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PaperclipPerfector  5d ago (text post)   23245 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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I find it equally tiresome, but I think anyone who's ever labored under the assumption that politics or say the media was ever at bottom about anything more than competing moral tribes with different visions of society's future, is deluding themselves.

For example, just the other day I was watching Piers Morgan's regretful debate with Mehdi Hassan over Israel/Palestine. Mehdi being a big player in the same space Piers is, clearly knows how the game is played, and spanked Piers pretty hard on his own show. It makes for great soundbites and entertainment, but is no way to conduct an honest debate.

I find it equally tiresome, but I think anyone who's ever labored under the assumption that politics or say the media was ever at bottom about anything more than competing moral tribes with different visions of society's future, is deluding themselves.

Maybe I have just grown much more cynical over the years, but I remember that the propaganda of, say, 20 years ago, was much more refined. Now it is just insultingly stupid, in a taunting "we know that you know we know you know we are lying, what are you going to do about it?" kind of way.

20 years ago the American media hadn't had it's back broken by social media and journalism was a profession rather than an advocacy platform.

Part of what makes professions different from trades is their willingness to punish their own for violating standards. Flaws did and do exist, but the economic downturns meant that there was a gradual shift towards the survivors being people willing to work for less (because they were more willing to work for ideology), and these people in turn- many of them more junior entries who had less experience and thus lower paychecks in the first place- were more inclined to punish on the basis of ideological deviation than on lack of adherence to style.

That explains the ideological conformity and the zeal of the survivors. It does not explain the total lack of subtlety.

I... generally don't associate conformist zeal with subtlety in the same person?

To clarify- the more subtle people were the professionals. The professionals were not the survivors.

I mean, you can both be zealous and competent at what you do, no? And if what you do is propaganda production...

You're conflating (and changing) the standard of comparison. Competent is not synonymous with subtle, particularly in a context where survival (a screening factor for what is / is not competent) is characterized by exceptionally enthusiastic support for a cause.

Being unsubtle is not a lack of competence in and of itself. Competence is the characteristic of what it takes to succeed. The metric of success in the selection effect to be a modern journalist is surviving as a modern journalist, not being a subtle propagandist.

You are correct. Signalling piety and subtlety are sometimes at odds. Willingness to believe in the correct kind of bullshit is a strong shiboleth.

I think my hiccup is that I think subtle propaganda is synonymous with effective propaganda and that, therefore, a subtle propagandist is synonymous with an effective propagandist for the cause which in turn would translate into signalling value. That is evidently not the case. But why?

Compare, say, Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver. People here will argue that the former was just as much of a propagandist as the latter, but he was definitely more subtle, and hence more effective. Why do we only get the Olivers now and not the Stewarts?

I think my hiccup is that I think subtle propaganda is synonymous with effective propaganda and that, therefore, a subtle propagandist is synonymous with an effective propagandist for the cause which in turn would translate into signalling value. That is evidently not the case. But why?

Human psychology, the difference between biases and fallacies, and what you are trying to use propaganda to do.

One of the critical points / takeaways of studies of psychological biases like anchoring or confirmation or others isn't that they are a tricky things to be avoided, but that they have an effect even if you are prepared and trying to resist them. You can know what the anchoring bias is, be forewarned that it's about to apply, and your frame of reference is still going to be the first number you hear that you don't reject outhand. This isn't an error of reasoning, it's how the brain works.

By contrast, fallacies are errors of reasoning. They can be dumb and pedestrian, but they can be high-effort as well. In fact, some have to be. It can take a lot of time to develop a compelling fallacy in a way that isn't as obvious as a bias.

The issue with propaganda is that biases can be as good as fallacies, but a lot easier to pump out. Time is money and number of influence opportunities, and fallacies aren't so much better that you'd rather invest in them instead of biases.

When you thus get into a resource-constrained environment- like a journalism sector in the age of zealous activists- with people more interested in audience-impact than the nature of the argument itself- like an activist zealout- then your better tool and the one more available to you is the bias, not the fallacy.

Compare, say, Jon Stewart and Jon Oliver. People here will argue that the former was just as much of a propagandist as the latter, but he was definitely more subtle, and hence more effective. Why do we only get the Olivers now and not the Stewarts?

One argument is that they weren't that different, but you were just younger and didn't notice the nature.

There was a theme in the Jon Stewart era that the Republicans were the evil party but the Democrats were the stupid party for failing what should be slam-dunk conflicts. The theme-evolution would be that when Trump came into office at the end of Stewart's career, that sort of division was untenable- the Trump was deemed to be both evil and stupid, and so the market (and the supporting coverage that keeps the media industry afloat) pressured in that direction.

The counter-argument to that, and to your difference, is that in practice Jon Stewart-era commentary was always that the Republicans were both evil and stupid, and that the Democrats were just sometimes stupid, maybe, if it wasn't actually a Republican fault to begin with. Remember that the most Conservative-leaning persona on Stewart's cast was the man who coined the term 'truthiness' to make fun of... the republicans he was parodying. The bias was never subtle, it was just more aggreable to you.

The breakpoint is that tastes changed, both with age and with changes in the audience. The target audience later actors cared about was different from the Stewart-era audience. It was one where Donald Trump was THE thing, and nuance was to be discarded because it might help him. On the other hand, your tastes evolved differently. As such, when presented with something disagreeable, you started to notice more than you would have before, and once you noticed it was no longer subtle.

More comments

Well one problem has been that technological developments and social trends have made it easier by lowering the costs for people with cheap contributions to have a voice. I was one of the few skeptical and somewhat cynical naysayers among those I knew who took the opposite position and usually went around championing things like the democratization of the media or X or Y, and allowing people to have a voice, saying its going to raise the aggregate level news quality among people's media diet. Instead you got the reverse, more along the lines I more or less thought it would, where the signal to noise ratio became so out of hand that the bad drives out the good, and mediocrity rules the waves from one end to the other.

None of these things ever get pitched on the harm they'll do to society when the first appear and gain traction, but instead it's all about the great and wonderful and productive things it'll enable us to do. But the noble and moral uses of these things only ever end up being a footnote and an afterthought to their real uses. Mindless consumerism. Intellectual laziness. Style over substance. I really don't understand how it seems like nobody ever saw this coming. I saw it coming from a mile away. But maybe I'm just that pessimistic.

Idiots on Twitter is one thing. Midwits on the payroll of the NYT is quite another.

I’m reminded of Gay — a NYT editor. I can’t remember if she tweeted that when Bloomberg spent 500m on his political he instead could’ve given the 327m Americans over a million dollars each or merely saw the tweet and ran with it as a story for Brian Williams.

In either case, she had more than enough time to think “that sounds crazy — is the math right.” And either she can’t do basic basic math or she doesn’t care.

That was peak cable news comedy.

Williams showed a screen-grab of the tweet during the broadcast that read: “Bloomberg spent $500 million on ads. The US population is 327 million. He could have given each American $1 million and still have money left over. I feel like a $1 million check would be life-changing for most people. Yet he wasted it all on ads and STILL LOST.”

Speaking in disbelief, Williams said: “When I read it tonight on social media it kind of all became clear.”

Even more embarrasingly, in the middle of reading out, the tweet remarked: “Don’t tell us if you’re ahead of us on the math.”

NYT Editorial Board Member Mara Gay then agreed: “It’s an incredible way of putting it. It’s true. It’s disturbing. It does suggest what we’re talking about here which is there’s too much money in politics.”

In all seriousness these days, it can be hard to tell the difference. Bari Weiss could've passed as someone they hired off Twitter.

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