2022: HOLD MY TEA! đŸ”

Looks like straight reporting to me, unless one thinks Biden didn’t speak to those donors.

Several sources are reporting about the HHS stocking up on $290 million worth of the radiation drug Nplate, for example The Hill, so I don’t doubt that this is a fact.
But I’m not really interested in reading the story that OANN may have made up around it, unless it is corroberated by more reliable news sources.

Edit: When judging reliability and bias of English language media, I rely on charts like these:

So I tend to mostly use sources in the green rectangle, and which are accessible online without a paywall, such as Reuters, AP, the Guardian and the BBC. The Hill is also inside that rectangle, and it doesn’t have a paywall, but I don’t use it much.
Note that OAN(N) is in the lower right, next to Fox News, but not as extreme as Info Wars.

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There is nothing in the intelligence community that suggests nuclear war is coming.

Even if Putin uses a tactical nuke the response is limited. Most NATO deterrent and detection agencies have implemented short term policies to not retaliate if a sub 50kt detonation is detected.

While Biden more than likely said those things, there isn’t much merit to his words. Common sentiment is that generals and watchkeepers won’t launch regardless of the orders (for both Russian and American). Instant loss of worldwide support for likely a century is a better deterrent. Russia is losing a lot already, and will have nothing if a nuke is launched. It would be the end of the country.

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Who the hell put buzzfeed in the green box :rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::rofl::ok_hand::ok_hand::ok_hand:

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I don’t know that medium at all, but it looks like the chart shows Buzzfeed News, which may be different from Buzzfeed. BuzzFeed News - Wikipedia.

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Washington Post and WSJ are in there too


As far as I understand, the green box represents media that are mostly factual (not much fake news). They can still be oriented politically conservative or progressive in their opinion pieces, but not extremely so.

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Hmm ok their news section may try hard to be respectable but because of the name and operation of their parent company I cannot take them seriously.

I fairly respect guardian and bbc for the most part, but would personally put bbc slightly more left than this chart has them.

Edit: also CNN needs to be over with huff post and msnbc

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What is considered conservative leaning or progressive leaning would vary in different countries. I often hear that centrist in Western Europe is more progressive than centrist in the US.
I suppose charts like these come from the US, but I’m not sure.

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I didn’t say there was, and I didn’t indicate any support for what Biden said. No, “there isn’t much merit to his words”—there rarely is. I look upon it as another example of the loose lips of our senile president.

I’m aware of all you said. Moreover, a tactical nuke would have potential blowback to Russia, so would seem pretty foolish. Of course, dictatorial monsters have done foolish things in the past.

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I know, I just want to make sure people reading it don’t get worried. Reflex reaction from my job I guess.

@gennan Canada’s Conservative right-wing political party is at the same “point” on the political left/right scale as the American Democratic party. Our Liberal party is also quite a bit more authoritarian compared to the Conservatives.

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I’m always confused about what “liberal” means in the US. From what I understand, in the US “liberal” is more or less synonymous with progressive and/or left wing politics. Your description of Canadian Liberals confuses me even more. Do I understand correctly that the Canadian Liberals are far right on the political spectrum?

In the Netherlands, “liberal” means promoting human rights, democracy, rule of law, secularism, individualism and personal freedom, while reducing taxation, government spending and government regulation of the free market. So economically right wing, but socially quite opposed to (religious) conservatism, discrimination, nationalism and authoritarianism.
We have opposition parties on the right that lean towards some of the latter, and we have opposition parties on the left that would reduce economic and social inequality by increasing government spending on social benefits and government regulation of the free market.

Our largest two parties (VVD and D66) are both liberal, and they seem to be fairly similar to the moderate wings of Democrats in the US and Conservatives in the UK (and I assume Conservatives in Canada, from your description). In the last 3 decades, our government coalitions included at least one of those liberal parties, and we have had a liberal Prime Minister since 2010.

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Because of my confusion and my complete lack of knowledge on Canadian politics, I tried to find some background on your claim that the Canadian Liberal Party has authoritarian tendencies.
I found this article from the New York Post (a medium in the nonsense region of that media bias chart), comparing Canadian covid restrictions and the Canadian government response to the Canadian truckers protests to authoritarianism.

I can recognize similar situations we had in the Netherlands of covid sceptics protests during lockdowns and the outrage in more heavily biased media about our country alledgedly turning into a dictatorship.
To this day, some of our far right politicians are calling for “tribunals” to convict and imprison the politicians and national health experts responsible for those “dictatorial” covid restrictions (which were dropped 6 months ago). I consider that complete rubbish. Those far right politicians have much stronger ties with authoritarianism (the likes of Putin, Trump and Orban) than our government does.

Also, when I look up the Canadian Liberal Party (Trudeau’s party) on wikipedia, I read it’s just a regular center-left party, probably quite similar to our liberal democrat party D66, and to a lesser degree our conservative liberal party VVD, in ideology.

So I now consider your above statement to be heavily biased. I take it that you didn’t vote for this party.

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No, on the scale of “Authoritarian vs Libertarian” the Liberal party is closer to authoritarian than libertarian, which is not what you typically expect if you only care about the name of the party.

Please note that this is from 2005, and isn’t recent. You may be surprised that spectrums change over time. For example, here is the 2011 one.

What changes do you notice about BOTH the Liberal and Conservative parties?

How do you think things would be now?

I’m always confused about what “liberal” means in the US.

What’s in a name? Why isn’t the “Democratic People’s Republic” a democratic party? Please judge parties by their actions and implemented policies.

Good luck finding someone without bias. I am biased toward criticism for whoever is in power. Unfortunately for you, the conservatives aren’t in power so you don’t see me complaining about them cutting budgets to teachers, health care, regressive social reforms, etc.

I actually did. You may be surprised that someone can vote for a party and still be critical of them in some way. I tend to believe that if you don’t criticize and question, then you don’t really care.

You may also be surprised to learn that I am vaccinated and support vaccines.

You may be surprised in other ways in the future. Who knows!

EDIT: just had a shower thought
 Please know I’m not mad at you or anything. “if you don’t criticize and question, then you don’t really care” to me means that you care enough to call me out and question me, which I highly value. I value you.

EDIT 2: It also means that since you responded, we aren’t just ruminating in our own minds and can come to an understanding, even if we still disagree.

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I’m not used to that type of political compass, and as as far as I know, libertarian is quite distinct from liberal, or perhaps libertarianism might be extreme liberalism?
I would actually consider socialism the opposite of liberalism (in the economical sense), not authoritarianism.

But when I see how EU countries are represented in that political compass as all right wing authoritarian states, I start to have serious doubts about the validity of this political compass and if it should be taken seriously at all.

image

source: The Political Compass

However, it does show the Canadian Liberal Party as more centrist than any EU country (except for France), so how does that fit into all of this?

image

And does the compass below make sense when comparing it to the compasses above? Joe Biden is more left wing than any EU government and the Canadian Green Party? I have a hard time believing that. As far as I know, even Bernie Sanders would only be a moderate social democrat in Western Europe.

If one wants to add a political axis to the traditional left-right (economical) axis, I find it more logical to add a social axis for progressive-conservative.

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2013

2015

2017

2019

2022:
https://carnegieeurope.eu/2022/09/29/how-far-right-victory-in-italy-might-ripple-through-eu-pub-88049

I despise the overall trend toward authoritarianism, but political popularism is closer to a pendulum. If left-wing stuff is winning for a decade, the next decade tends towards right-wing stuff and eventually wins. Then slowly but surely, the left will gain favor as the right messes up more and more, as people remember the bad more than the good things when it comes to politics.

That’s the best way to separate political parties for sure, and you’d see them on opposite sides. I find it more interesting to look at how they are similar though.

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He almost shares his birthday with Choi Jung. Both quasi-monarchs

Yes, Europe is shifting to the right (more capitalist) and nationalist/conservative populists are also gaining ground all around Europe.
But in my view, that’s different from authoritarianism. Authoritarianism restricts human and civil rights, freedom of speech, freedom of press, democracy and such things. I don’t think that’s happening much here yet, except maybe in Hungary.

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The quadrants are not separate categories, but regions on a continuum. The fact that The Pope is in the same quadrant as Stalin does not make The Pope another Stalin. His closeness to the axes makes him a moderate, and therefore closer to Gandhi and Chirac, even though they are in different quadrants. Each quadrant contains enormous variability and can accommodate philanthropists and monsters, differing in the extremity of their views.

You’ve got liberals on the right. Don’t you know they’re left?
This response is exclusively American. Elsewhere neo-liberalism is understood in standard political science terminology — deriving from mid 19th Century Manchester Liberalism, which campaigned for free trade on behalf of the capitalist classes of manufacturers and industrialists. In other words, laissez-faire or economic libertarianism.

In the United States, “liberals” are understood to believe in leftish economic programmes such as welfare and publicly funded medical care, while also holding liberal social views on matters such as law and order, peace, sexuality, women’s rights etc. The two don’t necessarily go together.

Our Compass rightly separates them. Otherwise, how would you label someone like the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan who, on the one hand, pleased the left by supporting strong economic safety nets for the underprivileged, but angered social liberals with his support for the Vietnam War, the Cold War and other key conservative causes?

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