This is a good set of questions.
fbmf wrote:FrankTrollman wrote:Could you at least pretend to get reputable news from somewhere instead of collecting everything from crank blogs?
This quote, from the inflation thread, is a sentiment I've seen many times on these boards over the years. It leads me to ask:
(A) In political discussion, what source are the left and the right going to agree is reputable?
Depends on how far to the Right you go.
In all seriousness, the Right Wing of US politics has basically entered the no-facts zone and has been that way for some time. Very recently Doom was parroting the gold bug conspiracy theory that the Bureau of Fucking Labor Statistics could not be trusted to provide cost and employment data. A while before that, Tzor was regurgitating the bizarre premise that the New York Times was a propaganda mill. Once your opponent has taken
official internationally recognized records out of consideration, then there really isn't a lot to talk about.
On the flip side, it's well established that News Corp is
full of crazy, and that consumers of its infotainment are
misinformed about basically everything. And News Corp owns a lot of stuff now. The Wall Street Journal has always been a pro-capitalism rag, but it used to bother getting
facts right. And it's not just News Corp. The Washington Post used to be a major journal that famously broke the Watergate scandal. But these days it runs "fact check" articles that find that Democrats aren't
nice enough to Republicans (
yes, really).
The news is so partisan these days that a lot of classic broadsheets are basically running "opinion differs on the shape of the Earth" articles of fake controversy between party hacks and
crazy party hacks. And when I say "partisan" I don't mean "divided between left and right", because communists don't actually run any major newspapers. I mean "blatantly a mouthpiece for the increasingly small circle of extremely rich people who actually own news outlets".
And yet even in this environment, where mainstream newspapers argue whether conservative healthcare pipedream Romneycare is "too far"
to the left compared to living in a libertarian test tube that has
already been shown to have failed, even then the right wingers of the US think that the news is too slanted
to the left. And so they seek out genuine madness like BigMedia to affirm their opinions that the world is being infiltrated by communist conspirators.
But to get back to your question, looking up government statistics, scientific studies, or the BBC is pretty damn impartial. The BBC actually has a strong UK-bias and was thus incredibly partisan on the issue of Zimbabwe's financial problems with the United Kingdom. But if you're talking about events that take place in like the United States or something, they are
fairly, well,
fair.
(B) I have heard it said that the right-wingers on this board are to be pitied, because they are merely parroting what THEIR news sources have told them, and right wing news sources are all (or largely) lies. On the flip side, I'm sure the Right feels the Left-wing news sources are all (or largely) lying liars. How does each side know that they aren't being victimized by lies?
You don't of course. The rabbit hole could go all the way down. The Bureau of Labor Statistics
could be falsifying their data in some long running scheme to do... something. The different news outlets
could have been in cahoots the whole time to plant any data they wanted. I mean fuck, as long as we're getting into radical skepticism, how do we know that there is even a Montenegro? I mean, I've been to Croatia, so I'm pretty sure it's there, but I don't think I've ever met someone from Montenegro.
Really what you have to look at is consistency of models. Does the thing that someone is saying make sense based on what they claim they believe? So let's look at some Pauls. Paul Ryan claims to be super worried about the deficit, but he wasn't worried about the deficit before there were social programs he wanted to cut, and he insists on piggy backing his spending cuts to giant tax cuts so there's no overall deficit reduction. Paul Krugman is a neo-Keynesian who believes in the modern equivalent of the biblical fat and lean calves deal. During good times, he should be suggesting running a surplus and paying down debt, and during economic crises he should be advocating more spending regardless of deficits. And that is what he does.
Now unfortunately, asking everyone to evaluate their pundits by asking to look at the math behind their predictions, claims, and demands is wholly unreasonable. But that genuinely is the only way you could be "sure". Paul Ryan is a flim-flam artist and every right wing pundit gibbering about how "serious" the damn thing is can only be illiterate, foolish, or a liar. But to really
know that, you'd have to go to the primary documentation. There are people who will do that
for you, but you'd have to trust
them, which means going back to
their numbers and so on. And so we are as a nation so fundamentally ill-informed that people
want to keep the government hands off their medicare.
(C1) Who are the right wing commentators that are so far out in crazy land that the Right-wingers on this board are ashamed of them?
See, there's the problem. The Right Wing basically has no shame. Glenn Beck writes gibberish on a chalkboard connecting healthcare reforms created in conservative think tanks to communist infiltrators fighting for the anti-christ against mormon jesus and the right fucking loves the guy. Sarah Palin is a fucking embarrassment, but she has a large following and Tzor needs to clutch pearls and reach for smelling salts when people say insensitive things about her.
The only thing a rightwing commentator can do to get disavowed by the right wing is to go off message. If you admit that water boarding is torture or that global warming is probably real, right wingers will cast you out. But it doesn't actually matter how many times Rush Limbaugh shoots his mouth off, eventually the RNC chairman will apologize to him.
(C2) Who are the left wing commentators that are so far out in crazy land that the Left-wingers on this board are ashamed of them?
Well that's a problem. Truly Left views don't really
get into American discourse. Like, at all. Keynesianism is moderately conservative and is by its nature a technocratic solution to keeping the free market reasonably free. And that's about as far "left" as things go. Krugman isn't a communist. To put this in perspective, let's imagine the kinds of left wing proposals there are to reform healthcare. We have single payer health insurance, we have national healthcare service (with or without adjunct private healthcare options), and we have dozens of examples of real working systems that do these things. Now let's consider the most conservative
possible system for universal healthcare:
- Everyone has to buy health insurance from the free market. Healthy people are not allowed to exclude themselves from the risk pool.
- The free market providers of health insurance are not allowed to kick people out of the risk pool.
- People who can't afford to buy healthcare from the free market still have to do so, so they get a voucher from the government that they use to buy something from the free market.
Right? That's the
most right wing universal healthcare plan that it is
possible to have. And that's Obamacare. That's the
left wing option presented to Americans.
Now that being said, the Lague of Revolutionaries for a New America
does put out a lunatic rantings paper from time to time. And the Huffington Post is often full of wooly-headed anti-scientific
bullshit. But even those guys aren't as consistently wrong as Breitbart or even Sean Hannity.
But the bottom line is that left wingers in the United States are such because the facts themselves have a liberal bias, and these opinions persist in spite of the media being a multi-billion dollar distributor of conservative propaganda. What genuine left wing sources there are have been relegated to blogs and shit, and we have to double check that shit too.
-Username17
