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selec posted:I mean…so what? Editors are not good at deciding what’s important information for me either. There’s this whole section in most newspapers called “Business” and it’s a whole bunch of information relevant to the people exploiting workers, and literally nothing useful in there for those same workers, no Labor section. Not really endorsing Vox's abysmal OP, but this is why learning to read critically is useful. Much of the reporting that is relevant and useful to people exploiting workers is also relevant and useful to those workers. Both because both sets of people need to live in the same reality, and because people will speak freely in forums they think are aimed in their peers in ways they will not in more combative forums.
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Dec 17, 2021 11:11
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:Why exactly is the OP "abysmal"? I don't think telephone line noise was a relevant metaphor for misunderstanding even in 1948. The Shannon model is popular with people who want communication and miscommunication to be a mathematical process, but it's a blinkered view that didn't reflect philosophy of language and communication even at the time. You can see how useless it is in the absolute howler of a GJB example. Any guide to understanding media that does not talk about framing is worthless, too. It's useful to think about sources and intent, but without also understanding how (for example) you can be primed to agree with the speaker through neutral-sounding language, you're always going to be led around by the nose. I will give it one thing: it does warn you to be suspicious of the motives and methods of anything you find agreeable. If you don't similarly apply that lesson to Vox's guide, then you failed the test! As for why I don't help improve it or whatever, I don't really want to. This thread's well is hopelessly poisoned, and I feel like holding myself out as an authority would be hypocritical anyway. PS probing Rask there was a stupid move. He said what I did in fewer words. Tearing down something that sucks and is making everything worse is good, even if you recognize you aren't the one who can build something better to replace it. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 12:52 on Dec 18, 2021 |
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Dec 18, 2021 11:36
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Thorn Wishes Talon posted:You say you aren't going to hold yourself out as an authority, then in the next breath you assert that "tearing down" this thread is good because it "sucks and is making everything worse." You don't have to be an authority to tell when something smells. You cannot be an authority on everything happening everywhere, so you're going to have to learn to identify useful and informative writing. And unless you trust the writer's intentions fully, you're going to have to learn how to read past the fact that their intentions may differ from your own. That applies to the Economist and it applies to this thread's OP, both the same. In this case, I don't think the OP has very much at all of value! It's a large and complex topic and attempting to simplify and condense it is treacherous even with the best of intentions. I'm not enough of an authority to teach people to understand how to engage with media without letting it affect them against their will, or understand the difference between bias and intentionality, or identify the biases and intent of an unknown speaker, or understand when unknown facts are being omitted. However, I do know enough to tell when someone has failed in their own attempt to do so. I don't think any such authority is participating in this thread, and I don't think this thread's culture is likely to produce by synthesis a work greater than any single participant could make on their own. I think it's much more likely one person will badger everyone into accepting their authority and drive off anyone who disagrees, because I believe that's what has happened in this thread. Discendo Vox posted:From the OP, in the very first paragraph: It's good to acknowledge the flaws of your work, but it's just a start. And I don't think you've fully acknowledged those flaws, but rather added qualifiers that you think shield you from my criticism. They do not. I don't think that the problem with the model you're using is that it's simplified; I think it's because it's simply not representative of reality. It does not offer any useful insight into understanding the sources of misunderstanding at all. The Shannon model is attractive to people who want language to be mathematical even though it is not, and I feel that you have fallen into that trap. Regardless of your reasons, though, it's still useless. I'm glad you agree with me about framing. And I'm glad you're familiar with Goffman, since Frame Analysis is a pretty important book on the subject. But you still did omit it except in passing in a later post. The way that a subject is framed is much more important than "noise," especially when you're talking about political reporting. The ways people are pushed into understanding a topic are much more important than the ways they might misunderstand! It's as though you wrote a guide to the functioning of a car focused on the windshield wiper switch and door locks, and mentioned in a later post that the engine, drive train, and wheels are important too but you couldn't find an interesting way to talk about them. Condensing a topic requires a strong understanding of what's important, and I feel you lack it, judging by what you've written. The well is poisoned because so many people, you included, have decided that any criticism is "making GBS threads on the work someone has done" or part of "a constant flow of people who come here to poo poo in it and tell everyone how worthless it is." Although it isn't the point I was originally intending to make, these are prime examples of Thorn Wishes Talon and you poisoning the well against any criticism of your work. I did read the OP, and I do think it contains very little of worth. If you've already decided that me telling you that what you've written is worthless is on its face a worthless comment -- and have mods here to make sure to back up that sentiment with probations -- then how do you ever hope to have any productive discussion with anyone who doesn't sandwich every criticism in compliments? You have an echo chamber where agreeing with you is "contributing" and "participating," and criticism is "poo poo". In any case, what I originally meant was that I don't think this thread is well-suited to the discussion in the abstract. It's going to be constantly derailed by people who want to argue about the quality of trash like Grayzone's war reporting or fight about whether CNN's reporting has any value, and interrupted by the mods deciding they suddenly don't like the tone of people who are too critical of the OP. This thread is chiefly a proxy war over what sources are allowed in D&D and by extension how D&D should be moderated, and that's inevitably going to swallow any subtler discussion whole. To admit fault would be to give ground in that partisan clash over how D&D should be run, and I don't think anybody's willing to do that. I think if you (or anyone else) can't see any criticism except in the frame of that proxy war over moderation, than any discussion at all is liable to be worthless. If that partisan slapfight has convinced you that there's a shadowy cabal that's conspiring to "[make] poo poo up about [this thread] for each other elsewhere," then, well, at least you could be more humble about holding yourself out as an expert on identifying conspiracy theories! I don't think these problems are fixable, and I'm not interested in making myself indefinitely available for badgering. I do read this thread occasionally, though, so there's always the possibility that I'll be surprised. Unrelated, split-quoting is annoying to read and reply to. It tends to lead to discussions where people try to reply to only part of what other people are saying rather than the totality of it. It's a bad habit, if one's goal is to eliminate misunderstanding. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 04:41 on Dec 19, 2021 |
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Dec 19, 2021 04:38
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Discendo Vox posted:Hard to give a useful explanation of ANT or Goffman when there's an audience of trolls actively ignoring what's already written. This is defeatist thinking. What good is an idea you can't defend against a hostile audience? It isn't a matter of convincing "the trolls," but rather understanding other people's counter-arguments and what underlies their thinking. Assuming you aren't convinced by those arguments, understanding the underlying thinking means you can better craft your own arguments to anticipate and address the response. You don't even need to be so open-minded that you're willing to be convinced, but you do need to imagine other people as motivated by some desire other than personal hatred of you yourself. To do anything else is just making excuses. If you just imagine everyone who disagrees with you to be a blind mindless contrarian, then you yourself have fallen for your own mindless contrarianism, and will likely have little to say that's worth listening to. That's true in general but especially true here, in this thread that is at least partially about teasing meaning from media created by people who generally do not share your personal interests. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 01:24 on Jan 13, 2022 |
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Jan 13, 2022 01:17
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Discendo Vox posted:I did anticipate what people would say, it's why I'm able to refer to text in the OP. You literally ignore what I say and attack the idea of the thread. It's why your last two posts resulted in probations. It is applying the lessons of the OP to the OP, as well as your own posts. The underlying message you are sending is garbled; you have the opportunity to evaluate the audience you've found honestly and recalibrate. This isn't some huge "by your own logic" gotcha. I think the OP is flawed because it's using transcription/encoding/interference errors in speech or writing, which can be measured objectively, as a metaphor for meaning, which I don't think can be. (Proving that meaning can objectively exist seems like a little bit more than an SA thread can tackle!) If noise is the chief topic of discussion, the metaphor by which we understand misunderstanding, then there must be some clearer way to communicate that message that is extricable from who you are or how you speak or how you act. It must be possible to approach that perfect connection, and I wonder how you would do it with a hostile audience. Now, I obviously think the metaphor is next to useless, and does not address actual issues of misunderstanding, let alone how to navigate a world full of people with often hostile or unclear agendas. But hostile people obviously exist! And I can't tell, by your arguments or by your actions, how you propose to accommodate that. My personal thinking is that "noise" is a fundamentally wrongheaded way of thinking about it. The best metaphor I've yet encountered is Sprachspiele, that language is inherently situational mutual understanding. There is no noise, just pieces of language that are inherently fuzzy and multifaceted and situational even in an internal monologue. There is no perfect, noiseless message, just a series of interactions that we can only understand (imperfectly) through dialogue. Communicating with someone is creating an (also imperfect) model of their thinking, a model that necessarily contains their model of our thinking; these mutual understandings are constantly feeding back into each other rather than collapsing to a perfect exchange of unmediated messages. Unmediated messages don't exist, and cannot be independently verified. Nobody has a platonic ideal message that is separate from who they are and how they think and how they think other people think, so there's no baseline zero that we can measure deviance from. Now, I hardly think that this is the only way to understand communication. (Imagine how hypocritical that would be!) And I realize that an introduction is going to be limited and simplified. But ultimately yeah. I am attacking the idea of this thread. And I am doing so using the thread itself as material, because it's handy and it supports my core belief that there is no message independent of the "noise". If you cannot swing the hammer you have forged, then I am inclined to say that it is a useless tool for understanding.
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Jan 13, 2022 05:27
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I am not mocking you, or engaging you in bad faith. I don't have any personal animus towards you. It's perfectly possible to engage in good faith as a hostile audience: like I said, I fundamentally disagree with the premises the OP rests upon. Focusing in on what I think is the most tenuous premise your arguments rest on: Discendo Vox posted:You can in fact measure degrees of fidelity against each other. You do not need an actual example of platonic message transmission to understand or measure how sources of error from either encoding, transmission, or decoding, or to study how they occur. We can talk about specific forms and ways to look at the details, construction, practice, transmission, etc of media without believing that we will reach some ideal truth, or arrive at a set of perfect sources. That has never been what the thread has about. I'm not worried about ideal truth, just the idea of an error-free message. Errors can be objectively measured in transcription or literal encoding of a piece of text or sound. But I don't think it's possible to know even one's own perfect, error-free message. It's an outdated idea, one that was refuted by turning it inward. All of the tools we have to attempt to separate meaning and message are themselves as entangled into the speaker's thinking and manner of speaking and manner of understanding -- as chock full of noise, to use the OP's metaphor -- as the entangled message to be interpreted. There's no error-free description of the process to separate error and message. It's a dead end, a hammer that cannot forge a hammer. How do you propose to measure the fidelity of the messages you send? What unit, what measure, what scale? What baseline do you use, and how do you know that baseline is itself without error?
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Jan 13, 2022 06:20
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cat botherer posted:In addition to social models, etc., this is also a natural framework for the foundations of physics and mathematics. The big idea, I think, is that this sort of dialectical ontoogical expansion allows us to "factor out" subjectivity in a pretty powerful way, and thus also change or localize on new interpretations. It always comes back to Hegel, lol I think all of what you posted is a productive way of understanding thought and communication, but where I disagree is the nature of a message and its meaning. I think approaching meaning from the idea that it can/should be understood in the way you understand the existence of an objectively real object, nor do I think it can be accurately described by formal structures in the manner of mathematics. In short: "What did they mean by this?" is not a question you can answer in the same way as "Where is my cat?" Even if all of the possible ways of determining objectively real facts are necessarily imperfect, they can reasonably be combined to give a consistent best understanding of reality. That might later be subject to revision, in which case the old understanding was wrong and the new one is correct. But a piece of communication isn't an imperfect measurement of an objectively real message-space or idea-space. Applying an empirical lens to meaning is always going to fail, because meaning isn't an object. There's no way to factor out subjectivity WRT "the message". Even if you could, there'd be nothing left when you were done. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 18:43 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 18:37
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cat botherer posted:"Objective" can really be seen as dealing with "objects," more like things out of themselves. The advantage of dialectical methods here, I think, is that they combine both subjectivity and objectivity in a relatively clear way, to help avoid some of the overconfidence that ostensibly objective models like S-W tend to promote. To the extent we talk about meaning, I still see it as objective, because we are treating this ineffable thing as an object, and attempting to pull some degree of objectivity out of it. This is the approach I fundamentally disagree with. The "object", the ineffable thing, is not a meaning contained in the message, but rather (a model of) the mind of the speaker. But your process of discernment is not observing a fixed reality, but rather writing an entirely new fiction that incorporates your own narrative as much or more than it does the speaker's. Not only will this new fiction inevitably change the mind of the speaker if they ever encounter it (if only by affecting their own model of your mind), but there isn't an objectively true model of a mind in their own mind that you're only discerning fuzzily. The idea of the mind as an object is itself a model/fiction. To drag this back to learning how to read the newspaper better: Minds and truths and messages are stories. It's important to separate them from objects. (This is possibly unhelpfully binary: Objects are always surrounded by a swirling tangle of stories and associations, and stories themselves exist as artifacts and events.) I think we need to use different models of understanding to answer the questions, "Is CNN a useful source of news?" and "What happened in Douma in 2018?" Both of these topics are media literacy! But "usefulness" is not an object we can discern the way we can discern physical things or events. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 19:19 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 19:16
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cat botherer posted:I actually agree with what I think you mean here. Objectiveness only exists in moments, which collapse because the concept itself cannot exist without contradiction. The value is that we can pretend the objectiveness does exist in restricted modes/moments. No. Like I get where you're taking that from what I said, but it's because I'm not articulating what I want to say well enough. Thinking and intent and meaning aren't objects. We can use objects as metaphors for them, and through the Sprachspiele come to describe them similarly. But we are creating something primitive and separate from the mind-narrative, and the process of creating this primitive consensus is not reproducible or reversible. Attempting to reproduce it or reverse it is simply creating new primitives. I'm not arguing that time exists, therefore it's impossible to know anything: I'm saying that thinking is not an object even though it can produce objects, many of which are attempts to liken itself to objects. Ultimately, I do think that you can narrow down the existence and nature of true objects, like a bomb, my cat, Joe Biden, or carbon dioxide. Discussion of these things narrows to a point: their being and properties. On the other hand, discussion of fictions, like ideas, meaning, minds, and thought, these don't narrow to a point without something like badgering people out of the conversation or creating frameworks of description that are so rigid that they can only express a narrow set of ideas. Fictions are an infinite space, created and explored simultaneously. Dialectical processes are still useful for this process of creating and exploring fictions! But when we apply them to fictions, we're not discerning, but rather creating. The only thing-in-itself is the physical symbols or sounds we create down as part of that process, which do not contain meaning but help us go on to create further fictions of meaning. Approaching this process of creation with the idea that there is a true meaning that we can eventually discern is itself a framework of description that is so rigid that it can only express a narrow set of ideas. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 20:31 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 20:29
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Koos Group posted:It's been pointed out to me that Vox has never claimed an ideal truth, nor an error free message, nor any other perfect state was required for media criticism as he describes it. And, if this argument takes the form "because media criticism cannot be perfect, it shouldn't be attempted at all," that would be an example of a perfect solution fallacy. So I'd like us to avoid that. I'd also like to remind everyone to make sure what they're saying is fresh, and they aren't trying to hammer on the same point they've made before in order to achieve victory. I'm arguing that the model Vox described in the OP and the post I replied to there implicitly relied on the idea that messages as true objects that we fuzzily relate to each other through processes of encoding and decoding. (Not that the messages are true, but that they truly exist.) Error is only meaningful in relation to an error-free perfect interpretation, even if you think that perfect interpretation is strictly hypothetical. We can talk about error in the context of true objects. My cat is a true object. If I say my cat weighs ten pounds but she weighs eleven, then I am off by a pound. This may be an approximation of her weight -- every possible unit or measurement could be more precise than it is now -- but there is a precise mass of cat that I am measuring imperfectly. Real objects exist, and have real properties. When we are talking about real objects, error and truth have specific meanings, and better understanding converges on a perfect ideal even if we cannot ever reach it. However, error is meaningless in the context of fictions and messages and narratives. My cat's personality is a fiction, a narrative to understand and give meaning to the things my cat does. If I say my cat is a delightful and you observe my cat and me interacting and think she's a real rear end in a top hat, what does error mean in that context? Have you misunderstood my sarcasm? Do you just feel differently about her actions? Do I find the fact that she's an rear end in a top hat delightful? Does "delightful" mean something different to you than it does to me? These are not subjects that you can describe empirically. Any discussion creates new understandings of my cat, of my feelings about my cat, of your feelings about my cat, all of which did not exist before but do inform and change the previous understanding of my relationship with my cat. "Error" is a non-sequitur to these questions. "Solution" is a non-sequitur to these questions. Approaching the topic of interpreting the news from the direction of identifying and eliminating error in the process of discerning a message is wrongheaded. Messages are not true objects. "What did they mean by this?" is not a question with a right answer, so there's no standard by which to judge deviation from that right answer as erroneous. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 22:39 on Jan 14, 2022 |
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Jan 14, 2022 21:52
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SubG posted:I agree with your conclusion but I think your line of reasoning is flawed. Even in the example, it's unclear if they've mistaken dragons for unicorns or are describing a new narrative. ("Sleeping on giant piles of gold" is a pretty fair of description of one of the main ways someone might be using "unicorn" in D&D.) To determine that we'd have to look at context, and the set of possible sources of context is pretty close to infinite. We can decide that the mindset of the hypothetical unicorn speaker is all that matters, or that the existing consensus on fake monsters is all that matters, or many other possible narratives besides. Unlike the true properties of real objects -- my cat is 11 lbs. at thus-and-such time and no other possible answer can be true -- contradictory claims can both have right-feeling narratives that do not falsify each other. I think you show that when you show that when you talk about the Shannon model. We can use true objects as metaphors for meaning but the metaphor is always going to lead to conflations. Because fictions are inherently fluid in a way reality is not, there's no metaphorical object that can't be infinitely divided into further metaphorical objects that are entirely separate. You do this, dividing meaning into semantic content and authorial intent. But I can do the same to your argument, separating "the right answer" into true qualities of a real object and an appeal to an unspecified consensus on imaginary things. All of these are stories about the ways people interact, and they are edifying in the way that stories can be, but there's no true answer that can always be derived in a replicable fashion through perfect analysis. Now, you are catching me out. I do think there's a consensus that yeah, a unicorn is generally a horse with a single horn (when it's not a billion-dollar privately-held company or the third person in a menage a trois with a committed couple or an impossible dream). Those consensuses obviously exist; otherwise, how would we be having this conversation in the first place? How would you understand any of the words I'm typing? I think Sprachspiele are the best way to think about them: evershifting language games where the meanings of the symbols change and grow even in the fixed moment by thinking about them or introducing new participants. We can't find the right meaning of things that aren't true objects, just make more right meanings or convince people to adapt/adopt our story of the right meaning. But... that's about as far as I get! I don't have a grand unified theory of semiotics, nor do I have a plan to apply such a plan to learning to read the newspaper good. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 05:52 on Jan 15, 2022 |
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Jan 15, 2022 01:33
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raminasi posted:I know that an article's headline is written by editors, not the article's author, but is that also true of the under-headline summary? (I don't know the name for that piece of the publication.) the dek or subhed. and it varies.
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Jan 16, 2022 21:27
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Whether the speaker believes what they are saying or not doesn't matter unless you are interested in the speaker's motives in particular. "Bad faith" often isn't especially relevant, and can easily become a distraction from understanding whatever it is you were hoping to learn about in the first place. What matters more, in most cases, is why you were able to hear what the speaker had to say in the first place. Sputnik follows in the footsteps of a strategy pioneered by Voice of America, on which it was patterned. (Its predecessor was even named Voice of Russia.) That strategy is simple: it's easier to simply hire someone already saying something pretty close what you want them to say than it is to convince someone to repeat your message uncritically. If you want to spread the message that a government is illegitimate or that a society is censorious and oppressive, simply find someone already saying that and give them the platform to say it even louder. In the case of someone like Ted Rall, he doesn't have to lie or be prompted to say things like US media is harshly censorious of leftist messages; he already believes that, and it's not like he's wrong! As a result, it's often more useful to look at how it is you're aware of a person speaking and what the motives of the people who made it possible might be. This is as useful a lens to understand Sputnik as it is to understand your grandmother's Facebook timeline or the front page of the Times. Who benefits from making it possible for me to see this, and how? Because at the end of the day, it's not about what they believe. It's about the fact that if they believed something else, they wouldn't be sitting where they're sitting.
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Nov 6, 2022 08:26
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Discendo Vox posted:You're doing the "but he has a point!" thing here that I just pointed out is a great way to stop evaluating a source critically. "US media" isn't a meaningfully defined category, and Rall counts as an example of US media; he's only "not wrong" in that the framing is vague and feeds the audience's sense of persecution, making "truth-tellers" like Rall more appealing. On the contrary, the point is that Rall can be pushing a propaganda line, even if he is speaking in good faith about his own beliefs (and I believe he is), and even if those beliefs are true (and I think they largely are to the limited extent I have encountered Rall). He is on Sputnik because it is useful to them to have someone saying that American society is censorious and the American government is illegitimate. This is a common thread through both the heterodox leftists and heterodox right-wing figures that show up on Sputnik and RT, when they agree on little else. It doesn't matter if he has a point; he's not there because he has a point. It's often more helpful to not be drawn into arguing whether the speaker has some concealed motive. Instead, a Marxist-style analysis, looking at what systems placed that speaker in front of you, can be more helpful in understanding the value of what they have to say, and what the limitations are on what they can say. It's as true for Ted Rall as it was for Andrew Marr.
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Nov 6, 2022 09:34
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Discendo Vox posted:Rall's claims aren't true, and they're not stated in good faith. Rall's claims are selectively framed and should not be separated from the context of the fact that they are duplicitous propaganda. The very fact that the example you're providing of Rall's beliefs is, at best, selective and resistant to falsification illustrates this problem; that Rall assigns or attributes leftism to himself is no reason to take him at his word, especially given the very obvious evidence to the contrary. Unless you have a ribcracker, specific claims about what is contained in Rall's heart of hearts are also unfalsifiable. Generally, the broad sweeping claims about the state of society that editorialists like Rall traffic in aren't falsifiable anyway. There's no unit of justice, or meter that can measure censorship or freedom. You keep slipping the language of objective measurement into your arguments to make them seem more scientific, but I'm not fooled. But it also doesn't matter, unless you're particularly interested in the psychology or history of a guy who drew ugly faces and labeled incongruous things "Bush's war for oil" then got fired for criticizing the LAPD. Propaganda is not necessarily a lie (meaning that the speaker believes/knows what they are saying is false), nor is it even necessarily false. Identifying a message as propaganda does not mean you're done with the task of ascertaining whether that claim is true or not. Instead, it's helpful to understand how that speaker is proscribed by the systems that brought their message to you, and why those systems brought you this person's message instead of that of a million others.
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Nov 6, 2022 10:21
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Propaganda is not necessarily disinformation. It's not even necessarily false. Confusing the two will mislead you into believing that everyone who says something true is trustworthy, or that true things said by motivated speakers are false. It's perfectly reasonable to accept Ted Rall's argument that working for Sputnik is compatible with his politics without needing to believe he's a liar. He's interested in criticizing the US government from a leftist POV, which generally limits you to the fringe, and that's compatible with Sputnik's overall propaganda aim of boosting American dissidents in English. He's proscribed by things Sputnik would not tolerate, like criticizing Russia's government or expressing leftism in any terms more broadly than criticizing governments Russia would prefer to undermine. As he's an American chiefly concerned with American politics with no real international views other than a vague anti-militarism, this isn't a problem for him. You can apply these same frames to a CNN commentator or an editorial in the Times. Rather than assuming the speaker is lying or some sort of catspaw, it can be more revealing to look at what they profess to believe, what the mission of the platform ownership is, and what systems proscribe their message and elevated it to you in the first place. It can help you suss out the ways a story is misleadingly framed, and better guess what isn't being reported on or what wasn't in the picture. In any case, it's more useful than trying to sort the world into propaganda outlets (false, lying) and news reporting (true, honest). Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 11:01 on Nov 6, 2022 |
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Nov 6, 2022 10:45
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Discendo Vox posted:I’m not conflating the two. I laid out the scope very clearly in the first post on this subject, I encourage you to read it more carefully. You are. Discendo Vox posted:It is not difficult to recognize that Rall is dishonest in his putative leftism when he does it for money on behalf of an overtly genocidal autocracy. This is illustrative in two ways, in fact. The second one is to recognize that the description of Russia as genocidal is itself a propaganda message, promulgated by both Ukraine and the US gov't for obvious self-serving reasons, while also recognizing that doesn't mean that the reports from Bucha are false.
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Nov 6, 2022 11:12
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I do want to say, Sputnik is a propaganda outlet. The fact that it is such a blatant propaganda outlet is useful for illustrating ways you can be directed to believe something by motivated actors, and what you can do about that. Lying isn't the only way to direct belief. How are we to understand something true said by someone with an obvious agenda?
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Nov 6, 2022 20:14
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Discendo Vox posted:The post I used to get the thread going again is about how disinformation obscures its source rather, you made a post about how motivated speakers conceal their motivations. that's helpful to know, but oftentimes a truth is more useful to a propagandist. it also means it's a very useful method for identifying everyday ways that narratives are created. Discendo Vox posted:
in this case, when M1 is "the propagandist simply chooses someone already saying the message they want to spread," you are describing an editorial page. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 02:54 on Nov 7, 2022 |
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Nov 7, 2022 02:49
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Discendo Vox posted:No, I'm pretty directly quoting the authors describing, explicitly, how disinformation propagandists obscure the identity of the originator of the message. Then I disagree with the authors. You're making a nitpicky distinction without a difference. In any event, your example isn't an example of either model, if you insist subterfuge is required. Ted Rall works for Sputnik, and writes editorials for them. He's not an authority they've subverted; he's some guy who used to draw cartoons for the LA Times years ago, and would probably have no outlet wider than a Twitter account if it weren't for Sputnik. And it's not a secret that he works for them: on top of them publishing his articles on sputniknews.com, he wrote an article titled "Why I Work For Sputnik." It doesn't even make any sense to suggest that he's secretly subverted, since his stock in trade has been saying that American society is hypocritical, censorious, and unjust for quite a while. Nothing here is concealed! There's no reason to believe he's anything but what he says he is, which is clearly a fool. NeatHeteroDude posted:Can someone go into more granular, like, specific detail about the kinds of procedural/administrative things that come with movies using military equipment in the u.s.? Like, what actually happens? I've heard it explained as "the studio gets free stuff and the military organization gets to make suggestions to the script that push a pro-military narrative." As I understand it, that's pretty much it, although sometimes the "free stuff" is access to things that they normally wouldn't have access to at all, like military hardware. It also often comes with a quid-pro-quo to copromote the movie along with the military in military advertising, while copromoting the military in movie advertising. Top Gun was the famous pioneer, but off the top of my head Man of Steel and Captain Marvel were also big examples. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 04:06 on Nov 7, 2022 |
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Nov 7, 2022 04:03
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Koos Group posted:I think that would fall into the category of deflective rather than legitimating, because the military is not (as far as I'm aware) taking the extra step of screening the movies they assist with, or otherwise presenting them as evidence that their goals and methods are legitimate. They are, and they are. In the case of screening movies, the key terms to look for are "script approval". Top Gun is a famous example. As for presenting them as evidence that their goals and methods are legitimate, there is the co-advertising, and the fact that most movies that work with the military present the military in a positive or sympathetic light, with some famous examples (like Hurt Locker) that are critical of the military where military approval falls apart. This was significantly more tense in the New Hollywood run of anti-war Vietnam movies. Is this covert? It's not a secret, but it's not something that you're really meant to think about, either. You're just meant to think that being in the military is cool and fun. Thinking of propaganda strictly as misinformation isn't helpful unless you're just trying to get people banned from Facebook.
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Nov 7, 2022 04:42
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Discendo Vox posted:And yet people continue to accept and rationalize and defend his framing of these issues, at length, and equivocate or misrepresent or ignore in order to do so. Because he can be a fool and yet still correct. Even an idiot or a shill can make a good point sometimes. If the point he's making in particular isn't good, you should go argue with the people in the thread defending that particular point. "He works for Sputnik!" is a good example of an irrelevant ad hominem attack, unless you can argue more clearly why it matters to that particular case. At the moment, you have a leaky sieve argument that everyone working for Sputnik is a lying propagandist, one that relies more on emotional language and restating your conclusion than sound reasoning. You're probably never going to find a good universal argument to always discard what a compromised person might say, because there isn't anyone who isn't compromised to some degree. We live in a society, bottom text, etc.
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Nov 7, 2022 06:00
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BTW here's a good example of what military/movie copromotion looks like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=agWOW5uy3TA
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Nov 7, 2022 06:03
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Discendo Vox posted:Again, "but the authoritarian propaganda has a point" isn't how good faith argumentation works. If it's a good point, you can find other people to make it than the propagandist. This post is a good example of what I mean about restating your point. It's propaganda, they're propagandists, he's a propagandist, it's harmful because it's authoritarian propaganda. It's always important to not mistake repeating the conclusion over and over again for a well-supported argument. In this case, it's to distract from the unanswered question: how do we deal with propaganda that is true? "You can find other people to make it than the propagandist" isn't relevant to the argument you're obviously importing from the other thread, where someone brings up Ted Rall, someone else says "huh he has a point," and you... are mad at that I guess idk. They don't need to "find other people" because the example you're using is someone talking about Rall in particular. Nobody's citing Rall randomly except the policomics thread and you, here, in this thread. He toils in obscurity, and there's no risk of anyone with any sense citing him for factual claims because he's an editorial columnist and cartoonist, not a reporter. This does bring up another common and important question for any piece of reporting or commentary: who gives a poo poo? It sounds flippant, but it's not. It's always helpful to recenter yourself and ask if there's anyone who really cares about the subject of the piece, and especially whether it actually matters to you or affects anyone's life for better or worse. Lots of outlets, both propaganda and merely self-aggrandizing, seek to play on your emotions, to get you to engage with them or encourage you to hate-share things or maybe just because they're assholes. Does it affect your life at all if there's a Mx. Potato-Head? Do you really have any reason to care about a retired actor's opinion about Ukraine? Is there any evidence at all that the fringe left-leaning cartoonist that you're mad about has any impact on the world other than starting forum arguments that annoy you? Ghost Leviathan posted:I've seen this before in a lot of contexts, a seemingly exclusively liberal obsession with 'good faith' and 'bad faith' and reading the tea leaves to try to tell the difference. It seems awfully convenient given it always seems to line up with trying to discredit people they don't like- and thus is almost exclusively used to punch left (albeit because that's where it may have actual impact for some reason, while the right is immune to hypocrisy) and to try to rehabilitate figures who have supposed good intentions despite a legacy of nothing but disaster. It's all just attempts at guilt and/or innocence by association while completely ignoring every bit of context. Not wanting people to lie to you and assuming that anyone who is compromised is always lying are both common, and not in any way specific to liberals, punching left or otherwise. If you think it is, it probably has more to do with the natural tendency to be more critical of people you disagree with. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 11:27 on Nov 7, 2022 |
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Nov 7, 2022 11:17
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Discendo Vox posted:I used Rall as an example of how disinformation propaganda obscures its point of origin. The models I provided from O&J are useful for providing a conceptual framework that can be applied to other media, and illustrate the importance of specific forms of source scrutiny. It wasn't a very good example of those frameworks. Nobody anywhere in the world, Sputnik included, is using Rall as anything but an example of some guy's opinion. "Read the original post!" is another one of those examples of restating the conclusion instead of making any supporting argument, btw.
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Nov 7, 2022 15:03
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| # ¿ May 10, 2024 02:04 |
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"Help help I'm being repressed" is an angle anyone who doesn't benefit from mainstream support can claim, often even if the only form of repression is simply being ignored. "The story the government wants to suppress" and "the story the media wants to suppress" and "the story you won't hear in the mainstream news" are not significantly different in impact. Hell, many people who do benefit from mainstream support can still claim to be repressed, depending on the audience. (I can think of multiple governors, senators, and even a Kennedy pulling that poo poo atm.) For an audience that is already primed to be receptive, all you need to point to is someone respectable who disagrees. There isn't a practical difference, in this, between the government encouraging/pushing/enforcing a consensus and a non-governmental agency doing the same, except WRT the way those efforts are perceived by the audience. And lots of audiences are primed to see anyone who disagrees as essentially synonymous or sympatico with the government. There are procedural differences, particularly in the US, but treating cultural pressure or corporate pressure as essentially lesser compared to government pressure is mistakenly treating constitutional technicalities as more important than they are for any non-government employee. The actual difference starts to show up when it's something the government will arrest you for, but that doesn't always line up 1:1 with the law, especially when you start talking about extralegal police abuse. also 
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Jul 7, 2023 20:46
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