Random Thoughts (Political Edition)

LeVeL said:
Yeah, it's been that way for a couple of years I want to say.
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Surprisingly accurate. :lol: 1 August 2014 is the day.
 
kunedog said:
[video=youtube;-4R0bWC41g4]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-4R0bWC41g4[/video]
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the important bits:
[video=youtube;K-IFcCY0m3E]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K-IFcCY0m3E[/video]

The University of Toronto Student Union has put out a statement blatantly lying about the event (emphasis mine):
http://www.utsu.ca/wp-content/uploads/2013/12/Response-to-Violence-and-Hate-Speech.pdf
Last week, we saw our community at its worst. Tuesday?
s rally was marred by bigotry and
violence, and the Campus Police refused to intervene when they knew of and saw trans
folks being assaulted. This is intolerable. Even now, the University has done nothing to
ensure that all students are safe on campus. In
the face of violence, hate speech, and
threats, trans students are not safe on campus and similarly, in the face of hateful and
racist remarks, black students are not safe on campus either.
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The student newspaper put out hopelessy biased coverage which makes it sound like there's doubt about what happened, as if the video doesn't exist.
http://thevarsity.ca/2016/10/12/free-speech-rally-devolves-into-conflict-outbursts-of-violence


To summarize:

1. Leftists make ridiculous claims of harassment and unsafe conditions, with zero evidence.

2. Leftists actually commit assault (and harassment) at a pro-free-speech event. "Out of revenge," I presume.

3. Leftists lie and repeat baseless accusations in the face of contradicting video evidence. The press does their best to help.

I'm glad everyone here got some "first hand knowledge" of one of these fiascos, as it played out in (pretty much) real time. Pay attention and you'll see it happen over and over: leftists/feminists producing endless claims of harassment/violence, while the opposition produces convincing evidence to the contrary. Just like Gamergate.
 
Next week, if all goes well, someone will win the presidency. What happens after that is anyone?s guess. Will the losing side believe the results? Will the bulk of Americans recognize the legitimacy of the new president? And will we all be able to clean up the piles of lies, hoaxes and other dung that have been hurled so freely in this hyper-charged, fact-free election?

Much of that remains unclear, because the internet is distorting our collective grasp on the truth. Polls show that many of us have burrowed into our own echo chambers of information. In a recent Pew Research Center survey, 81 percent of respondents said that partisans not only differed about policies, but also about ?basic facts.?

For years, technologists and other utopians have argued that online news would be a boon to democracy. That has not been the case.

More than a decade ago, as a young reporter covering the intersection of technology and politics, I noticed the opposite. The internet was filled with 9/11 truthers, and partisans who believed against all evidence that George W. Bush stole the 2004 election from John Kerry, or that Barack Obama was a foreign-born Muslim. (He was born in Hawaii and is a practicing Christian.)

Of course, America has long been entranced by conspiracy theories. But the online hoaxes and fringe theories appeared more virulent than their offline predecessors. They were also more numerous and more persistent. During Mr. Obama?s 2008 presidential campaign, every attempt to debunk the birther rumor seemed to raise its prevalence online.

In a 2008 book, I argued that the internet would usher in a ?post-fact? age. Eight years later, in the death throes of an election that features a candidate who once led the campaign to lie about President Obama?s birth, there is more reason to despair about truth in the online age.

Why? Because if you study the dynamics of how information moves online today, pretty much everything conspires against truth.
You?re Not Rational

The root of the problem with online news is something that initially sounds great: We have a lot more media to choose from.

In the last 20 years, the internet has overrun your morning paper and evening newscast with a smorgasbord of information sources, from well-funded online magazines to muckraking fact-checkers to the three guys in your country club whose Facebook group claims proof that Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump are really the same person.

A wider variety of news sources was supposed to be the bulwark of a rational age ? ?the marketplace of ideas,? the boosters called it.

But that?s not how any of this works. Psychologists and other social scientists have repeatedly shown that when confronted with diverse information choices, people rarely act like rational, civic-minded automatons. Instead, we are roiled by preconceptions and biases, and we usually do what feels easiest ? we gorge on information that confirms our ideas, and we shun what does not.

This dynamic becomes especially problematic in a news landscape of near-infinite choice. Whether navigating Facebook, Google or The New York Times?s smartphone app, you are given ultimate control ? if you see something you don?t like, you can easily tap away to something more pleasing. Then we all share what we found with our like-minded social networks, creating closed-off, shoulder-patting circles online.

That?s the theory, at least. The empirical research on so-called echo chambers is mixed. Facebook?s data scientists have run large studies on the idea and found it wanting. The social networking company says that by exposing you to more people, Facebook adds diversity to your news diet.

Others disagree. A study published last year by researchers at the IMT School for Advanced Studies Lucca, in Italy, found that homogeneous online networks help conspiracy theories persist and grow online.

?This creates an ecosystem in which the truth value of the information doesn?t matter,? said Walter Quattrociocchi, one of the study?s authors. ?All that matters is whether the information fits in your narrative.?
No Power in Proof

Digital technology has blessed us with better ways to capture and disseminate news. There are cameras and audio recorders everywhere, and as soon as something happens, you can find primary proof of it online.

You would think that greater primary documentation would lead to a better cultural agreement about the ?truth.? In fact, the opposite has happened.

Consider the difference in the examples of the John F. Kennedy assassination and 9/11. While you?ve probably seen only a single film clip of the scene from Dealey Plaza in 1963 when President Kennedy was shot, hundreds of television and amateur cameras were pointed at the scene on 9/11. Yet neither issue is settled for Americans; in one recent survey, about as many people said the government was concealing the truth about 9/11 as those who said the same about the Kennedy assassination.

Documentary proof seems to have lost its power. If the Kennedy conspiracies were rooted in an absence of documentary evidence, the 9/11 theories benefited from a surfeit of it. So many pictures from 9/11 flooded the internet, often without much context about what was being shown, that conspiracy theorists could pick and choose among them to show off exactly the narrative they preferred. There is also the looming specter of Photoshop: Now, because any digital image can be doctored, people can freely dismiss any bit of inconvenient documentary evidence as having been somehow altered.

This gets to the deeper problem: We all tend to filter documentary evidence through our own biases. Researchers have shown that two people with differing points of view can look at the same picture, video or document and come away with strikingly different ideas about what it shows.

That dynamic has played out repeatedly this year. Some people look at the WikiLeaks revelations about Mrs. Clinton?s campaign and see a smoking gun, while others say it?s no big deal, and that besides, it?s been doctored or stolen or taken out of context. Surveys show that people who liked Mr. Trump saw the Access Hollywood tape where he casually referenced groping women as mere ?locker room talk?; those who didn?t like him considered it the worst thing in the world.
Lies as an Institution

One of the apparent advantages of online news is persistent fact-checking. Now when someone says something false, journalists can show they?re lying. And if the fact-checking sites do their jobs well, they?re likely to show up in online searches and social networks, providing a ready reference for people who want to correct the record.

But that hasn?t quite happened. Today dozens of news outlets routinely fact-check the candidates and much else online, but the endeavor has proved largely ineffective against a tide of fakery.

That?s because the lies have also become institutionalized. There are now entire sites whose only mission is to publish outrageous, completely fake news online (like real news, fake news has become a business). Partisan Facebook pages have gotten into the act; a recent BuzzFeed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time.

?Where hoaxes before were shared by your great-aunt who didn?t understand the internet, the misinformation that circulates online is now being reinforced by political campaigns, by political candidates or by amorphous groups of tweeters working around the campaigns,? said Caitlin Dewey, a reporter at The Washington Post who once wrote a column called ?What Was Fake on the Internet This Week.?

Ms. Dewey?s column began in 2014, but by the end of last year, she decided to hang up her fact-checking hat because she had doubts that she was convincing anyone.

?In many ways the debunking just reinforced the sense of alienation or outrage that people feel about the topic, and ultimately you?ve done more harm than good,? she said.

Other fact-checkers are more sanguine, recognizing the limits of exposing online hoaxes, but also standing by the utility of the effort.

?There?s always more work to be done,? said Brooke Binkowski, the managing editor of Snopes.com, one of the internet?s oldest rumor-checking sites. ?There?s always more. It?s Sisyphean ? we?re all pushing that boulder up the hill, only to see it roll back down.?

Yeah. Though soon, I suspect, that boulder is going to squash us all.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/03/technology/how-the-internet-is-loosening-our-grip-on-the-truth.html
 
^ Very Interesting.

I think the point doesn't reside in "the Internet", though. The Internet is just a tool.

Yes, cospirationists or liers of all sorts are given a loud voice, but so is the case for information and truth. It has never been simple to debunk a hoax, to dispel the magic of a charlatan.

Even if more of them pop up every day.
And I think the problem lies there; not in the technical capabilities, but in our judgement. What we see is not a sea of false information flooding us because of the Internet, but a flood of lies flooding us because the number of liars is increasing, their presence being multiplied and made more present by the Internet. And because we are not good at understanding anymore.

Evaluating information is something that must be taught; respect and truthfulness are virtues to be taught; how to use reason must be taught. And they are not anymore. To understand the importance of truth, to understand that liars are dangerous and damaging, to understand things in the first place, we need to listen; to slow down and open up.

This is what we are not doing anymore. In a chaotic world dominated by too many inputs, by misused tools, we have no time to stop, to observe, to listen, to think; we binge on bits of endless preprocessed and predigested easy-food bits. We are overloaded by stimuli, but we are not able to elaborate on them anymore.

And -this- has clear causes which find in the excess of possibilities a fertile soil, but which are ultimately powered by human choices, not by the inherent characteristics of the medium.

We live in a world which is ever more about how big we are, how good we are, how much we -deserve- things, how easy they are to get, how important it is to get them, and get them easy. In a childish, hedonist world like the one we live in today, do we really expect people to use the Internet to destroy, rather than enhance, their childish stupidity?

The Internet is more a mirror of our societies than it is a driver of our choices.
 
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LeVeL said:
Spain Has No Government For 10 Months - Economy Grows, Unemployment Falls To 18.9%
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Spain has not really had a government for the past 10 months[...]There has been a government of course?ministers occupying each office that has ?minister? on the door and so on.
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The situation described in Spain (or Belgium) is more comparable to Obama governing with/against a republican House and Senate, than a country running without government. Article headlines and conclusion are greatly misleading.
 
^ Just to add to this, the article says

That economy has been allowed, left to, tootle along under its own steam and has done rather well as it does so
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It has done rather well... by following the laws and rules that were already set. Absence of a government doesn't mean absence of rules. It's just the application of the rules and directives that were aready there, made by a previous government.

Also, the economy is tootling along. What would have happened with a good government? Would it have been better or worse? We cannot know.

The only thing clear is that economy works where there is a fertile soil in which it can grow, and that soil is not generated spontaneously, it is the effect of choices.
 
Stop ruining his narrative of "Government is bad, mmm'kay".
 
SirEdward said:
It has done rather well... by following the laws and rules that were already set. Absence of a government doesn't mean absence of rules. It's just the application of the rules and directives that were aready there, made by a previous government.
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No one is advocating a lack of laws, rules, or even government. What we see in Spain is that the government stopped "helping" by creating more laws and rules and the economy did rather well. That's really the point - reduce government meddling to a minimum (but not to zero!).
 
The problem is this is not clear; the fact is that the article in Forbes is aimed to weaken the idea that a government has to set the table for economy to develop properly, substituting the government with some sort of lack of laws. The critics are not towards government overdoing things, but against governmental action in general.

The idea itself that "meddling" (which in itself a negative word, implying a government which is a non-necessary nuisance) should be kept to a minimum clashes witht the fact that what is making the foundation for the spanish economy is not "a minimum"... All laws currently enforced in Spain have been made by some spanish parliament and government, or by the EU. It's just that they have been made yesterday, not today.

I agree that government should act so that it actually does more good than harm to the economy, which often implies not doing too much in too short a time, but government -is- necessary, to the well being of the economy itself.
 
SirEdward said:
...government -is- necessary, to the well being of the economy itself.
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Yes, I agree - when it comes to the economy the government's role is to create an open and free market environment with the bare minimum of regulation to act as a "guide" of sorts. Unfortunately, most, if not all, countries have gone way too far with this.

Edit: I keep forgetting that you're a Marxist and that we fundamentally disagree on this. I won't post on this any further.
 
LeVeL said:
Yes, I agree - when it comes to the economy the government's role is to create an open and free market environment with the bare minimum of regulation to act as a "guide" of sorts. Unfortunately, most, if not all, countries have gone way too far with this.
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I respect this idea, even if I support a vision for a government that leads the entire country to wealth, rather than just creating an open plaza for market to occur.

However:

Edit: I keep forgetting that you're a Marxist and that we fundamentally disagree on this. I won't post on this any further.
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It's not that I am Marxist (which mostly I am not), it's that it's wrong to simplify and classify things so much that you actually start believing nothing can exist outside of them.
 
[video=youtube;e0bMfS-_pjM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0bMfS-_pjM[/video]
 
rickhamilton620 said:
There's plenty of people who want a candidate that they can relate to in some way.

For better or worse, Donald's managed to pull off a "cut the bullshit" persona that's obviously incredibly refreshing to a lot of people.

It's brilliant marketing whether your for or against him.

FWIW, I rarely see Clinton signs where I live (a York County small town/suburb) and work (a rural farming community minutes from the MD border), it's 99% Trump. A famous ish donut company based in York has publicly endorsed Trump and has themed advertising.

He's everywhere here. Clinton? Not so much.
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I'm not seeing a lot of Hillary signs or bumper stickers here either. There was a lot more overt support for Obama in 2008 or 2012.
 
GRtak said:
[video=youtube;e0bMfS-_pjM]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e0bMfS-_pjM[/video]
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I just realized that I have class on tuesday. And leave work early just to get there.

I may be a few minutes late.
 
Can you vote before work?
 
What time do the polls open there? I know I have voted at 6 am in the past.
 
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