|
Jerry Manderbilt posted:Related to my MLKJ quote masterpost in the OP, does anyone else have some pictures of clips of white pundits or political cartoons hostile to MLKJ when he was still alive? I know that the King Center archive has an entire section that's basically "hate mail written about MLK": http://www.thekingcenter.org/archive/theme/12696 I know they also have news articles but I'm not sure if they have a category solely about them.
|
#
?
Dec 26, 2015 01:31
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 06:35 |
|
|
Got a guy who believes that conservatives and conservative media's just as informational, rational and grounded as any other type of media and that disagreement on this point is pure bias. Fortunately, I think he's amenable to information to the contrary but I'm drawing a blank on any good 'go to' articles. Any recommended reading on the horribleness of right-wing media?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 01:10
|
|
|
Accretionist posted:Got a guy who believes that conservatives and conservative media's just as informational, rational and grounded as any other type of media and that disagreement on this point is pure bias. Fortunately, I think he's amenable to information to the contrary but I'm drawing a blank on any good 'go to' articles. Any recommended reading on the horribleness of right-wing media? Mediamatters?
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 04:05
|
|
|
Pretty sure that's entirely contingent on how you define conservative and leftist and mainstream media. By a bunch of sensible definitions, left-wing and/or mainstream media will be approximately as bad as conservative media. Noam Chomsky for example would probably say CNN (as an example for the center) differs from Fox by so little in the degree of objectivity that it doesn't matter.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 15:35
|
|
|
I think you might make some progress by distinguishing between news and editorial/commentary. What would you think of someone who claimed to be a big Football fan but they never watched any games, only ESPN shows like "Around the Horn"? They'd certainly pick up on important stuff, but they'd really be missing out on important stuff. Instead of looking at a play and learning to figure out if it was a good play or not, they'd be totally dependent on Woody Paige to tell them what they should think. So, next time you're watching the news, try to think about what's going on and what kinds of interpretation is being fed to you. It's very hard to get raw news, VICE has done some live feeds on the ground that were amazing, you could see what it was like for protestors in the thick of it, meanwhile every other media group was behind police lines sipping cocoa. Here's an important thing to look for: What is the emotional state of the reporter? Is this person agitated and yelling, or are they snarky and maybe a bit condescending? Those are big clues that you're listening to editorial. When there's panelists, try to keep track of how long any one person talks at length, and how deep into the subject they go. If the show jumps from person to person, each one only talking for 10 seconds, you might be getting such a shallow interpretation that it's basically worthless. They're just canned opinions for you to regurgitate. I'm sure there are better resources for this kind of critical thinking, but it's a skill, you have to practice it.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 16:55
|
|
|
Accretionist posted:Got a guy who believes that conservatives and conservative media's just as informational, rational and grounded as any other type of media and that disagreement on this point is pure bias. He's right, but only by virtue of all other media also peddling a viewpoint. If you depend on one source for your news (or one in-group, even), you're going to be misinformed.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 17:32
|
|
|
I mean if you narrowly define the categories as, say, "Fox News" vs "MSNBC" you can probably make a case that Fox is a lot worse about outright making poo poo up and then never acknowledging it when they're shown to be wrong, but beyond that yeah they're both biased in different ways and shouldn't be the sole source of news you get.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 19:04
|
|
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:I mean if you narrowly define the categories as, say, "Fox News" vs "MSNBC" you can probably make a case that Fox is a lot worse about outright making poo poo up and then never acknowledging it when they're shown to be wrong, but beyond that yeah they're both biased in different ways and shouldn't be the sole source of news you get. On the other hand, the guy Accretionist is talking about probably isn't asking how to best get an accurate picture of the world, but trying to prove some point about how leftists are stupid and irrational.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 19:44
|
|
|
Yeah, if I started talking about passive vs active voice and NPR's centrist pro-establishment slant it would just go over his head. He's specifically concerned about conservatives having a worse reputation than liberals.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 19:55
|
|
|
Business Insider, which usually skews right whenever i've seen them: http://www.businessinsider.com/fox-news-charts-tricks-data-2012-11 And here's the washington post, which also skews right every time I've read it, pointing out that Fox is significantly more wrong in general than MSNBC: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/erik-wemple/wp/2014/07/08/punditfact-scorecards-show-false-statements-on-fox-news-nbcmsnbc/ And Fox is goddamn stellar compared to other heavily conservative media like Breitbart or loving Info Wars.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 20:03
|
|
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:And here's the washington post, which also skews right every time I've read it, pointing out that Fox is significantly more wrong in general than MSNBC:
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 20:13
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:So by this one, whenever you want to learn the truth about something, flipping a coin is about as useful as watching the news. Naw, the coin only ever tells you the same two stories 
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 20:15
|
|
|
Yeah, a better analogy is: if you want to figure out the truth, you'll do about as good flipping a coin and deciding what heads stands for and what tails stands for once you've picked it up again, because when you watch the news, you know what specific lies you're gonna get depending on what kind of news you choose.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 20:58
|
|
|
Dr. Arbitrary posted:I think you might make some progress by distinguishing between news and editorial/commentary. Right, good information discrimination is difficult but incredibly important. The thing I don't know is how you 'teach' it. Cingulate posted:Yeah, I think very generally, not relying, especially not blindly relying, on mainstream news of either orientation is probably the proper way to go about it. If I was going to suggest one thing it absolutely would be to rely on 'mainstream media'. Non mainstream media is worse.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 21:33
|
|
|
asdf32 posted:If I was going to suggest one thing it absolutely would be to rely on 'mainstream media'. Non mainstream media is worse.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 22:10
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:The worst non-mainstream media is worse than the worst mainstream media, but the best non-mainstream media is better than the best mainstream media. It is? What sources specifically do you have in mind? Good reporting takes some actual resources and mainstream outlets do invest in good peices. Im thinking, for example, NY Times, NPR, the Atlantic.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 22:42
|
|
|
asdf32 posted:It is? What sources specifically do you have in mind? But I'm not gonna say the Times or NPR or the Atlantic are worse than Breitbart. Sure, a good newspaper is a good all-around news source than any blog. But the stuff hundreds of millions of people in the US and elsewhere look at - CNN and Fox and stuff on that order of magnitude - that's, well, not good, and especially if you use them to become informed about a specific topic - such as election forecasts - easily surpassed by smaller, specialised outfits, like 538.
|
|
#
?
Jan 2, 2016 22:55
|
|
|
So I have this friend who lives in the Netherlands and has never held a job nor does he plan to. He gets some kind of housing stipend and some kind of monthly payments to life off of from the state, and uses this pretty much entirely to buy weed and $150 gaming joysticks (all he does with his life is fighting game competitions, which he's good at, but not career good at). I guess my question is how do I react to this? I certainly think people on welfare shouldn't be forced to only buy necessities, or have any restrictions placed on their money at all really, but i've always had the idea that people in general want to work or achieve if they can and welfare is more about providing a stable base to launch off of rather than to fester in forever. Are there studies on this, showing that the vast majority of people don't act like this like i imagine? Should I even care at all that he acts like this, i mean with productivity skyrocketing we'll quickly find ourselves with enough surplus so not everyone has to work, or work as hard, so this should become more common and acceptable, right? I've spent a lot of time convincing other people that the Welfare Queen stereotype isn't really valid and now I have a real Welfare Queen right in front of me 
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2016 18:31
|
|
|
From the studies where a Mincome was provided to everyone regardless of their work status or how 'deserving' they were, people like that do exist, but they make a very low percentage of the population outside of new mothers and teenagers, both of which are temporary things. Also the benefits of the project in terms of reduced strain on health and welfare services far more than made up for those small proportion of people. I figure it's worth supporting a handful of people like that if it means there's less cracks for people to fall through and starve. And there's often some underlying health issue in those cases too, so forcing them into work for their own good would just cause increased healthcare expenditure.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2016 18:38
|
|
|
You just have to realise that Welfare Queens, much like most things showing up in fearmongering et al, do exist, yet always are far less omnipresent than they are said to be. As to how to react - well, it is your friend after all, so that is completely up to you. If I were in this situation and wouldn't consider person to be worthless (I know two similar guys, but one is drug junkie and other one beats his mother to get money for cigarettes and underage dates), I would, if they fancy discussions of the sort, occasionally talk through things like political climate and non-zero possibility of future welfare cuts. It is the modern age, after all, so it may as well work and you know, one day they may have some certification or two so that when the worst happens, they are not a fish cast out on the funemployement shores.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2016 18:42
|
|
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:So I have this friend who lives in the Netherlands and has never held a job nor does he plan to. He gets some kind of housing stipend and some kind of monthly payments to life off of from the state, and uses this pretty much entirely to buy weed and $150 gaming joysticks (all he does with his life is fighting game competitions, which he's good at, but not career good at). So to anybody earnestly decrying "welfare queens", ask them what they see as the optimal solution. Some will probably defend fascist slave state if you push it, and then you'll have learned something new.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2016 18:55
|
|
|
From a pragmatic standpoint, it's much cheaper to let a few "welfare queens" mooch than it is to setup a rigorous system that excludes them but doesn't exclude non moochers as well.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2016 19:05
|
|
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:So I have this friend who lives in the Netherlands and has never held a job nor does he plan to. He gets some kind of housing stipend and some kind of monthly payments to life off of from the state, and uses this pretty much entirely to buy weed and $150 gaming joysticks (all he does with his life is fighting game competitions, which he's good at, but not career good at). The percentage of people that live that way on full, conditionless mincome are actually pretty rare, all told. The other thing is you talk like he's doing nothing. OK so he doesn't have a job but he's another warm body at those competitions and probably goes to a lot of them, right? So for people who don't have time to go to all of them he's being there to be competed with. He's inadvertently doing something useful by always being around for people who want to play fighting games against somebody. Yeah it'd probably be better if he actually had a job but the other side of it is like...who cares? Assistance programs are always a really small sliver of an overall government budget and people that abuse them are a really small sliver of that. I'd rather that guy leech off the system than a bunch of kids go hungry.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2016 19:11
|
|
|
Guavanaut posted:From the studies where a Mincome was provided to everyone regardless of their work status or how 'deserving' they were, people like that do exist, but they make a very low percentage of the population outside of new mothers and teenagers, both of which are temporary things. Well that makes me feel better at least  Cingulate posted:Well how could we (e.g., the public) react? Throw him in jail? Stop paying for his food to the extent that he'll starve? Medicate him so he becomes docile? Obviously it'd be nicer if he went to cure cancer instead, but the question is, in what kind of society do you want to live - one where the occassional guy decides work sucks so much he'd rather not do i and manages to live a halfway decent life still, or a fascist slave state? My point is, that's may sound contrived, but it's basically the only alternatives. I don't really agree that there's only two options but I do think those tend to be the only actual options anyone really considers, so point taken. kalstrams posted:You just have to realise that Welfare Queens, much like most things showing up in fearmongering et al, do exist, yet always are far less omnipresent than they are said to be. As to how to react - well, it is your friend after all, so that is completely up to you. If I were in this situation and wouldn't consider person to be worthless (I know two similar guys, but one is drug junkie and other one beats his mother to get money for cigarettes and underage dates), I would, if they fancy discussions of the sort, occasionally talk through things like political climate and non-zero possibility of future welfare cuts. It is the modern age, after all, so it may as well work and you know, one day they may have some certification or two so that when the worst happens, they are not a fish cast out on the funemployement shores. I've known this guy for a long time and he really has no big problems, he grew up in a good family, graduated highschool (or whatever you guys call it in Europe) and went to a technical school for a little while. He's got no mental issues that I know of or even think he has, he's a perfectly normal healthy adult that just would rather smoke and play video games 24/7 than do anything else. FISHMANPET posted:From a pragmatic standpoint, it's much cheaper to let a few "welfare queens" mooch than it is to setup a rigorous system that excludes them but doesn't exclude non moochers as well. Yeah okay, that's kinda been my opinion too for a while but I wasn't really clear on the actual real life ratios of "moochers" to "actually needs it" until now.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2016 19:17
|
|
|
I've got a friend that has worked a series of crappy jobs with not much success. The world would be a better place if he could earn a subsistence wage and hang out at a game store and DM Dungeons and Dragons games all day.
|
|
#
?
Jan 4, 2016 19:43
|
|
|
I don't get Marx's concept of socially necessary labour time at all. Can someone explain it in terms a dur-dur stupidhead would understand?
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 17:23
|
|
|
Parallel Paraplegic posted:So I have this friend who lives in the Netherlands and has never held a job nor does he plan to. He gets some kind of housing stipend and some kind of monthly payments to life off of from the state, and uses this pretty much entirely to buy weed and $150 gaming joysticks (all he does with his life is fighting game competitions, which he's good at, but not career good at). you should react to this by remembering that life is long as loving gently caress and looking at a person at any particular point tells you less than nothing, and I don't need to be a statistician to tell your friend is a young man from that description. i guess it's theoretically possible for people to be unproductive their entire lives, but since that's just not how behavior works, they would have to be extremely weird special cases for that to be a long-term stable dynamic without some external factor or internal dysfunction maintaining it. that's why we invented violence and oppression, after all, otherwise people would just go out and do stuff autonomously. and we can't have that. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 18:15
|
|
|
vegetables posted:I don't get Marx's concept of socially necessary labour time at all. Can someone explain it in terms a dur-dur stupidhead would understand? You, and a bunch of other people, are stuck on a deserted island somewhere. You get elected chief, and are in charge of planning how to allocate people's work. The first thing you realize is that you have to make tradeoffs. And it makes sense to talk about them in terms of time, rather than money. Do you spend an extra-person day on 'Fish' or 'Shelter'? Next, you'd realize that, in the long term, you've got to make your own tools. And these tools wear out. So, you should 'price' projects in terms of the time they take + the time it takes to build the tools. So, getting a pit dug might cost "2 person-days (digging)" + "1 person-day (making shovels)" for a total of 3 person-days. The term 'Socially Necessary' comes in when someone notices that one pit took 3 person-days (because people had the foresight to build shovels), and another took 6 person-days (because people dug with their bare hands). Should you give the pits the same "value"? The idea is that "Socially Necessary Labor" = The amount of labor, on average, that you need to spend to get a thing, given that you're using the most efficient technology available.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 18:29
|
|
|
falcon2424 posted:You, and a bunch of other people, are stuck on a deserted island somewhere. You get elected chief, and are in charge of planning how to allocate people's work. This is a good explanation; thanks. The only thing I'm still not sure about is if it includes labour that turns out to be useless to society.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 19:06
|
|
|
DP.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 19:07
|
|
|
vegetables posted:This is a good explanation; thanks. The only thing I'm still not sure about is if it includes labour that turns out to be useless to society. You're the Island Chief: Do you build a giant coconut statue of yourself? On one hand, you can "price" the statue. It would take 10-person-days to build, including tool-replacement. On the other hand, you're assumed to be benevolent. So you're not actually going to commission the project. In the long term the answer is something like, "Yes: that's what the socially-necessary labor would be, if we built those statues. But we're not going to. So there shouldn't be any statues around to soak up value." To generalize that a bit, you'd realize that there's obviously a second 'kind' of value that makes you decide that "10-person-days of Food" is better than "10-person-days of Giant Coconut Statue". Since you're benevolent, you'd give an order like, "Work on whatever produces the most goodness-value per unit of time-value." People will leave over-staffed projects to work on ones that are better for society. The result is that, in equilibrium, the "Goodness-Value / Hour" should be about the same across all of the projects that actually get worked on.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 19:28
|
|
|
wait, that doesn't seem very consistent with anything we know about people's abilities to accurately estimate things. how does this account for heuristic bias? wouldn't we actually expect people to systematically ham up the estimates all the time just like they would in hypothetical free markets?
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 19:36
|
|
|
Zodium posted:wait, that doesn't seem very consistent with anything we know about people's abilities to accurately estimate things. how does this account for heuristic bias? wouldn't we actually expect people to systematically ham up the estimates all the time just like they would in hypothetical free markets? No, it isn't very consistent with those things. In particular, it won't deal well with private information or coordination costs. My best defense of the idea is that there are some situations where these biases matter less. Scale helps. One person fishing for an hour might catch something. Or they might not. You can't know. And you certainly can't assume the person was slacking just because they came in with 0 fish. But if you have data from 1,000 people fishing over a few years, then you can make a much better guess about average results. (Though, scale has its own challenges. Suppose the fishermen crowd each other. The first fish are easy to get. Then people have to start working more. You quickly end up in a world where "extra fish per extra person" is very, very different from the average fish per person) A stable equilibrium helps, too. Otherwise you get a lot of complexity as "socially necessary" changes with the available technology and infrastructure. And, it's useful if you have a reason why people feel solidarity with each other. Especially if the reason can push back against the temptation for people to think that their industry is particularly harder than another person's industry.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 20:12
|
|
|
I was thinking about our video game welfare queen. Would it be different if he spent his time painting or writing books, or maybe camping out in the woods for an astronomy hobby? Would it matter if he was terrible at these hobbies and generated art that only a very small number of people enjoyed? I think we'd have a problem if we had massive starvation and not enough people growing food, but why not let people pursue hobbies that don't add much value?
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 22:16
|
|
|
Parallel Paraplegic, I'd really like to know what the people you're discussing with would come up with if you force them to actually follow through with whatever they're on.
|
|
#
?
Jan 5, 2016 22:21
|
|
|
Cingulate posted:Parallel Paraplegic, I'd really like to know what the people you're discussing with would come up with if you force them to actually follow through with whatever they're on. Okay I think I mixed you guys up a bit. I'm not actively discussing this with anyone, I was trying to make up my own mind about how I feel about him. When I was talking about spending "lot of time convincing other people" I meant in the past, not right now. Sorry if it seemed that way, I guess this thread is usually more about active debates and that wasn't immediately obvious from my post  Dr. Arbitrary posted:I was thinking about our video game welfare queen. Well that kinda gets into whether or not you value a hobby for being "constructive" - i've generally considered video games as being basically just consumption, whereas something like writing or making art is at least making something. I admit this is a completely subjective opinion and I can't even really fully articulate or justify why one is better than the other myself, I just have a gut feeling that playing video games or watching TV is an inherently worse use of time than doing something constructive like making art, even if it's bad art, but it's entirely possible that this is just an artifact of me existing in a society that values work. I guess as long as only a small minority of people are using welfare to pursue their dream of playing video games forever I don't actually care, for reasons we've already been over.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2016 00:53
|
|
|
I would say think about what "work" means to you the value you place on "work" and why. I've been kind of coming to terms with the idea that really we don't need to work nearly as hard as we do as a culture (at least in the well off western world) and a lot of that comes from mentally redefining work and what it's value is.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2016 01:00
|
|
|
The only permanent layabouts I know are mentally ill (severely depressed alcoholic) or rich enough for the insane panoply of diversions it requires to be sustainable. For average people, mass sponging would require mass asceticism and that's implausible.
Accretionist fucked around with this message at 14:11 on Jan 6, 2016 |
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2016 14:08
|
|
|
Asceticism? I heard some of them have refrigerators now! But yeah, that ties in to the results of the Mincome study, those who chose to work less were either saving the health services money by not being forced into work that would possibly harm their mental health or new mothers who wanted to take additional time with their kids, which is still useful work. And teenagers, but I don't recall if it corrected for them choosing to study and having more time for that.
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2016 14:22
|
|
|
|
| # ? May 10, 2024 06:35 |
|
|
FISHMANPET posted:I would say think about what "work" means to you the value you place on "work" and why. I've been kind of coming to terms with the idea that really we don't need to work nearly as hard as we do as a culture (at least in the well off western world) and a lot of that comes from mentally redefining work and what it's value is. Buckminster Fuller posted:We should do away with the absolutely specious notion that everybody has to earn a living. It is a fact today that one in ten thousand of us can make a technological breakthrough capable of supporting all the rest. The youth of today are absolutely right in recognizing this nonsense of earning a living. We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery because, according to Malthusian Darwinian theory he must justify his right to exist. So we have inspectors of inspectors and people making instruments for inspectors to inspect inspectors. The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living. Personally, I'm going to come down on the contrarian side and say that as a culture we really should be working harder than we are. There are millions of Americans not working at full capacity, billions of man-hours going idle, that could be taking us back to the Moon. The problem with that, and the reason I'm not too loud about it, is that at present "work" is defined and justified by what's profitable for shareholders, rather than what society needs. Until we can fix that, this country isn't going to work as hard as it should, and shouldn't be asked to work that hard. 
|
|
#
?
Jan 6, 2016 18:49
|
|
