"[A] $637,000 NIH grant to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai last year to address health misinformation in marginalized communities. A component of the grant is to develop an app especially designed for hairstylists and barbers who are known influencers in communities of color. The app will give these community influencers easy access to understandable, reliable, and timely health infographics they can share with clients.”
I've never understood why educated black people don't get furious at Dems when they read things like this. Do they not get the condescenscion?
What is missing from this discussion is how much of the money goes to administration. So much of the USAID money went to groups and organizations that paid the staff an incredible percentage of the money that was given. Give a group a title like "Save the baby pandas," and the number of baby pandas is not the object. Your organization can get zero or no flags from censorship, but it provides a very handsome income for the people in charge.
So many layers of contractors each taking their cut before the money gets to the people that actually do the work for the panda for example. They’re left with nothing or next to nothing.
ANY talk of "mis/dis/malinformation," and especially a project or GOVERNMENT GRANT to "manage" or "control," or to "combat " it draws at LEAST 5 Flags from me.
The ONLY proper response to bad speech is MORE SPEECH, and loving your neighbor. That last part is actually sort of impossible, depending on who you ask, but even those folks will tell you it's not completely impossible.
Hard agree. When the people who’ve been wrong or lying about basically everything say they need more power to protect us from bad information, we should be suspicious. When they form a bureaucracy to criminalize and enforce speech codes, we need to call bullshit. The difference between pushing a government narrative and censoring opposing views is hazy at this scale and level of funding.
There was a study, I remember, that utilized hair dressers to encourage mammograms which noted a positive outcome.
I object to so much the Government is involved in and spends money on. I’ve lived my whole life speaking with others and have heard a lot of bull crap, I don’t need the Government to help me discern that
"Early internet culture was actually generally a progressive, California-type culture that thought very highly of everyday people for the most part."
Interesting call. Have no idea what progressive, California-type culture is. Born and raised there, in SoCal. Left a few decades before the 'early internet'.
My question is who jumped in to fund this monster of a project?
Yes, I remember hearing that the hairstylists and barbers could earn some of this grant money if they would promote the COVID shot and encourage clients to get it. They definitely hit the propaganda machine from all angles, and it worked. Imagine if that type of effort was put into something positive that could actually benefit people, like say encouraging people to eat real food in its most natural state, eliminating processed foods and beverages completely?
For the life of me, I don't understand why the information environment today should be regarded as any more “turbulent” than it ever was. Long before the internet—indeed, before there were newspapers and magazines, or widespread public literacy—there was more 'misinformation' than reliable, evidence-based information, more speculative, often half-baked belief than provably correct opinion. The world we're born into has always been a confusing place, full of mysterious unknowns and conflicting claims, and from childhood onward navigating life and deciding for oneself which narratives are plausible and potentially useful, and which can be safely disregarded, has always been each individual's responsibility. If the responsibility is burdensome it's also exhilarating; in fact, it's arguably inevitable, the very thing that makes us autonomous human beings. Who among us would willingly give up the freedom to form our own judgments about what's true and false, right and wrong, which people and information sources we trust, and what our preferences and ethical convictions are?
Not only are we free to do this, we're arguably obligated to do it. The verdicts of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, following World War II, made unambiguously clear that each individual is responsible for his/her own beliefs and behaviour, and that this isn't a responsibility that can be delegated to governments, religious leaders, bureaucrats or any other 'official authority.' I'm highly skeptical the judges would have made an exception for self-appointed internet 'misinformation' censors, had any existed at the time.
The truth is that, compared with previous eras, we can consider ourselves most fortunate: research has never been easier to do, factually reliable information never easier to obtain, and we can even claim far more conformity of opinion on a wide range of basic things than has ever existed before—justifiable and beneficial conformity, due to verifiable knowledge having become more extensive and widely shared than a fragmented ancient world could have imagined possible. The very last thing our era needs is would-be social engineers and other authoritarians filtering reality for us, on the internet or elsewhere, and arrogating to themselves the responsibility for sorting our experience into hierarchies of reliability, something we've always done for ourselves—competently enough, we might add, to develop the internet in the first place.
In short, Dear censors: please stop trying to help us! The unsought 'protection from turbulence' you offer looks more like a protection racket from here.
"But I think journalists, people who are free speech advocates..."
Um, well, not sure we come near to making this assumption any more.
at times those two things seem mutually exclusive
Yes! It seems the definition of both those terms has become increasingly subjective. To wit: compare a Corporate Media "journalist" to Matt.
Progressive money laundering. Public funds for political goals.
Absolutely correct.
If the Left is producing lists of "disinformation", you can bet a few things that are true will be on the lists.
But the far large problem will be all of the disinformation that is deliberately omitted from the lists.
"[A] $637,000 NIH grant to the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai last year to address health misinformation in marginalized communities. A component of the grant is to develop an app especially designed for hairstylists and barbers who are known influencers in communities of color. The app will give these community influencers easy access to understandable, reliable, and timely health infographics they can share with clients.”
I've never understood why educated black people don't get furious at Dems when they read things like this. Do they not get the condescenscion?
They have been programmed to believe that all of this is simply 'fairness'.
What is missing from this discussion is how much of the money goes to administration. So much of the USAID money went to groups and organizations that paid the staff an incredible percentage of the money that was given. Give a group a title like "Save the baby pandas," and the number of baby pandas is not the object. Your organization can get zero or no flags from censorship, but it provides a very handsome income for the people in charge.
So many layers of contractors each taking their cut before the money gets to the people that actually do the work for the panda for example. They’re left with nothing or next to nothing.
ANY talk of "mis/dis/malinformation," and especially a project or GOVERNMENT GRANT to "manage" or "control," or to "combat " it draws at LEAST 5 Flags from me.
The ONLY proper response to bad speech is MORE SPEECH, and loving your neighbor. That last part is actually sort of impossible, depending on who you ask, but even those folks will tell you it's not completely impossible.
Hard agree. When the people who’ve been wrong or lying about basically everything say they need more power to protect us from bad information, we should be suspicious. When they form a bureaucracy to criminalize and enforce speech codes, we need to call bullshit. The difference between pushing a government narrative and censoring opposing views is hazy at this scale and level of funding.
There was a study, I remember, that utilized hair dressers to encourage mammograms which noted a positive outcome.
I object to so much the Government is involved in and spends money on. I’ve lived my whole life speaking with others and have heard a lot of bull crap, I don’t need the Government to help me discern that
"Early internet culture was actually generally a progressive, California-type culture that thought very highly of everyday people for the most part."
Interesting call. Have no idea what progressive, California-type culture is. Born and raised there, in SoCal. Left a few decades before the 'early internet'.
My question is who jumped in to fund this monster of a project?
Yes, I remember hearing that the hairstylists and barbers could earn some of this grant money if they would promote the COVID shot and encourage clients to get it. They definitely hit the propaganda machine from all angles, and it worked. Imagine if that type of effort was put into something positive that could actually benefit people, like say encouraging people to eat real food in its most natural state, eliminating processed foods and beverages completely?
Imagine if journalists knew about this secret project…/sarcasm
For the life of me, I don't understand why the information environment today should be regarded as any more “turbulent” than it ever was. Long before the internet—indeed, before there were newspapers and magazines, or widespread public literacy—there was more 'misinformation' than reliable, evidence-based information, more speculative, often half-baked belief than provably correct opinion. The world we're born into has always been a confusing place, full of mysterious unknowns and conflicting claims, and from childhood onward navigating life and deciding for oneself which narratives are plausible and potentially useful, and which can be safely disregarded, has always been each individual's responsibility. If the responsibility is burdensome it's also exhilarating; in fact, it's arguably inevitable, the very thing that makes us autonomous human beings. Who among us would willingly give up the freedom to form our own judgments about what's true and false, right and wrong, which people and information sources we trust, and what our preferences and ethical convictions are?
Not only are we free to do this, we're arguably obligated to do it. The verdicts of the war crimes trials at Nuremberg, following World War II, made unambiguously clear that each individual is responsible for his/her own beliefs and behaviour, and that this isn't a responsibility that can be delegated to governments, religious leaders, bureaucrats or any other 'official authority.' I'm highly skeptical the judges would have made an exception for self-appointed internet 'misinformation' censors, had any existed at the time.
The truth is that, compared with previous eras, we can consider ourselves most fortunate: research has never been easier to do, factually reliable information never easier to obtain, and we can even claim far more conformity of opinion on a wide range of basic things than has ever existed before—justifiable and beneficial conformity, due to verifiable knowledge having become more extensive and widely shared than a fragmented ancient world could have imagined possible. The very last thing our era needs is would-be social engineers and other authoritarians filtering reality for us, on the internet or elsewhere, and arrogating to themselves the responsibility for sorting our experience into hierarchies of reliability, something we've always done for ourselves—competently enough, we might add, to develop the internet in the first place.
In short, Dear censors: please stop trying to help us! The unsought 'protection from turbulence' you offer looks more like a protection racket from here.
This article doesn't mention the words gaza, genocide, palestinians or jews, some nut job is gna point that out.
Does a better example of Fascism exist?
So now I'm not deplorable anymore just icky? guess I've come up in the world.
The mount Sinai teams level of expertise was watching Barbershop with ice cube.
But Matt, lying is lying. Big lies are punished more severely, however, the source that does those things is completely ignorable.