#journalism delenda est

[giantpetrel]

Journalism Delenda Est

President of Harvard does something that'd get a student expelled instantly, with a permanent black mark on their record. School desperately refuses to get rid of her for what, a month? All for purely political reasons. The media pull out the stops to portray it as some "crazy right wing conspiracy theory" for weeks even though the evidence is literally right there and utterly damning. She gets to resign (albeit forced) rather than being formally shitcanned. The media portrays her as a victim of the "far-right conspiracy theories" that they themselves declared into existence, which is latitude that no student would ever receive. And once again, this is at HARVARD.

Why do people respect academics again? These people have no principles whatsoever above political convenience. Every professor who signed that petition to not fire Gay should have a plagiarism checker run on their own CV; I'll bet you we find quite a few interesting things.

And as always, every journalist involved in this story should be boiled alive in oil.

#journalism delenda est #harvard #news #plagiarism #despicable people #lies and the scum who promote them

[king-of-men]

VG: Hvor var du da kampen raste som verst?

Leo Eitinger: Auschwitz.

#ouch #journalism delenda est #old unhappy faroff things

[havendance]

MAD? Could there be more MAD coming to this world?? 👀

Not any time soon unfortunately, but I want to... Maybe I'll pick it up again after this current round of fic I'm finishing up...

But, yeah, MAD IV is an ambitious little thing that I don't have a ton for yet, besides the base idea.

This is just about all I have for it so far in terms of actual prose 😅 and I'm still not sure if it's how I want to start, but regardless:

The woman sitting across from Lois Lane was one Destiny Davis, in her early 20s, professionally dressed, her hair in a small afro. She was an accountant working for a Metropolis tax firm and, more importantly, she'd sent Lois an email, claiming to have a story on the Justice League. She'd only agreed to talk in person, so here they were, in a little hole in the wall place Lois knew.

#MAD universe #havendance writes #the thing about MAD IV is that I periodically get the urge to write long form fake journalism pieces #but I also have plot ideas i want to stick in there too #so currently it's more ambition than actual fic #carthago delenda est #letters to the editor

[cromulentenough]

gonna try to stop thinking about the depp heard stuff and get back into actually fun stuff that got put on pause. i'm happy i watched the whole trial so i could make my mind up for myself after having seen everything in front of the jury and why they made the decision they did, rather than having to rely on conflicting second hand accounts.

ive slipped a few times but i think ive done a decent job of not getting sucked into arguments too much and just blocking people being egregiously sexist. better than i would have in the past anyway.

biggest takeaways not directly about the specific case: expert witnesses are ridiculously bullshit. apparently in some places the standards are even lower than in this case which is nuts. my trust in psychiatrists has gone down although there's massive variation. (i wasn't a fan of either sides experts with a couple of exceptions, although one side was way worse). journalism delenda est.

the process is excruciatingly tedious at times, which i'm sure the lawyers that are paid hourly are fine with, but man it sucks for people who can't afford good lawyers. there's a ton of legal stuff that's just done on trust. its bullshit that you can be called to sit on a jury for 6+ weeks and only be paid $30 a day. i do think it would have been better to sequester them but holy shit being a jury member would suck even more if they did that more often.

watching stuff at normal speed instead of 1.25x or 1.5x feels weird now.

[mariacallous]

reading an article which opens with an explainer for why undercover work is now rare in journalism and there was a line "but both journalism schools and hiring editors usually expect reporters to put themselves out on Twitter and Facebook."

depression. I feel that reporters should not be on twitter, and if they are they should just being using it as a pin board "hey here's a link to thing I wrote" and not you know, interacting or god forbid using it as a reporting resource

Twitter delenda est

[theonyxpath]

As always, we’ve been keeping ourselves pretty busy over the last month:

Games

Scarred Lands: Dead God Trilogy 1: Forsaken (in print)

Scarred Lands: Dead God Trilogy 2: Forsworn (in print)

Scarred Lands: Dead God Trilogy 3: Forbidden (in print)

Exalted: Hundred Devils Night Parade part 17: Gravehound and Tiger’s Eye (PDF)

Exalted: Adversaries of the Righteous part 12: Meimuna Kyree (PDF)

Our friends at White Wolf have also released The Monsters: A Vampire 5th Edition Quickstart, as a PDF on DriveThruRPG. If you’re looking to get into V5, this is a great place to start!

Prince’s Gambit, our Vampire: The Masquerade social deduction card game, is now available for purchase from Studio 2! You can either order a copy yourself, or you can get your FLGS to order from them!

Scarred Lands material for both Pathfinder and 5e — including the Player’s Guide, Wise & the Wicked, the Spiragos trilogy, and Scarred Lands dice — is also now available for order via Studio 2 Publishing! If you’d like your FLGS to carry Scarred Lands material, please let them know they can order from Studio 2!

The Onyx Dice dice app (iOS/Google) now supports two different styles of Werewolf: The Forsaken dice! Werewolf dice (rust colored) and Werewolf Bone dice (ivory).

Merch

Dreaming Art: Boggans (journal)

Dreaming Art: Eshu (journal)

Dreaming Art: Nockers (journal)

Dreaming Art: Pooka (journal)

Dreaming Art: Redcaps (journal)

Dreaming Art: Satyrs (journal)

Dreaming Art: Sidhe (journal)

Dreaming Art: Sluagh (journal)

Dreaming Art: Trolls (journal)

Requiem Covenant Art: Carthian Movement (journal)

Requiem Covenant Art: Circle of the Crone (journal)

Requiem Covenant Art: Invictus (journal)

Requiem Covenant Art: Lancea et Sanctum (journal)

Requiem Covenant Art: Ordo Dracul (journal)

Requiem Covenant Art: VII (journal)

Kickstarter Update

Our Kickstarter for Dystopia Rising: Evolution, the 2nd edition of the Dystopia Rising tabletop RPG, is now over! Thanks to intrepid survivors like you, we hit our goal in under a day, and achieved a total of at $39,608 (198% of the goal), with 736 backers.

With your help, we achieved eight stretch goals:

Dystopia Rising: Evolution Kickstarter backer T-shirt

The Threat Guide companion has added two sections

Dystopia Rising: Evolution digital wallpaper

A Dystopia Rising: Evolution community content portal will be created on DriveThruRPG, which includes LARP content

Dystopia Rising: Evolution jumpstart

Dystopia Rising: Evolution fiction anthology

Our next Kickstarter will be for Vampire: The Masquerade 5th Edition’s Chicago by Night. Keep an eye out in October!

Community Spotlight

The following community-created content for Scarred Lands has been added to the Slarecian Vault in the last month:

Your product could be here! Have you considered creating your own to sell?

The following community-created content for Realms of Pugmire has been added to Canis Minor in the last month:

Bizarre Bestiary

The Pugmire System Guide for OGL 5e Creators

Pugmire Base Set Tokens

Your product could be here! Have you considered creating your own to sell?

The following community-created content for White Wolf games has been added to the Storytellers Vault in the last month:

Vampire: The Masquerade: Vampire: The Masquerade Art Pack #13 (Gangrel)

Vampire: The Masquerade: Art: Dracula’s Castle

Vampire: The Masquerade: Monstros da Mitologia

Vampire: The Masquerade: Charts of Darkness: Vampire

Vampire: The Masquerade: Forgotten Disciplines

Vampire: The Masquerade: Gangrel Notes Editable

Vampire: The Masquerade: Beckett’s Vampire Folio 15: The Price of Hospitality

Vampire: The Masquerade: Beckett’s Vampire Folio 16: The Fall of the House

Vampire: The Masquerade: Of Northern Twilight: Draugar and Jotuns

Vampire: The Masquerade: Tzimisce

Vampire: The Masquerade: These Mean Streets

Vampire: The Masquerade: SotM’s Guide to Storytelling

Vampire: The Masquerade: Beckett’s Vampire Folio 17: Carthago Delenda Est

Vampire: The Masquerade: Blood War: Auckland

Vampire: The Masquerade: Forgotten Thaumaturgies

Werewolf: The Apocalypse: Hunting: the Monsters

Werewolf: The Wild West: Hunter’s Armory 6

Mage: The Ascension: Heirs to the Mountains of Madness

Mage: The Ascension: Progenitors Crash Cart, Vol 1

Mage: The Ascension: Progenitors Crash Cart, Issue 2

Exalted: Exalted Storytellers Vault Style Guide

Exalted: Exalted 1st Edition Templates

Exalted: Exalted 2nd Edition Templates

Exalted: Exalted 3rd Edition Templates

Exalted: Abyssals Resource Pack

Exalted: Alchemicals Resource Pack

Exalted: Aspect Book Resource Pack

Exalted: Caste Book Resource Pack

Exalted: Dragon-Blooded Resource Pack

Exalted: Fair Folk Resource Pack

Exalted: Infernals Resource Pack

Exalted: Lunars Resource Pack

Exalted: Sidereals Resource Pack

Exalted: Exalted Art Pack #1

Exalted: Exalted Art Pack #3

Exalted: Exalted Art Pack #4

Exalted: Exalted Art Pack #5

Exalted: Exalted Art Pack #6

Exalted: Exalted Storytellers Vault Logos

Exalted: Exalted Fiction Templates

Exalted: Alphabet of the First Age

Exalted: Rise of Rathess

Exalted: Beztup, the Alchemical Brewmaster

Exalted: Flame-Kin

Exalted: Scroll of Firearms

Exalted: A Morning in Garrison

Your product could be here! Have you considered creating your own to sell?

#Onyx Path Publishing

[monicadeola]

In questa newsletter non siamo mai stati fan di Mark Zuckerberg. Non tanto e non solo per l’immensa capacità di condizionare le nostre vite che ha raggiunto il fondatore di Facebook: la lista dei potenti è troppo lunga per averli tutti sullo stomaco. È che Zuck è proprio speciale, non solo perché il suo potere già smisurato non smette di estendersi, ma soprattutto perché di questo geniale ipernarcisista sono ancora impercettibili alcuni elementi essenziali: il quadro di valori, il livello di coscienza, la frequenza degli scrupoli, i confini dell’ego. La fenomenologia di Zuckerberg è un work in progress, se ne dovranno occupare almeno un paio di generazioni di esperti di ogni ramo: massmediologi, sociologi, politologi, psicanalisti, economisti, storici, criminologi. Qui e ora conviene però seguirlo passo passo, perché ogni sua mossa è decisiva. L’ultima è il rifiuto, contrariamente al boss di Twitter Jack Dorsey, di prendere le distanze dalle minacce di Trump ai rivoltosi americani, un rifiuto per nulla compensato dalla personale condanna della violenza presidenziale. Ne è seguita l’insubordinazione dei dipendenti di Facebook. Il tema più evidente, e importante, è la responsabilità dei social network rispetto ai contenuti che pubblicano, e la difficoltà — ma pure la necessità — di trovare un equilibrio tra il tutto di cui rispondiamo noi giornali e il nulla di cui rispondono loro. Ma il tema di fondo è la personalità di Mark, che tutto dirige, tutto inquina, tutto manipola. Fosse eticamente più strutturato, Mark, allora certamente sarebbero da prendere in considerazione i suoi dubbi sulla possibilità che le piattaforme digitali decidano cosa va pubblicato e cosa «censurato»: per esempio il Wall Street Journal lo prende sul serio e gli dà ragione, gli chiede di superare questo «test di credibilità», di resistere al «bullismo» liberal e di registrare le istigazioni presidenziali all’odio senza fare un plissé, così la gente si fa «la sua idea» e decide. Si potrebbe aprire una discussione importante sul pilatismo interessato di Big Tech, ma anche sull’oggettiva difficoltà di controllare tutto. Ma essendo la struttura etica di Zuckerberg labile, sappiamo perfettamente che questo è solo un paravento per continuare a pubblicare tutto ciò che genera attenzione, e dunque profitti. Per questo è importante chiedersi, periodicamente: In cosa crede Mark Zuckerberg? Cosa c’è nella sua testa? Cosa gli sta a cuore? Cosa lo muove e cosa lo può fermare? Uno dei più importanti zuckologi del mondo è Siva Vaidhyanathan, autore di Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy. L’amabile chiacchierata con Trump con cui Zuckerberg ha concluso l’ultima querelle lo ha indotto a fare su Wired un nuovo punto sulla questione. E a chiedersi: un uomo che con tre piattaforme globali come Facebook, WhatsApp e Instagram «è in grado di strutturare l’esperienza culturale e intellettuale di miliardi di persone nel mondo», come può finire a tarallucci e vino con Trump nell’ora «in cui gli Stati Uniti affrontano la peggiore minaccia dalla guerra civile»? Come ha potuto un giovane dall’apparente visone cosmopolita, che va alle marce gay e sostiene l’immigrazione, favorire nel 2016 l’elezione di «un razzista che si vantava di abusi sessuali»? E appoggiare di fatto leadership autoritarie come quelle dell’indiano Modi e del filippino Duterte? «Bisogna chiedersi perché», e la risposta non può essere semplicemente «i soldi». Certamente si copre a destra e a manca: lo ha già fatto con i democratici e forse teme che Trump e i repubblicani gli vadano addosso in caso di rielezione. Ma al di là di queste manovre politiche, resta inevasa la risposta chiave: in che cosa crede davvero? All’inizio Vaidhyanathan lo considerava addirittura un idealista. Uno che credeva, genuinamente e ingenuamente, «nella forza della connessione, della comunicazione, della comunità». C’è un concetto chiave, da non dimenticare mai: «Essendo poco istruito e poco esperto, Zuckerberg non era turbato dai fatti, dalla storia o dalla complessità. La connettività bastava e avanzava». Cresciuto in bolle come Harvard, Silicon Valley — e poi Davos —, «pensavo che non avesse contezza della varietà della crudeltà umana. Che da americano maschio bianco ed etero, fosse ignaro dei modi in cui la “comunità” possa opprimere quanto consolare». E che a furia di frequentare miliardari bianchi che lo adulavano, ne fosse rimasto incantato. Poi è arrivato un libro più aggiornato sui misfatti del social network — Facebook: The Inside Story di Steven Levy — che spiega in modo impressionante «l’entusiasmo con cui Facebook ha assecondato la censura dei governi autoritari», e come si è fatto usare per il genocidio dei Rohingya in Birmania, il terrorismo religioso in Sri Lanka o la propaganda negazionista sui vaccini. È forse Zuck un caso di dissonanza cognitiva, di incoerenza inconsapevole tra valori predicati ed effetti provocati? No, è semplicemente che la passione per la «connettività» convive senza problemi con quella per il potere. E un aneddoto del libro di Levy lo spiega bene. Si rifà alle vaghe reminiscenze di Zuck di storia romana. A quanto pare, ama citare il Catone di Carthago delenda est riferendolo a Google. Shakeratelo con la sua nota venerazione per l’imperatore Augusto (è pure il nome di suo figlio) e il gusto del cocktail sarà riassumibile in una sola parola: Dominio. È la parola che grida nelle riunioni, come se stesse giocando a Risiko. Vaidhyanathan: «Tutto per lui è una partita da vincere. Lui deve vincere. Se milioni di persone si rompono le ossa giocando, il suo piano di gioco servirà comunque al bene superiore di un numero superiore di persone». Lo stesso concetto lo ha usato Marc Isaac, super reporter tecnologico del New York Times, quando la sua collega Shira Ovide gli ha chiesto «di cosa ha paura Zuckerberg». Risposta: «Il dominio è fluttuante, soprattutto nel tech. Credo che sia questo a non far dormire Mark. Ha paura che la gente perda interesse in Facebook, che i suoi concorrenti fuori dagli Stati Uniti lo superino. Sono preoccupazioni valide. Ma per la gente è difficile coglierne il senso quando tre miliardi di persone usano una delle app della compagnia, e Facebook continua ad aumentare i guadagni. Ha paura di essere usurpato, anche se non sembra possa succedere presto».

Il problema è che, nella sua ossessione cesaristica — il potere da conquistare e da rafforzare di continuo nel timore di perderlo — Zuckerberg — come si è visto nella gelida testimonianza al Congresso sullo scandalo di Cambridge Analytica — non è nemmeno sfiorato dal dilemma che prima o poi raggiunge tutte le persone che fanno la fatica di pensare, anch’esso riassumibile in una sola parola: Contraddizione. La contraddizione tra intenzioni dichiarate e conseguenze reali, tra enunciazioni ed eventi, tra il bene che certamente Facebook fa a un sacco di gente tenendole compagnia — lo ha confermato la pandemia: quanto è mancato un Facebook a tanti anziani soli e spaventati — e il male che consente di fare a chi lo usa per fini ignobili. Ancora Mark Isaac. Se gli chiedono se «Facebook fa più bene o male», lui risponde: «Ci penso di continuo. Ma c’è un modo per misurarlo, e decidere quale parte ha vinto?». La domanda retorica sembra una risposta evasiva, ma Isaac aggiunge una frase tremenda: «La questione per tanta gente — o almeno è quello che mi chiedo io — è questa: se la natura di un prodotto consente danni seri, compresa la morte, quel prodotto dovrebbe esistere?». Non c’è però la minima possibilità che Zuckerberg sia preso da simili tormenti esistenziali. Ancora Vaidhyanathan: «Crede in sé stesso in modo così totale, ed è così convinto che la sua visione del mondo funzioni completamente, che è immune dalla dissonanza cognitiva. È immune da nuove evidenze o argomenti. I megalomani non soffrono di dissonanza cognitiva». Insomma, questo dominatore è sì un idealista, ma è «idealista riguardo a sé stesso e alla sua visione di come tutti gli altri debbano vivere». Perché «crede che il meglio per Facebook sia il meglio per noi. A lungo termine, il dominio di Facebook lo redimerà rendendo le nostre vite migliori. Dobbiamo solo arrenderci e fare funzionare tutto questo». Tratta Trump e i suoi simili da governatori locali e li asseconda «perché l’imperatore resta lui». Come sempre, gli imperatori possono essere deposti, se solo ci si ribella. «Forse sta cominciando a succedere. Ma forse è troppo tardi».

#Gianluca Mercuri #Corriere della Sera #Mark Zuckenberg #Facebook #dissonanza cognitiva #narcisismo #Steven Levy #Marc Isaac #Siva Vaidhyanathan

[giantpetrel]

The most galling thing about journalists is their ridiculous industry-wide messiah complex. Every last one of them have masturbatory fantasies about how their journalism could have stopped Hitler and the Nazis, too. "If only I could have spoken TRUTH to POWER back then, the Holocaust would never have happened!"

Meanwhile, actual modern-day Dr. Mengeles are cutting little boys' dicks off, molding pus-oozing facsimile vaginas for them, shooting girls full of HGH to make them into "boys"—literally real life demented evil mad scientist shit that 90% of the world would consider worthy of immediate summary execution if their neighbor were doing it—and journalists LOVE it.

#journalism delenda est

[samueldays]

Another one for the cauldron, @giantpetrel:

Like several previous journalists, this muddies the waters by saying

Gay experienced more scrutiny after plagiarism allegations.

when it should say that she committed plagiarism. Repeatedly. Blatantly. Incompetently. I'm a little curious how many of these journalists are in on the lie about "allegations", and how many genuinely believe this because all their own echo chamber sources are repeating the same line. Either way, journalism delenda est.

Even setting the plagiarism aside for a moment, there still was no excellence on display here. Gay did not have novel fields of study, nor original ideas, nor particularly competent execution of the boring subjects.

See for example Gay's paper: The Effect of Black Congressional Representation on Political Participation. It could be an example of the replication crisis and p-hacking: "look I got p<0.001 results" on results that flipped signs from case to case, probably because she was running multivariate models and estimates-built-on-estimates on top of a sample size of ten.

This person is not very smart. This person has been handed the tools of smarter people and used them to generate a flurry of numbers.

Gay��s experience is not unlike that of other prominent Black women leaders; there’s a disturbing trend where Black women are promoted and elevated into leadership positions and despite how qualified they are, they experience hyper-scrutiny once they take on the position.

That is a reality inversion. There's a disturbing trend where black women are promoted and elevated into leadership positions despite how unqualified they are and a lack of scrutiny. When a little bit of scrutiny then happens to Captain Plagiarism, who plagiarised so much she was plagiarising several times per paper, the journo whines about "hyper-scrutiny".

The inspection and interrogation that leaders face is even more severe for Black women leaders, especially those who are the “firsts.” This was evidenced during the confirmation hearings of the first Black female U.S. Supreme Court justice Ketanji Brown Jackson.

That's an interesting choice of example, because Jackson is such an overpromoted, underqualified, affirmative action hire, on the bloody Supreme Court, she cannot tell de facto from de jure.

The journalist goes on like this with Hannah-Jones of the 1619 Propaganda before closing with a delusional complaint about all the black excellence supposedly being suppressed.

No amount of wealth, achievements, accolades, or notoriety will offer safety and protection in an anti-black world.

Apart from the fact that your examples are bad, journo scum, there's the fact that your examples are in fact very safe and protected and well off and hyper-privileged by a pro-black world despite their misdeeds.

Gay is getting a million bucks a year and staying at Harvard in a different position, Jackson is still on the Supreme Court, Hannah-Jones got tenure. The journalist acts offended that they got pushback and that they aren't even better off.

Journalism delenda est.

#all #journalism delenda est #the death of expertise #or perhaps the death of credentialism #racepol #negrolatry

[samueldays]

in the spirit of xkcd's "did you know you can just buy labcoats?" , did you know you can just buy newspapers? some days it feels like any old shitposter can get a journalism job and spew high-velocity misinformation, like Aziah Siid at the Seattle Medium.

You're the ones doing the starving here, fuckwits.

Thanks to food deserts — or as some folks call it, “food apartheid”

Thanks to bad reporting - or as some folks call it, "Nazi-style propaganda"

that's halfway through the first sentence and Siid has very effectively set the tone for an article of race-baiting, blame-shifting, inflammatory, connotation-smuggling, condescendingly ignorant, hyperbolic, partisan hackery.

there are cities across the United States where Black families have to drive several miles to access fresh food at a supermarket.

link does not support claim, link is just tangentially related article using the word "food desert". link says this:

This gives me the impression that someone yelled "CITE SOURCES" at the journalist until the journalist did the malicious minimum of work to give the superficial appearance of a citation. The source "more than a quarter of a mile" does not support the article "drive several miles", and other problems.

Journalism delenda est.

That isn't even the topic yet, just a shitty lead-in. The topic:

But the lack of resources that disproportionately impacts Black communities isn’t limited to food or health care. Access to literature is also often limited in Black neighborhoods.

Interest in literature is also often limited in black neighborhoods. They have less desire for and less interest in books relative to whites.

Nearly half of American children live in a book desert — places that American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten defines as “neighborhoods that lack public libraries and stores that sell books, or in homes where books are an unaffordable or unfamiliar luxury.”

The linked article is by Randi Weingarten, but does not define "book desert" that way, as it does not use the word "desert" anywhere at all. Superficial appearance of citation again, journalism delenda est.

I'd call for Aziah Siid to be "fired" but there is nothing to fire her from. You can just buy newspapers. You can just write shitposts and have them published with fancy headings.

So I'm left reiterating: journalists lie, journalists spread disinformation, newspapers are full of shit, the profession attracts liars and incentivizes lying partly because it's loudly claimed to be fact-checkers, journalists can get away with contradicting someone and calling it a "fact check". It happens up and down the scale across the industry, from relative rando Aziah Siid, to upscale Keith Olbermann who has multiple awards for excellent journalism and he won't stop lying after repeated corrections.

If students don’t have books at home or in their neighborhood, they rely on what’s available in schools — in the classroom and campus library. But good luck finding banned and challenged books like “The Gift of Ramadan” by Rabiah York Lumbard and Laura K. Horton and “Sulwe” by Lupita Nyong’o and Vashti Harrison if students live in a place impacted by censorship.

"impacted" is such a wonderful weasel word that encourages the reader to imagine something maximally inflammatory with minimal commitment on the part of the journalist. There is no rebuttal that can be made here without Siid dodging that that's not what she meant by "impacted" - so I retort instead that it's content-free incitement and demagoguery. Journalism delenda est.

Similarly with "banned and challenged", where all the weighty connotation is being carried by the "banned" part, but all the truth of the sentence resides in the "challenged" part. I tried to find the specifics of the matter and as best I can tell, in one of the three thousand counties in the United States, The Gift of Ramadan was challenged for school review by partisan hacks and then got stuck in bureaucratic limbo in a poorly designed review process to determine whether it should be in schools in that county. Somewhere has to be the most fuckup county of 3000, and Duval County was it that year.

From the viewpoint of people who thought their book should be read by every student as a default, this cherry-picked one-county school-holdup felt like a "ban" despite the fact that the book remained available in bookstores.

What extraordinary entitlement.

The epicenter of these efforts? Florida and the attempts led by Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis to eliminate the teaching of accurate U.S. history and kill off access to diverse books.

Stripped of the bombast: Florida rejected one specific Advanced Placement course on African American Studies. DeSantis claimed this was because the course was a bunch of thrown-together left-wing talking points including queer theory and climate action along with the black blackety blackness.

The College Board released an edited version of the course, and claimed this was nothing to do with Florida because they get feedback from lots of people.

That’s why as part of a larger effort to make books more accessible, and directly combat these anti-history book bans, the national nonprofit Little Free Library and creative marketing agency Venables Bell + Partners have teamed up on the Unbanned Book Club.

Again with the use of "ban" for not using government resources to promote. Journalism delenda est, wordcels delenda est. The books are not banned, as shown by the fact that this project is legal. The vast majority of books in the world are not in any school, let alone every school; curricula change regularly; to call it "banned" that a book was removed from a school is a sort of linguistic robbery that steals the substance of word and leaves us with a confusion of tongues as of Babel.

#all #journalism delenda est #rant #babel

[samueldays]

Journalism delenda est, continued

If Fox News really were the right-wing hate-machine that Democrats love to imagine, Fox could spin off a channel with a name like Blacks Behaving Badly, which would be simply continuous coverage of murders and rapes committed by blacks.

Blacks Behaving Badly could easily get 24-hour material of constantly new crimes by giving merely an hour to each black murder or black rape, because blacks commit those crimes about hourly in America. (Compare the way left-wing press is still bleating about Emmett Till.) The information on BBB would all be true, of course, and the channel would be dedicated to covering some matters and not others, which is inevitable because every TV channel has to make some decisions about what to include of the millions of events that happen every day.

It would still be a wicked, shit-stirring, hate-inciting, no good, very bad, racebait channel with a chronic shortage of redeeming features, whose selective coverage would be obviously malicious.

I bring up this hypothetical construct as a point of comparison for the wicked bit of shit-stirring racebait and so forth that recently came out of Reuters in real life: a special report on how U.S. leaders have slaveholding ancestors. Chronic shortage of redeeming features.

Shoddy's line pretty much sums it up, but let's look at the special report a bit more.

In a special bit of adding insult to injury, it violates usability guidelines by hijacking scroll commands (mousewheel, arrow keys, etc) before we get to the main content. Here is the page as it looks when it first loads:

And here is the page as it looks after I hit the Page Down key:

These self-important theater kids made a fucking unskippable opening cutscene out of a fucking webpage. The Down arrow key does nothing here. The Page Down key pressed a second time merely advances the gradually revealing text by two lines, while changing the image's highlight. Page Down should skip me past the fucking image-video-hybrid-animation and move me down the page.

Then we get to the content. I shall excerpt and quote full paragraphs here.

More than 100 U.S. leaders – lawmakers, presidents, governors and justices – have slaveholding ancestors, a Reuters examination found. Few are willing to talk about their ties to America's “original sin”

Everyone Has Slaveholding Ancestors.

I can forgive the tweeter for being space-constrained and having to drop terms that can be inferred from context. The text in the full report (not headline), a page down, has no such excuse. Perhaps you say "it's obvious what they mean from context", but I assure you, it is not in fact obvious and the clarification further down is not the obvious one.

Many lawmakers need look no further than their own family histories to find a much more personal connection to slavery in America, a brutal system of oppression that resulted in the deadliest conflict in U.S. history.

Second deadliest, unless something very odd happened with WW2 since last time I checked. (Perhaps they're using a special metric like "deaths on American soil", I imagine.)

In researching the genealogies of America’s political elite, a Reuters examination found that a fifth of the nation’s congressmen, living presidents, Supreme Court justices and governors are direct descendants of ancestors who enslaved Black people.

And here's a clarification of "slaveholding ancestors", three fucking pages into the special report: ancestors who enslaved the Reverentially Capitalized Race. Doesn't count if they enslaved Persons of Pallor.

Except that paragraph is still wrong, descriptively and normatively. We'll see further down in the report that it's not counting the Africans who enslaved other Africans, such as Ayuba Suleiman Diallo. Or the extensive history of Islamic slavery, which via Andalusian intermarriage to the Spanish royal family and from there to the American colonies, results in a great many more descendants of people who enslaved persons-of-the-favored-race. Reuters put a great deal of work into studying a subject it frequently contradicts itself about the bounds of.

In addition, President Joe Biden and every living former U.S. president – except Donald Trump – are direct descendants of slaveholders: Jimmy Carter, George W. Bush, Bill Clinton and – through his white mother’s side – Barack Obama. Trump’s ancestors came to America after slavery was abolished.

This is racebait, journalism delenda est, everyone who wrote this should be banned from public communication.

Two of the nine sitting U.S. Supreme Court justices – Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch – also have direct ancestors who enslaved people.

Everyone has direct ancestors who enslaved people.

I am going to keep harping on this for as long as Reuters keeps playing fast and loose with words. This special report online does not have the space constraints of a physical newspaper, nor does it have the time constraints of having to report on urgent news with a deadline tomorrow. It is written by supposedly professional wordsmiths with alleged editors and so-called fact-checkers. It has the leisure to get things right. It's welcome to use shorthand after getting things right (and preferably noting the shorthand), but Reuters has not gotten it right yet and will continue to contradict itself.

South Carolina, where the Civil War began, illustrates the familial ties between the American political elite and the nation’s history of slavery. Every member of the state’s nine-person delegation to the last Congress has an ancestral link. The state’s two Black members of Congress – Senator and Republican presidential candidate Tim Scott and Representative James Clyburn, a powerful Democrat – have forebears who were enslaved. Each of the seven white lawmakers who served in the 117th Congress is a direct descendant of a slaveholder, Reuters found. So too is the state’s Republican governor, Henry McMaster.

I assure you that everyone involved here has forebears who were enslaved and is the direct descendant of a slaveholder. If you're going to contrast the two, get the specifics right.

This is racebait, journalism delenda est, everyone who wrote this should be banned from public communication and have a finger cut off as a continual reminder of their sins.

There's a bunch of specific people and degree of relation listed. I'll skip past them to see where Reuters is fucking around again.

A Reuters/Ipsos poll for this report suggests that a politician’s links to slavery might sway some voters. In a national survey, almost a quarter of respondents – 23% – said knowing that a candidate’s ancestors enslaved people would make them less likely to vote for that candidate. That number rose to 31% among respondents who identified as Democrats, and 35% among Black respondents. What’s unclear is how significant the topic is compared to race relations more broadly or other hot-button issues such as abortion.

Bold mine, Reuters really cannot keep this straight, this does not match their previous special report statements, and it also doesn't match the wording that was actually used in the poll. The poll respondents weren't given this whole special report for implicit context when they were asked:

“Would knowing that a political candidate’s ancestors or family members owned slaves in America make you more or less likely to vote for them?”

Journalism

Delenda

Est.

#all #journalism delenda est #flamebait #racepol #rant

[samueldays]

you got a loicence for that lie?

The so-called Online Safety Act passed in Britain this week.

Section 180 is vaguely worded but could be interpreted as a sweeping ban on trolling. Excerpt:

300 pages of law about one subject and it still winds up passing the buck to the guy in charge of determining "non-trivial". 🤮

Section 181 exempts licensed news outlets. Excerpt:

I rag on journalists sometimes, but I feel this exemption is far more damning than any point I've made myself.

Of course journos have to knowingly lie and cause psychological harm as part of their job, is Parliament's implicit position here, everyone knows that, it's unreasonable to expect journos to be honest, we need to give them special privileges so they can keep lying and hurting people.

(Credit to @echetus on twitter for spotting this in the draft bill months ago.)

#all #law #britain #journalism #journalism delenda est

[samueldays]

'Effectively, Ukraine has eliminated Russian ground forces'

...claimed an 'Eastern Europe expert' in this thread in March 2022, one month into the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

I was reminded of him when looking through some chatlogs today. At the time, I thought he was making absurd predictions, but figured he might try to water them down to claim something like accuracy if Ukraine won in the next month or two, stretching the definitions of words.

Now it's been a year and a half, and I want to revisit Sergej Sumlenny's bluster, not just for him being thoroughly personally wrong, but as a general reminder that anyone can call themselves an expert, and still be completely wrong.

In the first month of the war, this guy was saying shit like:

Russia and its army are about to collapse. RU obviously has no reserves left

Russia has been "about to collapse" every month for the last twenty months, somehow.

According to Ukrainian intelligence (and they get much info from the US I guess) Russia has already used 95% of all its ground forces gathered for the invasion, and it makes almost 100% of Russia's active ground forces. Effectively, Ukraine has eliminated Russian ground forces

If Ukraine would resist several more days, I am sure Russia will face the biggest defeat in its history. Nothing comparable. It will also trigger independency movements in Russia-occupied countries of Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Ichkeriya, Sakha, Komi and others

I am not seeing these things that were supposed to happen after "several more days".

When Moscow army will be eliminated (and it nearly is)

I am also sure - very soon we will face a shiny glorious future without the Prison of Nations. Thank to brave Ukrainians.

"very soon" has come and gone, Sergej, why are you still here?

The simple explanation, IMO, is that this guy is a pure propagandist, nothing else.

Perhaps he was never attempting to say anything true at all, he was completely disconnected from the evidence, Ukraine paid him to say pro-Ukraine things so he said the things his paymaster wanted. If Russia had paid him, he would have said the opposite.

But the thing about the Sumlennys of the world is that someone has put quite a lot of money into making them look expert. A Twitter account is free and can be set up in five minutes. A website for the European Resilience Center, maybe fifteen minutes and ten bucks to host. The content over at European Resilience, with regular updates, takes a bit more work. But Sumlenny being interviewed by external sources like France24 is not so easily manufactured.

For more on Ukraine's planned counter-offensive and all of the latest in Russia's brutal year-long invasion, FRANCE 24 is joined by Sergej Sumlenny, Journalist, Political Analyst, and Managing Director of the European Resilience Initiative Center.

Sumlenny got similar treatment in a wide variety of news outlets from ABC to Al Jazeera. Journalism delenda est. Both for Sumlenny personally, and for the many other journalists who interviewed him, respected him, failed to fact-check him, treated him as an expert, and gave him the prestige of an expert. There's two different meanings of "expert":

"expert" as in "has a credential and is used as a source on the subject being discussed"

"expert" as in "consistently produces good results and correct predictions"

and Sumlenny was very much the first sort. Which also has two meanings when I say it: that he was not the second sort, and that people did cite him and invite him and treat his opinion as being worth more than some random Tumblr blog.

(One might like to have a word that only means the second sort of expert. Good luck keeping it!)

The information ecosystem is polluted by Sumlennys. It's easy and common to go "Russian bot", but one should also have a mental space for "Ukranian bot", and then expand that term far enough to include Sumlenny, or have some other term for the less-obviously-bot-like people performing expertise as they spout nonsense. There is no side that is free of lies and nonsense, there is no credential that is clean, there is no institution that is clean. The clown world experts are everywhere. Sumlenny was not acting alone, nor is he unique, Sumlenny merely happened to get my attention, and the "factcheck" system that journalists love to talk about didn't catch him. It's not going to catch slightly more subtle lies. Epistemology is hard.

#all #the death of expertise #or perhaps the death of credentialism #journalism delenda est #factcheck #rant #bluecheck