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I find it very interesting that you wrote this huge post mortem on what is still very much an open question. Let's say that the lab leak hypothesis turns out to be true - something that is still entirely possible at this point. Would that not invalidate everything you've wrote here as these methods led you to the wrong conclusion? Would you not then be the one who fell for the conspiracy theory? Here, I can even answer your questions for you: "what goal does this accomplish for its authors?" If it was indeed a lab leak both US and China health officials would have an incentive to push the bat narrative to the press to cover their tracks. There are a lot of very angry people looking for someone to blame for covid and blaming it on nature will help diffuse those tensions. "what need does this satisfy for its believers?" "what are my needs?" This satisfies the need to be able to trust in authority, that those with the proper credentials always know what is going on and will always convey the truth. That you as a consumer of information are making the smart sensible choices unlike the fools who gobble up conspiracies. The entire exercise of this thread reminds me of the Zizek quote about how those who think they are beyond ideology are the ones most heavily steeped in it. Ideology is an inescapable function of the human condition. It cannot be transcended, so the point then is to embrace ideology in such a way that it furthers your goals. Likewise this idea that once you cut through the propaganda you will be left with the true authentic news is itself propaganda. It only ends up as justification for trusting authority. The point then is to accept that all media is propaganda, and to follow that propaganda which furthers your goals. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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May 15, 2021 19:01
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Silver2195 posted:I agree with much of your post, but this is going way too far. You should at least make an effort to find the actual truth, even if you can never do so perfectly. I think the disconnect here is in thinking that propaganda means something like "lies" or "stories made up whole cloth". That's not what propaganda is though, and I'm not suggesting that all media is lies and there's no such thing as truth or anything like that. Propaganda is information formed into a narrative that's intended to lead you to a conclusion. In fact propaganda literally cannot function without truth. This is the reason why I'm trying to push back on the idea that we merely have to train ourselves to follow the facts - because you absolutely can construct a false narrative out of true facts. I do agree with you that it's our task to suss out what truth we can from media, but my argument is that this can only be done from the starting point of treating all media as propaganda. The idea here is to find the truth in the fiction rather than the truth beyond or underneath the fiction. The methods described here and in other places in D&D are all based around how to look for things that might discredit a source. Ok that's all well and good, but tell me then who are the good sources who always tell the truth? Why not just list those out and we will only listen to them? The problem, obviously, is that no such sources exist. To bring it back to Discendo Vox's post that I responded to, I'm sure their methodology of finding reasons not to trust the sources they listed about the lab leak hypothesis are sound. That's not what I'm taking issue with. My problem is the idea that once the chaff of bad/discredited sources has been separated out, then surely we are left with the wheat of truth. This is what led them to making the mistake (in my opinion, obviously) of concluding that the other side of the story must then be the true one when as I said before this is still very much an open question.
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May 16, 2021 20:09
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Probably Magic posted:I'll be honest, I'm loathe to try to have any discussion with DV, but at the same time, he yelled at me about generalizing about the American media, as if there's some American media outlet that is 100% trustworthy. When I mentioned something about "mainstream media" to leave aside the possibility of some mystically independent and completely dependable media, he just tried to insinuate that I was somehow Freudian slipping my cryptoconservatism. Again, I'd put money DV is more aware of Fox News discourse than me, and I say that as a defense of me and not an attack on him. But let me then be direct: If he's upset about how I generalize about media, what media does he actually view as trustworthy and escapes my general cynical lens about being affect by our military-industrial complex. I highly doubt he means Jacobin and various leftist anti-military outlets, and nor would I, they're generally editorial and also prone to missteps. What media, then, does he mean, to put the above post more softly. DV, or anyone else who shares his views on media literacy, will never be able to answer this without giving up the game. Anything that they could put forth as the true and correct media source would necessarily fail their own criteria for trustworthiness because literally all media is biased. That's the only way it works. The real point of their style of media criticism isn't to filter out the bad sources in order to find the good sources (though they certainly present it that way), but rather it exists to filter out the information they don't want to accept. If a source is saying something I don't want to hear, like say for example they are being critical of the Democratic party, well obviously that source is biased and they've lied in the past and they are violating media rule #3.05 section C please refer to my OP. However if the source is saying something I already agree with, well then that makes sense to me and there's no reason to investigate further. It's not media criticism, it's a mental game to allow yourself to confirm your priors. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 13, 2021 16:50
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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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Discendo Vox posted:And predictably we're back to the totalizing equivocation about sources. Everything's biased, so my absolutely terrible obvious channel for propaganda and conspiracy theories should be acceptable when it tells me things I find ideologically appealing. Yes we know you love CNN, you don't have to keep telling us. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST) (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Dec 15, 2021 18:11
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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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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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Re: cat botherer That's just an excellent post and I completely agree with the conclusion. Dialectics is ultimately the logic of change itself, and media and communication can only be understood as a constant state of change. Formal logic - with its need to rest on and refer back to immutable axioms - cannot find firm ground in the age of the internet. The moment you think you have divined out the true and permanent rules of media and communication the whole landscape will change again.
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Jan 14, 2022 18:50
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