Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Windy » Fri Jun 29, 2018 6:44 pm

The real question is why is Milo advocating for himself to be shot?
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Marcuse » Fri Jun 29, 2018 6:53 pm

Aquila89 wrote:Theoretically, it's possible - the guy hated the newspaper for years, yet he only resorted to violence after Yiannopoulos advocated the murder of journalists. But that's just sophistry, I don't think for a moment that Yiannopoulos influenced this man's thinking.


Of course, but the complaint is that the "media" is reporting it, specifically the liberal media. The beeb is as liberal as they come, but they don't even mention Milo.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Absentia » Fri Jun 29, 2018 7:05 pm

CNN's version of the story has no mention of Milo either. I had been following the story on multiple major outlets and until ACL posted that Reddit link I had no idea what he was talking about.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby SandTea » Fri Jun 29, 2018 7:49 pm

It seems this is only connected to milo through that reddit screen shot. I don't hang around on the web anywhere other than here though so I wouldn't have heard about that supposed link if it wasn't posted here.

Here is a good little rundown of the suspects defamation suit against the news paper. It includes bits of the original article about him harassing a woman he went to high school with.

orig article wrote:"The emails started in late 2009 or early 2010 - she can't remember exactly, because it was only a few months later that they grew disturbing and she started documenting things.

"At first, she felt bad for him, so she shared some personal information and offered advice.

"'But when it seemed to me that it was turning into something that gave me a bad feeling in the pit of my stomach, that he seems to think there's some sort of relationship here that does not exist ... I tried to slowly back away from it, and he just started getting angry and vulgar to the point I had to tell him to stop,' she told the judge.

"'And he was not OK with that. He would send me things and basically tell me, "You're going to need restraining order now." "You can't make me stop. I know all these things about you." "I'm going to tell everyone about your life."

"An email in April 2010 said, 'Have another drink and go hang yourself, you cowardly little lush. Don't contact you again? I don't give a (expletive). (Expletive) you.'


link wrote:The appellant is pro se. A lawyer would almost certainly have told him not to proceed with this case. It reveals a fundamental failure to understand what defamation law is and, more particularly, what defamation law is not. The appellant is aggrieved because the newspaper story about his guilty plea assumed that he was guilty and that the guilty plea was, therefore, properly accepted. He is aggrieved because the story was sympathetic toward the harassment victim and was not equally understanding of the harassment perpetrator. The appellant wanted equal coverage of his side of the story. He wanted a chance to put the victim in a bad light, in order to justify and explain why he did what he did. That, however, is not the function of defamation law.

The appellant was charged with a criminal act. The appellant perpetrated a criminal act. The appellant plead guilty to having perpetrated a criminal act. The appellant was punished for his criminal act. He is not entitled to equal sympathy with his victim and may not blithely dismiss her as a "bipolar drunkard." He does not appear to have learned his lesson.


The internet sure is a double edged sword, aint it. This was a guy who actually was going to counseling. He had someone listening to him but he still wanted the paper to 'tell his side' of the story. I doubt that would have been any more flattering than the facts that they reported on. Stay safe surfing the tubes everyone. If that's even possible. So... stay lucky, I guess?
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Tesseracts » Fri Jun 29, 2018 8:20 pm

I moved this thread to Loud Noises because it’s been thoroughly established it isn’t about current events, in spite of the first post linking to a current event. I suppose it’s a debate about the media now.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Crimson847 » Fri Jun 29, 2018 9:11 pm

Oh boy. I didn't misrepresent Damore, I love complaining about TCS' echo-chamber qualities and the media twisting stories (like, well, Damore's), I was the first one here to note that Obama was putting kids in cages too, and I've long made my opposition clear to hateboner circlejerk threads like the Trump thread and the old SJA thread that are explicitly designed to spin people up.

So I'm probably on #TeamLemon here, right? Well, no. Others have objected to the personal shots, but my main objection is more central than that. Lemon, you argue that mainstream media sources are untrustworthy because, in short, they're biased toward particular viewpoints, don't pursue stories that don't serve that viewpoint, and omit inconvenient facts. You're 100% right about that. Then, however, you argue that the sources you prefer are exempt from this because...they're not as popular.

Those kids in cages have been reported by left and alt media for literal years, but the media somehow only managed to discover it this year. (no, they're not "all part of the media", alt media as clearly demonstrated here has absolutely no political clout, and is often ostracized for being unfaithful. Look at how wikileaks and the intercept are handled for giant flashing signs that this is undeniably true)


Good thing you need lots of political clout to mislead people or get a story wrong, eh? I mean, I see randos in comment sections say all sorts of batshit things. They don't have any power, and they tend to get insulted afterward for their views. Should I trust them without question too?

Thing is, alt-media and left media do every single thing you're attributing to mainstream media, because the things you're complaining about are more or less inherent to media as a concept. If you tell someone a story, you're choosing to not use that time to tell them a different story. You are spotlighting a particular problem or viewpoint at the expense of all others. If you're a human with normal human characteristics, you'll focus on telling the stories you think are most important and ignore stories you don't think are important, and since gauging "importance" is an emotive judgment your oeuvre will reflect subjective bias in what stories you cover and what stories you ignore. As an ordinary human, you'll occasionally do things that hurt your readers because they benefit you or people close to you, like doing sloppy research to save time or publishing clickbait to boost your ad revenue. Since perfectly objective writing is boring as hell (think legal documents and raw academic studies), you'll probably dress it up with some emotionally loaded terms and other pizzaz to keep the reader interested, which will further reflect your biases because that's what emotive words do. And while you personally may not do anything really unethical like fabricating a story out of whole cloth, in an industry with so many people working in it some fraction of them are bound to be ethically challenged. All of this adds up to seriously misinformed readers if they're getting all their news from you or people who think like you, whether you're a CNN anchor or a nameless YouTube guttersnipe.

In light of this, the solution isn't to divide media into "biased" and "unbiased" (or even "less biased") and try to cut out the former. All media is biased, but since we all have a viewpoint ourselves, we view media that supports that viewpoint as "pretty fair and balanced" and media that challenges it as "totally biased and worthless". So if we try to cut out "biased media", what we're actually doing is cutting out any media that challenges our preconceived viewpoint. Instead of avoiding bias, we end up unwittingly wallowing in it.

And when you wallow in your bias, you destroy your credibility with people outside that bubble, because you end up credulously repeating talking points that are obvious bullshit to everyone else. For instance, so far you've accused the mainstream media (and CNN in particular) of deliberately hiding or ignoring the fact that Obama kept kids in cages, and of blaming this shooting on Yiannopoulos. You've claimed that people who watch the MSM would be kept ignorant of the truth about both. But for those of us who pay attention to the mainstream media, we see a different picture:

https://hotair.com/archives/2018/06/21/ ... ids-cages/
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/18/us/photo ... index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/28/us/annap ... index.html

That's right: whatever alt-media source convinced you of these things fed you a line of bull. Not only that, but they convinced you to distrust the only people (the mainstream media and people who follow it) who would be able to refute said bull, just as liberal outlets discourage their viewers from trusting conservative outlets before feeding them inflammatory bullshit about conservatives. Isn't that an interesting coincidence?


If you want to get a more complete picture of the world, my suggestion would be to follow CNN. And Breitbart, and Fox News, and the Daily Beast, and any other outlet that's too "mainstream" or "biased" for you. As it stands, you're deliberately limiting your view of the world and harming your credibility with people outside your bubble.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Learned Nand » Fri Jun 29, 2018 9:22 pm

A Combustible Lemon wrote:Those kids in cages have been reported by left and alt media for literal years, but the media somehow only managed to discover it this year.

I just want to clarify the factual background of this:

The Obama Administration's detention of undocumented children was covered by the media somewhat extensively in 2014, during a spike in migration of unaccompanied children fleeing gang violence in central America. It came up in the news again recently because the Trump administration changed policies to separate parents from accompanied minors (which isn't something the Obama administration did).

Anyway, more generally, I agree with Crimson here. The fact that individual media sources don't give you the whole picture isn't a reason to discard the institution of journalism as a whole; it's a reason to read more media sources. Thankfully, the internet makes that easier than ever. If you're concerned that the media aren't reporting a story, then there's probably less reason to worry than you might initially think, because you would likely have about that from the media in the first place.

The solution to the flaws in journalistic media is a more expansive media diet, not a more contracted one that contains only a tiny selection of sources you trust. The latter strategy puts you at greater risk of trapping yourself in the same echo-chamber you're trying to avoid.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Ceiling_Squid » Fri Jun 29, 2018 9:46 pm

It certainly doesn't help when our president insists that the press is the "enemy of the people".

All while consuming a steady diet of Fox & Friends. It does distress me when the guy who should rightly be an example to the nation is not exactly spearheading a varied and illuminating media diet.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Krashlia » Sat Jun 30, 2018 12:34 am

Windy wrote:
Journalist brains literally operate on a lower functional level than normal people and they're drunk all the time and less people trust them every year.


I don't believe that anymore than I believe "Scientific claims that conservatives are more irrational than non-conservatives."

You've been had as much as the people you want to call out.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Crimson847 » Sat Jun 30, 2018 4:20 am

Found it.

http://www.businessinsider.com/journali ... ?r=UK&IR=T

The study, led by Tara Swart, a neuroscientist and leadership coach, analysed 40 journalists from newspapers, magazines, broadcast, and online platforms over seven months. The participants took part in tests related to their lifestyle, health, and behaviour. ...

The results showed that journalists' brains were operating at a lower level than the average population, particularly because of dehydration and the tendency of journalists to self-medicate with alcohol, caffeine, and high-sugar foods.

Forty-one percent of the subjects said they drank 18 or more units of alcohol a week, which is four units above the recommended weekly allowance. Less than 5% drank the recommended amount of water.


Seems plausible. Journalists often have to spend a lot of time travelling; the profession is hard-hit financially at the moment, so pay and hiring are down; and the financial crunch encourages outlets to publish faff and clickbait, which isn't what your average reporter went into journalism for. It's a high-stress, low-pay, and often low-satisfaction job right now, so it makes sense that diet and substance abuse problems would be epidemic.

That said, the sample size of this study is also 40, it only studies British journalists, and it's not clear if peer review has occurred. The article says it hasn't yet, but it's also dated May of last year.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Sat Jun 30, 2018 4:43 am

iMURDAu wrote:What happens when political control has influence and is influenced by the culture. Specifically the culture of the ruling party? Oh wait that's how things work and always have. So what are you talking about?


A Combustible Lemon wrote:Since they were facing a two-prong attack from the people in government and the people supporting government, they couldn't maintain their editorial freedom and totalitarian government was able to run mass propaganda to reinforce their message.


I already specified that that's the primary failing of the press. They're not the fourth estate and never can be because the people and the government are completely free to ignore them. They ignore them MORE if they're a political press. And the Press is growing more political. In the 80s and 90s it was far easier to believe the press is free, and so far easier to believe them when they attack the government, not because of any inherent values, but simply because it DIDN'T attack the government or participate in elections. It's a clear indication that a normally objective press can be trusted to attack the government only when necessary.

Tesseracts wrote:Saying they are all scum is no different than saying "all cops are scum" just because corruption exists in some parts of the police force.


People say all cops are scum and burn down the police and stuff like that because they've lost faith in the police force or see them as an authoritarian institution whose main and only allegiance is to the government, or in more recent cases to patriarchal institutions. So yes, saying media are scum is /exactly/ like that because they are an authoritarian institution with ideological allegiances. I don't see the problem here. The ICE is facing where that problem will go without it being addressed. People want to abolish the immigration police right now. And hopefully, people will one day revolt to abolish the press if they don't get their shit together.

Crimson847 wrote:Thing is, alt-media and left media do every single thing you're attributing to mainstream media, because the things you're complaining about are more or less inherent to media as a concept.


The problem here is I'm not calling alt and left media the good guys, I'm refuting the idea that widening your sources works. They've been talking about kids in cages for four years, but no one in their audience manages to cross over into more mainstream audiences and put the idea there. No one managed to force anyone who didn't want to talk about it to talk about it. The Intercept can be discarded immediately if you don't like it for its ridiculous stance on Israel, and I don't see any reason to force people to listen to an anti-semetic newspaper.

The fundamental problem isn't that press is bad or isn't objective. It's that

a) It can't be objective
Totalitarianism proved that press as an independent body cannot work without the support of people and government.
All journalists have biases, and their cultural refusal to recuse themselves from political stories in the service of the greater good is absolutely harmful.

b) People don't discard bad faith press
Bias is using the spotlight effect and bad editing. Bias is not staging protests or lying. Conflating the two is the problem here. What CNN did should be like what the National Enquirer does or what Veritas does, immediately and permanently disqualifying.
Stuff like Buzzfeed intentionally blurring the editorial line between opinion and reporting doesn't come through either, with people saying "BUT IT HAS REAL JOURNALISTS IN IT".
Stuff like poisoned sources aren't dropped. The SPLC has had to offer a full apology to Majid Nawaz, with millions of dollars in settlement, for their anti-anti muslim hitlist, but no one on their side is arguing to ignore them. People like Ayaan are still in deadly danger because of this refusal to handle bad faith behaviour.
While it's getting easier to admit, for example, NBC is liberal, for the longest time, even while the Zimmerman tapes were clearly edited specifically to inflate race tensions, people pretended it was politically neutral or at the very least journalistically objective. It isn't a joke like Fox is. The situation today where people can proudly say NBC is "as bad as fox" is new. Before it was NBC and CNN are neoliberal-conservative sites with a neoliberal-conservative bias and the only reporting they have you shouldn't trust is antiprogressive things.

c) People don't read the comments, ever
Youtube comments are garbage, all comments are memes and flame wars, etc. As people from the cracked comments, we at the very least should know the most important thing in the comments. Corrections. So many cracked articles about weird facts are misleading as fuck, and will never be corrected, even while they republish them for the tenth time. But then cracked does research and random commenters don't know things so who cares, right? Besides, real media writes corrections.

d) People don't read retractions and corrections and apologies, ever
This is something Glenn Greenwald highlights constantly. In the social media era, we can directly measure how much impact stories have vs corrections, you can directly see that corrections don't work. No one reads them. No one retweets them, no one likes them, no one shares them on facebook.
People who go on to do conversations tend to start, whether intentionally or not, with the uncorrected version. If they're corrected, they "admit it", but the damage is done, the team lines are drawn up and the tones are set. How many people have ever changed sides in an internet argument? Admitting it doesn't even work. If the primary problem was seperating families, why are people still talking about kids in cages? it's just a cowardly dodge so people can still talk about Trump. "You can talk about more than one thing at a time" isn't the answer when you're treating them both as this ambiguous mass of immigrant-hate in the actual conversation. When opposite sides started the more than one thing.

It doesn't become enough to talk about how kids in cages was always a thing, it needs to remain a referendum on the trump administration. The point of left media when it says "you weren't talking about this before" isn't to score points, it's to indicate the depth of the problem isn't just "change administration". But left media fails to point out the obvious fact that if you can't detain kids with parents but want to be hard on immigration and handle more crossing cases that turn into asylum cases as crossing cases first and asylum cases second, child camps are a necessity, because they don't want to support harder immigration control (because of the abuse inherent in preventing the movement of large groups of people, whether or not they support open borders or higher immigration), so if that was the only source, you'd be woefully underinformed.

e) Expert opinions are walking appeals to authority
Experts should be believed when they repeat facts. Experts need not be believed when they repeat conclusions. That's fundamental to science. Doubting conclusions is how the Particle-Wave idea was created.
The world's in the grip of Asimov's sciencism and it's sorta disturbing. Stuff like questions of personhood, always the job of philosophers and priests, get shot down by the opinions of doctors.
Pro-abortion people think explaining how statistically it's safer is an argument to make against people appalled at the very idea of killing children for convenience because doctors say it's not a child. How many of them even recognize that personhood has never been the area of expertise of doctors? abortion should be decided at a fundamental level through dialogue, compromise and popular support. The doctors and biologists should never have come into it except provide evidence where necessary, i.e, if someone proposes blastocysts aren't people because they fundamentally believe in thought and consciousness being important to personhood, the doctor can explain whether or not thought is possible. That's their role in the matter.

What's this have to do with media? Let's have an example. China and India are major pollutants. The problem here is that they have a lot of catching up to do to be industrialized to the extent of the first world, but it's going to damage the environment for them to do so.
So when media whines about the Paris Climate stuff, it's by default accepting the argument that it's ok for China and India to pollute, something Trump and Trumpists vehemently disagree with. To shore this up, they bring in experts to talk about how important it is to "handle" climate change. Happily ignoring the fact that Trump doesn't think it's handling Climate Change. As long as the media think it's handling climate change, it's handling climate change, and we don't need to have any deeper argument about the why and how of the matter.

Economists are new-age astrologers, and routinely ignore the idea that they're standing on the scales they're measuring. So when Economists come in to talk about Brexit, which is primarily a sovereignty and freedom issue, it's blatant sciencism. If people are panicking about Brexit (because the experts say it will be) and causing the economy to go bad, obviously that's proof of their point, isn't it? And when UKIP says they don't believe in the experts, it's not an open question is it, THEY'RE ANTI SCIENCE. SCIENCE HAS DEEMED BREXIT BAD.
UKIP has its own problems in that they don't provide any answer to the expert opinions, and they should if they were being intellectually honest.

But it's a sovereignty question. Sovereignty isn't decided by experts, it's decided democratically. Experts aren't the end-all. They're a compounding factor.

Obviously none of this would happen if people were actually allowed to reasonably disagree with experts, which would happen if the experts weren't a gigantic club being wielded against them by our friends in the media. But then icky people like flat earthers and anti-vaccers would have their views heard.
Yeah. They will. You can't stop them. They spread through word of mouth and the internet grapevine. Giving them a platform doesn't just spread their beliefs, it lets you control the messaging and framing around their beliefs. Which is the only control media will ever have on anti-expert opinions. But that cat's out of the bag and left the building when people cottoned onto media controlling narrative. So another weakness is

f) Media has no narrative control
There's so many of them. People like James Damore don't even need to explain themselves anymore. They'll just go to soft-right and alt-right podcasts to explain themselves because as Jordan Peterson proves pretty clearly, other media is shameless about framing and messaging things they don't agree with.
Anti vaxxers have their own insular little media chambers that they waltz around saving autistic children from not having polio in. Conspiracists have their Alex Jones to talk about chemtrails and hormone effects on ecosystems in. Reactionaries have Qanon style conspiracists to hang around. Communists live in a world where the labour movement is still a primarily communist thing, as if the working class doesn't detest the majority of their non-union causes.

It's not going against the idea that media's only job is cultural control to also say they /can't/ do cultural control. They can do it in bits and pieces. It's a dynamic system of hundreds of little cultural control centers shaping thought and narrative. They're ineffectual, not non-malicious.

This chaos is /definitely/ a worse thing than media running unchecked. I mean, people noticed. Disillusioned people pretty much act like the fabric of reality is dissolving around them. Democrats get to act like a government elected to oppose them shouldn't in the name of compromise, and republicans get to act like ignoring is the same as opposition because they have no idea how to move forward outside of gutting democrat things, which as I mentioned in the Iran thread, were in a very problematic manner, shoved through.



What incremental changes would fix /any/ of these issues that the press would actually take up and recognize?
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby SandTea » Sat Jun 30, 2018 4:49 am

Krashlia wrote:I don't believe that anymore than I believe "Scientific claims that conservatives are more irrational than non-conservatives."


And for that one, here are a couple. I just want in on the fun :D

Psychologists have found that conservatives are fundamentally more anxious than liberals, which may be why they typically desire stability, structure and clear answers even to complicated questions. “Conservatism, apparently, helps to protect people against some of the natural difficulties of living,” says social psychologist Paul Nail of the University of Central Arkansas. “The fact is we don't live in a completely safe world. Things can and do go wrong. But if I can impose this order on it by my worldview, I can keep my anxiety to a manageable level.”
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby Learned Nand » Sat Jun 30, 2018 5:34 am

A Combustible Lemon wrote:The problem here is I'm not calling alt and left media the good guys, I'm refuting the idea that widening your sources works.

What do you mean by "works" in this context? I don't think Crimson's point or mine is that widening your media sources will make the media better; just that it will mitigate problems with the media that might distort your beliefs.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby A Combustible Lemon » Sat Jun 30, 2018 5:57 am

It won't solve the problem with other people whose beliefs are already distorted. You can't democratize the media and assume it'll go well. Democracy has clear problems that people have been talking about for two hundred years. Minority views will be silenced by majority views. No one has the time to read 300 newspapers either. And people who cross echo chambers don't measurably make them smaller, they're mocked and downvoted on sight, from reddit to cracked to youtube. Cross polination is self-correcting.
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Re: Newspaper Shooting in Maryland

Postby gisambards » Sat Jun 30, 2018 11:14 am

Widening your sources works in that it gives you personally a better understanding of the situation, and that's all you can hope for. You seem to be blaming the press for what are fundamentally just failings of human nature. The idea that one could abolish the press is nonsense - people will always have a desire for news of current events, and so there will always be organisations trying to give that news, and those organisations will always tailor things to suit their own political agenda, and there will always be people who will just believe everything those organisations say. At least with a free press, you have the option of multiple viewpoints.
Much like democracy or capitalism, as deeply flawed as it is the press is entirely necessary for our society to continue to function. There simply isn't a realistic alternative to its existence.
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