Moonbox

CNN reported on claims that Jussie Smollet made. They reported on his story of what happened to him, which is all they can really do and then they roasted him after it turned out HE made it all up. I'm right with you in that I think CNN (and other outlets) were overly quick to grab on to this story and promote it, but this is an issue of editorial bias. They reported the information they had and were clear about where it came from. Misinformation is something altogether different. This is the deliberate spread of fake stories, claims and theories in an attempt to persuade (primarily) gullible people. The Seth Rich conspiracy falls into that category. There was no basis for the story whatsoever. It came out of thin air. Going back to Facebook and other social media, the insidious thing about these platforms is how they can be so successfully micro-targeted towards dumb and ignorant people and how there's no accountability for it. At least Fox News or CNN can be sued for deliberately promoting slander/libel. When a purpose-built shadow-corp is promoting conspiracies on Facebook, nobody can do much about it. Unfortunately there are a lot of uneducated and loudly opinionated fools that get their news from Facebook, so there's an obvious problem there.

I know that you don't like it, and not that it matters to you but neither do I. I'll even agree with you that our oil sands are an important part of the Canadian economy and should be promoted and fought for rather than stonewalled at every opportunity. That being said, you still seem to exaggerate its importance, downplay the importance of other sectors, all while nattering about catastrophic scenarios that will never come to pass and not understanding how the economy even works in the first place. Though I don't think Trudeau has done enough to protect and promote the Alberta oil sands, he's hardly in the same camp as May, Singh and Blanchet. Also I live in Ontario so I know well the folly of diving head first into the "green" economy. IF the oil sands all of the sudden just shut down...for some reason....which they wouldn't. Your doom and gloom scenario is nonsense. We didn't hear much about Seth Rich after the initial week before Fox had to retract the story for the same reason that we didn't hear about how Trump ordered Epstein murdered to make sure he didn't reveal their pedophile ring. It was because it was made up - a 100% fabrication. I don't even watch CNN, but that's your fall-back argument for pretty much anything/everything. NO! FAKE NEWS! FAKE NEWS! YOU'RE A LEFTY! MSM DEEP STATE! FAKE NEWS! The funny part about Seth Rich conspiracy was that literally the whole conspiracy is made up. He didn't die at an "opportune time", because he wasn't involved in the DNC leaks in the first place. That part was made up, and so the whole story makes no sense. You WANT it to be real, and so you'll twist your brain into a pretzel making it so.

and I think that the efforts have been about ridding the platform of fake news and propaganda. It's one thing to post a link to an actual news article and give your opinion (though it's stupid and pointless most of the time), it's another thing altogether to be promoting and spreading disinformation. The article you're linking is hardly the zinger you think it is... frankly it's quite poor. It's little more than a whiny conservative opinion piece making huge leaps of logic in all directions. Reddit is a cesspool of vitriol and barely moderated at all. You could jump into Star Wars subreddit and find idiots saying the worst things imaginable to each other because they disagree on whether Rey should have ended up with Fyn or Kylo Ren.

I think the hubub about Facebook is that it is banning/censoring accounts for repeating exactly what Trump says, though Trump himself isn't getting the same censorship. It's a curious look and there's definitely some selectivity and hypocrisy at work...or just haphazard enforcement. Regardless, twitter and facebook etc are not the same thing as news media. The distinction lies in "social" part. They're not reporting the news. They're just a platform that allows people/organizations to communicate. There's a huge difference, I would think, between reporting that something bad happened or that something dumb was uttered (usually with context), with actually promoting violence or disseminating dumb/hateful speech. I suppose you see a problem with the text in bold? It's pretty obvious why it's there. It's to deter lame attempts at moral equivalence, ie.. "The gay, black muslims are harassing me because just because I'm a white, heterosexual Anglo-Saxon male!" They're trying to nip that sort of nonsense in the bud, but it's not carte-blanche for black gay muslims to tell the guy he should hang himself and that they're going to eat his children.

What's your point? That news media reports on prominent figures saying stupid stuff? No doubt. What does that have to do with Twitter or Facebook? It's not a "right" to post on any of those sites, and they all have codes of conduct. That's a millennia-long tradition of idiots piling on to a wounded and unfortunate soul via mob or online anonymity. I'd say it's akin to bullying, but unless you have a really good one-liner to report, it's likely that most of the miscreants are going to just be able to keep trolling. That's why there's so many loud anti-SJW boycotts on social media, and why celebrities like Brie Larson get lambasted for holding opinions. It works both ways. I don't know the whole story and that seems like a stretch to ban him for that, but then I don't know what sort of history he has of posting. I do think he was antagonistic and dumb about it, but like you say the Left is all about that as well.

Like Donald Trump's threats of violence against protesters? That wasn't very hard. I can agree with that. As you'll likely remember (from this thread) I'm strongly against the sort of behavior you're talking about and think the "politically correct" movement has gone way too far, but then I also think there's a key piece you're missing. Racist, homophobic and threatening comments are really low-hanging fruit. There's a pretty clear demarcation for racist/homophobic content and threats of violence. JK Rowling doesn't get banned for poking/questioning transgender definitions, but she probably would if she called them freaks or something like that. The far-right tends to have very poor judgment on this sort of content.

Except I never said that at all. I tried to explain how badly you misunderstand what GDP actually measures, why it's an important statistic, and why even something like nail salons are worth measuring. You seemed to be under the assumption that all that matters in the economy is how much stuff we dig out of the ground and sell abroad - that that's the only way to generate wealth. It's demonstrably false, and I even gave you REALLY dumbed-down examples to show why it's wrong. Predictably, you just bulled through your own ignorance and kept repeating your one-liners. Nail salons are counted in GDP! GDP is MSM fake news! Every murder is worth investigating. Instead of reporting on that investigation, however, Fox News ran with a 100% unverified and completely made up conspiracy theory that Hilary had him assassinated. The investigation immediately debunked that theory and Fox was forced to retract the story and are being sued for it. The mental gymnastics you're doing to make things fit your perspective are dumbfounding. Fox News gets caught reporting on a completely made up story, and you spectacularly manage to twist your brain into believing that it's the democracts, or CNN that did something wrong. As always, thanks for the laughs.

Where are you? Fort Mac? Sadly it's not coming back anytime soon over there. Almost all of them go to the big cities - Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver. The real-estate markets in Toronto and Vancouver (surrounding areas as well) have been a steadily growing joke for about 10 years now, with cheap lending making it cheap to borrow and easier to qualify for mortgages, thus increasing demand, thus increasing prices. Those steadily increasing prices encourage people to borrow to buy a rental home for investment purposes, and when housing prices continue to climb, overseas money starts dumping in. You end up with loads and loads of foreign-owned condos, Airbnb's and even just straight-up empty houses all for the sake of speculative investing. At this point I'd argue that housing prices have fundamentally detached from at-home economics, with it being almost impossible for the average single Canadian to buy in these regions. Housing, after all, is meant to be lived in, but we have a real problem on our hands when middle-class Canadians are priced out altogether. I must admit to a bit of shadenfreude, however, as the greed and speculation seems to be coming home to roost. 50% of GTA condo-rentals were already in the red even back in 2018. With the coronavirus and a recession on our hands, laid off workers are moving in with family and rentals are going vacant. This will ripple out

Maxine's not a serious contender, or even a credible politician. His poor judgment has been highlighted too many times over the years for Canadians to really trust him. It's funny that you seem to think you're the arbiter of what is and what isn't a "true conservative". Yeah nobody's under any illusion that you'll consider the facts fairly or keep an open mind. Don't worry.

The bar is pretty low. There is a ton of truly stupid crap that stays up there. People (especially the far right) have this image that Facebook and Twitter etc are patrolling for any/all right-of-centre posts and scrubbing them, when that's not the case at all. It's when it's blatant misinformation, or hateful or even worse inciting/encouraging violence etc. In that you're at least correct. The left is no better in most cases - the only difference being that they seem to be hyper-sensitive about anyone's feelings getting hurt and therefore don't say as much inflammatory stuff. Folks think that it's Google or Twitter that's "shaping" their social media experiences when realistically it's actually your own habits and behaviors online that are getting fed back to you. You click on article links where you think you'll agree with the title. You unfollow people whose worldview you don't agree with. Your social media is shaped by your own lack of proactivity and open-mindedness, not by Bezos or Zuckerberg or quantum computers and such nonsense.

It's silenced and de-platformed by Google, Facebook and Twitter when it's saying stupid and ignorant crap, when it's blatantly lying, or when it's caustic and inflammatory. I can't stand Fox News but it still pops up regularly on my news feed because I have some Jewish friends that love to repost it.

So...you do realize how tongue-in-cheek this video is, right?

This is a kindergarten response. You've demonstrated you're entirely clueless on economics, and your response is "NO YOU ARE" followed by "I don't take kindly to ur big-city learnin' words!" My background, education and profession form the basis of my understanding on the topic. You have none. You know nothing about it. Every thought you utter on the topic is embarrassingly uninformed and amounts to little more than clueless one-liners. It doesn't matter what I reference. In your small little world, everything that goes against your fantasy-reality is blithely excused for being "minor" or "a lie" or "MSM fake news". It's a limp and pathetic mental crutch that leaves no room for intelligent debate, but you can use it on LITERALLY anything. Though it fails spectacularly to convince anyone else, it does help you make sense of the world and how everything you see and hear doesn't match up with your world view. I mean you ACTUALLY believe the Seth Rich conspiracy. It's some of the dumbest, most idiotic and poorly-sourced BS that's ever come out of Fox News, and you're telling us there's "video footage" of Hilary doing it herself? Really? Did you read that on 8chan, or from Q-anon? Fox News has retracted the story and are fighting a lawsuit on it, but please don't let those facts jar you out of your comforting version of reality. As for Rebel Media, no, it does not do anything important, and it does not serve any purpose other than to reassure people like you into thinking that you're less ignorant than you really are.

How do you even take yourself seriously saying that after you just got done calling me a chihuahua? Nobody said that, but it is your fault that you loudly and angrily express opinions on topics you're sublimely ignorant and uneducated on - like economics. That you don't even know what any of this stuff is just further demonstrates your ignorance. Look it up - it's funny. That's what Fox News is all about. Hilary also had nothing to do with the birther conspiracy. There's zero evidence of that. There's plenty of evidence, however, that Donald Trump promoted the conspiracy with help from Fox News, and then hilariously tried to blame it on Hilary after it was resoundingly debunked. Not really, because the measures turned out to not be ridiculous. From the very beginning, Carlson and Fox News have been downplaying the virus and telling viewers what they want to hear "There taking away ur freeedom - the virus is just hysteria" and then when it blows up in their face they pretend they've been taking it seriously the whole time. The Seth Rich conspiracy doesn't compare? Fox News peddling an absolutely baseless theory that the Clinton campaign assassinated him doesn't compare? Oookay. I think CNN sort of operates as a counterpoint to Fox News - both are extremely biased and lack credibility, regularly fail fact-checks and have histories of retracting statements and coverage. I don't have much of an opinion on CTV. I don't really pay attention to it. As for Rebel Media, it fails to even be as serious at Fox News. It's a rinky-dink clown show with a bunch of caustic morons that spend their time promoting opinions that its clueless fringe viewers already hold. It serves no purpose other than to validate you and let you drink your own bathwater.

Are you trying to say that CNN is combing through video swathes of video footage of police brutality, and saying, "Nah man, nobody cares about the white guy. Editor says just black victims." ? You seem to be arguing that wrongful police killings of white folk somehow weakens or disproves the current environment of protest. I'd argue the opposite - that all of the white people wrongfully killed just serves as further evidence of problems with our police systems. On the one hand I agree with some of what you're saying - the part about how much crime is disproportionately caused by black people and how that's reflected in the statistics. I'd even agree that the media is paying a disproportionate amount of attention to black victims specifically, and perhaps pushing the general picture that police departments are all racist. On the other hand, I think that this is arguing around the underlying issue - that there's very little accountability and transparency within the police departments (especially in the US) and that this (along with training and procedures) is in sore need of reform. I think your scenario is a disjunctive premise - all black and white. Either we just accept things as they are, or we enter a cycle of police-bashing, punitive cost-cutting and police disillusionment that eventually leads to limp law-enforcement and anarchy. In reality, there's a huge gray area in between. Let's also not forget the attractiveness of a $90,000/y salary, top-shelf benefits, early retirement and a golden pension. It seems its even easier to dismiss the implications of these policies. Redlining held generations of black folk back from home ownership, which ruled out the generation of George Floyd's parents (and their parents before that) from the same sort of economic mobility that most Americans had. I don't think I need to say this and you probably already know it, but there's a reason that minorities white-wash their resumes when applying for jobs. They statistically get more interviews as a result. There's no better example of "systemic racism" than that. As for the Indian Act...that's something that I'd likely fall in line with you on. Not really. He pointed out some potential fallacies or double-standards that may exist in the debate, but hardly disqualified the argument. He's a smart, educated guy and I actually like a lot of what he's saying, but the main point from what I could gather was that it's a much more nuanced topic than people like to believe. I agree.

You hear crickets because you choose to. Loud and angry nattering is unfortunately not a substitute for intelligent debate, but I think that point's lost on you. You're hilariously ignorant and uninformed on most of the topics you choose to rant about (like that nonsense about Canada's economy earlier in this thread) but nobody here has a chance to convince you otherwise. If you were even remotely open-minded and willing/capable to review outside information, you could do a quick search and very easily find a long list of debunked lies, retracted statements, and absurdly stupid reporting from current Fox News anchors. My favorites were Hannity's attempt at comedy over Obama's choice of mustard (he was getting tired of being mocked by late-night hosts, I think), the birther conspiracy, or of course the "terrorist fist-bump". If you take that sort of nonsense seriously, what hope is there for you to be reasonable here? As late as June 10, Tucker Carlson was blathering about how lockdown measures weren't necessary and that states who re-opened quickly weren't seeing their cases explode. How's that turned out for him? Mhmmm.... Anyways, I suppose it doesn't matter that I've voted conservative in probably 90% of Ontario and Federal elections. You've already determined I'm a leftist chihuahua so I don't really know where we go from here. Thanks for chuckles.

Except the media isn't solely focused on white cop vs black suspect violence. They're focused on police violence, and most (but not all) of the videos that have come out and we're actually seeing are against black folk. It's pretty silly to say that just because there weren't riots for Justine back in 2017, that this is somehow "proof" that the media is painting an unfair picture. People of all races are outraged by the videos we're seeing, and until we saw them we didn't actually realize how bad things were. The real kicker, and the craziest part about your backwards argument is that the current environment of protest and the resulting changes we'll see as a result will benefit ALL races. When police are properly held accountable for their actions, are forced to submit to public transparency and oversight and the culture of covering for each others' abuses is curbed, white chicks like Justine are going to be safer too. Where? In Canada? There were 235 in the US last year. It's easy to point to. Go google the term "Redlining". I'll do you a courtesy and give you a quick synopsis in case you don't want to read a whole article. It was an official practice across the USA to categorize neighborhoods and districts as desirable or undesirable places for investment, with minority inner-city neighborhoods predominantly in the lowest categories. What was the effect? Municipalities used it to decide where they were going to invest public funds (schools, infrastructure etc) and banks and insurers used the data to make lending decisions. As a result, generations of black people in the USA were declined for loans because of where they lived, when less qualified white folk would get approved. For decades, qualified black folk couldn't buy homes because of where they lived and though it was never explicitly because "you're black" it was because "you're from a bad neighborhood that happens to be black." We can ask the Natives in Canada how not being able to own real estate or property affects their economic mobility. Just for the record - when you post video links for people to watch that are 13 minutes long, kindly provide some sort of time stamp or explanation. I watched for 5 minutes and then closed it because nothing interesting had been discussed yet.

No. Rebel media isn't worthy of mention in the national media debate. It doesn't just have it's flaws. It's a clown show without even a shred of journalistic integrity, and serves no purpose other than to rile up an out-of-touch and wildly ignorant base, and to reassure in the face of their own ignorance. On the unapologetic Left, for example, we have newspapers like the Toronto Star. They wear their partisanship pretty openly, but at least they make pretenses of professional journalism (coloured as it is by editorial bias). One thing they don't do, however, is send confrontational granola reporters out to seek trouble and pick fights/arguments at neo-nazi rallies.

You're way ahead of yourself on this argument. I was arguing against your use of near-useless statistics like "police interactions" and the percentage of them that turn violent, nation-wide. It's too vague a term and has too many variables to account for to be very informative. It's also naive to say that police resources go to where crime is highest. Budget is one of the most important factors in this equation, and that's why places like Tulsa, AZ have less than half the police per capita of New York city, despite higher crime rates. Regardless, when you ask questions about Justine Damond and "where were you?" after she got shot, you're showing you're missing the point entirely. I didn't even know about her, just like I don't know about more than a tiny fraction of the black (or white) folk that police shoot each year in the USA. Justine's killer went to prison for something like 12 years too, so what on earth is your point? White lives matter too? Justice for Justine? K... This isn't really just about BLM. The target for the protests is the police organizations, their excessive use of force, and their appalling lack of transparency and accountability. It's become a race debate because, as you say, Black people are getting hurt more often than others. The fact that they statistically commit more crime is certainly relevant and explains a lot of that, but then why would you stop there? The systemic racism that black people have faced for decades, and the poverty and hopelessness that it begets is one of the main factors in the increased rates of crime, so it's hardly something to gloss over. The media attention is on black people because they're understandably the ones who are the most upset - not just at police violence - but at the circumstances they find themselves in as well.

Rebel Media is a joke. The name itself is a farce, and its news standards are equally comical.

I don't know how to break up quotes on this damn forum anymore. Sorry. "Police interaction" is not a reliable or relevant statistic. The term is excessively vague and the variables behind it far too wide for much useful information to be drawn. A wealthy community with little crime, for example, may still have a larger police force than a poor community with lots of crime, and the former would be padding its numbers with all sorts brief traffic stops and sleepy-town busy-work while the latter would be operating on a shoe-string budget and having a disproportionate amount of violent crime to respond to. Additionally, there's an appalling lack of transparency from the police departments themselves. Statistics on police shootings in the US are compiled mainly by the media and journalists, because even the FBI has to rely on voluntarily provided (and poorly scrutinized) police records. The unions have become so powerful at this point that many states won't even allow the sharing disciplinary records between departments, so you can forget about providing any accurate national records. The citizen agencies responsible for overseeing police complaints are also generally underfunded and get little/no cooperation from the folks their reviewing (quelle surprise) so accountability efforts are generally stymied from the start. Your logic behind black people committing more crime and therefore being subjective more to police violence works in a vacuum, but it's too simplistic. There's inherent bias in what you're saying to begin with, and that colors the police's focus and attitude towards communities of colour. It leads to stricter policing in coloured neighborhoods (and more lax policing in non-colored neighborhoods) which skews the numbers and creates a negative feedback loop. This makes a community fearful and distrustful of the authorities, which further sours the relationship and frustrates the police officers trying to do their job, and more people end up with criminal records for silly, petty stuff that young white kids in Barrie or Guelph or something would probably get away with. There's no easy solution to this, but it's extremely misguided to just condense the argument down to "black people cause more crime and therefore they get shot more." and yeah...we get it. White people get shot too. We just aren't seeing many videos of white chicks running away and getting gunned down. I promise I'll be here making the same arguments when that happens.

How do you even take yourself seriously when you post garbage like this? A clownish news agency sends a clownish reporter to pick a fight and get into an argument with some left wing goofs, and THAT proves something? I can post videos like that too. How do you figure driving your car into protestors and murdering someone compares to getting shoved and egged? I"ll eagerly await your reply.

I think you're right, but then we did screen them and we did give overwhelming preference to families.

That's a pretty easy question to answer Boges. Terrorist organizations are making explicit efforts to send emigrant agents to the West in order to recruit and encourage violence. While a peaceful family doesn't have to "answer" for that, that also doesn't mean that we shouldn't be screening carefully and show preference for families with children over single males or whatever.

Okay Shady. Sure. I'm intellectually dishonest. Don't let us stop you from tripping over your own contradictions and bewildering double standards (which Michael conveniently highlighted). You just keep powering through it. It your narrow little world, "we people" can all fit into one neat little box for you to argue against. I'm a hooligan-supporting, Cuomo-loving police-hater... As for the protests in Michigan, they turned violent the moment people showed up with assault rifles. Nobody died, obviously, but then who was going to touch that with a ten-foot pole? The police and authorities correctly saw it for what it was - open intimidation and a tinderbox waiting to blow. The same sort of calculus is being done with the current protests. There aren't any clear paths for resolution and we have decades of research to show that riot police and forced suppression is an escalation feedback loop. As for the protests, much of the death and violence is on account of opportunistic criminals taking advantage of the anarchy. Folks are getting killed trying to loot stores and steal cares, and I'm pretty sure NOBODY around here is supporting them, even diarrhea-mouth Cuomo.