Alternative news sources

[Sean]

Dave B

Sean, with all due respect, I think you underestimate them.

If only this were true, if only. And you needn't worry too much about 'due respect' actually- I know I'm right so I must say I don't fret too much what you guys think...

MishaK

...other people's critical thinking abilities...

When meeting someone I'm not sure about, my favourite deceptively casual questions include Which newspaper do you like to read? and Which television programmes do you watch? or similar, giving them the most seamless lying pleasantries back to keep the conversation totally smooth when I get the usual shocking replies of a zombie. No thinking person seriously reads newspapers or watches television- certainly haven't since I was a child 30 years ago.

I'll have a look at that link in a few minutes but the terms investigative journalist and mainstream media are fundamentally opposed and cannot exist together in the same organization- most people just absolutely do not want to know thank you very much if their little perspective on the world is going to be threatened. Just bring on the next war and the next mass murderous administration and sell it in terms of the existing culture and the masses are not about to complain.

As for 9/11 it sounds like you don't know just how well researched it is and how many qualified professionals are questioning the official conspiracy theory of this wondrous secret clandestine organization called Al Qaeda, run from the caves of one of the world's poorest countries, which overcome the $50bn a year air defense Norad network four times on one morning for three buildings hit by two planes to collapse at free-fall acceleration into piles of dust and molten metal, etc etc etc.

As introductions see the Loose Change documentary and website Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth.

Geo dude

the idea that one can look to conspiracy theorists and find more logical and sane reporting for Higher Minds is silly

I'm afraid this just doesn't follow and instead it's self-evident that anyone who looks beyond mass media has more developed critical thinking skills. I'm not about to start a war though- the US government with its propaganda machine can do that well enough.

[Parsifal]

If only this were true, if only. And you needn't worry too much about 'due respect' actually- I know I'm right so I must say I don't fret too much what you guys think...

Then why are you here? 

[Sean]

Hi Jeffrey

I myself think the MSM is not so much partisan oriented in their coverage as dedicated to maximizing ad revenue, which means superficial coverage of whatever inspires TV voyeurs for the moment.

The problem is that in developed societies mass media particularly television becomes the primary carrier of the very culture. You might think nobody would give a banana about some programme cobbled together by a bunch of office workers in some tower in Chicago but they do simply because it's broadcast and constantly reaffirms the sets of presuppositions behind the prevailing worldview. In developing countries people sit around the campfire and get their self-identity from just talking to each other- there's less alienation and less television to go home to.

I don't remember any reporting on the part of the major outlets that actually challenged the WMD claims.  No reporter seemed to think it worth his or her while to dig into the question for themselves.  They merely reported adminstration claims, and sometimes counterclaims by those actually opposed to the adminstration.  But a regular viewer would have come away from their coverage thinking that in the eyes of the news media, the Bush Adminstration claims has a Seriously Substantive Basis to them.

Absolutely.

[Sean]

Then why are you here?

Well I do always learn something and make interesting observations.

It's a good question though. Perhaps I'm just deceiving myself, or just being a conceited ****.

[drogulus]

     

You just wildly overestimate the average person's critical thinking abilities and the objectivity that a business selling a product is in a position to have.

     No, I don't think so. People have blind spots, but fringe thinkers have larger, more debilitating ones. My overall assessment is that while ordinary people kind of suck as critical thinkers the fringe-ists seem to have lost the ability to treat yes and no as possibilities. If normal people say yes, the fringe-ist must say no. There doesn't seem to be any room to actually consider, only to react.

[The new erato]

     
     No, I don't think so. People have blind spots, but fringe thinkers have larger, more debilitating ones. My overall assessment is that while ordinary people kind of suck as critical thinkers the fringe-ists seem to have lost the ability to treat yes and no as possibilities. If normal people say yes, the fringe-ist must say no. There doesn't seem to be any room to actually consider, only to react.

I totally agree.

And: There is always the possibility to pick up patterns in large (and sometimes randomly selected) and complex events. That doesn't mean that there is a pattern, just that we tend to select and see what we want, and when the complexity is high we can see any pattern we like by focusing selectively. There's where the conspiracy nuts go wrong.

And much as I am sceptical of US foreign policy, and much as I dislike many of the people mentioned in the quoted 9.11 article and am sceptical of their motives, the article is pure b.....t.

[dave b]

Sean, the following exchanges tell me that you have some kind of agenda which I think is best ignored from this point on. Your last observation is remarkably insightful, however.


DAVE B:     Sean, with all due respect, I think you underestimate them.



SEAN:    If only this were true, if only. And you needn't worry too much about 'due respect' actually- I know I'm right so I must say I don't fret too much what you guys think...


===========================================================



PARSIFAL: Then why are you here?



SEAN:     Well I do always learn something and make interesting observations.

It's a good question though. Perhaps I'm just deceiving myself, or just being a conceited ****.

[The new erato]

It's an inherent human trait to imprint patterns on random events, with those patterns strongly reflecting one's own beliefs. Read Kahnemann's Thinking, Fast and Slow. There's also a strong tendency to imprint meaning on random effects, and also to reverse the cause-effect relationship. Again, read Kahnemann. These affects have been proven again and again in double blind experiments. Hence all the stupid conspiracy theories floating around, their distribution being strongly helped by the Internet.

[Karl Henning]

. . . Hence all the stupid conspiracy theories floating around, their distribution being strongly helped by the Internet.

Up on Olympus, Pandora is laughing her laurels off.

[kishnevi]

most people just absolutely do not want to know thank you very much if their little perspective on the world is going to be threatened.

The lack of self knowledge Sean displays  in that statement is astonishing.

As for 9/11 it sounds like you don't know just how well researched it is and how many qualified professionals are questioning the official conspiracy theory of this wondrous secret clandestine organization called Al Qaeda, run from the caves of one of the world's poorest countries, which overcome the $50bn a year air defense Norad network four times on one morning for three buildings hit by two planes to collapse at free-fall acceleration into piles of dust and molten metal, etc etc etc.

Well, for one thing, it wasn't run out of caves, and it defeated Norad with one of the simplest tools in a tactician's toobox: surprise.  If you don't expect people to fly passenger jets into office buildings,  you don't particularly try to defend against that sort of threat.

In fact,  the "Truther" version of the Truth is far more bizarre and requires more leaps of faith than any version of the offical story.  And, as Taibbi's article pointed out, it would mean thousands of people have kept their mouths completely shut on the topic for going on a dozen years now.  And it requires one to believe that government agencies to be completely and totally efficient,  which anyone from the Political Right will tell you is nearly impossible, and anyone from the political Left will admit is an ideal rarely achieved in the real world.

[Karl Henning]

Oh, lawd, if only we had had Twitter in 1963 . . . .

[Geo Dude]

And to the extent that ideology drives coverage,  Fox News is far more blatant than CNN or anyone else.  This morning,  the clead stories on CNN were the California fire and horrendous weather in the American midwest, and then the Congressional hearings on how the US military deals with rape cases;  Fox apparently thought the only story worthy of attention was today's IRS hearings.

Agreed there (well, 'anyone else' excepted, MSNBC is as blatant as Fox) but I don't buy that they're lacking in partisanship because in certain cases coverage of what could have been some ratings-driving (and extremely important) events were completely ignored with nothing to account for it but politics.  A member of the NRA's administration commented during the '00 campaign that they had 'a candidate who would listen to them' if Bush won and there was a media feeding frenzy over it leading to Bush stating that he supported the Clinton assault weapons ban.  During his first term Obama met with Brady Campaign and told them personally that he was working on 'under the radar gun control' and not a peep was a heard about it.  Fast & Furious is another great example:  CBS reported on it, but most other stations avoided it* for as long as possible and then did everything they could to help Holder look completely innocent.  (Refusing to report on the fact that whistleblowers handed over e-mails to Congress that Holder sent about Fast & Furious during the operation after claiming that he didn't know about it until he heard about it on CBS, for example, and refusing to report on the fact that the White House stonewalled on releasing documents related to F&F throughout the investigation.)  The same thing happened with Benghazi with no one probing into the claims that the attack was caused by a demonstration inspired by a YouTube video even though Al Qaeda claimed credit publicly the day of the attack.  There was also little to no coverage on it when the DOJ argued that the state secrets privilege meant that they could shut down lawsuits from torture victims against the US government simply by claiming that documents related to those lawsuits infringed on state secrets, in spite of the constant screaming during the Bush era about the injustice of torture (though they did insist upon calling it 'enhanced interrogation' back then).

I don't claim that they're quite as partisan as they're sometimes made out to be, but there is at times a clear and present bias and doing a shitty job of coverage prior to the Iraq war doesn't change that.

*To be fair, this could have had to do with the administration's atrocious treatment of Attkinson after she reported on it.

[snyprrr]

Do you reeeally want me to Post in this Thread?

Still, the 4hour video 'Century of the Self' in MANDATORY viewing.

[Karl Henning]

Do you reeeally want me to Post in this Thread?

I'm sure I do!

[snyprrr]

I'm sure I do!

You, too, must watch 'Century of the Self'

[Gurn Blanston]

Do you reeeally want me to Post in this Thread?

Still, the 4hour video 'Century of the Self' in MANDATORY viewing.

Well, you've never made any claims about yourself, simply letting us each make our own choice of potentialities. Sean, OTOH, has set a standard for himself that few others could aspire to, so when HE goes down a certain path and when YOU go down that same path, the outcomes are not necessarily going to be the same.

[MishaK]

Sean,

It is of course much easier to say something as obtuse as this:

As for 9/11 it sounds like you don't know just how well researched it is and how many qualified professionals are questioning the official conspiracy theory of this wondrous secret clandestine organization called Al Qaeda, run from the caves of one of the world's poorest countries, which overcome the $50bn a year air defense Norad network four times on one morning for three buildings hit by two planes to collapse at free-fall acceleration into piles of dust and molten metal, etc etc etc.

As introductions see the Loose Change documentary and website Architects and Engineers for 9/11 truth.

with a straight face if you haven't actually first read the article I linked above: http://www.commondreams.org/views06/1001-24.htm

I suspect you won't again, given your self-evident fear of confronting the gaping logical fallacies in the world view you hold so dear.

the terms investigative journalist and mainstream media are fundamentally opposed and cannot exist together in the same organization

Have you ever even heard of Seymour Hersh?

I read these:

www.nzz.ch

www.nybooks.com

www.newyorker.com

You might want to take a look once in a while.

[dyn]

I totally agree with the OP. The lamestream media refuses to even acknowledge the remotest possibility that the world's leaders are controlled by shape-shifting reptilian aliens from outer space. Of course, this is because their jewish banker masters are in the pay of the same aliens, so that shouldn't be a surprise. Also, Project MKULTRA faked the moon landings. With chemtrails.

[The new erato]

Do you reeeally want me to Post in this Thread?

Still, the 4hour video 'Century of the Self' in MANDATORY viewing.

This thread is already quite funny, but if you are able to up the ante, please feel free!

[The new erato]

This thread is already quite funny, but if you are able to up the ante, please feel free!

You see? You can take a lesson from this:

I totally agree with the OP. The lamestream media refuses to even acknowledge the remotest possibility that the world's leaders are controlled by shape-shifting reptilian aliens from outer space. Of course, this is because their jewish banker masters are in the pay of the same aliens, so that shouldn't be a surprise. Also, Project MKULTRA faked the moon landings. With chemtrails.