Diskusjonstråd Se tråd i gallerivisning
-
G
Gjestemedlem
Gjest
Why We Might Be Alone in the Universe
GGjestemedlem
Gjest
Birth of a new news media — the Killer Application for YouTube?
https://medium.com/@bobc.server/bir...e-killer-application-for-youtube-6096e6111f94
Følg noen linker, og bruk litt tid.
---
Dette er faktisk viktig, og vi vil se mer av dette fremover.
Uten empiri er det vel strengt tatt ingen enkel sak å diskreditere noe som helst.
det er i mange tilfeller ikke noe problem. fornuften er mektig!
En ting som mange ser ut til å glemme, er at selv på Jorden kan ikke liv oppstå.
Det høres kanskje ut som en absurd påstand, men husk at alt liv på Jorden tilfører en av de tre hovedgrenene bakterier, arkebakterier (nynorsk: arkar) og eukaryoter. Bakterier og arkar oppstå for ca. 4 mrd. år siden, mens eukaryoter oppsto for ca. 2 mrd. år siden, mest sannsynlig som en sammenslåing av bakterier og arkar.
Det har altså ikke oppstått noen fundamentalt ny livsform på Jorden på flere milliarder år, så det er rimelig å anta at Jorden for 4 mrd. år siden var et dramatisk annerledes sted enn i dag, og at de helt spesiellt faktorer som gjorde det mulig for liv til å oppstå, ikke lenger finnes.
Dersom man skal lete etter andre planeter der liv kan oppstå, er kanskje ikke det lureste å lete etter noe som ligner på Jorden slik vi kjenner den i dag.
Arundhati Roy skriver om India, Modi og Kashmir.
Mye som ikke er nådd oss i våre medier. Lebensraum, segregering, folkemord og ekstrem undertrykkelse av de lavere kastene, samt hinsides forfølgelse av muslimer.
Krutt -- møt -- fyrstikk.
https://caravanmagazine.in/politics/rise-and-rise-of-hindu-nation
Toyota: – Ingen vil ha el-biler ( https://itavisen.no/2019/11/25/toyota-ingen-vil-ha-el-biler/ )
Electrek kan nå nemlig avsløre at bilprodusenten forklarte en rekke journalister bak lukkede dører at ingen ønsker å handle el-biler, samtidig som de skrøt av egen Hybrid-teknologi og hydrogen-satstingen de er mer eller mindre alene om.
Må være på linje med disse;
"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943
"There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977665finger
Gjest
el-bil salget globalt er ikke rare greiene
Det skjer noe nå, men Rom ble ikke bygget på en dag. Se den kurven videre frem mot 2030-40.
Noen ganger ser man ikke skogen for bare trær, heter det. India skulle overta som Asias vekstmaskin, etter Kina. Modi lovde ekplosiv vekst. Den har uteblitt.
Kina og India er ikke like, mens det garantert er "klasseskiller" i Kina, er det institusjonaliserte klasseskiller i India, med en stor del av befolkningen som er systematisk tilsidesatt som mindreverdige, urene og skambelagte. Der kinesisk økonomi tilbød arbeidsplasser til alle som stilte ved fabrikkdøren, er indisk økonomi ute av stand til noe lignende. Og det er nok et problem de vil ha vansker med å løse. De laveste kastene utgjør mange hundre millioner mennesker og er nok presis dem som indisk industri egentlig ville ønsket å rekruttere i. Men disse er også de samme det indiske samfunn har gjort hva det kan for å redusere til ikke-vesener.
Det blir en tøff utfordring.
DN om Indias vekstproblemer. Artikkelen berører ikke utfordringen med kastene, men burde kanskje gjort det.
https://www.dn.no/utenriks/india/na...det-er-ingen-enkel-vei-ut-av-dette/2-1-716034
her er for de som kan billedbøker. fantastiske bilder.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...nspreading-and-melania-dressed-as-a-ukip-moth
... The Guardian er nok ikke for meg som helst leser Donald pocket. Den andre Donalden burde vurdere det samme, dvs lese klassisk litteratur
- Ble medlem
- 02.08.2012
- Innlegg
- 1.126
- Antall liker
- 166
MUNK DEBATE DECEMBER 4, 2019
"The capitalist system is broken. It's time to try something different."
Pro:
Katrina vanden Heuvel
Yanis Varoufakis
Con:
Arthur Brooks
David Brooks
Debatten starter etter ca. 25 min.
Video:
[video]https://munkdebates.com/debates/capitalism[/video]Sist redigert:
Merkelig hvordan hva som skjer i India har gått under radaren. Modi kjører "full-on fascist state transformation".
Vel verdt tiden det tar å lese reportasjen:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/09/blood-and-soil-in-narendra-modis-india?
Har kanskje vært tatt opp før da jeg ikke har lest hele tråden.
Men, forsvinningssaken Anne-Elisabeth Hagen er selvfølgelig tragisk. Nå har politet etterforsket i over 1 år og har brukt og bruker enorme ressurser på denne saken. Da spør jeg om politiet hadde gått like tungt inn om saken hadde dreid seg om «den vanlige kvinne» i motsetning til en person fra det øverste samfunnslag? Eller hadde saken da vært henlagt for lenge siden?
- Ble medlem
- 19.09.2014
- Innlegg
- 21.979
- Antall liker
- 14.551
Generelt i Norge henlegges drapssaker i praksis aldri. Normalt løses de relativt raskt siden det nesten alltid er noen i nær relasjon til vedkommende, men det er nok av eksempler som har pågått veldig, veldig lenge. Intensiteten går selvsagt ned etter en stund, men henleggelse? Njet.
Eksempelvis ble Birgitte Thengs ble funnet drept i mai 1995 - i 2016 ble det besluttet å se på den på nytt for ørtende gang.
Dette er gull og platina. Grundig artikkel om Putins "regissør", mannen som har fått ansvar for å dramatisere det nye Stor-Russland, Konstantin Ernst.
Og om man ikke vil lese, kan man lytte til artikkelen.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2019/12/16/the-kremlins-creative-directorGGjestemedlem
Gjest
Denne er litt viktig.
"Labour’s ruling elite forgot that parties of the left are held to a higher standard than those committed to the status quo: to change people’s lives and spend their money, first you must win their trust. That obligation is even spelled out in Labour’s constitution, which insists that “Labour seeks the trust of the people to govern.” Instead, the leadership clique dragged around their 1970s baggage and arcane ideological obsessions – the antisemitism arose not by accident, but as the inevitable outgrowth of a strain of left conspiracist thinking – that marked them out as cranks, unfit to run the country."
.. dette er ikke Spiked eller Spectator lenger men selveste The Guardian... Bibelen for britisk venstreside.
--
This is a repudiation of Corbynism. Labour needs to ditch the politics of the sect
We can skip the first stage of grief. A result like this leaves no room for denial. Let’s move instead to the next stage: anger. We can feel a deep and bitter fury at what five more years of Boris Johnson will mean – at what his government, armed with such a mandate, will do. It will allow him to pursue a hard Brexit, to cosy up to Donald Trump and to trample on our democratic norms and judicial restraints. It will risk the union. It will allow him to ignore the poorest and most vulnerable, the children going to school hungry, to abandon the people whose lives and communities have been made thin by a lost decade of austerity and shrunken services – a decade that will now stretch, like a prison sentence, to 15 years.
We can be angry at the Tories for winning this election, but we must feel an equal rage for the people who let them do it. I am speaking of those who led the main party of opposition down a blind alley that ended in Labour’s worst election performance since the 1930s – a performance that broke new records for failure. Look upon the scale of that calamity: to lose seats to a government in power for nine lean years, a government seeking a fourth term that is almost never granted, a cruel government so divided it purged two former chancellors and some of its best-known MPs, led by a documented liar and fraud. A half-functioning opposition party would have wiped the floor with this Tory party. Instead, Labour was crushed by it.
The leadership’s defenders wasted no time in blaming it all on Brexit. To be sure, Brexit has convulsed our politics and made Labour’s electoral coalition perilously hard to hold together. But pause before declaring that this was the Brexit election: in fact, the NHS overtook Brexit as voters’ top concern. The trouble was, voters trusted Johnson on the NHS more than they trusted Jeremy Corbyn. You read that right.
Which brings us to a core point that those culpable for this disaster would rather you didn’t contemplate. Like anyone who travelled the country and listened to voters, candidates and canvassers, I heard with my own ears the Labour voters who said they couldn’t back the party this time, not because of Brexit but because of Corbyn. Indeed, Brexit was often cited not for its own sake – little of this campaign was spent debating customs zones and trade agreements – but rather for its confirmation of their view that Corbyn was irredeemably “weak”.
This problem did not wait until the election to reveal itself. The polling data was clear and voluminous on this point long before the election. Corbyn is the most unpopular opposition leader since records began. And though we may not like it, we know that voters’ assessment of the party leaders plays a huge part in their decision.
Labour knew it and Corbyn knew it. Those appalling numbers were not state secrets. His admirers always describe him as a selfless, almost saintly man, devoid of ego. So why didn’t he take one look at his own ratings and say, “I am clearly a drag on this party’s prospects. Those who need a Labour government have a better chance of getting one if I step aside.” Not a chance.
Corbyn’s own vanity was too great for him even to consider such an act of self-sacrifice. Instead he was encouraged by his own devoted legions of supporters, for whom the idea of a change of leader was heresy. In their mind, it was better to lose under Corbyn than to have a shot at winning with someone – anyone – else.
Perhaps it was too much to ask that he make way for a candidate less sure to repel the electorate. But he made this a presidential campaign, his face everywhere, other Labour heavyweights banished from the airwaves. In their place were factionally approved nodding dogs such as Richard Burgon. Never mind that they were bound to be useless, what mattered was that they were loyal to the ruling clique.
Of course, this relates not just to Corbyn but Corbynism. For the last four years, Labour has been in thrall to the notion that it’s better to have a manifesto you can feel proud of, a programme that calls itself radical, than to devise one that might have a chance of winning. Some even argued that, “win or lose”, Corbyn achieved much simply by offering a genuinely socialist plan – in contrast with Labour’s 1997 offer, which was so boringly modest and incremental.
Well, guess what. Labour’s “radical” manifesto of 2019 achieved precisely nothing. Not one proposal in it will be implemented, not one pound in it will be spent. It is worthless. And if judged not by the academic standard of “expanding the discourse”, but by the hard, practical measure of improving actual people’s actual lives, those hate figures of Corbynism – Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – achieved more in four hours than Corbyn achieved in four years. Why? Because they did what it took to win power.
That’s what a political party is for. It’s not a hobby; it’s not a pressure group that exists to open the Overton window a little wider; it’s not an association for making friends or hosting stimulating conversations and seminars; it’s not “a 30-year project”. Its purpose is to win and exercise power in the here and now. It is either a plausible vehicle for government or it is nothing.
That was beyond the reach of the faction ruling Labour. Not for them the electoral basics of reassurance and credibility. They came up with a manifesto more stuffed with giveaways than Santa’s grotto, and about as believable. The voter who quite liked the extra sugar in their tea represented by, say, free tuition fees, gagged when the sweetener of discounted rail fares, Waspi compensation, free broadband and a promised £6,700 a year to every family were all spooned into the cup.
Labour’s ruling elite forgot that parties of the left are held to a higher standard than those committed to the status quo: to change people’s lives and spend their money, first you must win their trust. That obligation is even spelled out in Labour’s constitution, which insists that “Labour seeks the trust of the people to govern.” Instead, the leadership clique dragged around their 1970s baggage and arcane ideological obsessions – the antisemitism arose not by accident, but as the inevitable outgrowth of a strain of left conspiracist thinking – that marked them out as cranks, unfit to run the country.
To warn of this danger and sound the alarm was to be instantly howled down as a Blairite, a centrist, a red Tory. On social media, a group of outriders policed the conversation, unleashing a pile-on of mockery and denunciation on anyone guilty of pointing out that the emperor seemed to be unnervingly lacking in clothes. (Then they affected surprise when those they’d told to “fuck off and join the Tories” didn’t come running to help.)
The tragedy of this is measured in the idealistic young volunteers who signed up for a new and necessary movement in 2015, but whose faith was abused by a clique of hard-left sectarian dinosaurs – and, most important, it is measured in the millions who needed a social democratic government and now won’t get one.
The question now is, how long will it take to draw the obvious conclusion? You might have thought that the experience of the 1980s – four defeats in a row, followed by a march towards electability – had been education enough. We’d seen this movie before but, it seems, we needed to see it all over again.
We’ll have a clue whether it’ll take a fifth – or sixth – defeat for the penny to drop when Labour selects a new leader. Will it look for someone who ticks all the ideological boxes, who’s as sound and “radical” as Corbyn, or will it look for someone who can win?
Underneath that is a larger question: are you in politics to control the Labour party, or to win power? If the honest answer is the former, then get out of the way. Go back to your student unions and your pub meetings and give Labour back to those who seek the power of government – and are fit to wield it.
den frivillige overvåkningen
ONE NATION, TRACKED
AN INVESTIGATION INTO THE SMARTPHONE TRACKING INDUSTRY FROM TIMES OPINION
THE DATA REVIEWED BY TIMES OPINION didn’t come from a telecom or giant tech company, nor did it come from a governmental surveillance operation. It originated from a location data company, one of dozens quietly collecting precise movements using software slipped onto mobile phone apps. You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies — and yet to anyone who has access to this data, your life is an open book. They can see the places you go every moment of the day, whom you meet with or spend the night with, where you pray, whether you visit a methadone clinic, a psychiatrist’s office or a massage parlor.
[…]
Within America’s own representative democracy, citizens would surely rise up in outrage if the government attempted to mandate that every person above the age of 12 carry a tracking device that revealed their location 24 hours a day. Yet, in the decade since Apple’s App Store was created, Americans have, app by app, consented to just such a system run by private companies.Sist redigert:
- Ble medlem
- 19.09.2014
- Innlegg
- 21.979
- Antall liker
- 14.551
Denne er ganske fiffig:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/is-inequality-inevitable/
Noen matematikere har studert transaksjoner og gjør en ganske overbevisende case for at det nærmest er en naturtilstand at noen ender opp med veldig mye og andre med lite, men at fenomenet kan begrenses med ymse former for skattlegging.
Innen rådende øknomisk teori er eksempelvis handel noe som kun skjer dersom begge parter mener å komme bedre ut enn før. Det er en fascinerende tanke siden den så åpenbart er feil: Vi har vel alle en eller annen gang betalt X for en vare man aldri bruker og etter å ha hatt den liggende i skapet i årevis blir den enten gitt bort eller solgt på finn.no for en brøkdel av betalt pris. Eller med andre ord en enorm feilvurdering av verdi for kjøperen.
The artifacts that persist in my memory, the way a bright flash does when you close your eyes, are the photographs of lynchings. But it’s not the burned, mutilated bodies that stick with me. It’s the faces of the white men in the crowd. There’s the photo of the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Indiana in 1930, in which a white man can be seen grinning at the camera as he tenderly holds the hand of his wife or girlfriend. There’s the undated photo from Duluth, Minnesota, in which grinning white men stand next to the mutilated, half-naked bodies of two men lashed to a post in the street—one of the white men is straining to get into the picture, his smile cutting from ear to ear. There’s the photo of a crowd of white men huddled behind the smoldering corpse of a man burned to death; one of them is wearing a smart suit, a fedora hat, and a bright smile.
Their names have mostly been lost to time. But these grinning men were someone’s brother, son, husband, father. They were human beings, people who took immense pleasure in the utter cruelty of torturing others to death—and were so proud of doing so that they posed for photographs with their handiwork, jostling to ensure they caught the eye of the lens, so that the world would know they’d been there. Their cruelty made them feel good, it made them feel proud, it made them feel happy. And it made them feel closer to one another.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2018/10/the-cruelty-is-the-point/572104/SSlubbert
Gjest
Siden det er så mye katastrofeonani i media og samfunnsdebatten:
2010 – 2020. Det beste tiår i menneskehetens historie
Med tanke på at det i år er 75 år siden slutten på WWII så er det vel verdt å lese hele Putins historiefortelling fra det uformelle CIS toppmøtet i St Petersburg rett før jul.
Dette sitter dypt hos Putin. Historiefortellingen om den Store Patriotiske Krigen var uten sammenlikning det viktigste limet gjennom 35 års forsøk på å konstruere en identitet som homo sovjeticus, inklusive for balterne.
For gjengen rundt bordet i St Petersburg, med mulig unntak av Pashinyan, har dette vært en like ubestridt barnelærdom som at Kosovo er Jerusalem for serberne.
Men i denne talen går Putin lengre enn hva han selv har etablert som offisiell historisk doktrine på saken, nemlig at det ikke kan stilles spørsmål ved Den Røde Armes totale og moralske seier over Nazi-Tyskland (som i den ulovlige annektering av de tre baltiske land).
ingen grunn til å sutre!
So in 2016, as another presidential election approached, Americans were able to claim the following distinctions:
• One in six were taking prescription psychiatric drugs such as antidepressants or anti-anxiety meds.
• More than 16 million adults and more than 3 million adolescents were suffering from significant depression.
• More than 1.9 million Americans were regularly using cocaine, with a half million hooked on heroin and 700,000 on methamphetamine.
• That year opioid overdoses killed 46,000, a new record.
• Binge drinking had reached epidemic proportions, with one in six US adults binge drinking several times a month and consuming seven drinks per binge; according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, bingeing was especially common among younger and more affluent Americans.
• Nearly 45,000 were taking their own lives annually, the national suicide rate increased by 24% since 1999; within the previous decade the suicide rate of teenage girls had doubled and of boys had jumped by 40%.
• Smartphone addiction was joining more traditional compulsions, with the average person checking their smartphone 110 times a day, impelled by Fomo – a fear of missing out.
• Compulsive-buying syndrome, AKA shopping addiction, afflicted an estimated 6% of the population; a comparable number were compulsive hoarders.
• On a daily basis, 11 million Americans, mostly women, struggled with eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia, while roughly 40% of adults and nearly 19% of children and adolescents were obese.
• Cosmetic surgeons were performing more than 17m procedures annually, with buttock augmentation and labiaplasty enjoying a particular spike in popularity.
• Forty-million Americans were regularly visiting online porn sites.
• The number of Americans infected with sexually transmitted diseases in 2016 surpassed 2 million, according to the CDC, “the highest number ever”.
• An estimated 24.7 million children were growing up in fatherless households, with such children substantially more likely to drop out of school, abuse drugs and alcohol and kill themselves; girls raised without a father present were four times more likely to get pregnant as teenagers.
• Although difficult to quantify with precision, 676,000 American children in 2016 were victims of abuse or neglect.
• Exercising their right to choose, American women were terminating around 650,000 unwanted pregnancies each year, despite the widespread availability of contraceptives.
• Exercising their right to bear arms, Americans had accumulated more than 40% of the planet’s small arms; the US arsenal in private hands was larger than that of the next 25 countries combined.
• Meanwhile, more than 33,000 Americans were being killed in firearms-related incidents annually.
• Year in and year out, the US had the world’s highest incarceration rate, no other developed nation coming anywhere close.
•Polling data showed that social trust – how Americans felt about government institutions and their fellow citizens – had sunk to an all-time low. Perhaps for that reason, when it came to voting, most Americans couldn’t be bothered; voter turnout in the US lagged behind that of most other developed countries.
• In an increasingly networked society, with two-thirds of Americans on Facebook, chronic loneliness afflicted a large portion of the population.
• In a phenomenon described as “deaths by despair”, the life expectancy of white working-class American males was dropping, a trend without historical precedent.
• The nation’s birthrate had fallen below the rate needed to sustain a stable overall population; America had ceased to reproduce itself.
• Not to be overlooked, in their pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, Americans were polluting, wasting food and generating trash with abandon, leading the world in each category.
Freedom without constraints: how the US squandered its cold war victorySSlubbert
Gjest
Sju enheter er "binge drinking" og det er et problem at folk besøker pornosider på internett? Hvem skrev den artikkelen der, Kjell Ingolf Ropstad?
Du vet jo at det folket der anser Bud for å være øl også?
For å gjenta ( for ørtende gang! ) det min russiske kompis sa om Bud:
"What is the similarity between Budweiser and making love in a canoe?
Both are fucking close to water!"
Nå må det jo tillegges at russerne har et utmerket øl som heter "Baltika". Smaker godt og fås i varianter med rimelig høy alkoholstyrke.
- Ble medlem
- 19.09.2014
- Innlegg
- 21.979
- Antall liker
- 14.551
Amerikansk bud er da øl. Ikke spesielt spennende og ikke særlig smak i, men det er fordi bryggeriet vil at den skal smake akkurat som den gjør. Ikke fordi de ikke vet hvordan de skal lage noe som smaker mer.
Den smaker sånn ca akkurat som en American Pale Lager skal smake. For øvrig har den 5% alkoholstyrke i USA så den er uansett sterkere enn norsk industripils.
Hva sier det evt om norske pilsdrikkere? Er de enda mer pinglete enn amerikanere som drikker Bud? Er det da "funcking underwater" å drikke Ringnes, Hansa, Frydelund, Dahls og alt det andre folk heller i seg her i landet ?
Lyttet til en god diskusjon mellom flere Russland-eksperter om hvordan Putin har sørget for å flytte oppmerksomheten til "Den store patriotiske krigen" og vekk fra Revolusjonen(e) som styrtet Tsarveldet. Påstanden i ordvekslingen var at dette var helt bevisst et forsøk på å få folkets oppmerksomhet på ytre fiender og vekk fra oligarker som utbytter landet slik aristokratene og tsaren en gang gjorde.
Samt dette med Stalin, egg og omelett.
Ikke nødvendig å lage å så mye oppstyr rundt de 800.000 Stalin fikk henrettet, og det er bare de offisielle, for ikke å snakke om alle ukrainerne som røk med i holodomoren og Vinnytsa, en håndfull millioner selveiende bønder og noen skarve titalls tusen polske offiserer i Katyn.GGjestemedlem
Gjest
Satire is not ‘fake news’
Babylon Bee editor Kyle Mann on his bizarre battle with the fact-checkers.
https://www.spiked-online.com/2020/01/10/satire-is-not-fake-news/
The Babylon Bee is a major internet phenomenon. The satirical site is known for its often outrageous headlines that seem to push all the right buttons – provoking hilarity and outrage in equal measure.
But for some, it is no laughing matter. We live in a world of rampant ‘disinformation’ and ‘fake news’, apparently. And the poor, defenceless, gullible populace cannot tell truth from lie – hence the recent ballot-box upsets across the West.
Only a few months after the Babylon Bee was launched, the fact-checking site Snopes branded it a ‘fake-news site’. Ever since, Snopes has provided seemingly earnest fact-checks on scores of Bee headlines, including one about whether Democrats really asked Brett Kavanaugh to ‘submit to a DNA test to prove he’s not actually Hitler’.
Snopes even contacted the White House when Donald Trump retweeted a Bee article. It was headlined ‘House Dems unveil surefire plan to get Trump re-elected’. The ‘plan’ was to ‘unveil these articles of impeachment, which clearly lay out the undeniable fact that [Democrats] will not win the White House back next year’. It was clearly satire. But one of Snopes’ fact-checks suggested that Babylon Bee had been deliberately deceptive in its output.
Recently, a CNN reporter covering ‘disinformation’ took umbrage at a Bee article headlined ‘Democrats call for flags to be flown at half-mast to grieve death of Soleimani’. ‘A lot of people sharing this “satirical” story on Facebook don’t know it is satire’, he complained.
So, can satire survive the fake-news panic? spiked caught up with Kyle Mann, editor of the Babylon Bee, to find out more.
spiked: What is it like to be accused of spreading disinformation?
Kyle Mann: It’s scary. You have people who see themselves as gatekeepers of information and arbiters of truth saying, ‘This is fake news. This is not fake news.’ They’re trying to tell people what’s real and what’s not. They have accused us of doing something insidious and of intentionally trying to deceive people. This is really concerning, especially in the internet age when, at the click of a button, your entire audience can be shut off by the social-media companies.
On the one hand, it’s funny to us. We’re just guys making jokes, and it’s almost a badge of honour to be attacked or ‘fact-checked’. But on the other hand, it presents a real threat to our business.
For us, it’s very clear – you click on our website and there are so many over-the-top articles that it’s obviously satire. People have been misunderstanding satire for hundreds of years and they will continue to misunderstand satire for hundreds of years to come. But our intent is never to deceive people.
spiked: Why is satire so important?
Mann: We believe that satire is one of the most effective means of communicating the truth. Satire has only become more effective really in the internet age because we are bathed in so much information and so many opinion pieces and articles that are skewed one way or the other. When you stumble across a satirical headline that cuts through all of that – maybe it makes a point, maybe it just makes you laugh, maybe it does a little bit of both – we’ve accomplished something. Sometimes a few words of satire can cut to the heart of a matter a lot more effectively than a 3,000-word think piece on a real news site. We see our satire communicating truth in an age of relativism, and in an age in which people don’t necessarily believe there is truth anymore.
spiked: Has the bias in mainstream comedy contributed to people misunderstanding your satire?
Mann: Yes, I think that’s exactly it. I’m willing to give people the benefit of the doubt, and I’m willing to say that when Snopes fact-checks us, it’s because there are some people who have genuinely been confused, and that’s fine. We were never really concerned by it until we were accused of intentionally deceiving people.
Because people expect comedy to go one way, when it points the other way, people on the left get very confused. They see that it’s funny and clever but think that there must be ulterior motives because comedy is supposed to be progressive. We target all sides, and that definitely confuses some people.
spiked: Why is the left providing such rich pickings for your satire?
Mann: The easiest targets are the people who can’t laugh at themselves. When you’re at a party and people are making jokes, the guy sitting there crossing his arms and scowling saying, ‘That’s not funny, you can’t make fun of that’, is obviously the easiest target. We’re a Christian website. And Christians used to be the ones who said, ‘You can’t joke about those things’. And so for the past 50 years, we’ve been the target. A lot of us have taken this with good humour, and it’s all in good fun. But now, because there is so much religious zeal on the left, they are the ones who are saying, ‘You can’t make fun of that’.
spiked: Has the absurdity of Donald Trump been good or bad for satire?
Mann: You’d be surprised how hard it is to do good satire on Trump because he is such a parody anyway. The reason a lot of comedy on the left has suffered in the Trump era is that comedians always try to make the same point about Trump. It’s just ‘Trump is bad, Trump is bad’. We get it.
When we do pieces on Trump, we try to roll with his personality. We see him as a kind of Michael Scott character, from the American Office. He has this complete overconfidence and yet there is a real vulnerability to him. He is obviously very insecure. I think when you can play with those elements instead of just saying ‘Trump is bad’, that kind of comedy is far superior.
spiked: Babylon Bee started off producing Christian satire. What’s behind that history?
Mann: We launched the site in 2016. We mostly did articles about church culture, and we still do a lot of it. But we obviously also filled a void with our satire of current events and politics. And that stuff has taken off a lot.
The reason we did Christian satire was that Christian comedy has typically been very tame and very safe. Christian comedians would make light-hearted jokes about church or this or that, and it would always end in a cheesy, ‘come to Jesus’ moment.
At Babylon Bee, we wanted to do dry satire about the church. It made a point sometimes, and other times it just lobbed a grenade in there so that we could watch the carnage. The idea was to do hard-hitting Christian satire that made fun of the many flaws of the American church – like its big consumer model and the big circus it has become. For a lot of Christians, it felt like this was comedy about us, that understands us, and that doesn’t hate us. That was a big element. And I think we’ve kind of been able successfully to transfer that kind of tone over to our political satire.
Kyle Mann was talking to Fraser Myers. -
Laster inn…
Diskusjonstråd Se tråd i gallerivisning
-
Laster inn…