The phrase "Trump is a coward" is currently trending among users on Donald Trump's own social media network, Truth Social.Trump, who recently backed out of a debate he had previously agreed to on ABC and instead insisted he debate Vice President Kamala Harris on Fox News, has come under fire for say...
It presents center-biased stories as unbiased. There’s no such thing as unbiased news. Nearly every news organisation that’s ever been founded uses “he” and “she” pronouns (or a localised equivalent) for various people, indicating a male or female gender. Gender is a social construct; it has no objective, or unbiased, existence. Gender only exists because we believe in it and treat it as real. Nearly all news participates in the social construct of gender and is therefore biased in favour of gender. And belief in gender isn’t universal. Gender abolitionists would say that gender should not be believed in or participated in. Now, I disagree strongly with gender abolitionists, but I am using their views here to illustrate the point that participating in gender implicitly is a bias. So all news is biased. But Ground News would call a centrist story that uses gendered pronouns unbiased, despite the implicit pushing of socially constructed and subjective identities.
Implicitly affirming gender isn’t bad. It’s a good thing. But it’s not unbiased. News SHOULD be biased. It should be biased in favour of fair and just treatment of all people. You have to be biased, biasless news is impossible. But Ground News lies and says biasless news does exist, and it just so happens to be the news that occupies the center of the overton window. A window that is rapidly drifting rightwards, and a window that Ground News is intentionally following, while telling users to come join them.
I believe they’re saying it’s impossible to not have a bias. The center of left and right isn’t unbiased - it’s a bunch of biased positions, as well. And you can figure out the position of a site like this by what they think is neutral.
I kinda got that part, the part that caught me off guard was the big gender rant. Like, I’m very amused because I can tell what their current brainworm is lol.
Do you consider biases hierarchical or all horizontally equivalent? Because believing in a core of grounding facts and agreeing on basic principles is what allows you to agree, disagree and to communicate. If you go around saying nothing means anything in an equivalent manner, you just explode social cohesion in exchange for very little.
If you take a hierarchical approach, people can deviate from convention (what has brought us here) as much as they are willing and have the time to read up and explore, but always with a way to pull back into safety at a less abstract layer where more people recognize each other’s positions.
E.g. you may debate gender definitions if you are settled on the idea of civic rights, human rights. Do you think that makes you a civic rights “conservative”? But civic and human rights rest on an already high abstraction level that depends on people being well-fed, educated, an economic system that works in practice at scale, etc.
This is the bullshit that is going to get Trump elected by the way.
I am impressed that you were asked about bias and could have gone with anything and decided the best thing to do was out yourself as a transphobe with dogwhistles. Why did you do that?
I’m perplexed: How do you go from someone saying “gender is a social construct” to them being trasphobic? I got the “spot the vegan” vibes that they were trying to suddenly make this about trans rights…
I didn’t out myself as a transphobe, in fact I made it very clear that I’m in favour of trans rights by adding an aside about how I disagree with gender abolitionists. The fact that I said recognising gender is a bias doesn’t make me a transphobe. And I was worried people would think that, so I made it clear that I think recognising gender is a good bias. But clearly you stopped reading before you got to that point.
Why did you go off on one about gender at all? It had nothing to do with anything and yet you filled your comment with transphobic dogwhistles. Of all the things you could have chosen you chose that?
Gender is an easy example of a social construct. It was more relatable to most people than talking about how consensus reality is fake.
One of the things I’m confused about is when you said Ground News is a conservative OP and was asked to elaborate you went on a long rant about gender bias but said nothing about why you believe they are conservative. You completely changed the point and never answered the question.
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