The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free • Hacker News Board

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#211

Post by busterarm » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 2:50 PM UTC

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #205

jhardy54 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're in for a surprise when you discover Fox News.

If you're talking about people like Chris Wallace, then I agree with your point. People like him are very much an example of The Cathedral but on the conservative side. Even stuff like The Five is pretty middle brow and establishmentarian but they aren't the vanguards of mainstream conservatism like Maddow and Joy Reid and others are for mainstream liberalism. Steve Bannon and his movement are more representative of…

If Maddow is the vanguard of mainstream liberalism, why are her ratings so terrible?

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#212

Post by shadowgovt » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

schemy wrote: post #196

shadowgovt wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are biased, but if the facts are accurate, that's irrelevant. A trustworthy organization doing fact checking on one side of the aisle while ignoring inaccuracies from the other side is preferable to no fact-checking at all. Question is: where is Republican Snopes? It's a free information market; why is nobody doing it?

>They are biased, but if the facts are accurate, that's irrelevant. Not really: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2009/aug/20/bernie-san... >The OECD's numbers tell a similar story. In 2007, the OECD said that the United States spent $7,290 per capita on health care, ranking it first among the 30 countries studied. Five other nations spent more than $3,645 per capita, the point at which the United States no longe…

If the facts are not accurate, that's relevant.

On average, are the facts accurate?

Also, 1.65 isn't double. I'm not quite sure what you're saying here.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#213

Post by javajosh » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 2:53 PM UTC

andrewtbham wrote: post #173

> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test" They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp t…

It's a mistake to judge an organization on one, or even a handful of incidents. There should be a pattern of inaccuracy and bias before you "cancel" a news source.

This is one of the unsung problems of the modern world, the growing impossibility of keeping an accurate "reputation" in your brain. Virtually everyone and everything has been accused of being evil, in general, or specifically. It's no longer good enough to just "have good feelings" about a name, because I guarantee you've read something about every name that is negative. Mere accusation is trivial to make, and society has somehow gotten away from swift and harsh punishment against baseless accusation. Without that (very useful) habit, the heuristic of equating reputation with number of accusations is meaningless, and yet we all still do it.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#214

Post by googthrowaway42 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

dragonwriter wrote: post #208

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making that way (i.e. via institutional consensus). At the end of the day unless you were personally there to witness something or can prove something mathematically or do the science yourself, you are ultimately dependent on some network of trust to inform you of the truth or falsity of something. And even then "true" and "f…

> There is no Republican Snopes because conservatives, since the Enlightenment, don't do sense making that way (i.e. via institutional consensus). Conservatives have always done sense making via institutional consensus, even moreso than post-enlightenment liberals, though the institutions that they tend to appeal to are those explicitly devoted to their ideological world view (whether it's the organs of a particular…

> objectives facts (what is) rather than ideology (what should be)

What is a "fact" or what is "true" is dependent on your values (aka your ideology). This is one of Nietzsche's main contributions to philosophy.

There are things like mathematical and logical truth and really basic physical assertions (e.g. the sky is blue) but those are qualitatively different than what we're talking about.

Both normative and positive statements about the world of human affairs are ultimately dependent on ideology and that might explain to you why you perceive conservatives as focusing on arguments over ideology. That is what people should be arguing over since from that all else flows. When people don't share substantially similar values even language itself becomes useless as a means of communication because the words themselves mean different things.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#215

Post by OrangeMango » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 2:58 PM UTC

dj_mc_merlin wrote: post #174

luckylion wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

1) There are protestors 2) They are doing things 3) "Protestors are doing things" is a lie because they might not "actually" be part of the protestors but instead be false-flag undercover agents? That's wild. You can't have a functioning press under those assumptions, because you don't know for absolute certain that everything is the way it looks. Donald Trump might be a long-term agent of the Democratic Party aiming…

There is a long, long history of false-flag operations undertaken during protests. Some caution is advised when deciding whether any one action is taken by genuine protesters, especially when it's as comically "unpatriotic" as burning the bible and flag.

For example (maybe - nobody will ever know):

> The Haymarket affair (also known as the Haymarket massacre, Haymarket riot, or Haymarket Square riot) was the aftermath of a bombing that took place at a labor demonstration on May 4, 1886, at Haymarket Square in Chicago. It began as a peaceful rally in support of workers striking for an eight-hour work day, the day after police killed one and injured several workers. An unknown person threw a dynamite bomb at the police as they acted to disperse the meeting, and the bomb blast and ensuing gunfire resulted in the deaths of seven police officers and at least four civilians; dozens of others were wounded.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haymarket_affair

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#216

Post by googthrowaway42 » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #211

googthrowaway42 wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're talking about people like Chris Wallace, then I agree with your point. People like him are very much an example of The Cathedral but on the conservative side. Even stuff like The Five is pretty middle brow and establishmentarian but they aren't the vanguards of mainstream conservatism like Maddow and Joy Reid and others are for mainstream liberalism. Steve Bannon and his movement are more representative of…

If Maddow is the vanguard of mainstream liberalism, why are her ratings so terrible?

Probably because the Cathedral of mainstream liberalism has been mortally wounded over the past decade. That has rapidly accelerated as of late and you're seeing the last dying breaths with the rise of populism on the left and right. Maddow used to have much higher ratings. AOC for example is not part of mainstream liberalism. She is at the vanguard of mainstream popular leftism.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#217

Post by stjohnswarts » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 2:59 PM UTC

andrewtbham wrote: post #173

> it is not that the facts it reports tend to be inaccurate yes it is. I really lost faith in nyt when they ran article about running out of running out of charge in a Tesla. When they were caught red handed lying they still wouldn't admit to it. Their response was: "Problems With Precision and Judgment, but Not Integrity, in Tesla Test" They just don't get it. People are sick of their BS and they need to just comp t…

Meh that was years ago. Things ebb and flow, but what got me recently was their uptake of cancel culture. They're even throwing out editors because their reporters and others there have glommed on to the idea that non-progressive -opinions- are not welcome. I am a progressive but I do not buy into this the shame-shame-shame bell attitude that has taken the internet by storm. Vanguarded by twitter.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#218

Post by smolder » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

makomk wrote: post #13

I think a more accurate description is that the elite narrative is paywalled but the one for the proles is free - and the elite are absolutely convinced their narrative is the truth. The contents of, say, New York Times or Washington Post reporting on the state of US Covid-19 testing and contact tracing and how it compares to the rest of the world, the evidence on mask wearing, or anything to do with Trump or protest…

How does it matter at all whether we're testing more than South Korea now? They did test far more at the onset of the crisis and have effectively contained the spread. We have dramatically more cases and a greater need for testing now than they do. Why would you get hung up on current testing rates when comparing the US to S. Korea? It is beside the point of who responded better. (Which they almost certainly did.)

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#219

Post by vharuck » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

vorpalhex wrote: post #144

imustbeevil wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The government, scientists, experts in various fields, people who have proven to tell the truth in the past, etc. You obviously still have your own ability to determine what fits your model of the universe and what doesn't. These are just groups of people more likely to have access to information that you might not. You don't have to trust anyone, but in a system where someone has to judge what is true, these groups…

Often times the truth is not popular, even amongst those who should be protecting it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scopes_Trial

Far more often, the truth is "popular" but boring. Not every nay-sayer is Galileo.

Re: The Truth Is Paywalled but the Lies Are Free

#220

Post by eli_gottlieb » Mon, Aug 03, 2020, 3:00 PM UTC

busterarm wrote: post #206

arp242 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's 7 years ago? I don't know anything about that entire story so I can't comment specifically, but the NYT publishes about 150 articles a day, so there are bound to be some stinkers over the years. It's not great, but dismissing an entire publication over it doesn't strike me as fair.

The NYT used to have industry-leading editorial standards. Just a week or two ago in their reporting on the UFO story, they initially reported it in a "ZOMG ALIENS ARE REAL!" way, which is the most clickbaity thing they could have done...and then silently published a correction after they got the bump in views. The NYT is practically indistinguishable from (modern) BuzzFeed.

Seconding this. I actually pay for the Times out of sheer nostalgia for its being my hometown paper, but when they're publishing Very Serious Stories on the press-release UFO crap the government was trying to distract people with, they're doing a just plain bad job of journalism.