Alternative Facts and American Carnage

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She is persevering. But what constitutes towing the line? I mean some of the media seems like it's on a consistent smear campaign.

Remember the big news conference with the stacks of manila folders which reporters were not allowed to examine? Shockingly, it all seems to have been lies. Trump has not filed any documents to separate him from control of his business.

http://www.propublica.org/article/trump ... es-done-so

How many did you have to look up?

Do you know what chain of command means? It's a military term, not a bureaucratic one. Governments and armies operate differently, on account of governments being, well, democratic. The reason armies are extremely structured and hierarchical is the need for swift decision making and action. Yet governments and parliament are extremely involved in long term strategy for the military.

Similarly, businesses are not democratic, which a lot of unfortunate young people find out when entering the workforce. It works as long as there are a lot of businesses creating competition. When businesses become too large, they start becoming very authoritarian.

And yes, most of the time the bureacracy operates reasonably independently. This is different in the US than from many other countries; there is a tradition in the US of changing large parts of the administration for every new president, whereas in many other countries the administration is more independent.

There are two reasons governements don't micromanage:

1) Nobody can be arsed, as they have more important things to do. Also, they don't have so much stuff to hide. Which leads us to the second point.
2) Micromanaging public relations means creating a propaganda bureau, because, again, it takes a lot of work, which the sitting President does not have the time, as he's supposed to be running the country.

And, yeah, I do see what you are doing........but the trouble with asking this sort of seemingly naive questions is that they really are very naive. You seem to be assuming that my opinions come from some emotional place or lack of knowlegde. The trouble is, they come from university studies in organizational theory, plus knowing quite a lot of people who have been involved in politics from a young age and are now in positions of influence. I am familiar with how these places function, having worked in one myself, and knowing lots of people who do. Of course they are not democratic, and you do watch what you say and how you represent the agency, and consider your posititon. But it would also be unthinkable for the sitting Prime Minister to directly instruct the bureaucracy on what to say; he or she would be branded a dictator in spe and crucified by the media, and with good reason.

Yeah earlier on I spoke of government agencies/departments and the military separately as going through channels and following a chain of command respectively. But you're the one who came up with the argument of micromanaging when that's not really the issue. Someone/anyone in a government agency/department/bureau posting statements or info to Twitter that's basically being broadcast to the entire world, is hardly an internal function or operation that falls under the concept of micromanagement. Also controls being placed on something as extraordinarily overt as that, is hardly dictatorial.

Last edited by EzraS on 23 Jan 2017, 6:33 am, edited 2 times in total.

Trump can try, but hopefully he won't be able to get them all.

There are already controls on that. Being put in charge of a twitter account is going through channels, they are doing the job they were hired to do. And do you really think the people on the account don't ask their bosses for approval when in doubt? Public relations is a big part of modern democracy; information is meant to be shared with the media, so that journalists can fact check. The strength of democracy lies in the plurality of media organizations accessing that information. The more, the better.

So the new administration wants to replace a loose control system with blanket silence. It will be interesting to see what comes next. Who will be put in charge of media relations once they get their bearings. My guess is, it'll look more like a business, i.e., less democratic.

I guess I need to point this out, although I initially believed that everyone would take it as read:

This is the Big Lie, and I don't mean to imply that using a Nazi tactic makes people Nazis. All authoritarians do largely the same thing, and yes I am calling you authoritarians, but I am not calling anyone a Nazi.

In Australia that would be illegal. I work for a government department and no, we can't use social media to vent our personal views on the government. We're not even supposed to that on our personal accounts but the idea of having a social media account and using that to criticise the administration would be quite unthinkable here. People have been fired for less.Not here.

We're not required to like the government but we can't criticize them in our capacity as state employees. Just like how when I'm working for a corporation I can't criticise them in public. Lucky thing I don't work at the Holden Factory or I'd even have to park in the crappy carpark just for driving a Ford.

It's this administration which characterizes the normal release of facts as an attack. They don't use the accounts to personally vent, obviously; worst. deflection. ever. They use them to release data or announce publications, events, facility closures and the like.

Last edited by jrjones9933 on 23 Jan 2017, 6:47 am, edited 1 time in total.

Fair enough.

That's what I was saying in regard to going through channels (or chain of command, depending on the branch of the government).



All they did was temporally shutdown their Twitter.

Last edited by EzraS on 23 Jan 2017, 7:00 am, edited 1 time in total.

In order to make sure nothing contradicts their alternative facts, like any dictator would want. You can say Trump isn't a dictator, but you can't point to anything he is doing that doesn't look like what any dictator would do.

I should include this, since basic logic matters. You can point to things that most dictators do that he is not. I expect that list to shrink, so go ahead and get on the record with dictatorial things that Trump will never do, and watch this space for updates.

Yes. Who's venting on twitter? About what?

Are you asking me or jrjones9933?

Sorry, but we moved on to the next page without comment on this new verified falsehood.