#but accuracy is critical because misinformation is... bad

[summersfirstsnow]

Quick accuracy check for the tweet!

As far as I've been able to find out, the tragic collision in DC, assuming that's the crash that they're referencing in the tweet (the only collision between two aircraft in the US in recent weeks), has not been attributed by investigators to the recent firings. It sounds like air traffic control at the airport was understaffed, but this has so far been attributed to a per-existing, long-term problem (x) (x).

Trump was definitely the reason that the US didn't have an FAA administrator to address the press & public, though, and hasn't done anything to fix the under-staffing in air traffic control rooms since, despite pressure and several other fatal plane accidents.

Possibly a short but also more accurate (if less punchy) way to make this connection:

"That plane crash happened when the ATC was understaffed, and Trump firing what most of the staff there are will make that way worse."?

or maybe ''Trump's unfounded accusations distract us from the fact that an even more understaffed ATC is going to make more and worse mistakes''?

Keep your messaging simple:

“Trump fired everyone in charge of airplane safety, and a week later planes started crashing into each other.”

That’s it. That’s the messaging. Don’t get bogged down disputing Trump’s false claims. Just blame him, in short and repeatable sentences.

[tangentiallly]

some of my thoughts on chatgpt and other gen ai stuff and people's usage of them and criticisms of them. it's long and rambly and disorganized and i kind of wrote it in a, just putting down whatever comes to mind at the moment way. very thinking-out-loud to myself. does not come to any certain conclusions. but i thought i'd post it anyway since i already typed it

i think my overall feelings toward chatgpt usage, or generative ai usage in general i suppose, is kind of like ……. i don't really use it myself, aside from when i was trying to run an experiment to gauge the accuracy of its answers and how i can trick it into saying specific false things etc, but that's more because i do not consider it useful for me personally & other concerns. but i also don't quite agree with the way some people frame any usage of it as a, idk, morally bad thing to do or something. and while i have my own reasons for not using it and i have various criticisms towards chatgpt/other gen ai stuff, there are also a lot of popular criticisms i just don't vibe with, or do see where it's coming from but think there are more complications than what it looks on the surface.

and i think there's also the difference between being critical of the technology itself, and being critical of the way many companies are trying to get on the latest overhyped trend which results to many of their actions. i guess i feel like the latter is a result of capitalism. while yes, i don't think every website / company needs their own chatbot to talk to the users and in fact find it quite annoying, and in fact the way a chatbot doesn't actually "think" & doesn't get the information the same way an old fashioned querying / information retrieval does and is instead a blackbox you input things and it generates a plausible sounding answer confidently which may or may not be correct, is something i consider quite unhelpful and detrimental to getting accurate information, and that the companies tripping over themselves to incorporate that should really instead focus on organization their data and its security better, etc. but also this …… overhyping of the latest shiny object and everyone wants to profit off it is not unique and it's happened with various many other things. such as many social media now have their own version of instagram stories. or the hype over cryptocurrency a few years back. what i'm trying to say that in this aspect i don't think chatgpt is like, uniquely bad/ a moral failing or whatever, but more like it is overhyped in a way that made people looking to catch the latest trend and profit off it feel they need to incorporate it into every product, which does have detrimental affect on the products and unnecessary environmental impacts that could have been avoid. but i guess i tend to think of it as, it's the society/market that made the usage this way, rather than the technology itself. not saying you can't be critical towards the technology, or that the distinction means that we can totally view it as something in a vacuum, but if it's more of a reflection of an, let's say underlying structure of the current market, then at least i think it should be recognized as well.

on a more personal usage level, as opposed to business level, i guess for me personally it comes down to i don't view it as a reliable way of getting correct information. like, granted, when you search on a web you can't guarantee the things you encounter are correct information either, and there are a lot of misinformation out there, but in a way i dislike how it condenses all that into a single answer and present confidently as if it's the truth - and i think condense could be quite a generous way to put it, actually. it's outputting a sequence of words that sounds plausible as the answer. it's not actually thinking and analyzing the data in the same sense humans are. but like, that's me. i know some people think that while it's not guaranteed accuracy, it's a good starting point with a vague direction pointed that they can then try to verify. it's not how i like to operate myself in searching for information/answers, like it's just not a method that i like, but i do see where they're coming from, and if it works for some people i don't particularly think there's anything wrong with it, i guess. (i know there's the argument of environmental impact - i'll leave that until later, i think that's its own section. but if i do set that aside from now, then it becomes just a matter of different methods working for different people.)

i'm going to go slightly off-track for a moment here. i took machine learning courses way back in the day, when that's still the popular term being used instead of ai. of course, what i worked with is now what people now call analytic ai instead of generative. and to me i've always thought of it as, no matter what name it's going by right now, deep down it's just statistics, or an optimization problem. it's about minimizing the error of the model's prediction, at the end of day. the algorithm has evolved since the early days, of course, but i still consider it a core concept in the mathematical sense if we really wants to boil down to it, even if the problem may look different. (that said i do not work in the field and i haven't really taken courses about newer gen ai stuff so my understanding only came from some side readings i did and memories of my understanding of previous iterations of the technology, so i could be wrong here.) i've seen an argument(hypothesis?) saying that because in terms of gen ai, in order to minimize that loss/error, the prediction of the next words/output of it should theoretically be something that doesn't generate element of surprise - because it deviates from minimizing the error. something like that. so it's not really good at writing a new story that has a plot twist because it goes against the minimizing error / minimizing the element of surprise. which kind of makes sense to me but i don't know if that's the case from what i've heard about people showing examples of chatgpt answers. but it's interesting food for thought. that said, since i am of the opinion that it's about generating an output that minimize the error (however you might define the error function here), i can quite see how it can be a useful tool in, say, summarizing existing data you give to it, rather than just outright generating something on its own based on single question. and i have heard people who said they find it very helpful in this aspect, and probably also other similar tasks. such as, like, writing a cover letter based on the descriptions you input, or other stuff. etc.

which i suppose is why i don't quite agree with the argument of "it's a template you're looking for, not chatgpt". because something that can easily boils down to a template to - i feel like that's something a gpt does better than just answering a question and has to search for answers. because it has more direct data relevant to the case to work with and the correct output you're looking for already fits a certain format. going back to the thing about minimizing loss function, that's what it's a better tool for. theoretically, i think. from a mathematical standpoint. also i've heard from different people telling me that this is what they find it better suited for.

of course, accuracy and suitable tool-aspect or not, there is the environmental impact argument to be considered. from a more …. overall, high level point, when it comes to generative ai and environmental impact, my thoughts are a bit uncertain. i've read both sides of the argument - from statistics about the power usage increase in the industry & data center cooling and arguments of how the training of models are more intense work, to people saying that yes it does consume power but so does many other things like video games etc. i suppose i do see where each of these are coming from and i don't have … a definitive thought yet. because data is ….. i mean it's A Fact but there are quite many ways to interpret it, as it often is. i think most of the data results here focused more on, the whole industry as a whole causing the data centers to consume how much electricity and water for cooling down, etc, but i do also wonder if the way so many companies are jumping on the trend unnecessarily contributed to that. because we don't really see a specific breakdown, you know? and data center is used for more than just one thing, anyway. sure, difference from previous years and the knowledge of what is new these years as opposed to before shed some light, and i'm not saying it's wrong to say that it does consume quite a lot of electricity, but on the other hand, i just … don't know if i know for sure to say, i guess. there have also been data on comparing different individual models and how some are more efficient, and i do think that if the technology is going to stay, people should work in finding a more energy-efficient solution when they train the models, etc. that said, beyond from that, i do not feel i know enough / have enough data on hand to say for certain either way.

but that's all from a model training standpoint, though. individual inputs/questions to existing models are a different matter. it's not on the same scale. updating the existing model with new data aside, if we just look at the individual user querying things standpoint, does the environment impact matter in this regard? even if a single query is, say, using 5 times the amount of a regular web-search query, how big is that difference really? because can't they argue that by asking that single question to chatgpt, you're saving up 5 google searches or something? not that i've seen people use this argument. i guess what i'm trying to say that the even though the environmental impact of training the model is something i don't think i can definitively speak on in either direction, i feel each individual query is of relatively low cost in comparison. something that may be classified as "yes it consumes energy, but probably no more than anything else". admittedly, i suppose we can't divorce this from the fact that, if more people are using these queries, it encourages the companies to build more models, which feedbacks into the loop which then causes more energy consumption.

hmm, idk. it's …. food for thought, maybe.

i feel like i've digressed so far into the environment aspect. where was i … anyway going back to the personal usage thing, aside from me not finding it useful to me but i can get how some people find it useful in certain ways, another thing that makes me averse to it is just ….. the way you're voluntarily inputting so much information into it. like yeah, i know that in today's world many big companies have collect all sorts of our data and it gets sold to companies that analyze it all and in turn sells it to better generate ads, etc. i know a lot of information is already being collected. i try in my small ways like using alternatives to google search etc, but the truth is a lot of data is still being collected. so does it matter? i suppose i just don't want to make it so easy for them lol. of directly just giving this information to the gen ai companies, so much data about me, that can be used. i know it doesn't matter in the grander scheme of things to them. but still. it's a personal thing, i guess. i don't want or need a model to be better trained to advertise things better to me. okay, i don't know if it's doing that right now specifically but it's easy to do so with the data collected, with the data voluntarily input, and i can certainly see how companies can think it'd be profitable to start doing so if it's not doing it right now. but it doesn't matter - i like to make myself not easily to market products or ads to. it might be a futile attempt but i like keep doing the small things in my ability.

still on the personal usage point, in terms of writing, one reason i avoid using it is i don't want the convenience that comes with it. i feel like it's something that if i rely on, could make my writing skills worse, which already isn't great to begin with (you can see by how …. unstructured and rambly this post it, lol). i need to active make the effort to write things on my own or else i feel like i'd let it slip through my fingers, kind of thing. i feel like i need to at least actively maintain some level of practice to stay at an average level of writing skills, lest it deteriorates too fast. sometimes i feel i'm bilingual in a way that neither languages feel fluent enough from the first language standpoint, then i think maybe i'm just one of those stereotypical stem students who are bad at reading/writing. but i do constantly think that i have to read and write to maintain the skills doing so, even if, when it comes to writing, i'm not really writing any serious writing stuff and it's mostly just fanfics or just work-related things. ( and when it's writing for fun/personal pleasure/creating things, i feel like the struggle of writing it is part of the fun. i like it. i want to convey this character dynamic in my mind to people, why would i want to ask a bot to make something up. it's not going to say what i want to say. it's like ..... asking a bot to play a video game for you isn't it? if it does it for you it takes out the fun of playing the game yourself. it's not something i want to do. my thoughts on other people doing it are more ....... complex and i think there's also a difference of just, doing it for yourself and the overall impact of many people doing it affecting the quality of book market or whatever. i'm not getting into that right now.)

that said, re: maintaining a certain level of skills, i think it's probably just a personal thing. i don't think everyone has this problem. most people are probably better at writing & reading than i am. so this aspect is really just another point in the "this tool doesn't really suit me but if it suits others then it's none of my business", thing. esp for work-stuff.

like, in terms of work-related things, whether you're using it at work say to draft some work-email or a template of a 3-stage plan or whatever, or using it to find jobs like writing cover letters or polishing sentences for your resumes, i personally don't feel it's wrong to do so. esp with the job market being what it is, i understand people trying to make use of whatever tool they think can help.

anyway, i don't really have a definitive conclusion on anything or strong pro or against stance. just …. musing some stuff out loud, including thoughts on the various arguments of various sides.

[narse-tantalus]

Since I just saw a post on the same blog about countering the spread of misinformation using the SIFT method I'm going to apply it here.

Stop

Is this post provoking an emotional response? Yes

Is it trying to? Also yes.

What do I already know about the source? Twitter screenshots on Tumblr are unreliable. I know nothing about the linked pmc19.com but it doesn't look like a government or university website url.

Investigate (The Source)

What can you find about the author/website creators?

the link to pmc19.com/data resolves, and that website does seem to be the source of these claims, although the current numbers are slightly off those reported in the tweets, likely because we're a week later.

pmc19.com links to a PDF with "Background on Dr. Hoerger and the PMC". There they discuss how Dr. Hoerger (who claims copyright of the webpage at the bottom) is trained in clinical psychology, has taught and was doing an MBA in 2019 on strategic management. It claims he's "an expert in personality, emotions, and affective decision science..." and mentions he did a masters degree wich involved a lot of stuff... And also epidemiology.

The PMC is apparently "The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative" with unnamed members who have " led many projects to keep people safer during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic." and "The PMC dashboard is cited in grant applications, including at least two grants already funded. It has been cited by trusted organizations like the People’s CDC, news outlets, and scientific journals, including several papers published in JAMA journals."

Which really sounds like they think I should trust them at least as much as I trust people who write grants, and/or "The People's CDC" -- this makes me think they are unlikely to be an accurate source.

Here's Dr. Hoerger's bio at Louisiana Cancer research center:

https://www.louisianacancercenter.org/people/michael-hoerger-phd

It says "Dr. Hoerger conducts psychosocial research to reduce the emotional and physical burden of serious illnesses. Dr. Hoerger is an international expert in psychosocial oncology as well as pandemic mitigation." And the lists a bunch of psychology stuff. Literally never mentions pandemics again. If he's an "international expert in pandemic mitigation" a) I'd expect him to work somewhere other than a Cancer center b) I'd expect his bio to mention his pandemic mitigation work. Maybe he's new to all this pandemic stuff? He certainly doesn't claim to be an epidemiologist on the pmc website, just to have worked on a project that involves it.

When I google "The Pandemic Mitigation Collaborative" the second result is this webpage which questions their methodology and suggests that their model is incapable of making accurate predictions -- claiming it's always going to be biased towards whatever happened on the same dates last year -- both low and high. (I'm summarizing and interpreting a huge amount here,so read it yourself, and the source is just a blog post so not intrinsically more credible...) But it is note worthy that the main 3rd party discussion of this organization is someone questioning the utility of their predictions.

https://buttondown.com/abbycartus/archive/we-need-to-talk-about-the-pandemic-mitigation/

What is their mission? Do they have vested interests? Would their assessment be biased?

Their mission seems to be to "track" or predict cases of covid -- but like better than the real CDC and epidemiologists. Presumably this is born out of concern for immunocompromised individuals, or boredom, or needing a project for a Strategic Management MBA, or distrust of Official Sources.

They appear to have a vested interest in pandemic mitigation, and therefore alarmism and possibly in not agreeing with official sources. Their assessment may well be biased!

Do they have authority in the Area?

No. They mention precisely 0 epidemiologists working for or with them. I don't see a reason to trust their models more than my physics grad student friends who made pandemic models on a lark in 2020.

Find Better Coverage

The official CDC (Centers for Disease Control) webpage on Covid data is here:

https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#datatracker-home

It indicates lower numbers than last year for everything they track, numbers that are kind of ticking up in recent weeks, but numbers that are forecast (if I'm reading that right) to reach a smaller peak than in prior years.

Notably the CDC is not making any directly comparable claims about number of people infected or infectious. Or how many might be infected next month. I believe this is because these are fundamentally unknowable from the data they have, and that speculating on them would be irresponsible for public communicators of science. Sure, one could create models that predict those numbers, but publishing the results to the public without context on the uncertainties of the models would be irresponsible since people might make life or death decisions like wearing a mask or getting a vaccine based on those bad predictions. Or they might just rage at people online who disagree with them. Idk, I'm not a science communicator.

Don't trust the CDC? Tough. The New York Times ended their own covid tracking in 2023 saying:

After more than three years of daily reporting of coronavirus data in the United States, The New York Times is ending its Covid-19 data-gathering operation. The Times will continue to publish virus data from the federal government weekly on a new set of tracking pages, but this page will no longer be updated.

This change was spurred by the declining availability of virus data from state and local health officials. Since few states report more than once a week (and some no longer report data to the public at all), the weekly data reports from the C.D.C. have become the most reliable source of information on the virus’s spread.

There new webpage is here and it was last updated in March 2024, it says:

These Covid tracking pages are no longer being updated. Get the latest information from the Centers for Disease Control, or find archived data from The Times’s three year reporting effort here.

John's Hopkins University has this to say:

On March 10, 2023, the Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center ceased collecting and reporting of global COVID-19 data. For updated cases, deaths, and vaccine data please visit the following sources: Global: World Health Organization (WHO) U.S.: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

So yeah, reputable sources have stopped caring and link you to the CDC as the place to get your info.

Trace Claims, Quotes, and Media to their Original Context

The pmc19.com website does appear to be the original context for these claims. Thank you OP for linking that.

My Verdict:

These claims are misinformation. Specifically they claim numbers that are based on a model that was not created by subject matter experts, that disagrees with the trends reported by the CDC and it's epidemiologists. Either government employed epidemiologists are wrong and no university epidemiologists want to call them out on it... Or the PMC is wrong. Since they aren't epidemiologists... They're probably wrong. Moreover: If you don't trust the CDC you shouldn't The PMC because in their technical apendix they claim to use CDC data to make their projections. The only way the PMC could be right is if all other epidemiologists are wrong about the COVID pandemic and how to interpret wastewater and hospitalization data.

The PMC and Dr. Hoerger are engaging in academic sounding BS. They have incentives to be alarmist and fear monger, and don't seem to care or understand that they're using a model that probably doesn't have predictive value.

Data source: https://pmc19.com/data/

[ysabelmystic]

Sometimes this site is so much fun but sometimes you end up with people telling you to kill yourself because you’re an evil white racist because they don’t know how to read.

Anyways I’m bored and feeling mildly antagonistic so here we go:

Hamilton: the Musical is not revisionist history because it does not claim to be a documentary.

it’s historical fiction. It’s entertainment, not educational. The characters sing and dance for crying out loud. Writing stupid, awful cringey fanfics are perfectly fine as long as this is acknowledged.

Believing that the founding fathers were Amazing People because of the musical is the source of alleged revisionist history.

If you are jumping through hoops to believe that the actual found fathers were good people, you have failed to properly educate yourself. Please do your research and learn to separate fact from fiction. It is OK to like the Hamilton: The Musical FICTIONAL characters. Enjoying the real thing to the same degree is ridiculous. Either do your research or acknowledge that you might be a slavery-apologist. And that makes you racist.

Any “non-fiction” writings that appeared in the wake of the musical that glossed over the atrocities the founding fathers committed and preyed on the newly-interested audience should be heavily criticized for its falsities. Also, please acknowledge that our history books also undeservingly glorify the founding fathers. Fight the misinformation in educational materials. That is the root of the problem.

LMM IS AN ASSHOLE.

Yes he is!!!! If you wanna watch this musical, you should pirate that shit.

“I don’t want to watch Hamilton because LMM is an asshole/I don’t like the negative impacts it’s had on pop culture and historical accuracy/I had a cringey obsession with it when I was in high school”

Cool. You’re valid. Don’t watch it. I don’t even like this musical. I’ll never watch it again, and I don’t like how people tried to woobify the founding fathers either. I had an argument amount the morality of Jefferson with someone because he was their “son”.

Reasons why I am addressing this:

1) I’ve been in fandoms with Problematic creators. Every time, without fail, people post about how [work] should be abandoned and/or left in the past, that your past obsessions are cringe, and that still enjoying [work] makes you disgusting and immoral. The Harry Potter fandom manages to carry on just fine.

2) Tumblr, historically, has a habit of reacting with the same cultlike shame and guilt circle-jerk mentality that you find in conservative religious cultures. There is only Good and Bad. It used to be that Hamilton was so amazing for its diversity, and hating it made you an evil racist. Now, liking it makes you an evil racist. There are things in this world that are undeniably evil and disgusting. Enjoying/having enjoyed a musical that had both positive and negative impacts on pop culture and entertainment is not one of those things.

3) All of those founding-fathers apologists? I hate to tell y’all but someone like that, musical regardless, was probably going to do that anyways. If they can’t acknowledge that white guys in the late 1700s were not likely to be good people, they’d also buy whatever trash they sell us in history textbooks. And probably learn to deny the holocaust if they found those circles. Those people who know that the founding fathers owned slaves and try to defend them? Garbage. These are the people who like to endorse the “good guy white sympathizer” characters in every other movie about racism. And they’re racist as shit! The musical didn’t make them racist. They’re willing to defend any kind of slavery? They already failed step one of not being racist.

Stop the morality policing and use critical thinking, and go put effort into worthwhile things, like the de-gentrification of Broadway, or a continued to push for real diversity (not the random side character or whatever tf Disney did to Finn) in entertainment, or promoting/purchasing more art by poc or idk. The actual protests and the race-motivated attacks murders by pigs and white supremacists occcuring RIGHT NOW???

Go wreck some statues of the real, slave-owning, cowardly piece of shit that was Thomas Jefferson and stop giving LMM $. But don’t attack people for enjoying a musical.

[yourtoradorasextendedwarranty]

Well then.

I recently discovered this "Gem" of an article and oh boy. This is next level insane conspiracy. *The article in question*

https://reclaimthenet.org/no-pixels-for-fascists/

Now the article is not promoting the context in it so much as covering it as a horror story. And at first I believe it to be satire...... But sadly it is not. First if all. Censorship is BAD. Many people will always argue with this because, "hate speech" or, "violent speech" but fact it, the people arguing for censorship so it because they believe that nothing they can or will ever say will be censored. Fun fact mind you. The term, "useful idiot" plays a big part here. See, people in powerful places don't ACTUALLY care about you or your views. They care about power. Consider for a moment why EA is backing this campaign. EA is a game publishing company that has been in hot water MANY times over the past several years. Up to and including incidents like putting out a game that was supposed to have some level of historical accuracy, but with "their version of history". Then there was the loot boxes controversy that literally started a legal war against predatory loot boxes in games, of which EA is literally the worst offender.

Now with all of this in mind realize something VERY specific. Many people that were "right wing" were very much not happy about the "our version of history" crap because it was not how the franchise had been treated prior. ""Left wing" people were mostly against the whole predatory loot boxes thing. Grant you yes, there was a lot of cross over, but fundamentally these were split issues. Now consider for a moment what some people consider to be fascist in modern culture. It's pretty broad. And it has been escaping it's proper meaning by a long shot. But with all of this said, something people neglect to realize is that totalitarianism, authoritarianism, and fascism are all basically the same. And all involve one fundamental truth. Absolute Control.........by ANY means necessary. Censorship is authoritarian by nature. Because when you can't speak, you can't spread ideas. Imagine for a moment Progressives, you finally get free speech removed. FINALLY these "right wing Nazis" can't spread their hate messages any more out of fear of fines, jail, or imprisonment. What doth the governing bodies do next? Maybe they ban protests. Maybe they don't ACTUALLY like gay people and ban pride parades or maybe remove gay marriage. And you think to yourself, "THEY CAN'T DO THAT! THEY ARE NOT ALLOWED T-". Yes they are. You literally handed them the keys and papers to the car....... And handed over your spares while you were at it. Meaning it's theirs now. They don't have to answer to you any more.

And that's the point. You THINK you can just take away people's ability to speak because you don't agree with them, but who's speech do you think they come for next? The people who helped put them in power. The people that handed them the keys. WHY?! You might ask? Because at that point, YOU are the biggest threat to them. You are the loud, violent, useful idiots that wished for absolute control over speech to adhere to your ,"moral compass". News flash. That power? Is all encompassing. And does not just go away when someone you won't like takes power. What's more, you actually TRUST many of the people in power at face value as if they actually care about you. They don't! You, to them, are only a means to an end. And think about it really. The biggest road blocks to freedom right now are mostly all people that label themselves, either left wing, or progressives. Any idea why you can't see your own folly? Because you have too much trust in people that have no real moral compass. Consider for a moment what you've been advocating for (not all of you).

Disarming the general public (2A)

Banning certain types of speech (1A)

Give full control of healthcare to the government (which they can then deny you of)

Give full control of production rights (to the people) by proxy also the government

You are literally advocating for the government to have absolute authority over everything. And it's funny too. They've got you believing that, "The rightous path to end *fascism*, patriarchy, racism, and bigotry,-" is to give them the power to make all of that much MUCH worse. What happens when a progressive get into office that is SO progressive, they legalize pedophilia? Maybe beastiality? Guess who speech gets removed next? Everyone against those ideas since one, you no longer HAVE the first amendment to protect you, nor a second to defend yourself. Then after that person, an extremist right wing LITERAL Nazi gets put in power? Guess what? Racism and bigotry are in full swing now. Welcome back to the 1800's. And guess what you can do about it? Absolutely nothing. And you know who's to thank for that? You are.

The above article also goes on to mention this, which...... Is basically insane-

Fact is, contrary to MOST news sources. GG was not a hate movement. The FBI confirmed as much. And calling "Trump and his associates" gamers? They can't even operate FB half the time. Their only experience with gaming is probably Pac Man. Also the article goes on to say "right wing people" are the problem. No they are not. Because of the text I wrote prior to this. Because they SEE the trap and they are the only ones fighting to keep us free. Them and a hand full of centrists and not insane leftists. Also, it bares noting that "right wing" and "left wing" are not the same in the US as they are in other places, but a lot of people don't fully grasp that. People still have this view of "the right" as hillbilly racists, who shoot people because they can, and wish death upon "the gays". But that's a far cry from the bulk of the right in modern days. Because consider for a moment if the left wing was identified by their extreme? Full government control, make people be gay by force, legalize all age dating/sexual acts, let everyone love everyone *most specifically animals*, and killing/imprisoning all "non progressives". That's your fringes.

The reason so many people literally can't open their eyes is because they honestly can't think for themselves. They listen to "news" media to get all their info, even though that info is often doctored to be as woke and untrue as possible. Do you know why? Because activist types of the progressive fringes are the loudest and most entitled of us all. Salon, Kotaku, IGN, Vice, BuzzFeed, Feminist Frequency, Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN etc. They ALL get their news stories from one another. And they are all activists who want to push a narrative. They have no reason to be honest. The more angry you get reading their stuff, the more you will come back to read their stuff. Basically a loop of hate. Because without it, they'd go out of business. They NEED you to click on, share, and parrot their stories. I mean consider this for a sec. When GG got big, who was it that would have taken the hardest hit from the information found out? Games journalists. Do you know why mainstream news outlets came to their rescue? To paint gamers as all being racist, sexist, bigots? Because if it had come out and gotten attention beyond the gaming sphere that games media was being dishonest and unethical in its practices, how long do you think it would have been until we started to consider the same about mainstream journalism. They KNEW this was bad for them. But they also knew they had dedicated fan bases that would spread their propaganda for them. And they used that. They used that to pin down a few bad actors (the fringe people latching into the coat tails of the movement) to paint the entire movement as hateful. And not only did they succeed in spreading those lies. Now any time they need to make people angry again, or they need something to hide behind, the bring up GG *GamerGate*. Because the article writes itself. And they know by talking about it, they can deflect all forms of criticism. Journalist has sexual assault allegations against them? It's just GG trying to hurt progressives. Black Face? Just a GG lie! They threatened me/my family. It's the perfect shield. So much so, even Hollywood had taken on the mantra. But they took it up a notch to just say, "my movie did bad because sexist man babies". And they all do it. They don't actually CARE about sexism or whatever, but they KNOW, even the mention of "those types" is basically a battle cry to misinformed people that only wish to form a hate mob and enact "justice" on these "bigots". Open your eyes. You're a tool for the rich and powerful and you can't even see it.

[khittyhawk]

So recently I saw a post on my dashboard featuring a tiktok video listing US interventions in foreign countries. One of the comments was decrying the video as Chinese propaganda and the other comments mocked the first with statements like ‘ah yes, stating facts is propaganda now’. I wanted to add a bit more context.

First, this comment adds more nuance to the contextless list of names and dates in the video, and if the linked user is correct, it looks like roughly 75% (give or take) of the video is correct. I’m not a historian, but I encourage people to research the specific events. It appears the video-maker took the list from William Blum’s collection of instances where the US government attempted or successfully overthrew a foreign government since WWII, which is unfortunately citationless. (I do also remember this list, specifically of US government interventions in Latin American countries from 1846-1996. I can’t vouch for its accuracy, but at least it has citations.) Yeah, the term ‘banana republic’ (which apparently has little enough pejorative connotation to have a clothing store named for it???) comes from US turning Latin American countries into little capitalistic fiefdoms for economic exploitation. As for actual legit sources for US government fuckery, the topic’s simply too big for me to find a comprehensive and fact-checked source. Instead, I’m just going to link to the wikipedia page as a starting page and encourage you to follow the links to the sources. I’ll post something about the garbage done by the US government to other countries once I gain the time and fortitude to undertake that research. ‘Cause ho boy, that’s gonna be a l-o-n-g post. (And since this post is getting long and off-topic, I’ll put the rest under a cut)

Secondly, propaganda can absolutely be factual. All those PSAs about smoking being bad for your health? Propaganda, because it’s presenting information to further an agenda. It just happens that the agenda in question is better health. Further, there’s also propagandistic misinformation - selective use of facts absent context. The US Republican party calling themself ‘the party of Lincoln’ is one of those. Yes, the US Republican party was initially created to oppose slavery and yes, Lincoln was the first Republican US president; however, while the name has remained, the US republican party no longer shares those values. Someone making this comment is attempting to influence your opinion on the US republicans by associating the concept with something you approve of - i.e., Lincoln. Most propaganda is subtler and more diffuse than this, but is still dangerous.

In this case, the propagandistic element is that tiktok leaves up criticism of other countries but not of the chinese government’s abuses. Tiktok has censored testimonial of the chinese government’s human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims, mentions of Tiananmen Square, Tibetan Independence, or the Falun Gong religion, and possibly (probably) the current Hong Kong protests. Tiktok’s owners say that the censorship is merely a way to keep Tiktok lighthearted so political topics are removed, but if so, why is this ^video still up?

More about the human rights abuses against Uighur Muslims (Published Nov 25, 2019). Uighur Muslims are detained in reeducation camps that are just as bad as you’re expecting.

Personal testimonial of Tiananmen Square and the Chinese government’s repression of its knowledge since then. (Published sometime in 2019; unfortunately I can’t find a more specific date) For those who don’t know, in 1989, the Chinese government set the military on peaceful demonstrators, killing anywhere from a couple hundred to 10,000 (true death count unknown).

And to emphasize that the government is not the people, I wanted to draw attention to human rights activism linked from the previous article: Chinese feminists speaking out against sexism via #MeToo and student activists (many young Marxists) demanding the release of detained workers.

[your-resident-boat-person]

Also, I had a friend recently express the concern that our (and most adults) negative reaction to AI is us becoming the old people we resented as kids for complaining about how things were better when they were kids. But there is one key difference. Those old people were having that reaction because it was new technology that they didn't understand, and from their perspective, it is what changes the world they were so familiar with into something that they weren't. They think kids are assholes because they on their phone. And while their is a discussion to be had about the effect technology is having on our communication and socialization skills, that isn't what they're saying. They're assuming correlation is causation. Kids are on their technology, and kids are assholes now, and they're not looking to discuss, they're looking to high-road. Meanwhile, most of the criticisms we have towards AI and it's effect on society is that we have a general understanding of how it works, where it struggles/fails (like the accuracy of the information it gives you), and why building a reliance on it is a bad idea. People make memes about how your future doctor is probably cheating with ChatGPT RIGHT NOW, but in all likelihood, it's probably true. I just graduated college a year ago, and most people I knew were genuinely shocked that I didn't use ChatGPT to bullshit essays. The effect is that people aren't learning anything about the subject they're writing about. They're not learning how to properly do research. They're not learning how to write and effectively construct a point or argument. I just reblogged a post today about how you're probably never going to use calculus, but that's not why you learn it in high school. You learn it to train your brain to think logically and make connections. The same is true of essays. Even for stupid classes you don't care about. The general effect this will have on the population at large is the stupification of humanity as a whole. As education becomes less effective, while students are simultaneously learning ways to cheat more effectively and easily, they learn less. And I don't mean a list of arbitrary facts. They're not training their brains to think as effectively. This runs deeper than "I hate kids, technology is bad". AI in the few years it's been around has already contributed MASSIVELY to the amount of misinformation and the speed at which it spreads. That dickhead Trump used ChatGPT to calculate the equation for the tariffs that crashed the entire economy. This is a problem that's only going to compound and get worse as time goes on.

im still losing it over the "how did high schoolers write 600 word essays before chatgpt" post. 600 words. that is nothing. that is so few words what do you mean you can't write 600 words. 600 words. this post right here is 45 words.

[gaylebon]

Critical Thinking in Social Media News

What we believe shapes the way we live, think, act, feel, emote, share, relate and exist! When it comes to media that we consume, the facts are important and when we don’t have the ability (or perhaps do not realize the need) to filter fact from fiction we become victims and participants with propagandists and liars. We have a responsibility to ourselves to consume news with understanding, knowledge, and wisdom if we seek to be credible individuals. Also, our responsibility to others extends much farther than we think; a single shared story on a social media platform can reach thousands in a short time, thereby informing or misleading.

Differences Among Misinformation, Propaganda, and "Fake News" on Social Media.

Misinformation spreads faster than true information in some social media contexts. For instance, after the Toronto attack in 2019, Natasha Fatah published two accounts of the attacker, saying in one report that the attacker was “middle eastern and angry” and in another report that he was “white” (Meserole, 2018).. The fake version (middle eastern and angry) went viral, this is apparently due to confirmation bias, and the author of the article says that Twitter is like a confirmation bias machine (Meserole, 2018). Our closely held views drive our responses on social media, which then triggers the algorithms to promote tweets or posts with the higher number of responses (Meserole, 2018). In this case, and in most cases, following the crowd is no guarantee of being right.

Fake news is defined by Trend Micro Inc. as, “the promotion and propagation of news articles via social media. These articles are promoted in such a way that they appear to be spread by other users, as opposed to being paid-for advertising. The news stories distributed are designed to influence or manipulate users’ opinions on a certain topic towards certain objectives” (Trend Micro, Incorporated, 2017). So, not only are lies being promoted, they are being promoted in a sneaky and deceitful way. Their site says that three things create a triangle to promote fake news, here is the diagram:

Furthermore, the tools and services to promote various kinds of fake news are listed in this article, with prices attached, and include “Create a celebrity”, “Institute a Street Protest”, and “Discredit a Journalist” (Trend Micro, Incorporated, 2017). An example of a fake news story found on the Business Insider website is "Democrats Vote To Enhance Med Care for Illegals Now, Vote Down Vets Waiting 10 Years for Same Service" (Gilbert, 2019), this is one that I can see many of my friends falling for, it was fake news

Propaganda is used to spread the views of those who use it; whether this is done with a good or bad motive, it seeks to influence audiences toward a certain view. One article online lists seven different kinds of propaganda (Masud, 2019):

Bandwagon-relies on people’s desire to be like everyone else.

Card Stacking-relies on withholding some facts while promoting others.

Plain Folks-relies on using ordinary folks to promote products/services instead of celebrities.

Testimonial-relies on well-known celebrities or highly respected figures (such as doctors).

Glittering Generalities-relies on emotional appeal and/or vague statements.

Name Calling-relies on ridicule or bad-mouthing the competition (such as Burger King ad that ridicules MacDonalds-see below).

Transfer-relies on benefitting from negative or positive qualities of others (product, person, ideology) (Masud, 2019).

           One example of advertising propaganda used the transfer propaganda method; when major soft drink companies were under scrutiny for reported pesticide content in their drinks, juice companies and other drink companies benefitted as a healthy alternative (Masud, 2019).

           Another example, this time of political propaganda, is fake Russian social media accounts used to influence North American’s in the presidential election (PBS News Hour, 2017, October 31). 

Which Of These Three Categories Is Most Difficult To Detect And Why?

           Most of us are savvy enough to recognize certain kinds of advertisements that use propaganda (such as Burger King’s ridiculing McDonald’s ad).

However, it is a little more difficult to spot misinformation, which is basically just a lie dressed as the truth. Therefore, it is most beneficial to have a high amount of curiosity combined with a healthy dose of skepticism that will motivate you to look for more corroborating evidence.

Furthermore, propaganda can be difficult to spot, especially if we are not using critical thinking, asking lots of questions, and looking at sources and other views.

How Can Users Of Social Media Detect And Avoid Repeating Misinformation Or "Fake News"?

Standards of critical thinking are important steps or markers of intelligent consumption of social media, they are clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth, logic, significance, and fairness (Meegan, n.d.). By understanding and implementing these standards we are less likely to fall for fake news and more likely to spot genuine, factual content. Take breadth for example; breadth expresses all sides of the story, giving us enough information for at least a start in understanding motivation and facts that would be hidden if only one side was represented (Meegan, n.d.). I personally make it a habit to only post stories that are factual (as far as I can determine); I search for opposing views and if I inadvertently post fake news or misinformation, I post a retraction and remove the original post. In this way I feel that I am being as responsible as possible.

Additionally, check out any sources that are provided and look for opposing views, or even just different perspectives. You may still not be able to determine all the facts, but you will be better armed to resist fake news, propaganda, and misinformation. Revealing the source of propaganda goes a long way toward providing the information needed to determine the credibility of stories on mass media or social media (Farkas, 2018).

Credibility: a Critical Aspect of Social Media.

           Social media as a source of news, opinion, entertainment, and advertisement is a fact; most people use SoMe (social media) this way. Credibility still follows known name brands and news sources; this is important in knowing who we are allowing to shape our views. Everyone is on SoMe and this is something we must keep in mind; anyone, and everyone, can have a presence there and not everyone is credible. Furthermore, purposely choosing known, credible sources may eliminate the chances of falling for fake news (Storehaug, 2019). Though we may be more likely to receive factual information from credible sources, be aware that our personal views and biases determine which sources we believe are credible.

Distinguishing Credibility in Social Media Versus Mass Media.

           Revealing sources is key in discovering the credibility of information intended to influence the public politically or otherwise. It seems that social media is uniquely positioned and equipped to influence the public, whether for good or evil. Because of this ability, the public should always question every source about any important subject. While mass media is not immune from this issue, it is less far-reaching (Farkas, 2018).

Moreover, propaganda is not new, nor is it only used for lying and misinformation. Propaganda theory looks at propaganda as being “grey”, “black”, or “white”; white propaganda displays “clear and overt sources” (Farkas, 2018) while black and grey propaganda do not (Farkas, 2018). Farkas (2018) says this about understanding “black” or “white” forms of propaganda “we have to investigate their underlying technological and political conditions and causes: Why are they there? What purposes do they serve? And what are their modes of operation?” (Farkas, 2018).

Gayle

                                                 References

Farkas, J. (2018). Disguised propaganda on social media: Addressing democratic dangers and solutions. Brown Journal of World Affairs, 25(1), 1–16.

Masud, M. (2019). 7 Types & examples of propaganda techniques to blow your mind.

Retrieved from https://advergize.com/advertising/examples-of-propaganda/

Meegan, G. (n.d.). The intellectual standards [Blog post]. Retrieved from https://theelementsofthought.org/the-intellectual-standards/

Meserole, C. (2018). How misinformation spreads on social media—And what to do about it. Retrieved from https://www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/05/09/how-misinformation-spreads-on-social-media-and-what-to-do-about-it/

PBS News Hour. (2017, October 31). Social media giants are vulnerable to foreign propaganda. Retrieved from https://youtu.be/MKfThgvFAG8

Storehaug, P. (2019). Social media marketing influence versus mass media. Retrieved from https://cloudnames.com/en/blog/social-media-marketing-influence/

Trend Micro, Incorporated (2017). The fake news machine; How propagandists abuse the internet and manipulate the public. Retrieved from https://documents.trendmicro.com/assets/white_papers/wp-fake-news-machine-how-propagandists-abuse-the-internet.pdf

Gilbert, B. (2019). The 10 most-viewed fake-news stories on Facebook in 2019 were just revealed in a new report. Retrieved from https://www.businessinsider.com/most-viewed-fake-news-stories-shared-on-facebook-2019-2019-11#8-tim-allen-quote-trumps-wall-costs-less-than-the-obamacare-website-3

[bountyofbeads]

Buckle Up for Another Facebook Election https://nyti.ms/2NfHao3

Buckle Up for Another Facebook Election

By opting not to change the company’s political advertising rules, Mark Zuckerberg has ensured another election shaped by the social network.

By Kevin Roose | Published Jan. 10, 2020 Updated 4:46 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted January 10, 2020 |

SAN FRANCISCO — If you were hoping to hear less about Facebook this year, you’re out of luck.

The social platform announced on Thursday — after months of hemming and hawing — that it would not change its basic rules for political advertising ahead of the 2020 election. Unlike Google, which restricted the targeting of political ads last year, or Twitter, which barred political ads entirely, Facebook and its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, decided to preserve the status quo.

Politicians will still be exempt from Facebook’s fact-checking program, and will still be allowed to break many of the rules that apply to other users. Campaigns will still be allowed to spend millions of dollars on ads targeted to narrow slices of the electorate, upload their voter files to build custom audiences and use all the other tools of Facebook tradecraft.

The social network has spent much of the past three years apologizing for its inaction during the 2016 election, when its platform was overrun with hyperpartisan misinformation, some of it Russian, that was amplified by its own algorithms. And ahead of 2020, some people wondered if Mr. Zuckerberg — who is, by his own admission, uncomfortable with Facebook’s power — would do everything he could to step out of the political crossfire.

Instead, Mr. Zuckerberg has embraced Facebook’s central role in elections — not only by giving politicians a pass on truth, but by preserving the elements of its advertising platforms that proved to be a decisive force in 2016.

“It was a mistake,” Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former chief security officer, said about Facebook’s decision. Mr. Stamos, who left the company after the 2016 election, said political considerations had most likely factored into the decision to leave its existing ad targeting options in place.

“They’re clearly afraid of political pushback,” he said.

Mr. Stamos, like some Facebook employees and outside agitators, had advocated for small but meaningful changes to Facebook’s policies, such as raising the minimum size of an audience that a political advertiser is allowed to target and disallowing easily disprovable claims made about a political candidate by his or her rivals. These proposed changes were intended to discourage bad behavior by campaigns, while still letting them use Facebook’s powerful ad tools to raise money and turn out supporters.

But in the end, those arguments lost out to the case — made by Andrew Bosworth, a Facebook executive, in an internal memo, as well as President Trump’s campaign and several Democratic groups — that changing the platform’s rules, even in an ostensibly neutral way, would amount to tipping the scales. Mr. Bosworth, who oversaw Facebook’s ad platform in 2016, argued that the reason Mr. Trump was elected was simply that “he ran the single best digital ad campaign I’ve ever seen from any advertiser.”

In other words, the system worked as designed.

Don’t get me wrong: Facebook has made strides since 2016 to deter certain kinds of election interference. It has spent billions of dollars beefing up its security teams to prevent another Russian troll debacle, and it has added more transparent tools to shine more light on the dark arts of digital campaigning, such as a political ad library and a verification process that requires political advertisers to register with an American address. These moves have forced would-be election meddlers to be stealthier in their tactics, and have made a 2016-style foreign influence operation much less likely this time around.

But despite these changes, the basic architecture of Facebook is largely the same as it was in 2016, and vulnerable in many of the same ways. The platform still operates on the principle that what is popular is good. It still takes a truth-agnostic view of political speech — telling politicians that, as long as their posts don’t contain certain types of misinformation (like telling voters the wrong voting day, or misleading them about the census), they can say whatever they want. And it is still reluctant to take any actions that could be construed as partisan — even if those actions would lead to a healthier political debate or a fairer election.

Facebook has argued that it shouldn’t be an arbiter of truth, and that it has a responsibility to remain politically neutral. But the company’s existing policies are anything but neutral. They give an advantage to candidates whose campaigns are good at cranking out emotionally charged, hyperpartisan content, regardless of its factual accuracy. Today, that describes Mr. Trump’s strategy, as well as those used successfully by other conservative populists, including President Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil and Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary. But it could just as well describe the strategy of a successful Democratic challenger to Mr. Trump. Facebook’s most glaring bias is not a partisan one — it is a bias toward candidates whose strategies most closely resemble that of a meme page.

On one level, Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision on ads, which came after months of passionate lobbying by both Republican and Democratic campaigns, as well as civil rights groups and an angry cohort of Facebook employees, is a bipartisan compromise. Both sides, after all, rely on these tools, and there is an argument to be made that Democrats need them in order to close the gap with Mr. Trump’s sophisticated digital operation.

Ultimately, though, Mr. Zuckerberg’s decision to leave Facebook’s platform architecture intact amounts to a powerful endorsement — not of any 2020 candidate, but of Facebook’s role in global democracy. It’s a vote for the idea that Facebook is a fairly designed playing field that is conducive to healthy political debate, and that whatever problems it has simply reflect the problems that exist in society as a whole.

Ellen L. Weintraub, a commissioner on the Federal Election Commission who has been an outspoken opponent of Facebook’s existing policies, told me on Thursday that she, too, was disappointed in the company’s choice.

“They have a real responsibility here, and they’re just shirking it,” Ms. Weintraub said. “They don’t want to acknowledge that something they’ve created is contributing to the decline of our democracy, but it is.”

In Facebook’s partial defense, safeguarding elections is not a single company’s responsibility, nor are tech companies the sole determinants of who is elected. Income inequality, economic populism, immigration policy — these issues still matter, as do the media organizations that shape perception of them.

I also don’t believe, as some Facebook critics do, that Mr. Zuckerberg is doing this for the money. Facebook’s political advertising revenue is a tiny portion of its overall revenue, and even a decision to bar political ads entirely wouldn’t materially change the company’s financial health.

Instead, I take Mr. Zuckerberg at his word that he genuinely believes that an election with Facebook at its core is better than one without it — that, as he said last year, “political ads are an important part of voice.”

There are reasons to quibble with Mr. Zuckerberg’s definition of “voice,” and to ask why a platform that fact-checked politicians’ ads or limited their ability to microtarget voters would have less of it. But it barely matters, because the terms for the 2020 election are now set. This election, like the 2016 election, will be determined in large part by who can best exploit Facebook’s reluctance to appear to be refereeing our politics, even while holding the whistle.

“They’ve laid out what the rules are going to be — and now everyone has to line up behind these rules,” said Mr. Stamos, the former Facebook security chief. “Which are effectively no rules.”

*********

If Mr. Kushner conducts the Trump 2020 re-election campaign with the competence and effectiveness we have observed in his myriad other roles in this administration, we may reasonably anticipate Democratic Party landslide victories in _every_ election next fall.

“Mr. Kushner is positioning himself now as the person officially overseeing the entire campaign from his office in the West Wing, organizing campaign meetings and making decisions about staffing and spending.“ To the Times: would this violate the Hatch Act? By my reading, it would ... unless one takes the position that Kushner’s isn’t a Federal employee simply because he doesn’t draw a salary.

Kushner’s Global Role Shrinks as He Tackles Another: The 2020 Election

Ivanka Trump’s husband will now supervise her father’s re-election campaign, but he continues to weigh in with advice to the president on a range of other matters.

By Annie Karni and Maggie Haberman |

Updated Jan. 10, 2020, 2:51 p.m. ET | New York Times | Posted Jan 10, 2020 |

WASHINGTON — When senior administration officials gathered in the Situation Room on Tuesday for a meeting to discuss the repercussions of the killing of Maj. Gen. Qassim Suleimani, Vice President Mike Pence had a seat at the table. So did Robert O’Brien, the national security adviser, and Mark T. Esper, the defense secretary.

But the White House aide whose portfolio is the Middle East was notably absent from the meeting.

Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law and senior adviser, was sitting for a photo shoot for a planned Time magazine cover story. He was also absent from the Situation Room later in the day when it was clear Iran was launching an attack on American forces and the same officials rushed back, joined by Mr. Trump and West Wing aides like Mick Mulvaney, the acting chief of staff, and Stephanie Grisham, the press secretary.

Over the past two weeks, Mr. Kushner has had little visible part in what has been Mr. Trump’s most high-stakes moment as commander in chief, the starkest example of how much his role in the White House is changing as the Trump presidency enters its fourth year.

Mr. Kushner has also served as the peacemaker in trade negotiations with Mexico and China, smoothing over disputes and serving as a mediator between foreign officials and Mr. Trump. But with the North American trade deal expected to become law within weeks, and the president poised to sign a first-phase China trade deal on Wednesday, that role will be less of a focus.

Instead, Mr. Kushner, who is married to Ivanka Trump, the president’s older daughter, is positioning himself to be the overseer of something of even greater personal interest to his father-in-law: Mr. Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign.

Unlike the behind-the-scenes role he played in the 2016 campaign — where he was seen as a key figure but, campaign aides said, never took a title and avoided blame — Mr. Kushner is positioning himself now as the person officially overseeing the entire campaign from his office in the West Wing, organizing campaign meetings and making decisions about staffing and spending. His more prominent role comes after much of 2019 was spent bogged down by the Russia-related investigations that had dogged the president since he took office.

The portfolio marks a sharp departure from Mr. Kushner’s focus in the early days of the administration, when he sought to be a central driver of administration Middle East policy, acting at times as a shadow secretary of state who circumvented official channels of power within the State Department.

Back then, Mr. Kushner’s influence in the region extended far beyond his stated portfolio of negotiating peace between the Israelis and Palestinians, setting an early tone by bypassing cabinet members to persuade Mr. Trump to make Saudi Arabia his first stop abroad as president.

“Since Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has come in, you’ve seen Jared’s role narrow to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” said Ilan Goldenberg, the director of the Middle East Security Program at the Center for a New American Security, who worked under former Secretary of State John Kerry on Middle East issues. “It’s been a gradual move, and it’s very striking right now.”

Mr. Kushner declined to comment on his change in focus, but his allies in the White House say he sees no reason to involve himself as extensively in international issues now that the State Department is run by Mr. Pompeo, whom he sees as far more competent than his predecessor, Rex W. Tillerson. They also pointed to the fact that Mr. Trump’s national security team now includes many Kushner allies, like Mr. O’Brien and Brian H. Hook, the special representative for Iran who has also worked with Mr. Kushner on the peace process.

Mr. Kushner’s status as a member of the president’s family has also made it possible for him to choose the moments and issues where his role is highly visible.

He played a critical role in persuading Mr. Trump to support a criminal justice overhaul, which he has also promoted as a way to help Mr. Trump win over African-American voters. But he has never unveiled a peace plan whose delivery date has been delayed indefinitely. And with Israel in its own political limbo, the expectations that Mr. Kushner’s plan would form the basis of a deal are low.

In recent months, Mr. Kushner has been directing the construction of the president’s wall along the southern border, telling associates he has a timetable for getting a portion completed by the election and holding regular meetings with status updates on how much mileage has been built. Mr. Kushner’s wresting of control over the issue has generated criticism from some administration officials, who said he dives into other people’s policy areas with abandon and little foresight.

Last week, he was involved in the Trump campaign’s decision to spend $10 million on a 60-second ad that will run during the Super Bowl, an announcement that came out after the campaign of former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg of New York signaled it would make the same buy, a person familiar with his role said.

But ever since Mr. Trump entered office with his son-in-law at his side, Mr. Kushner has been trailed by questions about what it is that he really does or has accomplished. His portfolios — streamlining the government’s information technology systems, brokering peace in the Middle East — have at times seemed so large that they are meaningless. His floating “senior adviser” status that functions outside of any formal chain of command has given him a role that seems simultaneously all-powerful and make-believe.

His expectations for winning an election, however, are higher.

During Mr. Trump’s vacation at Mar-a-Lago, his private Florida club, Mr. Kushner arranged meetings with campaign officials to discuss messaging. He made a rare appearance at a campaign briefing in December with members of the news media, where the former Democrat declared that he was now a card-carrying Republican.

Mr. Kushner spent the holidays with Mr. Trump, and it is unclear what private conversations he had with his father-in-law there about the situation in Iran. Mr. Trump, who personally granted his son-in-law a security clearance by overruling concerns flagged by intelligence officials and the White House counsel, often seeks Mr. Kushner’s counsel on issues he is not directly involved with, and they spent many hours together during the week.

Aides, however, would not say what Mr. Kushner’s view of the strikes was.

“Jared’s Middle East portfolio is primarily focused on developing a peace plan between the Israelis and the Palestinians,” said Hogan Gidley, a White House spokesman. “He gets involved in other matters where appropriate to further President Trump’s objectives.”

While he was not in any Situation Room meetings, Mr. Kushner pushed his father-in-law to deliver some kind of statement about the Suleimani strike from the White House rather than at a political rally later, despite concerns from other senior officials about the president speaking about a crisis that did not appear to be over.

And there are issues in the Middle East and on the international stage where Mr. Kushner still asserts himself: He was present for a meeting on Monday in the Oval Office with Khalid bin Salman, a member of the Saudi royal family. The meeting was not on Mr. Trump’s schedule, and officials have declined to give a summary of what was discussed; its existence was acknowledged by the White House only after the Saudis posted photos on Twitter.

After Mr. Trump met with the prime minister of Greece on Wednesday, it was Mr. Kushner he turned to in the Oval Office, an aide said, asking him to walk him out.

Among Trump critics, Mr. Kushner’s many roles have not instilled confidence. “It seems like he just bounces around based on whatever issue intrigues him at any given moment, without regard for his past track record, or inexperience on any given issue,” said Brian Fallon, Hillary Clinton’s spokesman during her 2016 campaign against Mr. Trump.

**********

[a-dragons-journal]

Otherkin Challenge

Putting this under the cut so I don’t spam the tag.

1. What name do you go by? What is the significance of it to you?

Rani! It is, as near as I can figure, the name I had when I was physically a dragon.

2. How old are you? (If you don’t mind sharing.) What is the gender you identify as?

18, nonbinary woman.

3. What is your Otherkin/Therian species?

Dragon.

4. How long have you known that you are Otherkin? How old were you when you Awakened?

Around a year and a half now; I was 16-17 when I awakened (the period I label as my awakening happened to fall over my birthday, inconveniently enough).

5. How did you find the Otherkin community?

I stumbled across an Otherkin FAQ - I have no memory of how that happened, only that it was entirely accidental -  and that led me to tomorrowlands.org and the rest of the community.

6. How does being Otherkin affect your life?

Not hugely, tbh - I’ve long since learned to override most behavioral urges, people learn remarkably fast to translate nonhuman noises and even respond in kind, etc, so there’s usually not a huge tangible effect. (It’s also hard to tell, given that nothing has changed since I awakened, I just have a name for it now - so what’s affected by being otherkin and what’s not? Hard to say.)

7. Are you “out of the metaphysical closet”? If so, to whom?

Yes! Mostly. My family does not and probably never will know. Most of my friends do, and those who don’t don’t know because it doesn’t come up rather than because I make any effort to hide it.

8. How did/would your family react to you being Otherkin?

I suspect it would be hard for my mom to believe, but other than that, I don’t think she would respond hugely negatively - just skepticism and neutrality. Still. Better not to bring it up.

9. What does being Otherkin mean to you?

I don’t know that it does mean anything, beyond the literal “identifying as something other than human” bit. It’s just a state of being. It’s not something I choose, so it’s somewhat counterintuitive to me to try and apply a deeper meaning to it - the same way I don’t apply a deeper meaning to me having blonde hair, or being asexual, or whatever. It just Is.

10. How do you believe you came to be Otherkin? Is it a psychological connection? Were you reincarnated? Explain.

I believe my draconity stems from a past life - that I lived a life as a dragon (on another planet or in another universe), and that for whatever reason my soul resonated particularly strongly with that shape and still remembers it, causing it to “bleed over” into this life.

11. What do you hope the Otherkin community will be like in ten years? Are you for public awareness or against it? Why or why not?

a) A little less... conflicted than it is now. I hope things will have settled down somewhat, and that we can sort out this issue of “Tumblrkin” (for lack of a more accurate but equally concise term) that’s arisen in the last decade or so - people calling themselves otherkin without really putting enough thought into it, or even actually understanding what it is first. On the other hand, I also like the shift away from “grilling” that the community seems to be taking - but that’s so recent that we’ve yet to see if it’ll stick.

b (and c)) ...Yes and no, honestly. Would I love public awareness that’s truly accurate information? Yes. Am I 99.9% sure that any large- or even medium-scale documentary or similar thing done on the subject will be sensationalizing and attention-grabbing at the cost of accuracy, making us out to be “crazies” and “wolfaboos”? Also yes. It’s happened before, and I have great faith in patterns.

12. Do you have phantom/astral limbs? What are they and how often do you feel them?

Yes! Most often, wings and/or tail (several days or weeks at a time, usually). Less often, horns, claws, paws, teeth, muzzle/snout, and digitigrade hind legs.

13. Do you mental-shift? Have you ever harmed yourself or someone else during one?

If I do, it’s so subtle/gradual that I’m not really aware of it. No.

14. Have you ever mental-shifted at a time when it could be considered inappropriate?

Not that I’m aware of, though I probably lean more draconic when I get tired/worn out and that does happen a lot during class, soooooo...

15. Do you Astral Project or practice any occult crafts?

I’m a witch, so yes. Haven’t gotten the astral projection thing specifically down yet, though.

16. Do you feel you are any sort of danger to society?

...No?

17. Does your nonhuman identity complicate every day life for you? If so, how?

Not particularly.

18. Why do you believe you are here as a human?

Because I was reincarnated here. :P

More seriously, I do tend to believe that we learn lessons across all our lives and thus life is about the living and the learning - but I don’t know if I chose to reincarnate here or if it’s determined by chance or some outside force.

19. Are you active among the Otherkin community?

You could say that, yes. (Thanks for 1200 followers, by the way, y’all.)

20. Are you religious? What faith do you follow? Does it contradict your Otherkin identity or do you feel that the two are synonymous somehow?

I am, though I’m not sure spiritual isn’t a better word. I’m Pagan, and please don’t ask for any more specifics than that at this moment - I’m in a bit of a questioning phase right now. Nothing about otherkinity inherently contradicts literally any religion, as far as I know, unless there’s a religion I don’t know about that has a rule about identifying as something other than human. The fact that I already believed in reincarnation sure helped pave the way for my explanation for my otherkinity, though.

21. Have you ever been emotionally, verbally, or physically harassed simply for being Otherkin?

Verbally, yes, though only online. Emotionally, not really, mostly because not a single antikin I’ve ever met is actually good at being cutting and insulting. They’re all boring and mediocre at it, and rehashing the same handful of bad insults a thousand times.

22. Do you feel you are oppressed because you are Otherkin?

No.

23. What is your take on fictionkin/mediakin? What about machinekin and appliancekin?

As far as I’m concerned, it’s really not my place to judge whether someone’s identity is “valid” or “real” or not. As long as they’ve clearly put thought into it and understand what otherkin is before they call themselves that, I try to live and let live. If they don’t seem to have a good understanding or seem to be misinformed, I try to gently correct them.

24. Did the awakening process seem relatively easy, or difficult to you? Why?

Somewhere in the middle, for me. On the one hand, it was less complicated than for many because there was never a doubt as to the possibilities - either I was a dragon, or I was a human (or, as it turned out, both). On the other hand, I loathe change, especially to something so integral as my labeling and identity - so I probably spent longer agonizing over it than I really needed to.

25. What do you think of the information provided online about Otherkin, is it relevant or not?

As with everything on the Internet, some of it is good, and some of it is bad. Read critically.

26. How has your Otherkinity/Therianthropy defined you as a person? Do you feel as if it has given you morals that you didn’t have before?

Not really? It’s something I’ve always had, whether I knew it or not. Trying to figure out how different I might have been if I wasn’t a dragon is both time-consuming and pointless.

27. Have you learned any life-long lessons due to your Otherkinity?

See above. Also, I’ve only known I was otherkin for a year and a half. Check back in in another five or six years.

28. What do you want to do with your life?

Marry my girlfriend, love and take care of my family, not have to constantly stress about money (or anything else, preferably). Chiropractic medicine.

29. Do you have any tips or advice for young and newly-Awakened Otherkin?

Take your time. You can’t rush self-exploration, nor should you. Furthermore, there will be some questions you can’t (or don’t want to) find answers to, and that’s okay. You’re not obligated to explain yourself to anyone but yourself - and your obligations to yourself are only to be truthful, to do your research and make sure you know what you’re talking about, and to be kind to yourself (and others).

30. Anything else you’d like to share with us?

I am very tired and I would like to sleep for a thousand years. Thank you.

[execatrix]

CATGIRL EXPOSED!

Hahah I mean, I’m actually shocked at the accuracy with which you psychoanalyzed me, for once. I’m glad to have met someone who wanted to listen to me and understand where I’m coming from. See, I’m not all bad. I don't always reply to @ben-10-setting-omnicrom’s post/replies on matters relating to the discourse because I'm not interested in reigniting that discourse. I will continue to defend myself and point out nonsensical or misinformed claims regarding Ben, but fighting people who've chosen to dislike me won't accomplish anything. And, tbh, I have better things to do.

As for the one response this got where I’m being accused of saying people “deserve to get thrown in the dirt” lol, uh…I don’t remember saying that word for word, but I also don’t remember a lot of what was said. I do have a life outside of this. You’re still blocked cause I forgot about it all and, like I said, I’m not interested in reigniting this pointless debate.

Of course I still have a problem with the relentless criticism Ben gets in this fandom, because more often than not, it’s just stupid. The arguments are completely stupid, hypocritical or short sighted. You can’t change my mind about that. BUT! I do also have to remind you that I wasn’t arguing solely because I disagree with those opinions of Ben, but because this person took one of the least controversial posts I made defending Ben, misinterpreted it, and made a YouTube video in order to show how I was wrong for saying what I said. If I remember correctly, it was this post. You be the judge of if that post was “problematic” at all. I’m not sorry for standing my ground.

I don't think it's exactly correct to not just misinterpret someone's words, misrepresent them and their intentions, and then respond in anger when they express that they don't like that without any prior clarification that you're not trying to start a fight. Even if you're a kid, and were going through a rough time, it doesn't excuse you doing something like that. If arguing with people on the internet is going to affect you that much, maybe don't go out of your way to do something that might potentially start a fight?

As I hope has already been demonstrated by my lack of willingness to instigate this further, I'm willing to put this behind me and those who were involved. But, I did grow claws for a reason (haha, I love that), and that's what's going to happen if you pick a fight with me.

In Defense of @xcatxgirlx

There was drama in the Ben 10 fandom ages ago. Little fuzzy on the exact details, but one of the major points of it (from my perspective) was this post.

In the post, my good friend Lenin added joke tags about their headcanon that Ben would grow up to be a multiple-time divorcee, but would eventually get his life together and settle down in a loving marriage with Rook.

I've known Lenin for years, and they often make jokes like this. I know for a fact that they genuinely care about Ben as a character, and I've seen their writing about Ben getting a happy ending. But the catch is, Lenin is also a fairly private person, and they don't often share their work with others unless they're close with them. Edit: Mb, I got this wrong. Lenin was new to the fandom and just started making posts about it. The context was something they provided in Ruby’s old server, but hadn’t shared with others yet.

So since she has no frame of reference, this is where Cat misinterprets the post as a genuine attack on Ben's character. (Double edit: I’m not trying to defend Cat’s behavior here. My point is, I don’t think she’s a monster)

Everyone who knows of Cat knows she's an extremely defensive person, especially when it comes to Ben. So she takes Lenin's comments seriously, making a response siting multiple canonical sources about how Ben is a good love interest.

Now, personally, I think it's reductive to label people as "deranged" or "unhinged" for being attached to a character. This entire drama was centered around ableism, and it's fairly hypocritical to overlook how she's been treated—not just here, but broadly. She's given little to no charity because she's "weird" about Ben. I don't mean to compare, but looking back, it seems that Cat was treated... like she was insane. Just because few people used the words, doesn't mean she wasn't treated like a psycho. It's the kind of hypocritical leftist thought of, "ableism is wrong, (except when someone's being the wrong kind of neurodivergent.)" And I'm not here to diagnose her, but you don't need a diagnosis to understand that, when someone behaves differently, they shouldn't be treated like they're freaks.

But of course, as people will argue, it's mostly about the harm someone does. And people say Cat caused a lot of harm.

So I'm going to say something. And people will almost certainly disagree, but if you have receipts, I'm more than happy to see them! I'd love to, I'm more than willing to be proven wrong!

However, from what I've seen,

She has never made a post attacking a specific person.

All her posts are about taking an argument and breaking it down. Her primary goal isn't to harass anyone, it's to defend Ben.

People talk about harassment campaigns. People often say, "Cat and co."

But, despite everything, she's... shockingly... absent.

She makes a point. She will argue that point. But if things go into ad hominins, or ultimately go nowhere, she will block you. Like she had me blocked, for the longest time.

There were harassment campaigns, but it wasn't her.

Again, people referenced "Cat and co."

So who was co?

Omnicrom was the one who caused this to become something bigger. Omnicrom was the one who never blocked anyone, Omnicrom was the one who called people pieces of shit in human skin, Omnicrom is the one who has a massive harassment post as their pinned post.

But Omnicrom and Cat are friends, right?

Well.

Omnicrom's blog is FULL of them reblogging and replying to Cat's posts. But what's fascinating is, Cat almost never replies back. Cat rarely talks to them, at least publicly.

So if they're not close, then why did Cat never call out Omni's behavior? Well, think about it. What other allies does Cat have? Even if she doesn't care for them, who else is regularly treating her with any kind of civility?

Why would she go out of her way to alienate one of the only people in the fandom treating her in any way that's halfway decent, especially when everyone else thinks she's a monster?

I know I probably don't have the full story. I know there's a lot of pieces that I'm missing. But I think I know enough to confidently say that Cat has been given the shit end of the stick, and a lot of shitty things that other people did have been unjustly pinned on her. It's obvious that Cat has a story behind her, that there's a reason she grew claws. Call me a bleeding heart, but I think she deserves more charitability than she was given.

[rosalraven]

Honestly, I feel bad for those d.rm s.tans who feel attacked whenever the green man gets even an ounce of criticism. It's obvious that they're trapped in an echo chamber where they often just reaffirm each of their own misinformed beliefs so they feel confident in their accuracy. The echo chamber then reinforces this idea that the world is out to get them and the world is cruel and everyone hates you because look they hate such a wonderful person so they would probably hate you too.

Then when members of their own community commits something heinous, they fall back on their own little corner to try to defend their community with their lives. They could then reference their fave making posts about not wanting hate and not wanting harassment when it's so obvious that he's been weaponizing them and blaming them for the toxicity surrounding him. A lot of them are also probably very vulnerable people too being used by an alleged groomer just to attack his haters and even people who dared not follow his command.

I hope that these people would one day find a better community than the one that has trapped them in this echo chamber. I hope one day that these people could find some closure for all the awful of reality. I hope that they start trusting people again instead of walling off the world.

It's frustrating to have so many people, so many vulnerable and young people, be stuck in such a toxic environment, weaponized by such an awful person against other vulnerable people. It's so frustrating.

[anthonybialy]

Policy of Errors

Claiming everyone else gets everything wrong is just another error.  The worst violators are mad about misinformation and don’t even have a sense of humor about irony.  People who never get anything right failing to smirk about it is not even the worst part.  Noting what they do believe here in reality hurts feelings and causes, which is sufficient proof for them.

Every single hoax confirms the liberal worldview.  Those are a fun few days for true believers. Trifling details like accuracy are for the intolerant.  Noting the constant stream of hate crimes in contemporary America is backed up about everything but the facts.  The feeling is what motivates Democrats, as it sure isn’t results.  Guardians against fascist racists are still convinced a MAGA Hate Squad is roaming Red State hive Chicago.  Jussie Smollett was attacked by everything but attackers.

Every charge against cops is believed by those who don’t believe any against criminals.  It only seems backward if you believe the entire criminal justice system is a farce designed to oppress the underprivileged.  

Overwrought liberals act reflexively in a way they claim those they impugn do.  It’s surely not the first time they think everyone else holds the same bleak personality characteristics they actually do.  Meanwhile, their belief system causes the problems they claim to remedy.  Proclaiming cops do bad makes stopping actual abuse harder.  It’s not the first time incentives go haywire because those who don’t grasp them encourage perverse ones.

Sneak in if you want to be treated like royalty.  Border sob stories reflect how Democrats only have sympathy for people in America who aren’t allowed to be here.  Uncannily, the pattern is the same with legal criminals.  The few things retailers manage to stock get stolen.

Foes of mean arrests and prosecutions enjoy acting like shoplifting is no big deal and just a way of coping with poverty, anyway.  You don’t want children to starve, do you?  Everyone struggles to make sure minors get enough calories during the era of Bidenomics.

The president’s grifting crackhead brat has to rip off others: how else would he make money in Dad’s economy?  Genetics indicate there are no useful skills no matter where one climbs the family tree.  Hunter Biden is just like his dad, and they both think they’re being complimented.  That bit where he was caught establishing a new standard for corruption showed us a lot about his defenders, too.

Eager suppressors assured us they were protecting the world against falsehoods as they violated the concept of open speech to promulgate one.  You’re now free to tweet regarding the scandal about the scandal.

Don’t be racist by noting the commie cabal which inflicts horrors upon citizens and the rest of the world as policy is responsible for what it did.  Chinese despots have to pretend China behaved.  I’m unsure what excuse Americans excusing a monstrous regime have. Are they ideological allies, bravely fearful that legitimate criticism will provoke bullies, or unable to distinguish between ethnicity and autocracy?  The answer doesn’t matter when the options are all repulsive.

The lengths America’s noisiest homegrown critics will go to defend a particularly appalling tyranny couldn’t serve as a more blatant example.  Perhaps those indignant on behalf of schemingly incompetent commies who infected the world are secretly admire the control of information in defiance of alleged absolute truth.

Gender is a whim.  Believe it or get treated like a witch.  Complicating the simplest observations is the cause of those most opposed to how things are.  Foes of the rather easy way to determine who’s a male or female are surely as dedicated to evidence on other issues.  Fanatical practitioners smugly announce they believe in science, which is the least scientific notion possible.

The presumption government will help can safely be classified as misguided.  It’s been disproven consistently enough that we can call it a lie if we’re feeling less generous.  The excuse of ignorance means not knowing a thing about current events, which is sadly likely among those whose reply to regrettable news about their ideology is “Fox News!”  Wondering what possible evidence could be on the side that figures every interaction requires political guidance is irrelevant, as they’ve made up their minds.

Those who get everything wrong are deeply concerned that you’re spreading lies.  The First Amendment’s whole point is that we can sort it out ourselves, which frightens control freaks who neither tolerate differing opinions nor challenges to what they risibly deem cold cases.  Jittery censors don’t believe in any sort of open market or natural right, and consistency is not always admirable.

Controlling alleged hate speech means anyone who disagrees.  There’s an ulterior reason just like everything else woke sputterers claim, namely that they’re as disconnected from the truth as they are productivity.

Psychological projection is the only productive liberal industry.  Business sadly thrives.  Making a show of calling everyone else a fibber is intended to distract from their own bouts with truth.  Robbers call tip lines blaming others.  I’m sure investigators will be thrown off by the blatant distraction.

If you didn’t want coercion with the sheen of legality, you should have thought about that before being bossed around.  A politician should decide everything except if babies get to be born, according to those obsessed with accuracy.  Lecturing about biology while averting their eyes from sonograms is merely the most egregious hypocrisy by those who commit sins they accuse everyone else of transgressions.  Everyone else is a phony, according to the most prominent examples.

[gattsuru]

There’s kinda an elephant in the room with Bergstrom’s paper:

To his credit, I’m using screenshots because he deleted the tweets, and, somewhat unusually for epidemiology circles, actually admitted they were wrong.

((Somewhat less to his credit, asymptomatic spread was a Big Obvious Risk to random shitposters in February and whoa does delving twitter a year back make me revise opinions on a lot of people.))

Which... to be fair, knowledge is a hard problem.  The random shitposters haven’t had a perfect batting average, to understate things (fecal spread, ventilators, random drugs, arguably vitamin D).  There are genuine limitations to untrained n95 mask use, and a tradeoff against other forms of mitigation and against availability for healthcare workers.  He probably wasn’t doing a Vox and masking himself at the same time he told people off for doing so, and wanting to make it hard for them to do so.  He’s not unique in making this mistake -- I’m particularly fond of WHO as an example, since they had their own workers meeting unmasked and then doing a surprised pikachu when they had outbreaks.

But he’s not a party in solving the problem, or even describing the problem.  Even for this paper!

Facsimiles of false information (e.g., misinformation and disinformation) can now spread across vast swaths of society without the risk of decay or fact checking along the way. Adding friction to this process has become one of the more promising approaches to reducing misinformation online. (105).

I don’t think anyone who’s seen a deep-fried JPG thinks that first sentence is true, or even close to true, or even false less often than not.  Social media can be incredibly prone to decay, whether it be link rot, copypasta, dereferencing or decontextualization, everything being paywalled, RE:FW:FW:RE: You Gotta Read This, or just Twitter/Facebook/Whatever being awful.  There’s been entire projects built around trying to reduce this entropy, or at least make provable communication, and they’ve been notoriously failure-prone.  Fact-checking is trivial and easy and also just as prone to the same problems of being disinformation or misinformation itself.

The deeper problem is that reference 105 is “G. Pennycook et al., Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online. Nature”, which is a thankfully-online paper that correctly describes the methodology of its tests, and the intervention involved asking participants to rate the accuracy of a website. This isn’t about “decay” or “fact checking”, or even about “friction” (since the control group for at least one test was requested to rate the humorousness of a website).  Which kinda mauls its use as a citation for such a thing.

((Good thing PNAS just some vanity publisher and not some high-impact prestige journal with layers of editors and peer review that should have caught this.  Let alone the other various problems with the sort of priming research in the Pennycook paper.))

And that’s just the first paper I checked!  This sentence is a better example of its own described failure modes (and the limitations of its proposed solution!) than the citation it’s using!

Which is... kinda the problem.  There’s not some nice bright-line test to find for “good” communication, or some magic piece of paper you can drip into an assertion and check for pH truth.  There’s no way to outsource evaluation of accuracy, only to change what you’re evaluating.  There’s not even a clean delineation from the jerk “wrong so you click” written by a human newspaper journalist rather than promoted by an algorithm.

When I criticize Bergstrom as an epidemiologist, that’s not because he’s been particularly bad or the field is particularly prone to error (though that’s damning with faint praise, rather than an endorsement), but to say that it’s a fault possible no matter the expertise of the author.  When I criticize his perspectives on the matter of disinformation, it’s not to say he’s unusually wrong, or that his history is totally incorrect.

But more critical than nitpicks about what extent this problem is new, or that we  have (and refuse to use) the option of older interactions, the limitations of knowledge kinda dooms and damns any of his considered solutions.  If truth had some golden path that made it clear and obvious, even if only to the properly anointed, we wouldn’t need self-appointed magisters to usher it into the light.

As it is, you’re stuck thinking, with your own brain.

You know that tumblr post that's like "Adults: why don't kids go outside?" and then there's a picture of a very pedestrian-unfriendly street from probably somewhere in the US?

I've been thinking a lot about how community seems to be lacking in fandom recently, and over on Dreamwidth people have been making some excellent points. I think modern social media is another place where adults have created a space that is hostile to young people trying to navigate their way online.

I get a lot of asks and see a lot of posts from young people lamenting the fact that they don't know how to make friends online. Because this isn't a problem that I experience, I've had a tendency to think along the lines of "kids these days" etc. But that's the easy out. Most of the people I'd consider "online friends" of mine are people I met online several years ago or they're people I met IRL and we just don't live near each other so our friendship happens online. I can't honestly say I'd feel confident in trying to make new friends on modern social media today.

If you start thinking about it more critically, it makes total sense that it's harder to make friends now. Modern social media has been optimized for "engagement." The goal of twitter or tumblr or instagram or tiktok isn't to help users find each other and talk to each other. The goal of those platforms is to keep people on those platforms. The more people they have on their platform, the more money they make. The more time people spend on their platform, the more money they make.

How do you make people spend more time on the platform? You make it as passive and entertaining as possible. Scrolling through tiktok is like channel surfing on a TV in the 90s or early 2000s. Scrolling through twitter or tumblr or facebook is just putting interesting or pretty or funny or angering things in front of your eyeballs until you get bored and switch to the next app, cycling your way through them.

Timestamps are hard to find. Content isn't chronological. Posts are dropped in on your feed from unknown sources, decided by an algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised if they did research into how casinos keep people inside and gambling when they made a lot of these decisions.

Each one of these decisions, all on its own, undermines our ability to find and form a community. Each one makes it harder to make friends to have a conversation. It's hard to get to know someone or have a discussion with them when you have no idea if what you're saying will be seen by 1 person or 1 million. I'm probably not the only person on this site that feels like I'm either an observer or a performer, but I'm rarely a participant.

The internet used to be a vibrant, weird, wonderful place where communities could pop up and grow. Now, our best shot at community is getting invited to a Discord server and hoping it still exists 2 weeks from now.

Web 1.0 wasn't perfect in a lot of ways, but I think it was a lot better for community than what we've got now.

[threewaysdivided]

Quality Should Not Be Binary

In my wanders through life in general - and the internet in particular - I’ve noticed a strange mindset regarding the quality of media and the people who produce it.  It’s this weird idea that something is either 100% perfect, flawless and ‘how dare you claim to be a real fan while suggesting there’s anything wrong’, or that it’s completely awful, valueless and ‘you’re a terrible person for enjoying that or thinking it has anything to offer’ - sometimes flipping from one to the other as soon as a ‘flaw’ is revealed, or a ‘bad’ work does something suitably impressive.

This mindset has never really made sense to me.  Maybe I’m a just habitual over-thinker who spends unhealthy amounts of time analysing things, but I can’t see how this sort of absolutist approach would do anything other than shut down discourse, limit the value to be had from a piece and maybe make people angry.

So in honour of that please enjoy some indulgently long navel-gazing about critical analysis and media quality.

Disclaimer: This post is going to summarise my personal philosophy. Everyone approaches life - and especially art - in their own way and far be it for me to say you’re wrong if you prefer a different approach.  You do you.

Blindness Hurts Both Ways

To an extent I get the simple yes/no mindset.  Analysis takes time and it would be exhausting to give an extensive, nuanced breakdown on your view at the start of every discussion.  Plus the whole ‘dissecting the frog’ thing can definitely apply to enjoyment of media.

However, taking it to the point where you’re denying the positive side of things you dislike or refusing to acknowledge faults in works/people you enjoy has the potential to swing around and bite you in the butt.

Why deny yourself a useful experience? I think there’s an important distinction to make between being good and being useful. Subjective, technical or, ethical ‘badness’ is not the same as having no value. Similarly, being touching, entertaining or otherwise enjoyable doesn’t preclude something from having genuine problems.

Personally, I can find it difficult to work out exactly what’s going right in a generally positive piece.  After all, ‘good’ doesn’t hinge on a single point - it’s usually the product of a lot of things working well together, and it can be hard to figure out cause and effect in a system like that. It’s much easier to look at a failed attempt and identify the specific elements that caused problems, where it had the potential to recover, and places where it might be succeeding in spite of those issues. Similarly, some works can be very strong except when it comes to ‘that one thing’, which in itself is a useful reference.  Negative examples can be just as beneficial as positive ones, and turning a blind eye to a piece’s weaker aspects just denies you that tool.

On the other hand, sometimes a piece and/or creator can be ethically awful while being technically strong or succeeding at its intended purpose. In this case, while they’re not positive it can certainly be valuable to analyse the techniques they use, and even apply those tools when selecting and creating things for yourself.

It’s important to remember that acknowledging where something is strong isn’t the same as endorsing or supporting it, and that there’s a huge difference between pointing out a genuine weakness or failing and maliciously hating on a work or creator.

Why give something that much power? Starting with the gentler side, I think it’s important to remember that a work being ‘good’ on the whole shouldn’t be an excuse to gloss over possibly troubling elements or to give creators a free pass on their actions.  Sure, even the best-intentioned artists make bad PR and creative decisions sometimes but it’s also valid to acknowledge and call out possible misbehaviour when it crops up, rather than blindly playing defence until it reaches critical mass and undermines the good of their work (or worse, actually hurts someone).

There can also be a danger to simply writing off and ignoring ‘bad works’, especially if you dislike them based on ethical grounds.  If something ‘bad’ is becoming popular it’s usually a sign that it’s getting at least one thing right - whether that be plugging into an oft-ignored hot-button issue, or simple shock-value and shameless marketing.  Attributing the success of such pieces to blind luck and ignoring any potential merits that got them there opens up the potential for other, similarly objectionable works to replicate that outcome.

Not to mention the issues that can come from letting these things spread unchecked.  Think about how many crackpot theories and extreme notions have managed to gained traction, in part due to a lack of resistance from more moderate or neutral parties who at the time dismissed them as ‘too stupid’ or ‘too crazy to be real’.  Unpleasant as it may be, I think there’s some value in dipping into the discourse around generally negative media.  If nothing else, shining a spotlight on the misinformation or insidious subtext that a work might be propagating can help genuine supporters notice, sidestep or otherwise avoid the potential harms even as they keep enjoying it.

Why lock yourself into a stance like that? Maybe it’s just my desire to keep options open, but it seems like avoiding absolutist stances gives you a lot more room to move.  Publicly championing or decrying a work and flatly rejecting any counterpoints runs the risk of trapping yourself in a corner that might be hard to escape from if your stance happens to change later.  If nothing else, a bit of flexibility can help you back down without too much egg on your face, not to mention shrinking the target area for fans or dissenters who you might have clashed with in the past.

A little give and take can also help build stronger cases when you do want to speak out.  Sometimes it’s better to just acknowledge the counterpoints you agree with and move on to the meat of the debate rather than wasting time tearing down their good points for the sake of ‘winning’.  The ability to concede an argument is a powerful tool - you’d be surprised how agreeable people become when they feel like they’re being listened to.  

Finally, from an enjoyment perspective, is it really worth avoiding or boycotting what could otherwise be a fun or thought-provoking experience just because you don’t 100% agree with it or have criticised it in the past? Sure, there are absolutely times when a boycott is justified but why deny yourself a good time just because it involves an element that’s been arbitrarily labelled ruinous.  ‘With Caveats’ is a perfectly acceptable way to approach things.

Existence vs Presentation of Concepts

A rarer argument that occasionally pops up is the idea that certain works are inherently ‘inappropriate’, ‘distasteful’, or should otherwise be avoided purely based on their subject matter.  Usually this revolves around the presence of a so-called ‘controversial’ topic; things like war, abuse or abusive relationships, sexual content, bigotry and minorities (LBGT+ relationships being a big one right now).

Personally I think this is a reductive and pretty silly way to choose your content.  No topic should be off-limits for any kind of media. (With the possible exception of holding off until the target audience has enough life experience and critical thinking skills to handle it.  There is some value in TV rating systems.)  Yes, some concepts will be uncomfortable to confront, but they are part of life and trying to keep them out of mainstream art simply stifles the valuable real-world discussions and conversations they might spark.

What we should be looking for is how a work handles the concepts it chooses to use.  There’s a world of difference between presenting or commenting on a controversial topic as part of a work, and misrepresenting or tacitly condoning inappropriate behaviour through sloppy (or worse, intentional) presentation choices.  The accuracy of research and portrayals, use of sensitivity and tact, consideration for the audience and overall tone with which a topic is framed are much more worthy of consideration than simply being offended that the idea exists in media at all.

‘Bad’ Art, ‘Good’ People and Vice Versa

I think it’s important to remember that our content creators are, well, people.  They’re going to have their own weird taste preferences, personal biases and odd worldviews that will sometimes show through in their output. They’re also going make mistakes - after all, to err is human.  Unfortunately, in the creative pool you can also find some genuine bigots, egotists, agenda-pushers, abusers and exploitative profiteers who don’t care about the damage their work might be doing.

It can be discomfiting to notice potentially negative subtext in the work or actions of a creator you like, and upsetting to realise that a work you love is the product of a person who you can’t in good conscience support.  Which of course leads to the discussion of art, artists, whether they can be separated and what to do when things go wrong.

Obviously I’m going to be talking primarily about the ethical/moral side of things, as I think most of us are willing to forgive the occasional technical flub, production nightmare or drop in outward quality from creators we otherwise enjoy.

It can also be a touchy subject so I’d like to reiterate that this is just an explanation of my personal philosophy.  My approach isn’t the only way and I won’t say you’re wrong for taking a different stance or choosing to stay out of it entirely.  

‘Bad’ art from an apparently ‘Good’ person In general, when it comes to apparent bad behaviour or negative subtext from otherwise decent creators, I favour the application of Hanlon’s Razor.

Hanlon’s Razor Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence - at least not the first time.

Art is a subjective medium, with multiple readings and interpretations being possible from the same piece.  It’s definitely possible for an author to lack the  awareness or experience needed to notice when unintended implications or alternate readings have crept into their work.  Sensitive topics are tricky to handle at the best of times and seemingly harmless edits or innocuous creative choices can stack into subtly nastier tonal shifts. Similarly, being a good creator doesn’t automatically make them good at PR or talking to fans - it’s easy to get put on the spot or to not realise the connotations of their phrasing and how it may have come across.   Of course this still means someone messed up, and it’s totally reasonable to call them out for ineptness, but I’d take an unfortunate accident over malicious intent any day.

Then there are times when the negative subtext is a lot less unintentional.  In that case I think it’s important to make the distinction between creator sentiment and the sentiment of the work, character or their production team (if collaborating) before making a judgement on them as an individual.  For example, the presence of casual bigotry might be justified in historical piece that’s attempting to accurately portray the culture of the time, and a creator/actor might write/portray a protagonist with biases and proclivities that they personally disagree with for the sake of a more compelling story.  The presence of a worldview within a work doesn’t automatically translate to the opinion of it’s creator.

Similarly, when considering a problematic production or team it’s worth acknowledging which positions hold creative power, if every member is complicit and why a dissenting individual might stay silent; whether out of contractual obligation, a desire not to throw colleagues under the bus or just because they don’t have the financial security to risk rocking the boat or walking away from the role.   It’s important to figure out who the buck stops with before we start pointing fingers.

Overall, I don’t think there’s much value in passing judgement on an artist for the troublesome content in a single work.  You’ll get more mileage and a fairer assessment from looking holistically across their collection and personal/private channels for telling patterns of subtexts and behaviours.  For the most part I prefer to offer the benefit of the doubt until there’s enough supporting evidence or they do something to definitively out themselves.  Speculation fuelled witch-hunts are no fun for anybody.

‘Good’ art from ‘Bad’ people Exactly what defines a ‘bad’ creator will vary (there’s a reason I’ve been putting the terms in inverted commas).  Whether it’s a disagreement with a key opinion/ creative philosophy/ method, that they’ve done something actually heinous/ illegal, or anywhere in between, enjoying a work while being in conflict with the creator can be a difficult situation to reconcile.  Personally I think there's power to the Death of the Author argument in these cases:

Death of the Author An author's intentions and biographical facts (political views, religion, race etc.) should hold no special weight in determining an interpretation of their writing.

If you’ve found value or enjoyment in a work then you’re well within your rights to enjoy the work on those grounds, even if the message you’ve personally taken from it runs counter to the original author’s opinions or intentions.  

It’s also important to remember that a creator’s personal and/or moral failings don’t retroactively invalidate their skill and achievements in their field.   It’s possible for a person to continue offering valuable insights, observations and lessons on their chosen speciality in spite of their other behaviour or stances.  Their work can have value in isolation, although it may be worth taking the information with a grain of salt when it comes to possible biases.

This becomes a little harder when the disagreeable sentiments bleed directly into their creations but, again, there’s no reason why you can’t decide that the strengths of a work are worth looking at even if they take some squinting past uncomfortable elements to appreciate.

The question should never be ‘can I still enjoy the art?’ because that answer is always yes - if you liked it before learning about the artist then you’re allowed to keep doing so afterwards.  The new context may add caveats to the discussion but it doesn’t demerit the existing positive aspects.

However, Death of the Author runs into problems when the creator is still alive.  If the artist is out of the picture then you can engage freely without any financial support or publicity going back to them.  When they’re still around the question becomes ‘do I still feel comfortable supporting them?’ This is particularly relevant when it comes to online creators, as just interacting with their content can generate passive ad revenue, increase view counts and contribute to algorithm boosts.

I honestly don’t think there’s any one answer to this particular question.  It all comes down to a personal case-by-case judgement; weighing the severity of the conflict against how much you value their work and, in the case of creative teams, whether you think their colleagues are worth supporting despite them.  Even if you decide to pull back there are soft options before going for a full boycott; using ad-block to limit passive financial contributions, buying physical media second-hand or lending/borrowing hard copies to avoid generating any new purchases.

There are creators that I disagree with politically but continue to enjoy because their stance isn’t especially harmful or is relatively minor compared to the value of their work.  There are creators who I no longer want to support but whose pieces I like enough that I don’t regret having purchased from them in the past.  On the other hand, there’s a creative team whose content I adore in isolation but who I’ve had to drop entirely after their leader was outed as an emotionally manipulative office bully.  Where someone else would draw that line comes down to their own personal standards, and it wouldn’t surprise me if another person took a completely different approach.

Don’t be a Jerk

I feel like this should go without saying.  Rational discussion is great.  Being able to have a critical discourse - even one that’s focused on the more negative sides of a work - is wonderful.  Opinions are fun.

However, the thing with opinions is that a lot of them differ.  We aren’t always going to sync up and there are times when you shouldn’t, and won’t be able to, force someone to agree.  In that case, please don’t attack them over it.  You don’t have to like or respect their views but some basic civility would be appreciated.  You’re trying to have a conversation, not win a catfight.  Condescension, derision, high-horsing, ad hominem and otherwise getting personal doesn’t tend to win many friends or endear them to your perspective.   And to the rare few who go so far as to threaten or harass fans, creators and their families; that’s an awful, completely unnecessary, out of line thing to do. (Seriously, never do this, it won’t help and just makes you look crazy.  Also, it can be considered criminal behaviour.)

It’s also important to know when to let things go.  You’re not always going to be able to turn the tide and constantly chasing the argument, stirring the pot and fighting waves of push-back eventually reaches a point of diminishing returns.  No matter how important the issue is there’ll be times when you’re just screaming into the void.  The best you can do is make your peace, say your piece and take your leave.  After all it’s not the school playground.  And unlike the playground, we’re not obliged to stick around.

Value Judgements: It’s Good to Examine Your Tastes

At the end of the day I think you get more mileage from reaching an opinion based on a value judgement of a work’s positive and negative sides than you do from just bandwagoning into blind adoration or hate.  ‘Perfect’ and ‘Unsanctionable’ aren’t binary boxes - they’re points on a scale, and figuring out where you stand on a piece can be a useful mental exercise.  Even if your opinion ends up matching the general consensus, at least you know how you got there and can defend yourself if challenged.  

If nothing else this kind of thing can help you figure out what elements you like, dislike and prioritise in media, and where your personal boundaries lie in regard to different issues.

Still, even after all this there are plenty more factors that determine whether or not you’ll enjoy something.  I’ve dropped way more pieces for not being to my subjective liking than I have due to technical or ethical flaws.  Your tastes are your own, and if needed you can stop the conversation at ‘it’s just not my thing’.

In the end there’s no ‘correct’ way to be a fan of something.  We’re all just here to have fun.  So try not to be an ass when you run across someone who does things differently.