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Obama Warns Against Irresponsible Social Media Use (bbc.com)
In his first interview since leaving the White House in January, former President Barack Obama spoke about the dangers of irresponsible use of social media. From a report on BBC: He warned that such actions were distorting people's understanding of complex issues, and spreading misinformation. "All of us in leadership have to find ways in which we can recreate a common space on the internet," he said. The former president expressed concern about a future where facts are discarded and people only read and listen to things that reinforce their own views. "One of the dangers of the internet is that people can have entirely different realities. They can be cocooned in information that reinforces their current biases. The question has to do with how do we harness this technology in a way that allows a multiplicity of voices, allows a diversity of views, but doesn't lead to a Balkanisation of society and allows ways of finding common ground," he said.
...One of the most divisive Presidents in US history famous for his identity politics and class-warfare and attacks on political/ideological opponents using agencies of the Federal government like the IRS.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
So ... we need a president to tell us that social media is made for narcisissm and is basically a loudspeaker for idiots.
Frammin' on the jim-jam, frippin' at the krotz!
People are little more than hairless chimps: we chatter and squeal (and sometimes kill) anyone we don't recognize as part of our in-group.
We only have the intellectual capacity to identify a small number of individuals personally as part of that group; beyond that we build more ephemeral identities based on communicated reputation and shared biases to identify 'tribes' of commonality with whom we perceive a commonality of interest, at least in the categories of behavior and belief that we feel are personally important.
Outside of THAT, we simply cannot know everyone individually; we base our expectations on stereotypes. What makes those stereotypes to enduring is that they are indeed based on FACT to a greater or larger degree - there is, for example, no stereotype that Asian men have 3 heads or that Muslims breathe water: unfortunately, the building of these stereotypes is rarely today based on personal experience, but on 'shared wisdom' which is just as likely to come from CNN or Breitbart as it is from someone trustworthy.
Finally, this is coupled with a deeply-felt (but never actually proved?) faith in little-L liberal tenets of western civilization: that if we "just communicate more", if we "just understand each other better" we'll all get along better. SIMULTANEOUSLY we profess that people should be coerced as little as possible, that the ideal (in fact, the very essence of democracy) is freedom of choice for each self-aware individual.
I don't believe our ideals are reconcilable with our fundamental animal natures without large scale dictatorial reprogramming. So there's the question: do we get to be ourselves and make free choices, or shall we embark on a Great Leap Forward where a beneficent overclass tells us all how to live so we can be happy?
Frankly speaking: I think John Calhoun's experiments into mouse dystopias are far more predictive of the ultimate outcome of this experiment than some sort of idealized utopia of unicorns and rainbows where we all love each other.
-Styopa
at the Democratic party, which basically ran Romney Bot 2.0, right down the the comment attacking the electorate and having $700 million pocketed by consultants who figured they already won.
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It's difficult for me to admit, but this comment is lucid and downright Presidential compared to what comes out of the Oval Office currently.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The contrast with the current administration is so depressingly stark...
The BBC isn't biased ? Like that time one of their reporters was trying to convince a trucker that illegal immigrants ripping up his truck and trying to stow on board to illegally cross into England was "A good thing" ? That's unbiased to you ?
The whole report reeks of apologism : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5FIsmquQqA
The BBC are definately left leaning and left-biased. Open borders, Diversity before Merit, Anti-conservatism. It's the same for Canada's CBC. The bias is apparent, and if you can't see it, you need to do yourself a favor and get some deprogramming.
"Not to mention all the idiots who use words like boxen."
Anonymous Coward on Monday August 04, @06:49PM
I really do want a citation which shows that Obama took the side of black people before facts came out. If your position cannot survive requests for clarification, then it is garbage. In this case, trolling, racist garbage.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
You need to get your facts straight.
Fact: The republicans funded it first, thus making it non partisan, or maybe bipartisan
The GOP, after the primaries, stopped using Fusion GPS. The Democrats took it up with hiring Steele who worked with Russians to get the dossier that seems to be used as justification for investigating Trump by the Obama admin. Let's also not forget Bruce Ohr that was in the Mueller investigation wife Nellie Ohr worked for Fusion GPS.
We do have evidence, through this affair, that the Democrats commissioned foreign agents to work with Russian officials with intent to influence the election.
Fact: The FBI is not tainted.
There are some problems with the FBI and the many conflicts of interests that are coming out. Mueller did the right thing by demoting them and removing them from investigations but that does taint their image and reputation and more importantly their perceived impartiality.
Fact: There is no evidence that the dossier is the only evidence going after the Trump campaign. The four indictments would say otherwise.
The problem is that many of the crimes for those indictments came years before the election or after the election during the transition. The investigation has gone beyond the original scope "Russian meddling and Trump collusion". I'll wait for the closure of the investigation but as it stands now I am not impressed with the indictments nor criminal charges Mueller has.
In short Obama warned and Trump demonstrated why the warning was necessary.
The problem is that Obama and his administration were so heavily biased that his warning would have been disregarded.
Obama wasn't even far left. He was way more moderate than left.
The discussion is tainted by weak vocabulary though. There are 2 axes to talk about. Progressive/conservative and libertarian/authoritarian. The discussion only focuses on the progressive or conservative angle but never touches the more important libertarian/authoritarian axis.
Expect every comment in this thread to not touch it, either, because the level of discourse nationwide is 5th grade at best.
A quick look through your posting history tells us your opinion is _worthless_ in this regard.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"A good thing"? Where in that clip, exactly?!
That was a pretty damn good report, BTW, following the exact definition of "unbiased": presenting a very complex issue from both sides. I guess such a thing is not common in America these days.
Practice safe text!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
So he's talking about media then, not social media.
Yeah, that is bad traditional media! Bad Media! Stop it.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
So an actual ex-president is no longer relevant but yet somehow a presidential candidate who did not win and has gone off the radar is still relevant? Man you guys got some hard-on for hillary dont ya?
Social conservatives? Sure.
But those who come to the US tend not to be as crazy as US evangelicals -- I don't see a large clamor from the Mexican (or greater Latin American) community to end science-based sex education or teach creationism as science in public schools.
If social conservatism has its way, at least it will likely be more pragmatic than the brand pushed by US evangelical Christians.
Disagree.
There are also extremely red states in the US. But if GOP were forced to actually campaign in CA, maybe they'd moderate their views and CA would actually BECOME more purple and less blue.
Same with red states and Democrats. The electoral system encourages dismissal of either end of the spectrum and appealing to the crazier fringes in swing states.
...then you're one weird American. Nobody else does. But as long as we're standing on the sidelines, hands in pockets, could we ask politely for some particulars: concrete policy, enforcement, or regulatory examples, of how Obama was all specially kind to American black people?
The "identity politics" of *saying* something nice are typically used to avoid doing much, and are often seen as a bullshit gesture. Here in Canada we appointed an Inuk (Leona Aglukkaq) as a federal minister, but she eventually failed reelection, because the Conservative government she represented forced her to take unpopular positions in her far-north riding (Nunavut). Her government was happy to have her as a face popular with northern people, but didn't change any policies because of her presence in the cabinet.
Under Obama, I'm at a loss to think of a regulation that was changed, or enforced less or more, that advantaged black people. They didn't appear to get arrested any less, killed any less, their communities didn't seem to get any more money. He didn't hand out a disproportionate number of government jobs to blacks. They didn't receive any special treatment that got them out of more mortgage foreclosures than white people (Neil Barofsky was pretty plain that Obama's Tim Geither only cared about the banks, didn't help *any* foreclosure victims.)
Welfare and food stamp rules didn't change - more people *needed* them because of the giant bank collapse and 10 million tossed out of work, but most of those people were still white. This question cuts both ways: why would black people vote for him so monolithically? What the hell did he DO for them, except psychologically?
People appear, from afar, to act as if Obama offering a few, purely verbal, opinions, was some great act, when none of them actually *DID* anything. Saying that Trayvon Martin looked like him didn't change any policing rules or persecute any cops. The Henry Gates cop still has a job and is now friendly with Gates. More briefly, "nothing happened".
Curious just now for how to end this question, I tried just googling "obama divisive identity" and grabbed the top link, a full article on same by a guy who'd appeared on Hannity in 2012. It has a long bullet-point list of his Obama-is-divisive grievances: ...and I could see only two that were about concrete actions that changed government spending, my personal touchstone for words-vs-works. The other 20+ were all just things that Obama *said*.
http://www.wnd.com/2012/08/oba...
(The two were "passing ObamaCare", which he'd run upon, and something about the auto bailout, which I could have sworn was popular at the time, certainly with mostly-white auto workers.)
Honestly, if you can't find policy changes, laws, regulations that caused harm, can't you let it go about what speeches or off-the-cuff remarks he makes? They don't hurt anything.
I also raise the issue because this goes, I dunno, not just double, maybe "octuple" for Trump. He mostly *says* things that offend his opponents, but if you had two different sections of the paper, the front page for things Trump *did* and the back page for "crap the President said today", the front page would need almost no space.
I'll bite. What did Obama do that was seriously illegal?
If you're talking about Trump persecuting Obama, that's an exceedingly dangerous road to go down, especially for Trump.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Look at the comments on the crazier US conservative sites, and people are calling for prosecution of Mr. Obama and much worse. I agree that it would be a disaster.