The Dying Art of Disagreement

Respectfully, I disagree. It's not a given that the comment implicitly agrees that naked pictures of women are disrespectful. The comment might implicitly agree that the economics of nude photos is disrespectful in this case, or in general, since this particular image is one that was sold. The comment might also be referring to the history of criticism of the Lena image: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna#Criticism

I'll try to clarify what I meant more concretely. The parent commenter in that thread seemed to think that any good person who knew the context would understand why it was bad. The next comment didn't see why it was bad, so the first person decided the next must not be a good person. Had they examined the other premise (context), they would have seen that lack of context is more likely. Of course there are other buried premises and assumptions, and all of those are more likely in some way imprecise or something rather than the next commenter simply being a bad person. Even in the most extreme cases, miscommunication happens all the damned time. Fixing those instead of deciding you're better/smarter/whatever is where I think those discussions should go.

The point is how the disagreement looked from the point of view of the person making those comments. I figured my own point of view isn't relevant to the meta-discussion.

However, there is one glaring issue. I completely agree that part of the increasing radicalism among younger Americans is coming from an increasing sensationalistic media that will say anything and do anything for clicks. [0] Unfortunately, there is a reason for that. Another absolutely phenomenal article that was written by a 50 year veteran of the news industry is "The Bad News About the News." [1] It describes more in detail precisely why the media has become what it has become. And the answer can be summed up in one word: money.

For many decades a small handful of media organizations had an effective monopoly on news, and access to information in general. That entailed a practically endless stream of money. Ethics and integrity cost nothing in a world where money is no concern. But then enter the internet. It, as a competitor to traditional news outlets, started very slow. And that slowness led traditional news media to fail to appreciate its potential. In short order the internet not only showed its potential but turned traditional media outlets borderline obsolete. They died from a fatal case of myopia. And we replaced them with social media which has shown that negative news, partisan news, emotionally charged news, and sensationalized news is what gets clicks. Even better when you combine them together.

And in the end, if you can't beat them join them. This has likely only been urged on by the ownership of the news media today. Time Warner owns CNN. Comcast owns NBC. Disney owns ABC. These are not exactly the first names you think of in altruism, which is what valuing an informed public over profitable quarters comes down to. The BBC is a peculiarity. They have ostensibly no profit motive, but I'm not familiar enough with their funding/directives/etc to even try to hypothesize why they've also jumped on the bandwagon. I can say something about ostensibly not for profit organizations in the US like NPR. NPR has been struggling. In the past 10 years alone they've had to buy out contracts and downsize multiple times. The only way they keep afloat is by donations, and mostly large donations. With them barely staying afloat if they publish anything that might cause a corporate donor to pull their support, it would be enough to put the company back in crisis. The company itself ends up beholden to special interests in a way that's even more insidious than Time Warner owning CNN. That's a direct and visible line. The line between donor interests and 'not for profit' organizations is less apparent to many.

I'm in no way defending what the news media has become. But like the article emphasizes, I think the first step before judging a group is to try your best to try to genuinely understand why they behave/think the way they do, in lieu of just attaching a label to them and calling them evil.

[0] - An image that sums up the state of the media today. https://i.imgur.com/PxU76c0h.jpg

[1] - http://csweb.brookings.edu/content/research/essays/2014/bad-...

[0] Dang does have a comment but, if I understand the meaning of [flagged] correctly, it was user downvotes that triggered the killing, and Dang just provided commentary. There is also a perfectly comment marked as [dead], which I assume is a shadow-ban for an unrelated matter.

"Even if you agree that the picture is crass (etc) due to being from Playboy, a much more likely and respectful explanation is that the asker simply did not know the history of it."

There may be others. It is incredibly hard to sidestep the wider cultural framing that women exist solely as sex objects, they are prey and men are predators. It is a problem space I have thought long and hard about. I think my statement that your statement implicitly agrees with certain things is accurate.

However, it wasn't intended to accuse you, personally, of anything. The degree to which it does so is an error on my part. It is late. I am tired. Etc.

I wholly agree with you that jumping to accusations was poor form. I did not witness that particular discussion of the Lena test photo, but I have seen such discussions before on HN. They tend to be incredibly uncharitable. This is really common when anything vaguely related to sex enters discussion.

I do my best to respectfully critique it. I am aware sex is a very sensitive subject. But the subtext of most such derails is that all heterosexual sex is inherently abusive of women. I really think that needs all the gentle, kind push back humanity can muster. I do what little I can.

Best.