Pathetic. Their neo Nazi activity is my business because it’s infecting my community, it’s beating members of my community up and leaving them dying in the street. It’s making my community unsafe for people who have done nothing wrong. This capitulation of yours to dangerous, vicious belief systems is beneath contempt. We fight intolerance because it is never benign. It does not affect you but it affects others and you are willing to turn a blind eye and pretend everything is fine, because when YOU walk home, nobody is going to stomp your head into a curb.
How much? All of it. The US population has been brainwashed for decades into believing fighting for workers rights is paradoxically, counterproductive to gaining workers rights.
Okay. I get it. You're using the low-quality "alternative news" articles with clickbait headlines to draw in short attention span readers because those are your cash cows. Having that steady advertising income allows you to finance real journalism like the things you listed that might not be able to stand on their own in the current trend-or-die marketplace.
So let's make a deal. If I pay a subscription, will you only give me the good headlines and not spam me with the crappy stuff I don't want to see?
That's a great example of how shoddy Buzzfeed's journalism is and why they shouldn't be supported.
> BuzzFeed was harshly criticized for publishing what Washington Post columnist Margaret Sullivan called "scurrilous allegations dressed up as an intelligence report meant to damage Donald Trump"
Doesn't seem shoddy to me. I agree completely with the quote from buzzfeeds executive staff. The materials were newsworthy because they were "in wide circulation at the highest levels of American government and media".
Hrm. In hindsight, it seems obviously preferable that the public got to view this dossier. It would have been hard to have an informed opinion about e.g. the Strozk situation without knowing about the dossier and it’s contents.
You can't build a reputation on garbage clickbait, and then expect people to take you seriously on-demand. Integrity isn't a light switch that you can flick on and off. To take any investigative piece seriously, I have to have some trust for the people that produced it, and I don't trust Buzzfeed to be anything other than low-quality, no-integrity mindless garbage.
I see you're being down voted into nothingness (ironic when the topic is about integrity, journalism, free speech) but I agree.
Buzzfeed has been garbage for years at least here in Canada, some pretty vile people work there (Scaachi Koul). I too can't take them seriously considering their history. Maybe the US version is better and maybe I will find them trustworthy but I can't see it happening anytime soon.
Even the NYT after that disaster with the hiring of Sarah Jeong. I didn't realize it was OK to be racist as a retort I foolishly choose the option of just never being racist.
Trust takes years to develop but will disappear in an instant.
Nowhere in the comment you replied to was it suggested that it would be achieved by undemocratic means. Ironically, in your comment you imply that democracy consists of lawmaking by whoever has more money.
To be clear, I find Facebook and Google's tracking-based advertisement business model repugnant. I was only giving credit as to the transparency report, which it publishes despite not being required to do so.
>It would be quicker to just look at the US, where protectionism has resulted in it becoming an economic superpower.
This is laughably false. The postwar US hegemonic sphere is built on trade liberalization. Please read up on GATT, the WTO, OECD, and the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act.
Prewar, the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act[4] is widely viewed as one of the worst economic decisions ever made, badly exacerbating the Great Depression by collapsing global trade. The US has been the world's main driver of trade liberalization since that protectionist mistake was reversed in 1934, for the entire duration of its superpower status.
The US existed, and was prosperous, before the Second World War. How the US economy functions in the postwar period really has no relevance to how it got to the position it was in before that. I do hope you’re not suggesting that a single protectionist act having a negative result means that 100 years of protectionism was actually bad for the US.
Protectionism was very effective in developing economies. Once your economy dominates and functions mainly by extracting value from submissive developing nations (who are not allowed to enact the same proteionist rules that allowed the US to become so powerful) free trade becomes beneficial to you (but not the other party)
>The US existed, and was prosperous, before the Second World War. How the US economy functions in the postwar period really has no relevance to how it got to the position it was in before that. I do hope you’re not suggesting that a single protectionist act having a negative result means that 100 years of protectionism was actually bad for the US.
The effects of the Smoot-Hawley Act as well as a hundred years of economic consensus are quite clear on this: protectionism is bad.
>Protectionism was very effective in developing economies.
Care to cite any sources? The infant industry argument is not widely supported by economists[0] and is mostly parroted by heterodox/Marxist economists like Ha-Joon Chang.
>Once your economy dominates and functions mainly by extracting value from submissive developing nations (who are not allowed to enact the same proteionist rules that allowed the US to become so powerful) free trade becomes beneficial to you (but not the other party)
This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose and effects of international trade. Comparative advantage creates a mutual benefit for both parties to trade. The postwar liberal order has been associated with astonishing increases in standards of living across the globe.
> The effects of the Smoot-Hawley Act as well as a hundred years of economic consensus are quite clear on this: protectionism is bad.
Please stop and consider that trade is a very complex situation with dependencies on many things, human psychology being one incredibly important but not very obvious one.
Turning a complex system into a binary, as you are doing, is not an optimal form of analysis. It introduces significant risk, because you are constraining your ability to consider possible outcomes of various policy decisions. Furthermore, you are basing your beliefs on recorded human history, which is an incredibly small sample size, and you are only looking at the average outcome. There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty and luck in human history, but the tone of your writing is that you have an utterly perfect understanding and indisputable conclusion.
At the very least, can you consider the possibility that while free trade is undoubtedly superior on average, that there can be negative individual outcomes in smaller time or regional frames?
EDIT: Also don't forget:
a) History is written by the victor
b) A lot of the studies you may cite (or other may use against you) are written by imperfect human beings, may be not perfectly correct or comprehensive, may contain bias (may be sponsored by someone looking for a particular conclusion) if not outright lies (lies, damned lies, and statistics and all that), and are not guaranteed to play out the same under different conditions.
The above would help explain why there are differences of opinion on such matters as this, and many other things. There seems to be this incredibly pervasive sentiment on both sides (yes, even yours!) of the political divide particularly in Western cultures, that the Ultimate Truth is blatantly obvious, if only the other side wasn't too uneducated to see it. This style of thinking strikes me as very ironic.
EDIT (to Rory, as I am throttled):
> I'm happy to consider exceptions to that rule or reasons to believe it is flawed.
Based on your tone and words, you certainly don't seem to have an open mind on the matter. I don't mean that as a snipe, I mean it is a fact that unfortunately you may find offensive. Keep in mind, people aren't perfect, and you are a person.
Above you said: "The effects of the Smoot-Hawley Act as well as a hundred years of economic consensus are quite clear on this: protectionism is bad."
You didn't say protectionism can be bad, or tends to be bad, you said it is bad. This is the very point of my criticism, it is an absolutist, one-dimensional conclusion on an incredibly complex system, based on a tiny sample size. If this statement offends you, you should stop and think about that for a little while, and I mean that sincerely and as non-offensively as possible.
> However, there is substantial theoretical and empirical work to support this point. Are you proposing an alternative or just handwavingly dismissing it as "science is wrong sometimes"? Unless you'd like to point to evidence that protectionism is good or at least a theoretical framework under which it can be good, the claim is little different from "evolution is just a theory, why don't you consider alternatives?"
Based on a disciplined reading what I've written, without subconscious interpretation and extrapolation, can you try to think of how this statement might be less than perfect? I could easily point out some flaws in this statement, but that tends not to be an effective way of communicating on these topics. Are you able to see any flaws in it, at all? (And, feel more than free to point out logical errors in my thinking, I encourage it!. But in good faith, before doing that please address my reasonable points.)
>Turning a complex system into a binary, as you are doing, is not an optimal form of analysis. It introduces significant risk, because you are constraining your ability to consider possible outcomes of various policy decisions. Furthermore, you are basing your beliefs on recorded human history, which is an incredibly small sample size, and you are only looking at the average outcome.
I'm happy to consider exceptions to that rule or reasons to believe it is flawed. (Certainly there are game theoretical reasons to impose protection in the short term in the hopes of coercing the other party into agreeing to lower overall protection in the long term. Though all indications are that the administration gives lip service to that at best — they are fundamentally opposed to free trade.)
However, there is substantial theoretical and empirical work to support this point. Are you proposing an alternative or just handwavingly dismissing it as "science is wrong sometimes"? Unless you'd like to point to evidence that protectionism is good or at least a theoretical framework under which it can be good, the claim is little different from "evolution is just a theory, why don't you consider alternatives?"
You believe your feelings over the consensus by professional Economists.
As for the rest of your argument:
A) WWI/WW2 onward is related to Free Trade and the other economies being destroyed.
B) Pre-1900s Protectionism was largely due to continuous trade wars with other powers that is universally agreed to have been detrimental for all involved.
Literally everything you are saying is not fact-based.
This doesn’t work[1]. Allowing parasitical ideology the space to express itself only emboldens it.
[1] All of recorded history