5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds

[gunslnger.livejournal.com]

5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds

It appears that even some of our esteemed colleagues from this above-average forum have fallen prey to the tactics described in the linked article. I hope that you can look at yourselves honestly and analyze whether you have succumbed to the lure of popular media and team politics or not. No one can tell you whether you are in the pool with the rest of them, but take some time somewhere along the way and be a little introspective about why you think the way you do and where your opinions are coming from. And keep in mind that the media is not your friend.

Partisan politics is not just a function of certain groups. The media keeps the game going too, mainly to keep the feelings of anger and offense going so that they can make money. (There's some secondary reasons too, of course.) So, is the solution to fix the media or to fix the consumers? Fixing the media isn't likely to happen, as they are just responding to how people work. Fixing the consumers isn't likely to happen as people generally aren't introspective and aren't aware that they are being manipulated, but that is where I do try to put some effort into waking people up (even those who are aware that they aren't aware and don't care to change). Or do you have a third option?

Comments

[mrbogey.livejournal.com]

The whole problem with anything political is the complete inability for so many to look at citations/resources and properly comprehend, evaluate, and make decisions.

So often an interpretation of a fact becomes the fact.

Take Wikipedia disputes, a short while back a dispute happened over the Haymarket Riot. A historian edited a factually incorrect statement that had become popular due to repeated citations by secondary and tertiary sources. The original claim was that the prosecutors did not present any evidence. The problem with this is the historian looked at the trial record and saw the prosecutor did indeed present evidence and argued a case. The claim they didn't was completely false. But it was a well sourced claim that was popularly accepted.

So as a result many editors at Wikipedia (aka people with lots of time and a desire to have power over something) kept throwing out the change in order to keep the false statement.

This could be cured if people just learned to employ logic and not confuse a strong belief for an absolute statement.

[a-new-machine.livejournal.com]

aka people with lots of time and a desire to have power over something

Sigh, no. They were complying with Wikipedia's stated rules, which require a secondary source rather than a primary source. The historian was using solely primary sources (trial records). The idea is to use sources that can be easily verified due to broader accessibility. Once that historian published his book on the subject, that was an acceptable secondary source, and the article was changed. This is an example of Wikipedia arguably having a bad rule, not of the editors being overzealous, power-hungry, and illogical.

[malasadas.livejournal.com]

In context, that is wildly and humorously ironic.

[fornikate.livejournal.com]

lol forever at this thread

[peristaltor.livejournal.com]

Thanks. Ya beat me to the correction.

IIRC, though, an additional irony was that the trial transcripts had been recently published online, but they were in some obscure historical site that no one at Wiki considered "secondary" enough.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Case in point, citing a writer on WWII who happens to cite David Irving and getting butthurt when someone points out the major, glaring holes in that, in a thread about somebody whose historical argument is that a schoolteacher's hugs are morally the same thing as the Holocaust, no less. And frankly I judge Wiki by virtue of its claiming that the Pied Piper of Hamlen is a German plot against Poles and that wholesale fakery of the Assyrian Genocide, which never happened, and the invention of the Pontic boycott genocide, where boycotting people is the same thing as Rwanda and Maly Trostenets. And this is not even getting into the endless problems with Wiki on any matter relating to Communism, where you're better off reading Conservapedia because it doesn't pretend to be fair and balanced and come up with the bullshit Wiki does.