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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   36365 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

The BBC is the leading purveyor of dangerous disinformation in the UK. Disinformation like "lockdowns work", "masks work" and "vaccines prevent transmission". If to any extent the BBC changed people's opinions on these topics, they would be, in part, responsible for catastrophic levels of harm to the victims of associated policies.

If twitter is going to label RT and similar as state sponsored in an attempt to counter disinformation, then they should also use such things on the disinformation-spreading BBC. I see no reason to give the 21st century Lord Haw-Haw any respect or deference on this matter.

Wait, the BBC is pro-caring about COVID now? The people in the UK I follow on social media are pretty annoyed at them for being part of downplaying COVID, similar to how I see people on the left in the US annoyed that US media is downplaying COVID. I guess they're annoying both sides.

The only remaining members of the COVID camp are incredibly alarmist 99th percentile concern types, some of whom have essentially built themselves into a corner like Eric Feigl-Ding.

It happened, it was a hilariously gigantic overreaction and it seems like society's preferred to just forget about the era as opposed to actually delivering any real comeuppance or punishment upon the ones who architected the ridiculous response.

It's hard for me to tell exactly how much of a bubble I'm in with respect to COVID precautions. I see plenty of comments online like yours suggesting the world looks to you just like 2019 except for occasionally encountering posts online to the contrary. I believe you, I'm just trying to understand how that can be.

I understand that I'm in a city where COVID precautions were more popular; masking in public is certainly not a majority here, but I would find it actively surprising to go to the grocery store or get on a bus/train and see no one wearing a mask. Certainly at any larger (i.e. 10+ people) social gathering I'm at, some of them will be wearing masks, but that's my friends group, so even more narrow than my neighborhood/city. (I know many of my friends test regularly (... although free tests may be going away, so that might not continue...), but that's not visible. It's pretty common for weekend-long-type events I attend to request negative tests.)

Trying to cast a wider net, I went looking at rules for recent conventions. PAX East (March 23-26, 2023 in Boston, MA) required masks. Anime Central (May 19-21, 2023 in Chicago, IL) only recommends masks (their publicity photo from a previous iteration on the top of their website shows everyone wearing masks; perhaps from a previous year when they were required? I've generally noticed events wanting to downplay masks use pre-2020 photos); maybe that's part of a trend towards loosening mask requirements at conventions? Of course, "geek conventions" is its own narrow group, and very well may itself be a hot spot for COVID precautions. Maybe my hobbies and the hobbies I'm aware of happen to be outliers in COVID-cautiousness?

Maybe my hobbies and the hobbies I'm aware of happen to be outliers in COVID-cautiousness?

Having been a frequent PAX attendee in past I'd definitely say that group is on the fringes of COVID observation/some of the Enforcer chats I've been in have had some of the most hilarious 'this person has not been outside in their life prior to enforcing' reminders and questions.

Perhaps there are people who are annoyed that the BBC's lies about covid were insufficiently outrageous, but the BBC still lied in support of lockdowns and forced masking.

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