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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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"The red flags regarding Brinton were overwhelming and obvious to all who cared to see them" is such an incredible line. Just the sheer audacity of instantly flipping from defense and deflection to tossing him under the bus without even blinking.

The interesting part is that there are still zero other articles about this entire incident outside of the right wing press, to the point that wikipedia was trying to delete all mention of it as "no reliable sources verify." So there's a system for absorbing and synthesizing a response to "enemy news" without officially acknowledging it exists.

I"m very interested in this. I have a sense that the extent to which WP's "Reliable sources" document is used throughout media and government is deep and unprecedented. I noted that Matt Taibbi saw 'reliable sources' cited numerous times in his Twitter investigation and because we know that many of the major tech platforms interface with WP directly (Ex. Google, Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa--a service I believe they pay for) it seems like there are dots that need to be investigated for connection. The specific document at Wikipedia is a nightmare of liberal bias (I'd consider myself a liberal, fwiw) and directly impacting the truthiness of any article related to modern personalities and events.

I think it's very likely this same document is acting as a source for everyone...why? Because people wouldn't do the same work twice if they didn't have to, particularly if it promoted the agenda they already wanted to purport. Anyway, I think there's a huge story about Wikipedia just waiting to be broken. I'd really like to know how WP doubled it's annual income since 2016, but don't have a pro statista account. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1311370/wikimedia-foundation-annual-funding/