#thought-terminating cliches and slander | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

thewillowness · 4 years

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There are (at least) two sides to every story.

Twenty-five years ago I was in a community college taking the Journalism 101 class. It was in the mid-1990s, when the discipline of journalism was increasingly absorbed into the greater field of media and communications. By the time I was considering going to a “J school,” many universities were scrapping their journalism department in favor of communications or media studies department. The World Wide Web was still in its infancy, only a few news outlets were seriously investing in the Internet. But the change was afoot.

A quarter century later, newsrooms across America have been downsized. News cycles are ever shorter, and everything is driven by clickbait-y headlines as journalists are now under a constant pressure to produce stories that get their employers the most Web traffic and social media engagement.

Good journalism is hard to come by. Even the “investigative” journalism these days are more of an “advocacy journalism,” written with a preconceived political agenda, for a pre-determined audience demographic.

I still know and believe that there are always at least two sides to every story.

I make a conscious effort to get my news from multiple sources, both left-leaning ones and conservative ones.

Lately I am really disturbed by how people can see an entirely different world depending on what media they’re listening to. This is particularly true when it comes to the coverage of COVID-19 in recent weeks and months. The left-leaning media have one set of narratives, while the conservative media have another. They rarely intersect or overlap. No wonder why we as society cannot disagree on controversial matters with civility or intelligent discourse. It is always this smearing and slander of the other side.

The left is using their favorite thought-terminating cliche in this, too: Godwin’s Law, also known as Reductio Ad Hitlerum. Anyone who does not wholeheartedly buy into the left’s doomsday paranoid hysteria is now called “science denier,” as though they’re a moral equivalent of Holocaust Deniers and Climate Change Deniers.

Here’s the problem with this: The Holocaust was a historic fact that happened in the past, with plenty of objective documentations and evidences. The science of SARS-CoV-2 and COVID-19, is still a developing field in which researches are still being verified and peer reviewed. Unlike the Holocaust, the best the scientists can say now is that we really don’t know the whole picture yet.

Contrary to what the left thinks of “science” (as their secular humanist religion), real science is not about believing in the predominant narrative pushed by doctors and experts on TV, hand-picked by liberal politicians. It is about rigorously discovering the facts and truth through scientific methods, which are then carefully scrutinized, vetted, reproduced, and then peer reviewed. Everything scientists do in their laboratories and studies are second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-guessed by other scientists. Even then, any established theory is bound to be revised, built upon, or debunked any time in the future.

The conservatives and libertarians, too, have their own share of this problem. Not everything is a sinister conspiracy by the Liberal/Socialist Elite. Sure, the Democrats have done much damage to America’s constitutional system as well as the economy. But there’s nothing inherently wrong about exercising the best practice in protecting our own health. While I fully support the message and efforts by the protesters this week at several state capitols, I don’t think this optic is helping. Like some of the far-left career protesters, they seem to go out protesting for protesting’s sake, forgetting the larger strategy for getting things done. And please put your TRUMP 2020 banners away. This isn’t about Trump, this isn’t about owning the Democrats. This is about the non-partisan issue that affects us all.

I saw a few social media posts by leftists decrying that these right-wing protesters “lack empathy.” I disagree.

Their empathy is with millions of working-class Americans who have lost their jobs. Their empathy is with victims of domestic violence whose safety is now in jeopardy because of this “stay home order.” Their empathy is with America’s small business owners who create about a half of all U.S. jobs -- and now are struggling to pay their creditors, vendors and landlords.

There are two or more sides to everything that happens under the sun. They are asking for a sensible, workable solution to balance these competing interests, without burning the whole country to the ground and forcing our children and grandchildren to pay for the massive debt and inflation created by the bailout and stimulus packages.

Their empathy is with the future generation of Americans who think this authoritarian, top-down police state is somehow acceptable.

Many on the left today are Millennials and Gen Zers, who have no memories of America before 9/11. They do not remember the days when anyone could get a driver’s license on the spot for a few dollars with minimal documentation, even without a Social Security Number. They don’t know that in America, one could just walk into a bank branch with that brand new driver’s license, open an account, and walk away with a checkbook (at least in theory no SSN was required for non-interest-bearing accounts such as checking accounts, and often banks near university campuses were used to open accounts without SSN because they were accustomed to dealing with lots of foreign students -- KYC wasn’t a thing until 2001, and in fact, when the proposal surfaced in 1999, there was a wide-spread opposition to it). They don’t know the days when anyone could get on an airplane, even buy a ticket with cash at the check-in counter using a fake name and no ID, and travel anywhere within the U.S.

The same Millennials and Gen Zers do not remember the terror of communism, and they are oblivious to the rise of the Chinese communist empire, which is now leveraging its new superpower status to export its own dream of authoritarian, totalitarian society around the world.

The left has conveniently forgotten Edward Snowden, Chelsea Manning, and Julian Assange -- once venerated by the Occupy movement as heroes.

Stop mocking and jeering at those who you disagree with. Take a good, honest look at what they are saying and why. And make your own critical, informed opinions.

Unfortunately, journalism today isn’t helping people do that.

#journalism #media bias #coronafascism #liberate america #totalitarianism #media literacy #critical thinking

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ergativeabsolutive · 5 years

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cancel me preemptively if you want but honestly this weird distinction people make of “TERF vs. SWERF” is really concerning to me and I think people should cut that shit out and think about what they’re doing.

So far I’ve only seen the term “SWERF” serving two very insidious purposes:

1) distancing TERFs with bad (conservative) attitudes towards porn and prostitution from their transmisogyny, momentarily “forgetting” that TERF-ism is primarily an anti-trans woman extremist ideology by temporarily naming them after this secondary aspect in a weird way that no one does with any other hate group

2) as a thought-terminating cliche used to shut down the possibility of any position on the question of “sex work” other than this stupid dichotomy between “the existence of porn and prostitution is entirely unproblematic. question nothing. sex-positive ftw” and “SESTA-FOSTA is good actually, i love cops. lets put already financially vulnerable women in an even more precarious position. btw while i got you let me just say fuck trans rights”. What better way to avoid actually thinking about your views and considering other ideas than to slander anyone who disagrees with you as a “diet terf”, as it were? Even better, what better way to ensure none of your friends or followers even consider what they have to say! It’s a cheap, dishonest tactic to its core.

Tell me, why should we mess around with a term like this? Call a spade a spade. If they’re a TERF, call them a TERF. If they’re not, don’t try to have it both ways, and actually think about what they’re saying before you compare them to a hate group. Stop throwing around buzzwords and think for yourself. Maybe they do have the same bad takes. Maybe they don’t. Either way, there are other ways of addressing it.

#txt #p #d

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