Meh, they’ve cleaned up their act a bit since they fired Bannon. They’re still highly partisan (and I don’t read them) but they’re not the fake news mill house they were for a time. They currently meet FBs standard for news tab. Concern about slant and spin could be duly noted, but in that case you’d have to complain about left slanted publications in the feed as well. No slant or spin would have the news feed basically empty.

yeah, that's what I've noticed lately, Timh. I've read a ton of articles on the Canadian post-election landscape and they're ALL reeking of partisanship. All of them are super favourable to one side with their choice of adjectives and then smash the other. It's nuts.

In fact, your earlier post (with that awesome 2nd paragraph on how the left of day is split in the traditional and this new wokeness (which you correctly point out basically irritates most of the population). It was one of the more refreshing reads, I shared it with a conservative friend of mine who liked it but noted, "well, he's clearly not a trump supporter" and I challenged the guy to look beyond that. Here's a guy who is actually breaking up the numbers of Trump supporters to show that it's not as rabid as we've been led to believe, and then he clearly shows that the left has some major problems with the direction its going since not everyone is onboard.

Anyway, it's tough to communicate with people on this stuff, but i like your viewpoints. I don't find you come across as partisan as well (I'm fairly centrist, myself, and I like Warren as well).

The US needs to find a way to have more than two parties.

Not going to comment on the rest of it bc I’m too crazy to talk politics.

..wot? The US government isn't set up to have more than two parties. There's no parliment or stuff. The whole system is set up so one party keeps the other in check and they resort to compromise positions most of the time. It's all designed to avoid an extreme populist party getting into power.

It's hard for me to think our system is any better as our last government got elected into power last week with one third of the popular vote. Because they have a minority government, in order for them to pass legislation they need to rely on one of the smaller fringe parties (NDP (very left) or Bloc Quebecois (sovereignty regional party). Both those parties are RABIDLY anti-oil&gas which is Canada's main economic driver.

so it's gonna be a weird four years

@mjack - I agree it’s be nice if US politics had more than 2 viable parties. Impossible to cover the range of possible political preferences with 2 camps we currently have. I haven’t put proper thought into it, but it seems attractive if they could work in a parliamentary system where more parties could thrive. Idk tho. Barney has a point about Canada, and not like Britain is a shining example of happy politics with the Brexit issue they’re struggling to deal with.

@Barney - no, I’m not a Trump supporter. I don’t have Trump Derangement Syndrome, but there are a number of things I don’t like about him and I don’t see myself voting for him. I have Republican friends and family who I respect and know are good people and had non-deplorable reasons for voting for him. Feel like the hysteria around his presidency drowns out reasonable criticism. My workplace runs CNN in the lobby and I’m so exhausted of Orange Man Bad. It’s 24/7 non stop and I don’t think I’m the only one who has just tuned it out and can’t be arsed with the outrage anymore. I feel party-less in today’s landscape. In my youth I was very working class left wing supporting Democrats in a partisan way, then became left libertarian supporting libertarian party for a while on social issues and frustrations with government, and now still have some working class leanings (identify as) but don’t feel like Dems represent that anymore. I’m a moderate politically and classical liberal philosophically; progressives steering the direction of the party strike me as extremely illiberal, and these days classical liberals are considered right wing even tho I’ve never voted Republican in my life ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Yeah most of your democrats are pretty right wing

Im libertarian I think but they don’t run candidates in my riding

Yeah, at least in respect to class politics. Both parties serve corporate interests. Idk how people can see Silicon Valley’s support for Democrats - see Dems support of unrestricted immigration, which hurts low skill workers and benefits the wealthy by creating a pool of neo-slave labor they can pay sub minimum wages to nanny their kids, clean their houses, maintain their lawns, and pick their fruit n veggies - see a Dem supporting media tell out of work coal miners Learn to Code - etc - and think oh yeah this is def still the party of the working class.

A hilariously insightful take I saw relatively recently was ‘We’re living in an era of Woke Capitalism, where corporations pretend to care about social issues in order to sell products to people who pretend to hate Capitalism’.

Lol that’s so perfect

Jordan Peterson goes off on that kind of hypocrisy. By showing that the loudest people are often the ones doing the least towards their own cause

Youtube linking doesn't seem to work as intended, so I'll just post the link. Peterson discussing the Hillary/Trump election, many of his points echoing TIMH above.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_cont ... 7n6M&t=187

As an Independent (also a Libertarian), it's really not "Trump Derangement Syndrome." Most accusations leveled against the President, which he denies, you can follow to the source which confirms the story is accurate.

Anyone know why we aren't seeing the old Simic Mass Manipulation lists in the current meta? Seems effective against all the planeswalkers + small green creatures (Wicked Wolf etc). One doesn't even have to do anything special - just fit Mass Manipulation into the standard Simic Food lists.

in this meta you are playing mass manipulation in abzan https://www.reddit.com/r/MagicArena/com ... nexpected/

I was considering that, too.

There is a consensus that you play Oko, Nissa, Krasis and their mana dork enablers. From there one direction could be ramp into MM, you could also go Bant for Teferi. But right now, the best avenue seems to be Sultai for Noxious Grasp. Looks just better to remove Oko/Nissa directly for 2 mana than steal them in 2020.

So which deck would you target with MM?

Reasonable criticisms aren’t what I mean by that. TDS is running negative news stories on how he eats his pizza or how many scoops of ice cream he takes because of your dedication to running 24 hour news cycle of Orange Man Bad. It’s calling Baghdadi an “austere religious leader” in obituary headline because “terrorist in chief” looked too much like a Trump win. It’s physically assaulting people in the streets for wearing MAGA hats, or staging hoax hate crimes about getting assaulted by Trump supporters on your way to Subway at 2am in freezing Chicago winter. It’s when your dislike of the guy moves past reasonable criticism and morphs into hysterical fervor. That’s what I mean by it.

i agree with all that. CNN in unwatchable as is MSNBC. I'm not a trump supporter by any stretch but I can't believe what passes for news

that being said, it does actually bother me how he (and others) eat their pizza, lol.

The only people who eat pizza wrong are peeps who get pineapple on it. Also, I eat pizza wrong

I think when it comes to the news media, it is less a political agenda then they print what sells. They ptint "Ornge man bad" and they get a ton of clicks. The left reads it to reaffirm what they believe, while the right reads it t criticize it. The same happens on the other side. I know someone that is fairly left and they watch Fox news to see what the other side is up to and criticize it.

TBH, this all started with Fox. They proved that being partisan was profitable. Accurate reporting was second to ratings, and since then most other news sources have jumped on the partisan for profit bandwagon.

This is really our fault. The news produces the content that we want. They wouldn't behave that way if it didn't sell. IMO, a solution is to make news non profit, but even that could be abused in some ways.

I think it actually starts with Newt Gingrinch in the 80s. There's a great book called It's Worse than it Looks and it's cowritten by a republican and a democrat (with both sides agreeing the republicans are the main problem), and it traces the start of all of this to Newt when he started the tactic of "throw the bums out" which ended up feeding perfectly the 24 hour news cycle.

Wintervoid, i agree that the solution is to remove profit from the news (but then people will still tune into the most entertaining news for the most part). The McLeir Hour (or whatever it was called) was the best until that guy died. It was on PBS and was fantastic. Now there's a new start-up called THE CORRESPONDENT or somethign like that which is trying to go back to deep journalism. I would encourage that as much as possible.

but yeah, i can't watch the news anymore. it's unwatchable.

Idk, it’s hard to tell motivation. Insider leaks from CNN that came out past month indicate the driving motivation for singular focus is Zucker’s personal vendetta against Trump. But Zucker has previously said in interview when they stop covering Trump the audience goes away. Both could be true. I’m sure individually among staff you have those who are about the rabid hate and those who would prefer different coverage or different tone.

Ultimately, you’re prob onto something re Fox News. When they first got big I used to read their “Fair and Balanced” slogan as ‘fair in balancing’. Obviously they were never Fair and Balanced with coverage (not sure if they still use that slogan?) but other major media skewed left and I thought it was fair enough for one to skew right. I think biggest difference back then was other media that skewed left at least considered the idea of objective journalism a good ideal and would make some effort towards it. I think you might have something there with once Fox showed naked partisanship could be profitable the other major outlets dropped pretense and went full partisan too.

Most disappointing thing to me in media now is seeing journalists abandon the ideal of objective journalism and in some cases publicly decry it. I get that people have biases that can’t completely be removed from their reporting, but that doesn’t mean the ideal is bad and a goal not worth striving for. Compare it to heath - I can never truly be in perfect health, but that doesn’t mean being healthy is not worth striving for, and good diet and exercise are just BS.

I wouldn’t argue this isn’t largely our own fault, even tho it takes two to tango. If an outlet is chasing clicks, We’re the ones clicking. I think the entire media debacle is a combination of factors (old media losing ground to new media, death knell of print, big media losing gate keeper status on spread information with technology enabled rise of independent media, increasingly polarized society, etc). Not sure how this storm will play out in the end.


EDIT: lol, peeps diligently trying to use this thread to talk on topic to subject title. If we continue this discussion, we should move it to off topic thread

https://mtgtop8.com/event?e=23525&d=362725&f=ST Top 5 in the MCQ with 2 Noxious Grasp maindeck lol.

I'm thinking Mass Manipulation would be effective against Simic Food. Both sides ends up with lots of target-able permanents after all, so why not. You can remove Nissa/Oko with Noxious Grasp, but if the game stalls out (my experience is it will), it's just more powerful to steal them.