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by groan 11 days ago
You’re being downvoted but for those of us not in the know, what’s wrong with Jacobin? (Keep in mind not all of us are from US/the West), the obvious may be lost on us.
5 comments

Nothing crazy just more highly biased opinion pieces masquerading as journalism just on the far left instead of the right. They have a narrative and they pick stories and “facts” to fit it. Just expect better on hacker news.
> far left

> Jacobin

Oh, you can go way further to the left of Jacobin.

… and way further to the right than OANN or Breitbart.

I’m always skeptical of media with an obvious institutional slant of any kind. Sometimes that’s true even if it’s a slant I kind of agree with.

Kind of narrows the media pool though. Most media these days is there to fellate someone’s existing worldview.

I hope that most people would try to get their news from sources who endeavor to report with as much of an objective perspective as possible, but I expect that most are comfortable with getting an editorial or interpretation of the facts from a biased perspective. I can read Jacobin with the same interest as I read the National Review, but I would never trust either to give me an unobjective statement of facts.
You can also shave off some IQ points by hitting yourself in the head… not sure _why_ you would do that though.
I'm just pointing out that Jacobin is hardly far left.
Jacobin has a reputation of being in the category of affirm-your-biases news media, albeit one that is left-leaning. Something strong enough that you'd have a prior that any Jacobin article is going to blame all of society's ills on capitalism, and since it's strongly baked into the priors of its readers, there's going to be no real investigation after blaming capitalism.

Which this article basically does, at first glance. It assumes capitalism is bad for baby-rearing, doesn't really motivate why, and instead just goes East Germany had a higher birth rate than West Germany before reunification, then after reunification, it flipped, therefore capitalism causes low birth rates.

I’ll respond to you but thanks for everyone who responded - I appreciate the perspective especially the call out to the Jacobians group from the other poster.

Honestly - it’s hard to find a publication that isn’t biased, or in many cases just outright wrong outside of a narrow subject matter and are ignorantly pushing someone’s propaganda because they don’t know better. The Atlantic, Economist are posted often and come to mind. I’m exaggerating slightly I’m sure Jacobian has a reason for being disdained.

How do you define bias? I feel like many publications are "biased" towards Austrian economics despite little evidence for their benefit, and many examples of it's proponents driving their homelands into the ground.

Should I declare everyone who says positive things about libertarianism as "biased" and discount their points?

It’s sort of like a leftist publication for leftists that have never read anything and don’t base anything in any economics or theory or historical context and just do unresearched reactionary “capitalism bad” stuff.

I do not know any actual leftists that take it seriously it mostly just serves to embarrass everyone.

For starters, they named themselves after a murderous left-wing terrorist organization:

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobins

> the most influential political club during the French Revolution of 1789. The period of its political ascendancy includes the Reign of Terror, during which well over 10,000 people were put on trial and executed in France, many for "political crimes".

For the down votes I would have gone with the "Shocker that Jacobian finds something bad and puts the root cause to Capitalism" comment.