A conspiracy theory doesn't have to be always incorrect, therefore we can't defend conspiracy theories based on anecdotal examples where they proved to be correct.
In other words, if I say "every dice in the world is rigged such that it always rolls 5", this would be a conspiracy theory. The fact that there may be actually rigged ones doesn't change that.
They studied whether the average American can use Google to fact-check news articles and the answer seems to be no. And in particular, some people seem to be really bad at using a search engine:
> So what do the low-google-fu people do to generate bad results? Often, they just literally plug the questionable article headline or URL into Google. If your search terms are “SHOCK REVELATION: SHILLARY CAUGHT DRINKING BABIES’ BLOOD AT MARTHA’S VINEYARD ESTATE,” Google’s probably going to give you results that go along with its assumptions.
But it doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to fact-check news articles, or that it can’t be taught.
It might be interesting to repeat the study for other groups. College graduates? Graduate students?
Also, I wonder if it’s possible to build a better search engine with this task in mind?
The cynic in me suggests that one of the political parties in the US doesn't really want the population well educated.
I also feel "fact check via google" is also the wrong way to go about it, because google just spits out whatever the internet says.
The reality is that a certain skeptical mindset is required when consuming news reports. And when the skepticism goes away, you end up with a cult. And that's not something that every school district teaches.
Firstly, I think you're right—and their policies very much so reflect this.
Re: the "skeptical mindset"—I think critical thought is essential. But that's a lot more complex than merely having a "skeptical mindset", which is effectively what these "Do your own research" type of people tend to have. They're skeptical of the "mainstream elites", and that's about the end of the thought process. They're very likely to buy most narratives that counters mainstream consensus.
There are, in fact, at least two positions on most issues that the English speaking world cares about. But why move the goal post from voter education to a discussion on the subjective badness of the two main parties? That is, if your aim is to make a point under the discussion being had.
Who violently overthrew Congress? Gaslighting doesn't help your argument.
Is the "markeptplace of ideas" like when the Media and the DNC incited mass riots for eight full months before the 2019 election, mass-terrorizing American voters? To what end? To make sure there was a "fair trial" (note: this assured the opposite)? Or to make sure that the preferred candidate was elected? Again, by targeting American voters.
When was Congress overthrown? Which Congresspeople were harmed? Which Grandmas with American flags, now with criminal records, meant to take over the US government?
Yes, there are a lot of people in prison. They have been subject to norm-breaking prosecution under the opposition party's adminstration. Whenever an opposition party decides to arrest and prosecute its competition, they try to deflect from the authoritarian fact and deride those people as crimimnals as much as possible. This is the playbook for every tin-pot dictator since Sumer.
And in this instance, the authoritarians in question rode into office on eight months of nation-shattering street terrorism that their party incited and protected. Of course, the dictators proclaim those riots as perfectly legitimate and that of their competition as criminal. See: Tin Pot Dictator.
However I never see proposals from Republicans to improve education, just either cuts or demands to ban books. Do you have examples where they have proposed improvements to education? Without that then I'm afraid Republicans really do always to appear to be anti-education.
I’m not sure if you read their education proposals, but their platform basically boils down to spend less money on public education and instead support charter schools, private schools and home schooling, etc., teach the bible in class, get rid of national educational standards, support abstinence instead of sex Ed, get rid of student counselling for contraception/abortions, get rid of government funded student mental health support, reinterpret Title IX to apply only to women/girls, and privatize the federal student loan program.
None these proposals are very education-forward at all, and are mostly just hot button issues to rile up the base. Each of these policies just decreases educational support and funding. How will any of these policies have any beneficial effect on the quality of education American’s receive?
Don’t even get me started with their stated tax policy. The Republicans’ entire platform on tax reform is to repeal the Johnson amendment, a ban on non-profit political campaign activity that prohibits non-profits (which includes churches) from participating in, or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for political office; and to make the tax code “so simple and easy to understand that the IRS becomes obsolete and can be abolished.”[0] This is a literal quote from the 2016 Republican Platform that you linked. Yeah, let’s just abolish the IRS. That’s a super realistic policy.
Yep, I honestly don’t get how people can seriously read this platform and claim in good faith that these are valid policy positions. The “evidence” they linked to support their claim ended up instead just supporting your original point that they were trying to refute. Agreed. Just completely mad.
problematic about what? the idea of an "educated" voter is very childish
a lot of political topics, particularly foreign policy and economics, are far too complicated for ordinary people to be informed about. if you ever have the time i would recommend reading the book "propaganda" by jacques ellul. or just skimming the chapter titled "the necessity for propaganda." it's pretty relevant to the thread as well
I think you can be skeptical of Democrats as well as Republicans.
Here's a for instance:
In ruby red Idaho, where I live, Mike Lindell said that votes were switched from Trump to Biden. [1] Trump won with 64 % of the vote in Idaho.
Get this:
"Butte County after the election reported a tally of 1,193 votes for Trump and 188 for Biden. Lindell contended Biden only received 130. But the hand count of ballots found 188 to be accurate."
So Mike Lindell thinks the democrats reached into Butte county in Idaho and twisted 50 votes towards Biden!
The cynic in me suggests this is true of both major parties in US politics. The sets of things they want to you learn and don't want you to learn -- usually because it's just too hard to have a public conversation due to ideological conflict -- those sets of things just happen to be different in either case.
I wonder if there is some connection between prevalence of actual cults (or any organization built on belief, like churches or totalitarian regimes) and opposition to teaching on how to be skeptical.
Building a better search engine would be easy. Just cutting out the most egregiously delusional sites would go a long way.
But nobody would use it. People who are intent on confirming their biases scream "censorship" if you tell them they can't use their favorite sources of misinformation. They will swear up and down that they are capable of telling truth from lies, and even if they can't the lies are their natural born right.
It can be taught but most people have little motivation to learn. Genuine verification of claims is a lot of hard work so for most people the question becomes: Why bother learning how?
First, the warm and fuzzy feeling you get by confirming your chosen world view doesn't take very much work. Just a couple minutes on Google.
Second, for many, the mere suggestion that there is a need to learn a new skill connected with research will likely be interpreted as an attack on their intelligence.
So the real question we have to be asking is how we can motivate people to even want to uncover truth even when it leads to discomfort. The answer is obvious for those who have already arrived there but not for those who haven't.
This has always been the push/pull between strict democracy, republic, and benevolent dictatorship.
In a strict democracy, there are too many "idiots" who don't actually understand what the issue is. In a dictatorship you can get a CRAZY amount of things done (see Singapore, China), but all it takes is one/few bad egg(s) and sends the whole country into the stone age (see Philippines).
A republic seems pretty okay in the long term for now mostly because if there's too much infighting the country becomes a gridlock (like now), but that seems more like a feature than a bug.
The main problem is that everyone thinks that it's something we have to teach other people to do, but few see this as something that they themselves have to get better at. In fact, people become simply hostile to others for doing this if it's a piece of information they like.
I just saw a quote yesterday taken out of context on Reddit, and one of the most highly upvoted comments was someone mocking people who want context. If the quote makes a bad person bad, than someone even bothering to look at whether or not it accurately portrayed the situation is the enemy trying to defend the bad person.
Everyone should put more effort into fact checking things they want to be true than things they don't, because it's usually when we want something to be true that we drop our guards.
Maybe we could take a step back and don't think in black and white. I do not "want something to be true", I give it a probability to be true between 0 and 1.
But the thing is that moving from binary (true/false) to continuous (probability) requires mental effort which many people prefer not (or are not able) to do.
> It might be interesting to repeat the study for other groups. College graduates? Graduate students?
College graduates are no longer a rarified group with high IQs:
We conducted a meta-analysis of the mean IQ scores of college and university students samples tested with Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale between 1939 and 2022. Results. The results show that the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points and declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year.
"[Claim presented as absolute fact], prove me wrong". That's not how logic/argument/discussion works. If that's how the conversation is structured, that person is arguing in bad faith. It's a simple rule that should be taught at a very young age.
My TL;DR: Some really interesting conclusions here, though nothing particularly surprising to anyone familiar with SEO practices. In particular the use of SEO techniques to target "data voids" to help own particular terms or phrases that are then used when searching up more information.
> Low-quality publishers have been found to use search engine optimization techniques and encourage readers to use specific search queries when searching online by consistently using distinct phrases in their stories and in other media. These terms can guide users to data voids on search engines, where only one point of an unreliable view is represented. Low-quality news sources also often re-use stories from each other, polluting search engine results with other similar non-credible stories…
Again, nothing most people here don't already know about the overlap between SEO and misinformation, but it is interesting to see some numbers behind the effect.
> We found that, among those who first rated the false/misleading article correctly as false/misleading, 17.6% changed their evaluation to true after being prompted to search online (for comparison, among those who first incorrectly rated the article as true, only 5.8% changed their evaluation to false/misleading after being required to search online).
One of the most interesting techniques exposed here is the use of unique terms that can then be easily owned by the misinformation outlets and likely to be used by those searching for more information.
> Using the headline/lede as a search query probably produces unreliable results because they contain distinct phrases that only producers of unreliable information use.
> The term ‘engineered famine’ in the article is a unique term that is unlikely to be used by reliable sources. An analysis of respondents’ search results found that adding the word ‘engineered’ in front of ‘famine’ changes the search results returned. 0% of search terms that contained the word ‘famine’ without ‘engineered’ in front of it returned unreliable results, whereas 63% of search queries that added ‘engineered’ in front of the word ‘famine’ were exposed to at least one unreliable result. In fact, 83% of all search terms that returned an unreliable result contained the term ‘engineered famine.’
Nothing made me respect mainstream media more than a thousand "alternative" pundits crying foul while not only failing to do better but regressing on the basics: asking accused parties for comment, asking adjacent experts for comment, retracting articles when conflicting evidence arises, clearly delineating op/ed, etc. It's fair to argue that these things aren't sufficient, but it's absolutely wild how easy it wound up being to pass off regression for progression on this front. People really do just want to hear confirmation of their own opinions.
> asking accused parties for comment, asking adjacent experts for comment, retracting articles when conflicting evidence arises, clearly delineating op/ed, etc
Mainstream media doesn’t do that anymore. Completely random example that I just saw: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/05/politics/road-to-270-electora.... The article says: “Trump is a seriously flawed candidate who has promised to govern in undemocratic ways.”
That's his personal testimony and by all objective metrics the truth - if you think that's an opinion that's more telling on yourself. Just because its about someone for a political race doesn't mean its particularly political to notice trump did a treason.
That's absolutely a political opinion: dependent on a particular narrative and presentation of facts that is different from others.
Just like it is one that the 2019 riots were eight months of pre-election terrorism incited and protected by the party that now sits in the White House. And who is bent on making a four hour riot the center of attention instead. Funny that. We could do this all day.
No, it’s not. He’s continuously lied about a democratic election, refusing to admit that he lost it and attempting to get people to falsify votes to cancel out his loss. None of that is a political opinion any more than any other statement of fact. You can still say you like him, but you can’t get away from reality by saying it’s an opinion.
Yes, it is an opinion. People are allowed to contest elections. There is no legal requirement to admit loss. He tried to get no one to "falsify votes". That's spin. None of that amounts to "a treason".
Your narrative depends on a curated set of statements made in a very specific manner. To wit, it is a carefully crafted opinion.
People are allowed to ask for recounts and present arguments and evidence following the legal process in that state. They are are not allowed to pressure local officials to “find” votes, try to avoid leaving office, or encourage their followers to commit acts of violence against government employees fulfilling their legal duties.
You might not personally be willing to accept that your guy did that but it’s a matter of public record, and he notably had ample legal opportunity to produce evidence or question the state evidence in the many cases he lost. You aren’t entitled to personal facts because you find the real ones politically inconvenient. Many of the officials he railed against and the judges who found his claims unconvincing were Republicans, but they were also Americans who took their duties seriously and found against him.
>They are are not allowed to pressure local officials to “find” votes,
Really? Show evidence of "pressure" that has any legal standing. Show me where it is illegal to use the language "find votes". Show me. Don't ignore me. Show me. Which is well within the boundary of English semantic use, that is common use in US elections, for prompting someone to assure that all of the votes are counted.
None of this intepretative bs is "public record" in your poor utilization of the concept, which attempts to imply that your narrative is factual.
This national scale partisan haggling of single word subjective language interpretation, resulting in prosecution of a President, is toxic in a manner that the Nation won't recover from. Especially when every word that every politician has ever said is eventually subjected to the same scrutiny. Or worse, when it isn't and this type of prosecutoriual scrutiny is only reserved for one side.
>try to avoid leaving office
When did they have to drag Trump out of the Oval? It is legal to contest an election. Your noisy bs doesn't substitute for argument.
>encourage their followers to commit acts of violence against government employees fulfilling their legal duties.
Show me where this happened, without resorting to having to paste your imaginative narrative onto it.
In contrast, we have lots of on-camera evidence of DNC politicians directly supporting mass-violent riots that went on for months prior to the election that installed "their guy". Subjecting the US populace to months of horrific terrorism during pandemic lockdowns. Getting away with excusing the ludicrous notion that lockdowns were necessary except when it comes to massive riots.
The single thing that DJT is guilty of is beating Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Which was made perfectly obvious by the media beginning in the 2015 election season, and since.
Especially considering the front-and-center involvement of Bush operatives in the national drama since 2016.
None of this nonsense has a degree of credibility.
It amounts to the uniparty and the media needing to distract from culpability for eight months of pre-election riots that they incited and covered for. Which resulted in the murders of almost thirty American citizens. Not after the fact strokes. But in-process murders.
It amounts to the uniparty and the media mandating that they dictate exactly which protests and protests turned riots, whether they go on for eight months or a few hours, are legitimate no matter what and which are not legitimate no matter what.
When they can do this, we do not have a democracy.
>ample legal opportunity to produce evidence or question the state evidence in the many cases he lost.
Lost what? He hasn't been convicted of anything. Your abuse of language does not constitute a point.
>You aren’t entitled to personal facts
There isn't a single aspect of the J6 narrative that doesn't rely on carefully crafting it around fact omission.
>Many of the officials he railed against and the judges who found his claims unconvincing were Republicans,
That a significant portion of the RNC is rabidly against Trump was made evident in 2015, and has been since. Many of GW Bush's advisors openly defected to support the DNC in response. Some went on to try to ruin democracy by advancing the false narrative that those supporting Trump were significantly comprised of Russians.
Again, the people engaged in this subversion are operatives closely tied to the man who lost the 2016 RNC primary to DJT.
Citing supposed party affiliation carries zero cache in this argument. The voters are permitted to elect whomever they wish, and any interference in that adminstration, or viciously authoritarian efforts to unseat or otherwise prosecute that candidate and his followers, is not buoyed whatsoever by party affiliation. It has to be valid only on its merits. If democracy is what you believe in.
“He says, you're not going a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no. Other than day one. We're closing the border, and we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I'm not a dictator.”
He’s clearly turning back the “dictator” comment and using a metaphor to talk about things within his executive authority. Trump has the power to close the border. He also has the power to approve oil drilling permits. He then specifically says: “after that I’m not a dictator.”
The way CNN ran with this comment was unmistakably in bad faith.
Why do Trump fans pretend to care about democracy after Jan 6, just take the mask off. Everyone knows Trump and the cult do not care about democracy ;)
What's really interesting is former democrats of color voting for the one guy that if he really got into power would try to turn the USA into the next installment of the white power movement. How people can make this mistake over and over again is something that really puzzles me, people that directly vote against their best interest. It's not as if Trump has been subtle about it with all of his dog whistling. And the dogs came running.
How is he not flawed? He's under multiple indictments, has been impeached twice, and voters already rejected him once. Seriously flawed is about right.
No one on either side is going to see opposition investigations, prosecutions, and tactics as legitimate. They only make a candidate "flawed" in the eyes of those who already viewed them as flawed. For everyone else, its even a net gain because it reinforces authenticity. Which may be the hottest commodity in Washington. If anything is the opposite of "flawed" in the world of politics, it is "authentic".
And if there are going to be these extreme tactics, they have to work the first time to work at all. Politically speaking. In order to not look extremely inauthentic.
Maybe the RNC and DNC shouldn't have gone so hard in the paint starting in 2015, if they wanted anything done now to not have the oppposite intended effect.
It doesn't matter if he lost once. There isn't an authentic candidate to take his place. Many on the Right would rather see Joe Biden or even Hillary Clinton in office than Nikki Haley. Because at least they wouldn't be ruling inauthentically in the name of conservative voters.
I can help you. Authenticity is a synonym for trust, in the context of elections. Its the core of voting preference. That is, the candidate who wins is the one who the voters best trust to represent them.
Inauthentic candidates are seen as less trustworthy to do so. To varying degree. In other words, they are seen to be liars to varying degree. That is, inauthentic. Now you've caught up on how the American mind works in elections.
In the context of how the Get Trump Witch Hunt, ongoing since 2015, has affected eelections going forward: voters are now prone to see such unusual behavior from the opposition as a marker of candidate authenticity. Such is the nature of democracy poisoning actions.
In other words, if a candidate is not subjected to roughly equal treatment, then they will be widely seen as less authentic (more aligned with the opposing party than someone who is subject to it). This was obviously going to be the case going forward, beginning in 2016-17.
Which is a horrific situation for democracy.
To wit, in January 2024, Trump's RNC opposition have degraded themselves to appeals to the supposed fact that the opposition hates them less and therefore they will be more effective. They largely don't (at least effectively) sell themselves on authentic behavior. Possibly because they lack the actual conviction to sell it. Instead, they are essentially tacking toward inauthencity as their primary sales pitch. As a result, they don't stand a snowflake's chance if voters are the determining factor in a head to head primary.
Flawed is an opinion. The rest are facts, but they are irrelevant to the article.
I even happen to share that opinion. But when you can’t help yourself from interjecting it where it’s irrelevant, that’s a signal you can’t be trusted to do your job. Shut up and dribble.
(Incidentally, I'm pretty sure this is an opinion/analysis article, not a news article. However, the fact that CNN doesn't clearly label opinion/analysis -- and the existence of analysis at all, which I don't remember being a thing a decade ago -- do[es] support your point.)
Right, and the "opposition comment" standards were clearly efforts to address that problem. Insufficient as they were, they pretty clearly helped. Media is worse for their loss and they have yet to be replaced.
Ground News is the first "new" thing that seems to be a clear step in a good direction, but I don't know how much adoption it actually has vs flash in the pan VC money.
Nothing made me respect mainstream media less than when in 2020 during the COVID pandemic they said they were absolutely 100% totally sure that COVID didn't leak from a Chinese biolab and that who ever suggested such possibility was a conspiracy theorist who should be banned from social media and the like.
Second, recall:
1. There was basically (and as far as I know, still is) no evidence to support this being the case. There was a suspicion at most, and it was basically a conspiracy theory in 2020.
2. This conspiracy theory had a deep root in anti-China / anti-Asian racism. Anti-Asian hate crimes rose 150% in 2020 [1]. So I think it's pretty understandable that mainstream media outlets felt a responsibility to quell interest in conspiracy theories resulting in real-world harm.
And Fauci, et al actively worked to discredit the lab leak theory in Jan-Mar 2020 when there were some early clues.. therefore casting anyone digging into them as a conspiracy theorist as you just did:
Social media is "the place" with the propagandist bots and partisan screamers? As opposed to where?
There are at least two significant red flags in this article:
a. It cites five studies, which it does not critique, instead of being a more serious review of one. Without a critique of any of the studies, the author restating their conclusions as some sort of pseudo meta-study is ironically low information. Given the forceful conclusions, an examination of the methodologies is crucial for persuasion.
b. The article is openly partisan.
Given how the terms "fake news", "misninformation" and "debunk" have been politicized and abused into virtual meaninglessness over the past eight years, the utilization of only those unexamined terms as the article's pillars does not make for compelling reading.
So much "news" today is opinion masquerading as fact. While news media companies often do get the facts wrong, even when the facts are right, those facts are heavily colored by commentary and slant, often leaving out other facts that don't adhere to the narrative. I'm highly skeptical when the author's conclusion is that readers can't discern fake news on their own, when even educated people disagree on what is fake news, when the author thinks that people doing their own research is a problem, and virtue lies in believing the common narrative.
It's always been that way. My favourite example is the nightly financial report, where they will invariably say "the market did [something] today because of X". Very occasionally, like on 9/11, they will be right. But most of the time, it's near impossible to say why they market moved the way it did. They are just authoritatively babbling plausible sounding bullshit. The amazing thing for me is for decades I believed them.
They don't just do it there of course. Another thing people describe is to read a mass media report on some event you attended, and not recognise it. I didn't realise how true that was until it happened to me. It was a report in by time.com of an event I attended in my local city. The report was all true, but it focused on a 10 person street protest. They were doing it because 1 million other people were attending the event, almost all of which were blithely unaware of the presence of those 10 people. It was a complete irrelevancy, yet it was probably the only words a fair chunk of the world's population got to read about the event.
This was all decades ago. Today, surprise surprise, people write and say anything to get your attention, so they can display a ad and make money from you. Nothing has changed. Not even the motivations.
Circa 2008, I conducted an experiment. I watched an hour of CNN every night but it was never that night's coverage. It was from exactly two weeks ago.
It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.
I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.
And it wasn't unique to them. Choose whoever your out group channel is.
Almost 10 years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:
The article talks about how a search engine can invisibly alter search to affect the outcome of an election.
It’s interesting you mentioned watching the news, but delayed…the article was written before the 2016 election and says Google favored Hillary Clinton.
Not taking away the point, because it’s valid…but you should find a newer article without such obvious error…just saying…
Unfortunately, "it didn't work this time" does not translate to "it doesn't work" or even "they didn't try it."
Manipulation - or preference shifting if you prefer - is not a binary thing. It's entirely possible to shift preferences (even significantly) but not shift them enough to win.
Whenever I look at examples of something that the sort of people who use the term “misinformation” call misinformation it’s - almost always a direct quote, presented with no further elaboration, from somebody they dislike. Presenting an accurate Joe Biden quote (for example) isn’t misinformation, and “doing the research” means making sure it wasn’t taken out of context.
"#1 killer of kids" is a good example of common misinformation you'll hear when the gun debate pops up again. boy do folks like parroting that one - from randoms on the internet, to the politicians, to the media.
> But what’s the most enraging thing your uncle can say at Thanksgiving, right after he tells you about how the Rothschilds are behind an army of Colombians set to invade Idaho next week? “I’ve done my own research on this.” In other words:
87 comments
[ 2.4 ms ] story [ 159 ms ] threadIn other words, if I say "every dice in the world is rigged such that it always rolls 5", this would be a conspiracy theory. The fact that there may be actually rigged ones doesn't change that.
> So what do the low-google-fu people do to generate bad results? Often, they just literally plug the questionable article headline or URL into Google. If your search terms are “SHOCK REVELATION: SHILLARY CAUGHT DRINKING BABIES’ BLOOD AT MARTHA’S VINEYARD ESTATE,” Google’s probably going to give you results that go along with its assumptions.
But it doesn’t mean you can’t learn how to fact-check news articles, or that it can’t be taught.
It might be interesting to repeat the study for other groups. College graduates? Graduate students?
Also, I wonder if it’s possible to build a better search engine with this task in mind?
I also feel "fact check via google" is also the wrong way to go about it, because google just spits out whatever the internet says.
The reality is that a certain skeptical mindset is required when consuming news reports. And when the skepticism goes away, you end up with a cult. And that's not something that every school district teaches.
Re: the "skeptical mindset"—I think critical thought is essential. But that's a lot more complex than merely having a "skeptical mindset", which is effectively what these "Do your own research" type of people tend to have. They're skeptical of the "mainstream elites", and that's about the end of the thought process. They're very likely to buy most narratives that counters mainstream consensus.
yes just the single party that is the opposite of mine of course ;)
Yep. Both U.S. political parties are equally problematic! No distinctions to be drawn, whatsoever!
I thought one of the benefits to the US was a "marketplace of ideas".
Is the "markeptplace of ideas" like when the Media and the DNC incited mass riots for eight full months before the 2019 election, mass-terrorizing American voters? To what end? To make sure there was a "fair trial" (note: this assured the opposite)? Or to make sure that the preferred candidate was elected? Again, by targeting American voters.
I recall a certain January 6 even to which the convicted criminals Elaine Stefanik refers to as "Hostages".
Who are you talking about?
Yes, there are a lot of people in prison. They have been subject to norm-breaking prosecution under the opposition party's adminstration. Whenever an opposition party decides to arrest and prosecute its competition, they try to deflect from the authoritarian fact and deride those people as crimimnals as much as possible. This is the playbook for every tin-pot dictator since Sumer.
And in this instance, the authoritarians in question rode into office on eight months of nation-shattering street terrorism that their party incited and protected. Of course, the dictators proclaim those riots as perfectly legitimate and that of their competition as criminal. See: Tin Pot Dictator.
Republicans, much like the Tories here, appear to want to cut taxes because everything they say is about reducing government interference.
Not always a bad thing, but cutting taxes inherently means some services will get caught in the trim.
When your Department of Education releases things like this, I can see why you would ignore the highly emotional charged language
https://www.ed.gov/news/press-releases/fact-sheet-house-repu...
However I never see proposals from Republicans to improve education, just either cuts or demands to ban books. Do you have examples where they have proposed improvements to education? Without that then I'm afraid Republicans really do always to appear to be anti-education.
https://prod-static.gop.com/media/Resolution_Platform.pdf
I don’t think any party is for slashing tax revenue anymore. The GOP wants a supermajority for raising taxes.
Reading the DoE press release you linked, it sounds like the objection is to double-dipping.
None these proposals are very education-forward at all, and are mostly just hot button issues to rile up the base. Each of these policies just decreases educational support and funding. How will any of these policies have any beneficial effect on the quality of education American’s receive?
Don’t even get me started with their stated tax policy. The Republicans’ entire platform on tax reform is to repeal the Johnson amendment, a ban on non-profit political campaign activity that prohibits non-profits (which includes churches) from participating in, or intervening in any political campaign on behalf of any candidate for political office; and to make the tax code “so simple and easy to understand that the IRS becomes obsolete and can be abolished.”[0] This is a literal quote from the 2016 Republican Platform that you linked. Yeah, let’s just abolish the IRS. That’s a super realistic policy.
Their tax policy is just laughable.
[0] https://prod-static.gop.com/media/Resolution_Platform.pdf
That was 2016, which was Trump who gave you folks tax cuts and attacks on education. Completely mad.
a lot of political topics, particularly foreign policy and economics, are far too complicated for ordinary people to be informed about. if you ever have the time i would recommend reading the book "propaganda" by jacques ellul. or just skimming the chapter titled "the necessity for propaganda." it's pretty relevant to the thread as well
Here's a for instance:
In ruby red Idaho, where I live, Mike Lindell said that votes were switched from Trump to Biden. [1] Trump won with 64 % of the vote in Idaho.
Get this:
"Butte County after the election reported a tally of 1,193 votes for Trump and 188 for Biden. Lindell contended Biden only received 130. But the hand count of ballots found 188 to be accurate."
So Mike Lindell thinks the democrats reached into Butte county in Idaho and twisted 50 votes towards Biden!
[1] https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-joe-biden-election-r....
But nobody would use it. People who are intent on confirming their biases scream "censorship" if you tell them they can't use their favorite sources of misinformation. They will swear up and down that they are capable of telling truth from lies, and even if they can't the lies are their natural born right.
First, the warm and fuzzy feeling you get by confirming your chosen world view doesn't take very much work. Just a couple minutes on Google.
Second, for many, the mere suggestion that there is a need to learn a new skill connected with research will likely be interpreted as an attack on their intelligence.
So the real question we have to be asking is how we can motivate people to even want to uncover truth even when it leads to discomfort. The answer is obvious for those who have already arrived there but not for those who haven't.
In a strict democracy, there are too many "idiots" who don't actually understand what the issue is. In a dictatorship you can get a CRAZY amount of things done (see Singapore, China), but all it takes is one/few bad egg(s) and sends the whole country into the stone age (see Philippines).
A republic seems pretty okay in the long term for now mostly because if there's too much infighting the country becomes a gridlock (like now), but that seems more like a feature than a bug.
I just saw a quote yesterday taken out of context on Reddit, and one of the most highly upvoted comments was someone mocking people who want context. If the quote makes a bad person bad, than someone even bothering to look at whether or not it accurately portrayed the situation is the enemy trying to defend the bad person.
Everyone should put more effort into fact checking things they want to be true than things they don't, because it's usually when we want something to be true that we drop our guards.
But the thing is that moving from binary (true/false) to continuous (probability) requires mental effort which many people prefer not (or are not able) to do.
College graduates are no longer a rarified group with high IQs:
We conducted a meta-analysis of the mean IQ scores of college and university students samples tested with Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale between 1939 and 2022. Results. The results show that the average IQ of undergraduate students today is a mere 102 IQ points and declined by approximately 0.2 IQ points per year.
Ref: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1309...
As a whole, their primary differentiator appears to be the ability to get loans.
Individual programs (by university or degree) vary though so cohort analysis by one of those may be useful.
> Low-quality publishers have been found to use search engine optimization techniques and encourage readers to use specific search queries when searching online by consistently using distinct phrases in their stories and in other media. These terms can guide users to data voids on search engines, where only one point of an unreliable view is represented. Low-quality news sources also often re-use stories from each other, polluting search engine results with other similar non-credible stories…
Again, nothing most people here don't already know about the overlap between SEO and misinformation, but it is interesting to see some numbers behind the effect.
> We found that, among those who first rated the false/misleading article correctly as false/misleading, 17.6% changed their evaluation to true after being prompted to search online (for comparison, among those who first incorrectly rated the article as true, only 5.8% changed their evaluation to false/misleading after being required to search online).
One of the most interesting techniques exposed here is the use of unique terms that can then be easily owned by the misinformation outlets and likely to be used by those searching for more information.
> Using the headline/lede as a search query probably produces unreliable results because they contain distinct phrases that only producers of unreliable information use.
> The term ‘engineered famine’ in the article is a unique term that is unlikely to be used by reliable sources. An analysis of respondents’ search results found that adding the word ‘engineered’ in front of ‘famine’ changes the search results returned. 0% of search terms that contained the word ‘famine’ without ‘engineered’ in front of it returned unreliable results, whereas 63% of search queries that added ‘engineered’ in front of the word ‘famine’ were exposed to at least one unreliable result. In fact, 83% of all search terms that returned an unreliable result contained the term ‘engineered famine.’
Mainstream media doesn’t do that anymore. Completely random example that I just saw: https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/05/politics/road-to-270-electora.... The article says: “Trump is a seriously flawed candidate who has promised to govern in undemocratic ways.”
That’s not in the opinion section.
For individual news shows I think the best are 60 Minutes and Frontline.
Just like it is one that the 2019 riots were eight months of pre-election terrorism incited and protected by the party that now sits in the White House. And who is bent on making a four hour riot the center of attention instead. Funny that. We could do this all day.
Your narrative depends on a curated set of statements made in a very specific manner. To wit, it is a carefully crafted opinion.
You might not personally be willing to accept that your guy did that but it’s a matter of public record, and he notably had ample legal opportunity to produce evidence or question the state evidence in the many cases he lost. You aren’t entitled to personal facts because you find the real ones politically inconvenient. Many of the officials he railed against and the judges who found his claims unconvincing were Republicans, but they were also Americans who took their duties seriously and found against him.
Really? Show evidence of "pressure" that has any legal standing. Show me where it is illegal to use the language "find votes". Show me. Don't ignore me. Show me. Which is well within the boundary of English semantic use, that is common use in US elections, for prompting someone to assure that all of the votes are counted.
None of this intepretative bs is "public record" in your poor utilization of the concept, which attempts to imply that your narrative is factual.
This national scale partisan haggling of single word subjective language interpretation, resulting in prosecution of a President, is toxic in a manner that the Nation won't recover from. Especially when every word that every politician has ever said is eventually subjected to the same scrutiny. Or worse, when it isn't and this type of prosecutoriual scrutiny is only reserved for one side.
>try to avoid leaving office
When did they have to drag Trump out of the Oval? It is legal to contest an election. Your noisy bs doesn't substitute for argument.
>encourage their followers to commit acts of violence against government employees fulfilling their legal duties.
Show me where this happened, without resorting to having to paste your imaginative narrative onto it.
In contrast, we have lots of on-camera evidence of DNC politicians directly supporting mass-violent riots that went on for months prior to the election that installed "their guy". Subjecting the US populace to months of horrific terrorism during pandemic lockdowns. Getting away with excusing the ludicrous notion that lockdowns were necessary except when it comes to massive riots.
The single thing that DJT is guilty of is beating Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election. Which was made perfectly obvious by the media beginning in the 2015 election season, and since.
Especially considering the front-and-center involvement of Bush operatives in the national drama since 2016.
None of this nonsense has a degree of credibility.
It amounts to the uniparty and the media needing to distract from culpability for eight months of pre-election riots that they incited and covered for. Which resulted in the murders of almost thirty American citizens. Not after the fact strokes. But in-process murders.
It amounts to the uniparty and the media mandating that they dictate exactly which protests and protests turned riots, whether they go on for eight months or a few hours, are legitimate no matter what and which are not legitimate no matter what.
When they can do this, we do not have a democracy.
>ample legal opportunity to produce evidence or question the state evidence in the many cases he lost.
Lost what? He hasn't been convicted of anything. Your abuse of language does not constitute a point.
>You aren’t entitled to personal facts
There isn't a single aspect of the J6 narrative that doesn't rely on carefully crafting it around fact omission.
>Many of the officials he railed against and the judges who found his claims unconvincing were Republicans,
That a significant portion of the RNC is rabidly against Trump was made evident in 2015, and has been since. Many of GW Bush's advisors openly defected to support the DNC in response. Some went on to try to ruin democracy by advancing the false narrative that those supporting Trump were significantly comprised of Russians.
Again, the people engaged in this subversion are operatives closely tied to the man who lost the 2016 RNC primary to DJT.
Citing supposed party affiliation carries zero cache in this argument. The voters are permitted to elect whomever they wish, and any interference in that adminstration, or viciously authoritarian efforts to unseat or otherwise prosecute that candidate and his followers, is not buoyed whatsoever by party affiliation. It has to be valid only on its merits. If democracy is what you believe in.
>but they were al...
“He says, you're not going a dictator, are you? I said, no, no, no. Other than day one. We're closing the border, and we're drilling, drilling, drilling. After that I'm not a dictator.”
He’s clearly turning back the “dictator” comment and using a metaphor to talk about things within his executive authority. Trump has the power to close the border. He also has the power to approve oil drilling permits. He then specifically says: “after that I’m not a dictator.”
The way CNN ran with this comment was unmistakably in bad faith.
Why do Trump fans pretend to care about democracy after Jan 6, just take the mask off. Everyone knows Trump and the cult do not care about democracy ;)
And if there are going to be these extreme tactics, they have to work the first time to work at all. Politically speaking. In order to not look extremely inauthentic.
Maybe the RNC and DNC shouldn't have gone so hard in the paint starting in 2015, if they wanted anything done now to not have the oppposite intended effect.
It doesn't matter if he lost once. There isn't an authentic candidate to take his place. Many on the Right would rather see Joe Biden or even Hillary Clinton in office than Nikki Haley. Because at least they wouldn't be ruling inauthentically in the name of conservative voters.
Inauthentic candidates are seen as less trustworthy to do so. To varying degree. In other words, they are seen to be liars to varying degree. That is, inauthentic. Now you've caught up on how the American mind works in elections.
In the context of how the Get Trump Witch Hunt, ongoing since 2015, has affected eelections going forward: voters are now prone to see such unusual behavior from the opposition as a marker of candidate authenticity. Such is the nature of democracy poisoning actions.
In other words, if a candidate is not subjected to roughly equal treatment, then they will be widely seen as less authentic (more aligned with the opposing party than someone who is subject to it). This was obviously going to be the case going forward, beginning in 2016-17.
Which is a horrific situation for democracy.
To wit, in January 2024, Trump's RNC opposition have degraded themselves to appeals to the supposed fact that the opposition hates them less and therefore they will be more effective. They largely don't (at least effectively) sell themselves on authentic behavior. Possibly because they lack the actual conviction to sell it. Instead, they are essentially tacking toward inauthencity as their primary sales pitch. As a result, they don't stand a snowflake's chance if voters are the determining factor in a head to head primary.
I even happen to share that opinion. But when you can’t help yourself from interjecting it where it’s irrelevant, that’s a signal you can’t be trusted to do your job. Shut up and dribble.
Don't forget the most important part of all: omitting details and testimony for the public good: https://jonathanturley.org/2023/12/04/the-responsibility-to-...
Ground News is the first "new" thing that seems to be a clear step in a good direction, but I don't know how much adoption it actually has vs flash in the pan VC money.
Second, recall: 1. There was basically (and as far as I know, still is) no evidence to support this being the case. There was a suspicion at most, and it was basically a conspiracy theory in 2020.
2. This conspiracy theory had a deep root in anti-China / anti-Asian racism. Anti-Asian hate crimes rose 150% in 2020 [1]. So I think it's pretty understandable that mainstream media outlets felt a responsibility to quell interest in conspiracy theories resulting in real-world harm.
[1] https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-hate-c...
If you're not aware of the evidence, it's not from lack of information being publicly available. From almost a year ago:
https://www.cnn.com/2023/02/28/politics/wray-fbi-covid-origi...
https://www.wsj.com/articles/covid-origin-china-lab-leak-807...
And Fauci, et al actively worked to discredit the lab leak theory in Jan-Mar 2020 when there were some early clues.. therefore casting anyone digging into them as a conspiracy theorist as you just did:
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/Final...
There are at least two significant red flags in this article:
a. It cites five studies, which it does not critique, instead of being a more serious review of one. Without a critique of any of the studies, the author restating their conclusions as some sort of pseudo meta-study is ironically low information. Given the forceful conclusions, an examination of the methodologies is crucial for persuasion.
b. The article is openly partisan.
Given how the terms "fake news", "misninformation" and "debunk" have been politicized and abused into virtual meaninglessness over the past eight years, the utilization of only those unexamined terms as the article's pillars does not make for compelling reading.
They don't just do it there of course. Another thing people describe is to read a mass media report on some event you attended, and not recognise it. I didn't realise how true that was until it happened to me. It was a report in by time.com of an event I attended in my local city. The report was all true, but it focused on a 10 person street protest. They were doing it because 1 million other people were attending the event, almost all of which were blithely unaware of the presence of those 10 people. It was a complete irrelevancy, yet it was probably the only words a fair chunk of the world's population got to read about the event.
This was all decades ago. Today, surprise surprise, people write and say anything to get your attention, so they can display a ad and make money from you. Nothing has changed. Not even the motivations.
It was amazing how much "breaking news!" was irrelevant or just outright wrong, how many large trend predictions were wrong, and how many "[person] will do X" were wrong. While the predictions could have been portrayed as opinions, they were presented as facts and the obvious next steps or conclusions.
I realized pretty quickly that avoiding CNN kept out the blatantly wrong information so even if I didn't replace it with anything, I was net ahead.
And it wasn't unique to them. Choose whoever your out group channel is.
Almost 10 years ago, I discovered this article and realized that some portion of it was probably on purpose:
https://aeon.co/essays/how-the-internet-flips-elections-and-...
It’s interesting you mentioned watching the news, but delayed…the article was written before the 2016 election and says Google favored Hillary Clinton.
Not taking away the point, because it’s valid…but you should find a newer article without such obvious error…just saying…
Which part is incorrect and why? Thanks.
So much for the manipulation being cut-and-dried…
No, I didn’t support her opponent either…
Their preferred candidate didn't win, therefore...
Why is this difficult?
Edit: Since we have no kinesics or vocal inflection, I should say that I’m not angry or frustrated, just tremendously sad.
Unfortunately, "it didn't work this time" does not translate to "it doesn't work" or even "they didn't try it."
Manipulation - or preference shifting if you prefer - is not a binary thing. It's entirely possible to shift preferences (even significantly) but not shift them enough to win.
Deja Coup: Donald Trump and the Slow Civil War
https://slate.com/podcasts/amicus/2024/01/donald-trump-janua...
This is an example of The Cowpox of Doubt: https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/04/15/the-cowpox-of-doubt/