4 of the many reasons why you should never trust news reports (or your friends' posts)
Please do your own research before reacting
The clickbait headlines and the unvetted sharing of sensationalist posts seem to increase by the hour.
Feels like a good time for a few reminders…
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Perception management keeps escalating. When I was much younger, I'd clip newspaper articles and use them to keep track of the narrative/bullshit development. When I went back over them, it eventually became easy to spot the emotionalism, meretricious logical fallacies, attempts to cultivate confirmation bias, distracting nonsense. Digitial of course is much faster, more frantic, higher volume. There's still very little signal and massive amounts of noise. Some of that is intentional, but most comes from internalised values.
I mentioned the incubator story yesterday when talking to my husband about the Israel attack. I remember hearing that woman's "testimony" back when it was original, never questioning why anyone would want to steal incubators in a war zone to begin with.
Now I listen to reports of Israel with skepticism. I listened to part of Ben Shapiro's statement and thought to myself that, while the rape and murder of civilians is ALWAYS reprehensible, it is also something that is pretty much a universal practice in war zones. Remember Somalia? Yugoslavia?
In my own country, we seem to be subject to the same type of manipulation with stories of residential school crimes, for which criminal investigation never happens. I do not deny that bad things happened. But so much just doesn't make sense