The Gaming Den

Since the morning of the 9th I've been alternating between going online seeking catharsis and, when that gets to be too much, going back to pretending to work and half-assing my way through the day. While I'm not sure when precisely I'll be ready to move on to a productive stage of grief, I think I'm getting kinda close.

So, what are some good sources for smart analysis of what the hell to expect and do? I mention The Young Turks in the subject because I've strayed into some of their videos recently and, while I can't match their vitriol, I'm hearing some things that resonate. Is this a source that's actually worth checking out or are they full of shit and just happen to match my disgust at the moment?

Any other sources of note? After this transition I think I'm either going to be completely riled up about politics or mostly disconnected. In the case that it's the former, I think it's smart to find some good news outlets now, preferably ones are ready to make the pivot to... whatever the hell the new future of politics demands.

I used to watch them, but then I came to realize that they are more of saying an opinion than fact checking. Even when they are shown to be wrong they will not make edits or recant some of their opinions. I just got annoyed by that.
You could look into former Young Turk worker Dave Rubin's "The Rubin Report".

The Young Turks are occasionally not shit, so they are better than CNN, but that's not saying much, they straightforwardly gave Jill Stein a platform and actively told people to vote third parties, and when the FBI leaked to Fox news the Clinton Foundation non-scandal, they made a video about the death of Clinton's chances for the whitehouse. The apparently have a magic switch which flips them between relatively sane people, to complete idiots that are literally the parody of the leftists that Frank is thinking of when he shit talks all the Sanders supporters who did vote for Clinton.

I'd have said that that's a rare position to hold, but apparently more than a rounding error of voters actually voted for Jill Stein like idiots, so it's a solid 1% of the population.

If you ever wondered what 2008-era Glenn Beck (apparently he reformed at some point during the Obama administration when he left FOX and got his own channel somewhere in the quadruple digits) would be like if he were liberal, the Young Turks is about on-target. That might actually be too generous. Glenn Beck always struck me as someone who was sincere in his convictions even if he was going insane from the feedback of his own echo chamber. I'm not sure the Young Turks have that sincerity.

They are entertaining, but as others say, they, especially Cenk, are very vocally hyper liberal, and akin to some of the shouting angry conservative pundits on Fox, just on the other side.

But they're entertaining, so if you keep in mind that watching TYT is like watching a Daily Show with no self awareness, they're not terrible. But do your own fact checking.

I think the point the Young Turks lost me was when I saw them getting outraged by an Australian KFC advert. It involved opposing cricket teams and a bucket of KFC used to bring harmony between the supporters - a proportion of whom happened to be Aboriginal. The Turks were decrying this as "obviously" racist, because "giving Fried Chicken to placate black people is a racist meme!".

The whole thing reeked of culture-blindness and, ironically, casual racism. They seemed totally oblivious to the fact that the whole black people - fried chicken meme is rooted in american cultural artefacts of the Deep South and would have no meaning in Australia. They were imposing their own reading onto the advert and not even trying to understand it in context. To say nothing of the small but noteworthy fact that ABORIGINALS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE NOT THE SAME JUST BECAUSE THEY HAVE DARK SKIN! I mean, really? Watching them claiming to take the high moral position whilst blanketly lumping everyone darker than them into the same category was incredibly cringeworthy to watch. It was almost a textbook example of leaping to a conclusion of racism based on your own prejudices and is exactly the kind of thing the right loves to accuse the left of doing.

After seeing that I could never quite see them as the moral champions they make themselves out to be.

Weird thing about the Young Turks: the name is based on a historical group that overthrew the Ottoman Empire and moved to a secular state. But whle they were at it they also participated in the Armenian Genocide perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire. Or rather, there were multiple factions within the Young Turks, and while the Constitutionalists were pro-Greek and pro-Armenian, the Nationalists were not and ultimately the latter faction won out long enough to systematically murder a million and a half Armenians. That makes the name "Young Turks" pretty morally complicated. Yes, the Young Turks overthrew a brutal hereditary dictatorship, but also yes their movement included a group that made their own brutal military dictatorship and performed an atrocity so astounding that Hitler literally based his own genocide plans on it.

Taking the name "Young Turks" for yourself is a moral minefield. You'd have to very carefully walk the line of supporting the good parts and not the mass-murder parts of the historical Young Turk movement. As far as I can tell, the people at the Young Turks show don't bother doing that and prefer to stand in their glass houses, throwing rocks.

-Username17

Red_Rob wrote:The whole thing reeked of culture-blindness and, ironically, casual racism. They seemed totally oblivious to the fact that the whole black people - fried chicken meme is rooted in american cultural artefacts of the Deep South and would have no meaning in Australia. They were imposing their own reading onto the advert and not even trying to understand it in context. To say nothing of the small but noteworthy fact that ABORIGINALS AND AFRICAN AMERICANS ARE NOT THE SAME JUST BECAUSE THEY HAVE DARK SKIN! I mean, really? Watching them claiming to take the high moral position whilst blanketly lumping everyone darker than them into the same category was incredibly cringeworthy to watch. It was almost a textbook example of leaping to a conclusion of racism based on your own prejudices and is exactly the kind of thing the right loves to accuse the left of doing.

I might argue that, despite them being two different groups, racism and racist people often doesn't concern itself with minor details like that. Of course, the US and Australia are not the same place and do not express racism in the same way, and their argument is still wrong for that reason alone.

Not to mention, yeah, like FrankTrollman says, they call themselves "The Young Turks". Don't do that.

I quite enjoy the program.

For better or worse, the phrase "young Turk" entered English with a general meaning - very weakly associated with the movement for which it was named - of a rebellious youngster.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/young_Turk

Horatio Alger used it in this sense in 1885, if you click on the quotation. That's 30 years before the Armenian Holocaust.

Now, I'd agree that usage probably should've been retired, but wiktionary has served me very efficiently and you can see Time Magazine using it in the same sense in 1966, 50 years after the Armenian Holocaust.

And Frank doesn't like them because they were solidly pro-Sanders.

Cenk also doesn't believe in the Armenian genocide, and gets pissed off when people bring it up.

I must say that Turkey's reaction to the Armenian Genocide has always puzzled me. I mean, Attaturk said bluntly that the treatment of Armenian subjects of the Ottoman Empire was a national shame. Turkey is not the Ottoman Empire. They could just say "Yeah, those Ottomans were super dicks sometimes, aren't you glad we're in charge now?" But they don't. Instead they try to pretend the Armenian Genocide didn't happen, when it's really quite obvious that it did.

So having Cenk randomly take Turkey's side in this particular argument is super weird. There is absolutely no reason for him to do that.

-Username17

I've never really enjoyed the show itself. While I may or may not agree with them on certain points they come off as dumb or oblivious far too often than I'd like.

Ana Kasparian seems the most knowledgable, least biased of them. Notably, she's the only women on the cast to my knowledge.

Prak wrote:Ana Kasparian seems the most knowledgable, least biased of them. Notably, she's the only women on the cast to my knowledge.

There are several women, unless they have left the show in the past year.

It's been awhile since I binged TYT on Hulu, so I'm not necessarily completely up to date on their cast.

Well, the news may be opinionated, but it's liberal and entertaining.