Friday, November 12, 2021

There is shading reality and then there is just making things up

I've been awake only three hours, doing some work, getting showered and dressed, taking care of morning routines.  Seems like there are a cascade of prompts centered on mainstream media malfeasance.  

One of the first was this:
Fair enough.  We all have bubbles.   Sarah Beth Burwick is apparently an attorney in California and from her Twitter account she appears to be one of the ever increasing crowd of traditional Classical Liberals who used to be loosely affiliated with the soft left and who are now discovering that they have no sympathy for the authoritarian left which is now dominant.  They can't conceive of themselves as Conservative and certainly not as Republicans.  She has not yet realized that a good portion of independents, libertarians, and the right are all various shades of Classical Liberal, all standing in opposition to the authoritarianism, racism, collectivism, and destruction of the hard left.

Looking at her twitter feed, she is having the same issue with the chasm between the science and the hard left/mainstream media version of Covid-19 public health threats and treatments as do all Classical Liberals of every stripe.  The science points in one direction and the government and mainstream media point in the opposite direction.

She may have once self-defined as Left and she may regard herself as living in a leftish bubble.  But if she is as independent a thinker as her science tweets indicate, then the responsibility for her ignorance of the issues and status of the Rittenhouse trial must largely reside with the mainstream media rather than with her.  

People are mocking her on twitter for not knowing that the mainstream media has with Rittenhouse, as earlier with the George Zimmerman trial, been indulging in ideological propaganda rather than reporting the facts.  But if you big mainstream media institutions are in lockstep on a lie, who is at fault?  The media or the consumer?

And there are many other comparable tweets from people who formerly (and at least for probably still do) identify as Democrats, suddenly realizing that the whole trial has been grossly misrepresented in gross and in detail.

Sarah Beth Burwick has an interesting thread on her experiences in a ~3,000 person lawyer-mom facebook group who functioned as an ideological tribe always seeking to purify itself of independent thinkers.  Or really, just thinkers.

Then there was this from a New York Times journalist covering politics.  
At least she isn't a science journalist.  Otherwise this is a pretty startling admission from someone who one might otherwise have guessed to be really intelligent and widely read.  Where do you start with someone who does not understand the purpose, mechanisms and origins of dog breeds?  

I think we can all understand not understanding the genetic mechanisms in detail but surely she would know at least at a conceptual level?  How can you operate in a, at least formerly, semi-intellectual environment such as media in New York City and not understand anything about animal husbandry, biology, genetics, history, etc.

Given that she is a junior person at the NYT, she almost certainly has very strong ideological positions on those issues.  Just no knowledge about them.  

Then there is this striking juxtaposition between partisan claims and empirical reality.  And yet no reporters are pointing out the disjoint between the reality and the claim.
It goes on and on.  Reams of propaganda from the government and the mainstream media and only gleams of truth peaking in from free thinkers and brave citizens.

This tweet sort of captures the frustration.


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