@mybarkingdogs yes. i think we should be very cautious about our own ability to know the truth, and we’ll be better prepared to act if we are cautious in what we accept as facts established than if we embrace exaggerations (intentional or not) and then have to reckon with our own credulity and with others’ accusations of fabrication or at best a very tendentious epistemology.
@GreenFire I do believe that Hamas terrorists viciously attacked specifically civilians too. I’m pretty sure of it, as sure as someone following events via distant media can be.
But there’s no evidence they beheaded babies. Journalistic orgs that spread that extraordinary claim w/o clear evidence have done harm to the likelihood of consensus Hamas viciously attacked specifically civilians. Which they absolutely did. But disinformation agents will say, “yeah, just like they beheaded babies.”
@GreenFire The quote that you give is probably the source of the story. But since the Israeli government is unwilling to confirm it, I think we should treat this person’s claim pretty skeptically. Journalists should have asked for evidence, or gotten multiple on-the-record confirmations, before repeating the story.
@GreenFire no national security experts say they have any evidence of such a thing. the US president has walked it back, says he hasn’t seen the photos he initially suggested he’d seen. the Israeli government has walked it back. what credible evidence remains for the story? https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/12/middleeast/israel-hamas-beheading-claims-intl/index.html
the beheading babies story is a microcosm of how the press sets the stage for misinformation to prevail.
hamas comitted terrible atrocities against children. intentional, close-quarters murder of children or civilians by any means is enough.
but they likely did not behead infants. press and even the president were eager to repeat what was basically salacious gossip, precisely because it dramatized an essential truth. but, though perhaps “inspired by a true story”, it was probably a lie. 1/
now, it will be easy for disinformation actors to paint the whole event with the same brush. there was no atrocity, all of that was lies and exaggeration by the Western lapdog press. they told you babies were beheaded, why should you believe them about anything?
reporters who perceive themselves as crusading for truth and justice, eager to tell the world of the horrors, instead make it more likely that the horrors will dissipate into a kind of he said, she said. 2/
the effect of this is catastrophic on our ability to reach consensus and act effectively. this is precisely how “russiagate” became the “russia hoax”, for example. /fin
before you blame the “deep state” for war-mongering bad intelligence, remember that 9/11, the Iraq War run-up, and now Israel’s catastrophe have been characterized by the elected executive ignoring the professional intelligence bureaucracy or tendentiously freelancing their own intelligence. cf #ElenaGrossfeld https://foreignpolicy.com/2023/10/11/israel-intelligence-gaza-hamas-war-1973/
Text: Grave warnings by Netanyahu's defense chief and the heads of Mossad and Shin Bet (Israel's domestic security service) on the impact of widespread conflict within Israeli society on military preparedness not only went unheeded but were used by the representatives of right-wing parties as further proof of the IDF and the intelligence community's bias and supposed left-wing prejudices. Rumors of Mossad-instigated protests, right-wing coalition partners blaming the military's soft approach to reservists threats to stop volunteering, and the persistent resistance of the Shin Bet to the policies proposed by the settler extremist turned national security minister showed the deep rift between politicians and some of the most respected Israeli institutions.
[New Post] Round up, wind up https://www.interfluidity.com/v2/9881.html
"The problem with woke capitalism is that it's no substitute for a union." @pluralistic https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/11/equal-opportunity-class-war/
If somebody believes a lie, and then tells it, are they lying?
@paninid @billseitz I guess it's right out of that same passage of Keynes. ("Thus the remedy for the boom is not a higher rate of interest but a lower rate of interest! For that may enable the so-called boom to last.")
But in my own view, interest rate policy is a bad lever to modulate demand, we'd be better off keeping short rates between 5% ± 2% and use other tools when that degree of "fine-tuning" isn't enough.
@paninid @billseitz "The right remedy for the trade cycle is not to be found in abolishing booms and thus keeping us permanently in a semi-slump; but in abolishing slumps and thus keeping us permanently in a quasi-boom." —J.M. Keynes
Here's to more resilient bubbles!
@karchie I agree 100%. The let's-ban-woke crowd is not there to "protect children" but to exercise power in hopes of imposing terrible policies and an unjust hierarchy on us all, and we should plainly say that. 1/
@karchie It's not "book banning" per se we're objecting to. We're kind of hijacking a virtuous aura from older civil rights battles by framing it that way, but we're not making our truest or strongest case, and we're leaving ourselves open to fascists' most effective persuasive tool, the claim that liberals are the real fascists because we impose a hierarchy based on who actually gets to enjoy putatively universal liberal rights, and from whom they are somehow withdrawn. /fin
@admitsWrongIfProven Agreed that age-appropriate may be a reasonable basis for library curation choices. But then much of the "book banning" debate in the US is just disagreement about whether LGBTQ+ themes are age appropriate. I think they are appropriate for any age, but others disagree.
You hint that "nonviolent ideas" might be a criterion. If so, that clearly distinguishes the Turner Diaries (which is agitprop for violent revolutionary racism) and could justify its suppression. 1/
@admitsWrongIfProven But that could justify lots of eg Marx and Marxist works as well. As well as, say, writings by founders of the American republic, who after all advocated violent revolution under the circumstances in which they lived. /fin
@LouisIngenthron Ha! Maybe less notable than I think!
Sometime in the 1990s I actually read the Turner Diaries, as an old-school physical book. I remember getting challenged in a cafe in Cambridge MA, angrily asked "What are you reading?" I'm like, hey, I'm a rootless cosmopolitan Jew but some motherfucker just blew up the Murrah building in Oklahoma City and I want to understand WTF they are on about.
@LouisIngenthron @karchie Yes. There were a lot of those that were unpleasant. But notability is usually enough to keep them (dangerously for our sanity!) in the library, where we migt accidentally begin them even if we are not assigned them...
@karchie To be clear, I'm not arguing that "Turner Diaries" need to be in every high-school library! I'm mostly suggesting we acknowledge that we nearly all are okay with content-based decisions about accessibility in libraries, and that accusing those we disagree with of "banning" while pretending we would never do any such thing is mistaken and ultimately unhelpful. (I also agree almost nothing shld be state-banned. Amazon does carry Mein Kampf, I guess bc historical or scholarly importance.)
@LouisIngenthron Again, we're not disagreeing in principle. We both agree that it's legit for libraries to make choices on the basis of some nonideological mix of popularity, notability, value-as-a-reference, etc.
I'd put to you, though, that the fact that I could bring up the Turner Diaries and pretty much all of my interlocutors know what I am talking about suggests that it meets a notability threshold that, absent other concerns, would be sufficient for many libraries to carry it.
@LouisIngenthron @karchie I guess the question I posed was trying specifically to acknowledge that. I agree there's no issue if we just think no one is interested in Turner Diaries. A library can't carry everything. But I don't think that's actually why Turner Diaries aren't in government libraries. I think there'd be more interest in it than in lots of books libraries routinely carry, and that it's obviously a notable work (even if it is a bad novel in more than an ethical sense).
@LouisIngenthron I think that's principled enough, as long as you acknowledge — which you do — that the *status quo* then is government suppression of Turner Diaries that should be remedied by its inclusion in age-appropriate, well-contextualized government provided sources of books. (Obviously that is not the case right now, so you are arguing for more affirmative government action to undo its current suppression of bad speech.)
@admitsWrongIfProven I certainly agree that forcing anyone to do menial work without pay is fascist or some epithet just as bad or worse. Enslavement is never good policy, in an ethical (or any other) sense.
But pay (and work conditions) are continuous, so it takes judgment to distinguish between "wage slavery" (what if we pay them 1¢ per hour?) and something maybe reasonable. 1/
@admitsWrongIfProven I don't think having some kind of public works corps ppl could volunteer for as part of a path to legal immigration is necessarily fascist or a bad idea. (To be less coy, I think it could be a very good idea.) But the ethical quality of a proposal like that depends on the actual quality of the conditions ppl would volunteer into: are the pay + conditions sufficiently decent that we can understand this as people reasonable "paying dues" rather than horrifyingly enslaved? /fin