I'd say that post-truth is worse than lying by omission. Usually lies by omission still have a grain of truth in them. "Post-Truth" statements seem to be made up out of pure fantasy and the people repeating them don't seem to care if they are true or not, just that they sound like they might be true. Did Hillary really kill five people by hand and drink their blood? Who cares if it's true or not? If a person thinks it kind of sounds like something she might do, they will repeat it as if it were 100% proven true. Their audience will do the same and before you know it, Photoshopped images of Hillary with blood dripping down her mouth will be circulating as "proof" of the claim. Meanwhile other people who are saying "this isn't true and here's the proof" will be either ignored or shouted down as being pawns of the "liberal elite media coverup."
I see it as a double-edged sword - like pretty much any form of human communication. The upside is that you can communicate with people across vast distances instead of just the people who live near you. This can expose you to different points of view. Perhaps I'm for something since I live in Upstate New York but haven't considered the repercussions to someone living in Montana. In ages past, I would have never spoken with that person and never even considered their opinion. Now, I might see their view and reconsider my support.
The downside is that you can wind up surrounding yourself with people who agree with you. This happened on both sides of the aisle during the last election. If someone expressed support for Trump, some Hillary supporters would unfriend them. If someone supported Hillary, Trump supporters would cut them off from their stream. The end result is that you just see people supporting your candidates and causes. This leads to dismissing the other side out of hand and even exaggerating their position to an extreme. (For example, "expand background checks on guns" becomes "THEY WANT TO TAKE ALL OUR GUNS AWAY!!!!")
It should be noted that this isn't unique to social media - my father isn't on social media and surrounds himself with "news" from Fox, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc. He doesn't listen to CNN, MSNBC, etc at all - even in an effort to see how different stations spin the same news. He's in a bubble and refuses to listen to anything that originates outside of his bubble.
The other downside is that people tend to be more brash online than face-to-face. If you called someone an idiot and a traitor to their face simply for having a different political opinion, you'd risk a punch to the face. Online, though, the worst you'll get is named-called right back and blocked. What's worse is that it seems like this brazenness is leaking out into everyday society (at least for some people).
In the end, I don't think there's an easy fix. There's no way to keep the good aspects of social media (and the Internet in general) while forcing people to be civil and to not stay in bubbles. You can ask people to behave in certain manners and perhaps even encourage it in some ways, but no system will be perfect. They will all suffer from the flaws inherent in the fact that the users are human.
Honestly, this isn't a Netflix problem. If they could, I'm sure they'd just rip their DVD catalog and put it online. However, this would be massive copyright infringement and the entertainment industry would launch lawsuits immediately on a scale that would likely shut Netflix down. Instead, they need to go about this the hard way of making deals with the copyright owners and paying them for each show that they put on streaming. It's a slow process made harder by many in the entertainment industry acting as though Netflix is the enemy and streaming leads to piracy. (In reality, putting a show on Netflix makes it less likely that the title will be pirated.) Netflix only has so much money to spend on content so they need to pick and choose among what's available to them.
In short, if your favorite show/movie isn't on Netflix, the copyright owner is likely more to blame than Netflix.
Of course they will. This way the people in charge of the information gathering can ensure that the elites keep in line and keep approving more snooping powers or else all that embarrassing information might "accidentally" be revealed to the world.
The Constitution and two Supreme Court rulings. One (Texas vs Johnson) which says that flag burning is an expression of your First Amendment rights and another (Afroyim vs Rusk) that says that the government can't revoke your citizenship as punishment for a crime. (Trump mulled removing someone's citizenship as "punishment" for flag burning.) Even Scalia recognized that flag burning was covered by the First Amendment
Yes, he'll get at least one Supreme Court appointment, but - at best (for him, not us) - he'd need to have the law passed, have it immediately challenged in court, and have it work up to the Supreme Court in the hopes that it wouldn't get struck down along the way.
And sometimes it's not even the "channels" but specific shows that we are interested in. Sure, some of those shows might cluster around a specific group of channels, but it's the shows we want, not the channels they happen to air on over cable TV.
At least until Trump opens up the libel laws (or passes new ones since Federal libel laws don't exist). Then, mocking the President will simply be illegal.
If there are that many illegal immigrants voting, shouldn't we have a nationwide recount to weed them out?
(For the record, I don't think there are that many illegal immigrants voting and I'm not really in favor of the recount. If Jill Stein can fund it with donations, fine, but otherwise I don't think things were close enough. As much as I hate Trump, I've accepted that he's going to be President and I'm moving forward to help mitigate the damage I think he'll do. I just think that the argument that "we shouldn't have a recount" doesn't jive with the "millions voted illegally so Trump really won the popular vote" story - which has no actual evidence backing it.)
Pretty much anyplace you meet someone (online or offline) has the potential of the other person being a creep or a criminal. This is why you never meet the person alone and in a private area for the first time. My wife and I met online (Yahoo Chat Rooms). We spoke for a month before meeting in person, but even then, my wife and I took precautions. We met in a very public place (a busy shopping area half way between where we each lived) and we each brought people with us to help "rescue" us if the other person wasn't who they said they were online. Thankfully, it all worked out nicely that day. (Except for having to leave each other at the end of the day. We clicked so well that we didn't want to separate.) Had it turned sour, though, we would have had precautions in place to ensure our safety.
He ran Breitbart which has been known for anti-Semitic content and which claimed to be the "voice of the alt-right." The same Alt-Right which recently had a conference where they were quoting Nazi literature, saying "Heil Victory" (which translates to Sieg Heil in German), and giving the Nazi salute. Bannon also didn't want his child to go to a school because it had "too many Jews."
There are also hybrid digital-paper methods that would allow for the rapid counting of digital with the auditing that paper provides. Where I vote, we fill in circles on a Scantron form. The form is scanned, the votes added in, and the form itself goes into a locked box. The votes are tallied digitally but if a recount is needed, the original paper forms can be retrieved. I'm not saying that Scantrons are the best system, but they are better than a purely digital touchscreen system.
Sadly, I know people who voted for Trump: Among them my parents. I've learned not to discuss politics with them - especially this election cycle where they called me "brainwashed" for not only listening to FOX News/Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh/etc and for supporting Bernie Sanders (and then Hillary Clinton). My parents are Jewish (as am I) and I really want to ask them what they think of Steve Bannon's appointment but I know the response I'll get - he's fine, Trump loves the Jews, and he won't do anything to us so we should support him even if he targets other groups. It's not worth the family drama to discuss politics with them.
How would this be Clinton being a sore loser? This isn't Clinton challenging the results. This is a group telling Clinton that she should challenge the results. Now, if she takes their recommendations and challenges them, you'd be fine saying "she's just being a sore loser." Until she does, though, this is just some group saying she should take an action. Pretty much any group could do this for any reason.
All that being said, unless there is better evidence of vote tampering, I don't think she should challenge the results. When it looked like Clinton was going to win and Trump was claiming he'd challenge the election results should they not go his way, I (and many others) called him on this for undermining our democracy. If Hillary did the same thing for no good reason, I feel like the same reasoning applies. I don't like Trump and his actions/appointments so far have disgusted me, but like it or not, he's the President-Elect. If there was concrete evidence of widespread vote tampering, I'd be open to an investigation, but if it's just "our models disagreed with the vote totals" then that's not enough for me to be in favor of this action.
I'd also add, other whistle-blowers came forward before Snowden and found themselves the target of trumped up charges against them while the issues the whistle-blowers raised were swept under the rug.
The same thing can be seen in conspiracy believers. (Understandable because the whole "fake news" thing is rife with conspiracy theories.) If you tell a "Moon Landing Hoax" believer that men actually landed on the moon, they won't believe you. If you show them proof, they'll say the proof was faked by the people who run the conspiracy. If NASA came out with a "No, we really did land on the moon" statement, they would take it as further proof of the reach of the conspiracy.
When people get deep enough in the conspiracy hole, there's no way to get them out of it.
Very interesting. That's probably about as close as we could get to actually pulling someone from another time into the present day. If you remember the title, please send it to me.
I don't think evolutionary adaptations would be too apparent even in 500 years' time. Evolution (for something as big as a human) typically works on scales of many thousands of years, not hundreds.
This was one of the problems this election season: How do you falsify a lie?
Suppose Breitbart ran a story with the title "Obama calls off Trump's transition, Declares self Emperor." Now you and I might know that this is complete bull, but how do you prove it to someone who thinks it might be true? Show them the Pants On Fire rating on Politifact? "That's obviously a liberal site." Show them the New York Times or Washington Post debunking? "I don't trust the mainstream media." Show them a report on FOX News? "FOX used to be good but it's gotten taken over by liberals." (Yes, there are a group of people who think FOX News is too liberal!)
When people decide they're only going to trust news from sources that we know make up stories (and repeat stories from similar sites), how do you prove anything to be a lie?
Then you have the cultural change. Imagine being frozen in 1900 and waking up in 2016. The whole social order is different. You likely are deeply at odds with it culturally.
I've often wondered this. If you could take a random person from different eras and plunk them into the present (even allowing for some sort of "techno-magic language translation"), how would they adjust? Obviously, the further back you go, the less able they would be able to cope. Someone from 1950 would stumble but might be generally fine. Someone from 1860 would have a lot of trouble. Someone from 1060 would likely run fleeing from all of the weird things they saw. What's the furthest back you could go and still have the person relatively well-integrated into society?
My question would be more about scratches. I live in upstate NY and when we get snow, I need to take out my roof rake to get the snow off my roof. If I don't, melting snow can form ice dams which, in turn, backs up water under the shingles and into my house. Currently, my shingles aren't damaged by me dragging my roof rake across them. Would the tempered glass shingles break or scratch? If the latter, would it affect their electricity generation? These are the questions I'd need answered before I put their product on my roof.
They're not "okay", but they certainly don't warrant the amount of panic and curtailing of citizens rights that has happened in response to fear of Islamic terrorism. My original assertion was that I fear Steve Bannon more than an Islamic terrorist. I'm highly unlikely to encounter an Islamic terrorist over the next 4 years, but Steve Bannon can have Trump implement policies that will directly affect me and people I know.
So 100 attacks in the past 15 years? That's 6 or 7 attacks a year on average. Were these all successful attacks with casualties? Or were some "bunch of guys planned an attack but were stopped before they even put together a bomb"?
I looked up the numbers and found this source. According to them, there have been 180 attacks or attempted attacks since 2001. (The 9/11 attacks aren't included.) In those, 357 people have been wounded and 260 people have been killed. This is in the past 15 years, so averaging it out, about 41 people per year are injured or killed due to Islamic-based terrorism. For comparison, 40 to 50 people are killed by lightning in the US and many more get struck and survive. So you literally have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being killed/injured by an Islamic terrorist.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say that post-truth is worse than lying by omission. Usually lies by omission still have a grain of truth in them. "Post-Truth" statements seem to be made up out of pure fantasy and the people repeating them don't seem to care if they are true or not, just that they sound like they might be true. Did Hillary really kill five people by hand and drink their blood? Who cares if it's true or not? If a person thinks it kind of sounds like something she might do, they will repeat it as if it were 100% proven true. Their audience will do the same and before you know it, Photoshopped images of Hillary with blood dripping down her mouth will be circulating as "proof" of the claim. Meanwhile other people who are saying "this isn't true and here's the proof" will be either ignored or shouted down as being pawns of the "liberal elite media coverup."
I see it as a double-edged sword - like pretty much any form of human communication. The upside is that you can communicate with people across vast distances instead of just the people who live near you. This can expose you to different points of view. Perhaps I'm for something since I live in Upstate New York but haven't considered the repercussions to someone living in Montana. In ages past, I would have never spoken with that person and never even considered their opinion. Now, I might see their view and reconsider my support.
The downside is that you can wind up surrounding yourself with people who agree with you. This happened on both sides of the aisle during the last election. If someone expressed support for Trump, some Hillary supporters would unfriend them. If someone supported Hillary, Trump supporters would cut them off from their stream. The end result is that you just see people supporting your candidates and causes. This leads to dismissing the other side out of hand and even exaggerating their position to an extreme. (For example, "expand background checks on guns" becomes "THEY WANT TO TAKE ALL OUR GUNS AWAY!!!!")
It should be noted that this isn't unique to social media - my father isn't on social media and surrounds himself with "news" from Fox, Hannity, Limbaugh, etc. He doesn't listen to CNN, MSNBC, etc at all - even in an effort to see how different stations spin the same news. He's in a bubble and refuses to listen to anything that originates outside of his bubble.
The other downside is that people tend to be more brash online than face-to-face. If you called someone an idiot and a traitor to their face simply for having a different political opinion, you'd risk a punch to the face. Online, though, the worst you'll get is named-called right back and blocked. What's worse is that it seems like this brazenness is leaking out into everyday society (at least for some people).
In the end, I don't think there's an easy fix. There's no way to keep the good aspects of social media (and the Internet in general) while forcing people to be civil and to not stay in bubbles. You can ask people to behave in certain manners and perhaps even encourage it in some ways, but no system will be perfect. They will all suffer from the flaws inherent in the fact that the users are human.
Honestly, this isn't a Netflix problem. If they could, I'm sure they'd just rip their DVD catalog and put it online. However, this would be massive copyright infringement and the entertainment industry would launch lawsuits immediately on a scale that would likely shut Netflix down. Instead, they need to go about this the hard way of making deals with the copyright owners and paying them for each show that they put on streaming. It's a slow process made harder by many in the entertainment industry acting as though Netflix is the enemy and streaming leads to piracy. (In reality, putting a show on Netflix makes it less likely that the title will be pirated.) Netflix only has so much money to spend on content so they need to pick and choose among what's available to them.
In short, if your favorite show/movie isn't on Netflix, the copyright owner is likely more to blame than Netflix.
Of course they will. This way the people in charge of the information gathering can ensure that the elites keep in line and keep approving more snooping powers or else all that embarrassing information might "accidentally" be revealed to the world.
The Constitution and two Supreme Court rulings. One (Texas vs Johnson) which says that flag burning is an expression of your First Amendment rights and another (Afroyim vs Rusk) that says that the government can't revoke your citizenship as punishment for a crime. (Trump mulled removing someone's citizenship as "punishment" for flag burning.) Even Scalia recognized that flag burning was covered by the First Amendment
Yes, he'll get at least one Supreme Court appointment, but - at best (for him, not us) - he'd need to have the law passed, have it immediately challenged in court, and have it work up to the Supreme Court in the hopes that it wouldn't get struck down along the way.
And sometimes it's not even the "channels" but specific shows that we are interested in. Sure, some of those shows might cluster around a specific group of channels, but it's the shows we want, not the channels they happen to air on over cable TV.
At least until Trump opens up the libel laws (or passes new ones since Federal libel laws don't exist). Then, mocking the President will simply be illegal.
If there are that many illegal immigrants voting, shouldn't we have a nationwide recount to weed them out?
(For the record, I don't think there are that many illegal immigrants voting and I'm not really in favor of the recount. If Jill Stein can fund it with donations, fine, but otherwise I don't think things were close enough. As much as I hate Trump, I've accepted that he's going to be President and I'm moving forward to help mitigate the damage I think he'll do. I just think that the argument that "we shouldn't have a recount" doesn't jive with the "millions voted illegally so Trump really won the popular vote" story - which has no actual evidence backing it.)
Pretty much anyplace you meet someone (online or offline) has the potential of the other person being a creep or a criminal. This is why you never meet the person alone and in a private area for the first time. My wife and I met online (Yahoo Chat Rooms). We spoke for a month before meeting in person, but even then, my wife and I took precautions. We met in a very public place (a busy shopping area half way between where we each lived) and we each brought people with us to help "rescue" us if the other person wasn't who they said they were online. Thankfully, it all worked out nicely that day. (Except for having to leave each other at the end of the day. We clicked so well that we didn't want to separate.) Had it turned sour, though, we would have had precautions in place to ensure our safety.
He ran Breitbart which has been known for anti-Semitic content and which claimed to be the "voice of the alt-right." The same Alt-Right which recently had a conference where they were quoting Nazi literature, saying "Heil Victory" (which translates to Sieg Heil in German), and giving the Nazi salute. Bannon also didn't want his child to go to a school because it had "too many Jews."
There are also hybrid digital-paper methods that would allow for the rapid counting of digital with the auditing that paper provides. Where I vote, we fill in circles on a Scantron form. The form is scanned, the votes added in, and the form itself goes into a locked box. The votes are tallied digitally but if a recount is needed, the original paper forms can be retrieved. I'm not saying that Scantrons are the best system, but they are better than a purely digital touchscreen system.
Sadly, I know people who voted for Trump: Among them my parents. I've learned not to discuss politics with them - especially this election cycle where they called me "brainwashed" for not only listening to FOX News/Glenn Beck/Rush Limbaugh/etc and for supporting Bernie Sanders (and then Hillary Clinton). My parents are Jewish (as am I) and I really want to ask them what they think of Steve Bannon's appointment but I know the response I'll get - he's fine, Trump loves the Jews, and he won't do anything to us so we should support him even if he targets other groups. It's not worth the family drama to discuss politics with them.
How would this be Clinton being a sore loser? This isn't Clinton challenging the results. This is a group telling Clinton that she should challenge the results. Now, if she takes their recommendations and challenges them, you'd be fine saying "she's just being a sore loser." Until she does, though, this is just some group saying she should take an action. Pretty much any group could do this for any reason.
All that being said, unless there is better evidence of vote tampering, I don't think she should challenge the results. When it looked like Clinton was going to win and Trump was claiming he'd challenge the election results should they not go his way, I (and many others) called him on this for undermining our democracy. If Hillary did the same thing for no good reason, I feel like the same reasoning applies. I don't like Trump and his actions/appointments so far have disgusted me, but like it or not, he's the President-Elect. If there was concrete evidence of widespread vote tampering, I'd be open to an investigation, but if it's just "our models disagreed with the vote totals" then that's not enough for me to be in favor of this action.
I'd also add, other whistle-blowers came forward before Snowden and found themselves the target of trumped up charges against them while the issues the whistle-blowers raised were swept under the rug.
The same thing can be seen in conspiracy believers. (Understandable because the whole "fake news" thing is rife with conspiracy theories.) If you tell a "Moon Landing Hoax" believer that men actually landed on the moon, they won't believe you. If you show them proof, they'll say the proof was faked by the people who run the conspiracy. If NASA came out with a "No, we really did land on the moon" statement, they would take it as further proof of the reach of the conspiracy.
When people get deep enough in the conspiracy hole, there's no way to get them out of it.
Very interesting. That's probably about as close as we could get to actually pulling someone from another time into the present day. If you remember the title, please send it to me.
I don't think evolutionary adaptations would be too apparent even in 500 years' time. Evolution (for something as big as a human) typically works on scales of many thousands of years, not hundreds.
So those were state legislatures passing gun control laws, not Obama passing a federal law to ban all guns.
This was one of the problems this election season: How do you falsify a lie?
Suppose Breitbart ran a story with the title "Obama calls off Trump's transition, Declares self Emperor." Now you and I might know that this is complete bull, but how do you prove it to someone who thinks it might be true? Show them the Pants On Fire rating on Politifact? "That's obviously a liberal site." Show them the New York Times or Washington Post debunking? "I don't trust the mainstream media." Show them a report on FOX News? "FOX used to be good but it's gotten taken over by liberals." (Yes, there are a group of people who think FOX News is too liberal!)
When people decide they're only going to trust news from sources that we know make up stories (and repeat stories from similar sites), how do you prove anything to be a lie?
And thus the zombie apocalypse begun.
I've often wondered this. If you could take a random person from different eras and plunk them into the present (even allowing for some sort of "techno-magic language translation"), how would they adjust? Obviously, the further back you go, the less able they would be able to cope. Someone from 1950 would stumble but might be generally fine. Someone from 1860 would have a lot of trouble. Someone from 1060 would likely run fleeing from all of the weird things they saw. What's the furthest back you could go and still have the person relatively well-integrated into society?
My question would be more about scratches. I live in upstate NY and when we get snow, I need to take out my roof rake to get the snow off my roof. If I don't, melting snow can form ice dams which, in turn, backs up water under the shingles and into my house. Currently, my shingles aren't damaged by me dragging my roof rake across them. Would the tempered glass shingles break or scratch? If the latter, would it affect their electricity generation? These are the questions I'd need answered before I put their product on my roof.
They're not "okay", but they certainly don't warrant the amount of panic and curtailing of citizens rights that has happened in response to fear of Islamic terrorism. My original assertion was that I fear Steve Bannon more than an Islamic terrorist. I'm highly unlikely to encounter an Islamic terrorist over the next 4 years, but Steve Bannon can have Trump implement policies that will directly affect me and people I know.
Nuclear taco trucks on every street corner!
So 100 attacks in the past 15 years? That's 6 or 7 attacks a year on average. Were these all successful attacks with casualties? Or were some "bunch of guys planned an attack but were stopped before they even put together a bomb"?
I looked up the numbers and found this source. According to them, there have been 180 attacks or attempted attacks since 2001. (The 9/11 attacks aren't included.) In those, 357 people have been wounded and 260 people have been killed. This is in the past 15 years, so averaging it out, about 41 people per year are injured or killed due to Islamic-based terrorism. For comparison, 40 to 50 people are killed by lightning in the US and many more get struck and survive. So you literally have a greater chance of being struck by lightning than being killed/injured by an Islamic terrorist.