RAW Semantics DESTROYS Glenn Greenwald

Part of the fun of RAW Semantics is that Brian has gotten really good with his illustrations. 

The RAW Semantics blog has an interesting new post up, "RAW as media critic #1." It's long, but you can read it in sections. Part two  apparently will be up soon.

Rather than try to summarize the post, which has a number of observations, I'll comment on a couple of things I found interesting.

Brian's survey of the social media scene can be depressing. Here is one observation I found kind of sad:

"Incidentally, those attention-grabbing war metaphors for criticism (“TAKEDOWN”, “ANNIHILATES”, “DESTROYS”, etc) apparently boost algorithm ranking dramatically on Youtube. So, in the competition for numbers, we end up getting “Elon Musk Just DESTROYED What Was Left Of The MSM’s Credibility” and “Economist DESTROYS Tory Budget”, etc. (Owen Jones, the UK journalist who posted the latter, admits he puts “DESTROYS” in his video titles because it gets him a larger audience)."

When I get an email from a left wing group with the subject line along the lines of "Elizabeth Warren DESTROYS Clarence Thomas" or from a right wing source with the subject "Donald Trump wants to know why he hasn't heard from you," I just delete it, cursing the fact that the sender assumes I am stupid. The fact that such come-ons actually are attractive to the credulous is the most depressing thing I read all day Friday. Of course, with my headline today I am having fun with what Brian talks about. 

I knew something about Brian's thoughts on social media from following him on Twitter. 

I say this to make a point. I don't rely on my main social media site, Twitter, to decide what I am going to read. As a rule, I work with curated lists, and the RAW Semantics Twitter account is included in both of the ones I look at every day.