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That's the point of the magazine: it's to spread ideologies around. If you want to know what people in the state department (or adjacent/influential) are thinki

That's the point of the magazine: it's to spread ideologies around. If you want to know what people in the state department (or adjacent/influential) are thinking, then "articles" in this magazine are one way of peering into their minds. One example of this is the the Mr. X article. It was published anonymously in Foreign Affairs. Mr. X was George Kennan, a US diplomat, who popularized the strategy of containment which ended up as US foreign policy during the Cold War. [0] So, if you want to know what's en vogue in certain foreign policy groups in US and western society, then Foreign Affairs is a very good magazine... But your point is right: I found very little substance and critical evidence to back many of the ideas presented when I had a subscription. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X_Article

uoaei 4y ago
More broadly, this perspective applies to most (all?) "news" media sources today. Actually fringe outlets are on average much worse, passing through the land of ideology toward pure virtue-signalling. The goal of reading news today isn't necessarily to get facts: those are accessible through implicit analysis and triangulation of the many perspectives offered for public consideration, and unfortunately that takes a lot of time and energy to the point where it needs to be one of your daily routines to get "caught up". The goal of simply reading news more generally is to understand the ideologies driving decisions in the halls of power (legislators, ministerial positions, and "deep state" a la The Blob). Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent was treated as an instruction manual by those whom it did not already describe at publication time, and the entire public discourse has seemed to be infected by such a strain of bad-faith ideology propagation as opposed to good-faith dialectics. It is a prisoner's dilemma after all -- if you make a good-faith argument, your opponent will capitalize on it in a bad-faith manner to dominate the narrative. The most significant positive change to my media literacy was in paying attention to which authors represent which viewpoints, and which platforms publish which authors for which reasons.
pessimizer 4y ago
> That's the point of the magazine: it's to spread ideologies around. If you want to know what people in the state department (or adjacent/influential) are thinking, then "articles" in this magazine are one way of peering into their minds. No more than the pre-Bezos Washington Post (as awful as the post-Bezos WaPo, except the headlines were less linkbaity), because the same family of billionaires owned both.

uoaei 4y ago

More broadly, this perspective applies to most (all?) "news" media sources today. Actually fringe outlets are on average much worse, passing through the land of ideology toward pure virtue-signalling. The goal of reading news today isn't necessarily to get facts: those are accessible through implicit analysis and triangulation of the many perspectives offered for public consideration, and unfortunately that takes a lot of time and energy to the point where it needs to be one of your daily routines to get "caught up". The goal of simply reading news more generally is to understand the ideologies driving decisions in the halls of power (legislators, ministerial positions, and "deep state" a la The Blob). Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent was treated as an instruction manual by those whom it did not already describe at publication time, and the entire public discourse has seemed to be infected by such a strain of bad-faith ideology propagation as opposed to good-faith dialectics. It is a prisoner's dilemma after all -- if you make a good-faith argument, your opponent will capitalize on it in a bad-faith manner to dominate the narrative. The most significant positive change to my media literacy was in paying attention to which authors represent which viewpoints, and which platforms publish which authors for which reasons.

pessimizer 4y ago

> That's the point of the magazine: it's to spread ideologies around. If you want to know what people in the state department (or adjacent/influential) are thinking, then "articles" in this magazine are one way of peering into their minds. No more than the pre-Bezos Washington Post (as awful as the post-Bezos WaPo, except the headlines were less linkbaity), because the same family of billionaires owned both.