Kitsap Media Opnion: Anglin and Unz Review are now better sources of 'foreign' news than MSM, Alt Media

[Macrobius]

https://www.unz.com/aanglin/armenia...ff-azerbaijan-doing-nothing-to-stop-invasion/

https://dailystormer.in/almost-100-of-ethnic-armenians-fled-nagorno-karabakh-in-less-than-2-weeks/

It's been happening for a while. The major news bureaus shut down their 'international bureaus' around the time the TV analog signal died, about a decade and a half after journalists became 'embedded' in war reporting -- in other words, state operatives.

In other words, we have lived in a digital simulation since at least the Obama era 'Smith-Mundt Modernization'[1]

[1]: https://www.usagm.gov/who-we-are/oversight/legislation/smith-mundt-faqs/

We have now reached the point that neither the Main Stream Media nor the 'Alt, Independent' media are reporting very significant international news, even if it is on their primary feed. Thus, sources such as Unz Review or Anglin's Daily Stormer have ACTUALLY become more valuable news sources about international affairs that 'the actual [simulacra] media'.

Anglin gives us a long except of AP news -- which is still in existence (whoever writes it now)

TAGS: #AM #SREF #SOPN

(click image below to read full article)

 

[Mike]

I am not sure what distinction you are trying to draw between Unz/Anglin and other alt media. There are plenty of informative sources outside Unz, though of course I, like probably you, generally enjoy Anglin's editorial spin. But in terms of getting raw information, being on the modern Internet is like being in a modern super-supermarket in America; there are more choices than you actually have time to take advantage of. It's one of the bright spots of modern existence, IMO.

Of course, the OP gist re Western MSM is self-evidently true. You will simply not know anything substantial about any foreign affair if you watch only MSM. The MSM does not tell you about foreign affairs generally; it tells only what you are supposed to think about foreign affairs. Oftentimes, the MSM does not want you to think anything about a foreign affair. In these cases, MSM coverage will be nonexistent or nearly so, as in for example the Armenian situation. As the saying goes, if you don't watch MSM, you are uniformed. If you watch only MSM, you are both misinformed and uninformed.

One limitation of the modern Internet is that it takes effort to find and filter sources of information given the plethora that exists. And it takes a nontrivial amount of time to learn about any foreign situation in depth. You can't reduce complicated situations and histories to memes and soundbites. But at least now the 10% of people that want to understand things with a reasonable amount of depth are able to do so, thanks in part to Unz and Anglin.

 

[Macrobius]

I am not sure what distinction you are trying to draw between Unz/Anglin and other alt media.

There used to be an 'alt media' for Progressives that often used the term 'independent'. Now that MSM is 7/24 Progressive and Marxist propaganda (or MIC bilge) it hardly matters, the coopting of say the anti-war progressive Left. There has always been a sort of Buckleyite/John Birch/Neocon and even Paleocon 'alt media' as well, but whatever claws and teeth it had died around the same time as Joe Sobran.

The alt right media that around in the run-up to 2016 was fairly promising but I think has a high rate of co-option.

About the other point made here -- I think part of the role of (actual) journalism is to select and curate and above all to INFORM. That is, not to serve up spin and 'historical narrative' however tarted up with interesting and even clever facts, but in the end, an rhetorical exercise not 'NEWS' in the sense of 'in-formation and intelligence extracted from data, responsive to an audience in a timely fashion' (the usual definition of an 'intelligence product' btw.

Google has bloody red hands here for destroying the RSS ecosystem (partly because the protocol was inefficient and partly because they doubtless saw it as a threat to their Search Engine being the 'unifeed'). Recommendation systems and I'm sure chatGPT derivatives will similarly degrade FINDING the sources, even though clearly they exist in abundance -- if nothing else, there is little reason to believe that satellite surveillance of weather, climate, and even images of the surface are any more than *lightly* censored, and certainly not outright falsified.

One can also point out the Medium/Substack ecosystems, which are extremely informative for long form discussion sometimes, though hard to navigate reliably. I think the model of 'a freemium blog with long form posts' is mildly flawed, since it is seems a bit too close to the 'paid investment newsletter' and always smells a little of being a grift.

 

[Mike]

There used to be an 'alt media' for Progressives that often used the term 'independent'. Now that MSM is 7/24 Progressive and Marxist propaganda (or MIC bilge) it hardly matters, the coopting of say the anti-war progressive Left.

Oh that. Not sure what ever happened to The Village Voice, but I know newspapers have fallen on hard time. Believe it or not, I think The Young Turks are occasionally (albeit rarely) on target; Ana (my guess it's partly a function of one's age group) is increasingly adamant about calling herself a woman (full stop) and thus running afoul of troons. The beautiful meltdown of the TYT during the 2016 Trump election night is so hilarious I can't really hate them, though I'd happily deport them. Better leftist media: I don't mind, in small doses, Jimmy Dore and his heir apparent Jackson Hinkle. I could go on. Yeah, I get your drift. Anglin and Unz do it better than this crowd, mostly, though Dore and Hinkle IMHO aren't bad. And there are many others we could talk about. The list is really endless.

There has always been a sort of Buckleyite/John Birch/Neocon and even Paleocon 'alt media' as well, but whatever claws and teeth it had died around the same time as Joe Sobran.

Sobran is a hero to me and Buckley a villian, doubly so for not only firing Sobran but also for calling PJB an antisemite in 1992. If there is a hot region of Hell, I believe WFB will be found there.

The alt right media that around in the run-up to 2016 was fairly promising but I think has a high rate of co-option.

About the other point made here -- I think part of the role of (actual) journalism is to select and curate and above all to INFORM. That is, not to serve up spin and 'historical narrative' however tarted up with interesting and even clever facts, but in the end, an rhetorical exercise not 'NEWS' in the sense of 'in-formation and intelligence extracted from data, responsive to an audience in a timely fashion' (the usual definition of an 'intelligence product' btw.

Google has bloody red hands here for destroying the RSS ecosystem (partly because the protocol was inefficient and partly because they doubtless saw it as a threat to their Search Engine being the 'unifeed'). Recommendation systems and I'm sure chatGPT derivatives will similarly degrade FINDING the sources, even though clearly they exist in abundance -- if nothing else, there is little reason to believe that satellite surveillance of weather, climate, and even images of the surface are any more than *lightly* censored, and certainly not outright falsified.

One can also point out the Medium/Substack ecosystems, which are extremely informative for long form discussion sometimes, though hard to navigate reliably. I think the model of 'a freemium blog with long form posts' is mildly flawed, since it is seems a bit too close to the 'paid investment newsletter' and always smells a little of being a grift.

I have this idea in my head. We somehow need to create a radically decentralized social media platform, served up literally from apps of individuals to whatever individuals they are connected to. I think the Internet is structured to make this possible, but no one has attempted this maneuver, this architecture I have in mind, which is essentially akin to email rather than centralized servers. As much I respect Elon for taking over Twitter and (partially) salvaging it, and Rumble for standing up and standing their ground, I think there are better options available to us waiting to be implemented.

 

[Macrobius]

I have this idea in my head. We somehow need to create a radically decentralized social media platform, served up literally from apps of individuals to whatever individuals they are connected to. I think the Internet is structured to make this possible, but no one has attempted this maneuver, this architecture I have in mind, which is essentially akin to email rather than centralized servers. As much I respect Elon for taking over Twitter and (partially) salvaging it, and Rumble for standing up and standing their ground, I think there are better options available to us waiting to be implemented.

IPFS (kitschy name of 'interplanetary file system') is essentially a distributed file system with links -- content is retried by a hash, very much like bit torrent. https://ipfs.tech/

It's not likely to go away at least in the near term because it is used as a more distributed, non-censorable method of making NFTs (non-fungible tokens in the Ethereum crypto ecosystem) available.

There are services to 'pin' IPFS files, though you don't have to do them if you can keep a set of servers up anywhere on the planet to cache your content.

The NFT ecosystem already has a notion of 'distributed apps' including those that run on various blockchains (you probably know this but a blockchain is just a simulated and distributed, but single-threaded, 'world computer' (EVM = Ethereum Virtual Machine) for shared authentication of whatever people pay to run on it -- data storage is too expensive directly 'on chain', hence the secure-ish storage ecosystem developing around it to store actual content rather than just the metadata to find it and authenticate it)

The idea of federated apps is behind the Fediverse (worst maketing name ever for a distributed, semi-non-censorable tech). What I've seen of it makes me believe it is a credible Twitter/Facebook/Image site alternative, but I've never seen it used to long form artifacts and suspect it's not optimized for streaming video [I could be wrong on this].

Also, since Pastebin started censoring raw content (inevitable) I run a hastebin server which can be found via the pURL (persistent URL) https://purl.org/hastebin - this uses the global pURL registry at archive.org which won't be going away soon and being run by librarians is SOMEWHAT censorship resistant, but the real anti-censorship guarantee is that it is trivial to write your own 'purl resolver' and redefine purl.org in /etc/hosts to point to it, if they do get uppity like Pastebin did.

Finally, it is very possible to 'push computation' and even 'virtual networking' to the EDGE, down to the IoT device level and certainly to smaller computers including mobile devices. This sort of tech is actively being pursued by large corporations as well. One example is virtual NVR (network video recorders) of surveillance footage, now used at large retail establishments to make retrieving brick-and-mortar security footage to HQ easy, on a selected basis -- soon to be combined with face recognition and location aware mobile apps to create a sort of 'customer situation awareness'. You can imagine how important this might become in high-risk retail environments -- a sort of instantaneous KYC.

You can bet that 'machine learning at the edge' is a hot topic right now. TFW chatGPT goes paranoid and creates a deep fake narrative about you and the heist you allegedly pulled, and files a 'tip' with the local SWAT team. Sounds to me like we are headed to MiniTru and Ingsoc on autopilot.

 

[Mike]

Tangentially related: Yoel Roth, Jewish homosexual know-it-all "fact-checker" and former "Head of Safety" of Twitter, is upset that he is no longer able to use his position to suppress commentary he does not like and throw American presidential elections anonymously. To be honest I really enjoyed this un-self-aware whiner's account of the blowback he received.

Yoel Roth (ex-Twitter Head of Safety) pens self-pitying screed | AutoAdmit.com

autoadmit.com

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