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Post by Maolsheachlann on Nov 19, 2020 10:33:25 GMT
It seems to me that it's becoming more and more difficult to know anything for sure in the world of today, with the level of censorship and bias in the media and online. When you try to dig deeper, all you ever seem to get is the same "party line" and improbable claims. On Google, a search for any controversial topic (such as possible election fraud in the US) will instantly bring up pages of results focused on one side of it, which seems inherently unlikely. To take the same example, we heard every news organisation in the Western world use the term "unfounded" or "baseless" whenever it reported Trump's claims of election fraud. But couldn't every single claim be disputed and called "unfounded"? What standard is being applied here? We rarely hear of "unfounded" claims of hate crimes, for instance. If you try to dig into the stories-- the Trump story or any other controversial story-- you run into a solid wall of "experts" who we are supposed to believe because...I'm not sure why. Presumably they are above partisanship or corruption because they are experts. For instance, in in this New York Times article, which has the wonderfully objective headline: "No, Dominion voting machines did not delete Trump votes", we are told: In Antrim County, Mich., unofficial results initially showed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. beating Mr. Trump by roughly 3,000 votes. But that didn’t seem right in the Republican stronghold, so election workers checked again.
It turned out that they had configured the Dominion ballot scanners and reporting software with slightly different versions of the ballot, which meant that the votes were counted correctly but that they were reported incorrectly, state officials said. The correct tallies showed Mr. Trump beat Mr. Biden by roughly 2,500 votes in the county.How much this DOESN'T tell you! It was an unofficial result, and it was caught before the final tallies. But would it have been caught if there weren't Republican monitors watching it? And that very benign: "it turned out they had configured the Dominion ballot scanners and reporting software with slightly different versions of the ballot"-- well, that sounds like it opens a huge field for fraud and tampering. It also sounds extremely vague. Furthermore, we are often told that this or that election body is "bipartisan" or given assurances from Republican officials have defended it. But we know that huge swathes of the Republican party are profoundly anti-Trump and I have no difficulty believing that they might turn a blind eye to corruption that got rid of this inconvenient, unwanted populist candidate. Indeed, I suspect many would actively participate in it. I've even noticed this tendency much closer to home. Whenever I Google my own blog (which I often do to log into it), the first results that come up are a post titled "Why I am Not Alt-Right" and "On Catholic In-Fighting". Both are somewhat "liberal", arguably-- the first obviously so, the second because I was defending the prerogatives of the Pope, who the liberal media do tend to see as "our guy in the Vatican". If I had written a post called "What the Alt Right are right about", would it turn up so quickly on Google results? For years, the first thread that came up on searches for the Irish Catholics Forum was, I noticed, "How to Formally Leave the Catholic Church"-- a rather obscure thread which hadn't generated very many answers (not even one page compared to the pages and pages of answers on many threas). The second result was generally a thread from the Irish Atheist forum, "Irish Catholic Forum Descends into Madness". (I haven't noticed anything like that with this forum.) When we think of the cataracts of media misinformation in the past, it's quite dizzying: the Tuam babies scandal (the myth of the septic tank), Savita Halappanavar (who died from an infection, not a pregnancy), the lurid exaggerations about the Magdalen laundries which even the official McAleese Report debunked, the Russian collusion accusations in America, the Cardinal Pell case, the rush to attack the Covington High School boys on the basis of a deliberately misleading video, the ludicrous characterization of figures such as Jordan Petersen and Milo Yiannapolous as "Alt Right", and so forth. But the media is so monolithic that these things quickly sink down the memory hole. On the one hand, it seems circular logic to reject all offered evidence as being, itself, part of the conspiracy. But today it's hard to avoid this, since the bias and propaganda really IS so pervasive. |
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Post by cato on Nov 25, 2020 20:06:20 GMT
I tend to be somewhat critical of almost anything I hear on media apart from the basic facts which it is normally (but not always) possible to work out. Irish media routinely avoid stories or omit inconvenient facts which present the story in a different light. RTE are particularly adept at this.
Objectivity seems to have been abandoned by many journalists who are obviously commited emotionally to one side in current debates. During the summer few journalists referred to George Floyd's previous conviction for a violent robbery of a pregnant black woman. They made no attempt to criticise calls to defund the police or query claims of systemic racism. Virtually all of them keeled over and accepted highly questionable assertions as fact. The facial reactions after the US election gave the game away on numerous occasions
Many of those who accept the intersectional outlook regard any critic as evil ,ill intentioned and unworthy of having a right to express their opinion. Even before this ideology emerged mainstream media in Ireland regarded traditional conservatives with scorn and disgust. This has been clear for years. Irish Radio and Tv is a joke, often Not even putting up a single dissenting voice. If there is a conservative on he 'll be outnumbered by a hostile presenter and panel. One reason why I prefer UK/US media is that there is a more vigorous genuine diversity there. Irish media is monochrome, slavishly predictable and wrong bar a handful of honourable exceptions
I don't retreat into reading/watching only what I agree with. I dip into RTE and BBC , the Guardian etc but more and more have to rely on other sources that reflect on news stories like Gript in Ireland or Unherd and Spiked in the UK. The Spectator gives a centre right perspective and has good discussions and Interviews on Youtube.
Catholic news is also partisan and divided but for different reasons.
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Post by hilary on Nov 26, 2020 15:58:07 GMT
I tend to be somewhat critical of almost anything I hear on media apart from the basic facts which it is normally (but not always) possible to work out. Irish media routinely avoid stories or omit inconvenient facts which present the story in a different light. RTE are particularly adept at this. Objectivity seems to have been abandoned by many journalists who are obviously commited emotionally to one side in current debates. During the summer few journalists referred to George Floyd's previous conviction for a violent robbery of a pregnant black woman. They made no attempt to criticise calls to defund the police or query claims of systemic racism. Virtually all of them keeled over and accepted highly questionable assertions as fact. The facial reactions after the US election gave the game away on numerous occasions When I heard there was a quote by Joe Biden like "I may be Irish but I'm not stupid" I had to look it up. It seemed he did say it and it was in the context of getting into a photo beside a woman who looked like someone else's wife. Harmless obviously (probably?) but Trump wouldn't have got away with it. |
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Post by Tomas on Nov 27, 2020 13:45:25 GMT
As reply to the main question, philosophically if you will, one could say thankfully for the better: we can know as we have always been able to know. But the problems come in legion nearly like a mental tsunami when the practical question is with the first one, and already mentioned on several occasions. In the media driven evil campaigns one is so often at a loss, not even able to assert any of the most basic facts in any area, no matter how many PhD you have in your own field of academy knowledge. Thus what we can know is extremely limited! The channels of information are strangled by systematic intervention from the top that owns the currrent agendas. Truth sips out only after some while. It´s a pattern discernible to more and more among the general public by this time. So in this sense we are not allowed to know pretty much anything. Until we learn what is going on in the real world, ruled by closed strategy rooms and apparently mostly the Globalist ones during the last horrific decline years, the modernist version of the cloud of unknowing is visibly still going "strong" above. Many shadows will linger longer than wanted, most always and everywhere in the present cyber sky. If we only consider the major trend currency, only bits and pieces of the real matters can be known, until for some reason that is often unknown in itself, they are let off and open as if it was on a sudden sale. Peculiar times can more or less be designed when entire economies are ruled by the richest as autocrats.
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Post by cato on Nov 27, 2020 16:45:22 GMT
On paper (or virtually) we have never had so much information but making sense of information is a complex time consuming thing.
Traditionally academics did value objectivity but now objectivity is seen as part of "oppression" in the mad ideologies that dominate schools , universities and increasingly in politics and liberal religion.
Many sectors seen as being impartial are pushing an agenda. We often hear the mantra "Trust the science" as if all scientists agree on everything especially how science is implemented and how it relates to every day life . That is plainly untrue. There is no unanimous views on science anymore that there is 100% agreement among theologians, historians or psychologists. There are core facts but a variety of interpretations. Bias is ever present but our media is heavily biased in one direction. It is so biased it is effectively propaganda for the state and its agendas.
Censorship is also back with a vengeance in our media. One example .No Irish mainstream media reported last week on a report on babies dying in hospitals after failed abortion attempts.
Minister Harris dismissed these potential cases when they were mentioned 2 years ago as a possibility in what passed for "debate" after the 8th amendment was dumped. One doctor said he got sick in the corridor after performing a feticide knowing he had just killed a baby. Outside of Gript and some pro life sites no one mentioned this horror. Most Irish people will never hear of this report and these grisly cases.
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Post by rogerbuck on Nov 27, 2020 19:56:08 GMT
It seems to me that it's becoming more and more difficult to know anything for sure in the world of today, with the level of censorship and bias in the media and online. When you try to dig deeper, all you ever seem to get is the same "party line" and improbable claims. On Google, a search for any controversial topic (such as possible election fraud in the US) will instantly bring up pages of results focused on one side of it, which seems inherently unlikely. To take the same example, we heard every news organisation in the Western world use the term "unfounded" or "baseless" whenever it reported Trump's claims of election fraud. But couldn't every single claim be disputed and called "unfounded"? What standard is being applied here? We rarely hear of "unfounded" claims of hate crimes, for instance. If you try to dig into the stories-- the Trump story or any other controversial story-- you run into a solid wall of "experts" who we are supposed to believe because...I'm not sure why. Presumably they are above partisanship or corruption because they are experts. For instance, in in this New York Times article, which has the wonderfully objective headline: "No, Dominion voting machines did not delete Trump votes", we are told: In Antrim County, Mich., unofficial results initially showed President-elect Joseph R. Biden Jr. beating Mr. Trump by roughly 3,000 votes. But that didn’t seem right in the Republican stronghold, so election workers checked again.
It turned out that they had configured the Dominion ballot scanners and reporting software with slightly different versions of the ballot, which meant that the votes were counted correctly but that they were reported incorrectly, state officials said. The correct tallies showed Mr. Trump beat Mr. Biden by roughly 2,500 votes in the county.How much this DOESN'T tell you! It was an unofficial result, and it was caught before the final tallies. But would it have been caught if there weren't Republican monitors watching it? And that very benign: "it turned out they had configured the Dominion ballot scanners and reporting software with slightly different versions of the ballot"-- well, that sounds like it opens a huge field for fraud and tampering. It also sounds extremely vague. Furthermore, we are often told that this or that election body is "bipartisan" or given assurances from Republican officials have defended it. But we know that huge swathes of the Republican party are profoundly anti-Trump and I have no difficulty believing that they might turn a blind eye to corruption that got rid of this inconvenient, unwanted populist candidate. Indeed, I suspect many would actively participate in it. I've even noticed this tendency much closer to home. Whenever I Google my own blog (which I often do to log into it), the first results that come up are a post titled "Why I am Not Alt-Right" and "On Catholic In-Fighting". Both are somewhat "liberal", arguably-- the first obviously so, the second because I was defending the prerogatives of the Pope, who the liberal media do tend to see as "our guy in the Vatican". If I had written a post called "What the Alt Right are right about", would it turn up so quickly on Google results? For years, the first thread that came up on searches for the Irish Catholics Forum was, I noticed, "How to Formally Leave the Catholic Church"-- a rather obscure thread which hadn't generated very many answers (not even one page compared to the pages and pages of answers on many threas). The second result was generally a thread from the Irish Atheist forum, "Irish Catholic Forum Descends into Madness". (I haven't noticed anything like that with this forum.) When we think of the cataracts of media misinformation in the past, it's quite dizzying: the Tuam babies scandal (the myth of the septic tank), Savita Halappanavar (who died from an infection, not a pregnancy), the lurid exaggerations about the Magdalen laundries which even the official McAleese Report debunked, the Russian collusion accusations in America, the Cardinal Pell case, the rush to attack the Covington High School boys on the basis of a deliberately misleading video, the ludicrous characterization of figures such as Jordan Petersen and Milo Yiannapolous as "Alt Right", and so forth. But the media is so monolithic that these things quickly sink down the memory hole. On the one hand, it seems circular logic to reject all offered evidence as being, itself, part of the conspiracy. But today it's hard to avoid this, since the bias and propaganda really IS so pervasive. Thank you, Mal for starting this thread. Your original post has hit me quite deeply since I first read it maybe two days ago or so now. It has been working in me, going around and around my mind. We need voices that articulate these developments - which I myself actually find very hard to keep up with. I think you could do this very well and want to encourage you in this direction that seems so important to me. I hope to say more. But right now I just want to add a something to this (particularly nasty ) pot, an unfortunately brief something that I saw on Facebook: All too brief! I wonder if as a librarian Mal you or anyone else would know how to get hold of the Catholic Times of 6th Dec 2019?! If this is true . . . well, words fail me. But it adds a very grim note indeed to the very grim but very good original post here. In fact I think I shall say loudly: PLEASE DOES ANYONE KNOW HOW TO GET MORE INFO ABOUT THIS? Either from the 6th Dec 2019 article or elsewhere? Thank you if you can help. I am not particularly adept at data gathering, sleuthing, stuff like this and yet it is so needed. |
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Post by cato on Nov 27, 2020 21:31:06 GMT
In relation to your above entry Rogerbuck the government have also been sitting on the report by forensic archaeologists into the Tuam site. The report was given to former minister Catherine Zappone who declined to publish it in 2019.For some strange reason neither she nor the current minister are in any hurry to publish it. I wonder why that could be? Hardly to sooth the feelings of the wicked nuns.
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Post by Tomas on Dec 12, 2020 11:58:29 GMT
We can definitely know by this stage that those who orchestrate for the "new" "normal" including fake solidarity as well as coercion, endless shift in digital machinery, compulsory masked citizens, lack of free movements of people and money, sordid vaccines business, squeling and aspersions, with many churches held under State surveillance assisted by informers and protestant thinking converts, various PC-certified devices in institutions, or in short modern slavery under disguise of good intentions and well-being in the humane health system, are, simply or not, morally flawed; while the only force against all this iniquity is what is always has been:
Holy Mother Church, and Her Bridegroom Jesus Christ,
Who is The Way, Truth, Life!
(What happens when even She becomes a similar flawed voice among the rest? Could the saints of tomorrow prevail in silence or will their voices be heard only in a darkness? Could it be that bishops goes "against" each other, rather than sustain silent penance?)
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Post by Tomas on Dec 12, 2020 12:06:02 GMT
The Supreme Court rejected the case on voting results in their first response yesterday, but it will probably not be the last word on the need for scrutiny on behalf of the Republicans. Takes longer time than awaited though. What we can know about US trickery in several states is not much here and now.
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