True, and I indeed should have said “reflex” instead.
True, and I indeed should have said “reflex” instead.
People are almost more susceptible to simpler charts with race and IQ than they are to the really complicated stuff
Ironically enough, that’s because they’re stupid.
It amuses the hell out of me every time the conservatives whine about their brazen disinformation getting censored, since whenenver and wherever they get an opportunity (including, especially ironically, Facebook), they reveal themselves to be the most cowardly censorious people on the planet.
Everywhere, without exception, where conservatives have control, anything that even hints at undermining their comforting delusions is instantly censored.
But if anybody dares to censor anything they might want to say, including overt and deliberate lies, they wail and cry like the spoiled children they are.
I guarantee that the explanation for this would become very obvious if one were to simply, as the cliche has it, “follow the money.”
So the unspoken bit about RFK Jr. is that he’s a tweaker, right?
I mean, the details are all in the context of politically entitled progeny, but the underlying vibe I get from the stories about him is very reminiscent of the tweakers I’ve known over the years.
Israel is a rogue state.
“I think she’s beautiful — very beautiful! I find her very beautiful. I think she’s liberal. She probably doesn’t like Trump. I hear she’s very talented. I think she’s very beautiful, actually — unusually beautiful!"
I don’t think it’s with her popularity that the creepy old serial sex abuser is preoccupied…
And a billionaire singer who’s already such a common target for AI deepfakes that she’s quite likely the one person on the planet most ready, willing and able to sue someone’s ass off over them.
Wow - that was quite possibly the dumbest thing he’s done yet.
He doesn’t need to do it this time - he has a veritable army of fascists, a brazenly corrupt and compromised supreme court and a squad of billionaire plutocrats to do it all on his behalf, and not coincidentally they have a detailed blueprint in Project 2025 that tells them exactly what to do, step by step, to transform the US into a christofascist/plutocratic autocracy.
All Trump has to do this time around is just carry on being Trump, while all those other people do all the dirty work.
To “win?” No - not really.
But I don’t think that matters much.
Honestly, I think that Trump and the overt fascists and plutocrats who are backing him fully intend to get him into office or destroy the country trying - that if he doesn’t win legitimately, he’ll “win” through fraud, or through the machinations of the brazenly corrupt and compromised supreme court, or through violent revolution.
His backers - the Heritage Foundation and the rest of the fascists and Musk and Thiel and the rest of the plutocrats and so on - don’t just want to try to get him into office - they want to destroy American liberty and democracy. It’s not even so much about him specifically - he’s just the right combination of charismatic and shallow that they see him as their opportunity to impose the autocracy they want. And I don’t think they’re going to let anything stand in their way. So whether or not he actually wins the election isn’t even really relevant, other than to the degree that that will determine what other strategies they might have to, and will, implement.
I’m regularly struck by the literal insanity of politics, but this whole deal with Israel is a particularly notable example.
The fact of the matter is that we have no idea what Harris’s actual opinion of the situation is. Regardless of what it might actually be, she has to support Israel, which at this point means supporting a government of literal murderous psychopaths who are simultaneously carrying out a genocide in Gaza and a violent incremental illegal land grab in the West Bank while also brazenly trying to provoke, and drag the US into, a war with Lebanon or Syria or Yemen or Iran. And why does she have to support all of that patent evil? Because if she doesn’t, AIPAC will spend millions and millions of dollars trying to destroy her, like they already destroyed Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush, for daring to have principles.
And what’s the likely net result of that? To elect a Republican, which is to say, a member of the party of actual antisemites.
They accuse Democrats of being antisemites merely for calling genocide genocide, and meanwhile, the actual antisemites - the people who comtinue to hold to the notion of Jews as evil, money-grubbing vermin who are conspiring to take over the world, are Republicans, even including Republicans in high office, like “Jewish space lasers” Marjorie Taylor Greene.
Think about how insane that is - a politician has to publicly support a genocidal regime or face being called an antisemite and having an Israeli advocacy group spend millions and millions of dollars to destroy her and instead elect the candidate from the party of actual Jew-hating antisemites.
And as if that isn’t enough, we have Jill Stein in the middle of it all, who, with zero chance of actually winning, is free to take the position that any rational person should take, and the position that the majority of the Democratic base takes - that genocide is genocide and is rightly condemned. And that then introduces the risk that she’ll draw off enough Democratic voters, merely by taking the position held by the majority, so the position that the Democratic candidate should take, that it will hand the election to the Republican - the candidate of the party of actual antisemites.
The whole thing is bludgeoningly insane. I don’t think anyone could’ve created such a grotesquely dysfunctional and actuslly counter-productive system if they’d deliberately set out to do it.
And yet that’s the world we live in - the world we’re forced to live in - a world warped by the literal insanity of a wealthy and powerful few.
It boggles my mind.
Right, nor did I expect a rating based an on individual article - sorry if that’s the way I made it sound.
It’s simply that the rating of high credibility accompanying an article that was so obviously little more than a barrage of loaded language cast the problem into such sharp relief that I went from being unimpressed by MBFC to actively not wanting to see it.
All I see here is someone whose ego relies on a steady diet of derision hurled in the general direction of strangers on the internet.
I haven’t seen any evidence that it does that, and quite the contrary, evidence that it does not - examples from publications ranging from Israel Times to New York Times to Slate in which it accompanied an article with clearly loaded language with an assessment of high credibility.
It’s possible that it’s improved of late - I don’t know, since I blocked it weeks ago, after a particularly egregious example of that accompanied a technically factually accurate but brazenly biased Israel Times article.
If you’re not going to answer then I’ll just default to the obvious: you think you’re special and that everyone else is an idiot/sheeple/etc.
Right - you’ll just assume that I see it as some sort of competition that I’m winning.
So are you saying that you wouldn’t be able to recognize my second example as a biased statement without the MBFC bot’s guidance?
Or did you just entirely miss the point?
I didn’t say it was a competition or anything remotely like that. Please show me where I did if you believe otherwise.
Okay
So you have a very high opinion of your own discretion but assume everyone else is trash or what?
Where would you put yourself as a percentile?
Right there. Obviously. In fact, that’s the exact point of a percentile - it’s a ranking system, which is to say, a competition.
So are you going to answer or not?
No.
No - actually I do the bulk of it based on presentation.
“Facts” fall into two categories - ones that can be independently verified, which are generally reported accurately regardless of bias, and ones that cannot be independently verified, which should be treated as mere possibilities, the likelihood of which can generally be at least better judged by the rest of the article. In neither case are the nominal facts particularly relevant.
Rather, if for instance the article has an incendiary title, a buried lede and a lot of emotive language, that clearly implies bias, regardless of the nominal facts.
That still doesn’t mean or even imply that it’s factually incorrect, and to the contrary, the odds are that it’s technically not - most journalists at least possess the basic skill of framing things such that they’re not technically untrue. If nothing else, they can always fall back on the tried and true, “According to informed sources…” phrasing. That phrase can then be followed by literally anything, and in order to be true, all it requires is that somebody who might colorably be called an “informed source” said it.
The assertion itself doesn’t have to be true, because they’re not reporting that it’s true. They’re just reporting that someone said that it’s true.
So again, nominal facts aren’t really the issue. Bias is better recognized by technique, and that’s something that any attentive reader can learn to recognize.
There actually is a statistical correlation between conservative, anti-trans political affiliation and a preference for transgender porn, and Texas leads the nation in searches for transgender porn.
Source