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Nah. Left wing hit-job-writing "journalists" aren't normies. If your standard is "what will ordinary people think" as opposed to "what will the Guardian think", the ideological purity standards are not that high. I know they claim to speak for all decent people, but they really don't.
Yeah, journalists aren't normies. No one said they were. That doesn't change the fact they set the standard for normies. Racism bad. Misogyny bad. Everyone except your racist uncle agrees.
You can't go and talk about race and IQ in public and come to any sort of hereditarian conclusion and not be eligible as a racist. Those are the rules.
You absolutely can though. To the normie mind, "racist" equals "doesn't like (group)". If you talk in a way that doesn't actually imply any dislike of a group, they won't grok you as racist, and won't pay any mind to people who accuse you of racism.
If you talk in a way that implies blacks are innately dumber than some other group you are not getting anywhere. Race and IQ stuff are beyond the pale if you are a hereditarian.
In what universe? I mean maybe in Berkeley, but the normies around me say shit that implies a black intelligence disadvantage all the time, they just don’t use the words ‘blacks are on average one standard deviation lower in IQ than whites’.
We must hang around different types of people.
I would say this is probably true, but normies don’t say things where you can see them like ‘they’re kind of clueless’ when someone’s getting irritated with a black? No complaining about ‘football names’ and ‘shaniqua’ and ‘what did they expect when they decided the government should be daddy’ or snarking about Juneteenth being so close to Father’s Day so everyone could have something to celebrate? No ‘well they’re racist too’? No discussion of how ‘Katrina kids’ dragged down the public schools and they should be more like the Vietnamese or Mexicans?
I'd agree to an extent, but those are seen as being private conversations. You don't go out in public outside the friendgroup and talk like that. In fact I'd argue most people who engage in such talk believe that it is not allowed. Cue memes of the group chat getting leaked and such.
It's not a matter of having an opinion of being allowed to say X or Y, there's just a recognition that this sort of thing is not allowed in the public eye.
It doesn’t seem like those kinds of statements are any less speakable in public than stuff like ‘bitches be crazy’ or other anodyne boomer political incorrectness.
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This is really interesting to me because it's rare to see somebody openly work from a foundation that social harmony is of higher moral value than truth. (Elsewhere you wrote: "You can't tell the black people the truth because that's ugly and no one has the stomach for it, so where do you go?")
I don't think this works philosophically in the long run to ultimately produce anything but gobbledygook, unless you take the Noble Lie stance of "ok, between you and me, we can speak truth, but it must be contained within this room and we must lie to the masses," which IMO still has its problems but at least it allows truth to flourish somewhere which seems a hard prerequisite to making any sense in the long run.
Speaking personally the idea that compromising truth in the name of not making people mad is an objective moral good is alien to me. I do it at times but always with a sense that I am selling out my integrity. Mostly just fascinated to run into somebody who's like "Yeah F it tell people what they want to hear, this is the moral thing to do."
I am not convinced a society earnestly built on this principle doesn't ultimately implode but time will tell I guess.
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The normies think what the journalists tell them to think.
Isnt the whole alleged "crisis of consensus", "political polarization", and "rampant anti-intellectualism" that typifies modern America indicative of the opposite?
There may have been a time many years ago where, if Walter Cronkite said it, people would assume it was true. But that time is long gone.
Epstien didn't kill himself.
The pandemic proved otherwise.
That just marks you as a non-normie. The normies have forgotten who Epstein was, and if you remind them, of course he killed himself, what are you, some sort of paranoid?
I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.
If any thing media viewership and trust were already trending downward before 2020 and the pandemic coupled with the George Floyd "summer of love" killed what was left.
We live in a world where (if a quick Bing.com search is to be believed) Joe Rogan's podcast averages more listeners per week than all of CNN.
The George Floyd "summer of love" had middle-aged white people setting up Black Lives Matter rallies in suburban towns. While wearing masks, as they were told by CNN et al. The pandemic and Floyd should have caused a huge drop in media trust; what it did is demonstrated that the power of the media was far greater than most thought.
Again, I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.
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In person, I've heard a lot of opinions from regular people with normal politics that you would typically only hear from the far-right online. What is considered allowable opinion online, much less the opinions that are typical of young journalists, are not at all typical of most people in the real world.
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They really don't. The journalists love to imagine that's the case, but it isn't.
If normies thought what the journalists told them to think, the Voice referendum would have passed with 80-90% of the vote.
Journalists have a huge influence on what people think, even if they don't follow journalists every single time. Elections are not won by every single voter doing what the journalist says; tilting the balance is enough to win the election.
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No they don't. Normies think whatever their friends do. That is, frequently, highly skeptical of the media.
I think "frequently" is understating the situation: "skeptical of the media" is now a supermajority, at an all time high, with 29% of last fall's Gallup poll reporting "not very much" trust in the mass media and 39% reporting "none at all".
Generalized distrust of media is insufficient if it does not result in skepticism of a given story. It observably did not do so for most people for COVID and BLM, which are the last two serious stress-tests of the thesis. It's really not so different from people having a super-low opinion of congress, yet reliably voting for their incumbent congressperson.
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