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Except people are often being fired for quoting Charlie Kirk verbatim . The First Amendment doesn't apply to only citizens.
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The problem with this statement is that your Chinese friend comes from a place where every information source allowed by the government can be safely assumed to be propaganda, by definition. That's how their system works. Not so in the west.
This extreme naivete is exactly what the parent comment's story is addressing.
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Except people are often being fired for quoting Charlie Kirk verbatim . The First Amendment doesn't apply to only citizens.
Is that supposed to be a problem or a counter point or something? It doesn't matter what ideological whims someone is espousing, people who hold discretionary authority backed by government violence ought to keep it in their pants.
That applies to violating the out-of-classroom First Amendment rights of publicly employed teachers by their publicly employed management at the urging of the federal government, too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_v._Des_Moines_Independe...
"The Court famously opined, 'It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.'"
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This is true in a _well functioning democratic government_ - by design: as long as there are differences, a single actor cannot take over. Understanding that the media is owned by powerful people, and people have agendas, is a key point to media literacy that should be taught at schools. It doesn't mean media should be ignored, nor that they always aim to manipulate (with some exceptions). It's, again, healthy if you…
>a single actor cannot take over. This is a distinction without a difference. People can screech about "we're a democracy, we don't have a king" all they want but if the overwhelming amount of discretionary authority in the system is held by a fairly small group of people cut from approximately the same cloth it doesn't really matter, they're all gonna decide things the same ways and the results are gonna be just as…
> It doesn't matter if you have a thousand people working to appease the ideological whims of one absolute ruler or a thousand people with the same set of ideological whims, it's still one set of ideological whims being worked towards.
that's exactly the point - there's a third option.
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This is true in a _well functioning democratic government_ - by design: as long as there are differences, a single actor cannot take over. Understanding that the media is owned by powerful people, and people have agendas, is a key point to media literacy that should be taught at schools. It doesn't mean media should be ignored, nor that they always aim to manipulate (with some exceptions). It's, again, healthy if you…
Lack of critical thinking is a bit of a worldwide schooling system failure. Underfunding on one hand and not having an education plan for people to develop those skills leads to what we have. Some are lucky to get those skills from home or from top tier schools. I imagine that this state of things was somewhat beneficial for the ruling elites but Russia is now showing the whole western world, that dumb population is…
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I wouldn’t say the NYT article falls apart it is just less sensationalistic. Very likely as this substack article suggests that these SIM farms do knock out SMS from time to time because they DDoS the tower. So that part is correct. Nation state ? Ok maybe far fetched. These farms are not out of reach of a normal person who over time purchases the technical pieces. It’s an investment.
The NYT article fell apart the moment they quoted the silly "35 miles from UN headquarters" quote by the SS without pointing out it's an absurd attempt at sensationalizing. No need to read further than that before figuring out it's a propaganda piece.
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There are many academics who disagree with his characterisation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_genocide_theory#Bloodla... The point is, he's an ideologue (who may end up being right even if I think he's not) which makes it a bit ironic to mention in the context of talking about propaganda.
Indeed, everybody except me is a ideologue with whom at least 2 academics and a reddit poster disagree. I, on the other hand, am always right, of course! Additionally, as a jew, I was raised on an ironclad ideological assertion that the holocaust was the worst thing people have ever done to each other, and no genocides have or will ever rival it. I'm keenly aware that there is a vested interest in maintaining that vi…
(Again I cannot reply to the comment below, but my point is not that I am not ideological; of course I am. But Snyder is also extremely ideological and uses his history to push a very particular kindideologues of politics, which is ironic given the context of the thread. )
(Adding another edit since I can't reply! But again, I don't understand why my interlocutor cannot understand that both sides can be ideological and that one needs to take that ideology into account when evaluating claims. Snyder is one such ideologue who consciously seeks to minimise Polish and Ukrainian collaboration with the Holocaust and claim that Jewish Soviet partisans fighting the Nazis were "criminals", see: [1] for examples (also an ideological source--of course--but some of the quotes from Snyder are really quite damning. ))
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Well, Snyder himself is a bit of a propagandist with his ridiculous double genocide theory. Here's a longer discussion[1] with examples of how he is an ideologue. (I would have liked to post a reply to the people responding to me but alas, I cannot.) [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1brdk1l/comm...
> drew scholarly criticism for being seen as suggesting a moral equivalence between Soviet mass murders and the Nazi Holocaust. That's a propagandist?
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While I think I agree with most of what you're saying, I think it can be misunderstood and it can be very damaging when taken to an extreme, so I'll just leave a quote from the absolutely fantastic 20 lessons from the 20th century by Timothy Snyder: > Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so. If nothing…
This reminded me of a YouTube clip I watched years ago. It was basically a retired KGB agent explaining how the media purposely puts out conflicting stories. This breaks the brain of the citizens, and they're unable to know what is true. We indeed see this here in the US. I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively. I can choose what I want to believe is true, though.