#News Gathering

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Let's not ignore the man behind the curtain, Rupert Murdoch.  

* * * *

Josh Marshall: 

The evidence emerging from the Dominion lawsuit against Fox News has the quality of liberal fever dreams. What’s the worst you can possibly imagine about Fox? What’s the most cartoonish caricature, the worst it could possibly be? Well, in these emails and texts you basically have that. Only it’s real. It’s not anyone believing the worst and giving no benefit of the doubt. This is what Fox is. In a moment like this it’s worth stepping way, way back, not just to the beginning of Fox News in 1996 but to the beginning of the broader countermovement it was a part of and even a relatively late entry to. 

Back in the 1950s and 1960s there was something historians and critics of the time called the post-war liberal consensus. It was not liberal in ways we’d recognize today. Indeed, it wasn’t liberal in many ways actual liberals of the time recognized. But it did represent an important level of elite consensus about state intervention in the economy and openness to a more restrained version of the American state created by the reformist periods of the first half of the 20th century.

Though what was then sometimes called “the race question” was “complicated” and not something that could be resolved overnight, there was also in elite opinion a general assumption that the South’s system of legalized apartheid was a source of embarrassment and something from the past that the country had to outgrow, even if not any time soon. (Just as is the case today, what is actually more properly called cosmopolitanism was sometimes misportrayed as liberalism: a general belief in pluralism, values tied to cities and urban life.)

I mention all this because, in the early 1950s and 1960s, what we now recognize as the embryonic modern conservative movement could rightly sense that there were assumptions embedded in elite culture that viewed certain of their core values and aims as backward, retrograde, archaic. When the early founders of modern “movement” conservatism looked at America’s elite consensus, they saw a set of assumptions and beliefs embedded in many elite institutions that ran counter to their aims and values. And they were not totally wrong. Over the course of the 1960s and 1970s they set about trying to build a series of counter-institutions, ones that wouldn’t, in their mind, have their sails angled permanently toward the winds of liberalism. 

One key moment in this story was the founding of The Heritage Foundation in 1973. Heritage was founded to be the counter to the “liberal” Brookings Institution. But Heritage was never anything like Brookings, even though in the D.C. of the ’80s and ’90s they were routinely portrayed as counterpoints — one representing liberalism and the other conservatism. Brookings was mainstream, stodgy, quasi-academic. Heritage was thoroughly ideological and partisan. In practice it was usually little more than a propaganda mill for the right. This pattern was duplicated countless times. 

The “liberal” Washington Post was matched by The Washington Times. Fox News, which didn’t come along for another generation, was not so much the answer to CNN as to CBS News, the iconic broadcast news organization of the first decades of the Cold War. What we see today in Fox News is most of the story: a purported news organization that knowingly and repeatedly reports lies to its viewers, whose chief executive brazenly works with and assists one party’s candidates by sharing confidential information about the other. What has always been the tell about Fox News is the tagline and motto: fair and balanced. The operation’s very branding is an aggressive bit of trolling. An unabashedly partisan and ideological operation selling itself under the heading of “fair and balanced.” It’s less a lie than a knowing taunt.

Here we get to the nub of the issue. Because this is not the entirety of the story. One of the things that is clear from the very start of the conservative movement was a basic failure to quite understand the thing they rallied themselves against, the history that in Bill Buckley’s famous phrase he was standing athwart and yelling “Stop!” None of the organizations that the right took issue with — the think tanks, the news publications, the movie studios, the nonprofits, the book publishers — were ideological, let alone partisan, organizations. When the founders of modern conservatism looked at CBS News they saw the shock troops of liberalism and the Democratic Party. Same with Brookings and the Washington Post and all the rest. And when they went to build their own versions of these institutions they patterned them off their own cartoonish understandings of how these operations functioned. The idea that institutions like CBS News or The New York Times were, whatever their faults and unexamined biases, fundamentally rooted in an ethic of news gathering and reporting was really totally lost on them.

So how do we get from this elemental misunderstanding to the raw and casual lying of the Fox of today? Well, that’s the thing: we don’t. Both were there from the very start. It’s all but impossible to disentangle the culture clash, the inability and refusal to really grasp what these institutions were, and the more open culture of propaganda, lying and mendacity. They’re fused together so tightly that getting your head around the relationship between them is more a matter of meditative absorption than anything that can be processed or explained discursively.

[Taling Points Memo :: Josh Marshall]

[dunmeshistash]

Dungeon Meshi Magic System - Bits about Magic and Mana

[aphel1on]

text post meme (misc)

[snarkspawn]

it's so nice to see my boy again, and to put him back into (more of the same) situations

[clouvu]

Offering lil doodles of them bc my eyes have been opened

[will80sbyers]

any type of censorship over LGBTQIA+ age appropriate themes / movies / books in schools is outright discrimination and should be called out as such

[goldstarknight]

MtG Phyrexia: All will Be One x Octopath Traveler (2023)

🔊 This one has sound. 🔊

In case you couldn't tell, I really like the Phyrexians. :)

Got back into Blender for this one and learned a ton of stuff about lighting, atmosphere, fluid simulation, modeling and even a little audio editing. Those faces in the background? First time I digitally modeled something. This was even more work than the Crimson Vow one, but it really paid off.

Maybe I'll do something like that again when I forgot how much work this one was. ^^"

(The music is 'Intro of GODWAVE' by Michiko Naruke from the game Half-Minute Hero: The Second Coming.)

[factual-fantasy]

I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW MUCH I LOVE THAT ONE SIDE PROFILE OF THE MARIO BROS NOR CAN I TELL YOU WHY

I DONT KNOW WHY OUT OF ALL OF THOSE DRAWINGS THATS THE ONE I LIKE THE MOST BUT IT’S ALL GREAT WORK FACTUAL

YOU’RE GETTING ME THROUGH FINALS👍👍👍

(Post in question)

STAAAAHP you're gonna make me fall back into my Mario phase!!1! XDD

(FR THO THANK YOU SO MUCH!! :DD I'm glad you liked that doodle! I was rather proud of how it came out😊!!)

[metalforhands]

Collecting Magic: The Gathering – Fallout

Fallout: New Vegas Companions

(And a bonus Yes Man!)

[haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted]

White Phyrexian Concept Art by Robbie Trevino

[littjara-mirrorlake]

Plane Shift: New Phyrexia Phyresis Rules 1.0

Contact with Phyrexian creatures and glistening oil can lead to phyresis, a special condition tracked in ten stages. Phyresis is not a disease, so immunity to disease cannot prevent a creature from being afflicted. Phyrexian creatures are immune to this condition.

A creature infected by phyresis experiences the effects of its current level and all those below.

Until level 5, greater restoration may remove a phyresis level from a targeted creature in addition to its other effects.

Every 24 hours, a character who has at least 1 phyresis level must roll a d20. On a roll equal to or less than their current phyresis level, they gain one level.

Phyresis Level Effects

1: No effect 2: No effect 3: Disadvantage on saving throws against being charmed or frightened by Phyrexian creatures 4: No new effect 5: Phyresis can no longer be removed by greater restoration 6: No new effect 7: Phyrexian language proficiency 8: Gain one augmentation for which you meet the prerequisites (detailed in a later installment) 9: No new effect 10: Incapacitated; begin compleation saving throws (see “A Sublime Transformation”) (Below the cut)

A Sublime Transformation

Most compleated adult Phyrexians, including player characters, are capable of compleating other creatures with sufficient ichor and time. A compleated creature retains its original type and racial features but gains the Phyrexian supertype. As a general rule, spells cast using Phyrexian mana that raise a target from the dead will return them compleated, if they were not already.

Much like being raised from the dead, the process of compleation is an exhausting ordeal that saps the energy of affected creatures. A newly compleated Phyrexian takes a -3 penalty to all attack rolls, saving throws, and ability checks. Each time the creature finishes a long rest, the penalty is reduced by 1 until it disappears.

Often, compleation is a process of optimization, reinforcing a creature's existing strengths. In that spirit, compleated player characters may increase one ability score above 20 by subtracting 2 from another ability score for each increase by 1 to the target score, to a maximum of 22. In addition, the compleated character gains one Phyrexian augmentation for which they meet the prerequisite.

Compleation is a unique opportunity for a player to re-work their character, extending to even class and subclass choices. Additionally, the mnemonic nature of glistening oil means that genetic material is not the only thing passed down from a Phyrexian to a creature they compleat. A newly compleated creature gains one skill proficiency possessed by the Phyrexian who compleated them.

Glistening oil carries the voice of Yawgmoth, who seeks to bend all to his whims. When you reach 10 phyresis levels, you must make a DC 16 Wisdom or Charisma saving throw each turn (your choice). The Phyrexian compleating you may grant you advantage on these saving throws. Successes and failures don't need to be consecutive; keep track of both until you collect three of a kind. When you roll a 1 on the d20, it counts as two failures; likewise, a 20 on the d20 counts as two successes. On your third success, you become compleated while retaining your previous memories and convictions. On your third failure, your bonds are altered to serve Phyrexia. You retain your base alignment and personality, but may suffer memory loss. Either way, you lose all phyresis levels and their effects.

Though powerful, the alteration of loyalties during compleation can be undone. Dispel magic or remove curse cast with a 7th-level slot or higher can restore one target creature to its former bonds if its mind had been altered in this way. You can target one additional creature for each slot level above 7th.

[necroticboop]

❝ Your realms are diseased, and we are the only cure. ❞

[iwriterobots]

It was revealed to me in a dream

[amphibianaday]

day 1612

[toweringclam]

YOU ARE FIGHTING AN INFECTION. YOU ARE FEVERISH. YOU ARE BREATHING AND ALIVE. THE OIL IN YOUR VEINS IS A VIRUS.

[goldstarknight]

Pixel Art Redraw of Phyrexian Unlife (2022)

This was my first attempt at making an MtG card with pixel art. Always loved this unsettling artwork. The horrifying realization of the character's transformation is is captured perfectly by their expression.