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The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

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Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's what the right wing is about at all. All the conservative pundits I listen to think Trump behaved disgracefully after the election and that there is still no evidence of sufficient voter irregularities to turn the election. Many still believe it's a major problem that states like Pennsylvania violated their own laws during the election, which should be illegal, but handling that is a separate iss…

Does "more election security" mean less black people voting? I mean the Republican party has argued in court that it should be legal for them to prevent black democrats from voting as long as it targets them as Democrat voters, rather than by race, so it's not like this is a big secret conspiracy or anything. https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

Thomas Sowell has been debunking the "disparate outcome means racism" fallacy for decades. I wish more people were listening. He's the most underrated genius of his time.

https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow...

In short, if voter ID laws cause some groups of people to vote less than others, that doesn't make the law discriminatory or make the law bad. Scanning over this ACLU article, I see nothing to convince me that voter ID laws are bad. Many of us here are programmers and understand there is a tradeoff between usability and security. Our current voting process errs far too heavily on the side of usability at the expense of security.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#152
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that I am oversimplifying anything. Why are you conflating freedom of speech, moderation and censorship? Freedom of speech means the government won't come and arrest you for saying something. That's got nothing to do with wokeness or Twitter. Twitter (et al) are commercial businesses. They have terms of service and if you don't abide to them you get kicked. It's very simple. You're not paying for it - y…

Just come forward and say that you're a trolling woke this thing about freedom of speech and governments is like one of your(theirs?) preferred point, but who cares? Governments are people elected by people, not coffee machines elected by coffee machine so I can also be a supporter of freedom of speech within people and their neighbours outside of the boundaries of the law, also yeah Twitter can do whatever it wants,…

> this thing about freedom of speech and governments is like one of your(theirs?) preferred point, but who cares?

Anyone who cares about reality? Because that's all freedom of speech is. If you break ToS, tough.

I don't follow the coffee machine bit, sorry.

> also yeah Twitter can do whatever it wants, I needed a mainstream platform which helped alienating people towards their circle

Glad you agree that Twitter can do whatever it wants. Maybe it sucks, but that's a free market for you!

Can I take it that you were banned from Twitter? If so, why?

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that's what the right wing is about at all. All the conservative pundits I listen to think Trump behaved disgracefully after the election and that there is still no evidence of sufficient voter irregularities to turn the election. Many still believe it's a major problem that states like Pennsylvania violated their own laws during the election, which should be illegal, but handling that is a separate iss…

I'm not asserting every single conservative fits this mold, or that you can't cherry-pick pundits who still play fair. But most of what the right wing is oriented around today is attacking the free press, stifling public education, making voting more difficult for urban citizens and pretending, loudly and constantly, that the last election was stolen. Where are the policy proposals? What major legislation did conserv…

Yes, and I'm asserting that 90+% of conservatives don't fit the mold you are casting. That was the point of my response. You can find crazies on both sides of the political aisle.

One of trump's failures is that he isn't a good statesman and so failed to unite his own party, which caused a lot of failures in the legislative process as people like John McCain voted against him just because they hated him. I sincerely wish Trump doesn't run in 2024, not because I think he would do worse than Biden (he would have been 100x better than Biden), but because his greatest strengths are also his biggest flaws, and I don't think he can lead the country effectively.

The general platform of conservatives is: "this is the greatest civilization in history we've inherited. Please stop screwing it up so badly!" That may be different from the RNC platform, but Republicans at least align with conservative values more closely than democrats, so we don't have much choice but to vote for them. Unfortunately, conservatives have rarely been dominant even within the Republican party, and many anti-conservative measures have been perpetrated by Republican presidents.

I agree we need new and better ideas to go mainstream in the party, though not that these ideas don't exist. Among the weaknesses of the Republican party in the past decade have been the unwillingness of the party elites to sense the times and pay attention to their constituents or to the looming culture wars.

As it is most of the time, the strongest argument to vote for a party is not that that party is great, but that the other party is worse. I have no solution for that.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#154

I am genuinely surprised at the comments in this thread. This article starts "That said, I do not think there is much evidence that misinformation has become more widespread, that this increase in misinformation is due to technological change, or that it is at the root of the political trends liberals are most angry about", which is immediately making this a partisan issue. Secondly: "The internet makes me better inf…

"Real people are dying because of perpetuated information on social media and "news" outlets."

You mean those about covid or vaccines? What exactly is wrong to let people choose? Why you think that what is best for you should be best for others?

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#155
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think that I am oversimplifying anything. Why are you conflating freedom of speech, moderation and censorship? Freedom of speech means the government won't come and arrest you for saying something. That's got nothing to do with wokeness or Twitter. Twitter (et al) are commercial businesses. They have terms of service and if you don't abide to them you get kicked. It's very simple. You're not paying for it - y…

If someone is denying the holocaust you don't give him a megaphone to express it, but you also talk to him and show him proof and surely you don't kill him or censor him or incarcerate him

I don't have to talk to anyone - hey have their freedom of speech, and I have the freedom not to listen to their nonsense. Would you force me to

Has a "woke" person killed someone now? Incarcerated them? Examples, please! I mean, I know that in Germany you might get in trouble for holocaust denial, but they kind of have had some major problems with that whole area, so I have some sympathy.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#156

This seems to be redefining what misinformed means, but I'm not sure what they intend to achieve by that. > "They don’t have crank opinions because they are misinformed, they have tons and tons of moon-related factual information because they’re cranks" Having a section about how conspiracy theorists are very knowledgeable about their subjects and then immediately saying that a right wing economist is really well inf…

“They” may not because “they” will be dead.

The 30 and younger crowd have stuck to their non-religous, progressiveness. Polls over the last decade have suggested progressivism had become even more entrenched in that crowd.

If there’s a future rightward lean it would be after a leftward drift.

I agree that conservatives are starting to see progressives were arguing for what the conservatives wanted. I scrape comments from Reddit and have quantified there are more posts of the “our side has advocated against our own positions in deference to politicians.”. They want to be left to socially manage their local life, which rubs up against that whole social democracy thing. While the politicians want to extract as much profit off our agency for as little real work of their own as possible, “both sides” on main street want their agency for their neighborhood.

The TV addicted pudding brains are dying off. The younger generation was weened on distracting multimedia, they have an intuition for where that ends and shared political life begins that the mush mouths dribbling the same old cable news from their lips don’t.

Favored information compositions have changed. Still the same physics on the whole but the ideas that captivate are more than just academic glyph sets with cherry picked snippets highlighted in dayglo. Generating never ending statistical objects is not learning which are most probable. Humanity is still figuring that out.

We can’t allow for sentences like “kill all X for Y reason” or “let chainsaw wielding nut run lose” for obvious reasons. But there are more sentences we can allow people to believe are true besides the ones that essentially translate to “grow business.”

It’s all very “build and tend your flock” in real habit anyway. That doesn’t sit well with the non-Church going crowd

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#157

Misinformation has always existed. I think the emergent phenomena that we are seeing is simply a scaled up version of the problems Plato pointed out in the Republic. The REAL problem, is that democracy as an organization if people isn't going to produce a society of freedom and justice, no, democracy produces a hedonic society. So the question becomes, how do we LIVE with that?

Isn't modern hedonism just freedom to pursuit happiness without necessitating context of religious frameworks. I don't see what makes you think hedonism isn't sustainable or stable.

Democracy has been the biggest boost to science and rationality than any of the other government structures.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#158
post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think “lying” as more of a “your claim is outright false” while “disingenuous” lends itself to more subjective forms of misleading. For example, if I refer to a given protest as “violent” on the basis that a literal handful (out of tens or hundreds of thousands) were violent, I’m not really lying but I’m certainly misleading people by way of my characterization.

Both imply intent and the common messageboard usage is a kind of pretend-polite way to claim someone is intentionally misleading when they might simply be disagreeing or just unintentionally wrong, misinformed, etc. A strongly held inaccurate belief is not 'disingenuous'. It's a tropey comment-cliche word that is probably best avoided when addressing people you disagree with online.

If you call someone disingenuous, then yeah, you're being offensive. But if you call the idea disingenuous, then it's much less offensive. If you phrase it like, "isn't that a little disingenuous?" it's even less offensive yet (I think "isn't that a lie" would come off a fair bit more offensive). Using "disingenuous" and words like it, I've had a lot of success finding common ground or at least identifying the locus of disagreement.

But of course someone who is set on causing offense can probably manage with any word.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does "more election security" mean less black people voting? I mean the Republican party has argued in court that it should be legal for them to prevent black democrats from voting as long as it targets them as Democrat voters, rather than by race, so it's not like this is a big secret conspiracy or anything. https://www.aclu.org/other/oppose-voter-id-legislation-fact-...

Thomas Sowell has been debunking the "disparate outcome means racism" fallacy for decades. I wish more people were listening. He's the most underrated genius of his time. https://www.amazon.com/Discrimination-Disparities-Thomas-Sow... In short, if voter ID laws cause some groups of people to vote less than others, that doesn't make the law discriminatory or make the law bad. Scanning over this ACLU article, I see not…

I don't really see how that applies to a well documented history of voter suppression?

Yes, in theory, you could have a color blind system and some random change could have a negative impact on some group randomly.

That's not what happened in reality though.

"In theory, I might not have killed him" isn't a great argument for someone found standing over a body with a knife, you're generally looking for something a bit more concrete.

Someone standing on top of a giant pile of bodies and saying "As I've said for decades, I theoretically might not have killed them" is even less convincing.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#160
post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Going by the accepted definition what you pointed me to The article you were pointed to contained far more information than that. Choosing to treat that one sentence as a strict definition doesn't really hold up. Your last sentence sound like a personal attack, which makes me think you aren't arguing in good faith.

OK, the actual definition on that page is: Woke (/ˈwoʊk/ WOHK) is an English adjective meaning 'alert to racial prejudice and discrimination' that originated in African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). Google says: adjective: woke; comparative adjective: woker; superlative adjective: wokest alert to injustice in society, especially racism. "we need to stay angry, and stay woke" Merriam Webster: chiefly US slang :…

But still you're here getting only the definition that you want to take and ignoring all the other stuff about wokes fighting for their ideals by trying to censor, ban, fire those who have different ideas, instead of discussing... I already told you that their attention to those things is not the problem but is the attitude no?

Let's say that I am a guy, attentive to social justice, noble. Then I am that same guy who reads about someone trying to talk bad about social justice, I converse with him (good), I start calling him names, want his head, want him banned and alienated (bad)

So this is an invite to go further than the definition and that point that you egregiously understood

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