Quote by H.L. Mencken: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep …”
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.”
How Twitter encourages smart people to look dumb
“Science by TwitterTM” is when smart people post things quickly without giving it necessary thought and reflection, and end saying things that are wrong or readily misconstrued. This is often followed by a string of tweets attempting to clarifying what was said.
Snopes confirms social media post and then mislabels it false
Snopes is a “fact checking” web site, also known for a co-founder who wrote fake articles for the site and plagiarized content from others, which now fact checks a social media post, finds most of it largely correct, and then labels the post “false”. They relied, in part, on a CDC report that is easily seen to have cherry picked data to produce a misleading, if not active disinformation report. But Snopes does not fact check the obvious deficiencies in the CDC report.
Publisher of Nature retracts over 40 papers from one of its science journals, because they were “nonsensical”
Nature published over 40 papers that were nonsense gibberish and has now retracted them.
By cherry picking: “Billionaires’ Pandemic Profits Alone Could Cover Cost of Biden’s Build Back Better Plan”
Newsweek demonstrates yet again that it is a perennial fake news publisher by cherry picking a data series to prove their point. This is bull shit level reporting and why no one believes mainstream news reports anymore.
Classic media manipulation of your viewpoint – SF Chronicle had to rewrite headline and replace photo illustration
Over the span of a few days, the SF Chronicle went from a headline emphasizing “Winter Covid surge” to a new title emphasizing “the endgame”, and a new illustration, removing the fear and negativity focus. Sadly, the media always goes for fear and negativity and manages to spin good news into bad. This time they got caught at it.
WSJ: Facebook routinely exempts the elite from its content moderation
Facebook completely controls public discourse in a totalitarian fashion. The WSJ reveals internal FB documents showing that FB “white lists” up to 6 million accounts world wide to get exemptions or special treatment from content moderation. The FB system applies to both FB and Instagram, and tends to include politicians (even down to the local city council level), actors, news media, sports personalities, academics – even those with very large followings on social media.
Because the FB content moderation system makes frequent errors, FB wanted to avoid the publicity that happens when a prominent person was censored by FB – thus, they excluded elite people from the system.
Through this system, Facebook controls public discourse – everyone can speak equally except some can speak “more equally than others” (to paraphrase Animal Farm).
The company has lied to the public about this system in the past, claiming that everyone was treated equally. But they are not. When public speech is censored by Facebook, Facebook becomes the arbiter of all information. In this case, FB has decided that elite members of society are more important than you or I and are given special speech privileges. Imagine the impact this has when some can promote (propagandize) their views but others are denied that option.
Facebook is a true menace to society.
Misreporting by error of omission: “These 5 states have less than 10% of ICU beds left as Covid-19 overwhelms hospitals – CNN”
CNN runs a prominent news story about the 5 states where ICU beds available is less than 10%. They conveniently left out many states that are also in that situation, apparently to make a point about Southern states?
Ouch: Science communicators assume you are stupid
Science communications is performed precisely as a propaganda function: “The first is what science communicators call “the deficit model,” which assumes the public is deficient in their understanding of science and need scientists as the learned elites to help the benighted masses.” and “The second limitation is that the goal of health communication is not to inform others, but to change their behavior.”
The National Low Income Housing Coalition is out with their annual fake report
Reporters are idiots. They fall for this story every year, year after year. And not one bothers to question the advocacy group’s press release. Not one.