Posted by Jinnistan  4/26/2023 1:11 am | #101 |
"Effective Altruism". Sounds dandy. This phrase started to get a bit more attention with the FTX crypto-collapse because its CEO Sam Bankman-Fried was vocally devoted to the cause. Elon Musk has frequently been invoking the subject. So what does it effectively mean? How is this a superior method of altruism? Or is it even altrustic at all? As Sam Bankman-Fried explained, effective altruism was simply "dumb game we woke westerners play where we say all the right shibboleths and so everyone likes us". Or in Musk's estimate, is it worth sacrificing the lives of a billion poor Earthlings today if it could maximize the benefit of a trillion interplanetary colonists 1000 years from now? It seems everyone has some differing ideas about what's "best" for the most people, especially in 'longtermism' where we're equating for all of the people who have yet to exist. Anyway, it's worth brushing up on a concept that most people not in certain small academic circles or in equally elite technocratic circles that have been appropriating the obscure philosophy.
Starting with the babies...
Rachel Donald wrote:
[William]MacAskill believes that, in the future, there will be trillions and trillions of human beings who will have colonised space. Therefore, he argues, we need to take the correct decisions today which will ensure those the existence of those trillions of people, and prioritise their wellbeing over the suffering of people today. It is fundamentally a utilitarian argument built upon the alleged inevitability of the unborn dramatically outnumber those alive today.....this gives effective altruists a psychological trick with which they can relieve themselves of tackling the genuine problems of today, but believe that they are doing it in good faith in order to protect the trillions and trillions of humans that will exist tomorrow.
Now, the most extreme version of this philosophy gaining a huge amount of power and influence resides in Silicon Valley, where upper middle class technologists believe it is their duty to repopulate the planet with more upper middle class white technologists. Simone and Michael Collins are leading the charge, out to have 10 children as quickly as possible, who they will indoctrinate to each have 10 of their own, and so on. They hope that, within 11 generations, their genetic legacy will outnumber the current human population.
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So when Elon Musk bemoans about what he sees as a population collapse, he's speaking quite specifically on which and whose population.
They say it is vital the 0.1% have large families so that these gifted children can save humanity, pushing a dangerous rhetoric that we need a particular kind of people being born, people who are educated a certain way, with access to resources and decision-making spaces, and, of course, white.
Of course, the Collins don’t say outright that these people must be white, but why else propagate one’s own lineage rather than adopt 10 children, desperately in need of those same resources, who already exist?
The movement looks an awful lot like white supremacy dressed up as techno-utopian utilitarianism. And it’s garnering traction. Elon Musk may not be directly affiliated with the Collins’ particular brand, but the father of 10 is an ardent believer that our biggest danger is population collapse, and regularly tweets out the necessity for certain demographics to have more children. He, like many others, is what Nandita calls “ecologically blind.”
There are millions of children in need around the world, and billions of people living in sub-standard conditions who need access to more resources. Many of these people are attempting to enter the nations clamouring to figure out how to reverse this “population decline”. This desperate racism not only highlights yet more evidence of the pathology of inequality and oppression the West built its nations upon, but also draws into question the now vs then problem.
These people do not believe themselves accountable for the world today—they believe themselves to be the gods of tomorrow.
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Posted by Jinnistan 4/26/2023 1:26 am | #102 |
In an earlier article I wrote for Truthdig, racism was a prominent theme. Pretty much everywhere one peeks around the neighborhood of EA, one discovers hints of racism — to say nothing of ableism, classism and sexism. After revelations last month that Nick Bostrom, one of the most influential philosophers within EA, wrote in old email claiming that “Blacks are more stupid than whites,” followed by the N-word, it became clear that many EAs are actually sympathetic with the view that racial differences in “intelligence” do exist, or at least aren’t particularly bothered by his claim. Others in the community have approvingly cited the work of Charles Murray, world-famous for his scientific racism, and one of the main focuses of EA — so-called “longtermism” — traces its roots right back to the 20th-century eugenics movement. None of this would be particularly noteworthy (the world is full of rotten ideas) except for the fact that EA and its longtermist offshoot have become extremely influential over the past decade....
Another way to think about this goes as follows: due in part to the ongoing legacies and influence of colonialism, exploitation and extractive capitalism, the Global North has most of the power and wealth. By utilizing a top-down approach, people in the Global North get to retain this power. That is to say, they maintain power over who gets wealth transferred to them and how this wealth is transferred. The decision-making process remains in the hands of mostly white people in the Global North, who live literally thousands of miles away from countries like Uganda and have no first-hand knowledge of what, say, Ugandan farmers are actually struggling with. Consequently, the traditional approach is profoundly disempowering to those it aims to help: recipients of charity become merely passive participants in trying to solve their problems, rather than decision-makers in their own right. Perhaps you can see how this further entrenches the political system of white supremacy....
EA enters the picture because, in Kalulu’s words, it’s “even worse than traditional philanthropy in the way it excludes those of us who are directly battling ultra poverty in the Global South.” There are two interrelated reasons for this: first, EA makes it even less likely that grassroots organizations will ever get funded. The reason is that the EA movement insists that members should donate exclusively to those causes, charities or organizations deemed “effective” according to certain metrics or criteria, developed by EA organizations like GiveWell, which is based in San Francisco. If an organization doesn’t qualify as “effective,” then it doesn’t deserve funding. This is what “doing good better” means: funneling money to those, and only those, charities that get the biggest bang for one’s buck....
This is basically a numbers game. For example, imagine that there’s a 0.0000000000000001 chance that some action you take today could add one unit of happiness to 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 people who exist in the far future. This yields an “expected value,” as longtermists would say, of 100, by simply multiplying these two numbers together. Now imagine that there’s a different action you could take that would, with a probability of 0.5, add 100 units of happiness to one person right now — say, someone struggling to buy three meals a day. This yields an expected value of only 50. Since 100 is twice as big as 50, if you were forced to choose between these two actions, you should take the first one — not the second!
This is how EA longtermists reason, and it’s what leads them to deprioritize the problem of global poverty, that is, relative to the importance of “helping” people in the far future — even if the probability of succeeding is extremely small. In fact, longtermists argue that one way to “help” these people is to ensure that they come to exist in the first place. On their view, which is highly contentious among philosophers, “could exist” implies “should exist” assuming that such people would have lives that are better than miserable. It follows that the non-existence of a potentially vast number of future people — many living in computer simulations — would constitute an enormous moral catastrophe, much greater than the catastrophe of global poverty in the present. Again, this is not because current people matter less, but because there are so many “happy” people who could (and therefore should) exist in the future. Since one way these hordes of unborn digital beings could fail to exist is if humanity were to go extinct, this line of reasoning leads longtermists to prioritize mitigating risks to our extinction over most everything else, even if these risks are highly speculative and very improbable. Hence, as Kalulu observes, longtermists “consider things like artificial intelligence as being existential threats to humanity (before they pose any threat), yet the movement won’t even lend a hand directly to those of us who are already starving in the present day.”
On the other hand, the EA movement has convinced an increasing fraction of its community over the past five years that global poverty as a whole isn’t the most “effective” cause area. Instead, we should redirect our finite resources to ensuring that humanity survives long enough to colonize space, spread throughout the accessible universe, populate exoplanets and build giant computer simulations in which trillions and trillions of digital people live supposedly “happy” lives. Although not all EAs have pivoted toward longtermism, and hence away from global poverty, the most prominent members of the EA community like Toby Ord and William MacAskill — both of whom once focused primarily on global poverty rather than the far future — have been vigorously promoting the longtermist perspective, and as I’ve discussed on many occasions before, longtermism is becoming hugely influential in the world more generally.
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Posted by Jinnistan 4/26/2023 1:47 am | #103 |
The people who are almost directly responsible for the world’s biggest problems today — the climate crisis, eroding institutions of democracy, and the sale of people’s own attention for profit — don’t find themselves to be accountable. Not only that, accountability, or even fixing today’s problems, isn’t even a desirable goal for them. At least not, according to ‘longtermism’ — the philosophy undergirding much of tech’s trajectory and, if we’re not careful, our own destruction as a race.
It’s an idea that, from its forward-looking scope, seems ambitious and futuristic upon first glance. But it’s one that believes in a future only for a few people — self-appointed representatives of humanity — at the cost of all the rest. And when billionaires begin to shack up underground or shoot off into space in a bid to colonize other planets, they’re not doing it for humanity as a whole; they’re doing it for a humanity that consists exclusively of their own ilk....
[Nick] Bostrom’s work is heartily endorsed by tech giants with the resources and capacity to not only outrun any of the world’s current crises, but also irreversibly influence the direction of our species as a whole. There are two key concepts in Bostrom’s argument: potential, and existential risk. Potential is what longtermists understand to be humanity’s capacity on a cosmic scale, a trillion years into the future. Our potential is as vast as the universe itself. An existential risk, according to the longtermist ethic, is one that threatens to wipe out humanity and with it, humanity’s potential. This is the most tragic outcome and one that has to be avoided at all costs. Now it’s possible that a few people — say, 15% of the world’s population — survive climate change. That doesn’t wipe out our potential even if it wipes out an unfathomable number of people — and so, according to longtermism, isn’t an existential risk.
“The case for longtermism rests on the simple idea that future people matter…Just as we should care about the lives of people who are distant from us in space, we should care about people who are distant from us in time,” wrote William MacAskill, the public face of longtermism. His book was endorsed by Elon Musk, who cited MacAskill’s philosophy as a “close match” for his own. Musk also happens to be one of the biggest players in the privatized space race, and his vision to colonize Mars is one that is increasingly no longer a semi-ironic joke...
There’s a web of influential figures writing the script of longtermism from various think tanks — together, they comprise an enterprise that’s worth more than 40 billion dollars. Among others, some advocate for sex redistribution, others say that saving lives in rich countries is more important than saving lives in poor countries, as philosopher Émile P. Torres reported in Salon. Longtermism’s utopia is a future where human beings are engineered to perfection — leading to the creation of posthumans who possess only the best and most superior of traits with no flaws at all. This is an idea rooted in eugenics, and it fuels the most civilizationally cynical ideas of who gets to be considered superior, and who qualifies as inferior enough to be flushed out of our collective gene pool. It’s important to note that what holds all of these ideas together is the benign-sounding idea of longtermism — and it’s even creeping into the United Nations. “The foreign policy community in general and the … United Nations in particular are beginning to embrace longtermism,” noted one UN Dispatch....
Nick Bostrom enjoys considerable ideological heft. As the chair of Oxford’s Future of Humanity Institute (FHI), he is one among a growing group of philosophers who have their sights set on our future in terms of how much more we can think, accomplish, build and discover on a scale previously thought to be unthinkable. “Anders Sandberg, a research fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute, told me that humans might be able to colonise a third of the now-visible universe, before dark energy pushes the rest out of reach. That would give us access to 100 billion galaxies, a mind-bending quantity of matter and energy to play with,” wrote Ross Andersen, who investigated the philosophies actively shaping the future of our civilization.
Tech is key to achieving this kind of potential, which is why people in tech are so heavily invested (and investing) in the idea. At the heart of the ethical deliberations is the cost-benefit analysis: how much is it okay to lose for the sake of ensuring the potential of future people? Maybe even post-people? It’s the “greater good” dilemma that has been used to justify devastating wars and policy decisions already: “Now imagine what might be ‘justified’ if the ‘greater good’ isn’t national security but the cosmic potential of Earth-originating intelligent life over the coming trillions of years?” Torres asks.
“…the crucial fact that longtermists miss is that technology is far more likely to cause our extinction before this distant future event than to save us from it,” they add.
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Posted by Jinnistan 4/26/2023 2:02 am | #104 |
You know, I’ve been thinking a lot about longtermism as a subset of an almost quasi-fascist, “ends justifies the means,” worldview......this idea of thinking in 10,000 year intervals......But what happened was this idea of really super long-term thinking dovetailed with that kind of Singularity University idea of super-scaled thinking. Right? So we’re gonna think in super long time zones and everything that we do, every solution that we come up with has to work at scale.
The term longtermism, as you’re using it now, to me is more like this focusing on the distant future, on the strange attractor at the end of time, at the Omega point, at the great shift, at the moment of transubstantiation. When consciousness rises from the chrysalis of matter as pure energy. And when we use that as our theory of change, the long term, that thing, what often happens is we’re looking so far ahead that we’re not looking at what Marxists would call conditions on the ground. You know, what’s happening in the real world with real people in this moment, and who am I willing to stamp on or do something, in order for that long-term thing?
And then that dovetails with this other thing they’re calling effective altruism, which is basically that you don’t have to really worry about what you’re doing as long as you spend a lot of money invested in these long term solutions that will solve things for your great-great-grandchildren. And that’s sort of the problem that a lot of us are looking at.
So, the folks that are doing this, most of the ones I’ve spoken to aren’t saying, “Oh, I think people suck” and all that. No, they’ll say, “Well, you know, humanity is a problem. It is the problem. We are solving for humanity with systems. We are solving for humanity with technology.” Right? Rather than solving for technology with humanity. You know, they’ll even use phrases like, “humane technology.”
There’s going to be 500 trillion humans, spread out in the heavens, a couple of thousand years from now. What does the pain and suffering of a mere eight billion people who are on this planet now, the larval stage of what is ultimately a winged human species? Yeah, we are the maggots to their butterflies, or whatever they’re going to be after the Great Metamorphosis.
And they, though, only the super wealthy and the technologists actually can somehow upgrade themselves to the point where they get to participate in the next one, right? They get to go cuz they’re gonna have the, whatever, vampire blood or neural nets or whatever they stick on themselves to migrate to the next thing.
But, yeah, but that’s back to, again, simple ends justifies the means. It’s the same thing as it’s okay for these Israelite slaves to die, s long as I get my pyramid, you know. We’ve been doing this a long time.
But, you know, they do this kind of rebellious wisdom thing, where they hypnotize you with their kind of psychedelic poetry and help you make sense of reality by seeing, you know, by imagining and hallucinating the great fractal at the end of time and imagining, you know… sometimes they call it Game B or Plan X or X Prize.
And again, it’s always that other thing, rather than what’s happening here. And when we say, “Well, what about what’s happening here now?” They’re like, “Well, you know, we are architecting the future of civilization. You’re stuck. You’re back in the old game. You’re back in the old battles, the old dialectics, you know. You’re still stuck with Marx and Hegel. We’ve gone on, through Ayn Rand to, you know, the next dimension.”
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Posted by crumbsroom 4/26/2023 11:01 am | #105 |
How convenient for the comfortable and the wealthy and the already entitled to sacrifice the joy of now for all those unborn people who we need to concern ourselves with ten thousand years from now
Oh, wait, they aren't sacrificing any of their joy? They get to continue to not be affected by the collapse of this planet and can continue to do whatever they want to destroy it as long as it makes them even happier and more comfortable, AND they can pretend to be the most altruistic human beings who ever existed.
Yes, these are exactly the people I want to hear talk about sacrifice. Or maybe it would be better if we could just put them all in a potato sack and throw them in some toxic sludge river to drown in the supposed complete irrelevance of the present moment.
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Posted by Jinnistan 4/26/2023 8:03 pm | #106 |
How convenient for the comfortable and the wealthy and the already entitled to sacrifice the joy of now for all those unborn people who we need to concern ourselves with ten thousand years from now
Oh, wait, they aren't sacrificing any of their joy? They get to continue to not be affected by the collapse of this planet and can continue to do whatever they want to destroy it as long as it makes them even happier and more comfortable, AND they can pretend to be the most altruistic human beings who ever existed.
Yes, these are exactly the people I want to hear talk about sacrifice. Or maybe it would be better if we could just put them all in a potato sack and throw them in some toxic sludge river to drown in the supposed complete irrelevance of the present moment.
It does make for an interesting parallel to the conservatives' rallying around "the unborn". "Pre-born" is a new one I heard recently. Talking about them as if they're already existing souls just waiting for that juicy opportunity to incarnate. I'm sure that some pro-lifers could use a similar utilitarian metric to claim that the the short term penalty on women's autonomy is outweighed by the trillions of happy families a thousand years from now. And, um, there's also quite a strong emphasis on race behind the pro-life movement. Great Replacement Theory, and all. Strange how for the first time in history humanity has achieved 8 billion people on the planet, but somehow we have this "demographic crisis". It rhymes with the reason why people like Musk are less concerned with the demographics that will be most negatively affected by climate change.
Douglas Rushkoff's new book Survival of the Richest goes deeper into this. It touches on "effective altruism" by necessity, as that's the current rationalization for thier desire, but mostly what the book is concerned with is this elite of tech-bro billionaires (and some multi-millionaires) who have realized that their money is directly tied to making the climate crisis worse. All of the environmental degradation and slave labor involved in the manufacturing of digital devices, all of the carbon-intensive resources necessary to keep their ubiquitous servers running, especially all of those servers spent mining that delicious new cyber-crude, cryptocurrencies. They don't want to give any of that up. So instead they want to see how they can make the climate crisis work for them. Buy a lot of land. Convert some missle silos into condos. Create an Eden behind the turrets and moats of their fortified communities. You don't have to worry about funding public education if you choose to believe that intelligence is genetic. We just need to breed more people like us, so smart and rich, who will take the reigns, eventually, maybe once all of the other earthly embers die out. What's the alternative? A Mineshaft Gap?!?!?
One of my favorite quotes from Rushkoff is while he was interviewing one of these tech billionaires, and inevitably they all start asking Rushkoff for advice, "What do we do if our private security force turns against us?"
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Posted by crumbsroom 4/26/2023 8:22 pm | #107 |
While it's likely that those who pursue super wealth are predisposed to super assholery, there is also no question that having too much money ruins people's brains.
Rich people are weird. Like deeply weird. But probably the only kind of weird that I don't find remotely endearing. It's gotten to the point with me I won't be shedding any tears for them if down the road the entire world revolts against them and rips them to pieces with their hands.
They are loathsome broken people. The only real prejudice that is still completely acceptable to indulge in is a bone deep hatred of those who accumulate wealth. It's a personality trait not that different from the kid who likes to kill cats on the weekends. There is something fucking wrong with you if you have the need to have more money than you can reasonably spend in twenty lifetimes.
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Posted by Jinnistan 4/26/2023 9:41 pm | #108 |
While it's likely that those who pursue super wealth are predisposed to super assholery, there is also no question that having too much money ruins people's brains.
Rich people are weird. Like deeply weird. But probably the only kind of weird that I don't find remotely endearing. It's gotten to the point with me I won't be shedding any tears for them if down the road the entire world revolts against them and rips them to pieces with their hands.
They are loathsome broken people. The only real prejudice that is still completely acceptable to indulge in is a bone deep hatred of those who accumulate wealth. It's a personality trait not that different from the kid who likes to kill cats on the weekends. There is something fucking wrong with you if you have the need to have more money than you can reasonably spend in twenty lifetimes.
There's definitely a certain threshold where I can no longer sympathize. I mean, it's perfectly understandable to seek out comforts and security, have your needs taken care of, have certain indulgences afforded. All of this multiplies with a family to provide for. But acquisitiveness becomes a self-reinforcing disease. For example, I can't really see any benefit to being even a lower level billionaire. Sure it's cute for a while, in a Brewster's Millions kind of way. Like Lou Reed's marble shower. But for any billionaire to still be hungry for more? How much is enough? And it's here in this club where you find the truly sociopathic and predatory creatures.
Here's a fun video. I like this guy's show, although sometimes he can get a little too Marxist for me ("Why don't we just get rid of money?" Put down the bong, dude.) This is a pretty reasonable and entertaining take on the price of avarice and the never-satisfying jones of wealth-addiction, especially concerning the psychological effects of wealth. And he briefly dips into effective altruism as well. (He's also done a couple of previously amusing videos on Elon Musk specifically.)
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Posted by Rock 4/26/2023 10:26 pm | #109 |
I always find it chilling how much these billionaires' solutions for humanity's troubles make them sound like the villains of a dystopian science fiction movie.
I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
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Posted by Rampop II 5/02/2023 3:51 am | #110 |
Allo, chaps. I'm back from the loo. Did I miss anything?
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Posted by Rampop II 5/02/2023 11:08 pm | #111 |
Further evidence that corporate price–gouging has moved from being one cause of inflation to THE cause of inflation:
"The real monster behind soaring prices:
"It's becoming clear that corporate greed is screwing over the US economy"
https://www.businessinsider.com/why-prices-inflation-soaring-corporate-greed-profits-margins-wages-jobs-2023-4
(I can't insert links from my phone)
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Posted by Jinnistan 5/03/2023 10:07 am | #112 |
I guess this thread is as good a place to talk about this "greedflation" since it was, at least, treated like a conspiracy theory for much of the past year. I posted last summer in the "I Like Biden" thread:
Inflationary policy appears more and more like economic warfare, much as the financial/corporate sector hobbled their cooperation with Obama during the early recession recovery until the 2010 midterm "correction"....It looks to me like Wall Street got spooked after realizing how serious Biden's progressive economic agenda actually was.
I haven't seen anything to refute that assertion. All of the given rationales for inflation that we heard last year - supply chain disruptions, too much stimulus cash - have proven false, but there's very little effort in the news media to correct these perceptions. Of course the business pages, if you venture there, have gotten a bit more honest about calling it what it is. They don't use "greedflation" so much as other euphemistic terms like "margin expansions", "mark-up growth" and "sellers inflation". That BI article does a good job of making such language into layman common sense. There have been a stream of other such articles recently as well, like this Guardian piece from a couple of months ago:
Large corporations have fuelled inflation with price increases that go beyond rising costs of raw materials and wages, pushing shopping bills to record highs....Higher profits margins are the result of “tacit collusion” by large companies, adding to the prices of hundreds of goods and services that were already under pressure after the Covid-19 pandemic and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine....the choices made by corporations are revealed to have caused historic ‘price spiralling’ – and governments are letting them do it.
Occasionally, you can even find a business story with the courage to spill the truth in clear language, however buried deep: "In many cases, corporations are charging more because they can."
Part of the obfuscation of this truth comes from our prior presumptions about inflation. The last major bout of inflation in America occurred in the 1970s. This inflation was caused by a "wage-price spiral", and the Federal Reserve contained this inflation by spiking interest rates, causing a recession, before the economy stabalized in the early '80s. This was called the "Volcker Shock", after the then-chair of the Fed, and this has been the orthodox wisdom for how to deal with inflation ever since. The problem with our post-Covid inflation is that it was not caused by this wage-price spiral, although many tried to convince us that it was, that the problem was that wages had grown too strong too fast, in addition to workers and the middle class receiving too much stimulus money, too much spending power, straining our supply chains. This explanation was cited as a given truth all of last year. And so when the Fed tried to use these same tools to address this latest inflation, the results have not only been mixed, but they have ended up hurting the very same people who were being erroneously blamed for the problem - cooling down raising wages, spurring unemployment, stunting mortgages, restricting lending all on top of the crunch of higher prices. Sounds like a form of class warfare, especially in the face of a strong momentum for higher wages and unionization across working sectors, and a pro-union Biden administration committed to tougher regulations and increased public investment. So far, I still haven't seen where the Fed has admitted that their tools for fighting inflation have been misplaced here, or even admitted that this current inflation is completely unlike previous inflations. So far, very few major financial authorities seem willing to admit what is only becoming more and more plain, "corporations are charging more because they can". And apparently there's nothing anyone can or is willing to do about it, which should be the most chilling part of this story.
Behind the scenes, again restricted mostly to niche paywall media, some of the banks have been warning companies that their greed will backfire, that the public blowback of their gouging, which can only inevitably become more well-understood, presents a potentially greater economic disruption in the long term. Maybe so. But I also wouldn't discount the blowback on those, the politicians and news media voices, who have so blatantly failed us by refusing to call it for what it was the entire time.
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Posted by Jinnistan 5/03/2023 9:36 pm | #113 |
[img]https://media.cnn.com/api/v1/images/stellar/prod/190807174717-01-tucker-carlson-0807.jpg?q=x_3,y_20,h_1684,w_2993,c_crop/w_250[/img]
"It's not how white men fuck."
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Posted by crumbsroom 5/09/2023 4:09 pm | #114 |
So how concerning is that ABC poll that has Biden trailing Trump in a head to head matchup?
Also, how is this even possible?
Yes inflation but....were talking Trump
And, yes, the media likes talking long and hard about Biden's age and declining mental fortitude but....were talking Trump.
Yes, I get why inflation is going to be held against the incumbent every time, for right or wrong....but this moronic shit about age and ability shouldn't even be an issue. At the very very least it's a wash. And likely much worse when it comes to Trump's mental fitness (in every capacity) because he's a doddering old maniac at the moment, and is only getting progressively worse.
And then we hear about CNN and their Trump town half and it's "Do you fucks ever learn?"
The notion that CNN is somehow in the bag for Democrats is so absurd on its face. It's clear all they value is ratings, whoever gives it to them. Corporate pigs, is what they are
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Posted by Rock 5/09/2023 4:24 pm | #115 |
I remember EA had a good summation of how supposedly liberal outlets end up having a right wing bias because they’re so afraid to look biased that they give undue attention to right wing talking points and fail to challenge them sufficiently.
I am not above abusing mod powers for my own amusement.
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Posted by crumbsroom 5/09/2023 6:24 pm | #116 |
I remember EA had a good summation of how supposedly liberal outlets end up having a right wing bias because they’re so afraid to look biased that they give undue attention to right wing talking points and fail to challenge them sufficiently.
I think this is definitely a part of the equation, especially now that the right has become so cartoonishly awful and incompetent that to report them as they really are definitely has a superficial feel that there must be a bias against them. That they can't be that bad. It's impossible because who could be this ridiculous. Certainly not an entire political party.
Except that it is possible and they are.
And this just makes how ineffectual the Democratic party has become, and how horribly warped Twitter idiots are making the left appear to be, all the more tragic.
The stupidity and the shallowness and the cowardice is astonishing in both it's badness and how profoundly it has rotted out all of our institutions
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Posted by Rampop II 5/10/2023 1:00 pm | #117 |
In Manufacturing Consent Noam Chomsky described a media motivation to fuel a public perception that the media has a liberal bias to prevent more liberal ideas from being taken seriously. Years later, Outfoxed would describe a changing trend in media outlets trying to mimic Fox News' sensationalist model because Fox had the highest ratings. And that was 20 years ago.
CNN, like all the other cable/national TV media outlets, LOVE Trump... not because of politics, but because of ratings. In 2016 the news companies absolutely could not get enough of his ass. It was nonstop wall-to-wall coverage, just "TrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpTrumpTrump..." Does anyone remember the day CNN spent the better part of an afternoon fixated on Trump's empty podium? Waiting for him to appear, they just kept the camera pointed at it, a shot of nothing but this pillar of wood in an otherwise empty frame, intercut with the usual talking heads, not reporting on any other topic, no matter how newsworthy (Standing Rock resistance of the Dakota access pipeline, the Flint, Michigan water crisis, Brexit), no, just wonking away in anticipation for the appearance of their beloved rabble–rousing narcissistic cash–cow, speculating about what he was going to say, admiring that... that podium! Remember how the media fed him hours upon hours of free publicity because he was such a draw, such a perfect example of how to hook viewers and glue them to the screen, baited and transfixed by something grotesquely outrageous. Recall what former CBS CEO Les Moonves said about all the media coverage of Trump back then: "It may not be good for America, but it's damn sure good for CBS." No cable news station is truly red or blue; they may wear a red or a blue costume; but they are all about the green. Cynical, bottom–line–feeding tabloids, they are corporations, legally bound by fiduciary responsibility to maximize quarterly profits for their shareholders, no matter how malicious or immoral the means may be to that singular end. It's compulsory greed.
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Posted by Jinnistan 5/11/2023 6:28 pm | #118 |
After last night's humiliating display of CNN's total journalistic incompetence, the new CNN CEO this morning sent around a memo that ultimately repeats what Jeff Zucker and Les Moonves said about Trump 7 years ago:
"I realize there’s been backlash and that’s expected. You don’t have to like the President’s answers but you can’t say we didn’t get them. Kaitlan pressed him again and again and she made a ton of news."
The old, sadly forgotten, saying is that "journalists don't make news, they report news". Kaitlan Collins didn't uncover any scoops, didn't penetrate Trump's BS or his cocky facade. All she and CNN did was to showcase it, advertise it, and whether you love or hate Trump, you pretty much got exactly what you'd expect. That's entertainment, not news. This is even more stale than Network. You gotta go back to Ace in the Hole to find a time when such cynicism still had an ironic edge. Dan Aykroyd shooting a grinder monkey from his office window so he could get a decent headline "NOT EVEN MONKEYS SAFE IN DERANGED SPREE". Collins just tee'd him up to keep knocking crazy balls out of the park, and he delivered, and, worse, in front of a crowd of adoring fans.
And the most disgusting part, I think, was Collins allowed Trump to repeat his 'blood libel' that Dems are killing infants post-birth, and she didn't even bother to push back on that easily refuted lie. I know I know, the fatigue, but maybe that's why you don't put someone like that on live TV.
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Posted by Jinnistan 5/23/2023 6:01 pm | #119 |
Again, this idea of our current scourge of inflation being a manufactured and willful wholesale robbery of the people (globally, not just Americans) is looking less and less like the conspiracy theory it was once dismissed as by the corporate media. Still, even as the so-called theory is gaining traction, with economists and business analysts basically becoming more direct in how they are publicly framing the issue, it still seems that the news media is trying, not so much to ignore the story but, to keep the lid on it just enough to cool it off as the reality of situation - that we were taken as fools in a moment of collective post-Covid sympathy while the economy came back on-line in '21-'22 - begins to seep into the ordinary citizen's consciousness. Personally, I'd prefer to see the riots that they're trying to quell. But at the very least, this notion of "greedflation" is becoming inescapably more mainstream:
In a speech in January, then-Fed vice chair Lael Brainard said wages weren't the main driver of inflation and pointed to a "price-price spiral" where companies mark up prices far higher than the increases in their input costs.
While factually more accurate, this statement still manages to avoid the more punctual description of exactly what it is - profiteering off a public crisis. But what takes this into much more malignant territory than sheer opportunistic greed is the further fact that there was a coordinated effort by these corporations to lie to us about it, basically gaslighting the public by exploiting our post-Covid sympathies to accept rationales that did not exist to the extent we were told:
In March, the chief economist at UBS Global Wealth Management, Paul Donovan, published a note on "profit margin-led inflation," describing how in late 2022 and into this year, companies — particularly retailers and consumer goods makers — convinced consumers that they needed to raise prices. (They didn't really.)
But businesses both large and small had a convincing story to tell: They really didn’t want to raise prices, but there was "this terrible war or the pandemic or labor shortages or whatever," Donovan tells Axios. "That's what's basically been going on."
With so much in flux, people were more accepting of higher costs for everything, and more convinced companies HAD to raise prices.
In earnings conference calls last year especially, executives spoke in corporate lingo about consumers accepting such price increases....Donovan's work describes companies taking advantage of a window of opportunity to raise prices more than normal. Like kids in a candy shop.
In a Bloomberg op-ed last month, the business-friendly paper blames the consumers for being too "passive":
It’s time this generation of consumers push back harder against unnecessary price increases.
But how would consumers know after being told for two years that these price increases were necessary?
The more clear truth of the matter tends to get buried at the bottom of otherwise didactic business columns, such as this example from a conservative-leaning site:
While companies passed on to consumers the higher costs incurred by backups in the supply chain at the beginning of the pandemic, they were able to keep prices higher and increase profit margins as the pandemic wore on simply because consumers had been conditioned to pay more.
Why on earth! I wonder who was performing this conditioning? Who was consistently telling the public, even by the summer of 2022 when the pandemic had effectively receded, that inflation was invariably being caused by something other than the bad faith of these corporations? Indeed, for these conservative-friendly sites, who was constantly preaching to the public that the cause was in fact Joe Biden's covid relief and social investment policies? You give the headlines to Biden blame while burying the truth at the bottom of wonkish business articles. And, equally indeed, this type of media blaming Biden for inflation has hardly been isolated to conservative-friendly news sites.
Now here's the new conspiracy theory that I have: I don't think all of these reporters are that stupid. Are you telling me that not one of these business reporters or economic analysts ever bothered to listen to any of the publicly-available corporate earnings conference calls? But instead asking us, actually congratulating us for "swallowing" these prices which were leading to record setting quarterly profits. I do not think that this is a case of a good faith misunderstanding or miscalculation by those in the corporate press who just managed to completely miss the conspicuous fact of expanding profit margins while also seemingly eager to pump up some drama against the president. Corporations are corporations. They knew that their taxes were on the line, just as they knew that wages were strong and labor unions were ascendent. Why would they want to correct the record while the Fed's higher interest rates were putting workers and penshioners back in their grateful place? Remember Liz Truss? What do you think is going on in America? At a time when Republicans want to slash public funding by 30% (excepting the military, natch) while more quietly making the Trump tax cuts permanent? Our media isn't red or blue, it's cold cold green.
That Hill article finally mimics the earlier Bloomberg one, blaming the consumers for getting suckered:
Some commentators have noted the way to combat profit-led inflation is to encourage consumers to revolt in the form of making fewer purchases, which could prompt companies to lower their margins in order to clear inventories and compete for sales.
Yeah, people. Why are you spending all of that excess cash that you don't have? (They call them "essential items" for a reason.) Do you really need all of those eggs? 'Cause god forbid if you actually expect the press or government regulators to do anything about this ass-chafing fleecing we're going through right now. Tell you what. How about you go protest outside these businesses in this hot-ass summer (that we caused)? I'll have bottles of water waiting for you, 8 bucks a pop. Or $10 for PFAS-free. (Haha. We can't get the PFAS out of the water anyway...)
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Posted by Rampop II 5/23/2023 6:29 pm | #120 |
Yeah, people. Why are you spending all of that excess cash that you don't have? Do you really need all of those eggs? 'Cause god forbid if you actually expect the press or government regulators to do anything about this ass-chafing fleecing we're going through right now. Tell you what. How about you go protest outside these businesses in this hot-ass summer (that we caused)? I'll have bottles of water waiting for you, 8 bucks a pop.
Exactly. When it comes to food and gas, people have little choice. We're being forced to "accept" an untenable situation and straining under the weight of it, hoodwinked by the deception that the crisis is unavoidable, and placated by false assurances that the strain is only temporary (that that covid backlash and supply–chain problems will level off, that the bird flu outbreak will be brought under control, that maybe they'll start vaccinating the damn birds, and that Russia's invasion of Ukraine will one way or another come to a close, or that the world will at least find another source wheat). The assumption that we're willing or even able to accept this as the new norm is a gross miscalculation.
