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The Bullshit

walterkirn.substack.com

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Re: The Bullshit

#121

Post by jollybean »

MisterBastahrd wrote: post #10

These recent substack articles which have been posted to HN are interesting. Not because the people who write the articles are intelligent and serious thinkers, because if they are, they definitely aren't showing it via their prose. 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 t…

Lack of editing doesn't make the output garbage, just a little more difficult to read, and sometimes with a little too much personal 'English' on the ball.

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.

Re: The Bullshit

#122

Post by bryanrasmussen »

I remember reading a biography of Aleister Crowley (the guy was boring), in which was put forward the theory that reading the news was a waste of time because:

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.

Re: The Bullshit

#123

Post by cpu_qwerty »

a_puppy wrote: post #113

This essay has a grain of truth, but then he stretches it way too far. 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 biase…

> The news typically gets the literal basic facts right, but they tend to distort and omit facts to fit their narrative. > 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.

Without clarity as to what constitutes literal basic facts vs facts that are distorted, this is just more plain bullshit.

Re: The Bullshit

#124

Post by smellsinore »

donkeybeer wrote: post #112
jollybean wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Edit: I'm sorry for the lengthy post, but I felt giving rough examples was necessary to convey the point. 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 tak…

Why is this downvoted? "Official" news may not be perfect but it is without doubt that most alternatives are way worse.

Probably because the reference to Q

Their biggest line was "nothing can stop what is comming" and sure enough the biggest thing to ever happen happened, Covid.

Re: The Bullshit

#125

Post by Animats »

The trouble with news today is that the ratio of publicity and punditry to data collected in the field is too high.

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

Re: The Bullshit

#126

Post by cpu_qwerty »

LQexplanation wrote: post #53
peytn wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this guy must have something to say with haters like these.

A guy standing in the middle of busy road and screaming that pigeons are spying him, has probably a lot of haters and not much to say. Let's judge people by their creations, not by the hate.

How about judging the essence of an argument instead of just talking about prose and going on an irrelevant tangent about "recent articles on HN"?

Re: The Bullshit

#127

Post by sellyme »

mistermann wrote: post #118
MagicWishMonkey wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths. Pretty standard alt-right nutjob. Substack is swarming with them…

There is no "was totally real" in there. 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.

Here's the quote with a tiny bit more context:

> 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.

Re: The Bullshit

#128

Post by jollybean »

smellsinore wrote: post #124
donkeybeer wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is this downvoted? "Official" news may not be perfect but it is without doubt that most alternatives are way worse.

Probably because the reference to Q Their biggest line was "nothing can stop what is comming" and sure enough the biggest thing to ever happen happened, Covid.

Am I to read your comment correctly as if to indicate that you are seriously validating the legitimacy of QAnon given their ostensible 'prediction' of COVID?

Re: The Bullshit

#129

Post by croo »

zug_zug wrote: post #89

In my opinion this is entirely unreadable. Not for what it has to say, but how it says it. 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…

Part of the excellent article was about how death puts a lot of things into new perspective. Like how useless it often is to take every point from a piece and double check the reasonableness and the implications of or to build an objectively more accurate picture of reality.

Re: The Bullshit

#130

Post by cpu_qwerty »

sellyme wrote: post #66
mistermann wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this from the article?

I'm assuming it's a satire in response to the following line, which claims that banned Facebook pages are "the anti-bullshit universe": > 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 ineffab…

> and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.

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?

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