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It would seem that this weekend, there was a fire at the house of one Diane Goodstein, a judge who Trump does not like. Reddit being Reddit, they immediately assumed the fire was arson and accused the right wing of violence; the linked story made the front page of Reddit. However, the investigation so far shows no evidence of arson: “At this time, there is no evidence to indicate the fire was intentionally set. SLED agents have preliminarily found there is no evidence to support a pre-fire explosion.
Point being, the radical left (i.e. Reddit) will say lie after lie after lie how how Charlie Kirk’s killer couldn’t have possibly done it because of his left-wing beliefs, even though the evidence overwhelmingly points that way, then they will turn around and accuse the right of right wing violence without any real evidence to back up their claims.
The truth matters. Objective fact matters. I have decried it when the radical right was telling lies, and will decry it as long as the radical left tells themselves lies.
I'd be hard pressed to think that any people who regularly post in dedicated political spaces aren't engaged in pure conflict theory especially when its a place like Reddit which is naturally and unnaturally designed to hide all pushback (mods controlling topics, downvotes hiding the wrong opinions). This is a culture war, and they believe their way of life is at stake at the very least. Of course they lie, that would be my default assumption given the low-quality and high incentives of most places that discuss politics. To me this is just a day that ends in y comment.
I mean Reddit is going to be more politically slanted than anything on /pol/ just because what they want the narrative to be is controlled by upvotes, downvotes, bots, and mods. And on 4chan mods or janitors might fuck with things or try to but pretty much half the posts in /pol/ at any given time are people trolling because its designed to be unpreventable and when they do try to prevent discussion of a topic it goes poorly (gamergate). Reddit just chugs along, lets get every single subreddit to ban twitter - done. No problem even if the majority of users didn't care or want that, just chugs along.
At this point continuing to concern yourself with that is just outrage masturbation. You linked to politics, politics, unfiltered news, and bluesky skeets. Politics I know is the most left leaning place I can possibly imagine and the others are probably worse. Pointing out moments when /r/politics lies for their own narrative is like shooting fish in a barrel overfilled with fish. Even the most reddit-pilled reddit user will shrug off the denizens of /r/politics with being arguments-as-soldiers liars as par for the course. And I'm sure those other subreddits hold about as much political water for being balanced as the_donald or kotakuinaction does.
I do think there's something to be said about Reddit only holding stigma with enemies of it. A "normie" will not really care if you said you read something on Reddit, but if you said the same thing and gave the same information and said you got it from 4chan or Twitter you'd be a racist, even if only slightly, and if you said it was from Facebook you'd be doling out misinformation or at the least boomer-tier out-of-touchness. Reddit might be, at a glance, easily seen as dominated and controlled by the left but it doesn't carry a stigma which I imagine is exceedingly useful in wagging the dog which I expect is the intention with conflict theory throwing-shit-at-the-wall-and-hoping-it-sticks way tallying of evil to preemptively win or bury an argument.
I do think this is why Elon is more hated than Trump in my opinion because he stole Twitter from the left which was used in the exact same way that Reddit is used. Stigma-free narrative control. Bluesky doesn't have that, even if Twitter/X is now racist, Bluesky is not just what normal people think about a subject in the way that twitter was presented before the buyout or Reddit is bundled and sold as now. (Reddit does have to be bundled but the bundling does work).
Anyways. Ever since I stopped going to Reddit because I was tired with the political discussions filling every single subreddit, regardless of what the content was supposed to be, I've been much better off and I think you should probably try to ignore it, too.
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I'm perfectly happy to accept the official narrative, if investigators say that it wasn't arson.
However, we live in an era where the internet has created so many different epistemic bubbles that question whatever the experts and authorities say, on both the right and left. On one hand, I think this can be a healthy thing. If you're a woman in the 1940's, and the medical authorities are telling your husband that he should get you a lobotomy to deal with your various issues, is it better to be married to a sheep who follows everything the authorities say, or a contrarian who maybe rubs some people the wrong way but whose questioning of authority leads him to rejecting lobotomies (maybe without any good evidence or reason for his actual rejection)?
I agree that objective facts matter. It is my hope that all people will embrace the idea that even if deferring to experts and authorities is often a necessary shortcut for getting by in the world for most people in most circumstances, you should be prepared to do your own research and have the independent conscience to depart from the crowd if that is what your reason or character tells you to do. On the other hand, sometimes you're going to lose to reality, and it will turn out the experts were right all along.
But it's all about humanity not putting all of its eggs into one basket. It is positively good for humanity as a whole if a small portion of us become Amish, or reject modernity for religious or ideological reasons, or join cults, or have their children die of diseases we have reliable vaccines for, because the diversity of practices maximizes the odds that there will be at least one group of humans available to inherit the ashes after the sheep do something so stupid and destructive that it kills billions of humans, or leaves most of humanity infertile, or does anything that almost wipes out the whole species.
There should be room for normie rule-followers, of course. They're the salt of the Earth, and society would be intolerable and impossible without them, no matter what shape society takes. But I think we should feel grateful for the insurance policy that groups that are often easily mocked or not taken seriously because they depart so far from consensus reality provide.
All this to say, I think it is completely fair to mock lefties that are so caught in their epistemic bubble that they can't conceive of the idea that fires just happen, and there's no need to invent an arson conspiracy with corresponding government conspiracy. Probably, they are just wrong, and they're just departing from objective, consensus reality for no good reason. But that's also not the worst trait a group can exhibit.
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Ooh, can I get a source on that one?
Because it sure looks like you're here to dunk on Redditors. Please review our rules, particularlythis one.
Since you asked for a source for when the right dropped the ball with regard to objective facts, back in 2012 George R.R. Martin commented about red tribe voter suppression. In response, someone in the red tribe claimed that “the Obama administrations lawsuit in Ohio is meant to prevent active duty servicemen from being allowed to vote early”. The right wasn’t even being told the same story the left was.
I couldn't find that in your link, either as a direct quote or a more general sentiment. Could you point to it more directly?
It's in this comment.
That said, I question @samiam's ingenuousness. His example of one side's political narrative is a 2012 LiveJournal post from GRRM, hmm?
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