I think I can say 'a lot' in the specific case where Trump got elected, but I'm talking about a general pattern which is hard to prove. And to which you answer missing the point in all possible manners.
a form of radical authoritarian nationalism,[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce...
I think that's an important observation. If you can't trust official sources and if you can't trust the press then what do you do? A lot of people turn to extreme populists, and Trump is one of those. Where is this going?
Bullshit.There is a whole range of statements where the relativism of opinions is real and 'fake news' is interpreted so broadly that it covers a whole range. Originally it referred to utterly baseless claims without any justification. Now it can be anything you don't like. It's mixed with conspiracy theories, anything that comes from anyone linked to anything russian, clickbait or dissenting opinions. Or anything that Propornot has listed as fake news. So in a way 'we'll first prohibit fake news and then tell you what it is'. Here is an article from a few months back about Google fighting fake news, and a socialist site seeing its traffic plummet. As well as a lot of indy sites. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
This is misguided. You're treating this as an application of a principle instead of one of traffic. The first is an on/off switch , the second is one of amounts and can be measured If you post an article and Google downranks it because its algorithms consider it bad for you, and other sites (including Twitter and Facebook) stop linking to you because that would downgrade them in Google search rankings or it could cause them to lose Google ads temporarily or permanently, and web providers only include your site in the more expensive tariffs (no net neutrality), then fewer and fewer people will find your article.
Net pseudocensorship can be put in place in an incremental manner. An important and pretty much invisible one is control: the accumulation of knowhow and infrastructure allowing government and others to intervene quickly when they see the need. You can build up that knowhow using politically correct cases. You increment it gradually and when there is a collision with powerful or loud enough interests you correct yourself. Meanwhile the threat of intervention causes everyone to adapt and avoid triggers or things that could be possible triggers. That is another aspect of control.
Once the organisations that control the major traffic get control over it they will be pressured more to do adjustments and every election will be accompanied by lobbying to get some kind of filtering through with an appearance of justifiability but with the intent of skewing the information flow. And since everything is being privatized there is a freedom to ignore the interests of the public while there is a willingness to go along with wishes of those with power.
So while you see a futile attempt, I see a dramatic and very negative evolution.
Straw man much? The guy tries to use weather events as proof for climate change. Whatever camp you're in that does seem rather eager to score points. A more conservative statistical approach should be enough.
Look who's talking. The demonstrations clearly started for economic reasons. Then they got hijacked. It's nearly over I think. All that's left is the rioters.
Yes I believe hate speech is part of the explanation of the Kristallnacht. Orders of magnitude smaller than what happened to the Jews in WW2 though. Kristallnacht also became possible because the government incited to do violent things against which other laws exist(destruction of property, looting, beating up people). If these laws had been enforced the scale would again have been an order of magnitude smaller. In a state where people are protected by rule of law the impact of hate speech can be minimized. Piling on new restrictions on speech however will come at a cost which is not understood. It will also make it very hard to express any form of anger, frustration, resistance against powers that be while they're hardly restrained by the new laws. Currently there's a large PR campaign against Russia. Do you see it breaking any hate laws? I don't.
Another note on how appropriate your example is: if the state had decided in a cool and civilized (oh well) manner that unfortunately, regretfully, in order to achieve a large german country filled with Aryans, one had to get rid of a number of people. Do you think hate would have been essential? Do you think Aktion T4 was driven by hate? I don't think it's a necessary component. The sense of superiority seems more important. You don't need to hate 'lower beings' in order to destroy them for the higher utopian goal of your mighty and pure new state. Hate is more something directed upwards
No i don't think that explains it. Government propaganda made the people tolerant of government policies, and complicit, and the state made sure to obfuscate the worst parts of those policies. But you make it all about the hate aspect of the propaganda. You can engineer the explicit hate part out of it and remain effective and meanwhile you can suppress the news getting out as hate speech because the rules usually work best for the strong party. A lot depends on balance of power. If you set up propaganda against a minority you have a different kind of problem than when it's against a majority. When a minority/weak party is being severely suppressed then hate and things resembling hate are also a pretty normal reaction.
So we need a lot of restraint when tackling hate speech. What i see however is a constant stream of new rules , against russian propaganda, against fake news, against hate speech. This is about changing power balance.
Twitter explicitly makes an exception for military or government entities in their latest set of rules. On the other hand it allows for a very broad interpretation of affililiation with violence so its potential for censorship is large.
That example is too remote for most people and it heavily underestimates how important it is and how much it applies to everyone. The article even refers to it: " a systematic error of inductive reasoning". The key concept is 'fit' and we all use it all the time. The new information has to fit with what you know already. It has to fit with the sources. If it is about people, it has to fit with the people. This is not unreasonable and it is tightly related to trust. If there are conflicts between authorities you look for minimal tension. If the NYTimes tells you something bad about a bad person, you believe it because the NYT has good reputation and the bad person bad reputation. The idea of proof is then a more advanced idea of fit: it has to fit with statements that have more solidity to them. So what does mainstream media do? it comes with a package of what to trust: reputable papers, official sources. Dissident sources should be distrusted. Never trust a mere blog. Don't trust anything our enemies say.
And what is the supposed remedy? Be critical and verify for yourself. I think that is both valid and fooling oneself. If you have an average intellect and a limited amount of time you use trust almost all of the time. You trust authoritative sources and if they show proof and you read the proof, you trust that the argument is valid wherever you have doubts. If you build up enough confidence in your own thinking you may be able to contradict an official source, but rarely by yourself alone: trust in the official media lowers and trust in other sources is raised who confirm your dissident ideas.
People like to think they are individuals who decide things for themselves. I think this is fooling oneself. It's bloody hard to get to any decent level of individuality , and starting by accepting how much we rely on other's authority is a good way forward.
Moonofalabama says yes, aggressive foreign instigation. There still is a degree of deniability, and as usual there are also valid reasons for the protests. http://www.moonofalabama.org/2...
On the one hand the mainstream will catch on quick enough: They know a news bandwagon when they see it and since Trump has joined the Iran hawks and they're going all out again to stir up conflict, so expect a lot of news from evil Iran and demonic Hezbollah. But on the other hand there is a lot of powerful opposition who think war with Iran is a bad idea and that often means the media will be conflicted as well.
I read that part of the issues are engineering questions: how hot till it buckles? The conditions aren't exactly laboratory but maybe close enough: some aspects can be argued decisively. Scientific enough for me. The science label doesn' t make any of it right and it doesn't have to apply to all of the claims.
The controlled demolition theory is commonly called a conspiracy theory. So are the people who take it serious a bunch of nuts? I doubt it very much and I am also not inclined to call it unscientific. Wrong probably, and messy (very difficult to draw conclusions) but not unscientific. Since it's so messy in practice a lot of people will not be convinced if proven wrong. The main reason for calling it a conspiracy theory is it's coupled with deep distrust of the government and this is considered unfounded.I consider that distrust well founded but I think it's a bad theory so there you go.
The requirements for a theory aren't exactly high. There are plenty theories which are not science. The science part of the theory is to what extent it can be proven wrong. If there is no clear test which could prove a theory wrong then it's not scientific. A common word for it is falsifiability. The whole debate is a bit complex especially when people discuss it on principles. My cheap version of it sidesteps the science part and replaces it by healthy science: 'In a healthy scientific endeavour you make sure bad ideas fail quickly'. Of course in that case even lack of money means you don't have a healthy scientific endeavour. A lot of High energy theoretical physics is unhealthy science because a lot of the predictions cannot be verified with any reasonable budget in a reasonable close future. But as a branch of mathematics it's ok.
So a situation where secret scheming is expected (lack of trust) you easily end up with theorie that cannot be proven wrong which makes it very easy to get stuck with them. I'm not fond of 'conspiracy nut'. As soon as there is distrust it's a hard environment to good thinking in. Maybe you can question the distrust.
This is too easy. The description 'conspiracy nut' already gives away the whole point of view.
The pattern with conspiracy nuts is that conspiracies by definition have a large component which happens in the dark and this make verification difficult. So roughly you can say conspiracy thinking is unscientific, and scientific thinking evolved to get a grip on the unreliability of convictions.
In practice this part which happens in the dark can be leaky and some things come out, but it remains a difficult area to work in and often a reasonable reply is 'I can't work with this theory, it's too unscientific'. It doesn't mean the theory is wrong but that you don't have a way to make it solid. So you get discussions about whether the details that came out are sufficiently solid. Are the science arguments about controlled demolition of the twin towers sufficiently solid?
Russiagate exists outside the realm of facts? Whichever side you pick on the Russiagate narrative there is conspiracy involved. Since conspiracy theories can cover everything where parties are scheming against others the scope of the theories can go from outrageous to credible, but scheming is part and parcel of political reality. It is true is that since conspirators are rarely conspiring openly the unverifiable bit in the dark gives a huge amount of freedom to fantasize things up. So I'd say that conspiracy theories are notoriously bad because they work in a conspiracy prone area.
Slashdot Mirror
I think I can say 'a lot' in the specific case where Trump got elected, but I'm talking about a general pattern which is hard to prove. And to which you answer missing the point in all possible manners.
a form of radical authoritarian nationalism,[1][2] characterized by dictatorial power, forcible suppression of opposition and control of industry and commerce...
If you put it like that, Soviet Russia?
How about Google just monitoring your searches for marijuana?
I think that's an important observation. If you can't trust official sources and if you can't trust the press then what do you do? A lot of people turn to extreme populists, and Trump is one of those. Where is this going?
Bullshit.There is a whole range of statements where the relativism of opinions is real and 'fake news' is interpreted so broadly that it covers a whole range. Originally it referred to utterly baseless claims without any justification. Now it can be anything you don't like. It's mixed with conspiracy theories, anything that comes from anyone linked to anything russian, clickbait or dissenting opinions. Or anything that Propornot has listed as fake news. So in a way 'we'll first prohibit fake news and then tell you what it is'.
Here is an article from a few months back about Google fighting fake news, and a socialist site seeing its traffic plummet. As well as a lot of indy sites.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
This is misguided. You're treating this as an application of a principle instead of one of traffic. The first is an on/off switch , the second is one of amounts and can be measured
If you post an article and Google downranks it because its algorithms consider it bad for you, and other sites (including Twitter and Facebook) stop linking to you because that would downgrade them in Google search rankings or it could cause them to lose Google ads temporarily or permanently, and web providers only include your site in the more expensive tariffs (no net neutrality), then fewer and fewer people will find your article.
Net pseudocensorship can be put in place in an incremental manner. An important and pretty much invisible one is control: the accumulation of knowhow and infrastructure allowing government and others to intervene quickly when they see the need. You can build up that knowhow using politically correct cases. You increment it gradually and when there is a collision with powerful or loud enough interests you correct yourself. Meanwhile the threat of intervention causes everyone to adapt and avoid triggers or things that could be possible triggers. That is another aspect of control.
Once the organisations that control the major traffic get control over it they will be pressured more to do adjustments and every election will be accompanied by lobbying to get some kind of filtering through with an appearance of justifiability but with the intent of skewing the information flow. And since everything is being privatized there is a freedom to ignore the interests of the public while there is a willingness to go along with wishes of those with power.
So while you see a futile attempt, I see a dramatic and very negative evolution.
I hear such a process is happening in Japan. Women deciding they don't need men in their lives.
I have no countermove to that! I hoped to play out my 'superscrabble' trump card but it only has 21x21 grid.
I lie awake at night worrying that a vibrator and a jar lid wrench is all you need to replace men.
Straw man much? The guy tries to use weather events as proof for climate change. Whatever camp you're in that does seem rather eager to score points. A more conservative statistical approach should be enough.
Look who's talking. The demonstrations clearly started for economic reasons. Then they got hijacked. It's nearly over I think. All that's left is the rioters.
Oh damn I'm wrong, there are enough blanks.
It's not possible. Not enough Z-tiles. Scrabble tile letter distribution is as follows:
A-9, B-2, C-2, D-4, E-12, F-2, G-3, H-2, I-9, J-1, K-1, L-4, M-2, N-6, O-8, P-2, Q-1, R-6, S-4, T-6, U-4, V-2, W-2, X-1, Y-2, Z-1 and Blanks-2.
Yes I believe hate speech is part of the explanation of the Kristallnacht. Orders of magnitude smaller than what happened to the Jews in WW2 though. Kristallnacht also became possible because the government incited to do violent things against which other laws exist(destruction of property, looting, beating up people). If these laws had been enforced the scale would again have been an order of magnitude smaller. In a state where people are protected by rule of law the impact of hate speech can be minimized. Piling on new restrictions on speech however will come at a cost which is not understood. It will also make it very hard to express any form of anger, frustration, resistance against powers that be while they're hardly restrained by the new laws. Currently there's a large PR campaign against Russia. Do you see it breaking any hate laws? I don't.
Another note on how appropriate your example is: if the state had decided in a cool and civilized (oh well) manner that unfortunately, regretfully, in order to achieve a large german country filled with Aryans, one had to get rid of a number of people. Do you think hate would have been essential? Do you think Aktion T4 was driven by hate? I don't think it's a necessary component. The sense of superiority seems more important. You don't need to hate 'lower beings' in order to destroy them for the higher utopian goal of your mighty and pure new state. Hate is more something directed upwards
Their economic policies were similar to the New Deal, and quite successful too.
No i don't think that explains it. Government propaganda made the people tolerant of government policies, and complicit, and the state made sure to obfuscate the worst parts of those policies. But you make it all about the hate aspect of the propaganda. You can engineer the explicit hate part out of it and remain effective and meanwhile you can suppress the news getting out as hate speech because the rules usually work best for the strong party. A lot depends on balance of power. If you set up propaganda against a minority you have a different kind of problem than when it's against a majority. When a minority/weak party is being severely suppressed then hate and things resembling hate are also a pretty normal reaction.
So we need a lot of restraint when tackling hate speech. What i see however is a constant stream of new rules , against russian propaganda, against fake news, against hate speech. This is about changing power balance.
Twitter explicitly makes an exception for military or government entities in their latest set of rules. On the other hand it allows for a very broad interpretation of affililiation with violence so its potential for censorship is large.
That example is too remote for most people and it heavily underestimates how important it is and how much it applies to everyone. The article even refers to it: " a systematic error of inductive reasoning". The key concept is 'fit' and we all use it all the time. The new information has to fit with what you know already. It has to fit with the sources. If it is about people, it has to fit with the people. This is not unreasonable and it is tightly related to trust. If there are conflicts between authorities you look for minimal tension.
If the NYTimes tells you something bad about a bad person, you believe it because the NYT has good reputation and the bad person bad reputation.
The idea of proof is then a more advanced idea of fit: it has to fit with statements that have more solidity to them.
So what does mainstream media do? it comes with a package of what to trust: reputable papers, official sources. Dissident sources should be distrusted. Never trust a mere blog. Don't trust anything our enemies say.
And what is the supposed remedy? Be critical and verify for yourself. I think that is both valid and fooling oneself. If you have an average intellect and a limited amount of time you use trust almost all of the time. You trust authoritative sources and if they show proof and you read the proof, you trust that the argument is valid wherever you have doubts. If you build up enough confidence in your own thinking you may be able to contradict an official source, but rarely by yourself alone: trust in the official media lowers and trust in other sources is raised who confirm your dissident ideas.
People like to think they are individuals who decide things for themselves. I think this is fooling oneself. It's bloody hard to get to any decent level of individuality , and starting by accepting how much we rely on other's authority is a good way forward.
Moonofalabama says yes, aggressive foreign instigation. There still is a degree of deniability, and as usual there are also valid reasons for the protests.
http://www.moonofalabama.org/2...
On the one hand the mainstream will catch on quick enough: They know a news bandwagon when they see it and since Trump has joined the Iran hawks and they're going all out again to stir up conflict, so expect a lot of news from evil Iran and demonic Hezbollah. But on the other hand there is a lot of powerful opposition who think war with Iran is a bad idea and that often means the media will be conflicted as well.
I read that part of the issues are engineering questions: how hot till it buckles? The conditions aren't exactly laboratory but maybe close enough: some aspects can be argued decisively. Scientific enough for me. The science label doesn' t make any of it right and it doesn't have to apply to all of the claims.
The controlled demolition theory is commonly called a conspiracy theory. So are the people who take it serious a bunch of nuts? I doubt it very much and I am also not inclined to call it unscientific. Wrong probably, and messy (very difficult to draw conclusions) but not unscientific. Since it's so messy in practice a lot of people will not be convinced if proven wrong.
The main reason for calling it a conspiracy theory is it's coupled with deep distrust of the government and this is considered unfounded.I consider that distrust well founded but I think it's a bad theory so there you go.
The requirements for a theory aren't exactly high. There are plenty theories which are not science. The science part of the theory is to what extent it can be proven wrong. If there is no clear test which could prove a theory wrong then it's not scientific. A common word for it is falsifiability. The whole debate is a bit complex especially when people discuss it on principles. My cheap version of it sidesteps the science part and replaces it by healthy science: 'In a healthy scientific endeavour you make sure bad ideas fail quickly'. Of course in that case even lack of money means you don't have a healthy scientific endeavour. A lot of High energy theoretical physics is unhealthy science because a lot of the predictions cannot be verified with any reasonable budget in a reasonable close future. But as a branch of mathematics it's ok.
So a situation where secret scheming is expected (lack of trust) you easily end up with theorie that cannot be proven wrong which makes it very easy to get stuck with them. I'm not fond of 'conspiracy nut'. As soon as there is distrust it's a hard environment to good thinking in. Maybe you can question the distrust.
This is too easy. The description 'conspiracy nut' already gives away the whole point of view.
The pattern with conspiracy nuts is that conspiracies by definition have a large component which happens in the dark and this make verification difficult. So roughly you can say conspiracy thinking is unscientific, and scientific thinking evolved to get a grip on the unreliability of convictions.
In practice this part which happens in the dark can be leaky and some things come out, but it remains a difficult area to work in and often a reasonable reply is 'I can't work with this theory, it's too unscientific'. It doesn't mean the theory is wrong but that you don't have a way to make it solid. So you get discussions about whether the details that came out are sufficiently solid. Are the science arguments about controlled demolition of the twin towers sufficiently solid?
Russiagate exists outside the realm of facts? Whichever side you pick on the Russiagate narrative there is conspiracy involved. Since conspiracy theories can cover everything where parties are scheming against others the scope of the theories can go from outrageous to credible, but scheming is part and parcel of political reality.
It is true is that since conspirators are rarely conspiring openly the unverifiable bit in the dark gives a huge amount of freedom to fantasize things up. So I'd say that conspiracy theories are notoriously bad because they work in a conspiracy prone area.