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Nate Silver wants to share what he wrote in his journal with you - LINK -
He's couching it as a "Reader Q&A" but it's a self-reflective series on him, his substack, the election, polls, and politics in general. If you're already fed up with Mr. Silver, it could be an exasperating read. I am not, however, and do find Nate's straight political takes (without any of the bulllshit "data journalism" or woo-woo risk and gambling stuff) to be better than the average pundit.
Just before the paywall, Silver concludes with a paragraph that reveals the rot at the core of the PMC-liberal elite;
Dishonesty has a price. The Liberal/Left coalition has been held together by ducktape, glue, and the continued adherence to the idea of a "better tomorrow" as guided by the experts. But they're all inveterate liars and the American people finally called them out on it. Is it a full moon, Nate's turning into a self-awarewolf.
I'm reading the instructions at the top of the page: "We ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War: ... Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike."
I mean we literally just had a discussion with someone arguing that inveterate lying was perfectly valid, after a campaign season full of the most shameless lying I've ever seen.
There are limits. I think people would appreciate an apology for the lies before extending any more charity. At least for the whole "our internal polls agreed with the prediction markets that trump was winning but we still called them insane cryptobro conspiracy theorists who did their own research (gross! Ick!)". Or "Biden's not senile you're just a rabid maga partisan for noticing." Or "the economy is amazing and Biden solved Trump's crime wave, illegal immigration isn't happening and you're imagining the price of eggs and why do you care anyway, you're weird!" All lies that were used here with no consequences for the liars other than going on some people's mental lists of sociopathic manipulators.
There's a point where you can't just get done with another round of lying and go "hey bro no hard feelings bro I was just using rhetoric to destroy your ability to understand reality and gaslight you into thinking you were insane for questioning our lies, leaving you helplessly adrift in a sea of mass propaganda to serve my own interests. Come on bro we've all done that, I do it to you all the time you can't stay mad at me! What about charity bro?! What about niceness and understanding?!"
It's time to coordinate some meanness against this tactic, because it's antithetical to everything this place tries to do, and it incinerates what little trust anyone has left. I want to come here to read people who will help me understand things I'm unaware of or confused about, not to get force fed this week's edition of "Blob Propaganda Magazine"
I mean honestly, I don’t think the press just started doing thing. I’ll be honest, I’ve near zero trust in the mainstream media as a truthful source of actual news. And I don’t think an apology fixes it. The issues are too deep for that, and they won’t change just because they promise to do better. I think at this point, the press need to clean house, top to bottom. Until then, I think it’s just reasonable to ignore the media and look for actual news.
I knew that they were lying about the polls when suddenly the “Keys” history professor showed up everywhere telling people how he’d never been wrong and only he could turn the keys. And if you paid attention, the keys he was talking about were either clearly false or manipulated to become true. Kamala was declared the incumbent, for one, which isn’t true. No major wars (just forget about Ukraine and Israel, both of whom were funding), a good economy (stop noticing the price of things). I felt like I was watching Baghdad Bob declare that there were no tanks in Baghdad while a tank rolls by behind him. More ridiculous than anything, but I felt like this was an insult to my intelligence. They couldn’t possibly think people would fall for this.
Oh the press has been doing it since before JournoList, that's baked in. What's new is spreading it to places like this through sophisticated distributed propaganda campaigns: delivering talking points to partisans and using them to manipulate people who trust them.
Take the surge in shoplifting for example. It wasn't just MSNBC or Vox lying about it, they had explainers on how to lie to family members about it. They had people showing up even in tiny communities like this to dress up the propaganda line in rationalist colors and make it go down smoother. They had YouTubers paid to go on rants about how it was all in our imagination and anyway it was just Corporate Greed.
What do you even do against a fully distributed and inescapable reality distortion machine like that? Obviously this election showed the limits of convincing people to ignore their lying eyes, but it took an amazing set of circumstances to wake people up.
My mom's told us a story a bunch of times about how, when she was in school as a kid, one day she and her classmates were told to head out to the sports field because some reporters wanted to take a picture. So the reporters had her and her classmates sit on the bleachers, and took a couple pictures, and then they told the kids to start make fists, start yelling and waving their fists in the air, look real angry. The kids did it, and the reporters took a couple more pictures. The next day, one of those last pictures was in the paper for a story claiming that she and her fellow classmates had staged a race riot.
Point being, it's definitely older than Journolist.
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Don't take this the wrong way (I agree with you), I'm not trying to pull a Reddit "source?" move, but I would genuinely love to see links for each of these things.
I'll see if I can still find them. Those particular ones were on the motte reddit I think.
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