SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Just before the dawn of the Trump administration, journalism in Washington, DC, faces an existential crisis -- but virtually no one in the profession is willing to diagnose it.
Here it is: For the first time, words don't matter. In August, as a guest on MSNBC's Meet the Press Daily, I noted that voters take Donald Trump seriously but not literally, while journalists take him literally, but not seriously.
[...] And journalists keep falling for it because they, like politicians, over-value words -- and they are now covering a politician who does not. President-elect Trump still takes the same cavalier approach to verbal description as he would in hawking a condo tower that's yet to be designed. And more than enough voters don't seem to mind. Trump has spent a career interacting with journalists, but as the first president never to serve in the military, the cabinet, or another public office before his election to the White House, he's never been immersed in the word culture that drives political journalism. [...] Most recently, when Trump announced he had chosen South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley to be his ambassador to the United Nations, journalists raced to re-tweet a March rant from Trump in which he said the people of South Carolina should be embarrassed by her.
[...] Writing endless columns on this or that flip-flop based on Trump's conflicting rhetoric is wasting the time of the readers and viewers who have decided that's not what matters with this particular President-elect. [...] If the press covers Trump the way it covered prior presidents -- too literally -- it may find its own customers take journalism itself a lot less seriously.
Source: CNN
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @07:57AM
That only works if everyone else doesn't take him literally or even better- can ignore him.
Unfortunately that's not the case.: http://www.businessinsider.com/nuclear-weapons-trump-clinton-2016-9/?r=US&IR=T [businessinsider.com]
The US President can unilaterally launch a nuclear strike. According to the rules and procedures all the rest are supposed to do is confirm/authenticate that the order came from the President, not whether the weapons should literally be launched or not. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_Codes [wikipedia.org]
The US Military weeds out those who would question orders from the President aka "not take things literally":
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_spectator/2011/02/an_unsung_hero_of_the_nuclear_age.html [slate.com]
But you've probably read about Richard Nixon acting erratically, drinking heavily as Watergate closed in on him. You may not have read about the time he told a dinner party at the White House, "I could leave this room, and in 25 minutes, 70 million people would be dead."
FWIW the USSR had a different approach. Apparently they had a system to launch nukes sometime even after they got hit. That way it doesn't have to be so hair-trigger: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Hand_(nuclear_war) [wikipedia.org]
The USSR took steps to ensure that nuclear retaliation, and hence deterrence, remained possible even if its leadership were to be destroyed in a surprise attack.[3] In contrast, Thompson argues that Perimeter's function was to limit acts of misjudgment by political or military leadership in the tight decision-making window between SLBM/cruise missile launches and impact.[8] He quotes Zheleznyakov on the purpose of Perimeter being "to cool down all these hotheads and extremists. No matter what was going to happen, there still would be revenge."[8]
Not sure how things are now though.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by aristarchus on Thursday December 01 2016, @08:17AM
Not sure how things are now though.
#LaunchNukes
OMG, did I type that as a regular expression? Sorry, My fellow Soylentils and sentient beings! Please place your head between your legs, and kill your ass goodbye. One would have thought that some one might have considered the fact that some day a crazy person could be President of the United States, so we should have a couple, at least, of failsafes on the nuke codes.
(Score: 3, Informative) by butthurt on Thursday December 01 2016, @12:01PM
Woodrow Wilson suffered a series of strokes; after the most serious one, his wife Edith secretly took over the president's duties.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/woodrow-wilson-stroke/ [pbs.org]
https://www.whitehouse.gov/1600/first-ladies/edithwilson [whitehouse.gov]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 01 2016, @11:10AM
The US Military weeds out those who would question orders from the President aka "not take things literally"
You can omit US from that sentence. And President from that matter. All soldiers are indoctrinated to take orders from their superiors without question.