>When I express views like this, I’m sometimes called a reactionary. People say I want to go back to the 50s. And they’re right – but it’s the 650s BC I want to return to, because Sparta had the right idea about male love. You can spend all day wrestling and wanking each other off if you want to, chaps, but you still have to get married, have kids and go off to fight wars.
Sure it combines "outdated pseudo-science and philosophically iffy reasoning behind its pretext". But it's not fake news. It's just shitty news, like so much other shitty news out there. I'm not defending Breitbart, I'm just saying it is a press outlet and it should be allowed to exist as one. It shouldn't have to suffer from censorship. No media source should have to suffer from censorship. Fake news mills aren't media sources.
>It makes me want to just yank Milo by the neck and show him what irreparable damage he is doing to people (if I could); if he even has the morality to care.
Milo is a partisan asshole but he's not a total idiot. Instead of calling for his website to be blacklisted, why not present your opposing view and start a reasonable debate on the subject? You could probably even get him to agree with a lot of your points, and perhaps even empathize.
Healthy dialogues are critical in a democratic society. Censorship is the antithesis of everything our society stands for.
>To your point about other publications such as the Washington Post being on the other axis of bias, I have trouble understanding how you can simply say they're just on the other side. From everything I've seen from the Washington Post, they're nowhere near as advertently dishonest as Breitbart is, accidentally or otherwise.
I don't have any particular examples right now, but just as Breitbart will group together articles of alleged attacks by immigrants or minorities, I've often seen WaPo group together articles of alleged attacks against immigrants or minorities on their top bar. I think Breitbart is probably more biased on average, but they both spin things pretty heavily. Between Breitbart, Fox, Drudge, Huffington, NYT, NBC, WaPo, there is not a single source of objective and neutral news analysis out there. It's probably more fair to put Breitbart and Huffington Post at the same bias degrees than Breitbart and WaPo, but the point is that all these sources are pretty shitty and biased and calling for just one of them to be censored is quite silly.
> why not present your opposing view and start a reasonable debate on the subject?
Exclamations like that are just baffling. There's this continuous hateful, spiteful and just awful bigotry being spewed, but when one labels it as such, suddenly one is being unreasonable and one has to engage. I won't take the bait. No sir, thank you.
I don't think that particular position is necessarily a hateful one. He's arguing from pragmatism. I don't agree with him at all (in this case or any other), but he's an openly gay (and self-admittedly promiscuous) man himself, so you can't say everything out of his mouth stems from homophobic bigotry.
Also, for whatever reason or other, I have at least one openly gay friend (who isn't even that conservative) who agrees with him. Clearly there's room for open debate here.
Ignoring him is probably better than engaging, but that's different from calling for social media providers to censor references to him.
No one is arguing Breitbart should be prohibited from existing. Other people choosing not to subsidize or do business with them is not a ban.
Also, degree of ideological bias is not the same thing as degree of journalist integrity or factual falsity. A "news" outlet can have no particular ideological bias and be completely disconnected from the truth, or it can have a strong ideological bias and be completely reliable on facts and even have high integrity in presenting all relevant facts in the stories it covers (while, or even would assume, being quite selective in its selection of which stories to cover at all.)
So, saying Breitbart is no more biased than HuffPo is not an argument that they are no more fake than HuffPo.
>You can spend all day wrestling and wanking each other off if you want to, chaps, but you still have to get married, have kids and go off to fight wars.
You really don't see anything incongruent about the article's premise and his "conclusion", nor do you see that it's a preposterously philosophically-foolish position to take? He's okay with marrying a women I will not love nor have any emotional stake in. She'll just marry me, we'll live together, and she'll just be a semen vessel? Spare me the willful ignorance.
>But it's not fake news. It's just shitty news
Can we stop nitpicking? These publications often rely on crappy news in aggregate to push a narrative. It doesn't matter that an article here and there is seemingly rational, or has bits of truth cited by 10 year old studies with whimsical interpretations of those studies, while completely ignoring those studies were never replicated again. Those stories in aggregate begin to build up a narrative. That narrative then becomes accepted by certain people and sometimes unfortunately unquestionably so; the narrative is surrounded by a maze of complete and utter drivel. For some people, it's too much to shift through so they don't even bother to self-critique. The "maze of crap" can even have the nocuous effect of lending credence to the publishing organization. It's the same thing with anti-vaccination people, it's the same thing with flat-earthers, or people who want to claim evolution is fake. The problem becomes muddled when you get into something grey, like politics. But it's still the same pattern.
>why not present your opposing view and start a reasonable debate on the subject?
You are effectively asking for a dialogue "reset" Not only would that be extremely exhausting to rehash the past couple of decades of why we are where we are in regards to certain subjects, but also would basically be a waste of time. People like Milo have no interest in honest debate, or "truth" if you will. If they did, they'd write far more eloquent positions addressing the actual evidence and perspectives that exist in whatever subject is being discussed; they certainly wouldn't take willfully ignorant positions on those subjects either. They'd also conduct themselves accordingly when being filmed. Watch any of Milo's interviews on video and watch him twist himself in circles. He spends the majority of the time backpedaling on things he said rather than take some affirmative position with evidence to back it up.
He and Breitbart are free to publish what they want, in whatever manner they choose. That doesn't mean they deserve people's attention or money. That doesn't mean people need to respect them.
>I think Breitbart is probably more biased on average, but they both spin things pretty heavily.
There is a difference here. Everyone is biased, so let's not use it as a talking point. The principle behind all this is willing to admit when you got something wrong. The principle is having the integrity to inform your readership of the wrong, and correct it. The principle is not ignoring blatantly well supported positions on certain subjects just so you can tickle your audience's emotions and fears.
And to the overall censorship point: No one is calling for censorship. Private citizens and companies don't want to deal with Breitbart. Companies like facebook probably just don't have the ability nor the resources to sort through every single thing that starts trending from Breitbart, only to have it be removed because it's fake. We are talking about a publishing source that posted so many fake news stories, Facebook and Twitter decided to hell with it, we'll just get the story from elsewhere. Breitbart is in this position because of their own actions, not because there's some conspiracy theory to silence one side.
>You really don't see anything incongruent about the article's premise and his "conclusion", nor do you see that it's a preposterously philosophically-foolish position to take? He's okay with marrying a women I will not love nor have any emotional stake in. She'll just marry me, we'll live together, and she'll just be a semen vessel? Spare me the willful ignorance.
I see many, many issues with it. Did you not read my post?
>Can we stop nitpicking? These publications often rely on crappy news in aggregate to push a narrative.
Yes, that's true. Again, so do other sources, including many left-leaning ones.
>Watch any of Milo's interviews on video and watch him twist himself in circles. He spends the majority of the time backpedaling on things he said rather than take some affirmative position with evidence to back it up.
Right, because he's mostly going for clickbait and ad revenue and just general attention and self-aggrandizement. But the point is that he has a right to do that, and you have a right to challenge him on it.
>And to the overall censorship point: No one is calling for censorship. Private citizens and companies don't want to deal with Breitbart. Companies like facebook probably just don't have the ability nor the resources to sort through every single thing that starts trending from Breitbart
It seems we agree on most things except this.
First off, as far as I'm aware, Facebook and Twitter have absolutely no plans to block Breitbart. They're only blocking fake news outlets. Outlets that completely fabricate stories and evidence and interviews etc.
Facebook is a private corporation, but like it or not they are a massive monopoly.
No, it's not censorship in the sense of government censorship, but it has a similar effect. We don't have to call it censorship for the horrible effects to become apparent, so I'll stop calling it that.
Facebook has so much reach that you could equate them to a state in many ways. Blocking Breitbart would only solidify conservatives' beliefs that liberal elites are trying to stifle their voice and prevent them from sharing any contrary opinions, and make them feel even more marginalized. It would be a major boon to Trump and his administration. I think that one single action could be the start of a path that makes our country much more divisive than it is now. Zuckerberg was 100% right to be extremely wary about blocking any news sources pre-election.
An advertiser dissociating with Breitbart is one thing, but major social media outlets that effectively act as common carriers should not ban things without a very good reason, like law-infringing material or scams (which fake news outlets generally are).
>When I express views like this, I’m sometimes called a reactionary. People say I want to go back to the 50s. And they’re right – but it’s the 650s BC I want to return to, because Sparta had the right idea about male love. You can spend all day wrestling and wanking each other off if you want to, chaps, but you still have to get married, have kids and go off to fight wars.
Sure it combines "outdated pseudo-science and philosophically iffy reasoning behind its pretext". But it's not fake news. It's just shitty news, like so much other shitty news out there. I'm not defending Breitbart, I'm just saying it is a press outlet and it should be allowed to exist as one. It shouldn't have to suffer from censorship. No media source should have to suffer from censorship. Fake news mills aren't media sources.
>It makes me want to just yank Milo by the neck and show him what irreparable damage he is doing to people (if I could); if he even has the morality to care.
Milo is a partisan asshole but he's not a total idiot. Instead of calling for his website to be blacklisted, why not present your opposing view and start a reasonable debate on the subject? You could probably even get him to agree with a lot of your points, and perhaps even empathize.
Healthy dialogues are critical in a democratic society. Censorship is the antithesis of everything our society stands for.
>To your point about other publications such as the Washington Post being on the other axis of bias, I have trouble understanding how you can simply say they're just on the other side. From everything I've seen from the Washington Post, they're nowhere near as advertently dishonest as Breitbart is, accidentally or otherwise.
I don't have any particular examples right now, but just as Breitbart will group together articles of alleged attacks by immigrants or minorities, I've often seen WaPo group together articles of alleged attacks against immigrants or minorities on their top bar. I think Breitbart is probably more biased on average, but they both spin things pretty heavily. Between Breitbart, Fox, Drudge, Huffington, NYT, NBC, WaPo, there is not a single source of objective and neutral news analysis out there. It's probably more fair to put Breitbart and Huffington Post at the same bias degrees than Breitbart and WaPo, but the point is that all these sources are pretty shitty and biased and calling for just one of them to be censored is quite silly.