I don't know, three pages back I was name-calling and venting and wondering the same things. I agree that one side doing one thing wrong is not equivalent to another doing a hundred things wrong.

Chaykin is very big on the Jazz Age, crime fiction, noir film, and pulp storytelling.  Weimar Germany has all of that, in spades, with the reality of social and political climate, the cinema of the era (especially Lang's Mabuse and Murnau's Dr Caligari), the decadent partying with society crumbles, heroes with feet of clay, villains who manipulate the common man, and lots of sex and pronography.  It filters into a lot of Chaykin's post-Star Wars work, from Flagg to Time 2, his revamping of the Shadow, his Blackhawk mini, Twilight, the later Dominic Fortune stories, his Batman elseworlds, Satellite Sam and more.

It's pretty easy to draw parallels, though America was probably closer to Weimar Germany in the Depression, as fascist impulses battled socialist ideals.  You have similar doom and gloom in the Reagan and Thatcher eras of the 80s (with good reason); but, give them enough rope and politicians will hang themselves and the pendulum swings back.

Morgan and O'Reilly are cut form the same cloth. They were tabloid editors/writers, employed by right wing billionaires, presenting puerile, sensationalistic fiction as news, while wallowing in the misery of others. In that, they were taking a page from previous generations of scum, whether it was the newspaper barons Hearst and Pulitzer (both s@#$-heels), celebrity scandal rags like True Confidential, or gossip harpies like Hedda Hopper and Liz Smith (and Rona Barrett).

There is a great deal of truth that the US political parties represent the conservative and the very conservative, as Ian Hislop, of Private Eye and Have I Got News For You, has indicated; but, the divide in Europe doesn't look as different as some would suggest, depending on the country. There are Left and Right parties; but, politics more often has the same swing between Right and Center, than Right and Left. Compromise usually ends up somewhere in the Center (or just to one side or the other). My observations of European politics suggest it isn't that much different than here, especially if you look at the European Union as a whole, rather than just individual countries. The same is true in the US, if you look at politics at the national level, rather than the state.

Yes. That's what I believe - that she did not mean any of that stuff. Not one bit.

@cody : Well, if you start to look at european countries as aw whole, as the EU, then the argument of small countries doesn't work anymore, this myth that free healthcare/college/job security only works ith a much smaller population. As it stands, since the Schengen EU, it has largely harmonized towards this paradigm. Just based on those three rights and their philosophical implications, I dont think it is fair to acess that they are similar to the US.
US politics is dominated by interpretations of an antique constitution, while most european countries change their constitution regularly. In countries like Spain, France, or Sweden, the far left is still a loud and powerfull voice in politics. There's also the fact that evolution tends to be slower in europe, but when they decide for a change, they stick to it, while in the US, there's shifts, back and forths with aquired rights. The US people define themselves by their culture, their origins (even porn stars are labeled by ethnicity!) while in Europe, nationality is more important (as the recent football worldcup controversy shows). You can even see that in US arts, which constantly substracts parts of its history (let's just consider the recent wave of conservatism in modern classical music, which is at the sae stage as those diversity & comics guys are, namely going back to an old white male elitist paradigm...).

I guess that what makes me believe Chaykin's vision, is how everything seems to be more binary in te US, good vs evil, god vs devil, dems vs repubs, marvel vs DC, Coke vs Pepsi, West Coast vs East Coast, rich vs poor... With this mentality, always seeking opposition, there's no room for a diverse political landscape, most people wouldn't compute with it, it's become part of the social DNA.
You may find this all nitpicking, and you might be right, but there's enough cultural gaps to at least challenge that notion

Sure I do

She can play the game of satire all she wants, but the bottom line is that she didn’t even respond directly to the dummies who insulted her. Fighting fire with fire, so to speak.

Those were general tweets posted to her main twitter feed. And she did it on a regular basis for around 2 years time.

If this was a right wing, white journalist saying this stuff about blacks or asians or hispanics...but then just simply chalked it up to satire after the tweets were unearthed...would you be inclined to believe them?

Like I said, I doubt it.

? Wait, are you really attempting to draw a parallel between an abused minority responding with genuine or not satire, with a right winger expressing the opinions of a right winger in a genuine or not satirycal manner?


First off, her work deals with that specific brand of social studies, so it is indeed more likely to be satire BECAUSE she did it over an extensive period of time. If it was just steaming off, that would have been a simple reflex maybe revealing something closer to her core. But again, she only started that after she was subjected to hatefull and racists attacks.
Note that those guys who felt free to start those attacks always tend to be of similar nature...

Secondly, if you respond directly to the racist haters, that's not satire anymore, duh! You state that your way is fighting fire with fire, which leads me to believe that satire indeed isn't one of your tools. 
Her's an exemple of recent conservative satire : theintercept.com/2018/07/24/conservative-network-says-fake-interview-alexandria-ocasio-cortez-satire/

Lastly, we're here talking about this journalist because you brought her specific case up : comparing her with an unlikely abstract is pointless. Give us an exemple of an actual right wing journalist saying this stuff about blacks or asians or hispanics who then defended himself by claiming this was satire and we'll see if the context tends to support this or not.

I have nothing against you personnaly, really, but the way you brought here this specific piece of "news" (without context and source), that's exactly what we're all denouncing here, including yourself : a agenda trying to pass as objective news. Becca's exemple with Rush Limbaugh's trees is exactly the same thing as what you just did.