Almost half of Republicans polled say courts should shut down “biased” news

By Dan Brooks in Contemporary Media 0 Comment

Alex Jones fans promote his “CNN is ISIS” meme.

If one phrase captures the willful irresponsibility of the alt-right, it’s “CNN is ISIS.” Back in June, Alex Jones and his Infowars show offered $1,000 to anyone who could get that slogan onto TV, either by holding up a sign or wearing it on a shirt. It’s a nonsense statement. No one actually thinks CNN is connected to the Islamic State, or that they are even comparably bad, but saying you think so expresses an attitude. That attitude is “I’m willing to say whatever, especially if it drives libs crazy.” “CNN is ISIS” is the gleeful refrain of a lifestyle that has freed itself from truth.

As stupid as it is, though, it also captures an animosity toward the press that is real among supporters of Donald Trump. The president himself has called the media an enemy of the American people and now refers to any bad press—including leaks—as “fake news.” He encouraged crowds at his rallies to boo reporters during the campaign, and he continues to do so at various public events. But all this mindless hatred wouldn’t affect the public’s support for a free and independent press, would it? That’s just too deeply ingrained in the American system.

Enter The Economist, who found in a joint poll with YouGov that 45% of respondents who identified as Republicans approved of “permitting the courts to shut down news media outlets for publishing or broadcasting stories that are biased or inaccurate.” Seriously, look at this:

In the same poll, 71% of Republicans said they trusted Donald Trump more than the New York Times. That’s astonishing. Even if you think the Times is biased, the number of inaccuracies it prints in a year does not approach the number of falsehoods President Trump uttered in his first week. Even his supporters admonish us to take Trump seriously but not literally, which is a polite way of saying he does not speak with any regard for the truth. Calling this man more trustworthy than America’s paper of record is like saying your dog is smarter than the faculty of Yale.

Now is a good time to remember that polls don’t necessarily tell us what people think so much as what they want to think—the idea of themselves they take on, suddenly, when a pollster asks them to express their beliefs. Probably, 71% of Republicans don’t reach for the newspaper and then decide they’ll get a more reliable report from President Trump. When you ask them to choose between the two, though, they want to convey their support for him by saying Trump is better.

This phenomenon probably also accounts for the terrifying plurality of Republicans who said courts should restrict the free press. The overwhelming favorite among the general pool of respondents to that question is “haven’t heard enough to say.” It’s good they haven’t heard enough, since no one is really talking about it. I wouldn’t need much background on that one to feel confidently against it, but it’s not as though the 28% who said they favored the idea are out there trying to make it happen. It’s more likely they heard a pollster ask about it and said okay, whatever. But Christ merciful and lambent, that’s a scary question.

Correction retracts entire story on Quist’s draft registration

By Dan Brooks in Montana Politics 0 Comment

Democratic candidate Rob Quist, shortly before his guitar was repossessed

Tomorrow is the last day to vote in Montana’s special election. That means opposition researchers have only 24 hours to reveal one more embarrassing detail about Rob Quist’s personal life on the internet. For a second it looked like the photo finish would go to Brent Scher, who published an item in the Washington Free Beacon today claiming that the National Archives had no record of Quist registering for the Selective Service. But it turns out Scher filed the records request wrong. I quote his correction:

After publication of this article, the Washington Free Beacon obtained a copy of Rob Quist’s Selective Service System registration card, which was filed on January 10, 1966, five days after Quist’s 18th birthday. The registration card was indeed held at the National Archives in St. Louis, Missouri, but could not be located for the below referenced records request because not enough information was initially supplied [emphasis added] to locate a record from Montana, where the registrations are organized by local board, according to an archive supervisor.

A-plus use of the passive voice in that second sentence, bro. It turns out no one could find Quist’s draft card because Sher asked for it wrong. This correction retracts the entire story. Instead of pulling the article, though, the Washington Free Beacon has left it up, but with the correction at the top saying none of it is true. It’s almost as though the Beacon were not a responsible news organization. It’s almost like it’s a propaganda site that was founded by a dark-money group and then spun off into a for-profit news venture.

Such outlets are everywhere, and they find no shortage of ethically flexible young people to write for them. You may remember Scher from this report that Quist had genital herpes, which cites his former urologist, whom the candidate sued for malpractice. Those are the kind of sweet moves you get when you use a PR flack instead of a reporter, but the downside is basic screwups like the one above. Kombat! Kids: Remember to tell the truth, or you won’t know if you’re becoming evil later.

This $150,000 medical bill for snakebite is not fake

By Dan Brooks in health care 1 Comment

The image above shows the bill for an emergency room visit that a man without insurance incurred after he was bitten by a snake. It’s been floating around Twitter, where a lot of users assume that it is fake—particularly users from countries that offer some form of socialized medicine, if anecdotal reading is any indication. But this bill is real. CBS News confirms that Todd Fassler got it in 2015, when he posed for a selfie with a rattlesnake and got bitten. That’s a very dumb thing that Fassler did. But the stupidity of taking a picture with a rattlesnake pales in comparison to the evil of charging $83,000 for the antivenom CroFab, which Fassler required to live.

Only one US manufacturer makes antivenom for rattlesnake bites, so they can charge what they want. So can the hospital, which first treated Fassler in its emergency room before moving him to intensive care for a few days. All this stuff is expensive because of concrete market forces, but from the perspective of the person who actually buys health care—the guy with a puffy arm whose heart will stop if he doesn’t agree, in advance, to pay whatever the hospital charges—the system is completely arbitrary.

Imagine if a man dragged himself to your door in the night, dying of an injury that you had the power to treat. “I’ll save your life,” you say, “but you have to buy a house and give it to me. Alternatively, you can become my indentured servant.” You would be an asshole. It’s immoral to extort dying people for more money than the median American household makes in three years. But because this process happens through a series of billing companies and office functionaries, we think of it as unavoidable. No single person is responsible, so it’s nobody’s fault. We have invented a system that ruins lives in the process of saving them, because the alternative is to do the difficult work of overhauling a broken system.

But what about personal responsibility? If Fassler didn’t want so much debt, he shouldn’t have gotten bitten by a snake. I say unto you, dear reader, that this kind of appeal to personal responsibility is a dodge. People are going to get bitten by snakes. They’re going to do really stupid stuff and incur injuries they easily could have prevented, because this is the way of the world. Saying sick people are responsible for what happens to them abdicates our responsibility to treat the sick. It posits an imaginary world without illness, when illness has been an aspect of human life since the beginning. The problem is not that people need medical treatment. It’s that we refuse to think of a fair and decent way to give it to them.

Searching for the elusive Bernie bro

By Dan Brooks in Democratic Candidates 3 Comments
Okay, those are bros.

Bros who love Bernie Sanders

Bernie bros are like raccoons. We know they’re out there, but we have a hard time actually laying hands on one. On Friday, Mashable ran a story headlined The bros who love Bernie Sanders have become a sexist mob. Emily Cahn writes:

[W]ith the Iowa caucuses now days away, a subset of Sanders supporters has become extremely vocal. Their messages, which are oftentimes derogatory and misogynistic, are geared at Clinton supporters (or anyone who disagrees with Sanders for that matter). They’ve even become prominent enough to earn a nickname: the “BernieBros.”

As examples of Bernie bro behavior, the story screenshots two Facebook comments on a photo of Sen. Jeanne Shaheen (D-NH) and Hillary Clinton. The first is from Carol Jean Simpson, who writes, “I am no longer voting for you. You should have supported someone with integrity instead of a lying shitbag like HRC. #FeelTheBern.” That’s derogatory. But it’s not misogynist(ic), and the astute reader will note that Carol Jean Simpson is a woman. The second commenter, Scott Lockhart, writes, “Their vaginas are making terrible choices!” Now that’s the kind of cartoonish misogyny we’re looking for. Unfortunately, Scott Lockhart turns out to be a parody account.

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Kaarma case legally documents inanity of Missoulian comments

By Dan Brooks in Internet, Uncategorized 0 Comment
Marcus Kaarma and a child he didn't shoot

Marcus Kaarma and a child he didn’t shoot

I can’t read the Missoulian comments section anymore, because I installed CommentBlocker. Its combination of comment-blocking power and arbitrary bugs prevents me from reading comments at the Missoulian even when I override it. So finally I have escaped the funhouse. Yesterday, the prosecution in Marcus Kaarma’s murder case argued that it was more a hall of mirrors. Objecting to Kaarma’s attorneys’ motion to move the trial because it had become “sensationalized” in local media, Deputy County Attorney Jennifer complained that much of defense’s evidence consisted of Missoulian.com comments. For example:

As an example, attached to one Missoulian.com article about the case a single user commented 31 times and another user posted 34 times, Clark retorted.

I wish that sentence were not a train wreck, because it confirms what we suspected all along.

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