People like to complain about FOX New's conservative bias (and to a lesser extent MSNBC's liberal bias), but they miss the fact that their real bias is towards viewership, and they've become news entertainment products, not sources of journalism.
NYT did a really good job covering this recently with their podcast Rabbit Hole:
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/podcasts/rabbit-hole-prol...
I'm curiously drawn towards anyone whom has people shouting "don't give them a platform!" or has suggestions that their ideas are so powerful that they may somehow corrupt minds weaker than, presumably, their own superior ones.
So I semi-regularly listen to these "alt" people. Alex Jones, McInnes, molyneux, and so on. The co-opting was largely realizing that in-between some of the crazy (there's a fair amount to filter out in Jones' case), there are these kernels of truth, often backed by government documents or reports.
The co-opting ideas, I guess, was a general realization that the common narrative doesn't necessarily reflect the entire reality. Even things which are presented as cut and dry, are often a frustrating messy grey once you dig into them. It's also given me a general skepticism of commonly held opinions about people in general. These "literal cult leader", "literal nazis", etc... have turned out to be less monsters and more humans with nuanced opinions which don't necessarily translate to 5min clips.
Different communities are good for different things and there is such a thing as community standards. It doesn't have to get to the Alex Jones political level either, just think like how weird it is when people hit on each other on Nextdoor [1] or if some guy was trying to sell his lawnmower on Grindr/Tinder.
1 - https://twitter.com/bestofnextdoor/status/100265658134170009...
I think of listening to them largely in the spirit of Lincoln's “I don't like that man. I must get to know him better.” There's an entire machine telling me to hate these people, write them off, or that they're overall "bad." So I listened to a bunch of their content to see what it was about. That's kinda it, really.
I haven't turned into some conspiratorial nut job or joined some cult (I don't think!). I listened to a couple of podcasts to try to form my own opinions. The output of the exercise was that I don't think these people are evil demons. I think they're largely just... people. Complex, right sometimes, wrong sometimes, and fun to hate on by the general media.
You freely admit that there's a fair amount of crazy. The signal/noise ratio is absurdly bad, even if we assume there's some kind of signal at all. The (usually banal, obvious) nuggets of truth are often intentionally thrown in as a way to make you let your guard down. If you are not 100% flawless at separating the nugget of truth from the shit, then over time your mind will inevitably fill with shit. Don't overestimate your own mental resilience. If people were half as strong-minded as they thought they were, there'd be no money in advertising.
Never listen to crazies. If there's something non-crazy in what they're saying, somebody non-crazy will be saying it too; listen to them instead.
So, again, I'll throw on a podcast at the gym and try to form my own opinions. If you exclusively get your opinions from clips on twitter or reddit, I don't think the opinions you've formed are actually yours.
Despite being exposed to "dangerous" ideas (I assume you're mostly talking about Jones), I don't think inter-dimensional space aliens are actually behind everything. I've managed to stay at least partially sane.
...or maybe I'm just not ready to believe yet (dun dun dun!) :)
What am I doing wrong?
So it's possible to have a reasonable and logical YouTube. However, even a single video can trigger YouTube's algorithm to attempt to pull you in.
Nice to do this every once in a while anyways, just to find another pocket of Youtube that interests you.
This sibling comment response is literally giving me chills. Is this like a bot or something or someone who literally thinks the idea of sensationalist journalism is like a "huh that's interesting, never thought of that" kind of thing?
I am pretty sure sensationalist journalism predates real journalism... Why would a feudal lord want his subjects to really know what was going on in the world?
Joe Biden is more conservative than Donald Trump in a lot of ways, as far as ideology and policy go. But MSNBC viewers love him and hate Trump, Fox News the opposite. They're not fair weather fans, they're committed to their teams.
This is my big complaint about Hollywood, too: if they charged people after the movie, instead of before; and 100% of the base price went to the theatre itself, while people could "leave a tip" for the filmmakers; then "box office" would actually correlate to the quality of the movie itself, rather than to the amount of effort put into the marketing campaign.
Doesn't sound like a bad thing, IMHO.
> tipping large sums of money
This would kind of suck, given the stupidity of current North American tipping norms. But I'm not sure whether they could actually manage to communicate "the existing tipping system should be venerated" during an experience that directly involves exposure to/use of a different tipping paradigm. It'd be like watching a movie about monarchy, as the result of the audience holding a democratic vote on what movie to watch.
To be clear, it's a "different tipping paradigm" because of these properties:
• tipping would be entirely optional, in a selfish-pragmatist sense: there's no way in which a lack of tipping would get you blackballed from the theatre or even given a bad look, because the tips don't go to the theatre or its employees;
• you'd be tipping a collective of unseen workers far away who produced the experience a while ago, rather than tipping an individual close-by who did the work just now;
• there would be no possibility for tipping to get you individually a better quality of service, because your tip would be anonymized through the hub-and-spoke (studio-theatre-audience) delivery model. The studio would just see a pile of tip money, at best traced back to particular theatres.
Really, it's more equivalent to how film-festivals ask for donations; but they'd be asking for donations on behalf of the movie maker, rather than for themselves.
> targeted at rich people who have the money to give large tips
This is true, but 1. I'm not sure it's worse than whatever kind of targeting we have right now given the system's current inventives (which would be... cinematic populism?); and 2. this would put film in line with most of the arts, which generally run off of commissions/patronage.
Society doesn't generally outright reject the output of those fields of endeavor, despite their being mostly tuned to the tastes of their (rich) clients/patrons.
(Society does feel more "detached" from such works, though; there's a lot of "I don't get it" in art galleries, mainly because many works were created to be understood mostly by the patron and the social-milieu of people they showed it to, rather than by any passerby.)
It's not really supposed to, it's just something to think about.
> But I'm not sure whether they could actually manage to communicate "the existing tipping system should be venerated" during an experience that directly involves exposure to/use of a different tipping paradigm.
They could emphasize how bad "being cheap" is. Make "looking poor" and "being stingy" be bad qualities that cause people to look down on you, that ruin relationships, and so on.
I suspect that the "box office" would correlate with how wealthy the audience was (or at least felt like they were) just as much as the quality.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMrtLsQbaok
She delvers a "how dare you..." line at the beginning that gets a good round of applause. Then she continues with her speech. Maybe I'm armchair QB-ing it, but she should have called out the audience for clapping. They're clapping for what she's saying, but as world leaders, it's their failure she's pointing out.