18 Comments

I'm on X and BlueSky. The former is far better on news.

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Interesting, you should write-up something comparing the two!! I haven't ventured over there. I only have so much time.

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Some of us only get news from news outlets that we pay to subscribe to. I can’t say I feel like I’m missing out by not handing money and personal information over to the tech oligarchs!

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Understandable. I don't pay for anything on X. I can't remember now what information I had to provide to sign up. Nice that there is a lot of free info on Substack too!

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X is a cesspool of disinformation, racism, and hate. It is getting worse all the time. I prefer not to give any attention to that cretin Musk and his teenagers trying to illegally destroy the Constitution. If you get your news there, I sincerely hope you fact-check every single thing multiple times with reputable sources.

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What do you consider reputable sources? I think the only way to get an accurate picture these days is to take in a wide variety of sources with different biases and then try to piece together the truth. Even "fact checks" have biases and are often funded by entities that have their own agendas.

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There is a substack called The Scroll that I find succinct, compact and interesting as a news source. I also read Matt Taibbi, Quillette and Unherd.

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I am very familiar with the latter three but have not heard of The Scroll-- will check it out!

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Ad hominems are not compelling arguments except in choir chambers.

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Maybe interrogate yourself as to why you feel attacked? I said nothing negative about you. Elon Musk is an absolutely disgusting human being; he is an unelected billionaire inserting himself into the guts of our federal government at every level in order to amass power, money, and information he can leverage, and it is absolutely illegal. And his platform has devolved wildly since he purchased it, teeming with disinformation and revolting racism and hate. If you disagree, I again suggest you ask yourself why you think this is an ad hominem attack on you.

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I find that the most sophisticated critiques of both Trump and Musk are on X (ironically).

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Learn to read closely. I didn't say I felt attacked. I implied you were using an ad hominem attack - in this case against Elon Musk, and that that kind of argument is largely ineffective. And you've repeated it here again. If I boil down the content of both your comments to the bare essentials, they are that you don't like this guy in a hyperbolic way and that you think he is breaking a law - without reference. There's nothing in it to convince anyone of anything. It's just vituperation. You are entitled to it, but I am put off by it. And it is a tone of comment unusual in this substack which seems to be geared toward rational discussion rather than vituperation.

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Reminder that comments are expected to abide by the HXA Way: https://heterodoxacademy.org/library/the-hxa-way/

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Nce picture, Susan. Where is it? Arizona?

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I tried Twitter a couple of times (when that what it was called) but could never make a go of it, just never used it. But there's a lot of paid-for manipulation going on on X that is warping our minds: check out James Lindsay's latest podcast episode, "We Are the Fake News Now." https://youtu.be/jCOWpHRJzZQ?si=uJzeSK4XE50R7zH4

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Thanks, I will check out his criticisms. I do suspect there is all kinds of manipulation going on at X but at least people can tweet what they want without getting banned. While I imagine a lot of the blue team has migrated over to BlueSky, my feed is suddenly filled with a wider variety of viewpoints than I have seen in a while, so I don't know what is going on with the algorithm. But it doesn't appear that Musk is shadow banning criticisms of him.

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I've been thinking about your observation. Nicholas Carr has a new book out that I havent read yet, called, Superbloom, that probably touches on this phenomenon in a critical way. There are hints of this in his recent blog post https://www.newcartographies.com/p/in-the-kingdom-of-the-bored-the-one

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