Market pressures can have a corrupting influence on many human endeavors, but to say "capitalism is ruining science" is incredibly reductive.
Capitalist countries, such as the US and western Europe, have had an outsized contribution to scientific endeavor, winning more than their share of Nobel prizes.
This is probably because investment in scientific research depends on a level of material prosperity that wasn't achieved in the USSR and communist China. Centrally planned economies tend to be so corrupt that researchers may have bigger issues to navigate than "publish or perish."
Jacobin takes a reasonable point (marketization can have a corrupting influence), dials up the stakes hyperbolically ("a new dark age!"), and pins it on its favorite bogeyman – "capitalism" – an amorphous, nefarious scourge (it's not clear what level of socialism we need to adopt to avert the new dark ages.)
Seems like a more reasonable take would just be to increase public funding to scientific research.
i think its a fair statement. just take a look at Pons & Fleischmanns' Cold Fusion... everyone thinks Cold Fusion is fake and/or conspiracy theory. the average person will laugh at you and say its fake science etc etc. IMO there was a major effort to silence and discredit Pons & Fleischmann. lots of wealthy people that would not want free clean abundant energy. but then today... NASA has some "new technology" called 'Lattice Confinement Fusion' that is "many years away" but is identical to the 'Cold Fusion' phenomenon ?!?!?!
I'm assuming it's a satire in response to the following line, which claims that banned Facebook pages are "the anti-bullshit universe":
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping.
I also like that the author explicitly refuses to provide any examples of these "anti-bullshit alternative media sources". Very common tactic amongst this ilk - complain about aggressive censorship and how George Orwell was specifically warning us about Twitter, all the while doing everything you can to avoid people seeing what was actually incurring bans.
I see it all the time in communities I run, people start trying to spin off alternative sites and talk about how <insert community here> impinges on free speech, and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.
It's insanely hard to get your content consistently removed from Twitter or Facebook, they do everything they can to avoid having to hire more moderators. It can happen, but then providing the examples will get everyone on your side immediately. Anyone who claims that they're being unfairly censored and yet refuses to show the content that actually got removed is trying to hide something.
> I see it all the time in communities I run, people start trying to spin off alternative sites and talk about how <insert community here> impinges on free speech, and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.
Are you suggesting that this person shares these behaviors?
It depends on what you mean by "these behaviours". I'm suggesting that the author is claiming some great injustice but conveniently trying to avoid letting anyone judge for themselves, and in my experience the people doing that usually aren't the world's most upstanding citizens.
I'm certainly not suggesting that the author is prone to outbursts of racial slurs - that was just an example of something I encounter regularly, and typically that type of person is far less literate - but I am extremely doubtful that the content they're complaining about removal of is as "anti-bullshit" as they'd like to claim.
Yes, generally speaking when I'm reading something I'd hope that my mind is doing some interpretation. It would be a rather difficult activity otherwise.
Agreed...the tricky part is realizing that it is doing interpretation, and realizing that what it ends up sending you is not reality, but an interpretation of reality, which is what you are discussing here (or all of us are discussing, in most any thread, or in life in general), as if it is reality itself. And then we're surprised when there are disagreements!!
The beauty of the mind though: even though it is doing this (manufacturing an interpreted version of reality in realtime), this tends to be an unpleasant idea to most people....but luckily, it also has the ability to interpret that away, allowing us to have our cake and eat it too (although this feature has some downsides of its own)!
> and then when you check what they were banned for there's a tirade of racial slurs directed at other members of the community.
This isn't always true. I don't want to derail the topic of this thread, but I certainly find I cannot talk seriously about the causes of disproportionate violence and rape from certain segments of the population without getting banned. Even though, looking deeply into the science, it doesn't support the mainstream viewpoint. If I can't trust the media and even websites like HN to be honest on something so basic, why should I trust them for anything else?
The author doesn't spell it out but he mentions that the idiot story about Hunter Biden's laptop was totally real and not Russia using Giuliani like a stooge and he implies that if you don't think covid was leaked from a lab you're an idiot.
So yea, I don't doubt that this guy thinks facebook is being mean by not letting him spread conspiracy bullshit on their platform.
> Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots to counterfeit presidential children’s laptops, viruses spawned in Wuhan market stalls, vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation, and patriotic tech conglomerates purging the commons of untruths.
Pretty standard alt-right nutjob. Substack is swarming with them.
That people so often stretch the truth in these matters (while complaining about people who are clearly writing provocatively, and thus have no shortage of genuine weak points) is interesting.
> Go read more bullshit. Immerse yourself in news of Russian plots [...]
Seems pretty clear-cut to me. The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
> One option, more popular each day, is to retreat to the anti-bullshit universe of alternative media sources. These are the podcasts, videos, Twitter threads, newsletters, and Facebook pages that regularly vanish from circulation for violating “community standards” and other ineffable codes of conduct, oft-times after failing “fact-checks” by the friendly people at Good Thoughtkeeping. Some of these rebel outfits are engrossing, some dull and churchy, many quite bizarre, and some, despite small staffs and tiny budgets, remarkably good and getting better. Some are Substack pages owned by writers who severed ties with established publications, drawing charges of being Russian agents, crypto-anarchists, or free-speech “absolutists.” I won’t bother to give a list. Readers who hunt and choose among such sources have their own lists, which they fiercely curate, loudly pushing their favorites on the world while accusing those they disagree with of being “controlled opposition” and running cons. It resembles the old punk-rock scene, but after it was discovered, not early on. Some of the upstart outlets earn serious money, garnering higher ratings and more page-views than the regime-approved brands Apple features on the News screen of my iPhone. (A screen I’ve disabled and don’t miss.) This wilderness of “contrarianism” – a designation easily earned these days; you merely have to mention Orwell or reside in Florida -- requires a measure of vigilance and effort from those who seek the truth there. As opposed to those who go there to relax, because they prefer alt-bullshit to mainstream bullshit. They can just kick their shoes off and wade in.
Does your mind detect any ~disrespect for alt-bullshit in here? For example, what meaning do you think is intended by "They can just kick their shoes off and wade in"?
> Seems pretty clear-cut to me.
That's the thing though: things are not always as they seem (I assume you've seen magic shows & optical illusions, or read to some degree on neuroscience, the numerous forms of psychological bias, etc)?
> The original comment did muddy the waters a bit by taking the inverse of that statement, but the author isn't being ambiguous on their beliefs in that regard.
Here are you referring to shared reality, or your/the author's/my individual highly customized model of reality? It's an important distinction, but one that is rarely made.
You think there are "vast secret legions of domestic terrorists flashing one another the OK sign in shadowy parking lots behind Bass Pro Shops experiencing “temporary” inflation"?
> alt-right
Yeah. I think the woke are done. No one actually likes or agrees with them, it's all just preference falsification.
I don't think anyone is under the delusion that domestic terrorists in the US are being secretive any more. That ship somewhat sails after an attempted insurrection.
let's not move the goalposts, we aren't arguing whether this was a "peaceful protest", we are arguing whether it was an insurrection aka a violent attempted takeover. If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong.
> One of the cops died of injuries sustained on site
> On April 19, 2021, the office of the chief medical examiner of the District of Columbia, Francisco J. Diaz, reported that the manner of death was natural and the cause of death was "acute brainstem and cerebellar infarcts due to acute basilar artery thrombosis" (two strokes at the base of the brain stem caused by an artery clot).
> If all it takes to overthrow the capital is the same level of violence as a civil riot, I'd say there's something wrong.
You are trying to use body count to measure the seriousness of an attempt to take over the government? It’s starting to look like the Taliban took over Kabul with less violence than what happened in the US Capitol.
I disagree. Do you identify any mis-information article? Otherwise I don't share your distain.
EDIT: this is an ad-hom. Please respond to the point - I also linked to WP as evidence that your claim is shaky. Refusing to do so because I linked to a journalist you dislike is pure tribalism.
I'm not going to read anything written by Greenwald, he's completely gone off the deep end. He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage about the Biden rape accusation unless he could provide some sort of proof - he concluded that being asked to show proof of what he was accusing someone of counted as "being censored".
Anyway, I'll say that just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace. Even if his death was completely unrelated, it doesn't make Jan 6 any less of an insurrection.
Again, this is an ad-hom. I didn't claim something was true because Greenwald believes it - I linked to an article addressing the topic, so you can address the content of that article, rather than its author.
> He quit his job at the intercept because they wouldn't let him publish conspiracy garbage ... unless he could provide some sort of proof
doesn't seem to match up with
> just because the guy died of a stroke afterward doesn't mean it wasn't caused indirectly by being blasted in the face by bear mace
where's the proof? various outlets already back-peddled on the claim he was hit in the head with a fire extinguisher, they have yet to prove anything with regards to bear mace (other than two men carried it).
More abstractly, most everyone bends over backwards to promote their subconsciously estimated personal ~~illusion~~ model of reality as being representative of shared reality.
The US intelligence agencies don't themselves have a clean record: COINTELPRO, PRISM, CIA spying on the Senate intelligence committee (then lying about it).
Each of those counts as a conspiracy, and it's of note that people like Edward Snowden have been hunted and chased out of the country (and people like Julian Assange similarly persecuted).
