This year it is especially weird considering it is Hillary that is really making a killing from the billionaire club and massively outspending Trump too in virtually every market.
It's not “the right” but a specific subset characterized kind of fact-free propaganda and bigotry characterizing the alt-right. You can easily find people from the more intellectually-coherent portions of the right who also aren't happy with that type of attack, would prefer to be talking about actual issues, and don't appreciate being grouped in with a bunch of self-described shitposters.
If Soros was found to be funding an equivalent group – maybe PETA or one of the black bloc groups, but there's really nothing comparable in both popularity and derangement currently – you would find similar disapproval for the same reasons. We don't because he's not the monster under the bed claimed by the less factually constrained.
The fact that you don't know about something doesn't make other people "factually constrained".
>That funding comes in addition to more than $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement from top Democratic Party donor George Soros through his Open Society Foundations, as well as grant-making from the Center for American Progress.
No it isn't. The article just tries a little mental flimflam with "umbrella organizations". If you think about that for a minute it's just a no-true-Scotsman argument.
Near as I can tell, Soros founded the Open Society Foundation (OSF) in 1993, and Soros is not involved in the day to day operations. The OSF, in turn, gave a grant to BLM. The way the washtimes puts it (and Limbaugh etc.), one might think Soros himself gave money directly to BLM, but that's not the case. There is more nuance and context that is relevant, and it is a distinction with a difference.
So your contention is Soros founded OSF with a boatload of money but has no influence on where the money goes?
I can get you a bridge for cheap. One thing I've found disturbing about this election is the extent to which Democrats can stare blatant corruption in the face and not see it.
>Now, as The Daily Beast reported last week, “Black Lives Matter” is an umbrella term for a decentralized network of everything from blogs to in-person meet-ups—like movie nights or lectures—to protests to Facebook pages, making the task of pinpointing the number to $33 million impossible.
This is the only use of the word "umbrella", here. It does not describe an "umbrella organization", a master control system. It describes the absence of central organization, an anarchist model of organizing, which, by the way, has been the favored method of organizing on the left for several decades. It is pointing out that it is impossible to give a grant to a group of people who lack central organizations. Some money might have gone to groups that are working on issues that BLM activists might care about - but $33 million has not been granted to BLM activists.
If you believe otherwise, show us the list of grants.
Congratulations. That's the dumbest comment I've seen this week on the internet.
There's an 88 in my user name because once I used one of those freemail services to register for an account in a spammy website and didn't bother to change the autocomplete.
There's lots of internet posters in the world with '88' in their username, many of them also have a '14', you'll forgive me if I jumped to a conclusion based on a similarity of your posts to theirs.
astazangasta already addressed the choice of sources but there's also a problem with the way you casually equate a group you don't like with the one you're supporting:
People can legitimately have different opinions about Black Lives Matter but there's no question that it's a real political movement with leaders, stated positions, etc. with many supporters around the country. Whether or not you agree with their positions or think that they're taking the best actions, that's a very different thing from a PAC some rich guy created to spew propaganda memes online.
Wait, are you getting the idea that the Pepe meme's current usage is astroturf? Because the Pepe meme's current usage is not astroturf. Palmer Luckey is jumping on a bandwagon here, not creating one.
Not saying it's AstroTurf but rather than it contributes nothing of value to public discourse. There are no ideas, no facts, etc. – only hate.
(Again, to be clear, I'm also not saying that this is true of all right-wingers – it'd be a huge step up if, say, he'd used that money to promote libertarian ideals, given a podium to a theologian or nat-sec hawk, etc. so there'd be something to talk about and maybe learn from. This is just the intellectual equivalent of trying to live on a diet of cotton candy.)
Well, if it's intellectual content you're after, the political environment of the United States in 2016 is a bad place to look in general; rare Pepes are just the cherry on top. (Oh, I suppose Gary Johnson must have a thought or two bouncing around in that rather square head of his, but he's so completely bereft of anything resembling rhetorical skill as to be not worth voting for even to make a point - can you honestly imagine the man at a UNSC meeting, or representing our nation to others? One shudders!)
I think that writing off the Pepe meme thing as "hate" and leaving it there is convenient, comforting, superficial, and insufficient to capture the essence of the matter. Since I no longer police my acquaintances for political compatibility or spend all my time inside a filter bubble, I've had the interesting opportunity to get to know a few Pepe posters. They're remarkable people, and from what I've been able to gather, fairly typical: young enough to enjoy drama and feel it strongly in their lives, thoughtful even if they haven't had the time or the scope to develop a broad and nuanced understanding of politics and ideologies, and very angry at the progressive left in power for what they perceive, I think accurately, to be its efforts to circumscribe for ideological reasons their thoughts, beliefs, words, actions, and opportunities. Pepe posters feel such effrontery is best met with loud, brash, insulting, and unstinting defiance. I feel it's best met with calm, thoughtful, reasoned, and discursive defiance. But I can and do respect the effectiveness of what they do, and they conversely seem to find it useful having an old guy around who's read books and thought thoughts they haven't yet found time for.
It is, of course, your prerogative to respond in whatever fashion you please to this analysis. I'm not asking you to feel sympathy for Pepe posters. They wouldn't want it even if you were inclined to extend it. I'm just providing a bit of insight into why they do what they do. Whether you're interested in understanding your political opponents, or would rather simply deride them in ignorance because they do not believe or behave as you do, is entirely for you to decide.
I have no way of knowing whether they truly believe what they're saying or simply is using it as a political weapon, but that doesn't matter because in either case the correct thing to do is to reject it as unserious.
If they choose to spend their time circulating white supremacist memes, that's a shame but we don't need to censor it — only refuse to play the false equivalence game.
You can be a left-libertarian or a right-libertarian. Left vs. Right is about whether you favor the interests of the people or of the elites; a libertarian is usually someone who doesn't particularly care for a strong government. Says nothing about whether they are generally opposed to elite power.
A better model is that "left" opposes oppression and favors care, empathy and equity, while "right" opposes barbarism and favors loyalty, family and just rewards.
Most right wingers would e.g. see the dominance of left-wing thought in academia and entertainment as its own form of elite power, an unearned and unwarranted influence not based on merit, which only pays lips service to its own ideals of rationality and impartiality.
I would have said at the lowest level the left tends to prioritize equality while the right prioritizes freedom to the extent the values come into conflict.
Originally (in the French Revolution) "left" vs. "right" was about "the people" vs. "the aristocracy & the church".
At the time this put a neat division between "power" and "powerless". Then we had a century or two of democratic power being used to pillory the rich; the boundaries have become confused.
I think the useful distinction is still the same - one should always fight against power, wherever it is strongest. Sometimes, in the modern day, this means supporting government. But most often it means opposing the conjunction of state and private power, which still, as in the early days before the French Revolution, continue to travel together.
No way. Most of the tech crowd definitely tends to be technocratic socialists: they have this unflinching belief that things can be planned if you just put the smartest people in the room on it (no surprise -- people that tend to have the ideas as them).
It is no surprise that socialism is often favored by the elites and when the everyman rejects it, the elites stick their noses up and pout, "They're just too stupid to know what is in their own best interest - we should be in charge. If only they knew that!"
> Why is every article about the right so negative?
To paraphrase Noam Chomsky (IIRC) in many respects the left in the US is equivalent to the center right in most other highly developed countries. HN has an international following. Combine US-based "left" with the rest of the world and you'll have a strong leaning away from the extreme right.
Add to that, Trump comes across as technology illiterate, sometimes hostile [1], which goes against the grain of the average HN reader.
[1] “We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”
Palmer Luckey supporting one candidate is not the problem, the leftist media that seeks to financially, politically and even socially destroy and ostracise anyone not supporting their candidate is the problem.
How can anyone support that? You turn on any major news channel today and what you see is a warped world view where anyone supporting Trump is compared to a Nazi, a deplorable, a racist or a homophobe.
Even Jimmy Fallon was attacked viciously for merely having Trump on his show because this "humanised" him to his viewers. So Trump and his supporters are subhuman according to the left? Did I get this right?
No wonder that it's always been the Socialists who built Gulags and concentration camps. They just can't stop thinking in these categories of humans vs subhumans.
Look, throughout history countries took prisoners during wars, so did Britain and others, and many suffered because of that.
But to compare this to concentration camps that were literally built to exterminate whole people isn't even funny.
In fact I don't particularly like the British because of my eastern European heritage but they were always known to treat prisoners and people that lived in the colonies they captured exceptionally well and more humanely than anyone else at the time.
I read that, don't you see the difference between this and setting up camps to exterminate people? It states right there that the deaths were results of gross negligence and mismanagement and the Boers attacking the British supply lines that prevented items from reaching these camps.
There was no order from higher ups demanding to exterminate the inhabitants.
Whose history do you imagine you're reading on Wikipedia? That of the republics forced to yield their sovereignty and accept annexation as a condition of surrender, or that of a victorious empire eager to minimize its war crimes?
Why does it mean so much to you to fight this to the last ditch the way you're doing? Do you imagine that it's not possible both to acknowledge the events of history, and to find modern progressivism distasteful in the extreme? I assure you this is quite possible! I manage it every day.
In the matter under discussion, I achieve it thus: while internment camps for enemy noncombatants have existed throughout history, in the modern era the British Empire bears responsibility for codifying the concept under the name "concentration camp". But the British implementation, however horrible, at least had the excuse of being an effective weapon of war: by inflicting starvation upon the loved ones of Boer guerrillas and scorching the earth which had held their homes, Kitchener very effectively broke the back of the Boer resistance - why go on fighting when everything and everyone you're fighting for has already been destroyed?
From there, the idea made the leap to Soviet Russia, where it was implemented under the general name of "gulag". The specific mechanism by which this transfer occurred I have yet to identify, but considering how much else the Soviets learned from their American progressive sponsors in this era, I find it quite reasonable to suspect that hand at work here as well. Since the Bolsheviks fancied themselves likewise at war with anyone, in the country they stole, who was insufficiently vicious to suit them, they no doubt found it quite reasonable to deal with such people by interning them en masse. Their major innovation here, if it was theirs, was in working their internees to death, rather than waste them by mere torture, rape, and starvation.
After a few decades' fermentation in this rich and fecund environment, the horror made its way to Nazi Germany, a regime which in this fashion, as in so many others, merely mirrored the Soviet excesses against which its leaders touted their movement as the only possible defense. Like the Soviet regime, the Nazis imagined themselves at war with internal elements dedicated to the destruction of the nation and people they claimed to defend; too, in both cases, they regarded the war as one to the knife, with no quarter whatsoever permissible. The Nazi innovation lay solely in systematizing the destruction of internees for ideological reasons; while the inmates of Nazi camps might serve as forced labor for whatever period of time lay between their internment and their extermination, the regime so desired they die that no consideration - not even the possibility that, kept alive a bit longer, they might materially contribute to the regime's chance of victory in the war in which it embroiled itself - was permitted to stand in the way.
Of course, no historiography of internment camps in the modern era is complete without considering those employed by the United States to intern her Japanese citizens during the Second World War, out of fear that some among them might constitute a fifth column. Young though she be, Columbia has known a surfeit of horrors. Indeed, she has herself invented more than a few, such as the eugenic idea - beloved of progressives in the "Progressive Era", whose modern descendants receive it as part of their ideological inheritance however bitterly they protest otherwise - an idea which so readily lends itself to enormities such as those for which the Nazi regime is so rightly excoriated, not to mention such trivialities as twenty thousand or more American citizens forcibly sterilized in its name. (California in particular deserves infamy for this, although only rarely receives it. Depending on whom you ask, the practice of forcible eugenic sterilization ended in that state some time between 1963 and 1997 - and even if we follow Wikipedia in assuming the former year, that the practice continued a full generation after the Nazi horror exposed its monstrosity is itself perhaps instructive.)
Had history gone only very slightly differently from its true course, the American internment camps would ...
As far as I can see, it's both of them, just with different in- and outgroups, and different styles - Clinton is establishment all the way, and Trump is apparently making the outsider bad-boy thing work pretty well for him thus far.
I don't like either of them. But I am looking forward to the debates.
"The book's main conclusion is that the deaths of 30–60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by laissez faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments. "
Yeah sure, everything that happened in British colonies was the fault of the British Empire. Even if it was a drought or natural disaster or if the country wasn't even part of the Empire.
Let's just call it genocide because you feel like it. Legal definitions do not matter, all that matters is how you feel about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943
Approximately 3 million people died due to famine .... Although food production was higher in 1943 compared to 1941,[3] due to the British Empire taking 60% of all harvests and ordering Bengal to supply a greater proportion of the food for their army
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876–78
he death toll from this famine is estimated to be in the range of 5.5 million people. .... during the famine the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight (320,000 ton) of wheat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770
The famine is estimated to have caused the deaths of 10 million people .... The (British East India) Company had conquered the area just six years previously f... It destroyed large areas of food crops to make way for the growing of indigo plants for dye and opium poppies for the production of psychoactive drugs. It increased the tax on agricultural produce from 10% to 50%, transferring much of Bengal's wealth to the company's shareholders. The stockpiling of rice was also outlawed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orissa_famine_of_1866
In Odisha alone, at least 1 million people, a third of the population, died in 1866, and overall in the region approximately 4 to 5 million died in the two-year period ... The fact that during the Orissa famine India exported more than 200 million pounds of rice to Great Britain even while more than one million succumbed to famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_famine_of_1896–97
it is thought that in the British territory alone, between 750,000 and 1 million people died of starvation....
Although the famine in the Madras Presidency was preceded by a natural calamity in the form of a drought, it was made more acute by the government's policy of laissez faire in the trade of grain.[8] For example, two of the worst famine-afflicted areas in the Madras Presidency, the districts of Ganjam and Vizagapatam, continued to export grains throughout the famine
(and if you don't want to count famines in India, there was that famous Irish one)
Remember when memes were lauded as a part of the millennial culture? Now when they are used for something you disagree with, it's seen as 'evil', 'wrong', or 'unethical'.
The problem is that the vast majority of voters are swayed by emotion, not fact.
These sorts of things are only going to get worse, because it is the only way to get people to vote your way. Even if you have a good idea and a sound plan, you need to dress it up in emotion-laced slop to get people to come out and vote for you.
It also doesn't help that the mainstream media, which is a very powerful force in the US when it comes to politics, is biased toward the Democratic party (as seen in the recent Wikileaks emails from the DNC). It means that to counteract this, you need to try another tactic, like posting on the Internet.
Even our leaders are swayed by emotion. Both Obama and Hillary have commented prematurely on important events ('Clockboy' and various police shootings) without having professionals and science weigh in on the actual facts of the events after a real investigation.
This is one of the main problems with our society today: anti-science winning out over facts and assuming someone is guilty before even attempting to see if they are innocent.
There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist.
Social media has made it worse because instead of just having the mainstream media feed us hyperbole and rhetoric, anybody with a Twitter account can do it too.
It has now had some real-world consequences and resulted in many people getting hurt and even getting killed in riots over half-truths, hearsay, and rumors.
If you want shit posting to stop, we have to live in a society where it has to stop working so well. Maybe even holding people responsible for posting lies that lead to riots or death.
Edit: sigh. I always try to have intellectual conversations here on HN and am always disappointed. Most people here seem to just want to hear the current San Francisco narrative about the world and live only within that bubble. It's actually really sad.
> There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist.
I don't know where you read that but you really, really, really need to learn about that book before repeating it, much less complaining about the lack of intellectual conversation.
Cathy O'Neil has a Ph.D in mathematics (https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=38230), worked as a quant, and most definitely is not claiming that math is racist. Rather, she's talking about how MISUSING math – and especially machine learning – can reinforce biases which were already present or introduced by sampling error. She's actually calling for greater mathematical understanding so people keep these things in mind and avoid them:
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[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 136 ms ] threadIf Soros was found to be funding an equivalent group – maybe PETA or one of the black bloc groups, but there's really nothing comparable in both popularity and derangement currently – you would find similar disapproval for the same reasons. We don't because he's not the monster under the bed claimed by the less factually constrained.
>That funding comes in addition to more than $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement from top Democratic Party donor George Soros through his Open Society Foundations, as well as grant-making from the Center for American Progress.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/16/black-lives-...
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/19/no-george-s...
If you'd read the article you linked you'd see, after much hemming, hawing, and redefining terms they admit their own headline is wrong.
I can get you a bridge for cheap. One thing I've found disturbing about this election is the extent to which Democrats can stare blatant corruption in the face and not see it.
This is the only use of the word "umbrella", here. It does not describe an "umbrella organization", a master control system. It describes the absence of central organization, an anarchist model of organizing, which, by the way, has been the favored method of organizing on the left for several decades. It is pointing out that it is impossible to give a grant to a group of people who lack central organizations. Some money might have gone to groups that are working on issues that BLM activists might care about - but $33 million has not been granted to BLM activists.
If you believe otherwise, show us the list of grants.
There's an 88 in my user name because once I used one of those freemail services to register for an account in a spammy website and didn't bother to change the autocomplete.
People can legitimately have different opinions about Black Lives Matter but there's no question that it's a real political movement with leaders, stated positions, etc. with many supporters around the country. Whether or not you agree with their positions or think that they're taking the best actions, that's a very different thing from a PAC some rich guy created to spew propaganda memes online.
(Again, to be clear, I'm also not saying that this is true of all right-wingers – it'd be a huge step up if, say, he'd used that money to promote libertarian ideals, given a podium to a theologian or nat-sec hawk, etc. so there'd be something to talk about and maybe learn from. This is just the intellectual equivalent of trying to live on a diet of cotton candy.)
I think that writing off the Pepe meme thing as "hate" and leaving it there is convenient, comforting, superficial, and insufficient to capture the essence of the matter. Since I no longer police my acquaintances for political compatibility or spend all my time inside a filter bubble, I've had the interesting opportunity to get to know a few Pepe posters. They're remarkable people, and from what I've been able to gather, fairly typical: young enough to enjoy drama and feel it strongly in their lives, thoughtful even if they haven't had the time or the scope to develop a broad and nuanced understanding of politics and ideologies, and very angry at the progressive left in power for what they perceive, I think accurately, to be its efforts to circumscribe for ideological reasons their thoughts, beliefs, words, actions, and opportunities. Pepe posters feel such effrontery is best met with loud, brash, insulting, and unstinting defiance. I feel it's best met with calm, thoughtful, reasoned, and discursive defiance. But I can and do respect the effectiveness of what they do, and they conversely seem to find it useful having an old guy around who's read books and thought thoughts they haven't yet found time for.
It is, of course, your prerogative to respond in whatever fashion you please to this analysis. I'm not asking you to feel sympathy for Pepe posters. They wouldn't want it even if you were inclined to extend it. I'm just providing a bit of insight into why they do what they do. Whether you're interested in understanding your political opponents, or would rather simply deride them in ignorance because they do not believe or behave as you do, is entirely for you to decide.
What is your proposal on how to deal with them? Burn their books and art publicly?
If they choose to spend their time circulating white supremacist memes, that's a shame but we don't need to censor it — only refuse to play the false equivalence game.
Most right wingers would e.g. see the dominance of left-wing thought in academia and entertainment as its own form of elite power, an unearned and unwarranted influence not based on merit, which only pays lips service to its own ideals of rationality and impartiality.
At the time this put a neat division between "power" and "powerless". Then we had a century or two of democratic power being used to pillory the rich; the boundaries have become confused.
I think the useful distinction is still the same - one should always fight against power, wherever it is strongest. Sometimes, in the modern day, this means supporting government. But most often it means opposing the conjunction of state and private power, which still, as in the early days before the French Revolution, continue to travel together.
It is no surprise that socialism is often favored by the elites and when the everyman rejects it, the elites stick their noses up and pout, "They're just too stupid to know what is in their own best interest - we should be in charge. If only they knew that!"
To paraphrase Noam Chomsky (IIRC) in many respects the left in the US is equivalent to the center right in most other highly developed countries. HN has an international following. Combine US-based "left" with the rest of the world and you'll have a strong leaning away from the extreme right.
Add to that, Trump comes across as technology illiterate, sometimes hostile [1], which goes against the grain of the average HN reader.
[1] “We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”
How can anyone support that? You turn on any major news channel today and what you see is a warped world view where anyone supporting Trump is compared to a Nazi, a deplorable, a racist or a homophobe.
Even Jimmy Fallon was attacked viciously for merely having Trump on his show because this "humanised" him to his viewers. So Trump and his supporters are subhuman according to the left? Did I get this right?
No wonder that it's always been the Socialists who built Gulags and concentration camps. They just can't stop thinking in these categories of humans vs subhumans.
But to compare this to concentration camps that were literally built to exterminate whole people isn't even funny.
In fact I don't particularly like the British because of my eastern European heritage but they were always known to treat prisoners and people that lived in the colonies they captured exceptionally well and more humanely than anyone else at the time.
There was no order from higher ups demanding to exterminate the inhabitants.
In the matter under discussion, I achieve it thus: while internment camps for enemy noncombatants have existed throughout history, in the modern era the British Empire bears responsibility for codifying the concept under the name "concentration camp". But the British implementation, however horrible, at least had the excuse of being an effective weapon of war: by inflicting starvation upon the loved ones of Boer guerrillas and scorching the earth which had held their homes, Kitchener very effectively broke the back of the Boer resistance - why go on fighting when everything and everyone you're fighting for has already been destroyed?
From there, the idea made the leap to Soviet Russia, where it was implemented under the general name of "gulag". The specific mechanism by which this transfer occurred I have yet to identify, but considering how much else the Soviets learned from their American progressive sponsors in this era, I find it quite reasonable to suspect that hand at work here as well. Since the Bolsheviks fancied themselves likewise at war with anyone, in the country they stole, who was insufficiently vicious to suit them, they no doubt found it quite reasonable to deal with such people by interning them en masse. Their major innovation here, if it was theirs, was in working their internees to death, rather than waste them by mere torture, rape, and starvation.
After a few decades' fermentation in this rich and fecund environment, the horror made its way to Nazi Germany, a regime which in this fashion, as in so many others, merely mirrored the Soviet excesses against which its leaders touted their movement as the only possible defense. Like the Soviet regime, the Nazis imagined themselves at war with internal elements dedicated to the destruction of the nation and people they claimed to defend; too, in both cases, they regarded the war as one to the knife, with no quarter whatsoever permissible. The Nazi innovation lay solely in systematizing the destruction of internees for ideological reasons; while the inmates of Nazi camps might serve as forced labor for whatever period of time lay between their internment and their extermination, the regime so desired they die that no consideration - not even the possibility that, kept alive a bit longer, they might materially contribute to the regime's chance of victory in the war in which it embroiled itself - was permitted to stand in the way.
Of course, no historiography of internment camps in the modern era is complete without considering those employed by the United States to intern her Japanese citizens during the Second World War, out of fear that some among them might constitute a fifth column. Young though she be, Columbia has known a surfeit of horrors. Indeed, she has herself invented more than a few, such as the eugenic idea - beloved of progressives in the "Progressive Era", whose modern descendants receive it as part of their ideological inheritance however bitterly they protest otherwise - an idea which so readily lends itself to enormities such as those for which the Nazi regime is so rightly excoriated, not to mention such trivialities as twenty thousand or more American citizens forcibly sterilized in its name. (California in particular deserves infamy for this, although only rarely receives it. Depending on whom you ask, the practice of forcible eugenic sterilization ended in that state some time between 1963 and 1997 - and even if we follow Wikipedia in assuming the former year, that the practice continued a full generation after the Nazi horror exposed its monstrosity is itself perhaps instructive.)
Had history gone only very slightly differently from its true course, the American internment camps would ...
I don't like either of them. But I am looking forward to the debates.
"The book's main conclusion is that the deaths of 30–60 million people killed in famines all over the world during the later part of the 19th century were caused by laissez faire and Malthusian economic ideology of the colonial governments. "
Let's just call it genocide because you feel like it. Legal definitions do not matter, all that matters is how you feel about it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bengal_famine_of_1943 Approximately 3 million people died due to famine .... Although food production was higher in 1943 compared to 1941,[3] due to the British Empire taking 60% of all harvests and ordering Bengal to supply a greater proportion of the food for their army
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_of_1876–78 he death toll from this famine is estimated to be in the range of 5.5 million people. .... during the famine the viceroy, Lord Lytton, oversaw the export to England of a record 6.4 million hundredweight (320,000 ton) of wheat
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Bengal_famine_of_1770 The famine is estimated to have caused the deaths of 10 million people .... The (British East India) Company had conquered the area just six years previously f... It destroyed large areas of food crops to make way for the growing of indigo plants for dye and opium poppies for the production of psychoactive drugs. It increased the tax on agricultural produce from 10% to 50%, transferring much of Bengal's wealth to the company's shareholders. The stockpiling of rice was also outlawed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orissa_famine_of_1866 In Odisha alone, at least 1 million people, a third of the population, died in 1866, and overall in the region approximately 4 to 5 million died in the two-year period ... The fact that during the Orissa famine India exported more than 200 million pounds of rice to Great Britain even while more than one million succumbed to famine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indian_famine_of_1896–97 it is thought that in the British territory alone, between 750,000 and 1 million people died of starvation.... Although the famine in the Madras Presidency was preceded by a natural calamity in the form of a drought, it was made more acute by the government's policy of laissez faire in the trade of grain.[8] For example, two of the worst famine-afflicted areas in the Madras Presidency, the districts of Ganjam and Vizagapatam, continued to export grains throughout the famine
(and if you don't want to count famines in India, there was that famous Irish one)
Let's just call it business because you feel like it. Legal definitions do not matter, all that matters is how you feel about it.
Their FAQs page literally has filler text, and one of the four most frequently asked questions is 'how do we know this is not a money grab?'
>I have personally donated $xxx to our Booster.com fundraiser.
really? you donated xxx dollars? Who is the "I" in that sentence?
https://www.nimbleamerica.com/faqs
The problem is that the vast majority of voters are swayed by emotion, not fact.
These sorts of things are only going to get worse, because it is the only way to get people to vote your way. Even if you have a good idea and a sound plan, you need to dress it up in emotion-laced slop to get people to come out and vote for you.
It also doesn't help that the mainstream media, which is a very powerful force in the US when it comes to politics, is biased toward the Democratic party (as seen in the recent Wikileaks emails from the DNC). It means that to counteract this, you need to try another tactic, like posting on the Internet.
Even our leaders are swayed by emotion. Both Obama and Hillary have commented prematurely on important events ('Clockboy' and various police shootings) without having professionals and science weigh in on the actual facts of the events after a real investigation.
This is one of the main problems with our society today: anti-science winning out over facts and assuming someone is guilty before even attempting to see if they are innocent.
There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist.
Social media has made it worse because instead of just having the mainstream media feed us hyperbole and rhetoric, anybody with a Twitter account can do it too.
It has now had some real-world consequences and resulted in many people getting hurt and even getting killed in riots over half-truths, hearsay, and rumors.
If you want shit posting to stop, we have to live in a society where it has to stop working so well. Maybe even holding people responsible for posting lies that lead to riots or death.
Edit: sigh. I always try to have intellectual conversations here on HN and am always disappointed. Most people here seem to just want to hear the current San Francisco narrative about the world and live only within that bubble. It's actually really sad.
I don't know where you read that but you really, really, really need to learn about that book before repeating it, much less complaining about the lack of intellectual conversation.
Cathy O'Neil has a Ph.D in mathematics (https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=38230), worked as a quant, and most definitely is not claiming that math is racist. Rather, she's talking about how MISUSING math – and especially machine learning – can reinforce biases which were already present or introduced by sampling error. She's actually calling for greater mathematical understanding so people keep these things in mind and avoid them:
http://www.npr.org/2016/09/12/493654950/weapons-of-math-dest...
https://mathbabe.org/2014/08/12/weapon-of-math-destruction-r...