April14_2025

Bad Brand of News

I have seen social media users on Mastodon, Bluesky, Reddit, Twitter all procliam:

1. New York Times created Donald Trump, so a bad brand of news.
2. Washington Post owned by Jeff Bezos who supports Trump, so bad brand of news.

By this extremely simplistic logic:

1. Which source is free of bias, mistakes, errors? I do not get answers to this.
2. The very social media brand that the person is complaining I provide examples of falsehoods, manipulation - yet they do not coondemn that social media platform brand.

This is the avoidince of the complexity of information sytems.

What is required is every single word and sentence is fact-checked. Like Wikipedia, every single mistake edited with history of who does the edits, etc. Every single sentence and claim made having a citation, ideally multiple.

The very idea of taking an entire book or even a 4 page news article and discarding it entirely for one singe listake is the very behavior of MAGA and Donald Trump. It is a serious crisis of forest for the trees.

At no poin in human history has a perfect book been written. In reality, this topic is a masive crisis, because people are told that the Holy Bible, Holy Quran, Holy Torah of the Levant / Middle East are a Perfect Error-Free Mistake-Free Book. Which is enitrely untrue, and yet, people try to behave this perfect error-free mistake-free book logic applies to The Atlantic magazine or Washington Post or Newsweek stories!

Deeper

1. WHO has validated the story?
2. Has the story made discussions about trends or future predictions that months or years later have proven to be correct?

Rick Roderick 1993

All this behavior is rather well described in 1993 by Rick Roderick of Duke University in his lectures "Self Under Siege". The shedding of complexity, calling things bullshit because topics and systems are too complex.

 

Brain damged writing

As with all my writing these years: Incomplete, unfinished, mistakes, errors, not edited.