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PaperclipPerfector  24d ago (text post)   32051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 10, 2025

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I’m not sure what you mean. In a democracy filled with uninformed and incompetent voters, if one side lies all the time, the other side must lie in turn in order to compete, let alone win. This is actually the very basis of newspapers in the American democratic tradition. X is not a newspaper, no, but it has taken on the same role. If the American voter wishes to learn about the facts and only the facts, they have to read papers and bills and data, and not Reddit or X or Bluesky. And yet they continue to use these services, at once proving that they are incompetent judges of the most obvious fact that the media lies. To quote Thomas Jefferson,

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knowledge with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. General facts may indeed be collected from them, such as that Europe is now at war, that Bonaparte has been a successful warrior, that he has subjected a great portion of Europe to his will, &c., &c.; but no details can be relied on. I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them

It's not irrational to delegate some amount of legal or political understanding to a trusted intermediate. One should still be open to whether they lied/erred and check their work from time to time, but expecting everyone everywhere to be deep subject-matter experts in this stuff is foolish.

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