Someone call the police, this was a brutal execution.
Actually, never mind. I never cared much for Cenk Uygur or Ana Kasparian, never subscribed to the Young Turks, gave them at best a little side-eye, so I’m not at all surprised at their steady drift from progressive liberal, sort of, to apologists for MAGA.
I won’t miss them. Maybe some real progressives will benefit as money shifts away from this annoying pair.
It’s not entirely unforeseen, given that the original Young Turks devolved from a broadly secularist opposition movement into genocidal nationalists in the first decades of the Twentieth Century.
Sigh. I used to really like The Young Turks personally.
Reckon they’ve made a lot of good clips and sometimes some good points over the years too but.. Yeah.
Certainly been put off by Cenk being a bully and loving the sound of his own voice rather than being willing to listen to others for quite a while.
I watched the first minute with Kasparian going on about criminals and I thought, “That’s familiar.” Oh, yeah, Anna Kasparian’s bit “I don’t care about your religion”. I’m not into shtick so I didn’t bother to see what her rant is about in this video.
I gave up on them when Cenk decided to try a Trump, i.e. run for office while not remotely qualified, due to not being born in the US. But, yeah, even up to that point there had started to wander into some stupid shit that drifted to the right and started to sound too much like what we got from the so called “new atheists” – “Its only bad to be a rich, privileged asshole if you are a conservative, and religious, otherwise its totally fine to hold all the same insane, horrible, ideas, and take a dump on people you think you are better than.”
But, yeah, for a while, I thought they might be worth something…
It looks like they see the oncoming fascism and have decided that their optimum survival route is to position themselves as “the good leftists”.
Help me out here. There’s virtually no shortage of righ-wing commentators (grifters, talking heads, influencers, whatever). From Limbaugh who was perhaps the originator now we have Peterson, Crowder, Bongino, Shapiro, and countless others with seemingly room for more.
On the left side, who do we have? Practically no one. Even seemingly leftist personalities like Bill Maher and now TYT show their true spots eventually. Why is this? I personally think conservatives just like being told what to think, while liberals are far too independent.
Cenk and Ana are really good at replacing what people actually say with hyperbolic straw people, all without naming. Just a bunch of “they”.
And the identity issue, the identity and lived experience is already part of the issue for people. They organize around their identity and the associated issues. Taking that would play into fascist divide and conquer.
I do believe Cenk and Ana are becoming more authoritarian.
@6 a.) It’s easier to make money from the right. Not only can you get money directly from Youtube, you can also get funding from wealthy nutjobs, and sell useless crap to your audience (a la Alex Jones)
b.) It’s easier to produce content. You don’t have to put a lot of thought or research into your content, as long as it sounds truthy and legitimizes their anger wing-nuts will lap it. Progressive however are more likely to criticize your arguments and aren’t as dogmatic as right wing boofheads.
That’s my take. I’ve only had four and a half hours sleep, so I’m probably missing something. Sorry in advance.
What’s the progressive-left-to-maga pipeline here? Could it be that the left doesn’t answer their call? Or that they don’t like/believe the answer?
Or put another way: Being on the right side of a battle doesn’t automatically make you right. Blaming the people for not buying what you’re selling is a loosing strategy.
Very sad and frightening. Benjamin lists some online alternatives, here are some others (in random order):
Jesse Dollemore
Meidas Touch
David Pakman
The Damage Report
Luke Beasley
Brian Tyler Cohen
Rebel HQ
The Majority Report
Gabe Sanchez
Farron Balanced
Progressive News Network
Tennessee Brando
Jack Cocciarella
Adam Mockler
@ ^ nomdeplume : I’d add Kyle Kulinski’s Secular talk & Mehdi Hasan’s Zeteo one plus the SBS, PBS, DW & Al Jazeera News channels which often have some good relatively left of centre coverage.
Also @nomdeplume, # 10: I’d also add Beau of the Fifth Column-recently taken over by his wire and renamed “Belle of the Ranch,” both YouTube channels.
They hardly supported MAGA. Telling the Democrats off for being too nice to Republicans was a good thing. Sadly the Democrats didn’t listen, that doesn’t make them MAGAts
I used to like The Young Turks, although I didn’t like them sensationalizing everything, particularly lame news items.
Oh & Owen Jones for British politics and Palestine from very left wing POV.
Yeah, well. POVs are basically opinion pieces.
I’d rather just have the facts, being able to form my very own opinions.
A 44 minute video to express an opinion!
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Hey, robro, I’m not into shtick either, so I also didn’t bother to see what this featured video rant is about.
But hey, at least they (Cenk Uygur and Ana Kasparian) are dead now. Murdered!
Therefore, no more shtick by either, ever. Unless the dead begin to speak again…
The good folks at Science-Based Medicine are realizing that they have to be more political than they’d like simply because the right has so thoroughly embraced anti-science positions. It was there (or Respectful Insolence) where I first encountered the idea of “audience capture” in which you make more and more edgy comments to entice your listeners, then go even further as they draw you farther and farther toward them.
I would also say the being a liberal means having ethical principles, and living by them in a world that values ethics less and less. Those who let go of those values early drift further and further to the right.
@ 17 Usual Troll
Speaking of shtick, thanks Captain Hyperliteral.
I assume you wish scientific papers were just raw data with no interpretations or conclusions.
I hadn’t seen these guys for years but after being utterly flabbergasted at Trump winning – again – I sought out some explanation that wasn’t right-wingers crowing about what a genius Trump is, and thought the Young Turks might have a worthwhile take.
I was shocked they were going on a rant about how you can’t possibly blame the voters – y’know the people who actually voted for Trump – it’s all because of the woke mind virus and how shit the left is. And the style of delivery was that sort of ranting style you expect from demagogues or fire and brimstone preachers.
@ 9 Erlend Meyer
Well according to this video, money. Selling out to the right is lucrative.
“I assume you wish scientific papers were just raw data with no interpretations or conclusions.”
Quite the opposite.
I like Perun, I like Joe Blogs (2.0), and so forth.
They set their thesis, they put their disclaimers, they thank the audience, they appease their sponsor, then they damn fucking well support their thesis. And there’s a summary at the end.
(I started watching that video, and it was of a guy doing the faces thing to an apparently interminable seet of video clips)
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Speaking of shtick, that’s yours.
(I am more subtle than you will ever understand, and most of my allusions are as pearls to swine for you)
Oh, BTW, Bogiferous one, you failed to grok this:
“Oh & Owen Jones for British politics and Palestine from very left wing POV.”
That is most informative.
Getting one’s opinions from a very left wing POV is surely the go.
(Absolutely nothing like getting one’s opinions from a very right wing POV; that’s entirely different!)
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Freethinking? Well, it’s a nice slogan
@ ^ John Morales : Just because you follow a particular channel or set thereof and get some information and see where certain people are coming from and what they are saying doesn’t necessarily mean you always agree with them 100% of the time or aren’t also making up your own mind. I look at sources from a number of viewpoints and then decide for myself.
“Freethinking” doesn’t mean just thinking only by yourself in (splendid or otherwise) isolation without being aware of what other people are saying and arguing and observing.
Can’t recall if Benjamin Dixon mentioned her or not but – of course – there’s Rebecca Watson’s channel on the left wing list as well.
When it comes to space exploration and rocket science there’s Scott Manley; for astronomy there’s Dr Becky, for palaentology and taxonomy and more there’s Clint’s Reptiles plus Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong and also a fantastic series looking at prehistoric animals and their worlds there’s Palaeo Analysis, Plus Moth light media, Ben G Thomas and for general science 7 Days of Science which is also Ben G Thomas but sorta separate thing as well. PBS Eons often has some great stuff too. Oh and for Climate Potholer54 & Dr Gilbz.
(sigh)
It’s not about what channels are meritorious for space news, it’s about you enthusing about some very left wing POV as if that were a good thing. And it’s not that you’re following them, it’s that you’re recommending them. Subject is Young Turks (not the Rod Stewart song), which is purely political.
Spruiking some point of view.
(It’s OK — God forbid you ever exit your media bubble!)
I am not one whit surprised you didn’t note my comparison; but here’s a hint: Newsmax.
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You know, I keep seeing these bullshit links to Meidas (not Mierdas!) Touch, with the fucking stupid clickbait headlines, and every single time it’s a great win for the Leftism and a great tragedy for the Rightism.
You do get those things are opinion pieces and demagoguery much more so than they are news reportage, no?
(rah rah rah!)
People thought Young Turks was left-wing? Haven’t they been belligerent centrists forever?
[OT + meta]
I think you might just be about old enough.
Remember the character Dexter Pinion in the political satire sketch comedy television series BackBerner?
I sure do.
“Dexter Pinion, the far-right conservative correspondent for government reconciliation who frequently railed against the supposedly left-leaning “AB-friggin’-C”.”
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BackBerner#Synopsis)
(I confess I did not pick up on that until my wife poked me and… well, dexter and pinion.
Bleeding obvious after the fact)
I don’t think Crank and Ana are grifters. I think it’s another case of “Twitter broke their brains”.
Oops Freudian slip by autocorrect, lul.
But the reason I don’t think they are grifters is that you can’t be anti Trump and grift to the right. Jimmy Dore is a clear grifter because he always ignores Trump except to compliment him for being “anti war” from time to time.
Watched them since 2007 or so, stopped watching them in 2016 once Jimmy Dore went on a pro-Trump crusade with beyond moronic arguments and the other guys let it slide for the most part.
The common denominator is narcissim. Those are people who didn’t pick up left-wing causes because they believed in them but because it was a fad at the moment they could use to lord it over others and have now decided that they can feed their egos better by becoming right-wing grifters. But of course they will insist that they were “left by the left”.
Thought experiment:
If we woke up one morning and found that all the MAGAs and RWNJs and Qnians and their apologists had been raptured — then what would TYTs be doing and would it be improving society?
And the second part of that would be: are they doing it now?
Pretty sure I remember it being leaked that TYT was taking large cheque’s from some billionaire a while back. Between that and Cenk union breaking that’s all I really need to know about their politics.
Think I would add to that interesting list this one:
Trae Crowder (liberal redneck)
Steve Shives, who is mainly a star trek guy, also sometimes does commentary videos, which involve political left views, which document details of things going on which he decides just annoy him about current trends, though, generally, its less “news” than kind of, “For my viewers, here is what is really going on with this.”
Oh, and @20 Silentbob – Yeah, one of the reasons I unsubscribed to them was that, while they tended left, it started to become bloody obvious that they had a bit of a “Democrat majority” bent on some issues – i.e., the same stupid excuses for why the party kept losing, which ran in utter contradiction to, well, actual progressive values. Claiming that the Democrats went “too woke”, when its blindingly obvious to anyone bothering to spend five minutes talking to anyone who didn’t vote on the left, and you would find out that they decided not to over Palestine, and a few other “not woke” things Biden and Harris did, is just stupid. The problem wasn’t “wokeness”, it was continued obliviousness to the fact that they never go far enough woke, and imho we on the left have the bloody opposite problem from Conservatives. For them, the problem is always, “I don’t believe they will do that to ME, despite all past examples, and being told direct to my face what they intend to do. Besides, we need to stamp down on all the bad things they tell me are out there, or we will lose everything!” The problem for the left is, as much as I hate to say it, because I do really believe that we need to at least progress towards better ideas, and a lot of the politicians are utterly out of touch with what that is in many cases, is that no one is ever good enough, and we lose trust easily, even when its blindingly obvious that the outcome, whether we are right or not about a candidate, of throwing them under the bus in the bloody middle of an election is almost always something worse than just getting them in, then doing everything after to hold them to the fire for the idea that are actually bad they may hold.
In short, the right always votes for shackles, while the left, sadly, self sabotage, because, “almost there, or close to, but just short of, or bad, but better than the alternative”, are all seen as, “Not good enough.”, despite the alternative being orders of magnitude worse than the worst option on our own side. Its almost like Dark Helmet in Space Balls was right, “evil will always triumph, because good is dumb.”
Yes. They are entirely different. Not just in terms of opinions on, say, taxation or gun control either. Reality has a bias, and one of those wings happens to be a lot more congruent with the facts than the other.
In particular, “left wing” when we’re talking about someone like Owen Jones just means humanism, more or less, and a concomitant additional level of critical skepticism to, e.g., objectively racist mainstream narratives on issues like refugees or Palestinian genocide. Listening to someone with an avowedly left wing POV like Owen Jones doesn’t just give you “opinions”, it is going to give you access to a lot of facts you wouldn’t necessarily get anywhere else. (For example, he recently was on the front lines doing a lot of good work breaking through the misinformation about the Amsterdam football riots.)
What a cliche. That one might even top “I’m not racist because I don’t see color” as far as ludicrous self-obliviousness goes.
I guess I’ll take this back if it turns out you’re an omniscient god, but otherwise, one key fact is you’ll never, ever have access to all the facts, or the capability to form an accurate opinion which incorporates all of them if you did (some are worse at that than others).
All we can ever consider are some of the facts, or aggregates of them. Hopefully the most important ones, but that selection is always necessarily filtered through POVs. Always. The key is in understanding what those POVs are, how in accordance with your own POV, and what information might falsify your POV.
Yeah, well, jack: I’ve always thought (and expressed) my view that a linear political political spectrum (only one axis) is more confounding than explanatory. It’s far, far too simplistic.
No, you’re not getting it. Others’ opinions are also facts.
I’m talking about freethinking.
(What I mean is that I don’t seek out others’ opinions so that I can then adopt them and save myself some thinking, as others apparently do)
Cenk and Ana are completely disgusting fake a**holes, selling out their values, because the 2024 Elections was read as if the General audience dismissed the progressive agenda, so they switched pivot straight to MAGA in order to stay relevant, in order to get their eyeballs during the Trump 2.0 era.
Deep inside, both of a total POS human beings, don’t bother wasting your time with people like them who need to attack other former acquaintances for their own survival mode.
These are the kind of people who should be rejected by Republicans, Democrats and even Indies, since they are just a bunch of sycophants catering to their own egos on YouTube.
That’s absolutely true. But also not really relevant. The political spectrum doesn’t have to be real in order for terms like “Leftist” or “The Left” to have a useful meaning, at least for a given time and place. The clustering of people and ideas labelled by that word may be a bit blobby and fuzzy at the edges, to be sure, but no worse than is usual with such things.
If you just can’t shake the association of the word “Left” with a spectrum, feel free to mentally substitute “Octarine” or “Sycamore” or something. The word isn’t the important part.
Like I said, self-oblivious. Covering it with a scoop of condescension doesn’t hide the smell.
No. You imagine it’s self-oblivious. Different thing, jack.
To understand others is to understand yourself. And to understand yourself is to understand others.
(At least when it comes to monkey-people understanding other monkey-people. For crab-people, YMMV.)
It’s not about understanding others, it’s about getting one’s opinions from the media.
Back in the day, my mother-in-law used to get her news from TV and the newspapers.
Whatever she was told to think, she thought.
StevoR and his like seek the like; thus prefers the “very left wing POV”.
Why seek specifically left or centre or right opinion pieces?
(Saddest part is how some people have over time claimed they get their news from late-night TV comedians)
No, the sad thing is that the “news” from late night TV comedians is often more accurate and relevant than what comes from the “media”. But, the real root problem is, well… said media, well before TYT did the same thing, “Capitulated before hand.”, as one person put it. They saw the risk of Trump winning, so they preemptively started kissing his ass, then the moment his win became inevitable they caved entirely, and are now fawning over him like he is the greatest thing imaginable. Now, part of this is pure survival – there is no way, if Trump decided to do so, that he wouldn’t work to erase every outlet that doesn’t like him, and again, as one of the alternative media recently commented, “We don’t want an invite to the White House or corporate sponsorship.”, the ones that are corporate sponsored, or who are desperate to sit right in front of Trump and lap up his BS, are going to be biased in what ever direction will benefit a) the corporation, which Trump would ruin if he decided he didn’t like their media outlet, and/or b) they ability to be “at the table”. Under prior administrations this worked by always “both siding” everything, but Trump is a freaking nutjob, whose actions in this run through already show him to have everything in common with a dictator, and none with a regular politician. As was also stated, Trump probably could be bought, but it won’t be US corporations “buying” him, because he is systematically putting billionaires in charge of parts of the government. You don’t need to bribe someone who just handed you for free, the keys to the entire building. But, for the gullible, this can be spun, again, as an asset – “can’t be bought”. Sigh…
In any case John, when literally even the self claimed “left media” is almost all corporate, and you have to keep asking yourself, “What is the pro-corporate, or pro-government spin on this?”, actively avoiding the “right wing” ones, who do nothing BUT spin things, even when telling the truth, into blame, fear, hate, anger, or confusion, which serves not evidence, facts, or truth, but rather “alternative facts and alternative truths”, i.e., half truths and lies that have a clear agenda, seems far more sane.. Now, should you also know what self claimed “other side” is lying about, and how they are spinning it? Yep, definitely. But, to treat it as anything other than intentional misdirection, to achieve what has been consistently an agenda of disenfranchisement, division, and power mongering – that is just stupid.
You are making unjustified assumptions again. About both of them, I suspect.
Anyway, I suppose you can name some opinions you hold which you didn’t get from the media?
Says a guy revealing that he has approximately zero 21st century media literacy. This attitude explains a lot.
Back in early 2020 or so, when she was doing a weekly show on Jacobin with the great Michael Brooks (and a bit thereafter, with Nando Vila) I was really beginning to warm to Ana Kasparian. Prompting me to wonder how she might have turned out, if we hadn’t lost Michael.