Matt Taibbi

Welcome to the American legal system.

This isn't as strong a justification as one might imagine. That system sucks in many ways. Recently we learned that DoJ routinely take every document held by particular targeted law firms, without warrants, and then designate "taint teams" of DoJ lawyers who view every document and suggest which ones should be seen by investigators. [0] The idea is that the taint team will forget all the documents they've seen when they later investigate other clients of the targeted law firms. Many judges have ordered this practice stopped, but DoJ DGAF.

This taint team concept obviously is unconstitutional and undermines justice, but ISTM the practice you describe is worse. When Meta's lawyers view documentation extracted from SimulaVR, they do so as agents of Meta. Their current stated goal may be to defend Meta in the present suit, but there's no reason to believe that's the only goal they'll ever have. Have Meta promised to throw away all documents after some of them have been presented to the court? Is there some sort of escrow concept that allows SimulaVR to trust someone other than Meta's lawyers? The danger to SimulaVR is actually greater if Meta are telling the truth that they are competitors!

If Meta actually were competitors of SimulaVR, it would be easy to show that by hiring an expert to testify that "this service and/or product sold by SimulaVR competes with this other service and/or product sold by Meta". The sort of thing described in…

Don't worry everyone. Wikipedia says MintPress is a conspiratorial website spreading Syrian and Russian disinformation [1]. So even though all the claims in the article can be independently verified (through wikipedia itself [2], or if you go through LinkedIn's login wall), this article can be safely dismissed.

It is better to wait for a trustworthy news source, such as the New York Times [3], to verify this. I'm sure they'll get around to it just as soon as they report on the 3-year-old story of Gordon MacMillan, an active duty officer in the British Army’s online psychological operations unit, that was revealed to be the Twitter executive for the Middle East [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MintPress_News

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kristie_Canegallo

[3] Why didn’t Snowden go to one of the big names at the Times? Could it be because one of the senior Times editors back then, Dean Baquet — now the chief — reportedly once killed a whistleblower’s story about a surveillance arrangement between AT&T and the NSA? Or because the Times had a history of sitting on damaging intelligence stories, including one about an analyst who doubted the existence of Iraqi WMDs that the paper held until after the 2003 invasion? - https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack

[4] https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-unmasking-of-twitter-exec-as-british-psyops-officer/ - Searching "Gordon MacMillan site:url" to this day finds no relevant articles on theguardian.com, bbc.com,…

I don't understand the bit about Taibbi. While he has some background as a general journalist, the overwhelming majority of what he writes these days is opinion work. More or less by definition, he has a perspective that colors his interpretation, and he wants to convince you that he's right.

When you say you "trust" a broad news organization I generally expect you mean that you take what they report to be a reasonable representation of the truth and that they aren't hiding things from you or otherwise spinning the interpreation.

When you say you "trust" an opinion journalist, really all you mean is that you agree with them[1]. Taibbi doesn't give you the whole story on anything! He gives you his perspective. This is what he wrote yesterday, for example: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/savor-the-great-musk-panic?s=r Now, sure, you might agree with that take. But you wouldn't hand this to your grandpa if he asked what all this stuff he was hearing about The Twitter was about.

[1] Personally I find that brand of anti-anti-right leftist journalism really tiring. Taibbi takes shots against the center left that draw eyeballs from people who want to see those libs suffer and in broad service to entities (yes, including the Russian government) that oppose them. I can't think of the last time I saw him write about a problem that I, personally, would like to see solved. Instead he writes about the other problems (some of them legitimate) with people who are trying to solve…

One thing that is maybe missing in this discussion is that this is not a new phenomenon. Greek antiquity had a period of intellectual enlightenment when science became popular enough to rival religion (see eg. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_rerum_natura ) then long medieval and dark periods where this was no longer the case. Then a renaissance, many aspects of which were also non lasting.

The important thing to realize, especially in democracies is that non intellectuals usually have the most political power and it's the job of the smart to convince them to give support to smart things.

This requires bringing common people to science's side instead of making fun of them. Although I enjoyed this movie and the newer one tackling the same themes as comic relief of really sad real world parallel situations, in some ways these movie makes the problem worst.

There could be ways to turn a lot of people around to support good causes and to prevent them from falling pray to dangerous manipulators. There are tons of common folks who's views are constantly shifting based on primal emotions and there is no reason they couldn't be shifted towards following science and truth if those who represented those concepts showed more respect. With elections often very close, just a few percentage points could make a huge difference.

The people caricatured are often easy to manipulate, not very smart and are often aware they are not very smart. They are often looking for leaders to guide and…

The letter complains about Fox and OANN's partisan and inflammatory rhetoric, with supporting citations to sources on the left who trade heavily in partisan and inflammatory rhetoric. Just three citations in you get to Karen Attiah, Washington Post's Global Opinions Editor: https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2020/jun/29/karen-attiah-washington-post-editor-white-women-ar/

> “White women are lucky that we are just calling them ‘Karen’s,’ and not calling for revenge,” Ms. Attiah tweeted to her 185,000 followers Sunday evening.

> “Non, je ne regrette rien,” she wrote in another tweet, making it clear she had no regrets.

Regarding misinformation, Rachel Maddow has suffered no negative consequences for jumping on every Trump-related conspiracy theory to pop up in the last four years: https://taibbi.substack.com/p/why-rachel-maddow-is-on-the-cover

> From there, the floodgates opened. “Commentary television is not news,” snapped David Cay Johnston of the New York Times, himself just days removed from saying on Democracy Now! that “I think [Trump] is a Russian agent.”

> He added: “Rachel Maddow in particular has certainly pushed the Mueller matter,” doing so in conjunction with “the facts at the time.” However, he said, her work was “driven by the commercial values of television.”

It's fair to say that Maddow has an opinion show, not a news show. But that distinction doesn't seem to matter to the Congresspeople who wrote the letter here--they suggest censoring Fox News, which…

Over the last few years I've made a habit of trying to understand others as much as possible. Historically I only read left-leaning sources but after exposing myself to more, it became clear that I was blind to the other side's perspective. I've found that there was typically validity to multiple views on most topics, and that selection bias (what news sources choose to cover) was a big problem. So these days I visit a number of sources, which is easier today because there are sites that try to represent views from different parts of the spectrum. Staying informed does take time (at least an hour a day), money (supporting news via subscriptions), and effort (takes away mental energy from other things).

Apart from the list below I also read and subscribe to a few different local news sources. Over the last several years, local news has been dying (financial issues) and I think that's a bad thing because it means you miss things happening around you that affect your life more so than national news, and because you only get a homogeneous national perspective (often reduced to a left versus right axis) instead of the more diverse issue-to-issue variation that is possible locally. I recommend identifying a few local sources near you if you have the time to read!

UNCATEGORIZED

1. Hacker News (I check the first couple pages several times a day)

2. Matt Taibbi (https://taibbi.substack.com - investigative reporting by a former Rolling Stone journalist)

3. Glenn Greenwald…