It is abrupt. I apologize.tillingborn wrote: ↑Mon Jan 04, 2021 12:13 pmThat's just rude.Immanuel Can wrote: ↑Sat Jan 02, 2021 5:55 amIt will be as irrelevant as the rest of your message. But more predictable.tillingborn wrote: ↑Sat Jan 02, 2021 1:10 amSince you have no affinity for Donald Trump, you will not mind me pointing out that his success as a politician is based on his understanding and manipulation of that point.
However, talk of Trump will still be irrelevant to any discussion of the case. Even if we grant him to be guilty of every charge his worst detractors make of him, that will not wash anybody else of their guilt. That much is patently obvious.
No, we all stand or fall on what WE do, not on what somebody else may or may not have done. And politicians are no different; one does not cleanse another. And seeing as I am not an American, and thus not bound to choose between two bad options, criticizing one is not, for me, a zero-sum game: in criticizing the one, I am not automatically praising the other.
What you're neatly glossing over here is that journalists are people who purport to provide information. They absolutely rely on this impression, and present it to the public as their raison d'être. Moreover, they always self-present as "objective" or "fair" in their reporting, and "comprehensive" in their scope. They pose as the information-gatherers and providers of the public...and especially of the voting public.What I have argued in this thread is that the same principle extends to journalism. Now it seems that we agree.Sorry: in the matter of selecting a government, there are no excuses for naivete. And the naive generally get eaten.
Now, we both know they never are all these ideal things. But that's the social function they position themselves to serve: gatekeepers of the information relevant to the public interest. They preen in that role, and we accord them that function, because it used to be that journalism was competitive, and thus if one paper didn't report an important story, we would get it from another. Thus, by competition if not by honesty, all the information would be available to the public: and a "buyer beware" attitude would serve to help sort it all.
The problem of reporter's distortion facts has always been one problem. That could alway be somewhat offset by skepticism, and that could do something to abate the problem of naivete. But the situation is different now. The internet is essentially becoming a monopoly on information: and there's no skeptical defence against information-not-reported-at-all. Even the most wise, cynical person has no safeguards against information he/she is denied access to entirely. That's what Google, Twitter and Facebook have been exposed as having conspired to do: to keep even basic information secret from the public, so that the electorate would not even have the chance to consider it.
And that's the case of the Biden laptop. The public was not merely lied to; they were denied knowledge that it existed, then they were denied knowledge that it contained anything, and they they were denied any information that it implicated "the Big Guy." So their skepticism was of no use to them. It was not that public was merely foolish or naive...it was that they were left totally ignorant by unscrupulous means.
So no, we are not "agreeing" that all the public needed was more cynicism. They were not even given the chance to practice their skepticism.