Misinformation from our own government has been influncing the deaths of millions from Vietnam, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the War on Terror. It also played a role in establishing NSA domestic surveillance, among a host of other problems. The plutocracy spends billions on information warfare across elections. I've yet to see an article headline mainstream media complaining of plutocrats and Wall St bankers like Gary Cohn in charge of US tax policy. This same corporate media has deep and proven links with the CIA. Also, the DNC used deception and subvertion against their constituents' candidate in favor of their own. Then you even have institutionalized crony influences like Al Franken giving his super delegate to Clinton when Bernie had over 60% of his constituents' votes. And Russian social media influence and ads has also been linked to extreme left propaganda such as anti-fa.
Protecting democracy is important, but we can't just only do it when it is convenient.
I'm inspired by Greenwald's articles, along this same line of thinking.[1]
Yeah, that is a load of scatter shot whataboutism. The FA is about peer to peer trolling. Not sure what Al Franken voting for his Senate colleague has to do with that. Hillary won the Democratic primary (popular, delegate + state) without the superdelegates and Bernie campaigned for her in the general. What about that?
I'd say that, far from being whataboutism, there's a pretty strong correlation between the sort of post-modern relative view of truth that we've allowed out of our politicians when they're in office, and the techniques they (and third parties on their behalf) have been using in elections.
Probably not worth the trouble, as I predict this whole thread will soon be flagged to oblivion, but here goes.
1) I can't be bothered to look for references, but the NY Times has not failed to notice (and criticize) the fact that the Trump administration is staffed by quite a few people from Wall Street. A fair question is whether the NY Times would be as critical of a hypothetical Hillary Clinton administration, if it made similar personnel choices.
2) The DNC has spent decades trying to avoid a repeat of 1972, when the "popular choice" of the party base (George McGovern) went down to a flaming defeat against Richard Nixon. The whole "super-delegate" thing was deliberately designed to make sure that party "elders" could influence the choice of nominee, so that the party base would not again nominate someone who was unelectable. This was non-democracy by design, not accidental corruption. You may not agree with the idea, but there was at least some logic behind it.
3) Russian social media influence seems to have been designed, at first, to exacerbate tensions in the US and subvert faith in US democracy. The decision to lean towards Trump seems to have been taken later on. And it could be argued that helping to build up antifa, and exaggerating its influence, would actually serve to increase pro-Trump feeling among his base.
>1) I can't be bothered to look for references, but the NY Times has not failed to notice (and criticize) the fact that the Trump administration is staffed by quite a few people from Wall Street. A fair question is whether the NY Times would be as critical of a hypothetical Hillary Clinton administration, if it made similar personnel choices.
The NYTimes also covered the Dakota Pipeline protests and the DWS DNC scandal. CIA influence in domestic media has also been covered in mainstream media.
But there's a difference between technically covering a topic somewhere and incessantly exposing an idea.
Whataboutism is an old school red-scare term literally coined to describe Soviet disinformation techniques.
I wonder if most people who use the term as an argument know this, or are aware of how it got into their lexicon.
Not only does the term imply one supports one side over the other (in this case Russian trolls), the term implicitly accuses one of being an actual Russian agent..
Search for 'whataboutism' wiki (and check the rational wiki as well).
> Lexicographers date the first appearance of the variant whataboutism to the 1990s,[1][4] while other historians state that during the Cold War Western officials referred to the Soviet and Russian propaganda strategy by that term.[7]
I think "Whataboutism" can be a harmful concept. It allows navel gazing fr a particular issue to be used to distract from real solutions.
Like when Israel is singled out for things that many or most other countries do to a greater extent. Countries should be judged as countries and compared to others facing similar situations, not singled out in a vacuum. And this leads to navel gazing that prevents the solution to the actual problems, because the solutions involve more than one country.
Or some feminists in the USA for instance drawing people's attenton to male avatars being default on social networks instead of focusing on honor killings and caste based rapes around the world and so on. Attention and outrage is a finite resource and whataboutism arguments squander it.
This is a great way to win an argument without actually refuting the argument. You raised a strawman argument--a thesis about Whataboutisms--and defeated Whataboutisms, even giving examples of things like Israel ane feminists. Nowhere did you raise conceers commenrary or anything that refutes the problems at hand, but you defeated the proxy--whataboutisms--giving the impression you refuted them.
This is a classic logical fallacy in debate, but a wonderully effective way to give the impression you refuted something.
Also, what is "conceers commentary" that I was supposed to give?
Who said I was refuting some specific problem? The point I was making was about the use of "whataboutism" to simply dismiss "but in the USA you lynch negroes" as an empty tu quoque.
I am saying that navel gazing has a cost -- it diverts attention and resources from where they are most needed. Israel and Feminists were just examples. There are tons. BLM for example focuses only on shootings of Black people by police, but those constitute only 5% of all shootings of Black people. It is common to focus on mass shootings, but those constitute less than 2% of all shootings. And so all the attention and resources are spent on preventing at most 2% of the actual problem: shootings.
Sometimes the navel gazing is by opponents who single out a group for special thrashing.
Often the navel gazing is exacerbated by critics belonging to the group themselves, because for various reasons they want to hold it to a higher standard. Noam Chomsky criticizes the USA more because he lives in it. Lots of Jews actually criticize Israel because they believe it is special and should do better. Many feminists feel other countries just are so far behind that they won't respond to their message. It's a form of soft racism also, saying those other countries arre just not as enlightened as the ones you criticize.
My point is - regardless of the motivation, using "whataboutism" to dismiss arguments can be dangerous because it gives cover to navel gazing and perpetuates problems for decades which could have been solved if people ordered offenders by their severity and prioritized them.
And anyways... Yea that's the point. You launched a arguments about 'whataboutisms,' or 'navel gazings.' This is what is called "straw man arguments." You assumed that what I said is equivalent to your straw man argument, and then defeated the straw man.
> How a small group of self-made experts came to advise Congress on disinformation campaigns is a testament to just how long tech companies have failed to find a solution to the problem.
The news nowadays simply build everything out of minimal fact, and popularize images they want to portrait with minimal reasoning.
This sentence jumps from A to B in such a mentally blind fashion, so much so that I think to describe just how absurd the connection would be an article in the same length of this report.
Did the author have any formal training in news writing at all, or they forgot what they learned...
Misinformation from our own government has been influncing the deaths of millions from Vietnam, to the Civil Rights Movement, to the War on Terror. It also played a role in establishing NSA domestic surveillance, among a host of other problems. The plutocracy spends billions on information warfare across elections. I've yet to see an article headline mainstream media complaining of plutocrats and Wall St bankers like Gary Cohn in charge of US tax policy. This same corporate media has deep and proven links with the CIA. Also, the DNC used deception and subvertion against their constituents' candidate in favor of their own. Then you even have institutionalized crony influences like Al Franken giving his super delegate to Clinton when Bernie had over 60% of his constituents' votes. And Russian social media influence and ads has also been linked to extreme left propaganda such as anti-fa.
Protecting democracy is important, but we can't just only do it when it is convenient.
I'm inspired by Greenwald's articles, along this same line of thinking.[1]
1 - https://static.theintercept.com/amp/the-deep-state-goes-to-w...