On top of that, just completely asinine tech reporting is becoming problematic.
Bloomberg supermicro? Never retracted, lead reporter on it is now BBG's cyber reporting czar.
NYT's NSA hacked Baltimore author? Came out with that smooth brained "Jetbrains == SolarWinds" story.
The wear and tear from a complex field only getting more complex, it governing a larger and growing share of our civil society, and already substantial roadblocks to explaining the layman "how to HTML," is really, really, really showing these days.
Sorry for the rant. I work in infosec, and this dynamic has been brewing for a while. Once the "r/WSB, a sometimes alt-right subreddit for stock trading" stories started hitting from all the otherwise top tier news outlets, I lost it finally.
I'm not barking up a MSM tree, but legitimately when and how does this dynamic start to change? It's getting absurd.
If groundbreaking free-speech is going on in there to drive the conversation forward, I haven't seen much of it yet.
I listened to about 40 minutes of a chat on SolarWinds from a lot heavy hitter defense<>tech people start with:
-> how do we feel about this level of compromise v. encryption access laws (not totally related but yeah good topic, let's go there!). This was asked by a pub policy devsecops rep at GitHub, so she knew her stuff.
answered first with (and I swear this is a close quote from a thought leader, startup founder and ex-Marine named "Marvin")
-> freedom of expression, leads to freedom of thought, which leads to freedom of innovation, which leads to freedom of minds, which leads to...
leading to:
-> clubhouse uses NLP, so of course if it's free you are the producing
and end somewhere far, far away from anything meaningful on SolarWinds while producing the worst type of verbal fluff from people who generally are there to self-promote their startups. I raised my hand in there to see if I could get in a question re: "hey that engineer asked a solid question 20 mins ago, I'm not sure it was ever answered." Moderators then disabled hand-raising.
Half of Clubhouse is SV founders practicing their pitches on each other, and the other half is entertaining discussions of the somewhat raunchy type, i.e. "Gain your empowerment, no more casual sex!" Additionally, although this is my take away from a casual scroll of profile pictures, clubhouse has a massive diversity footprint. Finally, we have minority techies congregating in numbers, talking about their stuff!
If tech reporters are really spending their time digging for the next GRU disinfo campaign there, then NYT needs its $70k a year back from those reporter salaries and should sub to FEYE's campaign reports instead.
I run into some issues with your use of Taibbi as a good anecdote though for unbiased reporting, and I won't touch your MSM comment.
I think Taibbi is a competent, honest, and candid reporter. That said, I was around during his coverage of GS in the Rolling Stone in '08-'09.
Is he good at speaking truth to power and creating compelling narratives? Yes. But he's biased in his coverage in the same way that Greenwald is. I don't necessarily agree with blurring* the line between OpEd and reporting is the direction that solves the disconnect.
Additionally, honest, citizen journalists with independent funding can misunderstand tech the same way a NYT reporter can. It's still a complex field only getting more complex.
The only citizens who will be able to expend the time and resources to do more than superficial reporting will either have a Paul Bunyan-sized axe to grind or be funded by someone else. In neither case will they be unbiased.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/03/technology/personaltech/t...
> So what’s your take? Are you concerned?
> KEVIN Honestly, not really?
and
> I’m not as worried about Signal. Similar to WhatsApp, Signal set a limit so that you can forward messages to only five people at a time. So it would be time-consuming for misinformation spreaders to make a message go viral. Also, Signal limits group chats to up to 1,000 people. That’s large, but not as huge as a Telegram group chat.
It's an article about how misinformation can spread here, but probably less significantly than on other platforms.
"Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman.
"Hot Spot". Another sensationalist phrase used to scare readers into thinking anyone that even slightly disagrees with their point is out there somewhere planning another attack.
The title also points to the continuation of painting tech as evil. As if "Private Messaging Apps" have anything to do with the primary concern, "Misinformation". It's a poorly written article with an even poorly written title. If you don't think articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices, it's going to be hard to find common ground.
I disagree that "articles like this are written specifically to inadvertently call for the censorship of more voices." The article takes on a subject that has been discussed a lot recently, and, on balance, probably pushes back at the notion that private messaging apps are a net harm in terms of the spread of misinformation. I'm not even sure how it's possible to specifically write an article intended to inadvertently accomplish something?
> "Misinformation" is among the list of grossly overused words in online discourse. It has no meaning, other than to exist as the boogyman.
As someone who used to work for an academic-backed non-profit that sought to understand misinformation using algorithms, I strongly disagree with this statement. I agree that many people use terms like "misinformation" in a way that isn't grounded in this kind of understanding, but people do that with all kinds of buzzwords. Without getting into solutions (even if your preferred solution is "do nothing"!), I think we can agree that misinformation causes real and demonstrable harm. So what's worse about using misinformation as a boogeyman, than, say AI?
I think the time for this excuse is long past. There is research showing that headlines matter.
It can both be intended to get more clicks, and to push an agenda. In fact it’s reasonable to assume every headline is like this, since they must generally conform to the agendas of the publication and must be interesting.
Headlines are generally written by editors, not the authors. However at this point, why does that change anything?
These are two people working together on a single published piece.
If you goal is to de-incentivize a behavior, it seems odd to arbitrarily discount the motivation for that very behavior.
> These are two people working together on a single published piece.
Copy editors (who write headlines at large news orgs) don't work with reporters on the content of the piece, only the style and grammar.
If the organization has an ideological position, they will reflect it. It doesn’t take some special deep thought to do so.
It seems like you are working hard to make the case that these headlines are somehow random, or that bias takes a lot of work to coordinate.
That’s implausible. They are a result of the organizational culture as much as any other writing they produce.
There are of course rare cases when someone acts on misinformation to do something harmful. I can easily think of several examples of bad reporting from supposedly reputable media outlets that caused a ton of damage over the last year.
Conversely, most true information does not cause harm either. But some true information does cause harm.
In that sense, I think the veracity of the information has little to do with the risk of harm, and that we should not allow this trojan horse for free speech regulation to take hold. For whatever problems free speech has, trying to stifle it is just not going to provide the benefit that people think it will.
The Iraq war was based on misinformation. It did cause perhaps the greatest harm in the last several decades. However, that was “officially sanctioned” misinformation directly from the government (whether they believed it in good faith or not). I think before doing anything to limit the flow of information, consider whether the proposed framework for suppression of misinformation have caught this. Worse, if someone knew that the WMDs were not there, and could have corrected that disaster, would they have been considered misinformation?
We have already seen this in action with the tech companies giving very loose directives to their content moderators to remove certain types of misinformation. A popular youtuber was censored for telling people that masks are a good idea back in March. The official information at the time was that they do not help. The truth was that they obviously do, and now you get censored for saying that they don’t help. If someone asks honestly about something suspicious related to the election, or believes a voting rule change was procedurally unfair, without paying any mind to the weird conspiracy theories, they get moderated. Because it sounds like “claims of election fraud” and the 3 seconds that the moderator spends on it don’t allow for nuance. Or the hunter biden “misinformation” that wasn’t. That basically means that the word of the US Government (particularly the Democrats) is the “true information” and anything else in conflict with that is misinformation. And that’s a pretty bad place to be. In practice, this just doesn’t seem to work, and does more harm than good.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fake_news_coverage_of_Sri_Lank...
Edit: I also wanted to point out that there's a technical term for true information that causes harm, "malinformation." Those of us who have studied misinformation have actually spent a lot of time documenting how misinformation has appropriated the trappings of malinformation in order to become more convincing. Furthermore, most of the misinformation being shared by volume on social media isn't of the "the sky is a layer of impenetrable foil" variety.
Wow, that is such an Orwellian thing to say.
The definition you just gave could be used to justify censorship of any truthful information.
Yes, this factual information is upsetting, but we need to let Facebook cover our eyes and decide how outraged we are allowed to be. Otherwise we might hurt ourselves or others.
I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation?
Malinformation as a concept is specifically that truthful information can be problematic and we need to be "protected" from it. If the truth is upsetting, then try to solve the problem, not people talking about it.
---
Then again, perhaps good malinformation policies could have averted rioting last summer, and we could have censored the initial George Floyd video that made it look like Floyd was murdered by a cop. The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes. So, if our friends in big tech had simply censored things until the full facts came out and we could see context, it would have been more orderly and harmonious.
Isn't preventing rioting and civil unrest one of their goals? Too bad we couldn't have blunted the outrage.
I don't see that the second half of that is inherent to the concept of "malinformation". There are situations where unabashed, unfiltered truth can be damaging or problematic. Defining that concept with a term is not in any way attempting to solve that concept. It doesn't presume that something has to be "done" about malinformation, but it can provide additional perspective on ways that misinformation can spread.
Do you not agree that truthful information can sometimes cause harm? What if I, say, reveal the identities of all CIA agents operating in China?
> I can appreciate that factual information could be presented in a dishonest way, but if it is so misleading, how is it not just misinformation?
Misinformation and malinformation are two different terms that mean different things: misinformation is never true, and malinformation is always true.
If you read my posts, I've been pretty careful to say that I don't necessarily have all the answers to the way different types of information spread across the internet. I just wanted to give some more context to the way researchers discuss these subjects.
> The police later released evidence that Floyd had overdosed on fentanyl and most likely died of natural causes
I hadn't heard this before, and don't really want to wade into it, but I'll just leave this here: https://www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/sep/25/blog-posti...
Mostly by other navel-gazing publications echoing the same fearmongering.
This is how consent is manufactured.
How about this one:
"The Journalistic Tattletale and Censorship Industry Suffers Several Well-Deserved Blows"
The other is aimed at preventing that.
You really should read it, because the article takes the opposite conclusion. "Are you concerned?" "Honestly, not really?"
Newspapers generally mark Opinion columns as Opinion. In the case of the NYT article, it's not marked Opinion, but you could reasonably infer it as opinion because it's written as a dialog between two people. However, it's not explicitly marked as opinion, which it should be in order to make it clear that this is just the reporters' opinions.
Meanwhile Greenwald states his Substack is where he's publishing as an independent journalist, so unless you want to start referring to him as an independent pundit (or entertainer, in the style of Fox News primetime), calls for journalistic integrity should absolutely apply equally there.
Also, accusing a man like Greenwald (who resigned from the media organisation that he founded because he disagreed with the direction it was taking) of poor integrity? That's a bit off-base.
> It’s interesting to note that WhatsApp has restricted message forwarding for exactly this reason [preventing false information spreading like on social networks]
We can all agree message forwarding limits are a good idea - no one like spam. The bailey is implied to be that we should keep tabs on identified extremists even in encrypted platforms.
> I share your worry about the encrypted apps becoming, essentially, huge shadow social networks.
> there’s now this debate about whether it’s good that all these unsavory characters from the dregs of the internet are disappearing from big social platforms, or whether it’s dangerous to have them congregating in spaces where researchers, journalists and law enforcement can’t keep tabs on them as easily.
The authors (or speakers, as this article is a dialog) never make the bailey argument. Instead they make arguments that would naturally lead to the bailey, if taken seriously. Private messengers could become "shadow social networks"? Well if they do, they must be policed like social networks. Also note in the second quote how the speaker distances them self from the argument with "there's this debate". They don't mention the alternative to the current situation, so it is left to the imagination of the reader - should we allow "unsavory characters" back on social media platforms? Or is the alternative that we continue keeping tabs on them on the encrypted messaging apps?
Notice the "we won't be helpless" - a clear inference that if information is published there that this person considers to be misinformation, they have an avenue to report it and get it censored.
And the whole tone of the article was clearly "the tech giants have agreed to censor the bad people, so now the bad people have fled to smaller apps where it's going to be harder to censor them". It's a discussion about how authorities can "stop the spread of disinformation" - you know, censor people.
https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-new-domestic-war-on-ter...
By whom? What topics are unable to be freely discussed on these applications?
For ex: on twitter, if a non-private account shares an article that completely misrepresents some statistc, there's a reasonable chance someone will swoop into their replies and push back on it. We see this all the time with both right leaning and left leaning pundits. Does this dynamic go away in large telegram chat rooms? My guess is it still happens in some form (give people some credit, most people are not blind fools). But then again, who really knows unless you're in the private group?
>Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done.
Thanks for the reminder. I'd forgotten to after the mess at The Intercept.
Are there any other independent journalists you would recommend?
I also sometimes send a bunch of money to the Guardian when I read something interesting there, probably more than I feel like for just the Guardian, but there's nowhere else I can pay for stories, everyone else want me to subscribe.
I pay for Andrew Sullivan's Substack and reading his weekly column is always a highlight of my Friday.
He's not really a "journalist" but John McWhorter's Substack is excellent too.
I haven't seen Greenwald do much other than outrage manufacturing in some years. I guess it's paying the bills.
Side note, that link you linked to is not "holocaust denial", and I'll prove it, I'll quote it directly for you: "Noam Chomsky famously defended a French professor against attempts to have him fired because he questioned Holocaust orthodoxies. People understand Chomsky found the ideas repulsive but academic freedom sacred. That's the noble leftist tradition I support." I don't know how you can interpret that the way you framed it when you linked to it, but I'm beginning to doubt that even you genuinely believe the arguments you're making.
https://twitter.com/heresysquad might be a little biased.
Jeez. At least give your opponents a charitable take on their argument. This stuff isn't some make-believe silencing of online Socratic circles that just happen to have "non-approved" viwes or "wrongthink". I don't think you get how scary some of these mobs are. They're online witch-hunts fueled by hate and the belief that their marks are the cause of the bad in the world. And when you add actually crazy people into the mix it bleeds over into the real world. They will doxx you, stalk you, find every public picture of you, your friends, your family online and send them to you with death threats. They will Photoshop those pictures so it looks like you're being tortured or raped and pass them around. If they find your address you'll start getting them in the mail and eventually messages with pictures of your house.
Like this problem is hard. I want free and open communication as much as the next person it's not so easy. Trading other people's safety for my liberty doesn't sound quite as noble.
I want free and open communication as long as it does inconvenience me or those in power?
Also remember: public groups and channels on Telegram are public. You can join them and report them if you want.
What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry.
The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities, because some well connected journalists said it was the next evil thing after Parler.
People believe this, just like they believe that MeWe is an alt-right hotspot (it is mostly ex-googleplusers discussing chili growing, general gardening, sharing landscape photos etc - unless maybe I haven't searched for the magic string that unlocks all the evil..?)
The result is that ordinary people shy away from newer, better technology and fall back to/stick with abusers line Facebook.
Yep. Facebook, the place that has hosted much more hate speech than any alternative platform I know of.
I'll assume you mean doesn't but that's not at all what I'm saying. It's easy to take an absolute stance as long as your blind to or don't care about the consequences of it.
> What you cannot is join my family group and start judging my kids based on what they said one afternoon when they were angry.
What? I don't think I would want to be in your family group chats but regardless I'm specifically talking about huge public/semi-public spaces.
> The problem here is that because of journalists like these we now have to prepare to defend Telegram against authorities
Look this shit sucks. It's terrible that the same group of awful people that seem to poison everything they touch have been flocking to different corners of the internet trying to find a place that won't kick them out to self organize. As Facebook/Twitter/Reddit have shown you don't actually have to get rid of them at large just make a good-faith attempt.
The places are public. The police can go there. Even Telegram itself take down public groups that incite violence.
They just don't kick people out for describing themselves as retards.
This doesn't seem to be about "the same group of awful people that seem to poison everything they touch" anymore. Now they want to take away anything they don't feel they control thoroughly, hence the broad attacks on Telegram ans Signal.
Seeing as of late the only prominent examples of the terrible behavior you describe are by exactly the people trying to warn the world of these evil people and save us from them, I'm going to have to file this in "baseless scaremongering."
This is the moral panic of our day. This is our satanic panic, and the people you're defending are our Tipper Gore.
That doesn't prove any particular percentage of the newcomers were, but when you see one like that...
But I say again, I believe this was an effect of the articles, not the cause.
You can't defend baseless attacks against things like WSB by reminding us that a real mob of scumbags exist and then expect others to disassociate the two. When an article is written attacking someone that is legitimately going after the evil people on the internet, your point may very well be valid, but in this case it is not. If you want these two scenarios disassociated from one another, perhaps don't associate them with one another.
You mean like that group that has torched neighborhoods, shot polive officers, shot other protesters, thrown rocks, use baseball bats on police and civilians etc etc?
Or do you mean the really really scary ones like the ones that walked into Capitol Hill and had four lunatics with strips along with them while the rest were busily taking photos?
I could be wrong, but I still don't think there was a single BLM protest this summer where 3 people were killed.
I wasn't there, wouldn't have been there if I could (quite on the contrary I'm working on getting people away from such activities.)
Still I think we shouldn't compare the Capitol event with one BLM event but rather compare all MAGA events with all BLM events.
I hope they mean “the next” after traditional media.
> 'the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks to warn that the Bad People had migrated to Signal and Telegram.'
and then decide this was good quality, unbiased journalism worth paying for. And then go on to post that sentence as evidence of its goodness.
Looks like anger porn to me.
Regarding journalistic value, his pieces are always loaded with links and references. I like reading his articles because I can easily read the stuff he is referencing to see if I interpret them the same way, and try to see whether I see things differently.
First-rate journalism highlights the subject's corruption or bad behavior with such persuasive and overwhelming evidence that the audience generally judges the person or organization under discussion to be a mendacious object of derision.
That is an accurate characterization of the journalism on the Snowden leaks that Greenwald won the Pulitzer for. E.g., the story on NSA spying on Petrobras.
Second-rate journalism simply cuts out the middle-man and casually derides the person directly for an audience that is drooling to see that person taken down a peg. E.g., "Liz Cheney is a compulsive liar who will say anything to manipulate the public, just like her father taught her to do."[1]
I have no idea why Greenwald insists on using techniques of second-rate journalism in his op-eds-- op-eds which quite obviously also include a lot of background research. But I find his consistent use of second-rate journalism steers his rhetoric in directions that directly mislead the reader.
E.g., when AOC tweeted about WSB, Greenwald alleged that she wanted to "claim these Redditors as their own," as he wrote in one of his articles. That's a mischaracterization of what she did, and apparently those Redditors agree with me:
https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbets/comments/l6fg8q/aoc_...
The responses there are a lot of fun to read-- lots of riffs, some surprising agreement, some reasonable disagreement. But as far as I can tell, nearly every default-visible comment there understood that she was uttering a relevant and common refrain from her political platform, not attempting to "claim" the users of WSB as current or even future social democrats. Politicians do this all the time-- e.g., Bernie Sanders did when as a presidential candidate in 2016 he spoke to Liberty University-- communicating to people with obvious opposing viewpoints where they are (albeit in her case with a bit of obvious snark) by focusing on common ground.
That is fundamentally different than a politician claiming a constituency for themselves who is likely opposed to their views in reality. When a politician does that it's at the very least condescending, and you can probably imagine how a group of trash-talking free marketheads on Reddit would respond if AOC actually tried to do that.
Greenwald's writing is littered with enough of these little boogers that it consistently gets in the way of his larger points. And in op-eds like his, there usually isn't that much original research in the first place-- there are plenty of other authors covering this territory who don't hurl completely unnecessary insults at people.
Just look at the comment sections of his articles to get a sense of what kind of person this type of writing attracts. It's not as rabid and pretentious as a David Foster Wallace fan club, but it's close.
[1] https://greenwald.substack.com/p/the-case-for-a-pardon-of-ed...
And honestly, why would any sane investigative journalist would want to distract from a breaking story with a bunch of facile name-calling? If for some reason Greenwald wants to write like that in a future on some similarly groundbreaking exclusive as the Snowden leaks were, I guess I'll have to reassess.
It is not a requirement. It doesn't even always have to be unbiased. But it should stick to the facts, something he does if you can ignore the witty parts.
Besides, that decision was made after reading more of the post, not just that part.
If the so-called watchmen of the “MSM” even for a second tired to meet the standards in their own writing that they hold for others, they’d be crushed. This goes triple for the biased “journalist” in the OP.
It’s so gross to see someone like this snipe and cherry pick examples from the vast, vast media system, and then have otherwise smart people take the bait because thinking it’s some enlightened, contrarian position.
It’s just a way to sell ads to the “ackshyually...” crowd.
But what if in a few years Greenwald falls (further) from grace and you find yourself in hot water for having financed him? Better use a prepaid card.
Everyone else should of course feel free to use a prepaid card.
If it's really possible for "some folks" to deplatform "whoever they want" "for anything", why is this power not available to me or anyone I know?
I know it's glib, but... come on folks. The anti-anti-anti-cancel-culture hyperbole is officially out of control. It should be possible to have a legitimate conversation of whether or not Lorenz is correct about Andreesen, and whether or not the accusation constitutes behavior that should be condemned, without resulting to this kind of culture war screaming.
If you really want good journalism, do you really believe the stuff you quoted from Greenwald qualifies? "Stasi notebooks", really?
Cancel culture is real and we must not allow it to be tolerated. I've been told that I'm "problematic" and should reconsider blogging... because I recommended a $40 pair of hair shears.
Greenwald is being a bit melodramatic, but his substance isn't wrong. A reporter lied and attempted to slam a public figure - and if it wasn't for that conversation being widely heard she likely would of seriously harmed his reputation with her lie.
It’s good, and better if you’re baked out of your gourd. But a tad melodramatic.
That... seems kinda spun. The source material isn't so damning. Taylor Lorenz was on the call, and tweeted:
"@pmarca just openly using the r-slur on Clubhouse tonight and not one other person in the room called him on it or saying anything"
Then later when she was corrected that it wasn't Andreessen but someone else, replied:
"Thanks for clarifying that it was Felicia saying that word, rather than Marc as many in the room heard it. I hope you can understand how some people in the room felt hearing it"
I mean, as I (someone who reads and values Lorenz's work) read it, she was offended (more, it seems, at the casual use of "retarded" going unchallenged than at the specific speaker), and tweeted about it, but made a mistake in attribution which she recognized (while pointing out that her original offense was that the word wasn't challenged).
And Greenwald wrote like 1000 words to go after her. And his essay, not her tweet, is at the top of HN right now.
So... who's cancelling who here?
I used gypsy because it's the title the person I was describing used. It's how they asked to be referred to, and as it's their literal blood heritage, I'm going to refer to them however they want to be referred to.
This happens today with words like "transsexual" - there are people very offended by that phrase and there are people who self-label using that phrase and want to be called that.
If we as a species are going to continue down a path of globalization where we have a lot of different cultures and communities around us, we're going to have to understand a word is not verboten universally. There's a difference between someone not wanting to be called retarded and taking offense anytime the word itself is used - even in non-derogatory contexts.
What's being said here is that the word retard is an insult, but does not rise to the level/strength of a slur.
In any case, my experience (and - probably - the context of my cultural upbringing) was that the word was used to both denigrate people with developmental disabilities and to degrade those who did not. This wasn’t calling someone a “loser”. This was using an immutable characteristic of someone’s personhood against them and attacking others by asserting a resemblance.
Are you seriously going to try to pull some narrow technical originalist definition to argue that in this specific edition of this specific dictionary it defines “slur” as being about ethnicity and thus that word can’t be a “slur” bc it effects a class of people that isn’t a specific ethnicity?
'mint2: I can't reply to your post, but despite the 'ThrowawayR2 account name, his account is five years old with four thousand points. Ironically, the only way in which he could pacify you is to create a new account and post from that instead.
While what you say about the account is true, it’s literally called a throw away. Even with the age, it’s questionable whether it’s an alt account. But yes my bad. I was misled by the misleading name.
When we get to that point, we've lost the forest for the trees.
And yes, if you said “don’t be a cripple” to your friend and a guy physical disability overheard it, how do you think that would make them feel? Why would you want to arbitrarily hurt someone, twisting a verbal knife, just to razz your friend.
Look, we should be polite and not use offensive words, but be consistent. The referenced word is rude and offensive but in no way the same room as words that have resulted in lynching, genocide, systematic oppression.
If we want to go all polite and ban all “slurs” then we’ll be getting butthurt over calling someone “stupid” or “idiot.” And of course I’ve worked with people who are upset at any foul language and even blasphemy.
Are we going to get to a point that major reporters are thinking it’s attention worthy to say someone says “Goddammit?”
Arguing over whether that’s as offensive as another word just a matter of time and we are experiencing a slippery slope.
Either we’re going to get offended by everything and live in China/Disneyworld where there’s never offense, or we’re going to stop getting hysterical over unimportant things and use that attention to fight real, difficult, systematic problems.
This is not accurate about how much I’ve heard and am familiar, or used it, or my bubble. It’s kind of astoundingly wrong to the point that it makes me wonder why you would assume that about a stranger.
Also weird how you think to know how hurtful some words are vs others like you have some clue into how to quantify the pain caused by words.
I wish I could achieve such knowledge and confidence as you express here, with some certainty that I wasn’t an idiot.
Also, I wasn’t around in the 50s so not sure how 50s white (or non-white as well I suppose) complained about not being able to say certain words. It seems to me that people in the 50s didn’t limit their speech too much and one of the improvements we’ve made is that there’s less callous and hurtful speech spoken.
Because your posts are saying/implying the r word is less hurtful or offensive than other now taboo words. That is the reason I infer you are more familiar and comfortable with the word than the other taboo words. Is that really a strange conclusion?
And you say “also weird how you think think you know how some words are vs others”. Isn’t that the core of your argument as well? So you get to judge whether the word is offensive, but I don’t?
And one doesn’t have to be alive during the civil rights movement to know many average Americans found it objectionable they couldn’t use whatever language they grew up using, as if that prior use made terminologies that should never have been acceptable, acceptable
Here’s one to start you off: https://www.specialolympics.org/stories/impact/why-the-r-wor...
I suspect “you retard” is stronger than “that’s retarded”.
Unlike various other slurs, the word has various valid uses apart from mental development so it’s not going away.
I'm being obviously sarcastic, but I'm guessing the irony will be lost on you.
And when confronted on it, she said 'thanks for clarifying' and doubled down on the lack of context. No 'whoops, I was wrong', no apology, no retraction.
What part of that sounds like good journalism to you?
Isn't exactly what you're doing -- which is to say condemning something for what in normal circumstances would be a mild transgression or simple misunderstanding, and drawing wild conclusions about the speaker that don't seem to be present in the original text -- exactly what the problem with "cancel culture" is supposed to be in the first place?
I mean, if you demand that Taylor Lorenz give Marc Andreessen the benefit of the doubt and assume good faith on his part, why are you not willing to grant the same to her?
Mr Andreesen doesn't need anyone's benefit of doubt, because he didn't say what Ms Lorenz claimed. And even if he did, the use of the word "retard" was entirely appropriate in its descriptive context in that discussion. There is no reason to assume anything besides good faith on the part of the lady who actually did use the word.
Taylor Lorenz, on the other hand, was caught in a lie. Not a little lie, mind you, but a loud, public slander. When caught, she responded not with an apology, but rather another lie, some sanctimonious excuses, and then she ran and hid. Ms. Lorenz has given us no reason to assume good faith on her part here.
This is a lax standard that might be okay to hold for a 15-year-old child, but not for an adult Times journalist.
> the Times’ tech team quickly donned their hall-monitor goggles and Stasi notebooks
> The little crew of tattletale millennials assembled by NBC — who refer to their twerpy work with the self-glorifying title of “working in the disinformation space”
> they clearly get aroused — find otherwise-elusive purpose — by destroying people’s reputations and lives
No one reads that and thinks "wow, these people are members of the actual Stasi? holy crap!"
As Greenwald pointed out, her recent reporting seems to indicate some sort of vendetta against Andreesen.
Accusing someone of saying something they didn't say is called "libel" or "slander" depending on the medium with which it is done. To call that out, publish it, and for people to enjoy that published work, that is a far cry away from having a stated mission to go after, expose and deplatform people sharing ideas you do not like. You use the word "cancelling" much more liberally than it's contemporary definition applies, I'd say you're stretching it beyond its elasticity in order to make an argument that doesn't exist to defend an indefensible act.
You do realize that this is not an acknowledgement of the mistake. It’s an attempt to deny the mistake and gaslight the person reporting it.
You don't give equal weight to blatant lies. There's no legitimate conversation to be had on this topic other than to point out the blatant lies, attempted character assassination based on fabrication, and complete abandonment of any shred of journalistic integrity or standards. You don't give legitimacy to clear malevolent liars by arguing their points as if they are valid.
Hyperbole is a well known tool in writing.
Here it is obvious that he is using it and it resonates with many of the readers. I say he used it well.
When is hyperbole wrong? IMO most often when it isn't obvious. If a normally capable but uninformed reader actually believe it to be true word-by-word then it is missing its mark.
I might feel more strongly about this than you since a bunch of my friends has been on the receiving end of some major abuse of power by journalistic powerhouses around here.
The fact is that there are pied-pipers of disinformation on these platforms leading vulnerable members of our communities down rabbit-holes to who-knows-where. Normally we would address this with in-person confrontation but I think people are struggling to find the tools to protect their friends and families.
People are being preyed upon and the victims may not be the ideal rational individuals that we aspire to.
I'm not trying to say that censorship is a good thing, just that the tools that we may have once used to protect our communities are not adapting to the new environments.
There were tabloid magazines full of "fake news" sold in supermarkets throughout my entire childhood. People would shake their heads and laugh at the silly headlines, but nobody, ever, talked seriously about censoring the tabloid newspapers just because they didn't believe what they were saying.
So in other words, brainwash kids by only showing them one side of political arguments their entire life.
Then when little Jimmy starts hearing whispers about the evil Republicans, we'll tell him if he looks them in the eye he'll turn to stone.
The subtext being that "we" are wiser and know better then those "people" and have the right and duty to protect "people" from themselves? I reject that; that way lies madness.
We have to allow people to dissent, or we will have destroyed our own civilisation.
you could've have just said ' vulnerable people'
I'm already hearing this in local debates. It seems to seriously scare some folks that there are places where they cannot deplatform whoever they want for anything.
(PS: Open groups and channels are not encrypted on Telegram servers and can be reported. It is just that Telegram doesn't have a history of letting other abuse it.)
Edit: I've been planning to subscribe for a while. I do now.
Do it if $5 is pocket money for you. If not for this then for something else he have done.
Good journalism is extremely important but much of what we see today is a mix of extreme bias, outright lies and outrage manufacturing.