Friday, February 17, 2017

Sandwichman — All News is "Fake News" (always has been)

From "The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore: the politics of loitering," Susan Buck-Morss:
The flaneur is the prototype of a new form of salaried employee who produces news / literature / advertisements for the purpose of information / entertainment / persuasion (the forms of both product and purpose are not clearly distinguished). These products fill the "empty" hours which time-off from work has become in the modern city. Writers, now dependent on the market, scan the street scene for material, keeping themselves in the public eye and wearing their own identity like a sandwich board.… 
A salaried flaneur profits by following the ideological fashion. Benjamin connects him ultimately to the police informer and in a late note makes the association: "Flaneur - sandwichman - journalist-in-uniform.The latter advertises the state, no longer the commodity." In an economically precarious and ideologically extremist climate like the 1930s the penalty for a writer's refusal to toe the political line could be great.
EconoSpeak
All News is "Fake News" (always has been)
Sandwichman

7 comments:

lastgreek said...

Trump: You know, it really doesn’t matter what the media write as long as you’ve got a young, and beautiful, piece of ass.

When he's right, he's right! ;)

Meanwhile in Canada,

The Canadian Press ‏@CdnPress
Here's Canadian Mounties greeting refugees from Somalia who walked across the border into Canada.

https://twitter.com/CdnPress/status/832691566636576768


Noah Way said...

George Seldes wrote about fake news in the 1930's.

Ralph Musgrave said...

Quite agree with Sandwichman. In fact I don't even know where to look for "fake news". Can someone provide some classic examples of this phenomenon?

lastgreek said...

Phil Williams ‏@NC5PhilWilliams 11hr ago
This is the @Newseum's Journalists Memorial, listing the 2,291 individuals who have died around the world reporting the news #NotTheEnemy

"Fake deaths"?

https://twitter.com/NC5PhilWilliams/status/832789035668033538

Ryan Harris said...

HERE IS FAKE NEWS FROM THIS WEEK FROM ASSOCIATED PRESS. It was distributed widely, every major news outlet carried it.

AXEC / E.K-H said...

Part 2

In methodological terms, economics is in dire need of a paradigm shift from false microfoundations and false macrofoundations to consistent macrofoundations.#3 Therefore, it is rather straightforward to identify proto-scientific rubbish: if it isn’t macro-axiomatized, it isn’t economics.

The beta-fake: What does the absence of expected facts, that is, of a materially and formally consistent economics mean? It could mean (a) that ALL orthodox and heterodox economists are incompetent scientists, or (b), that the dog cannot be heard barking, that is, the true theory exists but all hints and pointers are either promptly covered, explained away, diluted with floods of irrelevancies, or as far as possible removed.

Neither Orthodoxy nor traditional Heterodoxy has the true theory. Why exactly? It is imperative to distinguish between political and theoretical economics. The main differences are: (i) The goal of political economics is to successfully push an agenda, the goal of theoretical economics is to successfully explain how the actual economy works. (ii) In political economics anything goes; in theoretical economics the scientific standards of material and formal consistency are observed.

Political economics has produced NOTHING of scientific value in the last 200+ years. Theoretical economics has been hijacked since the founding fathers by political economics. And politics cannot do other than to corrupt science. The modus operandi of politics is to promote the own agenda and to hinder everything else. Political economists do not produce or promote scientific truth as an end in itself but apply the outer form if and insofar as it seems to help the agenda. Scientific knowledge that lies outside the agenda’s perimeter is ignored, blighted, hindered, covered, or suppressed.#4 Where policy dominates the dog’s barking cannot be heard.

The good thing about alpha-fake is that it is possible to spot it. Beta-fake is invisible. How to deal with it? Beware of top ten charts, beware of two-way promotional expert talk, ignore the recommendations of the representative economist, pursue his denunciations. In economics, which is a cargo cult science, it is the absence of expected facts that points the way to the missing truth. When both orthodox and heterodox economists, which have proven their utter scientific incompetence over 200+ years and are still wondering about the supply-demand-equilibrium shades in Plato’s cave, dismiss an alternative approach there might be great reason to allow this approach to be true.

The specifics and differences between the four false economic approaches is cave dweller blathering stuff. The absence of the true theory is the only worthwhile issue of economics.

Egmont Kakarot-Handtke

#1 Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_Cave

#2 Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Adventure_of_Silver_Blaze

#3 See ‘From Orthodoxy to Heterodoxy to Sysdoxy’
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2016/03/from-orthodoxy-to-heterodoxy-to-sysdoxy.html

#4 The violation of scientific standards/ethics is the very definition of political economics. The question is not so much whether it happens but to which extent. See
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/01/economists-incompetent-stupid-corrupt.html

AXEC / E.K-H said...

For the full text see: Economics, Plato’s Cave and the Silver Blaze Case
http://axecorg.blogspot.de/2017/02/economics-platos-cave-and-silver-blaze.html

EKH