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Fake News Prompts Gunman To 'Self-Investigate' Pizza Parlor (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A rifle-wielding North Carolina man was arrested Sunday in Washington, DC for carrying his weapon into a pizzeria that sits at the center of the fake news conspiracy theory known as "Pizzagate," authorities said Monday. DC's Metropolitan Police Department said it had arrested 28-year-old Edgar Maddison Welch on allegations of assault with a dangerous weapon. "During a post arrest interview this evening, the suspect revealed that he came to the establishment to self-investigate 'Pizza Gate' (a fictitious online conspiracy theory," the agency said in a statement. "Pizzagate" concerns a baseless conspiracy theory about a secret pedophile group, the Comet Ping Pong restaurant, and Hillary Clinton's campaign chief, John Podesta. The Pizzagate conspiracy names Comet Ping Pong as the secret headquarters of a non-existent child sex-trafficking ring run by Clinton and members of her inner circle. James Alefantis, the restaurant's owner, said he has received hundreds of death threats. According to Buzzfeed, the Pizzagate theory is believed to have been fostered by a white supremacist's tweets, the 4chan message board, Reddit, Donald Trump supporters, and right-wing blogs. The day before Thanksgiving, Reddit banned a "Pizzagate" conspiracy board from the site because of a policy about posting personal information of others. Alefantis, the pizzeria's owner, told CNN, "What happened today demonstrates that promoting false and reckless conspiracy theories comes with consequences. I hope that those involved in fanning these flames will take a moment to contemplate what happened here today, and stop promoting these falsehoods right away."
The pizzagate psychos are now being told this was clearly a 'false flag' operation to cover up and discredit a world wide pedophile ring... running out of a fucking pizza place.
Jesus wept, this country is doomed.
No one on Slashdot would ever promote right wing conspiracy theories! How absurd...
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
This is fairly typical thinking from conspiracy theorists.
They are the most gullible of people and just believe any crap that is put up on the internet. They like to believe that everyone else has no idea what is going on but in reality they are just eating the shit that other people make up.
The son of Trump's likely National Security Advisor is one of those gullible simpletons
http://www.independent.co.uk/n...
Pain is merely failure leaving the body
You mean Jon Stewart the comedian? Because I don't know of any Jon Stewart the journalist...
The funny part is that the Daily show often contained more news than the actual news
And at least the Daily Show is sometimes funny. Right wing fake news is always angry. I wonder why that is?
It's interesting how much these fake news social media campaigns are drawing out the nutcases. It makes sense, social media tools are designed to reinforce one's beliefs and continuously show you things that interest you -- as well as relevant ads of course! I could definitely see a conspiracy nut get hold of an idea from Facebook or Twitter, then have it keep popping up in his feed over and over again, then have his friends repost it, then see streams of tweets reconfirming their beliefs.
Social media in this case is kind of like conservative talk radio, in that the most devout listeners to it seem to get locked into a feedback loop over certain ideas, never to change them again. Their host is angry, gets the listeners riled up and the audience feeds on the anger.
That said, this whole story is a pretty sad statement on how we treat mentally ill people these days. New York (where I live) is completing the process of shutting down almost all of their custodial-care institutions and dumping people out onto the streets. Basically, you'll need to be Hannibal Lecter to get an inpatient psych bed, so you'll likely end up in prison instead -- or if society's unlucky, you'll just sit there stewing for years until something makes you snap and shoot up a pizza place. I'm not saying we should go back to the bad old days of locking people up for depression, giving them lobotomies or abusing them...but I do think deinstitutionalization went way too far. People should be able to seek a diagnosis for mental illness without stigma, and get treatment if they need it. I'm convinced this is why we have so many mass shootings in the US. Look at Adam Lanza (the Newtown guy) -- according to all accounts, his mother basically hid his developing mental illness for years and refused to accept there was a problem. But, the sad thing is that even if she had sought help for him, she wouldn't have been able to get it.
As evidenced by this sad case (I hope the pizza shop owners sue this idiot and garnish his wages for the rest of his life), and the election, I think the case can be made that the Internet doesn't necessarily enhance society. It's an interesting turn of events, and certainly not one that I considered seriously. I had always thought that the Internet went to shit in the early-mid 90's, when the public-at-large started to use it in large numbers. I couldn't imagine how bad it would end up today, though. And, sadly, we have such a large amount of the world's population still not online, I fear that it's going to get that much worse. I'm honestly disappointed in humankind that something with so much potential as the Internet can go to such shit so quickly.
I don't respond to AC's.
He was a nutcase, just like in this instance.
Apply Occam's Razor.
One nutcase, wound up by online trolls.
Wrong indicates something done in error. Fake news implies a deliberate action to invent the false news. One is an unintnetional error. The other is a deliberate fraud.
Learn to love Alaska
Why are we calling this "fake" news instead of "incorrect news" or "wrong news" or "wacko conspiracy theory"?
Because "fake news" has a very clear meaning that should be apparent to anyone who knows what the word "fake" means. Where do you use the word "fake"? You use it in places where something that is known to be false by the originator has the appearance of truth.
That's different from "wrong" or "incorrect" because those can result from simple errors. "Fake" implies that the person who creates the "news" KNOWS it's fake.
Fake news can have lots of different motivations.
-- It can be satire or parody, like the Onion.
-- It can be produced by people who just want to make money -- as it apparently were in this past campaign by some Balkan teens (who are hawking this fake news just like people hawk fake watches or "designer" purses).
-- It can be deliberate propaganda, made up by someone with a particular perspective intended to energize (or outrage) other people with that perspective.
-- It can even be a hoax created by those who want to embarrass their opponents by getting them to "take the bait" and then reveal that it's BS all along (again, something that multiple people have admitted doing to try to sabotage the past election).
All of these things are encompassed by the clear and unambiguous word "fake," i.e., something KNOWN TO BE false that looks like the real thing.
There are lots of folks who have been reading headlines about "fake news" recently and assuming it's about something else -- e.g., partisan sites spreading biased propaganda. But that's NOT FAKE NEWS. That's opinion or biased reporting or whatever. It may have its own problems, but biasing or distorting news by selectively choosing what to report or how to report it is NOT FAKE NEWS.
Actually making something up and knowingly publishing something literally false ("Person X did Y in city Z" when you know that didn't happen) *IS* fake news.
They believed one of Trumps tweets about removing citizenship from people.
Yes it is fucking stupid to believe something Trump has written but he's getting into a position where some of the stuff he writes is going to have to be taken seriously no matter how stupid it is.
What we consider "left" is somewhere between centrist and moderate right in the rest of the first world.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
> It's not like pedophile scandals are that rare among people in power.
Uh, yes they are fucking rare.
Just because you've seen a handful of them busted on the news doesn't make it common, it just means you are yet another innumerate. How many people in power are there? Tens of thousands - celebrities, congress, their staffs, corporate officers, millionaires, etc. Add them all up and then compare them to the number of cases of pedos among them. Its no different, probably less in fact, than the ratio of pedos to non-pedos in the general population.
Its precisely your kind of stupid-ass logic, completely untethered from reality, that let idiots like the shooter convince themselves that pizzagate is real.
I'm not going to knock Jon Stewart, he did an excellent job. But he was a comedian who was less of a joke than the rest of the news. That is what our problem is.
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
fake (news show)
NOT a
(fake news) show
Big difference.
That would only be relevant if there were a 50:50 ratio of black and white people. In fact your own link doesn't suggest what you are suggesting, it instead accepts that black people are more likely to get shot by cops and blames it on them being violent criminals.
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SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
I'm a conservative and strong supporter of the 2nd amendment, but can we please let that bogus list die. It's false example
Nidal Hassan, No political registration in either Texas or his prior state of residency Virginia, because neither requires registering as a member of a particular party.
Seung-Hui Cho, resident alien with no voting rights. As such he never registered to vote, party affiliation not known.
That's just a couple examples off the top of my head. The list you pulled these from was debunked years ago. Nutjobs come from both sides of the political spectrum.
The great Hunza secret to old age turned out to be its absence of birth records. The illiterate elders didn't know how old they were, and they tended to overestimate their ages by a decade or two, as I discovered by comparing their recollections with known historical events.
Read yourself: The Optimists Are Right.
If anyone is trying to revise history, it's you.
Yes it was Reagan.
No, it wasnt a democratic congress.
No, the democrats in congress at that time could not be considered progressive (much as you like to use the word as an invective).
Deinstitutionalization began in California, just before Reagan became governor. It was a response to a set of legitimate problems, originally as a concept of trying to get patients into more local care, with less federal and state funding. But that didnt happen, patients instead began ending up on the streets or in privately run (for profit) facilities.
And then Reagan as governor continued it, expanded it, oversaw the increasing privatization of it, and got paid by the people who profited off of the privatization.
At the national level, Carter and the Congress (the one you mistakenly say was to blame...) crafted a law, just before Reagan became president, to roll back deinstitutionalization, and provide federal funding to be gin getting a handle on the growing problem.
and Reagan along with a Republican controlled Congress killed the law as soon as he became president.
From American Psychosis:
In November 1980, Republican Ronald Reagan overwhelmingly defeated Jimmy Carter, who received less than 42% of the popular vote, for president. Republicans took control of the Senate (53 to 46), the first time they had dominated either chamber since 1954. Although the House remained under Democratic control (243 to 192), their margin was actually much slimmer, because many southern “boll weevil” Democrats voted with the Republicans.
One month prior to the election, President Carter had signed the Mental Health Systems Act, which had proposed to continue the federal community mental health centers program , although with some additional state involvement. Consistent with the report of the Carter Commission, the act also included a provision for federal grants “for projects for the prevention of mental illness and the promotion of positive mental health,” an indication of how little learning had taken place among the Carter Commission members and professionals at NIMH. With President Reagan and the Republicans taking over, the Mental Health Systems Act was discarded before the ink had dried and the CMHC funds were simply block granted to the states. The CMHC program had not only died but been buried as well. An autopsy could have listed the cause of death as naiveté complicated by grandiosity.
President Reagan never understood mental illness. Like Richard Nixon, he was a product of the Southern California culture that associated psychiatry with Communism. Two months after taking office, Reagan was shot by John Hinckley, a young man with untreated schizophrenia. Two years later, Reagan called Dr. Roger Peele, then director of St. Elizabeths Hospital, where Hinckley was being treated, and tried to arrange to meet with Hinckley, so that Reagan could forgive him. Peele tactfully told the president that this was not a good idea. Reagan was also exposed to the consequences of untreated mental illness through the two sons of Roy Miller, his personal tax advisor. Both sons developed schizophrenia; one committed suicide in 1981, and the other killed his mother in 1983. Despite such personal exposure, Reagan never exhibited any interest in the need for research or better treatment for serious mental illness.
[..]
California has traditionally been on the cutting edge of American cultural developments, with Anaheim and Modesto experiencing changes before Atlanta and Moline. This was also true in the exodus of patients from state psychiatric hospitals. Beginning in the late 1950s, California became the national leader in aggressively moving patients from state hospitals to nursing homes and board-and-care homes, known in other states by names such as group homes, boarding homes
The guy who said the election was rigged won the presidency with the second-most votes.
Furthermore, I don't think we've ever a generation that was so hated by their parents, nor one that had to face roadblocks being placed in at every step of the way decades in advance.
Grandparents, not parents.
Millennials are large enough to challenge the political power of the Baby Boomers. The Boomers, having utterly dominated politics and been the focus of the vast majority of marketing for their entire lives, are not taking this transition well.
Normally each subsequent generation is larger than the previous, so the power transition is more gradual and less shocking to those being replaced. For example, GenX's political and social beliefs are between the Boomers and Millennials. But GenX is too small to displace the Boomers so the Boomers retained power.
The big gulf between the generation losing power and the generation gaining power has created a lot of acrimony, especially because the side losing power can't do anything about it. Their loss of power is as inevitable as death, mostly because death is the primary cause of it. So they rage, lash out, and abuse while they still can. But soon they won't have the influence to do so. And they know it.