#political literacy is important

[eliosfixations]

My (Republican) Father called America the best country and I had to resist the urge to not laugh. But asked him “Ok, on what basis” and his first attempt was “Freedom” and I had to tell him that stat actually belongs to Sweden, we rank somewhere around 25. So he tried again , and said Military and I had to wage the question of “you mean the military that gets entirely too much budget, therefore inflating your taxes, and doesn’t actually effect your day to day life? Unlike the rascism you receive from members of your own party, which does?”

And he just resigned, and I watched him think it over, and all his reply was “ Well that’s just how it is.” And I sit here now thinking about how my Dad has simply lost hope, he doesn’t agree with a lot of what Republicans say, but he sees no way he can effect his government and let it work for him and not the other way around. He often talks about how simply talking about ithe changes you want isn’t enough to cause change, but I wage the question, what will not talking about the changes that need made at all do? How will not talking about political injustices that occur within our government allow others to know it is injust? Not talking about politics and not having these important conversations is how people become misinformed, out of the loop, and how things stay stagnant or sometimes allows terrible things to fly under the radar.

Our nation needs change, and sitting back and doing nothing won’t change anything, so to my fellow democratic aligned gen z who may find this, if you will be eligible to vote in 2024, please do. It’s of critical importance you learn the facts on the candidates and their viewpoints, register to vote, and just talk about it. Whether we like it or not Gen-Z has a responsibility to fix the world before it descends into further chaos, and to do that we need to unite and come together!

[perfectlyvalid49]

hey, thanks so much for adding that "check your sources" thing to the post criticising israel! I'm kinda terrified of how quickly people are just pouncing on the opportunity to spread misinfo (I mean every globally-discussed event seems to be surrounded by that nowadays...). I won't lie, I'm also running out of energy to fact-check because there's just so much conflicting info out there, but when people don't even bother before spreading bold statements from openly biased sources to hundreds and thousands... anyways, point being, I appreciate your efforts and I really liked your post, thanks for doing your best!

You’re welcome! I honestly believe that misinformation/disinformation is an existential threat to democracy. I wish more people were more careful about the information they spread. I’m glad someone out there appreciates whatever small addition to the conversation I can make.

But I gotta admit that my initial reaction to this was which post? A while ago I pushed back against someone uncritically posting criticism of Israel from Al Jazeera, and they blocked me, and I took it personally. So I kinda went on a tear for a few days where I posted that sort of thing a lot.

As for running out of energy to fact check – me too! I’ll admit that I don’t fact check everything; that feels like an impossible task. But for anyone who cares, I’ll go into what sorts of things I think about and what are more likely to make me fact check what I’m seeing. Media literacy 101, let’s go!

So the very first question you need to ask yourself is, “does the reporting organization have known biases, and how does that interact with the topic reported?” The easy example in the US is that everyone knows that Fox has a right wing bias, and MSNBC skews left. When in doubt, there’s a handy chart ( https://adfontesmedia.com/interactive-media-bias-chart/ ). But other biases can come into play as well. ABC is owned by Disney, so for reporting on Disney, I fact check anything that is coming from ABC. Al Jazeera has an antisemitic bias, so for reporting that involves Israel, I fact check anything coming from Al Jazeera. But either of those sources are valid for something apolitical, like the local weather forecast.

The next thing you need to look out for is, “how is this being reported?/Is the headline trying to make me feel something?” It’s one thing if an article is clearly marked as an opinion piece, but then it’s just that – opinion. If a newspaper is publishing something as not an opinion piece, then you need to see if the author is presenting facts, or presenting an opinion disguised as facts. Very frequently you can tell from the headline. For example, “Reported Death Toll in Gaza Rises to 15,000” is factual, and a good indicator that the article is trustworthy, whereas “IDF murders another 500 civilians; Death Toll Now at 15,000” reports the same number but with a clear bias (use of the word murder, deaths listed as civilian, uncritically accepting Hamas’s numbers even though we have evidence that they lie about these things, trying to evoke outrage). This doesn’t mean that the article can’t contain true facts! But it does mean it’s a good candidate for double checking against other sources.

Another thing to watch out for is, “is this trying to get me to do or not do something? If so, who benefits?” Is the article trying to convince you that it’s stupid to fight climate change? Either because it’s already hopeless or because it isn’t real – either way you should be suspicious. Who benefits? Probably big companies who don’t want to change how they’re run to lessen the impact on the environment. Or when you start seeing posts about how voting for democrats is pointless because they’re not doing enough – who benefits? People who want to see republicans in power instead. This isn’t necessarily cause for a fact check, but it’s still an important part of media literacy to be able to recognize this tactic and ask yourself this question.

Finally, ask yourself, “is the article telling me something I want to hear/am inclined to agree with?” We all have biases, and a lot of news articles play into that. And it’s very likely that you’ll fact check something you don’t want to believe anyway – because you don’t want to believe it, so of course you’ll look for something to prove it wrong. But things that you want to believe are the things you need to be the most cautious of, because they can still be false, but you’re more likely to pass them on uncritically. I actually sort of did this myself a few weeks ago – I posted an article about JVP sucking. And they do! But I could have picked a better article to post, because the one I selected was not super well written, and it had busted links. I should have double checked, but it was saying something I already agreed with, so I didn’t read the whole thing before sharing. (No one is perfect, I will try to do better).

And while this feels super relevant to the i/p conflict (and it is!), really, it’s applicable to just about everything. There’s an election in just under a year, and this will be very relevant to that too. I know there are news aggregates that will do some of the bias checking for you, but really the ability to think critically about a source of information is a really, really important skill. Practicing it for yourself is the best way to develop it.

[troythecatfish]

[elodieunderglass]

On the topic of the monarchist animals I'm just really curious. What makes the winnie pooh real animals bourgeois? It's not like they own much more than the others. Do they just have bourgeois energy?

(In reference to my addition on this post; https://www.tumblr.com/elodieunderglass/748488762087047168/hold-on-lets-do-this-properly-paddington)

In the post I state that none of the stuffed/toy animals in the Winnie the Pooh series are monarchists, but that the real animals are bourgeoisie. Obviously this is tongue in cheek, but it’s still politically interesting to me because nobody ever reads Winnie the Pooh as an actual book. They just draw depressed Disney Eeyore and think they’ve done something.

Owl and Rabbit are real wild animals that live in the Hundred Acre Wood. The other characters in the story are Christopher Robin’s stuffed animals.

The “real” animals (reasonably) consider themselves to be separate from the stuffed ones, but where it becomes unreasonable is how they assume superiority and how they use this to exert authority.

(A charming response about how the stuffed animals view this: Piglet points out that Rabbit is both clever and Has Brain, and Pooh replies that this is why Rabbit “doesn’t understand anything.”)

Owl is characterised by being a bit of a fraud. The stuffed animals respect him for his presumed education and literacy, but even a preschooler understands that Owl can’t actually read. he actively deceives the other characters in order to maintain a higher social status over them. (Actually, Rabbit’s the most literate character in the Wood.) Owl gains relatively little advantage from this status, apart from his belief that he is superior and the pleasure in everyone deferring to him. A notable theme throughout the written series involves characters approaching Owl for advice, based on his self-made reputation of being wise and thoughtful, and him giving explicitly bad advice, rather than admit that he has no idea how to help. Also, they forcibly give him someone else’s house, in such a way that the actual possessor of the house (Piglet) feels he can’t speak up. Pooh immediately offers to Piglet that he move in with him, which even as a kid felt like an incredibly unsatisfactory solution to having the shyest character’s actual house given away to the character who casually lies about everything just to feel superior.

Rabbit is a grown-ass adult real wild animal. He is the social leader of a massively large family and an extended group of hangers-on (he has fifteen or seventeen close relatives, and the extended Friends-and-Relations are a sort of army); he is the only actually literate person in the narrative, so it is understandable that he feels this (although he also believes Owl can read.) literacy and Brain are considered very important in the Wood.

Rabbit believes in his own superiority and believes himself to serve as a sort of cadet to Christopher Robin. In the series Christopher Robin is the ultimate judge, and a kindly ruler; Rabbit positions himself constantly at Christopher Robin’s right hand and wants to be his enforcer. Christopher Robin, who is five and a fairly distracted God, does not really enforce anything. This does not stop Rabbit from trying to organise the entire Wood. It’s frequently mentioned that Rabbit wants to feel important, he wants to be the Boss. A beautiful, beautiful commentary on his character is when he wakes up feeling “important, as if everything depending on him… it was a Captainish sort of day, when everybody said “Yes Rabbit” and “No Rabbit” and waited until he had told them.” Fantastic!

However, we can see where this leads him. In the first book Rabbit is shown being hostile and actively anti-foreign in his approach to other people. When kanga and roo arrive in the forest - sanctioned by Christopher Robin who has received new toys - Rabbit instantly says they have to get rid of them. Like there is NO friendship in Rabbit’s heart here. There is no “god has placed a new friend in the wood so we have to get on with it.”

Rabbit’s anti-immigration stances are funny, and in-character, and shown by the narrative to be wrong and unfair. But they’re pretty unleashed.

His plan is to kidnap the baby and hold it hostage until the mother agrees to “leave the forest forever and never return.”

This is not a normal response to a new character. It is in fact fucking unhinged. Coming from the most normal-adult real animal in the story, it comes out of nowhere. “We have to eliminate them instantly. Take the baby hostage, blackmail the parent and deport them” Rabbit these are war crimes.

Anyway it’s all very heartwarming as Rabbit learns that he likes Baby Roo. (Their relationship grows warmer as Baby Roo says “yes rabbit” and “no rabbit” better than anyone else.) We never really learn why Rabbit is so violently anti-immigration that he instantly jumps to doing crimes, but it’s possible that he doesn’t like the threat to the status quo. Baby Roo, by deferring politely, thus turns out to be a valuable social inferior for Rabbit’s power base.

But in the next book we also get another new character introduction: Tigger. rabbit does not like tigger. In fact, he stops visiting Roo because Tigger lives with them. Rabbit, frustrated by Tigger’s bounciness, also decides to deliberately trick and bully Tigger in order to make him “small and sorry.” The fact that this comically backfires on Rabbit is part of the Pooh-lore storytelling style, of course, but it’s still something obvious even to the preschool audience - that isn’t how you treat your friends.

In conclusion, due to their hoarding of (social) capital and behaviors that prop up an unjustly unequal social system, I think the real animals in Winnie the Pooh are a bit bougie.

[onemetricdylan]

Having a normal time in the Disco Elysium subreddit like “the story is pretty critical of communism even while highlighting positives” and then some dingus accuses me of being a centrist

[shithowdy]

the discussion surrounding generative images costing artists their jobs and being trained on stolen work is extremely important and worth having, but the reason i'm so zealous about pointing them out when i see them (and helping people learn to recognize them) is, once again, consumer and media literacy. ai generators have their arguable uses as tools for inspiration, but they are also tools for manipulation.

generative images, unlike a good photoshop, can be produced instantly with absolutely no skill required, which means that everything from online shopping to political propaganda is now inundated with convincing fakes. this could easily be you!

when doing your shopping this season, please pay close attention to products from unfamiliar sources like etsy shops.

does the product show multiple angles? (this is the most important thing for which you should look)

does the product have a lot of superfine details, yet no zoom on them?

do those details actually connect and make sense as shapes?

are things that should be symmetrical, such as chair legs or lamp bases, actually symmetrical?

does the light source make sense? (like this lamp example: why is the base not illuminated if the lamp is lit?)

if purchasing a print from an etsy (etc.) shop, is the style consistent or does the "artist" somehow seem to be an expert in every style and medium? (like, beware of shops like this one-- even without zooming and investigating, the inconsistent style is quite a red flag)

can you find an "original" of the image, like on an artist's social media, or does it seem to only exist in the context of the shop?

do the elements and details of the image easily distinguish themselves, or do parts of them merge weirdly together? (to use an example from the previously linked shop, check out the bottom of the coat on this image and how it fuses with the clothing beneath-- this is only the most immediate and obvious issue in the image)

REVERSE IMAGE SEARCH EVERYTHING.

my inbox is always open if you want help determining if something is fake. love you guys, protect your wallets.

[vexwerewolf]

I’m suddenly getting swathes of Lancer hate across my feed… Has something happened in the fandom? “Union is ______ how could they paint them as even remotely good. They allow _____, and I hate the devs they are ______. The whole thing is just 40k with communist veneer”.

Like am I taking crazy pills…? I thought that all of the problems were literally like right there on the tin “we are a utopia in progress! We will obtain it by any means possible even if it means being everything we say we are not/fighting against. As the player you decide what is right. How much will you ignore for someone else’s idea of utopia?” Like doesn’t it mean all the tools to actually change are there and that is the HOPE aspect of all of this?

(Sorry if this in incoherent grammar is a weak point and I pulled something in my back simply standing up. Now I am sad and crook backed in spasmodic pain)

This isn't an argument I feel super enthusiastic about stepping into, because it gets the most annoying sort of people in your mentions eager to maliciously misrepresent what you say.

However, yeah, there are some pretty terrible readings of Union floating around. I'd invoke "media literacy" because think that a lot of this comes from people not really holistically engaging with the fictional future history of Lancer, but also from a sort of dogmatic purism that requires future societies to be flawless, else they're irredeemable.

It is important to note that ThirdComm is the direct descendant of two highly imperfect societies. FirstComm was formed as a response to the Three Great Traumas of discovering the Massif Vaults (and thus that they were the inheritors of a fallen world), the wars over the Massif Vaults, and the discovery of the lost colonies, all of which collectively showed humanity how close it had come to total extinction.

FirstComm decided that it had a responsibility to ensure that humanity never risked extinction again. It manifested this by trying to colonize every habitable planet it could find, pumping out ship after ship to seed the cosmos with as much human life as it possibly could. This led to problems when it encountered civilizations like the Karrakin Federation and the Aun, who had been carrying humanity's torch just fine by themselves, thank you very much.

SecComm was an Anthrochauvinist fascist state. The book defines it thusly:

We can see a lot of Anthrochauvinist historical romanticism in the mech naming schemes of Harrison Armory, SSC and IPS-N - the fact that Harrison Armory names its mechs after great military leaders of pre-Fall Earth history, IPS-N does the same with naval figures, and SSC uses the names of Earth animals. Even the GMS Everest is named for a mountain on Earth. It's very Cradle-centric.

Anthrochauvinism was, to be clear, largely just an excuse for colonialism and hegemony. Atrocities could easily be justified under by stating that whoever they're being committed against were a threat to the Continuance of Humanity - a term that SecComm got to define.

It's also at this point that we have to zoom in from broad sociopolitical points to address one very specific piece of history: the New Prosperity Agreement. This was signed to prevent the outbreak of a Second Union-Karrakin War, and mandated that the Karrakin Houses would maintain privileged levels of autonomy within Union, and that they would be granted colonial rights to the entire Dawnline Shore. This agreement, struck in 3007u, basically defines much of the current political situation today.

ThirdComm was a final and inevitable reaction to the atrocities, abuses and excesses of SecComm. The unspeakable horrors of Hercynia were the spark, but I need to stress how little Hercynia actually mattered in the larger Revolution - at the start of NRfaW, it's explicitly stated that almost nobody in the galaxy even knows where it is, let alone what happened there. The Revolution was a generalized response to SecComm's tyranny, with no single rallying cry.

The Revolution might also have failed entirely, but for a critical error by Harrison Armory: pissing off the Karrakin Trade Baronies. After getting kicked off Cradle, the Anthrochauvinist Party organised a fleet at Ras Shamra to try and retake Cradle. Simultaneously, however, they were attempting to secure protectorate agreements to steal worlds in the Dawnline Shore out from under the KTB. Putting these two together and making five, the KTB assumed that the fleet was pointed at Karrakis, and started the First Interest War.

The First Interest War initially favoured the KTB. They smashed the fleet above Ras Shamra and simultaneously conquered the moon of Creighton in the Dawnline Shore. However, they underestimated just how ruthless Harrison I was - he "retook" Creighton by relativistic bombardment, and then conquered four of the 12 worlds of the Dawnline Shore with mechanised chassis, a technology the KTB had not adopted and had no counter for.

To prevent further loss of life, Union was eventually forced to broker a peace agreement that saw Harrison I handing himself over to Union justice in return for Harrison Armory's continued sovereignty, and the KTB joining Union as a full member state.

So, with that historical context out of the way, let me get to the second part of this absurd essay I'm writing.

Third Committee Union isn't a civilization that arose from whole cloth. It's shaped by five thousand years of Union history, six thousand years of post-Fall history, and six thousand years of pre-Fall history before that. It is, ultimately, an extremely well-thought-out and well-worldbuilt fictional polity, in that all of its imperfections come from traceable root causes in its history.

Why does ThirdComm permit the abuses of the KTB? Because to stop them, it would likely have to go to war, and such a war would butcher billions. Worse, to do so, it would probably have to ally with Harrison Armory and make horrific concessions.

Why does ThirdComm permit the expansionism and cryptochauvinism of the Armory? Because to stop them, it would likely have to go to war, and such a war would butcher billions. Worse, to do so, it would probably have to ally with the KTB and make horrific concessions.

Nobody in CentComm likes that Harrison Armory are empire-building expansionists. Nobody in CentComm likes that the KTB has a hereditary nobility and enforces blockades against planets that rebel against it. The problem is that ThirdComm is, in historical terms, still relatively new. They've been around five hundred years, and compared to the 1600 years that SecComm was around and the 2800 years FirstComm existed for, that's not very much.

ThirdComm is attempting to decouple itself from the Cradle-first politics of its predecessor, and to amend the many, many atrocities committed in the name of Humanity. It is not easy to do any of these things. SecComm was defined almost entirely by the fact that if it didn't like what you were doing, it would send in the military as a first response. Every time ThirdComm chooses to do the same, its legitimacy erodes, because the mission of ThirdComm is to prove that diverse, vibrant and compassionate human civilization can exist without devolving into war and bloodshed. ThirdComm always tries diplomacy as a first response because if it doesn't, millions of people could die.

[pretty-weird-ideas]

Anne Rice, Literature, and Literacy

As a Black book reader of Anne Rice, seeing racist IWTV fans doing the "Black kids in Brooklyn don't even know what a computer is" bit by stating Black fans that they are "anti-intellectual" for discouraging or telling Black fans to not read the books (or simply implying that reading the books aren't important) is disturbing.

Black people are allowed to protect their peace, and not read a book written with racist themes, by a well-known controversial author. Furthermore, the implication that not reading a specific series from an author that had a sharp downward turn in quality after Memnoch (I know hot take, I'm sorry) makes a person immature and unintelligent is a level of self-aggrandizing racism that not even Rick and Morty fans could pull off. Black people refusing to read racist content and instead choosing to prioritize content with Black characters and less harmful political themes being associated with a lack of culture and media literacy is repulsive.

Anne Rice fans (not fans of her books, but fans of HER) are in such a large fandom bubble that they have forgotten that people have been actively harmed by Anne Rice THE PERSON who was alive and isn't a figment of fandom imagination. You can READ her opinions and her political beliefs, you can read what she has said and done to real-life people who are still alive and are in fandom TODAY.

People have been harassed by Anne Rice, and people have been threatened and doxxed by Anne Rice and her supporters. She isn't a figment of imagination or a historical figure without living memories. Fanfiction.net isn't Fanfiction.net for no reason. AO3 isn't aggressively "like that" (positive and negative connotations) without cause. The existence of modern fandom culture was built by her horrid actions, and the further and further we get from acknowledging the harm and change she brought to fandom culture, the closer we get to losing fandom culture altogether.

I'm not going to say names, but once again it is repeated offenders who I have spoken about who have once again implied that Black fans are "encouraging" stupidity in Black people. That Black fans are unintelligent and that they are "uncultured" of their own volition. I'm not going to mince words here, the IWTV fandom is full of pieces of shit who believe that Black people are unintelligent and that their unintelligence is "self-inflicted". That their lack of interest in reading a singular book written by a controversial figure is a sign that they are inherently inferior. We've seen this with "Black culture encourages unintelligence" and "Black culture encourages violence" so seeing it within the confines of a space made up of queer losers (for lack of a better term as I am one myself) isn't surprising. But it is disappointing in ways that words, barring expletives, cannot describe. The xenophobia and racism towards African Americans in a show that centers African Americans is revolting. If I want to hear a rant about how Black Americans are encouraging vice and delinquency I could listen to Richard Spencer or Nick Fuentes wax poetic, I don't want to hear it from fans of a woman whose harassment campaigns towards critics are continuing from beyond the grave.

I don't want to be the person that begs people to read Black literature, but I wish a black person would walk up to white people and scoff when they say they haven't read N.K Jemisin or Octavia Butler. That we shall roll our eyes and say "What has literacy come to?" when someone says they don't know who Zora Neale Hurston is. Who walks around and rants about how "White culture is in such a bad spot because their people don't encourage listening to Jazz and Hip Hop. And how I shed my Black savior tears about how destructive their culture is,". Maybe then we would start to see shame.

[saintjosie]

say what you will about tiktok but there isn’t a single american news outlet talking about palestine that isn’t just pro-israeli propoganda and tiktok is one of the few places where you can actually get information about what’s happening there.

do trends and shitposts get annoying sometimes? yeah absolutely. but it’s still an incredibly important and powerful platform for information dissemination when you are able to filter through bullshit with a modicum of media literacy and find content creators you can trust. and doubly so in the wake of twitter falling to pieces.

what if elon musk isn’t as big of an idiot as he seems? what if he’s playing a long con, willing to lose 20 billion dollars (which is not even 10% of his estimated net worth btw) in order to further his political agenda? and why is there suddenly bipartisan support for a tiktok ban via KOSA (kids online safety act), supposedly in the name of protecting children?

both parties know that the american propoganda machine falls apart when the power of information lies with the people.

remember when conservatives initially wanted to ban tiktok? they were willing to allow tiktok to continue to operate if they either sold to an american company or relocated their servers to american soil. and now after tiktok managed to avoid doing either one while also managing to avoid giving any legal reason for a tiktok ban, suddenly there is bipartisan support for a bill that essentially allows for unrestricted censorship of the internet in america?

another thing to consider - where did this vitriol for tiktok come from? did it come from someone you know? and where did that person pick up that opinion? can that opinion be traced back to an actual person or were many of these opinions seeded by faceless accounts, the same way that faceless accounts spread nazi shit, terf shit, and shitty lgbtqia rhetoric, to start the unsuspecting down radicalizing pipelines?

every major political power in the world is constantly running psyops to erode our ability to trust what we see online, to sow misinformation and distrust, because the uninformed masses are vulnerable to manipulation.

think about the media you consume. double check it. get a second opinion. learn how to engage in GOOD FAITH discourse. learn how to be kind. learn when to block and move on.

protect yourself and in doing so, protect those around you. because without the communities that we have online, without the ability to organize and share, we lose.

[gretashand]

I don't want to sound like a boomer or anything but as more and more AI gets implemented into every day tech I implore you to pay attention to what it's correcting and not let yourself become complacent and lazy in your relationship with writing and literacy. I don't care if you use it, if its correcting your grammar learn what its correcting so you might not need it as much next time, if you're asking Grammarly to word something politely or in a different tone pay attention to how it does that. If its summarizing something to you take the time to read the full thing as well and pay attention to any disparities or anything you might have missed. Reading and writing is so important, and I think it's great that some of this AI can give you access to resource to help you improve it, but you actually have to pay attention and learn. Functional illiteracy is already a problem, and this kind of tech is only going to make that worse if we let it.

In the US kids still in school are becoming more technologically illiterate because tech came out that made using it easier/more mindless and so they stopped being taught how to use literally anything else.

So many people struggle with media literacy because they decided English/Literature class was worthless and writing essays was stupid even though its entire purpose is to make you media literate and give you tools to think critically and then express your thoughts with accuracy.

Progress is great, its fantastic, but we need to engage with it mindfully. Consumerism became an American trademark and we lost Home Ec. classes. Why teach you to sew, or cook, or garden (all great life skills that EVERYONE needs) when they can get you to pay for it to be done for you. Nothing is allowed to be fixed because they want you to buy a whole new version. They trademarked parts and tech for machines so that the people who knew how to fix things couldn't do it without them and the access to that kind of knowledge has gotten scarcer.

Reading and writing is the foundation of communication and understanding in the modern world. They are some of the most important skills you could ever have, do not let our vampiric, productivity money focused shit show of a society take that from you. The ability to read and write revolutionized civilization. It was gatekept from the masses because it makes people powerful. It makes you harder to control. Do not let them take this from you, and absolutely do not give it up to them of your own free will.

[qqueenofhades]

Hello! This is kind of a weird ask, I'm sorry to bother you, but seeing as you're a very intelligent studied historian that I deeply respect, I was hoping you could offer some advice? Or like, things i could read? Lately, i feel like my critical thinking skills are emaciated and its scaring the shit out of me. I feel very slow and like I'm constantly missing important info in relation to news/history/social activism stuff. Thats so vague, sorry, but like any tips on how i can do better?

Aha, thank you. There was recently a good critical-thinking infograph on my dash, so obviously I thought I remembered who reblogged it and checked their blog, it wasn't them, thought it was someone else, checked their blog, it also wasn't them, and now I can't find it to link to. Alas. But I will try to sum up its main points and add a few of my own. I'm glad you're taking the initiative to work on this for yourself, and I will add that while it can seem difficult and overwhelming to sort through the mass of information, especially often-false, deliberately misleading, or otherwise bad information, there are a few tips to help you make some headway, and it's a skill that like any other skill, gets easier with practice. So yes.

The first and most general rule of thumb I would advise is the same thing that IT/computer people tell you about scam emails. If something is written in a way that induces urgency, panic, the feeling that you need to do something RIGHT NOW, or other guilt-tripping or anxiety-inducing language, it is -- to say the least -- questionable. This goes double if it's from anonymous unsourced accounts on social media, is topically or thematically related to a major crisis, or anything else. The intent is to create a panic response in you that overrides your critical faculties, your desire to do some basic Googling or double-checking or independent verification of its claims, and makes you think that you have to SHARE IT WITH EVERYONE NOW or you are personally and morally a bad person. Unfortunately, the world is complicated, issues and responses are complicated, and anyone insisting that there is Only One Solution and it's conveniently the one they're peddling should not be trusted. We used to laugh at parents and grandparents for naively forwarding or responding to obviously scam emails, but now young people are doing the exact same thing by blasting people with completely sourceless social media tweets, clips, and other manipulative BS that is intended to appeal to an emotional gut rather than an intellectual response. When you panic or feel negative emotions (anger, fear, grief, etc) you're more likely to act on something or share questionable information without thinking.

Likewise, you do have basic Internet literacy tools at your disposal. You can just throw a few keywords into Google or Wikipedia and see what comes up. Is any major news organization reporting on this? Is it obviously verifiable as a fake (see the disaster pictures of sharks swimming on highways that get shared after every hurricane)? Can you right-click, perform a reverse image search, and see if this is, for example, a picture from an unrelated war ten years ago instead of an up-to-date image of the current conflict? Especially with the ongoing Israel/Palestine imbroglio, we have people sharing propaganda (particularly Hamas propaganda) BY THE BUCKETLOAD and masquerading it as legitimate news organizations (tip: Quds News Network is literally the Hamas channel). This includes other scuzzy dirtbag-left websites like Grayzone and The Intercept, which often have implicit or explicit links to Russian-funded disinformation campaigns and other demoralizing or disrupting fake news that is deliberately designed to turn young left-leaning Westerners against the Democrats and other liberal political parties, which enables the electoral victory of the fascist far-right and feeds Putin's geopolitical and military aims. Likewise, half of our problems would be solved if tankies weren't so eager to gulp down and propagate anything "anti-Western" and thus amplify the Russian disinformation machine in a way even the Russians themselves sometimes struggle to do, but yeah. That relates to both Russia/Ukraine and Israel/Palestine.

Basically: TikTok, Twitter/X, Tumblr itself, and other platforms are absolutely RIFE with misinformation, and this is due partly to ownership (the Chinese government and Elon Fucking Musk have literally no goddamn reason whatsoever to build an unbiased algorithm, and have been repeatedly proven to be boosting bullshit that supports their particular worldviews) and partly due to the way in which the young Western left has paralyzed itself into hypocritical moral absolutes and pseudo-revolutionary ideology (which is only against the West itself and doesn't think that the rest of the world has agency to act or think for itself outside the West's influence, They Are Very Smart and Anti-Colonialist!) A lot of "information" in left-leaning social media spaces is therefore tainted by this perspective and often relies on flat-out, brazen, easily disprovable lies (like the popular Twitter account insisting that Biden could literally just overturn the Supreme Court if he really wanted to). Not all misinformation is that easy to spot, but with a severe lack of political, historical, civic, or social education (since it's become so polarized and school districts generally steer away from it or teach the watered-down version for fear of being attacked by Moms for Liberty or similar), it is quickly and easily passed along by people wanting trite and simplistic solutions for complex problems or who think the extent of social justice is posting the Right Opinions on social media.

As I said above, everything in the world is complicated and has multiple factors, different influences, possible solutions, involved actors, and external and internal causes. For the most part, if you're encountering anything that insists there's only one shiningly righteous answer (which conveniently is the one All Good and Moral People support!) and the other side is utterly and even demonically in the wrong, that is something that immediately needs a closer look and healthy skepticism. How was this situation created? Who has an interest in either maintaining the status quo, discouraging any change, or insisting that there's only one way to engage with/think about this issue? Who is being harmed and who is being helped by this rhetoric, including and especially when you yourself are encouraged to immediately spread it without criticism or cross-checking? Does it rely on obvious lies, ideological misinformation, or something designed to make you feel the aforementioned negative emotions? Is it independently corroborated? Where is it sourced from? When you put the author's name into Google, what comes up?

Also, I think it's important to add that as a result, it's simply not possible to distill complicated information into a few bite-sized and easily digestible social media chunks. If something is difficult to understand, that means you probably need to spend more time reading about it and encountering diverse perspectives, and that is research and work that has to take place primarily not on social media. You can ask for help and resources (such as you're doing right now, which I think is great!), but you can't use it as your chief or only source of information. You can and should obviously be aware of the limitations and biases of traditional media, but often that has turned into the conspiracy-theory "they never report on what's REALLY GOING ON, the only information you can trust is random anonymous social media accounts managed by God knows who." Traditional media, for better or worse, does have certain evidentiary standards, photographing, sourcing, and verifying requirements, and other ways to confirm that what they're writing about actually has some correspondence with reality. Yes, you need to be skeptical, but you can also trust that some of the initial legwork of verification has been done for you, and you can then move to more nuanced review, such as wording, presentation of perspective, who they're interviewing, any journalistic assumptions, any organizational shortcomings, etc.

Once again: there is a shit-ton of stuff out there, it is hard to instinctively know or understand how to engage with it, and it's okay if you don't automatically "get" everything you read. That's where the principle of actually taking the time to be informed comes in, and why you have to firmly divorce yourself from the notion that being socially aware or informed means just instantly posting or sharing on social media about the crisis of the week, especially if you didn't know anything about it beforehand and are just relying on the Leftist Groupthink to tell you how you should be reacting. Because things are complicated and dangerous, they take more effort to unpick than just instantly sharing a meme or random Twitter video or whatever. If you do in fact want to talk about these things constructively, and not just because you feel like you're peer-pressured into doing so and performing the Correct Opinions, then you will in fact need to spend non-social-media time and effort in learning about them.

If you're at a university, there are often subject catalogues, reference librarians, and other built-in tools that are there for you to use and which you SHOULD use (that's your tuition money, after all). That can help you identify trustworthy information sources and research best practices, and as you do that more often, it will help you have more of a feel for things when you encounter them in the wild. It's not easy at first, but once you get the hang of it, it becomes more so, and will make you more confident in your own judgments, beliefs, and values. That way when you encounter something that you KNOW is wrong, you won't be automatically pressured to share it just to fit in, because you will be able to tell yourself what the problems are.

Good luck!

[radiofreederry]

Happy birthday, Paulo Freire! (September 19, 1921)

An acclaimed and influential Brazilian educator, Paulo Freire was born in the state of Pernambuco and grew up intimately aware of the effects of poverty on people's opportunities and educations. He went to law school but ended up pursuing a career in education. He worked to raise literacy - a prerequisite for political suffrage - among the rural poor, until the 1964 coup forced him to leave Brazil. While in exile, he published The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, his most influential work and an important piece of critical pedagogy. He returned to Brazil in 1980 and settled in Sao Paulo, joining the Workers Party and becoming municipal Secretary of Education. He died in 1997, leaving a strong and lasting educational and philosophical legacy behind.

[transmutationisms]

there's a certain rhetorical sleight-of-hand i often see on this website wherein the phrase "media literate" is deployed but what's meant is more along the lines of "sharing a specific interpretation of a text." the skills that make up media literacy have to do with the ability to understand what's being said in the text and how that message is conveyed mechanically. two people can be equally media literate and will still interpret the message radically differently if, say, one is a card-carrying marxist and the other votes tory. and that's not me saying that both are equally 'correct,' because i don't think that lol. but you can't resolve that type of disagreement by 'teaching more media literacy' (often a euphemism for economically inaccessible and culturally hegemonic university education) if you're ignoring the political and social interpretive frameworks and value systems that people are importing when they put their media literacy skills to use

[literaryvein-reblogs]

I hope this doesn't sound confusing, but is there a way to strike a balance between using "simple" words and "complex" words? Like, trying to write something that isn't too simple or too verbose.

I think context is the keyword here.

What I do is I just write using my current vocabulary, so that I'm able to convey what I mean as accurately as possible. And if I want to sort of elevate my writing, that's when I might swap out some simpler words with more "complex"/poetic words, or maybe even phrases. But I make sure I'm using the appropriate vocabulary. How do we do this? I'm just going to copy and paste here an excerpt from this writing resource to answer this question:

It’s important to use words and expressions that fit the context so your meaning is clear. For example, different audiences for your writing will require different levels of formality: the vocabulary you use in an academic essay may not be effective for a blogpost targeting a popular audience. Consider the following questions to help you choose the most appropriate words for your audience and purpose. a. What’s the exact meaning of the word? Words may be broadly similar in meaning but differ in important aspects of that meaning. Consider the difference between ‘the fragrance of flowers’  and ‘the odour of rotten eggs.’ Both words refer to the sense of smell, but fragrance has a positive core meaning while odour has a negative one. If you don’t know what a word exactly means, check it in a dictionary. Also look up sample sentences that use your "complex"/fancy word, and see how it is actually used. But, once you truly know what a word means, wordplay can be your friend. b. Is the word attached to a feeling? Compare the two sentences: ‘The freeway snakes through the town’ and ‘The freeway meanders through the town’. In this example, snake indicates negative feelings about the freeway while meander doesn’t. c. What level of intensity does the word show? Many words with similar meanings describe different degrees of the same quality or action. For example, ‘comical’, ‘hilarious’ and ‘side-splitting’  show different degrees of funniness. Think about the intensity of what you want to convey when choosing words. d. Is the word formal or informal? Go for formal words and expressions in business communication and academic writing. In the following examples, the second expression in each pair is more formal than the first: (1) come up with / create (2) one after another / at regular intervals (3) huge / considerable (4) enough / sufficient e. Is the word polite? Words which describe negative qualities or sensitive issues too directly can be offensive. Good communicators consider the feelings of their audience. For example, when writing about childhood obesity, it’s more appropriate to use ‘children with weight problems’ or ‘children of an unhealthy weight’ than ‘fat children’. f. Is the word specific or general? Use words with specific meanings whenever possible to make your message clearer to your audience. For example, avoid overusing general verbs such as ‘be’, ‘do’, ‘have’ and ‘get’, especially in academic writing, as they don’t accurately convey specific ideas. It’s better to use a more specific verb or verb phrase to strengthen your message. Compare the impact of the verbs in these sentences: ‘To be successful, learners need to have high-level literacy skills.’ ‘To be successful, learners need to develop and demonstrate high-level literacy skills.’ g. What other words does the word often go with? Some words are frequently used together and therefore sound more natural in combination. This is called collocation. For example, we say ‘fast train’ not ‘quick train’, but ‘quick shower’ not ‘fast shower’. Similarly, it’s more natural to say ‘highly critical’ rather than ‘deeply critical.’ Additionally, be aware of idioms. Idioms are commonly used word combinations or expressions. These have very specific meanings that are not obvious from the words they contain, e.g. ‘a piece of cake’, ‘get the hang of it’, ‘an Indian summer’, and ‘after a fashion’. Many dictionaries list and define idioms if you look up the component words. For example, try looking up ‘Indian’ or ‘summer’ to find ‘Indian summer’.

But if you have a wide vocabulary that people have difficulty understanding you, maybe you can do the opposite of this and swap out the too complex words with simpler ones, haha!

Lastly, when you read through your work whilst editing, ask yourself: Does this sound natural? Does it sound like your literary voice? Do you recognise yourself in this written work? Or do the simple/complex words you've inserted sound too unfamiliar?

Hope this helps, dear Anon. But if anyone has a better answer for this, do let us know.

[petervintonjr]

"As black America approaches the 21st century, our capacity or our failure to build a solid bridge . . . of works will determine whether millions of young blacks already with us or yet unborn will cross over into the new century, or fall into the abyss."

Another name you almost certainly didn't know: M. (Moses) Carl Holman, civil rights activist, writer, and poet. Born in 1919 St. Louis, Holman showed an early gift for writing, and at the age of 19 won a scriptwriting award from a popular syndicated radio program. He graduated magna cum laude from Lincoln University and went on to acquire Master's degrees from the University of Chicago and from Yale. While at Yale he published his first collection of poems, and began regularly writing articles for various newspapers and magazines on income inequity, urban poverty, literacy, and other issues important to Black Americans. In 1962 he taught English at Clark College in Atlanta, giving him a front-row seat to key events in the earliest days of the civil rights movement. As some of his students participated in sit-ins and the Freedom Rides, he found himself appointed to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, of which he eventually became deputy director in 1966.

In 1968 Ebony magazine named Holman as one of the 100 Most Influential Black Americans. That same year Holman published what is probably his best-known work: The Baptizin', a play which won first prize in the National Community Theater Festival. In addition to multiple collections of poems, Holman also published a definitive overview of the civil rights movement in the U.S., from 1965 to 1975.

Perhaps most significantly, in 1971 Holman was named Vice President of the National Urban Coalition. This organization had re-formed in 1967 in the wake of the so-called "long, hot summer" of racial strife and injustices. During this time Holman's singular talent for delivering quiet and polite, but still powerful, speeches came to the fore and he jumpstarted a great many local housing, education, job training, and economic development programs aimed at disadvantaged Black and Hispanic communities.

In his later years Holman forcefully addressed the issue of "dual literacy" for Black children --emphasizing that such students not only needed to be well-versed not only in the fundamentals such as reading, writing, and public speaking; but also in math, science, and technology. His 1988 obituary notes that Holman "had an uncanny ability to form a coalition out of the most diverse elements, and it was often said that the key to his ability to do this was the fact that he never appeared to have an agenda for himself."

(Teachers: Need some resources to engage your students this Black History Month? I'll send you a pile of these trading cards, no cost, no obligation. Just give me a mailing address and let me know how many students in your class. No strings attached, no censorship, no secret-relaying-of-names to Abbott or DeSantis or HuckaSanders.)