Sal wrote: PkrBum wrote:ussanews.com

Amazing, isn't it? Any source is good for these clowns as long as it tells them what they want to hear. It's one reason it's hopeless to try to wise them up. They won't listen.
I know another guy who swears to me that Conservative Treehouse and such are "real news stories from all over the world that the mainstream media doesn't want you to hear!" And even Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh's squeaky mini-me, called the Treehouse a "kook site." Usually if the mainstream media won't report something, it's because it's bullshit and they don't want to blow their integrity. If it's legit and gets them attention, they're gonna be all over it, whatever "side" it favors.
I
proved to this guy that Conservative Treehouse was bullshit, and he still quotes them all the time.
See, one time he put up a post alarmed about something Conservative Treehouse had reported about "sex changes on toddlers," with people giving hormones to little boys to help them "transition" into being women. He was super-enraged about it... as most people would be if that were a real thing. But, it isn't. It's horseshit.
Now, I'm no expert on trans people -- I have a few gay friends but don't know any trans people personally -- but I do hang around plenty of Democratic boards where there are plenty of 'em, and I've seen them discuss this topic because right-wingers try to push that fable all the time --
none of the trans people I've seen are in favor of transitioning toddlers. For one thing, ya
can't. Even if people didn't have moral objections to such a thing -- and they do -- it wouldn't work biologically.
Conservatives seem to think that to turn a guy into a girl, you just chop off his dick. You don't. I'm a grindhouse film freak, so I've seen this done, in a documentary called
Shocking Asia, which I hope never to watch again because it was a bit much even for me, and I've eaten pizza while watching
Faces of Death. Not to get gruesome, but in the operation you have to remove the insides of the penis and turn it inside out to form a vagina, which gets tucked in. And you have to wait until the person has fully developed genitals to do that, or you have nothing to work with. A lot of trans folks don't even go through with that part because it's intensive and expensive and painful. And you wouldn't start hormone treatments because you'd inhibit the development of the genitals you'd need to work with.
So, it's not a real thing for kids, it's just conservative ignorance. But they still spread stories like that around because they like to make trans people into "monsters" who do all kinds of bad stuff, instead of people who just use their freedom to live a life that seems weird to us, but makes them happy. Religious fanatics like absolute conformity, so they can't just leave folks alone, they have to invent reasons to crack down on them.
Anyway, not only was it a bogus story, it was bogus reporting. What Conservative Treehouse did was to have a "real news article" that was just them reacting to somebody's tweet. It wasn't pulled off any journalist wire or anything -- it was reporting that someone had tweeted a thing. If you went and looked up the original tweet, it was some obscure Twitter account that had around two hundred followers, and it was some supposed "liberal" who put out a "Fellow liberals! We have to stop this insane practice that we're doing!" thing. (Which, if you looked at the rest of their feed, was typical of most of their tweets -- they were all "I'm a liberal but the conservatives are right! We've gone too far!" They did that on just about any topic you can think of.) It was a total bullshit account obviously run by a conservative... and, it was obviously run by one of the same conservatives who runs Conservative Treehouse, because they reported on this tweet, from an obscure account that hardly anyone was following, within about an hour. They just
happened to spot this random tweet about this thing they wanted to raise an alarm about, right off.
How
conveeeeeeennnnient!
So, basically, if you want to fool a dumbass, set up a Twitter account, set up a blog, use the blog to report on the
craaaaazzzzy things that are coming out of that Twitter account... which you tweeted yourself. And present that as a "news story." Then rake in bucks to your Patreon and get hits for your ad revue from the shit-fer-brains that don't investigate what you're doing. People make a
lot of money telling conservatives what they want to hear. Anyway, this thing was so obvious and clumsy a feat of propaganda legerdemain that it was like doing a rabbit-out-of-the-hat trick that starts out with you shoving the rabbit into the hat in full view of the audience, then saying, "Forget I did that part, and the rest will be amazing!"
So I showed the guy how it was done, and presented other "news stories" where they'd done exactly the same thing, either from tweets or other blogs (which they also created for the purpose of feeding themselves things to react to), and he just went, "How do you know for SURE they didn't just happen on that tweet in half an hour?!?" Like that's freakin' plausible, and like it's not a bogus Twitter account in the first place. And even if it
were a legit tweet, it's a fucking
tweet, not a "news story from all over the world." People can tweet
anything.And the dude still fully trusts that website and gets angry when they tell him to get angry, believes whatever bullshit they want him to believe to keep him coming back, and he probably sends 'em his money. Dude's life
sucks now -- I've known him for years and before he got into all this right-wing bullshit (I think that comes as a midlife crisis for a lot of these people) he was a happier guy. Now he's
always upset about something. Can't review a book or a movie without injecting something about "leftists." He's made himself fearful and angry and obsessed. But he can't quit because he's addicted to the outrage.
Anyway... yeah, ussanews.

At least it's not the Epoch Times this time -- the forum's resident anencephalic likes that one a lot, too. Must be kinda fun to be that childlike.