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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...
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.
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