521–530 of 964 posts
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> make money [...] by building a huge social media following being a political outrage merchant. I think you have summarised both the nature of the US "information economy" and the state of political discourse in the US.
When you want to know why Fox News does anything it does, just take a look at it's marketshare [1]. That's why. [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/373814/cable-news-networ...
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About half of my Jewish friends celebrate Christmas. And my one Muslim friend (that immigrated from a Muslim majority country) celebrates it too. He also has gotten into the habit of saying "god bless" because I guess they say that a lot in Georgia?
I mean, Muslims believe in God too.
Anyway, Americanized Muslims tend to be quite "moderate", that is, they are either apostates or firmly on the path to becoming apostates. I don't know if this follows from selective immigration or from social pressure to assimilate into the liberal civic religion, but it is so. So it's not surprising that they would embrace the secularized counterfeit that many Americans already celebrate, just as they probably end up watching the high feast known as the Superbowl and joining into the national prostration before the Almighty Game.
I don't understand this fetishism with centrism and all opinions being treated equally, and that having made up your mind on an issue is necessarily wrong. When it comes to an issue like, say, climate change, I spent years reading the blogosphere, reading blogs like WUWT and whatever Judith Curry would come up with, and then the rebuttals, sometimes waiting years for the science to come out. For any issue around clim…
People that follow the ideology of echo-chambering that you're proposing is exactly what we don't need at this time. Labeling centrists with condescendence of fetishism is uncalled for. I suggest RTFA.
The press is doing a poor job of omitting facts (which is different from lying) because they don't echo back in their chambers. People that follow your proposal would be illinformed of the facts that are omitted.
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I mean, sure, but why are we talking about Fox specifically? CNN, MSNBC, etc. are just as bad. I find this ironic since this thread is about how bias isn't necessarily about outright falsehoods, but story selection and what is not said :)
Jonathan Haidt (who is mentioned in the article) did a study years ago. He separated a group of people into conservatives and liberals and then gave them a questionnaire on politics. Then he got a second group, separated them, and gave them the same questionnaire. Only he asked the second group of liberals and conservatives to answer the questionnaire the way they imagined the other side would. What he found was that…
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...
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fascist turn of the Republican party This is just projection from the Left that is working so hard to cancel anyone who steps politically out of line. They think that calling a group "Antifa" makes it anti-fascist, despite their tactics of violently terrorizing anyone with whom they politically disagree - even to the extent of their attacking journalists who simply document their activities. But somehow Republicans a…
> This is just projection from the Left that is working so hard to cancel anyone who steps politically out of line. To be clear, the leader of the conservative party of the US recently attempted a coup.
Further, the Democrats were urging violence throughout Trump's presidency, but the default US media never claimed that they were "attempting a coup". Democrats were attacking federal buildings with fireworks, arson, shooting high-powered lasers into the eyes of the police, and on and on. But those were "mostly peaceful protests".
https://thefederalist.com/2021/01/08/10-times-democrats-urge...
This is really why we can't have nice things.
Claims that 1/6 was an attempted coup are just so far beyond the pale of honest discourse.
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No need for the hypothetical — that happens regularly, and people on the left criticize them for it. They just don't often describe it as "censorship". Also, to add a bit of context: the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively far-right demagoguery. https://twitter.com/FacebooksTop10
that happens regularly It happens in a token way in infrequent and extreme circumstances. But there's nothing even remotely comparable to the fact that Donald Trump was banned from Facebook and Twitter, that numerous internet powers worked together to shut down Parler, that the NY Post was locked out of Twitter for reporting on Hunter Biden's laptop, etc. the top performing posts on Facebook are almost exclusively fa…
I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across. In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not…
Those are the sources you tried to balance with? Every one of those is a fringe hard-leaning source, except maybe Wapo which can't be trusted because it's owned by Bezos. You need to seek more moderate sources to begin with.
I tried this experiment: read nytimes, wapo, fox, national review and politico. I wanted to get different perspectives. However, I encountered a bunch of issues: They dont talk about or even cover the same things, which makes it hard to compare liberal vs conservative perspectives. This is the most common form of bias I've come across. In the rare case they do cover the same thing, many articles either simply do not…
Something else to keep in mind is that liberal/conservative is a false dichotomy. We have at least four major cultures in the USA - some scholars put it as high as eleven - and they each have differing core values. This accounts for much of the infighting we see in political parties and the various factions that arise. I'm not so much a progressive Democrat as I am a member of "Yankeedom," as Colin Woodard dubs it.
Related, I really really enjoyed George Packer's "The Four Americas" article from a few days ago: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/george-...
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Attacking the center is always the craziest narrative to me. It's saying: not only is it not okay to disagree with me and be on the other side, it's also not okay to not passionately agree with my exact side. The only right way to view these complex issues is to sign your name to join my party and then hold the party line, and everything else is unethical. I can't imagine a more obnoxious political viewpoint than tha…
I think perhaps the reason enlightened centrism gets its reputation is because there is no well-formed critique. There is a vague reference to the awfulness of both sides, it's never really described in depth or weighed, and then you end with the blithe "and that's why i'm a centrist." Even in this comment, both sides are terrifying cesspools, maybe - so what are the concrete things that you are afraid of if each of…