211–220 of 602 posts
"How many of your subscribers tuned in to Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN on U-verse, DirecTV, and AT&T TV for each of the four weeks preceding the November 3, 2020 elections and the January 6, 2021 attacks on the Capitol? Please specify the number of subscribers that tuned in to each channel ." Does this strike anyone else as a nakedly partisan move?
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Honestly, this isn't any more helpful than responding "citation needed" to someone asserting that man-made causes will accelerate climate change. The inevitability of the abuse of political power is not something that has to be debated over and over again in every thread.
>The inevitability of the abuse of political power is not something that has to be debated over and over again in every thread. I don't contest this, what I contest is the idea that there is comparable misinformation on both sides. rayiner has since updated his post with some examples that he thinks constitute misinformation by news sources themselves, but before the only example given was the tweets from the Washing…
I don't see that we need to even consider the question of parity. Saying that one side or another is worse, and therefore requires special attention, is wrong: it's false that only the worst offender should be policed.
All sides should be subject to the same rules, whether they're doing it a lot or just a little. My personal philosophy is that for all sides, the remedy is to encourage more information to shine light on the falsehoods, rather than trying to gag any ideas.
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"The People" believe whatever information has been promoted the most. To claim that we should do nothing to stop malevolent organizations from radicalizing vulnerable citizens is reckless. To lay the blame on individuals to fight this is victim-blaming. We need to battle this industrialized con artistry with whatever power we have - including police, courts, and laws. Throwing up our hands because "censorship bad!" i…
Exactly, the current strain of Conservative "thought" is to attack all forms of authority in order to muddle the truth and introduce doubt that any subject is knowable or provable. Allowing misinformation to spread serves that goal nicely and all they have to do is sit back and do nothing. Their entire goal is to create a society where their gut opinions are just as good as knowledge from experts, because experts hur…
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The New York Times is a corporation with a government-granted charter that grants it things like limited liability. It's fallacious to characterize it as just some ad-hoc "group" of individuals joining together to individually exercise their rights. And yes, I agree that we don't actually have a free press. Given our microkernel government, institutions like the New York Times are better seen as part of the de facto…
> It's fallacious to characterize it as just some ad-hoc "group" of individuals joining together to individually exercise their rights. Nobody is arguing that the New York Times is some ad-hoc group of individuals; it certainly has its structure. The argument is that the same principles that afford an ad-hoc group of individuals the freedom of association (and expression) is what also affords a structured corporation…
The Chinese room argument says otherwise, and it behooves us as homo sapiens to pay attention. How many individual reporters at the NYT wanted to give support the Iraq war? And yet that's what the entity itself ended up doing, using their contributions.
> Supreme Court has an established track record of aggressively protecting the rights of the organized press
You totally ignored my argument. The point is that most of what constitutes de facto government in the US is actually outside of what we call "the government", and resides in corporations. Hence pointing to Equifax, which explicitly promulgates constraints on our individual behavior, and yet has escaped all sort of democratic accountability.
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Democrats were proponents of free speech when Republicans controlled the media, culture, and institutions. Increasingly, the media, culture, and institutions are controlled by progressive Democrats (and I think there is a growing schism between liberals and progressives on this front), and traditional liberal ideas of the free exchange of information have no more value.
Which is exactly why no matter where you land politically, you should be 100% in favor of fighting for free speech for yourself and the other side.
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Important to remember that corporations, like all groups, have no mouths, no hands, and cannot act. All corporate actions, all corporate speech, is carried out by individual humans. Group rights are individual human rights, as groups have no brain and cannot act.
Except that there is a distinction between an individual performing an action of their own volition, and an individual performing an action to obtain income. The first represents the true will of the individual, while the latter only requires their desire to have a roof over their head. And as I said, the entity of the NYT is afforded protections that individuals are not. If individual rights are supremely important…
Tucker Carlson doesn't go on air and say the things he says because he's forced to, he does it because he wants to.
Full disclosure: my wife works for the New York Times.
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It is, but I'm not certain the courts will interpret it the same way when applied to a large media corporation making many statements over a long period of time. Like rayiner said, the courts have been protective of media corporation's free speech, but those were cases involving defamation or intentional infliction of emotional distress, not an insurrection with the intent to detain and possibly murder elected offici…
Both of those cases were unanimous decisions upholding free speech. Moreover, they were civil, not criminal cases.
Judging what is and is not misinformation must always be in the hands of the people. Never the hands of authorities whether those be government or corporate. Why must fight all censorship. Because once you allow "a thing" to be censored, it becomes possible to censor "any thing". Things in the past which were labeled misinformation and would have been suppressed for even longer (or forever) under current social attit…
Solution is real simple: share your data, cite your sources, sign your name.
Without provenance, accountability, transparency, it doesn't matter who is judging.
Is anyone finding this terrifying? When did democrafts, the party I vote for, become the people calling for tight censorship in every sector? Weren't the last people to make this move (more more ineffectively, thankfully) the Christian right? Is there something we can do to stand up for speech?
If you're convinced fascism has arrived in America, you'll excuse any means necessary to topple the dictator and to prevent a reoccurrence. The issue is in doing so, they've become the tyrannical force they propose to oppose. “Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes…