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This is nihilism at its finest. There are things that are knowable in this world, a website that claims A but does the opposite is one of those things. Trust

This is nihilism at its finest. There are things that are knowable in this world, a website that claims A but does the opposite is one of those things. Trust means said website putting their money where their mouth is. The only defense here is that it's an opinion piece and doesn't represent the website as a whole, but the solution is to possibly trust the author but not the website. Since we're talking about nuance here, a counterexample doesn't invalidate the point being made, especially about media in general.

majormajor 4y ago
You're performing a trick here in here of hiding the individual differences between two separate authors by referring to "a website" as a monolith. (And then you semi-walk-it-back, but treat that as somehow... a strange thing to do?) That's the sort of rhetorical subterfuge that helps promote a black-and-white us-and-them narrative. I generally don't even agree with Brooks on a lot of things, so I'd go even further and suggest that in many cases one should evaluate separate texts independently (this can lead to some problems at the extreme ends, but again, it's not a black and white rule). It's hard to see anything helpful coming from your sort of blanket dismissal response.
- P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
  This isn't reddit or HN where the content is purely user driven, this is a website that publishes what they themselves choose to publish, and we're free to judge them for that holistically. One suspects that if an author submitted an article denying the holocaust, the website in question would refuse to publish it. They can be judged by what they publish, and they acknowledge this by not publishing everything that's proffered to them.
msteffen 4y ago
I mean the website isn't a monolith; some parts are good, some parts aren't. Different writers have different perspectives. I think TFA is trying to argue that it's possible to see the world as a basically safe place, despite the presence of this kind of inconsistency. The website's not perfect, but it seems like it has some things going for it, and anyway you're smart and can get by just fine in a world with imperfect media :-)

majormajor 4y ago

You're performing a trick here in here of hiding the individual differences between two separate authors by referring to "a website" as a monolith. (And then you semi-walk-it-back, but treat that as somehow... a strange thing to do?) That's the sort of rhetorical subterfuge that helps promote a black-and-white us-and-them narrative. I generally don't even agree with Brooks on a lot of things, so I'd go even further and suggest that in many cases one should evaluate separate texts independently (this can lead to some problems at the extreme ends, but again, it's not a black and white rule). It's hard to see anything helpful coming from your sort of blanket dismissal response.

P5fRxh5kUvp2th 4y ago
This isn't reddit or HN where the content is purely user driven, this is a website that publishes what they themselves choose to publish, and we're free to judge them for that holistically. One suspects that if an author submitted an article denying the holocaust, the website in question would refuse to publish it. They can be judged by what they publish, and they acknowledge this by not publishing everything that's proffered to them.

msteffen 4y ago

I mean the website isn't a monolith; some parts are good, some parts aren't. Different writers have different perspectives. I think TFA is trying to argue that it's possible to see the world as a basically safe place, despite the presence of this kind of inconsistency. The website's not perfect, but it seems like it has some things going for it, and anyway you're smart and can get by just fine in a world with imperfect media :-)