News: An Unrelenting Torrent of Shit

Headline for TL;DR Kids

"To be completely cured of newspapers, spend a year reading the previous week's newspapers." ~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb (NNT), The Bed of Procrustes.

I am confident, the quickest, cheapest and easiest way to become more informed is to avoid media content somewhat generously referred to as "news". Way easier and more effective than Ground News.  

Having said that, this post is largely inspired by the most prominent "broadsheet" in my life "The Age" a Victorian broadsheet that at some point was acquired and became pretty much a reorganized copy of "The Sydney Morning Herald" considered the bourgeois alternative to the blue collar "tabloid" "The Herald-Sun" or "Sun-Herald" in NSW. 

If there was one thing I could convince you with, with the body of this post, it is that encouraging young people to consume news media - say via a unit in their one more-or-less mandatory secondary school subject where students have to analyse a newspaper article or editorial as if it is content worthy of ever taking seriously. We should not be doing this, particularly in the algorithm attention economy era. 

I contend, it is basically instructing students to outsource their thinking. Like having a math(s) subject where teachers routinely instruct students to solve problems by referring to the answers section, but worse because those answers would have to very often be incorrect, irrelevant or stabs-in-the-dark to be analogous to the content of news.

The Lockdown Months

I had the good fortune to actually live through some of the harshest (and harshley criticized) pandemic lockdown conditions to be in effect outside of China. I had the misfortune of being locked down with my parents who had ABCNews 24, the publicly funded 24 hour news station, running almost all day, unless I muscled in and changed it to the Food Network, pointing out that at the least, cooking programs are informative.

The experience was crazy making, and given a typical day in lockdown that consisted of a walk to the shops, preparing a meal (I would have gone even crazier if I hadn't had agency over my diet) and then telecommuting to work in the afternoons, and exercising/fox spotting at night.

Part of the morning routine was watching the daily press conference given by then and current Premier Dan Andrews and his cabinet. That combined with walking to the shops and walking past the newspaper front pages gave me three data points on the quality of our local press corp.

1. Information provided by the government. (including responses to questions)

2. The inane, often irrelevant and very leading questions asked by the press gallery.

3. How (1) was then covered in the newsprint.

Subsequently, I could see plainly that the best fucking way to ensure a person was completely misinformed, and not just misinformed but confused and outraged and a danger to themselves and their neighbours was to skip the press conference and read the newspapers.

For a concrete example, though I am making this up, consider it hyperbolic or satirical if you like but I think it conveys the character of what I witnessed on a daily basis it went a little (lot) like this:

Gov: Based on today's new case numbers and the current estimates of when a vaccine will be developed there is no revision to our roadmap out of lockdown. Case numbers are still growing but at a slower rate and the [Insert suburb] outbreak has not yet been contained though our contact tracers are not discovering new transmissions, it just takes one case slipping through the cracks.

Journalist: So can you guarantee that we will be able to have a Sunday Roast with mum for mother's day?

Gov: [With patience I could never muster to be a public servant] Mother's day is this coming Sunday, so no, unfortunately I can make no such guarantee that we will see any relaxation of the lockdowns for at least 3 weeks, please refer to the roadmap documents that have been in circulation for weeks.

Newspaper: DICTATOR DAN EATS BABIES!!

It was this degree of horseshit, that I experienced day-in-day-out for like 3 months. It was a real lesson in the constraint of public sentiment on policy effectiveness, and how the media can dedicate all it's energy to reduce the effectiveness of that policy.

The thing was, it wasn't just the Murdoch-owned-Right-Wing-Populist-Collingwood-Football-Club-Mouthpiece tabloid that did this shitty journalism, but the broadsheet also. Not only that, but the Australian Public Broadcaster that aired the daily press conferences, would cut from the conference to studio where it's inexpert panel of dipshit journalists would immediately start speculating as to what very literal concrete information could possibly mean.

“No is such an ambiguous word though. What does it mean?" ~ Richard Ayoade

Let's get this clear, every day for months I watched journalists routinely fail the super-fucking-easy test of what we knew, what we knew we didn't know, and what was being done about it.

The Alternative to Legacy Media

"Opinions are like assholes, everybody's got one." ~ Salt-N-Pepa

Even though this post should largely be about the torrent of shit produced by digital broadsheet The Age aka The Sydney Morning Herald a claim I shall attempt to substantiate in the next section, I believe prominent podcast "Triggernometry" is illustrative of the pitfalls of thinking there's a viable alternative to legacy or traditional media. 

I'll speak candidly, Triggernometry is a podcast started by two London comedians that I feel are mediocre enough that but for the podcast's popularity, we would never have heard of them and you probably still haven't, unlike Joe Rogan, and unlike regular guest Andrew Doyle. 

The original premise and promise of Triggernometry was "this is the show for you if you're bored of people on the internet arguing over subjects they know nothing about. At triggernometry we don't pretend to be the experts we ask the experts." I first stumbled across it in 2015, where it was actually an important parasocial relationship for me, as I watched the unveiling of the society I lived in as not understanding what I took to be basic concepts like free speech, rule of law and what constitutes racism.

At some point, fairly early in terms of Triggernometry's production timeline they changed their tagline to "honest conversations with fascinating people." A most telling rebranding.

See the telling thing being is that old tagline carried with it two hefty obligations, good obligations I feel. The first and more subtle one is that the hosts were committed to not pretending to be experts. The second and more obvious one was that they speak to experts about their limited domain of expertise.

"Honest conversations with fascinating people" can be conducted with a homeless schizophrenic under a bridge. One could use this tagline to rule out for example a guest like Dr Robert Malone on the basis that it cannot be determined that he is an honest actor with any confidence. In general though, someone can be honestly wrong, and that is problematic for a podcast that's pretences to being entertainment are far less strong than it's pretences to being informative.

Under the old tagline, you can watch the hosts basically listen to Rory Sutherland a marketing and sales expert, talking about his expertise. But we are already getting into the weeds of expertise, because marketing is a domain where many highly credentialed and compensated people can be said to be experts, but are not "experts" in the same way that a heart surgeon is an expert on triple bypasses. 

Someone can certainly be an expert on their own experience hence, getting a figure like former police-officer Harry Miller to talk about his experience with being investigated for a "non-crime hate incident" meets the standard of the old tagline. That is despite my suspicion that Harry Miller retells events in the tried-and-tested-way where he looks like a genius and everyone else a bumbling fumbling idiot, which I suspect is embellished rather than "honest".

Under the new tagline, it permits for a non-expert like Eric Weinstein to simply and honestly opine over "subjects they know nothing about" provided we agree that we are using "nothing" hyperbolically. One can opine over Jeffrey Epstein's death and large language model AI in a way that has no value above that of entertainment, without literally knowing nothing about the subjects. 

A better example is the last contemporary Triggernometry episode I attempted to watch, an episode titled "the case against Democracy" with someone I had never heard of Curtis Yarvin. I went in with expectations that I would hear something akin to Socrates/Plato-as-Socrates case against democracy, making cases against democracy and most importantly attempting to devise a better system I feel is useful speculation though I would never expect someone to propose a workable alternative. It turns out Curtis Yarvin is more akin to a rambling stranger one meets occasionally taking the number 19 train from the CBD to Coburg in Melbourne and someone who wasted 25 minutes of my life.

I didn't even here the titular "case against democracy" because Yarvin lost me at 12:53 when he described himself as "like many many very intellectual people an Oxfordian, I believe Shakespeare was the Earl of Oxford..." a statement under the chapter "being more radical than a Nazi" But that statement itself...[exhales] In a world where I would be confident average, normal citizens were competent to navigate an unregulated media ecosystem, that statement should set off about as many red-flags as an email from a Nigerian Prince that wants our help to transfer millions of dollars to our account.

To present my own case for that claim, the first thing I would present is that Yarvin never presented any arguments for Shakespeare being the Earl of Oxford, nor even substantiated, defined or quantified "many many very intellectual people" that he tellingly counts himself amongst. So an extraordinary claim like this, means whatever case he is trying to make that taking Shakespear "seriously" is more "radical" than Nazism (?) is just going to be a case built on an unjustified claim. This is distinct from something like Heterodox Acadamy platforming an Anti-Stratfordian to actually present his case against Shakespearian authorship. Again having notes on yourself like this should for a capable general population set off red-flags that here is someone worthy of attention only insofar as monitoring the attention he receives. A coalmine canary so to speak.

So I quit this interview, around the 25 minute mark, but I have this rule, which is if I see a thumbnail on Youtube that makes me groan and think "I never want to watch that" I will earmark it as something to watch in an attempt to prevent myself from falling into a bubble and being overly dismissive. So I gave Curtis Yarvin one more chance with an excerpted clip from his interview thumbnailed "why bad ideas succeed" (a very real and interesting phenomena, like "Lebron is the GOAT" for example) but he uses the example of Covid-19 entirely predicated on the lab-leak hypothesis being true. 

So maybe, "gain of function" is a bad idea, but Curtis Yarvin is not a man capable of explaining why it is. He is a rambling nobody, the Ricky Gervais show could have easily subbed Karl Pilkington out for Curtis Yarvin and just had Ricky exclaiming "that's bollocks, these are the ramblings of a maniac" with identical frequency.

Better yet, in a recent interview Peter Berghosian interviewing Jonathan Rauch author of "A constitution of knowledge" played him a clip of republican primary candidate Vivek Ramaswamy and asked for his reaction and reassuringly for me, at least, (you can dip below the line and judge the video commenters for yourself, but please judge that against what Jonathan Rauch actually says in response) Jonathan Rauch can actually parse the argument Vivek Ramaswamy says. He can distinguish the argument "speech censorship is ineffectual and counterproductive" and that Ramaswamy makes a torrent of factually incorrect claims and is attempting to avoid responsibility.

Anyone who read my last post has some idea of how much Youtube basketball content I have consumed in the last month, but as an advocate for free speech something I am just not convinced of is that the general population can parse anything that isn't fucking straight forward. Like youtuber Skap Attack explaining how it is possible for Steph Curry to be "both great and overrated at the same time." Okay, a frankly alarming number of people can't tell the difference between "great" and "greatest" or "greatest shooter" and "greatest player" and hence can't contemplate that "the greatest shooter of all time" could be overrated as "the greatest player of all time."

A woman breaks up with her partner, her partner is upset so he waits for her outside her home and murders her one night. Again, a frankly alarming number of people cannot parse that in the sequence of events, the break up precipitated (lead to) the murder and the woman is in no way responsible for her murder.  

Equally, not to play favorites, a woman is raped and murdered by a stranger while walking home from a comedy gig in Melbourne one night, and the Victoria Police tweet (or X) out some safety advice for women concerned about getting raped and murdered by a stranger and there is much outcry about "victim blaming" in response. Again, an alarming number of people cannot parse out the difference between giving information to a scared and motivated target audience as to how they can reduce their risk of being attacked, and the police not wanting to prevent and penalize the perpetrators of these attacks.

Most people it seems, especially the most active people, take action on what they hear and not on what was said, and what they hear is mostly determined by their prior convictions and not what is being said and presented. 

Legacy media has loads of inherent problems that make it biased and untrustworthy. Podcasts like Triggernometry, substacks like that of Triggernometry host Konstantin Kissen, and whatever other alternative media is out there is not a viable solution. 

I had an economics lecturer (a field in which "expert" is a very misleading title) who often said "I will introduce [this argument] in order to dismiss it." Alternative media has been able to exploit both the good and the bad of figures that legacy media has dismissed without even introducing. But alternative media is fucking terrible at dismissing these people. I mean seriously, Eric Weinstein is well passed his dismissal date, he practically deplatformed himself, why the fuck is triggernometry or anyone still interviewing him?

In my own internal shorthand, I call it the "financial advisor problem". Financial advice is theoretically a valuable service. In practice however, it is almost impossible for a lay person to determine whether they are getting good or bad financial advice, hence the only people well positioned to take advantage of financial advisors, are people likely qualified to give financial advice. If my notion holds any water, we would expect to find people who feel they were given terrible financial advice by an expert (as opposed to the media with something like crypto), and at least in my experience I can confirm such people exist.

What I haven't addressed, is the first burden Triggernometry dispensed of, which is a commitment to not present themselves as experts, the replacement of "we don't pretend to be the experts" with "honest conversations". Near as I can guess at least one of the co-hosts appears to think that if you interview enough doctors, you basically have a medical degree or some shit. Konstantin Kissin has released a book, insofar as it could be autobiographical I guess it's his domain of expertise, but what I would present is the valuable youtube artifact that is these 13 minutes of non-sequiturs to explain why plebians don't trust experts, claiming to EXPLAIN(ED) vaccine hesitancy.

Now, maybe it could be the actual explanation for vaccine hesitancy, but by the nature of the argument made, if it does explain vaccine hesitancy it establishes that vaccine hesitancy is moronic and people are no longer fit to navigate the world they live in. 

You could use this line of reasoning to believe that genetically modified foods could turn you into some mutant with too many eyes, or lizard scales, again an alarming amount of people cannot parse the paradox in believing that eating fish with fish dna is fine, and eating tomatoes with tomato dna is fine but eating a tomato with fish dna is dangerous. Oh god, relistening to Konstantin Kisin narrate his "explanation" causes me visceral pain. It's the longest way ever to say "vaccine hesitancy is explained by stupidity."

The tide went out when Covid-19 spread around the globe. It sorted the wheat from the chaff, it was easy to see who is tribal and who is rational. 

There simply is no alternative, and most people who appear to believe there is conform to a classic behaviour of conspiracy theorists: 

First, conspiracy theories claim to explain what institutional analysis cannot. They appear to make sense out of a world that is otherwise confusing.

Second, they do so in an appealingly simple way, by dividing the world sharply between the forces of light, and the forces of darkness. They trace all evil back to a single source, the conspirators and their agents.

Third, conspiracy theories are often presented as special, secret knowledge unknown or unappreciated by others. For conspiracy theorists, the masses are a brainwashed herd, while the conspiracy theorists in the know can congratulate themselves on penetrating the plotters' deceptions."[104] ~from Wikipedia

Again I'd refer you to the comments below the Boghossian-Rauch interview for ample examples of people who cannot parse how someone can be pro-free speech and anti-factual errors but are simultaneously confident they can diagnose Rauch with cognitive dissonance while providing so little argument I can't even do the work necessary to determine what Rauch said to stimulate their response.

Fuck. I spent the better part of A YEAR corresponding with my vaccine hesitant friend, the first...the. first...question I asked him was if his position was falsifiable. Like was it worth any of my time to look at any of his evidence and evaluate it and he reassured me that he wanted to believe the vaccines were safe and effective. Like, this isn't someone in Mexico or Wyoming. This is a friend who lived in Melbourne, Australia a country where at least 90% of the 27 million people got 2 vaccine shots and half got a booster. This was a Charlie Church whose Church banned him from attending services if he was not vaccinated, so this guy just had to look out his fucking window to see whether people were dropping dead from vaccines or not, and after the better part of a fucking year I eventually said I was declaring Covid to be dangerous and the mRNA vaccines to be safe and effective, that his position was in fact unfalsifiable because all evidence to the contrary was dismissed as part of the conspiracy and the only evidence I would accept to concede his point was for him to produce the 150,000 vaccinated corpses necessary to convince me that the vaccines were more dangerous than Covid-19.

The thing was, this guy was an avid consumer of alternative media, to the point where he dismissed any institutionally produced knowledge on the grounds that it was either publically OR privately funded (ie. funded) and that fact checking services could be dismissed as "basically rubbish".

Okay, this is what we are dealing with, and what the newly emerged alternatives to institutional, traditional, legacy media is rife with - "I'm allowed to believe what I want" an entitlement to wilful ignorance. 

All of the above, I feel really needs saying, before I take a massive dump on one particular piece of legacy media. There. Is. No. Alternative. That. Can. Assure. You. Are. Actually. Informed.

You are still better off insourcing your thinking and figuring shit out for yourself. You don't have to go looking for news of any import, it will come to you. If you are going to do your own research, start with "how do I do research?"

Prognosis Negative: Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect

A little context, I haven't been on the ground, so to speak, for years. At any rate I thought if I briefly glanced at the news stories from my local paper. Until I started looking for shithouse headlines to collate for this post, I without fail regretted the time spent even bothering looking at what my local broadsheet had to offer. 

On 0 occasions did I think "oh this lets me know what is going on." From the virtual front page, to politics, business, world, culture, lifestyle, opinion, sports it's crap, crap, crap and crap. I mean, crap for different reasons - like opinion is just fucking garbage, obviously. Sport you would think lends itself to fairly objective reporting, injuries are injuries, trades are trades, scores are scores, results are results, the problem for that section has always been that there's generally more coverage than there is sports news to report. A section like "world" is crap, because this is the internet age, why the fuck would you go to a Melbourne broadsheet to find out about Trump's latest indictment. Oh and politics is crap because of flagrant biases I will justify by pointing out that every second day the front page section is essentially a hit piece on some shocking corrupt transgression by the Victorian Government, and yet these pieces of hard hitting journalism keeping the govt honest on the front fucking page, top of the news feed rarely if ever crack the top 9 stories (I can't exclude that this is because the most viewed stories is calculated as an aggregate of Victorian and NSW readers, meaning any national story will beat out any local story). Crap, crap, crap and crap.

So Jurassic Park, Westworld and ER creator Michael Crichton had this to say:

“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them.

In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know.”

― Michael Crichton

I have not forgotten what a shitty job the journalists did during the Melbourne lockdowns, when I was literally living in the story they were misrepresenting on a 24-7 basis. I was not impressed with the quality of journalism to get a McDonald's Drive-Thru order correct, but I thought I might forget how shit it was when I no longer lived in state, and over time be lulled into thinking the news in any way beyond naming some real places and people could possibly deliver insight.

On the two or three occasions in three years I've been lured in by click-bait headlines to read an article, the result has been vacuous. I don't trust their journalists on any subject.  

Person of no particular qualification reacts to Torrent-Of-Shit That is The Age/SMH Headlines

Okay, let's go. I'll link to the articles to prove they are real, but fuck me, I've documented the shit The Age deemed "fit to print" and paid someone for the content. It's all behind a paywall. FYI.

I’d never thought I’d say this, but it’s better for women in the US for this one reason ~Madison Griffiths

...and let me guess "I won't believe what it is!" Like this is straight up clickbait bullshit. Whatever it is, it's going to be trite. This is going to beat out universal healthcare, paid maternity leave, the fact you can be prime minister?... fuck off.

 Dear Dan, you have robbed me of my coveted Games volunteer tracksuit ~ Kate Halfpenny, Regular columnist

Clearly a fluff piece. A bit of fucking whimsy. This was in response by the state government cancelling it's hosting of the Commonwealth games, a kind of Olympics for the former British Empire nations that just sucks. Like Australia can win half of the total available medal tally because the US, Europe and Asia are basically out. It costs almost as much as the Olympics to host, nobody wants to fucking host it hence Australia last hosted the games in 2018 on the Gold Coast, two games before that it was hosted by Melbourne. Australia hosted the games twice in 8 years, and was due to host it again in 2026, until the Victorian government pulled the plug deciding it was better to pay a $380 million fine for cancelling than billions of dollars for... okay, basically at this point the Commonwealth games is like the government deciding to pay a hotel to put up a bunch of howler monkeys in its rooms. So like the hotel owner is like "yabba dabba doo, gaurunteed income!" and everyone else is like "why the fuck would you do that?" the only headline necessary to cover the entirety of this story is "Government comes to senses, the Commonwealth Games suck." Not this shit from regular columnist Kate Halfpenny.

 "He played Harry Potter on stage. Now he’s out of work, and nearly out of money"

For four years, Gareth Reeves played one of the most high-profile theatre roles in the world. Now he’s back in a position depressingly familiar to all actors.

Unless I am mistaken, and slack jawed yokels now read The Age I'm not sure there's anyone to whom it would be news that an actor can land one paying gig and then be out of work and struggling on the bread line. Do people think anyone associated with a licensed Harry Potter product is basically set for life? That there isn't a vast gulf between someone who plays Harry Potter in a Melbourne stage show and Daniel Radcliffe? This is a story fit for print in The Onion "Out of work Actor plagued by hunger" Fuck off.

I’m going on the trip of a lifetime without my boyfriend. All anyone asks is how he’ll survive ~ Melissa Mason, Freelance writer

Some headlines need to be read in the voice of a moron, to make sure people understand how moronic it is. This I feel is one of those headlines, at the least it needs a "/p" What I suspect I would find is a freelance writer who is dating a child, or associates almost entirely with morons who cannot rise above small talk and cliches, and is generalizing out her ho-hum life to society in order to arrive at the conclusion that 21st century, 3rd decade women basically are Stepford Wives. This is what Alain De Botton would class as a news archetype, and an example of "the plural of anecdote isn't evidence." I mean is she going to Mars (trip of a lifetime) and people are actually expecting her to die and inquiring about the psychological impact on her boyfriend, or is she going on a contiki tour of Europe for more than two weeks and everyone expects them to cheat on each other. A fucking nothingburger.

Make no mistake, the Commonwealth Games fiasco will rob Australia of Olympic gold ~  Liz Ellis, Netball columnist

So at the least, this headline promises some kind of contention. Is it going to be as salacious as the IOC will take revenge on Australia because...? Or is it going to construct a causal argument to the highest degree of confidence that Australian Olympians are going to be denied real world experience in their own locality that would give them the competitive edge? or the government dumping public money into building new training facilities and event courses again giving a competative edge? Either fucking way, we won't feel it. Nobody will not watch the Paris 2024 Olympics or the 2028 Los Angeles olympics and rue the cancellation of the 2026 Victorian Commonwealth Games. Especially nobody is going to rue the not spending of a billion dollars to win a men's rowing Gold medal. This is fucking make-work for a staff columnist.

The Brunch Index: See how inflation is impacting the cost of your meal

 Spew. I think this headline tells you everything you need to know about The Age's target market. Incidentally this is not the Australian paper that spawned the Avocado Toast meme. If brunch is where you are feeling the pinch of inflation, put simply, you do not have a problem with inflation. I mean when cafe's stop serving "The Big Breakfast" an Australian variation on the "Full English" and replace it with muesli and avocado toast, brunch isn't an indicator of inflation, it is an inflated indulgence of wankers who cannot operate a toaster, a fork or a bowl. Yeah, I get that it is a fluff piece meant to make "economics fun" I get it and it is shit. Have some fucking dignity.

Beware, your social media influencer identity could eat you alive ~ Vicki Kyriakakis, Marketing strategist

Fun fact "influencer" and "newsworthy" are antonyms. Exactly how many fucking people have a social media influencer identity? And how many of those, read The Age? This article is a submarine archetype of explaining slang to your grandma. Not a cautionary tale of the dangers of wearing a wide brim hat and promoting "the secret" on instagram.

Divorce: Obsessed with celebrity divorces? You’re not alone

Again, needs vocalizing in the voice of a moron. Yeah, Princess Diana died in 1997, celebrity gossip is not a new and newsworthy phenomena. Will this article contain the phrase "a growing number of..."? I wont check and I do not care. Unless plebs are barricading themselves in the bastille, reporting on what plebs are talking about has to be the lowest form of news. This is what people are doing, like somehow we are deprived of senses. Or need our own social media feeds explained to us. This headline was categorized under the helpful subcategory of "Divorce" to tell us this story relates to divorces. Fuck me.

"Amid the global onslaught of pinkness, there’s something people might miss about Margot Robbie." teaser: Barbie is a global smash. But it’s not just for her starring role that Margot Robbie should be earning raves.

Clickbait, and the desperation of legacy media trying to be relevant. Full disclosure, I haven't seen Barbie, because why would I? Have you seen Fast X? Do you need a reason why not? I mean this is mostly clickbait and you could plug anything in as the thing we are all missing about Margot Robbie - she's a serious actress that has worked with Scorsese, she is kind to animals, she gives back to her community, she tried to reform Harley Quinn into a role model because the character was popular with teenage girls...it's not going to be insightful. This is cashing in on something popular.

The rise of the reverse boob job. 

Could it be coded transphobia? No. This is the archetype of "Hey ladies are you up to speed on what ladies are doing now?" news. A lot of women are dying their hair blond. A lot of women are getting brazillians. A lot of women are getting breast implants. A lot of women are getting butt implants. A lot of women are letting their hair go grey. A lot of women are keeping their maiden names. Women here's how to get the fuck back in line, what you need to know now. There's not no stories of this form about men (and it's still a question of whether fashion trend news about men is even targeted at men) but I'm confident they are vastly outnumbered by content that propagates the idea that women need to know how to conform to survive. Or that old women need to know what young women are doing to compete. Not in the fucking patriarchy.

Battle of the bachelor’s handbags: Six supermarket roast chickens put to the taste test

Oh look, someone heard a slang. Netflix revived 90s youth soap opera "Heartbreak High" and in the first season episode something it was revealed that the highschool basketball team was an Australian White Ibis, also known as a "Bin Chicken", alas everyone involved insecure that anyone would get how hep they were with the jazz crowd, had a character say aloud "oh my god the mascot is a Bin Chicken." and point, before the shot cut to the bin chicken mascot. 

Okay a taste test of some consumer product is a tried and tested piece of fluff. "Oh surprisingly the cheapest one is pretty good!" lets all hold our fucking breath. Or you know, scrap the whole food section out of respect for people not born without class.

Aussie icons: Four of Australia’s best chefs take the supermarket chook recipe challenge

Or you know, double down. So just when you thought they were in touch with the common unpretentious man and his "bachelors handbag" don't worry there's something for the chronic masturbators too - an article where someone takes a delicious rotisserie chicken and with a lot of time, money and effort transforms it into something worse - like a quiche or some shit. It's "lifestyle" people. This is one of those articles where they get people who snobs over pay to say "don't turn your nose up at the supermarket chook." when they already have with this "challenge".

Luxury fashion: ‘Such heartache’: Cosette under investigation after ‘superfake’ bag claims mount teaser: Fair Trading NSW is investigating after receiving a barrage of complaints from women concerned the luxury retailer sold them fake designer handbags.

Aka, vacuous people fall for fraud. (potentially). I listen to the podcast "feminine chaos" I like it, I like the hosts, very informative. One thing I like, is that generally they go big-picture big-issue. They understand in any given story, what principle is actually important, even as largely cultural critics. They will also keep me peripherally in touch with the shit that women think is important that I can't comprehend. Like a controversy over Alison Roman's "the stew" or an image leaked of some celebrity who has a stainless steel kitchen top counter. That's how I like to keep in touch with planet female with dare I say it, journalists I trust. Two of the few that I do. But I noticed, quickly, when collating the slew of shit produced by The Age, that what I deem to be shit unfit for printing skews heavily female.

Gay (it is relevant) comedian Tom Allen has a bit where he says "many people have come up to me after my shows and told me 'I didn't know what homophobia was until I met you.'" and I mean this as a reflection of The Age editorial quality when I say "I didn't know what misogyny was until I read the Age." and yeah, this is old, conservative (even though it is the left leaning broadsheet compared to the same market's tabloid papers) traditional media because it's content is still very much in a heteronormative gender binary. Anyway...

Glow or no? A divorced mate wants a secret spray-tan from me ~ Our Modern Guru has been inspired to write an erotic fiction novel about this scenario.

This did come with an image of two bronze golfballs to imply what is getting tanned are men's testicles. I'm guessing "Our Modern Guru" is The Age's agony aunt psuedonym. Is it news? no. Is it harmless fluff? no. Is it an ageing Steve Buscemi in a backwards cap carrying a skateboard saying "what's up fellow kids?" yes. 

Fashion’s new fakes: How AI will change what you wear ~ Six people at the forefront of a revolutionary creative frontier reveal (some of) their secrets.

The idea that a newspaper journalist has any sudden expertise on a tech development that got hyped yesterday is laughable. This is actually the kind of journalism that can do real harm - feeding the fucking hype beast because market forces demand you be relevant at all costs. AI it is safe to say, whatever it's impact shall be, is moving at a speed more akin to the metaverse and crypto than Covid-19. A fucking respiratory illness to lives and workplaces and economies upside down in a matter of weeks. AI is...something. I would say at this point, wildly unpopular spam. But vapid reporting like this can do real harm. The vast numbers of people financially ruined by buying into the first big crypto-bubble at it's peak, did so because legacy media started reporting on the phenomena "something completely fucking useless has leapt up $5000USD again overnight, have you missed the bandwagon?"

This pursuit of relevance does real harm. The news has an opportunity, just like it did with Covid to accurately report how little is known and how little we understand because everything is very new and the world is very complicated and new things generally take about 30 years to get adopted and we are nowhere fucking near that with block-chain, the meta-verse and AI. So much of the damage of Covid-19 wasn't the conspiracy theorists, but the media simply supplying 24-7 demand for information that just didn't exist. So they filled it with speculation instead of "get this through your fucking head, this virus is new. We just don't fucking understand it, so we are playing it safe." Instead of generating a shit-tonne of monday-morning epidemiologists.

A ‘quilted monstrosity’ no longer: The fashion snobs embracing the puffer jacket

Get in line women. This is not targeted at me, hoping I will bring back the Marty McFly life-preserver look. Could also have been written "unpopular fringe group change mind about something of no significance".

 TikTok isn’t the bogeyman of journalism, but it could help save it ~ Abbir Dib, Social media producer

Guess what? I'm a social media producer. Legacy media generating content on social media. 100% guaranteed crap. Unless TikTok's of the Heimlich manuover are popular, TikTok is saving nobody and nothing. Like seriously, where is an editorial on the dangers of normalizing vacuousness?

I have a good job and savings, so why do I still worry about money? ~ Paridhi Jain, Money contributor

There's some rule stating that if there's a question in a headline, the answer is guaranteed to be "no" that doesn't quite hold here, except to state that this article didn't need to be written and doesn't need to be read. Maybe if the author's title was given as "stand up comedian" we could have read what if delivered by a professional may have been a funny bit.

 Online scams are about to get more sophisticated than Nigerian princes ~ Suranga Seneviratne, Cybersecurity expert

The don't need to. People still get fooled by the old scams. People still read The Age, an unsophisticated scam filled with sophistry. I'm going to guess that had I bothered to read this article, it would be hyping up the impact AI is going to have, when the truth likely is, there are probably few technological developments that have been more anticipated and prepared for than AI. Like since Asimov at least.

Interview: What does a TV showrunner do? Basically everything, says Gretel Vella

Native advertizing.

 Lookbook: Chefs are style icons too now? Sure, OK

Sure, OK. I mean if every suit in the world wears a traditional Hungarian cavalryman's marriage necktie because Napoleonic Parisians became enamoured with them, why not aprons? Vapid shite, don't "Sure, OK" me and then still create and print the content.

 Since Jaws we’ve been obsessed with shark movies. What makes them so compelling? teaser: Whether it’s Jaws or The Meg, there are four essential elements all shark films need to reel in viewers.

Wait! Let me grab my pen! This is going to save me so much money on film school. Four essential elements you say? Is one of them a shark?

Running: Treadmill running can be as effective as outdoor running. Here’s what to know

And reproduced here is what you need to know on this subject: [nothing]

 From Barbie to Taylor Swift – why are men so afraid of girls? teaser: We are experiencing a great flowering of Girl Culture. Why is it so hard for some men to celebrate? ~ Jacqueline Maley

One, this is an even better example of "I didn't know what misogyny was until I read the Age" Two, are these real questions? Why is it so hard for you, middle aged white Australian woman to celebrate Paramount leader of China Xi Jinping's accomplishment of a life-long term in office, and the flowering of his One-China policy to reclaim Hong Kong, Taiwan and Tibet for the motherland? Could it be because it has as close as possible to nothing to do with anything you've ever cared about or had an interest in? Why is it so hard for you to celebrate Lebron James' historic eclipsing of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar's career scoring record (meaningless though it was)? Or why aren't you celebrating Carlton Football Club's late season surge in form to claim a spot in the finals? Is it because you are afraid of men's sports or is it because you don't give a flying fuck?

This one actually got me on the morbid-curiosity hooks, but having read it I cannot for the life of me recall what it even said. I don't think it even lived up to the promise of its faulty premise, that anyone who is not a girl should give a fuck that girls like being girly. As the great Toni Morrison said "leave me out of it."

 LGBTQ: Regardless of industry or gender, getting dressed for work isn’t always easy teaser: For women and those outside the gender binary, the right work attire is crucial for success.

Notewortyh in how little of The Age's content is actually targeted at LGBTQ issues, this is of the archetype "don't let progress fool you; nothing has actually progressed since we treated gays with lobotomies and electroshock therapy" archetype, or having not read it, I'm fairly confident it would turn out to be so. Okay I bit and I was wrong, it was of the "Minor discomfort caused by non-instantaneous universal adoption of ideals is actually a serious issue" variety. I mean it's under "lifestyle" so yeah, vapid nothing-burger. Now you could write a serious and thoughtful piece about the ideas and issues this piece of shit was written about, but they didn't.

The scoop: Someone should film a montage of the gaping mouths that pause at the entrance of this venue teaser: There’s wow-factor from every angle at Reine & La Rue, the ambitious, double-venue dining room and bar. Here’s the essential info you need to know.

Again, there is no essential info you need to know about any dining venue, unless untrained chefs are serving puffer-fish sushi. There's not even essential information you need to know for Seinfeld's "The Soup Nazi" You don't need to be relevant, hobbies are not essential and news should not propogate these harmful consumer intuitions.

Gossiping is an activity we can all enjoy for free – and it’s good for us teaser: Socialising lowers blood pressure, while bonding with others boosts the release of endorphins.

Nutrition journalism is bad enough, or if you are a journalist with a delusional readership that things they can be young forever - the goose that lays the golden eggs. I mean I don't fucking trust a newpaper to tell me gossip is good for us. Keeping in mind that Putin assassinating the leader of his former private army is for most of the world, just fucking gossip and a waste of our time. Tell me when Putin is dead, then maybe I would at least be able to determine if I can now travel to Russia.

Boy oh boy has the Women’s World Cup kicked the patriarchy ~ Nick Bryant

Or was it a flash in the pan fad that is fading from memory fast, reinforcing the stereotype that "la donna e mobile" as I can reliably guess that the Age journalists will move as quickly from the Matildas and Sam Kerr to the next thing deemed relevant as they moved on from Margot Robbie and Taylor Swift to the Matildas. Literally nobody predicted on staff predicted that interest in the Women's World Cup would peak during the nation hosting the Women's World Cup. This headline is just a variation of popular youtube video title "x DESTROYS y with facts and logic" whatever the vague, incoherent, abstract and nebulous phenomena referred to as the patriarchy is, I'm going to guess kicking it won't budge it an inch.

Don’t mention the (culture) war. Even I’m shutting up ~ Antoinette Lattouf, Broadcaster, columnist and author

Fire whatever editor put this headline together. It isn't even fucking clickbait. If I had to guess, this shit is going to be a "get in line ladies" piece of shit, about how if you want to be relevant you need to know that people have culture wars fatigue or some shit, so stop talking about US politics or some shit. Even this hot headed maverick girl boss is shutting up, so you know it's serious. I'm sorry, but seriously I didn't know what misogyny was until I read The Age.

Hair: Soccer’s favourite headband wasn’t designed to keep hair in place

teaser: Favoured by players like Ellie Carpenter, the stretchy headbands are supposed to be wrapped around ankles.

Okay, okay, okay. Gotta must resist urge to misogynise. Did the New York Times run a story on Allen Iverson's compression sleeve? No doubt they covered Air Jordan shoes. I guess...If like they picked up from media monitoring that the most searched thing on Google related to the Women's World Cup in Australia was "where did Ellie Carpenter get her headband?" then yeah, maybe it is newsworthy, but I would suggest the headline read "Even in the midst of the world's biggest tournament, female athletes are still coathangers...to women" As written, what shit. Absolute shit.

Millions are watching women’s soccer, so why are the players paid less? ~ Victoria Devine, Money columnist

Unfortunately due to the overlapping of my sample window for collating shite headlines from The Age and Australia and New Zealand hosting the Women's World Cup, I was actually hoping for the Matildas to lose so I didn't have to put up with more of The Age's shitty op-ed cash-in on a fad coverage. So...again having not read it I don't know if the comparison is going to be to the Australian Rules Football men's competition, or to FIFA Men's soccer. Will it compare Sam Kerr ($600,000 a year from Chelsea Football Club, plus a $1M 10 year sponsorship deal with Nike) to Lionel Messi's $54M USD per year, or to Richmond FC (Not the Ted Lasso club) Dustin Martin's $1.35 million dollar contract.

Again, misogyny rising thanks to The Age. Headlines like this reinforce the stereotype that women are bad at maths. 1.5 BILLION people around the world watched the Argentina-France World Cup final last year in Qatar. I don't have a worldwide total for the Women's World cup, but the UK had 14.8 or so million watch England lose the final and Spain had about 7 million watch their ladies win. Australia's peak audience was 11 million watching the Matildas lose to England in the Semi-finals, do I think people in China, Japan, Korea, Africa, Brazil, Mexico, the US supplied the missing 1.5 BILLION viewers to a ratings rounding error for the Men's competition? No. I don't. I suspect despite whole sections of the news being dedicated to a very Matildas-centric coverage of the women's world cup, I actually doubt when the numbers are crunched that it attracted and maintained as much interest as the indigenous AFL competition. Like that isn't hard fucking journalism to look up attendence at World Cup games (averaging around 30k) and compare it to attendence at AFL matches during the Women's World Cup (about 33~37 thousand a match) and then ask yourself again "a once-in-a-lifetime-hosting-of-a-once-every-four-year-competition-attracts smaller crowds than a 24 week regular season domestic pro sports men's competition and I seriously wonder why are the players paid less?"

 I actually know nothing of the compensation for pro-athletes participation on national teams. So I have no idea what the fucking argument is. One would have to go to the ratings of the Women's soccer games in the UK to make a meaningful comparison I literally couldn't find anything in terms of Women's FA Cup ratings, or viewership, a google search of women's FA cup "ratings" has google suggest I must have meant "rankings" where it is easy to find that AFLW attracts on average a million less viewers than AFL matches and it is one of the most popular women's sports in the world. Like fuck me take this seriously, why are you publishing "ugh men" journalism? 

Young men feel under siege – and it’s driving them to dark places

When I first turned up at university, I was confronted by two bracing pieces of graffiti: “All Men are Rapists” and “Women Walk. Men Stalk”. Anger was my first impulse. ~ Michael Bachelard

So this is the shit that is suggesting it is somehow a perplexing question as to why Andrew Tate got popular. The answer is, there's a lot of morons out there. But kudos at least on publishing this piece in the same paper that published "why don't mean go to see the Barbie movie?" and "why don't men watch women's soccer instead of AFL?" pieces.

 Why your local Facebook Community group offers the best drama on the internet

Lost pets, found keys, and paranoid posts about teens wearing hoods – welcome to your community Facebook group. ~ Thomas Mitchell, Culture reporter

Oh great, a scoop on the best content on facebook! fluff shite.

 At 48, I finally found the confidence to go to a concert alone

It’s time to break free from the belief that an experience only matters if we share it with someone else.

Most people stop needing someone to hold their hand to cross the street, or chew up food and regurgitate it into their mouths at around age 5. This is literally un-newsworthy. It isn't even hilariously mundane enough to get in the Onion as a type of "16 year old discovers Led Zeppalin, annoys friends"... I mean the only newsworthy thing is that 48 is embarrassingly old to have this revelation. Did your girlfriend finally go on the trip of a lifetime alone? This is TEDx level crap.

My father brought his new fiancée into our home. This is how my mum and I coped

According to my mother, it is possible to put jealousy aside for love.

How about according to an expert? I mean potentially a relatable family drama, I guess it depends on how you coped. Did you cope by being mature adults that realize you can't force someone to be with you or alone? Fuck off. 

Should grandparents be paid for childcare or should Nanna do it for nada?

The best part of being a grandparent is getting to hand them back, right? Well, it doesn’t always work that way. ~ Hannah Vanderheide, Contributor

Thank you for your contribution Hannah. Your contribution of more shit for the pile. 

 How surging insurance bills could help us deal with climate change

Insurance increases – and some areas being declared uninsurable – are a price signal from a hotter, riskier planet. Will they end up driving our adaptation to the climate crisis? ~ Liam Mannix

An unnecessary argument for why it is unfeasible to just ignore reality. Like this is just generating content out of the truism that if we had to pay for the damage we'd probably stop doing it.

Anyone who jinxes the Matildas by declaring a public holiday too early is a bum

Anthony Albanese is clearly trying to follow the example of Bob Hawke back in 1983 when he proclaimed an informal public holiday after our America’s Cup win. But there’s a vital difference. ~ Kerri Sackville, Columnist and author

Brilliant. Brilliant. Finally some coverage of jinxes for the astrology girls. It even fails as clickbait "but there's a vital difference" oooh what could that be? Could it be that Bob Hawke declared a public holiday after Australia won the America's Cup whereas Anthony Albanese is declaring one before the Matildas have even made it to the semi-finals? Given the rest of the media hyping of the cultural moment of the Women's World Cup that unfortunately coincided with my sample size, the real story to write on this matter is "Hey women, remember when Australia won the America's Cup in 1983 and everyone all got interested in Yacht racing forever?"

Rise of the Matildas shows why women’s football is bigger than a game

If you think the Matildas’ success has been a helluva ride, you ain’t seen anything yet. ~ Moya Dodd, Former Matildas vice-captain

Moya Dodd being a former matilda is not someone I can or would accuse of jumping on the hype train to cash in on a fad. But the teaser text under the headline unfortunately has an ironic valence - it is open to interpretation as "watch how quickly they slip from the public consciousness when they get knocked out." I'm sure Moya is more bullish on the future of women's soccer in Australia, and no doubt with good reason. Alas, I think it will be the much despised and maligned story of progress, where the events of this year will pump prime greater enrollment in women's soccer, leading to more talent being stuffed into the top of the funnel and eventually spitting more talent out. Keep in mind, Michael Jordan inspired a massive number of kids worldwide to take up basketball, and it has produced many great players from Kobe Bryant, Dirk Nowitzki, Lebron James etc. none of whom have in turn had the impact Michael Jordan did. 

What I want to impress, is not that I hate the Matildas and hope women's soccer will fail, but the flagrant irresponsible journalism of feeding misguided hype. I'm sure being host nation typically boosts the domestic teams performance, including Qatar being in the men's world cup group stage at all. But that boost cost $106 million dollars, that's more than two times what Lionel Messi earns in a year. The safe bet, is that it's a good thing, enjoy it while it lasts, be proud of our athletes and respect them as they respect the fair weather fans they are playing for and do not deserve their respect, but don't expect it to put an end to gender inequity.

 ‘You’re from Caroline Springs? You must be rich, then’ ~ Tracy-Kate Simambo, Contributor

So for anyone who doesn't know, Caroline Springs was one of the earlier new housing developments on the outskirts of Metropolitan Melbourne known for "McMansions" with quadruple bay parking garages because even a baby living in Caroline Springs needs a car to get to the nearest potty. The Age has been running fluff pieces on "life in the suburbs" and this one promises to be an interesting read, but is it newsworthy? No. Does it get digital real estate? Yes. Could that have been alotted to something serious, significant and informative but wasn't? also yes.

 Pets: Is it safe for your dog to lick your face?~ Exclusive

Okay, I must have made some copy-paste error somewhere because there is no way a redundant-to-a-google-search article could possibly be considered exclusive, but given how much absolute shit The Age pays and demands payment for publishing, I wouldn't put it past them. Now this might be considered newsworthy if three people in Leongatha had died after a dog licked their face and the police suspected fould play. It didn't. That was death cap mushrooms in beef wellington (which The Age covered) Just absolute pure embarrassing shit. 

Super Netball: Why the best netball league in the world is facing a $7.5 million black hole

A secret report shows Australia’s elite netball league is bleeding money and being propped up by the fees paid by junior and club players at a time when competition from rival sports is intensifying.

This must have been the actual exclusive, not the dog tongue safety PSA above, but I'm going to leave it for amusement's sake. When it comes to netball, the way to score an exclusive story is probably to write a story about netball. I mean, if even Sandi Toksvig thinks netball is a rubbish sport, you are in trouble. I've played netball, it is a fun game. Is it the stuff of a televised pro-sports league? That is a bridge too far. From memory, it is illegal to actually block a shot while blocking a shot on goal, if you block the shot you get called for "obstruction" you are only allowed to make a show of preventing the goal shooter or goal attack from scoring.

If you wouldn't make a pro dodgeball league, let alone a pro Twister, or operation league, I wouldn't make a pro netball league, keeping in mind another highly gendered pro sport of Roller Derby is likely more viable as a spectator sport and entertainment industry and near as I'm aware nobody has ever tried to make a pro-league out of it. If they only paid Sam Kerr what they pay Lionel Messi or Kylian Mbappe (or a quarter of what the Saudi's pay Christiano Ronaldo) she could bail out Super Netball with her pocket change. Damn you patriarchy! Why does the Arabian peninsula belong to the Saudi family with it's patrilineal heritage!!!

Victorian Parliament:This man’s father was enrolled as a Labor member after he had dementia and even after death

So this might be the only example I collected of what is usually the lead story on The Age's front page - an investigation into the corruption and criminality of the Victorian state government, and well, it seems at least that on the whole, Victorians don't care, certainly not enough to prefer the fucking twats that populate the main opposition party in our state. Stories like this may remind me of amusing Simpson's episodes where the dead vote for sideshow Bob, but that's not how voting works in Australia. I assume it means the Victorian Labor party managed to scam an extra few hundred bucks off of a mentally incapacitated and later deceased person due to some shady bureaucratic rollover procedure. Not exactly virgin sacrifices to Mammon type stuff. Not necessarily shite, but noteworthy because this is exactly the wolf that The Age (and every other news source) cried out on a daily basis during fucking lockdowns while ignoring that most citizens just wanted to fucking get on with it and wished the media would stop encouraging the grown toddlers to protest the fucking lockdowns thereby risking extending them.

 The one TV travel presenter I’d actually like to travel with

He’s not stylish, he’s not cool, he’s not particularly wild or daring. But he might just be the best travel presenter on TV. ~ Ben Groundwater, Travel writer

Warning! Warning! Controversial opinion - some guy would rather travel with a chill Rick Stein than hip substance abuser Anthony Bordain. Certainly fit for print. To think this is a job. Living the mother fucking dream.

 There are less painful tools to fix inflation, so why aren’t we using them? ~ Ross Gittins, Economics Editor

 Ross Gittins is alright, alas, he is writing in a domain that I know something about. Like Michael Crichton writing about show-biz, and I've seen him on programs like SBS Insight. The main problem is that economics is a non-expert domain, as Nicholas Nassim Taleb puts it. It is "know what" not "know how" otherwise known as a social science, and it is barely a science at that. In that context, Ross Gittins is alright.

Because almost all economics opinions are like, just an opinion dude. You know, you might get something occassionally like Erdogan in Turkey or Liz Truss in the UK where their economic policy is clearly, objectively wrong. But otherwise it's just content farming, writing an opinion about historical alternatives to combating inflation with interest rates. And though markets fluctuate constantly, the interest story is a story that moves at glacial speed. It could have sufficiently been covered in one column 7 months ago, and left at that. Instead let's just ramble on... while not covering the unspoken story that Australian's have dug themselves too far into debt speculating on the property market and now our government is fucked because you can either default on your mortgage because of out of control cost of living or default on your mortgage because of interest rate rises, but the one thing for certain is the government can't bail out citizens like it can big institutions.

Schools that excel: Students find purpose - and success - in schools that do things differently

Fire the editor that wrote this meaningless, vapid headline. Fuck you, whoever you are. But worth noting is that one of a broadsheet's traditional duties is to sell what are essentially finishing schools to wealthy and middle class people writing propaganda for private schools.

‘We did everything’: Why the original supermodels still rule

Linda Evangelista, Cindy Crawford, Christy Turlington and Naomi Campbell still define what it means to be a top model.

Where's our girl Elle? I didn't read it but I'm going to guess this article is going to be girl-power/girl-boss forward, ignoring how the beauty ideals of the 80s-90s are still more appealing than the new movements challenging traditional conceptions of beauty (unsuccessfully) and I will also guess they never clue in that this is actually an industrial relations story about how modern day models simply cannot get the fucking contracts the super models still enjoy. You know, like every fucking job for three decades.

Know how: Do you really have to buy new pots and pans? All your burning questions about induction cooking answered

Jill Dupleix grills three top chefs on how to make the move from gas to electric as pain-free as possible.

So one actual piece of information I did glean from this whole fucking exercise is that Victoria has banned any new home and maybe new kitchen renovations from having gas stove-tops, effectively forcing the widescale adoption of induction stove tops over probably decades if not a fucking century for the last gas hob to be replaced. That has resulted in an article by morons for morons.

Train journeys: I visited eight European countries without flying, and loved it

My epic 40-day journey marks a grand return to rail travel, unlocking the sheer pleasure of seeing the continent unfold at ground level.

So the whole travel section is fluff. Privileged fluff for people who do not need encouragement. This doesn't sound like serious journalism, or even travel journalism but a "what I did on my holiday" assignment from primary school. There's potentially a positive environmental message in there, but 40 days is in itself expensive, largely unfeasible for all but the wealthiest 20% of retired baby boomers. A far more environmentally friendly suggestion is the staycation.

Why trees in this east Melbourne suburb are disappearing at night

The city’s leafy eastern suburbs are quickly losing their greenery as private development and illegal tree-removing operations sweep the area.

This is likely the best most legitimate piece of journalism I came across in my entire exercise. If The Age produced stories like this, on a daily or even weekly basis, I could honestly say it was an institution worth keeping, rather than allowing to disappear like a tree in the Eastern suburbs that has fallen afoul of the perverse Australian economy that depends entirely on speculating on property and hoping someone, somewhere out there is actually producing a good or service.

North Korea diplomacy: ‘Disillusioned’: North Korea claims US soldier defected because of inequality in America

Aka "Look at what we've done. How giving credence to sketchy critical theories persuaded a young man to seek equality in North Korea."

 Lowe is right: New York’s soaring rents shows why freezes won’t work ~ William Bennett, Money contributor

I have no idea what the thesis of this article is or could be. At this juncture it is worth pointing out that The Age has a section called "Property" that for a long history of synergy between the major advertising revenue and being a newspaper, is basically a propaganda piece that puts North Korean state media to shame. The Age's view on property can be summarized as "house prices soar, buy now before they are out of reach." or "house prices drop, great time to buy a house before they soar again." or "crappy house sells for way too much - you too could be rich if you just buy houses!" and so on and so forth. No matter what is happening in the property market, the conclusion is you should borrow as much money as possible and buy into the property market.

There is nothing, more certain to be absolute shit, in an Australian newspaper than a story about the housing affordability crisis. Why? Because this is a crisis of affordability that has to be sold, without prices lowering or even stagnating, because the only thing Australian's have done since 1976 is bet that house prices will always go up. This is a nation where less than 20% of Boomers own like 5 houses and they won't sell it to a family that needs it to live for anything less than more than that Boomer earned in their entire lives because the way to earn your keep is to scalp a property to somebody desperate so you can live the lavish retirement you are entitled to by birth. You smart, they dumb. Why weren't they born in a massive voting cohort like you? 

So I'm going to hazard a guess, that anything deemed "not to work" will either be a truly ineffectual policy that actually exacerbated property owners monopoly power, or it didn't work because housing prices fell and that's just not how you achieve affordable housing dammit!

 How Trump’s ‘Co-conspirator No. 1’ went from hero to crank ~ Bill Wyman, Columnist

Talk about timely coverage, a story about Rudy Giuliani's fall from grace published mid-August 2023, 3 years after his client lost office. How does The Age keep up with the times like that? It must have been a deep investigative piece. Fuck off. That's like posting an article about the Matilda's 2023 World Cup run...today.

Fitness: Is this new fad the secret to reaching peak fitness?

Finally after less than a month, a literal example of Betteridge's law of headlines. Have you no shame The Age? Have you no decency? Two questions that can also be answered "no".

Literature: Does this book mean the end of authors?

Death of an Author was written by AI. Some have welcomed the development, others are horrified.

When it rains it pours. Some people are morons, other people are also morons. Remember Magic Eye? Boy that ended art.

 Arts: Think classical music isn’t the place for electric guitar? Think again

Betteridge's law of headlines MONSOON!!! I've talked a lot of shit about The Age and it's fine journalists. I think we can agree, when it comes to coverage of the Arts, The Age isn't afraid to take a controversial stance. 

 Gifts the Matildas gave us will linger

There were tears. There were always going to be tears. But once the hurt subsides for the Matildas and the nation, and it will, the prevailing sentiment ought to be not disappointment, but pride in getting so close.

Just the fucking nerve of trying to console a nation's hurt and disappointment when the Matildas failure to win it all obviously prevented Australia from being the first nation in the world to close both the unadjusted and adjusted gender pay gaps, prevent all violence against women by strangers and domestic partners, get equal representation in parliament and board rooms and transcend physical forms into beings of pure energy merging into one divine cosmic consciousness. Thank the divine cosmic consciosness for ending my misery that was The Age's cash grab coverage of the Matilda fad.

 Opinion: (For subscribers) Sam Kerr is not just a very naughty girl; she might as well be the messiah ~ Parnell Palme McGuinness, Columnist and communications adviser

Oooh! A life of Brian reference and an op-ed for subscribers only! Sign me up!!! What great exclusive subscriber only content. Where have you been all my life. Even in death the cynical cash grab continues.

 LGBTQ: Jeremy was 16 and depressed. A psychiatrist offered therapy to suppress his attraction to boys

The NSW government is moving to ban conversion practices. What does it mean for LGBTQ people, religious groups and healthcare providers?

So there's a potential story there, because you probably haven't heard it from The Age, but for some in the L and G of the LGBTQ there's a sense that the recent uptick in "gender affirming care" or social and medical transitions is a form of conversion therapy as at the extreme it is practiced in countries like Iran. Conversely among the T in LGBTQ there's a view that suggesting anything else might be going on apart from gender dysphoria, is a form of conversion therapy that jeopardizes the passability (as in either "passing" or being "read") of transition by delaying it. But the valance of conversion therapy for most people is "pray the gay away" style therapy, even though the headline in this case says psychiatrist and not priest.

The headline suggests the article will be of the archetype "don't let progress fool you, nothing has changed since we treated gays with lobotomies and electro shock therapy." This is a subject matter I would never entrust to an institution like The Age.

Biden is not the only 80-year-old running the US. Meet America’s gerontocracy

Many members of the US Congress are over 80. While age doesn’t necessarily determine ability, some are asking if it’s time for a new generation.

Aka how to take a statistic and turn it into a nothing story.

 Are couples who sleep in separate beds happier? I know I am ~ Kate Halfpenny, Regular columnist

Not just your partner, everyone else too I dare say. But according to Betteridge's law of headlines, the answer is no. Kate's answer actually implies that she is not in possession of the facts. The plural of anecdote is not data.

 If the US or China falter, the average Australian will pick up the bill ~ George Megalogenis, Columnist

Good job fuckwit. It must feel so great George, to go to bed knowing you really earned your paycheck today. How fucking newsworthy to suggest if our major customers lose money, we will lose money. Brilliant. Fucking. Journalism.

 Left wing propaganda or anti-feminist? What Barbie is really trying to say

Yes, Barbie the movie has heard of feminism. (And thinks it sounds awesome!) But how patriarchy-toppling is it really? ~ Diana Reid, Writer

Finally a "writer" to explain what the fucking Barbie movie is really trying to say, because if we just have the right exegesis we could topple "the patriarchy" okay and again I can gaurantee that the content of this article I haven't read will have less value than the "Rainbow Land" scene from The Campaign which also starred Will Farrell:

Birkenstock eyes $12b Wall St listing after Barbie bounce

The iconic footwear maker is riding high after Margot Robbie donned a pair of Birkenstocks in one scene in the hit movie.

"News just in: market reacts to idiocy" absolute shite journalism.

 ‘Fake news’: My mates were sceptical, but Tarneit could be Melbourne’s happiest suburb ~ Aanchal Sharma, Student

Hold my horses - this could be a reeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaal scoop. Melbourne's happiest suburb? I better move there.

 My adventures at Starbucks in LA showed why cash is still king ~ Millie Muroi, Reporter

So if this story turns out to be "moron learns bitcoin isn't a currency" it could at least be inspiring that any fucking moron can get a story published in The Age, so long as it isn't timely, informative or thought provoking.

 I just sold my investment property, how do I axe my tax?

The fact that you have capital gains tax to pay means you’ve made a profitable investment. However, I understand wanting to reduce this liability further. ~ Paul Benson, Money contributor

Oh no! Looks like The Age need to run a correction. The fact that you have capital gains tax to pay does not mean you have made a profitable investment, or even an investment at all. It means you sold an asset for more than you paid for it, which means someone has evaluated it's future earning potential as higher than you did when you purchased it. Congratulations, you've generated a profit through SPECULATING while likely contributing nothing to society at all and now you want to contribute less? Congratulations you disgusting fucking pig, you fucking parasite, you fucking leaner being lifted up by all the taxpayers around you. Fucking kill yourself in your non-investment property you worthless human shaped tic.

 FIFA Women's World Cup: First it was the winter blues, now PMD: Post-Matildas depression

Matildas mania was punctured with a bang on Wednesday. So how do we cope?

Note, if struggling for content, just publish the same story two, three times. Maybe invent some jargon literally nobody is using, or maybe was a brief thing on X for all of fifteen minutes, that's newsworthy.

 Dietitian’s guide: Why skipping breakfast for a morning coffee could be doing you harm

One of the biggest issues with coffee culture is that coffee often replaces a meal. Here’s how to enjoy your caffeine fix while also looking after your health.

Rest assured, no matter how bad The Age's journalistic standards are, they will never be beneath posting your bi-monthly "coffee - good or bad?" vacuous bullshit latest research dietary garbage story with a half-life of half an hour.

 A tortoise and a hare walk into a Labor conference. Which would make the better PM? ~ Sean Kelly, Columnist

A tortoise and a hare? Hmm, Aesop's fable reference. Intriguing...no. No that's not the word I'm looking for. What's the word I'm looking for... "not interested" it's two words!

 A wee message to men: stop peeing in public. You’re taking the piss ~ Jenna Price, Columnist and academic

What a clever turn of phrase. Clever. No. That's not the word I'm thinking of. What's the word? Shit. Absolute shit. And an insult that you were paid for this content, doubly because you are a fucking academic - I look forward to your paper that demonstrates and has replicated the causal relationship between people tolerating men pissing in public because "we are socialised to accept this behavior" yeah, I'm sure that holds up. You know how we tolerate behaviour that comes with a hefty fine and the possibility of being registered as a sex offender. 

Alcohol: Yes, two-day hangovers are real. Here’s how to deal with them

For some people, hangovers are quick and (almost) painless. For others, they’re something much worse.

All my life, I've felt persecuted that my boss thinks I drank on Sunday night and that's why I'm hungover monday morning, when in fact I've been whiping myself out every Saturday night and finally I have validation that Yes! two-day hangovers are real. And now I know how to deal with them. For some people, hangovers are quick and (almost) painless. For others, they're something much worse. (Lycanthropy). What the fuck is this shit. Who are we? I don't even fucking know anymore. It is truly unrelenting.

The Matilda who ran almost two marathons at the World Cup

The 736 players used in the Women’s World Cup recorded some amazing statistics.

Yeah amazing statistics, if you are fucking innumerate and discovered sports yesterday, like most of The Age's Matilda fandom reader base. Where's the article on the bicycle commuter who rides a Tour De France every month? Or has been to the moon and back this year. Dear age you juvenile rag for kindergartners, QUIT THE COPE.

 Mental health: ‘The stigma of antidepressants made me hide for years. But now I feel free’

There was a sense of shame around medication, as though it’s a band-aid rather than a solution and that by turning to antidepressants, I just wasn’t trying hard enough.

~ Melissa Mason, Freelance writer

I think there has to be a law regarding 21st century evocations of "stigma" which is nobody who complains of stigma will ever have to substantiate that that stigma exists. This is a sad story, but I feel, quite strongly giving someone a voice to generalize their personal experience out to the population at large. Who the fuck is stigmatizing medication? Name a movie where a character is about to pop a lithium tablet or prozac or some SSRI and someone stops them and says "don't be a coward! just try harder to not be depressed!" Congratulations The Age another fucking nothingburger story. 

I'm sure someone out there will find this story and relate, and know they weren't the only one. What I'm not sure of is that the stigma was the creation of the author, or the author's particular primary carers or some shit, not a typical story given most people are not even aware people they know are depressed, let alone go so far as to query their treatment plans. I guess when they are 48 they will discover the freedom of going to a concert by themself.

 AI: Is your dream house (or sofa) just a couple of prompts away?

I've noticed nowadays almost all AI content is sponsored content by Salesforce software, native advertising articles, but again the answer to the headline's question is no. Unless you only want to live in your dream house during your dreams. "The Internet can be used to look up song lyrcis!" that is the journalistic value of this article. AI art can design houses and sofas by stealing photographer and designers entire history of work. But if you want to realize it in the real world, you will have to pay a bunch of fucking money to get it created.

...

That's it, this is not all that The Age is, but it is a lot of the shit they publish on a daily basis. The links serve only to point out that I have not made this shit up. The Age makes this shit up. An AI could produce a newspaper as informative and as morally prehensible as The Age. Is this the end of legacy media? No. It is UNRELENTING SHIT. The Age will publish more shit tomorrow. 

What is worrying is that all this shit might be supplied, in response to some demand. What I hope as per my introduction to this post, is that if I walked into a secondary school and observed the curriculum I would find they no longer encourage young people to take newspapers seriously and furthermore don't even introduce them to students as texts for serious analysis, so much as how to avoid thinking news is informative and proceeding with a false sense of confidence. If there's a copy of The Age or The Herald Sun sitting around in the Senior and/or Junior common room so what. I'm not for banning entertainment.

Bias is irrelevant

Please keep in mind, news media having biases is a problem, and the measures of bias are currently restricted to a not-that-useful left-right dichotomy, though "culture wars" mean issues most people should actually have no opinion of, can wind up correlating with political dispositions.

Yes it is frustrating when someone dismisses a piece of datum, without examining it because the source is biased. I got very frustrated with a friend that dismissed any evidence that Covid-19 was dangerous, that Ivermectin is ineffective or that mrna vaccines were safe and effective on the grounds that the research were either publicly or privately funded therefore bias, therefore inadmissible.

My central concern with The Age's torrent of shit though, is NOT bias, but that it IS worthless to consumers. It is not fit to print. But anyway...

Alain De Botton, Pop-philosopher has done a lengthy talk about our media diet and suggests that we be taught story archetypes, proffering the example of a story about Prince William and Kate going to the shops, and Taylor Swift buying a sandwich or something as an example of the "They're just like us" story archetype. Which we should learn to recognize as the same story endlessly regurgitated.

Why? I guess because we should be able to learn by induction. As we should do with clickbait titles like "Boy steals woman's purse and instantly regrets it, you won't believe what happens next..." and "Four simple tricks to spot a narcissist, number two will blow your mind..." Today I saw a video titled "One simple dietary mistake almost destroys woman's legs" How long did it take for a qualified doctor hosting the video to divulge the dietary mistake? 5 minutes before she mentions anaemia, commonly caused by a lack of iron. 

We should learn from two or three examples of clickbait what clickbait is and that the promised payoff is non-existent. Using our capacity to learn to punch down the emotion centers of our brain that are reacting with "maybe a housewife did discover one simple treatment for wrinkles..."

I'm wary of archetypes, being persuaded that the point of stories is that they are flexible. The specific is where the value lies, not that there isn't valuable self reflection to be had when someone like De Botton points out to you your need for reassurance that royals and pop stars also shit. That lesson need only be learned once, preferably when you realize your parents had absolutely no qualifications when they decided to become parents.

Now there's a former US network TV exec (or so he claims) on Youtube that now rants against the woke agenda ruining entertainment, but he has a video where he explains that from the perspective of a TV executive you have to greenlight something and I would readily concede that the most valid critique of the point I've tried to make about the unrelenting torrent of shit The Age produces, is one of confirmation bias where I have just cherry picked every example of content-for-contents sake - whether this phenomena emerges because top down demand new content to turnover the website with every 24 hours, or whether the staff have a bottom-up publish-or-perish economic incentive to write something, anything about the Matildas or they'll lose their job.

Certainly it is not unprecedented for careers to be based on rehashing the same fucking content endlessly and they can be viable and lucrative. Talking-head-sports-analysts can dine out on "making the case Lebron is the GOAT" day after day, year after year. Matt Dillahunty gets paid to debate again and again "Is Christianity True?" and "Is Islam True?" For me these are debates that command my attention. I have an insatiable appetite for hearing both good and bad arguments, to see both cognitive dissonance  and disciplined argument in practice. 

So what is so bad about endlessly rehashing the op-ed "how can we fix housing affordability without lowering the price?" well probably just the fact that it isn't a debate - it is presented as "news". A journalist, investigating housing affordability should be able to come up with a pretty clear picture as to why housing is unaffordable, if they had any interest in actually reporting the news. Housing affordability is not a matter of opinion, it is a matter of facts.

Speaking of debates Douglas Murray, Matt Taibbi, Malcolm Gladwell and Michelle Goldberg participated in a Munk debate "be it resolved don't trust the legacy media" where Munk polls the audience before and after the debate on their position, in this case with 48% saying yeah, don't trust the legacy media and 52% saying no, you can trust legacy media before the debate, and after the debate it came out 67% don't trust, and 33% do trust. Keeping in mind the general public's alarming inability parse things, this result should be somewhat expected because you can resolve that legacy media not be trusted without trusting emergent media like podcasts and substacks, so the premise of the debate is very stacked in "don't trust"s favor.

Fortunately these debates aren't legally binding because the debate was lost, I'm almost sure, singlehandedly by Malcolm Gladwell who in a bold and stupid strategy continually accused Matt Taibbi for being nostalgic for the era when everyone in the media were old, white men, to a man who is himself, not white.

Again, there was something to Gladwell's tactic even though it backfired in this instance which is that I believe most people would struggle to comprehend how news media could simultaneously become more diverse and more biased. 

It should be simple: if you have a news team with 100% straight white males, 50 percent conservative, 50 percent left-wing in the 1960s and then in the 2020s you have a news team that is 45% male 45% female, 10% non-binary, 25% white, 25% asian, 25% black, 25% hispanic etc etc and it is 90% left wing, 10% conservative then we have increased diversity and the news team is more biased.

Here is a Ryan Chapman video on the subject of historic news bias:

Alas, The Age isn't spewing out a torrent of shit because of bias. Though I'm fairly confident if I wanted to find bias at The Age I'm sure in the worst case scenario I could find it, and hopefully if push came to shove I could find someone who has already found it, be that FriendlyJordies or Ground News (actually found a website that ranks it as Left-Center biased).

That sight rates the Australian Broadcasting Corporation virtually identically to The Age, slightly left-of-center and high in factuality. Let me demonstrate how limited that is in determining whether a news source is worthy of attention. This story caught my eye about hidden disabilities and a new lanyard people with hidden disabilities can wear (and very likely, people with no disabilities can also wear, given that anyone can buy one here.) anyway this quote caught my eye:

On the day of that bus trip, Ms Green was using a walking stick and wearing a bright green hidden disability sunflower lanyard, the latter of which is an internationally-recognised symbol. 

Still, nobody offered her a seat and her pain worsened.

Okay, I assume that the above excerpt is 100% factually accurate and has no possible political bias and it is garbage. It identifies that the Australian public won't give up a seat to a person with a walking stick and I wouldn't be surprised if any day of the fucking week you could write a story about a 8-months pregnant woman having nobody give up a seat on public transport for them. The supposedly newsworthy item is that this woman was wearing a bright "internationally recognised symbol" as well. In some technical sense, I'm sure the sunflower on a green background is "internationally recognised" in the sense that hidden disability organisations and their affiliates in multiple country. 

But as if, fucking as if people on the street should have any fucking idea what the lanyard means or even scrutinize a lanyard. Whatever the colour, most people who see a lanyard probably just assume the person has a job in a building somewhere. 

My problem with the unrelenting torrent of shit, is not bias, but news-worthiness. I guess there's another problem compounding news-worthiness being that editors are picking headlines that make it hard to tell if a story is newsworthy or pure trite. 

The Age is *Not Even* Wrong

It is simply reporting a lot of worthless gossip. Trying to find a non-paywalled story from A(us)BC news, I spotted an article nested in news addressing the very problem of the newsworthiness of economics journalism. 

It was a response to this article. The article it responded to, had some valid points, but ironically I feel an economics professor should be able to explain why enrolments in economics is dropping. Economics students should be able to calculate the net present value of studying economics versus say, management or accounting. It puts me in mind of an earlier critique of televised news programs that feature a market report segment that I have been unable to find but feel I can recreate more-or-less.

If you study marketing, you will discover that there is less to it than other business disciplines such as accounting, economics or finance. You will basically take subject after subject where "the 4 P's" are applied to different contexts. I can no longer recall but either *p*romotion or *p*lacement was touched upon as why one might want to advertise on television during a soap opera a product like Coca Cola or Pepsi, because there's a large overlap between the market for colas and the market for soap operas. It is less efficient to advertise the latest Airbus passenger airplane during a soap opera commercial break in the hope that one of the two purchasing executives in that country happen to be watching and are suddenly prompted to sign up for a new fleet of Airbus aircraft.

Why then, does the news feature a segment where someone runs through the days movements in the All Ordinaries index, the Nasdaq and Nikkei exchanges, the big movers in the ASX200 and the current going rate on oil futures. These segments are frequent, banal and boring so we don't often think "hang on, would any of this shit be news? Or timely, relevant information to anybody who works in finance?" Not plausibly. It's hard to imagine the broker that called in sick that day watching the evening news market report segment and going 'holy shit hol-eeeeeee sh-iiiiiiiiiiiiit!' 

And basically these segments really function as propaganda to convince lay people that the finance sector is doing valuable esoterica that you just don't understand.

Again, another article that comes to mind on a similar subject, that I want to attribute to cracked.com but due to their prolific listicles found no reasonable way I could track down the original article, made the point that most people have a kind of snobbery that say, Russia invading Georgia is something an erudite educated person of class needs to know about, and Kim Kardashian and Kanye West's wedding is the stuff of tabloid celebrity gossip trash.

But functionally, for most people consuming news media, Putin invading another post-soviet sovereign nation is gossip, even if you were like "holy shit, Ukraine is one of the largest producers and exporters of nitrate in the world, I gotta stock up on fertalizer!" you would be in the slimmest of minorities, and likely in an industry where the trades would have prepped you for the possibility months ahead major news media announcing the invasion.

Taking me to fucking TMZ, which used to run a daily live TV show, where they chatted about bullshit celebrity gossip and I remember this fat guy who had that 2000s bleached spikey hair combined with an early 90s goatee was talking about details of the Kim and Kanye wedding and it was like how many seats per table for guests at each venue and what the cutlery was going to be kind of details and the editor guy with his fucking drink bottle had the nerve to question the newsworthiness of that story even though apparently asking Drew Carey what he ordered at TGIFs is newsworthy. Anyway the fat guy defended reading out the tedious details by saying "people are interested and want to know this stuff"

Basically, "there is demand, so here is supply" and we get the nightmare of newsworthiness - the who watches the watcher problem. Keeping in mind, that TMZ has broken some newsworthy stories like the death of Michael Jackson, probably because they have financial incentives to follow celebrities around and ask them what they ordered at IHOP and shit.

The point not to lose sight of, is that so much more than the mundane activities of celebrities is fucking trash. 

Inevitable Junk Food Comparison

Mexico has adopted a 'seals' system, whereby all products on sale in supermarkets and bodegas, basically any packaged food has to have these black octagonal warning labels on them declaring if they have excessive sugars, sodium, saturated fat, calories etc. A snickers bar for example, has 3 of the aforementioned four. 

I have long questioned the effectiveness of such a policy in Mexico, because basically every fucking product has at least one black octagonal seal. So all else being equal, consumers choose whatever products they choose. I did discover that if a product has at least one seal it means a company cannot put a cartoon mascot on it, and it cannot be advertised to kids. I have fact checked this and it's true - Fruit Loops have no Toucan Sam, Crunch is Captainless, Rice Bubbles have no Snap Crackle or Pop. 

I would suggest news media have similar labelling regulations applied - things like having to display their political bias on the masthead, and their factuality score in order to legally operate (the fact that you can objectively measure how misinformed a person is, still blows my mind that we don't do this over a decade after Jon Stewart's interview on Fox News' Politifact)

There is also an important distinction to be made between fact and opinion, news and speculation. Nassim Nicholas Taleb is highly critical of how many in the economics and finance profession can make a living out of creating and presenting forecasts that, accurate or not, can be discarded without scrutiny and a new forecast presented.

How much fucking newsprint is expended in Australia on "what's the RBA going to do? Raise rates, lower rates, hold steady?" month after fucking month, there is so much journalism that takes the form of having your mum ask who killed the victim, 10 minutes into a watching a murder mystery an impulse that I gradually learned to reply with "I've seen this movie before and they never explain it, so you can't answer that question just by watching the movie." 

I get that people mortgaged up to their eyeballs care intensely about interest rate movements, but if the news was newsworthy what a person should be able to do is open up The Age (or whatever) and any speculative forecast carries with it a highly visible rating at how good they are at forecasting. (This would still require flagging that it is a speculative forecast and past performance does not guarantee future performance).

Superforecasters exist. There are people who are better at it and worse, they are much much rarer than the incidence of people who make a living forecasting. There are prediction markets, that are basically bets on what is going to happen.

The Dissemination Problem

We say one thing, and hear another. For example, in the Harris-Dennet free will debate, I am more persuaded by Sam Harris' we don't have free will side. Dan Dennet is a compatabilist, and has released lectures titled "stop telling people they don't have free will" and I've listened to those. Dennet's lectures are of value, and have good approaches like "what would be necessary for you to enter a contract with a robot?" but ultimately to me, Dennet has defined free will into existence by talking about the kind of free will (hyperbolically speaking) nobody actually cares about, ironically much like the "god" of theologians - an abstract theoretical deity who has almost no resemblance to the sky daddy of Abraham that most people pray to.

But Dennet has one point, which is that there is a dissemination problem in telling people they don't have free will. Beautifully captured by "Better Call Saul's 50% Off Special":

Which is to say, though it might be predictable that if you tell delinquent drug addicts you'll give them 50% off legal representation for felony charges, some morons will feel incentivized to commit additional felonies. It is less predictable but still possible, that if you tell people they don't have free will, some dipshits will interpret this as a legal defence for committing murder and shit.

People have a high propensity to straw-man or "so what you're saying..." anything they hear or read that does not comply with their conception of the world, and the great travesty of the op-ed era, is that people will even outsource their ability to construct fallacies to someone who will argue fallaciously for them, the service theologians have been providing for centuries, if not millennia.

This is just a basic problem faced by any news media. It is actually difficult to disseminate information to masses of people. Even neutral objective facts like "it rained yesterday" has the potential to be misinterpreted as "it will rain again today" and so forth. 

Hence the Matildas being Australia's national women's soccer team, featuring athlete Sam Kerr, playing as host nation in the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup is going to provide numerous objective facts to report on, but disseminating information about the tournament and the athletes therein is just made harder when you have 6 op ed's running simultaneously where people of no determinable qualification opining and speculating as to the significance of Australian women playing associated football in a tournament to I don't know...violence against women statistics?

Now, there is information useful to someone like me in the meta-story of the Matilda's coverage: Women excited about Matilda's participation in FIFA 2023 Women's world cup.

Similarly, the press' coverage of the first major Bitcoin Bubble was trying to disseminate a real story that people were going crazy for magic beans. I only really saw Australian TV news coverage of that phenomena and I was left with the subjective opinion that it was not responsible journalism. The coverage likely fomented FOMO purchases of Bitcoin at one of the worst times in history to do so. 

And again, there's the Hunter Biden laptop story, as a clear example of the problem of disseminating information - free speech absolutists feel strongly about this, but I have not seen sufficient evidence that they understand the dilemma of declaring something news worthy. In the case of the Hunter Biden Laptop story, it appears it would eventually indict Hunter Biden for profiting off the family name, and otherwise was a big fat nothing-burger concerning his father Joe. 

In this case, the laptop came into the possession of Trump's team and was sat on as a seemingly planned "October Surprise" to try and repeat the success of the Hillary emails thing. I have not heard free speech absolutists yet criticise Rudy Giuliani for effectively censoring this information from the voters until such a time as it suited the Trump Campaign. Social Media companies are private companies that to my knowledge are legally treated as platforms not publishers, and run by such in-touch philosophers as Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey and Elon Musk. 

So, if someone comes to you with a story that the son of a political candidate murdered a child for fun 8 months ago after the primaries and announcement of running mate and debates and campaigning and campaign advertising has been done and you're like "how long have you known of this alleged crime" and they are like "7 and a half months" what do you think? Is the allegation newsworthy? Probably, because if true it would be potentially consequential, are you obliged to run the story that will almost certainly impact the forthcoming election before the veracity of the allegation can be confirmed and disconfirmed?

And then there's the reasonable expectation that for vast numbers of people, they will think the allegation is the same thing as the actual crime, and never follow up and now think they have a family that drinks baby blood to sustain their youth in office.

"Move over Misogyny, there's a new bad guy in town: Matildogyny."

Man I could be a writer for The Age, or at least an editor that picks out headlines. I've used the term "meta" too many times already, but I recall reading on the toilet at work a Psychology Today article which, again I couldn't find. It made a claim about meta-emotions, how we feel about our emotional states that we don't seem to feel meta-meta-emotions, that is we can feel guilty that we feel angry, but we don't seem to feel pride that we feel angry about feeling guilty.

So when England knocked Australia out of the FIFA women's world cup 2023, I felt angry that I felt relieved that the Matilda's were out. Because there is no way I would have felt that relief, if not for The Age's relentless coverage during a period where I happened to be looking at the headlines every day in preparation for this post.

I compared it for a friend, to the classic Onion story: "Teen Who Just Discovered Led Zeppelin Starting To Piss Off Friends." But this isn't a teenager, and these weren't articles written by a Women's Sports figure like Liz Ellis. This was trite written and published in a major newspaper by people who discovered sport fucking yesterday, and predictably got way too excited.

Part of the problem, no doubt, was that the real story was "Women of Australia excited about FIFA Women's World Cup local team." but the way a news company chose to tell that story was to let said excited (mostly) women just write op-eds excitedly. 

They propagated a social phenomena instead of reporting on it. There was real journalistic work to be done to inform people with Matilda's fever instead of pandering to them. Like it literally only just occurred to me that much of the excitement arose from a false analogy that the women's international competition is as unlevel as the men's international competition. Like the Maltida's beating England or Spain would be the equivalent of the Socceroos beating England or Spain in the world cup. 

The Women's A-League in Australia was founded in 2008, where the Women's Super League (England's highest level of proffessional associated football, for which Sam Kerr plays) was founded in 2010, It was proceeded by the Women's FA founded in 1991. A difference of 17 years. 

The A-League was not the first professional associated football league, it's predecessor was founded in 1977. Compared to the VFA (The original AFL) which dates back to 1877, which is not as old as the oldest football clubs in England (1861) and Spains first national football competition was founded in 1929. Italy founded it's national competition in 1898 and Brazil in 1902. 

The FIFA Women's World Cup has been held since 1991. Guess who has won the most Women's World Cups: Brazil? No. England? No. Argentina? No. Italy? No. The United States has won the competition 4 times since 1991. It is a very different international playing field compared to the men's competition.

But instead the allocation of words to people with job titles as specific and illuminating as "writer" "columnist" and "contributor" to just ramble about how the Matildas would cure cancer and where to buy the Matilda's hairclips is like the editorial policy was "try to alienate and irritate actual sports fans by spending most of the time speculating on cultural impact, and the least time covering the competition."

Now, everything in women's sports is heading in the right direction. It will grow, I can't say whether it will ever close the gap. There are some competitions like Tennis for which the Women's battle has been one, and the movie has even been made. There are other competitions that are complete fucking basket cases, like the WNBA (Trinity Rodman, Dennis Rodman's daughter wisely chose to play soccer, and is part of the US national team and the highest paid player in USFW ever.)

I think in these confusing times, it is easy to accuse anyone who doesn't just accept the delusional garbage memes pumped out of academia regarding real issues like women's representation in public and private sectors, women's participation and women's safety as "misogynistic" like an aggressive knee jerk reaction to get all discussion and debate the fuck back in line. 

I was late to recognize that the driver of the recent uptick in climate-skepticism is largely people who don't want to ever have to consider their career choices, they would role the dice on completely destabilising the earth's ecosystems sooner than surrender the comforting idea that they can just keep driving to and from the job they currently have until they retire. It was almost too banal for me to see.

And now, thanks to the reporting of The Age, I am entertaining the thought that the pivot from "equal opportunity" a very unifying vision to "equity" in political jargon, is driven by a realization of mediocrity. Without a doubt, there are talented women unjustly reporting to mediocre men in the workplace. But they are likely a tiny minority, and probably very similar in size to talented men unjustly reporting to mediocre men in the workplace. Statistically however, the most likely outcome of equal opportunity coming into effect is not mediocre men being replaced with talented women, but mediocre men being replaced with mediocre women.

Which is to say, perhaps for many young dreamers, too much of the promise of equal opportunity rode on the idea that history was somewhat arbitrary, and maybe also, that business in particular was a meritocracy. Now, the theory has pivoted to one of social construction and conspiracy, post hoc rationalizing that if there are pay gaps there must not be equal opportunity, only oppression, and this is the social context in which journalists wrote about the Matilda's 2023 World Cup run.

The End is the Beginning is the End

Schools should absolutely not encourage kids to read newspapers. It is in my opinion far more worthwhile to give them a youtube videoessay, and teach them source methodology. Passing or failing on whether they can a) identify a claim as distinct from an argument. b) determine the factual basis for a claim. c) demonstrate how information is manipulated.

The classic "how to think" not "what to think". The irony being you have all these right wing activists trying to get critical pedagogy (though they refer to it as CRT, but the problem that should be of concern is teachers thinking it is their job to create activists not educate children) but appearing on FOX news to complain about indoctrination.

Just fucking news is the problem whether you are getting it from fucking Tucker Carlson or fucking Russel Brand or anyone in between. You don't need it. You certainly don't need to consume anywhere near the amount you do. Go buy a book. A nice work of classic fiction, if you need to fill the dead air of your day. Plenty of good paperbacks can fit in your pocket where your smart phone is.