Comments

  1. hemidactylus says

    So was Scott Baio the original dingbot? Then Kid Rock? Is that vat where Fox and Friends were born? Are Doocy and Kilmeade still functioning? Did they ever know weather or sports? Or was that a charade?

  2. tbtabby says

    Makes you wonder why the alt-right bothered to declare Taylor Swift their “Aryan Goddess” in the first place, when Murdoch will provide them an endless stream of blonde-haired, blue-eyed hotties who actually spew right-wing talking points.

  3. birgerjohansson says

    Can the living “bots” be replaced with an algoritm? The hardest part is rendering realistic-looking human images, but as AI has recently reached that goal…

  4. birgerjohansson says

    …In fact Rupert Murdoch and Donald Trump are both so predictable in their evil, they may already have been replaced by more reliable digital constructs. The persons we see are just actors.

  5. hemidactylus says

    Roger Ailes was an evil genius of ideological social engineering in how Fox News shifted the political landscape. Beyond ideology there were some apparently deliberate unconscious subtle triggers. I perceived a template for how women were supposed to appear on the network. The red power dress or blouse was obligatory. Then there was what I assumed to be an official hair color (“Fox blonde”). Maybe a lure for bros from the Nordic cornfields?

  6. hemidactylus says

    Not much of a Lawrence O’Donnell fan. Before the election of Trump wound up making ideologically driven opinion shows too unbearable to watch I used to limit myself to watching Kennedy on Fox Business and Maddow on MSNBC. Kennedy wasn’t born in the conservative dingbot vat. She was engineered at MTV. I vaguely recall her interviewing Henry Rollins way back then. Her show on Fox Business used to he called The Independents and she had libertarian sidekicks who didn’t quite tow the Fox line. Not sure how independent Kennedy is now. I currently try to avoid all that stuff as much as possible. Jaded cynicism prevents me from wanting to become more “informed” by cable “news” of either stripe. Not sure what to make of Newsy.

  7. sparks says

    If it’s the same ‘Kennedy’, and I think it is as she came up through MTV, then we’re talking pure fool. She’s the same one who, on Maher’s show, insisted that atheism is a religion.

  8. hemidactylus says

    @7- sparks

    Had to look it up as I don’t have HBO and Maher is no longer in my pantheon of atheist heroes.

    https://youtu.be/CusScRkK0JA

    As merely lack of belief in god(s) per dictionary I think Kennedy and whomever that other person is are seriously wrong. But atheism can be much more than that. Especially movement atheism. We have canonized our heroes.

    Kennedy calls atheism “a belief adhered to with zeal and fervor.” Hard to say how strongly typical atheists disbelieve in god(s) versus lack belief. But zeal and fervor seem apt, giving her benefit of the doubt (see what I did there with a pun?). I would say that atheists often seek group fellowship or social ties they lack when they quit the church.

    On Maher’s assertion that “Religion does not allow for new information.” this wasn’t properly fleshed out. Kennedy told Maher to talk to theologians (her examples were Notre Dame and Catholic Church). There may be more progressive theologians that allow social circumstances or scientific discovery to alter their perspectives. Maher rebutted with Religulous. Yet didn’t he talk to Jesuit cosmologist George Coyne (no relation) in that movie? Coyne is the poster child for Gouldian NOMA. Not sure if Kennedy would have gone there but Maher gave her a snarky unholier than thou shut down and ended the discussion.

    Is Maher an atheist dingbot? Or just a dick?

    https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Religulous

    “Father George Coyne, PhD: The Scriptures are not teaching science. It’s very hard for me to accept, not just a literal interpretation of Scripture, but a fundamentalist approach to religious belief. It’s kind of a plague. It presents itself as science and it’s not.”