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[Rolepgeek]

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.

Contentious decisions aren't the thing you're trying to avoid, as far as I know. Bad decisions and civil war are. If you disagree with someone but everyone still sticks to the agreement that you do what they say (and this requires a certain amount of faith both in the system and the person, which is easier since in small groups it's significantly less likely that you're able to just scamper off after playing dictator or the like, plus reputation stakes tend to be higher and the moral decision-making parts of your brain are more directly linked to people whom you know personally than the abstract concept of millions of people who voted for you). Furthermore, if half the population likes a decision, and half doesn't, that does lead to extremely contentious decisions, compared to dictatorial fiat. Fiat you can't change by scaring someone into not voting or rousing up riotous commotion to get turnout. You have to go full-scale revolution, or appeal to the dictator by reason, bribery, or threats.


Also people tend to be more satisfied with things they can't change; if you can't go back on a decision, your brain will try to allow you to be satisfied with what is. If you can go back on it, you will constantly worry about what could have been/what could still be and whether you made the right choice.

[Sergarr]

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

Ahah, no. Those are, as you might have heard, based in Olgino, which is in St. Petersburg, and I'm in Moscow.

Besides, getting paid would hurt the integrity of my artistic self-expression. Those trolls-for-money have no finesse, no depth to their brute-force tactics, they don't know how to judo sambo kung-fu agreeable and docile liberals into almost Stalinist authoritarians... then again, they're most likely paid to act as a diversion, away from the real political operators...

But really, I don't intend to troll people, it's just that, you know, stuff like that makes me wonder if I'm in some kind of parallel universe where USA's politically active part of population has suddenly decided that imitating Russia's worst is the best idea 5/5 and should be done ASAP. Because this simply doesn't look believable at all. Whoever is writing the book called "reality" should be fired for making unrealistic plots, clearly.

If hesheit is, good.

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

You should probably shorten that monster of a pronoun to a simple "they". It'd help you type it faster, and in places not so kind as Bay12, it will save your hide from a massive hategangbangbandwagon.

[Loud Whispers]

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.

I will wait until fox and cnn asplod before celebration

[Reelya]

fake news publicity debacle.

Yeah this meme again. Except the whole "fake news" thing was about spoof websites linking pretend stories on Facebook, not about stuff produced by journalists. If the stuff wasn't even produced by the mainstream media then how does it's existence somehow reflect on the mainstream media?

I mean you don't look at silly National Inquirer headlines and say "goddamn CNN!" because there's no connection to be made there. Same thing with the fake news on Facebook and mainstream press. They didn't make it, it's not their baby.

[Loud Whispers]

Journalists started this shit by lying their pants off, they made their fake news grave and they can lie in it

[ChairmanPoo]

As an aside, I think St Petersburg should have stuck with the name "Petrograd"

[TheBiggerFish]

Journalists started this shit by lying their pants off, they made their fake news grave and they can lie in it

Did they though?

[EnigmaticHat]

Journalists started this shit by lying their pants off, they made their fake news grave and they can lie in it

The original fake news debacle was the realization that most people on FB were getting their feed filled with links to far right or left websites INSTEAD of traditional news networks.

The second fake news debacle was just Trump repeating the phrase "fake news" whenever anyone criticized him.

Like I hate cable news as much as the next guy but they didn't do this.

[Neonivek]

Well, there's also the bit where they almost all claimed that Hillary had something like a 99% chance of winning since they didn't realize that a Trump victory was within the margin of error of the polls.

Ok if there is one thing I HATE about the whole "Hillary has a 70% chance of winning" isn't the percent...

It is that people immediately went "HA! See! It was wrong!" because people seem to not know how chance works.

[Neonivek]

Ohh man! 85% chance Hillary wins? That means she can't lose!

[hector13]

Political polling has a lot of soul searching to do. They can't seem to predict anything these days.

[MetalSlimeHunt]

Most "polling" has always been shit and based mostly on hype, this is nothing new. And despite the hate-on a lot of Trump supporters have for Nate Oxygen, 538 recognized the trend and gave Trump better odds than any other major site.

[Rolepgeek]

Is kinda funny that one year of bad predictions means polling is worthless, though

[TempAcc]

fake news publicity debacle.

Yeah this meme again. Except the whole "fake news" thing was about spoof websites linking pretend stories on Facebook, not about stuff produced by journalists. If the stuff wasn't even produced by the mainstream media then how does it's existence somehow reflect on the mainstream media?

I mean you don't look at silly National Inquirer headlines and say "goddamn CNN!" because there's no connection to be made there. Same thing with the fake news on Facebook and mainstream press. They didn't make it, it's not their baby.

Emphasis on publicity debacle. What it actualy first meant doesnt matter at all anymore, all that matters is that CNN and other outlets fucked up tremendously at handling the situation by pushing along the trend everyone tacked to it: that majors news outlets are actualy the biggest sources of fake news nowadays. They made themselves a bed out of pure dweebery, and will now be forced to lay on it by the everyone and the guy they ended up empowering by being huge idiots who overestimated themselves while underestimating public reaction and Trump's ability to use their grab their pile of shit and throw it right back at them. The shit throwers tried to throw shit at the shit throwing champion.

Also, lets not pull any punches here. Obama has whiplashed fox news with and without reason during his 8 years for free public appeal, and CNN and other democrat friendly outlets (obviously) gave it a free pass. Now the shitcannon turned around and CNN is taking the lashing, and suddenly its the end of the world and everyone and their mother is a dictator and open letters get thrown around because suddenly the once media top dogs aren't getting to eat the "truth is what I make of it" cake anymore.

[Reelya]

http://money.cnn.com/2017/01/18/media/nbc-today-show-donald-trump-tweets/

No, Donald Trump, NBC's "Today" show is not doing "badly."

It is actually America's highest-rated morning show among 25- to 54-year-olds, the key demographic for advertisers, and it is just 100,000 viewers behind ABC's "Good Morning America" among all viewers.

The high-rated morning show attracted Trump's ire on Wednesday by broadcasting a report that cast doubt on his job-creating record.

The report -- part of a new franchise called "Today's Fact Check" -- called Trump's impact "very small or non-existent."

Trump called that assertion "fake news."

Fake news = anyone who doesn't agree with Trump. Gimme a break please.

Also, Trump wants to fill the press corp at the white house with right wing radio talk hosts and selected bloggers now. I mean seriously. You didn't see Obama cramming reporters from Mother Jones and Huffington post in there. If you remeber about Bush and Jeff Gannon, Trump is poised to turn the entire press corp into planted Jeff Gannon type shills. That's what that "open letter" was actually about. Trump is basically threatening to replace the entire press corp media gallery with robot shills from friendly low-standards websites. Threatening to replace any questioning media outlet with loyal brownshirts has a very fascisty ring to it. Yeah, the Bush people planted a fake friendly in the press corp, but they did so quietly. Trump is loudly threatening to do so if the media don't kow-tow to his rule. He's even boastful of the fact. To be honest, given the scope of what Trump is threatening to do, that open letter was actually fairly restrained.

https://mediamatters.org/blog/2017/01/18/donald-trump-wants-army-jeff-gannon-shills-white-house-press-briefing-room/215043

IDK, you might think it's a good thing, but I think mainstreaming Breitbart and Infowars and whichever else radical conspiracy sites "truth" to be equal to established newspapers is actually a very dangerous thing to do.