JHUS Staging

Tag: bias

  • TLDR: A Simple Bias Check

    Hey everyone welcome to another edition of TLDR, I’m the girl with kaleidoscope eyes John Henry from JohnHenry.US, please don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe! Today we’re going to talk about bias, why you need to be aware of your own, and a simple bias check you can use to help ensure you’re living up to yourself.

    It’s probably important to note the context here: Ed Whelan is an arch-right lawyer and talking head who clerked for Scalia and write for National Review – we are NOT in the same lane ideologically, and that makes the point that much sharper:

    I strongly disagree with Ed Whelan on nearly everything, but that’s not what this is about. The simple fact is he’s right in this case, and he’s not only right but it’s incredibly important that every human being on the planet knows it. This is an exercise I do constantly myself and believe we all should.

    Why does it matter? Look no further than the dialogue surrounding the ongoing indictments of former president Trump. The current leftist cheerleading for the Espionage Act – one of the most troubling and problematic sets of law in our entire history of law – is frankly more than a little scary, and provides a great example of why it’s important to go through the exercise Whelan describes. Any sort of law that criminalizes speaking against the actions of the government is terrifying and should absolutely be subject to the harshest scrutiny…and all it really takes to understand that is saying to yourself “what if it was Donald Trump trying to use this power to his advantage, rather than it being used against him? How would he be able to abuse or misuse it?”

    Reverse this situation and have the Trump administration prosecuting Joe Biden illicitly under some pretense like the minor scraps that turned up at his home office, suddenly it’s not so cool. When you’ve got a war being prosecuted for unjust or unworthy reasons, suddenly it’s not so cool that you can be sentenced to ten years simply for advocating against war when war is what the government wants, like Eugene Debs.

    That’s not to say I think the prosecution of Trump is at all illicit or even flawed, just that if we were thinking clearly we’d have a lot more conversation happening about the Espionage Act that isn’t driven simply by the former president’s sycophants trying to make excuses for him in the media.

    But it makes someone like me who constantly writes in criticism of power and its abuses and those who hold and abuse it feel really uncomfortable about some of the company I’m keeping, when I start seeing ostensible left-wing activists and personalities getting all happy about the Espionage Act.

    When you turn it around, the flaws in the act become problematic, and we can’t afford to ignore that simply because those flaws happen to be working in a way that is both personally satisfying and morally righteous in the particular case of Trump. I’m not even saying “fix it first, worry about Trump after.” It’s the tool we’ve got now to do the job and the job needs doing, so we’ll use it.

    What I am saying, though, is we’ll keep having problems like him until we build and implement systems that actually do what they say they’re supposed to, like form a more perfect union, establish justice, ensure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity.

    The only way to do that for sure is to resist the urge to ignore abuses of power when they’re accomplishing things you like.

  • The Right Way To Be Wrong

    Everybody’s wrong sometimes. There’s nothing bad about that; we learn from being wrong, or should.

    Often you can get a sense of what’s motivating a person or entity by observing how they behave when they’re caught being wrong.

    A longtime friend and supporter showed me this article in which a recent meme from longtime clickbait/meme farm The Other 98 asserting off-hand that “Funny how we haven’t seen a single American mega church offer ANYTHING to the Ukrainians…” is entirely debunked as without factual basis.

    Followup shows that the page didn’t pull the image but rather changed the description…which is only useful when people have shared the description and not just copied/pasted the image as is the case more often than not. They could have just as easily thrown a DEBUNKED stamp on the original and edited that into the original post while deleting the first image entirely, but they didn’t.

    This is why you can’t just go sharing everything that confirms your biases. There’s nothing about the underlying values the meme ostensibly represents that’s wrong, it’s just that someone was in a bigger hurry to push people’s emotional buttons for easy traffic – 22K shares last I looked – than to get their facts straight.

    Perhaps my failure to adopt that attitude even as all of social media fell into it is why I don’t have 5 million people following me rather than 5 thousand aside from the big page where I’m a co-admin, but I also really like knowing that nobody can credibly accuse me of putting my own advancement, comfort, or benefit over the principles I believe in and the messages I’m trying to get into the world.

    Everybody gets it wrong sometimes, including me, and that’s okay. It’s what you do about it that matters. The right way to deal with this would have been to edit the post and replace the image with one showing clearly that it had been debunked.

    As it happens, I’ve been through this precise situation myself, probably a decade or so ago; back then it wasn’t possible to change the image in a post after it was posted, all you could do is delete it and just deleting it wasn’t sufficient to notify people it wasn’t accurate. I created a new corrected image and linked it in the description of the old, with edited text making clear that the original image was inaccurate and should not be used. Back then that was about the best you could do; the tools have since evolved.

    As a source of information, If performative ass-covering while still trying to reap the benefits of your error is your first instinct, it’s probably time to take a hard look in the mirror and ask yourself honestly what you’re really trying to do.

    As an activist or activist organization it’s vital to keep your priorities straight and not do things like this, because every time you do you’re validating criticism from “the other side” that call you “fake news” or accuse you of “lying” or “misinformation” or “propaganda,” and not without solid merit to their argument. Journalism currently has a similar problem; sensationalism “puts asses in seats” but it’s not often accurate.

    As a consumer of information it’s always imperative to make sure you’ve checked your facts – not just when something’s asserted that you don’t agree with anyway, but *even more so* when you do.

    Understanding bias is a core component of information literacy, which is a critical life skill for the modern day and beyond. That very much begins with understanding our own biases, because those are the ones that are going to most often be used against us. This is something I’ve been teaching for a very long time, and is now one of the core concepts underpinning CUSTODE. Our vulnerability to being easily manipulated by mass media has far outpaced the growth of our ability to see through the malicious application of persuasive communication, and until we fix that none of the challenges we currently face will ever truly be resolved.