The fact that much of the writing that comes out of so-called "legit news sites" these days has become so transparently partisan and false seems like a good thing to me: it's easier for people to spot that they are being manipulated. That is, a few decades ago, highly paid reporters and politicians had months to get their stories straight and hide evidence, these days, low-paid bloggers are reduced to throwing together short hit pieces that are easy to unmask for what they are.
No, the two are not anywhere similar to each other
Hence "a different kind".
and that lie, repeated millions of times to uneducated, unthinking people, is what made this happen
It obviously pains Democrats terribly that we live in a democracy, but don't worry, they are already working on imposing Soviet-style restrictions on the political process and the media to ensure that they stay in power.
Until those are in place, however, denouncing everybody who doesn't vote for your candidate as "uneducated, unthinking" is a losing strategy.
The problem is that the major news agencies are getting more difficult to distinguish from tabloids. They fire journalists in favour of some clerk to sit around and copy/paste tweets from randoms on the internet. THAT my friend is new.
I'm not so sure that's actually new. Sure, journalists used to be able to spend more time on stories, but even decades ago, they were neither unbiased nor particularly qualified even back then.
I think the main thing that has changed is that journalists are seeing that their profession is dying, and they are trying to ally with the party that would put protectionist laws into place: legislation to prevent any company other than media companies from making political statements before elections; legislation that would give them a special status and imprimatur of truth; etc.
This has nothing to do with "the political establishment", so stop lying and saying that's all it's about.
It has everything to do with the political establishment: the Republicans failed to nominate Jeb Bush, and the Democrats succeeded at nominating Clinton but failed to get her elected.
for the first time in it's 200+ year history, the US has elected a racist, sexist, xenophobic authoritarian strongman to office
You apparently don't know much about the history of the US presidency.
And if we had elected Clinton, we would have just ended up with a different kind of "racist, sexist, xenophobic authoritarian strongman", because if you think anything Hillary Clinton says reflects what she actually believes, you haven't been paying attention. Most of America was just utterly pissed off by getting such lousy choice of candidates.
The problem isn't fake news on social media. The problem is that major news sites gave up being subtle with their bias and went on an all out attack against Trump.
It's not surprising either: media companies are bleeding money and they are getting desperate. The only way they can survive is through getting in bed with a political party and getting special legislation passed that protects them from competition. Given how progressives favor elitism and government by experts, Democrats are the natural allies of the media. That's also why media corporations favor silencing pre-election free speech by all other corporations except for themselves. It's all about money.
What do Slashdot readers think is causing what this article describes as "our epidemic of misinformation"?
Nothing is causing it. Fake news has been around forever, just look around your supermarket checkout line.
We're having a "national dialog" about this "issue" because the political establishment is pissed that their candidates didn't get elected and they are trying to figure out how to regain control of the electorate.
Then go back to Europe and find someone to vote for there
Thanks for illustrating another point: your intolerance and bigotry towards any immigrant who doesn't vote Democratic; that's also typical for Hillary and her basket of deplorables.
I don't think anyone is suggesting censoring fake news.
Germany certainly is.
But I do think organizations like Facebook, if they're going to get into the game in any way, have an obligation to fact check anything they're claiming is news.
When you say "obligation", you are being deliberately vague: if someone attacks you for your statement, you simply say you mean "moral obligation", but you're actually implying a legal obligation.
but at the moment we are literally seeing people fabricating stories out of thin air and then getting them promoted by the likes of Facebook as actual news.
Heaven forbid people share funny or sarcastic stories on Facebook! It's the end of Democracy! But Democrats and progressives want to use a "fake news" scare as an excuse to hurt people critical of them and their political positions. It's the standard m.o. of the American left: create a massive scare story and then use it to advance self-serving policies, regulations, and/or legislation that keeps them in power. It's disgusting.
And we can lose so much of what we've gained in terms of the kind of democratic freedoms and market-based economies and prosperity that we've come to take for granted.
Well, we gained those no thanks to you, Mr. Obama. In fact, you spent most of your administration attacking and slowly degrading our democratic freedoms, market economy, and prosperity. Naturally, you progress to attacking the First Amendment.
And hate speech is hate speech. Stopping people from inciting hatred, prejudices, marginalising vulnerable minorities, etc. is a reasonable requirement of any civilised society.
The British Empire and Nazi Germany were both quite civilized. Thanks, but I prefer to live in a free country, as opposed to a "civilized" country.
Along with the media reporting fake news about fake news. CBS quoting a study from Buzzfeed
The NYT, WP, NPR, etc. just don't understand that people stopped listening to them because they have about the same level of independence and veracity as the old Pravda. If you need a recent example of that, look at the fake news about Bannon's supposed antisemitism and the egg all these media sites ended up with all over their faces.
Germany's Justice Minister says he believes Facebook should be treated like a media company rather than a technology platform, suggesting he favors moves to make social media groups criminally liable for failing to remove hate speech.
It also means making Facebook criminally liable when anybody says anything disrespectful about German politicians, and that's, of course, the main reason for why he is doing this: the German powers-that-be don't like being criticized by common folks.
It isn't Eurocentric goggles, it's old-timey goggles.
It's your understanding of "conservatism" that is Eurocentric.
The Democratic Party has remained basically the same entity throughout my lifetime. The Republican party changed drastically in 1980, and has continued to change since.
If you believe that, you're either very young or not paying very much attention. Hillary Clinton's political program was radically different from that of Bill Clinton, and Sanders almost managed to get the nomination.
"Critical issue", "subtle discussion", "humans are foolish"--the usual bullshit coming from people who want to sound educated, scientific, and thoughtful, and really are none of it. Why express contempt for people like you? To communicate to you that your self-aggrandizement isn't fooling everybody.
This critical issue deserves a more subtle discussion that guesses about when humans will go extinct on earth.
It's neither "critical" nor an "issue".
But humans are foolish, so we really don't know.
What you call "foolishness" is actually human behavior and psychology that has been honed by millions of years of evolution. Evolution, you have heard of it?
Seeming ain't believing and they going to learn a lot of hard lessons very soon.
Well, whatever a Trump presidency will bring, it's the fault of ignorant voters like you, people who believe the kind of claptrap that Ann Jones and Mark Manson produce; people who think that massive crony capitalism disguised as "single payer health care" is a good idea. Who believed that pushing a homophobic, nepotistic, anti-coal and anti-mining, thoroughly unpleasant woman worth $120 million as a gay rights icon and friend of the working and middle class was a good idea. It's ignorant voters like you that are responsible for the disastrous choice of candidate of the Democrats, and that's why Trump won by default.
The rest of us made the best of it. I could not bring myself to vote for someone who for years proclaimed that "marriage was between a man and a woman". And given the post-election stupidity of Democrats, it's unlikely I'll vote Democratic again any time soon.
The revolving doors between the White House & Congress and the big lobbyists has to be removed & the way money flows to politicians has to be entirely reformed.
Well, you get right on trying to push those reforms through. And when you're done with it, then we can revisit the question of single payer health care. As long as you're pushing for single payer healthcare before such reforms are made, you're just a dirty crony capitalist out to help the pharmaceutical corporations and health care companies enrich themselves.
Their healthcare system needs some reform but if that was the system that Obamacare had imposed, it would have been much more advantageous for the USA.
Again, you are ignoring reality: the US can't even get Medicare costs down to Canadian levels. If we adopted Canada's system, our medical costs would go even higher. Instead of Obamacare, Obama should have demonstrated that he can cut Medicare costs down to Canadian levels and then Congress could have (and likely would have) extended Medicare to everybody with no problems.
I do like a lot of what Canada does.
How nice for you, but American voters obviously don't; and they seem to be a lot more in touch with reality than you are.
You wrote that Dems confused the issue by incorrectly calling Nordic nations socialist instead of social democracies,
You completely misunderstood. What I pointed out is that Norway is not a "social democracy". The term "social democracy" refers to a combination of socialism and democracy. Norway has a Social Democratic party, but it is not in power. Norway is currently governed by a coalition of Christian Democrats, conservatives, and libertarians.
Ann Jones is using the term "social democracy" incorrectly; what she is describing with that term is properly referred to as a "social welfare state", which was actually created historically as an alternative to "social democracy". Most countries in northern Europe are social welfare states.
You disregarded Jones article about Norway because you've lived in Europe?
Correct. Jones's hypothesis is "Norway is nice because it's a social democracy; we should be a social democracy too." The way to verify that statement is not to look at Norway (which is a nice country), but to look at other "social democracies". As it turns out, most of them don't function like Norway. The logical conclusion is that it is not "social democracy" that makes countries nice. (That's only one of many problems with Jones's ignorant article.)
I've said long before Obama had dented the public consciousness that America needed to get to a single-payer program. The simplest way seemed to be Medicare-for-all. But nothing is simple in The Greatest Nation in History
Medicare already is much more expensive per patient than private insurance, so putting more people on Medicare would make the problems we have worse, not better. That is, if politicians can't even control costs in the existing Medicare system, what possible reason is there to believe that they could do so if we add millions more to that system? If Medicare had price controls like European health care systems, it could already cover all Americans out of existing payments.
When you call for a "single payer system", what you are calling for is simply that even more money goes directly from tax payers to pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry and is controlled by large political donors and lobbyists. That is, you are a cheerleader for corporate interests and crony capitalism, and you don't even realize it. And what's particularly disgusting about your position is that you sully the memory of people who died from our current dysfunctional system in arguing for a system that will condemn even more people to poverty and death down the road.
Europe is a big & varied place. You don't have the sole experience of it.
No, I don't, nor have I claimed to. You first generally accused people of not having lived outside the US, and I pointed out I had. My dismantling of your references, however, wasn't based on my experience, it was based on easily verifiable facts independent of my own experience. You, on the other hand, seem to lack both experience outside the US and knowledge.
Others, like this deceased friend, not so much. What treatments she could get couldn't save her but they could bankrupt her, as dictated by the free market
The US health care system wasn't free-market pre-ACA, and it isn't free market post-ACA. The overwhelming problem with the US healthcare system is its lack of cost and price controls, whether market-based or government imposed. That will cause the US health care system to fail more and more people every year, bankrupting families and denying treatments. And the reason for that is because voters like you let themselves be manipulated into supporting programs that serve the interests of politically connected corporations and lobbyists.
A small number of greedy fucks nearly collapsed the world economy but it's all the fault of the general public who wouldn't know a CDO if they tripped over one.
And you support those "greedy fucks" and you are too ignorant to even realize it.
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that much of the writing that comes out of so-called "legit news sites" these days has become so transparently partisan and false seems like a good thing to me: it's easier for people to spot that they are being manipulated. That is, a few decades ago, highly paid reporters and politicians had months to get their stories straight and hide evidence, these days, low-paid bloggers are reduced to throwing together short hit pieces that are easy to unmask for what they are.
So? Donald Trump threatening the press in no way contradicts what I said about the Democrats.
Well, then you are living under a rock.
http://www.politico.com/story/...
https://www.hillaryclinton.com...
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the...
Hence "a different kind".
It obviously pains Democrats terribly that we live in a democracy, but don't worry, they are already working on imposing Soviet-style restrictions on the political process and the media to ensure that they stay in power.
Until those are in place, however, denouncing everybody who doesn't vote for your candidate as "uneducated, unthinking" is a losing strategy.
Please keep going! Show everybody what's behind the mask of Clinton supporters!
I'm not so sure that's actually new. Sure, journalists used to be able to spend more time on stories, but even decades ago, they were neither unbiased nor particularly qualified even back then.
I think the main thing that has changed is that journalists are seeing that their profession is dying, and they are trying to ally with the party that would put protectionist laws into place: legislation to prevent any company other than media companies from making political statements before elections; legislation that would give them a special status and imprimatur of truth; etc.
It has everything to do with the political establishment: the Republicans failed to nominate Jeb Bush, and the Democrats succeeded at nominating Clinton but failed to get her elected.
You apparently don't know much about the history of the US presidency.
And if we had elected Clinton, we would have just ended up with a different kind of "racist, sexist, xenophobic authoritarian strongman", because if you think anything Hillary Clinton says reflects what she actually believes, you haven't been paying attention. Most of America was just utterly pissed off by getting such lousy choice of candidates.
It's not surprising either: media companies are bleeding money and they are getting desperate. The only way they can survive is through getting in bed with a political party and getting special legislation passed that protects them from competition. Given how progressives favor elitism and government by experts, Democrats are the natural allies of the media. That's also why media corporations favor silencing pre-election free speech by all other corporations except for themselves. It's all about money.
Nothing is causing it. Fake news has been around forever, just look around your supermarket checkout line.
We're having a "national dialog" about this "issue" because the political establishment is pissed that their candidates didn't get elected and they are trying to figure out how to regain control of the electorate.
Thanks for illustrating another point: your intolerance and bigotry towards any immigrant who doesn't vote Democratic; that's also typical for Hillary and her basket of deplorables.
Germany certainly is.
When you say "obligation", you are being deliberately vague: if someone attacks you for your statement, you simply say you mean "moral obligation", but you're actually implying a legal obligation.
Heaven forbid people share funny or sarcastic stories on Facebook! It's the end of Democracy! But Democrats and progressives want to use a "fake news" scare as an excuse to hurt people critical of them and their political positions. It's the standard m.o. of the American left: create a massive scare story and then use it to advance self-serving policies, regulations, and/or legislation that keeps them in power. It's disgusting.
Well, we gained those no thanks to you, Mr. Obama. In fact, you spent most of your administration attacking and slowly degrading our democratic freedoms, market economy, and prosperity. Naturally, you progress to attacking the First Amendment.
The British Empire and Nazi Germany were both quite civilized. Thanks, but I prefer to live in a free country, as opposed to a "civilized" country.
The NYT, WP, NPR, etc. just don't understand that people stopped listening to them because they have about the same level of independence and veracity as the old Pravda. If you need a recent example of that, look at the fake news about Bannon's supposed antisemitism and the egg all these media sites ended up with all over their faces.
So, pretty much like Merkel herself then.
It also means making Facebook criminally liable when anybody says anything disrespectful about German politicians, and that's, of course, the main reason for why he is doing this: the German powers-that-be don't like being criticized by common folks.
It's your understanding of "conservatism" that is Eurocentric.
If you believe that, you're either very young or not paying very much attention. Hillary Clinton's political program was radically different from that of Bill Clinton, and Sanders almost managed to get the nomination.
"Critical issue", "subtle discussion", "humans are foolish"--the usual bullshit coming from people who want to sound educated, scientific, and thoughtful, and really are none of it. Why express contempt for people like you? To communicate to you that your self-aggrandizement isn't fooling everybody.
It's neither "critical" nor an "issue".
What you call "foolishness" is actually human behavior and psychology that has been honed by millions of years of evolution. Evolution, you have heard of it?
Well, whatever a Trump presidency will bring, it's the fault of ignorant voters like you, people who believe the kind of claptrap that Ann Jones and Mark Manson produce; people who think that massive crony capitalism disguised as "single payer health care" is a good idea. Who believed that pushing a homophobic, nepotistic, anti-coal and anti-mining, thoroughly unpleasant woman worth $120 million as a gay rights icon and friend of the working and middle class was a good idea. It's ignorant voters like you that are responsible for the disastrous choice of candidate of the Democrats, and that's why Trump won by default.
The rest of us made the best of it. I could not bring myself to vote for someone who for years proclaimed that "marriage was between a man and a woman". And given the post-election stupidity of Democrats, it's unlikely I'll vote Democratic again any time soon.
Well, you get right on trying to push those reforms through. And when you're done with it, then we can revisit the question of single payer health care. As long as you're pushing for single payer healthcare before such reforms are made, you're just a dirty crony capitalist out to help the pharmaceutical corporations and health care companies enrich themselves.
Again, you are ignoring reality: the US can't even get Medicare costs down to Canadian levels. If we adopted Canada's system, our medical costs would go even higher. Instead of Obamacare, Obama should have demonstrated that he can cut Medicare costs down to Canadian levels and then Congress could have (and likely would have) extended Medicare to everybody with no problems.
How nice for you, but American voters obviously don't; and they seem to be a lot more in touch with reality than you are.
Republicans aren't conservative in any sense; Republicans (like Democrats) are a coalition of different ideologies.
Geez, really, why do people have this compulsion to view everything through Eurocentric goggles?
You completely misunderstood. What I pointed out is that Norway is not a "social democracy". The term "social democracy" refers to a combination of socialism and democracy. Norway has a Social Democratic party, but it is not in power. Norway is currently governed by a coalition of Christian Democrats, conservatives, and libertarians.
Ann Jones is using the term "social democracy" incorrectly; what she is describing with that term is properly referred to as a "social welfare state", which was actually created historically as an alternative to "social democracy". Most countries in northern Europe are social welfare states.
Correct. Jones's hypothesis is "Norway is nice because it's a social democracy; we should be a social democracy too." The way to verify that statement is not to look at Norway (which is a nice country), but to look at other "social democracies". As it turns out, most of them don't function like Norway. The logical conclusion is that it is not "social democracy" that makes countries nice. (That's only one of many problems with Jones's ignorant article.)
Medicare already is much more expensive per patient than private insurance, so putting more people on Medicare would make the problems we have worse, not better. That is, if politicians can't even control costs in the existing Medicare system, what possible reason is there to believe that they could do so if we add millions more to that system? If Medicare had price controls like European health care systems, it could already cover all Americans out of existing payments.
When you call for a "single payer system", what you are calling for is simply that even more money goes directly from tax payers to pharmaceutical companies and the medical industry and is controlled by large political donors and lobbyists. That is, you are a cheerleader for corporate interests and crony capitalism, and you don't even realize it. And what's particularly disgusting about your position is that you sully the memory of people who died from our current dysfunctional system in arguing for a system that will condemn even more people to poverty and death down the road.
Yes, that's exactly what you are doing.
No, I don't, nor have I claimed to. You first generally accused people of not having lived outside the US, and I pointed out I had. My dismantling of your references, however, wasn't based on my experience, it was based on easily verifiable facts independent of my own experience. You, on the other hand, seem to lack both experience outside the US and knowledge.
The US health care system wasn't free-market pre-ACA, and it isn't free market post-ACA. The overwhelming problem with the US healthcare system is its lack of cost and price controls, whether market-based or government imposed. That will cause the US health care system to fail more and more people every year, bankrupting families and denying treatments. And the reason for that is because voters like you let themselves be manipulated into supporting programs that serve the interests of politically connected corporations and lobbyists.
And you support those "greedy fucks" and you are too ignorant to even realize it.