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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   30073 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 21, 2023

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It's good that progressives post about school shootings, because events like that should be discussed

I mean ... not really? Progressives place an entirely unjustified emphasis on school shootings, and, in an unexamined manner, imagine that they are a threat worth mentioning to the well-being of children in the united states. Statistically ... they just aren't. Progressives should post less about school shootings, as a result. My point was just that when a progressive says 'this black shooting isn't worth reporting on because it's over-representing a rare phenomenon', that's wrong for reasons that aren't obvious to the progressive, the social taboo on racism and the idea that the racism is morally bad are melded with factual claim, in ways that make the output quite distinct from intentional dishonesty. (There's another objection like 'most people are stupid and won't be able to individually conclude that core political issues they hold are invalid because of thought experiments about biased reporting of a coin toss' but I'll ignore that for now.)

Since what we're discussing here is whether or not we should trust mainstream newspapers more than internet randos, this only proves my point.

I'm saying you shouldn't trust internet randos more. And if the randos (or more realistically, people 10 layers down the social media telephone game from them) got political power I'm not sure things would improve. If the media really were just being dishonest and there was a second non-dishonest group of people we could swap in for them ... that'd be one thing, but that's not the situation we're in.

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