I personally think The Trial of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens is a must-read, and I would also say that what Uncle Sam really wants by Noam Chomsky was truly eye-opening to me in recasting the history of American foreign policy, but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was an intentional part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy. Sometimes these criticisms of labor issues, of human rights issues, of democracy issues, etc are going to speak for themselves not because they conveniently coincide with a preferred state department narrative, but because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.
So I don't think it's enough to just say that the State Department would agree with criticisms as though that's sufficient to dismiss them. I understand there are corners in the internet where that passes muster, but to me it feels like it skips too many necessary steps in critical thinking.
> but that co-exists with a reality apparently uncomfortable to critics that having the moral upper hand and aligning ourselves with the project of global democracy post-World War II absolutely was a part of Roosevelt's post-World War II strategy and sometimes these criticisms are going to speak for themselves simply because they do map onto legitimate moral issues.
After WWII the United States imported many Nazi functionaries to serve as the founders of institutions such as NATO[1], scientists, etc. During the war, American businessmen profited heavily from doing business with the Nazi regime. Of course we weren’t alone in this.
Ending the Holocaust (too late) was obviously moral. But very little of what was done after was in interest of global democracy or the greater good, just as our entry into the war was not really about those things either. There were many in the global Jewish community and even in FDR’s own administration who were ringing the alarm bells long before we entered the war to do something, anything to help get Jews out of Europe to safety, who were denied and obstructed. Ultimately we only entered the war when it served our own best interests.
The focus on WWII is also interesting because it is one of the only times in the last century that the U.S. could have been said to fight a just war. What about all the rest?
>But the positions of the U.S. government and its vassal states are not defacto truth.
I don't know that anyone here is making that argument, so I'm not sure it's a prudent use of time to be engaging with it, and I think engaging would take us further away from the article with increasingly diminishing returns.
It’s valid to think that. But what actually happened was that a series of pieces that sound like the fever dreams of a State Department neocon got repackaged into a format palatable to liberals and disseminated, despite the fact that they lacked factual basis. The only substantive difference between that, and say, Fox News, is that Ira and NPR had the shame to apologize after the hoaxes were uncovered. If Ira had stuck to pieces about interesting bits of Americana that he and his team could validate independently, or brought in credible journalists well versed in the topics he was covering, he could’ve avoided this. But he didn’t. Why didn’t he feel that he needed to adequately vet his stories? Because he believed them to be true.
To paraphrase, if your prayer was answered or you were unexpectedly spared/saved/rewarded then it was god; and if not then he works in mysterious ways/you lacked faith/were unworthy/etc.
If the story is true, good. Facts without a story lose against stories without facts.
That’s why populism is so successful.
If facts would matter Trump would be president.
The facts were all known beforehand and are now, but many don’t care about facts.
People aren’t as rational as myths like the homo economicus try to make us believe.
Just look at ads. They sell emotions not facts.
> Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday’s weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can’t violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive.
[0]: https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Or consider a century earlier, in world war one we poured humans into literal meat grinders with the belief that maybe today, if we just poured enough in, it would make a difference. Despite the obvious evidence to the contrary for days, weeks, and months prior. One need not read much history to see that people will care about a story they have accepted long past the point their senses tell them otherwise. They will claim they are freezing while the flames lick their very feet.
Other official facts of the time period included 1. standing in a restaurant without a mask on is almost terrorism and 2. sitting at a restaurant without a mask on is fine.
Recommendations, regulations, and responses to the pandemic as it happened are factual in the sense that they happened, but are not "facts" in the same way. It is not a fact that standing in a restaurant without a mask was terrorism and sitting was fine. Instead, given the information available at the time, and the practical requirement to have your mask off to eat, this policy was chosen for a time as a risk mitigation balanced with practical requirements. The appropriateness of this policy is a matter of opinion.
Look at the rise of Qanon, for example, or antivax, or any other popular narrative-based fiction that is gaining traction.
The news still uncritically reports what the police claim happened.
The power of narrative is becoming greater in our connected world, not less. It has less requirement now to be rooted in any sort of facts.
I brought it up in conversation as i was annoyed. Everyone at the table picks up their phone to fact check me and they brought up the hall's website and said I was wrong. I had the email sent to me about the postponement on my phone, it was real. I didnt care to prove myself right. Checking the website now it's now showing october.
Why even fact check it? Just to prove me wrong? What if your fact check went wrong?
Is it just an excuse to pickup their phone due to addiction?
Social media has bred a generation who believe that value comes from being the loudest voice in the room. One-upmanship is one of the sure ways to make your voice stand out.
I had this issue with some junior colleagues. I had to point out that it's disrupting and actually quite tiring being interrupted all the time with minor corrections, often wrong or so unbelievably minor. One thought he could demand sources for everything I said no matter the stakes. They ignored context, nuance, caveats etc and just listened to the part they could attempt to easily refute. God I'm exhausted just recounting it
Am I an old fart ..
> Since its debut, Glass’s brand of journalistic storytelling has resulted in countless superb installments of This American Life. It has also resulted in one devastating misfire. The nadir of the TAL approach is its January 6, 2012, episode, “Mr. Daisey and the Apple Factory.” When it first aired, this show appeared to be yet another example of Glass’s artistry. A reworking of The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, a stage production by the monologist Mike Daisey that had been selling out theaters around the country, the program investigates how Americans, in their zeal for iPhones and iPads, have ignored the inconvenient truth that these sleek implements are largely manufactured by workers toiling in brutal conditions at the massive Foxconn complex in Shenzhen, China.
Tldr: a bunch of the allegations in the episode were false and got past TAL's production approach at the time, but they are more careful now.
“CNN is acknowledging that a gripping story it aired last week depicting a Syrian man being let free from a Damascus prison after the fall of dictator Bashar Assad’s regime was not what it seemed.”
https://apnews.com/article/syria-prisoner-clarissa-ward-fake...