The evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar notes that by age 3 an average child can use about 1,000 words (double Kanzi’s bonobo world record); by age 6, around 13,000; and by age 18, some 60,000: ‘that means it has been learning an average of 10 new words a day since its first birthday, the equivalent of a new word every 90 minutes of its waking life.
FREE SPEECH: Ten Principles for a Connected World, Timothy Garton Ash (2017)
Now that the presidential election is over, Politico's reporter has admitted that many documents found on Hunter Biden's laptop were authentic. This finding reverses the pre-election position of Politico, and is not a mere factoid. Rather, this admission corroborates Glenn Greenwald's analysis and evidence that left-leaning media was corrupt and complicit with the deep state leading up to the election. In sum, reporters refused to do their jobs as reporters and it led to fake news. I used to hate that term, but I can no longer deny that large swathes of our "news" is concocted . . . fake (e.g., several years of hysterical fact-free reporting on alleged Trump-Russia connection). The motivation was always clear - - left-leaning legacy news outlets hated Trump and made it their mission to avoid four more years of Trump.
Do I need to repeatedly write that I voted for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden and that I find Trump deranged, incompetent and dangerous? My concern in this post is not about who would make the better president. My concern is that the news media should always do its job, publishing important facts regardless of who the evidence helps or hurts, allowing the voters to decide what is important. The opposite of that happened regarding Hunter Biden's laptop, part of a growing trend. In the new way of discussing important national issues, one denies or hides evidence that conflicts with one's preferences. Proud and arrogant confirmation bias is the way many of us make decisions now, instead of relying on Enlightenment values. These are sad days, indeed. It reminds me of how we formerly ridiculed Pravda, the official newspaper of the communist party of the USSR.
Greenwald's Tweet on the Politico reversal is the first of a long thread that makes an airtight case against the news media. I highly recommend the entire thread:
COVID masking is mandatory for you (and even for your young children), too much of a bother for us.
Do I need to start this post with a reminder that I voted for Hilary Clinton and that I consider Donald Trump a generally dispicable person with whom I rarely agree on an issue?
Michael Sussmann has been indicted. The New York Times reputed this true fact but merely indicated that it's significance was limited, explaining that Sussman falsely told the FBI that he was not representing any client when he reported that there was a covert communications channel between Donald Time and Alfa Bank, a Kremlin-linked financial institution.
Compare the above NYT version of Sussmann's indictment to Glenn Greenwald's detailed analysis of the meaning and ramifications of Sussmann's indictment. These two accounts are night and day. Greenwald connected the dots to demonstrate the long-term mendacity and complicity of the left-leaning legacy news media regarding the supposed Trump-Russia connection, as well as the inescapable conclusion that Hillary Clinton delivered four key lies only eight days before the election.
Greenwald's story is one that he has told repeatedly, but this is yet more evidence showing how our news media is organized into two teams tethered to our two main political parties. Here is the link to following Greenwald's tweets on Twitter:
Greenwald has often lamented that reporters who make shit up are rarely punished. Much more often, they are promoted.
According to this article in the Chronicles of Higher Education, trigger warnings do not work:
Trigger warnings do not alleviate emotional distress. They do not significantly reduce negative affect or minimize intrusive thoughts, two hallmarks of PTSD. Notably, these findings hold for individuals with and without a history of trauma. (For a review of the relevant research, see the 2020 Clinical Psychological Science article “Helping or Harming? The Effect of Trigger Warnings on Individuals With Trauma Histories” by Payton J. Jones, Benjamin W. Bellet, and Richard J. McNally.)
We are not aware of a single experimental study that has found significant benefits of using trigger warnings. Looking specifically at trauma survivors, including those with a diagnosis of PTSD, the Jones et al. study found that trigger warnings “were not helpful even when they warned about content that closely matched survivors’ traumas.”
What’s more, they found that trigger warnings actually increased the anxiety of individuals with the most severe PTSD, prompting them to “view trauma as more central to their life narrative.” “Trigger warnings,” they concluded, “may be most harmful to the very individuals they were designed to protect.”