Unpopular Opinion

Most people believe in guilt by association, and can't logically separate out opinions from facts or the message from the medium. I'm not sure where I went wrong, but I was taught that stuff in high school, and then further in college... esp in like debate club, or history projects, where you had to learn about the other side's POV and all that... seems like nobody is learning that 'skill' anymore as it's 'irrelevant' for people today.

The idea of things being separable, is not really in vogue as it was 20-40 years ago. The internet has allowed the organization of mass moron-ization. More and more both internet content and my real lif einteractions w/ people... remind me of my dad who was your classic very angry moron. He flew into a rage anytime he saw or heard anything that didn't align with his pre-existing views and absolutely refused ever to learn anything new or entertain the possibility maybe he was wrong.

If Jonathan Swift wrote A Modest Proposal today, he'd be condemned for being an anti-Irish baby hating bigot any so would his publisher or anyone who read the book. You'd also have a movement clamoring to 'cancel' him and people on lemmy would be calling him Nazi and a fascist and citing the paradox of tolerance as to why he must be stopped.

Anyway, the problem is that most people operate at a raw emotional level. They do not think, they react. And this reaction-economy is what drives the internet, people are addicted to the shit that pisses them off, that makes them feel superior, and etc. It's a neurological drug.

Thinking about things... destroys that addictive drug loop of raw emotion. and of the moral high of being a 'good guy' fighting the 'evil bad people'. The moral ambiguity of reality makes people very uncomfortable.

The fact that the paper has labeled an article "opinion" doesn't mean it isn't theirs.

It's not coincidence. They don't pull opinion pieces randomly out of a hat.

If you post opinion columns with clearly genocidal opinions you are signaling you view that as a valid part of the discussion. You can't post a bunch of "ethnic cleansing is good" "should women be working" on and on articles while refusing to post plenty of others and escape criticism.

I suspect that the market and capitalism has had a hand. In my youth, I remember opinion pieces being marked quite clearly in newspapers, and in general it seemed like there was a sort of a popular, chatty, slightly-pompous style they were usually written in. I.e., it was pretty clear what exactly they were, and by that very nature, it allowed the writer to have some real fun with the premise.

Over time, my guess is that the faster nature of modern civ / society combined with capitalism skewed things towards dropping much of the former signal language, and treating news as more of a pure product, with a certain deception and advertising built-in to drive engagement and revenue.

On a side note, my take on scientific papers is that they're generally very difficult for laypeople to understand (hand raised here), and need a certain trained class of news-people to represent them accurately, simply in terms of what the paper is about. But more than that, even more specialised people are needed to put the paper in to full context, considering the publication, peer-review level, and junk science possibility. Unfortunately for the public, I'm not sure those people exist in any significant quantity.

ITT: people in a community called "unpopular opinion" making the point that unpopular opinions shouldn't have a platform

Thanks OP, for what it's worth I agree with you

Nazi bar

I think opinion pieces are fine if they're labeled as such. But more often then not this sort of thing happens to be nameless idiot hiding behind big brand.

I always suggest people to follow individual creators and not brands, since in case of poor quality it's very easy to filter out bad apples