I’m going to take this chance to ask what it is people hate about Gaia. I never went there, but I’ve heard about how its bad. I’m not doubting its bad, but what are the reasons behind this stigma?
I’m already at GaiaOnline. You have to wade through a lot of shit to find anything at all interesting.
Shouldn’t this be posted in the place people should be leaving?
No you see I was making a post that was like the first post in the thread. Sorry, I thought it would be well recieved.
No see I meant go post it on Gaia Online, only change all the words to “fuck you” and “leave” to “stay here and don’t infest any other boards you stupid bastards”
I can see how you mixed up what I was saying.
Perhaps you should LEAVE THE BRONX.
Why would they ever leave, when they can get a new hat for their awesome anime avatar for 1,000,000 internet dollars?
I see your point.
I retract my statement.
good day sir.
once i put a cat in the microwave and the cat exploded and our microwave was filled with cat guts
i think the aliens did it
I did NOT like that 
Anyway here I thought I would be learning about interesting stuff and instead Im subjected to…to all this!
once I sawr a blimp
my uncle apparently did that when he was a kid. I’m not kidding.
They kept the microwave.
I never made any claim of radio being homogenous. I made the point that no media went uncensored. The point I was making, which you don’t seem to get is that censorship here is done in very clever ways, such as government financing, the FCC (which most certainly does not only do what you said, it will also ban radio stations with certain content-- in some cities and states in America, White Riot cannot be played on the radio because it incited criminal action), and needlessly abstract obscenity laws. See the Dead Kennedys court case for an example of the latter. Radio being heterogenous does not matter, what does matter is that saying anything more radical than ‘vote democrat,’ or perhaps even ‘vote green’ can and often will get you banned from radiowaves.
Even if your points about radio being more free is true, the radio is certainly not the choice media in this country. Television, closely seconded by the internet, is still the choice source for news. And besides that, the point isn’t that the information isn’t there, it’s the way it’s presented as unimportant, skipped over if mentioned at all, and discredited (even if it’s definitely true) if it cannot be ignored and covered up any longer.
Controversy had nothing to do with it. The Rodney King trial was covered to say ‘bad black people’ when the riots started. It wasn’t on television news here until after the riots, and it was not presented objectively.
That and the fact that the government controls their airways and much of their financing. It does all come down to money, but not in appealingto a base. Media has the power to create it’s own base. For example, the Pentagon Papers, when printed, recieved a huge audience. That’s ‘scaring the taxpapers,’ but it was still a huge thing because the media actually reported it. Then look what happened to the Washington Post from the federal government. Oh, yes, that’s right, they tried to shut it down and even arrest staff members. That’s right.
Which level and kind of history class? It was glossed over for Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be presented as for the noble cause of ending the war, whereas the firebombings look bad however you see them. Oh, and I was looking through a supposedly college level history book when I wrote that.
I do, and censorship never works all the way. The fact is that most people don’t know much of this. That even those who do, many of them brush it off and never give it a second thought, then refuse to buy a Japanese car because of how badly they treated us. That’s the way, there’re a ton of things like that here, where people just don’t get it right. That’s why I say ‘successful fascism,’ because instead of holding people down, they train them like dumb-shit dogs to put themselves down and never come up.
It doesn’t matter, the point is that the news doesn’t even bring up the arguments made by one side. I simply have not seen all the evidence, and I’m not about to trust anyone on the internet when it comes to a man living or dying, I don’t think. The point is, a lot of those ‘unsubstantiated’ claims have a good deal of logic behind them and almost all of them could be solved one way or the other with proper investigative equipment, and that the fact that he’s even trying for appeal and as a fact was not given his constitutional rights in a trial.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘exaggeration.’ Pearl Harbour is brought up in first grade or thereabouts, and I can’t find any mention of the Tokyo firebombings, you know the ones that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people in nine of the largest cities in Japan, reducing the cities to ashes and dropping burning gasoling on women running with infant children on their backs that they hoped to save. Yeah, those. Those seem like something that history class might want to make a footnote of. Yet, in an AP History textbook, which is supposedly on par with a college history textbook, I cannot find a single reference to them; the closest thing to mentioning them was stating that the war had economically devastated Japan. Also, a lot of things that are not quite historically signficant are taught in history classes throughout the years. Just, only the ones that are good to America’s image.
Oh, and yes, there are plenty of places people can go to pick up information, but how many people here will go out of their way to see what things were really like in Japan in world war II?
There’s nothing noble about nuclear weapons, buddy.
The little quotation marks around noble were supposed to show I thought that it was bullshit, I guess that didn’t happen, though.
EDIT: Perhaps that’s because they weren’t there. . . oops.
That’s not true! If you have a good imagination, you can have lots of fun by yourself.
If people say they want to leave the country because they don’t like it, they can. It doesn’t really matter to me, and it doesn’t really bother me. Peopel say dumb things all the time, I don’t have to take it to heart. I’m happy where I am, and I’m happy of the opportunities I have in the States. Personally, I think some of the people who think the country is so horrible aren’t comparing it to some of the other countries and the world. We’ve all got problems. America used to be a rascist country, filled to the brim with ignorance, and in some ways, it still is, it just isn’t announced as readily by white folks anymore. I don’t gain anything by blaming all my problems on The Man and racism and the color of my skin though. I don’t gain anything by complaining either. Acknowledge the problems around you and either fix them or work around them or ignore them.
I like bulletsponge
I’m sorry, you seem to be falling back on conspiracy theories. Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence.
We have free speech, but this is not to say that all speech is protected. As the old saw goes “you don’t have the right to yell, ‘FIRE!’ in a crowded movie theater.” Likewise, speech that incites crime is not protected, even if it is politically motivated. Other political speech is not represented on mass media because there isn’t a market for it, as I’ve said.
It occurs to me that you might be angry that you don’t see your own political views represented in the media and in political debates, which strikes me as being sort of like the <a href=“http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/A/Amiga-Persecution-Complex.html”>Amiga Persecution Complex</a>.
Hell, today there were riots in Toledo that started when protestors at a Neo-Nazi rally attacked the police who were there to protect the Nazis’ right to free speech. Sure, they’re not on the radio, and they’re not on TV; it’s not smart for the producers of such media to let them on. They get angry letters and lose patronage.
I know that the FCC has the power to fine radio stations that violate its rules, and their final measure is to revoke its license. This is a legal (or legalistic) process, and it as far as I know requires multiple offenses to mount before you have a reasonable chance of clobbering an entire station. Quite often, our radio and television companies moderate themselves to avoid action by the FCC (Like when Michael Savage told a caller to his TV show to “get AIDS and die”).
Now, profanity statutes. I’ve got mixed feelings on this.
Profanity today exists mostly in commonly used words (in fact if they weren’t commonly recognizable as profane they wouldn’t be so widely used) and enjambings and portmanteus of them. The most popular ones, which George Carlin pointed out as “fuck, shit, piss, cunt, cocksucker, motherfucker, and tits.” Have endured pretty well over the last twenty years, and “motherfucker” is just a compound that includes a derivative of “fuck.” Because of this, although profanity does change over time, legislation against profanity can be effective. They tend to disrupt conversation as well, which isn’t good for social discourse.
They’re often used in idiomatic phrases and are thus semantically empty, and I don’t know of any that have any real use in political discourse other than to divert or gain attention. Unless, of course, you’re arguing against profanity laws. They seem to exist mostly for the regulation of spoken profanity, so that people can control their exposure to it, and to provide recourse to people in cases of verbal abuse (which is a form of violence, believe it or not).
What you seem to be saying is that profanity statutes are being misused in order to keep some political speech from being heard. I think you might be pointing to “White Riot” as an example, but I’m not sure.
On the other hand, I do disagree with profanity statues on principle; that is, I think it’s a waste of money to pass and enforce them. The police have real bad guys to chase, ma’am.
So, could you please provide some examples of profanity laws that are unnecessarily vague?
Okay, now to censorship. wouldn’t the aim of censoring media be to make it at least politically homogenous? Not to say that any facts can’t be politically sensitive.
There are plenty of media, including the Internet, which you mentioned, and sattelite radio, for another example, that are not regulated by the government, unless you want to invoke conspiracy, but conspiracies are pretty much impossible to quantify without a paper trail. And as we can see from the historical examples, some of which <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentagon_Papers”>you mentioned</a>, conspiracies don’t hold up well.
I’d like to think you’re just saying that there’s a <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Systemic_bias”>systemic bias</a> in our schools and media, though. All history authors and all journalists are human, and are prone to those faults that flesh is heir to. Just as we tend not to dwell on unpleasant memories, we also do not like to confront unpleasant facts. That’s just human nature, not “cleverly done” censorship; no sentience required.
Ideally, these things should be represented, but our schools don’t have the time. Also, sometimes they really aren’t historically significant. The firebombing of Tokyo and other cities isn’t as significant to the ending of the war as were the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the Japanese endured the incendiary raids for a long time, and it may have even deepened their resolve.
<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/My_lai_(massacre)”>My Lai</a>, on the other hand, is historically significant, as it became a social and plolitical meme. This was covered in my history classes.
Also, when it comes to war atrocities, schoolkids don’t see them depicted often unless their teachers show them a documentary that includes such footage. For example, in school I saw pictures of the mass graves at the Nazis’ concentration camps, but not video of gassings, shootings, hangings, or the torture and “medical experiments” that went on there. Having that raw experience wouldn’t have deepend my understanding of the events by any means.
Controversy had nothing to do with it. The Rodney King trial was covered to say ‘bad black people’ when the riots started. It wasn’t on television news here until after the riots, and it was not presented objectively.
According to Wikipedia, <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots”>the L.A. riots started after the trial</a>, which seems to conform to my memory of the events, though I was rather young at the time.
That and the fact that the government controls their airways and much of their financing. It does all come down to money, but not in appealingto a base. Media has the power to create it’s own base. For example, the Pentagon Papers, when printed, recieved a huge audience. That’s ‘scaring the taxpapers,’ but it was still a huge thing because the media actually reported it. Then look what happened to the Washington Post from the federal government. Oh, yes, that’s right, they tried to shut it down and even arrest staff members. That’s right.
Where does it say that staff were arrested? I find records of two injunctions and a Supreme Court case.
By “frightening the taxpayers,” I meant frightening them <i>off</i>, which would result in a dip in revenues for any advertising-driven business. Scaring people, using FUD tactics and the like, is a very effective if intellectually dishonest strategy. Not to mention that the taxpayers all hate the tax collector.
Which level and kind of history class? It was glossed over for Hiroshima and Nagasaki because Hiroshima and Nagasaki can be presented as for the noble cause of ending the war, whereas the firebombings look bad however you see them. Oh, and I was looking through a supposedly college level history book when I wrote that.
In this case it was High School, probably my sophomore year.
I do, and censorship never works all the way. The fact is that most people don’t know much of this. That even those who do, many of them brush it off and never give it a second thought, then refuse to buy a Japanese car because of how badly they treated us. That’s the way, there’re a ton of things like that here, where people just don’t get it right. That’s why I say ‘successful fascism,’ because instead of holding people down, they train them like dumb-shit dogs to put themselves down and never come up.
Atrocities can happen on both sides of any war. Not everyone is a historian, and for the most part get along just fine in their daily lives without making reference to a full account of war atrocities in past conflicts. The people who refuse to buy Japanese cars because of predjudice against the Japanese are idiots, and are missing out on some of the best cars being made today (I think American companies are now out in front in terms of reliability, service and value-for-money, at least according to Consumer Reports). Not only are they idiots, but they’re in a minority; otherwise I wouldn’t see so many Toyotas, Mazdas and Hondas around.
Parenthetically, I wonder when Jack Chick is going to get around to lambasting Mazda and Mercury for naming themselves after pagan gods. Anyway, moving on…
Just because people are largely ignorant of history doesn’t make their government totalitarian, much less fascist in any of the more strict senses. The government doesn’t control what we say on this message board, and would have a hard time suppressing valid political views if they came up on any of the media they regulate. We aren’t being held down, nor is the government inculcating us with <a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness”>learned helplessness</a> to hamper our political expression: society does that all on its own.
Well, I’ve spent most of my free time today on this, and I’ll have to be eating dinner soon, so I’ll just crop this off here. Good night, and God bless.