Brian Berletic use to write for Infowars, and is a current antivax and climate change skeptic. Fuck him.
Does this invalidate all his analysis? I’m sure it’s helpful to have that context, but it’s possible to be informed by people whose ideological program doesn’t perfectly align with our own.
I’ve learned a lot over the past few years from people like mearscheimer, Alexander mercouris, Jeff Sachs, even Andrew Nepolitano, all of whom have varying levels of bad positions.
Liberals analyze the world on vibes, which tends to mean they need complete ideological alignment with their information sources, which is obviously limiting. But having a philosophical framework orienting our analysis frees us from that limitation because it allows us to read widely, including sources with major problems, without risk of falling for their bad takes.
You absolutely avoided my point that he has tremendously bad takes, including ones that have left possibly millions dead (antivax), and probably billions future dead (climate change skepticism). The guy is a hard right reactionary that sometimes critiques US foreign policy, something that the far right does regularly.
Brian Berletic […] is a current antivax and climate change skeptic
Which invalidates his analysis on topics which relate to health and climate, but it doesn’t heavily impact the validity of his geopolitical analysis on this particular subject. Or is there anything about the analysis in this particular video that you disagree with or you think is tainted by the source’s views on climate change and vaccines and would like to discuss?
I appreciate you doing the research and pointing out his reactionary views and dubious history. It’s good to be aware of the biases of the media we consume, but we don’t need to be afraid of drawing from varied sources as long as we can gain something useful from them. When it comes to reactionary sources we just have to be extra skeptical and careful to identify where that reactionary bias possibly skews their analysis.
Critical media literacy is an essential skill to have, especially for a communist. We will never be able to completely insulate ourselves from content that is not aligned with our views, nor should we. We need to be able to distinguish good analysis from bad, factual information from disinformation, and understand how a source’s ideological orientation affects the quality of their commentary on a topic by topic basis.
In my experience Lemmygrad has a very high degree of political literacy and maturity, and i trust that no one here will suddenly do a complete 180 in their ideological viewpoint merely by coming into contact with reactionary sources - we are not that fragile - and that most people here know how to identify and discard problematic content in a piece of media.
