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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36422 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 10, 2023

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Trying to pave over that distinction as an 'own' makes your concerns, even when otherwise correct, look silly and easily dismissible.

It's correct! You agree it's correct! Letting people who hate you lie to your face and doing nothing, not even calling them liars, because you don't want to look 'silly' is cuckoo.

I agree that [NPR bad], although I'd phrase it more generally in terms of progressives/universa/etc. I do not agree that [NPR is state media implies NPR is bad] is correct. A smart liberal will just respond ... like above, "NPR often criticizes democrats, chinese media doesn't criticize Xi, my standards are reasonable". Is Xi Jinping said the COVID-19 pandemic is over, but the data says otherwise one of the top duckduckgo results for "site:globaltimes.cn Xi Jinping"? It is for biden / npr! Yeah, 50 stalins, but that's not the argument either elon or grandparent comments are making. You can't kill anything by striking at shadows!

Yeah, NPR is offensive to me in two independent ways, one of which is related to it being state-media and one of which is not: First, I don't like its political and cultural biases, which NPR happens to share with almost all other sources of news media regardless of funding source. I don't see NPR as significantly more pro-state than most of its privately-owned peers. Removing the public funding is not likely to improve NPR's reporting in any noticeable way.

But I also strongly object to the fact that I'm forced, at gunpoint, to contribute to the salaries of people who hate me and my values. It's not that state funding is necessarily corruptive of the final product (though it almost certainly is, to at least some extent), so much as the American people should not be forced to subsidize a news network that seems to actively despise them. Subsidies are bad regardless of whether the recipient feels obligated to the subsidizer or not.

These are two bad things about NPR, but only one of them has anything to do with its source of funding.

But I also strongly object to the fact that I'm forced, at gunpoint, to contribute to the salaries of people who hate me and my values

A fact check I skimmed implies that, generously, 23% of NPR's revenue is apparently ~ $309M. US federal govt revenue $4.90 trillion. That's 0.001450408163265306% of federal revenue - if you paid $50k in taxes, 72 cents of it went to NPR. Given half of the US loves NPR's values, "my tax dollars!!" isn't a good objection here. It's better for something like welfare

All you've done is demonstrate the pernicious problems associated with the distributed costs and concentrated gains of government subsidies. It may not be much individually, but in the aggregate, a lot of good/harm can be done with $309 million. At what point am I allowed to start caring about my tax dollars being spent on things I morally disagree with? Am I not allowed to oppose the government torturing people in my name (water boarding and attaching people to car batteries isn't exactly expensive)? It's not really about the money, it's about not providing implicit support to things I oppose. The government shouldn't be spending any amount of money producing politically charged propaganda aimed at its own citizens; the fact that I'm not personally bankrupted by it doesn't make it any less objectionable.

Who are you to decide how much @thorouglygruntled needs to pay for taxes before he can object? How much of his money goes into other people pockets, by force, before he can be against that?

It's not a numbers argument but a moral one.

Government spending is, inherently, going to be somewhat wasteful. The amount that goes NPR is entirely dwarfed by the amount that goes to things like agricultural subsidies or foreign wars. There are plenty of left-wingers who are as mad as he is about those. And since money is fungible, we can just split it up, and say - "none of the NPR funding and more corn subsidies came out of Thoroughly's taxes, and all of the NPR funding and less corn subsidies came out of @AnarchoBidenist's taxes.

"forced, at gunpoint, to contribute to the salaries of people who hate me and my values" sounds bad, until you remember that half of the country shares their values, at which point small amounts of govt support for them is just a natural and inevitable consequence of politics, where your problem is entirely with the values and not at all with taxes or the govt

And since money is fungible, we can just split it up, and say - "none of the NPR funding and more corn subsidies came out of Thoroughly's taxes, and all of the NPR funding and less corn subsidies came out of @AnarchoBidenist's taxes.

Well, this is way better argument in my opinion. The other one is a judgment call on how much money is it okay to take from someone before it's objectionable.

What i find interesting about your second paragraph is that it applies really well to people who want to defund the police. People shouldn't have to pay the government for the government to buy guns and train guys to come point the guns at you. Maybe worrying about government programs that literally entail pointing guns at citizens is more salient than being upset that the state is funding propaganda, gesturing in the direction of some theoretical gun being pointed.

You're allowed to oppose the government funding more than one thing at a time.

no doubt, but its a bit tone deaf to whine about uncle sam's gunmen coming to collect the tax money when those gunmen never actually shoot tax evaders and frequently do shoot other people.

[NPR is state media -> NPR is bad]

I don't know what an arrow means grammatically, but those are two separate statements. Npr is bad, and Npr is state funded. Which do you disagree with? If your concern is that progressives can easily dismiss it, my response is so what? Ideologues can dismiss anything which makes their ideology look bad, and a post modern ideologue barely has to even think about it for two seconds.

Besides which, regardless of how they could respond, they have chosen to respond by getting bent out of shape about it! The media is the progressive shadow, it covers for all their shenanigans. And accurately labelling these media organisations isn't striking at it, it is merely adding more light.

Sorry, the arrow was supposed to mean 'implies'. People say 'NPR is state media' to imply that that state-medianess is bad, causes bias or corruption. But that's not true - NPR would be just as bad, and self-censor just as much, if it was subscription-funded. There's little similarity between the ways US and chinese media are 'bad'. If you actually want to hurt NPR, believing that 'NPR is state media' just misdirects you - as elaborated above, removing their state funding wouldn't change anything! It's like, if you hate guns, saying "school shooting! assault rifle!" - it riles up the base, it convinces people, but the only thing they're convinced of is murky, non-actionable ideas.

I mentioned progressives easily dismissing it because Hoff said elon was doing good work by 'humiliating' and 'demoralizing' progressives. It being trivial to dismiss means it doesn't do that very well!

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