I feel a bit privileged, and in a dangerous way, because feeling like you're special can be an illusion that is easily shattered.
Here's what I mean. If I was born earlier, like say a baby boomer, I'd have less education in critical thinking, but I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland but serious, and the editors took it upon themselves to keep things balanced. They'd acknowledge other viewpoints and think properly about how to fit in their own perspectives.
If I was a gen Z kid, it was and is all a blur. Just loads of crap mixed in with everything. Chaos, no particular authority is obvious. More time spent in education but also more noise. Fewer cultural lighthouses since everyone is watching different things (both news and wider culture) and able to stay within whatever they already believe.
When I grew up I had a leg in each era. I still think some papers are better than others. But I also see the cacophony of crap for what it is.
Boomers have ended up in this world too and it's horrifying. My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US. They come up with crazy things from time to time, like they're missing a critical thinking inoculation.
Some people are adequately humble on some occasions, but statistically speaking you're very correct about whom this applies to.
(Personal side note: This shouldn't mean we throw our hands up in the air in hopelessness, but it should remind us that we all have a mandate to be more critical of our own thinking than of that of others.)
I'm not writing off entire generations, these are just generalities. It's a bit sad to have to caveat everything one says with "but of course there are still people who know how to think", because it's fairly obvious that certain unsaid things are the case.
If that's short-sighted, then it is only because that should also be applied to every generation. Most people of every generation in the world still believe in magic, which excuses any need to fully develop critical thinking skills.
Agreed. I don't think my parents generation lack critical thinking skills. They are dedicated to being individuated bootstrap pullers and live in this dissonance - because of course we live fully interdependant from birth. They see that everyone else has an ideology, except them, and so they generate their own truth inside and see any attempt at discussion of things they've never thought of as threat. They are the 'end of history' (Fukiyama) - the best music, the best culture, the best geopolitics, the best economy - and tho history has changed and we symbolically register that as ridiculous as well as the idea of a western sovereign subject - they cannot because their entire identity is at stake. At least these are the lies I tell myself so I stay gentle with them as they fade out.
> My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US.
Democracy is like science. If you don’t constantly doubt at least a little bit and check the outcome continuously, but instead just trust blindly, you’re doing it wrong.
Ah, yes... the "if I put everything in doubt, even the most painfully obvious things, it makes me seem smart" crowd.
Here's the thing, though: if one is basing their "doubts" on random brainfarts or propaganda pieces they saw on youtube or facebook and decided to trust blindly, they're probably also doing it wrong.
Skepticism that is not accompanied by critical thinking, actual knowledge, intellectual honesty and a dash of humility is useless or worse.
TL;DR: Epistemology is hard, but "just doubt everything" is not it, chief.
Not at all. Just criticizing his blanket statement, apparently used to justify "doubting the results of US elections": "doubting" just for the sake of doubting, particularly when it feeds into narratives being driven by trolls, disinformation and hidden agendas, doesn't do Democracy or Truth any service.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that the people in question (that are doubting the results of the US elections) are rather "skeptical" towards (so called) mainstream media, but not as much when it comes to the random crap on fox news, ann, youtube and facebook. If this is the case, then this makes them more "useful idiots" than actual "skeptics", in my opinion.
TL;DR: "Doubting blindly" (usually based on whatever Fox News or 4chan is spreading today) is as at least as bad as "trusting blindly".
This shouldn't matter, otherwise you'll succumb to false-flags and Reverse psychology.
In any case, the post you responded to doesn't say anything about fox news. Any basing an opinion on fox news isn't "Doubting blindly"; it would be blind trust.
Blind doubt aka scepticism is fine, because doubting something (with poor sources) isn't the same as assuming it's false - it's not assuming that it's true.
Lack of a reason to trust US elections is justification to doubt them. The standard is (should be) that these things prove themselves, rather than put the burden of proof on outside observers.
It's also worth noting the post that it was replying to said:
> My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US
which seems to take "doubting the outcome of elections" as automatically outrageous, without mention of reasons, sources or why.
> In any case, the post you responded to doesn't say anything about fox news.
I'm using "Fox News" as a placeholder for "media demonstrably known to propagate bald-faced lies". You can replace this with 4chan, youtube, facebook or wherever it is that those people get their "news" from. I'm going to assume they get their news from a bad source, due to the unsupported stuff they believe in; it may not be Fox News, but it's something just as bad (right-wing or left-wing).
> Any basing an opinion on fox news isn't "Doubting blindly"; it would be blind trust.
That's exactly my point. These (so called) "skeptics" (who are always doubting vaguely reasonable information sources) are usually intensely guillible people that have no problem blindly accepting information from demonstrably bad sources, particularly when is suits their own world views (i.e. not actual skeptics).
> Blind doubt aka scepticism is fine, because doubting something (with poor sources) isn't the same as assuming it's false - it's not assuming that it's true.
Again, as I said, "doubt" that comes with intellectual honesty is fine (i.e. you doubt but accept that you may be wrong and are willing to be corrected). "Doubt" that is based on simple ignorance (or unwillingness to figure things out), on the need to be contrarian, because it is convenient, because you think it makes you look smart, or because you are trusting horrible information sources is not. This second type of "doubt" is what I am calling "blind doubt" ("doubting for the sake of doubting" more often than not, and definitely for the wrong reasons).
Should we teach "flat earth theory" and "intelligent design theory" in schools (you know... because we have to be skeptical of everything)? No, blind skepticism is not fine.
> Lack of a reason to trust US elections is justification to doubt them.
Ah, yes. Inverting the onus of proof is fun. Do you have any proof that you haven't stole my property? Then you must have stolen my property (or, at least, I lack a reason to trust that you haven't stolen my property)! This is fun!
Meanwhile... number of pieces of evidence suggesting/demonstrating large-scale fraud in US election results: zero.
But, hey... you do you.
> which seems to take "doubting the outcome of elections" as automatically outrageous, without mention of reasons, sources or why
Can you give me a good justification for doubting the results of said elections, using actual observed and widely accepted facts other than opinion (e.g. "I personally lack a reason to trust US elections" is not a good justification)? I have yet to hear anyone provide any actual arguments that would support it, and all the US judges that have been faced with the same issue seem to agree with my assessment, so... yes, I am going to assume that these people (and you, if that is the case) are "doubting" it for all the wrong reasons: not based on actual information, critical thinking and intellectual honesty, but the exact opposite of it (probably because "they heard something somewhere" or because the "wrong" person won).
You think the burden of proof isn't (or shouldn't be) on the government?
Between your wilful "reading between the lines" based on your own biases, and smug insults ("But, hey... you do you"); I don't think this argument is going to go anywhere - I don't see the "accept that you may be wrong and are willing to be corrected" you talked about.
> I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland but serious, and the editors took it upon themselves to keep things balanced.
By "well-measured," I meant it's not long and rambly like most written material produced and consumed on HN. It covers a lot of different (though related) subjects in a short package and it was fun to read.
> but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages.
I have a better idea. The news has always been shit.
There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market.
It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs have adapted to fill in all those remaining hours. Consolidation hasn't helped, but I can look at any news clipping from the early 20th century and see the same level of bullshit I see today.
As with any field in a capitalist society, good things can only really come from those who care more about what they're working on than about any associated profit-motive.
I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks.
And of course some people like this still exist, but:
Anecdotally, it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity or civic duty and towards cynical profit-motive. You can see it in everything from hospitals, to universities, to technical companies like Boeing.
I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge. I don't know if centralization/acquisition is to blame, or stock market pressures, or private equity, or some cultural phenomenon. But it feels like we're only careening further down this path with each passing year.
> They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important
They operated the same way they do now, and worked on whatever their bosses told them to work on. It's just romantic to think they were unburdened by our mortal contrivances and somehow had the wherewithal to pick out "important" stories.
Do you push for good engineering practices at your job, even when they go beyond the quarterly business goals? I know I do.
It doesn't have to be just one or the other. You can have principles and push for what you believe to be good, even if your boss is ultimately profit-driven (even if you have some profit-incentive of your own!). Multiple factors come together. It's incredibly cynical of you to paint that sort of basic integrity as nothing but a romantic fantasy.
What I feel like I'm seeing today is that people are either less willing or less able to enact higher principles in their work. It could very possibly be a power-dynamic thing, or it could just be the spread of general cynicism like yours.
All professions have a distribution of competence, whether you're looking at programmers or journalists.
There's no evidence that the distribution of good journalists has fundamentally changed over time other than the effects of just a larger pool of eligible candidates. A quick glance through Peabody and Pulitzer winners over time can quickly confirm this.
If anything, I'd argue people are far more principled today than any other point in recorded history. Maybe they're just not your principles.
> it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity
It starts with the meaning of "professional". I know of two opposite ones:
1. "Professional" as in doing high quality work, no corner cutting, having respect for the problem and the customer.
2. "Professional" as in putting business first, with the implication that any possible corner will be cut, any possible sacrifice on quality will be made, if it makes the business more money.
The second meaning is what I've been seeing increasingly often over the years. It's a frequent sentiment in our industry - it's professional to keep applying subpar tooling and methods to a problem, because upskilling costs money short-term. It's professional to bloat your product and make your users pay an implicit tax, because it's saving fraction of those costs for the company.
> I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge (...)
I sometimes wonder if the answer is: none of those, things have always been as shitty - it's you and me who are growing up and discovering the world for what it is (and/or growing more cynical in the process).
As a journalist or a publication, you do need money to survive, and if you don’t survive then how can you make a positive impact with fair reporting? The choice is then between ads, financing, and truly surviving off your subscribers by being so expensive that only the top 1% can afford to read you. Any option compromises you in some way, choose your poison to the extent possible.
Despite all that being one huge grey area ethically speaking, I still think that without professional reporting all we’d have is a network of mini-influencers misrepresenting reality into their respective bubbles on Twitter/Substack/TikTok, either for likes or to further whatever hidden agenda they or their friends may have. It’s a good thing to have a job description and years of education that ingrain certain principles[0].
It’s doubly bad, though, when you betray those principles; being a journalist is (or ought to be) much like being a cop or a doctor—for the mechanism to work properly, people should be able to trust you to act in their interest rather than own personal gain (and you should deserve the trust).
Unfortunately, I don’t see a good way for such a model to persist. We’re losing trust in traditional affordable mass media, often for good reasons.
[0] Most importantly, to be cognisant of your biases—which indeed includes selecting which story to report on, selecting which aspects to mention, etc.—and to compensate for them.
3. "Professional" as in it's your job, and you're being paid to do it.
4. "Professional", as in you work within a profession, such as law or accounting, and are an accredited, paid-up member of the appropriate professional body.
I'll buy your (1), as in "professional paint job", but your (2) isn't a kind of professional; that's just race-to-the-bottom commercialism.
My theory is its data driven decision making. It's messed up the corporation to be purely metrics driven. Everyone hunts the metrics and misses the qualitative reasons for anything. We distrust internal models now, and try to be purely empirical, which is a mistake. We are overly technology now, but the technology lacks nuance and long term reasoning.
What irks me about data-driven decision making are two things:
1. Correctly reasoning from data is a very difficult task, needing advanced skills, requiring deep understanding of statistics. Most companies have nobody with such skill set on board.
2. It provides a fake air of legitimacy to otherwise arbitrary decisions. Whether by mistake (confirming your own biases with data) or on purpose, you can use data to justify whatever decision you already want to make, few people know enough statistics to call you on your bullshit.
I think you are right. The amount of people I know that even know the word “data driven” is surprisingly low. Maybe one, and that’s not even a specialist. Heck I don’t think I am one, although my analytic skills are usually why people hire me.
Yes, but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists. Local journalism pays rates that make teachers look like kings, and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work a week. It's a job that requires passion, because there are far more of them who are making under minimum wage at an hourly rate than there are who are making six figures.
Yes, but there are barely any of this type of journalist anymore, and barely any outlets for them to be published in.
What there are are a lot of connected people who went from elite schools to exclusive unpaid internships, jobs in prestige nonprofit PR departments, and consulting firms, then to national outlets at very high salaries. Their coworkers are ex-politicians and campaign flacks, and people who worked at massive hedge funds and investment banks, who decided that they preferred punditry and socializing to their jobs.
The people you're talking about are bloggers/substack people now, and are generally denigrated by mainstream outlets.
Oh, you mean other than about 90% of journalists in America.
I worked around multiple newsrooms. It's clear that you have not.
There is a very big world outside of the corner of the internet that you live in. And it still exists despite the internet trying to kill it off. Most "hometown" papers still exist. Go find some of them. Read them. What you'll see is that most of them are staffed by about 5-6 people, a few freelancers, and then a bunch of bylines that are simply the name of the paper, because they don't want you to realize how short-staffed they are (these are also written by those same journalists and editors).
That's the reality of the modern newsroom for the VAST majority of news outlets in the US.
> but journalists are usually journalist because they WANT to be journalists
So do accountants. And actuaries. And doctors. And programmers. And artists. And pretty much most every other profession. There's nothing special about clergy or journalists or doctors because they chose the career they did.
> and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work
This is just more romanticism. I'd wager that the distribution of hours of journalists looks very similar to most professionals.
I've done startups for 25 years which has included publishing, there's nothing special about the hours of journalists. Every profession thinks that they put in more work and hours than others. Ask anyone at a law firm.
That's both adorable and utterly irrelevant to the topic at hand. I've worked in a newsroom. You've heard of one. It's like you're intellectually flagellating yourself with your own brand of self-importance at this point.
There's nothing special about newsroom journalists. Like somehow they're the only people on the planet with deadlines, or that everyone is waking their editor up at 3am with that important story that just needs to make morning print.
I don't see why you think "I worked around a newsroom for 13 years" is a good rebuttal to the fairly trivial claim that most professionals chose said profession because they wanted to do it.
Well, maybe it's because he replied to ME and I made specific claims that he decided to doubt. Now maybe in this brave new world, some people don't consider actual lived experience to be worth a whole lot, but that's not my problem.
The associate editor at the paper I did work for was making $13.50 an hour as of two years ago when I left. I know this because she overheard a conversation regarding the salary of my subordinate who was guaranteed to be paid a certain hourly rate (that was about 3x hers) upon his initial 6 months with the company, and she vented to me about it one night when I was in the office to perform some server maintenance and she had just arrived back from a football game she covered for the sports editor, who was out of town on vacation. She routinely wrote between 16-20 stories a week, did layouts for 5 sections of the paper including real estate, legal, and classifieds, covered all official local events, and covered girls' sporting events.
Does that seem to you like something you could do in 40 hours?
You're still missing the point that people tell almost identical stories for just about every profession in existence. The user that replied to you wasn't even doubting you, they were just saying that it's not special.
I was the lead developer for a custom CMS platform for a small company and literally sat in the newsroom with the reporters and worked with them on a daily basis. When I first started working for the company, it was directly after Hurricane Katrina and I did work directly FOR the paper as well as dev work because the COO had yet to justify to the CEO why they needed a full time developer, much less a team. The hours were long and the work sucked but I was hourly and got to experience their work habits and schedule.
I think it's written by human beings who have a limited subset of knowledge, many times because sources aren't forthcoming or verified, and that if we ever held developers to the same standard that we held journalists, that it'd be nigh-impossible to hire any of them.
Because digging up facts is very expensive, and not necessarily engaging to the public.
Ontario Public Broadcasting has this show 'The Agenda' with 'Steve Paikin' where he brings in mid-level and behind-the-scenes people from the bureaucracy people and they talk about granular issues of civic reform in great detail.
If you want to inform yourself on the nitty-gritty details of the new 'Subway Expansion' and why it's over budget, it's all right there.
But it's incredibly boring , and there's very little viewership.
Donald Trump put it really well when he said he would be 'great for news ratings'. It was rubbish, and a lot of people tuned in, it brought in a lot of money.
Add in the economics brought on by the Internet and we have a real problem.
In the excellent The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin[1] the author describes that Freedom of the Press isn't worth a whit unless you own one and that was why he got into the printing business. It's been common knowledge for a very long time that the primary purpose of political reporting is to persuade and not to inform.
American journalism in the aftermath of WW2 had a brief moment where it became both a unifying idea (largely sharing and building shared cultural values) and was largely seen as high-integrity. This perception began collapsing around the start of the internet news age, and now has pretty much totally collapsed. But it's important to remember that the WW2 consensus around the press was just an artifact of its times and that Franklin is talking about the press from a very different lens. To him the "press" was more like the Federalist Papers or Thomas Paine's "Common Sense". If you want to see what journalism _used_ to be like in the US, read about Yellow Journalism [1], or just read some news from the 1800s industrial era in the US.
In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse!
And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.
We have unrealistic expectations of news publishing. Modern TV and movies has made certain professions far more glamourous than they are (journalists, police, doctors) because it makes for good media. But most doctors are not ER doctors. Most journalists are not breaking news. Most police never fire their service weapon.
But to somehow think the moral distributions of people are superior from the average population, just because of career selection, is dubious at best. Something being protected by law doesn't somehow make its practice exalted.
Yeah, not sure what that guy's on about. PBS, NPR, and other not for profit news orgs like BBC aren't perfect, but then what is? If I had to choose a single news source to try to stay informed, I'd take any one of those three over any of their for-profit competition.
Don't mistake the BBC for a "not-for-profit". BBC Worldwide is a commmercial operation. The BBC has large shares in various commercial TV operations.
The only parts of the BBC that are arguably not-for-profit are iPlayer, and domestic TV and Radio; and the BBC World Service. These are paid for by a controversial hypothecated tax, controlled by the government of the day; as a consequence, the Beeb is fairly consistently pro the government of the day, and anti the official opposition (they can see which side their bread is buttered on).
[Edit] The World Service is paid for out of general taxation, specifically the Foreign Office budget. It's not paid for out of the Licence Fee.
Well, let's just consider one example. Did NPR tell people thousands of times that Trump called Nazis "very fine people"? I suspect they did. Did they ever tell people the truth that he hadn't actually said that? I suspect they didn't, or that it was a very quiet and brief admission. Now, do you suppose NPR did vastly better on all the other stuff they gush at the mouth about all day?
They were presumably not referring to NPR specifically, but to public-service broadcasters in general, like ARD and ZDF in Germany, BBC in Britain, ORF in Austria, RAI in Italy, and so on.
NPR has an implicit assumption in ~every story that a problem is best addressed by government intervention and spending. They're credulous of any claim an "authority" makes.
2. Could this article be more sympathetic to the administration? https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027552833/heres-why-biden-is... the meanest thing they say it's "misjudged the speed". Why not "it's been obvious for two decades ANA could never hold together including the eight years he was VP"
It's more benign than qanon. I haven't checked their coverage of mask wearing. I'll change my mind if they were pushing masks when Fauci was lying and saying they were unnecessary.
QAnon is benign, we wouldn't even know of its existence if it wasn't constantly brought up by press outlets to supply their readers with a desperate need for a boogeyman.
According to the author's examples of bullshit, NPR peddles the same stuff as the other for-profit main stream publications.
> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops [0], viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls [1], vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots [2] behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation [3], and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths.
I listed to them for years but noticed a considerable shift in their reporting in the last 2-3 years.
Edit: I'm sorry for the lengthy post, but I felt giving rough examples was necessary to convey the point.
It's true that some unofficial quality voices are disrupting established narratives ... but I'm sorry to say this isn't the shift that matters, because 99% of the 'unofficial sources' are considerably worse than just 'bullshit' in the press.
The 'Giant Kraken Monster' of fake news is really shocking, and it's taking over some sectors. I couldn't quite fathom it until I saw it happen to someone in my own life.
While we argue about 'truth' here on HN, information is being submerged by nonsense on mainstreet.
It's not so much war between civil people arguing over the facts - it's more like Information World War Z of people hopped up on very bad, made up information.
I was at a relative's home a few days ago listening as a he was listening to his Facebook stream and it was very shocking.
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but:
"Tanks will Roll, Power Cut, the Great Reset and Trump will be re-instated by Coup on Aug 10 ..."
"I have a source, who cannot be named, because his life would be in danger, that Nanci Pelosi was in direct contact with the Chinese Communist Party on January 6 directing the assault on Capitol Hill"
"Those that stole the election, put them ballot boxes full of fake votes for Biden, they need to be executed for treason, the True Patriots Will Rise"
"It's masks now, folks, but this is the globalist master plan, it's just the first step. This is the reason the second amendment exists, folks"
"Big Pharma does NOT want you to know about natural cures, because, well, why do you think? You are the experiment folks. The Sheep out there doing what the government tells them - but the Lions, the True Patriots, know better."
"Q said:" - and then a bunch insane of statements from QAnon etc.
It's dizzyingly conspiratorial and it's really scary to watch people eat that up. My family member indicated that they don't believe most of it, but that's their primary news source and, it has affected them greatly.
My family member is becoming an information zombie who is losing their grounding in reality, and cannot be reasoned with on these issues, even if they are quite rational otherwise. Once you start to believe cabals of the elite are killing children in basements in blood-lust ceremonies, that mysterious Q controls things behind the scenes, that vaccines i.e. life-saving medicines are invented as a tool of control, and that of course all of the 'main stream media outlets' are all lying, then what?
Watching them listen - it's like a form of information hypnotism - it's as though they're in a mystical / religious trance. If someone already has a reason to actually 'want to believe', and they don't care, and they just 'let go of rationality' ... then they fall into the trap. I think it's the same kind of programming that cults use.
It's really a sight to behold, and the experience of how the information is communicated, the anger, the tone of voice, etc..
The MSM has a problem with bias that could stand to be corrected, and it's have more quality 'outside' voices, but even some of the better sources often falter. Matt Taibi, probably in the same vein of the author of this piece about 'BS', usually has some great things to say but I feel even he is jumping the shark a bit trying to get attention to his Substack with overzealous headlines.
In order to put this into relative context, here is some polling data from Pew [1][2] which shows a material minority of Americans are susceptible to even the more over the top conspiratorial information (i.e. QAnon), for less egregious but nevertheless still completely false information, I believe the number is much higher, reaching up to 30% for those who believe that the ...
Am I to read your comment correctly as if to indicate that you are seriously validating the legitimacy of QAnon given their ostensible 'prediction' of COVID?
I remember when France went to war against Khadafi our newspapers/TVs were all supporting this, given the amount of direct suffering it caused I'd say that being worse than this is .. hard!
Gaddafi stated publicly that he was going to Benghazi to kill civilians, something which he had done in the past. He had a few battalions heading through the desert to do that.
He was already causing great harm, or rather, the war was causing great harm. Choosing to tilt the game board to one side over the other is definitely something to ponder, and there's definitely a lot of information to dig up and report on, but it's not a 'fake news' story.
Gaddaffi's life is actually stranger than fiction, he did kidnap young women and put them into his Harem. That's not made up. In fact, it's odd that you don't hear more 'fake news' about some world leaders who continue to have these practices because there's so much material to work with.
You're misrepresenting/misreading what I said, yes he was a scum doing great harm but it seems that the situation became a lot worse after France&England intervention as was to be expected, so what was the point of the intervention?
Noone in the mainstream news AFAIK did its job and asked what will be going to happen next?
1) 'It was worse after UK/France intervened' is basically false.
"so what was the point of the intervention" - like I already said, at least to prevent an impending massacre, and then to tilt the outcome to 'one side', in which all things being equal, was preferable, and still is even in retrospect.
There was already a civil war, before any intervention.
If the UK and France had not intervened, there would have likely been a massacre - again, this is what Gaddafi stated he would do, moreover, there's no reason to believe that he would have unambiguously quashed the rebellion, meaning the civil war would have gone on in which he would have been a primary antagonist, possibly with the upper hand.
'The outcome' was titled by Western Powers, and it would have been better if there were more stability, but there's no reason to believe that it's worse after intervention.
The 2011 war was not hugely violent. In the entire war only a few thousand civilians and fighters died, which is frankly minimal. Through to the late 2010's the political instability was not very violent. The mini-war in the late 2010's was again, fairly specific and shortlived with few casualties.
2) 'Noone in the mainstream news AFAIK did its job and asked what will be going to happen next' - first, I don't think that this would represent any kind of fake news, just the media not having foresight, and often they do not. Second, Obama was very public with his statements of 'What Happens Next?' - it's why the US did only the frontline air support, AWACS, drones etc. and didn't do any of the main fighting. The 'big questions' around 'bad outcomes' definitely lingered, there were a lot of question marks about that during the war. Finally - none of that constitutes fake news or 'bullshit' really. If you wanted more specific and detailed covarage in the aftermath, you can see most of it on Al-Jazeera. CNN is not exactly going to have good coverage within Libya.
1. Use narrative engineering to persuade angry, frightened, gullible people to tune in and self-select.
2. Use narrative reinforcement to make them angrier and more frightened.
3. Wind them up and point them at a target.
4. Profit politically, and possibly also financially.
It doesn't matter what the narrative is. As long as it has an outgroup that can be accused of doing terrible things that arouse fear, rage, and disgust, almost any narrative will do. It could be vax conspiracies, it could be election conspiracies, it could be any number of other hot-button topics.
It's no different to how official propaganda works. [1] It isn't even all that different to conventional advertising.
The only difference now is that it portrays itself as covert, revolutionary, transgressive, and individualistic, where during the glory days of Time it used to present itself as wise, objective, and paternal.
But in fact it's just the same old farmed behaviour modification reinvented for social media.
[1] The suggestion that there was ever any kind of benign separation between old-fashioned patrician journalism and the US establishment is itself obvious bullshit. Historians have written books about this. This is just one intro.
So that would include the far right and the government, then. Hardly "everyone" ;)
I do find it interesting that left-leaning people (like myself) find it difficult to acknowledge that left-leaning media also engages in The Bullshit. Because we tend to agree with the propaganda statements, it's incredibly difficult to spot as Bullshit.
News co-ops are part of the free market. If you want to site successful non-free-market news organisation there are things like the BBC. Which is respectable, and really quite a wonderful organisation if the propaganda is favourable to your cause.
Eloquently put! Personal experience- wrote to bbc and asked them to address/edit/revisit their past articles making someone a victim and a 'hero' for a cause several years earlier in light of a court ruling absolving the accused and establishing holes in the 'victimhood'. They refused it flat out! Took a few seconds for BBC's reputation to go 180 degrees in my mind.
Absolutely. Time was just as guilty of misinformation, exclusion, blackouts, appeal to vague authorities, and maintaining the Overton window for the establishment. Yeah, sure, it had a much more professional sheen and you had to pay attention to notice, but it was still shit.
My father refused to read Time for decades - decades - because they'd manipulated their cover photo of OJ Simpson to make him look darker-skinned than he actually is. It was, I'm told, A Thing, along with All-American restaurant Denny's having to pay out millions in damages over racial discrimination (Wells Fargo having to do the same 20 years later does much for my suspicion that the 2010s are something of an echo of the 90s). This is what is on my personal radar; I'm sure someone with other priorities can name similar, fact-based grievances with other institutions that ostensibly design their products for general American consumption.
For news, in many cases, the issue isn't so much the veracity of what's being reported, but... what's being reported. You only have so many pages and only so much reader mental bandwidth.
Yes. But it, and other mass media like it, generated unifying narratives, narratives that weren't hermetically sealed from conflicting narratives.
That meant you could talk to your relatives at Christmas and perhaps have different ideas about the same facts, rather than completely different sets of facts.
But that isn't true with the examples the author proposes. It has degraded a lot, although we forgot about changes in media. Nobody knew in yesterdays world which articles were read and which were not. Newspapers were bought as a whole. Today analytics show us that the most bullshit articles generate the most clicks, either out of rage or affirmation. Content is seriously drifting that way because for any business that is a sensible choice. But for quality this is misinterpreting data. A case were less data leads to better results. Rare, but a misinterpretation can be more damaging than remaining inconclusive.
Online news is compared to its paper versions, many outlets still have significant differences here. Of course there was a lot of bullshit too, but today almost everything is bullshit. We even built bullshit-thrones for those that produce the most.
The author starts by comparing the news from newspaper/magazine to modern online news to call it shit and I agree.
In spite of being a business I feel printed newspapers at large struck to a code of ethics and used that "freedom of the press" judiciously.
In India Newspapers played a crucial role in organizing against colonial rule, Many freedom fighters were themselves a publishers/editos of such newspapers. At the later part of the freedom struggle such newspapers came under heavy attack, editors jailed and unspoken horrors imposed upon them.
Even today printed news papers which survived from those era does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.
But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.
These recent substack articles which have been posted to HN are interesting. Not because the people who write the articles are intelligent and serious thinkers, because if they are, they definitely aren't showing it via their prose.
They're interesting because they show exactly the sort of vacuous garbage one can expect when an amateur is is trying to make a name for themselves as a writer and has no editor to slap their hand or even ask for some sort of coherence.
Essayist is a more concise way to describe someone who engages in long-form verbal diarrhea. It takes neither moral courage nor intellectual valor to declare oneself above the fray without describing your method for being so.
> He has also reviewed books for New York Magazine and has written for The New York Times Book Review and New York Times Sunday Magazine, and is a contributing editor of Time, where he has received popularity for his entertaining and sometimes humorous first-person essays among other articles of interest. He also served as an American cultural correspondent for the BBC.
> In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008–09 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago. He graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1983 after completing a 22-page-long senior thesis entitled "Entangling Breaths (Poems)." Following that, he obtained a second undergraduate degree in English Literature at Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey Scholar.
You don't think this guy can get a job as an editor?
A guy standing in the middle of busy road and screaming that pigeons are spying him, has probably a lot of haters and not much to say. Let's judge people by their creations, not by the hate.
It's probably just because he spends most of his essay complaining only about left-wing media sins. Nobody said he had to be neutral, of course, but if you want to know who the haters are...
Lack of editing doesn't make the output garbage, just a little more difficult to read, and sometimes with a little too much personal 'English' on the ball.
Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, Andrew Sullivan, The Dispatch are all fine Substack publications.
Their audiences are really small however, it's the total opposite of populist, I'm not sure how much influence they could possibly have.
I think it's more interesting how he's been already labeled as an amateur who's trying to make a name for himself, alt-right nut-job, covid conspiracy theorist, racist and so on, all in various comments on this page. Having grown up in a communist country, it's so disturbing, especially now, to see how whenever someone has a diverging opinion (someone could agree with you on 99 issues and have a different thought on the last one) he's done and needs to be labeled and treated like a pariah.
I'm assuming it's a satire in response to the following line, which claims that banned Facebook pages are "the anti-bullshit universe":
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping.
I also like that the author explicitly refuses to provide any examples of these "anti-bullshit alternative media sources". Very common tactic amongst this ilk - complain about aggressive censorship and how George Orwell was specifically warning us about Twitter, all the while doing everything you can to avoid people seeing what was actually incurring bans.
I see it all the time in communities I run, people start trying to spin off alternative sites and talk about how <insert community here> impinges on free speech, and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.
It's insanely hard to get your content consistently removed from Twitter or Facebook, they do everything they can to avoid having to hire more moderators. It can happen, but then providing the examples will get everyone on your side immediately. Anyone who claims that they're being unfairly censored and yet refuses to show the content that actually got removed is trying to hide something.
> I see it all the time in communities I run, people start trying to spin off alternative sites and talk about how <insert community here> impinges on free speech, and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.
Are you suggesting that this person shares these behaviors?
It depends on what you mean by "these behaviours". I'm suggesting that the author is claiming some great injustice but conveniently trying to avoid letting anyone judge for themselves, and in my experience the people doing that usually aren't the world's most upstanding citizens.
I'm certainly not suggesting that the author is prone to outbursts of racial slurs - that was just an example of something I encounter regularly, and typically that type of person is far less literate - but I am extremely doubtful that the content they're complaining about removal of is as "anti-bullshit" as they'd like to claim.
Yes, generally speaking when I'm reading something I'd hope that my mind is doing some interpretation. It would be a rather difficult activity otherwise.
Agreed...the tricky part is realizing that it is doing interpretation, and realizing that what it ends up sending you is not reality, but an interpretation of reality, which is what you are discussing here (or all of us are discussing, in most any thread, or in life in general), as if it is reality itself. And then we're surprised when there are disagreements!!
The beauty of the mind though: even though it is doing this (manufacturing an interpreted version of reality in realtime), this tends to be an unpleasant idea to most people....but luckily, it also has the ability to interpret that away, allowing us to have our cake and eat it too (although this feature has some downsides of its own)!
> and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.
This isn't always true. I don't want to derail the topic of this thread, but I certainly find I cannot talk seriously about the causes of disproportionate violence and rape from certain segments of the population without getting banned. Even though, looking deeply into the science, it doesn't support the mainstream viewpoint. If I can't trust the media and even websites like HN to be honest on something so basic, why should I trust them for anything else?
The author doesn't spell it out but he mentions that the idiot story about Hunter Biden's laptop was totally real and not Russia using Giuliani like a stooge and he implies that if you don't think covid was leaked from a lab you're an idiot.
So yea, I don't doubt that this guy thinks facebook is being mean by not letting him spread conspiracy bullshit on their platform.
> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths.
Pretty standard alt-right nutjob. Substack is swarming with them.
You think there are "vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation"?
> alt-right
Yeah. I think the woke are done. No one actually likes or agrees with them, it's all just preference falsification.
I don't think anyone is under the delusion that domestic terrorists in the US are being secretive any more. That ship somewhat sails after an attempted insurrection.
let's not move the goalposts, we aren't arguing whether this was a "peaceful protest", we are arguing whether it was an insurrection aka a violent attempted takeover. If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong.
> One of the cops died of injuries sustained on site
> On April 19, 2021, the office of the chief medical examiner of the District of Columbia, Francisco J. Diaz, reported that the manner of death was natural and the cause of death was "acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis" (two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by an artery clot).
I disagree. Do you identify any mis-information article? Otherwise I don't share your distain.
EDIT: this is an ad-hom. Please respond to the point - I also linked to WP as evidence that your claim is shaky. Refusing to do so because I linked to a journalist you dislike is pure tribalism.
I'm not going to read anything written by Greenwald, he's completely gone off the deep end. He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage about the Biden rape accusation unless he could provide some sort of proof - he concluded that being asked to show proof of what he was accusing someone of counted as "being censored".
Anyway, I'll say that just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace. Even if his death was completely unrelated, it doesn't make Jan 6 any less of an insurrection.
Again, this is an ad-hom. I didn't claim something was true because Greenwald believes it - I linked to an article addressing the topic, so you can address the content of that article, rather than its author.
> He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage ... unless he could provide some sort of proof
doesn't seem to match up with
> just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace
where's the proof? various outlets already back-peddled on the claim he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, they have yet to prove anything with regards to bear mace (other than two men carried it).
> If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong.
You are trying to use body count to measure the seriousness of an attempt to take over the government? It’s starting to look like the Taliban took over Kabul with less violence than what happened in the US Capitol.
That people so often stretch the truth in these matters (while complaining about people who are clearly writing provocatively, and thus have no shortage of genuine weak points) is interesting.
> Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots [...]
Seems pretty clear-cut to me. The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons. It resembles the old punk-rock scene, but after it was discovered, not early on. Some of the upstart outlets earn serious money, garnering higher ratings and more page-views than the regime-approved brands Apple features on the News screen of my iPhone. (A screen I’ve disabled and don’t miss.) This wilderness of “contrarianism” – a designation easily earned these days; you merely have to mention Orwell or reside in Florida -- requires a measure of vigilance and effort from those who seek the truth there. As opposed to those who go there to relax, because they prefer alt-bullshit to mainstream bullshit. They can just kick their shoes off and wade in.
Does your mind detect any ~disrespect for alt-bullshit in here? For example, what meaning do you think is intended by "They can just kick their shoes off and wade in"?
> Seems pretty clear-cut to me.
That's the thing though: things are not always as they seem (I assume you've seen magic shows & optical illusions, or read to some degree on neuroscience, the numerous forms of psychological bias, etc)?
> The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
Here are you referring to shared reality, or your/the author's/my individual highly customized model of reality? It's an important distinction, but one that is rarely made.
More abstractly, most everyone bends over backwards to promote their subconsciously estimated personal ~~illusion~~ model of reality as being representative of shared reality.
The US intelligence agencies don't themselves have a clean record: COINTELPRO, PRISM, CIA spying on the Senate intelligence committee (then lying about it).
Each of those counts as a conspiracy, and it's of note that people like Edward Snowden have been hunted and chased out of the country (and people like Julian Assange similarly persecuted).
It's no longer a credible business model to simply report what you see to a wider audience. We have Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and every person on the planet with a smartphone for that. (See the fall of Kabul for the latest example.)
When people read the news they expect a lens upon the world that they agree with, that connects to everything else in a coherent narrative that confirms what it was they thought they knew. This fakeness (or 'bullshit') is a form of hypernormalization for the consumerist society.
Uh-huh, because if something is bullshit then anything that disagrees with it is anti-bullshit. Fauci says masks are bad? That clearly self-serving bullshit entitles you to any reality you want. Don't think Covid is real? Well, some liberal elite once told you a false thing and they also believe Covid is real, so it's the bullshit. You're standing up to the bullshit. They only have to step in their own once to entitle you to spend your entire life head-over-heels in your own bullshit and it's fine because it's not THEIR cowpie.
It's a personal amusement of mine that the singnal-to-noise ratio on the internet is so terrible. Sorry, Tim Berners-Lee. The abysmal state of facts on the internet also seems a failure of capitalism of sorts: a low-distortion news channel doesn't seem an impossible business model, but here we are.
> What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public. It didn’t hire ex-CIA directors, top FBI men, NSA brass, or other past and future sources to sit beside its anchors at spot-lit news-desks that blocked our view of their lower extremities. But it gave in.
Incredibly, this essay about bullshit is bullshit. Here's a snip of journalism from 1977:
"Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations."[1]
The long, well documented history of intelligence services mixing in with journalism is impossible to miss if you do any research at all.
> The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines.
This is more bullshit. The protest started on July 11th. Here are some headlines/bylines/opening paragraphs from that week:
(BBC 7/13) Cuba protests: Arrests after thousands rally against government: Dozens of people have been arrested in Cuba after thousands joined the biggest protests for decades against the island's Communist government, media and opposition sources say.[2]
(Reuters 7/11) Cuba sees biggest protests for decades as pandemic adds to woes -- Chanting "freedom" and calling for President Miguel Diaz-Canel to step down, thousands of Cubans joined street protests from Havana to Santiago on Sunday in the biggest anti-government demonstrations on the Communist-run island in decades.[3]
(WaPo 7/12) Cubans hold biggest anti-government protests in decades; Biden says U.S. stands with people -- Communist Cuba erupted in its largest-scale demonstrations in decades on Sunday as thousands of people chanting “freedom” and “yes, we can” took to the streets from Havana to Santiago de Cuba in a major new challenge to an authoritarian government struggling to cope with increasingly severe blackouts, food shortages and a spiking coronavirus outbreak.[4]
The only way you could arrive at the same conclusion is if you did not read any of the news from that week.
Take the author's advice, avoid bullshit. However, actual bullshit is usually essays like this, which are really opinion pieces that do not attempt to mention any facts at all. If your "alternative media" is nothing but opinion pieces that count other similarly prejudiced opinions as research, it's bullshit all the way down. Journalism has some bullshit mixed in, as does everything, but at least there's a chance you will walk away with some information.
You do have an argument, but was it as blatant as it is now? I just saw Clapper today and no one, but weird people like me remember his lies to the American public. In 1977, you could easily miss it, because it was hidden.
To me that would just make the news like a casino slot machine that mixes some dopamine spiking wins in with some cutting losses. The most dangerous kind of bullshit, is bullshit mixed with factual, respectable reporting since it makes the bullshit all the more believable.
If this article piqued your interest but you want something a bit more detailed, I'd recommend Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman. Good book, a bit one-sided at times, but very interesting in its analysis of the implications of TV on culture. Much of what he describes in the latter chapters seems even more applicable in the age of Twitter and Snapchat.
He retreads an old song we're all familiar with and like, but this guy obviously has a persecution complex:
>The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom.
When someone writes about a variety of abstruse topics, I can only draw on my limited experience with a few of those to judge their reliability about the rest. In this case, I happen to read Google News sometimes. So I know he's talking nonsense. I was deluged with stories about Cubans protesting for freedom. Sure, there were a few mentions that they weren't happy with the slow vaccine rollout, but the overwhelming majority of articles trumpeted the neoliberal party line and crowed about the protest song Patria y Vida.
This kind of selective attention to what must feel like a personal insult accompanies that other signal of a persecution complex, the Poor Lost People Like Me trope
>the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons.
What he fails to understand is that the cliquishness of "his" group and the "narrative" of the "mainstream" are really one and the same phenomenon. Humans naturally try to find, redefine and support a cause or movement, which apparently reflects some primal culture-forming instinct. The idea that this is an external phenomenon -- that some outside, manipulative force is making people arrange into mobs -- is paranoia talking. Humans are natural mob-formers.
The media will always seem to be pushing a narrative because it is made of human beings who feel powerful when they support a narrative. What is necessary is to see the world as it is while aware of this phenomenon, not to delude yourself into thinking you can outrun your own nature.
Media was once so money intensive, that no privat endeavour could provide it, thus the public media was created - payed by the public in general with a fee/taxes. When the private TV/Radio came up, the question was if they could survive. Advertisment money is good money, which we came to know much later, when those streams of revenue past over to the big internet companies (mainly Google and Facebook) and they thrived. Today we still see the first generation of media being still around ("public"), the second "private" also struggling and we have a lot of private persons (eg. "YouTubers") making big money, today. There are huge shifts and ignoring that is probably because of the "if your job depends on it". So the encumbents bent and twist themselves, like CNN ("fake news") and claiming things like "freedom of the press is in decline". No!,... times change and we need to and are all adapting and shifting. Except for those still working in the "private" and "public" news sector. With it also it's characteristics change: You rather follow the person(journalist), who is an expert in his field and someone you like and trust, like "Tim Dodd, the everyday Astronaut" (reporting on SpaceX) and others with bigger reach and smaller, weirder and less weird, with more attack surface and less. Some of them get themselves into trouble and need to move to other platforms or vanish completely. I remember Anonymous being expelled from Facebook and moving over to the Russian VKontakte network around 2015. Some stuff seems to only surface on 4chan. Bans or defunding of channels/outlets do get noticed and discussed in those "alternative" communities, or on the original platform/community itself. There is no hiding, it's getting less and less, actually. The freedom of the press got actually... democratized.
Many things that used to be "the good old way" have changed. Every generation things the upcoming generation is headed for doom.
First it was TVs, then it was video games, now it's social media.
I understand the sentiment and know it's easy to think that that one time in the past was the best way. Hell I even think about those few years with that group of people were "the best", nostalgia.
But if we always look at the past and try to recreate it, then we'll not allow great things of the future to come.
There are legitimate ways the past was better, but that's usually rooted in a belief. So hold onto the belief, let go of the past? I do commend those who onto a belief and let go of the past. It's not always easy in a changing future.
Wait 30 years and then consider whether 2021 is "the good old way".
I imagine it will be for most people, just like 1969 was "the good old way" for the author of TFA, and 1736 was for Ben Franklin.
It's not that the bullshit was better back then, or even that times have changed, for the better or for the worse. It's just that the way the human mind works, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
As time goes by, we still don't see things as they are. We see them as we were.
Yes, of course there's bullshit everywhere. But what can you do with that knowledge exactly? Knowing that something is fallacious and full of BS doesn't give you some advantage. It makes it worse. Knowing that the system is full of lies and corrupt doesn't provide a means to get some good from that knowledge or take advantage of knowing the "truth". It's just depressing to know that the takers will always be taking, the fakers will always be faking, and those who know how to work the lies keep winning while those who know the truth of the BS just self-congratulate their own knowledge. Does the BS always win?
Say one knows for a "fact" who killed JFK or the origins of the pandemic, or one knows the actual mechanism by which startups are funded or big deals won (it's never the way it's portrayed to be). What does knowing the truth of any of those facts do other than provide one with some self-satisfaction of knowing? Is it better to live in self-deception and believe the simple lie versus know the hard truth? Does knowing the "actual truth" even provide that self-satisfaction given that the lies and untruths win out so much of the time? Confronting the lies never seems to provide the expected win that those who seem to possess the truth would expect.
tune out. it's not like being up to date about everything going on the world is necessary. follow only the news you care about, read only the people whose work you enjoy
That's certainly the easy way. But that only applies to news and internet chatter and social media blather -- stuff that's fairly easy to tune out. I've already tuned those out. But the lies and BS are much more than just what the nattering neighbobs say on the Internets and the glowing chatter box. The lies exist everywhere if you look deeply to find the truth when what you expect doesn't match reality. It's much more difficult to tune that out.
I could invoke Always Sunny in Philadelphia Frank's duper/dupee dichotomy or Carlin's rant ('it's all bullshit and its bad for ya'), but I won't. It is lazy.
Knowing something is bullshit helps. Knowing the system and understanding what the levers do is an advantage. This is also the reason there is so much bullshit. Advantage goes to those with accurate world model and ability to use it to their advantage.
All that said, I have no real answers to the posited questions as those probably have to be answered individually.
>The information it imparts, if one bothers to sift through it, is information about itself; about the purposes, beliefs, and loyalties of those who produce it: the informing class. They’re not the ruling class — not quite — but often they’re married to it or share therapists or drink with it at Yale Bowl football games. They’re cozy, these tribal cousins. They cavort. They always have. What has changed is that the press used to maintain certain boundaries in the relationship, observing the incest taboo. It kept its pants zipped, at least in public.
I think this is thought provoking. An at the same time harmless but also horrible example was to see Jen Psaki sing Happy Birthday for a Reuters journalist. Am I alone to think this reflects bad on journalism?
In my opinion this is entirely unreadable. Not for what it has to say, but how it says it.
The word "bullshit" is a burden. It is a painful, unscientific term that chips away our objective neutrality every time we encounter it.
The author knows. The author is emotional. The author is trying to make US emotional. I don't want to be rashly emotional, I want to be neutral, cautious, objective, thoughtful, and deliberate. Every point I take from a piece I want to double-check the reasonableness and the implications of, to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.
But not if it requires wading through so much frustration.
Part of the excellent article was about how death puts a lot of things into new perspective. Like how useless it often is to take every point from a piece and double check the reasonableness and the implications of or to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.
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[ 1785 ms ] story [ 2421 ms ] threadHere's what I mean. If I was born earlier, like say a baby boomer, I'd have less education in critical thinking, but I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland but serious, and the editors took it upon themselves to keep things balanced. They'd acknowledge other viewpoints and think properly about how to fit in their own perspectives.
If I was a gen Z kid, it was and is all a blur. Just loads of crap mixed in with everything. Chaos, no particular authority is obvious. More time spent in education but also more noise. Fewer cultural lighthouses since everyone is watching different things (both news and wider culture) and able to stay within whatever they already believe.
When I grew up I had a leg in each era. I still think some papers are better than others. But I also see the cacophony of crap for what it is.
Boomers have ended up in this world too and it's horrifying. My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US. They come up with crazy things from time to time, like they're missing a critical thinking inoculation.
Now I think about it, that likely particularly applies to those of us who believe we are great at critical thinking.
(Personal side note: This shouldn't mean we throw our hands up in the air in hopelessness, but it should remind us that we all have a mandate to be more critical of our own thinking than of that of others.)
Democracy is like science. If you don’t constantly doubt at least a little bit and check the outcome continuously, but instead just trust blindly, you’re doing it wrong.
Pretty sure we've gone quite a lot farther than a little bit.
Here's the thing, though: if one is basing their "doubts" on random brainfarts or propaganda pieces they saw on youtube or facebook and decided to trust blindly, they're probably also doing it wrong.
Skepticism that is not accompanied by critical thinking, actual knowledge, intellectual honesty and a dash of humility is useless or worse.
TL;DR: Epistemology is hard, but "just doubt everything" is not it, chief.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that the people in question (that are doubting the results of the US elections) are rather "skeptical" towards (so called) mainstream media, but not as much when it comes to the random crap on fox news, ann, youtube and facebook. If this is the case, then this makes them more "useful idiots" than actual "skeptics", in my opinion.
TL;DR: "Doubting blindly" (usually based on whatever Fox News or 4chan is spreading today) is as at least as bad as "trusting blindly".
This shouldn't matter, otherwise you'll succumb to false-flags and Reverse psychology.
In any case, the post you responded to doesn't say anything about fox news. Any basing an opinion on fox news isn't "Doubting blindly"; it would be blind trust.
Blind doubt aka scepticism is fine, because doubting something (with poor sources) isn't the same as assuming it's false - it's not assuming that it's true.
Lack of a reason to trust US elections is justification to doubt them. The standard is (should be) that these things prove themselves, rather than put the burden of proof on outside observers.
It's also worth noting the post that it was replying to said:
> My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US
which seems to take "doubting the outcome of elections" as automatically outrageous, without mention of reasons, sources or why.
I'm using "Fox News" as a placeholder for "media demonstrably known to propagate bald-faced lies". You can replace this with 4chan, youtube, facebook or wherever it is that those people get their "news" from. I'm going to assume they get their news from a bad source, due to the unsupported stuff they believe in; it may not be Fox News, but it's something just as bad (right-wing or left-wing).
> Any basing an opinion on fox news isn't "Doubting blindly"; it would be blind trust.
That's exactly my point. These (so called) "skeptics" (who are always doubting vaguely reasonable information sources) are usually intensely guillible people that have no problem blindly accepting information from demonstrably bad sources, particularly when is suits their own world views (i.e. not actual skeptics).
> Blind doubt aka scepticism is fine, because doubting something (with poor sources) isn't the same as assuming it's false - it's not assuming that it's true.
Again, as I said, "doubt" that comes with intellectual honesty is fine (i.e. you doubt but accept that you may be wrong and are willing to be corrected). "Doubt" that is based on simple ignorance (or unwillingness to figure things out), on the need to be contrarian, because it is convenient, because you think it makes you look smart, or because you are trusting horrible information sources is not. This second type of "doubt" is what I am calling "blind doubt" ("doubting for the sake of doubting" more often than not, and definitely for the wrong reasons).
Should we teach "flat earth theory" and "intelligent design theory" in schools (you know... because we have to be skeptical of everything)? No, blind skepticism is not fine.
> Lack of a reason to trust US elections is justification to doubt them.
Ah, yes. Inverting the onus of proof is fun. Do you have any proof that you haven't stole my property? Then you must have stolen my property (or, at least, I lack a reason to trust that you haven't stolen my property)! This is fun!
Meanwhile... number of pieces of evidence suggesting/demonstrating large-scale fraud in US election results: zero.
But, hey... you do you.
> which seems to take "doubting the outcome of elections" as automatically outrageous, without mention of reasons, sources or why
Can you give me a good justification for doubting the results of said elections, using actual observed and widely accepted facts other than opinion (e.g. "I personally lack a reason to trust US elections" is not a good justification)? I have yet to hear anyone provide any actual arguments that would support it, and all the US judges that have been faced with the same issue seem to agree with my assessment, so... yes, I am going to assume that these people (and you, if that is the case) are "doubting" it for all the wrong reasons: not based on actual information, critical thinking and intellectual honesty, but the exact opposite of it (probably because "they heard something somewhere" or because the "wrong" person won).
No, because scepticism doesn't imply we should.
> Ah, yes. Inverting the onus of proof is fun.
You think the burden of proof isn't (or shouldn't be) on the government?
Between your wilful "reading between the lines" based on your own biases, and smug insults ("But, hey... you do you"); I don't think this argument is going to go anywhere - I don't see the "accept that you may be wrong and are willing to be corrected" you talked about.
Is this really true? Or is it an illusion due to you being the target audience of the MSM then? For example, there are no lack of claims and incidents of media bias for the pre-naughts in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_State...
Some neat anecdotes in there tho.
I have a better idea. The news has always been shit.
There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market.
It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs have adapted to fill in all those remaining hours. Consolidation hasn't helped, but I can look at any news clipping from the early 20th century and see the same level of bullshit I see today.
I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks.
And of course some people like this still exist, but:
Anecdotally, it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity or civic duty and towards cynical profit-motive. You can see it in everything from hospitals, to universities, to technical companies like Boeing.
I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge. I don't know if centralization/acquisition is to blame, or stock market pressures, or private equity, or some cultural phenomenon. But it feels like we're only careening further down this path with each passing year.
They operated the same way they do now, and worked on whatever their bosses told them to work on. It's just romantic to think they were unburdened by our mortal contrivances and somehow had the wherewithal to pick out "important" stories.
It doesn't have to be just one or the other. You can have principles and push for what you believe to be good, even if your boss is ultimately profit-driven (even if you have some profit-incentive of your own!). Multiple factors come together. It's incredibly cynical of you to paint that sort of basic integrity as nothing but a romantic fantasy.
What I feel like I'm seeing today is that people are either less willing or less able to enact higher principles in their work. It could very possibly be a power-dynamic thing, or it could just be the spread of general cynicism like yours.
There's no evidence that the distribution of good journalists has fundamentally changed over time other than the effects of just a larger pool of eligible candidates. A quick glance through Peabody and Pulitzer winners over time can quickly confirm this.
If anything, I'd argue people are far more principled today than any other point in recorded history. Maybe they're just not your principles.
It starts with the meaning of "professional". I know of two opposite ones:
1. "Professional" as in doing high quality work, no corner cutting, having respect for the problem and the customer.
2. "Professional" as in putting business first, with the implication that any possible corner will be cut, any possible sacrifice on quality will be made, if it makes the business more money.
The second meaning is what I've been seeing increasingly often over the years. It's a frequent sentiment in our industry - it's professional to keep applying subpar tooling and methods to a problem, because upskilling costs money short-term. It's professional to bloat your product and make your users pay an implicit tax, because it's saving fraction of those costs for the company.
> I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge (...)
I sometimes wonder if the answer is: none of those, things have always been as shitty - it's you and me who are growing up and discovering the world for what it is (and/or growing more cynical in the process).
Despite all that being one huge grey area ethically speaking, I still think that without professional reporting all we’d have is a network of mini-influencers misrepresenting reality into their respective bubbles on Twitter/Substack/TikTok, either for likes or to further whatever hidden agenda they or their friends may have. It’s a good thing to have a job description and years of education that ingrain certain principles[0].
It’s doubly bad, though, when you betray those principles; being a journalist is (or ought to be) much like being a cop or a doctor—for the mechanism to work properly, people should be able to trust you to act in their interest rather than own personal gain (and you should deserve the trust).
Unfortunately, I don’t see a good way for such a model to persist. We’re losing trust in traditional affordable mass media, often for good reasons.
[0] Most importantly, to be cognisant of your biases—which indeed includes selecting which story to report on, selecting which aspects to mention, etc.—and to compensate for them.
4. "Professional", as in you work within a profession, such as law or accounting, and are an accredited, paid-up member of the appropriate professional body.
I'll buy your (1), as in "professional paint job", but your (2) isn't a kind of professional; that's just race-to-the-bottom commercialism.
1. Correctly reasoning from data is a very difficult task, needing advanced skills, requiring deep understanding of statistics. Most companies have nobody with such skill set on board.
2. It provides a fake air of legitimacy to otherwise arbitrary decisions. Whether by mistake (confirming your own biases with data) or on purpose, you can use data to justify whatever decision you already want to make, few people know enough statistics to call you on your bullshit.
If you're going to water the statement down to that level, how does it not still apply today?
What there are are a lot of connected people who went from elite schools to exclusive unpaid internships, jobs in prestige nonprofit PR departments, and consulting firms, then to national outlets at very high salaries. Their coworkers are ex-politicians and campaign flacks, and people who worked at massive hedge funds and investment banks, who decided that they preferred punditry and socializing to their jobs.
The people you're talking about are bloggers/substack people now, and are generally denigrated by mainstream outlets.
I worked around multiple newsrooms. It's clear that you have not.
There is a very big world outside of the corner of the internet that you live in. And it still exists despite the internet trying to kill it off. Most "hometown" papers still exist. Go find some of them. Read them. What you'll see is that most of them are staffed by about 5-6 people, a few freelancers, and then a bunch of bylines that are simply the name of the paper, because they don't want you to realize how short-staffed they are (these are also written by those same journalists and editors).
That's the reality of the modern newsroom for the VAST majority of news outlets in the US.
So do accountants. And actuaries. And doctors. And programmers. And artists. And pretty much most every other profession. There's nothing special about clergy or journalists or doctors because they chose the career they did.
> and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work
This is just more romanticism. I'd wager that the distribution of hours of journalists looks very similar to most professionals.
Well, when I want to know what it's like to fuck around with Wordpress, I'll ask for your input.
Bullshit indeed.
There's nothing special about newsroom journalists. Like somehow they're the only people on the planet with deadlines, or that everyone is waking their editor up at 3am with that important story that just needs to make morning print.
The associate editor at the paper I did work for was making $13.50 an hour as of two years ago when I left. I know this because she overheard a conversation regarding the salary of my subordinate who was guaranteed to be paid a certain hourly rate (that was about 3x hers) upon his initial 6 months with the company, and she vented to me about it one night when I was in the office to perform some server maintenance and she had just arrived back from a football game she covered for the sports editor, who was out of town on vacation. She routinely wrote between 16-20 stories a week, did layouts for 5 sections of the paper including real estate, legal, and classifieds, covered all official local events, and covered girls' sporting events.
Does that seem to you like something you could do in 40 hours?
So this work you did "around newsrooms" and "with journalists" was sysadmin work? Have I misread that?
I think it's written by human beings who have a limited subset of knowledge, many times because sources aren't forthcoming or verified, and that if we ever held developers to the same standard that we held journalists, that it'd be nigh-impossible to hire any of them.
Ontario Public Broadcasting has this show 'The Agenda' with 'Steve Paikin' where he brings in mid-level and behind-the-scenes people from the bureaucracy people and they talk about granular issues of civic reform in great detail.
If you want to inform yourself on the nitty-gritty details of the new 'Subway Expansion' and why it's over budget, it's all right there.
But it's incredibly boring , and there's very little viewership.
Donald Trump put it really well when he said he would be 'great for news ratings'. It was rubbish, and a lot of people tuned in, it brought in a lot of money.
Add in the economics brought on by the Internet and we have a real problem.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellow_journalism
And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.
But to somehow think the moral distributions of people are superior from the average population, just because of career selection, is dubious at best. Something being protected by law doesn't somehow make its practice exalted.
The only parts of the BBC that are arguably not-for-profit are iPlayer, and domestic TV and Radio; and the BBC World Service. These are paid for by a controversial hypothecated tax, controlled by the government of the day; as a consequence, the Beeb is fairly consistently pro the government of the day, and anti the official opposition (they can see which side their bread is buttered on).
[Edit] The World Service is paid for out of general taxation, specifically the Foreign Office budget. It's not paid for out of the Licence Fee.
Two quick examples from npr.org right now:
1. Somehow we can model how the economy can adapt to zero carbon in 40 years yet couldn't predict changes to solar PV becoming more affordable in the last ten: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027370891/climate-change-sol...
2. Could this article be more sympathetic to the administration? https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027552833/heres-why-biden-is... the meanest thing they say it's "misjudged the speed". Why not "it's been obvious for two decades ANA could never hold together including the eight years he was VP"
It's more benign than qanon. I haven't checked their coverage of mask wearing. I'll change my mind if they were pushing masks when Fauci was lying and saying they were unnecessary.
> Father Syquia leads a team of four priests who get additional assistance from volunteers: psychiatrists, doctors, lawyers and laypeople.
There seem to be some trained professionals hidden behind the show and prayers.
> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops [0], viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls [1], vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots [2] behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation [3], and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths.
I listed to them for years but noticed a considerable shift in their reporting in the last 2-3 years.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924506867/analysis-questionab...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/29/800725826/why-wet-markets-are...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/01/15/957421470...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2021/07/17/1017264502/the-federal-reserv...
[4] https://www.npr.org/transcripts/959667930
That's the author's definition of bullshit though, it doesn't necessarily constitute actual bullshit.
It's true that some unofficial quality voices are disrupting established narratives ... but I'm sorry to say this isn't the shift that matters, because 99% of the 'unofficial sources' are considerably worse than just 'bullshit' in the press.
The 'Giant Kraken Monster' of fake news is really shocking, and it's taking over some sectors. I couldn't quite fathom it until I saw it happen to someone in my own life.
While we argue about 'truth' here on HN, information is being submerged by nonsense on mainstreet.
It's not so much war between civil people arguing over the facts - it's more like Information World War Z of people hopped up on very bad, made up information.
I was at a relative's home a few days ago listening as a he was listening to his Facebook stream and it was very shocking.
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but:
"Tanks will Roll, Power Cut, the Great Reset and Trump will be re-instated by Coup on Aug 10 ..."
"I have a source, who cannot be named, because his life would be in danger, that Nanci Pelosi was in direct contact with the Chinese Communist Party on January 6 directing the assault on Capitol Hill"
"Those that stole the election, put them ballot boxes full of fake votes for Biden, they need to be executed for treason, the True Patriots Will Rise"
"It's masks now, folks, but this is the globalist master plan, it's just the first step. This is the reason the second amendment exists, folks"
"Big Pharma does NOT want you to know about natural cures, because, well, why do you think? You are the experiment folks. The Sheep out there doing what the government tells them - but the Lions, the True Patriots, know better."
"Q said:" - and then a bunch insane of statements from QAnon etc.
It's dizzyingly conspiratorial and it's really scary to watch people eat that up. My family member indicated that they don't believe most of it, but that's their primary news source and, it has affected them greatly.
My family member is becoming an information zombie who is losing their grounding in reality, and cannot be reasoned with on these issues, even if they are quite rational otherwise. Once you start to believe cabals of the elite are killing children in basements in blood-lust ceremonies, that mysterious Q controls things behind the scenes, that vaccines i.e. life-saving medicines are invented as a tool of control, and that of course all of the 'main stream media outlets' are all lying, then what?
Watching them listen - it's like a form of information hypnotism - it's as though they're in a mystical / religious trance. If someone already has a reason to actually 'want to believe', and they don't care, and they just 'let go of rationality' ... then they fall into the trap. I think it's the same kind of programming that cults use.
It's really a sight to behold, and the experience of how the information is communicated, the anger, the tone of voice, etc..
The MSM has a problem with bias that could stand to be corrected, and it's have more quality 'outside' voices, but even some of the better sources often falter. Matt Taibi, probably in the same vein of the author of this piece about 'BS', usually has some great things to say but I feel even he is jumping the shark a bit trying to get attention to his Substack with overzealous headlines.
In order to put this into relative context, here is some polling data from Pew [1][2] which shows a material minority of Americans are susceptible to even the more over the top conspiratorial information (i.e. QAnon), for less egregious but nevertheless still completely false information, I believe the number is much higher, reaching up to 30% for those who believe that the ...
Their biggest line was "nothing can stop what is comming" and sure enough the biggest thing to ever happen happened, Covid.
Isn't that a tautology?
I remember when France went to war against Khadafi our newspapers/TVs were all supporting this, given the amount of direct suffering it caused I'd say that being worse than this is .. hard!
He was already causing great harm, or rather, the war was causing great harm. Choosing to tilt the game board to one side over the other is definitely something to ponder, and there's definitely a lot of information to dig up and report on, but it's not a 'fake news' story.
Gaddaffi's life is actually stranger than fiction, he did kidnap young women and put them into his Harem. That's not made up. In fact, it's odd that you don't hear more 'fake news' about some world leaders who continue to have these practices because there's so much material to work with.
"so what was the point of the intervention" - like I already said, at least to prevent an impending massacre, and then to tilt the outcome to 'one side', in which all things being equal, was preferable, and still is even in retrospect.
There was already a civil war, before any intervention.
If the UK and France had not intervened, there would have likely been a massacre - again, this is what Gaddafi stated he would do, moreover, there's no reason to believe that he would have unambiguously quashed the rebellion, meaning the civil war would have gone on in which he would have been a primary antagonist, possibly with the upper hand.
'The outcome' was titled by Western Powers, and it would have been better if there were more stability, but there's no reason to believe that it's worse after intervention.
The 2011 war was not hugely violent. In the entire war only a few thousand civilians and fighters died, which is frankly minimal. Through to the late 2010's the political instability was not very violent. The mini-war in the late 2010's was again, fairly specific and shortlived with few casualties.
2) 'Noone in the mainstream news AFAIK did its job and asked what will be going to happen next' - first, I don't think that this would represent any kind of fake news, just the media not having foresight, and often they do not. Second, Obama was very public with his statements of 'What Happens Next?' - it's why the US did only the frontline air support, AWACS, drones etc. and didn't do any of the main fighting. The 'big questions' around 'bad outcomes' definitely lingered, there were a lot of question marks about that during the war. Finally - none of that constitutes fake news or 'bullshit' really. If you wanted more specific and detailed covarage in the aftermath, you can see most of it on Al-Jazeera. CNN is not exactly going to have good coverage within Libya.
1. Use narrative engineering to persuade angry, frightened, gullible people to tune in and self-select.
2. Use narrative reinforcement to make them angrier and more frightened.
3. Wind them up and point them at a target.
4. Profit politically, and possibly also financially.
It doesn't matter what the narrative is. As long as it has an outgroup that can be accused of doing terrible things that arouse fear, rage, and disgust, almost any narrative will do. It could be vax conspiracies, it could be election conspiracies, it could be any number of other hot-button topics.
It's no different to how official propaganda works. [1] It isn't even all that different to conventional advertising.
The only difference now is that it portrays itself as covert, revolutionary, transgressive, and individualistic, where during the glory days of Time it used to present itself as wise, objective, and paternal.
But in fact it's just the same old farmed behaviour modification reinvented for social media.
[1] The suggestion that there was ever any kind of benign separation between old-fashioned patrician journalism and the US establishment is itself obvious bullshit. Historians have written books about this. This is just one intro.
http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
Isn't this what everyone does now?
Is there actually a "pure" movement or source that doesn't engage in this kind of Bullshit?
I do find it interesting that left-leaning people (like myself) find it difficult to acknowledge that left-leaning media also engages in The Bullshit. Because we tend to agree with the propaganda statements, it's incredibly difficult to spot as Bullshit.
The 'Far Left' operates in much the same way.
The examples I gave were just of one person's stream.
Just one side gets a pass by many people, the other not so much.
Were they? News co-ops has historically been quite good.
where alternatives tried? or just quickly squashed?
For news, in many cases, the issue isn't so much the veracity of what's being reported, but... what's being reported. You only have so many pages and only so much reader mental bandwidth.
That meant you could talk to your relatives at Christmas and perhaps have different ideas about the same facts, rather than completely different sets of facts.
Online news is compared to its paper versions, many outlets still have significant differences here. Of course there was a lot of bullshit too, but today almost everything is bullshit. We even built bullshit-thrones for those that produce the most.
In spite of being a business I feel printed newspapers at large struck to a code of ethics and used that "freedom of the press" judiciously.
In India Newspapers played a crucial role in organizing against colonial rule, Many freedom fighters were themselves a publishers/editos of such newspapers. At the later part of the freedom struggle such newspapers came under heavy attack, editors jailed and unspoken horrors imposed upon them.
Even today printed news papers which survived from those era does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.
But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.
They're interesting because they show exactly the sort of vacuous garbage one can expect when an amateur is is trying to make a name for themselves as a writer and has no editor to slap their hand or even ask for some sort of coherence.
> In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008–09 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago. He graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1983 after completing a 22-page-long senior thesis entitled "Entangling Breaths (Poems)." Following that, he obtained a second undergraduate degree in English Literature at Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey Scholar.
You don't think this guy can get a job as an editor?
Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, Andrew Sullivan, The Dispatch are all fine Substack publications.
Their audiences are really small however, it's the total opposite of populist, I'm not sure how much influence they could possibly have.
Where you have what passes for freedom of speech, the corrollary is that everyone has the freedom to oppose your views.
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping.
I also like that the author explicitly refuses to provide any examples of these "anti-bullshit alternative media sources". Very common tactic amongst this ilk - complain about aggressive censorship and how George Orwell was specifically warning us about Twitter, all the while doing everything you can to avoid people seeing what was actually incurring bans.
I see it all the time in communities I run, people start trying to spin off alternative sites and talk about how <insert community here> impinges on free speech, and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.
It's insanely hard to get your content consistently removed from Twitter or Facebook, they do everything they can to avoid having to hire more moderators. It can happen, but then providing the examples will get everyone on your side immediately. Anyone who claims that they're being unfairly censored and yet refuses to show the content that actually got removed is trying to hide something.
Are you suggesting that this person shares these behaviors?
I'm certainly not suggesting that the author is prone to outbursts of racial slurs - that was just an example of something I encounter regularly, and typically that type of person is far less literate - but I am extremely doubtful that the content they're complaining about removal of is as "anti-bullshit" as they'd like to claim.
Do you believe that your mind may be doing some interpretation (with or without "your" knowledge) in the formation of this conclusion?
The beauty of the mind though: even though it is doing this (manufacturing an interpreted version of reality in realtime), this tends to be an unpleasant idea to most people....but luckily, it also has the ability to interpret that away, allowing us to have our cake and eat it too (although this feature has some downsides of its own)!
This isn't always true. I don't want to derail the topic of this thread, but I certainly find I cannot talk seriously about the causes of disproportionate violence and rape from certain segments of the population without getting banned. Even though, looking deeply into the science, it doesn't support the mainstream viewpoint. If I can't trust the media and even websites like HN to be honest on something so basic, why should I trust them for anything else?
So yea, I don't doubt that this guy thinks facebook is being mean by not letting him spread conspiracy bullshit on their platform.
I missed that part, any chance you could quote the text where he says this?
Pretty standard alt-right nutjob. Substack is swarming with them.
> alt-right Yeah. I think the woke are done. No one actually likes or agrees with them, it's all just preference falsification.
so, where was the violence?
Does this look like a peaceful protest, to you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=XajBh9oTdqI&feat...
> One of the cops died of injuries sustained on site
No sources for this, so I'll assume you're referring to Officer Brian D. Sicknick. So, this might not be true: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-c...
There's a section on this in Wikipedia too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick#Subseq...
> On April 19, 2021, the office of the chief medical examiner of the District of Columbia, Francisco J. Diaz, reported that the manner of death was natural and the cause of death was "acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis" (two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by an artery clot).
EDIT: this is an ad-hom. Please respond to the point - I also linked to WP as evidence that your claim is shaky. Refusing to do so because I linked to a journalist you dislike is pure tribalism.
Anyway, I'll say that just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace. Even if his death was completely unrelated, it doesn't make Jan 6 any less of an insurrection.
> He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage ... unless he could provide some sort of proof
doesn't seem to match up with
> just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace
where's the proof? various outlets already back-peddled on the claim he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, they have yet to prove anything with regards to bear mace (other than two men carried it).
"Prosecutor: Bear spray not used in Capitol attack on officers, defendants seek bond" -- https://wtop.com/dc/2021/04/men-charged-in-jan-6-bear-spray-...
> Even if his death was completely unrelated, it doesn't make Jan 6 any less of an insurrection.
You stated an officers death as evidence of the level of violence. I don't believe this was true, and I think it does make it less of an insurrection.
You are trying to use body count to measure the seriousness of an attempt to take over the government? It’s starting to look like the Taliban took over Kabul with less violence than what happened in the US Capitol.
That people so often stretch the truth in these matters (while complaining about people who are clearly writing provocatively, and thus have no shortage of genuine weak points) is interesting.
> Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots [...]
Seems pretty clear-cut to me. The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
How about a lot more context:
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons. It resembles the old punk-rock scene, but after it was discovered, not early on. Some of the upstart outlets earn serious money, garnering higher ratings and more page-views than the regime-approved brands Apple features on the News screen of my iPhone. (A screen I’ve disabled and don’t miss.) This wilderness of “contrarianism” – a designation easily earned these days; you merely have to mention Orwell or reside in Florida -- requires a measure of vigilance and effort from those who seek the truth there. As opposed to those who go there to relax, because they prefer alt-bullshit to mainstream bullshit. They can just kick their shoes off and wade in.
Does your mind detect any ~disrespect for alt-bullshit in here? For example, what meaning do you think is intended by "They can just kick their shoes off and wade in"?
> Seems pretty clear-cut to me.
That's the thing though: things are not always as they seem (I assume you've seen magic shows & optical illusions, or read to some degree on neuroscience, the numerous forms of psychological bias, etc)?
> The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
Here are you referring to shared reality, or your/the author's/my individual highly customized model of reality? It's an important distinction, but one that is rarely made.
The way right wingers bend over backwards to pretend that Russia doesn't have a long history of this sort of thing never ceases to amaze me.
As the saying goes: "Humans gonna human".
I didn't pretend anything, I compared two things.
The US intelligence agencies don't themselves have a clean record: COINTELPRO, PRISM, CIA spying on the Senate intelligence committee (then lying about it).
Each of those counts as a conspiracy, and it's of note that people like Edward Snowden have been hunted and chased out of the country (and people like Julian Assange similarly persecuted).
When people read the news they expect a lens upon the world that they agree with, that connects to everything else in a coherent narrative that confirms what it was they thought they knew. This fakeness (or 'bullshit') is a form of hypernormalization for the consumerist society.
It's a personal amusement of mine that the singnal-to-noise ratio on the internet is so terrible. Sorry, Tim Berners-Lee. The abysmal state of facts on the internet also seems a failure of capitalism of sorts: a low-distortion news channel doesn't seem an impossible business model, but here we are.
Incredibly, this essay about bullshit is bullshit. Here's a snip of journalism from 1977:
"Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations."[1]
The long, well documented history of intelligence services mixing in with journalism is impossible to miss if you do any research at all.
> The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines.
This is more bullshit. The protest started on July 11th. Here are some headlines/bylines/opening paragraphs from that week:
(BBC 7/13) Cuba protests: Arrests after thousands rally against government: Dozens of people have been arrested in Cuba after thousands joined the biggest protests for decades against the island's Communist government, media and opposition sources say.[2]
(Reuters 7/11) Cuba sees biggest protests for decades as pandemic adds to woes -- Chanting "freedom" and calling for President Miguel Diaz-Canel to step down, thousands of Cubans joined street protests from Havana to Santiago on Sunday in the biggest anti-government demonstrations on the Communist-run island in decades.[3]
(WaPo 7/12) Cubans hold biggest anti-government protests in decades; Biden says U.S. stands with people -- Communist Cuba erupted in its largest-scale demonstrations in decades on Sunday as thousands of people chanting “freedom” and “yes, we can” took to the streets from Havana to Santiago de Cuba in a major new challenge to an authoritarian government struggling to cope with increasingly severe blackouts, food shortages and a spiking coronavirus outbreak.[4]
The only way you could arrive at the same conclusion is if you did not read any of the news from that week.
Take the author's advice, avoid bullshit. However, actual bullshit is usually essays like this, which are really opinion pieces that do not attempt to mention any facts at all. If your "alternative media" is nothing but opinion pieces that count other similarly prejudiced opinions as research, it's bullshit all the way down. Journalism has some bullshit mixed in, as does everything, but at least there's a chance you will walk away with some information.
[1] http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
[2] A4ET8a8uTh0 ↗ You do have an argument, but was it as blatant as it is now? I just saw Clapper today and no one, but weird people like me remember his lies to the American public. In 1977, you could easily miss it, because it was hidden. chrisco255 ↗ To me that would just make the news like a casino slot machine that mixes some dopamine spiking wins in with some cutting losses. The most dangerous kind of bullshit, is bullshit mixed with factual, respectable reporting since it makes the bullshit all the more believable.
Today it is in plain sight.
>The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom.
When someone writes about a variety of abstruse topics, I can only draw on my limited experience with a few of those to judge their reliability about the rest. In this case, I happen to read Google News sometimes. So I know he's talking nonsense. I was deluged with stories about Cubans protesting for freedom. Sure, there were a few mentions that they weren't happy with the slow vaccine rollout, but the overwhelming majority of articles trumpeted the neoliberal party line and crowed about the protest song Patria y Vida.
This kind of selective attention to what must feel like a personal insult accompanies that other signal of a persecution complex, the Poor Lost People Like Me trope
>the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons.
What he fails to understand is that the cliquishness of "his" group and the "narrative" of the "mainstream" are really one and the same phenomenon. Humans naturally try to find, redefine and support a cause or movement, which apparently reflects some primal culture-forming instinct. The idea that this is an external phenomenon -- that some outside, manipulative force is making people arrange into mobs -- is paranoia talking. Humans are natural mob-formers.
The media will always seem to be pushing a narrative because it is made of human beings who feel powerful when they support a narrative. What is necessary is to see the world as it is while aware of this phenomenon, not to delude yourself into thinking you can outrun your own nature.
First it was TVs, then it was video games, now it's social media.
I understand the sentiment and know it's easy to think that that one time in the past was the best way. Hell I even think about those few years with that group of people were "the best", nostalgia.
But if we always look at the past and try to recreate it, then we'll not allow great things of the future to come.
There are legitimate ways the past was better, but that's usually rooted in a belief. So hold onto the belief, let go of the past? I do commend those who onto a belief and let go of the past. It's not always easy in a changing future.
Wait 30 years and then consider whether 2021 is "the good old way".
I imagine it will be for most people, just like 1969 was "the good old way" for the author of TFA, and 1736 was for Ben Franklin.
It's not that the bullshit was better back then, or even that times have changed, for the better or for the worse. It's just that the way the human mind works, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
As time goes by, we still don't see things as they are. We see them as we were.
But your "wait 30 years" observation puts you in a different age bracket from me; I'll be dead and gone (or reborn as an ant or something).
For example, leading one to take a vaccine that vastly decreases the risk of dying from a wildly infectious variant of a coronavirus.
Who needs that, right HN!?!
* mock kicks the pavement *
* takes a drag from a cigarette *
* nods my head to Nickelback's "How You Remind Me" *
Say one knows for a "fact" who killed JFK or the origins of the pandemic, or one knows the actual mechanism by which startups are funded or big deals won (it's never the way it's portrayed to be). What does knowing the truth of any of those facts do other than provide one with some self-satisfaction of knowing? Is it better to live in self-deception and believe the simple lie versus know the hard truth? Does knowing the "actual truth" even provide that self-satisfaction given that the lies and untruths win out so much of the time? Confronting the lies never seems to provide the expected win that those who seem to possess the truth would expect.
Knowing something is bullshit helps. Knowing the system and understanding what the levers do is an advantage. This is also the reason there is so much bullshit. Advantage goes to those with accurate world model and ability to use it to their advantage.
All that said, I have no real answers to the posited questions as those probably have to be answered individually.
I think this is thought provoking. An at the same time harmless but also horrible example was to see Jen Psaki sing Happy Birthday for a Reuters journalist. Am I alone to think this reflects bad on journalism?
https://youtu.be/EFyFOQTs9DI
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Kirn
The word "bullshit" is a burden. It is a painful, unscientific term that chips away our objective neutrality every time we encounter it.
The author knows. The author is emotional. The author is trying to make US emotional. I don't want to be rashly emotional, I want to be neutral, cautious, objective, thoughtful, and deliberate. Every point I take from a piece I want to double-check the reasonableness and the implications of, to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.
But not if it requires wading through so much frustration.
Also, not everything in life is science, and emotions can be useful messengers. Ignore them at your peril.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/