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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 26, 2025

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It kind of says it all that you're go-to example is a seven-year old story from a third-rate publication. This article was literally famous for the extravagance of the claims within it and the denials from relevant organisations. And you know who published many of those denials? Bloomberg. Perhaps something from the current decade and in an actual prestige publication might be nice - after all if 'virtually every longform article' you read turns out to be a lie it shouldn't be that hard to find reams of examples.

My example is a nine year old story from a second rate publication: Machine Bias from ProPublica was the last long-form news article I trusted.

I don't have anything newer because...I stopped trusting the authors, and therefore stopped reading the articles. I'll revisit the issue once they cut ties with the old, flawed system and try to make a new one. I'm not holding my breath, though.

How about you give me a list of publications that would count to you, and how many examples you require.

That would take forever so to get an idea of what I mean I'll give some examples from a single subgroup, say foreign policy/international affairs (for no particular reason): Foreign Affairs, the Economist, ISW, World Today (Chatham House's magazine), the World Service, Brookings, the aforementioned FT and WSJ, Foreign Policy, JDW etc. etc.

This says more about your ability to recognize sources that regularly include slop than your ability to avoid sources that routinely include slop.

Foreign Affairs as an opener was a good joke, I will give you that.