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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36336 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Is the BBC state sponsored media? N. S. Lyons says yes

And while the BBC claims it can operate with nearly three-quarters of its funding coming from the government (whoops, I mean "the public”) and still remain independent in its coverage, this is clearly nonsense. Any organization that relies overwhelming on a patron for its continued financial existence will do what that patron wants. Obviously. And thanks to leaked emails and WhatsApp messages we can peruse a real time record of how the government leveraged this deference during the pandemic, with, for example, an “IMPORTANT ADVISORY” email sent from senior BBC editors to reporters informing them that Downing Street was “asking” if they could please avoid using the word “lockdown” to describe shutting people in up in their homes – and thus only “curbs” and “restrictions” appeared in BBC headlines the next day. This has hardly been limited to pandemic exceptions. As one BBC inside source told The Guardian: “Particularly on the website, our headlines have been determined by calls from Downing Street on a very regular basis.”

Edit: Paging @SSCReader per this earlier discussion

I largely agree, although I still think there’s some value in holding these people to the same standards that they hold their counterparts in Bad Countries like Russia and Iran to. If you were to make this argument as a defense of Russia Today, saying, “The fact that they’re funded by the Russian government is irrelevant; the viewpoint advocated by RT is due to the kinds of people who work for RT, and the people who listen to it,” there is no chance in hell that the NPR audience would consider that defense remotely credible.

So, if they want to believe that “state-affiliated media” is a valid and useful category, then pointing out the obvious parallels is a useful way to humiliate and undermine them. I’m not necessarily saying this is the best approach - I think that maintaining intellectual coherence and actually having good arguments is probably more important than “owning the libs”, although my confidence in that view is fraying - but I do think it’s probably the best thing that Elon Musk can do, because these people are actively trying to destroy him, leveraging every bit of sophistry and media manipulation that they can muster; for that reason, Musk’s only relevant goal right now is to humiliate them, rob them of their power to control the narrative, and demoralize their audience in any way possible.

But NPR's quality is leagues above russian and iranian state media. And the latter are regularly censored on matters of minor corruption in ways the former is rigorously guarded against. There really is a kind of "state-run media" that the soviets had, and that Russia today has, that the US doesn't have today. Trying to pave over that distinction as an 'own' makes your concerns, even when otherwise correct, look silly and easily dismissible.

Musk’s only relevant goal right now is to humiliate them, rob them of their power to control the narrative, and demoralize their audience in any way possible

... It's just musk doing yet another epic musk thing, like "legacy verified. may or may not be notable". Robbing power? NPR continues to post exactly what they did a month ago, the same people as last month trust it or don't trust it, etc. Nobody's been demoralized.

(I didn't expect NPR to ragequit twitter though, that was dumb)

And the latter are regularly censored on matters of minor corruption in ways the former is rigorously guarded against.

I do not consider it an improvement to live in a country where the inside-baseball skulduggery of regime apparatchiks is out in the open, but the sophistry and censorship and propaganda gets deployed on topics of me being locked in my house for 2 years due to a cough or having all my tax money blown on irrelevant wars half a world away. Oh, and also, those refugees? Doctors, lawyers, scientists. White People are only 56% of the births now? Nah, that's not important news, no need to report that.

Truthing me about the small stuff but lying about the big stuff is MUCH WORSE than vice-versa.

I do not consider it an improvement to live in a country where the inside-baseball skulduggery of regime apparatchiks is out in the open, but the sophistry and censorship and propaganda gets deployed on topics of me being locked in my house for 2 years due to a cough or having all my tax money blown on irrelevant wars half a world away

Oh, you can get both, except that the Chinese government might literally lock you in your house (or rather apartment building) because you might catch a cough.

Truthing me about the small stuff but lying about the big stuff is MUCH WORSE than vice-versa.

Chinese/Saudi media does that too. You might be surprised how much people in China trust state media.

How sure are you that China's approach to lockdowns are any worse than in the west? Most western countries had universal lockdowns, often long, and often multiple of them. China tended to have shorter regional lockdowns. When it comes to time spent under lockdowns, the average person in Europe likely faced a greater level of lockdown than the average person in China. Perhaps more tellingly, the reaction to dissent against lockdowns in China was to lift lockdowns, while the reaction in the West was to beat the shit out of protesters or even shoot them. Both are utterly despicable, but the CCP was already regarded as illegitimate pre-2020.

I have to wonder how much of "China lifted lockdowns in reaction to outcry" is a result of optics, where even the CCP realized "this looks really bad" WRT things like Shenzhen(?) going hungry and the government having to deploy drones that broadcasted stuff like "please control your soul's desire for freedom." I imagine even the Bluest parts of North America wouldn't think to write something that sounds like it could have come from the mouth of Chairman Sheng-Ji Yang.

Why would China have worse optics for, approximately, doing the same lockdowns that many other places around the world have seen, complete with hunger and nigh-satire levels of totalitarian imagery?

the reaction to dissent against lockdowns in China was to lift lockdowns, while the reaction in the West was to beat the shit out of protesters or even shoot them.

Western repression is a sieve, Chinese repression is a dam. A dam fully contains dissent until it reaches emergency levels. Canada could treat its protestors roughly because they didn't reflect a level of discontent that could threaten the regime.

My point is about media, not policies.

but the sophistry and censorship and propaganda gets deployed

Does it make sense to attribute the lockdowns to 'censorship and propaganda' being 'deployed'? It seems to have, much moreso, been a 'decentralized consensus' among national, state, and local experts, media, bureaucrats, etc. It was bad, but the cause of the bad thing wasn't censorship and propaganda. Anti-lockdown censorship was bad, but it wasn't load-bearing. Being against lockdowns (and vaccines, etc) became pretty partisan, and I don't think less censorship would've made blue people change their minds back then. Would Rs have become more anti-lockdown?

Either way, censorship based on 'enforced government order' and voluntary censorship for non-personal motivations are quite different. Concerns with the views or actions of the media are different from concerns about 'the government controlling the media'. You make an argument for the former, but nothing for the latter. The media is bad, but bad in an entirely different way!

When it comes to whether lockdowns depended upon censorship and propaganda to exist is not relevant to whether we should regard organisations that were paid to put out that propaganda by states as state sponsored.

They actually admitted to using propaganda several times. They decided as policy early on, to imply that masks don’t work (they later reversed course). They have admitted to trying to scare people into compliance by playing up the deaths (which is why there was major reporting on hospitals being overwhelmed, nurses and doctors nearing burnout (and dancing), and the ubiquitous “death clocks” in every major news outlet). It was a master class in narrative creation, down to the anti-opposition propaganda (misinformation!, anti-science, killing grandma) and the videos of people being thrown out of various stores for refusing masks.

I think COVID was a problem, and obviously people did die. It just turns out that unless you had a pretty serious health condition, if you were under 50, you could go on about your life and never get anything that much worse than a bad flu. And tbh, had we treated flu to the same level of propaganda, the results would’ve been roughly similar. People would absolutely panic, because more people than you think die of flu every year. We just don’t put up giant deathclocks on the nightly news.

I think COVID was a problem, and obviously people did die. It just turns out that unless you had a pretty serious health condition, if you were under 50, you could go on about your life and never get anything that much worse than a bad flu.

This is false.

We can argue over exactly what rate of death and severe side effects is acceptable and what mitigations are acceptable to reduce those rates, but COVID-19 causes a lot more of both than any flu we've seen other than the 1918 one, including among the young and healthy. Previously young and healthy people becoming majorly disabled by Long COVID is something that happens, albeit rarely. I'm not sure where to get the best data on this, but the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season, but that's not counting post-COVID sequela which we know is significantly more common than with the flu but difficult to measure, partially because studies vary widely in their definitions. And it's unclear how to define a fair comparison because getting the flu rarely happens more than once a year and usually significantly less often while COVID-19 infections happening multiple times a year is common.

Mind, the flu poses very little danger to the young and healthy, so even a lot more dangerous than the flu can quite reasonably fit inside your acceptable risk profile. But treating them as the same is not accurate.

(And, uh, maybe it wouldn't be terrible if we took some measures to strengthen our protection against airborne pandemics like improving ventilation and accidentally reduced flu prevalence as a side effect.)

the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season

Which puts it in the range of the Hong Kong Flu and Asian Flu, two mostly-forgotten pandemic flus in the latter half of the 20th century.

but that's not counting post-COVID sequela which we know is significantly more common than with the flu but difficult to measure

We know no such thing.

the death rate across all age groups appears to be ~3x for COVID-19 vs. a normal flu season

How much of this was due to mismanagement? Such as, the initial treatment plan of putting the sick on ventilators, which didn't work and basically consigned many to death who might have survived with some other basic treatment approach? Or how the Northeast US hit a death jackpot by putting sick people in nursing homes, which was like throwing a match on dry kindling? Not to mention the financial incentives for hospitals to mislabel deaths as "due to COVID" rather than "tangentially adjacent to COVID?" When the entire bureaucratic/media complex has a vested interest in proving that fear of COVID is warranted, I'm skeptical of the numbers they present to press their case.

It just turns out

This is the wrong phrasing, since we already knew all that by February 2020. Propaganda and so-called opponents of disinformation instead propagated disinformation that it was otherwise.

Either way, censorship based on 'enforced government order' and voluntary censorship for non-personal motivations are quite different. Concerns with the views or actions of the media are different from concerns about 'the government controlling the media'.

Didn't government agents (FBI and/or state department) request Twitter censor specific antivaxxers?

Hard to believe this was decentralized.

Perhaps a better word instead of 'government controlled media' is deep state.

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