Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 69 posts

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#41

Post by jdpedrie »

iak8god wrote: post #38
thraway2016 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. On the Right, we see the same thing with your side. Total blind faith in blank slate theories of human equality, and uninterested in the piles of twin studies and metastudies that clearly demonstrate innate differences between demographic groups, even actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk to a Hillary voter when it veers into "Conservatives are all anti-science but the Minnesota Transracial Adoption…

Why is it so important to you people to believe you were born better than someone else? This is a serious question, not just snark.

"When did you stop beating your wife?"

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#42

Post by tmuir »

thraway2016 wrote: post #26
dibujante wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? Not just uninterested, but actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk with a Trump voter when it veers into territory like "world leaders are withholding a cure for cancer" and "the Pope has a secret base in Antarctica."

Interesting. On the Right, we see the same thing with your side. Total blind faith in blank slate theories of human equality, and uninterested in the piles of twin studies and metastudies that clearly demonstrate innate differences between demographic groups, even actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk to a Hillary voter when it veers into "Conservatives are all anti-science but the Minnesota Transracial Adoption…

I thought vast consensus by scientists was proof of conspiracy, like in the case of climate change.

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#43

Post by thraway2016 »

iak8god wrote: post #38
thraway2016 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. On the Right, we see the same thing with your side. Total blind faith in blank slate theories of human equality, and uninterested in the piles of twin studies and metastudies that clearly demonstrate innate differences between demographic groups, even actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk to a Hillary voter when it veers into "Conservatives are all anti-science but the Minnesota Transracial Adoption…

Why is it so important to you people to believe you were born better than someone else? This is a serious question, not just snark.

It has nothing to do with "better". It has to do with policy.

Predicating policy (e.g. education, criminal justice, employment) on fundamentally wrong and unscientific assumptions about people's capabilities inevitably leads to gross inefficiencies, and mental and social health problems.

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#44

Post by dibujante »

ta_donk_gt wrote: post #35
dibujante wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are all shitty arguments, but they're not conspiracies. They're just shitty arguments. A conspiracy would be more like "Bush did 9/11", which the left was guilty of for a while. Eugh.

Initially, the point was that it is only Trump supporters that are uninterested in actual facts, but sure, plenty of conspiracy theories on the left as well (was just trying to keep it clean): "Trump has had or wants to have sex with his daughter..see, here is this picture of her sitting on his lap when she was 12" "Trump stayed in a Russian hotel room, found out the Obamas had previously stayed in that room so hired…

OK, that is weird as shit and I've never heard it before, but a cursory internet search checks out. I think my brain actively filters out mirror.co.uk links at this point.

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#45

Post by iak8god »

thraway2016 wrote: post #43
iak8god wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why is it so important to you people to believe you were born better than someone else? This is a serious question, not just snark.

It has nothing to do with "better". It has to do with policy. Predicating policy (e.g. education, criminal justice, employment) on fundamentally wrong and unscientific assumptions about people's capabilities inevitably leads to gross inefficiencies, and mental and social health problems.

Let's suppose there is an indisputable 10 point IQ gap between the mean Green person and the mean Purple person that couldn't possibly be explained by confounding factors like, oh, say the legacy of Purple people, who are the dominant group in the society in question, treating Green ones as subhuman for centuries.

So what? Why don't we focus on getting to a situation where all the people have the same opportunities (access to education, nutrition, equal treatment under the law, etc, etc, etc) and THEN we can worry about precision policymaking based on the differences.

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#46

Post by ebfd »

tmuir wrote: post #42
thraway2016 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting. On the Right, we see the same thing with your side. Total blind faith in blank slate theories of human equality, and uninterested in the piles of twin studies and metastudies that clearly demonstrate innate differences between demographic groups, even actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk to a Hillary voter when it veers into "Conservatives are all anti-science but the Minnesota Transracial Adoption…

I thought vast consensus by scientists was proof of conspiracy, like in the case of climate change.

His argument seems to be that, like many Republicans do with climate change, many Democrats dismiss problematic science out of hand as a "conspiracy". I don't see how doing exactly that serves as a rebuttal.

Your post comes across as sheer aggression, communicating the same concept as "fuck you".

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#47

Post by ionised »

thraway2016 wrote: post #26
dibujante wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? Not just uninterested, but actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk with a Trump voter when it veers into territory like "world leaders are withholding a cure for cancer" and "the Pope has a secret base in Antarctica."

Interesting. On the Right, we see the same thing with your side. Total blind faith in blank slate theories of human equality, and uninterested in the piles of twin studies and metastudies that clearly demonstrate innate differences between demographic groups, even actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk to a Hillary voter when it veers into "Conservatives are all anti-science but the Minnesota Transracial Adoption…

You might start by not conflating The Left™ (which I assume you mean by 'your side') with Hillary supporters.

I'm probably considered a wishy-washy, bleeding-heart, virtue-signalling, liberal cuck (or whatever the hell the current deliberately antognistic buzzwords are) but I actively disliked Clinton and to a slightly lesser extent Obama.

People need to stop painting eachother with broad brushes. It's naive sports-team tribalism that gets us nowhere other than a highly polarised and aggressively charged shitshow.

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#48

Post by throwaway420 »

tmuir wrote: post #39
throwaway420 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can't know for certain what's going on there, but you will notice that some people are desperate to declare that this has been "debunked" without there being any sort of investigation.

We can't know for certain if there has been an investigation, but you will notice that some people are desperate to declare that this has not been investigated by the relevant authorities.

Supposedly, somebody filed a FOIA request to get info on the DC police's investigation into these allegations and despite previously saying that their investigation hasn't yielded any proof of a crime, it turns out that the police never even investigated it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omlQHWrgmd4

Nothing conclusive here, but again, there are so many voices here who are so hysterically adamant about something that can't be proven either way that it makes me think that there's more to this.

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#49

Post by dllthomas »

fnovd wrote: post #12
pjc50 wrote: post #5

It's good to see this analysed; conspiracy theory of this kind has long been a plague on US politics and now it seems to be spreading to Europe. It takes a remarkably small number of people to put it in front of the meme-susceptible, who will then themselves spread it. (What I don't really understand is why US conspiracyism limits itself only to things that don't exist - you don't hear so much about Watergate, Iran-C…

>(What I don't really understand is why US conspiracyism limits itself only to things that don't exist - you don't hear so much about Watergate, Iran-Contra, COINTELPRO and so on.) There's an easy answer: you can't wildly speculate when you have the facts. This is why "PizzaGate" is still being talked about. There will never be proof, because it's a ridiculous conspiracy. That leaves the conspiracy enthusiasts free t…

> It's almost tautological: once we know something happened, it's no longer a conspiracy.

That's... not actually what "conspiracy" means.

Re: How a fake story about Angela Merkel led to a far-right cluster on Reddit

#50

Post by chillingeffect »

ta_donk_gt wrote: post #31
dibujante wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Are the majority of Trump (and Farage, and Petry, and so forth) voters similarly uninterested in actual facts? Not just uninterested, but actively conspiratorial. It's hard to talk with a Trump voter when it veers into territory like "world leaders are withholding a cure for cancer" and "the Pope has a secret base in Antarctica."

"Violence against Trump supporters is justified because he is literally Hitler", "Even though everyone knew the rules of the game up front, Trump is not actually the legitimate president because his popular vote tally was lower", "Trump is not a legitimate president because the Russians may have been involved in releasing some 'routine, not interesting' emails", "Even though the U.S. has interfered in over 80 electio…

>people in general will say and believe a lot of stupid stuff if it helps their team

It's all about "Motivated Reasoning," a term I learned from Jonathan Haidt.

For things we want to do, we ask ourselves, "how can I?"

For things we don't want to do, we ask, "must I?"

Since I've learned this, about 95% of discussion has been reduced for me. It doesn't make things easier though. It's hard for me to take that so many people are operating in such a biased way.

And it's even harder because it means really thinking through concepts like fairness, immigration, sexism, etc. These are not easy to reason about. And it takes a lot of time.

Post reply on HN