Is Bud Light Right And I'm Wrong?

[Dill]

(06-09-2023, 02:19 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: This is possible and I agree that the media will focus on the more extreme stories, for obvious reasons.  But I consume a lot of less mainstream media, both left and right, and I rarely encounter such a story regarding right wing protests.

I went on very left leaning sites and searched for college protest.  Logically one would assume that if a site is going to cover such a right wing protest it would be a far left site.  Here are the results.

I'm traveling this month, so it's not easy to respond to posts on time.

I thought the issue was which side has "demons," or "more demons," per C-Dawgs post. 

Your post #110 asked   How many left wing speakers have been attacked or prevented from speaking at college campuses?  Now, how many right leaning speakers has this happened to?  How many gay pride parades have been attacked by groups of violent protestors?  Now, how many right leaning events/protests have been attacked by groups of violent protestors?  I literally just provided the Glendale example.

The ultimate point is, and what many people here are desperate to avoid confronting, is there is extreme bullshit going on on both ends of the ideological spectrum today.  The only difference of substance is that one side is constantly excused by the mainstream and the other side is consistently demonized, see "domestic terrorist" parents at school board meetings again.  

So when I responded I wasn't thinking of right/left wing protests so much as the concept of "canceling." It's often represented as some kind of "left" phenomenon, but I think shaming someone on twitter is not as serious as denying someone jobs or firing someone--the kind of thing that often is not covered in MSM media. If one can distinguish between "radical leftists" of right wing media fame and actual leftists, I think the case can be made they are subject to greater harassment than a few very prominent right wing provocateurs. The way to determine that would not be to follow emotional or trendy news coverage, but by working through the bean counting of sites like Georgetown's Free Speech Tracker, which I linked above.

In any case, when assessing "demons," I'm not interested in lining up tit for tat "both sides do it."  At this conjuncture, what people ought to be recognizing is that one side's demons are the greater threat to civil peace and democracy--i.e., millions of Americans groomed to support a violence-inciting autocrat for president. The first ex president to face criminal charges--and the majority of one party separate his actions from their consequences to the degree they are alienated en masse from their own government. At the moment I do not see a more serious problem than that in our domestic politics. "Confronting extreme bullshit" on both sides just obscures this problem, delays recognition and so solution.

(06-09-2023, 02:19 PM)Sociopathicsteelerfan Wrote: Quote:I tried your suggested Youtube experiment. I found that the "left" search and the "right" search often called up the same videos. My hesitancy about using Youtube to assess quantity is that there is no reason to suppose the number of videos breaking one way or the other corresponds to anything other than the intensity of organization of one side as opposed to the other. This is why it is important that states and the federal gov. compile data on political violence, against which we can check our impressions of the magnitude of a perceived threat.

One would think if right wing protests were occurring at anything close to the same rate that these sites would be covering them.  That there are so few stories, while certainly not definitive, certainly raise doubts as to their occurring equally, or close to equally.

The bolded offers my reasons for why youtbue searches can be good for many things, but a count of videos on protests is not likely to correlate to some actual count of protests.  The angriest or most organized or most manipulated can account for quantity there. I think right wing media and their students are much more active on such venues. Not to mention Russians.