761–770 of 1001 posts
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On matters of science the scientists decide which is which.
On all matters reality decides which is which. None of us have a psychic link to God (anyone who thinks he does, does not, and should be institutionalised), but there are many good heuristics for what is true, and we do not have to abandon the concept of truth.
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I think you're being sarcastic, but just in case you're not > Propaganda is the deliberate, systematic manipulation of information—including facts, half-truths, or lies—to influence public opinion, attitudes, and behaviors toward a specific cause, ideology, or agenda.
A large percentage of Americans are convinced that police will just shoot them if they happen to feel like it. Even including ICE in this statistic, you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop. Police encounters that turn deadly, not even blatant murder, are on the order of 1 in 50,000. However, that stream of police murder videos are definitely real. Propaganda is often stoking tiny…
Well that's exactly the problem. There's nothing stopping them: no accountability, no justice. Many cops just don't feel like randomly shooting people, and that's good. The problem is if they do, and even if they brag about it, little will be done.
Take for example the latest Sainte-Soline repression scandal revealed a few months back by Mediapart [1] where videos show dozens of riot cops making a contest about maiming the most people, encouraging one another to break engagement rules, and advocating for outright murder. Everybody knew before the bodycam videos, but now that we have official proof, we're still waiting for any kind of accountability.
If i go around and shoot people, there is no way i will avoid prison. If a cop goes around and shoots people, or strangles people to death, prison is a very unlikely outcome.
> you will never even meet someone who knows someone who was murdered by a cop
That's not how statistics work. Police abuse tends to happen in the same low-income social groups (and ethnic minorities). As an example, living in France, i've met several people who had a family member killed by police. Statistically unlikely if i only hung around in "startup nation" or "intellectual bourgeoisie" circles, which is not my case.
[1] https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifestation_du_25_mars_2023_...
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Enough of them to give rise to the term "algospeak" which means using words like "unalive" in place of "kill" to avoid automated censorship. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algospeak Meanwhile you can report a bot who's posted 20+ comments under a video to advertise illegal drugs and all of the reports and subsequent appeals will consistently come back as "No violation found".
This has been happening for 10+ years on e.g. YouTube, you can't say certain words in the video or mention them in the title or you get demonetized. Nothing to do with China.
That's not censorship problems.
That's advertisement problems. That's conflicts of interest problems. That's incentives problems. That's people-who-post-videos-just-to-make-money problems.
Well, okay, it can easily be turned into censorship problems: instead of just demonetizing the video, don't show it to anyone. It's quite a fine line, but the line is indeed there.
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a surprising amount of people seem to genuinely believe law enforcement (generally, not just police) is at its core based on discretionary actions guided by their moral values and not a morally neutral action upholding agreed upon contracts that is to say, the law only applies to you if you do "bad" things. and ill be honest, there is a level of truth to this to me. from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to fo…
> from a practical standpoint, it is infeasible to formally understand every nuance of every law ever created just to be a citizen I feel like this is basically the case in everything. * A lot of people don't read the article before commenting. * Nobody reads TOS for things. * Most people don't read academic papers. * MIT or BSD license is easy, but how many people here have actually read the whole GPL, Apache, or Mo…
Less about value judgements. More about outsourcing to people/brands we trust.
When it comes to software licenses, we aren’t lawyers, so the informed people will use a primer created by a trusted 3rd party. Maybe GitHub’s “which license is right for me?” Page.
Who to vote for in local elections is usually decided via one of the following: (1) I know/met the person, (2) I trust the party they affiliate with, (3) I trust the newspaper/news source which recommended them.
Academic papers are usually thick, long, and inaccuracies are difficult for anyone not in that field of expertise (or something relevant like statistics) to identify. Most people require an overview of the article by an expert. Hopefully (but unlikely) they can choose one which is impartial / minimally biased and who can give an opinion on how definitive or significant the findings are.
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That's some very obtuse thinking. The US has been applying soft power and hard power in South America - to put it euphemistically, as the most recent US intervention was just days ago - for close to a century. The Chinese... haven't. Why should people in South America give a shit about Tiananmen or Tibet and at the same time not give a shit about the escalating authoritarian grip of the US regime, which is infinitely…
How can you say the Chinese "haven't"? They've been using soft power for some time with Venezuela. They've been importing Venezuelan oil. They have been making loans as well. The loans a are a huge part of "soft power". They've also replaced a lot of items impacted by Trump's tariffs from South America.
I threw my computer off the balcony. I look at a web design business. "No fair!" I think to myself, "if only I had a computer I could have a web design business too!"
I smash the web designer's computer out of spite.
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A bunch of people around the world used 小红书 for months when they were worried about a twitter ban. They got the same version of the app that people in China got. I haven't seen any formal studies but my impression, at the time, was that Chinese people were far better informed about the US than Americans were about China.
Well, yes, China doesn't have open media for its citizens. Chinese people will on average be less well informed about China , even accounting for the extent of Americans who choose trashy propaganda channels. (reminded of ex-tech influencer Naomi Wu, who basically went dark with a post along the lines of "the police have told me to stop posting")
but of course. the benchmark is minor influencer and HN darling naomi wu.
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Right, if a future democratic president starts sending masked government thugs out to assault and kidnap American citizens we all know that 100% of the people who are defending the current ICE atrocities will suddenly be outraged about government tyranny.
They are acting with the expectation that Democrats are too spineless to do anything because thats all they have seen their entire lives and they are probably right.
What should happen is that everyone who is flagrantly violating the law and looting the federal govt right now should be quickly and aggressively prosecuted. Real concrete legislative reforms should be enacted to limit future corruption and dangerous adventurism by demented leaders.
I expect none of that to actually happen.
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Disclaimer: i'm far from an anti-vaxxer and i have a scientific background (though not in biology). It's often hard to establish scientific consensus. When it's not hard, it can take a long time. Cases such as climate change are as easy as it gets: models are always a flawed approximation for reality, but denying climate change on a scientific basis is almost impossible nowadays because we have too much data and too…
There’s a difference between questioning the status quo and spreading obvious misinformation. Did the vaccine save lives? Yes. Did misinformation about the vaccine cost lives? Yes it did.
The fact that so much money was given to private corporations, in secret deals outside any legal proceedings, on unproven products, all while censoring any critics, really gave the conspiracy theorists water for their mill.
I believe they would have had a much harder time spreading their misinformation, if they couldn't have the street cred of having "the system" against them. That is, if we had the voice of doctors vs random loonies, instead of our respective corrupt governments vs anyone they're trying to censor.
Ladies and gentlemen, the frog has been boiled.