Once a Chinese grad student explained to me a difference he noted between Chinese and American citizens. He said in China no really reads or watches 24/7 major news outlets in China. They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life. He said Americans seem to get really emotional over content in the press and seem to really struggle with the idea of propaganda / journalism in the news.
I tend to agree with student, NYT and major news outlets are clearly used for propaganda and if you sit back and look at it from perhaps another angle it makes sense , why wouldn’t a world super power with a massive government apparatus use media to influence and control citizen behavior?
So yes the anonymous experts, the anonymous intelligence experts, the experts on CNN panels .. etc etc. It’s the government pushing a narrative for a purpose. My two cents live your life and spend your precious emotional energy for the people you care about around you. Do things in your local community and help when and where you can.
I'd like to point out that the student's advice, "of course the news is ridiculous propaganda, just ignore it and go about your life and focus on your friends and family" is the the response desired by the authoritarian Chinese government who has carefully engineered the situation in the first place.
The purpose of constantly publishing obvious lies is not for people to believe them (though some always will), it's to devalue the idea of truth in general. Combine that with overt (but unpredictable) penalties for supporting the 'wrong' cause, and a disinterest in politics becomes the easiest and safest path for a member of the public. As long as the economy's good, people just don't care about anything that doesn't harm them directly.
Exactly this. Without an active interest in politics people stop caring if their rights are taken away one step at a time. The thought process becomes - the government will do what the government will do, I just need to toe the line and be happy that I am not in jail.
You see a common theme in some people talking about science related things, aka "The science was wrong", which is very rarely the case. Most of the time when that is said it's "The conclusion was slightly incorrect because of statistically insignificant findings" (probability based) versus wrong (binary). You end up with a class of people that start thinking all science is wrong and at any moment their crackpot crap is suddenly going to be correct.
I mostly blame bad journalism for this. Always looking for sensational content to capture attention, outlets publish credulous articles on single journal articles without providing enough context for their unsophisticated audience. It would take much more time and effort to properly contextualized them, and in many cases, it would be apparent that it is too early for the general public to draw any conclusions from the research. It wouldn't be newsworthy.
I don't have particular knowledge about how things are in China, but the underlying strategy is real and employed by authoritarian regimes against their citizens and adversaries.
In the US, the right-wing media and Trump have been doing it to us, in addition to our adversaries.
In the old days, propaganda was used to make people believe specific things. But information streams aren't as easily controlled today, so instead the idea is to create confusion and distrust. It's a DDoS on reality. Sadly it can be very effective.
Regarding the good economy = apathy, my conclusion is the opposite. I think our good economy is the reason a significant portion of the US population with overwhelming outgroup preference exists at all. As quality of life deteriorates I think that behavior will be selected out and those remaining will get back to the basics of tribe survival. I think it is the fundamental fallacy of the modern socialist that if things get bad enough, people will undergo some personal revelation about climate or vote Bernie or something. I think when you look at extremely poor places like Yemen, you don’t see fertile ground for progressive idealism.
You're strawmaning the socialist view. The stealman version is that people who are feeling economic pain are more likely to want to do something about it, and may be primed to develop class consciousness and become politically mobilized. Socialists generally consider material conditions to be more important than identitarian concerns, which in their view, are often used as a wedge to divide working class people who might otherwise be united by their common economic interests. They don't think poor people are somehow magically less likely to be bigots.
> is the the response desired by the authoritarian Chinese government who has carefully engineered the situation in the first place.
But they are an "authoritarian" government so they don't really care what their citizens believe. Right? Doesn't your logic apply more to "democratic" and "free" countries. No?
> The purpose of constantly publishing obvious lies is not for people to believe them (though some always will), it's to devalue the idea of truth in general.
"Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day." -- Thomas Jefferson
Are you saying the US was "authoritarian" from the very beginning?
> As long as the economy's good, people just don't care about anything that doesn't harm them directly.
Isn't this true for every government? "Democratic", "authoritarian", "monarch", "anarchic", etc?
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 is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.
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.
I don’t think it’s some master scheme. They are trying to make money more than anything else. So they distort the truth to what sells the most. That just happens to be one of two major ideologies that hate each other. The effect is the same, but the motivations, and thus how you counteract, are different.
>They are trying to make money more than anything else.
Who knows what some people will do these days, just for that.
Well, we actually have a pretty good idea, without all the gory details.
But I know what you mean, it's not too easy for multiple sources to be on the same page even when they really try sometimes.
However, only the few most popular are what most people listen to, and those biggies are usually well aware of each others' stance. On an ongoing basis. And if a combined effort were to take place nothing else would have a chance.
Sometimes even sharing personnel, concurrently and/or sequentially, which can also lay the groundwork for approaches that seem competitive but are really complementary. As designed with a single, possibly obscured agenda designed from the ground up to deceive.
Things like this might be why "trust but verify" may have to be deprecated, and reversed to "verify and still be skeptical" if the propaganda keeps getting worse.
I would expect to see conflicting narratives in any country with free press. Why would we expect different outlets with different biases to run consistent narratives?
I agree it’s healthy for Americans to be more skeptical of journalism, especially the sources they think they trust. But a key difference between NYT and Xinhua in China is that NYT explicitly doesn’t want to be duped. Sure reporters are lazy and will run an article quickly about a breaking story they get from a government tip. But if they find out it was wrong the editors will be pissed and likely print an update or even retraction. That’s the key difference between independent media and government propaganda.
> But a key difference between NYT and Xinhua in China is that NYT explicitly doesn’t want to be duped
The NYT intentionally runs stories that are highly dubious or they know to be false, then later issue a small retraction in a footnote.
The latest fake news they published was the story around Zohran Mamdani where they used hacked data from Colombia University to claim he checked "black" on the admission documents to gain an unfair advantage. That's because they are partisan hacks. I don't necessarily like Zohran, but he represented a threat to mainstream Democrats therefore the NYT had to do something about him.
Yes, when the Russian military was assembling outside of Ukraine, I was chatting with a lot of Russians on social media who were convinced (by their media) that it was just a normal drill, and that the Americans were just buying into their own government propaganda. Over the course of those conversations, Russians would say things like, "We know our media is propaganda, but you don't know that yours is just as propagandist". It was interesting that the goal of Russian propaganda wasn't to get Russians to believe that their media was infallible, but rather to get them to believe that there were no facts, that the truth was subjective, that every country's media was equally propagandist.
I saw a similar theme in right-wing American propaganda wherein American conservatives know that their media is biased, but they assume that "mainstream media" is just as bad.
It seems like in all of these cases, propagandists aren't trying to get people to believe the propaganda, but rather to discredit the entire idea of objective facts or reliable reporting.
which is fine and all but majority of people will take that first piece of news and not see the updated information / article piece. The damage is done at that point.
Retractions are a blimp in the sea of falsehood. 30 second retraction statement has no weight against 1 day of false narratives.
The only way to create a true counter weight is the amount of time encompassing the false hood should be the same amount of time given to the retraction. 1 day of false hood should equal 1 day of retraction.
Will this mode of operation exist, most likely not. The closest the USA had to such would be the Fairness Doctrine. [0]
There should not be conflicting narratives on the press about things like if the COVID vaccines work or not, or if the disease kills people or not. Or if the world is warming.
Interesting. But how should we determine which narrative is correct, and whether conflict should be allowed? Perhaps some sort of "Ministry of Truth" in the federal government could do the job?
When one side has to ignore all of science, that has build Western society and allowed it to live in unnaturally dense populations with unnatural life spans, that is not disagreeing on cause. That has driften to theological/emotional belief in something. Keep those out of news.
If some media comes disagreeing, they are blatantly lying. Also, there should not be diverging narratives about whether if you jump off a cliff, you will fall.
No, I don't really argue about individual studies with individuals on the internet. What I'm describing is the current consensus opinion of the larger medical and research community.
Okay, if there is any such thing as objective truth then this (by which i mean your statement that there should not be conflicting narratives, not the statement about the vaccine itself) is objectively false.
The COVID vaccines were pressed into widespread public distribution on an emergency use authorization; any other newly-developed vaccine would have spent years mired in clinical trials and debate. The first COVID vaccines deployed would have taken even longer because they were also the first mRNA vaccines. There was not by any means a consensus that they were safe or effective, only that the risk was justifiable in light of a sudden global health crises.
Plenty of them had the government following the money that pays for all the gifting and arresting the fraudsters, yes. Lying for the love of the sport isn't a crime, for deluding a society into giving you money and power is.
And also have a diversified professional media, so that the money leaves a track.
I don't even know what what a media organization "lying for deluding society into giving [the media organization] money and power" refers to or what kind of criminal codes might exist against it.
Deniability and having a response for different lines of criticism. It derails the critic who operates under the assumption of a consistent narrative and meaningful arguments. It gives the believer something to hold on under most scenarios. It removes truth and reality grounding from equation. Its diabolically effective.
Edit after down votes: The paragraph above was meant on why would one expect conflicting narratives not from different sources, as the Parent Comment stated, but rather from supposedly official sources or propaganda outlets. My bad, must have read the comment on a hurry.
One thing that’s interesting is that if you intentionally consume media with different viewpoints, you can often glean what’s true and what’s not by comparing how they each spin the story, because the opposite sides will almost never be in coordinated collusion about their misrepresentations.
> I can't tell you what is true or false (in media) objectively.
The parenthetical is doing a lot of work. The only real truth is that which you experience with your own senses. For everything else, you are choosing to believe somebody else's truth. It's worth remembering that whenever you consume media.
You can't really believe your own senses either. Science is our only systematic way to arrive at reliable information, you really can't know anything, but you can construct reproduceable experiments that increase your confidence enough that those facts can be relied upon to construct more complex theories by linking experimental results together, and those links increase your confidence because their co-occurrences help validate each other and when experimental results diverge you can also reduce your confidence deconstruct or iterate on the theory.
Science relies on our senses too - that's all the data we get. But yes, science is a way of compensating for bias in our individual perception and building durable models that make useful predictions even for phenomena we can't directly perceive.
Be wary of overgeneralizing scientific conclusions, though. Science may say that the measles vaccine is 99.7% effective, but if your kid comes down with a rash 3 days after a high fever and a week after being exposed to a known measles case, it starts from head down, and they've got white spots in their mouth - congratulations, they're probably in the 0.3%. Likewise, science may say that men are on average better in spatial and mathematical reasoning than women, but if you meet a top-notch woman programmer in your job, believe your experience, not the science. That science makes a conclusion about the averages doesn't prevent you from having an outlier right in front of you.
Yes, also there's science the social system, and science the method. I'm only really speaking about the portion where senses are prone to a bunch of different failure modes, and science is a way to compile a bunch of sensory observations as a form of parity check or error correction mechanism. Science the social system also has failure modes, but the system is the only thing we have that has shown any actual progression in its results, and has a strong track record.
>> 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.
That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like.
During covid the Governor of Michigan banned shopping for gardening supplies. This raised a big fuss. One of my FB friends shared a reporters story saying the ban was fake news and that the order did not include anything like that. He even provided a link directly to the order itself so you could see for yourself. Most people would not bother because hey, he went to the source! I followed the link, found the paragraph - which was super clear and explicit about the gardening thing - and posted a direct quote of it in response. I lost a FB friend that day. Facts are hard to find (you must do it yourself) and just piss people off when they don't like them.
> That means every time the press says something about what Trump did, you have to find a direct quote or video of him saying it. Or read an actual executive order. The media abandons facts to criticize power they don't like.
You’re implying they don’t include a video of what they claim he said and any reputable news source pretty much always does.
Don’t get your news from Facebook and Twitter and you’ll be starting from a much better position.
Indeed, source very much still matters. "It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
"Qui bono," who benefits, is a great question to ask about the organization and the story when reading it, especially when combined with Hanlon's Razor. Tend not to attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. And when malice is reasonable, then make sure to ask Who Benefits from the malice. If that's difficult to determine or the benefit seems small in comparison to likelihood of human stupidity, assume human stupidity.
Is the organization historically trustworthy? (MSNBC and Fox News, when not being talking heads and not talking about the current culture war buzzwords, tend to do good reporting.) If the story is wrong, is it reasonable to assume it's because someone somewhere misread something, mistyped something, misstated something, or otherwise made a mistake? (Perhaps the story breaking or otherwise too recent for slow, quality research. Perhaps the reporter, while trained in research, is not expert enough to come to the correct conclusions of their research, or is not researching or can't find nonexistent peer criticism to the research, both big problems in science reporting, especially when the reporting is of initial findings that haven't been peer reviewed.) If the story is not accidentally wrong through human stupidity, then qui bono, who benefits from malice? (Does it present a politician as unhinged or out of control? Does it ? And especially, would the story impact wealth, either to hurt it or protect it?) Sources like PBS, which (while they are NOT immune) are impacted far less by click-through ad rates and through funding partially derived from donations and public funding have less incentive to push narratives that benefit particular monied and/or political interests, or foreign sources like BBC or AJ don't get as much benefit when it comes to stories about US events that don't tie directly back to their organizational/political benefits. (When these are NOT the case, of course, then malice become far more easy to assume for these sources!)
So is it more likely that Governor Whitmer targeted gardening supply stores during the early pandemic because she was testing/pushing the limits of government power to limit the freedom of citizens to go where they wished or to expand government's economic control over the American marketplace, or is it more likely that there was political power to be derived from presenting the image of the governor as petty, tyrranical, and nonsensical? Or is it more likely that everything, both the initial EO's presentation, the angry response to it, and the fact-checking of the response, were victims of our human foibles?
Personally, I think it's far more likely a mix of human stupidity in writing the EO in a way where it was easy to misread the EO as specifically targeting gardening stores, combined with a malice decision to push hard on what was probably originally a misreading because it presented a view of the governor that worked to politically tear down her trustworthiness as she was taking actions that were having an economic impact on monied interests in the state (the EO essentially tried to turn big box stores into grocery-only stores to limit gathering, which during the Fog of War of the early pandemic was a reasonable health goal even if years of hindsight have given us a far better view of how impactful that actually was or not). Plus some stupidity on pushing back far too hard on the fact-checking response to give the impression that the EO didn't even mention gardening (it completely did, very clearly, in the list of attempts to pre-empt loopholes to the EO's attempt to limit the uses of large stores in order to minimize the reasons for people to gather in them to limit crowd sizes). Also, the Facebook/Twitter viral news sources get their money from clicks, so their stories tend to be far more about pathos than ethos or logos and truth is all-too-often a casuality for them.
I'm sorry about the length of my thoughts here. Bevity is the soul of wit, and I'm a rather witless man.
The important point is to distinguish between truth and the co-ordinated release of information in the NYT, BBC etc. The latter is very much intended to send a message, but it is not to be taken as literal truth.
I cannot about the NYT, but the BBC is one of the most impartial sources available.
So much so that the left and the right accuse the BBC of biasing the other in equal measures!
If you want to talk about bias in the UK press then you’re better off looking towards The Sun, The Mail and anything owned by Murdoch (that guy has done so much damage to the world it’s unreal).
> but the BBC is one of the most impartial sources available.
I almost spit out my coffee in laughter reading this. Entirely ridiculous assertion. You are completely blind to the fact that the BBC is insanely partial by picking and choosing what it reports on and what it doesn't. This is just level 2 detection of bias that you aren't reaching, imagine all the other things you're missing.
You’d need to have literally infinite resources if you wanted to avoid a situation of having to pick and choose what you report on.
What matters is that all sides of the debate get representation. And the BBC does this almost to a fault.
The ironic thing is the fact that BBC is so good at doing this, everyone feels their voice is marginalised and then complains of bias.
So when people call the BBC “biased”, and as ferociously as you have, what they’re actually saying is “the BBC airs too many opinions that oppose my own biases”
> Can you show me any story on BBC that is biased to the right?
They're saying that the BBC is relatively impartial, not that it is biased to the right.
If you're saying that the BBC has left-biased stories, and therefore the claim of impartiality requires evidence of counterbalancing right-biased stories, I think you need to start by providing evidence of the former. (Even if you think it's blindingly obvious that the left-biased content exists, your examples will clarify what would be required to balance it out.)
I hope you're being sarcastic. If you do want a debate, there's plenty of research on bias at the BBC, and there are examples of bias left and right, pun intended.
The left accuse the BBC of bias because, eg, the new Green Party leader has not been on any relevant BBC politics programs while Farage and other right wing politicians are regular fixtures.
The right accuse the BBC of bias because they fact-check them when they lie.
These things are not equivalent.
The BBC has lost a lot of credibility over the last decade or so. I can completely understand why they rolled over (often pre-emptively) to placate a Tory government that talked a lot about defunding them, but ultimately it has not served them well.
The newspaper situation in the UK is diabolical for sure.
I can’t think of a worse person to cite that principle; Snyder has lied and evaded historians with basic inquiries about his work.
As we speak, his official position is that Russia and China are both engaged in genocides and another state categorically is not and you should be punished for inquiring. I don’t think that position is going to age well, for him or for you.
The propaganda is so effective because the propagandists can rely on your lack of basic rigor and media bubble to present abstractions as a real moral position. And there’s no way to say this without hurting feelings and causing people to get defensive. Look up what any historian who isn’t on tv has say about Snyder’s work on libgen, it’s not sensationalist or context-free, it’s just someone going through and documenting mendacious claims and poor historiography: https://defendinghistory.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/07/Omer...
What is telling is not that one reviewer can be authoritative, but more that the response is "Shut up and go away, I'm trying to have a media career." Pretending to be a controversial truth-teller speaking for principles is how Americans like to be propagandized to and how we like to become niche celebrities instead of doing work that requires accuracy and rigor.
It is possible to accept that one can’t know the absolute, complete, detailed truth without giving up on identifying and rejecting lies.
That’s the whole authoritarian / fascist shtick: if you can’t be 100% certain that no formulation of any vaccine has ever increased illness, then “vaccines kill people” is just as true as “vaccines save lives”.
I don’t need to have personally reviewed all records of every single version of every single vaccine to confidently assert the two statements are not remotely equivalent in accuracy.
Both statements as written are true: vaccines do kill people and vaccines do save lives.
If you insert the implicit “all”, then both are false: not all vaccines save lives and not all vaccines kill people.
But your knowledge of medicine is quite deep if you know the relative rates of vaccines with zero deaths ever versus the rate at which defective vaccines are produced. Do you have a good source you can share?
So many fallacies. To be charitable, I will assume you are just trying to wind people up with nonsensical rhetoric.
There are no zero-death vaccines, as you know. There are also no zero-death diseases, as you probably know. The relative rates of death between the two are not even close, as you know.
Unless you get your eyes open to Intuitionist Math and then you realize math isn't "true".
Then again... where in the trillion or so parameters of any LLM is The Law of the Excluded Middle that classical math requires to be "true".
Even more comical is that there are certainly embeddings in there _about_ an excluded middle. With thousands of dimensions and billions of values in each one.
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.)
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 view [0], even if it is not true (many academics say that an equal, perhaps greater number died in The Holodomor, for example – not that that need be true for the two to be compared).
Take your own link, for example: it describes David Katz, a holocaust scholar, who commented, "Snyder flirts with the very wrong moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin". This is just a dude saying his opinion, even though a moral equivalence between Hitler and Stalin is not, in fact, "very wrong".
(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. ))
Your entire reply to my post, from beginning to end, is 1 sentence, quoted below for posterity (before subsequent edits anyways, I can't keep track of all your changes made after this reply):
> Stalin is very, very, very different from Hitler
We see that you're literally ideologically repeating, almost verbatim, an ideological opinion, while complaining that someone else is an ideologue. Thus, your comment is extremely ironic given the context of this thread and your prior complaints. Indeed, you are the only one who appears to be the ideologue, and so all we have to go on as far as Snyder, are the naked, unsupported assertions of an ideologue.
Sure, stalin is very, very, very different from hitler, just like an isosceles triangle is very, very, very different from a scalene triangle. Any 2 different things in the universe are different by definition, and "very" is nebulous, therefore your logic also means that anything can be described as "very, very, very different" from everything else. A truly meaningless statement.
In short, the evidence presented indicates that Snyder is not an ideologue, and there aren't actually any issues with what Snyder is saying, only ideologues who either disagree with what he says or don't like that he's saying it.
That's preposterous. Hitler intentionally created extermination camps, which targeted "Bolsheviks" above all. He then forced his armies on a bloody rampage into Russia, where he overextended and was defeated, after violently murdering millions.
There is a dominant thread of anti-intellectualism that lumps virtually all WW2 deaths as "victims of communism". This is total nonsense, obviously, promoted by neo-Nazi and Nazi sympathizer groups.
Stalin likely killed more of his own people than Hitler did if you count artificial famines, which I do. This shouldn't be surprising because Stalin was in power for longer and had a greater degree of unchecked power over the Soviet Union than Hitler ever did. Of course, many of the people murdered by either regime weren't actually communists.
> There is a dominant thread of anti-intellectualism that lumps virtually all WW2 deaths as "victims of communism". This is total nonsense, obviously, promoted by neo-Nazi and Nazi sympathizer groups.
That's not what I'm doing and I'd advise you to review the HN guidelines, particularly the one that reads, "Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
> Lecturing about "good faith" in the same comment that equates (extreme) economic mismanagement with intentional mass murder. Spare us the sanctimony.
The 'assume good faith' guideline pertains to our fellow HN posters, not stalin.
As far as I know, it's totally ok to conclude stalin was not acting in good faith when he killed millions of undesirables.
Could you please stop repeatedly editing multiple comments to respond to replies? The "reply" function exists for a reason, and your backedits disrupt the directional read of a thread, confusing the discussion.
If the HN system tells you that you're posting too fast, and you need to slow down, that also exists for a reason: you are, and you do. You can still reply (so please stop saying you cannot), you just need to slow down, be patient, and wait. It's ok to wait. Don't try to evade the restrictions. Wait.
I'm just replying to make my position clear since you replied with very misleading content. It's not my fault HN wants to be an echo chamber and makes it difficult to respond to people when they are wrong.
I'm not educated, let alone a historian, but there do seem to be some parallels here and it seems like the most disparate factor would be the very specific oppression of Jewish people. But the Soviet mass murders involved the death of a huge number of 'undesirables'; most just happened not to be Jewish. They were thrown into unspeakable conditions of torture, murder, starvation, etc. so I can see why Snyder would see them as similar.
I think treating the government as a singular entity pushing a narrative is missing a bit. There is no singular government moving in lock-step, I think we've seen a lot of those seams showing recently.
There are factions, supported by various wealthy powerful interests. Those factions include people in government but also people funding or controlling media.
The owner and CEO of a major social network was literally given a public-facing government position, and others in the administration were previously TV personalities.
Wealth, media, and government are an ouroboros, not a one-directional megaphone from The Government to The Citizens.
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 understand it as it is (a viewpoint, espoused by people with a specific worldview). Interpreting the news require critical thinking. Most people never develop critical thinking.
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 divorced from what people want.
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.
it's a distinction with A TON of difference. Well-functioning democracies have a push-and-pull that tends to slow things down BUT also prevents massive outreaches. Systems with tons of "sides" are stabler than dual systems because of this.
> 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.
>it's a distinction with A TON of difference. Well-functioning democracies have a push-and-pull that tends to slow things down BUT also prevents massive outreaches. Systems with tons of "sides" are stabler than dual systems because of this.
Right, a democracy won't succumb to one insane leader peddling particularly insane whims the way a dictatorship possibly can. But for the other 99/100 years of the century when things are business as usual it's a distinction without a difference.
The fact that we have a nominal democracy doesn't change the fact that we're being ruled by the small ideological minority that holds the bulk of the power in the system.
>that's exactly the point - there's a third option.
Yeah, we could have a government by some semblance of the people and all the diversity of that implies, but we don't, at least not to any serious degree at the federal level, so here we are.
> But for the other 99/100 years of the century when things are business as usual it's a distinction without a difference.
"business as usual" under a totalitarian regime is slightly different from "business as usual" under a democratic regime. We have plenty of examples of both in the world right now. They're not equivalent...
You're contrasting dictatorship vs oligarchy. The key differentiator for democracies is leaders who are subject to re-election incentives.
Populist parties are surging all over the world. Perhaps there are a few modern democracies where all the political elites are "cut from approximately the same cloth", but if so, they aren't countries I am very familiar with.
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 a huge liability.
Indeed it is - and likely by design anyway (critical thinking is bad for political control, after all). You generally want the ones in power (preferably the ones aligned to you) to be better educated than the masses.
In a 'well functioning' aristocracy the rich and titled tend to go to the best universities and get educations an such. In authoritarian governments the opposite tends to happen. Anyone that is too smart could take over and rule themselves and must have an accident before that can happen. You end up circled by ass kissers.
Sure, it's a bunch of silos made up of sub-silos with people with their own goals.
But, I have far too often seen this "the government isn't a monolith" assertion used in the most deceitful, dishonest irredeemably bad faith arguments here on HN (and other parts of the internet as well) to shut down discussion of cases where some subset of the government is doing things that are bad for it's own selfish reasons.
Ditto for the "they're not literally conspiring" assertion used to shut down discussion of cases of where interests align and no conspiring or active coordinate is needed to achieve the results.
I keep joking that instead of the normal repressive state-controlled media, the West has media-controlled states. Electing a TV host is just a culmination of that. Or a media owner, like Berlusconi. Coincidentally he was brought down by his underage sex trafficking.
Westerners voluntarily tune into their propaganda, leaving the 24/7 news channels blaring.
But there is a critical difference in that elections do happen, they do get counted, and they do make a genuine difference in the political and economic outcomes which affect millions of people.
What your Chinese friend isn't saying is that all those Substack writers in the US would be disappeared into Chinese gulag's. The US has a strong freedom of speech clause baked into its core governance system...When I was fifteen I'd be subscribed to five different punk zines and would be creating mix-tapes from 10 different sources (and much of it wildly offensive and political).
That might've been used to be so, but isn't so anymore. U.S. has nothing to do with freedoms or, say, democracy anymore. It used to have been praised for those things for decades by quite a lot of people from all around the world. I don't really know if it was actually so (I'm a foreigner and I only perceived it to be so, but could be quite easily have been wrong all that time about that), but now the curtain is down and U.S. gov doesn't even pretend anymore to not be evil towards people (both inside and outside U.S.).
As for your comment about Chinese gulags - is this like American Guantanamo??
Doubt. What are post-USSR countries (except for Ukraine) where government detains lots of people who hasn't committed any crimes? How many people get wrongfully killed by cops in post-USSR countries? In U.S. that's like a sport for cops to find an excuse to unalive someone.
And what is democratic about the fact that majority of people votes for candidate A, yet candidate B becomes the president because... because it's people don't actually vote for president, they vote for someone who counts pro-some party and it's THEY who vote for president in the end. What's democratic about corruption being completely legal (lobbying)? Do you know a single post-USSR country where lobbying is legal? (Hell, how can it be legal at all? there's no distinction between lobbying and corruption, that's the same thing!)
Loudest voice in the room wins. Crying baby gets the milk. Always.
You can pick any opinion you got from media. Whether it is the whole discussion around autism or the push for DEI. Everything comes down to someone speaking or maybe even shouting.
The unfortunate fact is that people try to see everything through a conspiracy lens and hence miss out voices are still heard - loud and clear.
There’s something hypocritical about a person who thinks it’s an injustice for them to be fired for expressing their opinions, when that opinion is that they are glad Charlie Kirk was murdered for expressing his opinions.
Karl Popper said,
“But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols."
> when that opinion is that they are glad Charlie Kirk was murdered for expressing his opinions.
You are conflating the expression of an opinion with the opinion itself.
Generally, the point people are getting fired for making is that the very circumstances of Charlie Kirk's murder are precisely the circumstances he advocated for. I don't find it hypocritical to draw attention to that irony. I do, however, find it hypocritical to fire someone for expressing dissent about the opinions of a man who literally became famous for directly asking random people in public to enter into arguments with him.
> Generally, the point people are getting fired for making is that the very circumstances of Charlie Kirk's murder are precisely the circumstances he advocated for.
He never advocated murdering people over political disagreements. He disagreed with banning guns, but even the people who advocate banning guns don’t usually openly advocate banning bolt action hunting rifles.
The sentiment here is to cheer and laugh at a premeditated murder. If you want to rationalize it, whatever. It’s no use trying to have a discussion with someone who cheers and laughs at a man getting murdered for having discussions.
You're right that he didn't cheer on political assassination.
He merely intimated that trans people's lives are less valuable than others and that black people and women are incapable of intellectual equality with whites and males. A debate about whether that is an indirect encouragement to violence is a valid one.
And to be very, very clear: ambivalence at his departure from earth is not equal to ambivalence of the manner.
I was happy Rush Limbaugh died of skin cancer. I was not happy Charlie Kirk died of murder.
> He merely intimated that trans people's lives are less valuable than others and that black people and women are incapable of intellectual equality with whites and males.
False.
> A debate about whether that is an indirect encouragement to violence is a valid one.
Lying about what other people say and mischaracterizing those statements as an incitement to violence is itself an incitement to violence. Stop lying and stop inciting violence!
That's a provocative statement, especially taken out of context like that, but it doesn't necessarily imply the devaluation of anyone's life, and the broader context of everything Charlie Kirk said and the way he treated people, including people who identified themselves to him as transgendered, makes it obvious he didn't feel that way. But then again, that's exactly the reason you stripped that quote out of context and posted it to an online argument in which you are much more explicitly devaluing the lives of people you disagree with politically.
But he said it. So you're either wrong and he meant it, or you're defending the words of a disingenuous sack of... Well, let's say "lies". That bad faith provocateur act has no role in decent society.
His speech was legal and despicable. He was not a good person. He may have believed himself to be a Christian, I don't know his heart, but he was not Christ-like.
That's the same tradeoff we make with all civil rights.
Lots of people criticized Donald Trump's proposal of a "total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on", and rightfully so in my opinion. Do you think the irony would be thick if some of those people were murdered by Muslim terrorists?
when that opinion is that they are glad Charlie Kirk was murdered
I have yet to see anyone express that opinion. I've seen plenty of dark jokes, and even more comments calling him out for saying that the second amendment is worth a few deaths, but I haven't seen a single person say they're glad he was murdered.
I tried to look up the supposed 30k tweets that have been collected by the site used for organized harassment, but it doesn't seem to be openly published, counter to their promise.
People were getting doxxed for far less than "celebrating murder". Saying he was a bad person made you eligible for your name, location, picture and job to be plastered on a doxxing site before it got hacked and shut down.
> Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that any non-citizens who celebrated Kirk's death would be immediately deported…
> Attorney General Pam Bondi indicated on Katie Miller's podcast and in subsequent Department of Justice announcements that she intended to "target" speech against Kirk following his death as hate speech…
Since the very clear, repeatedly court-upheld, very specific wording of the 1st amendment protects free speech for anyone at all residing inside the United States (Yes, even including illegal immigrants, not to mention residents and visitors, though by voicing a politically disliked opinion they might risk becoming fast-track targets for deportation through other "formal" justifications) and also offers no legal classification for what exactly "hate speech" is, both of these lying, corrupt, inept, would-be parrots of Tinpot Trump are at least legally wrong.
It's amusing on the one hand, considering the hatred their very boss and most of the MAGA types poured on cancel culture and its notions of speech that shouldn't be allowed as hate speech, only to now reveal one more show of whining, gross hypocrisy.
On the other hand it's also deeply worrisome, to see key enforcers of federal U.S. law being so completely mendacious and cavalier about the actual legal part of their jobs in that very same territory.
Cancel culture won. Conservatives are not being hypocritical for having been against it and now for it. If your opponent is using an effective weapon and you don't also pick up that weapon, you will lose.
well so much for a principled stand against or for something by this dogshit logic. I guess the only important thing is to cheer on whatever gets the votes, never mind how badly all things deteriorate as a result?
I'm no fan of democrat progressive culture, but if the crap you describe is what passes for a bottom line in the conservative camp, then it's garbage either way.
What does being a libertarian have to do with it? Do you take as for granted that unless you're a libertarian, you shouldn't bother with at least a few firm moral principles in your politics? That anything goes so long as it garners votes and social media "engagement"?
Republicans started cancel culture. It really gained steam in 2001 when they cancelled the Dixie Chicks for being anti-war (turns out they were right). So I guess you're right, the left adopted it after realizing they'd lose if they didn't use such an effective weapon against fascists.
Yep. Imagine I punch you. You say: "Don't punch me". I punch you again. Then you punch me back. I say: "Aren't you being hypocritical? I thought you were against punching."
The path forward at this point is for the left to admit they made a mistake, apologize, and work to negotiate a new set of ground rules.
It's not about who "invented" it. It's about who started the most recent round.
We had a big discussion about cancel culture just a few years ago, where the left responded to complaints about it by saying: "cancel culture doesn't exist", "freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences", "free speech isn't hate speech", "you're just saying that because you're a racist/sexist/etc."
In other words: "Our ideology justifies large-scale, systematic application of public shaming for mild noncompliance with our ideology. We aren't going to stop doing this."
A lot of prominent left-wingers simply lack the moral authority to complain. What goes around comes around.
If you, specifically, were complaining about left-wing cancel culture, I'll grant you have the moral authority to complain about right-wing cancel culture as well.
> It's not about who "invented" it. It's about who started the most recent round.
Starting when? Several of the examples are quite recent; there's no point in my life where people of both political persuasions weren't boycotting or criticizing things.
> freedom of speech doesn't mean freedom from consequences
This remains entirely true. The First Amendment protects us from government-applied consequences. Being fired for being an asshole by a private employer has always been kosher. Being fired because the FCC threatens your employer with revocation of their broadcast licenses over protected speech has not.
The only one I'd consider recent is US national anthem kneeling.
I'm in my mid-30s. I only have the vaguest memories of cancel culture around 9/11. I have very vivid memories of progressive cancel culture during the late Obama administration and onwards. It very much was not a one-off sort of thing. It was a systematic practice which was systematically justified. The 9/11 stuff died down as 9/11 receded into the past. Progressive cancel culture only started dying down when Elon Musk bought Twitter.
I agree that progressive cancel culture was mostly not implemented with the help of the government. I agree that Brendan Carr overstepped in a way that wasn't a simple case of "tit for tat", and I think he should be fired.
On the other hand, consider Karen Attiah. If you took what she said, but replace "white men" in her statement with "black women", and imagine a white man saying it, he absolutely would've been risking his job just a few years ago. People were fired for far less.
> I only have the vaguest memories of cancel culture around 9/11.
Maybe you agreed with the canceling enough it wasn't noticeable; I cited two specific examples directly related to that day. It was… not a fun time to be anti-war.
I disagree with her firing, but there are no First Amendment concerns here. The Washington Post is free, under the First Amendment, to be shitty, even with regards to employment. They canceled her, as is their right, and as our ape evolutionary cousins do despite a lack of language, social media, or political parties. "I don't like you, so I won't associate with you" is deeply ingrained in us.
>Maybe you agreed with the canceling enough it wasn't noticeable; I cited two specific examples directly related to that day. It was… not a fun time to be anti-war.
I was roughly 12 years old when Iraq was invaded. I was sitting in class staring at the clock and waiting for recess. It was a different political era from my perspective, and it feels a little disingenuous that you keep harping on it. It seems to me that there's been significant turnover in the US political power players since that time, so the hypocrisy accusations don't seem to land very well. Remember that Trump gained popularity with the GOP electorate in part due to his willingness to unequivocally condemn Bush & friends for their middle east misadventures.
>"I don't like you, so I won't associate with you" is deeply ingrained in us.
Sure. But when explaining why they fired Attiah, the Post wrote: "the Company-wide social media policy mandates that all employee social media postings be respectful and prohibits postings that disparage people based on their race, gender, or other protected characteristics".
They're applying the exact standard that progressives requested. It appears to me that they are actually applying it in an even-handed way. If I was a journalist circa 2017, and I made a post suggesting that America was violent because of people caring too much about "black women who espouse hatred and violence", in the wake of a black women recently being murdered, then the risk of progressive dogpiling, and my subsequent termination, would've been extremely high. It's not respectful, and it disparages on the basis of protected characteristics. Remember, Al Franken lost his job (even after he apologized!) for things like squeezing a woman's waist at a party.
I think you're a little fixated on the government thing, as cancel culture is generally speaking a non-governmental phenomenon, regardless of who is doing it to who. At least recently in the US.
> I was roughly 12 years old when Iraq was invaded. I was sitting in class staring at the clock and waiting for recess. It was a different political era from my perspective, and it feels a little disingenuous that you keep harping on it.
It's a little disingenuous to go "I only have the vaguest memories of cancel culture around 9/11" and "I have very vivid memories of progressive cancel culture during the late Obama administration", in that case. I, similarly, have few memories of paying for health insurance when I was in middle school.
> They're applying the exact standard that progressives requested.
Maybe! But describing him as a "white man" is accurate, as describing Obama as a "black man" would be uncontroversial. If you start talking about white/black men as monolithic groups, you start getting into trouble.
> I think you're a little fixated on the government thing, as cancel culture is generally speaking a non-governmental phenomenon…
I am, because the people who whined incessantly about that phenomenon are now weilding governmental power to do the same thing, in a way that is clearly far less acceptable legally.
where's the room for a firm set of beliefs and moral framework, or perhaps a principled stand against or for something by this dogshit logic of yours?
The only important thing is to get them votes and followers then? The conservatives can fuck off just as hard as the radical left if that's all that matters.
So is Nazism, that doesn't mean all moral frameworks are created equal. Also, tit for tat is a type of cynical pragmatism, not a thing based on some principle (misguided or not) which is a basic requirement of a moral framework; the notion of doing something or not doing it because you feel it to be right, regardless of benefit.
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.
> 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.
"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.'"
If an entry level commissioned officer can be expected to keep it in their pants than an entry level teacher can too.
Yeah it's a first amendment issue depending on where through the gray area the line is drawn but the .gov runs right through the gray areas of violating rights all the time, I don't really see the big deal if it does it to it's own cogs.
> non-political government office holders ought to not weigh in on politics
They have the clear First Amendment right to do so on their own time.
I mean, I hold the opinion that people "ought not to" be fans of Charlie Kirk. But you'd correctly object if I enforced that opinion with government power.
> Before your ilk became dominant in public discourse…
>They have the clear First Amendment right to do so on their own time.
They don't have a right to a government job.
Are you fine with CPS employees espousing absurd opinions about the fitness of homosexuals to be parents? Because that's the door this opens. Think a few steps ahead.
If you wanna spew politics and keep your LEO or teaching job get elected sheriff or school board.
They have a right not to be fired from their government job for espousing constitutionally protected speech that doesn't affect their duties. (As affirmed by the Supreme Court, regularly!)
> Are you fine with CPS employees espousing absurd opinions about the fitness of homosexuals to be parents?
No, but "I hate a significant portion of the population in a way that directly relates to my job" and "I didn't like this one specific guy that has nothing to do with my job" are… substantially different things.
Very interesting. I stand corrected. I will note, however, that this is literally the only example I've seen of someone getting fired for a legitimately non-celebratory remark. We've got a legal system for stuff like that. For every single example you could give me, I can give you at least a thousand counterexamples. 99.9% of all the folks being fired are getting fired for being reprehensible.
Eh, that one is worse than the first, and while not "celebratory", certainly shows a lack of judgement and character. I'd fire someone for this, too. This has less to do with free speech and more to do with revealing yourself to be an insensitive asshole.
The man was murdered in front of his children, and this woman's instinct is defamation of character. She's continuing to repeat the lie that Charlie Kirk "excused the deaths of children in the name of the Second Amendment".
The immediate aftermath of someone's death is not the time to critique them, gently or not. Total lack of decorum and social sense. Not fit to teach young children.
There is… little disagreement on this aspect of the First/Fourth/Fifth/etc., though.
> revoking their visa is not jail
The First Amendment protects you from non-jail government consequences just fine, for obvious reasons - "we're fining you $1M for your speech" would have just as much impact.
The first amendment should only apply to citizens. I understand that current case law says it applies to everyone, but I think that is a misstep that we can & should correct.
I agree with you. I get tired of people complaining about "cancel culture" and the reactions of private individuals and groups to the opinions and actions of other private individuals and groups. People have the right to say what they want and to do what they want up to the limits of causing harm to others. They can shout their inflammatory opinions from the roof tops. They can boycott and petition to try to convince private groups from giving platform to opinions or people they don't like. All of that is protected speech.
This current executive branch is weighing in and using its influence to try to control speech. It's not "you'll get disappeared by secret police for what you told your coworker in confidence" levels of control, but that it's happening at all is alarming. I worry that they have no problem trampling on the first amendment and that it seems like no part of the government is going to restrict them from it.
Censorship in oppressive countries is often not carried out directly by the government. Instead, to save face, it is enforced along invisible power lines. The government gives a silent nod to other actors in society nudging them to act accordingly. For example, an Eastern Bloc citizen might not receive a formal penalty for leaving the communist party, but their children's admission to university could suddenly become more difficult, of course without any official acknowledgment of the fact.
Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences. People aren't "making comments," they're celebrating the murder of a man whose opinions they disagreed with.
Many Americans are waking up to realize that a large number of people they considered friends and colleagues would revel in their death if they let their political opinions be heard.
I would 100% fire someone for celebrating murder. Sorry, call me old-fashioned, but I believe in hiring people of integrity, and I will fire you if I find out you don't have any.
> Freedom of speech, not freedom from consequences.
Freedom of speech requires freedom from government consequences. I have freedom of speech still if you say "I don't like your speech"; I don't have it if the cops say "I'm arresting you for your speech".
> I would 100% fire someone for celebrating murder.
And you can. You can also skip their birthday party. But "I'm glad so-and-so is dead" largely can't be a reason to, say, lose your drivers' license, social security benefits, or government employment, because the First Amendment applies to government specifically.
Facebook, Google, the grocery store, etc. have never been subject to the First Amendment.
(People can, and do, get fired for espousing Charlie Kirk's beliefs, too. That's free speech/association for you.)
> "I'm glad so-and-so is dead" largely can't be a reason to, say, lose your drivers' license, social security benefits, or government employment, because the First Amendment applies to government specifically.
Unless I'm mistaken, that's not happening. If it is, it's wrong and should be corrected.
In Jimmy Kimmel's case, the FCC chair threatened ABC's broadcasting licensure to pressure them to punish his (very, very mild, incidentally) protected speech.
I don't believe that the FCC threatening ABC's broadcasting license has anything to do with free speech. There were murmurs about lawsuits for defamation of character all over Twitter. I'm no lawyer, I don't claim to know if that's even possible.
But it's clear that with the emotional tension of the situation, ABC wasn't about to get itself in legal trouble over a second-rate, late-night show host.
So, while the FCC may have been threatening, we have a legal system designed to prevent such over-steps of power, should they occur. It seems pretty clear ABC wanted no part of the storm that was brewing.
It's clear you've never even watched the very videos you claim to be citing.
1a. He's referencing DEI, citing how it debases people. He literally says, _in the video_, "I don't want to have these thoughts, but that's what DEI does." I know you won't go watch it, but you're just parroting a false statement that Charlie Kirk never made.
1b. He never said that. He said that Black families had better standards of living before the Civil Rights Act, referencing both household incomes, rates of fatherlessness, and crime rates. All objective facts that are true. It's hardly racist to point out how America is not getting better for black Americans.
2. I've not heard this one. Feel free to cite a source and I'll take a look.
3. I've also not heard this one. Once again, I'll go look if you'd like to provide sources.
Shouting down other people deprives them of their freedom of speech, and is rightfully prevented. Padilla was detained because he was attempting to do that: disrupt someone else from exercising speech. He could have made the exact same speech in his own space without consequences.
If you disapprove of how Padilla was treated, that's fine, just be honest about why he was detained: not for the content of his speech, but his attempt to prevent another from speaking.
Interrupting or questioning people isn't a denial of first amendment rights. You're using extremely sloppy logic, mixing "freedom from interruption" with "freedom of speech".
Absolutely, repeatedly interrupting people with questions can get you arrested. Go to a public commentary session at your local town hall. Exceed your allotted time period and keep questioning the officials. You'll eventually be arrested and taken away. Because in doing so, you're depriving the rest of the town from their opportunity to give a public comment.
There's nothing complicated about this. Padilla isn't being treated any differently from anyone else. Freedom of speech does not entail freedom to prevent others from speaking.
No. In the West, there are competing news sources(despite the best efforts of many). They might be equally biased but you do get a devil's advocate system.
China is a one party state that controls all media. Not remotely the same.
In China, you would not have known the story was bogus.
The other thing to note is that journalism in the US has gotten really lazy. A lot of the articles you will see in the MSM are based on leaked info and press-releases from PR firms, etc. It's easier to for journalists to regurgitate stories hand-fed to them than doing truly hard and costly investigative work.
I think it's less laziness than the fact that the news media has been in a constant state of disruption since the internet. It's a much riskier business than it used to be.
The other thing is the completely different information universes left and right live in in America. It's difficult to have a conversation with someone on the other side of the political divide because they believe a completely different set of facts. Meanwhile, in China, everyone knows the news is B.S and they only trust information they get directly. In the past, before the Internet, there was a lot more time invested in maintaining relationships just to get good information. Is that the case in China?
It reminds me of this business litigation a company I was an investor in had between the partners. I wasn't very close to the situation, so I had no first hand knowledge of what actually happened, but each side had a contradictory set of facts. Both could not be true at the same time. Each side asked me to join their side, but I told them that that's what the judicial process is for: to find out who's facts the jury believes. Unfortunately, this means it's going to be a long process that will go to trial because they are so totally far apart on the facts that they will have to have a trial. Also unfortunately, this also probably means someone is lying in a pretty pathological way. The same thing seems to be occurring in American politics and there's no real neutral arbiter I guess except the voters.
In US politics, while one side may lie considerably more than the other, neither side is really committed to truth. One is selective in the truth and distorts the interpretation to push their narrative; one just blatantly lies to push whatever is their position of the moment.
Perhaps none of us have living memory of how when the chips are down there is no place to turn to but a source of truth. For every propaganda(ish) outlet, there is a place you can check for real news NYTimes,CNN,Fox juxtaposed to things like propublica,snopes or icij.
One friend got taken in by a fake news story and rued the internet is full of fake news and propaganda that spreads in a minute, I am so dismayed, how can I know what is real?. a friend replied: the internet is wonderful too you can check in under a minute if something is fake.
I think the main difference is, in liberal countries people depend on the media to manufacture consensuses, while China does not need anyone but the leader to create them. No society can survive without a certain degree of consensus
I believe it’s a mistake for liberal countries to rely on centralized content distribution platforms for consensus - that’s how you end up with consensus being for sale.
Ah, so like Russia. The ultimate dream of all authoritarians. A society that no longer even dreams of freedom, that becomes fully apathetic.
Do you know how many independent newspapers there are in China?
Zero. Even ones with what we'd call liberal ones are controlled and will be dealt with if they go too far.
Just because things aren't working well does not mean we have to tear it all down
There are certainly some news outlets that operate like propoganda. I mean Fox comes to mind, if you ever watch you’ll notice they carefully craft their statements and rarely talk about facts, mostly feelings. News is at its core a business, and they know they get eyes on things by scaring people or talking about things that seem shocking at face value. NYT and other outlets that do long form articles (Wired) have invaluable information. But we live in a world where most people (especially perpetually online people) just browse the headlines and take what they want from it. We’ve lost nuance, and because of that in the US one party is using that to their advantage.
Fox (and the right-wing media more broadly) act as boosters for the right and negative partisanship generators for the left. They protect republicans from accountability. They manufacture scandals about the opposition.
And it's so effective we couldn't even collectively manage to banish from public life the guy who nearly murdered congress and his veep on television. Truly scary.
They aren't mutually exclusive; Westerners get emotional about news, but still understand that there is a propaganda component. That doesn't mean the news isn't useful. Outlets might be selective about what they say, but the truth in reporting sort of stands in plain sight; if you read a balance of sources, you get a decent idea what's happening, surrounding a particular issue.
News organizations very rarely lie. They might be misleading in framing or selective wording, but they won't outright put something in print that is a complete lie.
Isn’t it a feature that people are vocally dissatisfied with what the media reports? To just accept it quietly in silence seems in fact the worse outcome. Even if everyone knows the media reporting is wrong, keeping quiet about it creates a strange meta state where the reporting is true enough that no one wants to publicly question it, because nobody else is questioning it, so it’s unclear whether your fellow citizens accept it as true or not, so you need to assume they believe it’s true.
The constant news consumption isn't just an American thing.
I live in Britain and have colleagues and friends who (admittedly) watch or read news first thing after waking up, and read news website articles constantly throughout the day.
We're talking, multiple times per hour. They read the news more frequently than things happen to be in the news.
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.
I object your reference to the collective west. As a Canadian, i believe my country has very little in common with the US. In fact, the US is pretty similar to China when it comes to propaganda.
No, it's not. There is a big difference between Chinese-level control of information and what is seen in the west. Naivete would be believing that the west has none, or maybe that the West has so much that it is somehow already an Orwellian Big Brother state.
That's a ridiculous statement and honestly this blog post itself is very misleading. The quote taken on condition of anonymity is someone saying there is no evidence this was a national security threat. The NYT article is not at all a hair on fire credulous tale of near disaster. It quotes government officials and experts, connects it to "normal" criminal cartels and offers some opinions on what could be a worst case scenario. As much as this could easily be a simple criminal case, it was already connected to threats made to politicians so it's not far-fetched.
>They are fully aware that all of it is propaganda and just go about their life.
In my experience with people I've interacted with in China is that there is quite a range of belief in the propaganda. I've had people say some truly wild things that were clearly the result of how news and history have been presented to them. Its also important to consider that we are interacting with people that are more engaged with the West and aren't seeing the perspective of a lot of the country.
I used to work for a large semiconductor manufacturer and the first time I visited the headquarters in the US I was shocked to see Fox News was on 24/7 in the cafeteria.
Whenever I see a major negative news story about republicans I always visit the Fox News website and you’re lucky if it’s a sub heading at the bottom. If it’s a particular bad story there will always be a Biden or Hillary story dug up as a headliner to change the narrative.
Perhaps propaganda is not the right word. I think a better word is "sensationalized" which happens often even here on HN with titles trick people into clicking on the link. With each click having monetary value, this is just the norm.
I had a teacher in high school that married a Chinese woman, and when her parents came over they said "Your propaganda is so refreshing, you hardly even notice it."
It's always struck me how hamfisted the Chinese government sound in its communications.
I basically agree with every word you wrote. But also, it means you wake up one day one day and tanks are rolling through the capital city, and the President is threatening American cities with illegal military occupation.
Okay I got a little bit rage baited by this but to summarize- we Westerners value openness in government to prevent abuse and corruption, so getting mad about propaganda is common.
What's the most popular tag-line for YouTube/TikTok videos and online spammy ads? "The TRUTH about ..."
Americans have PTSD, and paranoia.
Before Nixon, Americans had an idylic belief in "America" as some bastion of exceptionalism, independence, idealism. We're the best, and we can do anything. We never got attacked, we had the most money, power, etc. Everything's good and we're the best.
But since Nixon, they learned their most-venerated politicians lie to them. But not only politicians; the news lies, corporations lie, scientists lie, their neighbors lie. And when 9/11 happened, suddenly the facade of invulnerability fell (because it was a foreign terrorist, rather than domestic, like Oklahoma City). Year after year, the media bombards Americans with terrifying stories of somebody lying to them, secretly hurting them. They're all out to get you. And polls show year after year that Americans are less trusting of their institutions.
To function in a society, you have to trust somebody. So they still watch the news, listen to politicians. They hide in some in-group, like a political party or ideology, or even just a Facebook group. But they are hyper-aware that anybody could be lying to them at any time. That some commonly-held truth is actually a weapon used to hurt them.
They have been bombarded with fear for decades by the media and politicians. Every single day they are told that "the enemy" is working to destroy everything they love. This isn't an exaggeration, this is literally the line given by politicians, and then parroted by their favorite media source. This is why Americans both obsessively watch media, and are really emotional about everything they hear in the media. It's why so many Americans latch onto conspiracy theories now (they didn't used to). We are all afraid because our system has made us afraid, and we don't know who to trust.
The Smith-Mundt Modernization Act of 2012 changed restrictions on disseminating propaganda materials domestically. Passed as part of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2013, it amended the 1948 Smith-Mundt Act, which had previously blocked the domestic distribution of content produced by U.S. government agencies like the State Department. This is a driving factor behind a lot of the decline in quality of news as propaganda starts to drown out legitimate reporting.
> Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.
> In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.
> That is the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect. I'd point out it does not operate in other arenas of life. In ordinary life, if somebody consistently exaggerates or lies to you, you soon discount everything they say. In court, there is the legal doctrine of falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus, which means untruthful in one part, untruthful in all. But when it comes to the media, we believe against evidence that it is probably worth our time to read other parts of the paper. When, in fact, it almost certainly isn't. The only possible explanation for our behavior is amnesia.
Surprised this hasn't been posted within a comment yet :)
This is perfectly reasonable when people know that they have no control of the government, it’s like the weather then…you just deal with it.
The problem is that in the USA , we’ve been told that we have a democratic republic, and that we have significant self-determination in affairs of the state, and that justice, freedom, and the right to live relatively un-disturbed are inalienable rights.
It’s bullshit in practice, of course, but we’ve been told this, and we’ve been told it’s our duty to protect those rights, up to and specifically including armed insurrection.
Many people actually believed what they were told.
you caring a lot doesn't change reality in your favor. You get one vote that you can exercise once a year or so. Thats about all the agency you have on the wider world (and probably rightly so, if its to be proportional to the population)
Being informed just enough to choose the less horrible of the two clowns the systems presents you... takes very little effort. Everything past that is a waste of brain cycles. Spend your energy on things you can affect. If you care about your children then spend the emotional energy on your friends, family and community. It'll help them more
That's right, one person caring and not acting doesn't change reality, neither does one person caring and acting (most of the time). A relatively small number of people caring and acting, however, can change the course of history.
While it is in nobody's interest to care, individually, we're all better off if we care and act just a little bit.
i assume caring and acting here you mean in the context of larger issues. bc effort spent on your immediate world definitely does change reality
there is no mechanism past voting to change the big picture. Nor should there be. The person going around with the megaphone convincing other people their right inherantly feels their feelings are more right than others'
And you dont need to care an aweful lot when it comes to voting. Any caring past that is basically like getting worked up about the weather
> there is no mechanism past voting to change the big picture.
I hope I’m not reading this too narrowly, but this seems too reductionist. Everything probably rolls up to a vote at some point, sure, but there are lots of things citizens can do to change the big picture between filling out their ballots every few years.
During the Great Depression, protests were a driver of policy change (New Deal, labor rights…) that still endure, and protests laid the ground work for the American Civil Rights Movement in the 60s.
Ultimately, these work because politicians do need to win elections, sure. But there are plenty of ways to organize or be a part of a movement to change society that aren’t simply filling in a bubble in a ballot box.
This is straight nonsense, why do you think Jimmy Kimmel had his show reinstated yesterday? The pendulum is constantly pushed and pulled in different directions outside of elections, if you decide you don’t need to care all you do is give way to those that do.
That's silly. Talking about such things; with friends, family, online, etc; raises awareness of it. And the more people that are aware of such things, the more likely they are to vote against it. So if you're relying on votes to change things, then discussing it helps.
i think when it comes to big picture stuff it makes sense that everyone has proportionate input. just bc you care a lot, doesnt mean you should have more say
just make your opinion, cast your vote and let other people make their own decisions. Feeling youre right and gotta go convince all the wrong people is sort of inherantly a bad selfrighteous place to come from
EDIT:
I think there is a broader sentiment that we all just have to care more and everything will get sorted out. I think recent history hasn't bore that out. People seem to care and have extremely strong emotional opinions about everything now a days.. and I don't think in the net it's brought anything positive
The entire Republican platform (especially since ~2016) has switched focus to something less like propaganda, and more like engagement for engagement's sake. Conservative talking heads do tend to frame everything from a particular perspective (that's the propaganda part), but rather than try to convince everyone to agree with them, they do the opposite: try to get as many people as possible to disagree with them, so they can get themselves and their audience into eternal "arguments". These "arguments" are never intended to be logically defensible. Instead, they are intended to fail as spectacularly as possible. Naturally, most other media outlets love this, because they get to profit from their own participation. The only value left in this dynamic is engagement.
By leveraging the alleged "two sides" of American politics, both politicians and media corporations have managed to create an infinite feedback loop of engagement with their media; and at the same time have managed to direct that feedback into political support for their preferred policies. Knowing this, it's entirely unsurprising that many of the highest positions in government are now held by household TV personalities, like Dr. OZ and Donald Trump.
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So what can we do about it? If engagement is the new currency, can we simply boycott this entire thing by disengaging? I doubt it will be possible to get enough people to actually participate, particularly those who are currently the most engaged. Disengagement only creates an implicit victory for whoever is speaking loudest.
Honest argument is incredibly important. There is no value in diversity of thought until differing positions meet each other and collaborate. Media corporations have found huge success by replacing argument with bickering. I think the first step in undoing that damage is to help people understand the difference between the two: argument is goal-oriented, whereas bickering is goal-avoidant. Knowing that difference, I think we should find ways to practice argument with each other, and redirect our engagement into collaborative progress.
I mean your comment, number one on this post, is propaganda to ignore the major sourcing of information that least pretend to have a system for evaluating what i true, what is worthy to present and replace it with.......? In the USA we have historically tried to keep abreast of what is going on in the world, partly because we are a nation of immigrants with ties/emotional ties around the world. Is that a thing in China? It didn't seem so when I was working with people in China. Giving a Chinese cultural position (ignore the world) might not be a fit for an American.
This is just wrong. There is a huge difference between having a free press vs not. And while publications like the NY times are not perfect, they pretty much never outright lie, unlike state propaganda.
Comparing Chinese media with American media is insane. One can argue most big media companies in the US have an editorial line that is aligned with one ideology, particularly true for most legacy media outlets. But many are still putting out very high quality mostly unbiased content. News are not meant to be consumed as facts but to challenge one’s own beliefs and seek out the truth or truths. Living in a bubble completely disconnected from both national and global events that impact us all is irresponsible and usually exactly what totalitarian regimes expect us to do.
I agree from a high level, but I think the major difference is that:
- Chinese news is propoganda in the traditional sense - directed/approved by the central government
- US news is not centrally controlled like that, but most sources lean heavily left or right, and distort narratives to fit their views.
I feel like liberals believe that, while Fox News is clearly presenting things from a right-leaning perspective, most of their chosen news sources are neutral. That's absurd. NYT is certainly far left in how they spin the majority of their stories.
They do still do a lot of fact-based reporting, that why I'm still a subscriber. But their staff is 90% liberal, and it certainly comes through in a lot of their reporting, not just in opinion pieces. The left is as much as an echo chamber as the right, if you stick to media aligned on either side.
There are certain issues in particular that can derange them more than others (e.g. Gaza), but IMHO the NYT's cultural biases usually soften Trump & R's image more often than not these days, because of the way they sane-wash/both-sides to the extreme (to avoid accusations of bias).
The right-wing media is a category difference though - it's not an echo-chamber, it's a disinformation factory.
There are a couple of exceptions, but they are few and far between. WSJ has managed to maintain it's cred despite being owned by the Murdochs (its opeds are another matter). The Dispatch is another good one. A good way to filter out the bad ones is to look at their coverage of the 2020 post-election. If they helped reinforce Trump's stolen-election lies they are either crackpots or bad actors.
Apple released its new operating system today, macOS Tahoe. This is a full version upgrade (26.0) with a new look, feel, and many changes. At this time, I recommend NOT updating to Tahoe for the following reasons:
Stability: Version 26.0 is the first release and, like most “.0” versions, contains glitches that will take time to fix. Later versions (26.1, 26.2, etc.) are expected to address these issues.
Release Cycle: Apple now releases a new macOS every year instead of every two years. These initial yearly releases are often closer to “beta” products, and Apple typically patches problems over the first 6–8 weeks.
There is no real advantage to upgrading right now. It’s best to wait 6–8 weeks until the system stabilizes and then reevaluate.
How to Skip the Upgrade
When prompted, simply do not click “Upgrade Now.” This upgrade may pop up on your machine over the course of the next few days.
Close the upgrade window, or scroll down to select other updates.
For reference, macOS Sequoia (15.x) is now at version 15.7, which means it’s very stable and well-patched.
The EU may have a geopolitical interest in taking another look at nuclear. The dependance on Russian natural gas and expensive imported US natural gas is not good for their economic outlook long term. Honestly I am surprised Germany has not fired back up a couple of its plants considering its difficulties with Industrial output and competing in a world market.
This is just utterly and completely wrong. EVEN THE COMPANIES THEMSELVES say it would be stupid to reopen those plants.
And, of course, the idea that "dependence" on Russia is bad, but replacing it with dependence on other states AND with building a bunch of nuclear bombs in my backyard that are PRIME targets to literally take out my entire grid, is laughably bad.
We have plenty of uranium in Europe. Australia also has plenty. Lots of countries have plenty, both friendly and not so friendly (that we still buy lots of stuff from anyway). We absolutely don't need Russian uranium. Uranium is also easy to store long-term (years).
There is zero risk of a new stupid energy dependence on Russia.
True, there is uranium everywhere. Yet Russia still has a 40% marketshare on enriched uranium because enrichment is the difficult part, just ask the Iranians.
Older male got some Tadalafil from the doctor and not covered by insurance. Cost 530$. Told them i will not be using insurance and did an RX code and the prescription was 11$.
The system is beyond silly in pricing.
Another prescription had a 10$ copay since it was just a generic drug. Again I requested please don’t run through insurance and the rx price was 4$.
I did a deep dive into understanding how prescription pricing works in the US, long story short it is insanely way too complex and for profit private health care insurance is not good for the health of the population.
Agree I switched to Linux gaming about 4-5 years ago and cannot be happier. Just finished Expedition 33 and it ran flawless. Even setting up a simple OBS desktop to capture HDMI and stream ... so much easier with Linux than Windows. No forced updates, no random reboots, no annoying widgets, no AI integration... just does what I want it to. Why Microsoft just won't release an stripped down edition and make it afforable and easily accessible is beyond my understanding. I am now an old timer and 15-20 years ago I would do almost everything on a PC simply and efficiently now I find Linux gets this job down hands down better than anything Microsoft has to offer.
This checks out. I find myself watching more youtube videos anywhere from WW2 restored footage, to Bloodborne and Elden Ring lore. There is some great documentary style content on youtube that just isn't on major streaming services. Well at least that I can find.
A therapist once explained to me that the human mind first processes things through the emotional regions of the brain (limbic) and only afterwards can it reach the logic center (pre frontal cortex).
This has helped me to understand a lot of human behavior and social media posts and reactions (also propaganda, cults, sales, etc)
You may think you have come to a logical conclusion about political issue x or political party x, but very likely the vast majority of us are first having a triggered emotional reaction and later using our pre-frontal cortex to logically create a narrative on why we feel this way and justify it.
Taken to extremes I think you can see things like today happen and see how people react.
Sometimes I catch myself defending someone or a position and later realize I am just wrong, it’s just that I had an emotional reaction felt a possible connection with the person or a cause or vibe they expressed or are connected with and then my attorney brain kicks into overdrive trying to make it all add up.
It also explains a lot of domestic issues, if you are upset or scared your brain stays in the limbic center and is literally incapable of rational thought until you calm down or feel safe.
Another way to frame the same observation that I like goes:
"A magician, asked how he comes up with his magical tricks, asks back: are human rational or irrational? It's a trick question, we are rationalizers. We make up our minds, and then come up with a reason why that's right.
Magical trick is all about understanding this dynamic and guiding the reasoning to the conclusion you want it to make"
A19 uses the 3nm process and its benchmarks look similiar to the A18. My two cents I would hold off to next version of the air/pro with the 2nm process and the A20 series chips.
"Doc Burford contends that the true danger facing teams today isn’t competition, disruption, or lack of capital—it’s leadership devoid of expertise, decision-making dominated by superficial metrics, and a culture that values appearances more than actual value creation. Sustainable success comes from building things people want, not engineering facades to appease investors or the market. Relying solely on executive titles or data without understanding the craft or customer rapidly leads to collapse."
Have to agree and think this encapsulates alot of what we have been living through in the US over last few decades.
I tend to agree with student, NYT and major news outlets are clearly used for propaganda and if you sit back and look at it from perhaps another angle it makes sense , why wouldn’t a world super power with a massive government apparatus use media to influence and control citizen behavior?
So yes the anonymous experts, the anonymous intelligence experts, the experts on CNN panels .. etc etc. It’s the government pushing a narrative for a purpose. My two cents live your life and spend your precious emotional energy for the people you care about around you. Do things in your local community and help when and where you can.
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