Comment by xer0x
8 hours ago
Odd, I saw this bubble up on social media this week as a tinfoil hat curiosity. I don't know what's real anymore.
8 hours ago
Odd, I saw this bubble up on social media this week as a tinfoil hat curiosity. I don't know what's real anymore.
There's good news and bad news. Unfortunately they're the same news. Given the rapid dissolution of any sort of publicly verifiable 'news' outlet, and the abject commercialization of media, plus the doublespeak of politicians and businesses, the PR industry, self-censorship in response to cancel-culture and other divisive popular behavioral trends, and the replication crisis in science - it's not just you. It's everyone.
>Given the rapid dissolution of any sort of publicly verifiable 'news' outlet
When was the news ever publicly verifiable? If Walter Kronkiue said that the North Vietnamese shot at our naval vessels twice on two different days you had no way of even accessing alternative viewpoints and that the 2nd day was questionable, you just had to trust him.
Today with all the contrarians and competing alternate sources it's arguably better because if there's some smoking gun that something is BS it almost certainly will get talked about. It might be bullshit on both sides but at least it's there to look at if you want.
And how would you be able to publicly verify the competing alternate sources and the smoking gun? It's no different than the situation with old media, except there's more noise and disinformation, and everything is easier to fake.
Unless you personally are physically there with whatever necessary field expertise exists to run experiments or interrogate witnesses, you wind up having to trust somebody either way.
I mean the fact that the effect of all of this "alternative" media has been the complete dissolution of any kind of objective reality in favor of conspiracy theories and pseudoscience, rather than holding power to account, should demonstrate that it isn't better.
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