Posts by Dennis Frank
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to BenWilson,
Hmm, #16 on the all-time greatest hits list, all of which are mere estimates not historical fact (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_by_death_toll). But I had in mind the lack of the usual overt cruelty (genocide, torture, concentration camps, etc) and he seems to have abandoned the guillotine as standard treatment for political opponents institutionalised by the prior (leftist) revolutionary government.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to BenWilson,
Napoleon turned out to be quite benign, as dictators go, but I guess it was a refreshing change from the previous century (in which puritan ideology made depicting the pope as antichrist the prevalent norm).
"Steve Bannon runs the new vast right-wing conspiracy—and he wants to take down both Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. By Joshua Green | October 8, 2015" Bloomberg, as pr arm of the yankee capitalist establishment, perhaps tongue-in-cheek posing as conspiracy theorists. But it illuminates rightist identity politics as a confusion, eh?
"Bannon is a kind of Jekyll-and-Hyde figure in the complicated ecosystem of the right—he's two things at once. ... “I come from a blue-collar, Irish Catholic, pro-Kennedy, pro-union family of Democrats,” says Bannon, by way of explaining his politics." "Our vision was always to build a global, center-right, populist, anti-establishment news site." “The modern economics of the newsroom don’t support big investigative reporting staffs,” says Bannon. “You wouldn’t get a Watergate, a Pentagon Papers today, because nobody can afford to let a reporter spend seven months on a story. We can. We’re working as a support function.”
I've been wondering why the Tea Party is no longer flavour of the month, despite their apparent victory. Rebranded as alt-right? If so,why? Anyone here adept at elucidating the psychology that drives political branding?
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I agree that the USA is operating as an oligarchy nowadays (as much as a democracy). I suspect Trump will join the club of oligarchs, after draining the swamp sufficiently to make it a hostile ecosystem for his competitors.
The left, having recently tired of demonising Trump, are now busy demonising Barron, so in performing the necessary reality-check I found an excellent in-depth profile on the Bloomberg site, from over a year ago (https://www.bloomberg.com/politics/graphics/2015-steve-bannon/) some of which is worth recycling.
“When Clinton became secretary of state, the foundation signed an agreement with the White House to disclose all of its contributors. It didn’t follow through.” So top democrats can’t even honour the agreements they sign with each other. No wonder voters think they can’t be trusted to run the country.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Farmer Green,
Ah, back when common sense prevailed in popular culture. A dim memory now.
"By 1740 BC, the Egyptians had a symbol for zero in accounting texts" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/0_(number)) goes to show that after a millennium and a half of being civilised, they'd become sufficiently unnatural to conceive it.
"Posting fake news stories is a modern form of identity politics, proclaiming an affinity for a particular community", according to the former director of the MIT Media Lab's Sociable Media Group and author of "The Social Machine: Designs for Living Online" (MIT Press, 2014).
So, if you post the news that zero isn't natural you proclaim identity as a member of a community grounded in common sense. If you post the news that zero is a number you proclaim identity with the community who like using abstract concepts. You just need a tv game show in which the two compete and you'll have a semblance of identity politics based on either/or logic (whereas both/and logic is more postmodern).
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Farmer Green,
Yeah that traditional view is long established. My father's father ran the meals-on-wheels service for the St Johns Ambulance org back in the fifties in New Plymouth. A practical application of his christian faith. Since he was station master at the railway during the day, the voluntary sideline would have been an effort.
We need a more novel ingenious approach now, incorporating teamwork. You know how the left merely uses groups for consciousness raising? The positive alternative necessary in the new millennium is a task & results focus, with a disciplined commitment to delivery. The right tend to comprehend this technique - but their problem is that they are merely mercenary. The middle way is the way forward.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to BenWilson,
"To solve 12 you need to obviously either accept that a line can be not straight, or tear the paper accordingly."
Flawed assumption? Note that the test does not specify a straight line. Same applies to #1 perhaps (a line around something tends to become a circle).
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Last night Howard Kurtz was discussing fake news on Fox, tonight Seven Sharp did a feature on it (normally I don't watch either - nor any tv) and showed a graph of clicks on fake news sites cllimbing past clicks on real news sites in recent months, so it's a happening thing alright...
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to BenWilson,
I appreciated your in-depth comments Ben. I think the positive side of meritocracy lies in the potential for using clever designs.
For instance, most of the good-news green stories I've seen in the media the past decade haven't come from democracy via green politicians; they've come from inventors & entrepreneurs applying their inventions. I remember Branson telling an interviewer that he spends his entire time awake thinking about green energy. Such a synthesis of philanthropy & voluntarism requires only the explicit advocacy & use of enterprise teams as the suitable vehicle for volunteers to collaborate in.
Last year, in my submission to parliament's Justice & Electoral Committee Inquiry, I advocated reviving our moribund Legislative Chamber by means of a similar team-driven voluntarist scheme: http://www.alternativeaotearoa.org/get-this/parliamentary-reform-to-facilitate-a-new-style-of-politics
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to David Hood,
Wasn't Jackson famous for defeating the central bank option? Vaguely recall it was the second Bank of the United States which he campaigned against & the people gave him victory. That epic struggle between those who wanted a free market in banking & those who wanted a central bank to rule them all took a century to resolve, ending in the defeat of the former & the creation of the Fed just over a century ago.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to B Jones,
Good one: I was wrong. Only half-way thro part 1 so far but seems an excellent essay, thanks.