The Bullshit
walterkirn.substack.com
walterkirn.substack.com
I have a better idea. The news has always been shit.
There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market.
It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs have adapted to fill in all those remaining hours. Consolidation hasn't helped, but I can look at any news clipping from the early 20th century and see the same level of bullshit I see today.
I do think that many journalists in the past operated this way. They would chase a story not because it was profitable, but because it was important. Not all of them, maybe not even most, but many. Nobody goes into journalism for the huge paychecks.
And of course some people like this still exist, but:
Anecdotally, it seems to me like there's been a shift across all sectors (not just journalism) away from professional integrity or civic duty and towards cynical profit-motive. You can see it in everything from hospitals, to universities, to technical companies like Boeing.
I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge. I don't know if centralization/acquisition is to blame, or stock market pressures, or private equity, or some cultural phenomenon. But it feels like we're only careening further down this path with each passing year.
They operated the same way they do now, and worked on whatever their bosses told them to work on. It's just romantic to think they were unburdened by our mortal contrivances and somehow had the wherewithal to pick out "important" stories.
It doesn't have to be just one or the other. You can have principles and push for what you believe to be good, even if your boss is ultimately profit-driven (even if you have some profit-incentive of your own!). Multiple factors come together. It's incredibly cynical of you to paint that sort of basic integrity as nothing but a romantic fantasy.
What I feel like I'm seeing today is that people are either less willing or less able to enact higher principles in their work. It could very possibly be a power-dynamic thing, or it could just be the spread of general cynicism like yours.
There's no evidence that the distribution of good journalists has fundamentally changed over time other than the effects of just a larger pool of eligible candidates. A quick glance through Peabody and Pulitzer winners over time can quickly confirm this.
If anything, I'd argue people are far more principled today than any other point in recorded history. Maybe they're just not your principles.
It starts with the meaning of "professional". I know of two opposite ones:
1. "Professional" as in doing high quality work, no corner cutting, having respect for the problem and the customer.
2. "Professional" as in putting business first, with the implication that any possible corner will be cut, any possible sacrifice on quality will be made, if it makes the business more money.
The second meaning is what I've been seeing increasingly often over the years. It's a frequent sentiment in our industry - it's professional to keep applying subpar tooling and methods to a problem, because upskilling costs money short-term. It's professional to bloat your product and make your users pay an implicit tax, because it's saving fraction of those costs for the company.
> I don't know if it's because the people who used to care care less, or because the people who never cared are being put in charge (...)
I sometimes wonder if the answer is: none of those, things have always been as shitty - it's you and me who are growing up and discovering the world for what it is (and/or growing more cynical in the process).
Despite all that being one huge grey area ethically speaking, I still think that without professional reporting all we’d have is a network of mini-influencers misrepresenting reality into their respective bubbles on Twitter/Substack/TikTok, either for likes or to further whatever hidden agenda they or their friends may have. It’s a good thing to have a job description and years of education that ingrain certain principles[0].
It’s doubly bad, though, when you betray those principles; being a journalist is (or ought to be) much like being a cop or a doctor—for the mechanism to work properly, people should be able to trust you to act in their interest rather than own personal gain (and you should deserve the trust).
Unfortunately, I don’t see a good way for such a model to persist. We’re losing trust in traditional affordable mass media, often for good reasons.
[0] Most importantly, to be cognisant of your biases—which indeed includes selecting which story to report on, selecting which aspects to mention, etc.—and to compensate for them.
4. "Professional", as in you work within a profession, such as law or accounting, and are an accredited, paid-up member of the appropriate professional body.
I'll buy your (1), as in "professional paint job", but your (2) isn't a kind of professional; that's just race-to-the-bottom commercialism.
1. Correctly reasoning from data is a very difficult task, needing advanced skills, requiring deep understanding of statistics. Most companies have nobody with such skill set on board.
2. It provides a fake air of legitimacy to otherwise arbitrary decisions. Whether by mistake (confirming your own biases with data) or on purpose, you can use data to justify whatever decision you already want to make, few people know enough statistics to call you on your bullshit.
If you're going to water the statement down to that level, how does it not still apply today?
What there are are a lot of connected people who went from elite schools to exclusive unpaid internships, jobs in prestige nonprofit PR departments, and consulting firms, then to national outlets at very high salaries. Their coworkers are ex-politicians and campaign flacks, and people who worked at massive hedge funds and investment banks, who decided that they preferred punditry and socializing to their jobs.
The people you're talking about are bloggers/substack people now, and are generally denigrated by mainstream outlets.
I worked around multiple newsrooms. It's clear that you have not.
There is a very big world outside of the corner of the internet that you live in. And it still exists despite the internet trying to kill it off. Most "hometown" papers still exist. Go find some of them. Read them. What you'll see is that most of them are staffed by about 5-6 people, a few freelancers, and then a bunch of bylines that are simply the name of the paper, because they don't want you to realize how short-staffed they are (these are also written by those same journalists and editors).
That's the reality of the modern newsroom for the VAST majority of news outlets in the US.
So do accountants. And actuaries. And doctors. And programmers. And artists. And pretty much most every other profession. There's nothing special about clergy or journalists or doctors because they chose the career they did.
> and local journalists routinely put in 60-80 hours of work
This is just more romanticism. I'd wager that the distribution of hours of journalists looks very similar to most professionals.
The associate editor at the paper I did work for was making $13.50 an hour as of two years ago when I left. I know this because she overheard a conversation regarding the salary of my subordinate who was guaranteed to be paid a certain hourly rate (that was about 3x hers) upon his initial 6 months with the company, and she vented to me about it one night when I was in the office to perform some server maintenance and she had just arrived back from a football game she covered for the sports editor, who was out of town on vacation. She routinely wrote between 16-20 stories a week, did layouts for 5 sections of the paper including real estate, legal, and classifieds, covered all official local events, and covered girls' sporting events.
Does that seem to you like something you could do in 40 hours?
So this work you did "around newsrooms" and "with journalists" was sysadmin work? Have I misread that?
I think it's written by human beings who have a limited subset of knowledge, many times because sources aren't forthcoming or verified, and that if we ever held developers to the same standard that we held journalists, that it'd be nigh-impossible to hire any of them.
Ontario Public Broadcasting has this show 'The Agenda' with 'Steve Paikin' where he brings in mid-level and behind-the-scenes people from the bureaucracy people and they talk about granular issues of civic reform in great detail.
If you want to inform yourself on the nitty-gritty details of the new 'Subway Expansion' and why it's over budget, it's all right there.
But it's incredibly boring , and there's very little viewership.
Donald Trump put it really well when he said he would be 'great for news ratings'. It was rubbish, and a lot of people tuned in, it brought in a lot of money.
Add in the economics brought on by the Internet and we have a real problem.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/52309.The_Autobiography_...
And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companies.
But to somehow think the moral distributions of people are superior from the average population, just because of career selection, is dubious at best. Something being protected by law doesn't somehow make its practice exalted.
The only parts of the BBC that are arguably not-for-profit are iPlayer, and domestic TV and Radio; and the BBC World Service. These are paid for by a controversial hypothecated tax, controlled by the government of the day; as a consequence, the Beeb is fairly consistently pro the government of the day, and anti the official opposition (they can see which side their bread is buttered on).
[Edit] The World Service is paid for out of general taxation, specifically the Foreign Office budget. It's not paid for out of the Licence Fee.
Two quick examples from npr.org right now:
1. Somehow we can model how the economy can adapt to zero carbon in 40 years yet couldn't predict changes to solar PV becoming more affordable in the last ten: https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027370891/climate-change-sol...
2. Could this article be more sympathetic to the administration? https://www.npr.org/2021/08/14/1027552833/heres-why-biden-is... the meanest thing they say it's "misjudged the speed". Why not "it's been obvious for two decades ANA could never hold together including the eight years he was VP"
It's more benign than qanon. I haven't checked their coverage of mask wearing. I'll change my mind if they were pushing masks when Fauci was lying and saying they were unnecessary.
> Father Syquia leads a team of four priests who get additional assistance from volunteers: psychiatrists, doctors, lawyers and laypeople.
There seem to be some trained professionals hidden behind the show and prayers.
> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops [0], viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls [1], vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots [2] behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation [3], and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths.
I listed to them for years but noticed a considerable shift in their reporting in the last 2-3 years.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924506867/analysis-questionab...
[1] https://www.npr.org/2020/01/29/800725826/why-wet-markets-are...
[2] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2021/01/15/957421470...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2021/07/17/1017264502/the-federal-reserv...
That's the author's definition of bullshit though, it doesn't necessarily constitute actual bullshit.
It's true that some unofficial quality voices are disrupting established narratives ... but I'm sorry to say this isn't the shift that matters, because 99% of the 'unofficial sources' are considerably worse than just 'bullshit' in the press.
The 'Giant Kraken Monster' of fake news is really shocking, and it's taking over some sectors. I couldn't quite fathom it until I saw it happen to someone in my own life.
While we argue about 'truth' here on HN, information is being submerged by nonsense on mainstreet.
It's not so much war between civil people arguing over the facts - it's more like Information World War Z of people hopped up on very bad, made up information.
I was at a relative's home a few days ago listening as a he was listening to his Facebook stream and it was very shocking.
I'm paraphrasing from memory, but:
"Tanks will Roll, Power Cut, the Great Reset and Trump will be re-instated by Coup on Aug 10 ..."
"I have a source, who cannot be named, because his life would be in danger, that Nanci Pelosi was in direct contact with the Chinese Communist Party on January 6 directing the assault on Capitol Hill"
"Those that stole the election, put them ballot boxes full of fake votes for Biden, they need to be executed for treason, the True Patriots Will Rise"
"It's masks now, folks, but this is the globalist master plan, it's just the first step. This is the reason the second amendment exists, folks"
"Big Pharma does NOT want you to know about natural cures, because, well, why do you think? You are the experiment folks. The Sheep out there doing what the government tells them - but the Lions, the True Patriots, know better."
"Q said:" - and then a bunch insane of statements from QAnon etc.
It's dizzyingly conspiratorial and it's really scary to watch people eat that up. My family member indicated that they don't believe most of it, but that's their primary news source and, it has affected them greatly.
My family member is becoming an information zombie who is losing their grounding in reality, and cannot be reasoned with on these issues, even if they are quite rational otherwise. Once you start to believe cabals of the elite are killing children in basements in blood-lust ceremonies, that mysterious Q controls things behind the scenes, that vaccines i.e. life-saving medicines are invented as a tool of control, and that of course all of the 'main stream media outlets' are all lying, then what?
Watching them listen - it's like a form of information hypnotism - it's as though they're in a mystical / religious trance. If someone already has a reason to actually 'want to believe', and they don't care, and they just 'let go of rationality' ... then they fall into the trap. I think it's the same kind of programming that cults use.
It's really a sight to behold, and the experience of how the information is communicated, the anger, the tone of voice, etc..
The MSM has a problem with bias that could stand to be corrected, and it's have more quality 'outside' voices, but even some of the better sources often falter. Matt Taibi, probably in the same vein of the author of this piece about 'BS', usually has some great things to say but I feel even he is jumping the shark a bit trying to get attention to his Substack with overzealous headlines.
In order to put this into relative context, here is some polling data from Pew [1][2] which shows a material minority of Americans are susceptible to even the more over the top conspiratorial information (i.e. QAnon), for less egregious but nevertheless still completely false information, I believe the number is much higher, reaching up to 30% for those who believe that the election was fraudulent [3].
[1] https://www.journalism.org/2020/09/16/most-americans-who-hav...
[2] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/11/16/5-facts-abo...
[3] https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/559402-one-third-of-am...
Their biggest line was "nothing can stop what is comming" and sure enough the biggest thing to ever happen happened, Covid.
Isn't that a tautology?
I remember when France went to war against Khadafi our newspapers/TVs were all supporting this, given the amount of direct suffering it caused I'd say that being worse than this is .. hard!
He was already causing great harm, or rather, the war was causing great harm. Choosing to tilt the game board to one side over the other is definitely something to ponder, and there's definitely a lot of information to dig up and report on, but it's not a 'fake news' story.
Gaddaffi's life is actually stranger than fiction, he did kidnap young women and put them into his Harem. That's not made up. In fact, it's odd that you don't hear more 'fake news' about some world leaders who continue to have these practices because there's so much material to work with.
"so what was the point of the intervention" - like I already said, at least to prevent an impending massacre, and then to tilt the outcome to 'one side', in which all things being equal, was preferable, and still is even in retrospect.
There was already a civil war, before any intervention.
If the UK and France had not intervened, there would have likely been a massacre - again, this is what Gaddafi stated he would do, moreover, there's no reason to believe that he would have unambiguously quashed the rebellion, meaning the civil war would have gone on in which he would have been a primary antagonist, possibly with the upper hand.
'The outcome' was titled by Western Powers, and it would have been better if there were more stability, but there's no reason to believe that it's worse after intervention.
The 2011 war was not hugely violent. In the entire war only a few thousand civilians and fighters died, which is frankly minimal. Through to the late 2010's the political instability was not very violent. The mini-war in the late 2010's was again, fairly specific and shortlived with few casualties.
2) 'Noone in the mainstream news AFAIK did its job and asked what will be going to happen next' - first, I don't think that this would represent any kind of fake news, just the media not having foresight, and often they do not. Second, Obama was very public with his statements of 'What Happens Next?' - it's why the US did only the frontline air support, AWACS, drones etc. and didn't do any of the main fighting. The 'big questions' around 'bad outcomes' definitely lingered, there were a lot of question marks about that during the war. Finally - none of that constitutes fake news or 'bullshit' really. If you wanted more specific and detailed covarage in the aftermath, you can see most of it on Al-Jazeera. CNN is not exactly going to have good coverage within Libya.
1. Use narrative engineering to persuade angry, frightened, gullible people to tune in and self-select.
2. Use narrative reinforcement to make them angrier and more frightened.
3. Wind them up and point them at a target.
4. Profit politically, and possibly also financially.
It doesn't matter what the narrative is. As long as it has an outgroup that can be accused of doing terrible things that arouse fear, rage, and disgust, almost any narrative will do. It could be vax conspiracies, it could be election conspiracies, it could be any number of other hot-button topics.
It's no different to how official propaganda works. [1] It isn't even all that different to conventional advertising.
The only difference now is that it portrays itself as covert, revolutionary, transgressive, and individualistic, where during the glory days of Time it used to present itself as wise, objective, and paternal.
But in fact it's just the same old farmed behaviour modification reinvented for social media.
[1] The suggestion that there was ever any kind of benign separation between old-fashioned patrician journalism and the US establishment is itself obvious bullshit. Historians have written books about this. This is just one intro.
Isn't this what everyone does now?
Is there actually a "pure" movement or source that doesn't engage in this kind of Bullshit?
I do find it interesting that left-leaning people (like myself) find it difficult to acknowledge that left-leaning media also engages in The Bullshit. Because we tend to agree with the propaganda statements, it's incredibly difficult to spot as Bullshit.
The 'Far Left' operates in much the same way.
The examples I gave were just of one person's stream.
Just one side gets a pass by many people, the other not so much.
Were they? News co-ops has historically been quite good.
where alternatives tried? or just quickly squashed?
For news, in many cases, the issue isn't so much the veracity of what's being reported, but... what's being reported. You only have so many pages and only so much reader mental bandwidth.
That meant you could talk to your relatives at Christmas and perhaps have different ideas about the same facts, rather than completely different sets of facts.
Online news is compared to its paper versions, many outlets still have significant differences here. Of course there was a lot of bullshit too, but today almost everything is bullshit. We even built bullshit-thrones for those that produce the most.
In spite of being a business I feel printed newspapers at large struck to a code of ethics and used that "freedom of the press" judiciously.
In India Newspapers played a crucial role in organizing against colonial rule, Many freedom fighters were themselves a publishers/editos of such newspapers. At the later part of the freedom struggle such newspapers came under heavy attack, editors jailed and unspoken horrors imposed upon them.
Even today printed news papers which survived from those era does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.
But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.
Try to find out what's happening in Kabul right now. What have we got?
Vast amounts of commentary are available, all resting on a very narrow base of facts. There's a little bit of cell phone video leaking out. Large numbers of people at the airport, out on the tarmac, hanging around planes that aren't going anywhere. Aljazeera has a reporter embedded with the Taliban, and he got a tour of the presidential mansion, showing lots of guys with rifles exploring the place and having meetings.
On the PR side, we have statements from the US State Department that the US embassy has been evacuated, civilian flights out of Kabul have stopped, military flights are continuing, the US has a few thousand troops at the airport, and more troops are coming in. There's a Taliban Twitter feed.[1] "The situation in Kabul is normal".
So what do we really know.?
- General agreement that there was no substantial fighting in Kabul.
- General agreement that the US holds the airport and the Taliban holds most of the rest of the city.
That's about it for hard facts. Yet there's a huge volume of published bullshit on all major media of all persuasions.
[1] https://twitter.com/Zabehulah_M33/status/1427101139481268227
The grain of truth is that mainstream news doesn't live up to the standards they like to claim they do. The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs.
Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biased, one can simply ignore it and believe whatever one wants. The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right, so if one's worldview contradicts the literal basic facts, then that person is wrong. And opinion pieces are no better than blogs, but no worse than blogs either; so if an opinion piece makes a valid argument, that's just as valid as an argument made by any other source.
Without clarity as to what constitutes literal basic facts vs facts that are distorted, this is just more plain bullshit.
Does it? If anything it's quite tame. The truth is worse, and has been for a long time.
>Where he stretches too far is his claim that because the mainstream news is biased, one can simply ignore it and believe whatever one wants
The post never makes that claim.
>The mainstream news may distort and omit facts, but they do get the literal basic facts right
You'd be surprised, and seldom when it matters most.
At best they'll offer some retraction of their errors afterthey're caught with their pants down, and when it's too little, too late (as with the WMDs or the Contra affair).
Nowadays, that they don't even have to do that (e.g. Steele dossier), since their errors are lost in the barrage of new BS news anyway, and the public, bombarded by all that, has developed the memory and attention span of a proverbial goldfish.
The word "bullshit" is a burden. It is a painful, unscientific term that chips away our objective neutrality every time we encounter it.
The author knows. The author is emotional. The author is trying to make US emotional. I don't want to be rashly emotional, I want to be neutral, cautious, objective, thoughtful, and deliberate. Every point I take from a piece I want to double-check the reasonableness and the implications of, to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.
But not if it requires wading through so much frustration.
Also, not everything in life is science, and emotions can be useful messengers. Ignore them at your peril.
Here's what I mean. If I was born earlier, like say a baby boomer, I'd have less education in critical thinking, but I'd also be more protected by the news media than the time when gen Z grew up. By that I mean most of the stuff in the paper at the time was down the middle, somewhat bland but serious, and the editors took it upon themselves to keep things balanced. They'd acknowledge other viewpoints and think properly about how to fit in their own perspectives.
If I was a gen Z kid, it was and is all a blur. Just loads of crap mixed in with everything. Chaos, no particular authority is obvious. More time spent in education but also more noise. Fewer cultural lighthouses since everyone is watching different things (both news and wider culture) and able to stay within whatever they already believe.
When I grew up I had a leg in each era. I still think some papers are better than others. But I also see the cacophony of crap for what it is.
Boomers have ended up in this world too and it's horrifying. My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US. They come up with crazy things from time to time, like they're missing a critical thinking inoculation.
Now I think about it, that likely particularly applies to those of us who believe we are great at critical thinking.
(Personal side note: This shouldn't mean we throw our hands up in the air in hopelessness, but it should remind us that we all have a mandate to be more critical of our own thinking than of that of others.)
Democracy is like science. If you don’t constantly doubt at least a little bit and check the outcome continuously, but instead just trust blindly, you’re doing it wrong.
Pretty sure we've gone quite a lot farther than a little bit.
Here's the thing, though: if one is basing their "doubts" on random brainfarts or propaganda pieces they saw on youtube or facebook and decided to trust blindly, they're probably also doing it wrong.
Skepticism that is not accompanied by critical thinking, actual knowledge, intellectual honesty and a dash of humility is useless or worse.
TL;DR: Epistemology is hard, but "just doubt everything" is not it, chief.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that the people in question (that are doubting the results of the US elections) are rather "skeptical" towards (so called) mainstream media, but not as much when it comes to the random crap on fox news, ann, youtube and facebook. If this is the case, then this makes them more "useful idiots" than actual "skeptics", in my opinion.
TL;DR: "Doubting blindly" (usually based on whatever Fox News or 4chan is spreading today) is as at least as bad as "trusting blindly".
This shouldn't matter, otherwise you'll succumb to false-flags and Reverse psychology.
In any case, the post you responded to doesn't say anything about fox news. Any basing an opinion on fox news isn't "Doubting blindly"; it would be blind trust.
Blind doubt aka scepticism is fine, because doubting something (with poor sources) isn't the same as assuming it's false - it's not assuming that it's true.
Lack of a reason to trust US elections is justification to doubt them. The standard is (should be) that these things prove themselves, rather than put the burden of proof on outside observers.
It's also worth noting the post that it was replying to said:
> My university educated in laws in the UK are doubting the outcome of elections in the US
which seems to take "doubting the outcome of elections" as automatically outrageous, without mention of reasons, sources or why.
Is this really true? Or is it an illusion due to you being the target audience of the MSM then? For example, there are no lack of claims and incidents of media bias for the pre-naughts in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Media_bias_in_the_United_State...
When people read the news they expect a lens upon the world that they agree with, that connects to everything else in a coherent narrative that confirms what it was they thought they knew. This fakeness (or 'bullshit') is a form of hypernormalization for the consumerist society.
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping.
I also like that the author explicitly refuses to provide any examples of these "anti-bullshit alternative media sources". Very common tactic amongst this ilk - complain about aggressive censorship and how George Orwell was specifically warning us about Twitter, all the while doing everything you can to avoid people seeing what was actually incurring bans.
I see it all the time in communities I run, people start trying to spin off alternative sites and talk about how <insert community here> impinges on free speech, and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.
It's insanely hard to get your content consistently removed from Twitter or Facebook, they do everything they can to avoid having to hire more moderators. It can happen, but then providing the examples will get everyone on your side immediately. Anyone who claims that they're being unfairly censored and yet refuses to show the content that actually got removed is trying to hide something.
Are you suggesting that this person shares these behaviors?
I'm certainly not suggesting that the author is prone to outbursts of racial slurs - that was just an example of something I encounter regularly, and typically that type of person is far less literate - but I am extremely doubtful that the content they're complaining about removal of is as "anti-bullshit" as they'd like to claim.
Do you believe that your mind may be doing some interpretation (with or without "your" knowledge) in the formation of this conclusion?
The beauty of the mind though: even though it is doing this (manufacturing an interpreted version of reality in realtime), this tends to be an unpleasant idea to most people....but luckily, it also has the ability to interpret that away, allowing us to have our cake and eat it too (although this feature has some downsides of its own)!
This isn't always true. I don't want to derail the topic of this thread, but I certainly find I cannot talk seriously about the causes of disproportionate violence and rape from certain segments of the population without getting banned. Even though, looking deeply into the science, it doesn't support the mainstream viewpoint. If I can't trust the media and even websites like HN to be honest on something so basic, why should I trust them for anything else?
So yea, I don't doubt that this guy thinks facebook is being mean by not letting him spread conspiracy bullshit on their platform.
I missed that part, any chance you could quote the text where he says this?
Pretty standard alt-right nutjob. Substack is swarming with them.
> alt-right Yeah. I think the woke are done. No one actually likes or agrees with them, it's all just preference falsification.
so, where was the violence?
Does this look like a peaceful protest, to you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=XajBh9oTdqI&feat...
> One of the cops died of injuries sustained on site
No sources for this, so I'll assume you're referring to Officer Brian D. Sicknick. So, this might not be true: https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-false-and-exaggerated-c...
There's a section on this in Wikipedia too: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Brian_Sicknick#Subseq...
> On April 19, 2021, the office of the chief medical examiner of the District of Columbia, Francisco J. Diaz, reported that the manner of death was natural and the cause of death was "acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis" (two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by an artery clot).
EDIT: this is an ad-hom. Please respond to the point - I also linked to WP as evidence that your claim is shaky. Refusing to do so because I linked to a journalist you dislike is pure tribalism.
Anyway, I'll say that just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace. Even if his death was completely unrelated, it doesn't make Jan 6 any less of an insurrection.
> He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage ... unless he could provide some sort of proof
doesn't seem to match up with
> just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace
where's the proof? various outlets already back-peddled on the claim he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, they have yet to prove anything with regards to bear mace (other than two men carried it).
"Prosecutor: Bear spray not used in Capitol attack on officers, defendants seek bond" -- https://wtop.com/dc/2021/04/men-charged-in-jan-6-bear-spray-...
> Even if his death was completely unrelated, it doesn't make Jan 6 any less of an insurrection.
You stated an officers death as evidence of the level of violence. I don't believe this was true, and I think it does make it less of an insurrection.
You are trying to use body count to measure the seriousness of an attempt to take over the government? It’s starting to look like the Taliban took over Kabul with less violence than what happened in the US Capitol.
That people so often stretch the truth in these matters (while complaining about people who are clearly writing provocatively, and thus have no shortage of genuine weak points) is interesting.
> Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots [...]
Seems pretty clear-cut to me. The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
How about a lot more context:
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons. It resembles the old punk-rock scene, but after it was discovered, not early on. Some of the upstart outlets earn serious money, garnering higher ratings and more page-views than the regime-approved brands Apple features on the News screen of my iPhone. (A screen I’ve disabled and don’t miss.) This wilderness of “contrarianism” – a designation easily earned these days; you merely have to mention Orwell or reside in Florida -- requires a measure of vigilance and effort from those who seek the truth there. As opposed to those who go there to relax, because they prefer alt-bullshit to mainstream bullshit. They can just kick their shoes off and wade in.
Does your mind detect any ~disrespect for alt-bullshit in here? For example, what meaning do you think is intended by "They can just kick their shoes off and wade in"?
> Seems pretty clear-cut to me.
That's the thing though: things are not always as they seem (I assume you've seen magic shows & optical illusions, or read to some degree on neuroscience, the numerous forms of psychological bias, etc)?
> The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
Here are you referring to shared reality, or your/the author's/my individual highly customized model of reality? It's an important distinction, but one that is rarely made.
The way right wingers bend over backwards to pretend that Russia doesn't have a long history of this sort of thing never ceases to amaze me.
As the saying goes: "Humans gonna human".
I didn't pretend anything, I compared two things.
The US intelligence agencies don't themselves have a clean record: COINTELPRO, PRISM, CIA spying on the Senate intelligence committee (then lying about it).
Each of those counts as a conspiracy, and it's of note that people like Edward Snowden have been hunted and chased out of the country (and people like Julian Assange similarly persecuted).
Say one knows for a "fact" who killed JFK or the origins of the pandemic, or one knows the actual mechanism by which startups are funded or big deals won (it's never the way it's portrayed to be). What does knowing the truth of any of those facts do other than provide one with some self-satisfaction of knowing? Is it better to live in self-deception and believe the simple lie versus know the hard truth? Does knowing the "actual truth" even provide that self-satisfaction given that the lies and untruths win out so much of the time? Confronting the lies never seems to provide the expected win that those who seem to possess the truth would expect.
Knowing something is bullshit helps. Knowing the system and understanding what the levers do is an advantage. This is also the reason there is so much bullshit. Advantage goes to those with accurate world model and ability to use it to their advantage.
All that said, I have no real answers to the posited questions as those probably have to be answered individually.
This is just ranting.
News isn't fundamentally that different from what it was, fifteen, thirty years ago. The difference is that its audiences are far less captive. Attention is scarce. In order to captivate Attention now, you have to "sell" it what it wants, and what a good chunk of Attention wants is to read bullshit that confirms the views of the bubble that it inhabits. You need tricks like clickbaity headlines and whatnot.
The unfettered alternatives that spew raw misinformation are not better, though.
Arguably, having to compete with all that for attention is what drags down news.
The news has always been controlled by someone. It has always had owners, and ran on advertising money.
In the pre-internet past, the news, in a manner of speaking, competed for attention with tabloids. But tabloids were obviously in a separate category. If someone started a sentence with "I read in the Enquirer that ...", you could laugh them off as a twit.
I think this is thought provoking. An at the same time harmless but also horrible example was to see Jen Psaki sing Happy Birthday for a Reuters journalist. Am I alone to think this reflects bad on journalism?
First it was TVs, then it was video games, now it's social media.
I understand the sentiment and know it's easy to think that that one time in the past was the best way. Hell I even think about those few years with that group of people were "the best", nostalgia.
But if we always look at the past and try to recreate it, then we'll not allow great things of the future to come.
There are legitimate ways the past was better, but that's usually rooted in a belief. So hold onto the belief, let go of the past? I do commend those who onto a belief and let go of the past. It's not always easy in a changing future.
Wait 30 years and then consider whether 2021 is "the good old way".
I imagine it will be for most people, just like 1969 was "the good old way" for the author of TFA, and 1736 was for Ben Franklin.
It's not that the bullshit was better back then, or even that times have changed, for the better or for the worse. It's just that the way the human mind works, we don't see things as they are, we see them as we are.
As time goes by, we still don't see things as they are. We see them as we were.
But your "wait 30 years" observation puts you in a different age bracket from me; I'll be dead and gone (or reborn as an ant or something).
They're interesting because they show exactly the sort of vacuous garbage one can expect when an amateur is is trying to make a name for themselves as a writer and has no editor to slap their hand or even ask for some sort of coherence.
> In addition to teaching nonfiction writing at the University of Montana, Kirn was the 2008–09 Vare Nonfiction Writer in Residence at the University of Chicago. He graduated with an A.B. in English from Princeton University in 1983 after completing a 22-page-long senior thesis entitled "Entangling Breaths (Poems)." Following that, he obtained a second undergraduate degree in English Literature at Oxford University, where he was a Keasbey Scholar.
You don't think this guy can get a job as an editor?
Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibi, Andrew Sullivan, The Dispatch are all fine Substack publications.
Their audiences are really small however, it's the total opposite of populist, I'm not sure how much influence they could possibly have.
Where you have what passes for freedom of speech, the corrollary is that everyone has the freedom to oppose your views.
1. It tended to be poorly written.
2. It was often false or at least incorrect.
3. If there was anything really important you will find out about it quickly enough.
My summary of the points may be off - I read this 30+ years ago.
>The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines. The accompanying photos didn’t support this claim; they featured ragged American flags and homemade signs demanding freedom.
When someone writes about a variety of abstruse topics, I can only draw on my limited experience with a few of those to judge their reliability about the rest. In this case, I happen to read Google News sometimes. So I know he's talking nonsense. I was deluged with stories about Cubans protesting for freedom. Sure, there were a few mentions that they weren't happy with the slow vaccine rollout, but the overwhelming majority of articles trumpeted the neoliberal party line and crowed about the protest song Patria y Vida.
This kind of selective attention to what must feel like a personal insult accompanies that other signal of a persecution complex, the Poor Lost People Like Me trope
>the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons.
What he fails to understand is that the cliquishness of "his" group and the "narrative" of the "mainstream" are really one and the same phenomenon. Humans naturally try to find, redefine and support a cause or movement, which apparently reflects some primal culture-forming instinct. The idea that this is an external phenomenon -- that some outside, manipulative force is making people arrange into mobs -- is paranoia talking. Humans are natural mob-formers.
The media will always seem to be pushing a narrative because it is made of human beings who feel powerful when they support a narrative. What is necessary is to see the world as it is while aware of this phenomenon, not to delude yourself into thinking you can outrun your own nature.
The interesting question is what are the consequence of this? I think there is a rapidly shrinking pool of trust towards our institutions and corporations. I believe that a lot of the issues with the coronavirus (especially the vaccines) are directly attributable to this. If someone who has been blatantly lying to you for decades tells you "take this medication, it's safe, trust me" and keeps repeating it over and over again, I think one can sympathise with those who feel entirely suspicious about it.
I'm not saying the censored content is actually more trustworthy. Science is (should be?) A process of accepting all theories backed by evidence, experimentation and the failure of competing theories. If you censor scientific papers and evidence because they are politically inconvenient it effectively dismantles one of the few effective tools we have for a shared understanding.
It's a personal amusement of mine that the singnal-to-noise ratio on the internet is so terrible. Sorry, Tim Berners-Lee. The abysmal state of facts on the internet also seems a failure of capitalism of sorts: a low-distortion news channel doesn't seem an impossible business model, but here we are.
Incredibly, this essay about bullshit is bullshit. Here's a snip of journalism from 1977:
"Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty‑five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters. Some of these journalists’ relationships with the Agency were tacit; some were explicit. There was cooperation, accommodation and overlap. Journalists provided a full range of clandestine services—from simple intelligence gathering to serving as go‑betweens with spies in Communist countries. Reporters shared their notebooks with the CIA. Editors shared their staffs. Some of the journalists were Pulitzer Prize winners, distinguished reporters who considered themselves ambassadors without‑portfolio for their country. Most were less exalted: foreign correspondents who found that their association with the Agency helped their work; stringers and freelancers who were as interested in the derring‑do of the spy business as in filing articles; and, the smallest category, full‑time CIA employees masquerading as journalists abroad. In many instances, CIA documents show, journalists were engaged to perform tasks for the CIA with the consent of the managements of America’s leading news organizations."[1]
The long, well documented history of intelligence services mixing in with journalism is impossible to miss if you do any research at all.
> The other day when Cuba erupted in protests, numerous stories explained the riots, confidently, instantly, as demands for COVID vaccines.
This is more bullshit. The protest started on July 11th. Here are some headlines/bylines/opening paragraphs from that week:
(BBC 7/13) Cuba protests: Arrests after thousands rally against government: Dozens of people have been arrested in Cuba after thousands joined the biggest protests for decades against the island's Communist government, media and opposition sources say.[2]
(Reuters 7/11) Cuba sees biggest protests for decades as pandemic adds to woes -- Chanting "freedom" and calling for President Miguel Diaz-Canel to step down, thousands of Cubans joined street protests from Havana to Santiago on Sunday in the biggest anti-government demonstrations on the Communist-run island in decades.[3]
(WaPo 7/12) Cubans hold biggest anti-government protests in decades; Biden says U.S. stands with people -- Communist Cuba erupted in its largest-scale demonstrations in decades on Sunday as thousands of people chanting “freedom” and “yes, we can” took to the streets from Havana to Santiago de Cuba in a major new challenge to an authoritarian government struggling to cope with increasingly severe blackouts, food shortages and a spiking coronavirus outbreak.[4]
The only way you could arrive at the same conclusion is if you did not read any of the news from that week.
Take the author's advice, avoid bullshit. However, actual bullshit is usually essays like this, which are really opinion pieces that do not attempt to mention any facts at all. If your "alternative media" is nothing but opinion pieces that count other similarly prejudiced opinions as research, it's bullshit all the way down. Journalism has some bullshit mixed in, as does everything, but at least there's a chance you will walk away with some information.
[1] http://www.carlbernstein.com/magazine_cia_and_media.php
[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-57813704
[3] https://www.reuters.com/world/americas/street-protests-break...
[4] https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/07/11/cuba-protest...
Today it is in plain sight.
For example, leading one to take a vaccine that vastly decreases the risk of dying from a wildly infectious variant of a coronavirus.
Who needs that, right HN!?!
* mock kicks the pavement *
* takes a drag from a cigarette *
* nods my head to Nickelback's "How You Remind Me" *
Some neat anecdotes in there tho.
"The walls are closing in"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f1ab6uxg908
That's what the bullshit is. The almost identical media headlines and catch phrases everywhere. The 100s of identical bot tweets.
Now I just read Telegram channels and I see the enormous anti-lockdown protests taking place worldwide. There are literally hundreds of thousands of people in France right now protesting vaccine passports across the country and nobody has heard about it because of a hermetically sealed mainstream media blackout.
I come to Hacker News when I want to see what the propagandized classes who read whatever "news" app came with their phone are believing. Everyone here is pretty smart, you're just in Plato's cave looking at the shadows on the walls. The bottom line is, if you see that all your news sources are repeating each other, it may be time to diversify your news sources.
I've seen this reported numerous times by "mainstream media", here's a recent one:
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/protesters-france-denou...
If one news source reports "this is a sphere", and another reports "this is a sphere", and yet a third reports "this is a sphere", then you better go find and listen to the crackpot insisting it's a cube. Otherwise it's a sure sign you're in a bias bubble. There is no underlying truth about the shape of the thing, so any similarity in reports must have come from the reporters being hacks and bullshitters. Why yes, I am very smart and a free thinker. Let me tell you how you must be in Plato's cave for accepting the sphere-narrative instead of my preferred cube-narrative. I wonder why I am perceived as arrogant and tedious?
My post was the equivalent of "this is a sphere." Your reply is the equivalent of "this is a circle.". Thus, you are wrong. Why? Because math.
If you want to argue like this, I'll be here all day. :).
Btw, when you have two opposing viewpoints you are supposed to use your reasoning skills to determine truth, not apriori decide what is true as if it's an abstract math problem and stick your fingers in your ears so you don't hear any disturbing contradictions.
> then you better go find and listen to the crackpot insisting it's a cube
OP never implied this, this is a strawman intended to cheaply dismiss the point.
> I wonder why I am perceived as arrogant and tedious?
^ followed by a personal attack..