The Race to Weaponize Empathy

https://medium.com/@johnrobb/the-race-to-weaponize-empathy-5...

> Notice how the factual content remains unchanged.

I know that I am nitpicking and I am not a logician at all, but the factual content in these usages seems to me to be different when they are interpreted not just as formal propositions, but sentences made in a human context. To be "righteously indignant" has connotations that one is indignant about an important matter, whereas "making a fuss over nothing" implies that the matter is not very important. There is a significant difference in how important the matter is between these usages.

For e.g., one can differ on the matter of drawing cartoons of a religious figure. You can either be "righteously indignant" or "make a fuss over nothing" about it. These two have different factual content because they convey different claims about the severity of the matter.

No, the foodfight started when two things happened. Liberal pundits began blowing fake news' impact out of proportion and suggesting that it swung the election. They also began casting it as a characteristically conservative problem and put legitimate right-wing news outlets like Breitbart on lists of fake news sites. We right-wingers then began using the term tongue-in-cheek and people got all worked up thinking it was some kind of propaganda technique. It's just lighthearted needling/trolling.

Remember that right before "election hacking" became the only election topic discussed among Clinton supporters, it was "fake news".

I find it depressing how partisan and tabloidy Breitbart is, and I'm therefore unsurprised that people like Ben Shapiro have denounced it.

However, Breitbart presents an alternative to the mainstream media, which has developed such a pervasive bias that it no longer understands what fair reporting is.

The conservative community realized the depth of this problem in cases like the Kermit Gosnell trial, where the entire media ignores the topic and Fox, basically the only A-list conservative media outlet at this point, miss it too because it's simply under the radar. The mainstream media outlets rely so much on the AP and one another that you need a source that is fundamentally independent in determining what they find notable. So if I want news on immigration, abortion, or guns that isn't pandering garbage, Breitbart offers a better alternative.

Here's an example that stuck with me. A couple months ago, the NYT had an article called "The Week In Hate" prominently listed on the front page of its website. It was a short list of hate incidents, including a high schooler sending a Snapchat with a racial epithet in it, and someone writing "black bitch" in the snow on a black woman's car. The front page of the NYT. The same people who didn't write a word on a man who murdered an estimated hundreds of infants by snipping their spinal cords because it was "local news". The world has gone insane, and although Breitbart is insane too, it might be the kind of insanity we need.

In response to your last sentence: "serious" or "sensible" conservative thinking usually just means neutered conservative thinking. The current conservative revival is partially a backlash to the left's perceived entitlement to define acceptable right-wing thought.