temporal1 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 17, 2023 11:25 pm
Szdfan wrote: ↑Mon Apr 17, 2023 11:05 pm
temporal1 wrote: ↑Mon Apr 17, 2023 10:58 pm
Everything needs to be up for questioning.
You’re plenty cynical. No need to increase.
Things of course should be questioned, but being stuck in a permanent spot of "questioning everything" and never moving on to some sort of understanding of truth is lazy.
I am cynical. I question lots of things. I think truth is complicated and multifaceted. I also believe that truth is knowable.
i agree.
on the former page, do you believe the Michael Weiss tweet should not be questioned?
i pulled a random comment, there were several questioning, i pulled one example.
the MW tweet is extremely serious. don’t you believe it needs to be questioned? tweets like that easily ramp up violence.
Sure it can be questioned. It should be questioned. I would ask, though, what you mean by "questioning." Rejecting a story out of hand without trying to verify it isn't questioning -- it's just rejecting based on my preferences and bias. I don't think randomly pulling the Joe West tweet is questioning. I think it's an easy way to reject the story as "fake news" without doing the work.
(Incidentally I Google a lot of the claims made by others on MN to see if I can find something to verify them or to understand the context better).
Here's how I would question something like the allegations in MW's tweet (and I did take some of these steps).
1) Who is MW? What does he do? Does he work for a credible news organization, NGO or some other relevant company or organization? (Joe West listed no employer or affiliated organization in his Twitter bio).
2) I would then look at his other tweets. Do they also seem credible? What point of view or bias do I detect based on what he posts or reposts. (Joe West bragged about Russian military hardware and posted about "heroic" dead Wagner Group mercenaries).
3) Do the allegations in the tweet fit any kind bigger pattern? Are their other allegations of war crimes by the Russians against civilians? I'd say yes, there is a pattern. When the Russians withdrew from Bucha in the early days of the war, they left behind evidence of murder and torture of civilians. There's also been a steady stream of allegations of Russian war crimes in Russian held and formerly Russian held territory (i.e. Kherson).
4) I would then see if the the allegations get picked up by other credible news sources. Do these other news sources just repeat the tweet or do they do their own reporting and bring up additional details not in the original tweet. In other words, does the story have legs? This can take a few days.
5) Finally, do the allegations get investigated by some sort of credible NGO or human rights organization? This can take months.
For me, this is a way of questioning the story and figure out whether or not I believe it's true without just jumping on a tweet by some rando. I don't think that's helpful or responsible.
i didn’t jump on the Jussie Smollett bandwagon either. i don’t live far from Chicago. they’re my neighbors.
thankfully, that story was so questionable from the start, no violence resulted from it. it could have.
the mainstream wanted it to be true.
I initially thought the Smollett story was true. I was wrong. I disagree that the mainstream wanted the story to be true. Initially, the only information to report on was Smollett's allegations. There wasn't any other information available and in order to be timely, news has to report the information they have, which can lead to mistakes.
Of course, once Smollett's story fell apart, mainstream reported that too. More information was available. I think that if the mainstream wanted the allegations to be true, they would have buried the story. They didn't.