I think it’s science/math/engineering “smart” people in particular were being ultra logic based can take you to some weird places if garbage gets in there. Don’t mean logic colloquially, mean a person who thinks in terms of “if X then Y…” and can do some brilliant things in their field with that skill. But get a bad X in there and things can go haywire. And it can happen to “smart” people because we all have to make educated guesses at variables in our thinking.
1 Like
Facebook is kerosene on an already burning fire. We had this shit figured out with television like 70 years ago, it is completely unacceptable to have unregulated derp.
1 Like
shit needs regulators obviously, but there’s just no way anyone had even radio, not to mention television or papers, figured out 70 years ago.
He’s talking about the Fairness Doctrine and maybe elite control of the MSM.
I’ve dealt with my brothers deplorableness for a long time. Mostly because he knows to keep it to himself. But being antivax…it’s hard not to get more fucking infuriating by being antivax every day. Parents 50th anniversary is in a month, and they aren’t pleased about it either (and dad is a right winger, but has at least got his shots)
I was talking to his teenage son the other day. We have a regular vacation spot and its fucking obvious sea level has been rising on the beach we like to swim at. His reaction was oh there is some article that explains it I saw. I basically said fuck it there is the proof of climate change but fuck it, have you gotten your shot. SIlence. You know its fucking right to get your shot. Silence.
Fuck it all.
(some vulgarities added with my frustration)
3 Likes
I thought John Nash had real psychological issues
1 Like
It’s fairly unlikely you can tell this. Rate of sea level rise has been an inch every 8 years or so.
3 Likes
Well maybe I’ll give my nephew credit that there is an explanation why our specific area is much more higher than normal (but I never saw it). But it has been fucking clear lake level has been rising (maybe this is just Michigan fuckery)
It’s Michigan fuckery. The lakes have been above average lately, though trending down. Considering you called it a “sea level”, Chris’s confusion was understandable.
1 Like
fairness doctrine never really worked. it was just orgs following norms until those eroded. not sure what you mean about elite control of MSM, but that was almost always the case, with the possible footnote that in WW periods a lot of news was censored. but even things we consider a new phenomenon like fake news isn’t a uniquely 21 century thing, first half of 20 century was basically newspapers disseminating made up propaganda for pennies on the street, and the later half was governments creating news stories to justify already decided and enacted policy.
What I mean by elite control is that news was controlled by people devoted to centrism and accuracy rather than people pushing agendas on niche outlets and social media. I meant more the 2nd half of the 20th.
What happens when centrism and accuracy are incompatible?
2 Likes
i’ll give you the devotion to centrism, but accuracy wasn’t a staple of late 20th century journalism. e.g. vietnam and the vietnam papers, aids epidemic coverage, the entire reagan administration, in fact multiple coverups and scandals and coverage of coverups and scandals by every administration from nixon (probably even before him, i just don’t know enough examples) to bush ii.
2 Likes
I mean Manufacturing Consent came out in the 80s and was pulling examples from 60s era Vietnam coverage. Kronkite and the gang weren’t more truthful than today’s media, they were just more respectable.
1 Like
The whole reason you know the bad parts of those things is the MSM priority on accuracy. Assange didn’t publish the Pentagon Papers, the NYT did.
Supporting the Vietnam War was the centrist position for a long time.
pentagon papers revealed over a decade of government lying and if you reflected on that decade of reporting, you could conclude that “MSM” media was certainly not digging deep enough, or perhaps was complicit with the government in stories it published.
centrist or even public opinion on vietnam, just like centrist and public opinion on iraq, was orthogonal on whether invasion was justified. like, in both situations, the country would definitely be helped if a minority had enough political power to block going to war, even if the masses demanded it. that’s a poor excuse obviously but i think it’s a mistake to hold up a different era as having been significantly different or better than right now. similarly, just like most posters here believe it’s dumb to pursue bipartisanship, because it’s obvious the gop are headed for one party rule. but in reality, it’s only selective memory that describes any late 20th century decade as a true bipartisan era, because we now know the culture war on women/minorities/gays was already in full swing.
First rule of arguing politics is to call the other person or their sources biased. If you don’t do that before the other person you automatically lose the argument.
Every source is biased and it’s silly to pretend otherwise. I’d prefer if they’d just be open about their biases.
The issue is that “mainstream media”, whatever that means, had convinced people for decades that they didn’t have any bias. A lot of that was tied to the idea that centrism is inherently unbiased, rather than just one specific type of bias. Also the idea that repeating something an official government source (police, military, intelligence, state dept, various executive agencies) is inherently unbiased, when in reality it’s simply legitimizing the deeply ingrained biases those sources have.
2 Likes
These two things are very different. The first tends to extremism. Uncontrolled newspaper and radio gave us the rise of Hitler Lenin and Mussolini. The latter is about maintaining the status quo capitalist power structures and elites.
Same thing played out when the printing press was new media. Gave us the wars of religion and all those nutty religious extremists, before states got got it under control.
Playing out again a third time with social media. Its a race between the extremists spinning things out of control and the current elites finding ways to control it.