Hard News: The fake news problem
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Bruce, correct. It is essentially meaningless (expect for how individual states assign their electoral college votes and those numbers have been stripped of that context).
If one was talking counties, you could say Clinton lost the counties by a little over 100000 votes. As the right votes in the right counties would have flipped enough to change the electoral college result. But that would be equally meaningless.
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Email
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Email
sorry i should have done this
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
Email Web
Yeah, quite illuminating. A Hillary voter who admits to creating propaganda designed to discredit Hillary, but in order to infiltrate the fake news subculture. This guy evokes the old double-agent scenario that prevailed during the Cold War and was recycled from the 19th century. Stalin was on the payroll of the Okhrana (Tsar's secret police) while acting as a terrorist to overthrow the Tsar.
People who play both sides against each other while operating in the middle are archetypal. The archetype was known as Hermes in the classical era. It generated trade and the media. It creates a conduit between two realms (attractors). Chaos theory taught us that the boundary between competing attractors is inherently creative, and fractal geometry computerised displays show us how it happens. Thus life forms emerged on the skin of Gaia, where earth meets sky. Metaphysics, substrata of the real world, can elucidate group psychodynamics. I'm just tossing this out there for those with the cerebral capacity to integrate it. Our deeply shallow contemporary culture requires conformity and we ought to be compassionate with everyone fixated on appearances, but transcending an inadequate status quo is always essential for progress.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
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the path to illumination...
... but transcending an inadequate status quo is always essential for progress.
I'm just a mere 21 pages into Alan Moore's epic 1266pp, 2016 opus, Jerusalem - anything could happen!
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/sep/15/jerusalem-by-alan-moore-review -
David Hood, in reply to
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The archetype was known as Hermes
You could just as easily describe him as a seducer archetype as he was giving people what they wanted even if it was built on lies, and making rather a lot of money in the process (in interviews, Jestin Coler plays up the confusing the right-wing aspect, but in a "follow the money" kind of way he made rather a lot of income from doing so).
My compassion tends to be for the innocent people put at risk by the readership of these stories acting on what they believe to be true.
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
Email Web
Interesting - hadn't heard of the author. Wikipedia: "At the time of publication it was one of the 10 longest novels written in the English language." We're still in the year of publication, so that very likely still applies. I like big deep fiction.
The Guardian reviewer quoted a couple of sections that seemed rather turgid in style, so I wish you luck with it - briefly reminded me of Alvin Toffler (ugh). Still, if he paces most of it swiftly & is concise as much as obscure, maybe worth reading eh?
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
Email Web
Mm, I always empathised similarly. However the natural design of our world includes deception. Best source: Dark Nature (Lyall Watson). Caused me considerable angst, in the nineties - almost cured me of my innate green idealism.. : )
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"innate green idealism"
Interesting choice of words. Something like the "will to live"? -
Rich Lock, in reply to
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A Hillary voter who admits to creating propaganda designed to discredit Hillary, but in order to infiltrate the fake news subculture.
A few people recently have mentioned NPR's Planet Money podcast, episode #739 titled "Finding the Fake-News King".
Apparently (I haven't listened to it yet) the fake-news-story creator they interview (who might even be the same guy) observes that he's in it solely for money, and that he tried peddling fake anti-conservative news, but that liberals would quickly debunk it with facts & research, and it would wither on the vine. In contrast, he found that anti-liberal news was swallowed wholesale and spread like wildfire, and on top of that any attempt at fact checking was regarded with suspicion, as if the fact checkers themselves were partisan members of the conspiracy to hide the "truth" of the fake news stories.
There was also this piece a while back, which makes a pretty convincing case that the sort of people likely to swing in behind Trump are also the sort of people who fall for pyramid schemes, purchase errection pills, and send money to Nigerian princes.
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John Farrell, in reply to
Boy, have they signed up for the big one!
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Farmer Green, in reply to
Seeing as we more "intelligent" animals have few innate behaviours, and as "innate green" can be reasonably taken to be " sustainability instinct", then we have eating, fleeing, and sleeping as possibilities for the innate behaviour.
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Craig Ranapia, in reply to
A Hillary voter who admits to creating propaganda designed to discredit Hillary, but in order to infiltrate the fake news subculture. This guy evokes the old double-agent scenario that prevailed during the Cold War and was recycled from the 19th century.
Or Jestin Coler could simply be lying about who he voted for, because that makes better copy (and gets him a lot more attention) than "Oh, I’m just another opportunistic scum-bucket who has made an awful lot of easy money.”
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andin, in reply to
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transcending an inadequate status quo is always essential for progress.
Then theres the question, which way is progress?,
Cause it looks like a lot of dead end streets at present -
Dennis Frank, in reply to
Email Web
No, much more than just a will to survive (athough I needed that to survive my father's method of parenting). In literature, it has always been described as mystic, or as a sense of oneness with nature. I had it as a child, by virtue of solitary rambles through the local bush not seeing a human for hours on end, just me surrounded by plants.
Jan Christian Smuts described it in his autobiography (from exploring the high veldt in his youth). Bob Marley went to #1 with his song Oneness. Some interpret the mystical feeling as spiritual and I'm not averse to that. Ecospirituality was an accepted part of the green movement long ago - probably can trace it back to the hippies sticking flowers into the barrels of the guns of the troops in their peace protests. Smuts rose to general in the Boer Army.
Winston Churchill made him a Field Marshal in the British Army so he could serve in the War Cabinet (WW2) because he was so good at thrashing the Brits in battle (I presume). A warrior mystic, eh? His book Holism and Evolution (1927) is a gem even now. He also wrote the Preamble to the United Nations Charter (and served two separate terms as PM of South Africa).
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
Email Web
Progress, for us here in Aotearoa, would involve Labour, the Greens & NZ First agreeing to form a center-left government so voters have a positive alternative to the status quo. Too bad they think competing is better than collaborating, eh? Clever people would do both concurrently. They said Gerald Ford was an unsuitable president due to being unable to walk & chew gum at the same time. Same problem.
In a more global sense, progress still requires a sustainable economy rather than destroy nature to maximise short-term profits. Trump met with Al Gore - apparently because his daughter is onto it. If he wises up & starts being presidential, some alt-rightist will probably assassinate him.
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Dennis Frank, in reply to
Email Web
Yeah, you get the impression some of these people just get off on trying to con others with bullshit. Such people have always been around - unfortunately online media gets them a lot more prominence nowadays. Social media is getting so toxic users are disconnecting & I expect that trend to snowball.
It could produce a counter-trend in which intelligent design of social media starts to provide safe havens for those who seek a quality experience? But the race to the bottom still seems appealing to many (probably because freefall is such fun).
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For anyone who wondered why the term Alt-Right has become an acceptable euphemism for Nazi, I recommend Pete Reynolds' essay, Why I Am Changing the Name of Our Puppy-Burning Movement to “Alt-Warmth”.
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andin, in reply to
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In a more global sense, progress still requires a sustainable economy
Not people acting less like self centred arseholes?
Oh thats right its all a vast conspiracy... by something....aliens? -
Dennis Frank, in reply to
Email Web
I've spent a long time trying to figure that out. There's more of a basis for taking the alien thing seriously than you'd think, but that ought not to motivate us to be distracted by it too much. Occam's Razor suggests that mass psychology has deep enough dimensions to explain social complexity without adding the et factor in.
Selfishness seems to have become amplified by capitalist marketing strategy post WW2. The atomisation thesis. Selll more product if you create more choices, so there has to be consumers with many different tastes.
Breaking down traditional social bonds created a looser matrix & greater personal autonomy. Speaking from experience, us boomers had to break free of the shackles because trad society was so repressive. We didn't need to read Orwell - we knew he was just extrapolating from our status quo. Now that the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, younger generations will have to reinvent community as a survival strategy.
Doing so when everyone is into their own thing may seem daunting, but every generation faces a collective challenge that the zeitgeist provides them, so one just has to connect up with others who sense the rising tide.
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Farmer Green, in reply to
Ecospirituality was an accepted part of the green movement long ago – probably can trace it back
Taoism.
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Farmer Green, in reply to
community as a survival strategy.
That meme has been around for a little while.
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Farmer Green, in reply to
consumers with many different tastes.
"Reduced"; "Special"; "etc".
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Joe Wylie, in reply to
Taoism.
80s Taoist vampires. My favourite kind.
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Stephen R, in reply to
Now that the pendulum has swung to the other extreme, younger generations will have to reinvent community as a survival strategy.
One of the side effects of our technology is that my community is not the people I live next to any more. I know more about and have more in common with some people in Finland than I do the people three doors down my street. And my "local" community of interest is people spread around Wellington and the rest of New Zealand more than my suburb.
I'm not sure that's a good thing, I'm not sure it's a bad thing, but it is a bit different.
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