I’m going to say up front that I know this is a lot of RSS feeds. You are welcome to tell me I need to trim the list a bit.

!lefty_stacks@ibbit.at:

News and Politics:

Comics:

  • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.auEnglish
    1·
    2 days ago

    Yeah, I have no idea. I can literally do curl https://breakthroughnews.org/feed/ and it shows me a 403 and says “The action you just performed triggered the security solution. There are several actions that could trigger this block including submitting a certain word or phrase, a SQL command or malformed data.” Whatever. Looks like historicly is working now though.

    As for the comments on propaganda, I find the word has lost a lot of its meaning, and is often used as “something I won’t investigate/will dismiss out of hand” (I’m not saying you are doing that either.) Instead I tend to focus on bias. Everyone has a bias, and all news has a bias. Some people are aware and even admit their bias, some have never bothered to confront their bias. The same is true with news/media.

    Yeah, but it’s not just about bias, it’s about lying on purpose. I’m fine if someone has a different bias than me; The Atlantic has a very different bias from me and I’m sort of okay with it. I’m talking about deliberately crafting something that’s false to try to serve some kind of power structure. It’s the same reason I wouldn’t host Fox News and I filter stuff like that out. That’s what I mean by “propaganda,” maybe some other people have different meanings but that’s what I mean by it.

    I’m trying to sort of bend over backwards just because I get so loudmouthed about lemmy.ml doing censorship, and so I want to check it from all angles to try to make sure that at least from my POV I’m not doing the same thing. But I do feel like it’s okay to strip something out that’s just bald-faced “I don’t care what’s true, here’s my narrative to try to favor my side.” I think almost all journalism has a bias, and also almost all journalism at the end of the day is trying on some level to get at the truth, and to me that’s okay. But then there’s a certain grouping where the narrative and matching with the right bias is the main thing, and the truth of it is just not important to them. If someone’s doing that then I don’t want to be involved with it or give it any more strength to push their message. Hopefully that makes sense… and yeah, that’s why I removed nytimes, because they seem like they’ve been crossing over that line into publishing stuff that their own staff is literally shouting at them isn’t true, just because it pushes the right narrative. They don’t do it too much but when they do it it’s pretty significantly different from the truth (which I think is also really common).

    I think instead of focusing on not spreading ‘propaganda’ it might be more productive to be upfront about a publication’s known bias and encourage readers to read it critically.

    Yeah, almost all of the time I like to make noise about stuff in the comments after the fact instead of trying to do any prior restraint, and then people can read it and agree or disagree. I don’t feel like “bias” is always the main thing though. Everyone’s biased to some degree, and as long as you see a broad range and people get to try to poke holes where they see something that doesn’t hold up, it’s fine. It’s more a question of, is this person lying on purpose to try to support their biases or not.

    Thanks again for the community to manage. I’ll leave a comment after this so you can mod me (waiting on posts to federate). I did see the instructions for adding feeds. Seems easy, I’m familiar with command line style interactions.

    Sounds good! Yeah, just let me know, happy to have you take it over and like I say if there seems like one feed that needs to get spun off into its own community just let me know and I’m happy to do it.

    • RedWizard [he/him]@lemmy.mlOP
      1·
      2 days ago

      I wonder if BT blocks VPS IP ranges. I bet that’s it.

      I appreciate your perspective. As for ML at a minimum I know they are trying to combat Sinophobia which is a rampant and pervasive issue, but we don’t need to rehash that stuff. I agree with you about the lying stuff. NYT has a long history of doing just that. Post 9/11 they were the primary pusher of the fake WMD story. I guess for me, I have to at a minimum entertain the anti-west perspective when people here will defend the NYT and the BBC as objective and principled journalism, while they regularly manufacture consent for Israel. It makes you wonder what else are they are covering for and what other stories your not hearing.

      Also, I’m not sure what might be happening but not a single thread from the sub has synchronized with ml. Same with lefty stacks. Hard to know on whose end the issue is manifesting. At least my comments seem to sync.

      • PhilipTheBucket@quokk.auEnglish
        1·
        2 days ago

        I wonder if BT blocks VPS IP ranges. I bet that’s it.

        Could be. Generally my policy on RSS feeds is that if someone wants to make it difficult to pick up their RSS feed then I don’t post from their RSS feed I guess.

        NYT has a long history of doing just that. Post 9/11 they were the primary pusher of the fake WMD story.

        I wouldn’t say the primary. Pretty much the whole of American media was pushing it, it was back in the pre-internet-news days (or right on the inflection point) so the antiwar perspective was really this sort of secret thing in the media that never got talked about, in a way they could never get away with today.

        In the NYT, it wasn’t entirely pro-war but there were a couple of people like Judith Miller and Thomas Friedman that were really pushing it. I remember having some arguments back then because people I respected were reading the NYT and getting sucked in by those arguments… NYT was always pro-American Empire, “Manufacturing Consent” which you mentioned actually went into a massive history of it as regards places like Nicaragua and Israel going way, way back. I actually think the place I picked up “The Newspaper of Record” to use in the community description was from Chomsky incessantly using that terminology sarcastically in his writing. But anyway they were usually biased, but the Iraq War was weird because a couple of their columnists went off into total factual fantasy-land instead of just presenting a biased view using clever code-words and framings as people usually did. But yeah, for the Iraq War they were doing open fantasy-land propaganda similar to what they’re doing now for Israel. It is sad.

        It makes you wonder what else are they are covering for and what other stories you’re not hearing.

        I mean if you become aware of something I should be publishing that I am not, let me know. I think it’s a pretty broad range at this point. I’m not in favor of countering pro-Empire lies with anti-Empire lies, I would much rather focus on a broad range, kick out anyone who shows themselves to be clearly comfortable with lying, and then the chips fall where they may in terms of whose narrative gets helped along by the end product. That seems to me like a fair and decent way to do it.

        Also, I’m not sure what might be happening but not a single thread from the sub has synchronized with ml. Same with lefty stacks. Hard to know on whose end the issue is manifesting. At least my comments seem to sync.

        Hm. I dug around for way too long in the DB, and my tentative conclusion is that maybe all the posts it had to make finished in a little batch 6 hours ago and so you’re not getting anything because there hasn’t been anything nothing new to send since you subscribed. I upvoted a couple of the posts, so maybe the upvote federating out should mean you get a couple of posts?

        If you don’t, then I have no idea, but maybe wait a day or two and see if it suddenly kicks in or something.