In Search Of A Cleaner Fuel, Bernie Sanders Experiments With Burning Giant Pile Of Tax Dollars

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

Heh heh, Babylon Bee is spot on again with their satire.

 

In Search Of A Cleaner Fuel, Bernie Sanders Experiments With Burning Giant Pile Of Tax Dollars

WASHINGTON, D.C.—Bernie Sanders has revealed he and his team have been working on an alternative to gasoline: an innovative new idea of burning a giant pile of tax dollars instead of outdated, harmful fossil fuels.

Sanders experimented with hundreds of different blends, from a mix of coins and dollars to pallets of hundred-dollar bills. But he finally settled on a giant pyramid of cash when he made his big breakthrough.

"All you people care about is money," Sanders said as he tossed a specialty Venezuelan cigar he had imported onto the big pile of cash. "We need to start caring about the environment, and if the best way to do that is to destroy the economy by burning all the cash, that's what I'm going to do."

The presidential candidate added that "it's not about money; it's about sending a message to climate change deniers: 'Everything burns.'"

When questioned on further details on his environmental plan, Sanders asked, "Do I really look like a guy with a plan?"

 

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Wall Street Journal article below.  Author is the Editor in Chief of the Babylon Bee satirical site. Reposting the article in full in case of WSJ paywall block.

 

A ‘Fact Checker’ Declares War On Satire

When we make fun of liberals, Snopes pretends to take us seriously and labels our jokes ‘false.’

By Kyle Mann

Aug. 21, 2019

If your job is to make people laugh, what do you do when your brand of humor is classified as dangerous?

I run the Babylon Bee, a satirical website, and we’ve had to face that question a lot lately. The “fact checkers” at Snopes.com—once a reliable source for distinguishing reality from urban legends—have been smearing the Bee as “fake news.” They don’t seem to have a problem when we make fun of Trump-worship, conservatives, fundamentalism and megachurches. But when we target Democrats and the left, suddenly we’re branded liars.

The most recent controversy began when Snopes published a thorough “debunking” of our satirical take on Georgia state Rep. Erica Thomas’s false claim that a white man in a supermarket told her to “go back to where you came from.” Our humorous headline: “Georgia Lawmaker Claims Chick-fil-A Employee Told Her to Go Back to Her Country, Later Clarifies He Actually Said ‘My Pleasure.’ ”

Snopes knew this was a joke but questioned our “brand” of satire. The website called us “junk news” and a “ruse.” It accused us of intentionally “muddying the details” of a current event to “fool” people.

In response our CEO, Seth Dillon, instructed our lawyers to demand an edit of the article and appealed to the public on social media. The scolds at Snopes seemed to comply and removed the worst bits from their piece. But they then rolled out a new rating, “Labeled Satire,” which is meant to suggest that we are somehow making jokes in bad faith. Here’s the explanation of the new rating: “Not all content described by its creator or audience as ‘satire’ necessarily constitutes satire, and this rating does not make a distinction between ‘real’ satire and content that may not be effectively recognized or understood as satire despite being labeled as such.”

Snopes proceeded to publish a long-winded piece explaining why it “fact checks” humor in the first place and reposted a summary of an unpublished Ohio State University study on satire in which the authors claim the Bee’s material is “among the most shared factually inaccurate content” they’d found.

If I told you the Ohio State study looks like a setup, with researchers providing grossly inaccurate summaries of the Bee’s stories and asking participants if they’re true or false, you might think I was satirizing these people. Nope—it’s true. Our headline “Nation Awaits Apology From Media That Pushed Fake News Story for Two Years,” for example, was summarized as “Most Americans believe that major media companies should apologize for pushing the now-debunked news story of collusion between President Trump and Russia.” Our article never made that assertion, and their hacked-up version misses the joke—which assumes the nation isn’t holding its breath for an apology for the collusion hoax.

In short, they drained the humor from our jokes, then feigned shock when research subjects failed to see it.

This ugly dispute has demonstrated the danger of assigning authority to supposedly unbiased fact-checkers. They have the power to slap a joke they don’t like with a “false” rating and defame the authors as purveyors of lies and fakery. Last year Facebook threatened to forbid us to collect money from ads, and even to boot us entirely, after Snopes “fact checked” a piece of ours headlined “CNN Purchases Industrial Washing Machine to Spin the News.”

Life isn’t always “true” or “false,” and mockery, like art, is especially averse to easy labels. Scams and hoaxes are fairly called lies. Opinion and satire involve layers of context and interpretation—and, yes, bias. It’s dishonest for “fact checkers” like Snopes to treat satirical sites like ours as if we claimed to be objective news sources simply in order to saddle us with the “fake news” sobriquet.

Lies claiming to be objective truth are a problem, and sometimes people mistake satire for fact. But let’s not give up our sense of humor just because some “fact checker” pretends not to have one.

Mr. Mann is editor in chief of the Babylon Bee.
 

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[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

Seems surprisingly relevant to this thread:

Facts, Logic Banned From Next Democratic Debate For Being Tools Of The Alt-Right

"... Some candidates, like Bernie Sanders, have long railed against logic -- especially math, a subset of logic -- as it is mainly used to poke holes in their large-scale government plans. “We’re trying to help people, which just seems so right,” Sanders explained at a rally, “and you want to scare people with your logic of why it won’t work? That’s violence.” The attendees at the rally nodded at this logic-free assertion.

With this new rule and the narrower field, viewers can expect a spirited, emotional debate. One topic the candidates are expected to cover is the minimum wage, with the candidates throwing out numbers of what it should be until one just feels right."

[Tom Kirkman + 8,860]

For amusement.  This is Tweet is fake.  But I wasn't sure if it was actually real or if it was fake.  So apparently the joke's on me for having to check her Tweets to see if this was real or fake.

 

However, this 15 second video below is real.  And is probably one of the reasons why I wasn't sure if the Tweet above was real or not.