:eek:

surely being a "headwear aficionado" is worse than simply being a man who dons a fedora

i mean, if we're splitting hairs about similar-looking hats, what are we even giving the fedora (which was really a trilby but actually a bowler hat) guy shit for?

well sure, there's nothing wrong with a fedora

RGB, the "technically it's ephebophilia" guy for bad hats

:rofl:

I think the distinction between paedophilia and ephebophilia is actually important.

It's just not a very good defense for the latter. And it's an even worse one for the former.

WHAT IS GOING ON IN THIS HOUSE

Fedoras are cool. They are and always have been the hat of the man on the job, whether he's a 1930s detective or a rugged outdoorsmen.

Trilbies are a hat of the rich and became popularized at horse races.

You know I recently had a tense exchange with a Dutch bartender who thought I was being annoying for believing there is a significant different between whiskey and brandy.

He was wrong and so are all of you.

ooh, where exactly was that?

I think people look generally ridiculous in fedoras, trilbites, or anything else resembling either of those two things.

We're absolutely not giving fedoras a pass.

The business simply will not agree to those terms.

uh... yeah because the first two are fedoras and the third is a trilby

a touristy bar across the canal from Centraal Station, right near the big basilica/cathedral thing over there

He even mocked me! He said, "IIIIIIM AN AMERICAN AND IIIIIIII KNOW EVERYTHING!"

I'm anti every kind of hat except the Devo power domes and those require very specific circumstances like being Devo

WOW MUCH BETTER

brendan looks good

hahahah oh wow, you got the dutch treatment

in other news my cousin is posting zerohedge articles on facebook, I thought I wouldn't hear of that site anymore since toc was banned.

not sure if he suddenly turned alt-right which I would find hard to believe, but he's apparently very anti mainstream media

I'm so weary of 'anti msm' people now that I'm almost fully pro-MSM

I'm critical and skeptical of the spin in mainstream media, but being biased toward elites is different from being "fake." I supplement my consumption of mainstream media with independent media, but everybody who completely excludes mainstream media from their diet is typically very dumb.

It was something in support of Assange and against alledgedly false claims against him, moreso than anti-msm. But that term alone reeks of ghosts from this board's past so much that it causes me to shiver.

Since putting a television in the living room after the new year, I have started to watch the local 6:30 a.m news. So much bullshit!

I bet a lot of what people consider independent media is also mainstream.

Sometimes can't tell if news or merely entertainment. jk. totes not news.

Where is the line between MSM and "real" news? Is there a heirarchy?

Like what makes "independent" news sources any more reliable?

I don't think anybody in this thread made a distinction between mainstream news and "real" news.

"Independent" = not owned by one of a few giant media corporations.

Discussion about bias in mainstream news can be found in Herman and Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Essentially, mainstream media tends to be biased toward elites, because (1) the news is owned by giant corporations, so it's in their interest to spin the news in ways favourable to their rich shareholders and owners; (2) the news relies on access to elites for content, and that access could be curtailed if it is too critical of elites; (3) the news relies on revenue from advertisers, and advertising could be pulled if the news is too critical of the large firms that buy ad space; and (4) media outlets will receive lots of flak for reporting in ways inconvenient to power structures.

Of course, conflicting opinions can still be found within the mainstream media. But this is usually only on topics that powerful elites disagree amongst themselves on, and the range of opinion won't be much larger than that. Issues on which elites are in consensus will not be contested very often in the mainstream media (for example, try to find mainstream American news critical of Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict; or, back in 2003, papers that weren't cheerleaders for the Iraq invasion).

Being "independent" isn't a sufficient condition for being reliable, of course. You can still have total nutcases spouting nonsense to their audience of like-minded followers. It's just that, indepedent media don't necessarily have the same biasing incentives that the mainstream media do.

But, like I said, having a spin or a bias is quite different from being "fake." The mainstream media, most of the time, doesn't just make shit up, like conspiracy theorists claim they do. It's not "lies made up by the lizard people to control us" or whatever. They report on things that actually happened, just with a filter that colours how they report it, what issues they give time to, how much time, and what sides of the story get to be heard. And because only the mainstream media are large enough to foot the costs of some very important aspects of reporting, one must still rely on them to get a fuller perspective on the news, and I don't think it makes sense to eliminate sources like the Washington Post or the New York Times from one's consumption. If you do that, you're missing an important component of the news. Read it, but take a look at what's not being said, too.