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thehandtruck posted:Its been fun watching each ideology squeeze Squid Game into their respective digestive tracks and either reduce or inflate it. The show was fine I guess, kind of babies first money bad sort of thing. Americans disgust me. A horror concept representing exploitation of the poor under unchecked capitalism? One where it is very straightforwardly demonstrated that the desperation of debt peonage creates feedback desperation for neoliberal institutions to further exploit? Clearly this could back the fundamental arguments of any ideology! In my essay, we will explore how Squid Game is this decade's libertarian magnum opus,
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Oct 30, 2021 21:33
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Kavros posted:A horror concept representing exploitation of the poor under unchecked capitalism? One where it is very straightforwardly demonstrated that the desperation of debt peonage creates feedback desperation for neoliberal institutions to further exploit? Clearly this could back the fundamental arguments of any ideology! In my essay, we will explore how Squid Game is this decade's libertarian magnum opus, If we had "post of the day" badges, you would get one. How else can anyone see Squid Game as anything else as a brutal critique of unchecked capitalism? Even the lead's "successful friend" ends up in the same situation.
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Oct 31, 2021 03:57
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VideoGameVet posted:If we had "post of the day" badges, you would get one. Capitalism can't fail it can only be failed
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Oct 31, 2021 04:05
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I find it really interesting that the two of the biggest non-music korean media exports (squid game and parasite) are both about the destitute desperation of the lower class contrasting with the disdain and indifference of the wealthy.
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Oct 31, 2021 13:29
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Don't forget Snowpiercer! Also by Bong Joon-ho.
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Oct 31, 2021 16:23
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Remember Korea (south) had massive demonstrations against their government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016%962017_South_Korean_protests "On 3 December (2016) 2.3 million people hit the streets in a further anti-Park rally, one of the largest in the country's history. An estimated 1.6 million people gathered around the main boulevards from the City Hall to Gwanghwamun Square and Gyeongbok Palace. Another estimated 200,000 people gathered around the city of Busan and 100,000 in Gwangju." So, That 4.2m people out of a population of 51.22 million (2016). Imagine 27+ million Americans turning out to protest on the same day. Having been to Korea 2x I got the impression that they don't take crap nicely. The result? "On 3 December 2016, three opposition parties agreed to introduce a joint impeachment motion against President Park Geun-hye. The motion, which was signed by 171 of 300 lawmakers, was put to a vote on Friday, 9 December 2016, and passed with 234 out of 300 votes, a tally much greater than the required 2/3 majority and which included 62 members of Park's Saenuri Party.[44] The Impeachment process then moved to the Constitutional Court of Korea which could take 180 days to review the impeachment. Park Geun-hye was finally impeached on 10 March 2017." The Women's Marches (day after Trump's inauguration) had between 3,267,134 and 5,246,670 people participatin in the marches in the U.S. I think that's the largest US protest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2017_Women%27s_March VideoGameVet fucked around with this message at 22:37 on Oct 31, 2021 |
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Oct 31, 2021 22:32
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American protests are significantly weakened by the assumption that they’re necessarily some kind of properly civil event somewhere between a street fair and a request to speak to the manager. It’s one of the lesser crimes of the way the civil rights movement is taught that everyone now believes that mass mobilization is merely an attempt to shame somebody. Imagine if 10% of America understood what a general strike was.
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Oct 31, 2021 23:30
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Antifa Turkeesian posted:American protests are significantly weakened by the assumption that they’re necessarily some kind of properly civil event somewhere between a street fair and a request to speak to the manager. It’s one of the lesser crimes of the way the civil rights movement is taught that everyone now believes that mass mobilization is merely an attempt to shame somebody.
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Oct 31, 2021 23:34
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Also no one in the US legislarure was attached to an actual cult, though I suppose the decade is young.
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Nov 1, 2021 00:21
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Another way to look at those numbers is that a percentage of the population of Seoul came out to protest. To get a comparable ratio in the US multiple major cities entire populations would be to mobilize. It helps when 10% of the county lives in one city with even more in the metro area. American protests need to take different forms and tangle with the fact that an empire the size of the US can now still instantly communicate from one side to the other.
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Nov 1, 2021 00:25
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Gumball Gumption posted:Capitalism can't fail it can only be failed It's hard to understate just how much it's taught that any criticism of capitalism is by default invalid and unserious.
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Nov 2, 2021 06:11
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Kavros posted:A horror concept representing exploitation of the poor under unchecked capitalism? One where it is very straightforwardly demonstrated that the desperation of debt peonage creates feedback desperation for neoliberal institutions to further exploit? Clearly this could back the fundamental arguments of any ideology! In my essay, we will explore how Squid Game is this decade's libertarian magnum opus, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdVBOT2FFNI
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Nov 2, 2021 17:19
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VideoGameVet posted:If we had "post of the day" badges, you would get one. 🤗 I will take the post of the day badge as long as humanity swears that they will not create anything remotely resembling my blighted satirical concept, from now until the end of t noooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo
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Nov 2, 2021 17:49
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New thread for discussing social critique in fiction
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Nov 2, 2021 18:51
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Mercifully Ben does realize that the show is condemning his ideology, and basically dismisses it as compelling and well-produced but ultimately meaningless fluff, which is slightly less irritating than if he tried to pretend it was arguing in favor of his own worldview.
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Nov 2, 2021 20:33
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Mellow Seas posted:Mercifully Ben does realize that the show is condemning his ideology, and basically dismisses it as compelling and well-produced but ultimately meaningless fluff, which is slightly less irritating than if he tried to pretend it was arguing in favor of his own worldview. In that case do not google squid game communism.
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Nov 3, 2021 07:14
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Maybe a dumb question -- does there exist something like Google News, except it shows genuinely distinct international perspectives on a thing? So like when I click on "full coverage" for a topic, instead of showing me a thousand US sources that are all basically saying the same thing, I get the typical US take on it, then whatever the consensus Indian take on it is, then whatever the Chinese state is saying, then whatever consensus there is in Africa about it, Europe, Russia, etc.? We live in an astonishingly vast ocean of information but whenever I check the news, what strikes me most is how suffocatingly insular and filtered it is, and I need to open a window.
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Nov 8, 2021 05:32
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:Maybe a dumb question -- does there exist something like Google News, except it shows genuinely distinct international perspectives on a thing? Any service offering such an aggregation would be incredibly limiting at best, and more likely deliberately misleading. There is not a single "consensus" take for the billion-plus population of India, let alone Europe, Russia or Africa. These countries have their own media ecosystems, as does China, with major internal variance of opinion. Countries with dominant inward or outward state propaganda systems, like China, still generally publish different material targeting different audiences. If you are having a problem with the "insularity" and "filtering" of the sources you are reading, then I encourage you to find different mediating sources- no individual aggregator is going to actually reflect the diversity of positions or sources in the US, for example. It is also entirely possible that multiple outlets report the same things because those things are actually true. In the pursuit of less "filtered" or "insular" material, you should be extremely cautious of a desire to seek out information you want to believe is true; this just makes you an easier mark. The internet makes it easy to find someone who will tell you what you want to hear. There is not a shortcut here. If you want to learn the opinions of people or media in other countries, you have to read about and learn the ins and outs of that media and information system in the same way that you do sources from the US. That means reading a lot more material, from a lot of different sources, and doing additional broader research. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 06:39 on Nov 8, 2021 |
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Nov 8, 2021 06:30
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Discendo Vox posted:Any service offering such an aggregation would be incredibly limiting at best, and more likely deliberately misleading. There is not a single "consensus" take for the billion-plus population of India, let alone Europe, Russia or Africa. These countries have their own media ecosystems, as does China, with major internal variance of opinion. Countries with dominant inward or outward state propaganda systems, like China, still generally publish different material targeting different audiences. I guess I should clarify the question - does anybody know of media aggregators that do not filter based on region or language? Yes, I know that the utility of such an aggregator would be extremely limited for most people, and it would take considerable media literacy and machine translation to make good sense of, but surely something like this must exist. It can't be that hard to code up a dumb aggregator of all the world's most popular publications, so my hunch is that they do exist, and I'm just not good at finding them.
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Nov 8, 2021 07:05
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386-SX 25Mhz VGA posted:I totally get that there is no substitute for knowing the ins and outs of a particular media environment, that continents are not neatly homogeneous perspectives for a given topic, that confirmation bias exists regardless of the diversity of sources yours exposed to, and so on. That said, I do appreciate the effort in what you're saying. It might just make sense to look up various major news sources in whatever country you're interested in (as well as minor ones if you're looking for a specific sort of different perspective) and then do the machine translation. Though as Discendo Vox mentioned, there's not going to be any reasonable/easy way to do this for a really big country, unless you're just looking for the broadest of strokes.
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Nov 8, 2021 19:45
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An interesting piece of data for this thread: The Verge is changing their policy on anonymous sources, and gives some examples of how "on background" tends to work. https://twitter.com/reckless/status/1458449659735777283 quote:Today, The Verge is updating our public ethics policy to be clearer in our interactions with public relations and corporate communications professionals. We’re doing this because big tech companies in particular have hired a dizzying array of communications staff who routinely push the boundaries of acceptable sourcing in an effort to deflect accountability, pass the burden of truth to the media, and generally control the narratives around the companies they work for while being annoying as hell to deal with. A few of those can definitely be tied to specific incidents, but it's not really shocking to see that corporations have gotten used to exploiting loose sourcing policies and easy access to anonymity. It gives them plenty of flexibility to influence the narrative.
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Nov 11, 2021 18:52
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An excellent development; enthusiast press outlets tend to have much worse practices overall because they're so dependent on (and get direct positive reader response to) industry communications. This is the issue that was used to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the emergent alt-right with gamergate. It seems to be an especially big problem in outlets covering "tech"; ars technica practically seems to have a shared staff with whomever does PR for Tesla. This makes me curious what the Verge's policy was before this change; here it is, with no sourcing policy at all. Remarkably, it seems Vox media doesn't have global policies on these issues, which means this lesson may have to get learned over and over again. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 23:17 on Nov 11, 2021 |
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Nov 11, 2021 23:14
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Discendo Vox posted:It seems to be an especially big problem in outlets covering "tech"; ars technica practically seems to have a shared staff with whomever does PR for Tesla.
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Nov 12, 2021 01:35
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DTurtle posted:Do you have anything specific to point to here? For one, I find ArsTechnica to be one of the better tech news outlets out there. And for another, one problem with Tesla is that they do not have a PR department. So there is no one for the media to officially talk to. The main issue here is that enthusiast sources are frequently very credulous with their reporting on the topic(s) they focus on (and as Discendo Vox mentioned, this seems to be exceptionally bad in tech reporting). I think it's a combination of a couple things. One is that the people who choose to do such reporting already have a preexisting perspective on the topic of their reporting - they want tech stuff to be cool and exciting, and will be inclined to just credulously believe stuff that sounds cool. The other is that they have direct business incentives to report in this way. Not only will readers be less interested in reporting that says "maybe Tesla is full of poo poo about ______," but companies will be less willing to give access to media orgs that don't treat them positively*. If you want the high-profile interviews with the leaders of X company, you're going to want to report on them in a way they approve. And there's also the fact that you can do "technically true" reporting that is still extremely misleading. Like if a company issues a press release where they're completely full of poo poo, a media org can report on this as "company says X" without challenging any of their claims. I think this happens a lot with Tesla specifically - Musk or Tesla will make claims that are transparently complete nonsense intended to pump the stock price (like the recent thing with the "Tesla bot"), but the media still treats them seriously. * This is also an issue with news media in general with regard to political reporting. They have an incentive to not anger the government (or at least both major political parties - they're okay as long as one likes them), so they might just lose access to interviews, press events, etc.
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Nov 12, 2021 03:55
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DTurtle posted:Do you have anything specific to point to here? For one, I find ArsTechnica to be one of the better tech news outlets out there. Ars technica routinely reports on musk companies by uncritically repeating their advertising claims or investor relations claims, at length. A quick google gives simple examples: Here's them just repeating the content of their investor report with a very limited amount of context in a paragraph at the end; this is fairly typical; even as it runs alongside reporting of actual events happening to the company from outside. Here's another similar article based on the Model S Plaid announcement. About 99% of the story is direct quotes from the press event and marketing materials, with all images provided by Tesla. This is stenography for a customer base. DTurtle posted:And for another, one problem with Tesla is that they do not have a PR department. So there is no one for the media to officially talk to. Nope. Tesla stated they were dissolving their PR department, an act which got widespread and synonymous coverage; all that this actually means is that they don't answer press inquiries on the record. It does not mean that they do not have a communications or PR division, only that it is obscured; even coverage of the dissolution indicated other PR divisions within the company still existed. They use comms contractors and through press events (which are still going to be run by people who are de facto PR), or use other proxies, explicit or not, to do PR work. The net effect is for the company to be less transparent about their influence activities, and that they do not respond to formal on the record inquiries (unless they want to). Here's an example of one of the root pieces of coverage of the move. Notice it includes the following: quote:The move has been confirmed to Electrek at the highest level at Tesla with the source saying, “We no longer have a PR Team.” Someone at Tesla said that to the press, under conditions of disclosure. quote:Gina Antonini, a senior manager on Tesla’s comms team for three years, saw her role changed to director of external relations and employee experience at Tesla in February. They still have external relations, and they moved at least some of their comms team to similar titles in that division ("external relations" is communications, including both direct and indirect PR as well as things like government relations depending on the company). Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 07:07 on Nov 12, 2021 |
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Nov 12, 2021 07:03
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Discendo Vox posted:Ars technica routinely reports on musk companies by uncritically repeating their advertising claims or investor relations claims, at length. A quick google gives simple examples: Here's them just repeating the content of their investor report with a very limited amount of context in a paragraph at the end; this is fairly typical; even as it runs alongside reporting of actual events happening to the company from outside. I don't know what exactly your expectations are when it comes to stuff like this. You and I have talked about this before, but, as a regular consumer of Tesla news and technology news in general, outlets like Ars Technica taking investor reports and converting them into digestible articles provide a valuable service. I'm not going to read several dozen-page PDF documents (or, god forbid, PowerPoint slides) containing a plethora of financial terms and similar jargon because I'm a layperson. I will, however, read interpretations of those reports by the tech press because they tend to highlight the important bits in ways that normal people can understand, as well as provide context. Sometimes that context is limited, as you noted in your first example, but Ars specifically has an above-average readership in terms of sophistication, and the comments sections on their articles tend to have useful discussions that add to the articles themselves. (Ars is actually remarkable in the sense that they are one of the last general-purpose news sites with fairly useful and informative comments sections.) Discendo Vox posted:Here's another similar article based on the Model S Plaid announcement. About 99% of the story is direct quotes from the press event and marketing materials, with all images provided by Tesla. This is stenography for a customer base. As opposed to... what? It is a press event, and the attendees are encouraged to take the information provided by the host and report it to their audiences. What is your ideal scenario here? Should Jonathan Gitlin whipped out his camera and taken his own pictures, or activated ~~stealth mode~~ to sneak into the backrooms and perform some top investigative journalism to uncover what Tesla must really been up to?
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Nov 14, 2021 03:48
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Slow News Day posted:I don't know what exactly your expectations are when it comes to stuff like this. You and I have talked about this before, but, as a regular consumer of Tesla news and technology news in general, outlets like Ars Technica taking investor reports and converting them into digestible articles provide a valuable service. I'm not going to read several dozen-page PDF documents (or, god forbid, PowerPoint slides) containing a plethora of financial terms and similar jargon because I'm a layperson. I will, however, read interpretations of those reports by the tech press because they tend to highlight the important bits in ways that normal people can understand, as well as provide context. Sometimes that context is limited, as you noted in your first example, but Ars specifically has an above-average readership in terms of sophistication, and the comments sections on their articles tend to have useful discussions that add to the articles themselves. (Ars is actually remarkable in the sense that they are one of the last general-purpose news sites with fairly useful and informative comments sections.) First, note that the company that supposedly has no PR department has press events and press photos, and people who provide language, quotes, and photo materials to the press. As to the actual subject matter, yes, it is in fact a problem that the mediator conflates reported fact with claim, and solely sources statements from the company. Tesla financial reports tend to not follow GAAP and the company has, to put it mildly, plenty of context, including critical context, that can be applied to their claims both in financial reports and in vehicle launch claims.
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Nov 14, 2021 04:13
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Discendo Vox posted:Ars technica routinely reports on musk companies by uncritically repeating their advertising claims or investor relations claims, at length. A quick google gives simple examples: Here's them just repeating the content of their investor report with a very limited amount of context in a paragraph at the end; this is fairly typical; even as it runs alongside reporting of actual events happening to the company from outside. Here's another similar article based on the Model S Plaid announcement. About 99% of the story is direct quotes from the press event and marketing materials, with all images provided by Tesla. This is stenography for a customer base.
Discendo Vox posted:ars technica practically seems to have a shared staff with whomever does PR for Tesla.
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Nov 14, 2021 12:49
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Is the idea positive news is false and negative news is true?
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Nov 14, 2021 13:25
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I took (and still take) issue with Discendo Vox's accusation that "ars technica practically seems to have a shared staff with whomever does PR for Tesla." I do not think that their coverage of Tesla in any way supports that accusation. In order to support my position, I think it is very useful to look at the types, content, and tone of articles that ArsTechnica published in the past about Tesla, especially when compared to other outlets covering tech where I would actually support that accusation. True or false does not play a role in that. I would expect all the factual things in the articles on Electrek and ClenTechnica to be true, but the type, content, and tone of those articles I cited is completely different. To be fair, I obviously selected the headlines on those sites that seemed most egregious to me. However, I did not see any comparable articles (on the first page) about Tesla on ArsTechnica. Basically all the information posted in various articles about Tesla on ArsTechnica seem to completely rely on public information (investor reports, press releases, information on the website, news from other news sites, tweets, Reddit users, etc.). I didn't really see anything that could be traced back to "anonymous" sources from Tesla. DTurtle fucked around with this message at 14:04 on Nov 14, 2021 |
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Nov 14, 2021 13:43
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DTurtle posted:I was mostly surprised by you specifically calling out ArsTechnica with regards to Tesla coverage. No one reads YOSPOS. It is Sunday.
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Nov 15, 2021 02:12
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Chris Cuomo was suspended by CNN after it came out he was working to support his brother against accusations of sexual harassment and then fired once CNN was reminded that there were sexual harassment accusations against him from his time at ABC. https://www.latimes.com/entertainment-arts/business/story/2021-12-05/sexual-harassment-claim-doomed-chris-cuomo-at-cnn quote:
When Cuomo started on CNN, they agreed it was a conflict of interest for him to cover his brother. They changed their minds last year and the two did a regular series of on-air get togethers, friendly and chummy, ignoring the reports about Andrew Cuomo's disastrous COVID policy and the many excess deaths in nursing homes. They changed their minds again once Andrew Cuomo's sexual harassment accusers really started to pile up and the nursing home issue started to stick. This resulted in a weeks-long blackout of coverage about the Andrew Cuomo scandals on one of their major, prime time shows. Friendly coverage when things are good for Andrew Cuomo, limited coverage when they're bad. Hard not to mistake that for an extreme bit of favoritism and bias. Anyway, last night, they ran that "This is an apple" ad for the first time in years. It felt like they were burned by this long-running ethical boondoggle and wanted to say "Hey, we're great, not fake news like those other guys!"
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Dec 6, 2021 19:13
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I'm not a fan of CNN but it's quite a stretch to say that bias and conflict of interest are the same as fake news.
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Dec 6, 2021 19:17
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:I'm not a fan of CNN but it's quite a stretch to say that bias and conflict of interest are the same as fake news. You're really gonna need to expand on this because I don't think those things are meaningfully different at all. How does a guy using the largest platform on one of the three big cable news networks to give people the impression that his brother was doing an excellent job handling the pandemic as governor when he was in fact doing a terrible job not count as fake news? This really just reads as "when someone on our side does it they meant well but made mistakes whereas when their side does it its obviously because they are evil and nefarious."
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Dec 6, 2021 20:09
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At one point "fake news" meant literally fictional news.
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Dec 6, 2021 20:32
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Owlofcreamcheese posted:At one point "fake news" meant literally fictional news. Andrew Cuomo's great handling of the pandemic was absolutely fictional news.
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Dec 6, 2021 20:37
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Professor Beetus posted:Andrew Cuomo's great handling of the pandemic was absolutely fictional news. Is it useful to do this? There was a rise of literally false stories having large effects, birther claims, crisis actors at school shootings, the stop the steal stuff, and a deliberate tactic to help support that fake news has been people like trump making sure to muddle and confuse terms like 'fake news'. Like it's good for people to know the differance between poor journalism, bias and outlandish stories. The easy sick quip of "heh, it's all the same" really only hurts conversations. Overly positive reporting about Cuomo is not the same thing as reporting jew did 9/11. It's okay to distinguish both things as problems in journalism without demanding both be treated equivalent
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Dec 6, 2021 21:52
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I don't think it's a meaningful distinction in this particular case just because a fancy news org did it in a more subtle way. If anything, it's worse than the poo poo you mentioned because many more people were willing to take it at face value, including likely many people on this site who think of themselves as very smart and good at media literacy. e: although tbf I also think the term fake news is dead as doornails with as much as it's gotten coopted by the 25% or so of Americans who are lapping up the garbage you mentioned and dismissing everything they don't like as "fake news." Once Trump started using the phrase it was pretty much rendered useless. Professor Beetus fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Dec 7, 2021 |
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Dec 7, 2021 00:28
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Professor Beetus posted:I don't think it's a meaningful distinction in this particular case just because a fancy news org did it in a more subtle way. If anything, it's worse than the poo poo you mentioned because many more people were willing to take it at face value, including likely many people on this site who think of themselves as very smart and good at media literacy. Nazis ruin everything they touch, OP
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Dec 7, 2021 03:31
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:I'm not a fan of CNN but it's quite a stretch to say that bias and conflict of interest are the same as fake news. What is the functional difference?
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Dec 7, 2021 03:58
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