861–870 of 1001 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> You can publish only true facts Can we go back to just calling them "facts"? A statement can be true or false, but a fact is true. You're playing into the idea that there are "false facts" or "alternative facts." There aren't. Those are lies or errors.
A statement can also be an opinion, I think the intention was to differentiate from statements that are meant to appear to be facts but are false.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If these actions are being done domestically against US citizens, with no just cause sure I will get upset, but that has yet to be seen. May I just ask, why does this distinction matter? Why do you believe the world should be divided into "people who were issued bits of paper by my overlords" and "people who weren't"? I never understood this division in other people's heads. It leads to all sorts of philosophical p…
That some governments use that kind of tribal moral relativism to justify war does not mean that war cannot be waged for justifiable and morally good reasons.
I am fairly sure that's not true. A real war, where both parties have a fair chance of winning, only has losers. Or if one side is much bigger, like the Netherlands against the Germans in 1940 or the USA against Iraq more recently, it's more of a coup.
It's interesting to note that Julian Assange didn't demonstrate control of the wikileaks private key during his Reddit AMA 1 month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5n58sm/i_am_julian_as... Considering the political situation unfolding in the US and who this leak weakens, there is some evidence that wikileaks is not in the hands of a neutral party. There is clear motive right now for undermining the CIA. Th…
He very clearly explained his motives for not doing so in the AMA, and he gave an alternate POL by reading from the blockchain. This whole narrative of Wikileaks not being neutral is a very weird story, because they've never published anything that wasn't verified to be true. Since that's something they can't be attacked on, it seems that the strategy for discrediting Wikileaks has now become to accuse them of associ…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's certainly been a handful of very overt political troll commentators with talking point narratives which I've noticed on HN in the last few weeks. Thankfully HN has a better reputation system in place. News website comments have 0 barrier to entry, and Twitter and Reddit are clearly prone to mass bot'ing. It helps that there's access to an API for transparency on those sites but the persona astroterfing ops ar…
Interesting. I was actually joking about HN. I can't think of an example where hangers-on or bots or engagée interest groups have ever been able to sway the popular opinion en masse. Not saying the special interest groups won't take bids from any interested takers or have negligible effect. Luckily for the rest of us, it takes more than a marketing campaign to bring Putin to power or turn the tide against Trump. From…
/r/undelete logs many instances of some of the weirdness.
Check any popular political tweet and you'll likely notice the first or top replies are coming from trolls pushing empty narratives.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
While what they are publishing is true and should not be ignored, they certainly appear to be choosing their targets and not choosing others, for example, they claimed to have information from the RNC , but they did not publish it claiming it was already published in other sources. The timing of the leaks was rather suspect too. In interviews, Assange insinuated months before during the primary that he had the emails…
Hillary was under investigation throughout the primaries, and we know from the leaks that some democratic political operatives thought it was a bad idea for her to run due to the amount of dirt out there about her.
So instead I think the opposite is true- the fact she hasn't had major (true) scandals (Benghazi and emails we know are trumped up) means she is fairly clean. Yes, she has some flaws.
It is unbelievable to me that Mike Pence was using his own private email to conduct state business _while_ decrying Hillary. How hypocritical is it possible to be?
And re dirt on Hillary, this puts it into perspective. http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2016/12/25/14037576/t...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Wikileaks could focus its hacking efforts anywhere, so the question is, why Turkey? On 24 November 2015, Turkish F-16 combat aircraft shot down a Russian Su-24 during an airspace dispute close to the Turkish-Syrian border. Russian President Vladimir Putin described the incident as "a stab in the back by the accomplices of terrorists" and further stated that "today's tragic events will have significant consequences in…
> Wikileaks could focus its hacking efforts anywhere, so the question is, why Turkey? Wikileaks has stated repeatedly that it is not a hacking organization, it distributes items given to them by others.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because we don't live in a Disney movie where everyone gets along and lives happily ever after? Do you think if we get rid of CIA the Russians will just disband the FSB? The Chinese will just suddenly become transparent and stop all international espionage? The entire world will suddenly love US and try to suck up to the biggest superpower?
The CIA doesn't follow the rule of law (as evidenced by this leak). Wanting to disband them is not the same thing as saying we shouldn't have a US intelligence agency.
> the omission of emails pertaining to russia creates a narrative. Maybe Assange dislikes the taste of polonium in his tea, or something.
It's interesting to note that Julian Assange didn't demonstrate control of the wikileaks private key during his Reddit AMA 1 month ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/5n58sm/i_am_julian_as... Considering the political situation unfolding in the US and who this leak weakens, there is some evidence that wikileaks is not in the hands of a neutral party. There is clear motive right now for undermining the CIA. Th…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
He very clearly explained his motives for not doing so in the AMA, and he gave an alternate POL by reading from the blockchain. This whole narrative of Wikileaks not being neutral is a very weird story, because they've never published anything that wasn't verified to be true. Since that's something they can't be attacked on, it seems that the strategy for discrediting Wikileaks has now become to accuse them of associ…
This is the approach used by both left and right parties in the U.S. The parties and their surrogates attempt to taint sources as biased and by proxy all content from the source invalid.
We now have data showing that the left tends to read both mainstream and left sources. While the right tends to live in their own little Fox-Breitbart bubble. This means that the right gets news from extremely biased sources with no anchor in reality. While the left tends to read and share a wider variety of media. http://www.cjr.org/analysis/breitbart-media-trump-harvard-st...
It's also been shown that the right is more likely than the left to distrust the fact-bearing mainstream media [1], because a strategy of the right, as in some authoritarian countries, is to generate distrust in media that they do not control.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/04/opinion/sunday/why-nobody...
So no, both sides do NOT do it equally. The right does way more to taint real sources like the NYT as biased.
[1] within mainstream I'd tend to separate profit-seeking and independent/family-owned media. But you can lump them together for purposes of contrast with GOP-donor-funded conservative media.