Comment by feralimal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by feralimal | Hacker News Reader

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> Hah... so, did you verify this stuff about MSM being a force to mislead?

Its obvious. If you look at what is presented, you are given lots of claims, but very few facts. Its just a load of evidence-free noise. What's to evaluate?!

Seriously, look a little deeper at almost any article. There is no actual information there. The question you should ask - critically - is how do I know this to be true? And if you don't know it to be true, why do you believe it to be true anyway?

UPDATE/EDIT

And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.

Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?

I also get the "you're posting too fast" messages...

Sarcasm follows: But oooh yeah, it's a giant conspiracy, everyone's out to suppress your views!

If your views are aligned with what the echo chamber agrees with, you will be able to reply. If you do not get the echo chamber's approval, you are downvoted and cannot reply.

What's the conspiracy?! Its a fact.

But yes - it really does mean that my views are suppressed. I cannot reply to others as I would like.

Hmm, how do you differentiate between claims and facts? What are facts other than just things where you can verify? Where you can think "Ok, I agree that this is true". Like 2 + 2 = 4. We probably can both verify this, so that's a fact. How about e = mc2 ? Well, it's stood the test of time and many physics professors saying what it means, so to me this is also a fact. Same with the fact that the earth is spherical; but if you talk to a flat-earther, they'll start saying all sorts of nonsense (at least to me) because they don't believe the hundreds of years of research, and "want to see it for themselves", and what they "see" is that the earth is flat (because they have confirmation bias)

Yesterday MSM reported live as Trump supporters attacked the Capitol. I see that as factual information, there were thousands at a Trump rally nearby, presumably because they wanted to hear their leader talk; and nobody's said these people dispersed and a bunch of others came from the bushes...

The media also said "x thousand more people died due to Covid-19 yesterday", here I do have implicit trust that the reporting is correct, then again they're just reporting numbers from government agencies. TBH I'm not that invested in this that I need to proof whether the number is correct or not, but that's the thing isn't it; a Covid-denier wants to think Covid is a lie, and therefore the number of deaths is a lie, because there's something in it for them, maybe it's because their business is currently shut down and their bank account is being drained and they're going to lose their house and go hungry soon..

I've been reading a bit of Noam Chomsky this afternoon, not a person I'd agree with politically but many of his observations ring true regardless.

"The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information."

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