The Bullshit • Hacker News Board

Re: The Bullshit

#191

Post by Chris2048 » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

IIAOPSW wrote: post #146

narrator wrote: post #119

I think one of my favorite cases of bullshit was the 2 years spent investigating Trump for Russian collusion, and nothing happened despite "Anonymous sources say..." stories every week in the New York Times. The hilarious thing about watching this is is the seemingly coordinated narrative everywhere with everyone using the same phrase like they all are just repeating "the truth" from some central source where they wr…

>The bottom line is, if you see that all your news sources are repeating each other, it may be time to diversify your news sources. If one news source reports "this is a sphere", and another reports "this is a sphere", and yet a third reports "this is a sphere", then you better go find and listen to the crackpot insisting it's a cube. Otherwise it's a sure sign you're in a bias bubble. There is no underlying truth ab…

OP specifies repetition of phrasing, not just the facts themselves, implying some degree of "coaching"/collusion or a common source (i.e. non-independence).

> then you better go find and listen to the crackpot insisting it's a cube

OP never implied this, this is a strawman intended to cheaply dismiss the point.

> I wonder why I am perceived as arrogant and tedious?

^ followed by a personal attack..

Re: The Bullshit

#192

Post by Chris2048 » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 2:58 PM UTC

MagicWishMonkey wrote: post #170

Chris2048 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

and how are conspiracy stories about Russia any more/less reasonable than conspiracy stories about deep (US) gov?

Is it really a conspiracy if US intelligence agencies say Russia has been stirring up shit? The way right wingers bend over backwards to pretend that Russia doesn't have a long history of this sort of thing never ceases to amaze me.

> to pretend that Russia

I didn't pretend anything, I compared two things.

The US intelligence agencies don't themselves have a clean record: COINTELPRO, PRISM, CIA spying on the Senate intelligence committee (then lying about it).

Each of those counts as a conspiracy, and it's of note that people like Edward Snowden have been hunted and chased out of the country (and people like Julian Assange similarly persecuted).

Re: The Bullshit

#193

Post by rcxdude » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

6tZAfJuXT2LL wrote: post #145

narrator wrote: post #119

I think one of my favorite cases of bullshit was the 2 years spent investigating Trump for Russian collusion, and nothing happened despite "Anonymous sources say..." stories every week in the New York Times. The hilarious thing about watching this is is the seemingly coordinated narrative everywhere with everyone using the same phrase like they all are just repeating "the truth" from some central source where they wr…

> hermetically sealed mainstream media blackout. I've seen this reported numerous times by "mainstream media", here's a recent one: https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/protesters-france-denou...

"The mainstream media aren't reporting this" is basically always false. It just makes the story more enticing to contrarians (who don't read the mainstream media anyway and aren't likely to check).

Re: The Bullshit

#194

Post by majewsky » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 3:22 PM UTC

coldtea wrote: post #150

maigret wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Europe they have a good market share, easily double digit.

Huh? Who in Europe listens to NPR?

They were presumably not referring to NPR specifically, but to public-service broadcasters in general, like ARD and ZDF in Germany, BBC in Britain, ORF in Austria, RAI in Italy, and so on.

Re: The Bullshit

#195

Post by ryandrake » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 3:22 PM UTC

Chris2048 wrote: post #176

MagicWishMonkey wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the cops died of injuries sustained on site, lets stop pretending this wasn't a violent confrontation. There were plenty of serious injuries. Does this look like a peaceful protest, to you? https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=XajBh9oTdqI&feat...

let's not move the goalposts, we aren't arguing whether this was a "peaceful protest", we are arguing whether it was an insurrection aka a violent attempted takeover. If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong. > One of the cops died of injuries sustained on site No sources for this, so I'll assume you're referring to Officer Brian D. Sickni…

> If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong.

You are trying to use body count to measure the seriousness of an attempt to take over the government? It’s starting to look like the Taliban took over Kabul with less violence than what happened in the US Capitol.

Re: The Bullshit

#196

Post by majewsky » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 3:26 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #153

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that's how the far right operates. 1. Use narrative engineering to persuade angry, frightened, gullible people to tune in and self-select. 2. Use narrative reinforcement to make them angrier and more frightened. 3. Wind them up and point them at a target. 4. Profit politically, and possibly also financially. It doesn't matter what the narrative is. As long as it has an outgroup that can be accused of doing terrib…

Why only the far right? Isn't this what everyone does now? Is there actually a "pure" movement or source that doesn't engage in this kind of Bullshit?

The comment you're replying to responds to that in the second half, starting at "It's no different to how official propaganda works."

Re: The Bullshit

#197

Post by kazinator » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

> 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 ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping.

This is just ranting.

News isn't fundamentally that different from what it was, fifteen, thirty years ago. The difference is that its audiences are far less captive. Attention is scarce. In order to captivate Attention now, you have to "sell" it what it wants, and what a good chunk of Attention wants is to read bullshit that confirms the views of the bubble that it inhabits. You need tricks like clickbaity headlines and whatnot.

The unfettered alternatives that spew raw misinformation are not better, though.

Arguably, having to compete with all that for attention is what drags down news.

The news has always been controlled by someone. It has always had owners, and ran on advertising money.

In the pre-internet past, the news, in a manner of speaking, competed for attention with tabloids. But tabloids were obviously in a separate category. If someone started a sentence with "I read in the Enquirer that ...", you could laugh them off as a twit.

Re: The Bullshit

#198

Post by MagicWishMonkey » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

Chris2048 wrote: post #190

MagicWishMonkey wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linking to Greenwald really isn't helping your case...

I disagree. Do you identify any mis-information article? Otherwise I don't share your distain. EDIT: this is an ad-hom. Please respond to the point - I also linked to WP as evidence that your claim is shaky. Refusing to do so because I linked to a journalist you dislike is pure tribalism.

I'm not going to read anything written by Greenwald, he's completely gone off the deep end. He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage about the Biden rape accusation unless he could provide some sort of proof - he concluded that being asked to show proof of what he was accusing someone of counted as "being censored".

Anyway, I'll say that just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace. Even if his death was completely unrelated, it doesn't make Jan 6 any less of an insurrection.

Re: The Bullshit

#199

Post by cyberge99 » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 3:56 PM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #57

roenxi wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In response to something you didn't actually say - news is a classic example of when a free market may be bad, but all the alternatives people tried were much worse! And on what you did say - total agreement. The news has always been terrible. The internet has brought the cost of broadcasting so low actual honest or expert opinions and can make it out as well as the orthodoxies of people who can afford media companie…

We have unrealistic expectations of news publishing. Modern TV and movies has made certain professions far more glamourous than they are (journalists, police, doctors) because it makes for good media. But most doctors are not ER doctors. Most journalists are not breaking news. Most police never fire their service weapon. But to somehow think the moral distributions of people are superior from the average population,…

This was largely due to the repeal of The Fairness Doctrine (USA).

Re: The Bullshit

#200

Post by Abishek_Muthian » Mon, Aug 16, 2021, 5:45 PM UTC

tomnipotent wrote: post #6

> but it isn’t the news and it hasn’t been for ages. I have a better idea. The news has always been shit. There's this weird fetish with "freedom of the press" that distorts the fact that news is still a business, run by free market forces, with the same distributions of incompetence and corruption as any free market. It used to be the "nightly news", but we now have a 24/7 always-on consumption culture and news orgs…

The author starts by comparing the news from newspaper/magazine to modern online news to call it shit and I agree.

In spite of being a business I feel printed newspapers at large struck to a code of ethics and used that "freedom of the press" judiciously.

In India Newspapers played a crucial role in organizing against colonial rule, Many freedom fighters were themselves a publishers/editos of such newspapers. At the later part of the freedom struggle such newspapers came under heavy attack, editors jailed and unspoken horrors imposed upon them.

Even today printed news papers which survived from those era does have better quality of writing than online content(even from the same news media) due to some resemblance of their editorial practices.

But all those printed newspapers are on the verge of bankruptcy or already dead. Their online counterpart is now only concerned with how many articles can be published/hour, There's not even proof reading because of this as they have to please Google, Facebook, Apple for those screen time.