CNN Clickbait

CNN is a sensationalist tabloid. FOX News is the most notoriously misleading news organization out there. CNN is worse. If you like CNN because Fox is too right wing and MSNBC is too left wing, the alternative I suggest for you is NPR. NPR gets their funding primarily by soliciting their readers and listeners for donations. NPR has a left leaning bias because of their college educated listener base. But NPR also panders to a significant minority of their listeners who are conservative, forcing NPR to make a sincere attempt at accuracy.

The same can not be said for CNN. If you've read my blog before you know my #1 political issue is health care policy. For our example here, let's focus on Trump's rash decision to cut subsidies to private insurers.. Let's compare Fox's main story vs. CNN's main story on that:

1. Fox reports that "Trump says Obamacare stinks, and he's not going to pay 'massive' amounts of money to bail out the private health care insurance companies any more. This will rattle health care markets and start a huge legal battle." Is this politically biased? Yes. Does it make hasty projections about the future? Sure. BUT IT IS BASICALLY ACCURATE, COVERING WHAT ACTUALLY HAPPENED.
2. CNN reports that "Trump supporters hate multiculturalism, so they hate anything with the Obama label on it, so Trump will destroy Obamacare because of its name." Is Trump racist? Maybe. Are some fraction of his supporters? Obviously. BUT IT IS CATEGORICALLY UNTRUE THAT THE PROBLEM THEY HAVE WITH OBAMACARE IS THAT IT WAS SIGNED BY A BLACK PRESIDENT. 

The reason why Trump supporters don't like Obamacare because it has ALREADY failed to provide fly-over states with affordable coverage. For example:

As hard of a sell Medicare For All is to fly-over state voters, it is far easier to sell to them than Obamacare is, because Obamacare was already wrecking them financially in 2016. NPR listeners realized from NPR interviews that many a Trump supporter's 2nd favorite pick was Bernie Sanders. These fly-over state voters would have voted for Sanders when the sexual allegations against Trump were revealed. But even if Hillary suddenly released a video of her in camo shooting an AR-15 while hunting deer with the president of the NRA, fly over state voters STILL COULD NOT VOTE FOR HILLARY BECAUSE SHE SUPPORTED OBAMACARE OVER MEDICARE FOR ALL. The "opposition to Obamacare is about racism, not economics" CNN is peddling here is a postmodern platitude. CNN either doesn't care about accuracy, or it is actively sabotaging its viewers.

Let's take CNN's big story when the Vegas shooting happened. Supposedly "Whether a state has a large capacity ammunition magazine ban is the single best predictor of the mass shooting rate in that state." But then nobody picked this up and did their own story? If this is such a big deal worthy of attention, how come the only other news organization to pick it up was actually Fox? CNN is so bad that even Fox shouldn't trust them!

Another example of CNN's frivolity is this story about how a widow of a fallen solider never got her promised phone call from Trump. So she spent a lot of time in person with Pence, who would be a less painful to hang out with than Trump would be, and then Trump never fulfilled a promise - because Trump's dishonesty is what... some kind of news?

On any of these tabloid stories CNN runs (and they release ridiculous pomo garbage masked as news every day,) go to the bottom of the web page. There you will see paid content that is yet more not-really-news. What do you call a news website with poor news accuracy, low factual content, that ultimately just takes you to more clickbait? CNN IS CLICKBAIT.

If you are a right winger, you are reading this and chuckling "I told you so." But if you are a left winger, you need to realize that words matter - the truth matters - eschew post modernism if you want to influence reality. You can't win elections if you constantly mistake fantasy for reality. CNN's bombastic bulls**** is precisely the type of cultural evil that is tearing our society apart and leading us the wrong direction:

God Hates Pomo

The word "God" means something. There is a dictionary definition: creator, ruler, supreme moral authority. When people - using the English language as it is used after the year 2000 - start to say "Muslims, Christians and Jews worship different Gods" - or in fact when they say ANY religion is worshiping a different God, they are playing a rancid game of pomo. Unless a religion is worshiping some form of anti-God - like perhaps the (openly not-necessarily-theist and highly-critical-of-typical-belief-in-God) Church of Satan - it is not fair to say they worship a different God, regardless of how pagan or polytheistic they are.

Playing the "my Asherah statue is better than your Baal statue" game of "your God is not my God" abuses the English language, it is screwing around with the definition of the word God. God always refers to the highest being in your supernatural cosmology. If my word for that is Asherah and your word for that is Baal, then we are talking about the same entity, even if our beliefs about that entity differ.

Accusations of polytheism are used to justify this game of "your God is not my God." The problem here is all versions of God have pantheons. Allah of Islam has both angels and gins. The Father of Christianity has arch angels and lesser angels and fallen angels. As proudly polytheistic as worshipers of the Norse Gods may be, a worshiper of Thor still admits Thor is subordinate to Odin. Athena is subordinate to Zues. The key here to understand that arguing over weather or not this or that entity in a pantheon is a "lesser God" or an "Angel" is a matter of semantics. Michael the Arch Angel in Christianity would be considered a lesser God when viewed from the lens of Polytheism, and Thor would be considered an Arch Angel through the lens of Monotheism.

The real difference between Polythesim and Monotheism in practice is can different deities be called upon for different purposes. Do I only pray to God the Father in the name of Jesus for any blessings I may need, or do I should I pursue Athena specifically when I need technological insight, instead of always praying to Zeus for everything? Now the biggest organization on Earth promoting Monotheism is the Catholic Church, and they more so than anyone else with their pantheon of Saints advocate praying to lesser beings than God the Father. All of this Monotheism vs. Polytheism in practice is pure semantics.

Instead of playing the "your God is not my God" pomo game, we should instead say "we have major differences in our beliefs about God." Because words matter. Because words have definitions. The most important English speaking country in the world, culturally and historically from a global perspective, is the United States of America. Our founding fathers used Free Masonry to have a neutral definition of God that everyone could agree on, and this is indeed the overt definition used on our money: "In God We Trust" with an all seeing eye and an Egyptian Pyramid but no sign of a cross to be seen.

Pretending like the word God means something more exclusive is postmodern deconstructionism, and is dangerously nihilistic and irresponsible. It's a great example of what I call pomo unibomber bulls***, and attempts to undo centuries of dialogue and understanding between different faiths, seeking to take us back to a time when we would kill each other over semantics: