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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28479 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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AP covers it with the stock phrase "claiming without evidence" that we saw so much of in 2020.
Is there a word for that kind of use of cliché? I think Orwell wrote about it being omnipresent in '30s propaganda.

It’s the definition of npc to include those phrases. I am sure you have seen the video smash ups of dozens of news crews say the exact same phrase. That’s one of the approved phrases for the story. And if you go thru Reddit you will see dozens of people using it in a thread.

For a news organization it’s obviously bad to repeat that lie. They could say bad evidence but without is false.

Or they could say “no smoking gun.” Honestly there is a lot of evidence. Perhaps enough evidence that it Joe Biden was long retired but this came to light AUSA’s might not have a problem indicting him (especially if he had an R instead of a D after his name).

Perhaps enough evidence that it Joe Biden was long retired but this came to light AUSA’s might not have a problem indicting him (especially if he had an R instead of a D after his name).

If he was merely VP right now he'd already have been forced to resign.

I dunno, I reckon Hunter talking about money for the big guy is a gun with a pretty smoky whiff about it. The defences are more "But you didn't see the bullet actually leave the gun, did you?"

Seems like there is even more than just that. Hunter told one of the Chinese business men his father wanted to understand why he wasn’t laid yet. Weird threat unless Joe had previously been involved.

There is also the fact that it seems US and European policy actually supported Shokin until Joe got him fired.

Hunter told one of the Chinese business men his father wanted to understand why he wasn’t laid yet.

I assume that "laid" was a typo for "paid", but it's Hunter, so I'm not 100% certain there...

Either way, could you link a source for this?

Honestly, I've wanted to reply to like half your comments with that same request. There's so much playing Telephone on the internet and so many people playing it poorly that my first instinct is to filter out anyone who makes a surprising claim without either an identity plus word-for-word quote or a hyperlink to the claim's source. It's bad enough when places like CNN so often do that, but if TheMotte commenters can't be held to a higher standard than mainstream reporters then what are we even doing here?

I would add perfectly fair to ask for a source. As I admitted below, one particular part of the story my memory played tricks on me. I post from my phone so hard to do a long comment c/p sources but if asked I will find.

At the same time, I am equally annoyed when people claim there is no evidence when they appear unwilling to have looked for the evidence. You can’t just say “cite please” so there is an advantage there.

Happy to find cites for whatever other questions you have. Note I provided a cite for the above statement in a separate message.

A button to set up a link would be a godsend here. It wouldn't have to be the fancy kind that does it all for you, just one that appends square brackets to a URL and then adds regular brackets afterwards for people to write in would make a huge difference.

Ha laid. That’s a funny autocorrect.

https://nypost.com/2023/06/22/hunter-biden-used-joe-as-leverage-in-china-biz-deal-text/

Thanks!

The picture perfect example of this mindless repetition for me was when it was asserted that Donald Trump said "without evidence," that Kyle Rittenhouse acted in self-defense. The entire interaction of course, was on video, which was publicly available and used as evidence in the court of law which acquitted him.

Yeah. They don’t seem to understand what the word evidence means. Well, I’m sure they do. They just don’t mind lying.

It’s made me wander a lot if the human brain has been broken the past few years or most of society has just always run on going with I guess I can call it your tribal truths.

It’s honestly made me illiberal. I use to believe things like the way you defeat bad speech is with good speech. If you just have better evidence you win. But now I don’t have that belief and if something is really bad then censoring it is the thing to do. And of course Trump is really bad so censoring anything positive for him is good. If I controlled the news I’d probably just censor all tran stuff and eliminate them.

The last few years we have had an information over load. I wander if we just reached a point where humans couldn’t process all the noisy data entering their life.

Is there a word for that kind of use of cliché?

It's just classic propaganda principles:

  • Avoid abstract ideas - appeal to the emotions.
  • Constantly repeat just a few ideas. Use stereotyped phrases.
  • Give only one side of the argument.
  • Continuously criticize your opponents.
  • Pick out one special "enemy" for special vilification.

I am a tennis fan. On the tennis Reddit page, they are discussing Novak’s comment that he isn’t anti-vax but stood for the proposition that bodily integrity meant he shouldnt be forced to take the vax.

The five bullets you list explain perfectly how the propaganda affected the main heavily upvoted response on Reddit.

The highly upvoted poster makes the claim taking the vax isn’t about freedom but that Novak was selfish putting others at risk by refusing the jab and thereby not getting to herd immunity.

This was a common refrain during the pandemic. It appealed to people’s emotions, it repeated a simple idea, it didn’t wrestle with other arguments, and it vilified a small subset (the selfish people refusing to take a safe jab to protect everyone else).

The poster never seemed to stop and think about the particulars. For example, Novak already had covid. Why did he need a vaccine? Why would a vaccinated person need protection from non-vax? How far did this principle go (ie should fat people be required to have medical surgery to lose weight given that their fatness imposes a strain on the health system)? How effective were the vaccines at creating herd immunity compared to a prior infection? How deadly was covid? If someone was very scared of covid, what protections could they take themselves instead of demanding everyone else take precautions? Did susceptible people have the right to force medical interventions onto others so that susceptible people could live their lives more normally? What amount of risk is appropriate to impose on someone for the good of the collective? Who gets to determine what is the appropriate risk? What process should be used?

There are a ton of meaty issues there. Maybe you determine on net you are still pro socially sanctioned vaccine taking but it isn’t obvious and it isn’t obviously selfish to oppose it. Indeed, in Novak’s case he sacrificed a lot for his principle (skipped numerous tournaments which could’ve cost him the all time slams lead) so kind of weird to even call him selfish — seems a lot more selfless compared to the redditor smugly denouncing him with no cost to the redditor. But I think it’s because propaganda worked. The pro vax redditor repeated the simple talking points drilled into his or her head during an emotional time and identified Novak as a villain.

What’s really odd is that the propaganda still works on vaxes! The redditor continues to make these claims in light of the severe underperformance of the vaccine in stopping the spread. You would think that would cause him or her to say “did I make a mistake somewhere in my thought process” but nope.

Makes me think “where do I have these blinders.”

Novak already had covid. Why did he need a vaccine?

I sometimes wonder if "sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic" is an even more effective description of human psychology than it was intended to be.

In the technological explanation of how vaccines work, the fact that they resemble the disease-causing virii is a good thing: the closer a vaccine molecule resembles the virus, the more effective the antibodies we learn to produce in response to it will be in response to the virus. We can't make a vaccine resemble a virus perfectly, because we would like to have it be a lot less harmful than the virus, but a virus has a perfect resemblance to itself, so a priori we'd expect the virus to produce the most effective immune response. There are possible second-order complications we might discover, but with Covid-19 we didn't. The benefit of a vaccine isn't "you're more likely to get better immunity than from an infection", it's just "you're much less likely to be debilitated or killed in the process".

In the subconscious magical explanation of how vaccines work, the Law of Contagion imbues them with persistent magical links to other people/objects/contexts, giving them power independent of the mere molecules they're made of. Sometimes these bonds can be removed by a "formal cleansing, consecration, exorcism, or other act of banishing", as Wiki says, so the same molecules which when bonded to Trump's Vaccine Can't Be Trusted might later lose that non-material bond to evil Trump and be instead bonded to The Science, which Says Everyone Needs a COVID-19 Booster Shot—and Soon. But sometimes those bonds are more immutable: a vaccine can be bonded to Medicine and Health and The Science, but a virus is irrevocably bonded to Disease and Death. How could something bonded to Disease and Death make you less likely to get a repeated disease later? That's just not how magic works.

This is my new favorite explanation for the blinders phenomenon

I think this is a perfectly legitimate analysis of provax propaganda. Especially as we know for a fact that States engaged in deliberate propaganda tactics in this specific issue.

But be careful to consider that such rethorical tools are just that: tools. Anyone can wield them. Indeed you could very well take some antivax discourse and apply this analysis there as well.

The important lesson here is twofold:

  1. Rethoric is powerful and somewhat amoral
  2. While rethorical arguments can be used to conceal untruth, their deployment alone does not refute the underlying proposition

It also didn't help that COVID was compared to the 1918 flu; while it was worse than a typical flu season, it's more comparable to the 1957 or 1968 flu pandemics than 1918, which took out a lot of healthy young people. Our public health institutions and memes are in a very real way coasting and riding on the mind-boggling gains we got from the discovery of germ theory to the advent of cheap and readily available antibiotics. COVID's bad, but smallpox it is not.

I'm still amazed people managed to convince themselves to destroy the economy for something this mild. Especially when the same experts who said we should ran simulations before and were quite happy to write down that this was the worst possible thing you can do when experiencing a much harder challenge. We gamed it out to be prepared and then threw away the playbook day one.

I guess I shouldn't be surprised we got a cowardly middle manager response when we select politicians to be cowardly middle managers.

That clip of the republican primary debate where a question is asked and everyone but Vivek is glancing at everyone else to see if they should raise their hand or not is a perfect model of what happened.

Vivek being China of course. For which nothing but a hard response was ever in the cards. And then most of the west aligned because nobody in power had any guiding principles or leadership, so they just followed the lead of whatever seemed to have any authority.

I'm still amazed people managed to convince themselves to destroy the economy for something this mild.

They were convinced to sell the entire manufacturing sector to the Chinese for ...nothing at all afaict, so this isn't that surprising.

Bill Clinton sold trade agreements to the Chinese in exchange for buckets of Chinese cash. The manufacturers sold their capabilities to China in exchange for increased profitability. The American Consumer got cheaper goods and thus cheered it on.

The only people that got nothing in exchange were the manufacturing laborers, but their careers were a sacrifice the rest of us were willing to make.

Part of it was that we could afford it. Part was our public health institutions being designed a century ago to deal with real pandemics and disease outbreaks.

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