domain:betonit.substack.com
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
To get a reasonable, moderate perspective, you have to follow the kind of people who march around with tiki torches and scream "Jews will not replace us!" That's not much of an exaggeration; the statement that libs were right about misinformation came from Jason Kessler, the organizer of the Charlottesville goon march.
Come on. That is a cheap rhetoric trick and you know it. Anyone can read Mein Kampf, find an unobjectionable quotation which which their current political opponent would disagree and thus prove that their opponent is literally less reasonable than Hitler.
I think English has the idiom that even a stopped clock is right twice a day. I am sure that if I were to dig through all the stuff Trump had said this year, I would be able to find plenty of sentences which sound reasonable, even insightful in isolation.
MonkeyWithAMachinegun
Dancing to Tom Paine's Bones
38m ago
'Who shot this low-rent ghetto drug dealer? Well flip my dickens, it was this other low-rent ghetto drug dealer.'
That's... pretty much Season 1 of The Wire to a T, which is widely acknowledged as one of the best seasons of television ever produced.
Botond173
22m ago
Criminal Minds goes even further in that regard as it features multiple black bad guys (and girls). In one episode it even features a white woman who makes a false rape allegation.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
The whole "misinformation" thing has always seemed strange to me. The default was that everyone was always wrong about everything, 100% of the time.
This is a common misconception. For most things of life-or-death importance, people were usually at least vaguely right. The Middle Ages might have had a cosmology which was laughably wrong, but their farmers certainly knew what was the optimal time to plant grain, because no society which is wrong about these things can survive.
Would medieval Europe have benefited greatly from a time traveler infodumping all the actionable knowledge of our age, e.g. how the plague works, and how to bootstrap an industrial civilization a la planecrash? Sure.
But there is a difference between being wrong because you lack the tech to find evidence either way (e.g. microscopes and sterilization for germ theory) or because your epistemics suck (which to be fair they often did).
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I mean so was the printing press. I don’t see this as a huge problem, as eventually we will learn to deal with it. And I find that in almost all cases, the dangers of censorship and centralized clearing houses of information is that not only does it make organized lying possible— in fact easy — but it makes countering the official lies nearly impossible.
The danger of too much contrarianism is being exposed to crazy ideas that fail on critical examination. This is at least possible because the truth is also available.
plural
3m ago
There was a TV Show a few years back called New Amsterdam and it was the peakness of Woke. It wasn't really well received or popular but it certainly was probably a signal of the high water mark of the popularity of that ideology I think. But it could also have been a very well disguised parody. I couldn't take it after a couple seasons so there could quite possibly be better examples than these, I wish I could find clips of them but it's hard to beat tumors caused by racism.
There was a whole episode about getting people to take the COVID vaccine because their freezer broke or something and they need to use up all the vaccines in a small period of time. So they get the word out and people show up but when the Chief notices that everyone waiting in line to get it is white he cancels the plan to give it out so he can give it to black people but when he approaches the black community over it they say they've all gotten their vaccine and he needs to look in his own backyard, to which the token conservative character says they haven't gotten the vaccine because they're waiting until people at risk get it, so the Chief decides to tell him to gather all his conservative friends and they all show up just in time for the arbitrary timer on the vaccine's viability to run out and nobody get vaccinated at all.
Another episode is about a previous Chief from the 70s-80s getting cancelled for throwing away donated blood during the AIDS crisis. That's it. Apart from doing that he was perfectly coded as a good left-leaning guy he did great stuff for minorities and the underprivileged but he breaks down and admits that they couldn't be sure if the blood donated from gay people at the time could have infected people with HIV so he ordered the blood thrown out. His legacy destroyed and the new Chief, disgusted at his decision, has to confirm to others that yes, it was true this man made a mistake with blood 50 years ago and must be erased from history. In the end, the old man leaves in shame as his picture is removed from the hospital wall.
I remember an episode where a minor was getting a court injunction against the hospital because they said their treatment was bad and the court responded by shutting down on childrens' aspects of the hospital until it was investigated and the first thing the psychiatrist says to the Chief about it is "You need to sort this out now, they're already shutting down our trans children's clinic."
To me, The Pitt in many ways seems more preachy even though the episodes are dedicated to mostly medical treatment because it's often injected into situations apropos of nothing and the resolutions feel bad because they're presented in the narrative in a way that feels like they're strawmanning/weakmanning an argument and then declaring victory.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
3hr ago
C'mon Turok, I like tolerate you, but you gotta stop making yourself such an easy target. It's a bad look to start your post with "some rando on Twitter said something", you could have easily made the point yourself.
Anyways, I'm pretty sure that people believing and spreading factually false things is an unsolvable problem, certainly with the existence of the internet. While I am regularly dismayed by the selective gullibility/incredulousness of the twitterati, it probably can't be helped at any sort of scale, and the sort of public concessions that you seem to seek would probably backfire and result in further ideological entrenchment. You can call out that attitude where it happens here, but don't just complain to us about wrong and stupid everyone else is.
Testing123
7hr ago
You’re actually underselling the wokeness of the Pitt. Some mildly SPOILERY events:
-
A black woman comes into the hospital with extreme pain. A white doctor thinks she is faking the pain to get painkillers, but a non-white doctor comes in and declares that she has sickle cell anemia and really is in pain. -
Later on, a white main comes into the hospital with extreme pain. The white doctors believe him, but a non-white doctor correctly infers that he’s a drug addict. -
A white family has a kid with measles because they didn’t get him vaccinated. They then delay treatment almost to the point of the kid dying because the mother “does her own research” with blogs. -
A white man in the waiting room is repeatedly rude and causes escalating problems because he has to keep waiting to be seen by the doctors while more injured people get treatment before him. At one point, the white man complains about other people getting treatment with his tax dollars. Later, the white man punches a female administrator in the face and says something MAGA-y. -
A white woman in the waiting room initiates a fight with someone because the latter person is wearing a hospital mask. IIRC, the white woman even screams something about Fauci lying. -
An obese woman comes in with a vague problem. A doctor tells her to lose weight and the obese woman gets upset. Another doctor comes in, finds the real problem (which isn’t related to obesity) and scolds the first doctor for being fixated on the obesity. -
A very old black guy comes into the hospital and prompts a speech by the main white doctor about how a group of black doctors made some important medical discovery 50 years ago that is underappreciated today.
This is just off the top of my head, I’m sure I’m missing a bunch of these.
but you could never imagine him saying "libs are right"
He would not say it because of all the things libs are definitely wrong about, this is the one that they are the most wrong about.
There is enormous danger of misinformation and disinformation, and of modern lysenkoism, in enshrining the opinions of any class of people, even your beloved Elite Human Capital's. Letting ideas compete is the long term solution, not the problem, even if it can be sometimes subobtimal in the short term.
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
This is Sarah Champion's method to arrive at 1 million victims: “I extrapolated that Rotherham is a town [of] 200,000 and had 1,400 known victims of CSE [child sexual exploitation] between 1997-2013 and 15% of women report their rape - so scaled up,”
I really don't want to lessen a large number of very serious crimes, but to say that method is seriously flawed would be an understatement.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
6hr ago
I'm pretty sure there's a fascinating generational divide at play in things like this.
Here's my folk theory on that. Because of the particular circumstances Boomers were born into, many of the more artistic ones were raised in a much more conservative environment, then had a massive crisis of faith / trust / belief in the late 60s through the 70s, and then had to figure out a way to reintegrate themselves into society and make art about it. And because of that, whatever their other flaws, they were often VERY good at making entertainment that could talk to actual moderates and conservatives, because in many cases, they were the black sheep who had charted an overt path away from where they had started. They were the prodigal sons, but when they returned, they intended to remake culture with what they had found.
If you were a conservative, trying to maintain a traditional culture, these people were like the pied piper of Hamelin. They were really good at targeting younger members of your home communities, seductively you might say. They were legitimately good at representing things you recognized while also undermining it with a certain kind of criticism or nuance, at their best. Or even when they were provoking, they were good at signaling that they were provoking from within a shared tribe, so to speak.
Gen X didn't have the formative experience of the draft, and they grew up in the shadow of both this artistic explosion as well as the backlash, the stagflation of the 70s, and the rise of the religious right, and the cold war of the 80s. They saw the huge excesses of the divorce revolution and the drug culture and AIDS as-it-was-experienced and various miserable, alienating radical activist movements. They were, perhaps, particularly attuned towards cynicism about politics and messy ambiguity in art as a result. The best Gen X (at least when they were young) was often provocative, knowing exactly how to needle a conservative majority, but rarely preachy... (although if I go back and listen to, say, Eddie Vedder now, I can recognize the west coast SJW inclinations there the whole time). And also, the left of center counter culture got stomped down so incredibly hard in the 80s that they legitimately recognized themselves as outsiders, a kind of marginalized dissent. And Gen X got irony.
I think (when it comes to art and communication), everything kind of went to hell with the combination of the collapse of conservatism in the George W Bush years, the rhetorical success of, especially, Jon Stewart, and the messianic rise of Obama. Because it ushered in a kind of generational change, and that meant that a lot of the Millennials, especially, developed their early political identities during the Bush years and then experienced a conversion experience with Obama, all while internalizing the worst elements of Jon Stewart's frequent stance of "we, the smart ones, don't even need to refute the arguments of these moral monsters and intellectual imbeciles, and so we will use a condescending sneer at them instead". And I mean, I liked that tone during the Bush years too - it was very fun and self-satisfying. But it mixes with thoughtful art really, really poorly, it doesn't do nuance or ambiguity, and it really only works when you're preaching to the choir. And once Obama swept it, it turned out that being against something legitimately lousy was easy mode, and when you're for things (like high speed rail in California, or a really aggressive trans agenda), and you leave a giant trail of wreckage in your wake, sneering at your opponents simply isn't enough. That doesn't persuade. It doesn't take reality seriously, or your own failures. Everything that made those messy dissident Boomers so effective had dried up. And I really do think radically different life experiences played a major role here. I think there's an ugly tendency in modern progressive culture broadly for people to want to feel as though they are both, at once, the eternal put upon victims and dissidents of power, while also the natural experts, the aristocratic power that stands in perpetual judgement due to intellectual merit and thus moral merit. And... that just really sucks for sophisticated art. And then the radicalization that happened in the lead up to Trump has just made everything vastly worse, of course. I've noted it before, but the run up to the 2016 election was the first time in my life that I had EVER seen artistically cooler, non-cringe media from Republicans than Democrats. It felt, at the time, like that was an important bellwether of something.
I've seen Freddie de Boer bemoan what he calls the "We are already decided" stance (or something like that). I think if you're in communities that have already adopted that stance, it becomes very difficult to make sophisticate, nuanced art that can reach out to people with other life experiences.
I remember early on in cancel culture Chris Rock (I think) talking about how he couldn't play colleges anymore. And he had some statement that was like, "You can't be wrong anymore on your way to being" - suggesting, I think, that even if you were going to tell a joke that ended up with an approved morality, you weren't allowed to even play around rhetorically with the unapproved morality, or give it is due, or take it serious, as a rhetorical technique before ending up where you were supposed to. I think I'm paraphrasing that roughly right. And I think (if I am) that that captured some of the specific tension I find so interesting here.
hydroacetylene
24m ago
Does the medical field understand that alienating conservatives through crazy far left is the reason for their decline in public trust?
I'm not intending that as a snarl. I'm intending that as a legitimate question- have they considered it?
bolido_sentimental
35m ago
I am a serious chess nerd, and to be honest, I enjoy it purely as an end in itself. I don't think it's making me smarter or better at anything - I just really like chess, and so I play it and study it because it's fun. It brings me great happiness to have something like that
I wonder if this is sort of a luxury of the middle-aged: I do not need to be getting better at "real" skills to give myself a shot in life, because I'm married, mid-career and so on. It certainly would be more valuable to do something else with her time from that perspective. But it's not as useless as some other things. Like others have said, it's socially acceptable and even cool to some people; and it is certainly possible to meet folks and make friends (admittedly odd ones) through it.
plural
1hr ago
The Wire exists. As best as I can recall there is only a single real murder investigation in the wire that's not gang related. In fact there's an entire storyline about no one giving a shit about gang murders because they're not interesting or meritorious enough to devote resources to investigate.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I think this is broadly true, but I think there’s another serious problem which is that starting with Gen X, there’s been a steady decline in literacy in the sense of having read and absorbed enough written fiction to understand how to use things like symbolism and metaphor and subtext to tell good stories. It’s actually weird, but for artists, they are not subtle at all. One conversation on Reddit sort of crystallizes this. There’s a very famous episode of old series Star Trek in which Kirk lands on a planet full of literal Nazis. As in full on swastika wearing, goose stepping Nazis. Turns out that this Nazi planet was turned Nazi, deliberately by a rogue Starfleet officer. Now, lots of people on Reddit, college educated, supposedly literate had a huge problem with the episode. They could not grasp that you could have the bad guy defend a bad idea unless you secretly hold the views that the villain is espousing. And of course if you can’t imagine other people telling stories without having to explain that X is bad so that you understand that they don’t agree with it, telling a story where you don’t hit people over the head with your own views lest you be accused of heresy becomes impossible. First because you don’t want to be mistaken as a heretic, as you kinda need to be able to work in mainstream media, but second because you have no idea how to use subtext or metaphor or symbolism to get a point across. It’s a skill issue.
hydroacetylene
8m ago
A surprising number of people just literally don't know that Eptstein's victims were adult-presenting teens who were mainly 16-17 and performed escort work. They think it's Rotherham, where elementary and middle school aged girls were used as brothel prostitutes.
Every society has distinguished between hetairia and porne. People are fine with the former as a vice other people engage in but furious at the latter involving citizen women.
theincompetencetheorist
10m ago
Well part of the problem is that all social media tech is that a small group of people deciding everything based on how much they can trap you in their algorithms to shove advertisement in front of your face. I would not characterize that as decentralized! It is the very nature of the companies gives the two-digit IQ megaphones on social media, it is encoded in the incentive structure of the business models. Someone stupid getting their voices heard get the slightly smarter people spending energy on feeling good about how they are smarter than the idiot got boosted.
Misinformation and disinformation is not an internet problem it is a (social) media problem and the quote just conflated that.
chooky
16m ago
I am confused what the complaint about the episode was and what subtext was occurring. It does not seem to me that the episode was any more subtle than that "The Nazis are bad guys, and the bad guys are Nazis".
hydroacetylene
21m ago
The wire is a character drama focused mostly on the criminals as long-run characters in a broader narrative, though. Very different genre than episodic investigative dramas from the cop's perspective.
You can make an interesting show about investigating lowlives shooting each other. It just wouldn't look anything like CSI.
WandererintheWilderness
1hr ago
"Invasive species" is strong language, to be fair. Yes, African-Americans were brought over to the US, but this was a few centuries ago and by now they're as native as the rest of the immigrant US population.
Well, the metaphor was about the small scale, about white couples adopting black orphans. The idea is that the singular black child is "invasive" in the gated environment of the white family's hearth-and-home. An ugly sentiment, but not really historically falsifiable either way.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
4hr ago
This is an astute observation, but I assume you can reason out what the result would be if an entire generation or two of Americans were raised only being exposed to the counterfactual reality presented in media, with no knowledge of our exposure to the mundane-but-not-telegenic underlying reality. They’d have an extremely skewed understanding of what the world is actually like.
Transfer of learning doesn't exist, so all those quotes about how chess teaches foresight and vigilance are full of shit; learning chess teaches you to play chess, period. And we are not in an age or place where it is a common pastime, so it is not particularly useful as a social skill, either.
I would not be categorical about it, I think there are a lot of lessons that a child would learn from chess. Mostly character lessons, not intellectual lessons, and not because it's chess specifically, but because it's a competitive game. It would teach a child humility; even if the kid is good, she will meet people who can effortlessly curbstomp her at it, so she will have to learn to deal with that. She will also learn that if she studies and practices hard, she can improve at something; a valuable insight that eludes a surprising amount of adults.
There's a few pitfalls too though, it's important that she understands that just because she can beat some people at chess, especially adults, it does not make her better, superior or even really more intelligent than them. And vice-versa. But I can easily imagine a kid losing respect for adult autority because she thinks she's more intelligent than them.
Totalitarianit
6hr ago
The medical accuracy and fast-paced intensity of the show are really good. After watching a good portion of this season, I ended up going back to the old ER from the 1990s and 2000s and watched several seasons. There's a lot of nostalgia and good accuracy with series as well, which I enjoyed, but I noticed the same sort of progressive lecturing in the 1990s ER episodes as I did in the The Pitt. I've come to realize over recent years that social lecturing is heavily baked into a lot of these mainstream shows. It's incredibly powerful and influential.
The side effect of this realization it is that I am quick to dismiss any new series or movies wherein I catch a whiff of this sort of presentist lecturing. Even though I recognize the moral framework and lecturing of older 1980s and 90s shows and movies, it aligns more with how I view the world so I can tolerate a certain amount of it. I find the current progressive ideological force-feeding in entertainment to be insufferable though. I understand that society moves on and changes, and that some of my frustration is just a natural reaction to entertainment no longer appealing to my age group, but I also think this era of film entertainment is objectively terrible when it comes to the hit:miss ratio.
Big budget film companies adhere to certain formulas that will turn a profit, while the only real social risks taken in big films is the left-leaning. The latter isn't new but the type of leftwing ideology being pushed is. To add insult to injury, these large production companies churn out something like 6 superhero/comic book films per year at about $200m per film, along with a biopic or two that are well done, but not really worthy of the praise they typically get. Smaller studios like A24 are promising, but they too are unfortunately captured by the same progressive ideology that has consumed every Western institution on the planet. There are still some diamonds in the rough (Top Gun: Maverick), but it is mind-numbing how widespread and pervasive this sort of progressive lecturing has become.
RoyGBivensAction
Zensunni Scientologist
5hr ago
"Our enemies are simultaneously too strong and too weak" is frequently described as a common trademark of fascism
The damage done by that Umberto Eco essay is up there with the xkcd "showing you the door" comic.
I regret to inform you that you share a planet with people who believe in penis-stealing witches, and many of them don't even have Internet access.
The whole "misinformation" thing has always seemed strange to me. The original default was that everyone was always wrong about everything, 100% of the time. Recently, in large part thanks to the Internet, some people are occasionally less than 100% wrong. You might even say that the Internet made people less wrong (bah-dum tiss).
People being wrong is not a new problem and the Internet didn't make it worse.
During the life of Marie Antoinette, there was a scandal involving a diamond necklace that severely damaged her reputation. Except she had literally nothing to do with it, and she could prove that she had nothing to do with it. The French press vilified her anyway.
And who could forget about Alfred Dreyfus, the Jewish military officer who was accused of selling secrets to the Germans? You know, the guy who was proven innocent and then dragged through the mud by the French press because the army was too embarrassed to admit they made it all up? The guy who was vilified because of a bunch of lying journalists and government officials? That guy?
/images/17528682967017636.webp
Hey, I'm starting to notice a pattern here. It seems like journalists and government officials have been spreading disinformation since before the invention of the telegraph. Maybe instead of giving journalists and government officials unlimited power to censor anyone who disagrees with them, we should consider that maybe the call is coming from inside the house.
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