I think what makes it murky is that it was trending because people were likely mostly critically quoting Wednesdays insurrectionists, not endorsing their words.
It was more about documenting what happened a few days ago and what intentions the rioters had. That context is lacking and should have been provided by Twitter right away when making it "trending".
That's what some of the protesters were screaming. It started trending when people pointed this fact, not as a support for it, but because people were freaking out and started to document/discuss it.
I get that it was said by protesters, and that it started trending because of that.
At the end of the day the phrase “Hang Mike Pence” ended up on the trending section of Twitter. Millions of people look at this. It was removed by Twitter, and it was the right call.
Justifying calls to violence due to “missing context” is a poor argument, and now is just not the time to toy with being lax on this.
Maybe they could've called it "Don't Hang Mike Pence" to clearly differentiate between the ones who supported and the ones who don't? but then again, I'm not up to date with Twitter etiquette :)
I don't think it's smart enough. But I also personally don't really care what the Twitter algorithm boost or not.
Twitter trending topics are a terrible feature IMHO, you never know what the context is behind a keyword trending, and the majority of people using it are asking why it is trending.
Can confirm - i've retweeted some of the recent "hang mike pence" related tweets.
The great thing, that this title doesn't clarify, is that a lot of the trending tweets (at least of recent, and what i RT) are not promoting the hanging of pence, but speaking out against it and the people who say it.
I've never liked mike pence, we have opposing perspectives - but man, i have never even thought about hanging him. But these rioters, who in theory are part of his party, were there and ready to hang him because he didn't do what they wanted, just did his job. Something I have to give him credit for.
I've (anecdotally) observed this is the case with some trending topics. You'll go check out something like #BabyKillingIsGood (not real, I made this hash tag up obviously), thinking, wow that's crazy, the hashtag invokes an idea I find quite objectionable as would any reasonable person. And 99.9% of the tweets on that hash tag are, "Um, actually, killing babies is not good. #BabyKillingIsGood #DumbIdea #No #Disagree #Etc."
Yeah, got me to click. After seeing enough of that, I stopped assuming the topic indicated support (or lack of support) for the idea it conveyed. They became less interesting to me at that point.
It's kind of sad to see how these threads quickly turn into a a messy sequence of poorly reasoned arguments or how some people are trying to justify really extreme positions.
It is interesting that this comment is written in a specifically vague way so no one can tell if the "extreme position" you are talking about is hanging the sitting VP or censoring social media. Therefore lots of people are going to upvote this thinking you are on their side and it is the other side that uses "poorly reasoned arguments" to defend their "really extreme positions."
I was referring to the threats of hanging in this case. I phrased it more generally because there are many other examples from the similar threads that we've had over the past couple of days. It's astounding that I even need to clarify this.
This was my thought exactly. It's a technique that i see people like Sam Altman and other tech gurus use on twitter. Make no specific mention about who or what you're talking about, and your words can apply to everything and appeal to everyone.
I'll say my own personal quiet part out loud: Every thread on this topic has the highest upvoted chain of comments about how "Trump was bad, but i worry about the implications of banning politicians". This sole statement has been stretched to its logical limits. There's very little more to discuss about this that is interesting or new.
This would be whack-a-mole otherwise, but when I saw this trending the vast majority of the tweets were sharing videos of people chanting that slogan in the Capitol amidst the storm. By suppressing the sharing of that information people are actually less likely to be aware that's what they were chanting (I know I would be less aware because that's where I learned about it).
Now I guess there's the potential they weren't actually shouting that and it was dubbed, but it seemed credible based on many of the sources discussing it on twitter, some of whom were 1 degree separated from the source of the video.
Aside: there are so many landmines in me writing this that I don't know how to qualify my comments well enough to not be accused of something. Guess no one has to say to me "may you live in interesting times."
Is it enough for other news organizations or even more small time / personal sources to mirror the videos? Possibly something that can convey more context than 280 characters allows?
I think you're right. Getting access to this info would always be possible through other, more in-depth sources. I see this comment here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25705945, which is a good one and pre-internet was the only way these types of things would "trend" in the past (at least beyond some tiny fraction of the population).
Even in a low level sense, this is an inherent calculation to the doing of moderation. If you let a hot button issue be spoken of freely, it dominates the timeline. If you cut it out, something else becomes the topic in its place, but that can actually help with discussing the issue by forcing it to be addressed only indirectly, linked into a larger narrative, instead of with reactive side-taking.
Blocking the trend, in this instance, is different from blocking the speech.
This is a perfect example of why social media is a total disaster and no one should be trusting it for anything at all. There are many, many things that seem to be taken as fact on social media that are impossible to find on any reputable media source. Maybe the crowd was chanting hang Mike Pence, maybe not. I'll wait until a credible source reports it. The AP had reporters in the crowd (getting assaulted [1]), presumably many other organizations did as well, I expect them to report what they heard.
There are many other examples (both from this incident and others) already prevalent, including on HN, which is really depressing.
At least these you don't have to rely on a reputable source -- much of what happened in the capitol was captured on video. In some cases, it was streamed live.
You still need to take care to see the entire context of the situation -- It's still easy to be fooled by a 2 minute clip but it's much harder with a 20 minute or hour long clip.
I'm not really sure how a longer clip or even a live stream is as reliable as a reputable source + those things. They can both be easily dubbed over and manipulated as well. I don't think it will be long before this is happening regularly.
If a reporter and publication release the evidence and also stand by it's authenticity, that definitely lends more credence and at least allow you to filter where information is coming from by reliability.
These people are a lost cause. There was a vicious attack on an unassuming black woman in LA yesterday where more than 20 trump supporters held her down and punched and maced her. These people are terrorists and should be dealt with accordingly.
So? Just because a few people did something unacceptable doesn't all of them are like this. A while back a child got killed named Cannon Hinnant by a black person for no reason does that mean we should label all blacks as a terrorist?
When people use violence in the name of a cause then i think the cap fits.
Also i think you’re making a false equivalence here. There is a not insignificant fraction of them willing to be violent because because they either don’t (or don’t want to) understand how democracy works.
I think it’s fine to lump those people together as domestic terrorists.
>I think it’s fine to lump those people together as domestic terrorists.
You can do that, but after many people in power and including in this site supported BLM riots earlier this year this rings hollow. It's clear most people don't care about violence being a limit given that violence was used tremendously throughout the entire year in all those protests and supporting them was the trendy position among the elites, that now suddenly decided violence must be opposed at all costs and those who support it must be terrorists. Give me a break.
Call it for what it is, when one side uses violence it's good, when the other uses it it's bad, because this is a battle, and in a battle all that matters is punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. I'm glad that this is becoming more and more clear as time passes and all pretense of principles is being dropped, and anyone with any sense can see that this is true.
BLM Didn't use violence to achieve their goals. Quite the opposite they were consistently attacked by police dressed up like the army, heaving people off the streets.
Where were the police in DC?
This wasn’t a protest it was a violent attempt to overthrow.
I don't know how you can reconcile cities being burned, statues toppled, police stations being overtaken, parts of a city being declared an autonomous zone with "violence wasn't used" but whatever, discussion is clearly pointless.
I will re-state my claim: this is a battle, and in a battle all that matters is punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. When you defend the BLM riots yet condemn this one you're engaging in that behavior. You can disagree with me all you want but that's the truth to anyone who has any sense.
Perhaps saying there was no violence is overstating it but it was a very different scale with very different intent abhorrent in either case.
People are undoubtedly angry because they are seeking to be treated equally. To not be murdered by the police. There’s still such an astonishing amount of injustice and yet they didn’t try to overthrow the government.
The crux of my argument is that these two groups are not comparable. One seeks equality and the other seeks to go against democracy and attempt a coup. This is what i mean by false equivalence.
What's gross is people defending the burning down of small businesses during a pandemic.
Either way, reasonable people who don't defend violence in either case are irrelevant, because things happen through violence regardless. What are you going to do about it when a horde of BLM rioters comes for your business and burns it down? Have a peaceful conversation with them about how much you don't think violence will solve the problem? No, you either have a gun or you don't.
People supported BLM -protests-, not riots. The media has worked very hard to conflate the two. Nobody wants our cities to be destroyed. That was also general rioting, not people specifically targeting the U.S. Capitol building and going after the politicians inside in order to interfere with the election process. It's not really comparable unless you omit all context.
President Trump supported the Capitol -protests-, not the invasaion. The media has worked very hard to conflate the two. Nobody wants our institutional buildings to be invaded. That was also a general and very peaceful invasion, not people specifically targeting small businesses during a pandemic and burning them down for no reason other than because they can. It's not really comparable unless you omit all context.
I see a of comments like this expressing frustration, but find them confusing. They are framed as an opinion or position, but don't contain any real substance.
Who exactly are these people?
What exactly do you mean by "to be a "lost cause"?
Sometimes I wonder if most or all of the problems with major social media sites come from trending pages and private groups. The concept of keeping up with people online isn't a bad one, but so many of the bad stories wouldn't be so terrible if they weren't amplified by trending pages or huge private groups. Trending pages most consistently, in my opinion.
Depends very much where in the US. And to some extend how you look, how you talk and what your gender is. The overwhelmingly large majority to places is safe. But every large enough city has unsavory places that need at least being aware of what (not) to do. But that is similar in a lot of countries.
As someone who has lived here my entire life I'm not sure how the next month is going to unfold.
Historically though the United States has crime issues, a few of the most dangerous cities in the world (not in a war zone) are in the US (St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit).
You probably can't get a VISA. Trump really turned the screws to the # of available ones, only 85K H1B last year (200,000 people applied). Might want to wait a year for Biden to fix that.
Of course it is, don’t trade the headlines. But it’s important to know your experience in the US will vary dramatically based on economic status.
If you’re high income/above-average educated (which you pretty much have to be to immigrate to the US due to the overly strict/broken immigration system), there’s no better place to be. You will be able to reach the absolute peak of your potential here. 10/10, would immigrate again.
If you’re middle of the road on income/education, you’d be better off in other developed countries that have robust socialized services (healthcare, pension, free education, etc) like the Nordics. Most developed countries have a better lifestyle for the average person.
If you’re below average on income/education, the US is the worst of the developed countries to live in. I’d stay far away.
I live in Pittsburgh, and we recently had the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting.
There were also people being threatened along the route of a Black Lives Matter protest, who just happened to be there and did not join in enthusiastically enough, in the eyes of the marching protesters. No one was injured, but from the videos it seemed very close to getting out of hand. (Marchers coming off the street to verbally accost people sitting outside at a restaurant, grabbing drinks off their tables. Marching into a McDonalds and verbally harassing the manager...about something.)
And of course police going off on protesters, looking for excuses to escalate the use of force.
And with police reluctant to engage in communities where they are...unpopular...(with reason), murder rates are at their highest rates in years in many cities.
And now the unprecedented attack on the capitol.
I feel like I will get responses saying I am understating or overstating the violence from "one side" or the other. But my point is no one can deny the amount of violence is rapidly increasing, and no one really knows if it will get a lot worse before it gets better.
I wouldn't recommend anyone coming to the US right now, without a good reason.
Those are certainly some scary anecdotes you have, but the stats don’t support them. Things just seem worse because the media (and social media) likes to make a political spectacle out of everything to drive engagement. Shootings are no longer murders, they are events to argue over gun control. Terrorist attacks are no longer about the attacks, they are used to argue about encryption, the free flow of information, and censorship.
These events just seem more frequent because rather than being a one day headline they get talked about ad nauseam for weeks.
It seems you spend a lot of time watching sensational news media and not a lot of time looking at actual data (don’t feel bad, it’s a trap I’ve fallen into before).
Yes, it’s super safe. The news is playing a game of reality TV trying to control narrative in a big political struggle.
This has literally no impact on the day-to-day lives of people around the country. Even when the BLM protests were in full force, you had to go to specific downtown areas of large cities to see anything.
The only thing that happened to real people this year is covid, and that does suck. The vaccine should help though.
Do not throw away your future plans based on this drama.
I doubt you can get a visa just because you want to work here. You need to be invited by a firm like google and even then, your chances are like 20%. Or you can be an exceptional scientist of some sort. Or you can be just rich and invest a million into usa. In either case, your social class will be too high to worry about personal safety.
Why would a Trump supporter want to “hang Mike Pence” when he has been loyal to him for 4 years and just did his constitutional duty on the 6th ? I am lost for words
One man's "just did his constitutional duty" is another man's "completed a stolen, fraudulent election".
I'm in the first camp, but the fact that an entire news/social media ecosystem is promoting the latter interpretation is a problem I have no idea how to solve.
It's the same old extremist playbook that's been in operation in American politics since at least 2001. You're either with us or against us, no room for debate, our way or the highway, literal saint or literal demon. Then turn around and claim that your opponents don't want to hear you out or compromise, because to you compromise means getting everything you want.
There is "us", and there is "them". If you are not a part of "us" then you are an enemy. Some of the most dangerous enemies are people who previously appeared to be part of "us", but have now betrayed our cause.
The extreme supporters are some of the people believing that the election was rigged, despite the inability to provide information that can convince an unbiased court.
If we extrapolate on this, can't we conclude/believe that some people who feel the system is betraying them, would see Mike Pence as conspiring with those stealing the elections?
Do some of those people value "constitutional duty" right now? If they did, they wouldn't have stormed the Capitol.
It's hard to understand people when there's a certain amount of conspiracy theories influencing their emotions.
It's unfortunately one of the problems with politics. A bunch of people who make laws that mostly don't get to apply to them, get to say what they want, with little or no accountability.
Trump convinced them Pence had the power to unilaterally overthrow the election and make Trump President for a second term, so they are upset with Pence for not doing that.
That's why. They've been told the election has been stolen and (the classic cult move) that anyone who disagrees with that is a traitor out to get them.
They're Trump supporters. Not broad Republican supporters. It's a personal loyalty cult.
On a good day like a third of twitter's trending topics are people saying "I can't believe this is a trending topic".
Irrespective of that there's a certain authority imbued with words listed in a trending topics section, whether or not the user clicks on them. Since trending topics lack context, there's a literalism to them that can distort meaning.
As much of this was about a reaction to the video rather than a literal interpretation, it would probably be best to reword it with more context or make it a news item, if it's to remain up at all.
If that was about reporting what happened at the Capitol I don't think it should've been removed. But if people was asking in Twitter for Pence to be hanged, then yes.
We shouldn't treat the same way reporting violence than violence itself.
I don't think I agree. Me tweeting "it's bad to say 'hang mike pence'" is still letting the concept of Mike Pence being hanged propagate. I mean, we're talking about it right now on Hacker News, even!
Toxic ideas are like a virus, and even well-meaning opposition can serve as a host, allowing them to spread rapidly rather than die out.
True. Not a great example, but "don't think of an elephant" is a good example of this effect, where someone who otherwise wasn't thinking of elephants, starts thinking of one.
The context of the discussion becomes less relevant if only the phrase trends. The seed gets sown in the mind.
Well, the government doesn't have any say in Twitter trends, so it's hard to argue this is what an "authoritarian state" does. It's a private company that would prefer its product isn't used in the murder of a politician.
I don't have an answer, and I don't think there is one. I do, however, wish there was more scrutiny of the people spreading the message (aka the president of the united states) than companies trying to navigate this really tough balance.
I don't think it's hard to argue that. When countries like China censor, what they do is make companies delete anything they don't like. Now it is the company directly who decides to censor which in my opinion is worse.
Why worse? Because you don't get to elect those who run the company. In a democracy you have the chance to change the government but that can't be done with a private company. Now, when you have a few companies that control most of the communication channels and they can censor indiscriminately anyone who they don't like, you're absolutely doomed.
So you'd rather the current government make this decision? You know, the government run by a president who directly incited all this "hang mike pence" stuff, right from Twitter itself?
While the rioting was happening, the president tweeted "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!" And his lawyer tweeted "[Pence] will face execution by firing squad. He is a coward & will sing like a bird & confess ALL."
I'm not sure if those are the people we want making these decisions.
Like I said, I don't like any of this. I want to live in a world where we don't have to decide between the government and large companies, neither of which I particularly like. But alas, here we are... and currently, Twitter is the one on the side of "not lynching the VP", so I guess I'm on their side.
You're completely missing my point. Of course anyone with more than 2 neurons is on the side of "not lynching the VP". My point was that a company like Twitter should not censor people talking about the fact that rioters chanted "hang mike pence".
You can't say a company removing content is something China would do. It's the opposite. In an authoritarian regime, Twitter would be forced to be in lock step with the government, and the opposite is happening now. Think of it as checks and balances.
I'm glad they halted that. But it reduces the common area we can even discuss anything going on this week in politics.
Taking a step back...
We've got these two sides. Regardless of the merits, each side believes they know the truth, and that the other side is delusional. And it is easy enough to engage with your media outlets of choice, and get your beliefs reinforced.
How can we have a meaningful discussion as a nation, when there is no apparent common ground? No set of agreed-upon facts?
Now I of course have my own very strong opinions and I'm sure I have a good comprehension of the truth. But that isn't going to convince anyone on the other side anymore. To people on one side, the other side's minds appear to be just poisoned.
A common tactic to try to get through to the other side is to just yell louder. But that isn't working.
Almost everyone (including really terrible people) don't want people killed. That is why it is often necessary to de-humanize the enemy. We give them labels, make them not worthy of the protections of civil society, and then it is justified if they die. Because they are not people anymore.
That's not quite it either, the truth is actually worse.
We know the other side are people, the fact that we insult them acknowledges that. Think of hitler youth forcing a rabbi to scrub the pavement on their hands and knees. The cruelty is intentional, not based on seeing them as less than human.
That’s just not true. We have nearly an entire human history to prove otherwise. The only reason why we stopped killing each other is due to nuclear bombs.
I think your comment is being misunderstood. I interpreted it to mean that most people don't naturally have the capacity to kill others who they identify as equals, and that's why many extremist groups take steps to other their targets.
I get the sense that people are reading it to mean that the rioters at the capital hadn't been radicalized like this. Or that dehumanizing people in that way is somehow okay. Perhaps you can clarify.
I tend to believe that, thankfully, most people don't have the capacity for extreme violence at a moment's notice. It takes intense conditioning. The US military started to emphasize this [1](paywalled) after it was discovered that even during combat, while people were shooting at them, most soldiers didn't try to kill their enemy or even fire their weapon [2].
So it seems like the highest priority is to re-humanize the "normies" and "communist antifa spies" or whatever nonsense phrase these extremists are using. I have *absolutely* no idea how to do that, but it must be done.
You say nothing. You just be happy they are stupid enough to say it in public and see if they end up on LEO radar. I am sure threatening VP is treated with same severity as threatening P.
Street Epistemology is the kind of thing I think can ultimately be successful. Instead of yelling at people or telling them their wrong and you're right, discuss with them how and why they come to their beliefs in a non-confrontational way. The hopeful result is that you both come away thinking about how better to examine what you believe.
What is the two sides exactly? There is a group that has produced no evidence for their claims and is threatening and acting out violence - is that one of the sides?
There is a point in which a particular group is no longer acting in good faith, and is taking advantage of the tolerance and ability to have discourse.
Yeah, I finally had to stop having discussions with MAGA family members because the complete lack of good faith. Because they are family, I would listen and then spend time reading their sources and gathering facts and information to have a real discussion around, and as soon as their beliefs in a topic were challenged they would fall back to 'what about Hilary's emails' or Hunters laptop. It just became pointless to have a discussion.
It's cult like. I can't imagine supporting any side or politician like these people do.
Side a: 2016 US election was stolen. 2020 was fair and square.
Side b: 2020 US election was stolen. 2016 election was fair and square.
Seems that there are a small number of people who think a) both elections were stolen or b) both elections were fair and square. They are being drowned out by sides a and b.
If you fit side a or b above, you might want to some logical thinking. Pretty simple to see the two sides are simply opposite sides of the same coin, both deeped in hypocrisy.
2016 also had open violent attacks on democratic process to certify president election, remember? Riots, destruction of property in November and December 2016? Calls for electoral college voters to switch their votes. Ring a bell?
You have to pay more attention to what both sides were arguing.
In 2016, side A was arguing that the inputs to the election (voter opinions) were manipulated by foreign agents. This claim was 100% proven true by the Mueller report. Whether this actually changed the results of the election is impossible to say (I am of the opinion it was Comey's announcement 11 days before the election which tipped a close election toward Trump). But an effort was made, and that effort was for the benefit of the Trump campaign, and was explicitly supported by the Trump campaign. See: Mueller report Vol I, or Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election (5 volumes).
In 2020, side B was (and still is) arguing that the output of the election (the actual vote total) was changed. This has been shown to be false by repeated recounts, audits, investigations, court cases, etc.
If you think these two scenarios are identical, look a little closer.
Hilary Clinton used the term "stolen election" throughout the last four years, including 2020. That's not an input, it's an output. People - including the media - called Trump an illegitimate President for 4 years. That's not an input, it's an output. Perhaps you should be the one paying more attention instead of getting defensive when your hypocrisy is exposed.
You can try to spin it or rationalize it all you want, both sides are behaving the same.
Literally only one side stormed the capitol during a joint session of congress in an attempt to overthrow the election, so "behaving the same" is stretched pretty far here. By pretending both sides are the same, it would appear you are the one spinning and rationalizing.
I mean, let's not forget that Donald Trump of all people called into question the results of his own win in 2016 by claiming that 3 million people voted illegally, and that people were being bussed to New Hampshire to vote against him. He even formed a commission to investigate this "fraud"! So any impressions that the vote was illegitimate were flamed by the winner himself!
> We've got these two sides. Regardless of the merits, each side believes they know the truth, and that the other side is delusional.
You're partially right. We have at least two sides. One side is CLEARLY delusional. Fueled by conspiracy theories and lies. We also have other sides, but the two sides that get the most attention are the only sides that matter. We have one side that is most definitely delusional, other sides maybe have members who might be, but one side is DOMINATED by delusion.
Having an opinion you strongly believe in is not enough to make it true or right.
The republicans have espoused a dangerous ideology that not just allows but welcomes factual untruths and a worrying disconnect from rational thought.
There is a need for political parties of various philosophical bents to push and pull in different directions based on reasoned and informed decisions.
Once you give up that core grounding you basically invite fanatism and I don’t see what possible positive outcome we can expect from this.
> Having an opinion you strongly believe in is not enough to make it true or right.
Of course it isn't enough. That's why the media outlets in question will make up facts, or really slant things to appear to carry sufficient factual weight, and then the reasoning from there comes out to the desired conclusion. Not that there is usually much reasoning going on, it is mostly emotional arguments.
> The republicans have espoused a dangerous ideology that not just allows but welcomes factual untruths and a worrying disconnect from rational thought.
Only if you truely believe in the delusion. I don't think most of the fascist rioters truely believe there was any election fraud. I think they needed a public rationalization in order to radicalize tacit sympathizers. Being delusional is more social acceptable and less alarming than being an out and out violent racist insurrectionist.
That's likely true for some. But many people do belive there was fraud. I think there were some very suspect things about the election. But I read Article II, and the 12th amendment. The congress is directed to count the Electoral votes submitted by the states. It's basically ceremonial, unless there is no majority in the Electoral vote. There is a process defined for that situation. There is not a word about challenging the votes as submitted. Mike Pence was absolutely right.
There may or may not have been fraud in any of the states. But once they certify their Electors, that's it as far as I can see. I honestly don't know if there is a remedy even for clear fraud if the state goes ahead and certifies the results. In theory a state doesn't even need to hold a public vote. The legislature could just appoint the Electors. The founding fathers clearly wrote the constition to give the power of electing the president to the states. Allowing any level of the federal government to override that seems to be a conflict of interest.
Many of the hard-core sympathizers haven't heard anything else than all the allegations of fraud and stealing. This works when the psychopath in chief commit these crimes himself, and then projects it to the next unsuspecting victim. Thus the feelings are real, but the real fraud is the criminal cult leaders. Since people believe feelings, or feel to validate thoughts, this works all too well!
While I have no way of knowing if that's true, it's not too hard to take a few flaws in how our perception works[0] and a starting point to get to believing in widespread election fraud.
1. I'm a Republican because of policy X.
2. I'm a person that thinks carefully about facts and reason.
3. Trump is the Republican candidate -> President.
4. I voted for the Republican. I must have done that because of #2 (and not just #1.)
5. Trump speaks the truth - he speaks for the people, people like me.
6. Trump believes election fraud is a problem. Combine #4 and #2 and the linked perceptual flaws of selective focus, imagining that election fraud could happen, allowing myths/stories to guide my responses to the things I read... plus I'm carefully thinking about facts and reason, and I voted for Trump, and most of the people in my social network also voted for Trump... it must be the plurality of the nation. My peers are also carefully thinking about facts and reason, and I'm sure the news networks I follow do as well...
This is super simplified and skipping about a thousand steps, and yet, it's really not hard to see almost anyone getting somewhere they never thought they'd end up after years of reading and listening to mostly facts that agree with what Trump tells his believers.
That's probably easier to believe happened than "I want to be an extremist and I want to violently attack Congress when they attempt to certify an election, even though it was a legitimate election."
> One side is CLEARLY delusional. Fueled by conspiracy theories and lies.
Which set of conspiracy theories? The crazy ones that Trump was a Russian asset and everything surrounding that nutbaggery for four years?
How about the current nutbaggery from the other extreme that this election was stollen through voting machine manipulation, ballot stuffing, discarded Trump ballots by postal workers, etc.
It's hard for me to get upset at either side when it all looks so insane.
It's plain Trump admires Putin, and even fell in love with Kim Il-Sung. You can't box in that person as a normal human being, but have to see past the appearances what he truly aspires too. More and more people realize this now, but many of us have revealed this for many years already. Especially past victims will tell you horror-stories. What happened now was to be expected, and worse.
We'll call it nutbaggery as soon as you explain why Trump's campaign manager was caught funneling internal campaign data to a Russian intel officer during the 2016 election [1], while they were busy hacking Trump's opponent's party, and sending spies to meet with Trump's son and son in law at Trump's house (meeting which they welcomed enthusiastically, they lied about, and did not report to the FBI) [2].
[1]: Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, Volume V.
[2]: Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I.
> The Senate Intelligence Committee assessed that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's "high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services" was a "grave counterintelligence threat".[15] The foremost individual was Manafort's employee Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian.[15] The committee identified Kilimnik as a "Russian intelligence officer"; describing that Manafort and Kilimnik had a "close and lasting relationship" even through the 2016 election.[18] Manafort repeatedly tried to "secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik", including "sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy".[18]
> The Senate Intelligence Committee introduced a new allegation regarding Kilimnik, that he "may have been connected" to the Russian military intelligence's hack and leak of Democratic Party material. However, the report's discussions on this topic are redacted.[19] Manafort's connection with the Russian hack and leak operation is "largely unknown", but possible, given "two pieces of information" the committee found; the details of such information were also redacted.[18]
I'm sorry but just because a small vocal and extreme part of the conservative party has chosen to buy into conspiracy theories does not mean the entire side has. I know many conservatives who have not gone down this path and hate what DJT has done to the party.
Calling a huge portion of the country delusional with no basis or fact is precisely what is driving this division. Both sides have a lot more in common than you might imagine. Far more than what they disagree on.
It would help if compromises would be made in order to further progression of society. Politically, you have to root out the circus part of the current agenda, meant as diversion and confusion tactics.
Yes! Democrats and Republicans agree on more than they think. At least those in the middle. We've fallen into this trap of thinking we're totally divided when we argue on the margins about taxes and healthcare (and don't get me wrong, there are some pretty big divisions there).
But today we're not really arguing over the margins; the question before us today is "should we live in a democracy where the people decide the outcome of elections?" 90% of Democrats and Republicans will agree that yes! We should!
Let's secure our democracy, then we can go back to arguing over the tax rate.
For the last twenty years I thought things would eventually just come back to center. I’m not sure anymore. It’s possible it’s as follows: One side will win. History will be written by those winners. Pick your side and fight for it?
I think this is true, and I think this is also the historically precedented answer. The partisanship in Europe in the early 20th century was not resolved by debate or belief, it was resolved by war and more generally political realignment. The vast divide between capitalism and communism was resolved by cold "war," by two superpowers aligning one with each and declaring the opposing ideology a security threat and then trying to starve out the other.
I think we can avoid another major war, but I don't think we can avoid one ideology winning and one losing.
This is the fight we are being led into but there is another way. Compromise and working together. Truth be told it would be the best for both sides, and both sides are equally as guilty in not achieving it.
Try to steer people to the media outlets that are still mostly balanced? NPR comes to mind. Or encourage people to read a leftish and a rightish source? And encourage people to think for themselves?
It would also be nice, albeit maybe very hard, to encourage even the less balanced media to try to speak to everyone and to write critically and honestly. For example, I personally lean left, but I find the New York Times to be increasingly vapid and unthinking.
In general, if you’re reading news (or Twitter!) just to find people who agree with you, you’re doing it wrong. This is true regardless of political party.
NPR does a good job of presenting the basic facts in their news segments, but their commentary, editorial, and human interest programming is 100% progressive.
How about the story that gave serious airtime to the book “In Defense of Looting” [0], which as the title implies, wholeheartedly condoned the looting and rioting that occurred during the summer protests.
First I would point out that the article start with:
"This story was updated on Sept. 1, 2020. The original version of this story, which is an interview with an author who holds strong political views and ideas, did not provide readers enough context for them to fully assess some of the controversial opinions discussed."
So they are clearly cognizant of the fact that the content is very controversial. I think it's a sensitive and important subject, and one that doesn't really get addressed in a serious, scholarly way. In some ways, it's a perfect example of the kind of heterodox research that conservatives have advocated for in universities and public forums. And it is the job of the media to try to communicate what ideas are out there.
Progressive is just the label they choose to use for themselves, so it's polite to use that same label when addressing or describing them.
It doesn't really mean that automatically makes their views or policies inherently better than those who disagree with them. It's important to analyze things people say and and investigate their claims for yourself, and not just tribally agree with them on everything they say just because they use an adjective that sounds nice to describe themselves.
While you may believe that NPR is mostly balanced, I assure you that one side does not. They view it with derision, and believe it is the epitome of bias. And they will view just about any media source not aligning with their view similarly.
I've got someone, who when I sent her links to The Guardian or other MSM sites, said "They're paid off by Rockerfellers and Rotschilds to report made up stories". Snopes? She sent me a link to a blog that mentioned some Snopes scandal, as if saying Snoopes can't be trusted 100% (and yeah sadly there was a scandal involving the founders of Snopes).
Of course she has her cheap-o fake-news Wordpress sites as her "sources" about her "knowledge", and she's convinced they're telling the truth. I end up seeing the equivalance, why do I believe the network of MSM sites are telling the truth when she can believe the same thing of the network of fake-news sites? One thing is, MSM sites fact-check each other, but a lot of things she thinks are fake news aren't being "fact-checked" by MSM...
A funny thing though, she's a "Bill Gates wants to kill Africans through vaccinations", and she said "Search for this theory, but don't use Google, they're paid off by big pharma, use Duck Duck Go.". Then I had to tell her, "You do know Duck Duck Go uses results from Bing... which is owned by Microsoft?" (I think she knows the BG/Microsoft connection).
It's kind of interesting. "Billionaire wants to kill black people" sounds like a leftwing conspiracy. I wonder why rightwingers are the ones believing that one. Just a general tendency to believe in conspiracy theories?
Have you talked to these people? My mother in law calls all media “fake news”. She’s gets all her information from YouTube. She’ll sit for hours watching the shows each day. There is no convincing her. Literally believes the other should be shot. Not amount of evidence will change her mind. She’s catholic even the pope couldn’t change her beliefs.
> How can we have a meaningful discussion as a nation, when there is no apparent common ground? No set of agreed-upon facts?
It's worse than this. Even just presenting facts that are inconvenient or go against the desires of beliefs is enough to make you an enemy / part of the other side, no questions asked.
This dance never ends. Soon enough people's behavior will evolve and the groups will start calling themselves the same ways PACs do ( you know, American Roads, Appleplie And Flag for Orphans Foundation ). We already had an indication with Bogaloo group ( although for them it the name was something of an inside joke ). This is why censorship is effectively self-defeating.
If 50% of US population, apparently, thinks that hashtag is valid, you can rest assured it will either surface in some cloaked form ( say, bunnies for adoption ), or worse, it will disappear from the radar where LEOs will not be able to easily track it ( and boy can they easily track it now ).
I may be coming across as a free speech fundamentalist, but that is the problem with actual rights. You tend to defend assholes since they are the ones who tend to push the envelope.
I don't want to dance this dance. Its trajectory tends to end somewhere around Xi banning Winnie and number 8 ( ie. shit getting ridiculous ). It is not fun in the meantime.
I think the idea that the "sides" are roughly equally balanced is a false narrative pushed by the smaller side. Obviously "hang Mike Pence" isn't an appealing idea to anywhere near 100% of Republican voters, and I would wager it's appealing to just about 0% of non-Republican voters.
What you're seeing is that the amount of yelling is roughly equally balanced, but you can't extrapolate from that to what all people actually believe. Obviously you won't find common ground for every single person, but there is common ground for 80-90% of them.
A few more bits of information:
- There's Mike Pence himself, the actual vice president of the United States, and his unwillingness to go along with the worldviews of those who have by now concluded he needs to be hanged.
- Mitt Romney, the actual Republican presidential candidate in 2012 (who won 47% of the popular vote), has been pretty strongly opposed to the idea that Trump secretly won / would have won, to the coup, etc. Previously he marched in Black Lives Matter protests and voted to convict the President in the impeachment trial last year. (Romney also created Romneycare, the model for Obamacare, even though if you listen to how loudly people yell, it seems like half the country opposes it.)
- Georgia elected two Democratic Senators. More generally, the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013 and several states are actively engaged in gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts. The fact that you see Republicans roughly tied with Democrats doesn't indicate that Republican policies are equally popular.
And, again, the "side" that advocates for "hang Mike Pence" is hardly the totality of the Republican Party.
So what can be done?
I think the highest-impact thing is to help out efforts to re-enfranchise Americans and end gerrymandering. The work coordinated by Stacey Abrams in Georgia is a good place to start, for instance. Regardless of what party or policies you support, if you believe in democracy, getting elections to be more representative can only be a good thing. And in particular, if you're right-leaning but worry that the Republican Party is going too far, making it so that the party has to compete by convincing centrists instead of being able to rely on extremists will be good for the party.
It's odd to me how someone could think that there is more hatred for Mike Pence coming from within his own party vs. outside of it. I don't know what social media circles you've participated in for the past 5 years, but it seems clearly the opposite case to me. There is an overwhelmingly large group of people online who equivocate Mike Pence with Nazism, and they regularly call for punching and killing of anyone who has that label. Last August, a Trump supporter was killed at a Portland BLM protest, where afterwards into the microphone the organizer yelled "I am not sad that a f*cking fascist died tonight. He was a f*cking Nazi. Our community held its own and took out the trash." Many young people praised this. I do not believe the remarks would have been different if it were Pence in the same situation.
I'm not arguing that there is more "hatred" for Pence coming from within his party than outside it, in a general sense. I'm arguing specifically that "hang Mike Pence" is coming from the far right, and only from the far part of the far right.
If you find this odd, you should read some far-right forums. I read these social media circles (as well as far-left ones of various sorts), not because I agree with them, but because I think it's useful to understand what the "other side" thinks. The one I was reading today had multiple memes of him as a traitor - one had him photoshopped as Brutus assassinating Trump-as-Caesar surrounded by Romney and others, one had him next to Benedict Arnold, etc.
Meanwhile, at some point in the NYC Women's March four years ago, when folks were chanting "Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go," I tried to lead a "Michael Pence has got to go." Nobody really joined in.
And in any case, my original point is that there is a large number of folks, Democrat and Republican and everything in between, who do not agree with "hang Mike Pence," and it is on those people's beliefs that we can build common ground. I don't deny that there are protestors with megaphones who shout extreme positions, but my exact point was that you should not extrapolate based on who shouts the loudest.
I agree with your overall point that we need to revitalize our voting system. The Center for Election Science has made a convincing argument for approval voting as a method to de-polarize elections [1].
Yup. Another thing about our current system that I only realized after talking with folks who do politics for a living about what they do: the fact that elections are close to 50/50 isn't a sign of a deep and fundamental divide in our country, it's that it's financially not worth getting much past 50/50. If you are currently at 48%, it's worth changing your platform a bit to get 51% of the population; if you're at 51%, it's not worth changing your platform to get 55%.
More directly, if you're polling well in 40% of districts, poorly in 40% of districts, and competitively in the rest, it's worth focusing your attention only on the competitive districts, until you get to 50%. It's not worth paying any attention to the ones you're not competitive in.
Other voting methods (approval or ranked-choice) will reduce this effect and make political parties more representative of what people actually believe, instead of designing the system such that we have two parties that do the worst possible job of each representing 50% of the people.
There are good statistics on the number of deaths and positive tests for Covid.
There is a reliable and agreed upon process for counting votes in the states, and plenty of avenues to dispute those counts, and a court system that has heard every single complaint from the losing Presidential candidate and made clear rulings based on the evidence.
What is abundantly plain from this week, is there is a very large number of people who clearly just wanted to bash some heads and break a lot of stuff and threaten more violence. They felt untouchable and that no rules applied to them.
These people have zero interest in finding objective truths about the world. They just enjoy the feeling of power over other people and they use words in whatever way thinks will increase that power, regardless of any connection to the truth.
Let me be very clear, I do wish there was an objective set of facts that are agreed to by both sides. But that doesn't seem to be true anymore.
> There are good statistics on the number of deaths and positive tests for Covid.
There is a significant segment of the population that believes the virus is a hoax, or not nearly as bad as the media says. Some of these people, even while dying from the virus, are still in denial, and yell at the medical staff about it.
Go watch some interviews with doctors and nurses. It will make you very sad and disappointed in humanity.
At least some, maybe most of those challenges were dismissed on procedural grounds, lack of standing, etc. They never got to the point of examining the "evidence." Maybe the retort to that is the challengers should have foreseen that. But the people filing these challenges were not unhinged randos from Twitter. They were elected officials, lawyers, educated people. They aren't going to go into court with something they know is frivolous.
Given that a sizable minority (and likely unprecedented number) of the voting public thinks there was fraud in the 2020 election, maybe it would have been better to have rebutted the evidence rather than the process.
The lawyers refused to lie in court, because their "evidence" was just the lies and empty allegations, which would be a crime to present in court. So they were summarily dismissed, by Trump appointed judges no less.
I'm not sure what you are trying to imply. Yes, they were going to have to present evidence. They didn't have any, and that's also why they didn't actually allege fraud. And that is why the cases were thrown out.
If you're asking why anyone paid them to file unwinnable cases: So there would be lawsuits to point to, and for the (minuscule) opportunity to have a (Trump-appointed) judge create some kind of win (again to point to it).
I think the problem appears much worse on twitter than it really is. It rewards narcissists and trolls. The far right and far left love fighting online, but in reality most people are somewhere in the center of the two, watching quietly. There is still some good, if not perfect, discussion on HN and other places. I havent seen people calling for public executions here at the very least. The sun will burn out before the twitter mobs learn to be decent to each other, it's best to just disregard them.
To me it looks like the issue is lack of "perceived respect" (more complex than that, but I use a simple word to describe whole thing) from the "other side". Now, one side would need to somehow get the other side convinced that yes, we respect you as human beings even if we disagree on some things. And that respect does not just mean nice words, but also actual policies which make people (not their opinions) thrive. Bad news is that it is not an easy task - for either side.
Due to the election results, it is now Democrats' turn to see how they can start to heal the nation. It is imperative that they see that the reason for Trump's success is not racism or misogyny of Trump's supporters. The real reason is that there are lots of people who think that their life is not good. And that needs to be fixed. Bad news again is that it is not easy. Even worse is that if you fail, escalation continues and at some point you are looking at breaking the country or even civil war.
This is the core problem. Who do you trust? Fox news or CNN.
The answer for me is I trust no one. They are all liars. I verify for myself. All governance (government, legal, media, military, education, etc) is there to foster a divisive situation as that makes us easier to rule. When people are divided they will not see the plans that are being executed and how they are pawns in a larger game.
You can call it delusional or conspiracy, but there are plans - you can very easily see these on the WEF's website, or read about them in Klaus Schwabb's book. If you don't want to see what is in store for you, what can I say? Switch the news back on, and have a good life.
The truth is that there are a controlling group of people that are entirely unaccountable - governments and voting provide them with a buffer from people - they enact their plans regardless of all that. And further to that, most of us are in an impossible situation that we can do very little about. BLM or MAGA protests - its all the same.
If you want to talk about solutions, the only answers are disengagement from the system. And if you go deep into that, the only answer is disengagement from the legal system. If there is one thing that causes the issues we have, its that we believe we are the legal name that we have a birth certificate of. And on it, it says 'this certificate cannot be used as proof of ID'.
The only law 'they' are happy for us to break, is the one where we use the legal name. You are not the legal name. You may not know who you are, but you are not that..
It is illegal to use the legal name. When we do so, we are acting with dishonour. And that is where our problems begin. And also where they can end.
We've got, to reduce the complexity quite a bit but identify some factions with very distinct (though overlapping in various combinations) current interests: progressive Democrats and corporate neoliberal Democrats and moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans unequivocally appalled at the MAGA insurrection and those overtly supportive of the MAGA insurrection and mostly-conservative Republicans overtly opposed to the MAGA insurrection but eager to push it off the radar.
I have absolutely no idea what can be done. I think the best thing that could most realistically happen is that things "cool off" in the months after Biden is inaugurated and the world continues to spin.
Hell will freeze over first. Trump will not show at inauguration, he has not acknowledged Biden as the next President or that fraud was insignificant in the election.
Anyways, whatever he says, he's got zero credibility, follows the most pathological path of psychopathy, though is expert in massively duping people for his own crimes and frauds. Though, he's so bad and incompetent in everything else, he relies on enablers around him that he later can backstab for his own mistakes.
He has said he will not attend the inauguration. He has said there will be an orderly transition of power, so that implies he acknowledges Biden as the president-elect, or at least realizes that he's out of challenges. True that he has not disavowed the fraud claims, and probably never will.
1. He didn't attend Capitol, but urged his followers to storm it "peacefully" while extorting Congress.
2. He's always lying.
3) He implies nothing, at least nothing predictable.
4) True, he still keeps lying about fraud even though he alleged fraud long before the election process even (before summer). He used anchors and primed his base for months on this. Even got underlings to sabotage effectiveness of the US Postal Service.
What he did agree to was "orderly transition" of power, and he most probably has this in mind (another prime):
We do not have "two sides." Many on the two dominate groups believe there is only "the other side" but there are people that believe facts, science, etc. are more important than either side. It would be naive to believe even those that value truth highest are without bias, but it would not be naive to conclude that we are better off trying to combat polarization, and avoid simplifying our labels into "us vs. them", "right vs. wrong", "fact vs. fiction" because these labels are too simple, too broad, and ultimately inaccurate.
I do believe that the arguing, the battle... it's a distraction, in a sense. It's an amplifier. It's a self-reinforcing polarization engine.
Maybe I'm just saying what you said, but I think it's important to break down the concept of "two sides" if you want to have any hope of finding common ground.
How many of you (in the U.S. if not abroad) want the best for the United States? Who among us want it to be a strong nation full of employed, educated, healthy citizens? Who wants to revisit the tenants of our founding fathers, learn lessons from the past while being willing to try new things and accept changes? Who wants this stark divide to be behind us?
Who wants to deescalate from violent rhetoric and focus on proven methods of finding and sharing truth?
>How can we have a meaningful discussion as a nation, when there is no apparent common ground? No set of agreed-upon facts?
I think that's the important thing right there. Echo chambers and identity politics have divided the USA greatly.
The way forward is not to divide more. For example Biden inferring that Trump is hitler and calling Senator Cruz Goebbels the nazi propaganda minister is not going to heal the divide.
>Now I of course have my own very strong opinions and I'm sure I have a good comprehension of the truth. But that isn't going to convince anyone on the other side anymore. To people on one side, the other side's minds appear to be just poisoned.
Imagine this for a second. Say you are going to spend all your waking hours reading the news. You could read every major source. You could review videos, pictures, you could have a good knowledge of what's going on in a small part of the world. You wont know what's going in 90%+ of the world.
The problem is that you cant do that. You dont have the time to do that and so you only look at a few sources. We then have the problem that the news cant be trusted. It's beyond clear that they publish outright lies.
That's why we have these delusion vs reality issues. To fix this problem isn't to give people more time. It certainly isn't to remove opposing viewpoints.
When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say. -George RR Martin
Like probably most people in the discussion here, I think I’m smarter than the average person, and can discern the truth from multiple conflicting claims.
But a little introspection shows me that no, this isn’t really true. I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true.
Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell?
As much as it goes against my grain, I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is, even though we know they don’t always get it right.
Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better.
You are right. No one person can know everything about everything. Heaven's know I defer to experts if I know I can trust their opinion. The issue is trust.
And US has about only one institution left that people seem to trust. Military. It does not bode well for the fate of the republic.
I don't know that "people" in the original argument equates to "universally", but the only institutions that a majority of people have either a "Great deal" or "Quite a lot" of trust in are the medical system (just barely, 51%), the military (72%), and small business (75%). So small business is trusted more than the military, and basically nothing else is.
6% of people have a great deal of trust in Congress and 9% in television news which I guess are around the percentage of dentists who recommend sugared gum to their patients who chew gum.
The meme is 4 out of 5. So yeah, most of them say sugarless gum, then there's the ones that ignore the rules of the poll and say don't chew gum. Those aren't the dentists we are talking about.
There really are dentists out there that will tell you that if you chew gum, the sugared stuff is what you want. Not a lot of them, but probably about the same percentage as people that have a great deal of trust in congress or television news.
People trust the military precisely because in the last several decades it has been studiously apolitical. This is a fragile state of affairs, and unusual by historical and international standards.
> I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true.
Very honest!
> As much as it goes against my grain, I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is, even though we know they don’t always get it right.
No! They don't always get it right?! They are literally there to ensure you get it wrong! They really are. They are part of the governance structure - they will not tell you the way out of this situation, or give you good information.
All I would say, is that you need to ensure that you act on what you know. Not on what you believe. Verify everything you accept as true or discard or assume it but be prepared to be corrected if you get better information. And if it turns out that you don't know a whole lot - that is fine! At least you're not acting incorrectly and causing problems!
At the end of the day if you are acting on stuff that you don't know, you can inadvertently cause more harm, even though you mean well. You can be manipulated (easily) to go along with the crowd.
Think about it. If people have the wrong information, that means that they cannot respond meaningfully. If you are swimming in a world of lies, how will you give the correct answer?
UPDATE/EDIT
And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.
Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?
Government's goal is to implement whatever governance is decided to be best to manage people.
You say a mob stormed congress. I saw a dramatic event, that justifies a lot of authoritarian actions to be undertaken on others. Including de-platforming the president! Isn't that amazing?
Other dramatic events are perfectly fine, of course, such as the BLM protests.
Why is that? The answer for me is that some protests suit the governance agenda, and some don't. A message needs to be given to indicate rightthink and wrongthink.
I think you must believe that the government (lights, camera) 'action' you see on TV are far more than a simple soap opera intended to distract you. Perhaps you believe that one side is 'good' and the other 'bad'. If that's it, you are falling for the good cop/bad cop routine, and being sold down the river by both sides.
(I don't mind moderation - but what we have on HN is no room for free thinking, consensus opinion wins the day. Was I really posting too much, was I undertaking a DDOS attack? Or was my opinion, if reasoned, unpopular and not to be heard. Let me know.)
I am not posting too fast in trying to reply to responses.
The reason I am blocked is because my opinions are not popular and they are downvoted.
This is the issue: HN is an echo chamber. Those who can downvote (those with 500+ upvotes) can downvote others and maintain the echo chamber. A function of the design is to take away the right of reply from those whose opinion they do not like.
It is probably a spam filter, downvotes are an imperfect proxy for post quality. Tons of low quality posts is a form of spam. You don't have to be posting links to things you want to sell to be spamming.
No offense to you but typically there isn't a ton of value to someones posts that are repeatedly downvoted. They tend to be repetitive. I didn't look at yours so am not making a judgement on your statements but instead on others I have seen.
So an algorithm to slow down posts of that kind make sense even if it isn't perfect.
No one sees a post with a huge number of replies and assumes that since not every reply is replied back the person gave up. It is generally known that keeping up is hard when you are outnumbered.
You should keep that in mind and focus your efforts. If you get a bunch of replies focus on the upvoted ones first since then your reply will be more prominent as well. Ensure you aren't repeating your points, while some people carpet bomb replies most only do that when they are substantially similar.
On the topic of the post I replied to you got caught by several reasons for downvotes:
* Spreading a conspiracy. You emphatically say that those in power are lying.
* Providing no evidence or even examples really. You have to back up extreme rhetoric with robust supporting evidence. You didn't provide any.
* Bad place to make a stand. You chose to complain about overbearing tech companies on a topic about Twitter stopping people calling for the death of the VP. Direct calls for violence are agreed to be bad for everyone so using it as a jumping board for overbearing tech companies is a bad idea.
* You finally used yourself as the example of overbearing tech companies. Never ever do this. You are incredibly biased about your own actions. You understand why you are taking them and give yourself immense benefit of the doubt. Using a literal spam filter as an example of what is wrong with tech because you personally got caught by it is a fundamentally flawed argument. You are incapable of reasonably inspecting the quality of your own posts.
Finally your original post is woefully ignorant. No one can know whether the election was stolen based on their own knowledge. No man is an island I believe is the phrase. The actual information required to prove that without a doubt is impossible to obtain. You need to have the data summarized to stand a chance. So by saying "acting on stuff that you don't know" after making it obvious you don't believe in secondary sources you are showing that you are making a fundamentally flawed argument.
> They are literally there to ensure you get it wrong! They really are. They are part of the governance structure - they will not tell you the way out of this situation, or give you good information.
> Verify everything you accept as true
Hah... so, did you verify this stuff about MSM being a force to mislead?
The problem with the Internet nowadays is, it's already like a Library of Babel [0], if you want to have your views confirmed on anything, you can find someone saying "Yes, it's like that.".
> Hah... so, did you verify this stuff about MSM being a force to mislead?
Its obvious. If you look at what is presented, you are given lots of claims, but very few facts. Its just a load of evidence-free noise. What's to evaluate?!
Seriously, look a little deeper at almost any article. There is no actual information there. The question you should ask - critically - is how do I know this to be true? And if you don't know it to be true, why do you believe it to be true anyway?
UPDATE/EDIT
And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.
Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?
I've been reading a bit of Noam Chomsky this afternoon, not a person I'd agree with politically but many of his observations ring true regardless.
"The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information."
Hmm, how do you differentiate between claims and facts? What are facts other than just things where you can verify? Where you can think "Ok, I agree that this is true". Like 2 + 2 = 4. We probably can both verify this, so that's a fact. How about e = mc2 ? Well, it's stood the test of time and many physics professors saying what it means, so to me this is also a fact. Same with the fact that the earth is spherical; but if you talk to a flat-earther, they'll start saying all sorts of nonsense (at least to me) because they don't believe the hundreds of years of research, and "want to see it for themselves", and what they "see" is that the earth is flat (because they have confirmation bias)
Yesterday MSM reported live as Trump supporters attacked the Capitol. I see that as factual information, there were thousands at a Trump rally nearby, presumably because they wanted to hear their leader talk; and nobody's said these people dispersed and a bunch of others came from the bushes...
The media also said "x thousand more people died due to Covid-19 yesterday", here I do have implicit trust that the reporting is correct, then again they're just reporting numbers from government agencies. TBH I'm not that invested in this that I need to proof whether the number is correct or not, but that's the thing isn't it; a Covid-denier wants to think Covid is a lie, and therefore the number of deaths is a lie, because there's something in it for them, maybe it's because their business is currently shut down and their bank account is being drained and they're going to lose their house and go hungry soon..
If your views are aligned with what the echo chamber agrees with, you will be able to reply. If you do not get the echo chamber's approval, you are downvoted and cannot reply.
What's the conspiracy?! Its a fact.
But yes - it really does mean that my views are suppressed. I cannot reply to others as I would like.
We really need to slow down and examine our premises more carefully.
1. Gatekeepers (in this case, any media labeled "mainstream" and any popular social media corporation) exist to spread disinformation.
2. These gatekeepers are part of the government (or governance structure); they operate on the direction of the government.
3. They will not give you "good information." Any of them.
All of this to argue that President Donald Trump, perhaps arguably the most powerful man when acting President is speaking the truth about widespread election fraud, which - in 2016 would make him look better, as he claimed he won the popular vote, and in 2020 would preserve his position of power and influence over you.
To accept that lie, you need to believe that the vast majority of news outlets and social media corporations are all secretly conspiring, planning, communicating and executing alongside election officials, bipartisan judges, etc. and all at the behest of a "deep state" shadow government, but the only people that are willing to "admit" this exists are people that are Trump's biggest fans.
To me, it was always the case. I think TV was set up to be the most powerful propaganda delivery mechanism. That's pretty clear, when you look at how the BBC was created.
But - for more info, so that you can confirm this is explicitly the case, you should look up 'Operation Mockingbird'. Or the way that the CIA sponsored arts and culture.
The media being part of governance is not a conspiracy.
UPDATE/EDIT
And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.
Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?
> the CIA's secret campaign to turn American art into anti-Soviet cultural propaganda
This is perfectly credible. But extrapolating that example of government influence over culture to the premise "media is 100% under the control and direction of the government" or, furthermore, a hidden or shadow government... is stretching well beyond a logical conclusion. (It would have to be a shadow government, because mainstream media and social media were not going along with the Republicans led by Trump, when they were in power over several branches of the U.S. government.)
You need a lot more evidence to dispel the notion that this is "not a conspiracy."
What would you think if I said to you that there is a conspiracy so broad and deeply embedded that a small group is able to take a set co-ordinated actions, across the planet, with every country taking part that constrain individuals to their houses and restrict their movements and interactions, and to force individuals possibly at gunpoint to take injections that they object to? And that governments would be able to do so, with most cheering them on?
Is that a conspiracy? If I had said that to you last year, you would have called me mad.
Contrast that, with what would happen if you tried to prevent just one individual coming near you, even if they had provably caused you harm. You would need to go to court, prove your case, get a restraining order, etc. And you would never be able to exclude them from work, enforce a passport, mandate good citizen score for loans and travel!! Apparently none of the legal stuff is applicable if the whole world is being locked down. No one needs to go on the record to state why all this is required.
This is where we are at! Do you really want to trust CNN? lol
The kind that's so disgusting that it'd be asinine to infer that my comment refers to this specific instance, rather than the overarching topic of Twitter (and the rest of the social media cabal) controlling what constitutes acceptable discourse.
And yet, only this flavor is actually being removed, so it’s almost as if you have no point at all and are just riding a wave of populist indignation, entirely ungrounded in reality...
The thing that makes society work better is accountability, which lets us cooperate at ever larger scales without cheaters. The book "The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations" describes how the advent of double entry accounting meant that you could detect fraud, and suddenly you could do things like give your goods to a naval merchant who will sail away with them and bring you back the money and it works because you can detect any cheating and this is the foundation of capitalism (textbook version). You can think of the arrow of progress as pointing in the direction of increasing accountability . So, the problem with social media is that people lie, always have, and it's like we are just noticing this for the first time ever, and now we are responding to that. Social media is making us more accountable, not less! See #MeToo, etc
But hasn't Trump (and others) shown that if you repeat the lies enough people start believing them and those who could debunk them slowly gives up by lack of time or resources ?
> Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell?
It's pretty obnoxious and exhausting to read about "Oh yeah, I know that's X, because..." on Twitter. Like the whole "It's Antifa ambushing the Capitol", because "the Antifa sign is to wear your hat backwards", "those are Antifa helmets", or just a screenshot of a photo of some guy with the text "phillyantifa.org" next to the picture is enough to convince some people that, "Yeah, it's Antifa".
It's a cheap grasping for evidence to reaffirm your views/world belief though, to fix your cognitive dissonance. Because trying to find the whole truth would mean confronting yourself and maybe figuring out you've been dumb enough to be lied to. That your "team" are the ones who are ready to be violent towards members of the government. Or that maybe your views are based on your fear of the other...
> I would, however, add a casual observation: at this point Trump has been the front-runner for long enough that it’s very hard to imagine his supporters suddenly losing faith, because it would be too embarrassing.
> Bear in mind that embarrassment, and the desire to avoid it, are enormously important sources of motivation. [...] Nobody likes looking like a chump, and most people will go to great lengths to convince themselves that they weren’t.
> Now think about someone who has been supporting Trump since the summer. For the Trump bubble to burst, many people like that would have to slap their foreheads and say, “Wow, he’s not a serious person! What was I thinking?”
> And very few people ever do that sort of thing. Someone who has spent months supporting Trump despite establishment denunciations — which means something like a third of Republicans — will go to great lengths to avoid conceding that he has been foolish. At this point such people will insist that any negative reports about Trump are the product of hostile mainstream media; Trump’s very durability so far is likely to make him highly resilient looking forward.
The trouble is that our gatekeepers inevitably go beyond being neutral arbiters of truth and allow their personal biases to color their analysis. And they might even believe that they're doing the right thing by guiding society in the "correct" direction. But audience members with opposing views pick up on those inconsistencies and then disbelieve everything the gatekeepers say, even the unbiased truthful stuff.
>But audience members with opposing views pick up on those inconsistencies and then disbelieve everything the gatekeepers say, even the unbiased truthful stuff.
That's not the fault of the "gatekeepers," nor should it be their problem. Disbelieving everything a source claims because you find "inconsistencies" and "bias" when no human being is ever perfectly consistent or unbiased in their views is an irrational and infantile way of thinking.
> I think I’m smarter than the average person, and can discern the truth from multiple conflicting claims. But a little introspection shows me that no, this isn’t really true. I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true.
The least thing Twitter could do is allow us to see who started a specific hashtag. Hashtags can be pushed using Tweetdeck through private accounts.
I got excited because I thought I would in no time be able to, not discern the truth, but identify whether I can trust the source. After all, there is a name for content which does not identify its source: Grey propaganda.
Wouldn't this encourage false-flag hashtag squatting? Just figure out what your "enemies" are likely to hashtag, and set up some unpleasant accounts to use the tags before they do.
Who is the enemy here? The people or governments?
Arab spring succeeded in Tunisia because real time news sharing was faster than state-sponsored-media. The same thing happened in Egypt.
>set up some unpleasant accounts to use the tags before they do.
That's what governments tried to do, but they failed, and were failing. Bots with aged accounts and Tweetdeck got better in 2015.
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
* “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, January 21, 1980, p. 19.
I'm a bit irked by these 'always been a thing'-responses.
Yes, it may be true that the thing (whatever it may be) is not a recent development, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have steadily gotten worse over time and might eventually reach a tipping point that would be worth worrying about.
> Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better.
By "our current technology" you mean social media. If you need evidence that it is time to do something about social media, consider this:
28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people - with the figure rising to 44% among Republicans. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648
Before social media these kinds of nonsense would never spread, but now so many people believe this kind of nonsense that it has become a huge threat to society.
Many people forget consciously. This works without social media, but the amplification may accellerate and strengthen the signal that much more when effective.
> Before social media these kinds of nonsense would never spread, but now so many people believe this kind of nonsense that it has become a huge threat to society.
Are you sure about that ? The Red Scare, the Cold War, nuclear weapons on Irak, and so on and so on ... I'm pretty sure a said nonsense would find a way to spread just like history showed us in the past.
> 28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people
The craziest part is, the Gates Foundation did fund something very close to that: not microchips, but Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches record vaccination.
It's essentially a tiny tattoo visible only in infrared light to track who has been vaccinated. So that rumor is more of a misunderstanding (of the difference between quantum dots and microchips) than misinformation.
What you're referring to as "gatekeepers," I would see as one of many sources of evidence. Others include direct experience, non-expert opinion, data from experiments/studies, and so on. Ideally we'd weigh each source of evidence by how trustworthy and reliable they are, and then we'd use our brain to make sense of what may be true based on that evidence.
Society does not "work better when gatekeepers decide what the truth is." That's especially the case when the "truth" is political, and people have ideological incentives to report what they see as the truth in a certain light. Instead, society works better when individuals are free to look at the evidence and think about it for themselves. This is because in this case, you're treating the members of that society with human dignity.
I'd love to see Twitter's lifetime list of "Halted" trending topics. Obviously this is a more understandable example, but it's interesting to note Twitter admitting politically relevant trending-topic censorship.
A couple things stick out from the legislative and violent coup attempt at the Capitol. The legislative side looked doomed to fail so Trump rallied his peers and incited them with words like trial by combat via Rudy Giuliani.
1. Pence was pressured before and DURING the siege. Trump called once his followers were besieging the building to pressure Pence to overthrow the certified votes of this nation. His rhetoric was 100% responsible for the crowd's focus on Pence.
2. Trump directly pointed at the media at the rally and labeled them again as the enemy. During the siege all sorts of media members were violently assaulted. With the mob labeling them antifa as a means to rationalize mob violence against them. An AP reporter sustained a beating for several minutes as the crowd shouted for his death.
The doors on the Capitol building had "murder the media" scrawled on it by Trump/GOP's supporters. They chanted for Pence's hanging at the same doors.
This was a coup attempt coordinated and driven by sitting Republicans and the President of the USA. There is a direct line to be drawn from their actions to the results seen in the Capitol. The coup barely failed.
233 comments
[ 0.23 ms ] story [ 244 ms ] threadWhen will the government step in and compel Twitter to respect the free speech of these patriotic Americans? Conservative voices are being silenced!
At the end of the day the phrase “Hang Mike Pence” ended up on the trending section of Twitter. Millions of people look at this. It was removed by Twitter, and it was the right call.
Justifying calls to violence due to “missing context” is a poor argument, and now is just not the time to toy with being lax on this.
Twitter trending topics are a terrible feature IMHO, you never know what the context is behind a keyword trending, and the majority of people using it are asking why it is trending.
The great thing, that this title doesn't clarify, is that a lot of the trending tweets (at least of recent, and what i RT) are not promoting the hanging of pence, but speaking out against it and the people who say it.
I've never liked mike pence, we have opposing perspectives - but man, i have never even thought about hanging him. But these rioters, who in theory are part of his party, were there and ready to hang him because he didn't do what they wanted, just did his job. Something I have to give him credit for.
I'll say my own personal quiet part out loud: Every thread on this topic has the highest upvoted chain of comments about how "Trump was bad, but i worry about the implications of banning politicians". This sole statement has been stretched to its logical limits. There's very little more to discuss about this that is interesting or new.
Now I guess there's the potential they weren't actually shouting that and it was dubbed, but it seemed credible based on many of the sources discussing it on twitter, some of whom were 1 degree separated from the source of the video.
Aside: there are so many landmines in me writing this that I don't know how to qualify my comments well enough to not be accused of something. Guess no one has to say to me "may you live in interesting times."
Blocking the trend, in this instance, is different from blocking the speech.
There are many other examples (both from this incident and others) already prevalent, including on HN, which is really depressing.
1. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2021/01/09/he-was-docum...
https://twitter.com/ExportedFromMI/status/134776388564682752...
Reuters photographer eyewitness confirming it was a common refrain and discussed openly.
https://twitter.com/jimbourg/status/1347559078831284227
Myriad videos from the day too of people shouting things like "WHERE'S PENCE?", sometimes at capitol police.
You still need to take care to see the entire context of the situation -- It's still easy to be fooled by a 2 minute clip but it's much harder with a 20 minute or hour long clip.
If a reporter and publication release the evidence and also stand by it's authenticity, that definitely lends more credence and at least allow you to filter where information is coming from by reliability.
Also i think you’re making a false equivalence here. There is a not insignificant fraction of them willing to be violent because because they either don’t (or don’t want to) understand how democracy works.
I think it’s fine to lump those people together as domestic terrorists.
You can do that, but after many people in power and including in this site supported BLM riots earlier this year this rings hollow. It's clear most people don't care about violence being a limit given that violence was used tremendously throughout the entire year in all those protests and supporting them was the trendy position among the elites, that now suddenly decided violence must be opposed at all costs and those who support it must be terrorists. Give me a break.
Call it for what it is, when one side uses violence it's good, when the other uses it it's bad, because this is a battle, and in a battle all that matters is punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. I'm glad that this is becoming more and more clear as time passes and all pretense of principles is being dropped, and anyone with any sense can see that this is true.
BLM Didn't use violence to achieve their goals. Quite the opposite they were consistently attacked by police dressed up like the army, heaving people off the streets.
Where were the police in DC?
This wasn’t a protest it was a violent attempt to overthrow.
Call it what it is indeed.
I don't know how you can reconcile cities being burned, statues toppled, police stations being overtaken, parts of a city being declared an autonomous zone with "violence wasn't used" but whatever, discussion is clearly pointless.
I will re-state my claim: this is a battle, and in a battle all that matters is punishing your enemies and rewarding your friends. When you defend the BLM riots yet condemn this one you're engaging in that behavior. You can disagree with me all you want but that's the truth to anyone who has any sense.
People are undoubtedly angry because they are seeking to be treated equally. To not be murdered by the police. There’s still such an astonishing amount of injustice and yet they didn’t try to overthrow the government.
The crux of my argument is that these two groups are not comparable. One seeks equality and the other seeks to go against democracy and attempt a coup. This is what i mean by false equivalence.
You are you defending violence with whataboutism. And advocating for Machiavellianism.
Gross.
Either way, reasonable people who don't defend violence in either case are irrelevant, because things happen through violence regardless. What are you going to do about it when a horde of BLM rioters comes for your business and burns it down? Have a peaceful conversation with them about how much you don't think violence will solve the problem? No, you either have a gun or you don't.
The point of your argument is that violence is inevitable and therefore good?
Who exactly are these people?
What exactly do you mean by "to be a "lost cause"?
What does it mean to be treated like a terrorist?
Am I expected to grow my own lynching tree?
Should I accelerate the incubation of my own Mike Pence clone, in the basement of my own research lab!?
is it safe to live there?
As someone who has lived here my entire life I'm not sure how the next month is going to unfold.
Historically though the United States has crime issues, a few of the most dangerous cities in the world (not in a war zone) are in the US (St. Louis, Baltimore, Detroit).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_murder_rate
https://apnews.com/article/homicide-st-louis-coronavirus-pan...
This varies a lot depending on where you live, your skin color and your socioeconomic status.
If you’re high income/above-average educated (which you pretty much have to be to immigrate to the US due to the overly strict/broken immigration system), there’s no better place to be. You will be able to reach the absolute peak of your potential here. 10/10, would immigrate again.
If you’re middle of the road on income/education, you’d be better off in other developed countries that have robust socialized services (healthcare, pension, free education, etc) like the Nordics. Most developed countries have a better lifestyle for the average person.
If you’re below average on income/education, the US is the worst of the developed countries to live in. I’d stay far away.
I live in Pittsburgh, and we recently had the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting.
There were also people being threatened along the route of a Black Lives Matter protest, who just happened to be there and did not join in enthusiastically enough, in the eyes of the marching protesters. No one was injured, but from the videos it seemed very close to getting out of hand. (Marchers coming off the street to verbally accost people sitting outside at a restaurant, grabbing drinks off their tables. Marching into a McDonalds and verbally harassing the manager...about something.)
And of course police going off on protesters, looking for excuses to escalate the use of force.
And with police reluctant to engage in communities where they are...unpopular...(with reason), murder rates are at their highest rates in years in many cities.
And now the unprecedented attack on the capitol.
I feel like I will get responses saying I am understating or overstating the violence from "one side" or the other. But my point is no one can deny the amount of violence is rapidly increasing, and no one really knows if it will get a lot worse before it gets better.
I wouldn't recommend anyone coming to the US right now, without a good reason.
These events just seem more frequent because rather than being a one day headline they get talked about ad nauseam for weeks.
Look at any chart of violence in the US, it’s a steady downward slope over the past 30 years. There’s never been a safer time to be alive: https://www.statista.com/statistics/191219/reported-violent-...
Don’t feel bad, it’s a mistake we've all made before.
This has literally no impact on the day-to-day lives of people around the country. Even when the BLM protests were in full force, you had to go to specific downtown areas of large cities to see anything.
The only thing that happened to real people this year is covid, and that does suck. The vaccine should help though.
Do not throw away your future plans based on this drama.
"In the long term, violent crime in the United States has been in decline since colonial times."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States
I'm in the first camp, but the fact that an entire news/social media ecosystem is promoting the latter interpretation is a problem I have no idea how to solve.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_McCarthy
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Coughlin
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Jackson
There is "us", and there is "them". If you are not a part of "us" then you are an enemy. Some of the most dangerous enemies are people who previously appeared to be part of "us", but have now betrayed our cause.
If we extrapolate on this, can't we conclude/believe that some people who feel the system is betraying them, would see Mike Pence as conspiring with those stealing the elections?
Do some of those people value "constitutional duty" right now? If they did, they wouldn't have stormed the Capitol.
It's hard to understand people when there's a certain amount of conspiracy theories influencing their emotions. It's unfortunately one of the problems with politics. A bunch of people who make laws that mostly don't get to apply to them, get to say what they want, with little or no accountability.
That's why. They've been told the election has been stolen and (the classic cult move) that anyone who disagrees with that is a traitor out to get them.
They're Trump supporters. Not broad Republican supporters. It's a personal loyalty cult.
Irrespective of that there's a certain authority imbued with words listed in a trending topics section, whether or not the user clicks on them. Since trending topics lack context, there's a literalism to them that can distort meaning.
As much of this was about a reaction to the video rather than a literal interpretation, it would probably be best to reword it with more context or make it a news item, if it's to remain up at all.
We shouldn't treat the same way reporting violence than violence itself.
Toxic ideas are like a virus, and even well-meaning opposition can serve as a host, allowing them to spread rapidly rather than die out.
The context of the discussion becomes less relevant if only the phrase trends. The seed gets sown in the mind.
Hiding information from the population is what authoritarian states do.
I don't have an answer, and I don't think there is one. I do, however, wish there was more scrutiny of the people spreading the message (aka the president of the united states) than companies trying to navigate this really tough balance.
Why worse? Because you don't get to elect those who run the company. In a democracy you have the chance to change the government but that can't be done with a private company. Now, when you have a few companies that control most of the communication channels and they can censor indiscriminately anyone who they don't like, you're absolutely doomed.
While the rioting was happening, the president tweeted "Mike Pence didn't have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!" And his lawyer tweeted "[Pence] will face execution by firing squad. He is a coward & will sing like a bird & confess ALL."
I'm not sure if those are the people we want making these decisions.
Like I said, I don't like any of this. I want to live in a world where we don't have to decide between the government and large companies, neither of which I particularly like. But alas, here we are... and currently, Twitter is the one on the side of "not lynching the VP", so I guess I'm on their side.
You can't say a company removing content is something China would do. It's the opposite. In an authoritarian regime, Twitter would be forced to be in lock step with the government, and the opposite is happening now. Think of it as checks and balances.
Taking a step back...
We've got these two sides. Regardless of the merits, each side believes they know the truth, and that the other side is delusional. And it is easy enough to engage with your media outlets of choice, and get your beliefs reinforced.
How can we have a meaningful discussion as a nation, when there is no apparent common ground? No set of agreed-upon facts?
Now I of course have my own very strong opinions and I'm sure I have a good comprehension of the truth. But that isn't going to convince anyone on the other side anymore. To people on one side, the other side's minds appear to be just poisoned.
A common tactic to try to get through to the other side is to just yell louder. But that isn't working.
What's left? What can be done?
We know the other side are people, the fact that we insult them acknowledges that. Think of hitler youth forcing a rabbi to scrub the pavement on their hands and knees. The cruelty is intentional, not based on seeing them as less than human.
1) Dehumanize the enemy
2) Kill/eliminate the inhuman enemy (no longer considered to be people)
3) Trump designated target
as well.
Doesn't matter which side you think you're on then. At some point they come for you:
Must-see new video shows Capitol riot was way worse than we thought
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752
https://edition.cnn.com/2021/01/09/media/reliable-sources-ja...
I get the sense that people are reading it to mean that the rioters at the capital hadn't been radicalized like this. Or that dehumanizing people in that way is somehow okay. Perhaps you can clarify.
I tend to believe that, thankfully, most people don't have the capacity for extreme violence at a moment's notice. It takes intense conditioning. The US military started to emphasize this [1](paywalled) after it was discovered that even during combat, while people were shooting at them, most soldiers didn't try to kill their enemy or even fire their weapon [2].
So it seems like the highest priority is to re-humanize the "normies" and "communist antifa spies" or whatever nonsense phrase these extremists are using. I have *absolutely* no idea how to do that, but it must be done.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/killing-does-not-com...
[2] https://www.historynet.com/men-against-fire-how-many-soldier...
Then again I would also say you’re correct as the people engaging with that violent and vitriolic content probably don’t consider them actual humans.
There is a point in which a particular group is no longer acting in good faith, and is taking advantage of the tolerance and ability to have discourse.
https://kottke.org/17/08/the-paradox-of-tolerance
It's cult like. I can't imagine supporting any side or politician like these people do.
Side a: 2016 US election was stolen. 2020 was fair and square. Side b: 2020 US election was stolen. 2016 election was fair and square.
Seems that there are a small number of people who think a) both elections were stolen or b) both elections were fair and square. They are being drowned out by sides a and b.
If you fit side a or b above, you might want to some logical thinking. Pretty simple to see the two sides are simply opposite sides of the same coin, both deeped in hypocrisy.
2016 US election had foreign propaganda interference (damn our algos weren't good enough!)
2021 Open violent attack on democratic process to certify president election.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/2147684/violence-erupts-across...
Or to fulfill this "promise"?
Pompeo Promises 'A Smooth Transition To A Second Trump Administration'
https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/1...
---
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752
In 2016, side A was arguing that the inputs to the election (voter opinions) were manipulated by foreign agents. This claim was 100% proven true by the Mueller report. Whether this actually changed the results of the election is impossible to say (I am of the opinion it was Comey's announcement 11 days before the election which tipped a close election toward Trump). But an effort was made, and that effort was for the benefit of the Trump campaign, and was explicitly supported by the Trump campaign. See: Mueller report Vol I, or Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election (5 volumes).
In 2020, side B was (and still is) arguing that the output of the election (the actual vote total) was changed. This has been shown to be false by repeated recounts, audits, investigations, court cases, etc.
If you think these two scenarios are identical, look a little closer.
You can try to spin it or rationalize it all you want, both sides are behaving the same.
Literally only one side stormed the capitol during a joint session of congress in an attempt to overthrow the election, so "behaving the same" is stretched pretty far here. By pretending both sides are the same, it would appear you are the one spinning and rationalizing.
I mean, let's not forget that Donald Trump of all people called into question the results of his own win in 2016 by claiming that 3 million people voted illegally, and that people were being bussed to New Hampshire to vote against him. He even formed a commission to investigate this "fraud"! So any impressions that the vote was illegitimate were flamed by the winner himself!
You're partially right. We have at least two sides. One side is CLEARLY delusional. Fueled by conspiracy theories and lies. We also have other sides, but the two sides that get the most attention are the only sides that matter. We have one side that is most definitely delusional, other sides maybe have members who might be, but one side is DOMINATED by delusion.
I just wanted to note that the "other side" that I'm not on, also believes basically the same thing with regards to my side.
The republicans have espoused a dangerous ideology that not just allows but welcomes factual untruths and a worrying disconnect from rational thought.
There is a need for political parties of various philosophical bents to push and pull in different directions based on reasoned and informed decisions.
Once you give up that core grounding you basically invite fanatism and I don’t see what possible positive outcome we can expect from this.
Of course it isn't enough. That's why the media outlets in question will make up facts, or really slant things to appear to carry sufficient factual weight, and then the reasoning from there comes out to the desired conclusion. Not that there is usually much reasoning going on, it is mostly emotional arguments.
As if the dems didn't do the same? Let's be honest with ourselves, both extremes are very dangerous, and polarization is continuing. The far left will kill people if left to their accord: https://cdn.cnsnews.com/styles/article_big/s3/2021-01/Arthur...
In fact, doing so is probably harmful.
There may or may not have been fraud in any of the states. But once they certify their Electors, that's it as far as I can see. I honestly don't know if there is a remedy even for clear fraud if the state goes ahead and certifies the results. In theory a state doesn't even need to hold a public vote. The legislature could just appoint the Electors. The founding fathers clearly wrote the constition to give the power of electing the president to the states. Allowing any level of the federal government to override that seems to be a conflict of interest.
1. I'm a Republican because of policy X.
2. I'm a person that thinks carefully about facts and reason.
3. Trump is the Republican candidate -> President.
4. I voted for the Republican. I must have done that because of #2 (and not just #1.)
5. Trump speaks the truth - he speaks for the people, people like me.
6. Trump believes election fraud is a problem. Combine #4 and #2 and the linked perceptual flaws of selective focus, imagining that election fraud could happen, allowing myths/stories to guide my responses to the things I read... plus I'm carefully thinking about facts and reason, and I voted for Trump, and most of the people in my social network also voted for Trump... it must be the plurality of the nation. My peers are also carefully thinking about facts and reason, and I'm sure the news networks I follow do as well...
This is super simplified and skipping about a thousand steps, and yet, it's really not hard to see almost anyone getting somewhere they never thought they'd end up after years of reading and listening to mostly facts that agree with what Trump tells his believers.
That's probably easier to believe happened than "I want to be an extremist and I want to violently attack Congress when they attempt to certify an election, even though it was a legitimate election."
[0] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/pieces-mind/201208/f...
Which set of conspiracy theories? The crazy ones that Trump was a Russian asset and everything surrounding that nutbaggery for four years?
How about the current nutbaggery from the other extreme that this election was stollen through voting machine manipulation, ballot stuffing, discarded Trump ballots by postal workers, etc.
It's hard for me to get upset at either side when it all looks so insane.
[1]: Senate Intelligence Committee report on Russian interference in the 2016 United States presidential election, Volume V.
[2]: Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, Volume I.
> The Senate Intelligence Committee assessed that Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort's "high-level access and willingness to share information with individuals closely affiliated with the Russian intelligence services" was a "grave counterintelligence threat".[15] The foremost individual was Manafort's employee Konstantin Kilimnik, a Russian.[15] The committee identified Kilimnik as a "Russian intelligence officer"; describing that Manafort and Kilimnik had a "close and lasting relationship" even through the 2016 election.[18] Manafort repeatedly tried to "secretly share internal Campaign information with Kilimnik", including "sensitive internal polling data or Campaign strategy".[18]
> The Senate Intelligence Committee introduced a new allegation regarding Kilimnik, that he "may have been connected" to the Russian military intelligence's hack and leak of Democratic Party material. However, the report's discussions on this topic are redacted.[19] Manafort's connection with the Russian hack and leak operation is "largely unknown", but possible, given "two pieces of information" the committee found; the details of such information were also redacted.[18]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senate_Intelligence_Committee_...
BTW, this report was released by Senate Republicans. As soon as this matter is cleared up, you can call it nutbaggery.
Calling a huge portion of the country delusional with no basis or fact is precisely what is driving this division. Both sides have a lot more in common than you might imagine. Far more than what they disagree on.
But today we're not really arguing over the margins; the question before us today is "should we live in a democracy where the people decide the outcome of elections?" 90% of Democrats and Republicans will agree that yes! We should!
Let's secure our democracy, then we can go back to arguing over the tax rate.
For them, "group strength" and tribalism is more important, so their behaviour is not is not delusional within that paradigm.
Thats what no one understands
I think we can avoid another major war, but I don't think we can avoid one ideology winning and one losing.
It would also be nice, albeit maybe very hard, to encourage even the less balanced media to try to speak to everyone and to write critically and honestly. For example, I personally lean left, but I find the New York Times to be increasingly vapid and unthinking.
In general, if you’re reading news (or Twitter!) just to find people who agree with you, you’re doing it wrong. This is true regardless of political party.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2020/08/27/906642178...
"This story was updated on Sept. 1, 2020. The original version of this story, which is an interview with an author who holds strong political views and ideas, did not provide readers enough context for them to fully assess some of the controversial opinions discussed."
So they are clearly cognizant of the fact that the content is very controversial. I think it's a sensitive and important subject, and one that doesn't really get addressed in a serious, scholarly way. In some ways, it's a perfect example of the kind of heterodox research that conservatives have advocated for in universities and public forums. And it is the job of the media to try to communicate what ideas are out there.
Nothing you're saying disputes that, editorially, they have a strong progressive bent.
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752
It doesn't really mean that automatically makes their views or policies inherently better than those who disagree with them. It's important to analyze things people say and and investigate their claims for yourself, and not just tribally agree with them on everything they say just because they use an adjective that sounds nice to describe themselves.
Haha, you realize that the right considers NPR Marxist propaganda?
Of course she has her cheap-o fake-news Wordpress sites as her "sources" about her "knowledge", and she's convinced they're telling the truth. I end up seeing the equivalance, why do I believe the network of MSM sites are telling the truth when she can believe the same thing of the network of fake-news sites? One thing is, MSM sites fact-check each other, but a lot of things she thinks are fake news aren't being "fact-checked" by MSM...
A funny thing though, she's a "Bill Gates wants to kill Africans through vaccinations", and she said "Search for this theory, but don't use Google, they're paid off by big pharma, use Duck Duck Go.". Then I had to tell her, "You do know Duck Duck Go uses results from Bing... which is owned by Microsoft?" (I think she knows the BG/Microsoft connection).
It's worse than this. Even just presenting facts that are inconvenient or go against the desires of beliefs is enough to make you an enemy / part of the other side, no questions asked.
If 50% of US population, apparently, thinks that hashtag is valid, you can rest assured it will either surface in some cloaked form ( say, bunnies for adoption ), or worse, it will disappear from the radar where LEOs will not be able to easily track it ( and boy can they easily track it now ).
I may be coming across as a free speech fundamentalist, but that is the problem with actual rights. You tend to defend assholes since they are the ones who tend to push the envelope.
I don't want to dance this dance. Its trajectory tends to end somewhere around Xi banning Winnie and number 8 ( ie. shit getting ridiculous ). It is not fun in the meantime.
What you're seeing is that the amount of yelling is roughly equally balanced, but you can't extrapolate from that to what all people actually believe. Obviously you won't find common ground for every single person, but there is common ground for 80-90% of them.
A few more bits of information:
- There's Mike Pence himself, the actual vice president of the United States, and his unwillingness to go along with the worldviews of those who have by now concluded he needs to be hanged.
- Mitt Romney, the actual Republican presidential candidate in 2012 (who won 47% of the popular vote), has been pretty strongly opposed to the idea that Trump secretly won / would have won, to the coup, etc. Previously he marched in Black Lives Matter protests and voted to convict the President in the impeachment trial last year. (Romney also created Romneycare, the model for Obamacare, even though if you listen to how loudly people yell, it seems like half the country opposes it.)
- Georgia elected two Democratic Senators. More generally, the Voting Rights Act was gutted in 2013 and several states are actively engaged in gerrymandering and voter suppression efforts. The fact that you see Republicans roughly tied with Democrats doesn't indicate that Republican policies are equally popular.
And, again, the "side" that advocates for "hang Mike Pence" is hardly the totality of the Republican Party.
So what can be done?
I think the highest-impact thing is to help out efforts to re-enfranchise Americans and end gerrymandering. The work coordinated by Stacey Abrams in Georgia is a good place to start, for instance. Regardless of what party or policies you support, if you believe in democracy, getting elections to be more representative can only be a good thing. And in particular, if you're right-leaning but worry that the Republican Party is going too far, making it so that the party has to compete by convincing centrists instead of being able to rely on extremists will be good for the party.
If you find this odd, you should read some far-right forums. I read these social media circles (as well as far-left ones of various sorts), not because I agree with them, but because I think it's useful to understand what the "other side" thinks. The one I was reading today had multiple memes of him as a traitor - one had him photoshopped as Brutus assassinating Trump-as-Caesar surrounded by Romney and others, one had him next to Benedict Arnold, etc.
Meanwhile, at some point in the NYC Women's March four years ago, when folks were chanting "Hey hey, ho ho, Donald Trump has got to go," I tried to lead a "Michael Pence has got to go." Nobody really joined in.
And in any case, my original point is that there is a large number of folks, Democrat and Republican and everything in between, who do not agree with "hang Mike Pence," and it is on those people's beliefs that we can build common ground. I don't deny that there are protestors with megaphones who shout extreme positions, but my exact point was that you should not extrapolate based on who shouts the loudest.
[1] https://electionscience.org/library/the-center-squeeze-effec...
More directly, if you're polling well in 40% of districts, poorly in 40% of districts, and competitively in the rest, it's worth focusing your attention only on the competitive districts, until you get to 50%. It's not worth paying any attention to the ones you're not competitive in.
Other voting methods (approval or ranked-choice) will reduce this effect and make political parties more representative of what people actually believe, instead of designing the system such that we have two parties that do the worst possible job of each representing 50% of the people.
That's just not true.
There are good statistics on the number of deaths and positive tests for Covid.
There is a reliable and agreed upon process for counting votes in the states, and plenty of avenues to dispute those counts, and a court system that has heard every single complaint from the losing Presidential candidate and made clear rulings based on the evidence.
What is abundantly plain from this week, is there is a very large number of people who clearly just wanted to bash some heads and break a lot of stuff and threaten more violence. They felt untouchable and that no rules applied to them.
These people have zero interest in finding objective truths about the world. They just enjoy the feeling of power over other people and they use words in whatever way thinks will increase that power, regardless of any connection to the truth.
> There are good statistics on the number of deaths and positive tests for Covid.
There is a significant segment of the population that believes the virus is a hoax, or not nearly as bad as the media says. Some of these people, even while dying from the virus, are still in denial, and yell at the medical staff about it.
Go watch some interviews with doctors and nurses. It will make you very sad and disappointed in humanity.
At least some, maybe most of those challenges were dismissed on procedural grounds, lack of standing, etc. They never got to the point of examining the "evidence." Maybe the retort to that is the challengers should have foreseen that. But the people filing these challenges were not unhinged randos from Twitter. They were elected officials, lawyers, educated people. They aren't going to go into court with something they know is frivolous.
Given that a sizable minority (and likely unprecedented number) of the voting public thinks there was fraud in the 2020 election, maybe it would have been better to have rebutted the evidence rather than the process.
https://today.yougov.com/topics/politics/articles-reports/20...
I'm not sure what you are trying to imply. Yes, they were going to have to present evidence. They didn't have any, and that's also why they didn't actually allege fraud. And that is why the cases were thrown out.
If you're asking why anyone paid them to file unwinnable cases: So there would be lawsuits to point to, and for the (minuscule) opportunity to have a (Trump-appointed) judge create some kind of win (again to point to it).
Due to the election results, it is now Democrats' turn to see how they can start to heal the nation. It is imperative that they see that the reason for Trump's success is not racism or misogyny of Trump's supporters. The real reason is that there are lots of people who think that their life is not good. And that needs to be fixed. Bad news again is that it is not easy. Even worse is that if you fail, escalation continues and at some point you are looking at breaking the country or even civil war.
This is the core problem. Who do you trust? Fox news or CNN.
The answer for me is I trust no one. They are all liars. I verify for myself. All governance (government, legal, media, military, education, etc) is there to foster a divisive situation as that makes us easier to rule. When people are divided they will not see the plans that are being executed and how they are pawns in a larger game.
You can call it delusional or conspiracy, but there are plans - you can very easily see these on the WEF's website, or read about them in Klaus Schwabb's book. If you don't want to see what is in store for you, what can I say? Switch the news back on, and have a good life.
The truth is that there are a controlling group of people that are entirely unaccountable - governments and voting provide them with a buffer from people - they enact their plans regardless of all that. And further to that, most of us are in an impossible situation that we can do very little about. BLM or MAGA protests - its all the same.
If you want to talk about solutions, the only answers are disengagement from the system. And if you go deep into that, the only answer is disengagement from the legal system. If there is one thing that causes the issues we have, its that we believe we are the legal name that we have a birth certificate of. And on it, it says 'this certificate cannot be used as proof of ID'.
The only law 'they' are happy for us to break, is the one where we use the legal name. You are not the legal name. You may not know who you are, but you are not that..
It is illegal to use the legal name. When we do so, we are acting with dishonour. And that is where our problems begin. And also where they can end.
No, we don't have two sides.
We've got, to reduce the complexity quite a bit but identify some factions with very distinct (though overlapping in various combinations) current interests: progressive Democrats and corporate neoliberal Democrats and moderate Republicans and conservative Republicans unequivocally appalled at the MAGA insurrection and those overtly supportive of the MAGA insurrection and mostly-conservative Republicans overtly opposed to the MAGA insurrection but eager to push it off the radar.
Anyways, whatever he says, he's got zero credibility, follows the most pathological path of psychopathy, though is expert in massively duping people for his own crimes and frauds. Though, he's so bad and incompetent in everything else, he relies on enablers around him that he later can backstab for his own mistakes.
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752
2. He's always lying.
3) He implies nothing, at least nothing predictable.
4) True, he still keeps lying about fraud even though he alleged fraud long before the election process even (before summer). He used anchors and primed his base for months on this. Even got underlings to sabotage effectiveness of the US Postal Service.
What he did agree to was "orderly transition" of power, and he most probably has this in mind (another prime):
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pompeo+%22to+second+Trump+administ...
I do believe that the arguing, the battle... it's a distraction, in a sense. It's an amplifier. It's a self-reinforcing polarization engine.
Maybe I'm just saying what you said, but I think it's important to break down the concept of "two sides" if you want to have any hope of finding common ground.
How many of you (in the U.S. if not abroad) want the best for the United States? Who among us want it to be a strong nation full of employed, educated, healthy citizens? Who wants to revisit the tenants of our founding fathers, learn lessons from the past while being willing to try new things and accept changes? Who wants this stark divide to be behind us?
Who wants to deescalate from violent rhetoric and focus on proven methods of finding and sharing truth?
I think that's the important thing right there. Echo chambers and identity politics have divided the USA greatly.
The way forward is not to divide more. For example Biden inferring that Trump is hitler and calling Senator Cruz Goebbels the nazi propaganda minister is not going to heal the divide.
>Now I of course have my own very strong opinions and I'm sure I have a good comprehension of the truth. But that isn't going to convince anyone on the other side anymore. To people on one side, the other side's minds appear to be just poisoned.
Imagine this for a second. Say you are going to spend all your waking hours reading the news. You could read every major source. You could review videos, pictures, you could have a good knowledge of what's going on in a small part of the world. You wont know what's going in 90%+ of the world.
The problem is that you cant do that. You dont have the time to do that and so you only look at a few sources. We then have the problem that the news cant be trusted. It's beyond clear that they publish outright lies.
That's why we have these delusion vs reality issues. To fix this problem isn't to give people more time. It certainly isn't to remove opposing viewpoints.
When you tear out a man's tongue, you are not proving him a liar, you're only telling the world that you fear what he might say. -George RR Martin
https://mobile.twitter.com/hashtag/guillotine2020?lang=en
Wasn’t ‘halted’.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/guillotine
https://mobile.twitter.com/notallbhas/status/124791247934001... : Bernie sanders’ plan c = guillotine
What about the idea that the tweet you've linked to was not after a sudden mob of violence was mobilised?
But a little introspection shows me that no, this isn’t really true. I’m not hunting down original sources for everything I think I know, I’m mostly relying on gatekeepers (experts) to tell me what is true.
Unfortunately, in social media, everybody gets to be an expert! How can the average person tell?
As much as it goes against my grain, I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is, even though we know they don’t always get it right.
Our current technology allowing any kind of garbage to be amplified to the masses is making things worse, not better.
And US has about only one institution left that people seem to trust. Military. It does not bode well for the fate of the republic.
I don't know that "people" in the original argument equates to "universally", but the only institutions that a majority of people have either a "Great deal" or "Quite a lot" of trust in are the medical system (just barely, 51%), the military (72%), and small business (75%). So small business is trusted more than the military, and basically nothing else is.
6% of people have a great deal of trust in Congress and 9% in television news which I guess are around the percentage of dentists who recommend sugared gum to their patients who chew gum.
There really are dentists out there that will tell you that if you chew gum, the sugared stuff is what you want. Not a lot of them, but probably about the same percentage as people that have a great deal of trust in congress or television news.
Hard to believe, but these people exist.
Very honest!
> As much as it goes against my grain, I have to admit that society works better when the gatekeepers decide what the truth is, even though we know they don’t always get it right.
No! They don't always get it right?! They are literally there to ensure you get it wrong! They really are. They are part of the governance structure - they will not tell you the way out of this situation, or give you good information.
All I would say, is that you need to ensure that you act on what you know. Not on what you believe. Verify everything you accept as true or discard or assume it but be prepared to be corrected if you get better information. And if it turns out that you don't know a whole lot - that is fine! At least you're not acting incorrectly and causing problems!
At the end of the day if you are acting on stuff that you don't know, you can inadvertently cause more harm, even though you mean well. You can be manipulated (easily) to go along with the crowd.
All the best.
UPDATE/EDIT
And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.
Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?
What do you imagine government's goal to be? Especially in a country like the US where half the elected are trying to shrink it?
People believing lies led to a mob storming the US Congress. Do you think the goal of the people in government was to get lynched by a mob?
(I use hacker news because it is moderated. That's not part of the problem)
Government's goal is to implement whatever governance is decided to be best to manage people.
You say a mob stormed congress. I saw a dramatic event, that justifies a lot of authoritarian actions to be undertaken on others. Including de-platforming the president! Isn't that amazing?
Other dramatic events are perfectly fine, of course, such as the BLM protests.
Why is that? The answer for me is that some protests suit the governance agenda, and some don't. A message needs to be given to indicate rightthink and wrongthink.
I think you must believe that the government (lights, camera) 'action' you see on TV are far more than a simple soap opera intended to distract you. Perhaps you believe that one side is 'good' and the other 'bad'. If that's it, you are falling for the good cop/bad cop routine, and being sold down the river by both sides.
(I don't mind moderation - but what we have on HN is no room for free thinking, consensus opinion wins the day. Was I really posting too much, was I undertaking a DDOS attack? Or was my opinion, if reasoned, unpopular and not to be heard. Let me know.)
I am not posting too fast in trying to reply to responses.
The reason I am blocked is because my opinions are not popular and they are downvoted.
This is the issue: HN is an echo chamber. Those who can downvote (those with 500+ upvotes) can downvote others and maintain the echo chamber. A function of the design is to take away the right of reply from those whose opinion they do not like.
No offense to you but typically there isn't a ton of value to someones posts that are repeatedly downvoted. They tend to be repetitive. I didn't look at yours so am not making a judgement on your statements but instead on others I have seen.
So an algorithm to slow down posts of that kind make sense even if it isn't perfect.
No one sees a post with a huge number of replies and assumes that since not every reply is replied back the person gave up. It is generally known that keeping up is hard when you are outnumbered.
You should keep that in mind and focus your efforts. If you get a bunch of replies focus on the upvoted ones first since then your reply will be more prominent as well. Ensure you aren't repeating your points, while some people carpet bomb replies most only do that when they are substantially similar.
On the topic of the post I replied to you got caught by several reasons for downvotes:
* Spreading a conspiracy. You emphatically say that those in power are lying. * Providing no evidence or even examples really. You have to back up extreme rhetoric with robust supporting evidence. You didn't provide any. * Bad place to make a stand. You chose to complain about overbearing tech companies on a topic about Twitter stopping people calling for the death of the VP. Direct calls for violence are agreed to be bad for everyone so using it as a jumping board for overbearing tech companies is a bad idea. * You finally used yourself as the example of overbearing tech companies. Never ever do this. You are incredibly biased about your own actions. You understand why you are taking them and give yourself immense benefit of the doubt. Using a literal spam filter as an example of what is wrong with tech because you personally got caught by it is a fundamentally flawed argument. You are incapable of reasonably inspecting the quality of your own posts.
Finally your original post is woefully ignorant. No one can know whether the election was stolen based on their own knowledge. No man is an island I believe is the phrase. The actual information required to prove that without a doubt is impossible to obtain. You need to have the data summarized to stand a chance. So by saying "acting on stuff that you don't know" after making it obvious you don't believe in secondary sources you are showing that you are making a fundamentally flawed argument.
I appreciate you attempting to 'set me straight'. All the best.
> Verify everything you accept as true
Hah... so, did you verify this stuff about MSM being a force to mislead?
The problem with the Internet nowadays is, it's already like a Library of Babel [0], if you want to have your views confirmed on anything, you can find someone saying "Yes, it's like that.".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Library_of_Babel
Its obvious. If you look at what is presented, you are given lots of claims, but very few facts. Its just a load of evidence-free noise. What's to evaluate?!
Seriously, look a little deeper at almost any article. There is no actual information there. The question you should ask - critically - is how do I know this to be true? And if you don't know it to be true, why do you believe it to be true anyway?
UPDATE/EDIT
And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.
Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?
"The key element of social control is the strategy of distraction that is to divert public attention from important issues and changes decided by political and economic elites, through the technique of flood or flooding continuous distractions and insignificant information."
Yesterday MSM reported live as Trump supporters attacked the Capitol. I see that as factual information, there were thousands at a Trump rally nearby, presumably because they wanted to hear their leader talk; and nobody's said these people dispersed and a bunch of others came from the bushes...
The media also said "x thousand more people died due to Covid-19 yesterday", here I do have implicit trust that the reporting is correct, then again they're just reporting numbers from government agencies. TBH I'm not that invested in this that I need to proof whether the number is correct or not, but that's the thing isn't it; a Covid-denier wants to think Covid is a lie, and therefore the number of deaths is a lie, because there's something in it for them, maybe it's because their business is currently shut down and their bank account is being drained and they're going to lose their house and go hungry soon..
Sarcasm follows: But oooh yeah, it's a giant conspiracy, everyone's out to suppress your views!
What's the conspiracy?! Its a fact.
But yes - it really does mean that my views are suppressed. I cannot reply to others as I would like.
1. Gatekeepers (in this case, any media labeled "mainstream" and any popular social media corporation) exist to spread disinformation.
2. These gatekeepers are part of the government (or governance structure); they operate on the direction of the government.
3. They will not give you "good information." Any of them.
All of this to argue that President Donald Trump, perhaps arguably the most powerful man when acting President is speaking the truth about widespread election fraud, which - in 2016 would make him look better, as he claimed he won the popular vote, and in 2020 would preserve his position of power and influence over you.
To accept that lie, you need to believe that the vast majority of news outlets and social media corporations are all secretly conspiring, planning, communicating and executing alongside election officials, bipartisan judges, etc. and all at the behest of a "deep state" shadow government, but the only people that are willing to "admit" this exists are people that are Trump's biggest fans.
But - for more info, so that you can confirm this is explicitly the case, you should look up 'Operation Mockingbird'. Or the way that the CIA sponsored arts and culture.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/modern-art-was-cia-...
The media being part of governance is not a conspiracy.
UPDATE/EDIT
And, in other conspiracy news, I am unable to reply to comments below. "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." This will probably prevent me from replying for a few hours (last time it was 3 hours). Understandably, people will think I'm flaky and unable to defend my position, where I am happy to have a meaningful interaction and share a different point of view.
Ask yourself, should I be able to say what I have said, in a free society? Did you think HN wasn't part of the problem?
This is perfectly credible. But extrapolating that example of government influence over culture to the premise "media is 100% under the control and direction of the government" or, furthermore, a hidden or shadow government... is stretching well beyond a logical conclusion. (It would have to be a shadow government, because mainstream media and social media were not going along with the Republicans led by Trump, when they were in power over several branches of the U.S. government.)
You need a lot more evidence to dispel the notion that this is "not a conspiracy."
Is that a conspiracy? If I had said that to you last year, you would have called me mad.
Contrast that, with what would happen if you tried to prevent just one individual coming near you, even if they had provably caused you harm. You would need to go to court, prove your case, get a restraining order, etc. And you would never be able to exclude them from work, enforce a passport, mandate good citizen score for loans and travel!! Apparently none of the legal stuff is applicable if the whole world is being locked down. No one needs to go on the record to state why all this is required.
This is where we are at! Do you really want to trust CNN? lol
And now our current technology owners have decided to only let one flavor of garbage be amplified to the masses.
Stopping one particular narrow class of violent incitement is still allowing a wide variety of flavors of garbage.
It's pretty obnoxious and exhausting to read about "Oh yeah, I know that's X, because..." on Twitter. Like the whole "It's Antifa ambushing the Capitol", because "the Antifa sign is to wear your hat backwards", "those are Antifa helmets", or just a screenshot of a photo of some guy with the text "phillyantifa.org" next to the picture is enough to convince some people that, "Yeah, it's Antifa".
It's a cheap grasping for evidence to reaffirm your views/world belief though, to fix your cognitive dissonance. Because trying to find the whole truth would mean confronting yourself and maybe figuring out you've been dumb enough to be lied to. That your "team" are the ones who are ready to be violent towards members of the government. Or that maybe your views are based on your fear of the other...
Also, written 5 years and a month ago https://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/12/15/the-donald-and-... :
> I would, however, add a casual observation: at this point Trump has been the front-runner for long enough that it’s very hard to imagine his supporters suddenly losing faith, because it would be too embarrassing.
> Bear in mind that embarrassment, and the desire to avoid it, are enormously important sources of motivation. [...] Nobody likes looking like a chump, and most people will go to great lengths to convince themselves that they weren’t.
> Now think about someone who has been supporting Trump since the summer. For the Trump bubble to burst, many people like that would have to slap their foreheads and say, “Wow, he’s not a serious person! What was I thinking?”
> And very few people ever do that sort of thing. Someone who has spent months supporting Trump despite establishment denunciations — which means something like a third of Republicans — will go to great lengths to avoid conceding that he has been foolish. At this point such people will insist that any negative reports about Trump are the product of hostile mainstream media; Trump’s very durability so far is likely to make him highly resilient looking forward.
That's not the fault of the "gatekeepers," nor should it be their problem. Disbelieving everything a source claims because you find "inconsistencies" and "bias" when no human being is ever perfectly consistent or unbiased in their views is an irrational and infantile way of thinking.
The least thing Twitter could do is allow us to see who started a specific hashtag. Hashtags can be pushed using Tweetdeck through private accounts.
In 2016, @jack asked which feature we want to see https://twitter.com/jack/status/814537990366228480
I replied with "ability to see who started a specific hashtag" https://twitter.com/maram5e/status/814720800024621060
@jack thought it was interesting and mentioned VP of Product at twitter. https://twitter.com/jack/status/814721829273292804 I got excited, but nothing happened.
I got excited because I thought I would in no time be able to, not discern the truth, but identify whether I can trust the source. After all, there is a name for content which does not identify its source: Grey propaganda.
>set up some unpleasant accounts to use the tags before they do.
That's what governments tried to do, but they failed, and were failing. Bots with aged accounts and Tweetdeck got better in 2015.
Good book by Tom Nichols:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Death_of_Expertise
Not anything recent:
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
* “A Cult of Ignorance” by Isaac Asimov, Newsweek, January 21, 1980, p. 19.
* PDF: https://media.aphelis.net/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/ASIMOV_...
'Special' thinking has been part of the American DNA since the beginning (Jamestown, Puritans/Pilgrims):
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fantasyland:_How_America_Went_...
Yes, it may be true that the thing (whatever it may be) is not a recent development, but that doesn't mean that it couldn't have steadily gotten worse over time and might eventually reach a tipping point that would be worth worrying about.
By "our current technology" you mean social media. If you need evidence that it is time to do something about social media, consider this:
28% of Americans believe that Bill Gates wants to use vaccines to implant microchips in people - with the figure rising to 44% among Republicans. See: https://www.bbc.com/news/52847648
Before social media these kinds of nonsense would never spread, but now so many people believe this kind of nonsense that it has become a huge threat to society.
1) Project your crimes unto your opponents (smokescreen + taking out targets).
2) Using priming, anchoring and repeating the same message exactly over and over. Ie. this is code for the "smooth transition" of power:
Pompeo Promises 'A Smooth Transition To A Second Trump Administration' (2020)
https://www.npr.org/sections/biden-transition-updates/2020/1...
Many people forget consciously. This works without social media, but the amplification may accellerate and strengthen the signal that much more when effective.
Yes, it is brainwashing techniques.
https://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/chris-99178053752
Are you sure about that ? The Red Scare, the Cold War, nuclear weapons on Irak, and so on and so on ... I'm pretty sure a said nonsense would find a way to spread just like history showed us in the past.
The craziest part is, the Gates Foundation did fund something very close to that: not microchips, but Biocompatible near-infrared quantum dots delivered to the skin by microneedle patches record vaccination.
It's essentially a tiny tattoo visible only in infrared light to track who has been vaccinated. So that rumor is more of a misunderstanding (of the difference between quantum dots and microchips) than misinformation.
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/invisible-ink-cou...
https://stm.sciencemag.org/content/11/523/eaay7162
There are people out there who know exactly what to use you for.
Society does not "work better when gatekeepers decide what the truth is." That's especially the case when the "truth" is political, and people have ideological incentives to report what they see as the truth in a certain light. Instead, society works better when individuals are free to look at the evidence and think about it for themselves. This is because in this case, you're treating the members of that society with human dignity.
1. Pence was pressured before and DURING the siege. Trump called once his followers were besieging the building to pressure Pence to overthrow the certified votes of this nation. His rhetoric was 100% responsible for the crowd's focus on Pence.
2. Trump directly pointed at the media at the rally and labeled them again as the enemy. During the siege all sorts of media members were violently assaulted. With the mob labeling them antifa as a means to rationalize mob violence against them. An AP reporter sustained a beating for several minutes as the crowd shouted for his death.
The doors on the Capitol building had "murder the media" scrawled on it by Trump/GOP's supporters. They chanted for Pence's hanging at the same doors.
This was a coup attempt coordinated and driven by sitting Republicans and the President of the USA. There is a direct line to be drawn from their actions to the results seen in the Capitol. The coup barely failed.