While I acknowledge that the MBFC does have some right wing bias, I think it serves its purpose. Aka to flag literal propaganda “news” sites.
The titles are literally accurate in the image. Israel is (unethically) launching preemptive strikes.
If you look at the .ml news communities that don’t use MBFC you will see that way too many news stories are from literally Russia Today, Southern China Morning Post, and other extremely biased to a very particular agenda publications.
I think people are trying to tie MBFC to being Zionist just so the bot will be dropped and it will be easier for them to normalize things like Russia Today outside of .ml spaces.
that’s quite the theory… does the bot somehow prevent posts from those places? were there more instances of popular posts from those places before the bot?
I wouldn’t say it’s a theory. Just my thoughts / speculation. I would speculate that people who are pushing out RT / Alex Jones level content would be more hesitant to do so if there would be a big “this is not a reliable news source” sticker next to it.
I would speculate that people who point Alex Jones / RT stuff just hope people read the article without thinking about where it comes from.
The requirements of quality, fairness, honesty, transparency and bias-minimization of their process for a “trust gatekeeper” such as MBFC claims to be should be far higher that those for mere newspapers, not the other way around - the former wants to control your interpretation of everything you read on the Internet whilst the latter only controls what you read in their site.
One thing is when a guy you’ve seen a lot in your local pub asks you to “lend me a fiver”, a whole different thing is when a some random guy down the pub whom you don’t really know well keeps unpromptedly telling you “go talk to this guy, he is a great investment advisor” and then the second guys asks you to “give me all your life savings and I’ll make sure you’ll be rich”.
Not only is the level of proof any half way intelligent would demand to trust somebody with “a fiver” totally different from that to trust somebody with all of one’s life savings, but the second setup even stinks of funny business due to the whole hard-push by a 3rd party whom I don’t even know well enough to trust.
Just because you’re seeing more of the “complete total bollocks” style of propaganda from places like Russia and China in communities without MBFC doesn’t mean what you see in those that have MBFC is not propaganda-heavy: I actually lived in Britain for over a decade and also in other countries in Europe (and speak those languages so can follow their news) and certainly the BBC and The Guardian systematically - as exemplified here - spin their reporting, a far more subtle style of propaganda which is based in Marketing, PR and Politics methods to shape people’s impressions of specific actors (unlike the outright lying of the newsmedia from authoritarian countries) and which is especially common in Anglo-Saxon countries.
They’re just as much out to make up your mind for you rather than merely inform you (and at least the guys at The Guardian have very openly stated they’re “opinion formers”) as the Russian and Chinese media - they just use different techniques for their manipulation of people’s opinions.
MBFC activelly re-inforces the “spin” style of propaganda of very specific news outlets with specific politican biases by claiming they are highly trustworthy and even (laughably) left-of-center, and yet compared to the newsmedia from many European non-English Speaking countries this stuff is clearly and consistently massaged to manipulate the reader into feeling in a certain way towards one side and a different way towards another side.
News reporting using the same kind of techniques to manipulate people as Car Adverts, Investing Scams and Politicians isn’t Journalism.
Had I grown up reading and watching on TV all my life this kind of spin portrayed as “news”, I would have trouble noticing it, but I was born in Southern Europe and beyond Britain also lived in Northern Europe, so this style of spin used for “opinion forming” in most mainstream newsmedia in the English-speaking World really stands out for me because it’s always “loaded” in the same direction.
Why do I need MBFC to do this when I can just read someone in the comments who claims “This was posted by a Russian bot farm”?
If you look at the .ml news communities that don’t use MBFC you will see that way too many news stories are from literally Russia Today, Southern China Morning Post, and other extremely biased to a very particular agenda publications.
I don’t see any of that on their local front page. In fact, most of lemmy.ml’s front page is reposts from lemmy.world. The only other sources I see are the BBC, BoingBoing.Net, and TheConversation.Com.
I think people are trying to tie MBFC to being Zionist
The agent flags virtually every mainstream news source as Left or Center-Left. The AP, the Guardian, Reuters, CNN, you name it. The very concept of Left/Right seems to boil down to “Do American Conservatives hate you?” If they’re Zionist on top of that, it’s likely only because these corporate media outlets tend to track with the American foreign policy position of any given moment.
But don’t actually bother to ask why mainstream news gets consistently flagged as “Left Wing” despite mapping neatly to a right-wing government’s enthusiastic endorsement of various fascist middle eastern state leaders. Hell, don’t ask why mainstream news habitually runs gushy positive news stories about Saudi monarchs and North African military dictatorships.
To even raise the question… you must be getting your news from all the Russia Today articles on lemmy.ml.
It’s a pretty good introduction for those who don’t care for swearing and sexual jokes. Better than Apples to Apples, I’d say. Could use room for improvement, I’ve been meaning to put together a combination of the full game and expansions that my whole family can play
I’ve asked walls near me about their beer preferences, they don’t seem to have anything to say regarding the matter. Or any other matter, for that matter.
Pretty sure it's not an official plate. The sovereign citizens will print their own. Sometimes like this in an effort to fool cops into thinking its a regular plate so they don't get pulled over.
It’s not a customized plate, it’s just straight up fake. Sov citizens buy them, and cops often don’t even pull then over because they’re so fucking annoying to deal with.
Just a guess, but it’s probably just because the person would end up throwing a tantrum. “YOU CAN’T ARREST ME! I’M BEING ARRESTED! I DIDN’T DO ANYTHING WRONG! WHERE’S YOUR PROOF!” (Or something like that.) As anyone around them tries to ignore the guy shouting at the top of his lungs and trying to do his best not to get handcuffed.
Yeah, there’s definitely a hassle vs reward calculus that quickly gets figured. Usually the hassle side of the equation is a little too high unless its something that can be quickly and easily fixed. Like if they forgot something it’s very easy to just go “oh, and can I please get …” which usually immediately reminds them and they go grab it.
Or if the food got royally fucked then engagement can become worth it, even over something harder to fix. Like, if my steak is well done and I ordered med rare, I kinda want either a new steak or a comped meal.
Could just mean smaller friend groups as well. I conceptualize the major difference as introverts recharge by being alone and extroverts recharge by being around people. There was some recent research that disputed the concept of introverts and extroverts altogether, noting that when introverts became more regularly connected to people, their mental health improved. Introversion might just be the sum of our fears about connection that keep us from living a fuller life, with avoidance taking the role of an unhealthy coping mechanism for being unwilling to face our social fears. I say THAT because a lot of research has come to the conclusion that we are wired for connection and that the presence of close relationships is a strong predictor of the length of our life.
I also say this as someone with raging social anxiety, it sucks and I just get overwhelmed within a couple hours.
a lot of research has come to the conclusion that we are wired for connection and that the presence of close relationships is a strong predictor of the length of our life.
Well I gotta restructure my retirement funds for some short but quality time
Unfortunately there has also been research that shows money only influences happiness up to a certain point, and then, after that only affects happiness if it is spent on quality shared experiences with friends and loved ones.
Sorry mang, I can make a pretty good case that the research shows you need to have close people in your life for connection and happiness, we’re hardwired and coded for it. So hey, I think you’re probably a person worth knowing and that there’s somebody you’d really get along with, living not far from you. To a degree, interpersonal avoidance is choosing safety now to pay with loneliness later. Take care.
Introverts don’t not want social connection. They just prefer a smaller number of deeper connections. “You’re not people” is a common sentiment from introverts to their closest friends and family. Most introverts still have and enjoy social connection. They just prefer it in an intimate or chill setting to large groups.
I agree with most/all of this, it just seems like the question is, do they prefer those chill settings because of the increased intimacy OR the safety and relative lack of chaos. Increased positive experiences or decreased aversion? By aversion, I mean, are there sensory issues with crowds? feelings of overwhelm? more social anxiety at the uncertain? etc.
In other words, would introverts who had stronger social skills and newly managed social anxiety symptoms still make the same choices? I think the answer is a pretty solid “I/We don’t know” but at least people are working on finding out!
Hm… I’ve always been introverted. However as a teen I’ve gone to high school parties with my friends, gotten drunk, smoked weed, hung out with friends, talked to girls… I’ve gone to night clubs, bars, theaters, and restaurants… the way I see it is if I’m with a crowd of people I personally know, I’ve grown up with, or simply my family members, I don’t feel introverted. My energy is focused on them not everyone else outside of my crowd. But put me into an environment where I don’t know a single person and I’m expected to have dialogue with them? Eh… that’s a different story. That environment will definitely spend away my mental energy - UNLESS we’re all having a conversation on a subject I can definitely relate to. If it’s an enjoyable dialogue, then I walk out of that environment feeling just fine.
I feel like i am the person and i can confirm it is absolute hell, there is a constant need to have interesting conversations with new people but starting them is basically my worst fear
It’s understandable, in an environment where they don’t control all the information that readers have access to, propagandists have to use framing techniques from PR, Marketing and Politics to push out a certain impression of trustworthiness and maximizing empathy towards one side, since they can’t just use outright lies without getting caught like propagandists in places like Russia can (mind you, the NYT has definitelly been caught repeating IDF lies).
At least this time around they didn’t use the trick of the Passive Voice (for example: “Massive strikes land in Lebanon”).
That propaganda trick is a pretty common one in the “reporting” of these news sources when they talk about Israeli bombings of civilians in Gaza (which are generally reported as “deaths in Gaza” as if they were just due to natural causes rather than being murders).
Mind you the “verbatum” and undisputed quoting of IDF claims on the title as exemplified here is also a pretty commonly used propaganda techniques by these newsmedia outlets.
That… doesn’t sound right. I don’t think that’s associated with introvertism/introversion. I’m an introvert, I’ll be damned if someone hands me food that was not ordered by me and me not say something. Especially if I’m craving a specific food before I even show up to the restaurant.
The Intercept collected more than 1,000 articles from the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times about Israel’s war on Gaza and tallied up the usages of certain key terms and the context in which they were used. The tallies reveal a gross imbalance in the way Israelis and pro-Israel figures are covered versus Palestinians and pro-Palestinian voices — with usages that favor Israeli narratives over Palestinian ones.
The term “slaughter” was used by editors and reporters to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 60 to 1, and “massacre” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 125 to 2. “Horrific” was used to describe the killing of Israelis versus Palestinians 36 to 4.
Only two headlines out of over 1,100 news articles in the study mention the word “children” related to Gazan children. In a notable exception, the New York Times ran a late-November front-page story on the historic pace of killings of Palestinian women and children, though the headline featured neither group.
Overall, Israel’s killings in Gaza are not given proportionate coverage in either scope or emotional weight as the deaths of Israelis on October 7. These killings are mostly presented as arbitrarily high, abstract figures. Nor are the killings described using emotive language like “massacre,” “slaughter,” or “horrific.” Hamas’s killings of Israeli civilians are consistently portrayed as part of the group’s strategy, whereas Palestinian civilian killings are covered almost as if they were a series of one-off mistakes, made thousands of times, despite numerous points of evidence indicating Israel’s intent to harm civilians and civilian infrastructure.
Lots of us know this. Lots of us can also see that the 4 titles that you posted are not an example of this.
Some of those article titles that you are trying to paint as inaccurate, are in fact highly accurate. I can’t find anything wrong with the titles of the guardian and the new York Times that you posted. They are reporting a thing that happened and a thing that was said. They make it very clear that the “pre-emptive” thing is a claim of Israel and not a fact.
Unlike your claim in the OP, The Guardian also doesn’t have a credibility of high on that shitty mbfc site, but only “mixed”.
Your alternative titles really highlight how little you value factuality.
Hezbollah did not claim to be launching a pre-emptive attack. And claiming that they launched a pre-emptive attack after they were already attacked is … Weird.
No one is reporting that Hezbollah was launching these rockets in self defence, because Hezbollah has already let it be known that their attack was a retaliation for the murder of one of their commanders in july.
No news source worth their salt is going to use those titles, because it’s straight up inventing alternate facts.
Your 4 examples of what you want to portray as “non credible reporting” are professionals. Unlike you, they’re not just going to invent news to push their narrative. Yes they have their biases, but unlike your alternate facts, their reporting is based on actual facts.
As I’ve explained above, reliably giving prominence to the quotes of one source promotes that one source and those quotes as it subconsciously it makes it seem more important to the reader.
This is a technique used for Propaganda when the propagandist doesn’t control the information space of the reader: since outright lies would easily be caught when readers have easy access to other newsmedia, the promotion of one side over the other by the propagandist is instead done by portraying it as more important by quoting it more often, giving more prominence to those quotes and never challenging them.
It’s interesting the number of concerned posters popping out if the woodwork here repeating the pretty old falacy commonly harped by such news media that “they are stating those are quotes hence they’re giving fair coverage” which is an obvious oversimplification of how impressions are made on others and hence of how opinions are made by even the most junior professional in PR, Marketing or Politics.
Even if every ingredient doubled in cost (same as domestic inflation) and profit is a 1/6 of the burrito, we wouldn’t even be at $4. This is corporate greed.
Perhaps for the consumer, not for the energy providers
What costs more? Gas or wind? Oil or solar? Coal or wave?
There’s a premium charged for new technology, sure. To cover R&D costs, new tooling, etc, but once the machinery is made, the fuel is essentially free. The wind blows itself, the sun has its own fuel, the tides move freely
Energy arbitrarily costs more because those that sell it have decided it costs more. Aka corporate greed, which is what this post is complaining about in the first.
Technically, inflation is just another form of taxation.
Milton Friedman, an economist from the Chicago School of Monetarism, coined the phrase “inflation is taxation without legislation” to explain how inflation and rising prices can reduce the value of money and purchasing power, similar to higher taxes. Friedman believed that inflation could be managed by keeping the volume of moving liquidity in line with the amount of products in circulation. Inflation is when the price of goods and services increases across the economy, which can reduce the value of assets and a currency’s purchasing power. This can make taxpayers less well-off due to higher costs and “bracket creep”, while also increasing the government’s spending power. Some say that inflation is a “hidden tax” that can be especially harmful to people who have the least ability to pay. Inflation and money creation are closely linked, and the government can create money through taxing, borrowing, or printing it. Printing money to finance a deficit is sometimes called an “inflation tax”.
Monetary devaluation is the only thing that gives any thin-veiled justificstion for price increases. Anything not covered by the inflation calculator is greed.
I went through the drive thru last year and spent almost $20 on 3 beef chalupas. The cashier looked puzzled before she told me the total lol. The one thing I want from that place, I knew it would cost me.
The supply chain presumably cost something in the first pic too. The prices of those things should have also gone up according to inflation. So wouldn’t they also be included in the “inflation adjusted” figure? It’s not like they were calculating what it cost without needing a supply chain.
In fact, I would think that if anything, the overall price of supply chains would have decreased as technology got better (better fuel, better gas mileage, better routes, better forms of transportation, better computer models to predict outcomes, etc).
Supposedly the argument for the recent absurd food prices is because of oil prices increasing (translates to shipping costs increasing) so much with Russia invading Ukraine and everyones sanctions on Russian oil plus the disruption of wheat production in Ukraine.
As it turns out, moving oil across the ocean is really expensive. Even if you can buy oil at the same price in the US and Europe, it’s still cheaper to buy it locally and not have to deal with moving it.
“When some wild-eyed, eight-foot-tall maniac grabs your neck, taps the back of your favorite head up against the barroom wall, and he looks you crooked in the eye and he asks you if ya paid your dues, you just stare that big sucker right back in the eye, and you remember what ol’ Jack Burton always says at a time like that: ‘Have ya paid your dues, Jack?’ Yessir, the check is in the mail."
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