Mel in South Carolina always sends me cool stuff, almost too much to process sometimes.
She sent an interesting Christmas card which sort of says it all in a nutshell but some have found offensive and I am hereby redacting.
Careful Mel, they might be listening. We don't want to end up on an enemies list now, do we?
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One of the most pernicious tenets of today's right wing is that "our mythology and false information" trumps your hard data and expert consensus.
We could be talking about climate change, polio vaccines, raw milk, or any one of a thousand different topics.
If you disagree with me, you are part of a vast conspiracy, promulgated by [insert here]___________ (your favorite mainstream media, George Soros, pharmaceutical company or deep state government entity.)
This is how you get people to start doing things like drinking bleach, you find some debunked study from France, get on InfoWars or Rogan and go all in. People will lap it up before you know it and swear that it is true. Very easy.
There are now many people, and I have met some of them, whose sole source of information is X. Quite scary.
God help them.
There is a great article at the WaPo about NewsGuard, a company that was launched to fact check news sites' credibility. Advertisers that don't want to be associated with bullshit conspiracy blather, hire NewsGuard to vet news on platforms on which they sell products. They are a current villain de jour of the extreme right, that accuses them of censorship.
Since 2018, NewsGuard has built a business offering advertisers nonpartisan assessments of online publishers — backed by a team of journalists who assess which sites are reputable and which can’t be trusted. It uses a slate of nine standard criteria, such as whether a site corrects errors or discloses its ownership and financing, to produce a zero to 100 percent rating. But conservatives now question the company’s premise. Brendan Carr, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to lead the Federal Communications Commission, accused the company of facilitating a “censorship cartel,” in a November letter to leading tech platforms. Noting that key legal protections depend on tech executives operating “in good faith,” Carr continued: “It is in this context that I am writing to obtain information about your work with one specific organization — the Orwellian named NewsGuard.”
Such charges seem stupid and misplaced to me. Your fantasy does not get to have equal billing with empirically data driven reality. Conservatives are incensed because NewsGuard is uncovering some pretty bogus disinformation that they willingly embrace because it helps their cause with their base, primarily non college educated folks who lack the cognitive skills and knowledge base to critically evaluate information.
NewsGuard has also been targeted by conservative regulators over its grants from the Pentagon to track disinformation efforts by Russia, China and Iran targeting Americans and U.S. allies. They accuse the company of having an anti conservative bias.
This is absurd as the co founder, Crovitz is a conservative ex publisher and columnist with the Wall Street Journal. I believe that they have instead a "no bull shit" bias. And you will note that conservative publications like the WSJ and National Review score very well on their metric test. FoxNews even outpolls MSNBC. By the way, look at the Epoch Times, which supplies a lot of stories for our local paper and where they rank on the truth scale.
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