@newtboy
can you show me where hedges promoted russian propaganda?
i ask this sincerely,because i have not seen any evidence of what you are accusing him of.

i get that we disagree,but hedges has earned my respect for his journalistic veracity.

you have earned my respect for being a decent human being,who i happen to agree with more often than not,but in this case i will not simply disregard hedges stellar work because you accuse him of being a propagandist.

i have read his books.
watched his lectures.
and sifted through his sources.

you have openly admitted you have done none of these things,yet..you have formed an opinion on his work by the venue he has chosen.you have even gone as far as to presume his intent on WHY he is on that venue.

now..you are free to speculate all you wish in regards to hedges motivations,and even be skeptical of his work due to him being on RT atm (he was also on Telesur,and al jazeera english).


i do not find this skepticism unwarranted nor unreasonable.i understand why you may feel this way.

but i am the captain of my own ship.
i do consider hedges respectable and worthy of consideration,because i have considered his words,read his books and watched his lectures.

i have considered his works and found them informative and reflective of our current situation.

just as i have found:howard zinn,noam chomsky,amy goodman,jeremy scahill,laura poitrus,glenn greenwald,paul jay,richard d wolffe.

does this equate to everything that they postulate the unerring word of GOD?

of course not.
i can disagree with someone and still respect them for their views.

example:@bcglorf

i really do not see an issue here.
i also do not understand why i am being put in a position to defend why i may respect a reporter/journalist for the good works they have produced.

i am sure there are authors/journalists/academics that you admire and trust their work,because they have earned that trust by being consistent with their methodology.

so i do not see a rub at all.
i see you making conflations and comparisons based loosely on associations,and not tangible and concrete evidence.

if you have evidence,and i am simply being biased and residing in my own bubble.then by all means..pop that bubble...i am human after all,and just as prone to confirmation bias as the next person.

@bcglorf

think we are talking about two separate issues,with a only a subtle overlap.

i totally agree that when it comes to russian politics,and/or state sanctioned military operations,RT tends to lean in favor of the russian state.

but in my opinion this does not detract from the works of hedges,or hartman or even abbey martin.who used to have a show "breaking the set" and "empire files".

we can view american corporate media through the same lens.

FOX=republican message of the day
MSNBC=democrat message of the day
CNN=the american state message of the day.

taken in aggregate,these corporate media outlets are all propaganda/misinformation machines.

but..taken singularly...

shep smith on FOX does some good work.
while personalities such as o'reilly,cavuto and carlson are simply demagogues.

or rachel maddow on MSNBC.
who does an excellent job of disseminating the politics behind a lot of republican shenanigans.sadly her show is incredibly biased and partisan.so while i LOVE her analysis..i realize that it is a tad bit biased and slanted.

i do not watch CNN.except when i want to know what bullshit excuse the american government may be focused on.

so i get where you are coming from,and i agree for the most part.
i simply refuse to outright ignore someone like hedges,with his credentials,because of the venue he has been relegated to in order to express his criticism.

is/does RT sometimes promote russian propaganda?
yes..of course.
does this equate to chris hedges being a russian propagandist?
no..it does not.

and i am also not necessarily disregarding your discernment and discrimination towards hedges.
we all have a metric we use when discriminating.
yours is simply different than mine.
this does not equate a moral right nor wrong,just different.

but you and i may disagree on some things,but i would like to think we have both earned each others respect.

so when you post a comment.i read it with that respect dictating the lens with which i view your words.i know that you consider your words carefully,and i think it polite to give those words the same consideration that you gave them when writing.

we can disagree,and have,but i always walk away with at least understanding WHY you may feel a certain way.

@ChaosEngine

"Ironically, I'm somewhat echoing the sentiments in the video, in that facing an uncomfortable truth requires you to think and that's not a bad thing. But my uncomfortable truth is that not all speech can be free."

^this.right on mate.thumbs up.

free speech is not a binary equation.
many variables to consider,and i am of the thinking that i would rather not legislate words.

Ok. Thank you for clarifying.
I feel you have now invited action against you by moderators AND verbal retaliation from fellow sifters.
You are welcome to your opinion, as disgusting as many may find it, but you are NOT welcome to use blatant racist hate speech when explaining your theories, not here. The rules on that subject are clear, and you have blatantly, repeatedly, and unapologetically violated them.
I do give you props for standing behind your words, that's far more adult than hiding from them and pretending you didn't mean it or were just joking.

Btw, calling you out on your inappropriate actions in no way equates to condoning Obama's inappropriate actions.

Let's not forget original sin. Jesus certainly committed that one by being born.

I also take issue with his short vacation in hell equating to "taking the punishment we deserve". How does a long weekend by one equate to eternity for billions? I've discussed that with shiny before, but I don't understand his answer.

I'm with you, though. Much better to party at the hookilaou in hell than lay prostrate in heaven.

I wish, but probably not in my lifetime in America.
Many people here equate control of their car with control of their lives and refuse to consider any alternatives. Keep in mind, 1/4-1/2 of us here believe scientists 'made up' climate change for money (somehow, I've never heard an explanation of where that money comes from), those people aren't likely to cede control of their car to a computer made by computer scientists.
I'm not one of them, though. I'm with you, I want to be able to get in my car, tell it where to take me, and go to sleep until I'm there.

@MilkmanDan

I don't like the notion of free super delegates but they didn't swing the primary. If they were taken out of the equation, Hilary still had a majority. Party favouritism and a media sense of inevitability probably did though.

The main conclusion I drew from the result is that in dire economic times, people will hold their nose and vote their perceived economic interests above anything else. I mean Clinton got 65% of Latinos vs. Obama's 71% in 2012 - Trump got a larger share than Romney. In most of the battleground states Clinton only won 50-55% of women.

Tack onto this the insider vs. outsider narrative, and the desire for a 'change' from government policy associated with Obama / Democrats, and you have a the holy trifecta. In hindsight it's easy to see going after Trump's character was a distraction.

One of the great intellectual catastrophes of the modern world, and probably the harbinger of the ultimate doom of our civilisation, is the collapse in the distinction between 'compare to' and 'equate with'. We can reasonably compare almost anything to almost anything else, and how unfortunate that we can expect immediately to be confronted by some aggrieved outrage-peddler who imagines they have a right to find the comparison insulting.

It is a literal fact that any group of two or more people, or living things, or indeed most objects of any kind, will possess some internal differences. As a matter of certain truth, not subject to doubt, muslims share with rats and serial killers the trait that they evince diversity of behaviour and belief. This demonstrates the total banality of the 'but they're all different' argument. It's not for their differences that these groups are disliked.

That's probably enough of a lesson for one day, and certainly @oritteropo ought to know better. I don't want to take the trouble to argue deranged claims like 'there are muslims who don't believe in god', or tiresome diversions on how christians and other jews can be just as bad, or to debate the relative merits of various religiously mandated dress codes; but you are right about one thing @SDGundamX: I would much prefer that islamic violence and oppression were a harmless and overblown bogey, but ethics is not a children's game - these are real people, with real victims, and too many of both.

Okay my down vote is based on the seven and a half minutes i watched. IMO trying to somehow equate "the book of dna" with the making of a real book is plain idiotic. How does any half way intelligent person buy into such nonsense? Just makes me cringe.

I need a drink now.

What? The home invaders? The reporter? The police corporal? Oh Bob, you dumb, racist doofus.

Meanwhile, this is a great example of why nobody should have guns. It looks like a fucking lazertag game in a fortress of unopened toilet paper rolls. Having lethal force be a part of that equation is just loony.

They're not both terrible to the same degree, though.

Your country's right-wing media have had it out for the Clintons for over 20 years now. Ever since one of them became President.

And all they've been able to come up with is some controversy about the Benghazi embassy bombing. There were many 'Benghazi's' during Bush's tenure. And the problem with the e-mail servers. And again, the Cheney-Bush presidency sucessfully deleted over 30,000 e-mails pertaining to their conspiracy to send America to war in Iraq. Why doesn't the news cover that? Because their deletion of e-mails was wholly successful.

So despite all of that fear, uncertainty, and doubt being spread by the right-wing media in the past 20 years the Clinton Foundation has done incredible humanitarian work throughout the world. Apparently it's possible that Melinda Gates and a sultan of Brunei may have been able to speak to Hillary because of their sizable donations, but it's also possible that those people are already of necessary stature to speak to Hillary.

So, that's 3 things over 20 years that stuck. Hillary has fought her entire life to be where she is, even having to endure heckling by men when she was writing her Harvard Law acceptance test. To say that she's in the same basket as Trump is, at best, intellectually dishonest. You're just parroting your media's narrative.

If you think Hillary is bad then you must believe Trump to be truly deplorable. Then why would you equate the two?

http://mindyourdecisions.com/blog/2016/09/07/the-horse-horseshoe-boots-viral-brain-teaser-the-correct-answer-explained/

From everything I've read, including this link, it's really just a basic algebra problem. What appears to make it difficult is that people who don't use algebra and math all the time will not know the specific rules with equations.

As far as posting it, why do we post anything here? This piqued my interest and I thought it might be something others would enjoy. If it isn't something you care for, don't vote or down vote.

But all the ice won't melt.

By the time all the ice gets melty, the freshwater will dilute the salinity of the oceans. Once diluted, the oceans will be be slightly less good at conveying heat from the equator to polar regions, which means the poles will get colder and start to accumulate ice.

Now this process may take a long time. Could be decades. Could be centuries. Could be longer. But it will happen.

alcom says...
@kingmob The right-wing conspiracy of convenience says that the data has been adjusted to heighten the urgency and panic and perpetuate their scientific fraud. This is a misunderstanding of flux adjustments that used to be made to climate models in the 90's and early in the 00's:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_circulation_model#Flux_buffering

Recent improvements in modelling equations mean that they no longer rely on flux adjustments, but hearing that they had to made adjustments at all sounds sketch.

Because the "hockey-stick" model was an overshoot based on the peak in 1998, deniers tend to either:

a) Argue that the "warming hiatus" between 1998 and 2013 disproves AGW theory. This fallacy disproved itself in the last 2+ years as global surface and ocean temperatures have exceeded the 1998 record year on year.
or:
b) Attempt to discredit scientists arguing that their own funding depends on the alarming data that they publish. Far-right conservatives continue to demonize scientists as a cabal of billionaires working in concert to sway public opinion. If that was true, then the whole hiatus period sure didn't help their cause, but the graph hasn't moved.

This is sound science, and denialism is collapsing under the weight of its own bullshit. At the time of posting, NOAA said that July 2016 also marked the 15th consecutive warmest month on record for the globe. That is the longest stretch of months in a row that a global temperature record has been set in their dataset.