u/LinguisticsTurtle

See here: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1978/06/26/girl.

It's free to read here: https://archive.ph/G9sEB.

I've watched Destiny's stream a bit. I've watched Hasan's a bit too. I think that everyone can immediately agree that:

• (1) streaming culture seems very inefficient (isn't rambling for hours and hours inefficient and inarticulate? also, isn't rambling inferior to articles given that there are no hyperlinked sources?)

• (2) streaming culture seems very low-IQ

• (3) streaming culture seems to be very drama-centric (the streamers like Destiny and Hasan benefit from being characters in an ongoing soap opera that draws people into the drama...just like people tune into a soap opera, people tune into the latest salvo from Destiny or from Hasan)

I don't know that much about streaming culture or how much it influences things. I think that the Hasan-vs.-Destiny thing is probably an important microcosm in terms of how streaming culture operates. They each have their "fans". And they both have their "echo chambers", though I don't mean to suggest that both of the "echo chambers" are equally filled with distortions; maybe Destiny's is far worse.

I wonder what's been written on (1) the Destiny-vs.-Hasan thing, (2) streaming culture, and (3) where the truth lies in terms of the stories and interpretations and analyses that Destiny and Hasan push to their audiences.

I wonder about the extent to which Destiny is a grifter whose past reveals that his "liberal" image is fake. I don't know nearly enough aobut Destiny to be able to evaluable the extent to which that's true.

There are two extremely frustrating things that you'll see when Destiny talk about Israel/Palestine with people. First, he needs to be talking to really good scholars; it has to be a scholar on the other side and it has to be a really good scholar. For example, if his opponent argues for a one-state solution then Destiny will bring up how that's risky because what if the single state devolves into terrorism and violence? Well, maybe the one-state position is unrealistic or undesireable; maybe the one-state position is a convenient "straw man" for people like Destiny to beat up on, whereas the scholars who support a two-state solution would mop the floor with Destiny and easily debunk Destiny's nonsense.

Second, Destiny will sometimes raise questions that are seemingly perfectly fine and seemingly perfectly interesting, but mixed in with the seemingly reasonable stuff he'll just say the most outrageous bullshit. Destiny puts out such a huge volume of stuff, so someone really needs to sift through his ramblings and find the craziest stuff and expose how crazy it really is, but it's a huge chore...nobody has time to do that.

I did see this piece (note that the hyperlinks were removed when I copy/pasted the below text):

https://www.currentaffairs.org/news/2024/03/my-date-with-destiny

>I was not eager to do this. While Destiny appears not to have read a single full book on the Israel-Palestine conflict, he’s a formidable opponent in one-on-one conversations. He’s very, very aggressive, and a quick thinker. I find his moral positions horrifying, and many of his factual statements are erroneous, but more than one person has been embarrassed in an argument with him. I don’t think his style is conducive to serious intelligent discussion, because he speaks so fast that you can barely think, interrupts constantly, and appears more interested in “destroying” you than in taking what you have to say seriously. In those kinds of conditions, the opposing party is likely to blurt out whatever pops into their head, without being able to give it much thought. That’s great if the goal is to try to make them look foolish or erupt in dumb rage, but it’s not really a good way to learn anything. I’m a writer and a “slow” thinker who likes to revise my thoughts before offering them to the public. Fast-paced debate is something I don’t care for, because inevitably I say ill-considered things in the moment and then realize later what the right answer was.

>Fortunately, I came away from the two-hour discussion with my dignity intact, and a number of Destiny’s fans emailed me afterward to say they thought I did well. Some even said they had subscribed to this magazine or wanted to support us. (You should, too.) As far as I can tell, there are no videos online called “Writer with FAKE BRITISH ACCENT gets OWNED and DESTROYED in Israel-Palestine Debate,” so I’ll chalk that up as a win. I don’t ever want to do a discussion with him again, though.

>As I say, the problem with these fast-paced arguments is that you’re responding with whatever you can think of in the moment, and you can’t do things like dive at length into the actual evidence. There were a number of moments where I claimed that one thing was true, Destiny claimed it was false, and we just had to go back and forth, each insisting we were right. I was not able to fully substantiate my positions in detail and show why I am confident in them. I’ll do that here, because the issues we argued over are actually incredibly important.

>The stakes of the issue here are high: if I am right, there is a hideous crime against humanity occurring with full U.S. support, and we as Americans have a strong moral obligation to try to put a stop to it. If Destiny is right, we can all go back to playing video games. So let’s review some of the important disputes. I will show that, if we slow down Destiny’s arguments and actually evaluate them, they are dangerously ignorant.

Obviously 2666 is regarded as a masterpiece, but I wonder if there are any articles that talk about the novel and also talk about the challenges to the "femicide" framing of things. See the below:

https://www.texasobserver.org/qa-molly-molloy-story-juarez-femicides-myth/

>Molly Molloy: Female murder victims have never comprised more than 18 percent of the overall number of murder victims in Ciudad Juárez, and in the last two decades that figure averages at less than 10 percent. That’s less than in the United States, where about 20 to 25 percent of the people who are murdered in a given year are women. Ciudad Juárez is experiencing profound social distress, and the elevated violence in the city is a continuing crisis. But this idea that Juárez is a place of disproportionate violence against women is a misperception.

...

>MM: Mexican statistics are notoriously difficult to get and unreliable. That said, statistics do exist—and they can be very useful, especially when you can track them over time. And there are other sources. From the late 1980s until her death in 2009, Esther Chavez Cano, one of the most eloquent voices on women’s rights and human rights in Juárez, wrote hundreds of columns in Juárez newspapers to draw attention to the lack of social services in the city and especially to the ravages of domestic violence that primarily affected women and children. She became a spokesperson and a resource for families of victims, and she began to keep meticulous records of the crimes against women.

>Of the roughly 400 cases documented in Esther Chavez’ files from 1990 to 2005, about three-quarters of the cases were domestic violence, and the cases were essentially resolved. That is, the killer was known as an acquaintance or domestic partner or other relative of the victim. Only about 100 were completely unsolved cases. These are the cases that have received (and continue to receive) most of the media, artistic and academic attention. The only real statistical study on the topic, done in 2008, found that the proportion of female homicides in Ciudad Juárez was lower than Houston’s.

>What’s more, until 2008, when the violence associated with organized crime escalated and the Mexican military was deployed, Juárez was not exceedingly violent—at least not compared to other places around the globe that have similar kinds of social pressures. Before 2007, as far as I know, there was never a year with more than 300 murders, and that ends up being a murder rate of somewhere between 25 to 30 per 100,000 people. That’s a relatively high rate, but it’s not as high as some of the rates you see in U.S. cities like Detroit and New Orleans, where the murder rate can be upwards of 60 per 100,000.

>When you look at the 427 murders—that’s the figure usually quoted for the number of women killed between 1993 and 2007—those are all of the female murder victims. Those are not categorized by the type of crime. If a woman is shot in a robbery, it goes into that number and is categorized [by some] as a femicide, even though there would be nothing to indicate in that crime that she was killed because she was a woman. There was a famous case in 2004 that Mexican reporter Sandra Rodríguez wrote about in her book La Fábrica del Crimen of these young boys who murdered their family—mother, father and sister. The mother and sister are counted as femicides, even though that wasn’t a gender-specific crime.

...

>MM: I have a problem with this extreme focus on the women victims. I think every single one of the victims matter. The fact that a crime or homicide victim is a woman, or a child, or a man—it makes a different story. But in human terms, no one victim should be more highly valued than another.

>If 300 people are killed and 30 of them are women, but the women’s murders are the ones that get all of the attention, I find that to be absolutely mistaken and wrong. There are so many other victims and people are killed for many different reasons. Not every woman victim is killed for some sexual reason, or simply because she’s a woman. Sometimes people say to me, well, the women are innocent, the men that are killed are narcos and criminals. That’s such an oversimplification, and it is a statement made with absolutely no evidence. It is a criminalization of the great majority of all of the homicide victims. This is what has happened especially since the number of murders exploded in Juárez in 2008. And it is false.

>It’s almost like we’re fetishizing these dead women. To always be looking back at these women as if their bodies are this kind of sacrificial host—I find that to be troubling, in terms of our culture and our focus on life and death and what it means. In other words, if you’re constantly focusing on women as if they’re this symbol for suffering, you never move beyond that particular death to look at the social conditions that gave that kind of life, and that kind of death, for so, so many people.

I made a previous post ( https://www.reddit.com/r/chomsky/comments/1v1i6nf/what_is_actually_at_stake_in_terms_of_chomskys/ ). I just want to break down some tactics that I noticed.

---

1: It's true that a lot of people are angry about Epstein-related matters on Reddit. But can mobs of angry people be wrong? Can mobs of angry people be misinformed? Isn't there a history of mobs of angry people getting their pitchforks out based on low information? I noticed a tactic where the goal is to translate "Lots of people got angry" into "They must be well-informed and correct about the issues at hand".

2: This can be a powerful tactic to use, since it makes the person who challenges the defamation into a "weirdo". It's an appeal to numbers. It's an appeal to the power of the mob. My own thoughts on this were:

>I genuinely (not being starky) don't know how many of those "people" were bots. Reddit is a cesspool. A lot of comments are just angry little snippets that might or might not be from real human beings.

>But more importantly, how many of the "people" who came to this subreddit had some kind of axe to grind? What if they were pissed about some geopolitical conflict that Chomsky had weighed in on? Chomsky is a very political person; lots of people have grudges against him for various reasons.

>Another issue is: There are a small handful of people who have studied this case in any detail, whereas everyone else is going based on low-info media mythology.

3: I think that when it comes to smear campaigns it's extremely important to study the history of them and how they operate. Under conditions of panic, people are scared of the mob and they will "throw under the bus" their friends in order to appeal "balanced" and in order to protect themselves against the "mob". People may later realize "I shouldn't have conceded too many points to the mob", but it's too late; once you go down the road of giving in to the mob, you can't backtrack, since you've locked into your position. You are now feeding the moral panic because you've conceded too many points. The correct view is just to not weigh in on the facts of the matter. If you weigh in, you get locked in, and later you may realize that you gave in to various defamatory lies in order to appease the mob and appear "balanced" and appear reasonable. I made this point:

>the obvious point is that you can't really take at face value anything that anyone says under the conditions of societal panic and societal hysteria. Everyone has an enormous self-interested incentive to condemn Jeffrey Epstein and condemn anyone who associated with him. Privately, people might be thinking "This whole media carnival is insane and this is the stupidest moral-panic nonsense that I've ever witnessed", but publicly people will still make statements that condemn and distance. It would be PR suicide to do anything other than feed into the media frenzy; basic self-interest and basic self-preservation requires that you issue statements about how Epstein was an Evil Demon and Chomsky was "disgusting" and whatever else.

4: I think that it's absolutely crucial to understand how smear campaigns operate. And how sex-panic cases operate. There are patterns that emerge when you look into these things. I don't know if anyone on this forum has looked into this particular case, but it might be a really important one in order to see how these things work: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVaAlBfNnJY. I've noticed that people online constantly refer to Hasan having shocked his dog; there are memes about it and people deploy that accusation incessantly. Did he ever actually do anything whatsoever to his dog?

5: This defamation campaign is a crucial example to study: https://monthlyreview.org/articles/anatomy-of-a-propaganda-campaign-jeremy-corbyns-political-assassination/. It was highly effective. One of the lessons of this defamation campagin is that you can't "give in" to the lies. If you give one inch, you'll get destroyed. You have to have a spine against the liars and defamers. When people "give in" to the accusations, they help to cement those accusations. Of course, I can't blame people for "giving in" out of fear, since these panics are genuinely scary. These panics are genuinely scary and everything happens so quickly. Here's another piece on the Corbyn case: https://canadiandimension.com/articles/view/jeremy-corbyn-is-the-most-smeared-politician-in-history. See here:

>If our mainstream press has become a propaganda machine for the right-wing, it’s no wonder that the first openly socialist leader Britain has had in twenty years has been the victim of perhaps the longest continuous smear campaign ever seen against a politician in the UK.

6: Imagine Epstein had been accused of murder. I doubt any of this mob-fueled insanity would be occuring. Everything related to sex turns our brains off. Sex panics are very powerful; murder "panics" (insofar as they even occur) are not nearly as powerful. When they used to lynch Black people in the US, accusations of rape were much more potent in order to get people to lynch Black people and celebrate the lynching; there were accusations of other things too, but sexual things are a special category when it comes to mobilizing anger and panic, whereas murder accusations and other accusations just don't evoke the same level of emotion. There is scholarship showing that for 1000s of years, anything related to sex has been a special category for humanity in terms of deactivating rational faculties and evoking rage.

7: This Epstein thing is like the "Faurisson affair". We now look back on the Faurisson affair as a joke; obviously Noam was right and everyone else was being insane and hysterial and irrational. Maybe I'm wrong; maybe there are still people who think that Noam did something wrong regarding the Faurisson affair. But at the time, it was a huge panic; Noam got a lot of heat for that. I think that after the panic subsides people start to calm down and look at things without the blinding heat of rage and panic. Regarding Faurisson, Chomsky pointed out the facts, including that Faurisson wasn't actually denying that the Holocaust took place. Everyone lost their minds. Again, maybe some people still believe that Chomsky did something wrong regarding the Faurisson thing, but my sense is that people's blood pressure doesn't skyrocket on that matter any more. At this current moment, sex panics make people's blood pressure go through the roof.

8: The below is a super important thing to think about not because Hedges himself is so important but because of the principles involved:

https://bevstohl.substack.com/p/im-no-longer-waiting-for-the-storm

>Hedges spent over a decade teaching in New Jersey state prisons, building genuine relationships with criminals, some convicted of egregious violent crimes, even publishing a book celebrating the bonds he formed with those folks. Like Chomsky’s, his philosophy is rooted in the idea that convicted people retain their humanity and shouldn’t be permanently defined by their worst acts. This is the same principle Chomsky applied to Epstein: the man had served his sentence. Yet Hedges denies Chomsky the same moral complexity he extends to those convicted of murder. This is not journalism.

9: The core tactic is shaming people who try to investigate the facts and who try to become fluent and well-informed and serious. You're not allowed to look into the facts of the Epstein case or else you're "litigating pedophilia" or "obsessed with pedophilic rape" or "defending Epstein". This keeps the defamation and the lies going. Investigation of the facts is taboo. In a sane world, understanding the facts would be a good thing. Presumption of innocence and skepticism would be a good thing. In a sex panic, understanding the facts is a huge crime and you will be shamed and attacked. See here:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2016/02/29/oscar-hangover-special-why-spotlight-is-a-terrible-film/

>By their nature, moral panics are hysterical. They jettison reason for emotion, transform accusation into proof, spur more accusation and create a climate that demands not deliberation or evidence or resistance to prejudice but mindless faith.

>They are the enemy of skepticism, which those on the left and near-left, liberals, progressives, regard as the sword and shield of journalism when it’s convenient or ideologically appealing. The Globe did not so much practice journalism as it constructed a courtroom of panic, one that reversed the presumption of innocence and spilled over into real courtrooms where real defendants didn’t stand a chance.

10: I think that this is the truth of the matter:

https://www.compactmag.com/article/noam-chomsky-was-right-about-epstein/

>Among the strangest casualties of the entire affair is Noam Chomsky. Whatever one thinks of his contributions to linguistics, or his political history, it would be impossible to seriously contest Chomsky’s impact as a researcher, theorist, and advocate. But suddenly, we are being told that his reputation is in tatters and his life’s work tainted because he socialized and corresponded with Jeffrey Epstein. None of those rushing forward with melodramatic denunciations betray the slightest hint of an essential trait that Chomsky himself exhibited: a willingness to examine the actual facts and follow them to their logical conclusion, notwithstanding the opprobrium that may be unleashed as a consequence.

>Here is that unutterable conclusion for present purposes: Chomsky was substantively correct in his judgments about the Epstein hysteria. That he should now be repudiated for this—by a parade of former friends and collaborators, no less—merely underscores how pervasive the hysteria is.

11: I found this ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tgN0R3Skocc ) debate interesting because it shows how the Epstein stuff is a religion. It's something people believe in their hearts. The facts don't matter. I remember that when Chomsky was getting harangued about the Faurisson affair he asked one journalist "Do the facts matter?". Nobody wanted to know the facts about Faurisson. Nobody wants to know the facts about Epstein. It's taboo to "litigate the facts" when people are consumed by emotion and rage and hysteria; people have put "all their chips in" on this both emotionally and sometimes career-wise, so there's no possibility that they might be wrong on the facts, since that would be like telling a religious believer that they've been wrong their whole life about their religion. Once you put "all your chips in" on the Epstein thing, it's going to be nearly impossible for you to backtrack.

12: Not only is it taboo to "litigate the facts", but it's also just a difficult thing to do, since it's tedious. It takes a lot of time and energy and investigation to learn the facts of a complex legal saga. Chomsky made this comment:

https://www.imdb.com/name/nm0159008/quotes/

>I don't mind the denunciations, frankly; I mind the lies...intellectuals are very good at lying. They're professionals at it. Villification is a wonderful technique. There's no way of responding. If somebody calls you an anti-Semite, what can you say: "I'm not an anti-Semite"? If somebody says you're a racist or a Nazi? You always lose. The person who throws the mud always wins, because there is no way of responding to those charges.

See this piece here about a letter that Chomsky signed: https://fair.org/home/corporate-pundits-defend-academic-freedom-from-protesters-not-government/. And see this quote (note that the hyperlinks were lost when I pasted this):

>One Harper’s letter signatory, Bari Weiss, longtime self-styled free speech warrior and current editor-in-chief of CBS News, has a history of suppressing speech she doesn’t like. She has likened student protesters to terrorists (Free Press, 9/7/24). In December, she cut a CBS segment documenting the Trump administration’s rendition of Venezuelan migrants to a Salvadoran internment camp. She has notably little to say about the dangers of government censorship when the government in question is controlled by Trump or his allies.

I'm sure Chomsky would agree that Bari Weiss is a hypocrite. Does that mean the letter says anything wrong or bad?

I mean, obviously shitty people might sign a letter for shitty reasons. Does that mean the letter is letting the right wing off the hook or that the letter is wrong? Or that the letter is saying that the right wing is less bad on free speech?

See here another quote from the piece (again, note that the hyperlinks were lost when I pasted this):

>Pinker wrote on X (1/12/26) in January that “censorship of teaching in Texas universities (including Plato!) is worse than anything from the woke left.” Yet he has commented far more often on the latter than the former. It’s not difficult to determine whether state and federal governments or critics and student protesters pose a greater threat to academic freedom. But it is clear which these writers would rather confront.

I wonder if there's any way around that situation. I know of a journalist who says that the Internet Archive is the only source of honesty on the internet or something to that effect; I would be very upset if there were no way around this situation. Maybe a separate archive could scrape these outlets if the Internet Archive can't? See here:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/anishasircar/2026/04/14/why-major-news-sites-are-blocking-the-internet-archives-wayback-machine/

>“The issue is that Times content on the Internet Archive is being used by AI companies in violation of copyright law to directly compete with us,” New York Times spokesperson Graham James told Wired, declining to clarify whether this referred to documented violations or a hypothetical concern. Reddit cited the same rationale — it didn’t want the Wayback Machine to become a backdoor for AI companies to access content Reddit is now licensing.

...

>The coalition collected more than 100 signatures from journalists and presented the letter to the Internet Archive. Signatories range from television anchor Rachel Maddow to independent reporters like Kat Tenbarge and Taylor Lorenz.

>“In previous generations, journalists would turn to the physical archives of a local newspaper or of a local public library to access historical reporting and follow the threads of the present back into history,” the letter reads.

>“With many newspapers closed, and no clear path for local public libraries to preserve digital-only reporting, the work of safeguarding journalism’s record increasingly falls to the Internet Archive.”

I also wonder if the NYT has made it so that their articles can't be viewed on archive.ph, and I also wonder whether there's any way around that situation as well.