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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31393 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 30, 2024

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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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