GarbageShoot [he/him]

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  • 34 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: August 18th, 2022

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  • And fact is not subjective, opinion is, and you seem to lump them together

    You say this about the comment in which I say:

    In essence, it is a media consensus machine with some basic reading comprehension thrown in for people who can’t read English well enough to determine if a statement is, for example, an expression of the authors feelings or a statement on facts of the world.

    Not to mention that “whether something is a fact or not” or, more commonly, “what is the most likely explanation for what we are seeing,” is typically not something you have practical access to, which is why you are reading about it, so what you are left with is not metaphysical truth, but testimony, which is very corruptible. I don’t just mean this as a hypothetical, I mean that most outlets engage in an aggressive battle over a small minority of mostly-social subjects while operating in complete or near-complete agreement on many important topics.

    But even if we want to sidestep the issue of testimony mediating our access to metaphysical truth, there is still the question of which facts to include.

    Low-hanging fruit:

    https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2024-08-21/clinton-dnc-speech-harris-endorsement-joy

    ctrl+f “epstein”: 0

    https://spinscore.io/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.latimes.com%2Fpolitics%2Fstory%2F2024-08-21%2Fclinton-dnc-speech-harris-endorsement-joy

    ctrl+f “epstein”: 0

    Seems like it’s missing important information that it could at least mention in passing about the subject of the piece, but maybe that’s just me. I guess it’s all relative.

    And it uses primary sources for information verification, and those tend to be major outlets purely due to their size.

    Like I alluded to in mentioning “circular citation”, very often news organizations aren’t doing anything resembling original research in their articles. They are just publishing what other articles already said.

    But you are still missing that this is question-begging the correctness of the media, even though they have over and over been shown to be quite willing to work together to push atrocity propaganda and all kinds of nonsense.




  • I don’t know how to explain to you that perspective is a problem that can’t be escaped by using machines. It’s like using video in place of vision; yeah, there are obviously plenty of cases where it’s helpful for a specific task, but fundamentally you are going from using a human to using something made by humans.

    From what I can glean immediately, this thing gets its idea of the “truth” from what is published on major new sites, like PBS, NYT, and such. As a result, what it can “verify” from circular citation becomes what is “true.” In essence, it is a media consensus machine with some basic reading comprehension thrown in for people who can’t read English well enough to determine if a statement is, for example, an expression of the authors feelings or a statement on facts of the world.



  • I actually agree with it in this case that excluding what Russia has said about this is silly at best, but Media Bias Fact Check-style websites aren’t actually free of bias, they are just question-begging a certain paradigm.

    Like, if an article covering the US election only mentioned what Republicans have to say, that doesn’t mean the only other viewpoint it needs is what Democrats have to say; there is more to an issue than what the two most influential parties have to say, but to say that you need those two perspectives while not advocating for the Greens or, say, one of the communist parties, is already assuming many different positions on foreign intervention, environmental policy, and so on, where the two parties mostly agree.

    Likewise, depending on where it is, there are various popular groups throughout Ukraine and Russia that might have a substantially different perspective that is closer to the truth.


  • Literally just read the list. It’s not ahistorical because it gets history wrong, it’s ahistorical because it has nothing to do with history. It has no ability to explain how and why fascism emerged when it did rather than sooner or later and thereby has very little understanding of what it actually is. It’s like defining a disease by a very loose checklist of symptoms, the fundamental causality is completely absent, so there is very little you can even do with it besides make a shaky diagnosis.

    Incidentally, Trump isn’t a fascist. He flirts with being a fascist and in many ways has lit the way [something something tiki torches] for future fascists, but fundamentally, he’s just doing fascist-like rhetoric as a way to sell people on relatively normal neoliberal policy. Probably the most strange thing he did was bomb Qasem Soleimani, something that Democrats didn’t even really oppose on any grounds other than it being rash, despite Soleimani being a leader in the fight against ISIS. If I had to pick a second thing, it was probably lowering military funding to South Korea, which was just him being stupid and accidentally a clearly good thing to do. He’s not harder on immigrants than Democrats, he’s not harder on China or Russia, he’s just a normal rightist wrt to queers, he likes giving tax cuts to rich people, and he’s fussy in diplomatic meetings. He had very few policies that Biden didn’t immediately perpetuate. If you want to call the whole neoliberal edifice fascist, fine, whatever, but he’s not special in anything but aesthetics.




  • Trump doesn’t have even a double-digit number of loyalists in the Senate and proportionately probably about the same in the House. This is a relevant detail because his enablers in Congress are overwhelmingly party loyalists who will drop him like a sack of potatoes the moment it becomes more expedient to. The reason that matters is that it was mainly the Republican Party that got all those Congresspeople elected, not Trump, even in the races where Trump endorsed them, so the relative locus of power is the Republican Party (and really it’s the donor class, but we don’t need to get into that).

    All this to say that AP’s simplistic and unsubstantiated flattening of Venezuelan politics to “There’s one guy in charge of everything, his lockstep minions, and the brave rightists fighting them” is below you to believe.




  • Maduro isn’t a socialist, Chavists aren’t socialists and he’s openly a Chavist (i.e. a follower in the tradition of Hugo Chavez, who was a great progressive but not really a socialist).

    I don’t give a shit what the Carter Center has to say about any of America’s enemies, and they provide no means to evaluate the substance of the claim by “experts from the UN” (which is different from a report by the UN or an official committee of the UN).

    And, again, Maduro did not appoint the judges; he doesn’t even have the power to.

    Maybe most pertinently: Do you not remember last election cycle, when all the neoliberal news outlets were joined together in their outrage over the NED and friends saying Maduro stole the election, only for that claim to “just turn out” to be pulled from thin air? Do we need to do this every six years when a US-backed reactionary loses?