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The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

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Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#281
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I googled for 2 minutes ( actually I used a different search engine because I don't trust google much for politics anymore), and I found this: https://www.quora.com/Why-is-a-gun-license-accepted-as-a-vot... "Your university I.D. was issued by a university compared to a government issued one. The license to carry contains your verified address, dob and all that. What does your University one have? The LTC required…

The government controls who it wants to grant these licenses to, so these restrictions mean you need the governments permission to vote, when it's your right to vote. Why not get better integration with universities so it is a valid id?

The government controls who it wants to grant these licenses to, so these restrictions mean you need the governments permission to vote, when it's your right to vote.

This is Texas, not Massachusetts or New Jersey. The government does not get any more discretion in granting an LTC in TX than they do in issuing any other form of ID. Meet the requirements and they are legally obligated to give you one.

As an aside, getting an LTC in the shall-issue states is easier than getting a non-driver's license ID. In both cases it's just "meet requirements, show up, do paperwork, wait for them to check your computer records" but the police/sheriff issue it and they don't deal with nearly as many people wanting to file paperwork with them so they haven't optimized those processes for treating people like cattle the way the DMV has so it's a little easier.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does criminalizing providing food and water to people standing in line support that goal? https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/block-the-vote-vot...

It's amazing that in every democratic country other than the US this stuff is uncontroversial, yet has to be explained here on HN. You can't have partisan activists hanging around outside voting booths all day and "helping" people no more than you can have votes being cast by having voters step up to a loudspeaker and announcing their preference to the crowd. I live outside the US and was honestly quite surprised to…

I'm not sure what the scare quotes around "helping" mean here. The volunteers in question are literally providing snacks and water to everyone in the line outside the polling places who asks.

Can you clarify your meaning?

> The solution to long queues is to set up more voting booths so the queues are smaller.

Yes. Laws are also being passed to intentionally decrease the number of polling places available, especially in counties dominated by the party that is not in power.

https://www.npr.org/2020/10/17/924527679/why-do-nonwhite-geo...

> This is, like, Intro To Civics level stuff

I agree, but only because Intro to Civics probably skips over the more advanced topics like America's fraught history of use of land ownership, poll taxes, and literacy tests to deprive people of their citizen-guaranteed right to vote. As an American citizen, I'm not actually required to carry ID; therefore, imposing an ID requirement on my right to vote can be interpreted as a stealth literacy test ("Oh, you didn't know you needed an ID? No vote for you."). It is a reasonable position to treat any new such requirement as suspect (and a reasonable position to disagree).

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Free Beacon reported that a source told them the crack kits could specifically include pipes, and the story went viral https://freebeacon.com/biden-administration/biden-admin-to-f... Snopes labeled the reporting with a big red X and MOSTLY FALSE rating . . . while confirming the Free Beacon reporting as entirely true. Here’s how they explained it: > In 2022, a U.S. Department of Health and Human Services substanc…

> The Free Beacon reported that a source told them the crack kits could specifically include pipes, and the story went viral No offense but if you asked me to make up a typical right wing red meat outrage generating story, this would be it. > Snopes labeled the reporting with a big red X and MOSTLY FALSE rating You didn't link to Snopes, instead "leadstories.com" which i've never heard of. Where is the source from Sn…

https://web.archive.org/web/20220209193043/https://www.snope...

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#284
post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am legitimately not convinced he was attempting a coup. I am willing to admit I am wrong on this. I've read accounts from leftwing media sources and from their wording it sounds like what Trump did was really bad. I've read accounts from rightwing sources and from their wording it doesn't sound bad at all. I have not done a great deal to try to reconcile the two and decide where the truth lies. Right now, I believe…

> I absolutely do not think Trump was in any way encouraging people to riot in the capitol, much less stage a coup. I also believe that no such fraud was ever found. I think that depends on how you interpret a lot of statements made by Trump and others[0], for instance: “We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will…

I can agree with you that trump probably was hoping for chaos of some sort though not explicitly asking for it or knowing what form the chaos would manifest. Thanks for the info!

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#285
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, I'll bite. Google "Grievance studies affair". It provides a chilling look into how wokes are corrupting science in order to advance their political agenda. Is this example sufficient for you?

OK. So what better way to hightlight the corrupting of science than by citing an unethical experiment that ignores all the rules of science?! This is a bit like the group at MIT sending deliberately vulnerable patches into the linux kernel. It doesn't indiate that the reviewer is malicious, just that the peer review process is lacking. Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why y…

> So what better way to hightlight the corrupting of science than by citing an unethical experiment that ignores all the rules of science?!

This is textbook example of a "whataboutism" argument. I point out one group of people who have done something wrong, and you point out another group of people who have (arguably) also done something wrong, as if it is some kind of justification. Two wrongs don't make a right.

You asked for a concrete example where "woke" causes some damage, I provided one and asked "is this example sufficient for you?" You responded with a novel about unrelated things without answering my question. Let me ask again: is this example sufficient for you? Do you accept that this is an example that demonstrates that - in addition to whatever positive things woke causes in society - woke also causes some negative things in society?

> Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why you need the control group.

I agree a control group submitting nonsense papers of right-wing propaganda would have been necessary to prove that these woke-activism nonsense papers were published because of political activism (as opposed to not reading papers). That said, I strongly suspect that the papers were read, because these are not predatory journals that publish anything you submit. Furthermore, when you look at the papers which ARE being published, it's obvious that they tow the party line with regards to political messaging.

> papers about, eg., butt-plugs ... If this is what keeps you up at night, rather than, say, a president who lost a democratic election whipping up a violent mob ...

This is another bit of misdirection from you. You're pretending as if I'm bothered by the existence of prank papers. No, as you perfectly well know, the prank papers are not what "keeps me up at night", it's the underlying phenomena the prank papers exposed: that certain fields of science have been entirely subverted by woke political activists. The problem is - as you well know - that these fields are no longer producing science, they are producing political propaganda camouflaged as science. This is what the Grievance studies affairs demonstrated.

Also note that you are doing a whataboutism defense here as well, when you start talking about entirely unrelated things like Trump and January 6th. You're not scoring any points here.

> It's a bit disappointing, though. I've been promised supression of news stories, people being banned, censored, fired, muted, offed from platforms, the end of freedom of speech, killing, incarceration (I can provide quotes). This is pretty weak sauce by comparison.

It's not hard to find these examples. If you actually were interested, you could find these examples yourselves in a few minutes of Googling. But you're merely pretending to be interested. Here's one case where I provided an example of a fields of science being subverted for woke political activism, and you dismiss it as "pretty weak sauce". Why would I go out of my way to provide more examples for you? You're just going to dismiss every other example just like this. You're not interested in any facts that are counter to your world view. You're merely pretending to be interested.

> You may have hit on something about "their political agenda", though - that sounds like something which we should be able to enumerate, perhaps providing us wih a summary of the woke ideology that we hear about. Perhaps then we can synthesize a revisionist definition of "woke"? So, political agenda - what do "they" want? Shoot!

I'm not interested in attemps to redefine a political movement in a dictionary sense. A movement can have a perfectly nice-sounding dictionary definition while at the same time it can cause harm in society. That doesn't imply any kind of logical contradiction.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#286
post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This disingenuous line of argument is reminiscent of Antifa greenwashing that was common a few years ago. Feign ignorance, pretend you have no idea what kind of people identify as Antifa, and then ask "Isn't fascism bad? So why is it bad to be anti-fascist?" ...while Antifa is literally burning down cars and shops indiscriminately...

What is disingenuous about saying that the literal definition of woke seems like a good thing? I said nothing about Antifa - why are you creating a straw man? Stick to woke. If you would like to propose a new term that encompases the original defintion of woke and something else then feel free - hyer-woke, or something. Why do you want to change the defintion of words? And, are you a fascist?

> What is disingenuous about saying that the literal definition of woke seems like a good thing?

You're pretending to be wholly unfamiliar with the subject of culture wars, when in reality you are very familiar with them. That's disingenuous. The other poster seemed to have endless patience with you pretending "not to understand" and "not know" things which you know and understand perfectly well.

I don't know why you can't just stand up straight and argue for the things you believe in, instead of trying to play some mind games, lying and cheating? If your cause is worthy and your arguments are good, then surely you can achieve your goals without resorting to lies?

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#287

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…

> 5G vaccines, QAnon, flat earth, and many other fringe movements exist and ARE misinformation, the questions is how broad these movements are.

I do wonder how many people are in these movements. It kind of reminds me of the Westboro Baptist Church who succeeded in getting themselves a ton of media attention despite being ~70 people. I think Qanon is probably a couple orders of magnitude bigger than the WBC but I would be surprised if the core following exceeds 100,000 people in the US.

I personally believe these things are more a manifestation of underlying mental illness than anything else and if you somehow pushed a magic button to delete all traces of Qanon from the public consciousness they would immediately become sovereign citizens or Holocaust deniers or something (if, indeed, they aren't already). If someone's in Qanon or a Flat Earther it's not because they didn't read the Snopes article debunking Pizzagate or that they didn't understand how the Foucault pendulum works.

I don't think this can be fixed with better information. These people are not well and they need psychiatric help.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#288

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to learn how you filter out the FUD!

Like I said, I'm not sure how to describe it. You kind of have to... identify, and then strip out, the emotional content of a message. (Note: don't do this all the time, but if the emotions are FUD, most of the time is a good rubric). A big part of that is identifying how someone is saying something, as opposed to what they're saying. This can be word choice, italics/bold/caps; grammatical structures, narrative struc…

I think the "take the emotion out" part really resonates. The idea of avoiding people who artificially "raise the stakes" is pretty interesting too, it seems like you have a sound process for this.

It sounds like you might enjoy comedy theory as this is where I learned majority of what you're talking about. Specifically improv comedy.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#289
post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OK. So what better way to hightlight the corrupting of science than by citing an unethical experiment that ignores all the rules of science?! This is a bit like the group at MIT sending deliberately vulnerable patches into the linux kernel. It doesn't indiate that the reviewer is malicious, just that the peer review process is lacking. Clearly the papers are obvious spoofs - I doubt that they were read. This is why y…

> So what better way to hightlight the corrupting of science than by citing an unethical experiment that ignores all the rules of science?! This is textbook example of a "whataboutism" argument. I point out one group of people who have done something wrong, and you point out another group of people who have (arguably) also done something wrong, as if it is some kind of justification. Two wrongs don't make a right. Yo…

> This is textbook example of a "whataboutism" argument. I point out one group of people who have done something wrong, and you point out another group of people who have (arguably) also done something wrong, as if it is some kind of justification. Two wrongs don't make a right.

Oh, it's realy not - you presented an experiment (Grievance studies affair) as an example of "how wokes are corrupting science in order to advance their political agenda".

But what you cite is a terrible, deeply flawed experiment which proves no such thing.

So in answer to your question if it wasn't obvious; no, it's not sufficient.

Re: The “misinformation problem” seems like misinformation

#290
post #148

> 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. If anything, people seem to be better-informed than in the past — which is what you would expect because our information technology has gotten better [...] This kind of framing makes…

How come only experts are/should be allowed to speak on a subject? This leads to a technocracy, which while enticing those in the pseudo-aristocracy, it sucks for everybody else involved.

Every time I see someone post this all that goes through my head is this person has an ego and thinks they should speak for the country/world.

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