volkris @volkris@qoto.org

@gcblasing@mstdn.social ah, one of those cases of trying to blame someone for what they literally didn't do

@davidtoddmccarty I mean, they have been outed as having just made shit up, or at least having really violated journalistic standards.

And since we are in a moment when the administration is left leaning, the support of those papers really fits the definition of propaganda quite well.

In my opinion the right wing outfits are just utterly dumb, they really don't have the staff that has the expertise to know what's going on in the world.

But when the left leaning outfits publish stuff that isn't true, well that's a lot more insidious, supporting the ones in power and avoiding accountability for them.

@wjmaggos just to name one particular example, I found it amazing that Trump was impeached through processes in Congress where people for and against the impeachment showed absolutely no interest in figuring out what was true or false.

The hearings had people on two sides of the aisle standing up and recounting completely different versions of events, and they even called witnesses that rejected the factual claims being put on the table, but none of that even seemed to matter.

I don't think that would have been tolerated previously but now that is celebrated.

Like I said, there's nothing new about falsehoods and fabrications circulating in society. The difference is that now we generally tolerate and even celebrate them.

@freemo

@bigheadtales sure, because the people that we chose to elect determined her to be qualified.

That's how the US system works.

@wjmaggos again I don't think it's true that the odds of seeing a false claim are particularly higher now. Yellow journalism has always been a thing. Political parties and special interest groups and kooky conspiracy theorists and just plain fiction writers have always been around.

The reason I think people are less critical now range from changes in academia where ideas like postmodernity have become more prevalent even in hard sciences through changes in the consumers of media where people actually seek out content that's really vapid and uninformed.

The fictions have always been there. It's just that these days I'm seeing more and more people eager to believe them.

@freemo

I do want to build on @v 's point because this is a hobby horse of mine.

I always say that Fediverse/ActivityPub/Mastodon isn't actually decentralized. Rather, it is recentralized around instances, and throughout all of this time of development, it seems to reinforce a philosophy that ignores the empowerment of users, preferring to empower instance admins and developers looking to impose their ideas of user experience on users.

And I really think that's a shame, so I want to call it out as often as I can.

This is just another instance of user empowerment being left to second class status.

All of the people in comments saying that a user can just change instances or start their own instance or whatever else are just promoting that same philosophy: The user is asked to work to avoid the ones who actually have power in this organizational philosophy.

It's one of the big issues with this platform that I don't think gets enough attention, but isn't going to be solved.

@evan

@bigheadtales conspiracy theories like that are never particularly compelling

@wjmaggos The reason I don't think that's the case is because there's nothing particularly new about questionable sources of information and questionable ideas being floated around socially.

I don't think it's harder than ever because it's really not that different.

It's just that all too many have normalized faulty reasoning and acceptance of bias confirmation instead of legitimate examination and consideration of claims put before us.

For example, @freemo asked about solid evidence here, and that's something I see far too few people doing.

I don't think it's hard to figure out how to think about what's true.

It's just that so many people don't.

@webuiltthiscity but that doesn't show that it's the best way to help people get out of poverty since it didn't really look at the cost effectiveness.

In fact I'm surprised it wasn't more effective. Those results make me wonder.

@wjmaggos when you're uncertain about one claim that doesn't mean the opposite claim is definitely true, and this is a really important concept.

Right now we have broad swaths of the public marching forward with an assumption of guilt that is far from proven, and it's pretty important that we recognize that because otherwise we end up with the same old situation where two different people can't communicate because they can't agree on what is and isn't basic truth.

If there isn't evidence showing that Trump is guilty, as @freemo requested, that doesn't mean he or OJ are definitely innocent.

However, it does mean that the assumptions about guilt are really overblown and hysterical.

This is pretty important right now as serious legal matters are weighing heavily on the public.

@robreed@mastodon.social I think that one of the biggest problems society faces these days is the lack of quality information to the general public, where we have so many issues that we can't resolve because we literally don't know what's true or not.

We need high quality sources of information so we can begin to unravel some of that problem.

At this point I think it's much more important that we have high quality information. Maybe we can talk about independence or anything else once we address that basic epistemological crisis.

If people can't agree on what is true then everything else seems pretty futile.

@servelan I don't think salon appreciates that the customers are getting exactly what they want, it's not a scam, it's just that this is one way they express their discontent with a world that seems to have gone off the rails.

And in missing that salon is missing something really important.

@robreed@mastodon.social meh, I would say we need to put high quality sources first regardless of their independence.

Focusing on independence over quality prioritizes the wrong aspect of the source.

After all, an awful lot of independent sources are independent because they put out nutty content that legit institutions don't want to associate with.

@SteveThompson certainly, of course the better situation is to have institutions functioning well enough that there is neither discontent nor things to inspire rebellion in the first place.

Things are pretty off the rails and it would be nice if we could fix that.

@mark_ohe as trees get old and toward the end of their life cycle they end up releasing even more potent carbon into the atmosphere, though.

It becomes pretty effective to harvest them to keep the carbon sequestered into things like house construction, while making more room for new trees to take in even more carbon.

So this kind of thing can be pretty counterproductive.

@SteveThompson Well it's not JUST another ploy to grab cash--that it actually sells says a lot about the state of the public that has become so fed up with our institutions that they would pay money to participate in that symbolism of defiance.

So it's both.

Trump is profiting, but profiting off of general discontent in the country that really needs to be addressed.

@shlenny it's just stirring the pot and clickbait for Propublica.

The product of the Supreme Court is its rulings, the reasoning in the logic in the opinions that it hands down publicly. The rest of this is just distraction.

And it's really not healthy for society for journalists to promote muck racking over real civic education in the country.

@mheadd there's the old saying that one needs to find out why a fence was put up before taking it down.

@wjmaggos so no?

@freemo

@SuigSays@mstdn.social I mean ISN'T it worth a lot to have the constitution properly interpreted?

ProPublica just shoveling more drama to get clicks.