It's weird how many smart people still haven't realized they are being lied to by the legacy media and establishment figures. Even after repeatedly discrediting themselves.
Taibbi and Shellenberger aren't perfect either, but they are more reliable and honest. Taibbi is still the investigative journalist he's always been.
Step one is realizing that the establishment lies to you.
Step two is recognizing that the other guys are more than happy to lie to you too, or lie to themselves, and have an even easier time of it due to lack of vetting.
The problem is that when you are leaning towards believing something anyway and find out that you were being lied to about it, you don't become more critical of all information, just information that is in conflict with what 'seems' right to you.
It is a terrible side-effect of doing things like teaching kids in the 80s and 90s that marijuana was a terrible drug because when they find out it isn't, then everything else they said is suspect and any authority that tries to say anything about drugs gets treated with suspicion.
In line with this, using fear of the worst possible outcome in order to scare people backfires heavily if it doesn't happen because then convincing them of anything related to that subject again is going to have to come from a completely different source and direction.
Often new, independent journalists will claim that the mainstream media is lying to the citizens and when I replace "mainstream media" with "my competitors" it makes a lot more sense.
"My competitors are lying to you" is a variation of the "my competitors have a bad product" claim that I imagine many small businesses make to discredit the market leader.
Does it mean that the market leaders have a better product? Not necessarily, but I don't automatically trust a business to be honest about its competitors, especially if the business is new and gets market share by directly attacking its competitors.
All levels of aptitude/intelligence are equally likely to be conned because a con works by getting your emotions to turn your intelligence to the task of tricking you.
For example, by exciting your greed so much you come up with a justification for why an unusual circumstance is genuine.
> For example, by exciting your greed so much you come up with a justification for why an unusual circumstance is genuine.
But you might be better at that the more intelligent you are. E.g. I understand there's an established result that professional ethicists and ethics researchers act less ethically than the average person on average, because they find it easier to come up with excuses for how what they wanted to do was actually ethical.
Agreed! However, you're missing that the higher your aptitude, the higher the bar for tricking yourself.
So yes, a very intelligent person can come up with a sophisticated justification to trick themselves. A less intelligent person will come up with a less sophisticated narrative. Both people work on the con till it's enough to pass their bar, which is why I say it's a factor of desire rather than reason.
A restatement might be: There is "book smart" intelligence and "street smart" intelligence. People without a lot of street smarts but a lot of book smarts are probably easier to con.
> Taibbi is clearly a partisan hack that only attacks one side, ever.
You should probably expand your reading to his articles in Rolling Stone, particularly those from 4-5 years ago. You would not say “ever” if you did that. But…for a writer that admittedly leans left in his politics, he is willing to call out that side when a story leads there.
He is much like Glenn Greenwald in that respect. Both he and Glenn get a lot of hate from folks on the left for daring to stray from the left messaging orthodoxy.
He falls into the class of writers who claims to lean left but in the past years has actually been a pretty obvious supporter of the right. This is a transparent yet effective schtick - for some reason people never question the framing of "even so-and-so is willing to call out their own side".
I think you might be over generalizing “the right”. He certainly aligns on specific things with the right, but not everything—only where there is common overlap to his personal politics. Same as on the left…
It’s ok to be on a “side” and still be critical of that side. No one would rightly accuse Bill Maher or Jimmy Dore of being conservatives, but they are damn sure critical of certain perspectives as of late of the American left.
It's fascinating to see what different bubbles we live in. I and most everyone I respect and run into the opinions of would consider Maher and Dore small-c conservatives.
Bizarre. Both were very vocal supporters of Bernie Sanders in 2016/2020 DNC primaries and have multiple occasions pushed democratic socialism as their ideal political paths for America, but because they are also occasionally critical of leftist authoritarianism tactics or ineptitude of democratic politicians they get lumped to be conservative?
I guess if your bubble is pulling it’s identity from the leftist dogma du jour anyone who departs from that orthodoxy would be dismissed as conservative.
Did they shift their opinions…or did the left simply shift leftward so that democratic socialism proponents now seem conservative? I’d argue that most probably did not shift their politics and opinion, but the definition of who is left and who is right changed—at least from the “orthodox” left’s perspective.
Amazing that in 2023, Bernie Sanders and his supporters are now considered conservative.
Democratic socialism is not conservative. There's this specific weird case that a number of Sanders' prominent supporters turned out to be really weird people. A number of them, including Brienna Joy Gray, are supporting RFK Jr in the upcoming election. This is an example of how politics doesn't map perfectly onto a left-right line.
> This is an example of how politics doesn't map perfectly onto a left-right line
That really is my point, the center political position is always arbitrary…in general and on any given single political opinion. So most normal people don’t break exactly along the dogmatic lines set by whatever is the governing authority of right and left.
My political opinion is driven above all else by pragmatism that does not break cleanly in right or left or by party. As such where i sit on the political spectrum is always relative to the person evaluating my opinion.
Since COVID, I find the who left and right thing hugely confusing.
I used to identify as left, and would still do that, except that what passed for left-leaning news during COVID became nothing more than propaganda, and left-leaning journalist put their investigative and sceptical credentials to one side.
During COVID, and still perhaps even now, it turns out you can become a member of the far right, just by staying politically still.
> Since COVID, I find the who left and right thing hugely confusing.
There really seem to be some strange shifts recently in the US where the democrats have become quite a bit more hawkish and intolerant of alternative opinions than I have ever seen before in my lifetime.
Couldn't have anything to do with the lack of action against constant mass shootings, police brutality, regressions in law's around women's bodies, the attacks on LGBTQ rights, no couldn't be.
Honestly, fuck outta here with "alternative opinions" noise.
I get the feeling they are just disappointed in where liberalism has shifted and their recent work is calling out that discomfort.
My reading of both is quite honestly the exact opposite of what you describe, they tend to call out the authoritarianism they see no matter the side. Frankly even Taibbi’s recent foray into Government and Twitter is more an indictment of a government’s overreach into controlling speech which is very authoritarian in action. That series spoke about both Trump and Biden’s administrations attempting to control public discourse. It certainly feels like it was more critical to the Biden admin, and that might help the GOP…but that might be because there was a lot more evidence of it provided to him.
I think Greenwald started his rightward journey with "the enemy of my enemy is my friend", or at least, an acceptance of the fact that right-wing media were the only people willing to platform him criticizing the centrist consensus, even when he was still criticizing it from the left. But over time he's been so love-bombed by right-wing media that he's actually switched sides.
I disagree about a lot of the rest of what you say, but I think you're on point with regard to Taibbi and Greenwald.
Chomsky isn't a fascist. He's just stuck in the mid-late 20th century anti-Vietnam-era paradigm and thinks everything that happens in the world is always America's fault. He hasn't updated his view of the world since the 1980s at best.
Taibbi and Shellenberger aren't perfect either, but they are more reliable and honest. Taibbi is still the investigative journalist he's always been.