- Apr 1, 2009
- 15,432
- 4,226
- 118
- Gender
- Whatever, just wash your hands.
So then you're a libertarian, you could just say that. I mean its a really naïve political position, but it is one and pretty much explains everything you have argued.
New York Hospital to Pause Delivering Babies After Unvaccinated Workers Resign En Masse
- Thread starter Cicada 5
- Start date
The problem is, we now live in a world in which I and others think it highly likely that if the powers that be KNEW there were effective treatments for Covid, they'd lie about it and their media allies would support the lies.
ITMT, Joe seems pleased with the drug regimen he used. Certainly not proof positive, but like so much else, be nice to have some independent review we could trust.
ITMT: Do you think nurses really will walk off the job and be replaced by members of the National Guard? Hysteria?
Considering that the "think for yourself" crowd doesn't take their own advice when it comes to Facebook mommy groups and conspiracy nuts, I no longer take that term seriously.
I'm sorry to say it, but I think the problem there is more with you and others than it is the powers that be and the media.
I mean, if we're talking about drug/vaccine effectiveness, you're not just talking about the government and media lying, but a whole host of agencies, and a few million scientists, doctors, etc. are too. From a rational perspective, this is at best unlikely. Nor is it I think particularly attractive that there's an implicit assumption in there that all these people are malign or ignorant.
I know a guy who's a practising medic in the USA: he said his institution tried HCQ early on in covid. They didn't just ditch it because a load of published studies said it was useless, they saw that for themselves.
But wouldn't you think a regular person might have more faith in the media if they reported that doctors were treating people with HCQ and it was ineffective as the headline, rather than reporting that Donald Trump was poisoning people to death with fish tank cleaner?
Like, we joke about people doing their own research, but people doing their own research are going to manage to find wikipedia, and wikipedia is going to tell them that hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin are both medicines used in humans. At which point they reach a crossroads, where the group most prominently telling them not to take a medicine is also lying and telling them it's fish tank cleaner and horse dewormer. I can't blame people for having no faith in institutions that readily blow all their credibility in the headlines, and without that credibility, people are left with only the option of judging for themselves while having little capacity to do so effectively.
Maybe. My recollection was that someone was telling Trump these things might help and he said so, and an immediate butt load of ridicule fell upon him from public people that should not have known better (at least not yet) as we didn't know much about Covid at the time.
Sure, but the people telling Trump that they were effective were mostly shysters and crooks like Gregory Rigano. And Trump did far more than just say someone had told him it was effective; he explicitly told people to take it.
And the critics did know better. If a "cure" is touted that is 1) unproven and 2) potentially harmful, then you don't need to 'wait and see'. The right thing to do is to debunk immediately.
It's stunningly unethical and dangerous for someone with that big a public presence to promote unproven remedies, and I frankly cannot believe there are still people defending it (not referring to you, Gorfias, just the partisan hacks in the RNC).
I think @tstorm823 makes a good point and kind of what I am writing about, " But wouldn't you think a regular person might have more faith in the media if they reported that doctors were treating people with HCQ and it was ineffective as the headline, rather than reporting that Donald Trump was poisoning people to death with fish tank cleaner? " That's the sort of thing I recall too.
There was some ridicule and piss-taking in some parts of the media, but there was also plenty of perfectly sober articles debunking it.
If people get annoyed at some elements of the media taking the piss, and then conclude that they'll trust none of it, including the outlets that didn't do it... and then, moreover, they choose to trust shysters and conmen instead? Then they're not being rationally sceptical. They're being hardheaded morons.
The ones doing the piss-taking are certainly the loud ones we remember. We need more cross ideology condemnation of this sort of thing, regardless the source.
That'd be nice.
But the people complaining about this never had a problem when the right-wing tabloid press or Fox News or Breitbart pillory, denigrate, and insult their opponents. I don't think for a second they actually give a shit about press standards.
I can blame them when they unquestioningly trust the other thing they see, however, with their skepticism suddenly turned off when it's not the mainstream.
What on earth are you talking about?
"Regular people" made the media we have today. They didn't want sober people trying to tell them boring shit about how the world actually worked - that's so 1970s. They wanted pizazz, and emotion, and crowd-pleasing. Conservatives didn't pour onto Fox News to make it the USA's leading cable news channel so they could hear the reality of the world. They went there to listen to Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity aggressively demean liberals, whether or not any of it was true. And then when Fox decided some bullshit and partisanship was going a bit too far, a load of them switched to Newsmax and OAN to get their fix. And then when you're talking about young "regular people", if they're not glued to cat media and Tiktok crazes, they're listening to self-appointed YouTube weirdos with no appreciable expertise at all.
Everyone makes a moan about clickbait, but clickbait exists because it works. When I was at school in the late 80s /early 90s we were told that newspaper articles needed a catchy headline, and then the important stuff in first because the rate at which attention dropped off in an article was shocking. What was it? 50% of readers don't get past the third paragraph (which pretty much means the third sentence in some newspapers) or whatever? That was before the internet, which with a vast explosion of content became even more focused towards grabbing attention and quick gratification.
You're asking for a type of media not many people want and earns little to support, doubly bad because it's the stuff requiring the most money to produce because it needs standards. The money has drained out of the old, august bastions of proper journalism into the pockets of two-bit gobshite operations, and with this austerity those organs that want to maintain standards have seen those standards forcibly eroded even further, and they have had to compete in shallowness to grab attention. And who drove all this? "Regular people" did.
Blaming the media is thus so much bullshit: they're not letting the people down, they're giving the people what they want. Blaming the media is the excuse people make up to believe whatever shit they feel like, deflect self-criticism, and not exercise any personal responsibility. They do it because they want to believe what they feel like and they don't want to take responsibility when the erroneous shit they shouldn't believe in but did caused something to go badly wrong.
Who's fault was it John Doe believed something completely stupid and ill-informed like ivermectin was the miracle cure for covid, against the advice of just about anyone John should rationally expect to have a good opinion on the matter? Oh yeah, the media, because they called it horse dewormer. Yeah, that really explains how John just passed over a legion of scientists, medical doctors, health advisory panels and healthcare organisations, the government etc. No, John just didn't read or ignored all that because an opinion writer called it horse dewormer, which means clearly no-one at all doubting ivermectin has any credibility.
What this actually tells us is that John Doe is a fucking moron. If you really want to control the thoughts of all the John Does out there, you need to rethink your support for freedom of speech, because the only way John Doe is going to believe what's true is to forcefeed him a totalitarian information diet that doesn't leave him any room for bullshit.
Don't you understand? It's all the media's fault for not holding John's hand, patting him on the back and reassuring him that he's the best human being who ever lived and this really is all just the fault of those people who hate John just because they're jealous of how much better a person he is than them. How could he trust the media if they left out such basic, obvious facts like that?!
Well. your understandings of the media and the history of it are way off. The news has been bs and propaganda for centuries, not decades. You very noticeably exclude any specific left-wing media from your criticism. Selling people lies because they want it isn't in any way new or unique. Weird doomsday cult people and snake oil salesman are about as old as human civilization. There are no old bastions of proper journalism. The New York Times has been trash for longer than any of us have been alive, and that's the outfit that sets the agenda for the entire US media industry, one way or another.
But you're not gonna defend a snake oil salesman for giving people what they want, are you? It's complete moral cowardice to deflect criticism away from people guiding popular discourse with lies because you want to blame someone else.
They aren't being rationally skeptical. They are being rationally trusting. It is completely reasonable to have more trust in information coming from sources that don't explicitly hate you and lie about you on a daily basis. In the absence of other ways of determining truth, when all you have is to decide who to listen to, when would you not pick the person who isn't lying about you personally?
But they're not merely excluding sources that are hostile to them. They're also choosing to distrust the plenty of media outlets that don't insult them, and they're choosing to distrust pretty much all the scientific researchers globally who've done the work.
And the sources they're choosing to trust are just as hostile, just as derogatory. Just not to them personally.
This is not rational. It's moronic.
You're imagining something that doesn't exist. Not even NPR can go a day without without saying something hateful or judgmental about Republicans/conservatives.
How dare a media outlet criticize a political party and its policies? How are you not seeing the ridiculousness of this argument you're making? Oh no, NPR was judgmental. Fucking lol.
Last edited:
Oh, please. If you're going to argue that every outlet that isn't conservative is also insulting to conservatives, then you're either jumping at shadows or you need to get a thicker skin.
(Not to mention the double-standard, of course; conservative-aligned outlets in the US routinely spout hateful, judgemental shite about liberals and/or left-wingers. Then when NPR does it (in much milder language than your average Fox News cast, mind you), suddenly the media is too mean).