectives" just means a community which has democratic voting on things the community has authority over. It gives the "collective" no more power over members than existing democracy does. The other form of "collective" is for corporations, where it means a corporation in which employees vote on important matters. Compare that to the "normal" form of a corporation - which is a dictatorship and it's hard to argue that being allowed to vote on matters somehow disenfranchises half the company. Obviously if only 50% of the company wanted to do a specific thing, then no more than 50% of the company could get their way whether or not they were allowed to vote on it. Giving them the vote is what a collective corporation is all about. They weren't getting their say to start with so, a voting system always empowers more people than it disempowers.

[TempAcc]

:v
Isn't that open letter essentialy playing into Trump's hand?

Trump has hijacked an election with meager media support, with everything opposing him except for your right wing CNN equivalents, which aren't many or nearly as powerful. He got shit thrown at him by buzzfeed just now, called them and CNN out for it, and got out on top since the supposed report containing evidence turned out to be trash.

If Trump has one half of a brain left, he'll realize that he just got a golden opportunity.
Think about it, suddenly he gets exactly what he wants: a open letter from "the US Press Corps" (lol) basically telling him that, if he doesnt play by their rules, they'll ban whoever they want from their outlets for saying anything they deem "a distortion of truth". Give it a few days and Trump comes out saying the same people who trying to pin shit on him and spread fake news are now threatening to do anything they can to shut him out if he keeps calling them out. Imagine that, outlets that have admited to using supposed proof against him in the past and had their sources called out and proved to be shit time and time again, now trying to throw their weight around and tell him he should be careful.

Its like an anemic chimpanzee trying to bully a huge silverback.

He gains even more popularity from it and outlets that repeately throw shit at him get even more blasted by everyone else.

This is Trump, he doesnt need to say anything true, he just has to call out the major media outlets, which are already a huge target due to the fake news publicity debacle. They throw a punch, Trump drop kicks them in the chest, his voterbase (shock full of people who really hate these media outlets and haven't forgot how hilarious the whole coverage of the election was) will applaud tremendously.

Good fucking job empowering the god emperor of america even further.

[Sergarr]

Someone calling themselves the US press corps have written an incredibly condescending open letter to Trump.

Such a colossal amount of self-importance is amazing. It's like they are trying to beat the Donald at his own game.

We will strive to get your point of view across, even if you seek to shut us out. But that does not mean we are required to turn our airwaves or column inches over to people who repeatedly distort or bend the truth. We will call them out when they do, and we reserve the right, in the most egregious cases, to ban them from our outlets.

yesssss the America's finest are finally embracing censorship as an important tool in managing the media

this is a great milestone in achieving Russian cultural victory

[TheBiggerFish]

Now if they actually follow through on that a glorious media renaissance of fact-based reporting.

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA-*urk*

[ChairmanPoo]

I've been tempted for a while to ask Sergarr whether he works at one of those Russian troll factories...

[TempAcc]

If hesheit is, good.

If hesheit isn't, though, can we eat himherit?

[Baffler]

It's the media's job to be hostile and untrusting of the administration. That's got to be balanced with honesty, but the last thing you want is blind faith in official pronouncements. Obviously hostile such as repeatedly asking "is the president from Kenya" isn't the type of "hostile and untrusting" I'm talking about. That's just distracting the public from real events.

Trump's threatening to use this thing "access" to control the narrative, such that there's a competitive game in which anyone who isn't completely sycophantic doesn't get to cover politics. That's actually scary, and is something I definitely think the media should be assholes about rejecting.

TempAcc said it better than I could tbh, but I'll add that it's nigh-impossible for them to shut out Trump like they seem to be threatening to do. That might be a credible threat for dissidents, protestors, and freshmen congressmen, but they can't exactly no-platform the most powerful man on Earth.