The author of this article says it was unsubtle, obvious satire but I would say that the post they referenced was solidly in Poe’s law territory. Is it really so hard to imagine someone genuinely writing that? Perhaps they’ve never met a misogynist.
Wishing for it to be true after it had been shown to be false is one thing (and clearly dumb), but I think the existence of such a subreddit is a perfectly reasonable thing to be outraged over in the first place. Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.
The problem with Poe's Law is that the person invoking it is often just revealing their own biases. It's not impossible to imagine any number of people writing any number of things, it's a failure to calibrate your expectations about the likelihood of parody properly that's the issue.
Journalists in particular should feel responsible to investigate likely satire before signal-boosting it. If they're actually disincentivized from doing so, that indicates that something is pretty rotten about our media culture..
>Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.
If your deep concern causes you to detach from reality, then being made fun of will hopefully provide a merciful way for you to regain your grip. Look at the recent "witches vs. Taliban" fiasco - perhaps gentle mockery will help people focus their activist impulses towards more-productive ends?
But this cuts both ways — you are exposing your own biases in believing it’s obvious satire. I hold the prior that most people writing on the internet are not doing it merely to get a rise out of liberals. I have also known men who became violent and angry when a women they had sex with decided to get an abortion. What’s different about this Reddit post? What’s supposed to indicate to me that it’s obviously in jest? Genuinely asking.
I understand it was intended as satire. What I don’t understand is why anyone would be surprised that you fooled people. People are notoriously easy to fool! Smart people, dumb people, brilliant scientists. Happens all the time. I would go so far as to say that being fooled, and being a gigantic dumbass, is the state of nature of human beings.
It didn’t end up in any news source I would classify as having a good reputation.
Subs like transpets illustrate more how ridiculous it is people are fooled. Thousands of upspergs on posts about dilating dogs or castrating cats. People are absurdly gullible and it’s really just terrible.
> People are absurdly gullible and it’s really just terrible.
Have you considered how far we would have gotten as a species if we had a pervasive assumption of bad faith in our interactions with other people? Complex societies depend on assuming good faith. People who assume others are always acting in bad faith are often traumatized or suffering from other forms of mental illness. I don’t find it “ridiculous” that people believe stupid things. I believe stupid things, and I’m sure you do as well. It’s certainly bad, but I’m not quite sure how your contributions improve the situation. Mostly they seem calibrated to reduce social trust and push people towards assuming bad faith. What if you wrote about how to identify satire instead?
There _is_ a pervasive assumption of bad faith. People almost always consider the possibility of bad faith when they don't know the other party, at all levels of society since the beginning of recorded history. A bad actor can have a massive (sometimes irreversible) negative impact; it's an important behavior that we should encourage.
> Complex societies depend on assuming good faith.
Maybe stuff like this exposes the fact that the media are not as reliable as we think. If they are propagating this fake news, what other fake news are they propagating?
Yeah, it’s problematic that there are so many gullible people and also pretty problematic that there are so many useless people looking to exploit that.
>But this cuts both ways — you are exposing your own biases in believing it’s obvious satire.
It doesn't cut equally both ways because there's an obvious ground truth that exonerates those who believe it's satire. I didn't claim it was obvious, and I could see why an outsider would be unsure. But the deflection of "can't blame me, Poe's Law" doesn't hold when plenty of people are able to see through the ruse.
All I’m saying is I think it’s forgivable to take something like this seriously, especially without full context. Doubling down after learning it’s a ruse, not so much. My observations on this issue are hindsight, this article is the first I learned of it.
> I didn't claim it was obvious, and I could see why an outsider would be unsure
You described people who believed it as “detached from reality.” Is that not tantamount to saying it’s obvious?
> You described people who believed it as “detached from reality.” Is that not tantamount to saying it’s obvious?
Not the op, but it clearly was detached from reality. 1) It was false, therefore not reality. 2) The people who believed it were journalists, who should know to check first and also should know not to believe everything you read.
The story is supposed to indicate that you should adjust that prior. If it's this easy for someone to trick us into getting mad, what other things are we still mad about because we don't yet know the trick? (When I first learned this lesson, I spot checked a few old controversies I was mad about, and a few of them had indeed been proven false without my knowledge.)
> The story is supposed to indicate that you should adjust that prior.
Sure, I get that.
> If it's this easy for someone to trick us into getting mad, what other things are we still mad about because we don't yet know the trick?
I appreciate what you’re trying to say, and indeed I am well aware of how many times I have been wrong. It has happened several times a day, at varying scales, for my whole life so far. It takes a lot to make me mad. People acting in bad faith and creating a hostile information environment just to prove that other people are gullible is one of the things that does it.
Dude, if you're so far down your partisan internet mouthbreather rabbit hole that you start to defend other people for biting on embarrassingly obvious bait, you might want to take a break. Go camping or join a bowling league or something. Touch grass.
https://camas.github.io/reddit-search/#{"subreddit":"TXbount... See the posts there if you want. A few were removed by the mods for being too obvious, but in general it was not subtle. u/cry_for_me_fatty and u/cats_like_my_cum, etc. the comments or post histories would make clear to anyone of even mild discernment that it’s not real.
and > Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.
Jokes aren’t sociopathic? We make fun of anyone, and where else can you demonstrate that people are too willing to fall for stories they’re mad at but with topics they are super invested in in an over the top way?
So as long as you can imagine someone holding the view you are reading, it is no longer important to critically evaluate its veracity?
In isolation, this view might be rational. However, in aggregate, this mindset can cause a cycle of increasing extremism. A good portion of those misogynists you speak of came to their views because they have read countless fake left-wing content that they thought was real, and in response became more entrenched in their opposing views.
The cycle goes like this - a fairly sane, conservative person sees someone on a conservative subreddit post a link to the 'transparents' subreddit, and sees posts they believe are real that talk about parents giving their kids hormones against their will. A natural response is to think "Woh, those trans rights people are crazy, maybe we should push back against trans rights"... and they become a little bit more extreme in their beliefs. Multiply this by a thousand, and you have a crazy extremist on your hands.
The same thing happens on the other side, and you get more and more extremists on the left. Now the cycle becomes even more self-sustaining, because now you have legitimate crazy extremists adding fuel to the fire by making real posts that sound a lot like the satire posts. So now, the satire has to be even MORE extreme to be humorous, and the cycle deepens.
This is a really hard problem to combat. I agree with you that this Texas law is absolutely insane and dangerous. However, I don't think the solution is to stop being critical of evidence that confirms what we already believe to be true, just because we are so sure of what we believe.
I think the real problem is that “some guy wrote some crazy shit on a forum and somebody liked it” became newsworthy. The fact that this journalist didn't even check the story on Google, is certainly a problem but no the main one.
> It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as the things confirm their priors.
As long as it fits into a convenient, simple, marketable narrative that isn’t unacceptable to the outlet the journalist works for, its not that hard. Bonus, sure, if its one that the outlet the journalist works for is already pushing (which is probably more important in most cases than the journalist’s own priors; in fact, that this is the case is pretty visible when journalists switch outlets.)
If you have to rely on a news source’s veracity, I would not rely on the veracity of Vice and Business Insider, to put it mildly. And “New York Times bestselling author” is a marketing blurb, not a reputation for reporting the truth.
I’ve never once seen a worthwhile article come out of Business Insider and yet yours is the first negative opinion I’ve ever seen expressed about it. Maybe because most don’t click inside to know that the titles are invariably clickbait compared to the actual bulk of the article? I don’t know.
That's the frustrating thing isn't it, "fake news" became popularized in the last few years and 'professional journalists' who can't even be bothered to fact check anything are really proving it right. Which is a shame since a free unbiased press is healthy for a society.
I'm with you until your last line. An "unbiased" press I think was a pretty unusual and brief development in the mid 20th century. I have no problem with a partisan press that wears its heart on its sleeve and states its objectives in the masthead: I'm perfectly capable of reading critically, and noting what's omitted as much as what's covered, and I'll know which alternative periodical to seek out for the other side of the story. The pretension to neutrality, to me, seems to result in less information overall.
It's fine if they are completely biased. That's OK. It is not fine if they run "fact-checkers" and then de-claim anything contrary to what they propagandize as "misinformation" / "raycist" / "nazi". Then they use these fact-checkers to get people banned/doxxed.
Even when their fact-checkers are utterly wrong, they will just update stating "needs more context".
I'm 100% with your premise. When I first got exposure to the world of blogs, I had to quickly learn the skill of rejecting the parts of a piece that are ill-supported while pulling insight from the well-considered[1] parts. This doesn't just extend to rejecting inferences, but to spot-checking facts: studies are not that hard to skim, and important topics will usually have multiple analyses out there that disagree with each other.
But once I started doing that, I couldn't turn it off for regular media sources. Reading articles critically was a huge shock: there are a LOT of really low-quality articles at (eg) the NYT, cases where they get the most basic of facts wrong, and are trivially fact-checked by clicking through to the study they reference.
However. I don't think the vast majority of people are capable of exiting "pour facts into my brain" mode when reading an article. Your position that we should bite the bullet and stop pretending to be neutral would bolster the epistemology of the few who already think critically, but do horrible damage to that of the masses. Maybe the NYT is the best society can do for honest, mass-market journalism. If that's the case, it seems dangerous to give up what little commitment to rigor and honesty they have. I certainly don't want to live in a world where even more people get their news from Breitbart equivalents.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the only successful examples of opinionated, high-quality journalism are denser and less accessible, from The Economist all the way up to specific blogs. Perhaps because simplified narratives are required to hold the attention of John Q Public, and every simplification is an opportunity for bias.
[1] My favorite example of this was when I followed a chain of links and read an article that I disagreed with much about, but retrieved a very novel insight about how to better achieve social justice, a cause which is important to me. As I got deeper into the article, I started having more and more strong disagreements until at a certain pt I realized the guy was a (self-identified) Christian reactionary monarchist, ie a paleo-paleo-conservative. The second thing I learned that day was the meta-lesson that even someone whose values are incredibly alien to me can teach me something tangential to his values.
I'm left here wondering which is true: has journalism as a field regressed, with loss of its original principles, or has it never been good to begin with.
The professional journalists feel much less like the sources of information that they should be, and more like definers of "truth".
A lot of ills are laid at social media's door, but I think this is a warranted one. Journalists were/are the beating heart of Twitter's userbase, giving it outsize influence through years of a minuscule userbase (eg there was a non-trivial period where there were more active in-stream users of Google+ than Twitter).
There have always been media personalities, but Twitter has made that the default mode of the industry, and removed editorial safeguards from a dramatic amount of the journalistic conversation.
Less interestingly but probably more saliently, the economics destruction that the internet wrought on journalism has just destroyed the economic buffer that allowed them to build a culture of standards and principles (such as it was). People have always liked being affirmed over being informed, and the journalism market now forces journalists to deliver that.
> I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that,
It's really not that difficult a skill to build though. The trick is not to get perfect at detecting sarcasm or trolls but to realize that if you're talking about an individual or a minuscule group of people online (like the 57 members of the "bounty hunter ring"), it's almost never worth paying attention to regardless of its trolling status. Best-case they're trolling, worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit. Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world.
I'm serious, it's really, really easy not to get taken in by bias-confirming dumb things. In fact, there's a force running counter to your framing, in which the average person has _less_ excuse to be taken in by trolls. Journalists have an economic incentive to jump on a story, while an individual is free to avoid having an opinion until there's enough usable information to shift your priors.
> Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world.
Careful though, QAnon was once an infinitesimally small amount of nutty people, and now they have at least two[1], likely more, sitting US Congressional representatives, with 36 running next year[2].
Sure, I'm not suggesting there's 0% signal. I'm suggesting that the SNR of "someone said something crazy" is so close to zero as to be useless. Hell, crying wolf about it isnt just useless, it's counterproductive.
"worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit"
That is NOT the worst case. If they were serious in the bounty case it could result in punishment for multiple people and reward of $10000 for the "trolls".
In the trans case, it could result in child abuse or animal abuse.
And this would be true if even ONE of those posts were serious. Not to mention it could give actual crazy people some horrible ideas.
In light of today's date,remember that Sudan offered up Osama Bin Ladin to the US in the 90s before shipping him off to Afghanistan. Imagine if the US didn't dismiss the offer as "well you are just offering us one crazy guy and we don't care". 3000+ people in NYC and millions in the Middle East and South East Asia would be safer.
Eh, landlords didn’t explode like this one, but over the years its memes and jokes have been shared quite a lot on twatter, probably more than either of the others total did. This was definitely more potent tho
The journalist in this article, Steve Silberman has an entire Twitter filled with strongman rhetoric. I'm not really surprised someone with this style of rhetoric was so easily duped. I am concerned that he works for a major publication like Wired.
To reiterate: it was surely carefully crafted to be impressive, and it has that intended effect on some. However, this fact is not as good an indicator (of anything, really) as one may be tempted to assume.
I know a common tactic these days is to claim “Major Outrage from x Community” and then source said outrage from a few random tweets. It’s yellow journalism, really, and I wouldn’t be surprised if some of the less ethically constrained journalists were anonymously behind those tweets in order to hit their 5pm deadlines.
There's been plenty of discussion on the Texas law, as indeed there has been on trans issues and the other bait they use. I'm much more interested in focusing on stories nobody else is covering, and "a bunch of low-effort trolls convince hundreds of thousands that people are gathering on reddit to plan bounty hunting" is a fascinating story that nobody was covering. Sorry it wasn't to your liking, but it's a story I think people should hear.
Fact is, your article spends disproportionate quantity of words disparaging the behavior of the cynical satirists, compared to the aproximately zero words used to rebuke the Texas law which prompted that particular gambol of theirs.
It might appear as if you support Texas' stance on abortion, and want to defend it from some trouble-making Internet miscreants who dare to mock it.
You do not know every single one of these people or their motivations. Maybe for some, everything is "LOLZ", but maybe some are serious. This sort of community looks like something anyone could join, for any number of reasons.
(I'm aware that there are some groups out there who perpetrate real harm, like stalking and harassing individuals ("lolcows") who are selected by the group as a target.)
Undoubtedly. But, generally speaking, an unimportant thing and an important thing cannot be important at the same time.
I don't think that the "Internet troublemakers" did anything wrong, on the face of it.
Making a joke forum where you pretend that you're a Texan who is seriously bounty hunting women for the crime of abortion is no worse than, oh, Jonathan Swift writing an essay about how poor people could improve their situation by their children to be eaten by the rich.
Why would someone who wants to write comment Y in response to something on hackernews should instead go to medium.com (or elsewhere) and write an entire article with totally different content X?
Is that what you do yourself; or else, why are you recommending it to me, then?
Damn, I wish I hadn’t used up my daily data limit reading this story. Now I don’t have any attention left for the real important stuff. I was outraged when that post about hummingbirds was on HN’s front page the other day for this reason.
To go full Godwin: I don't care that the majority of Germans have fulfilling spiritual lives and don't believe everything the Nazi party says. I care that enough of them have decided to invade Poland and kill every one there.
The notion that there are sides and not a web of gradients is built on caricatures. It's the same kind of thinking that makes people believe the color painted over a state on the news tells you anything about an individual there.
The notion that there are sides and not a web of gradients (in the US) is built on polls. The real mystery I want an answer to is why the country us split 50/50 on almost everything.
We're only split 50/50 on issues, and things are issues because we are split 50/50. If a large majority of people agree on both what to do and how to do it, we just do that.
You don't exactly need a poll for "issues" like should we legalize necrophilia or should we go to war with Australia.
Reminds me of the rush to condemn the Covington High school students who were accused of harassing the Native American. (As it turns out, the Native American was at fault.) Hordes of enraged, under-informed snowflakes took to the internet to bully the kids. Not very many apologies afterward.
Especially repulsive are the Hollywood light-thinkers and politicians who were duped. Imagine how the kids felt, having celebrities and politicians talk about them that way.
We live in a post-irony world where any utterance may be claimed to mean what it says or its exact inverse as the situation or changing winds of culture causes its author to see fit.
Having not seen any of this happen, I'm forced to wonder: is this entire story fraudulent? Did r/drama do any of this, and/or were the people reacting to it actually in on the joke? Is the "of course people fell for this" reaction falling for the meta-troll? But it won't keep me up at night.
edit: oh, good. Cousin comment by drdec went there
I mean honestly, MSM: what are the odds an actual group of bona fide Texans takes the time to create a forum to help each other collect their $10,000 abortion bounties over the next few months?
Seriously, what are the goddamned odds? I'm completely illiterate when it comes to statistics.
Irregardless, I do know I'd bet anything the odds are infinitesimally low given the poor track record of the MSM.
Sometimes hard to tell, especially after all these years of Trump. Is “the election was stolen” satire? The difference between satire and reality is in the intent of the author, harder and harder to detect as people read less and less of it
You do recall the months-long investigation into this question ? One that resulted in 37 indictments and 5 prison sentences? Even if it exonerated the Trump campaign, which it didn't, I don't think you're very accepting of alternate viewpoints.
No, I don't recall that. I recall a years long investigation into it that conceded that no evidence was ever found that implicated Trump or his campaign of colluding with Russians. I kind of have to wonder why people like Adam Schiff are still hiding all that "ample evidence" of collusion they insisted existed -- is he also in Putin's pocket and covering up for Trump?
I can guess how accepting you are of alternate viewpoints.
Joe Biden is literally on videotape saying he threatened the Ukrainian government to not receive aid if they didn't fire their prosecutor investigating his son's company. When trump accused him of it, trump was impeached for his predecessors crimes.
But yeah let's talk about what's literally on videotape
Biden is on tape talking about he passed along the message that Ultimate had to fire a corrupt prosecutor who was refusing to investigate companies including Burisima the company whose board Hunter Biden was on.
VP Biden was merely the messanger
Getting rid of the corrupt Shokin was supported by the rest of the Obama administration, the State Department, the EU, and many Republicans.
Trump was impeached for trying to pressure the Ukrainian president into making up bullshit investigation of Biden to tarnish his name. For trying to abuse American aid money to blackmail a friendly foreign leader
Keep telling that to yourself. Getting rid of a prosecutor investigating your son's company because of 'corruption' smells of corruption. That more members of the administration supported it just smells widespread corruption.
I mean the majority of public evidence strongly points towards Trump colluding with Putin regardless of whether Russias efforts changed a close election
There is no evidence of that at all actually. Saying there is is on par with anti-vaxxers and other election conspiracy theorists. It's a denial of reality, and a denial of the expert investigations and reports into it.
You have been taken by a conspiracy theory. You were lied to by people you trust, etc. I know it's hard or impossible to accept that, but that's what it is.
I think the QAnon stuff was originally satire or joking around. It was just a hypothetical thing like “can you imagine?” There was probably some sarcastic tongue-in-cheek responses with false confirmation: “can you believe [absurd thing] is actually true!,” etc. Some less savvy people didn’t pick up on it, and we know the disastrous results. I wonder how the original “Q” poster feels that it was taken completely seriously.
It's possible honestly, but frankly groups like this wouldn't organize on Reddit but rather at a local church, where the twitteratti and new York times intelligentsia would have little insight
Oh hey, cool to see my article here. If anyone has questions or wants further details on anything, I'm happy to stick around this thread for a bit. I've paid altogether too much attention to this saga; glad it's going to some use.
Definitely an interesting article. Have a clap or two. (I have no idea what that's worth on Medium anymore.)
I haven't encountered this specific group before, but I've definitely run into the "we want to believe the worst of our enemies" mindset, when I got into an argument with an earnest, well-meaning Bernie Sanders supporter who came across an obviously tongue-in-cheek Joe Biden pinup coloring book during the 2020 primaries (I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke") and was angrily denouncing it on Twitter as "this is what Biden supporters really believe." I pointed out that there is, in fact, a 2016 Bernie Sanders pinup coloring book, and was met with, more or less, "Yes, but that's obviously a joke." Yes. Yes, it is. Sigh.
I enjoyed your essay. I felt the C.S. Lewis quote was quite apropos.
One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less.
I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.
I enjoyed your essay. I felt the C.S. Lewis quote was quite apropos.
One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less.
I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.
Hi! Not at all related to the content at all, but here's an article about accessibility and link display text that I send to anyone and everyone I see not following the standards: https://usability.yale.edu/web-accessibility/articles/links
tl;dr: don't have display texts like "here" or "this" or "this comment" etc, it's bad for people who use screenreaders, and super easy to fix, but almost no one knows about this issue, which is why I go around spamming people about it.
I also encourage everyone reading this to start spamming this advice to everyone you encounter!
yes, my question is, WHAT should have tipped the journalists off?
If this was some elaborate puzzle what were the actual clues? or are they just supposed to dismiss anything that "sounds" unusual. And that goes for both cases, the bounty hunters and the trans one.
Your article claims it was "obvious" but you NEVER mention WHY it was obvious
Dismiss anything that sounds unusual outright? No. Apply extra scrutiny to things that sound unusual? Absolutely. If they had even googled /r/txbountyhunters, they would have found a rDrama thread early in the results talking about it. If they had looked through the accounts at all, they would have found indications that they weren't conservative pro-life Christians from Texas. Same with the trans one. A number of the pictures were re-used from random sources. Commenters in both often had absurdist/troll-ish usernames, they would make extreme and erratic comments - the signs were all over the place.
More to the point, the satire is obvious because the posts are absurd, over-the-top, and deeply implausible. Spray-painting your baby's mouth and crushing hormone pills to put in your teenager's food, then bragging about it on reddit, are not things people do. Writing a meandering post in southern vernacular about bounty hunting your sex partner is not a thing people do. Do people do insane things sometimes? Yes. But when you want to use a genuinely insane thing as evidence for any sort of political message, you should put more work into it than just assuming whatever outlandish story someone's spinning online that happens to be perfect culture war fuel is truth.
A minimal level of fact-checking and scrutiny would have been enough in this case.
The funniest part about this is that reddit censors all posts/comments linking to rdrama.net, aiding the trolls. Even if someone wanted to expose the trolling, they couldn't.
The only tangible clue you mentioned that didn't rely on "it sounds absurd" was the fact that it was initially cross posted with r/Drama and I agree with you on that point. If journalists could easily see that, they should have looked into what it was.
If the "joke" is supposed to be similar to what Sacha Baron Cohen does, this isn't enough. Like his Erran Moorad stuff, a reasonable person would look up his claims before sitting in for an interview or "training" with him and asking for 3 year olds to be given guns. In Borat 2, the disguises seemed to be intentionally bad.
Most importantly, at the end of the joke he came out to the world and said it WAS a joke and publicized that it was a joke. What r/Drama is doing is less like a joke and more just ways to basically start a civil war. If they were genuine clowns and cultural critics like Cohen(who is literally a classical clown according to Wisecrack) they would come out and proudly declare it in public.
> WHAT should have tipped the journalists off? If this was some elaborate puzzle what were the actual clues? or are they just supposed to dismiss anything that "sounds" unusual.
Their inability to verify the claims. The proper approach to journalism is to neither dismiss nor accept claims, but to investigate them. If the investigation yields a story, you publish the evidence collected; if it's a dead end then nothing gets published. In this case, the journalists clearly never did any actual investigation.
Groups like this are very important to have around for the rest of us to periodically recalibrate our bull@#$% detectors against.
That people whose professional reputation and livelihood it is to keep well-calibrated fell for this, is leagues more dangerous than these jokesters themselves. Sad!
Same sort of bs is happening with the horse paste stuff now. The story about hospitals being overrun due to people oding were wildly inaccurate at best.
Horse paste? It's not you specifically, but you're not the first person I've seen recently who has referred to it and didn't appear to understand what the substance is. Someone I know called it a "horse tranquilizer" in a conversation the other day. It's Ivermectin. It's a dewormer. It shows some promise, but more research is needed into its efficacy.
Anyone who has a baseline knowledge of medicine would call it a dewormer. It's pretty much the standard one. I feel like the fact that so many people don't have a mental compartment for a basic medical term like that nowadays really has a lot to do with how much trouble we've had controlling this virus. Of course an mRNA vaccine is scary to someone who doesn't know what mRNA is.
We're never going to escape this cycle without better science education.
> Horse paste is an intentionally derogatory term for it. It's not meant to be scientifically accurate.
"Horse dewormer" is as accurate as it can possibly be. It is also used extensively as a cow dewormer and pet dewormer. People are going to veterinarian and pet shops to buy paste sold to deworm horses and cows to take it themselves. They are not taking drugs produced for human consumption. They are going with the animal products designed and sold to give to animals.
If, the next time you have a fever, you reach for the dog/horse wart remover... I'm gonna call that "dog wart remover" regardless of the fact that it contains an ingredient that is used to treat fevers in _humans_
In that case, why you lying by not mentioning the FDA is telling people not to take ivermectin intended for _horses_ and _cows_? [0] Or that calls to poison control centers involving ivermectin are up by a huge amount, and that the drug has repeatedly failed clinical trials for COVID? [1]
That's a good point, but the majority of ivermectin in the US is used as a dewormer. Maybe I'm incorrect here, but I'd say that the principle use of this drug is as a dewormer. It can also be used in other applications, but anti-strongyles and such is the majority use.
It's got a picture of a horse and PASTE in a big font. But, yes, like sibling post, it's used derisively for people who won't get a free vaccine known to reduce death 10x+ but will get random shit radio hosts tell them to try.
Anyway, there's no reason ivermectin couldn't be used to treat breakthrough cases in people who have taken the vaccine as well. So it's something that could help everyone.
You say it shows some promise. Do you have a credible citation? Because I've followed it closely, and nothing out there indicates it shows promise, and a lot shows it doesn't.
I'll agree that it is misleading to call it horse paste, but if you call it a de-wormer, that doesn't sound a lot better to me. It's not an anti-viral, and the only "promise" it has shown is equivalent to the promise shown by a handgun fired at a petri dish a la xkcd.
Big paper retracted recently, current status is in the low to no effect size. Still under study and might get a better grasp of effectiveness in the future, so nothing on efficacy is conclusive atm.
Since you seem to be knowledgeable is there an objective writeup of the thought process behind this whole thing e.g. Joe Rogan, who was vaguely skeptical of Covid, I think, I remember Bill Burr mocking him for having a big opinion on the manliness of masks rather than listening to doctors.
But then he got Covid and announced he was taking a medicine that some people think might help, but hasn't been proved.
Now there's all the talk about horse paste or whatever but I feel like we all skipped over a step where there's a group of people who have taken a conspiratorial approach now leaping on an unproven medicine, which just seems odd. So they've always believed in Covid, but pretended not to?
And I feel like I'm going crazy but didn't this already happen with some other drug, that people thought might be really helpful but turned out not to be?
Is it the lockdowns they don't like, the vaccines? Why is jumping on unproven meds so popular in certain circles?
So, a few things, I don't think outright covid denial is a major thread. I tend to see much more "herd immunity/get to normal" from right-adjacent circles.
Regarding Right-wing distrust: The vaccine is new tech (and I mean fundamentally new, not just another flu vaccine). This means that unlike previous vaccines, it's safety profile wasn't nearly as well understood. It's efficacy is pretty well characterized. Conversely, Ivermectin isn't just horse dewormer, it's used in humans too. It has a known safety profile, and had early research dramatic report a 90% reduction in death (the one that was later retracted). Remember, not believing in vaccines doesn't make covid go away, so you've got a chunk of people desperate for an alternative solution. So they see this "known element" and reported efficacy and think that it'll be an alternative to the vaccine.
The previous case was Hydroxy chloroquinine, and I have quite a bit of spite for both sides of that argument then too.
>Anyone who has a baseline knowledge of medicine would call it a dewormer
Right, but in all the contexts I've heard it, it's not just a "dewormer", it's a "horse dewormer". That's technically true, but it's also FDA approved for human consumption. Making fun of people for consuming "horse dewormer" is like making fun of people for consuming "horse tranquilizer" for their depression[1].
Except many of the people being made fun of are calling poison control because they are literally overdosing on horse dewormer. Literally apple flavored dewormer paste for horses.
Are you referring to the Rolling Stone article which then spread through cable news? That story was retracted because it was totally bogus.
There’s more to the ivermectin story than having anti-parasitic properties, even though that’s how it became famous. It also appears to have anti-viral properties [1]. And there have been 60+ studies showing its efficacy [2]. Just because it has anti-parasitic properties doesn't mean it couldn't also block biological pathways in viral infections as well.
FWIW researching it is good and should be encouraged but most quality clinical trials so far like NCT04429711 and NCT04391127 haven't been very promising. Those which do show a statistically significant result have been flawed in one way or another. Hopefully when the Principle Trial reports people will get over it one way or another, but it's not looking promising. It may help somewhat at best, but it's no miracle cure.
Not many. About a thousand cases this year, compared to about 700 last year. Over 300 million country. Which includes calls like "I took thus medicine and now I feel funny! Also I drunk a bottle of whiskey but that never hurt me before, must be the medicine!". The real overdose cases are in dozens, no more, over all the nation. It's like saying "many people are struck by lightning " or "many people are eaten by the sharks". It happens, but it's not many.
There is no evidence that it brings any preventative or curative effects as regards covid. It has side effects, especially when taken at high dosage, which the people shilling it recommend and those taking it do. They buy the horse version as it's cheap and available without prescription. So it is indeed horse paste they are taking, even if the same substance is also used in properly dosed human products, used in specific situations where it is effective. "Anyone with a baseline knowledge of" pharmacology would also agree that the standards applied to vet and human pharmaceuticals are not the same, as well as that the active ingredient is not the only thing that matters, as e.g. how the product is packed or what other ingredients are included to ensure efficidnt uptake varies between products.
So, at best, people take a sane dose and it has no effect whatsoever as covid is not an intestinal worm. At worst, they take too much and it makes them more ill. There are indeed people hospitalised for it, whether that's a global, national, local or non-issue I can't say but that any unnecessarily sick person in the context of a pandemic takes another bed away is pretty obvious.
Humans take ivermectin everyday to treat rosacea. Referring to it only as a dewormer is overly specific and is purposefully chosen to imply a human taking it would be out of the ordinary. It is carefully phrased propaganda.
Counterpoint: "Doing it for the lulz" can still observerbly result in radicalization. Tangentally, Poe's law applies to online communities where the original group is satirical, but gradually accretes people who take it very seriously. IIRC, there was a subreddit that started as trolling/satire, and later on became the real hateful thing, and after many years of popularity, was subsequently banned after being featured in the national press.
> That people whose professional reputation and livelihood it is to keep well-calibrated fell for this
No, their professional livelihood is predicated specifically on the opposite: to lie to the public, but to do so convincingly. Falling for anything that fits their narrative is par for the course, since discovering and reporting truth is literally the opposite of their mandate.
Journalism is a profession filled by people who would push their own mother down a flight of stairs to earn a "Pulitzer Prize", a prize that is literally named after one of the most dishonest propagandists whose lies are directly responsible for the Spanish-American War and the fate of millions of Cubans for a century after.
These are people PROUD to win something named after this scumbag. They CRAVE it. This small fact is all you need to know about the character of the kind of people who choose to work in this "profession".
Imagine investment bankers scrambling over each other to win a coveted "Ponzi Award", or pastors working to earn a "Payne Award"
You can also see some more rdrama handiwork in the fatuous "/r/transpets", where they pretend to perform gender reassignment surgery on their animal companions.
Not just "early" 4chan. It's still a thing on current 4chan, but in an even more strange and twisted form. But yeah, it definitely means the early 4chan trolling has fully entered the mainstream world.
I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY I LOVE MARSEY
The ease at which misinformation flows these days reminds me of a scene in "The Big Short", where Steve Carell's character says to a group of Wall Street investors, expressing his discontent for the profession, "I thought we were better than this. I really did."
I guess I shouldn't be so disappointed; I bought into all the "Blair Witch" hype twenty years ago. LOL
I understand your concern that discussing this incident will prevent anyone from talking or thinking about the abortion ban. But you'll be thrilled to hear that HN actually supports sharing and discussing more than one link! In fact, at any one time there are dozens and dozens of links being shared. On top of that, there are new ones everyday.
I hope that puts your concern to rest. Unless there's some other reason that you think discussing this topic binds everyone into a magical compact forbidding them from discussing the ban itself?
>Reading responses like this, more than anything, I am reminded of C.S. Lewis:
> Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
> Increasingly, that’s where the culture war is headed, I think. Wishing that black was blacker, conviction that false stories reveal deep truths about opponents while truths inconvenient to their allies should be minimized, salivating over any opportunity to rage at the outrage du jour.
Human nature never changes. In that passage CS Lewis is literally a prophet foreseeing the major role partisan media will play in unleashing hell during the Yugoslav wars of the 1990s. Also Rwanda and Radio des Mille Collines.
so what exactly should have tipped off the journalists or commentators? and yes, I mean not just the bounty hunters but also the trans one.
If the idea was that this was some elaborate puzzle to solve, what EXACTLY was the solution and how should they have come to it?
This is not a cleaver joke, the people supporting this aren't Sacha Baron Cohen. In Borat, there were many things that would tip people off beyond just the absurdity of what he was saying or doing.
So what EXACTLY were journalists on either side supposed to pick up on?
The fundamental rule imo should be that the more absurd the claim, the more it deserves a double check. That hospitals are prioritising gunshots below ivermectin is absurd to what I hope is most people.
The fundamental rule is to double check everything. Otherwise you end up letting false stories through that confirm your preexisting biases, since they don't sound "absurd" to you.
Yup, and the common excuse that you don't have time to check everything out is nonsense too. You're not required to have an opinion on everything, and you shouldn't have an opinion on anything you haven't bothered to inform yourself about.
192 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 222 ms ] threadToo Good To Check: A Play In Three Acts: https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/too-good-to-check-a-pl...
Wishing for it to be true after it had been shown to be false is one thing (and clearly dumb), but I think the existence of such a subreddit is a perfectly reasonable thing to be outraged over in the first place. Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.
Journalists in particular should feel responsible to investigate likely satire before signal-boosting it. If they're actually disincentivized from doing so, that indicates that something is pretty rotten about our media culture..
>Texas’s SB8 will cause real harm, and making fun of people who are deeply concerned for women’s safety because of it seems borderline sociopathic to me.
If your deep concern causes you to detach from reality, then being made fun of will hopefully provide a merciful way for you to regain your grip. Look at the recent "witches vs. Taliban" fiasco - perhaps gentle mockery will help people focus their activist impulses towards more-productive ends?
It didn’t end up in any news source I would classify as having a good reputation.
Have you considered how far we would have gotten as a species if we had a pervasive assumption of bad faith in our interactions with other people? Complex societies depend on assuming good faith. People who assume others are always acting in bad faith are often traumatized or suffering from other forms of mental illness. I don’t find it “ridiculous” that people believe stupid things. I believe stupid things, and I’m sure you do as well. It’s certainly bad, but I’m not quite sure how your contributions improve the situation. Mostly they seem calibrated to reduce social trust and push people towards assuming bad faith. What if you wrote about how to identify satire instead?
Maybe stuff like this exposes the fact that the media are not as reliable as we think. If they are propagating this fake news, what other fake news are they propagating?
It doesn't cut equally both ways because there's an obvious ground truth that exonerates those who believe it's satire. I didn't claim it was obvious, and I could see why an outsider would be unsure. But the deflection of "can't blame me, Poe's Law" doesn't hold when plenty of people are able to see through the ruse.
> I didn't claim it was obvious, and I could see why an outsider would be unsure
You described people who believed it as “detached from reality.” Is that not tantamount to saying it’s obvious?
Not the op, but it clearly was detached from reality. 1) It was false, therefore not reality. 2) The people who believed it were journalists, who should know to check first and also should know not to believe everything you read.
Sure, I get that.
> If it's this easy for someone to trick us into getting mad, what other things are we still mad about because we don't yet know the trick?
I appreciate what you’re trying to say, and indeed I am well aware of how many times I have been wrong. It has happened several times a day, at varying scales, for my whole life so far. It takes a lot to make me mad. People acting in bad faith and creating a hostile information environment just to prove that other people are gullible is one of the things that does it.
Jokes aren’t sociopathic? We make fun of anyone, and where else can you demonstrate that people are too willing to fall for stories they’re mad at but with topics they are super invested in in an over the top way?
In isolation, this view might be rational. However, in aggregate, this mindset can cause a cycle of increasing extremism. A good portion of those misogynists you speak of came to their views because they have read countless fake left-wing content that they thought was real, and in response became more entrenched in their opposing views.
The cycle goes like this - a fairly sane, conservative person sees someone on a conservative subreddit post a link to the 'transparents' subreddit, and sees posts they believe are real that talk about parents giving their kids hormones against their will. A natural response is to think "Woh, those trans rights people are crazy, maybe we should push back against trans rights"... and they become a little bit more extreme in their beliefs. Multiply this by a thousand, and you have a crazy extremist on your hands.
The same thing happens on the other side, and you get more and more extremists on the left. Now the cycle becomes even more self-sustaining, because now you have legitimate crazy extremists adding fuel to the fire by making real posts that sound a lot like the satire posts. So now, the satire has to be even MORE extreme to be humorous, and the cycle deepens.
This is a really hard problem to combat. I agree with you that this Texas law is absolutely insane and dangerous. However, I don't think the solution is to stop being critical of evidence that confirms what we already believe to be true, just because we are so sure of what we believe.
No, I don’t believe that.
I’d cut them some slack, because we’re all bad at that, but their literal job is to check things out.
As long as it fits into a convenient, simple, marketable narrative that isn’t unacceptable to the outlet the journalist works for, its not that hard. Bonus, sure, if its one that the outlet the journalist works for is already pushing (which is probably more important in most cases than the journalist’s own priors; in fact, that this is the case is pretty visible when journalists switch outlets.)
What? Business Insider has always been known as a low-value clickbait website AFAIK. Maybe people don't talk about it much because it's assumed?
Even when their fact-checkers are utterly wrong, they will just update stating "needs more context".
But once I started doing that, I couldn't turn it off for regular media sources. Reading articles critically was a huge shock: there are a LOT of really low-quality articles at (eg) the NYT, cases where they get the most basic of facts wrong, and are trivially fact-checked by clicking through to the study they reference.
However. I don't think the vast majority of people are capable of exiting "pour facts into my brain" mode when reading an article. Your position that we should bite the bullet and stop pretending to be neutral would bolster the epistemology of the few who already think critically, but do horrible damage to that of the masses. Maybe the NYT is the best society can do for honest, mass-market journalism. If that's the case, it seems dangerous to give up what little commitment to rigor and honesty they have. I certainly don't want to live in a world where even more people get their news from Breitbart equivalents.
I don't think it's a coincidence that the only successful examples of opinionated, high-quality journalism are denser and less accessible, from The Economist all the way up to specific blogs. Perhaps because simplified narratives are required to hold the attention of John Q Public, and every simplification is an opportunity for bias.
[1] My favorite example of this was when I followed a chain of links and read an article that I disagreed with much about, but retrieved a very novel insight about how to better achieve social justice, a cause which is important to me. As I got deeper into the article, I started having more and more strong disagreements until at a certain pt I realized the guy was a (self-identified) Christian reactionary monarchist, ie a paleo-paleo-conservative. The second thing I learned that day was the meta-lesson that even someone whose values are incredibly alien to me can teach me something tangential to his values.
It doesn’t take much to convince “professional journalists” of things, as long as they know it will get clicks. FTFY ;)
The professional journalists feel much less like the sources of information that they should be, and more like definers of "truth".
There have always been media personalities, but Twitter has made that the default mode of the industry, and removed editorial safeguards from a dramatic amount of the journalistic conversation.
Less interestingly but probably more saliently, the economics destruction that the internet wrought on journalism has just destroyed the economic buffer that allowed them to build a culture of standards and principles (such as it was). People have always liked being affirmed over being informed, and the journalism market now forces journalists to deliver that.
It's really not that difficult a skill to build though. The trick is not to get perfect at detecting sarcasm or trolls but to realize that if you're talking about an individual or a minuscule group of people online (like the 57 members of the "bounty hunter ring"), it's almost never worth paying attention to regardless of its trolling status. Best-case they're trolling, worst-case they're a little nuts and talking shit. Even in the worst case, "I found an infinitesimal amount of nutty people on the internet" is not useful information for either a journalist or your personal model of the world.
I'm serious, it's really, really easy not to get taken in by bias-confirming dumb things. In fact, there's a force running counter to your framing, in which the average person has _less_ excuse to be taken in by trolls. Journalists have an economic incentive to jump on a story, while an individual is free to avoid having an opinion until there's enough usable information to shift your priors.
Careful though, QAnon was once an infinitesimally small amount of nutty people, and now they have at least two[1], likely more, sitting US Congressional representatives, with 36 running next year[2].
1: https://www.forbes.com/sites/jackbrewster/2020/11/04/congres...
2: https://www.businessinsider.com/the-36-qanon-supporters-runn...
It's interesting to see that a lot of people still believed it, even when evidence that it was a Drama troll op was provided.
The Texas bounty hunters sub wasn't the first foray of the dramanauts, but it definitely attracted the most attention out of all of them.
The C.S. Lewis quote is basically my thoughts on the matter of people's reactions to these sorts of subs.
Perhaps, that one may be impressed merely by reading such a blurb is part of the problem.
I especially liked the “oh, and also, in addition to all that other stuff, he has a gold record for the Grateful Dead album he produced”
Luckily journalists and the Left are neither stupid or lacking backbones.
Coming soon: A biting expose on racist tech bros on ycombinator...
It’s not called yellow because of the reason you’re thinking.
Women have their rights trampled upon in Texas, but let's focus on the "internet troublemakers" who draw attention to this situation using satire?
It might appear as if you support Texas' stance on abortion, and want to defend it from some trouble-making Internet miscreants who dare to mock it.
You do not know every single one of these people or their motivations. Maybe for some, everything is "LOLZ", but maybe some are serious. This sort of community looks like something anyone could join, for any number of reasons.
(I'm aware that there are some groups out there who perpetrate real harm, like stalking and harassing individuals ("lolcows") who are selected by the group as a target.)
I don't think that the "Internet troublemakers" did anything wrong, on the face of it.
Making a joke forum where you pretend that you're a Texan who is seriously bounty hunting women for the crime of abortion is no worse than, oh, Jonathan Swift writing an essay about how poor people could improve their situation by their children to be eaten by the rich.
If some people believed it, that's their problem.
Is that what you do yourself; or else, why are you recommending it to me, then?
> “It may be a lie, but the fact I believed it speaks volumes about my enemies, and not me”
... that's pretty much the zeitgeist of our times. (By which I mean, people who are on Twitter and Facebook) facepalm
Ask any politically independent or moderate person, and they can tell you everyone else only sees caricatures of the other side
Generalizing about one's political enemies is the pastime of all people, including "moderates".
Ergo, all parties continually optimize their positions, and apparently meet at a boundary that's usually about half the elective.
Not really. There are basically no countries in Europe with a 50/50 split.
> There's a strong selection bias for positions which attract more votes
Again, no, not really in Europe with proportional representation or similar systems.
If 50+1 wasn't the magic number, it makes sense you'd see parties optimizing for other things.
You don't exactly need a poll for "issues" like should we legalize necrophilia or should we go to war with Australia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duverger%27s_law
Is this sarcasm/irony? Or are you doing precisely what this post talks about? Or perhaps I am parsing your words incorrectly?
The CS Lewis quote from the article:
> Wishing that black was blacker, conviction that false stories reveal deep truths about opponents
Especially repulsive are the Hollywood light-thinkers and politicians who were duped. Imagine how the kids felt, having celebrities and politicians talk about them that way.
You can just check. It's not typing a name into google is difficult.
edit: oh, good. Cousin comment by drdec went there
Seriously, what are the goddamned odds? I'm completely illiterate when it comes to statistics.
Irregardless, I do know I'd bet anything the odds are infinitesimally low given the poor track record of the MSM.
I can guess how accepting you are of alternate viewpoints.
That?
But yeah let's talk about what's literally on videotape
Biden is on tape talking about he passed along the message that Ultimate had to fire a corrupt prosecutor who was refusing to investigate companies including Burisima the company whose board Hunter Biden was on.
VP Biden was merely the messanger Getting rid of the corrupt Shokin was supported by the rest of the Obama administration, the State Department, the EU, and many Republicans.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/republican-senators-pushed-for...
Trump was impeached for trying to pressure the Ukrainian president into making up bullshit investigation of Biden to tarnish his name. For trying to abuse American aid money to blackmail a friendly foreign leader
You have been taken by a conspiracy theory. You were lied to by people you trust, etc. I know it's hard or impossible to accept that, but that's what it is.
I haven't encountered this specific group before, but I've definitely run into the "we want to believe the worst of our enemies" mindset, when I got into an argument with an earnest, well-meaning Bernie Sanders supporter who came across an obviously tongue-in-cheek Joe Biden pinup coloring book during the 2020 primaries (I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke") and was angrily denouncing it on Twitter as "this is what Biden supporters really believe." I pointed out that there is, in fact, a 2016 Bernie Sanders pinup coloring book, and was met with, more or less, "Yes, but that's obviously a joke." Yes. Yes, it is. Sigh.
> I mean, how can you read "Joe Biden pinup coloring book" and immediately go "oh, this is a joke")
Should read and not immediately?
One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less.
I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.
One thing I'm not sure comes through is that the trolls are actually doing us a service by exposing the absurdity of that particular law, or whatever else the focus their attention on. What they pretended to be is entirely plausible, and because of human nature, will almost assuredly happen for real under that particular law. It's just too easy - you're in a bad relationship, trying to find a way out, she gets pregnant, gets an abortion, and you use the opportunity to break up and make some dough. Will that happen a lot? Probably not. Will it happen? I'd be willing to bet on it. It's that gray in the C.S. Lewis quote - there is always some black in it, more or less.
I think of the trolls more as bellweathers than anything else. They're just helping us see the logical extremes of what is going on.
tl;dr: don't have display texts like "here" or "this" or "this comment" etc, it's bad for people who use screenreaders, and super easy to fix, but almost no one knows about this issue, which is why I go around spamming people about it.
I also encourage everyone reading this to start spamming this advice to everyone you encounter!
More to the point, the satire is obvious because the posts are absurd, over-the-top, and deeply implausible. Spray-painting your baby's mouth and crushing hormone pills to put in your teenager's food, then bragging about it on reddit, are not things people do. Writing a meandering post in southern vernacular about bounty hunting your sex partner is not a thing people do. Do people do insane things sometimes? Yes. But when you want to use a genuinely insane thing as evidence for any sort of political message, you should put more work into it than just assuming whatever outlandish story someone's spinning online that happens to be perfect culture war fuel is truth.
A minimal level of fact-checking and scrutiny would have been enough in this case.
If the "joke" is supposed to be similar to what Sacha Baron Cohen does, this isn't enough. Like his Erran Moorad stuff, a reasonable person would look up his claims before sitting in for an interview or "training" with him and asking for 3 year olds to be given guns. In Borat 2, the disguises seemed to be intentionally bad.
Most importantly, at the end of the joke he came out to the world and said it WAS a joke and publicized that it was a joke. What r/Drama is doing is less like a joke and more just ways to basically start a civil war. If they were genuine clowns and cultural critics like Cohen(who is literally a classical clown according to Wisecrack) they would come out and proudly declare it in public.
Their inability to verify the claims. The proper approach to journalism is to neither dismiss nor accept claims, but to investigate them. If the investigation yields a story, you publish the evidence collected; if it's a dead end then nothing gets published. In this case, the journalists clearly never did any actual investigation.
That people whose professional reputation and livelihood it is to keep well-calibrated fell for this, is leagues more dangerous than these jokesters themselves. Sad!
Whatever fits the narrative I guess…
Anyone who has a baseline knowledge of medicine would call it a dewormer. It's pretty much the standard one. I feel like the fact that so many people don't have a mental compartment for a basic medical term like that nowadays really has a lot to do with how much trouble we've had controlling this virus. Of course an mRNA vaccine is scary to someone who doesn't know what mRNA is.
We're never going to escape this cycle without better science education.
"Horse dewormer" is as accurate as it can possibly be. It is also used extensively as a cow dewormer and pet dewormer. People are going to veterinarian and pet shops to buy paste sold to deworm horses and cows to take it themselves. They are not taking drugs produced for human consumption. They are going with the animal products designed and sold to give to animals.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/08/more-people-are-pois...
Calling it a dewormer in this context is a lie of omission.
But salicylic acid is also used in skin care products like wart remover.
Here's a wart remover product for dogs and horses, which contains salicylic acid as an active ingredient: https://www.chewy.com/creative-science-wartsoff-wart-dog/dp/...
If, the next time you have a fever, you reach for the dog/horse wart remover... I'm gonna call that "dog wart remover" regardless of the fact that it contains an ingredient that is used to treat fevers in _humans_
---
[0]: https://twitter.com/us_fda/status/1429050070243192839
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/30/health/covid-ivermectin-p...
It's got a picture of a horse and PASTE in a big font. But, yes, like sibling post, it's used derisively for people who won't get a free vaccine known to reduce death 10x+ but will get random shit radio hosts tell them to try.
Anyway, there's no reason ivermectin couldn't be used to treat breakthrough cases in people who have taken the vaccine as well. So it's something that could help everyone.
[1] https://www.google.com/search?q=ivermectin+tablets
I'll agree that it is misleading to call it horse paste, but if you call it a de-wormer, that doesn't sound a lot better to me. It's not an anti-viral, and the only "promise" it has shown is equivalent to the promise shown by a handgun fired at a petri dish a la xkcd.
But then he got Covid and announced he was taking a medicine that some people think might help, but hasn't been proved.
Now there's all the talk about horse paste or whatever but I feel like we all skipped over a step where there's a group of people who have taken a conspiratorial approach now leaping on an unproven medicine, which just seems odd. So they've always believed in Covid, but pretended not to?
And I feel like I'm going crazy but didn't this already happen with some other drug, that people thought might be really helpful but turned out not to be?
Is it the lockdowns they don't like, the vaccines? Why is jumping on unproven meds so popular in certain circles?
Regarding Right-wing distrust: The vaccine is new tech (and I mean fundamentally new, not just another flu vaccine). This means that unlike previous vaccines, it's safety profile wasn't nearly as well understood. It's efficacy is pretty well characterized. Conversely, Ivermectin isn't just horse dewormer, it's used in humans too. It has a known safety profile, and had early research dramatic report a 90% reduction in death (the one that was later retracted). Remember, not believing in vaccines doesn't make covid go away, so you've got a chunk of people desperate for an alternative solution. So they see this "known element" and reported efficacy and think that it'll be an alternative to the vaccine.
The previous case was Hydroxy chloroquinine, and I have quite a bit of spite for both sides of that argument then too.
https://www.mdpi.com/1999-4915/13/6/989
Right, but in all the contexts I've heard it, it's not just a "dewormer", it's a "horse dewormer". That's technically true, but it's also FDA approved for human consumption. Making fun of people for consuming "horse dewormer" is like making fun of people for consuming "horse tranquilizer" for their depression[1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketamine#Depression
There’s more to the ivermectin story than having anti-parasitic properties, even though that’s how it became famous. It also appears to have anti-viral properties [1]. And there have been 60+ studies showing its efficacy [2]. Just because it has anti-parasitic properties doesn't mean it couldn't also block biological pathways in viral infections as well.
[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S016635422...
[2] https://ivmmeta.com
https://xkcd.com/1217/
FWIW researching it is good and should be encouraged but most quality clinical trials so far like NCT04429711 and NCT04391127 haven't been very promising. Those which do show a statistically significant result have been flawed in one way or another. Hopefully when the Principle Trial reports people will get over it one way or another, but it's not looking promising. It may help somewhat at best, but it's no miracle cure.
Come on, nobody calls it that, ketamine is generally known by the epithets:
"Date rape drug"
also
"Drug used to murder Elijah McClain"
So, at best, people take a sane dose and it has no effect whatsoever as covid is not an intestinal worm. At worst, they take too much and it makes them more ill. There are indeed people hospitalised for it, whether that's a global, national, local or non-issue I can't say but that any unnecessarily sick person in the context of a pandemic takes another bed away is pretty obvious.
And what is required to prevent it is every single journal to not fall for it. And all it takes in one journal to fall for it.
No, their professional livelihood is predicated specifically on the opposite: to lie to the public, but to do so convincingly. Falling for anything that fits their narrative is par for the course, since discovering and reporting truth is literally the opposite of their mandate.
Journalism is a profession filled by people who would push their own mother down a flight of stairs to earn a "Pulitzer Prize", a prize that is literally named after one of the most dishonest propagandists whose lies are directly responsible for the Spanish-American War and the fate of millions of Cubans for a century after.
These are people PROUD to win something named after this scumbag. They CRAVE it. This small fact is all you need to know about the character of the kind of people who choose to work in this "profession".
Imagine investment bankers scrambling over each other to win a coveted "Ponzi Award", or pastors working to earn a "Payne Award"
Any stickam and gaia trolls here?
That was so funny lol
It is so funny to read this, tempting not to jump in, roflcopter
I guess I shouldn't be so disappointed; I bought into all the "Blair Witch" hype twenty years ago. LOL
I hope that puts your concern to rest. Unless there's some other reason that you think discussing this topic binds everyone into a magical compact forbidding them from discussing the ban itself?
> Suppose one reads a story of filthy atrocities in the paper. Then suppose that something turns up suggesting that the story might not be quite true, or not quite so bad as it was made out. Is one’s first feeling, ‘Thank God, even they aren’t quite so bad as that,’ or is it a feeling of disappointment, and even a determination to cling to the first story for the sheer pleasure of thinking your enemies are as bad as possible? If it is the second then it is, I am afraid, the first step in a process which, if followed to the end, will make us into devils. You see, one is beginning to wish that black was a little blacker. If we give that wish its head, later on we shall wish to see grey as black, and then to see white itself as black. Finally we shall insist on seeing everything — God and our friends and ourselves included — as bad, and not be able to stop doing it: we shall be fixed for ever in a universe of pure hatred.
> Increasingly, that’s where the culture war is headed, I think. Wishing that black was blacker, conviction that false stories reveal deep truths about opponents while truths inconvenient to their allies should be minimized, salivating over any opportunity to rage at the outrage du jour.
People want the other side to be as evil as possible. Not a commendable tendency.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propaganda_during_the_Yugoslav...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio_T%C3%A9l%C3%A9vision_Lib...
If your mother says she loves you, check it out.