Really? There seems to be an entire review/product testing industry, of which Consumer Reports is one of the more well-known names. They seem to have been around a while. I would think they might be interested in your constructive criticism. I'm sure they'd rather stick to factual matters and not contrived hypotheticals, and imagine how much more successful they would be!

Seriously though, if hand-waving dismissals are all you've got, you're not exactly coming from a strong position here.

I'm far from left leaning, though it's amusing to have someone suggest that I might be. I would describe myself as small-'l' libertarian in most matters (which, by the way, is not anarcho-capitalism, though it's often portrayed that way by ignorant or dishonest people).

Most voters are too stressed out, pressed for time, and overwhelmed with trying to take care of their families and make ends meet for concerns like "dumb" (or their short memories and demonstrably low attention spans) to enter into it, really. So they tend to defer to some form of authority, or appearance of authority. The polished speaker in an expensive suit who appears on TV and has lots of famous names behind him tends to fit the bill. So does a government official when he issues a press release that is never seriously questioned or critiqued, against which contradictory facts are either never introduced or selectively introduced. It often takes a lot of research, a wide range of interests, a familiarity with history, and a willingness to "follow the money" to see what's wrong with that.

For all of these reasons, plus a variety of psychological ones, PR is used so heavily for one simple reason: it works. If an idea is already in your best interests, no one would need sophisticated PR, various forms of misrepresentation and deception, and various emotional appeals to convince you of it. The facts would be on their side.

Speaking of familiarity with history, mass surveillance has no place in a constitutional republic but several dictatorships have found it extremely useful. The most reliable way to subvert a relatively free society is to have some kind of threat, real or imagined, and tell the public that such measures are necessary for their safety and security. This is an age-old practice, but it's explained well in an interview with Hermann Goering, who was (among other things), the founder of the Gestapo:

Göring: Why, of course, the people don't want war. Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally, the common people don't want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.
Gilbert: There is one difference. In a democracy, the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.
Göring: Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.

What follows is my opinion. Omission is the simplest, most basic way to deceive or mislead without actually making a verifiably false statement.

A professional news source is far too sophisticated to risk their credibility by actually knowingly making a statement that can later be disproved. It's an unnecessary gamble. One can present news and apply any slant desired simply by selectively reporting the facts. Then the presenter can claim that every statement made was verifiably true without technically lying.

I'm not sure if that happened here, but I can tell you that it happens in mainstream news all the time, far too often to be coincidental and (I believe), much too frequently to be accidental. It's one of those "knew or should have known" situations.

To give just one simple example, a reading of any major newspaper or a watching of any network news show would lead one to believe that civilians with conceal-carry permits never stop a crime without having to fire a shot. You simply won't see this mentioned, but it does happen and it happens during events that get reported. The news article will say something like "the suspect was subdued until police arrived", which is technically true. However, to say any more would go against a narrative (guns = evil! - unless held by a gov't agent) cherished by most of the decision-makers who decide what news is and how it gets presented (a surprisingly small group of people).

Yes, but a lot of people get some kind of strange visceral satisfaction from seeing a plan backfire, even when it has no effect on their own lives. That tendency is especially noticable when the person implementing the plan is famous, wealthy, powerful, or generally successful in some way.

Thus, several posters seem to have a vested emotional interest in a cynical motivation for this particular plan. Apparently their worldview would take a swift kick to the gonads if they were wrong about this one.

Personally I'd be delighted to know that something somewhere was done for a good reason, and that this good reason was also the real reason. I'm not remotely naive enough to assume that, but if it should turn out to be true, it would be good news all the same.

Isn't that what usually happens? Most people don't care about discovering the truth, whatever that may turn out to be. If they cared about that, they wouldn't be so quick to judge. Instead, they would be asking more questions.

What most people care about is highlighting events that appear to validate whatever worldview they cherish most, and ignoring, downplaying, or being offended by any credible information that doesn't. It's the reason why there's so precious little genuine dissent on this site. Most of what masquerades as disagreement is little more than pigeonholing and name-calling from people who mistake their own passion for proof of veracity.

There are religious/spiritual/philisophical traditions with various terms for this kind of behavior, most of which are synonymous with "ego" or "pride".

I try not to reply to myself but I will add: what happened with oil money and the Women's Temperance Movement wasn't very different from what the MPAA/RIAA and others are doing today with intellectual property law, it's just more blatant now. In modern times the pretense that the government isn't supposed to be bought like that and made to serve corporate interests is taken much less seriously than it was nearly a century ago.

Also, just like now with our surveillence society, when Prohibition was being discussed there were people who knew how and why it would go wrong and tried to warn others. They weren't taken seriously enough. It has to run its course and fail miserably -- as predicted -- before it was repealed, but by that time an entire industry had been built around oil/gasoline and the automobile and entrenched itself, so it served its original purpose well enough.

But that was definitely a case of people being misled by PR/manufactured consent to support what was clearly not in their own rational interests. Just like I tried to explain earlier, as a "disconencted observer" scrying into my "crystal ball" and all of that...

The classic economic case is Betamax vs. VHS (VHS had better marketing), though certainly there are others. A recent voting case is the passage and public support of the PATRIOT Act and all of the people who don't have a problem with massive warrantless surveillance and are, in fact, apologists for it. The whole Prohibition fiasco is another, especially if you actually understand why it happened (alcohol was Ford's fuel of choice for his automobiles, and unlike oil, it could easily be produced independently on a small scale, a position that Standard Oil didn't like -- but even if you didn't know that, trading some drunks for gangsters like Al Capone was a bad deal).

Value of any sort can have personal and subjective elements. A piece of artwork you think is beautiful might be ugly to me, for instance. That such cases exist does not mean there are never any objective observations that can and do also contribute to a rational notion of "value". I believe you might be inclined to agree that buying, say, a lawnmower with a terrible reliability record is a bad deal when it costs 30% more than an equally capable and more dependable model. Although if you are some sort of economic masochist, well then, I'm not here to judge...

... who tend to worship a God of love and forgiveness who turned water into wine and teaches them not to judge others ... which they learn about in a New Testament, most of which was written by an apostle who said that what goes into a person's mouth does not defile them, but rather, what comes out of their mouth.

Apparently they have no sense of irony. I do wish more religious people would read and understand their own holy book, at least if they are going to participate in local politics.

Yet another force making sure that self-respecting people with integrity who really care about their community don't want to become police officers.

So the intention is to rob the accused (who is innocent until proven guilty) of a chance to confront his accusers and achieve the good representation that true due process requires?

This intention is already manifest in other ways. The worst of which is the prosecutorial abuse of the system. The prosecutor completely throws the book at someone, tacking on multiple charges leading to years of imprisonment for a comparatively minor offense, but then offers a reasonable sentence if the accused pleads guilty. Many criminal cases never even go to trial because of this, making a mockery of the foundational concept that government carries the burden of proof.

I never understood the concept of tacking a "court cost" onto the amount of a ticket. If not for things like the courts and criminal justice system, why are we paying taxes? If they want to move away from taxation and adopt usage fees instead, we can have that debate, but right now they seem to want to do both. It's effectively double-dipping.

I don't know about that. People vote against their own self-interest all the time, both at voting booths and with their money in the marketplace. All it takes to get them to do that is a little propaganda (or PR, or whatever you like to call it - I prefer the old term "manufactured consent" because it's more honest). It works all too well, even in the case of advertising in which the bias of the message is obvious.

Only the abortion topic brings out the "emotional thinkers" (not really thinking at all) more than the gun control issue does. If they were rational and wanted to do something about this problem, they would look deeply at the fundamental causes of violence in all of its forms and lose their psychotic fixation on this particular weapon of violence.

They'd also realize that making it easy for people who are not driven by violence to legally arm themselves for the purpose of last-resort self-defense would (at least) reduce the body count and reduces criminal violence everywhere it's tried.

It might also occur to them that criminals who are willing to commit murder, who are not afraid of arrest, imprisonment, potential death penalties, potentally getting shot by cops, etc., are not going to be scared of going to jail for illegally possessing a firearm. Productive law-abiding people with families, lives, and standing in the community who don't want to go to jail (who have a lot to lose from it) are the people who obey weapons restrictions. They're also the people who tend to be the victims in these shootings.

Trolling is an intentional act. It involves knowingly posting things you don't really believe in order to stir people up. Posting your on-topic actual beliefs about an issue is not an act of trolling. To mod otherwise because the mod dislikes something, or finds it "offensive", is a form of self-delusion, an effort to censor with the approval of his or her own conscience.

If you can prevent yourself from reacting emotionally to it (which with dead bodies, grieving families, and the injustice, is quite understandable) you realize that in any other context, the word "mass" or "massive" is used to describe a quantity much larger than 14. That, and ignorance of the legal definition of a mass murder (3 or more bodies) are the only reasons anyone would question the use of that word.

If some sections were "murder-free zones" and others weren't, yet most of the mass murders kept happening in the ones that were declared "murder-free zones", would you fault someone for noticing the connection?

You see, you're having an emotional reaction to a factual matter. The whole guns topic seems to produce a lot of that. That's why you're using faulty reasoning that's easy to debunk.

When they can keep drugs out of prisons that last suggestion of yours might even work.