In order to ensure that this thread continues to meet TL standards and follows the proper guidelines, we will be enforcing the rules in the OP more strictly. Be sure to give them a re-read to refresh your memory! The vast majority of you are contributing in a healthy way, keep it up!
NOTE: When providing a source, explain why you feel it is relevant and what purpose it adds to the discussion if it's not obvious. Also take note that unsubstantiated tweets/posts meant only to rekindle old arguments can result in a mod action.
On January 04 2017 17:32 Liquid`Drone wrote: But the 'real fake news' has gotten real influence. There's an alarmingly huge number of Trump supporters (and his supporters genuinely are 'worse' than others in this regard) who believe stuff that's just flat out bullshit. Trump's Alex Jones 'there are fish people' endorsement is leagues worse than NPR claiming obscure conservatives are prominent.
I haven't seen good evidentiary reporting to show Trump supporters were swayed in their votes by false news websites, or even that wide swaths of Trump voters read and believe that stuff. I'm expecting everybody here that's heard of it knows some grandma or older relative that takes it as face value. I just don't see it go beyond anecdotal evidence or being covered from an outlet that just pushes assertions from their own ideological goal to delegitimize Trumps narrow election.
That's why legacy outlets want to draw a bright line between false news they report with a bud of truth behind it and false news that originates from whole cloth on some website made for clicks. Facebook's attempts to clamp down on fake news are based on illegitimate fact-checking websites whose articles rating worthiness are basically opinion journalism. It's all mixed together, and if you'll pardon an opinion outlet to illustrate this, Obama does it quite well. Lying about who wrote letters is one thing, but when it comes to Planned Parenthood not providing mammograms or news on Obamacare architects, we see a free pass. This part of journalists surrendering their jobs to advocacy has been known long before liberals lost a presidential election and tried to pin some of it on fake news in their exasperation. So we're all back here laughing at the naked attempts to clear their names while tarnishing false media; it's akin to asking Putin if Russia hacked the US and using that to call for an end to falsehoods about Russian involvement.
And then we arrive at left wing fake news. The alt right is Trump's constituency, this amalgamation of rape apologists and white supremacists. Trump stands ready to throw all the Mexicans, Muslims, and gays into prison camps and crush minorities with the power of the fed. All this talk about the economic trials of rural America is dog-whistle code, a facade, for racist undercurrents that propelled him to power. If you've never met a Trump supporter in urban America, major news outlets will tell you what they're like. And as a side-note, the big original Post story lumped a bunch of left-wing sites into the analysis, but the takeaway remained that this was a Trump phenomenon.
The internet's getting old. People recognize when something stinks about a story, because a decade ago it was chain letters spread through email. How about the perspective that this is a minor problem and most people can recognize when they're being sold a story invented from the start from an outlet they've never heard of? I find the opposite: that people aren't too stupid to disbelieve a story they read on facebook and we don't need this paternal presence to help idiots out with extirpation/curation.
To move onto some more related interesting bits, why weren't Hillary supporters so pathologized. Hillary improved on Obamas performance in a few places: DC suburbs, Arlington/Fairfax, Manhattan, my county of OC CA ... were those voters motivated by economic anxiety, and for the east coast, maybe a decline in the military/industrial complex?
On January 05 2017 03:05 LegalLord wrote: Any discussion of "fake news" should start with this rather than with an absurd story about a conspiracy theorist and a pizza slave ring.
On January 05 2017 02:26 zatic wrote: Since we are on the topic, here is a reconstruction of the Podesta hack solely based on publicly available information (regarding Trump's 14yo could have done it tweet):
What strikes me as odd is that I can't access any of the source material ("The bitly is private" and secureworks doesn't load for me; the Google cache doesn't show the images) so independent verification is hard to come by.
Anyone have better luck in that regard?
Huh. All the links and images on his twitter work for me. Weird they don't show up for you; try another browser maybe? The bitly definitely isn't private when I click on it.
On January 05 2017 02:26 zatic wrote: Since we are on the topic, here is a reconstruction of the Podesta hack solely based on publicly available information (regarding Trump's 14yo could have done it tweet):
Nice! It's funny how much better 'rando'-twitter user's breakdown/evidence is compared to like the 100s of articles published elsewhere.
(It's still noteworthy that evidence is *still* circumstantial in terms of a direct Russia connection)
Russian made hack was used to infect an unconnected laptop is a real statement. Presenting it so that it suggests Russia did it intentionally would be bias.
Sort of? What's a real statement is someone made X-Agent (presumably Fancybear, but Fancybear has been attributed to using it at the very least) then released it. Later that released malware then ended up on a laptop in Vermont. That's the extent of what happened in that story. The big leap that tries to connect everything is the idea that Fancybear is the sole 'owner' of X-Agent and all uses of it are attributed to them, but it's been shown that the malware is obtainable by other people. Even outside of attributing it to Russia is the deceptive-ness in saying something at simple as "Russian made malware found on Vermont laptop". Like that's true, but it still suggested an unfounded bias as its worded to draw a connection to Russia. Even something like "X-Agent found on Vermont Laptop. X-Agent, believed to have originated from a Russian hacking group..." would paint a very different picture with the same facts. My point is that even that real statement can carry bias if you don't properly construct the story around it.
In terms of believing the CIA or not... The problem is not in the reporting of what those agencies are saying, but not accompanying that information with the publicly available evidence and properly showing the current gaps in public knowledge.
I understand that words can be loaded--but that's why we have the word Biased to show that.
Bias in media is expected (100% of all information is biased) False News is something different altogether.
Danglars' post above is on point. Basically, we aren't really interested in differentiating between outright lies and the creation of false narratives with things that may be superficially true.
On January 04 2017 17:32 Liquid`Drone wrote: But the 'real fake news' has gotten real influence. There's an alarmingly huge number of Trump supporters (and his supporters genuinely are 'worse' than others in this regard) who believe stuff that's just flat out bullshit. Trump's Alex Jones 'there are fish people' endorsement is leagues worse than NPR claiming obscure conservatives are prominent.
I haven't seen good evidentiary reporting to show Trump supporters were swayed in their votes by false news websites, or even that wide swaths of Trump voters read and believe that stuff. I'm expecting everybody here that's heard of it knows some grandma or older relative that takes it as face value. I just don't see it go beyond anecdotal evidence or being covered from an outlet that just pushes assertions from their own ideological goal to delegitimize Trumps narrow election.
That's why legacy outlets want to draw a bright line between false news they report with a bud of truth behind it and false news that originates from whole cloth on some website made for clicks. Facebook's attempts to clamp down on fake news are based on illegitimate fact-checking websites whose articles rating worthiness are basically opinion journalism. It's all mixed together, and if you'll pardon an opinion outlet to illustrate this, Obama does it quite well. Lying about who wrote letters is one thing, but when it comes to Planned Parenthood not providing mammograms or news on Obamacare architects, we see a free pass. This part of journalists surrendering their jobs to advocacy has been known long before liberals lost a presidential election and tried to pin some of it on fake news in their exasperation. So we're all back here laughing at the naked attempts to clear their names while tarnishing false media; it's akin to asking Putin if Russia hacked the US and using that to call for an end to falsehoods about Russian involvement.
And then we arrive at left wing fake news. The alt right is Trump's constituency, this amalgamation of rape apologists and white supremacists. Trump stands ready to throw all the Mexicans, Muslims, and gays into prison camps and crush minorities with the power of the fed. All this talk about the economic trials of rural America is dog-whistle code, a facade, for racist undercurrents that propelled him to power. If you've never met a Trump supporter in urban America, major news outlets will tell you what they're like. And as a side-note, the big original Post story lumped a bunch of left-wing sites into the analysis, but the takeaway remained that this was a Trump phenomenon.
The internet's getting old. People recognize when something stinks about a story, because a decade ago it was chain letters spread through email. How about the perspective that this is a minor problem and most people can recognize when they're being sold a story invented from the start from an outlet they've never heard of? I find the opposite, that people are too stupid to disbelieve a story they read on facebook and we need this paternal presence to help idiots out with extirpation/curation.
To move onto some more related interesting bits, why weren't Hillary supporters so pathologized. Hillary improved on Obamas performance in a few places: DC suburbs, Arlington/Fairfax, Manhattan, my county of OC CA ... were those voters motivated by economic anxiety, and for the east coast, maybe a decline in the military/industrial complex?
Where's the evidentiary reporting that people are swayed by MSM bias?
Oddly omitted from the ongoing evaluations of Barack Obama’s “legacy” is the fact that the U.S. is currently waging a ground war in Iraq, the country Obama was elected with a specific mandate to withdraw U.S. troops from. He launched his campaign in 2007 firmly on the premise that the Iraq War was a mistake, not just that it had been managed incorrectly (as his opponent Hillary would claim, much to her detriment) — but that the fundamental philosophy which undergirded George W. Bush’s misadventure was inherently wrongheaded.
Campaigning in such a fashion very obviously didn’t make Obama a “dove” — his (fulfilled) pledge to escalate the war in Afghanistan and his (fulfilled) pledged to attack “terrorists” in Pakistan demonstrated that — but still, he had as conspicuous a mandate as any to dramatically reconfigure the U.S. strategic mission in Iraq.
Fast-forward to January 2017 — Obama has but a few weeks left in office. And what’s going on? Sure enough, yet another Iraq War with the U.S. at the helm. Call it Iraq War 3.0 — since August 2014, the U.S. has been engaged in an active combat mission in the very country Obama was supposed to have extricated us from. The initial impetus behind the war was purportedly to save Yazidis stranded on a mountain — so, it was going to be strictly benign and “humanitarian,” and of a highly “limited” nature. That’s always how these things begin, with the noblest of alleged goals. Only a monster could object to rescuing besieged Yazidis.
The war was presented to the American people under false pretenses. The main aim, it was later shown, was not strictly “humanitarian.” If the aim was strictly humanitarian, then achievement of the limited goal of preventing the allegedly imminent slaughter of the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar would have been sufficient to complete the mission. But yet here we are, 2.5 years later, waging offensive war to root out ISIS “insurgents” in Mosul and elsewhere. The war has expanded beyond the scope initially conveyed to the public — that’s indisputable. And it has expanded in increments, with staggered deployments of additional “advisors” here and there, as if the commanders are consciously trying to evoke echoes of Vietnam.
I am looking forward to when media outlets start running massive reports on our ground troops fighting in Iraq and suffering casualties and how much of its continuance is Trump fascism or whatever. Probably lots of use of "quagmire." It's all under the general heading of Obama's foreign policy failures over eight years and Trump has a lot of work to do, should he commit himself to turning the (unacknowledged, unreported, de-facto) US military policy abroad around.
How much of his legacy was making sure the broken pieces didn't fully collapse before he left office?
On January 05 2017 02:26 zatic wrote: Since we are on the topic, here is a reconstruction of the Podesta hack solely based on publicly available information (regarding Trump's 14yo could have done it tweet):
Nice! It's funny how much better 'rando'-twitter user's breakdown/evidence is compared to like the 100s of articles published elsewhere.
(It's still noteworthy that evidence is *still* circumstantial in terms of a direct Russia connection)
Russian made hack was used to infect an unconnected laptop is a real statement. Presenting it so that it suggests Russia did it intentionally would be bias.
Sort of? What's a real statement is someone made X-Agent (presumably Fancybear, but Fancybear has been attributed to using it at the very least) then released it. Later that released malware then ended up on a laptop in Vermont. That's the extent of what happened in that story. The big leap that tries to connect everything is the idea that Fancybear is the sole 'owner' of X-Agent and all uses of it are attributed to them, but it's been shown that the malware is obtainable by other people. Even outside of attributing it to Russia is the deceptive-ness in saying something at simple as "Russian made malware found on Vermont laptop". Like that's true, but it still suggested an unfounded bias as its worded to draw a connection to Russia. Even something like "X-Agent found on Vermont Laptop. X-Agent, believed to have originated from a Russian hacking group..." would paint a very different picture with the same facts. My point is that even that real statement can carry bias if you don't properly construct the story around it.
In terms of believing the CIA or not... The problem is not in the reporting of what those agencies are saying, but not accompanying that information with the publicly available evidence and properly showing the current gaps in public knowledge.
I understand that words can be loaded--but that's why we have the word Biased to show that.
Bias in media is expected (100% of all information is biased) False News is something different altogether.
Danglars' post above is on point. Basically, we aren't really interested in differentiating between outright lies and the creation of false narratives with things that may be superficially true.
Step One: Assume all information is biased. Step Two: Assume that something that seems convincingly unbiased is simply you seeing a bias you agree with. Step Three: Use critical thinking skills to come to your own conclusions based on the information provided.
Assuming there is information out there that isn't creating what you accuse as "false narratives" is your first mistake. All information creates false narratives.
What is important is differentiating facts and lies.
Once you collect the facts, you then collect the perspectives of those facts to determine how different biases comprehends them. Take those different perspectives and use it to contextualize the importance or unimportance of any given fact.
Then you use critical thinking skills to come to your own conclusions on what you think about that fact.
It's not a very controversial statement to say that fake news created in Eastern Europe is a bad thing. Go to Fox for your half of the biased MSM narrative, and we can get rid of fake news. There's no reason not to get rid of fake news from Eastern Europe.
House Speaker Paul Ryan on Wednesday called WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange a "sycophant for Russia," just as President-elect Donald Trump was on Twitter promoting Assange's interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.
During an interview with conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, Ryan said he would not "comment on every little tweet or Facebook post" from Trump. But he said he was hopeful the president-elect would "get up to speed on what's been happening" regarding Russian hacking of political operatives and organizations when he receives an intelligence briefing on the subject later this week.
Asked by Hewitt whether he had any thoughts on Assange, Ryan said he had "none, other than I think the guy is a sycophant for Russia."
"He leaks, he steals data and compromises national security," Ryan said, later adding, after Hewitt pointed out that Assange was facing accusations of rape in Sweden, that he thought the WikiLeaks founder was "under house arrest."
Oddly omitted from the ongoing evaluations of Barack Obama’s “legacy” is the fact that the U.S. is currently waging a ground war in Iraq, the country Obama was elected with a specific mandate to withdraw U.S. troops from. He launched his campaign in 2007 firmly on the premise that the Iraq War was a mistake, not just that it had been managed incorrectly (as his opponent Hillary would claim, much to her detriment) — but that the fundamental philosophy which undergirded George W. Bush’s misadventure was inherently wrongheaded.
Campaigning in such a fashion very obviously didn’t make Obama a “dove” — his (fulfilled) pledge to escalate the war in Afghanistan and his (fulfilled) pledged to attack “terrorists” in Pakistan demonstrated that — but still, he had as conspicuous a mandate as any to dramatically reconfigure the U.S. strategic mission in Iraq.
Fast-forward to January 2017 — Obama has but a few weeks left in office. And what’s going on? Sure enough, yet another Iraq War with the U.S. at the helm. Call it Iraq War 3.0 — since August 2014, the U.S. has been engaged in an active combat mission in the very country Obama was supposed to have extricated us from. The initial impetus behind the war was purportedly to save Yazidis stranded on a mountain — so, it was going to be strictly benign and “humanitarian,” and of a highly “limited” nature. That’s always how these things begin, with the noblest of alleged goals. Only a monster could object to rescuing besieged Yazidis.
The war was presented to the American people under false pretenses. The main aim, it was later shown, was not strictly “humanitarian.” If the aim was strictly humanitarian, then achievement of the limited goal of preventing the allegedly imminent slaughter of the Yazidis on Mount Sinjar would have been sufficient to complete the mission. But yet here we are, 2.5 years later, waging offensive war to root out ISIS “insurgents” in Mosul and elsewhere. The war has expanded beyond the scope initially conveyed to the public — that’s indisputable. And it has expanded in increments, with staggered deployments of additional “advisors” here and there, as if the commanders are consciously trying to evoke echoes of Vietnam.
I am looking forward to when media outlets start running massive reports on our ground troops fighting in Iraq and suffering casualties and how much of its continuance is Trump fascism or whatever. Probably lots of use of "quagmire." It's all under the general heading of Obama's foreign policy failures over eight years and Trump has a lot of work to do, should he commit himself to turning the (unacknowledged, unreported, de-facto) US military policy abroad around.
How much of his legacy was making sure the broken pieces didn't fully collapse before he left office?
Ironically, as much as I would have loved to "take it to the bank" on this Obama campaign promise, our foreign policy is extremely hard to turn around.
Notice the NYT’s bizarrely passive headline from August 7, 2014 — as if Obama was not the Commander-in-Chief with near-absolute power to order the U.S. military to do as he pleases. You’d almost think that this intervention just sort of naturally materialized somewhere out there in the universe, and Obama, as a mere bystander lacking agency, stepped aside and simply “allowed” it to go forward.
And with our gigantic foreign policy apparatus, interventions do just "sort of naturally [materialize] somewhere out there" especially in the Middle East. Because our foreign policy apparatus loves to meddle all around the world, and people back home here in the US probably understand .01% of the problem and the reason why the way we are poking around in the middle east is "best."
Obama did a nice thing slowing down the meddling of the US foreign policy machine. Just that much is already pretty hard. Maybe Trump can reverse it eventually. But whatever the future will bring us, I already know Clinton would have been an unmitigated fucking disaster in this arena.
Donald Trump called WikiLeaks "disgraceful" and suggested there be a "death penalty" for their actions during a 2010 interview.
Speaking on camera to preview Brian Kilmeade's radio show, the Fox News anchor brought up the topic of WikiLeaks. At the time, WikiLeaks had published hundreds of thousands of classified documents and videos that were leaked to the organization by Pfc. Chelsea Manning, known at the time as Pfc. Bradley Manning.
On January 05 2017 02:26 zatic wrote: Since we are on the topic, here is a reconstruction of the Podesta hack solely based on publicly available information (regarding Trump's 14yo could have done it tweet):
Nice! It's funny how much better 'rando'-twitter user's breakdown/evidence is compared to like the 100s of articles published elsewhere.
(It's still noteworthy that evidence is *still* circumstantial in terms of a direct Russia connection)
Russian made hack was used to infect an unconnected laptop is a real statement. Presenting it so that it suggests Russia did it intentionally would be bias.
Sort of? What's a real statement is someone made X-Agent (presumably Fancybear, but Fancybear has been attributed to using it at the very least) then released it. Later that released malware then ended up on a laptop in Vermont. That's the extent of what happened in that story. The big leap that tries to connect everything is the idea that Fancybear is the sole 'owner' of X-Agent and all uses of it are attributed to them, but it's been shown that the malware is obtainable by other people. Even outside of attributing it to Russia is the deceptive-ness in saying something at simple as "Russian made malware found on Vermont laptop". Like that's true, but it still suggested an unfounded bias as its worded to draw a connection to Russia. Even something like "X-Agent found on Vermont Laptop. X-Agent, believed to have originated from a Russian hacking group..." would paint a very different picture with the same facts. My point is that even that real statement can carry bias if you don't properly construct the story around it.
In terms of believing the CIA or not... The problem is not in the reporting of what those agencies are saying, but not accompanying that information with the publicly available evidence and properly showing the current gaps in public knowledge.
I understand that words can be loaded--but that's why we have the word Biased to show that.
Bias in media is expected (100% of all information is biased) False News is something different altogether.
Danglars' post above is on point. Basically, we aren't really interested in differentiating between outright lies and the creation of false narratives with things that may be superficially true.
Step One: Assume all information is biased. Step Two: Assume that something that seems convincingly unbiased is simply you seeing a bias you agree with. Step Three: Use critical thinking skills to come to your own conclusions based on the information provided.
Assuming there is information out there that isn't creating what you accuse as "false narratives" is your first mistake. All information creates false narratives.
What is important is differentiating facts and lies.
Once you collect the facts, you then collect the perspectives of those facts to determine how different biases comprehends them. Take those different perspectives and use it to contextualize the importance or unimportance of any given fact.
Then you use critical thinking skills to come to your own conclusions on what you think about that fact.
It's really reckless to consider all bias equal in severity.
A bias that slightly favors keeping Obamacare vs repealing/replacing it or favoring one candidate slightly over another is a pretty minor offense; maybe it'll change people's minds, but you're talking about changing them between two options that are presumably at least both reasonable and you're likely competing with someone's personal interests on the matter.
Then you have things like how the (likely/possibly) Russian hacking is being handled where it's being used to fan widespread anti-russian sentiments, reporting on WMDs in Iraq, and other things of that nature. Where people don't have a person interested or experience with the subject, are far removed from the technical details, and the eventual consequences can be incredibly severe and dire.
Maybe it's just me, but if you're going to write words that could potentially sway people into potentially violent or catastrophic consequences then you better be careful as hell with your bias and whether or not you choose to comprehensively lay out all the evidence.
----
I don't like this Russia-Assange talk. It's pretty clear Assange really does not like Clinton and there's good reasons that explain that, but I'm not seeing the Russia connection or why that has to be an explanation for his actions.
I mean this quote makes it pretty clear his motivations:
“Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire “international community”. We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants.”
I look forward to four years of contradictions between Trump and the party he represents on a broad range of issues. It's quite humorous, to say the least.
On January 05 2017 03:05 LegalLord wrote: Any discussion of "fake news" should start with this rather than with an absurd story about a conspiracy theorist and a pizza slave ring.
On January 05 2017 02:26 zatic wrote: Since we are on the topic, here is a reconstruction of the Podesta hack solely based on publicly available information (regarding Trump's 14yo could have done it tweet):
What strikes me as odd is that I can't access any of the source material ("The bitly is private" and secureworks doesn't load for me; the Google cache doesn't show the images) so independent verification is hard to come by.
Anyone have better luck in that regard?
Huh. All the links and images on his twitter work for me. Weird they don't show up for you; try another browser maybe? The bitly definitely isn't private when I click on it.
The bitly API that he references that contains all the links is apparently private now (I didn't bother to check, I just take his word for it).
The secureworks page doesn't load for me. I get to it, it's a blank page. I check the source, it's nothing at all. I check isup.me and it says it's up but I get nothing from it. I check the Google cache and it gives me a page which seems to suggest what was said but the images are gone so I can't verify it. I checked on multiple devices, though I'm not really in the mood to check from multiple locations.
On January 05 2017 02:26 zatic wrote: Since we are on the topic, here is a reconstruction of the Podesta hack solely based on publicly available information (regarding Trump's 14yo could have done it tweet):
Nice! It's funny how much better 'rando'-twitter user's breakdown/evidence is compared to like the 100s of articles published elsewhere.
(It's still noteworthy that evidence is *still* circumstantial in terms of a direct Russia connection)
Russian made hack was used to infect an unconnected laptop is a real statement. Presenting it so that it suggests Russia did it intentionally would be bias.
Sort of? What's a real statement is someone made X-Agent (presumably Fancybear, but Fancybear has been attributed to using it at the very least) then released it. Later that released malware then ended up on a laptop in Vermont. That's the extent of what happened in that story. The big leap that tries to connect everything is the idea that Fancybear is the sole 'owner' of X-Agent and all uses of it are attributed to them, but it's been shown that the malware is obtainable by other people. Even outside of attributing it to Russia is the deceptive-ness in saying something at simple as "Russian made malware found on Vermont laptop". Like that's true, but it still suggested an unfounded bias as its worded to draw a connection to Russia. Even something like "X-Agent found on Vermont Laptop. X-Agent, believed to have originated from a Russian hacking group..." would paint a very different picture with the same facts. My point is that even that real statement can carry bias if you don't properly construct the story around it.
In terms of believing the CIA or not... The problem is not in the reporting of what those agencies are saying, but not accompanying that information with the publicly available evidence and properly showing the current gaps in public knowledge.
I understand that words can be loaded--but that's why we have the word Biased to show that.
Bias in media is expected (100% of all information is biased) False News is something different altogether.
Danglars' post above is on point. Basically, we aren't really interested in differentiating between outright lies and the creation of false narratives with things that may be superficially true.
Step One: Assume all information is biased. Step Two: Assume that something that seems convincingly unbiased is simply you seeing a bias you agree with. Step Three: Use critical thinking skills to come to your own conclusions based on the information provided.
Assuming there is information out there that isn't creating what you accuse as "false narratives" is your first mistake. All information creates false narratives.
What is important is differentiating facts and lies.
Once you collect the facts, you then collect the perspectives of those facts to determine how different biases comprehends them. Take those different perspectives and use it to contextualize the importance or unimportance of any given fact.
Then you use critical thinking skills to come to your own conclusions on what you think about that fact.
It's really reckless to consider all bias equal in severity.
A bias that slightly favors keeping Obamacare vs repealing/replacing it or favoring one candidate slightly over another is a pretty minor offense; maybe it'll change people's minds, but you're talking about changing them between two options that are presumably at least both reasonable and you're likely competing with someone's personal interests on the matter.
Then you have things like how the (likely/possibly) Russian hacking is being handled where it's being used to fan widespread anti-russian sentiments, reporting on WMDs in Iraq, and other things of that nature. Where people don't have a person interested or experience with the subject, are far removed from the technical details, and the eventual consequences can be incredibly severe and dire.
Maybe it's just me, but if you're going to write words that could potentially sway people into potentially violent or catastrophic consequences then you better be careful as hell with your bias and whether or not you choose to comprehensively lay out all the evidence.
----
I don't like this Russia-Assange talk. It's pretty clear Assange really does not like Clinton and there's good reasons that explain that, but I'm not seeing the Russia connection or why that has to be an explanation for his actions.
I mean this quote makes it pretty clear his motivations:
“Power is mostly the illusion of power. The Pentagon demanded we destroy our publications. We kept publishing. Clinton denounced us and said we were an attack on the entire “international community”. We kept publishing. I was put in prison and under house arrest. We kept publishing. We went head to head with the NSA getting Edward Snowden out of Hong Kong, we won and got him asylum. Clinton tried to destroy us and was herself destroyed. Elephants, it seems, can be brought down with string. Perhaps there are no elephants.”
I'm not arguing that all biases are equal, I'm saying nothing has zero bias. Very different statements.
As the consequence of any single narrative increases in stakes, the importance of critical thinking also increases. A politician disliking the flavor of coffee ice cream has zero consequences to me, so I won't really analyze what the meaning of that factoid is. A politician saying there's Russian influence on American policy making does have big consequences and requires a lot of analysis and attention.
On January 05 2017 03:05 LegalLord wrote: Any discussion of "fake news" should start with this rather than with an absurd story about a conspiracy theorist and a pizza slave ring.
On January 05 2017 02:26 zatic wrote: Since we are on the topic, here is a reconstruction of the Podesta hack solely based on publicly available information (regarding Trump's 14yo could have done it tweet):
What strikes me as odd is that I can't access any of the source material ("The bitly is private" and secureworks doesn't load for me; the Google cache doesn't show the images) so independent verification is hard to come by.
Anyone have better luck in that regard?
Huh. All the links and images on his twitter work for me. Weird they don't show up for you; try another browser maybe? The bitly definitely isn't private when I click on it.
The bitly API that he references that contains all the links is apparently private now (I didn't bother to check, I just take his word for it).
The secureworks page doesn't load for me. I get to it, it's a blank page. I check the source, it's nothing at all. I check isup.me and it says it's up but I get nothing from it. I check the Google cache and it gives me a page which seems to suggest what was said but the images are gone so I can't verify it. I checked on multiple devices, though I'm not really in the mood to check from multiple locations.
No such problem for you?
Loads fine for me; there's not that much interesting additional information, but the source does say the same things as the tweets.
Steve Mnuchin, Treasury Secretary, bought a struggling bank on the condition that it be bailed out in 2008. He was Trump's chief fundraiser during the campaign.
#DTS
A bank run by Steven Mnuchin, President-Elect Donald Trump’s pick to be Treasury secretary, may have engaged in “widespread misconduct” while foreclosing on homeowners, according to a leaked 2013 memo written by lawyers in the California attorney general’s office.
The memo urged top officials in then-Attorney General Kamala Harris’s office to sue OneWest Bank over the allegations, which included backdating mortgage documents to speed up foreclosures and manipulating the results of home auctions. Harris didn’t pursue the case, according to the Intercept, which published the memo on Tuesday. The memo doesn’t say Mnuchin took part in or even knew about alleged misconduct.
“The attorney general’s office made no finding of any violation and took no action against OneWest,” Tara Bradshaw, a spokeswoman for Mnuchin, said in the Intercept. She said that state attorneys general don’t have jurisdiction to investigate federally chartered banks like OneWest, according to the website.
The Senate is vetting Mnuchin and Trump’s other cabinet picks ahead of confirmation hearings. A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. partner and hedge-fund manager and Trump’s chief fundraiser during the presidential campaign, Mnuchin hasn’t previously worked in government.
EPT
