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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:I mean, breaking down lovely articles from mainstream sources would actually be great. "Look at how CNN hired an ex-director of the CIA! This proves they are a part of the propaganda machine!" is dumb as balls. When people point things like out, they're not doing so as "proof this media organization (or political party, etc) is bad." The judgement about the organizations/people in question has already been made based off of a bunch of other facts/context. The easiest to understand analogy is probably the way you might talk about Republicans. If you post a news article about some Republican being connected to some bad person/organization, or indicating they might have done something bad, you're not posting it to prove to other people that the Republican Party is bad, right? That's something that you understand to be true based off of a ton of other information, and the media piece in question is not necessary to that understanding. If some specific reporting isn't true (or more likely just has some ambiguity or isn't proof on its own), it doesn't affect your opinion about the Republican Party (or Trump or whoever), because that opinion has a much broader basis to it than a particular news story. It's the same with situations like this. A lot of arguments here stem from this misunderstanding. Someone posts something and other people respond to it as if the poster's intent was to use the thing they posted as proof of something. This is not the case. There's just a difference in assumptions about the world that influence how people interpret and engage with information. If you don't already think that person/organization is bad, it's going to matter much more to you whether you can "debunk" (or at least cast some doubt on) a media piece indicating otherwise (because it's running contrary to your starting beliefs). And you might think that someone else is acting in bad faith when they don't change their own opinions in response to this, even though that isn't the case (because the media piece in question was never integral to their perspective). So with something like "an organization hiring an ex-director of the CIA," the person posting it probably isn't posting it as all-encompassing proof of anything. It's just one data point among a long history of other information. Sort of like how you'd probably think about a Republican Senator hiring someone who used to be a director at a gay conversion facility; in and of itself it isn't hard proof that they're homophobic, but in the greater context of their career and the history of the Republican Party it's easy to ascertain the relevance of it. For something like "the nature of major US media as propaganda," there'd need to be an actual serious discussion about the broader topic (that includes information outside the scope of a single article), but that's obviously considered outside the scope of this thread (which seems to just focus on either individual pieces or theory/hypotheticals).
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 07:47 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 16:12 |
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You tried this on the first page of the thread already.fool of sound posted:This same example supposes that it is impossible to know if having higher brain functions is good or bad because they sometimes allow people to do bad things. Everything that is consistently effective to any end is a product of the availability of accurate information and it's bizarre to me that several people are unable to immediately discern the difference between ability and motivation. A war of unfalsifiable declarations of prior ideological commitments immune to criticism isn’t compatible with good faith discussion. Yes, it does in fact turn out that if you do not care about the truthfulness of your claims, you’re just making GBS threads up the forum. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 08:43 on Dec 30, 2021 |
# ? Dec 30, 2021 08:40 |
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Discendo Vox posted:A war of unfalsifiable declarations of prior ideological commitments immune to criticism isn’t compatible with good faith discussion. How is it unfalsifiable? Surely you can check and compare certain actions or expressed opinions vs what the person says they believe?
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 09:41 |
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If Bob believes that the way people engage with and interpret information depends solely on the assumptions and beliefs they hold about the world, and that those assumptions and beliefs are basically immovable objects (i.e. cannot be dislodged no matter what contradictory evidence is shown), and that when they share information with others they do it to receive validation from allies and get a reaction from enemies, then there's really no reason for Bob to participate in a debate forum, IMHO.
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 11:46 |
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Josef you were the other person advocating for Yylqya’s position on the first page of the thread. The fos quote above was in response to you after ytlaya stopped engaging. It may benefit you to click on it and remind yourself how it went the last time around.
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 14:29 |
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Why is this thread stickied? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 15:39 |
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I would love to discuss if people think this was just accidental or what https://twitter.com/bbcnewspr/status/1476506386964131840?s=21 Because it seems wildly improbable they didn’t know who Dersh is and what he’s accused of
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 15:58 |
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Dersh reportedly has spent more or less his entire career ingratiating himself with various wealthy and important people, and judging by how many op-eds of his get published I wouldn't be surprised to find out he leans on various friends to get screentime/page space.
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 16:19 |
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fool of sound posted:Dersh reportedly has spent more or less his entire career ingratiating himself with various wealthy and important people, and judging by how many op-eds of his get published I wouldn't be surprised to find out he leans on various friends to get screentime/page space. Ok but he’s literally an unnamed coconspirator in Epstein’s nonprosecution deal and is publicly suing at least one of the victims. Like I get that he’s a schmoozer but are you saying the BBC was unaware or just didn’t care?
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 16:25 |
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selec posted:Ok but he’s literally an unnamed coconspirator in Epstein’s nonprosecution deal and is publicly suing at least one of the victims. I think it's the latter. He probably has a buddy high enough up in the BBC to avoid any ostensible editorial standards. Honestly the BBC seems to have no standards at all as far as opinion pieces go: they recently gave a rapist a lengthy interview where she accused transwomen of being rapists, for instance. E: still peering through their posted guidelines but not seeing a ton on non-financial, non-British-politics related conflict of interest stuff fool of sound fucked around with this message at 16:50 on Dec 30, 2021 |
# ? Dec 30, 2021 16:30 |
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Here's the guidelines, and here's the conflict of interest section of the "guidance", which is intended to "supplement and explain" the guidelines. I've not got time to dig in atm, but it looks like the guidance references guidelines sections 4 and 14, in addition to section 15 on conflict of interest itself.
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 18:15 |
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Discendo Vox posted:A war of unfalsifiable declarations of prior ideological commitments immune to criticism isn’t compatible with good faith discussion. While I'm not sure if you're referring to what I posted, there's obviously room for debate on the different ideological assumptions people have, but it's usually outside the scope of this thread (or Current Affairs for that matter, and this thread was basically prompted by peoples' posting in Current Affairs and its predecessors). This is relevant, because, more often than not, the complaint made about some article isn't "this article is factually wrong" but instead "this article doesn't necessarily prove the point (or implied point) of the person who linked it." Your issue usually seems to be something along the lines of "this person is saying/implying X, but the article they linked is not proof of X." Right? But that's rarely why they're posted. These articles are usually posted in the Current Affairs thread, which is just a "discussing recent events" thread that is explicitly not about discussing broader views about ideology/government. So you end up with a sort of proxy war where the only allowable "weapons" are recent news articles and anything beyond that is outside of the "rules of engagement." (To be clear, I'm not implying this is bad - I understand why this is done, since things would just descend into a Thunderdome situation otherwise.) The reason why I made the comparison with the way people discuss news about Republicans is because it's directly analogous and an easy way to demonstrate that this is something that applies to everyone involved. You know drat well that you and most others won't complain about random negative articles posted about Republicans (despite there being many contemporary instances of egregiously horrible reporting on Russiagate-related issues by the most well-regarded media organizations). This is probably because you don't think it matters much, since you (usually not wrongly) already believe the Republicans are bad due to a large amount of other information/context. Even if a particular article about Trump (or whoever) being bad isn't that convincing or has some misleading elements, it doesn't trigger the "I need to push back against this" feelings, because "people thinking badly of Trump/Republicans" isn't exactly something worth being concerned about. Even if a specific article isn't a smoking gun, there's no actual doubt about who Trump is, so the gist is correct. All of this - deciding what matters and what warrants being contested - stems from ideology. Ytlaya fucked around with this message at 20:09 on Dec 30, 2021 |
# ? Dec 30, 2021 20:07 |
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selec posted:I would love to discuss if people think this was just accidental or what It's ok ... he kept his underwear on.
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 21:20 |
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selec posted:I would love to discuss if people think this was just accidental or what They didn't just interview him. They allowed him to talk about how the person who accused him wasn't used as a witness in this case because she's not credible. If it wasn't intentional it's a gently caress up that shows the BBC can't be considered credible because there is no oversight. Fox news has done the same thing, given him airtime to attack those who have accused him of rape.
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 21:30 |
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Discendo Vox posted:Josef you were the other person advocating for Yylqya’s position on the first page of the thread. The fos quote above was in response to you after ytlaya stopped engaging. It may benefit you to click on it and remind yourself how it went the last time around. I wasn't advocating for it. I didn't disagree with a small section about how I think the idea of there being a hard break between "legacy" media stuff and "current" media stuff is not absolutely obvious. I explained myself poorly, that I'll certainly grant, but I don't think acting smug about it is edifying. Thorn Wishes Talon posted:If Bob believes that the way people engage with and interpret information depends solely on the assumptions and beliefs they hold about the world, and that those assumptions and beliefs are basically immovable objects (i.e. cannot be dislodged no matter what contradictory evidence is shown), and that when they share information with others they do it to receive validation from allies and get a reaction from enemies, then there's really no reason for Bob to participate in a debate forum, IMHO. But he can believe that both are true. It can be the belief that something can be both an honest attempt to inform people about something and also a way to gain acclaim with people you respect.
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 21:37 |
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Ytlaya posted:While I'm not sure if you're referring to what I posted, there's obviously room for debate on the different ideological assumptions people have, but it's usually outside the scope of this thread (or Current Affairs for that matter, and this thread was basically prompted by peoples' posting in Current Affairs and its predecessors). This is relevant, because, more often than not, the complaint made about some article isn't "this article is factually wrong" but instead "this article doesn't necessarily prove the point (or implied point) of the person who linked it." Ytlaya posted:Your issue usually seems to be something along the lines of "this person is saying/implying X, but the article they linked is not proof of X." Yeah, it's called invalid arguments, or, you know, lying. Ytlaya posted:Right? But that's rarely why they're posted. Actually, they're posted because the mediating poster thinks they do support their claim, but they don't apply any scrutiny to them- or they're posted to troll the thread or because the user is rapidly weaponizing material they think will own their enemies. Ytlaya posted:These articles are usually posted in the Current Affairs thread, which is just a "discussing recent events" thread that is explicitly not about discussing broader views about ideology/government. You want this to be about underlying ideology. Just like the first page discussion, it's about factual reality and the ability to actually discuss and consider truthful information. Ytlaya posted:So you end up with a sort of proxy war where the only allowable "weapons" are recent news articles and anything beyond that is outside of the "rules of engagement."(To be clear, I'm not implying this is bad - I understand why this is done, since things would just descend into a Thunderdome situation otherwise.) No. It's a setting where arguments are logically valid and claims are supported by evidence, not completely unrelated or openly disingenuous framings. Not posting random articles to vent, not a forum for abuse. There are plenty of sources of evidence that aren't recent news articles. The goal is not to win a war. It's to have discussions that reflect reality. The people who are trying to weaponize tweets that don't support any factual claim are explicitly abusing the space. Ytlaya posted:The reason why I made the comparison with the way people discuss news about Republicans is because it's directly analogous and an easy way to demonstrate that this is something that applies to everyone involved. You know drat well that you and most others won't complain about random negative articles posted about Republicans Nope. Claims should be supported by valid evidence. I've spent plenty of time qualifying and caveating and explaining and attacking sources regardless of their political sourcing. I, personally, like all people, can be imperfect at this, but the whole point of being able to have a good faith discussion is that other people can also do so to compensate for my limitations, and that there is a shared grounding in facts. The existence of ideology only serves to make this more important. That I do not apply infinite scrutiny to all claims and sources does not mean that the existence of ideology renders reality unimportant. That the problem of induction exists does not somehow make it logically valid to lie about twitter links you haven't scrutinized because you're so irony-poisoned about owning posting enemies that you don't care about what the link says or where it came from. Ytlaya posted:(despite there being many contemporary instances of egregiously horrible reporting on Russiagate-related issues by the most well-regarded media organizations). Then you can discuss those specific instances and the mechanisms of how that reporting factually happened, which is what this thread is about. You can identify specific causal mechanisms and elements by doing things like fool of sound is, by looking at actual policies. You do not need an overreaching ideological gloss that makes identifying and discussing specifics impossible. Ytlaya posted:This is probably because you don't think it matters much, since you (usually not wrongly) already believe the Republicans are bad due to a large amount of other information/context. Even if a particular article about Trump (or whoever) being bad isn't that convincing or has some misleading elements, it doesn't trigger the "I need to push back against this" feelings, because "people thinking badly of Trump/Republicans" isn't exactly something worth being concerned about. Even if a specific article isn't a smoking gun, there's no actual doubt about who Trump is, so the gist is correct. Ytlaya posted:All of this - deciding what matters and what warrants being contested - stems from ideology. If you have an ideological commitment to not applying even the smallest amount of scrutiny to the sources you mediate, if you are so committed to your opposition to discussion that you work with others to actively derail that discussion, if you are routinely so desperate to win "proxy wars" that you are posting tweets that don't support your claims, then lie about your claims, if you're so irony-poisoned that you care more about being true to your ideology than true to reality, than you've rendered yourself unable to participate in good faith. fool of sound posted:Generally if people have decided that they are opposed to truth that is deleterious to their ideology they should probably stay out of this thread and preferably subforum. Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 22:09 on Dec 30, 2021 |
# ? Dec 30, 2021 21:56 |
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camoseven posted:Why is this thread stickied? (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Dec 30, 2021 21:58 |
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selec posted:I would love to discuss if people think this was just accidental or what Considering the multiple pedophile scandals that rocked the BBC just a few years ago, and the ongoing inquiries related to that? Even managing to somehow do this completely by accident would still be a sign of there still being serious management and cultural issues regarding the BBC's handling of pedophilia. After just how loving horrifying the BBC's mishandling of the Jimmy Savile stuff was, as well as Stuart Hall on top of that, any even mildly competent organization would be putting a lot more executive scrutiny on their handling of anything even slightly pedophile-related.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 03:00 |
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camoseven posted:Why is this thread stickied?
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 04:29 |
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camoseven posted:Why is this thread stickied? This would actually be a fascinating thing to slot into the McLuhan tetrad model. This model gives us four questions - or "probes" as professor McLuhan referred to them. I think we can all mostly agree that whatever the content of the message is, the medium through which it's being delivered can be classified as "an internet discussion forum" To apply the model, we ask these four questions: What does the medium enhance? What does the medium make obsolete? What does the medium retrieve that had been obsolesced earlier? What does the medium reverse or flip into when pushed to extremes?
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 14:04 |
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camoseven posted:Why is this thread stickied?
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 14:30 |
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This thread makes really stupid conspiracy theorists mad which is funny and good
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 14:36 |
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Somaen posted:This thread makes really stupid conspiracy theorists mad which is funny and good Oh, you mean the people who like it then.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 14:42 |
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Lib and let die posted:This would actually be a fascinating thing to slot into the McLuhan tetrad model. This model gives us four questions - or "probes" as professor McLuhan referred to them. I think we can all mostly agree that whatever the content of the message is, the medium through which it's being delivered can be classified as "an internet discussion forum" Can you provide any good examples of this model being applied to anything? I’m finding it hard to understand how the questions might be answered without seeing someone else do it first.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 18:13 |
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Somaen posted:This thread makes really stupid conspiracy theorists mad which is funny and good My favorite conspiracy theories are the ones they publish in the NYT and WaPo: -Iraq had WMDs -China is our enemy -Poor people are poor by choice -Haiti is a problem if its own creation The list goes on. So many weird, ahistorical things floated as stipulations in op eds and articles. You’d be hard pressed to construct an accurate understanding of how our society works if they were all you consumed.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 18:32 |
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selec posted:My favorite conspiracy theories are the ones they publish in the NYT and WaPo: Since apparently this hasn't been said enough ITT, lets try it again: fool of sound posted:This thread has never been about sorting sources into good or bad piles and everyone who thinks it is is loving stupid and I'm sick of them. It's about criticizing loving media, and recognizing that different sources do different things well or poorly.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 18:45 |
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Kalit posted:Since apparently this hasn't been said enough ITT, lets try it again: So do those not count as conspiracy theories or what? Oh don’t see how you can avoid recognizing and talking about how a media source is fundamentally untrustworthy in a thread about media criticism.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 19:00 |
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Kalit posted:Since apparently this hasn't been said enough ITT, lets try it again: That reads like the thread consensus is in agreement with the Propaganda Model but that sure wasn't the case the last time it came up.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 19:07 |
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is pepsi ok posted:That reads like the thread consensus is in agreement with the Propaganda Model but that sure wasn't the case the last time it came up. It definitely does not, no.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 19:55 |
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Ok so the idea is that you can't sort sources into a good pile and a bad pile because they are all biased in various ways and degrees, but these biases are ultimately the result of individual actors and not broad social forces such as capitalsim. Is that a decent summary? I'm honestly asking here for the sake of clarity.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 20:01 |
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selec posted:My favorite conspiracy theories are the ones they publish in the NYT and WaPo: Only choice to resist bad conspiracy theories is to believe good conspiracy theories
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 20:11 |
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Or maybe “conspiracy theory” is deeply flawed as a category?
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 20:22 |
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is pepsi ok posted:Ok so the idea is that you can't sort sources into a good pile and a bad pile because they are all biased in various ways and degrees, but these biases are ultimately the result of individual actors and not broad social forces such as capitalsim. Is that a decent summary? I'm honestly asking here for the sake of clarity. Its more that there are usually more specific problems than "profit motive exists" or "media sources are owned by wealthy people". Those are reductionist and not really useful for diagnosing specific problems with reporting.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 22:35 |
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The Kingfish posted:Or maybe “conspiracy theory” is deeply flawed as a category? Nah, its pretty valid. Stuff like this attempt to claim a guy is CIA because his videos are 'professionally done'. https://twitter.com/Nitzky89/status/1475908225803464718 Or this dreck. https://twitter.com/MaxBlumenthal/status/1474493866103521288 There is a definite difference between bottom of the barrel trash run by a guy who thinks everything is a big conspiracy and stuff like the nyt.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 22:49 |
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fool of sound posted:Its more that there are usually more specific problems than "profit motive exists" or "media sources are owned by wealthy people". Those are reductionist and not really useful for diagnosing specific problems with reporting. There are always multiple contributing factors to all things. This feels a lot like "we can't prove any individual storm was specifically stronger because of climate change" argument. Where if a more proximate because exists we can't or shouldn't blame (and as a result we'll never address) something with a broad net impact.
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 23:20 |
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Pharohman777 posted:Nah, its pretty valid. The NYT is bottom of the barrel trash that never met a war it didn’t like. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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# ? Dec 31, 2021 23:42 |
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Harold Fjord posted:There are always multiple contributing factors to all things. This feels a lot like "we can't prove any individual storm was specifically stronger because of climate change" argument. Where if a more proximate because exists we can't or shouldn't blame (and as a result we'll never address) something with a broad net impact. You can't paint a picture worth reading if you're using a brush so wide that the strokes barely fit on the sheet of paper you're using. Absolutely refusing to acknowledge the existence of nuance and insisting on making vast sweeping claims about the entire media environment all at once is not particularly useful nor interesting. Whether any specific storm is specifically stronger because of climate change isn't particularly important. It might be mildly interesting for a scientist to dig into the specifics of one storm to measure the impacts and influences as precisely as possible, but throwing out a blanket "climate change makes all storms stronger, no exceptions" is not only a waste of time but also a big loving distraction: storm strength is not the primary impact of climate change, nor is it the primary reason that climate change is bad.
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# ? Jan 1, 2022 00:39 |
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Nucleic Acids posted:The NYT is bottom of the barrel trash that never met a war it didn’t like. So what wars, specifically and do you count changes in the papers approval as political winds shift and new facts emerge? Because the nyt has been around for really loving long period of time, and views on a war can change over time, see the war in iraq as an example.
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# ? Jan 1, 2022 06:04 |
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Pharohman777 posted:Because the nyt has been around for really loving long period of time, and views on a war can change over time, see the war in iraq as an example. I’m at a total loss for how you can miss the point so completely.
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# ? Jan 1, 2022 06:28 |
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# ? May 28, 2024 16:12 |
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The Kingfish posted:I’m at a total loss for how you can miss the point so completely. So what point were they trying to make? They spat out a broad statement on the New York Times war reporting without evidence or context.
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# ? Jan 1, 2022 07:02 |