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Going to just make a single post re-iterating the core problem that probably can't be addressed. Most arguments over various topics stem from broader disagreements that would be considered outside the context of the threads they take place in, and because of this they can never truly be addressed/resolved. Usually what happens is that different people have different base assumptions about the topics being discussed. This often takes the form of one side believing that a "good faith" argument is one that treats the mainstream US/Western narrative as the "null hypothesis," so to speak. They don't "blindly" believe it, but they do think it's the starting point that others have the burden of disproving. From this perspective, a good faith/evidence-based discussion is one where other people have the burden of disproving the media narrative. And on the other side, you have people who believe the burden of proof is instead of those advancing the mainstream narrative. This argument usually can't be addressed with hard evidence. There is no "objective" way to resolve this. This is especially the case when the argument is about the likelihood of future events, or about the honesty of public figures - in those situations, some sort of "unbiased hard proof" is literally and inherently impossible! The hospital bombing in Gaza from a couple weeks was probably a situation with an unusually high amount of hard evidence, but that still ended up not going anywhere because people can simply pick and choose which sources they want to believe. In a conflict like this, most on-the-ground info isn't going to be coming from the major US new orgs, so people can simply reject the authenticity of anything they don't like, and there's no "God of Truth" who can come down and prove them wrong. We directly saw this when someone posted a non-American reporter. This was ultimately rescinded, but it would not have been if the reporting were instead from "a random person" (or from any organization that is considered "biased").* The core issue is that there's a deep disagreement about "the nature of the United States (and consequently both its major political parties and the rest of the world)." A serious debate about this would be considered off-topic for a current events thread. So you'll just endlessly have people arguing with each other about the latest news, with zero avenue for ever resolving the actual source of their disagreement. To resolve the disagreement, you'd need an actual discussion about "why someone believes that it doesn't make sense to trust the good intentions of US political figures," or "the history of nations going back decades and what that implies about their current behavior and goals." If people started arguing about this, it would be considered a derail (and I don't even necessarily disagree with this - a "current events" thread is essentially meant to be "a thread where people react to current events"). The closest things to solutions I can think of are one or both of the following: - Have a thread where these deeper ideological disagreements can be discussed, and people are redirected there if they start having arguments in the current events thread (but this would require that mods not step in with their own personal ideas of what constitutes "bad faith," because they're usually oblivious to their own personal ideology) - Explicitly identify the US Current Events thread as "Succ Zone for Democrats." A bunch of people want to just discuss the latest political news with people who think similarly to them. I genuinely get this - it's basically what the Succ Zone in C-SPAM is. You want to chat with your buds, and it feels like some sort of trolling when someone comes in and starts arguing. No one would have an excuse for being mad if they were booted for arguing in a thread with that explicit "mission statement." * This is a somewhat separate topic, but my personal feeling about this is that people should be allowed to post whatever, and that the false stuff will end up being filtered out eventually. Who cares if people temporarily believe something wrong? It's better for that to happen than it is for "anything that isn't from a handful of authorized sources" being outright banned. This is especially the case in a situation like "a war zone where there's little media access and a huge amount of information is having to come from amateur sources." It's fine if someone posts something that ends up later being revealed as fake news! Once it's revealed as fake, people will point this out. The God of Misinformation isn't going to smite you.
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Nov 7, 2023 23:36
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| # ¿ May 11, 2024 17:04 |
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