If there is to be toleration in the world, one of the things taught in schools must be the habit of weighing evidence, and the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true. For example, the art of reading the newspapers should be taught. The schoolmaster should select some incident which happened a good many years ago, and roused political passions in its day. He should then read to the school-children what was said by the newspapers on one side, what was said by those on the other, and some impartial account of what really happened. He should show how, from the biased account of either side, a practised reader could infer what really happened, and he should make them understand that everything in newspapers is more or less untrue. The cynical scepticism which would result from this teaching would make the children in later life immune from those appeals to idealism by which decent people are induced to further the scheme of scoundrels.
"False balance, also bothsidesism, is a media bias in which journalists present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports. Journalists may present evidence and arguments out of proportion to the actual evidence for each side, or may omit information that would establish one side's claims as baseless. False balance has been cited as a major cause of spreading misinformation.[1]"
Censorship usually involves removing one side's articles and reasoning and not even attempting to dispute it. True balance by taking account of both sides will include rebuttals of the sides against the other side. Both sides should be free to make their case and also make their rebuttals to the other side. Censorship likes to eliminate one side, so that rebuttal and dissent doesn't take place and isn't known. To what degree a piece of information makes one side's claims baseless is often up to interpretation as well. Our claims are often stronger in our own minds than when spoken out loud to others in reasoned discourse. When we accept any one arbiter as the single source of truth for what is true or fake, we have given up reasoned discourse and dissent. We should think for ourselves, and trust others to think for themselves. No one is more totalitarian than the person who thinks only he and his friends are worthy of thinking for and choosing for themselves and that they must protect others from themselves at all costs.
This is truly the worst aspect of censorship - You don't know what you don't know. And this is being greatly amplified by social media. I am not afraid that I will be fed false information; if it appears too outlandish, I will do sufficient fact-checking before accepting it as truth. In most cases on open platforms someone would have already done fact-checking to debunk. I am afraid however that I become too enwrapped in my social bubble that relevant information never gets brought up in the first place.
This is nothing new and relates to "Lies, damned lies, and statistics". Most facts can be manipulated by omission, taking things out of context, and choosing favorable metrics, so that you can lie without saying anything falsifiable. Only way to correct this is to allow the other side to present their argument in an open discussion.
What is too outlandish to you is not too outlandish to others. Some believe the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated by the CIA. Some believe the earth is flat. Some believe a Nigerian prince got their email address from their dead friend’s cousin’s mother’s embassy and is about to send them a billion dollars.
How can you be so totally confident that your own bullshit meter is accurate? Why do you think your confidence in your own ability to decipher fact from fiction is any different than people who believe complete bullshit?
If your main objection to censorship is that it is used to hide the truth, why don’t you object equally to people with megaphones intentionally flooding the zone with shit and distributors that enable that behaviour?
Just as the left–right political spectrum is actually more of a circle than a straight line, it seems to me that the spectrum of censorship vs free speech is also a circle. A bad actor may obfuscate truth through censorship; a bad actor may also obfuscate truth through massive volumes of misinformation. The latter is what is happening here. It’s a denial of service attack on human brains, and like a DoS attack, the only way to weather it is to filter the malicious traffic—you can’t just add capacity in the form of “good counterpoints” since human brains can’t scale like that.
" why don’t you object equally to people with megaphones intentionally flooding the zone with shit"
That analogy is simply incorrect. You can spend your life on YouTube watching cat videos, no conspiracy theory in sight. Nobody can force you to watch their video on YouTube. So nobody has a megaphone in YouTube. Only YouTube itself has the megaphone, they can choose what to push to people.
It is NOT TV where you have a single stream that everybody watched, and if you insert shit, everybody watches it.
"internal @Facebook research that found over 60% of people who joined groups sharing extremist content did so at Facebook’s recommendation."
So you're right: youtube has the megaphone. I wonder what the proportion of people watching extremist/disinformation content on youtube because of suggestions is? In some ways it's worse than TV, because if you publish shit on TV you get people writing to the regulator to complain (qv Janet Jackson superbowl nipple ridiculousness). On youtube you may never know what your fellow citizens are watching until they say "of course the world is ruled by lizards, here's the video that proves it".
I wonder if people would accept the compromise that youtube would host this content but force it to "unlisted". After all, the recommendations are their speech, not yours.
... and Facebook's recommendation would be based on their prior activity. If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups.
In the meantime, there's a heck of a gulf between whether or not Facebook lets a group be recommended, and actively censoring content dissenting to the chosen narrative.
> If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups.
The whole point of recommendation algorithms is to find missing edges in the graph, so it can easily lead you to misinformation in 1 or 2 hops.
Think of it this way: the misinformation content is highly valuable - it generates a lot of engagement. There is always a “potential energy” (people like you also liked...) between low-value content and high-value content that the platforms are attempting to convert to “kinetic energy” (engagement - views, clicks, comments) in order to monetize it. The goal is to find the shortest path to the high value content.
Proof required, from my personal experience moderating a political forum, and from that of other mods, the issue is the flooding of our information networks with Information prions and virii targeting our limbic systems. Social media is currently heavily polluted.
> If their interests on Facebook (what they like, follow, etc) were mostly cat videos, Facebook wouldn't be recommending extremist groups.
You're right, it's not that obvious, it's far more sinister. Cat videos are unlikely to end with you being recommended extremist groups, because there likely isn't much engagement from cat video viewers and extremist groups.
People who are deeply unsatisfied with life, however, might engage if they see it as a way out of their dissatisfaction, inadvertently training the recommendation algorithm to promote extremist content to dissatisfied people. That strikes me as at least plausible, though I don't know if the data is out there to find out what people are recommended what content under what criteria.
> In the meantime, there's a heck of a gulf between whether or not Facebook lets a group be recommended, and actively censoring content dissenting to the chosen narrative.
I disagree with this part. I don't have numbers handy for Facebook, but YouTube gets 500 hours of video uploaded every minute. It is physically impossible for you to see everything that gets uploaded to YouTube. Even if they stopped accepting uploads right now, you'd probably still die before you saw a significant portion of the content available.
Removing something from recommendations is, in most cases, tantamount to censoring it. If there are 500 hours uploaded per minute, and we assume that each video is 15 minutes long (which is likely longer than the reality), that's 2000 videos uploaded per minute. Assuming random distribution of views (which it's not, because of the recommendations), your video has a 0.05% chance of being viewed out of the videos uploaded in the same minute as yours. If you widen that to videos uploaded in the same hour, it goes down to a 0.00083% chance. Widen it to a day and you're down to a 0.0000347% chance. You would get 1 view per 2.8M views if YouTube deleted everything before that day, and killed recommendations entirely. I don't know how typical my usage patterns are, but I only search for probably 1 out of every 25 or 50 YouTube videos I watch. If that's a typical usage pattern, then you would actually get 1 view per 75M - 150M views. If everyone in the US logged on and watched a random video, you would get ~2-4 views.
It's all theoretical napkin math, but there is a staggering amount of data in the hands of Facebook, Google, et al. I do agree that actually removing the content is more significant, but the difference between removing the content and just making it so obscure that it's hard to see unless you're looking for it is basically the same. It's like if newspapers would agree to publish your stuff, but only if you encoded it as the first letter of each line of text. They have technically published your views, they've just made it hard enough to find that the only people who see it is people who already knew it was there.
I don't know what to suggest though. This is almost an inevitable outcome of collecting this amount of content; a lot of it is going to be relegated to some esoteric corner where no one ever sees it.
It's crazy. I started writing why I disagreed based on my visceral reaction to the topic. But as I constructed my arguments, they were not sound. So I suppose I agree? Hm.
The above paragraph is sincere--that did happen. And interestingly, it shows the power of consuming the opposing view point. We all know that the government is currently spewing lies, and it is indeed a disgusting and corrosive thing. I want to silence it, but it's easy enough to contempt it from a distance. Let the truth and the lies be heard so that we as a people will grow wise to it all.
Personally I am not from the US, and I don't know that the government is spewing lies. What makes you so sure? And if you are so sure, why are you worried people could be swayed by the lies - why not make them equally sure with the information you have?
However, I am happy with letting the courts decide. Where is the problem?
I have seen lies from all big political parties in the US.
More broadly, I think the trouble is that "lies" are often more appealing than truths by design, while truth is what it is. For example, some Americans may have been swayed to support the Gulf War by the Nayirah testimony, or in 2003 by Saddam Hussein's alleged people shredder. I don't think this justifies censorship, but the ability to sharpen people's BS filter and the amount of bunk they may receive is somewhat asymmetrical, echoing Goering's quote from the Nuremburg trials.
But weren't those lies perpetuated by mainstream media? Where, if not YouTube, would you find the counter narratives? And wouldn't people who believe the MSM not then considered the YouTube debunking to be "lies" and called for censorship?
Unfortunately as YouTube and the rest of the internet has grown larger, and more consolidated, [1] the positions allowed have narrowed in scope and counter narratives have become less acceptable. While websites with counter narratives (WikiSpooks for example) do exist, they're generally not very visible anymore. I think what you're describing is largely what is happening will happen, and those who present counter narratives will be de-legitimized, including and conflating both those who are genuinely illegitimate (Dr. Gene Ray/time cube) and those who aren't.
The closest alternative I can see is reading media with opposing spin (People's Daily, RT) and yours and hoping together they composite a clearer picture. For example I would not expect to see this [2] headline in a US paper.
it's funny the lies this time are coming not from the government but from the opposition and their propaganda machinery.
I'd never consider myself government supporter, but with Trump it's like the last bastion before the country is overrun with far-left SJW hordes swayed by misinformation.
It's ironic the ultimate win for democracy manifests itself in stolen elections.
Well, I have a belief system that's coherent and arrived at through my personal experience, which had me thinking very poorly of the 'orange man' LONG before it became a political thing. In fact, I'm damn horrified at how far the guy got, and I think I understand quite well how it was done.
It's not just some abstract 'otherwise neutral orange man' whose identity is entirely constructed by news media, and that's a strange argument to make. I think many people thought 'Al Capone bad' too, particularly if he'd robbed them or shot somebody they liked. I'm sure the greedy news media HELPED people get mad at Al Capone, and that there were redeeming factors in the guy, but the notion that there were automatically as many redeeming factors in Capone as in everybody else is NOT sensible. Maybe he just was mean, and sucked.
Likewise with 'orange man'. Way before he was a political figure, he was mean and sucked REALLY bad relative to my sense of how things work in the world. Some people just suck very, very much.
If you assume anyone who has success automatically does not suck, I admire your optimism but I sure don't share it. Seems to me that without considerable oversight, the opposite is usually true, and that the worst people, entities, companies etc. win. Hence, the invention of means of oversight, and the attempt to codify what's good and bad.
Yeah, I think this comes back to the false balance. Just because a large portion of the mainstream news dislikes someone doesn't make them biased. Should you trust every story they write about him? Probably not. Is he clearly a demagogue, as can be seen in his unedited speeches? Absolutely. Do other politicians lie? Yeah. Does he lie a lot more brashly and obviously? I'd say so. So it's a bit of a crying wolf situation. It fits his behavior patterns quite clearly to pick up on conspiracy theories, simultaneously exploiting them for his own benefit and seemingly being convinced by them. It also fits the behavior patterns of established Republicans to avoid speaking out against him lest their radical base turns against them, without making strong stances unless it fits their agenda as well. If this so happened to be an instance where orange man right, then I think a lot of reasonable people have dismissed that possibility long ago because of the firehose of misinformation he has historically put out.
Never said I was automatically right, timeeater. All belief systems are coherent to the believer.
They're tested by reality. It seems to be that a lot of the people who say 'orange man bad' and think that's the heart of my position, are currently dying of COVID or giving it to others. And that is their experience, though a lot of those same people are sticking with their belief systems UNTO death, not being shaken from them by their experience.
I will keep an eye out for when things in my belief system seem to be not lining up with reality. I wish those 'other people' would do likewise, but I think I'm better at it.
You're again misrepresenting their statements. They aren't saying that only Trump fans get covid, but that an oversized portion of Trump fans get covid due to fictional ideas about the virus.
Same type of claim, that is not supported by data. If you have the data, please provide it.
In the same vein, you could assume Democrats are more at risk because they put too much faith in masks, thereby entering more risky situations. Not saying that's the case. The point is, your expectation of who gets infected is merely your partisan belief, not anything rooted in evidence.
I think that anyone who doesn't believe that the election was legitimate - i.e. that no meaningful fraud occurred - should be banned from the HN community.
Their "arguments" are full of shit and are a bunch of pseudo-philosophical, pseudo-analytical, pseudo-objective cant.
Their "evidence" is literally disinformation / propaganda.
They act exactly like those crypto-racists who know that their true belief would be deemed unpalatable or unacceptable by the community so they'll blow as much smoke around as possible without ever stepping out to say what they're actually driving towards.
Enough is enough. It's clearly dangerous to allow these views the shroud of legitimacy by giving them space in the public square. It's gone so far that anything other than a rejection functions as a legitimization.
By allowing the lie of election fraud to be presented as just another thing to be discussed on HN, HN is enabling those people and their cause, which is to overturn the results of a legitimate election.
The irony is anyone was to be banned it would probably be me for making this comment. Think on that! ; )
You have a good point, but I think you're downplaying the power of clickbait. I consider myself a relatively smart, educated, and rational person, and I can't tell you the number of outlandish headlines I've clicked on just to see what they say.
The thing with censorship is they aren't going to censor the clickbait. Google knows exactly what clickbait looks like and they could have purged it years ago with a few algorithm tweaks that nobody would have minded. They're going to censor stuff that makes people ask hard-to-answer questions and/or challenge consensus positions.
That sounds like a good idea until it clicks that good scientists ask hard to answer questions and challenge consensus positions. Censorship is fundamentally anti-evidence. People can't present evidence that the channel owners don't like, and people can't model how to handle untrue opinions in conversation because they never come up.
We are talking about an adult audience, right? They are allowed to vote. So you have to assume they are independent enough to make their own decisions. Period. Your argument for censorship sounds a lot like patronisation.
Black-or-white thinking like this is false and damaging. The world has nuance, and the idea that “[people are] independent enough to make their own decisions. Period” rejects that nuance and substitutes a simplified and idealistic model of human behaviour which is alluring but does not reflect how human brains actually work.
It is not patronising to say that people are not all created with the same set of skills, beliefs, and values, and that some will engage with obvious bullshit. Many are not capable or interested in engaging with complex topics in a way that does not self-reinforce their pre-existing opinions. I have discussed this elsewhere[0].
When a group of people are motivated to exploit the weaknesses of others in order to get them to do things that are damaging to our democratic institutions, and they use misinformation to do it, it is unpleasant but not unreasonable to me to suggest that spreading lies through misinformation is as serious as suppressing truth through censorship and that they should both be treated equally seriously.
I think you can argue that that assumption is wrong, and that that is also the biggest problem with democracy and voting. You are asking people to vote on a topic they are often not well informed on, or are unwilling/unable to spend time to educate themselves thoroughly. Also anybody of a certain age is allowed to vote, regardless their level of education, and their ability to make sound decisions.
If you want to drive a car, you have to proof you are able to do so. Why not demand the same if you want to vote?
In the US you vote on people, not policy. Most people can't understand all the ramifications of a policy, but a lot of people can spot a crooked liar if the know them a little, we do it every day. That is why I like the older idea of picking state legislators and letting them pick the president and maybe the senators. And up the number of people in the house. The idea is that you should know or know a lot of people who know the person you are voting for. Media won't come into it, civics education won't come into it. It will be like picking a plumber in your neighborhood.
Again, this is patronising. Apparently, you believe your opinion is more worthy then the opinion of others because you assume you are more intelligent and more informed then they are. So in essence you are saying you are the better human. This is a very slippery slope. In fact, I would consider this borderline fascism. But hey, if a lefty utters ssuch nonsense, nobody seems to notice.
Good question and the answer is no one knows how to create rules about who is or isn’t fit to vote (beyond the most basic things like age, and even with that there’s an interesting history) without also giving so much power to whomever is able to set those rules that the result isn’t a democracy at all.
Exactly my point, and the same applies to corporate censorship. Since we have allowed corporations to perform censorship completely independent and on their own, free speech is a thing of the past.
Another way to see this is that those with less education or influence are basically the new women. The argument against giving women the right to vote was basically based on the same viewpoint. They dont know about the world, so all they can do is harm if allowed to vote.
> If you want to drive a car, you have to proof you are able to do so. Why not demand the same if you want to vote?
Not sure if you meant this as a rhetorical question, an ironic one, or a real suggestion about creating restrictions around who can vote.
Either way, "free speech is a thing of the past" is a bit all-or-nothing. It's always been a battle, never as good as we thought it was (such as the argument Noam Chomsky makes in 'Manufacturing Consent'), and always been tricky to figure out what to do when, and where.
Agreed, and that's one thing i do vote for: free/cheap education for everyone. I benefit from other people getting educated, so it's a no brainer that government should invest in this.
To be fair while its very distasteful to our current sensibilities, this was not always the assumption in the US, at least among some of the Founders. My understanding of the rationale for the support for the requirement of land ownership was that those who were not finically independent or secure would instead vote for those who issued wild campaign promises (giant walls, closing Guantanmo Bay or withdrawing troops for example) in order to get themselves elected.
> How can you be so totally confident that your own bullshit meter is accurate? Why do you think your confidence in your own ability to decipher fact from fiction is any different than people who believe complete bullshit?
I don't. I also don't believe the people at companies like YouTube are any likely to be better than myself or the average person.
It’s nice to think that everyone is on equal footing, but even ignoring differences in education and genetics, the universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions tends to refute your assertion that everyone is equally good at determining whether or not any given idea is bullshit.
All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them. I have written about this elsewhere[0], and The Story of Us[1][2] goes into this process in much more detail.
> It’s nice to think that everyone is on equal footing, but even ignoring differences in education and genetics, the universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions tends to refute your assertion that everyone is equally good at determining whether or not any given idea is bullshit.
The universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions is precisely why no person or group can be expected to perform better at evaluating evidence and determining which ideas are too dangerous to allow other people to be exposed to.
> All humans—myself included—will go to great lengths to reject reality when it feels like it is a threat to a core value. This is especially the case when people have tied their identity too tightly to a given subject (i.e. hyper-partisans.) The average person, sufficiently prejudiced toward believing a given falsehood, is not going to be able to determine that it is false because their brain will start to play tricks on them.
This is precisely why no person can be expected to perform this role as a gatekeeper of truth.
Thanks for your links, I'm a big fan of waitbutwhy.com. With regard to [1], there's no reliable test to see where a person is on the psych spectrum, even heavy doses of introspection can lead to limited and imperfect insight, and its likely the case that the same person will move up and down on the psych spectrum depending on a variety of factors. Because cognition is costly, if someone reaches a conclusion while they are in tribal mode, its going to be difficult to reevaluate their position later when they are in scientist mode. This is why its so important to have access to a variety of opinions, thinkers, and perspectives. Even the best of us are vulnerable to motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases.
> The universal existence of motivated reasoning, emotional reasoning, confirmation bias, and other cognitive distortions is precisely why no person or group can be expected to perform better at evaluating evidence and determining which ideas are too dangerous to allow other people to be exposed to.
This isn’t what I was hoping folks would take away from my comment.
Have you ever been too invested in some problem, or too upset by something, to see the truth of the situation? And when you ask someone else, who is not emotionally invested, they easily point out the way forward? That is the kind of phenomenon I am talking about.
Most humans have the capability to objectively assess ideas in general, but when someone has a strong emotional attachment to a specific idea—such as partisans who are predisposed to believe voter fraud misinformation—they are not going to be capable of evaluating that specific idea as well as someone who isn’t predisposed to believe it.
I am not claiming that there is any single entity that is capable of being a gatekeeper of all truths. I am saying that there are people who are going to be less capable than others to evaluate the truthfulness of a specific idea. In this case, YouTube moderators are almost certainly going to be more capable of objectively evaluating whether or not a video is proof of widescale voter fraud than a poster who is strongly motivated to lie (intentionally or not), or an audience member who is strongly motivated to agree with that lie. And in that way, there are some people who are more capable of evaluating the objective truth than others.
> Because cognition is costly, if someone reaches a conclusion while they are in tribal mode, its going to be difficult to reevaluate their position later when they are in scientist mode. This is why its so important to have access to a variety of opinions, thinkers, and perspectives. Even the best of us are vulnerable to motivated reasoning and other cognitive biases.
Yes. Exactly. I’m confused how we are arriving at such different conclusions from the same basic understanding. I hope that this added explanation helps.
> Have you ever been too invested in some problem, or too upset by something, to see the truth of the situation? And when you ask someone else, who is not emotionally invested, they easily point out the way forward? That is the kind of phenomenon I am talking about.
Yes I have. Unfortunately, I am not aware of a reliable test to identify whether a person is capable of rational thought on a given subject. This means that when we witness a dispute between people about an issue, we are unable to reliably and provably evaluate the disputants meta-level reasoning. This is complicated by the fact that evaluating someone's reasoning on the meta level is nearly always complicated by object-level concerns, including our own cognitive biases.
> Most humans have the capability to objectively assess ideas in general, but when someone has a strong emotional attachment to a specific idea—such as partisans who are predisposed to believe voter fraud misinformation—they are not going to be capable of evaluating that specific idea as well as someone who isn’t predisposed to believe it.
Thats why its so harmful to put people in a position of being an information gatekeeper. You have no way of ensuring that your information is being filtered by a person who is emotionally detached. In fact, due to the potential for influencing other people, those positions are much more likely to be occupied by partisans who will then use it to advance their own perspective, often without even realizing it.
> In this case, YouTube moderators are almost certainly going to be more capable of objectively evaluating whether or not a video is proof of widescale voter fraud than a poster who is strongly motivated to lie (intentionally or not)
This is exactly the problem. There is no reason to suppose that a youtube moderator is non-partisan, a high rung thinker, or emotionally detached from the subject they are evaluating.
> And in that way, there are some people who are more capable of evaluating the objective truth than others.
Yes but there is not a reliable, objective way to identify them or to check their reasoning process for errors.
> Yes. Exactly. I’m confused how we are arriving at such different conclusions from the same basic understanding. I hope that this added explanation helps.
I feel exactly the same way. I'm at a loss to explain this except that either we have some different premises that have not been revealed in this discussion so far, or perhaps Aumann's agreement theorem [0] is not applicable to this issue for some reason.
> There is no reason to suppose that a youtube moderator is non-partisan, a high rung thinker, or emotionally detached from the subject they are evaluating.
The other way to frame this is that there is a reason to suppose that, at this point, someone uploading videos to YouTube claiming evidence of widespread voter fraud—which is all that YouTube are prohibiting here—is almost certainly not a high rung, emotionally detached thinker.
> Yes but there is not a reliable, objective way to identify them or to check their reasoning process for errors.
No, but you can make a reasonable deduction on which of these two groups of people—YouTube moderators or mass voter fraud video uploaders—is more likely to succeed at being objective. There are no certainties when dealing with humans and we just have to roll with it using the best heuristics we can.
> I'm at a loss to explain this except that either we have some different premises that have not been revealed in this discussion so far,
I don’t know. This may be a wrong assessment on my part, but it feels to me like you are extrapolating negatively into the future far more than I am in terms of the potential harm this one change to YouTube’s terms could cause.
Believe me, I totally understand the potential for harm caused by powerful interests controlling a narrative—there’s a limitless number of examples to choose from, many of which have been targeted directly at people like me—but the harm that is happening right now is that other powerful interests (the President of the United States & his political party) have made up a story about voter fraud and are encouraging a bunch of their partisans to flood the zone with shit, and they are doing that on YouTube.
In my eyes, this ban might help to disrupt the ongoing voter fraud misinformation campaign enough that it ends up collapsing before permanent damage is done to our democracy. It seems vanishingly unlikely that it is the start down some path that ends with people being brainwashed by YouTube into believing a bunch of falsehoods, especially compared to the alternative of letting people continue to upload this garbage to their site.
I’m far more concerned about YouTube’s recommendations algorithm and the way it is deliberately designed to funnel people toward more and more extreme content. I suspect YouTube would not need to ban this content at all if their algorithm hadn’t spent the last decade optimising for engagement over all else.
> The other way to frame this is that there is a reason to suppose that, at this point, someone uploading videos to YouTube claiming evidence of widespread voter fraud—which is all that YouTube are prohibiting here—is almost certainly not a high rung, emotionally detached thinker.
I'm not aware of that reason. Could you explain further?
> No, but you can make a reasonable deduction on which of these two groups of people—YouTube moderators or mass voter fraud video uploaders—is more likely to succeed at being objective.
I disagree, but I'm really saying that I'm unable to make that deduction. Perhaps if you shared your reasoning process I might agree.
> I don’t know. This may be a wrong assessment on my part, but it feels to me like you are extrapolating negatively into the future far more than I am in terms of the potential harm this one change to YouTube’s terms could cause.
Almost certainly that is the case. I'm of the "sunshine is the best disinfectant" persuasion. When you tell people they aren't allowed to question the integrity of an election it is absolutely consistent with the interpretation that those questions might lead to unwanted answers. Its clearly consistent with other interpretations but the problem with closing down debate is that you lose the opportunity to compare those interpretations.
> powerful interests (the President of the United States & his political party) have made up a story about voter fraud
If they have made it up, wouldn’t the best response be to ask them for evidence so everyone could see how the allegations were baseless?
> encouraging a bunch of their partisans to flood the zone with shit, and they are doing that on YouTube.
If you consider that partisans of the other side are also flooding social media with their own claims about the integrity of the election, it starts to look more like a healthy debate that needs to be hashed out rather than suppressed.
> In my eyes, this ban might help to disrupt the ongoing voter fraud misinformation campaign enough that it ends up collapsing before permanent damage is done to our democracy.
There has already been a considerable amount of damage. I don’t know how permanent it is, but allowing President-elect Biden to take office under this cloud of suspicion while suppressing the means by which the suspicion can be removed would be devastating to the perception of legitimacy of the government. The only hope for our democracy is to investigate these allegations and demonstrate that our election system is robust enough to handle the challenge of people asking questions about facts they interpret to suggest fraud or misconduct.
> It seems vanishingly unlikely that it is the start down some path that ends with people being brainwashed by YouTube into believing a bunch of falsehoods, especially compared to the alternative of letting people continue to upload this garbage to their site.
Its not clear to everyone that these videos are garbage, yet suppressing them will prevent people from critically examining them while providing evidence that the other side has something to hide.
> I’m far more concerned about YouTube’s recommendations algorithm and the way it is deliberately designed to funnel people toward more and more extreme content.
Platforms that do not prioritize engagement will retain fewer users than those that do. Sadly, this is the same process in effect all over the world as a result of late capitalism converting everything into attractive commodities. This is the same emergent process that creates addictive snack foods and Netflix. If youtube didn’t prioritize engagement then they would be replaced by a platform that did.
tl;dr You assume both side argue in good faith. When one side doesn’t argue in good faith they can hack our classic understanding of freedom of speech.
We need a word for flooding a space of discourse with so much noise that the truth is obscured and hidden.
It’s not censorship in that it’s removing speech, but it’s as effective in undermining free speech.
It’s obviously what is happening now.
I think the error in what you say is you assume both side are arguing in good faith.
But when one party doesn’t argue in good faith, it means they are saying things they don’t truly believe, or that they don’t respect or care about having a fair discourse.
Like how during the debates Donald Trump continuously attempted to talk over Biden, and essentially control the discourse via bullying.
Just making shit up in order to shut someone else down isn’t okay, and we need to figure out how to protect our traditional values of free speech while also combating when people attempt to destroy our freedom of speech by using this technique at a mass scale in our modern media environment.
I think its more accurate to say there are bad faith actors on both sides. Thats why its so dangerous to let someone shut down one side of a debate because of bad faith actors. You're also shutting down the good faith actors on that side, while leaving the bad faith actors on the other side still able to participate in bad faith.
> I think its more accurate to say there are bad faith actors on both sides.
Bullshit, because at this moment that comparison is a mountain vs a molehill.
0. Trumps lies about Covid and the pandemic crisis which have contributed to the deaths of tens of thousands of Americans
1. The racist birther conspiracy.
2. The vast number of well-documented lies Trump told over the last few years.
3. The baseless lies about election fraud or whatever.
But you know all this. I don’t believe you’re arguing in good faith and I think you’re full of shit. Because, after these last four years saying “bad actors on both sides” means that you’ve chosen to either obscure or deny reality.
What you’re doing is dangerous to democracy and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I’m not saying YouTube removing this content is the right move, but your logic only holds up in a fantasyland devoid of fact or context.
> Bullshit, because at this moment that comparison is a mountain vs a molehill.
Regardless, my point in replying to you was to assert that the existence of bad faith actors doesn't justify silencing good faith actors who seem to represent the same "side."
> But you know all this. I don’t believe you’re arguing in good faith and I think you’re full of shit.
Then why did you reply to me? What value is there in engaging in some bad faith bullshitter on the internet? Don't you believe that I'm going to respond with more bad faith bullshit and further confuse anyone who isn't rational and detached enough to see the truth?
> Because, after these last four years saying “bad actors on both sides” means that you’ve chosen to either obscure or deny reality.
After all this you're not even able to see how there could be bad faith actors on both sides? You don't think that bad faith actors on your own side might harm your cause or detract from your message? Or you don't think they exist?
> What you’re doing is dangerous to democracy and you should be ashamed of yourself.
I get that you're passionate about this so can you explain this statement? If me sharing my opinion is so dangerous then why is it safer to let me vote? I'm genuinely curious how you can think that its good for the common person to cast a ballot but its bad for the common person to share their opinions on the integrity of the election.
> I’m not saying YouTube removing this content is the right move, but your logic only holds up in a fantasyland devoid of fact or context.
What's the error in my logic? Is trump uniquely bad so the normal rules don't apply, or is there something dangerous about the idea that people who decide whose opinions should be heard are potentially bad faith actors who could corrupt the discourse?
> Regardless, my point in replying to you was to assert that the existence of bad faith actors doesn't justify silencing good faith actors who seem to represent the same "side."
But as the case stands right now, Youtube isn't shutting down good faith actors on one side, but bad faith actors, who happen to be on one side.
There is no silencing of good faith actors, although I wholly agree in concept that it's a thin line to walk.
> But as the case stands right now, Youtube isn't shutting down good faith actors on one side, but bad faith actors, who happen to be on one side.
How are they determining bad faith in an objective, reliable, and verifiable way? The policy is to delete content that alleges that there was widespread fraud. That doesn't reference the sincerity or faith of the actor, but the object-level claims that are being made. It would seem that means they are deleting content they disagree with, regardless of whether it is put forth in good faith or not.
> There is no silencing of good faith actors
Can you support this statement? It seems like an article of faith to me. How would you know that all the videos that had been removed are put forth in bad faith?
> although I wholly agree in concept that it's a thin line to walk.
Does that mean you acknowledge the possibility of error in judgment with respect to this issue?
The burden of proof rests on the claimant. There’s a reason US courts of law keep throwing out these claims of widespread fraud: because the claimants consistently fail to provide the widespread evidence to back their claims up.
What there is widespread evidence of, however, is bad-faith actors that are both highly active and plentiful.
Therefore I would suggest the few good-faith actors who find themselves unfairly suppressed first take it up with those dirty lying bastards for sullying ALL their reputations, and secondly ask themselves what they must do to fully disassociate themselves from the scum and rebuild their negative credibility to a level where people are willing to listen again.
Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. They can fix it or they can whine. And which they choose speaks volumes too.
Indeed. Which is why I'm so interested in the evidence behind these claims that I keep hearing that there was no vote fraud, or at least not enough to change the election. Sadly, when asked for proof, these people who believe there was no vote fraud always walk it back: "I haven't seen any evidence." Well great, then maybe you're not in a position to make positive claims on the basis of a lack of evidence.
> There’s a reason US courts of law keep throwing out these claims of widespread fraud: because the claimants consistently fail to provide the widespread evidence to back their claims up.
Are you so sure you can read the mind of a judge? This whole discussion is about motivated reasoning and cognitive biases. When did we start assuming that judges were immune to political bias?
> What there is widespread evidence of, however, is bad-faith actors that are both highly active and plentiful.
I agree with that. Where is your evidence that none of them are judges or Google/YouTube employees?
> Therefore I would suggest the few good-faith actors who find themselves unfairly suppressed first take it up with those dirty lying bastards for sullying ALL their reputations
That would be like telling BLM activists to go tell the black criminals in their community to stop doing crimes that piss off the police. You're implying value judgments that aren't in evidence and lumping people together on the basis of your perceptions when those people may not even really have anything in common except being seen as enemies by the same group of people. People want to be heard. Its wrong to shut them down because some other people said some other ridiculous stuff that you think is basically the same thing because you're done listening.
> secondly ask themselves what they must do to fully disassociate themselves from the scum and rebuild their negative credibility to a level where people are willing to listen again.
People are willing to listen, that's why its so important not to give them a platform. Surely you don't think that YouTube is suppressing videos because they don't like them when those videos aren't going to be watched by anyone?
> Qui cum canibus concumbunt cum pulicibus surgent. They can fix it or they can whine. And which they choose speaks volumes too.
Part of fixing the alleged election fraud would be to present evidence to the public, including videos of that alleged fraud. And if those videos are being suppressed then part of fixing that would be to debate the propriety of suppressing viewpoints that you don't like.
“Which is why I'm so interested in the evidence behind these claims that I keep hearing that there was no vote fraud, or at least not enough to change the election.”
[Sees what you did there]
Did we mention bad-faith arguments? Yes. Yes, we did.
> Did we mention bad-faith arguments? Yes. Yes, we did.
A good example of a bad faith argument is repeatedly employing the motte-and-bailey fallacy by making positive claims, and then when asked to support those claims with evidence, shifting the burden of proof to your opponent by equivocating between statements of the form "there was no X" and "I haven't seen any evidence for X." People often do this unintentionally because they are confused about the difference between object-level claims and statements about the evidence for object-level claims. But one begins to suspect bad faith when this distinction is explained and then ignored, and the behavior repeated.
Of course there is no test for bad faith and people can be both confused as emotionally involved so they repeat themselves. Which may be the case here, I'm not a mind reader.
> How are they determining bad faith in an objective, reliable, and verifiable way? The policy is to delete content that alleges that there was widespread fraud. That doesn't reference the sincerity or faith of the actor, but the object-level claims that are being made. It would seem that means they are deleting content they disagree with, regardless of whether it is put forth in good faith or not.
How many cases of fraud has there been in this election? 1? There has been 0 evidence of widespread fraud. The only possible way any argument could be made in good faith is if you have the naivete of a child. I'm not saying that as a value judgment, but as a matter of fact.
> > There is no silencing of good faith actors
> Can you support this statement? It seems like an article of faith to me. How would you know that all the videos that had been removed are put forth in bad faith?
I can not prove a negative, other than the absence of evidence of the contrary. Do you have any examples of good faith actors being silenced that we can discuss the merits of?
> Does that mean you acknowledge the possibility of error in judgment with respect to this issue?
Yes, but I have seen no evidence of this, so I reserve that hypothetical for when it happens.
> How many cases of fraud has there been in this election?
I haven't the foggiest idea, I'm not a cop or political-type person.
> There has been 0 evidence of widespread fraud.
What kind of evidence would you expect to see?
> The only possible way any argument could be made in good faith is if you have the naivete of a child. I'm not saying that as a value judgment, but as a matter of fact.
How are you able to attest to that fact?
> I can not prove a negative, other than the absence of evidence of the contrary.
What evidence would you expect to see if YouTube had deleted a good faith video?
> Do you have any examples of good faith actors being silenced that we can discuss the merits of?
No because I'm not even sure how one would attest to the "good faith" of a video that is no longer on YouTube. Thats why I'm so puzzled at the certainty exhibited by people who seem determined that these videos and ideas are so dangerous that they should be suppressed. What kind of experiences and evidence would make someone so confident that they were right and they hadn't merely been misinformed?
> Yes, but I have seen no evidence of this, so I reserve that hypothetical for when it happens.
Wouldn't you want to have some evidence in support of your statement before you make sweeping claims? I'm trying to see how you can reconcile the part where you think these other people are bad because they make statements about reality without evidence, but you're fine with making statements about reality yourself without evidence.
That any person in the long chain of people required for the type of conspiracy suggested would slip up and leave any tangible trace, have a change of heart, leak something, or that hundreds of people noticing their names had been used to vote already when they tried to, or any number of other possible evidence.
> What evidence would you expect to see if YouTube had deleted a good faith video?
I don't expect any Youtube video to provide evidence to begin with, I expect it in court, where over 50 cases have failed to produce a single piece of evidence.
> Wouldn't you want to have some evidence in support of your statement before you make sweeping claims? I'm trying to see how you can reconcile the part where you think these other people are bad because they make statements about reality without evidence, but you're fine with making statements about reality yourself without evidence.
I make statements about the reality that santa and big foot don't exist because there's never been any evidence showing they do. I accept that this is not 100% certainty, but it's absolutely reliable enough to base reality around until further notice.
I'm opposing your suggestion that videos stating something very provable without any kind of evidence is the same thing as what I'm doing, and I've explained that stark difference.
> That any person in the long chain of people required for the type of conspiracy suggested would slip up and leave any tangible trace, have a change of heart, leak something, or any person that noticed their name had been used to vote already when they tried to, or any number of other possible evidence.
You haven't seen the videos [0] [1]? Interesting, did you look for them? Didn't the news report on them? Did you see the affidavits? [2] [3] [4]
Or do you just interpret all of that in a way that is consistent with your belief that these are all spurious allegations by bad faith actors?
> I don't expect any Youtube video to provide evidence to begin with, I expect it in court, where over 50 cases have failed to produce a single piece of evidence.
Surely you understand that sworn affidavits are evidence?
> I make statements about the reality that santa and big foot don't exist because there's never been any evidence showing they do.
You've never seen a video purportedly of Bigfoot? Or did you interpret it as a hoax because of your priors? You've never heard of Saint Nicholas? Or do you think that he never existed because someone told you outlandish stories about him and that colored your perception of the entire thing?
> I'm opposing your suggestion that videos stating something very provable without any kind of evidence is the same thing as what I'm doing, and I've explained that stark difference.
You're asserting that there isn't any evidence when you're actually ignorant of evidence and defending the decision of a major corporation to prevent their platform from being used to share evidence.
I'm not really keen to present evidence myself here because I think its clear that there is no such thing as evidence without interpretation, and most people (on both sides of the issue) have already decided to interpret everything in the way that justifies their biases. I'm also not convinced that there was enough fraud to change the outcome of the election (although the attorney general of Texas and 17 other states do seem to think so [5]). But there's so much purported evidence of fraud it was pretty easy to go get some links so I could disprove the notion that there hasn't been any presentation of evidence. There has been enough to raise questions about election integrity. Which is actually where these allegations of bad faith start to become really interesting because the same people saying there's no evidence are accusing people of bad faith for their arguments alleging fraud that refer to evidence. So humans being human, basically, which is why I'm actually much more interested in the epistemological and cognitive issues that arise in this case.
Dude the courts looked at whatever "evidence" was presented and rejected it. Multiple times. And we've listened to you here. Now fuck off.
What you're really saying is that there is election fraud and Biden's win is illegitimate. Which is just another way of saying, "I don't believe in democracy, I'm an authoritarian and I'm going to go out and undermine democracy because I want America to be an authoritarian state."
You should be banned from HN and I think that anyone who doesn't believe that the election was legitimate - i.e. that no meaningful fraud occurred - should be banned from the HN community.
Enough is enough. It's clearly dangerous to allow these views the shroud of legitimacy by giving them space in the public square. Otherwise HN is just enabling them.
You're full of shit and all this pseudo-philosophical pseudo-analytical pseudo-objective cant you're spewing is nonsense.
You're acting exactly like one of those crypto-racists who knows that their true belief would be deemed unpalatable or unacceptable by the community so they'll blow as much smoke around as possible without ever stepping out to say what they're actually driving towards.
> What you're really saying is that there is election fraud and Biden's win is illegitimate.
I can't help it if five pieces of evidence lead you to that conclusion. But maybe now you can see why we think it is so important that people be allowed to make these allegations so they can be responded to, rather than suppressed and allowed to fester. If 5 pieces of evidence can suggest to you that the election was fraudulent and the President-elect is illegitimate, then can you imagine how much easier it is to persuade someone who isn't so firmly pro-Biden as yourself?
> Dude the courts looked at whatever "evidence" was presented and rejected it. Multiple times.
Actually a lot of those cases were dismissed for lack of standing. Evidence wasn't even presented.
> You should be banned from HN and I think that anyone who doesn't believe that the election was legitimate - i.e. that no meaningful fraud occurred - should be banned from the HN community.
This is how echo chambers are formed.
> Enough is enough. It's clearly dangerous to allow these views the shroud of legitimacy by giving them space in the public square. Otherwise HN is just enabling them.
Its probably more dangerous to allow them to be suppressed if in fact they are untrue. Now if they are true and you're saying that's what makes them dangerous, then I can understand why you would want them suppressed.
> You're acting exactly like one of those crypto-racists who knows that their true belief would be deemed unpalatable or unacceptable by the community so they'll blow as much smoke around as possible without ever stepping out to say what they're actually driving towards.
So you don't even think its possible in theory to be concerned about election integrity unless its for partisan reasons? That would explain a lot.
> You're full of shit and all this pseudo-philosophical pseudo-analytical pseudo-objective cant you're spewing is nonsense.
> Now fuck off.
I think statements like this are unhelpful and I'd suggest you examine your own emotional state and see why you feel so hostile to people you don't even know.
“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” -C.S. Lewis
"The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated"
This is clearly wrong. Greedy people are never satisfied. Look at our modern day robber barons, a mere handful with more money than hundreds of millions of people. Yet their wealth continues to grow.
At what point to we discern fact from fiction? We're currently discussing this issue on a site that caters to the tech community, an industry and culture based on solid science and facts. I doubt anyone in the industry would argue unsubstantiated fanciful opinions stand on equal ground as the established and proven scientific facts that underlie everything we do in stark terms. If we did, we would get nowhere. Why would this principle not apply to anything else? Yes of course there are no shortage of divergent opinions and theories within our science and any other science for that matter. Questioning withing reason leads to innovation but there is no valid argument to be made that any opinion is equal to established facts and should be treated as such. Our industry and culture would simply not exist if that were the case or any other science. Should the wild opinions of people who think the Earth is flat hold the same scientific weight as millennia of established and proven math, science and observation? Our opinions of reality do not change reality. I'm sorry, your assertion only tries to poison the well by arguing emotion and unsupported opinions somehow carries equal weight to established and provable truths. The arbitrator of truth is reality.
Flat earth conspiracies has not poisoned any well. When Mythbusters tested some of the theories we also gained as society a bit by showing the scientific process in the face of conspiracy theories.
A corner stone in science, which goes far back in history, is trust. In order to understand anything we have to put trust in established facts, in experts and common understanding. Part of building science is building trust, and censorship has a strong negative impact on trust. If we go back to the analogy of poisoning the well of knowledge, censorship destroys people trust in the water itself.
To take an example of why this new Youtube policy might be problematic, could we still have a video about the risk in Postal voting? In the UK election in 1990, it was estimated that 50% of postal voting arriving from Ireland was fraudulent. Trust in the voting system was at an all time low. As a response the voting system was changed and identification became a requirement in order to vote. Trust in the election system went massively up, and suspicion of fraud went down. A decade later the UK government removed some parts of the requirements, but for Ireland the requirement still remain today. Should an opinion that the US could learn from the UK past experience with postal votes and voter trust be censored, or would it poison the ability to discern fact from fiction?
What if the President of the United States suddenly started supporting flat earthers?
I think suddenly then they would be able to poison the well.
Science is a bad example because the process of science can be quantified. We can argue about it but basically can quantify what is or isn’t a valid scientific experiment.
This creates a “good faith” environment because everyone has to play by the same rules.
Outside of science this is harder to achieve. If one side argues in bad faith, they can just keep making shit up or doing things to undermine the discourse itself, like talk over someone else or bully them.
Freedom of speech kind of both depends on and is in conflict with culturally enforced norms and restrictions around who is able to say what when, and how loud.
Bear in mind that when our classic idea of free speech was developed, it was simply assumed by most that it would be white, propertied men doing the talking. Point being there are assumptions behind these conceptions with are important to consider.
Most of us don’t want white, properties dudes to be the only ones talking, but no one who cared about any form of democracy or equality would want to hang out in a town square where everyone is just yelling all the time and beating up other people so they can be the only one talking.
Restriction per se isn’t bad. It’s all about how it’s done, and why.
What we are seeing now is a shifting both of cultural norms and the infrastructure of our media environment which means that “free speech” no longer has some of the constraints and restrictions which enabled it to perform the truth-seeking function we desire it to.
Good faith and bad faith environment is about trust. When that trust break down you either find methods to regain trust or discourse becomes impossible.
So what strategies works most effective in restoring trust? We can learn by looking at the effective ways people have done in the past to create the opposite, increase distrust and conflict. Assuming bad faith based on race and class is very effective in creating environments of distrust, both on internet forums and elsewhere. Preemptively exercise power in unpredictable way, and enforce unclear rules in an inconsistent and nontransparent way also works wonder to further conflicts. Displaying symbols of ideological values and focus on tribal differences can effectively increase conflict over multiple generations.
You can not censor people into trust, and thus censorship is not a tool to create a good faith environment. You can remove people from the discourse until only people who belong to the same tribe is left, where every single participant trust the others because of psudo-kinship. Free speech, along with concepts like human rights and liberty, is however centered around common rules being enforced consistently in order to create trust among people who would otherwise be mistrusting of each other. You let the other side talk in order to create a common trust that they will let you talk.
> You let the other side talk in order to create a common trust that they will let you talk.
Oh they’ve been talking. We’ve all heard.
> Good faith and bad faith environment is about trust.
Not so. Someone acting in bad faith is by definition untrustworthy.
You seem to want to equivocate. I don’t know if YouTube choosing to censor this content is wise, but since the content is false, spreads disinformation on purpose, nutty, and dangerous to democracy and the lives of civil servants, I can understand why.
> Science is a bad example because the process of science can be quantified. We can argue about it but basically can quantify what is or isn’t a valid scientific experiment.
The demarcation problem is essentially scientists disagreeing that we can sharply divide science from non-science.
The replication crisis is evidence that not all "science" is actually science.
> If one side argues in bad faith, they can just keep making shit up or doing things to undermine the discourse itself, like talk over someone else or bully them.
Silencing one side of a debate is also undermining the discourse.
> What we are seeing now is a shifting both of cultural norms and the infrastructure of our media environment which means that “free speech” no longer has some of the constraints and restrictions which enabled it to perform the truth-seeking function we desire it to.
Actually what we are seeing now is the democratization of free speech so that an oligarchic elite is no longer the only group who is able to make their voice heard. In this light it is unsurprising that the oligarchic elite wants restrictions on speech.
> Actually what we are seeing now is the democratization of free speech so that an oligarchic elite is no longer the only group who is able to make their voice heard.
Exactly who do you think the major donors to the Trump campaign and the Republican Party are?
Do you actually believe these election-fraud lies were spontaneous, as opposed to something people were whipped into believing by a propaganda campaign funded by the wealthy?
Money in politics is a problem for both parties, not just Republicans, but, your argument is bullshit.
> Do you yourself believe Joe Biden won the election
I refuse to answer on the principle that I don't submit to religious tests. You can call this bullshit if you like, you've said you're not here for mutual understanding and so I understand that you're not interested in my point of view.
> there was not any meaningful “election fraud” or whatever?
Of course there was meaningful election fraud. Any fraud is meaningful because it challenges the idea that free and fair elections are possible.
> Anything other than a yes-or-no answer to my question is bullshit.
Those were two questions, a yes-or-no answer wouldn't have even explained which one I was answering.
Why does it bother you so much if somebody believes in flat earth? And why do you want to prevent them to discuss their silly theories? Are you so insecure in your own knowledge? A bunch of people believing in flat earth does not diminish our science in any way.
The problem isn't that some people believe the Earth is flat. The problem is that it's no longer disqualifying.
If one person believes the Earth is flat, that's not an issue. The problem is that much of the country has organized itself into information bubbles. Those bubbles can be large enough to span entire congressional districts and even entire states. Those states elect representatives and senators. These days, the Senate and House can be split by a single vote on some issues. We live in a world where there's a very real possibility that a state will elect someone to office who believes things as wild as "the Earth is flat" and they will be the deciding voice on critical issues facing us today.
Beliefs inform actions. I believe the building I am in is not on fire and I am conducting myself accordingly. If I believed the building was on fire, my actions would be quite different. It is naïve at best, disingenuous at worst, to pretend that someone’s beliefs exist in some magic bubble that does not have any effect on the world around them. When people believed in witchcraft, real people were burned. Even before the pandemic, people that did not believe in the science supporting vaccinations led to real outbreaks of real disease that killed real people.
I believe procrastinating on HN makes me less productive and here I am still procrastinating. I'm not acting on my own belief. And yes beliefs do mostly exist in "magic bubbles" without any special impact on the world at large. I hope you realize a lot of people have also died because of unscientific beliefs that seemed scientific at the time. The idea of censoring of wrongthink is nothing new. There are still many countries today which still practice such policies and I don't think you'd want to live in such places.
> And yes beliefs do mostly exist in "magic bubbles" without any special impact on the world at large.
> I hope you realize a lot of people have also died because of unscientific beliefs that seemed scientific at the time.
“Beliefs mostly don’t effect the world…people are dead because of false beliefs” Which is it? What people believe mostly doesn’t matter, or people’s incorrect beliefs have been life or death matters often?
> I believe procrastinating on HN makes me less productive and here I am still procrastinating. I'm not acting on my own belief
You are acting on it by talking about it to other people. But good job picking a belief so low stakes that you can try to pretend that your beliefs that are literally your map of the world, don’t determine how you act in the world.
> The idea of censoring of wrongthink is nothing new.
Neither I nor the parent comment talked about that. Just that what people believe is important and has real world ramifications. It isn’t being “insecure” in my science to worry about people that think physics isn’t real, or vaccines aren’t real, or that killing someone that doesn’t believe in their god is required, or people with certain skin colors are biologically predisposed to violence, or that there is a vast global conspiracy going back hundreds of years to trick people about the shape of the earth.
If majority of humans acted upon majority of their beliefs, the humanity would have destroyed itself several times over. You cannot have good ideas without bad ones. How would you learn anything otherwise.
I don't know what are you talking about then if not about censorship? Are you only asserting: bad people do bad things?
I don't know why, but it seems that of all the silly ideas out there, flat-earthers have a special place in the minds of some people here on HN, since they are brought up so many times.
Believing that the Earth is flat is mostly harmless. Believing that vaccines cause autism, that covid is a hoax, etc is actively harmful to society and actually kills people (more often then not not the one who believe it in the first place).
Youtube was already pervasively censored and editorialized / moderated. If you are using Youtube, it's important to be aware of its role as the arbiter of what's allowed and how discourse is directed.
But of course most Youtube hogwash content producers and their followers aren't in it for the love of truth or philosophy. Maybe some of the more naive are, and have been fooled to be puppets in Youtube's strings.
I have a screencast of installing Debian that’s unlisted and has one view uploaded several years ago and last month I got an email saying YouTube had decided, after a review, that it is only suitable for mature audiences. I don’t know who flagged it or who reviewed it but there’s no video, only a screen share of Debian installation and there’s no audio. I think YouTube just counts on people appealing wrongful flags.
I no longer believe YouTube is more malicious than it is incompetent.
If you allow Islamic terrorists to publish their indoctrination materials, conversions to their cause will increase.
I’m ok with censoring that stuff.
Most of the censorship cases i can think of have been religious or conservative groups and in all those cases i thought the call for censorship was misguided. There are situations where I’m ok with censorship. One of them is Islamic terrorist propaganda and fake news.
> If you allow Islamic terrorists to publish their indoctrination materials, conversions to their cause will increase.
This is especially what I'm sceptica about, as well as the banning of publications such as Mein Kampf.
It seems to me that the proportion of those that were first unconvinced, and then read such material and become convinced by it is negligibly small. Rather, most of the followers never actually read the publications and mostly got into it to feel part of a group as their friends were followers.
They're typically publications that were never read by either the proponents, nor the detractors who wish to ban it.
> Most of the censorship cases i can think of have been religious or conservative groups and in all those cases i thought the call for censorship was misguided. There are situations where I’m ok with censorship. One of them is Islamic terrorist propaganda and fake news.
There is very few news that is not fake — the addage of “All news is accurate, except that one article about that one field one happens to be a specialist in.” seldom fails to hit the mark.
That you need to specifically single out “Islamic terrorism”, opposed to simply keeping it about “terrorism” as a general concept also betrays a deal of specificity in your view, which is often the problem with censorship — that not all are censored æqual.
>> It seems to me that the proportion of those that were first unconvinced
That population is every person ever born - no one was born believing in Anti-semitism or Nazism.
>> and then read such material
Wait - we're not just limited to first order effects, someone who reads may relay those ideas to another in a different form. E.g. by starting a social gathering of some sort.
>> and become convinced by it is negligibly small
The Nazi party membership reached over 8 million people.
>> There is very few news that is not fake
Poor wording on my part, i meant specifically Islamic terrorist propaganda not fake news more generally.
>That population is every person ever born - no one was born believing in Anti-semitism or Nazism.
No one is born tob believe in anything, however one typically has opinions on matters by the time that one is capable of reading.
>Wait - we're not just limited to first order effects, someone who reads may relay those ideas to another in a different form. E.g. by starting a social gathering of some sort.
And even there I feel the reading of material in print is negligible as a proximate cause to inspire that.
>The Nazi party membership reached over 8 million people.
And most had never read Mein Kampf.
They were members because their friends were — most Christians have of course also never read a Bible from cover to cover.
>> And even there I feel the reading of material in print is negligible
But the written bible needs to exist or the religion will fade out, correct? No one is able to adopt the practices of the Minoan religion. The Minoan religion is dead since their people have gone and they didn't write much, if anything, down and no one can accurately choose to adopt their beliefs.
>> most Christians have of course also never read a Bible
Why differentiate between them reading and them being read to by a pastor for example? What's the difference?
Christian churches often choose to host bible classes, why would they promote use of scripture to further indoctrination if it's not effective? Why would they read to the congregation from the bible?
> But the written bible needs to exist or the religion will fade out, correct?
By name perhaps, the same ideas will always live on under a different name.
> No one is able to adopt the practices of the Minoan religion. The Minoan religion is dead since their people have gone and they didn't write much, if anything, down and no one can accurately choose to adopt their beliefs.
The practices have lived on under a different name.
> Why differentiate between them reading and them being read to by a pastor for example? What's the difference?
A pastor has also never read the entire Bible to them from cover to cover; most haven't the faintest idea of what is in there.
> Christian churches often choose to host bible classes, why would they promote use of scripture to further indoctrination if it's not effective? Why would they read to the congregation from the bible?
You will find that they tend to omit the passages that are considered controversial, and that would lead to the Bible's potential banning.
> But the written bible needs to exist or the religion will fade out, correct? No one is able to adopt the practices of the Minoan religion. The Minoan religion is dead since their people have gone and they didn't write much, if anything, down and no one can accurately choose to adopt their beliefs.
Despite the extinction of their civilization and our inability to translate their language, we do know quite a bit about minoan religion through the study of artifacts and the accounts of their neighbors. Contemporaneously the Homeric epics were carried on in oral tradition for hundreds of years before the greeks wrote them down. And yet despite ready access to greek mythology you would be hard pressed to find anyone alive today who believes it to be true. The absence of a text does not eliminate the idea it conveys, nor does conveying an idea lead automatically to its adoption.
“ Since Linear A is as yet undeciphered, there is effectively no contemporary textual evidence regarding Minoan religion. Even if Linear A were deciphered, it is unlikely that much information regarding Minoan cult practices, much less Minoan religious ideology, would be forthcoming above and beyond the names of the divinities which the Minoans worshipped.”
— we know basically nothing of their religious practices except that we think they existed based on artifacts found and some reasonable hypothesis.
>> you would be hard pressed to find anyone alive today who believes it
What does belief have to do with whether an idea can be communicated or not? It’s sufficient to be able to say the idea was XXX
> What does belief have to do with whether an idea can be communicated or not? It’s sufficient to be able to say the idea was XXX
What does belief have to do with a religion dying out? Everything!
Without writing, the greeks could get people to carry on their religion. With writing their religion died out. Clearly the spread of ideologies is not as simple as "writing spreads it and the absence of writing kills it."
People become readicalized. Nobody s born a die-hard islamist, so yes, making it harder to access radical content is maiing id harder, but not impossible, to become radicalized. Goes for extreme right wing content and other religious extremists as well.
And most news isn't fake, luckily. All news is biased, true, but that doesn't mean it's fake. Which is a big difference. That the press isn't doing itself a lot of favours by being what it is today is also true.
I think it is telling you specifically mention "Islamic terrorist" twice in your brief comment. It would seem you are OK with censoring that (I agree), but given your very narrow focus, seems you are not OK with banning "terrorist", which is revealing.
Since you took the extra effort to exactly specify what exactly should be censored, under your definition, would you be OK with Anders Breivik's manifesto?
It is also the problem -- when people want to use censorship as a tool to selectively ban some bad but leave other bad alone. Who decides which bad is bad, and which bad we should conveniently ignore?
> Most of the censorship cases I can think of have been religious or conservative groups
That's all the Islamists are: a conservative religious group which believes in gun ownership and the use of violence. The difference between the people posting with gun+quran and the people posting with gun+bible is razor-thin.
That is such a perfect example of ingroup bias in action.
You can label these materials as censorable because you, likely not a follower of islam, believe that material from islamic uploaders talking about a revolution and indoctrination do not belong on your platform.
yet here we are, with thousands of christian, america-first indoctrination videos, calling for an uprising against everything from vaccines to elections. IT IS THE SAME THING.
you do realize this is a "are we the baddies?" situation, no?
So here we are, being told by YouTube that sources calling the leader of the world's most vile and brutal organization an "austere religious scholar" and deliberately misinforming public about what they can and cannot read are called "credible and authoritative sources".
When your supposedly single reliable source of truth (the media) is so obviously and shamelessly biased, how can you not question the source of "truth" and those who suppress other viewpoints?
I'm reminded of a seemingly prescient quote from 1999's Alpha Centauri:
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny.
The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism.
Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Commissioner Pravin Lal, "U.N. Declaration of Rights"
You should have picked better examples like the censorship of the photos of inside the detention centre used to keep the now-orphaned kids that the US split from their parents at the Mexico border and now can’t find the parents.
Or the US involvement in civilian deaths in Yemen.
Your examples both got proper smack downs. My examples are still censored - you or i have never seen pictures of the conditions the kids are stored in (and if you think you have, double check its authenticity). Would be reporters for the Yemen are suppressed well before there’s any risk of them deciding to just skip mainstream media and post online instead. End result is an information vacuum and we can’t have an informed discussion because neither you nor i knows what’s actually happening.
Why should we faithfully assume that people will produce that material if given the chance? There are plenty of "common misconceptions" in existance. (but i note that i think your argument here is the most convincing of the replies).
Also, will they do it in a timely manner?
>> I'd like the opportunity to make that decision myself
Is it possible you're not equipped to make that decision for yourself? In the way that a 12 year old child is not best placed to decide about drinking a bottle of vodka. Or in the way that if a doctor shared every detail about your ailment - you might still seek their guidance to help decide an appropriate treatment.
> Why should we faithfully assume that people will produce that material if given the chance?
Mostly the "someone is wrong on the internet" phenomena. There are a large number of people who like arguing things and debunking. They just need exposure.
> Is it possible you're not equipped to make that decision for yourself?
Well, yes.
It's also possible, qnd indeed just as likely, that we should not have allowed the common pleb to vote on the grounds that they don't have the free time or the long-term planning to make good decisions on how the country should be run.
>> There are a large number of people who like arguing things and debunking. They just need exposure.
"It's cold outside, put a jacket on or you'll catch a cold!"
This isn't debunked yet but it's had plenty exposure over decades at this point.
Some things are just too boring to question so plenty of people continue to put on a jacket to avoid catching the cold, which does nothing, rather than washing their hands before touching their face, which could stop some spread.
Eric S Raymond's all bugs are shallow thing appealed to me but hasn't really worked that way. I think that's a similar story.
I think this premise of exposure always solving radical ideas is likely to be false but it's not without merit because exposure and illumination are such great tools in other cases that are very like this problem.
I think you need exposure and motivators. In the case of things like islamic extremism and think there will be far more people willing to do the debunking legwork than on the topic of catching a cold from the cold.
> This phenomena is how I've been mostly converted to racism
I'm sightly surprised that someone would just come out and happily admit that they've been radicalised by the internet and are comfortable being a racist.
I was mostly using the term for shock value to emphasize the point and to help drive home the fact that not being able to find the counter-arguments/deradicalization can be a very bad thing!
(Annoyingly, there's so many meanings of "racist" that it can apply to anywhere from 99% to 1% of the population, depending on which of the main definitions are used)
I had to google what on earth HBD was. For others (from less wrong)
>... HBD (Human bio-diversity, the claim that distinct populations (I will be avoiding using the word "race" here insomuch as possible) of humans exist and have substantial genetical variance which accounts for some difference in average intelligence from population to population) is true, and that all its proponents are correct in accusing the politicization of science for burying this information.
I'd just note that noticing differences between races, eg black people are blacker is not racism really, it's more discriminating against races.
I'm reasonably sure that the vast majority of people would consider the statement "The average African American is less intelligent that the average "white" American, this is partially due to genes and cannot be entirely fixed without genetic engineering." to be textbook racism.
Indeed it does. The question of how good a measure IQ is is an interesting one.
Scores on Raven's progressive matrices certainly correlate well with all sorts of things (working memory, income, ability to do computer programming, ability to write a popular story), so I guess it depends in how you are defining "intelligence".
Do you have a source for this? I can find him saying it could be true (if it weren't for test scores influencing later worklife via people judging you for them) but not actually saying it is true.
It most likely would (considering all the things that are considered racist nowadays, which includes a set of all things and then some). But that's a descriptive statement, not normative. It really shouldn't be.
Western governments support religious Muslim groups against secular fascists in Syria and people at home complain about religion and conservatives. There is an educational deficit somewhere and these censorship ambitions are not only counter productive for foreign policy issues, they seem to be more of a crave to control a world that isn't understood in the slightest.
If we censor fake news, I am also in favor of censoring you.
The problem is that when a side has no real standing, they'll Gish gallop.
A good example of this is flat earthers or anti vaxxers. They've got no scientific or reasonable leg to stand on, yet they publish so much unscientific garbage as to be garnering support. It will LOOK like they are more credible because the shear amount of garbage they push will go unresponded to by the other side. Meanwhile, they'll just simply ignore the other half of the argument. They refuse to address those points while making a ton of their own.
It gets worse. There's starting to be major bubbles of misinformation forming. So broad that the arguments made are almost impossible for the other side to decode. A great example of this is something like the comet pizza Q anon conspiracy. If you don't know, it goes something like this "A pizzeria in DC was a central location in a pedophile ring which the Clinton's had deep connections to."
Where does a reasonable debate even begin with something like that? It's easy enough to show that "No, that's crazy" Heck, even minimal rational thought should be enough to debunk this garbage. Yet it still flows (so much so that someone decided to show up armed to demand the pizzeria release the kids[1])
Yet, when a debate comes up, all a Q anon follower would pretty much have to say something like "Yeah and I bet you like comet pizza as well". That sort of attack would be devastating in the eyes of those already tuned into Q anon crap yet would be completely reasonable for an outsider to be like "Yeah, I like their pizza".
These techniques are effective which is evidenced by how much misinformation flows throughout the internet. Giving equal time and access to both sides doesn't appear to be effective in combating this misinformation. There's got to be a better way.
Yeah. The way I've been thinking about it lately as like the "pigeon playing chess"... He just knocks over your pieces and declares victory. A confluence of factors has led us to a point where a scary number of people side with the pigeon. And that is how democracy is eroded.
I think the full analogy is something akin to "He'll knock over all the pieces, shit on the board, and strut around like he won." Which is quite the mental image and fits perfectly.
We have an attention economy and you only hear about anti-vaxxers from people that like to distinguish themselves against the most basic fantasies. Grow some standards and it will solve itself.
Well actually Epstein's tropical island was a central location in a pedophile ring which the Clinton's had deep connections to. All they got wrong was the location.
> A good example of this is [...] anti vaxxers. They've got no scientific or reasonable leg to stand on
You should read up on the Leicester Method.
I have no opinion one way or the other, but it seems to me, that rather than malleable minds being "influenced" by propaganda, it is a natural reaction to being "told" what to think.
Pro vaccine advocates, come across much the same as modern atheists, or rust users - vehemently proselytising their views, with little regard to the fears, concerns, or opinions of others. This naturally rubs people the wrong way, especially if one is predisposed to contrarianism.
I've been on the internet for 23 years and I have never been forced to watch an anti-vaxxer's video. Your theory that by producing lots of videos they subvert lots of people is simply wrong.
It's the same fallacy as with the "Russian Bots" election conspiracy. Just because you can create lots of content, doesn't mean you can make people watch it.
I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as you. What Russia correctly worked out is that, if you can create the requisite content, you WILL get people to watch it, just statistically. And because you're (indirectly) feeding it with a coherent, directed intention, including specific elements like 'the Russian Bots people are talking about don't exist and anybody saying so is a loony', you can get your bubble of alternate information to grow and serve useful purposes (useful to you: NOT necessarily useful to the people you're using to fill your bubble)
You absolutely can make people watch it, even side with it passionately to where they'll burn through their friends requiring loyalty to the information bubble. It's a matter of statistics, and directing the contents of the information bubble with reasonable effectiveness. It's a bit like nuclear fusion: sort of 'wait, these lumps of metal do THAT?!?'
Yes, in fact they do. And, yes, you can direct HUMANITY to whatever ends you like, including 'The USA should be torn to bits by civil war please, so it is no longer a rival superpower'. Plenty of people out there would find that useful, wouldn't even have to be exceptionally short-sighted. Mind you, it's still damn reckless even if it is not absolutely short-sighted.
I'm not sure you decided to use weasel words on purpose. There's a colossal difference between "being forced to watch" propaganda and being exposed to it.
I'm not forced to open phishing emails but sometimes I do by accident or carelessness. I'm also not forced to open links someone close or not happen to send my way. I'm not forced to read weird facts-denying delusional rants on social media but sometimes I stumble upon it while scrolling around a main page.
Given the unlimited torrent of propaganda and manipulated content that we are exposed constantly and is designed precisely to control you to serve the manipulator's goals, what should we do?
Hell, just open a tab with any of the facts-denying extremist media channels that currently plague the US. Do you believe they are preaching to fishes, or that there are people exposed and manipulated by it?
Not weasel words - are you saying if you were exposed to anti-vaxxer videos, you would become an anti-vaxxer? It should be obvious to you how ridiculous that assumption is.
This is just hand-wavy fearmongering about "mass psychology"
Yet that is exactly how propaganda and mis-information works.
How exactly do you think antivaxers became antivaxers? They weren’t born like that, they were exposed to propaganda and eventually fell for it.
I know several wonderful, educated and otherwise reasonable people, who have fallen for antivaxing, antimask, covid-is-a-lie conspiracies. This includes two teachers in the public school system. The same people who are supposed to teach critical thinking to the next generation. Think about what that means for a moment.
Propaganda works. Stopping propaganda, highlighting “fake news”, debunking conspiracies, and teaching critical thinking is essential.
You are mixing things together that don't belong together. Covid is very new and scientific discussion is still ongoing. There is no consensus. Anti-vaxxers are about tried and proven vaccines they don't trust.
I think as with other things (like religion), people get mostly "infected" by their peer group. Also there are certain aspects that make memes prevail, like fear and protectiveness of one's own children in the case of vaccines. It's not simply a matter of exposure to YouTube videos.
> You are mixing things together that don't belong together.
But they do belong together, don't they? I mean, they are all under attack by facts-denying militant groups fueled by anti-intellectual propaganda.
> Covid is very new and scientific discussion is still ongoing. There is no consensus.
That's no excuse to intentionally deny facts and information already established on the disease. And no, just because a militant group actively denies and rejects facts that doesn't make them disputed nor does it means there is no consensus.
> It's not simply a matter of exposure to YouTube videos.
This is not about youtube or twitter or sneaker net. This is about people actively disseminating and consuming propaganda and disinformation. The shit is the same even if you switch spoons.
"But they do belong together, don't they? I mean, they are all under attack by facts-denying militant groups fueled by anti-intellectual propaganda."
No, that is just a strategy of defamation that you fell for. Basically the "Hitler was a vegetarian" argument against vegetarianism. In short, "a person of type x believes y" does not imply "everybody who believes y is a person of type x".
" And no, just because a militant group actively denies and rejects facts that doesn't make them disputed nor does it means there is no consensus."
If you would watch more YouTube, you would be aware that it is not only "militant groups" who argue about aspects of Covid.
"This is about people actively disseminating and consuming propaganda and disinformation."
I do sports pistol shooting as a hobby. Recommendations have improved recently, but before you never were never further than two clicks away from ISSF championship chronicles to videos by disturbed people with firearms.
What do you mean by "undeniable steep gradient towards extremism" - it was undeniable that more people were becoming extremists via YouTube? I thought that is what we are discussing? Whether YouTube algorithm tries to show you extremism is another question. I am not defending the YouTube algorithm - presumably more extreme things lead to more engagement.
Look at external data. We now have diseases reappearing that were eradicated decades ago. Inside anti-vaxx communities.
Nobody is “forced” to watch a YT video. But if these show up in searches, along with pseudo-scientific articles, pseudo-documentaries on all platforms and actively work on becoming viral, then there is a problem.
Maybe creating a lot of content does not imply that people will watch it, but the reality is that a lot of people do.
True. And I don't have evidence that it has inflated the problem beyond anecdata. That said I don't think it's reaching to believe it has.
Anti-vaxx movement was started by a bogus publication from a then reputable source. It was blown up by ease of information spread and exacerbated by the undermined confidence in traditional media. That much is known.
I think the vaccine story has specific aspects for why it spread, not simply YouTube exposure. It provides good anecdotes, because many people get vaccinated and many people get randomly sick. So almost everybody knows an anecdote from somebody who got severely sick after vaccination.
It takes basic knowledge of statistics to verify that those things are just random correlations, not causation (show that incidence of certain afflictions (like autism) is the same among vaccinated and non-vaccinated people). That is what the memes feed from. I don't think censoring would help much here, especially as most people know such stories personally. I don't know people directly, but I know people who know people who got sick after vaccination. I suspect many others do, too.
Granted, anecdotes spread especially well on Social Media. It works the other way round, too. Have you heard a story of somebody who almost died, or died, from Covid, despite being young and healthy? Such incidents are very rare, but since they get shared a lot, one such personal report may be shared by thousands or even hundreds of thousands of people. every one of them now feels like they "know" somebody who died from Covid despite of being young and healthy.
Should such stories also be banned, to ease the psychological burden (fear) on billions of people?
> Should such stories also be banned, to ease the psychological burden (fear) on billions of people?
No, they are clearly different. One encourages dangerous behaviour for yourself and more importantly others around you, the other does not. This is also there is not much talk about banning flat earth or moon landing conspiracies out of social media.
Maybe not from them, een if you get your fair share of recommendations (at least I do), but certainly about them. And that is attention for anti-vaxxers as well. The moment traditional media stops being after clicks and treating reporting like entertainment will be a very big step in the right direction, so.
> The problem is that when a side has no real standing, they'll Gish gallop. A good example of this is flat earthers or anti vaxxers. They've got no scientific or reasonable leg to stand on....
> Where does a reasonable debate even begin with something like that?
Observe how your mind is drawn to the very most egregious examples of conspiracy theories, and conspiracy theorists, and then expands that into your conceptualization of the whole. Also observe your sense of omniscience ("They've got no scientific or reasonable leg to stand on...", demonstrating your perception that you've reviewed all the evidence and arguments from the community).
I believe that a reasonable debate first requires that all parties realize and acknowledge the illusory nature of consciousness, and in turn reality. But this seems to be an extremely unpopular idea, so we may be waiting a long time before we can have a reasonable debate.
Not who you are replying, but fair points, and there is obviously a really important question at hands, that is trust. No one person can hold all the information, discoveries we have accumulated over the years, so we ultimately rely on the belief that someone we respect is trustworthy.
And the thing to notice here is that even an astrophysicist can only BELIEVE that gravity exists, when asked even though they could most probably prove it if needed.
With these things aside, the both sides mentality stops being applicable at a certain point. While one side can show you thousands of evidence that a certain cure does work, the other side shows one questionable example of it not working and it is enough for their believers. So as to answer the specific case with antivaxxers: I will not engage with such an argument because they in fact have no scientific leg to stand on automatically. For to have any meaningful debate, we would have to talk about a specific vaccine that may or may not be safe. If we have such a strong statement (in a mathematical sense) that ALL instance of something is a given property, is ought to not be true in a mathematical sense - and without understanding probabilities there is no point in arguing.
> No one person can hold all the information, discoveries we have accumulated over the years, so we ultimately rely on the belief that someone we respect is trustworthy.
Agreed. However:
a) it is not necessary to accept these beliefs as epistemically flawless
b) it is possible (and useful) to be consciously aware that we have done this (as opposed to holding the perception that we know(!) these things)
> With these things aside, the both sides mentality stops being applicable at a certain point.
I'm not sure, so I will ask for clarification: do you believe I have asserted that both sides are equal, at the object level? I am pointing out their similarity at the abstract, neurological level, although perhaps that is lost in translation (but the more explicit one is, it seems the more offense is often taken)
> While one side can show you thousands of evidence that a certain cure does work, the other side shows one questionable example of it not working and it is enough for their believers
How confident are you that this belief is accurate? You realize that it is an intuitive belief, at least now that I point it out, right? (And I do not mean this in a snarky way, I mean it literally, and seriously, for reasons that may not be obvious).
> So as to answer the specific case with antivaxxers: I will not engage with such an argument because they in fact have no scientific leg to stand on automatically.
This suggests omniscience, on at least two levels. (I do not intend this in a snarky way either.)
> For to have any meaningful debate, we would have to talk about a specific vaccine that may or may not be safe.
There is no shortage of anti-vaxxers willing to have that conversation. Finding one that genuinely knows what they are talking about, that is another matter, but there are some very well read people among all the idiots.
> If we have such a strong statement (in a mathematical sense) that ALL instance of something is a given property, is ought to not be true in a mathematical sense - and without understanding probabilities [and epistemology] there is no point in arguing.
Does this apply to both sides of the disagreement? :)
I believe that a big part of the problem here (and the numerous other culture war arguments that are currently raging out of control) is that people tend to approach/discuss the issues from a strict object level perspective, and also that both parties tend to not be mindful that such discussions are fundamentally a neurological process, and therefore subject to all the flaws and fallacies inherent in any such undertaking (which seem to be heavily amplified in discussions that are indeterminate, and culture war based) [1].
I believe that if people really cared about optimizing outcomes on these issues as much as they proclaim/self-perceive that they do, they would be willing to take the steps that are necessary to do so, or at least consider the ideas. But alas, it seems to be a bit of an intractable, recursive/coordination problem. Maybe things will get better in 2021 - one should never give up hope!
[1] For example, if you go looking for it specifically, can you spot any omniscience (lack of self-awareness) in this thread (both in the noted anecdotes, as well as in the conversation itself)?: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25385833
In this context that has been done. No attempt was made to block court cases brought up about the incident and everyone has been talking about the claims made since the election happened over a month ago.
Algorithmic sharing causes misinformation bubbles to grow in a way that has never before been seen.
Why do we need to ignore this effect and let it run its natural course? We know what happens. Flat earthers and anti vaxxers and now millions of illegal ballots.
They even explicitly allowed the discussion during the counting process and afterwards as court cases were brought forward.
So has every conspiracy theorist on the planet. What's that saying... "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence"? I notice you didn't site any of the sources of your personal research.
Show me hard evidence, you know, like the kind that can be substantiated, with a quantifiable impact on the election results, which are able to stand up to the scrutiny of the courts. I know, such high standards! Meet them and you have my ear, but there is such a huge amount of garbage information out there that unless you do, I don't have time to listen anymore.
Most of my information has come from watching the many hours of state legislature hearings (PA, MI, GA, AZ). I don't have a link readily available but they should be easy enough to find if you look.
There have been a few witnesses in these hearings that have been debunked. For example one lady testified that people were voting in MI without identification. Which is perfectly legal. A bit disconcerting, but legal. Other witnesses have provided wild speculation (e.g. Smartmatic hacking) with indeed no evidence.
The vast majority of the witnesses at these hearings, however, do seem to be legitimate complaints. It seems odd to me, that a reasonable person, after listening to their testimonies, would not at least have some doubts regarding the integrity of the election.
Whether it's the constitutional issues regarding signature matching in PA, or the poll watchers being thrown out in MI, or the many other issues at hand, it seems that at least one of these reasons would be cause for concern. And these aren't small issues - they could potentially affect hundreds of thousands of ballots.
So when people say that there is "no evidence" - I am a little bit shocked, surprised, at how quickly these claims are dismissed. Usually people point to the judges' casual dismissal, as justification for their own casual dismissal. Very rarely have I seen much effort made in actually investigating the claims that have been made. Actual investigation into these issues have been limited at best, and done with the strict intent of "debunking" rather than trying to get to the truth.
( Please be considerate with the downvotes. I am a new user and the negative karma is causing rate limits, effectively censoring me from this discussion. I am trying to have reasonable, constructive discourse. )
> Usually people point to the judges' casual dismissal, as justification for their own casual dismissal
I can't say how usual this is without evidence, but sounds like you might be casually dismissing other peoples' thought processes, including the judges.
I think some of the issues and concerns being raised absolutely should be looked into, and at minimum they should help inform us on how to improve election processes going forward. But the bar for deciding to throw out votes needs to be very high, so I expect the evidence required to reach that level to go far beyond seemingly legitimate witness complaints. Those complaints seem like a great starting point for investigators though, and it's beyond my expertise to evaluate them myself.
Unfortunately we also have an administration coming at these issues in rather dubious ways, which seems to harm their efforts for seeking out the truth. It makes me suspicious they are really only seeking their version of the truth, otherwise why would they be arriving at such strong conclusions _before_ enough evidence has been gathered to determine real, quantifiable effects of specific events? If I have a hypothesis and want to legitimately evaluate it by gathering facts and then I proceed to announce conclusions before the evidence has been gathered and vetted, I would be correctly dismissed as biased and only looking to advance my own agenda, not seeking the truth.
> I have done my own research, and to me, it seems unquestionable that election laws were broken in a variety of significant ways that meaningfully impacted the result of the election.
Oh? Why in your research were highly paid lawyers unable to point to anything convincing? Why in most cases did they not even try once in a venue where lying would have penalties?
It's pretty well documented that poll watchers were denied their lawful right of meaningful observation.
The counter-claim to this is that the poll-watchers were being rude/abusive but this is the claim that does not have evidence.
The lack of meaningful observation in MI/PA alone, contrary to election law, would result in 100's of thousands of ballots being thrown out.
There are many other ways election laws were also broken. This is just the example I use that, to me, is the most straight forward and best documented.
> Why in most cases did they not even try once in a venue where lying would have penalties?
Often times the courts haven't even provided the opportunity to swear in witnesses.
Other times, e.g. Arizona, only a few were deposed unfortunately. Probably for time reasons? It took weeks to document the affidavits. I would have preferred that Binnall had chosen other witnesses/affidavits to swear in, but there certainly wasn't time to do them all.
> The lack of meaningful observation in MI/PA alone, contrary to election law, would result in 100's of thousands of ballots being thrown out.
That's just not how it works. Even _granting_ the premise, it's not "You couldn't see well enough? Well let's disenfrancise a few hundred thousand people." That's not a reasonable remedy by any stretch of either common sense or law.
Then going back to the premises, isn't this in PA the one where they could see, they just weren't as close as they wanted to be, and they were exactly as close as the observers from the other campaign?
> Other times, e.g. Arizona, only a few were deposed unfortunately. Probably for time reasons? It took weeks to document the affidavits. I would have preferred that Binnall had chosen other witnesses/affidavits to swear in, but there certainly wasn't time to do them all.
Time reasons sounds reasonable to you? They have raised multiple _hundreds_ of millions of dollars, and the candidate has his own funds. They can't get more lawyers and assistants to help? This has been going for weeks.
You don't think it's more likely that the witnesses and affidavits they're using are subpar because that's the best they have?
In Michigan, based on testimony/affidavits:
1) The poll workers were almost exclusively Democrats.
2) It was only Republican poll watchers who were being thrown out
3) Republican poll watchers were not replaced after they were thrown out
4) By the end of the night there were only a handful of Republican watchers
5) The Democrat poll watchers would harass the Republican poll watchers until they are thrown out
6) The reasons provided to throw out Republicans were applied unevenly (Only applied to Republicans)
Again, this is based on the dozens of testimony/affidavits I've heard & read. If there is evidence to the contrary for the above claims, I haven't seen it.
> That's just not how it works. Even _granting_ the premise, it's not "You couldn't see well enough? Well let's disenfrancise a few hundred thousand people." That's not a reasonable remedy by any stretch of either common sense or law.
How should it work? It's not a fair system either to kick out all of the observers, and then claim that "no fraud happened" after kicking out everyone who was there to detect fraud.
The election laws exist for a reason and these laws were basically outright ignored.
Keep in mind, that even with the limited observation, there is testimony that points to specific cases of fraud. For example, during the duplication process, when both Biden and Trump are filled in, the vote (according to testimony) went to Biden. When a challenge was raised, the challenge was ignored. This is one example of many where challenges were raised and ignored.
> You don't think it's more likely that the witnesses and affidavits they're using are subpar because that's the best they have?
I don't know why they chose to select those witnesses to depose, and not the others. Perhaps Binnall personally felt those were his strongest witnesses. Maybe the other witnesses were not available to testify (or did not want to seek out the harassment).
I don't know. Judges are fallible, as are laywers, and people.
I can only tell you what I personally believe based on the evidence/testimony I have heard & read, is that there is compelling evidence and its a legitimate case worth hearing, and should not be dismissed so casually as it has often been by the judges so far.
(Please be considerate with the downvotes. I'm a new user, and I'm trying to be constructive with my posts, yet getting rate-limited due to negative karma.)
>Again, this is based on the dozens of testimony/affidavits I've heard & read.
Cite them, please.
>For example, during the duplication process, when both Biden and Trump are filled in, the vote (according to testimony) went to Biden. When a challenge was raised, the challenge was ignored.
Cite this, please.
>This is one example of many where challenges were raised and ignored.
Cite this, as well, please.
>I can only tell you what I personally believe based on the evidence/testimony I have heard & read, is that there is compelling evidence and its a legitimate case worth hearing, and should not be dismissed so casually as it has often been by the judges so far.
These next two questions are real questions, not snark, I promise.
Honestly, genuinely, do you believe your layman perspective is more valid than someone who has spent their entire life honing their craft (judges)? Do you really believe that?
Edit: Downvote me if you want, but at least have the decency to answer my questions. If you're so concerned about it, then get your information out in front of more people, instead of making baseless claims.
For the specific claim made above (Biden and Trump both filled in, going to Biden), if I recall it was one of the witnesses during the Michigan legislature hearing.
If you do a search for "Exhibit 1" this will take you to the list of affidavits.
> Honestly, genuinely, do you believe your layman perspective is more valid than someone who has spent their entire life honing their craft (judges)?
In matters of law, certainly not. In matters of right and wrong, I consider myself on an equal footing as anybody else.
I've reviewed the reasons the judges have dismissed the cases. The reasons typically boil down to either:
1) Outright dismissal without giving opportunity to provide any evidence,
2) Dismissal on technical grounds (e.g. standing),
3) Dismissal from declaring the affidavits hear-say,
4) Dismissal that grants premise that election laws were not followed but this does not prove fraud
I'm not sure what the legal standards are on what determines an affidavit to be hear-say or not, but they can be submitted to a court as evidence. Thus far, no judge (as far as I'm aware) has allowed them to be provided as evidence.
Regardless of the legal implications of affidavits and the standards they must meet to be provided as evidence in court, I have seen more than enough (dozens if not hundreds) of testimonies that provide the same consistent general picture: election laws were not followed, and in a significant way.
For point #4 above, either the election laws exist for a reason, or they don't. The election laws that prevent fraud were (in my opinion) blatantly ignored, in critical Democrat areas, amounting to hundreds of thousands of votes processed without the required legal oversight.
(For the record, wasn't me who downvoted. Thanks for engaging in constructive discussion. )
Thanks for the links. I have reviewed the first link some weeks back. From what I can tell, the judgement falls under the "casual dismissal" category. Aside from the fact that the judgement is loaded with clearly biased editorializations, it doesn't provide adequate justification for its findings. As an example:
> Challengers are allocated one per respective party or organization to each counting board.5
> The only challenger right specifically listed with respect to absent voter ballots is to observe the
> recording of absentee ballots on voting machines. M.C.L. § 168.733(1)(e)(i) (“A challenger may
> do 1 or more of the following: … Observe the recording of absent voter ballots on voting
> machines.”) This requirement was met at all times.6
"This requirement was met at all times". How was this finding reached? The footnotes referenced (5,6) does not provide any indication to how this was reached. Yet, this finding is in direct contradiction to the affidavits that were provided. On what evidence was this finding based?
Further, the judgement states:
> Even Plaintiffs’ “material” allegations could not possibly support their causes of action. If
> each and every one of the allegations were true (they are not true), at most, they relate to a small
> number of ballots, that could not possibly change the outcome of the election.
This is just factually not true, based on the number of hours of lack of meaningful observation, which would be hundreds of thousands of votes. Again, there is no indication in the judgement how this finding was reached.
THANK YOU however for providing these links. I have not yet looked at the other two and I will review them with the attention they deserve.
prucomaclu: Shame on you for gullibly believing and mendaciously spreading hypocritical, cynical, Anti-American lies, and shame on Texas for trying to overturn Democracy.
Supreme Court dismisses bid led by Texas attorney general to overturn the presidential election results, blocking Trump’s legal path to reverse his loss
The Supreme Court on Friday dismissed a long-shot bid by President Trump and the state of Texas to overturn the results in four states won by Democrat Joe Biden, blocking the president’s legal path to reverse his reelection loss.
The court’s unsigned order was short: “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another state conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed as moot.”
Justices Samuel A. Alito Jr. and Clarence Thomas, as they have in the past, said they did not believe the court had the authority to simply reject Texas’s request. “I would therefore grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.”
Trump, who has appointed three of the court’s nine members, has long viewed the Supreme Court as something of an ace-in-the-hole, and called for the justices to display “courage” and rescue him in post-election litigation.
[...]
The states said Texas’s claims were hypocritical and cynical. Although Texas said in a filing that it “does not ask this court to reelect President Trump,” the suit does not ask the court to discount the votes in any state Trump won where state officials and courts altered voting procedures because of the coronavirus pandemic.
Among those states are Texas itself, where the governor made changes.
> For the specific claim made above (Biden and Trump both filled in, going to Biden), if I recall it was one of the witnesses during the Michigan legislature hearing.
Shame on you, and shame on Texas. You LOST the Civil war, and you FAILED to start another one. Trump and Texans are such Anti-American sore losers. No slaves for you!
Republican congressman rips Texas GOP for suggesting secession and says 'my guy Abraham Lincoln and the Union soldiers already told you no'
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Friday criticized the Texas GOP for floating the idea of secession after the Supreme Court rejected a bid to overturn the results of the presidential election.
In a statement, the Texas GOP chairman suggested that "law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution."
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said the statement should be immediately retracted and the people involved fired. "My guy Abraham Lincoln and the Union soldiers already told you no," he said.
> Texas does not need permission from the federal government to secede
A majority vote within Texas cannot deprive any in the minority of the protection of the US Constitution, or absolve the US federal government of their obligations to that minority.
Such a vote might plausibly be argued to justify a negotiation process which might lead to a separation, including territorial or other accommodation to the minority that wishes to remain affiliated with the US, but absent a more specific preexisting legal/Constitutional framework for succession the right of self-determination does not mean a potentially transitory majority has an automatic right to forcibly separate the territory including an unwilling minority from the institutions of a nation to whom that minority wishes to remain affiliated.
Are you trying to fraudulently overturn the results of the free and fair election that your comments should be downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and violate the guidelines?
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Are you going to keep creating new accounts every time you get so much negative karma you can't post any more, as many times as Trump and the GOP have lost lawsuits trying to overturn the election, until you're at "prucomaclu50"?
>Trump And The GOP Have Now Lost More Than 50 Post-Election Lawsuits
>The Trump campaign and its Republican allies have officially lost or withdrawn more 50 post-election lawsuits, and emerged victorious in only one, according to a tally kept by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, underscoring the extent to which President Donald Trump and the GOP’s efforts to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the courts has overwhelmingly failed to affect the election results.
>The 50-case milestone was reached Tuesday as a state court in Georgia dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit, and the count includes both cases that courts have struck down and that the GOP plaintiffs have chosen to withdraw, such as an Arizona lawsuit that the Trump campaign backed down from because it would not affect enough ballots to change the election outcome.
>The Trump campaign and GOP’s only win struck down an extended deadline the Pennsylvania secretary of state set for voters to cure mail-in ballots that were missing proof of identification, and likely only affected a small number of mail-in ballots.
>Among the Trump campaign’s more notable losses in court thus far are the campaign’s failed lawsuit attempting to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results, which a Trump-appointed appeals court judge said was “light on facts” and “[had] no merit,” and a Nevada court that found the campaign had “no credible or reliable evidence” proving voter fraud.
>Courts have also repeatedly struck down the campaign’s allegations claiming their election observers were not able to properly observe the vote counting process, and while one Pennsylvania court did grant the campaign a win by ordering that poll watchers can move closer to election workers, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned the ruling.
>In addition to the Trump campaign, GOP allies including state lawmakers, Republican Party officials and former Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell have also brought dozens of entirely unsuccessful lawsuits, and a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers was rejected Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
>The legal campaign is expected to continue until the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14—or potentially until January—but a “safe harbor” deadline midnight Tuesday, which ensures certified results submitted by that date can’t be challenged by Congress, will make it harder for outstanding cases to succeed.
Are there any other controversial scenarios that you believe are true, but that require thousands of individuals to secretly plan and execute, and then cover up, and still not have enough evidence to win in court?
Offer ten million dollars to one of the "inside" poll workers and get first hand eye witness testimony. Surely one of them even sneakily video taped the wrongdoing so that they could sell video evidence to the highest bidder. Surely at least one of these thousands has a paper trail of communications used to coordinate the scheme. And considering that polling officials are bipartisan, surely a few thousand would be motivated to testify about the corruption!
It takes thousands to successfully conspire. It only takes one for it to fail.
The Armenian Genocide comes to mind. You also couldn't prove that Uyghurs are being subject to anything out-of-the-ordinary in Chinese courts right now.
I'm not saying that that's what we're dealing with here, but saying that "if bad things were happening everyone would already know" is begging the question, not a convincing argument. Noting that we'd expect odd statistical distributions of votes in the case of fraud is a better one.
Trump has crossed so far over the line and lied so much, that not caring if he wins or loses isn't a reasonable, defensible position any more.
You're pretty lucky to be in such a privileged position that you can be so careless, but there are so many people who are directly affected and attacked by him that aren't privileged to be so lucky and care-free as you claim to be.
What exactly would he have to do in order for you to care? Is separating kids from their parents and putting them in cages while undermining Democracy just fine with you? Or can he get away with anything he wants to in your mind, even worse than that, and you still don't care if he wins or loses? Where do you draw the line?
There's always a "but", isn't there? "I'm not racist, but [racist shit]..." "I don't mean to be rude, but [rude shit]..." "I'm not a Trump supporter, but [parrots Trump's lies]..."
Whatever comes after the "but" always proves whatever came before the "but" was a lie. That's what "but" means.
Again: where do you draw the line? Tell me what he'd have to do in order for you to give a shit? This time, try not using the word "but".
> Other Presidents have started wars. Tortured people. Persecuted whistleblowers. Spied on the American people.
> Generally speaking, Trump continued those things, as would Biden.
Which wars has Trump started? Last I checked, he will be the first president in a long time not to start/enter a war during his presidency. In fact, he's trying to pull troops out of his predecessors wars and instead Congress is seeking a super majority to block him from doing so in the NDAA.
Maybe it just seems this way, but it seems like it's been a very long time since a US President has not started any new wars.
I agree with you - it is a point in his favor that he's at least trying to pull out of these wars.
I think it was 2 years ago, he announced he was pulling out, and the media instantly went into panic mode, calling the actions reckless, attacking his decision.
So I will give credit where credit is due. He's at least trying to pull out of the wars.
Don't be ridiculous. No other president has ever tried to overturn the results of an election like Trump. You're attempting to make a blatantly false equivalency. That's textbook "bothsidesism". If you're "morally opposed to everything this President has done", then why do you "not care if Trump wins or loses"?
You've also offered absolutely no proof of your unfounded claims that "it seems unquestionable that election laws were broken in a variety of significant ways that meaningfully impacted the result of the election".
That's total bullshit. No it certainly isn't "unquestionable", and you have no proof of that whatsoever, and neither does Trump, which is why his absurd court cases are all being thrown out with such prejudice.
If you have some "unquestionable" convincing proof, then why doesn't Giuliani have it too, and share it with the court? Why don't you share it with us here and now? Because you don't. You are simply parroting Trump's and Giuliani's and Putin's propaganda and lies.
>And I generally do my own research.
And yet you somehow coincidentally come up with the exact same conclusions that Trump is lying about, but neither of you has a shred of proof. There's your problem.
>To clarify, I said "to me, it is unquestionable".
All you've proven is that you're "unquestioning", which is why you're parroting disproven lies. But not one shred of proof for your claims about election fraud. The only widespread instances of fraud are the claims you're parroting.
You mean the "widely scorned" Texas election lawsuit? That's bullshit. But you wouldn't know that, being so unquestioning and gullible.
Funny how Texas, which has historically been so concerned about "States Rights" (a euphemistic dog whistle for the right to own slaves), is suddenly so busy sticking their nose into other state's rights.
Trump Asks Supreme Court To Let Him Join Widely Scorned Texas Election Lawsuit
Election experts scoffed this week when Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton announced he would be filing a lawsuit in the Supreme Court against four key states in an attempt to block presidential electors from finalizing Joe Biden's election victory.
But now President Trump and 17 states he carried are joining that effort.
Officials in the states targeted in the suit — Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania — derided it as nothing more than an unfounded publicity stunt.
The lawsuit may be a typically adept Trump move to get attention, but election law experts said he has little chance of getting the Supreme Court to support his move.
As election law expert Richard Hasen put it about the Texas filing, "This is a press release masquerading as a lawsuit. ... What utter garbage. Dangerous garbage, but garbage."
Just how little legal support there is for the lawsuit is evidenced by who signed the briefs asking the high court to intervene. Trump's brief was not signed by acting Solicitor General Jeffrey Wall or any other Justice Department official. Rather, the brief was signed by John Eastman, a conservative law professor at Chapman University. (A Trump campaign statement said the president intervened "in his personal capacity as candidate for re-election.")
The Texas brief was not signed by the state's solicitor general, Kyle Hawkins. Paxton, who signed the Texas brief, remains under indictment over securities fraud and is also facing an FBI investigation on bribery and abuse of office allegations.
All of the briefs filed so far are in the form of a motion seeking permission to sue the states in the Supreme Court. As legal experts have noted, it is unclear what legal standing Trump, Texas or the 17 states supporting their move have for challenging the results of elections in other states.
Moreover, with the Electoral College slated to meet next week, this legal action amounts to little more than an eleventh hour Hail Mary pass. It is more like trying to stop the game clock from ticking when all the players are walking off the field.
Trump and Texas File New Election Lawsuit After Supreme Court Rejection: A Closer Look
Seth takes a closer look at the Supreme Court rejecting a lawsuit seeking to block Pennsylvania from certifying its electoral votes for Joe Biden and the GOP attempting another Hail Mary pass to overturn the election results.
It's up to the charlatans filing the frivolous lawsuits to "PROVE" their claims, which they've spectacularly failed to do, not the rest of the world to disprove them. I've already provided you with links and citations, but you're ignoring them, so I'm not going to waste my time on that again, since you're arguing in bad faith, and have already proven you won't read them anyway.
If you support states rights so much, then why do you support Texas interfering in other states' rights, or does it only go one way?
"States Rights" is actually a racist dog whistle, as we all well know. People like Ronald Reagan who use that term don't actually mean it at face value, but use it as a dog whistle to racists, since they actually support things like the federal war on drugs and don't support things like gay marriage, both of which prove they don't give a damn about "states rights". That's evidence that they're not arguing in good faith, and actually mean it as a racist dog whistle, no matter how much fake moral outrage they inflect their denials of racism with. It's about as convincing as saying "I'm not racist, but ..."
The point of using a dog whistle like "states rights" is so you can deny it by saying things like "I can tell you, that my personal support of states rights, has absolutely nothing to do with racism." The cat is out of the bag, and that's simply not plausible, especially given your other statements:
When you claim to support states rights, that directly contradicts your claim of supporting Texas's frivolous lawsuit that explicitly interferes in other state's rights, so it's pretty obvious you're not being intellectually honest or arguing in good faith.
You're not fooling anyone by unquestioningly supporting a frivolous unconstitutional lawsuit that flagrantly violates states rights, and totally fails to prove its claims, then implausibly claiming you support states rights, but not in a racist way.
Once your precious Texas Hail Mary lawsuit is laughed and kicked out of court, what will you say then? Will you finally admit you're wrong, or will you descend even deeper into conspiracy theories?
>Dog-Whistling Dixie. When Reagan said “states’ rights,’ he was talking about race.
>The current row is about interpreting Reagan’s defense of “states’ rights” and his choice of venue. Was this language, in this place, an endorsement of the white South’s wish to reverse the 20-year-old trend of using federal laws (and troops when necessary) to protect the rights of African-Americans? Or was Reagan’s remark just an expression of his well-known disdain for “big government”—and his choice of Neshoba County an unhappy blunder? In the ambiguity lies the answer.
>"I still believe the answer to any problem lies with the people. I believe in states' rights. I believe in people doing as much as they can for themselves at the community level and at the private level, and I believe we've distorted the balance of our government today by giving powers that were never intended in the Constitution to that federal establishment." -Ronald Reagan
>He went on to promise to "restore to states and local governments the power that properly belongs to them." The use of the phrase was seen by some as a tacit appeal to Southern white voters and a continuation of Richard Nixon's Southern strategy, while others argued it merely reflected his libertarian economic beliefs.
And we all know about the Republican Party's racist Southern Strategy, of course:
>In American politics, the Southern strategy was a Republican Party electoral strategy to increase political support among white voters in the South by appealing to racism against African Americans. As the civil rights movement and dismantling of Jim Crow laws in the 1950s and 1960s visibly deepened existing racial tensions in much of the Southern United States, Republican politicians such as presidential candidate Richard Nixon and Senator Barry Goldwater developed strategies that successfully contributed to the political realignment of many white, conservative voters in the South who had traditionally supported the Democratic Party rather than the Republican Party. It also helped to push the Republican Party much more to the right.
>If you can provide a link with meaningful substance, that counters the specific claims being made in the Texas lawsuit, or any other election lawsuit, I would like to see it.
Well, prucomaclu, aren't you ashamed of yourself for being so gullible, delusional, and Anti-American to think Texas's fraudulent lawsuit actually had a chance? Shame on you, and shame on Texas.
>The Supreme Court has smacked down the much-talked-about Texas lawsuit to overturn the results of the election.
>Days after rejecting a Pennsylvania case, the order from the Supreme Court reads Texas’ motion “is denied for lack of standing” and says “Texas has not demonstrated a judicially cognizable interest in the manner in which another State conducts its elections.” [...]
>Furthermore, the complaint was riddled with falsehoods and unproven conspiracy theories of voter fraud that centered around a bogus statistical analysis that claimed there was only a “1 in 1,000,000,000,000,000” chance of Biden winning the four states. [...]
>“Texas’s effort to get this Court to pick the next President has no basis in law or fact. The Court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated,” Pennsylvania’s brief stated.
Here's the Supreme Court order rejecting Texas' attempt to throw out the results of the presidential election in four other states. The court declines to hear it; the only dispute is a technical one over the manner by which it is killed.
It's over.
The court's decision - that Texas lacks standing to bring this case - means it could not and did not reach the other issues. But these claims have all been rejected for many, many, many other reasons by other state and federal courts. Many.
Justices Alito and Thomas indicated that the court was (in their very consistent view) required to hear the case but that they too "would not grant other relief" - meaning they too wouldn't sign on to Texas' request for an injunction throwing out the election.
After all that, not one of the three Supreme Court justices nominated by President Trump made even a squeak in public to support this breathtaking attempt to invalidate the election he lost.
The State of Texas’s motion for leave to file a bill of
complaint is denied for lack of standing under Article III of
the Constitution. Texas has not demonstrated a judicially
cognizable interest in the manner in which another State
conducts its elections. All other pending motions are dismissed
as moot.
Statement of Justice Alito, with whom Justice Thomas joins:
In my view, we do not have discretion to deny the filing of a
bill of complaint in a case that falls within our original
jurisdiction. See Arizona v. California, 589 U. S. ___
(Feb. 24, 2020) (Thomas, J., dissenting). I would therefore
grant the motion to file the bill of complaint but would not
grant other relief, and I express no view on any other issue.
CERTIORARI GRANTED
20-222 GOLDMAN SACHS GROUP, ET AL. V. AR TEACHER RETIREMENT, ET AL.
>5 big problems with Texas' bid to overturn Biden's win at the Supreme Court
>"This case is hopeless," said SCOTUSblog publisher Tom Goldstein, who argues frequently before the court.
Read it yourself, because I'm not summarizing it for you, since you're not arguing in good faith, just trying to waste people's time.
After you read that, can we both agree on the fact that Trump is a pathetic sore loser, who has absolutely no chance of overturning the election, which Joe Biden won fair and square, and by Trump's own definition and words, won it in a "massive landslide" (except that Biden ALSO won the popular vote, which Trump LOST both times)?
>Biden On Track For What Trump Once Called ‘Massive Landslide’ Electoral College Victory
>Democratic candidate Joe Biden is on track to win the presidency, but if he wins in all the states where he’s currently ahead, the victory won’t even be close by some peoples’ standards: namely, President Donald Trump’s standards.
>Biden leads Trump in Georgia, Pennsylvania and Nevada, which, along with Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona and the rest of the states that have been called for him, would give him exactly 306 electoral votes.
>If that number seems familiar, it’s because Trump won that same number of electoral votes in 2016 after capturing Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan himself, even as he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes.
>In an interview with Fox News host Chris Wallace in Dec. 2016, Trump dismissed a question about Russian interference in the election by boasting “we had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the electoral college, I guess the final number is 306 and [Clinton] is down to a very low number.”
>Two of Trump’s electors ended up defecting in 2016, along with five of Clinton’s, giving him 304 to her 227, which he tweeted was a “MASSIVE (304-227) Electoral College landslide victory!”
>Biden is also on track to win the popular vote by an even larger margin than Clinton did: he currently leads by over 4 million votes, nearly 3 points, according to the New York Times.
That lawsuit you're so excited about is a complete fraud, and you should feel ashamed for falling for such a transparent pack of lies. It's just recycling bogus claims that have ALREADY been disproven in court. But of course you believe it because you want to. Prepare to be sorely disappointed by reality. Texas has again made itself a laughing stock, and an embarrassment to the rest of the country.
>Battleground states file fiery condemnations of election results lawsuit as 106 House GOP back Texas
>Officials in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Georgia have filed ferocious condemnations of the Texas lawsuit in the Supreme Court that seeks to overturn election results in the four key battleground states won by Joe Biden.
>The Pennsylvania filing describes the move by Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and supported by Donald Trump, as using a “cacophony of bogus claims” in support of a “seditious abuse of the judicial process”, resting on “a surreal alternate reality”.
>State Attorney General Josh Shapiro wrote: “Texas seeks to invalidate elections in four states for yielding results with which it disagrees. Its request for this Court to exercise its original jurisdiction and then anoint Texas's preferred candidate for president is legally indefensible and is an affront to principles of constitutional democracy."
>Mr Trump lost the four key states, and the action by Texas is an attempt to invalidate millions of votes, thereby potentially swinging the election to him. The states’ court filings come as 106 Republican lawmakers signed onto the Texas brief in support fo delaying their certification of presidential electors.
>The Pennsylvania filing continues: “Texas's effort to get this court to pick the next president has no basis in law or fact. The court should not abide this seditious abuse of the judicial process, and should send a clear and unmistakable signal that such abuse must never be replicated.”
>In her state’s filing, Michigan Attorney General Dana Nessel described the challenge as “unprecedented” and “without factual foundation or a valid legal basis". She wrote: “The election in Michigan is over. Texas comes as a stranger to this matter and should not be heard here.”
>Wisconsin Attorney General Josh Kaul called the lawsuit an "extraordinary intrusion into Wisconsin's and the other defendant states' elections, a task that the Constitution leaves to each state."
>Attorney general of Georgia Chris Carr concurred and argued that the case does not meet the standard for the court to hear it: “Texas presses a generalised grievance that does not involve the sort of direct state-against-state controversy required for original jurisdiction.”
>He continued: "And in any case, there is another forum in which parties who (unlike Texas) have standing can challenge Georgia's compliance with its own election laws: Georgia's own courts."
> What exactly would he have to do in order for you to care? Is separating kids from their parents and putting them in cages while undermining Democracy just fine with you?
This "kids in cages" practice started under the Obama Administration. The Trump Administration stopped it. [0]
Obama never had a policy of separating kids from their parents, like Trump does, and the cages were only used for 72 hours before releasing them to the Department of Health and Human Services for further placement.
The Associated Press reported in late 2019 that an unprecedented 69,550 migrant children were held in U.S. custody over that year.
So do you support separating kids from their parents, and keeping them in cages for longer than 72 hours? If not, then why are you defending the Trump administration's policies to do just that, by complaining about Obama? Of course I don't approve of Obama putting kids in cages for 72 hours either, but that CERTAINLY does not justify Trump separating them from their parents AND putting many tens of thousands of them in cages during the Coronavirus pandemic for much longer periods of time, then refusing to cooperate with the efforts to reunite them with their parents. Your argument is pure whataboutism and deflection.
Is youtube really the arena to dispute the election claims? The courts are the proper arena for this and Trump and company have had ample opportunity to use those.
They did and were dismissed. Why? Because had no damn evidence for their claims. They are now trying to cancel millions of mail in votes. I’ve never seen anything more coward, tactless and boorish than the people supporting this whole charade. I am completely and unequivocally disgusted by these people who would rather burn everything down than acknowledge loss
Affidavits are not evidence if you never submit them. Rudy Giuliani has been going around having people signing affidavits that he never subits to court as evidence (they would then be subject to perjury laws). I can't believe this tactic is fooling some literate people.
Those Affidavits might not yet be evidence according to the legal definition, but they certainly are according to the common usage definition and the bayesian definition. Which are the relevant definitions in this thread.
This appears to be some sort of "technicality" narrative that's being used to quickly and without effort/discussion dismiss the election fraud claims arising from the witness affidavits. The affidavits exist, representing people that claim to have witnessed certain things.
So in a reasonable society with good discourse, we should be saying "wow, that looks serious, so many people claim they witnessed crimes." followed by "let's all do our best to get these infront of a court/judge, or get the government entities investigating it so they can be resolved/dismissed formally".
Instead, we get information suppression/dismissal on the part of Youtube and news outlets, and internet lawyers dismissing things because "it hasn't gone in front of a court yet". Come on man, let's solve this and either dismiss them fully or get them investigated. Otherwise we're just perpetuating "conspiracy theories" and then turning around and complaining about how half the population believes in conspiracy theories.
There have been dozens of cases submitted to various courts.
Those courts evaluated the evidence presented and dismissed the cases out of hand. What do you think the court does when it dismisses a case? Do you think it just randomly chooses cases to dismiss?
Don't pretend that hasn't happened. Don't conflate what is playing out in the media and what has happened in the court system.
Most of these dismissals have come before evidence is considered. There are dozens of reasons to dismiss cases without considering evidence.
There is a bucket load of evidence that shows election irregularities and failures of election staff to follow laws, but that does not mean there is enough evidence to prove the Trump campaign's allegations in court.
Also, a lot of the cases getting bounced are seeking emergency relief which often requires a higher standard of proof/evidence which is usually hard to come up with before discovery.
Also, even if the allegations are proven, there may not be a legal remedy that a court is willing to offer -- this can be grounds for early dismissal too. If you ask for something the court thinks it cannot offer, case dismissed no matter what the evidence is. Often if legal remedy is unavailable courts will point to the electoral process as the remedy.
So who am I supposed to argue with here? The other guy that said "affidavits aren't evidence because they haven't been submitted to courts", or you that say that "things have been submitted to various courts and dismissed". Which one is it?
Either way, I'm not going to stop arguing for reasonable discourse and getting to the bottom of things.
The "other guy" said this: Affidavits are not evidence until they're presented to a court. [emphasis mine]
There have been so many court cases tossed out (50+ if some accounts are to be believed, but that's just hearsay) , one of two things has to be happening:
1) The affidavits never made their way into court as evidence, likely because the plaintiff lawyers didn't want to put them forward as such, or
2) The affidavits were presented in court as evidence and got discounted because they're too weak as evidence
But the common thread appears to be that these "affidavits" don't stand up to any strong scrutiny, and amount to "random person alleges they saw fraud happen", which then quickly changes to "random person alleges they believe they saw fraud, but couldn't state for sure" when under penalty of perjury.
There are affidavits. They have not be submitted to courts. But this is not because Trump and friends have been prevented from doing so. Instead they have chosen not to submit this material. So cases have been tossed for lack of any factual evidence. These affidavits are reasonably declared "not evidence" because when offered the chance to get a court to look at them the legal team has instead skipped it.
The problem is in this case “reporting about it” literally means “spreading baseless lies”. Since as others have said we’ve now seen in court that the Trump administration and their cronies had shit.
Furthermore, it’s “spreading baseless lies which also fire up people who are threatening to murder civil servants.”
I don’t know if YouTube deciding to censor itself on this is right or not, but, let’s not censor ourselves. If we are going to discuss this let’s discuss the whole truth of the matter.
I happen to agree that false balance is a truly profound problem. And I would go so far as to say it's one of a small handful of ideas I wish could be drilled into the head of every consumer of news. I find it to be one of the most underappreciated and incredibly important ideas of the past few decades.
All of that said, this is one of the last places where I think it is a helpful response. The thrust of Russell's quote is about being informed and thinking critically, which you can value without equating it to false balance.
> [...] present an issue as being more balanced between opposing viewpoints than the evidence supports.
The idea that some evidence X supports viewpoint Y usually requires some underlying moral assumptions. Many times it's those fundamental moral assumptions that are in discussion, not the evidence itself.
For example: if the scientific evidence is "lockdowns stop the spread of the virus", someone may say: "well, this evidence supports my viewpoint that we should be in permanent lock-down until the virus is completely eradicated". But that starts from the assumption that stopping the spread of the virus is always the most important goal and other considerations (economy, education, etc) should be ignored.
Fake facts are an issue, but once we agree on facts, we're only halfway there, then we need to agree on what to do based on those facts.
Agreed. There seems to be this assumption among certain partisans that the only reason people disagree with them is because they’ve been lied to. If everyone just knew the truth, then we would obviously be in unanimous agreement on policy etc. First example that comes to mind is the oft-repeated assertion that working class Republican voters have been duped into “voting against their own interests”.
I’m of the opinion that misinformation, while dangerous, is often incorrectly blamed for problems that are really caused by fundamental disagreements in morals and values.
> Science tells us what situation we are in and what consequences our actions are likely to have, but it does not tell us what to do. Science does not say you shouldn’t pee on high voltage lines, it says urine is an excellent conductor.
This isn't a moral assumption this is just simplistic and stupid. Moral assumptions are pretty close to irrelevant in all practical issues, because they're not the simple little checkboxes people put them into for examples.
But then they wouldn't fit in 2 and half sentences and we might actually have an attempt at a reasonable conversation rather then suspiciously starting from the conclusion one side wanted to start with.
GP's quote implores the reader to do the balancing. When journalists do it (especially poorly) it becomes just another facet of a the publication's/writer's bias.
That's not to say that a good counter argument shouldn't be presented in the article, just that a moral mandate to include both sides often creates that false balance
> When journalists do it (especially poorly) it becomes just another facet of a the publication's/writer's bias.
But that's also why the condemnation of balance is misdirected. Facebook is not a journalist, it's a communications platform. It isn't choosing how to spend its own words in a newspaper with a finite number of pages or a news channel with a finite amount of airtime, it's choosing what other people can say in a medium with effectively unlimited carrying capacity.
It also has a big problem because the platform is simultaneously a medium for the dissemination of information to the public and a medium for the debate of nascent ideas.
Suppose that tomorrow we got a claim of widespread election fraud that could actually be substantiated, given a sufficient amount of crowdsourcing or collaboration between experts in different fields. Now they can't even discuss it because the effort to substantiate it involves putting forth a theory that hasn't been substantiated yet?
Facebook is not a journalist, it's a communications platform.
That's just mincing words. Facebook is very much a communications platform that determines what its users get to see. In that sense, Facebook exercises editorial control over its content, and to its users it makes no difference whether that control is automated or manual. Therefore it doesn't matter whether we classify Facebook as a "journalist", the damage done by Facebook's editorial control is the same.
It isn't. A journalist is choosing what they themselves say out of their own mouths. Anybody attributing everything that third party speakers say via Facebook as the official position of Facebook is false.
Ah, yes... that only works if we are not being actively manipulated.
In ideal world all people would be weighing evidence, try to think logically and appeal to timeless, basic principles.
Unfortunately, the world is not ideal and (what a shocker) half of people have less than 100 IQ.
While it is easy to see through most lies most of the time (the logic just isn't there), the goal is not to fool everybody. It is enough to fool just enough people to sow confusion.
Although my quote rather questions whether there is always something to balance in the first place. If you try to find the middle ground between truth and a blatant, confident lie that was pulled from thin air to sow doubts on that truth, you get a half-lie — or truth casted in doubt, which was exactly what the lie was made for.
Find a fringe case about a dead body voting and you can sow doubts about a whole election. Call out a politician lying once and suddenly it does not matter anymore whether you are lying every day to the casual onlooker.
I am absolutely not sure whether censoring such content is the right answer, but I'm pretty sure providing an open microphone and an uncontrolled echo chamber to narcisstic sociopaths backed by Wall Street interests and foreign bot armies isn't either.
> We're inundated with information every day. We don't have enough time in our lifespan to individually process all of that information. Hence we need a system that naturally filters out the noise and out only input to is to ensure that the system is fair.
The system you are referring to is called our discerning minds, and it is already in place. By removing any piece of an argument you are removing the ability of a discerning mind to make a sound judgement.
And which part of your discerning mind has the superhuman ability to process and fully investigate every bit of information you run across vying for your attention?
There's a reason why advertisements work, and it goes hand-in-hand on why ads are regulated.
> And which part of your discerning mind has the superhuman ability to process and fully investigate every bit of information you run across vying for your attention?
Good question. Of course, there is no individual human mind capable of such a thing, and so why should such a mind be permitted to decide what the masses get to see?
Why do we need courts anyway when we can use our own discerning sense of vigilante justice?
Individually humans are quite helpless. That's why we build systems to are able allow us to cooperate and tackle problems that are bigger than any one of us.
The justice system, government, private enterprises, the media, etc. We should make sure that all of them are doing their job and weeding out the bad actors accordingly. We then give input to these systems to ensure that operate within their remit.
> Why do we need courts anyway when we can use our own discerning sense of vigilante justice?
You're still talking about humans though, right? Does that system not count as part of "our discerning minds"? What is a jury if not a group of discerning minds?
To be clear, I agree that human systems are necessary (the justice system, military, etc), but when it comes to squelching speech I disagree with that approach. When real people have real concerns and those concerns are silenced by an opposing group, that is oppression plain and simple.
Is satire to be suppressed because it makes exagerrated or nonsensical claims? Where do we draw the line, and who gets to decide when satire crosses the line to become incendiary?
What would be the end goal of your proposed system that filters speech that you consider "noise"? To prevent a tyrant from taking power by spreading false information? The truth is that once we live in a society where free speech is suppressed then we are already living under a tyranny.
> Is satire to be suppressed because it makes exagerrated or nonsensical claims? Where do we draw the line, and who gets to decide when satire crosses the line to become incendiary?
Deciding what to publish is itself a system to disseminate information.
Free press and free speech doesn't mean you can force other people to publish your speech. It just means that government is not allowed to suppress it.
>What would be the end goal of your proposed system that filters speech that you consider "noise"? To prevent a tyrant from taking power by spreading false information? The truth is that once we live in a society where free speech is suppressed then we are already living under a tyranny.
Don't use silly slippery slope arguments. The US already has limits on speech that directly cause harm to others.
> Free press and free speech doesn't mean you can force other people to publish your speech. It just means that government is not allowed to suppress it.
That's a fair point. This has been an interesting exchange. I'm still not sure if we've actually been agreeing with eachother without realizing it (due to me misinterpreting your meaning), but I've enjoyed the discussion. It's helpful to talk about this sort of thing if for nothing else than to reaffirm our own positions. I appreciate that you came back to the conversation to continue the engagement over the course of nearly a week, like a long game of chess. Your argument did cause me to reassess my own positions in a few cases, and that alone made the exchange worthwhile.
Allowing governments and corporations to be that filter is incredibly dangerous given how much the interests of those institutions and individuals can diverge from yours.
Though admittedly, it might not be much worse than the current system (the interests of news orgs definitely diverge from yours).
Government has certain duties, but the media should absolutely be held to certain standards by the public. We (as in the public) can't just allow media outlets to spout lies completely contrary to the truth. Free speech is protection from government interference. But the public absolutely should be able to seek redress from bad media, including those that facilitate bad actors.
"False balance" is irrelevant to Russell's point above. He would be the first to explain that the average of two false statements is not necessarily true. The referenced "inference as to what really happened" does not proceed by the method you assume it to do. Indeed, the false-balance problem, where it occurs, is merely another way in which his maxim, "everything in newspapers is more or less untrue" is realized!
What needs to be emphasized, because most people misunderstand it (evidence: all the comments around here): The problematic thing is _false_ balance, that is, making a show of representing both sides while actually doing a crappy job for one side. _Real_ balance is something to strive for. False balance might be equally bad or worse than just representing one side. But a properly balanced article is far preferrable to both. And the right approach to fixing false balance is not to remove one viewpoint, but to add arguments, evidence and (if nothing else is available) trustworthy opinions.
Also, balance doesn't mean that a reader will go away with a feeling of "this issue is 50-50, might as well throw a coin to decide". Balance in this case should mean that the writer has put a similar amount of effort into understanding and representing both sides. And if the writer happens to lean towards one side and naturally know more about it, that means making up for that inherent bias.
I have recently seen two people attacked on Twitter for being balanced and not wanting to take the extreme point of view. I don't think it's healthy to polarize the talk so much.
Not clear to me why false balance is even a thing. It's the job of a paper in its reporting to report things, not to influence opinion. Implicit in "Bothsidesism" is the notion that a paper should have an interest in the direction of influence it provides. That's against the interest of "news" (in the literal sense of the word) and the general proliferation of reported facts. I suppose I'm several decades too late with this take.
Especially as only one side is attacked for not covering "both sides fairly". While the other side is fine for doing the exact opposite. Same goes for stuff like climate change ("Greta took a plane", "Greta has someone writing her speeches", "The guy wote a book, he only wants to sell it"...). That's simply dishonest, and that moderates are even considering taking these arguments into account is simply beyond me.
People say this like they think they're correct. If it turned out they were wrong, you can bet they'd be the first to demand the censure of anything that went against their careful constructed narrative
How about Covid-19 Pfizer or Moderna vaccine? Can we discuss that? Or we have to accept that it is great because it is great?
Is it allowed to cite Pfizer that in the III tests phase it applied vaccine or placebo to 43 000 people out of which 170 developed COVID-19 - 162 in placebo group and 8 among those vaccinated.
On that base vaccine producer claim that they achieved 95% effectiveness. Can we doubt that number because of the small number of people who developed disease? Is that fact somehow proves that Covid is not that infectious as people thought? And so on.
Should we believe Swiss regulator who refused to accept vaccine? Or maybe Swiss regulator did that since some Swiss company is working on the vaccine?
Can we ask if taking vaccine makes someone non-spreader of the virus? Can we ask if it was tested on older people, people who take a lot of other medicines (like many older people do)? Is seems that people with allergies (what?) should not take vaccine. Was this even testes?
There are many pros and cons and doubts, the evidences is one thing, the conclusions might be different.
Same with election case. Was there at least one case when we have a prove that election result was manipulated? I think at least one can be found. Why can't this be discussed?
Remember the Russian election manipulation? I firmly believe any doubt would have been censored because it didn't align with the narrative for which there was zero evidence in the end. Indeed, this was a false balance as it was political propaganda for a party to safe face and explain defeat.
This Wikipedia article is bad and it should be removed as it doesn't do anything to further knowledge and the message of the sources was daringly misinterpreted and would not constitute anything different than the anecdote I mentioned in the first paragraph.
The article is hostile to thought, thoroughness and honesty at the same time, that is only topped by the shallow word creation that is "bothsidesism", which should constitute assault if written down in earnest.
That wasn't my understanding and that's the reason I'm poking at this a bit. To see if I was mistaken and to what extent. The other replies seem to be confirming my feeling that "nothing" is at the very least an overstatement.
There is 5 volumes (!) worth of evidence, collected by the (bipartisan) Senate Intelligence Committee, showing that Russia did actively influence the 2016 election. What hasn’t been proven is collusion between Trump and Russia.
Of any real collaboration between Trump and the Russians? Yep.
(I means it's not technically zero evidence as there's evidence of most things, including flat eartherism, it's just tiny compared to the counterevidence or even the complexity penalty)
He wrote that nearly 100 years ago. With an additional century's experience, I think it's clearer that teaching media literacy just isn't enough.
One reason is the bullshit asymmetry principal: "The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it." Another is that liars get a lot more practice in selling their lie than people do in analyzing and refuting a particular lie. A third is that people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive; if I blow $10 on a stupid purchase due to lying ads, I'm out $10, but the liar is making a living. And that's before we even get to the asymmetry in mass communication, where a liar can reach millions. Or the modern micro-targeting era, where lies can be tuned to the audience and hidden from debunkers. Or the way the whole idea of truth can be weakened by authoritarian behavior and mass disinformation.
So we really can't expect individuals to keep up on their own. As much as I love cynical skepticism, it's not enough these days.
How would we know? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning."
Very little of that is taught because the educational institutions who would be responsible for teaching it have curriculums that cannot withstand it.
Hand-waving to students that "u shuld do critical thinking" is not sufficient to actually teach critical thinking.
Also our educational institutions totally ignore the distribution of intelligence in the population. The curriculum is dumbed down to the lowest common denominator which does an incredible disservice to high (or even average) intelligence individuals.
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.
This is true, to an extent. But, that's what journalism is supposed to solve. Instead of spending 1000 hours researching some issue as an individual, have 100 journalists spend 10 hours researching it and collaborate on the reporting. Sadly, we have very little actual journalism anymore, which I'll explain next..
> people who live on their lies usually have a much stronger incentive
This, I totally agree with.
Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative. If not through advertising, but by buying the media companies directly. Further, if you give a "journalist" a choice between working for 10 hours to tell the truth or working for 1 hour to tell a lie, getting paid the same amount either way, the outcome is obvious.
Moreover, declining educational standards, and especially lack of critical thinking skills, has led to a deadening of the public palette. The market is not incentivizing actual journalism because objectivity is hard, opposes too many special interests, and the public (at large) doesn't have a taste for it.
The only takeaway from this ought to be obvious. We can't rely on the institutions and corporations who created this problem to solve it. Clearly they're leading us to "thought police" and censorship. I think, however, the lights should be turned on and the public at large should get a crash course in critical thinking.
Critical reading of sources is part of the German high school curriculum, introduced around 8th grade; it is kept up until the end, and most people seem to come out none the wiser.
I think we regularly overestimate the role rational thought plays in people's decisions and opinions. It's not nearly enough to make rational appeals or offer factual evidence to convince people of anything.
Recall that around 20% only reach a Hauptschulabschluss (or the equivalent in their state), where critical reading takes a back seat to just reading. A few percent don't finish secondary education at all.
Here[1] for example are the learning goals for Berlin. Assessing the quality of an informational text and weighing the arguments is skill level G and H (page 27). This is explicitly not a goal for these students.
Critical reading in the german curriculum is far from unbiased in the selection of topics: Should we have the death penalty? Of course not, arguing otherwise will get you a bad grade. What about the yellow-press? Universally bad of course, Katharina Blum is required reading. Religion? All are nice and equally fine, criticizing religion is a nono and "fear of god" is an aim of all education mandated by the constitution. So please read Nathan der Weise critically and regurgitate what the official comment says. Do we need a military? Of course not, why would you want to invade Poland again? Workers rights? Good and well, but compromise is necessary for the good of the economy and society. Except in the case of teachers, as state officials they always get a bad deal supposedly...
I've come to see "critical reading" to be just a furtherance of the teachers' and the states' biases and aims by means of a more sophisticated cloak. You are supposed to be able to fake a little critical thinking, but arrive at the predetermined conclusions. Don't rock the boat, stay inside the lines, but do this little hand-wringing ritual so you don't seem like an unsophisticated sheep.
It would seem that you had a) not the best teachers and b) didn't get it. I had a very left-leaning liberal history and civics teacher, he never argued against the existence of a German military. I was in school when crosses were tossed out of classrooms, that was never a real question, besides a couple of catholic religion teachers.
And why wouldn't all religions be treated equal in a country that guarantees religious freedom? Quite an important lesson to learn, if you ask me. Death penalty? Abolished in Germany, so I don't get your point of arguing for it. That being said, you can. If the arguements are good, it shouldn't impact your grades. If it does, well, grades in German (literature) are highly subjective as well. And try arguing against Catholic dgma in Catholc religion class. Religion calsses are, by the way, mandatory in all (most?) German states, and the church has huge sa in who teaches it.
I'm not sure if I didn't get it or I got it all too well... If you want to educate pupils to be critical, then of course they need to be critical not only in a curriculum-intended classroom setting. They need to be critical in all parts of life, or you've failed in what you wanted to teach them. This also means arguing against catholic dogma in catholic religion class. Every point of view needs to be defended, even the point of view that the teacher and curriculum promotes. Arguing otherwise means that you teach pupils to only be critical on a few select subjects that are politically acceptable to be critical about, like the usual tropes of "human rights in china" or "death penalty in the US". Then you are just teaching the faking of critical thinking and reading, not the actual thing.
Bavaria re-introduced crosses in classrooms several years ago, with very shady arguments.
> "And why wouldn't all religions be treated equal in a country that guarantees religious freedom?" and "Religion calsses are, by the way, mandatory in all (most?) German states, and the church has huge sa in who teaches it."
The notion of religious freedom that you promote and that schools promote explicitly excludes freedom from religion, i.e. Atheism or Agnosticism. Just like forced religious education (couldn't pick ethics as an alternative for lack of teachers, and as soon as ethics was available, noticed that the religion curriculum is literally "dancing and singing" while ethics is hardcore philosophy to keep pupils away from the subject and from any kind of acceptable grades).
Oh, and that the death penalty was abolished is beside the point. If you pick "death penalty" as a subject of discussion, then of course it must be an equally valid outcome of the discussion to be pro death penalty, if the arguments provided weigh more heavily. Changing policy isn't the intent here. Learning to discuss such matters critically is. Which doesn't work if the outcome is predetermined and you will be punished with bad marks for arriving at the "wrong" conclusion.
Ethics is a very common alternative, even bavarian countryside schools (source: a friend of ours is teaching English and religion at such a school), upt to the point where they have to mix classes for catholic religion. And ethics is covering much more than just religion (source: bith my childern are in ethics class).
Regarding your last argument, following that logic would include argueing genocide as a solution as well. Which you obviously cannot. There is no way why China's human righs abuses should be tolerated or supported. Tolerated to the degree geopolitical realities dictate, sure. Learning why realities are what they are and why China is doing what they do, of course. Finding arguments supporting their actions for the sake of the argument and "critical thinking" excersise, no way. Same goes for the death penalty.
Well, but in that case the curriculum is even more screwed up because they picked exercise topics (and death penalty is the classic) that according to your arguments are totally unsuitable. You are arguing to limit critical thinking to the cute "bunnies or butterflies" topics. I would argue that critical thinking is necessary, especially in topics that "hurt". One may leave genocide or cannibalism to the advanced classes, but if a topic isn't the least bit controversial, I would say it is impossible to learn critical thinking.
Lots of people historically considered genocide a solution (and lots still do). So it is very very far from "obvious". If you dismiss such arguments out of hand instead of showing why the strongest versions of them are flawed you will never convince anybody who is not on your side already.
It is. This is one of the major outcomes of a strong history curriculum. Interpreting sources and narratives. Every single major university offers a four year degree that is basically nothing but this sort of thing. And engineers consistently yell and scream that it isn't real education.
That's a fair point, however we don't reach university until after 12 years of compulsory state-run education in the U.S.
By that time, many developmental windows have been missed, a persons personality is already solidified.
University is too late for these fundamentals, which IMHO ought to be taught in primary school. I think we horribly underestimate the ability of children to do this. Which I attribute to the assembly-line education that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
> University is too late for these fundamentals, which IMHO ought to be taught in primary school.
There are so many fundamentals that are skipped throughout compulsory education. Stuff like basic taxes and home economics and labour law, which is the kind of stuff we all have to endure throughout our lives.
School is not designed from the point of view of the citizen. It's designed from the point of view of the elites running the nation.
It shouldn’t take 4 years to learn those skills though. Just the fundamentals of identifying what the biases of the authors and institutions are is something that should be taught for a year in high school.
It’s not complex and doesn’t require 4 years of classes, but it does require practice and it’s better to start early before you develop a bunch of political views and ideological blind spots.
> It shouldn’t take 4 years to learn those skills though.
No skill is binary. You can learn some of this in a single class. You get more practice if you take two dozen classes. You get even more practice if it is your profession.
Quality humanities education teaches empathy and the ability to analyze and judge sources created by humans, especially written text. That can absolutely happen at an earlier age. I'm certainly on board with increasing the amount of history education offered to high schoolers, though I suspect that many people are not.
I would posit that 4 years is way too long and much of that 4 years is too much inward facing bullshit based on a huge pile of flawed science (social psychology).
My friends that went down the 4 year history/literature path appear to be just as susceptible to spreading biased bullshit full of logical fallacies on social media as anyone else.
> How would we know [media literacy isn’t enough]? It's not really taught. As you pointed out later, it's not just "media literacy," it's "thinking for yourself," "critical thinking," "skepticism," "reasoning."
While I also think it is true that we do a terrible job in general of educating people to think critically, it is not simply a failure of education—or at least, not in the traditional sense of “if you just force knowledge into someone, they will understand it”. I feel like there is real merit to the idea that media literacy may not be enough to save us from the firehose of the internet. Human brains are reckless and love to engage in motivated reasoning, filtering, and other cognitive distortions to protect us from information that threatens our core values.
I’ve known engineers with impeccable critical thinking and reasoning skills—but only when they were programming. On other matters, where any sort of emotional or value judgment was involved, they would uncritically accept false information which meshed with their belief of how the world is. For example, someone once told me that they didn’t think that vaccination actually caused the decline in measles rates because the MMR vaccine wasn’t developed until after infections started going down. OK, great, valid reasoning, except their next thought should’ve been that maybe there was a different measles vaccine that came first (because there was). They didn’t go there, though, because they have a deeply held belief that vaccines are bad/scary, and their brain conveniently suppressed the critical thinking process that might’ve lead them to need to reevaluate their position.
You might argue that this person doesn’t have “true” critical thinking skills, and maybe that’s true, but I also know that I tell myself stories and avoid seeking out contradictory evidence in order to protect some of my most deeply held beliefs—even though truth and honesty are what I value above all else. Some cows are just too sacred.
> Journalism has failed because it was bought out by corporate interests who have a vested interest in a particular narrative.
I feel like this is a reductive answer to a very complex problem. I think you’re spot on that the market is not incentivising high quality reporting, but there are many factors at play beyond “journalists got bought out” and “educational standards are bad”. There are so many diverse interests who don’t want people to think critically, including a lot of ordinary people! It’s hard to think critically all of the time. The world is unfathomably complex. You and I may be hanging on, just barely, thanks to genetic and/or socioeconomic lotteries giving us slightly better hands in life. Most people don’t have those advantages and are highly motivated to pound reality into an uncomplicated place where there are only two distinct genders, or all cops are bastards, or it’s all the mainstream media’s fault, or we can save the planet from global warming by just planting a trillion trees, or whatever. There’s no one single source of this quagmire, and no One Simple Trick that will solve it.
I appreciate your well reasoned response and I totally agree with almost all of it.
> media literacy may not be enough
I would grant that there is an intelligence distribution in the population and the capacity to acquire critical thinking skills is clamped by something that is largely genetic (and somewhat random), not to mention education or experience. Further, people who are on the lower end of the intelligence spectrum need some way of reasoning about the world even without that capacity. They then must rely on more intelligent people to analyze and synthesize a cohesive perspective that will work for them and their level of interpretation. In other words, I agree that objectively it's not enough for everyone. But still, we certainly ought to educate as many people as possible and certainly the capacity of society to manage a consistent cohesive perspective for those people would increase as well.
> Human brains are reckless
This and your following point about engineers compartmentalizing their thinking ability is hard to refute. However I would say two things on the matter.
1. It's a matter of degrees and having a system which optimizes human development (e.g. parenting, family) to leverage as many developmental windows as possible (on an individual basis) would minimize reckless thinking.
2. At scale, a functioning and diverse media with a healthy amount of honest journalism also minimizes the likelihood that reckless thinking would persist for very long.
> this is a reductive answer
True. It's difficult to know what level of interpretation is appropriate in any context. I agree that there are complex issues and forces in play, however I would argue that after a certain point it is necessary to trim the fat and synthesize a cohesive, if not simplistic, perspective. Western civilization is known for it's ability to do that and maintain much of the original value of a thought. I'm not an oncologist, but there is a vested public interest for oncologists to "spread awareness" and educate people about cancer. We typically don't challenge the oncologist when they make an analogy, don't describe cancer with exactly the correct technical terminology, or unpack every individual aspect of cancer in their explanation.
Your point about ordinary people having an incentive to minimize critical thinking is very true and insightful. None of this occurs in a vacuum, and to some extent there is a degree of personal responsibility to be sure. Personally I am less inclined to lay this problem at the feet of an individual, who in my estimation, was sabotaged for generations by corrupted media and educational institutions. However, I will definitely acknowledge the pendulum of moral responsibility swings in both directions.
> There’s no one single source of this quagmire, and no One Simple Trick that will solve it.
This is true in analysis but not in synthesis.
Abuse and predation, in particular against children (primarily perpetrated by parents) is the single biggest and impactful source of this quagmire. The One Simple Trick: peaceful parenting.
> uncomplicated place where there are only two distinct genders, or all cops are bastards, or it’s all the mainstream media’s fault, or we can save the planet from global warming by just planting a trillion trees, or whatever
Or where everyone is created equal and there are no important differences between races and sexes. Where their political opponents are all evil and stupid. Where different government systems (representative democracy? Monarchy? Whatever the CCP is?) are obviously horrible. Where weird new ideas are destined to fail or have already been tried and found to fail (like reusable rockets, Musk was far from the first person to think it might be a good idea).
> Or the way the whole idea of truth can be weakened by authoritarian behavior and mass disinformation.
So... YouTube. YouTube is the arbiter of truth we should accept?
Does that sound any less creepy to you? That a handful of people whose management is headquartered in a few zip codes in San Francisco can determine what people are allowed to talk about?
No, the courts are the arbiter of truth we should accept. And since many of these videos are alleging things that multiple court cases (including the US Supreme Court) have already thoroughly debunked, Youtube should not be getting flak for removing the content.
I don't think YouTube has to be the arbiter of truth. Or of what people are allowed to talk about. But I think they definitely should be the arbiter of what they're comfortable supporting on their platform. As you're proving right now, they are far from the only platform.
I think it's a reasonable choice for a platform to label, deamplify, or even ban content that is both clearly false and clearly dangerous. Do you think that tweet is both false and dangerous?
E.g., look at medical licensing. One could oppose it, on the grounds that people should be able to make up their own minds as to whether somebody is competent to perform surgery on them. Saying that a person can't call themselves a medical doctor is just denying them freedom of speech! Who is the government to come between private parties! Etc, etc.
But in practice that would lead to incredible harm for little gain. I think individual freedom is an important value, but not the only one, and that real-world concerns require balancing values.
Here is my heavily biased take. People need to teach analytic philosophy, scientific methodology, logical empiricism, social-psychological dynamics, journalism, jurisprudence, and perhaps a version of initiative (e.g. initiative to try doing journalistic investigation or playing an impartial judge) in middle schools for every student.
I'm not sure if it is too much to ask from folks, but progress doesn't come easy anyway.
Many orthodox people speak as though it were the business of sceptics to disprove received dogmas rather than of dogmatists to prove them. This is, of course, a mistake. If I were to suggest that between the Earth and Mars there is a china teapot revolving about the sun in an elliptical orbit, nobody would be able to disprove my assertion provided I were careful to add that the teapot is too small to be revealed even by our most powerful telescopes. But if I were to go on to say that, since my assertion cannot be disproved, it is intolerable presumption on the part of human reason to doubt it, I should rightly be thought to be talking nonsense. If, however, the existence of such a teapot were affirmed in ancient books, taught as the sacred truth every Sunday, and instilled into the minds of children at school, hesitation to believe in its existence would become a mark of eccentricity and entitle the doubter to the attentions of the psychiatrist in an enlightened age or of the Inquisitor in an earlier time.
--Bertrand Russell
It's an important skill to independently discern the likely from the unlikely on your own, but any idea repeated often enough becomes "truth", and it's an important function of society to recognize fake truths and purge them.
I don't try to change people irl. If they don't understand in a couple of tries, it's better to ignore them and let them go their merry way. It's not my job to educate tons of willfully ignorant people. Something something, don't fight with a pig, it will drag you down to its own level and win with experience.
> What gave you the idea that there is an end-game? The social dialogue is never ending.
Then this is a denial-of-service attack. Bad-faith actors can hijack the public conversation forever by simply refusing the budge. The public conversation then becomes a free and indefinite platform for them to spread propaganda, and any attempt to change that is portrayed as a great evil.
That sounds nice in practice, but in our post-truth, post-evidence world I am not sure what else we can do. It's impossible to dissuade some of these people and many people viewing YouTube are vulnerable to falling for their bullshit.
Why not? Why does no longer publishing flat earth videos not kill the idea for the most part?
How do you think these critical masses around _specific ideas_ are formed? Qanon isn't a whisper campaign.
A thought experiment: we burn all books about Area 51 alien stuff. The whole myth would probably die along with our generation. There's no more stuff reinforcing it, no large traces. No more grainy photos.
That original quote might work for a general ideology but I don't think it works nearly as well when applied to specific narratives.
(Of course this works in all directions, see the obliteration of socialist movements in the 50s and 60s)
'It's an important skill to independently discern the likely from the unlikely on your own, but any idea repeated often enough becomes "truth", and it's an important function of society to recognize fake truths and purge them.'
Prove that an important function of society is fake truth purging. And define truth. How big are the fake truths, how much damage do they cause, and how expensive is it to disprove them? If a young child claims that the temperature of a hydrogen atom 52 light years away is 0.1K, but in reality it is 0.01K, shall we:
A. censor the child to stop the spread of misinformation
B. print 8 billion flyers to correct anyone who may have overheard the child
C. put teams of MIT scientists to run experiments to determine the most recent temperature of the atom
D. ignore it
E. claim it's 0K according to god's will
In a more practical example, most people are probably split between C, D and E. The C people might land on the moon sooner, the E people might be more fulfilled. D is watching their son's soccer game. Who is "right"?
Acquiring the true "truth" has a cost, and that cost may be too high, and until we have a proper document from god detailing the worth of each person, we can't know who should live and who should die. If we don't produce enough food, somebody will starve. Who should starve? Perhaps the person with the highest metabolism, to spare as much food as possible. Perhaps the dumbest, to ensure future generations aren't crippled and the problem gets solved quicker. Perhaps the meanest, to spare future conflict. Or perhaps future conflict is good, to weed out the weak. "Truth" might mean maximizing human potential, which could imply minimizing human "drag". Spray peanut dust in stadiums! Shoot people who wear glasses! Gene edit everyone to be 9 feet tall! Kill everyone and create and feed a world-spanning singular ultra-brain (skynet?), for _IT_ shall determine "truth".
The word "truth" almost has a political bias to it, belonging to the party of science-people. I say that with a straight face as someone familiar and trusting of mathematics. It's great that we can build F-22s and nukes with it, but, maybe we were better off worshipping Zeus. Actually, people are a relatively new thing, and the main spreaders of "lies". Perhaps the universe was "truer" before people came around. Perhaps birthing a child is to "lie".
And what is the endgame? What happens after our perfect system of rationalism solves every known fact and theoretical possibility in the entire universe? Did we win? Is our final score 42?
In my 'education', I can't think of a single element of the historical record that was presented through conflicting accounts of contemporary sources. One side is simply labeled as evil and ignored, but, as far as I know, nobody has ever agreed with this characterization of themselves. Evidence too, if at all, was always used to support a narrative account of events, rather than to eliminate possibilities until a particular version of history is proven.
You could never teach a class like this. It would unleash epistemological chaos throughout the school.
My public U.S. high school history classes all included conflicting accounts from contemporary sources. Additionally we were several times asked to write position papers from an arbitrarily assigned side, regardless of our own opinions or those of the teacher, using those contemporary sources as a model for the arguments.
I would assume that that level of discourse in a history class is not the most common, but the opposing viewpoints were expressed directly in the textbooks as a standard appendix to each chapter, which were adopted district wide and probably statewide in Texas. This was not a special curriculum that our teachers designed, although they probably expanded on the concept more than most, given that it was a magnet high school.
I wish I had a history class like that in high school. I took AP American History and there was a lot of attempt to discuss alternative viewpoints that was constantly shut down as "not being on the test."
Similar story from my high school history education. We had a good focus on historography and understanding the nature of different types of sources.
I feel as though things like this are not valued as they could be in our wider education system, or at least in what society values in the education system.
I believe you are talking mostly about conflicting rhetoric. I’m talking mostly about conflicting accounts of fact. In every level of education, even after the facts changed over time, there was always a canon. This is because history is taught by induction of stories versus deduction of fact. The former is indistinguishable from well-crafted propaganda. The latter is what makes a great defense attorney. But if you look at what history class is all about, it’s the story, which is considered true if it can’t be disproved. We should know that this is logically backward. The burden of proof beyond all plausible alternatives should fall on the storyteller, and in many cases the evidence is sparse enough to support many. And if there are alternative possibilities, the record of our own deceit tells us that we should be less righteous with opinions and more comfortable with uncertainty. For instance, there are entire generations of population labeled as patently stupid or evil for their beliefs and actions, which should induce a stack overflow recursion upon self-reflection.
My history education was mostly one-sided like this in primary school, but not in secondary & post-secondary school. Perhaps the difference is that I wasn't studying in the US, but I don't remember any grave epistemological chaos.
History is full of things that can't be proven. We'll never be able to know for sure if the (battleship) Maine was destroyed by Spanish sabotage or if it was simply a tragic accident. Or take for example, the question "Did Germany start WWI". It sounds like a yes or no question, but the reality is far more complicated. Failure to understand this complication causes real problems (in this case WWII).
edit: removed American sabotage theory regarding the Maine, as it is rather unlikely.
Assuming the truth of this, that's exactly the problem. This stuff is something every single person needs to be taught, not just the 1% choosing a history major of the 36% of the people who go to college.
I feel what you’re saying is an exaggeration. In highschool history class we definitely had conflicting viewpoints on the causes and blame for WW1, varying perspectives on the use of gas in warfare, the arguments about the ethics of bombing civilian targets in WW2, and the debates about the necessity and ethics of the conflicts between “western” and communist powers during the Cold War. This hardly unleashed “chaos” - it was an above average but otherwise normal Canadian highschool history class.
We do see students, even at the college level, claiming that the high quality academic writing they are assigned in curricula is "liberal indoctrination". This method does not function because even the most well researched academic study of these topics can be simply rejected out of hand by students who have been fed lies about the very structure of education.
That’s because, outside certain fields where research can be verified objectively, it very often is a liberal take on whatever is being researched. A vanishingly small number of academics have conservative, or even moderate views. In fields where you can’t objectively analyze the arguments that are being made, liberal assumptions and viewpoints get baked into the research. Even when there is a numeric component, the numbers are viewed from the perspective of liberal assumptions about causation and significance.
I got into an argument the other day with a political science professor about colonization. It was completely unrecognizable to me as someone who is from a former British colony and whose father spent a lifetime working on bread and butter issues affecting the developing world, such as maternal health. (I explained the academic concept of “decolonization” to my father. He thought it was the political process of devolving governance from colonial powers to native governments. I said, no, what they mean by that now is removing colonial influences and culture from the country. My dad’s response was “why the hell would you want to do that?”)
> That’s because, outside certain fields where research can be verified objectively, it very often is a liberal take on whatever is being researched.
I don't really agree with this, but even if it were true the responses are completely disproportionate. My wife is a historian. Every semester or so she gets a student who outright refuses to do the readings because it is all sjw bullshit and insists on spending class time arguing that slavery was actually super good for africa. And then she needs to deal with this student with kid gloves or they will run to FIRE or whatever. A colleague of hers this semester had a student complain because "the course description didn't say that it would cover women" after a single lecture on subaltern groups.
The answer, which is surely obvious to a person of your intellect, is that people wish to disentangle themselves from the institutions which gave rise to colonialism in the first place and have perpetuated it in indirect fashion, eg by the reification of private property and the legal infrastructure surrounding its disposition.
That sounds bananas to me, and I've literally never met a Bangladeshi (at least one whose ever lived in Bangladesh) express a view like that. The institutions and laws we inherited from the British are one of the few functioning parts of Bangladesh. When my parents were growing up, school instruction was still in English. That's proven to be a huge leg up in the global economy. And culturally, my mom still cherishes the education she received in classic American, British, and Russian literature.
What would you be left with if you "disentangled" Bangladesh from the "institutions" and "legal infrastructure" of British colonialism? What's left wouldn't be a society fit for modern people. And what's so good about what was there before the British, anyway? The Mughals were colonizers too. I have a Muslim last name despite being born thousands of miles away from the Middle East. How far back do we have to go?
> Decolonization, as we call it, is rather a modern phenomenon that has been bubbling up since the late twentieth century. There are calls for decolonizing everything, art history included.
> In the postcolonial condition, the main challenge was to break this cycle or to create a process to rectify these influences. Indeed, such influences either denounced or distorted the precolonial ideas and elements of the society and culture. To many, this is what decolonization is, looking back to precolonial ideas.
> But, where to start? To reshape the curriculum of art education, the first thing needed is literature for the students. The problem is that formal art education was institutionalized here during the British period.
As a citizen of Tunisia, a former French colony, I’m going to have to wholeheartedly disagree with you on this :)
Firstly, your experience does not automatically discount the experiences of countless people from the many European colonial projects. Statistically speaking, the fact that you’ve never met a Bangladeshi who disagrees with you tells me more about the company you keep than what Bangladeshis think about colonialism in general.
Secondly, disconnecting from colonialism is a logical continuation of independence, and a form of building a country’s identity. Yes, colonial powers did some good things, but everything they did was ultimately for the benefit of them and the citizens they forced on us. I assure you: had it not made economic sense, they would have burnt everything down when they left. If you do some basic research, you’ll find that many African colonies got the bare minimum of development required to extract resources, simply because the colonizers did not intend their citizens to relocate long term.
Finally, eschewing the colonial past does not mean that you need to throw everything out. Rather, you take control over the narrative: (1) take what benefits you, (2) be proud of your heritage, especially that which your colonizer tried to suppress, (3) throw out the nonsense, and most importantly, (4) explicitly condemn the atrocities and injustices perpetrated by your occupiers. Forgetting and forgiving is not how you build an independent nation; seeking truth and justice is.
And before that it was controlled by the Ottomans, Muslims, Byzantine Romans, Vandals, Romans, Phoenicians and Berbers. (I may have left some groups out).
Many of these invaders had themselves been previously colonised from elsewhere.
It often seems to me that it’s only the last one or two groups that are demonised, and the atrocities perpetrated by previous generations of colonists are forgotten by those who would construct a new national myth.
Well, that’s not really surprising, is it? The more recent the colonizer, the larger the impact felt by the average citizen.
Besides, I think invaders only got more “organized” as time progressed. Brutality and domination are shared across time periods, but the more subtle techniques, such as cultural genocide and historical revisionism, only became effective tools in the invader’s toolbelt relatively recently.
More crucially, thanks to various technological advancements, modern European colonizers were able to steal resources at a scale never before seen in the history of this planet.
As a citizen of Morocco, another former French colony, this is pretty absurd. Under the Ottomans, the Caliphates, Rome, and under Berber rule (which is pretty much 99% of people), the Average Tunisian was was more or less equal to anyone else. The land was integrated, and so on
You seem to be missing the distinction between invasion, colonisation, and imperialism. Out of all of those you listed, only one group colonized (read: Settled) Tunisia, which are the Berbers. The others simply invaded. Which, under the feudal system, was not that big of a deal for the average person, and Tunisia was kept to a pretty high degree of development, with an economy focused on trade and production.
This is completely different to Imperial economies based around resource extractions, where you are treated as inherently lesser to the citizen from the Métropole, where people are kept poor on purpose, and where industrial scale massacres were often commited, nowhere even near the scale of anything that came before.
Romans extracted tons of resources and used plenty of people as slaves. Arabs annihilated any culture that was there before and replaced it with islam and a lot of people died in ottoman invasions. What exactly did the French do to your country that was objectively so much worse than what any other invader before them did?
Rome did, but that was par for the course at the time, and Maghrebians were allowed to become full citizens to the point where many became Roman emperors.
The Ottoman invasions didn't actually do that much damage to the Maghreb. It's a place very far away from them. Ottoman conquests of the Maghreb had around 40 000 casualties, many of them not of Algerians but of Ottomans and French/Spanish soldiers.
As for the Caliphate, they certainly did not annihilate any culture before them, and it's incredible to equate culture with Religion. The dominant religions there at the time of their invasion were Christianism and Judaism, which were preserved for a long time and are barely different from Islam, and religion is a tiny aspect of Culture. Their impact on the common person is so small that during Islamic rule the vast majority of people didn't even speak Arabic.
What the French did that was objectively much worse was to create a system where the citizens of the Maghreb were to remain an inferior second class only useful insofar as resources can be stolen forever.
As for colonialism in general, which I should remind you is the point, it caused more deaths than WW2.
You have hand waved away 2 thousand years of conquests of Maghreb as minor infractions. I'm mean it went from carthaginians to romans, vandals, byzantium, arabs, turks. Changed religion, culture and languages several times. You can't seriously believe that this were non violent happy occurences. Before the french even came they already spoke a different language than their ancestors, they prayed to a different god than their ancestors and they had no control over their territories. They were second class citizens even before the french came. I understand how you feel about French occupation and consider it worse because it was not so long ago and is in the nation's living memory. Other colonializations were more complete and successful and therefore part of what Maghreb is today. But objectively they were at least as bad as the french occupation.
The Maghreb followed Abrahamic religion for 1600 years, more or less, actually. The god we prayed to didn't change from Rome, the Vandals, Byzantium, Arabs, and Turks.
The language didn't change either. Most people spoke Berber languages for 2000 years. Even now there are towns where you can't get by with Arabic well.
People of the Maghreb were not second class citizens under Rome. Neither were they under the millenia+ in some places of self-rule.
It's fine if you don't know the difference between pre-modern invasions and colonization, and it's fine if you don't really understand the history of the region, but by god don't use that to justify imperialism which killed tens of millions of people.
In any case, ask yourself this. Why is it that two Africans became emperors of Rome, but that Africans never led modern European powers, nor were even allowed to vote? Ask yourself that, and you will understand the distinction between the two.
Not only that, but almost half of the Maghreb was never even invaded by the Ottomans, and even then it was De Jure, and not De Facto, mostly. Same for the Vandals and the Byzantines.
So no, your analysis is incorrect. Additionally, it's very well known that pre-modern war was much less bloody.
> Why is it that two Africans became emperors of Rome, but that Africans never led modern European powers
Because more often than not the military decided who became princeps, and military advancement was more egalitarian.
I’d hazard a guess that if Rome had still been controlled by the senate the chances of advancement in Roman society would have been restricted to Italian born patricians.
>The Maghreb followed Abrahamic religion for 1600 years, more or less, actually. The god we prayed to didn't change from Rome, the Vandals, Byzantium, Arabs, and Turks.
Most European languages stem from the same base Indo Euroupean language. And a still a German can't understand a Frenchman or a Slav. Even though Islam has the same roots as christianity it is a totally different religion with an even more different set cultural norms.
>The language didn't change either. Most people spoke Berber languages for 2000 years. Even now there are towns where you can't get by with Arabic well.
I would say the arabic language, which is the dominant language of the area (72%), is quite different from the berber language(27%).
>It's fine if you don't know the difference between
pre-modern invasions and colonization, and it's fine if you don't really understand the history of the region, but by god don't use that to justify imperialism which killed tens of millions of people."
I'm disappointed and expected more from you than lowly accusations of me supporting colonialism.
>In any case, ask yourself this. Why is it that two Africans became emperors of Rome, but that Africans never led modern European powers, nor were even allowed to vote? Ask yourself that, and you will understand the distinction between the two.
Septimius Severus was half Roman and half Punic, so not Berber. Also his successor, his son Caracalla has even less to do with the people of Northern Africa. By the time Severus became roman emperor, some parts of North Africa have been under the roman empire for 300 years. France has a lot of citizens of North African descent today who have the same rights as any other citizen with a different origin.
>Not only that, but almost half of the Maghreb was never even invaded by the Ottomans, and even then it was De Jure, and not De Facto, mostly. Same for the Vandals and the Byzantines.
>So no, your analysis is incorrect. Additionally, it's very well known that pre-modern war was much less bloody.
Hacking somebody apart with a sword is not something I would call less bloody. You seem to be under impression that the rulers always changed peacefully without any wars, battles, destruction of cities, persecutions, etc. I'm sure that after 200 years of any new ruler things settled down and life when on, maybe even better that before, but before that things were pretty bad and ugly.
> Firstly, your experience does not automatically discount the experiences of countless people from the many European colonial projects.
I’m not discounting anything. But I’m skeptical that there are “countless” people who embrace decolonization of the kind which modern academics mean when they use the term. Note that @angibrowl talked about reforming institutions and legal systems and property rights, which is more aggressive than what you refer to below.
> Statistically speaking, the fact that you’ve never met a Bangladeshi who disagrees with you tells me more about the company you keep than what Bangladeshis think about colonialism in general.
They like the things that come along with having an Anglo legal system that makes it easy for people to invest in the country. They cite development, the economy, increased living standards, and improved law and order as reasons why they think the country is headed in the right direction. They have high approval rates for the media, parliament, and high court. Their list of top problems is corruption, drugs, unemployment, security, and education.
Reading local news, talking to family, and following politics suggests to me that the problems that people actually care about have little to do with colonial legacy. Indeed, the problem of corruption is widely recognized among Bangladeshis as a cultural shortcoming, not some externally imposed problem.
Now, Bangladesh is quite a nationalist country. The Bangla language movement was a more political force in the mid 20th century and was one of the drivers of independence. At some point, the medium of instruction was changed from English to Bangla at the primary and secondary level. But today, English is taught from the first grade—with the big debate being how to teach it, not how much influence it has on the culture.
> (1) take what benefits you, (2) be proud of your heritage, especially that which your colonizer tried to suppress, (3) throw out the nonsense, and most importantly, (4) explicitly condemn the atrocities and injustices perpetrated by your occupiers. Forgetting and forgiving is not how you build an independent nation; seeking truth and justice is.
I agree with the first three, and strongly disagree with the fourth, at least in the context of my experience. Britain is never going to write Bangladesh a big check. They are a shadow of their former selves and cannot do so anyway. So what’s the point in dwelling on the past? All it does is tint the policy choices you make going forward. How a country shapes it’s institutions, laws, and culture, should rest on what will make the people prosperous going forward. Fixating on what aspects of culture or what laws and institutions were inherited from the colonial power creates a strong impetus to change those things for the sake of asserting the country’s own identity. For example, the Bangladesh High Court still writes its decisions in English and routinely cites decisions of other Anglo courts. That’s a good thing! The Anglo legal system is one of (in my opinion, the) finest in the world and highly suited for participation in the global economy. What are we going to do, replace it with Sharia? That’s what some people want, and that’s the only real alternative.
This is my beef with the academic decolonization literature. It makes your political discourse backwards looking. The article posted above about prosecution of homosexuality is a great example. The article notes that the first ever such prosecutions have happened in 2017. And it blames Victorian legal codes that have been on the books since 1860. But that’s obviously absurd. If those laws have been on the books since 1860, why are they only being enforced now? That’s obviously not what changed. Looking backward and blaming Britain blinds the author to the much more recent trend of fundamentalist Islam being imported from the Middle East.
If you want to talk about how to improve LGBT rights in Bangladesh, is decolonization a useful framework? Should we look back to acceptance of hijra (transgender people) in pre-Islamic Bangladesh? No! When the Indian Supreme Court recently granted recognition to Hijra, it did so by reference to international human rights law, court cases in the UK and Australia, and surveys of legislation in western countries: https://www.lawyerscollective.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/04....
> If you want to talk about how to improve LGBT rights in Bangladesh, is decolonization a useful framework.
Rhetorically, yes. Pointing out that a law certainly isn't something brought in to protect Bangladeshi values and culture, but a relic of the former colonial powers' values it's now extremely embarrassed by is a useful line of argument. Of course it would be wrong to assume that prejudice against LGBT people in Bangladesh stems primarily from fidelity to the values of Victorian Britons, but when you're arguing against people who insist that those arguing for greater tolerance are importing foreign values to replace what Bangladeshis have always believed, the actual historical context can help.
It is certainly not for me to tell you how to feel about your home country, but it is not that hard to imagine a version of the past with less colonialism and a better outcome. Consider only Thailand's example as something to think about.
"Disentangling" isn't about throwing things away and being left with nothing, it - I think - is about reevaluating what you have and what you would like through the careful consideration of the colonial legacy. The people with power in a society, even if they are not themselves "colonists" are often served well by the status quo, so a detached examination of these things is often challenging.
I think the waves and waves of "colonialism" are not really relevant to the discussion, the "modern" system of colonialism is a distinct thing, worthy of consideration in isolation and there might very well be some good to come of thinking about it. For me, I am a Canadian so I think of these things in terms of the indigenous peoples of Canada, who have had a lot of success in reclaiming something of an independent identity within Canada but still inside the larger social context. It is not a straightforward thing and it is more important to some people than to others, but it is interesting and has value nonetheless.
Exactly. Indigenous people in North America weren't just colonized, their cultures were systematically destroyed. Children were taken away on steamboats to boarding schools, forced into Christianity and beaten if they spoke their native languages. Now the languages are all almost completely dead and the cultures have suffered greatly. It was the explicit goal of the white governments to wipe out native cultures and forcibly assimilate them.
Decolonization is about recovering from that, not about eschewing cars for canoes.
OK, but so what? Bangladesh is not the ne plus ultra of formerly colonialized places. People in other places have developed different ideas from those you adhere to, rooted in their own experiences of colonization, prior views, and outlooks on international affairs. I get it, you prefer the culture you were most recently colonized by to your perception of what existed prior to that, and that's a position I can relate to even if I don't fully share it.
But you're in no position to make that judgement for all other people, and dismissal of their sincerely held and closely argued points of view as 'bananas' is trite and beneath your level of education and accomplishment. And while you may not have met any Bangledeshis who have explored such views, a simple search for 'decolonization Bangladesh' turned up several thought-provoking reads, such as https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/haque.... (on conceptions of beauty in art) and https://www.e-ir.info/2019/08/16/decolonising-queer-banglade... (on conceptions of propriety in sexual relations). Perhaps you would find it illuminating to assign yourself the exercise of writing a brief on the topic for an imaginary client whose views differed from your own.
> People in other places have developed different ideas from those you adhere to, rooted in their own experiences of colonization, prior views, and outlooks on international affairs.
Who are these people? Western academic journals and media amplify views that align with those of western academics, so it’s hard to gauge what ordinary people in other countries believe.
In my experience, apart from Britain and the US (alignment with the Anglo world), Bangladeshis look to ideas from the Middle East (alignment with the Muslim world) and socialism (alignment with the Soviet bloc). All of these are imported too. They were embraced not out of a desire to eliminate British influence, but out of the notion that those ideologies were the future. It’s like microkernels-socialism was seen as a scientific government of the future at the time. Today, the country is quite capitalist: https://www.forbes.com/sites/alyssaayres/2014/10/28/banglade...
About two decades ago I read an article from a Middlebury professor advocating Bangladesh to ignore the World Bank embrace what today would be described as economic decolonization. https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2001/05/alternative-pro.... (“But there is another way of looking at things, a Gorasin way, one developed closer to home, less despairing and less grandiose at the same time.”).
Luckily these ideas found no purchase, and Bangladesh’s economy grew by a factor of five since that article was published.
> I get it, you prefer the culture you were most recently colonized by to your perception of what existed prior to that, and that's a position I can relate to even if I don't fully share it.
I prefer air conditioning and the rule of law and economic growth. Western culture, I find less relatable over time. Pets, I’ve always found odd. Pop culture attitudes towards marriage and babies and old age, young people talking back to their elders, etc. I find all that curiouser and curiouser as I get older.
> But you're in no position to make that judgement for all other people, and dismissal of their sincerely held and closely argued points of view as 'bananas' is trite and beneath your level of education and accomplishment.
Fair.
> And while you may not have met any Bangledeshis who have explored such views, a simple search for 'decolonization Bangladesh' turned up several thought-provoking reads, such as https://www.collegeart.org/pdf/programs/international/haque.... (on conceptions of beauty in art)
This is the article I linked, and it’s a (judicious and even handed) critique of decolonization ideas. It opens with a Tagore quote:
> Rabindranath Tagore, the great poet-philosopher of Bengal once said, “To taste the beauty of a Greek sculpture or an Italian Renaissance painting, one needs not to be a Greek or an Italian. A painting is actually a painting, not Indian, Ajantan, nothing.”
This article is extremely disingenuous. While British law may be the statutory basis for prosecuting homosexual behavior, that’s not the reason prosecutions are suddenly happening now. (“On Thursday, 18 May 2017, Bangladesh saw the arrests of men on the alleged basis of their homosexuality for the first time in its history.”). The law has been on the books since 1860. The British are long gone. What changed? Islam—another colonial import. Bangladesh has increasingly aligned itself with the broader Islamic world. When we left in 1989, headscarves were nowhere to be seen. Today they are quite common. The best thing that could happen for LGBT people in Bangladesh is westernization. It’s our western constitution, with due process rights and equality of all under the law, that offer the best hope of protection.
Those expressing a point of view you took issue with, whose point of view seems just as valid to me as yours.
This is the article I linked, and it’s a (judicious and even handed) critique of decolonization ideas. It opens with a Tagore quote:
Yes, but it goes on to explore other perspectives, and how art that Tagore appreciated alongside others has, in some contexts, been presented as objectively superior.
You can go on complaining about articles being disingenuous and so on (although I think you're choosing to miss the point it's making), but you started out by claiming that nobody in Bangladesh has any truck with such ideas and I'm pointing out that they are in fact being debated there as in other places, even though you may not approve or agree with many of the people articulating them.
Hardly. I'm just summarizing the view of some advocates of decolonization I've met. Liberalism itself is characterized by a high regard for property rights, and most of the decolonization advocates I've met would not characterize themselves as liberals.
I don’t want to sound like I think all of academia is “liberal indoctrination.” (I have traditional engineers’ views on liberal arts majors, but that’s a separate issue.) But the liberal outlook is pervasive. Even when people are trying to be even handed, ideology just tends to give you different perspectives on the same facts, or makes it so you find different facts compelling. Let’s face it—you’re not going to have a robust discussion of religious freedom in your typical political science class, unless maybe if you invoke Muslims as the avatar for your argument.
I also don’t want to imply that o think liberals can’t be good scholars or do good research. But I think the overwhelming liberalness of academia, of the social sciences in particular, creates an echo chamber that makes people intellectually lazy.
To circle back to my colonialism example, there is a desperate need for political theory to help former colonies develop their societies and institutions. And the academic work in this area just isn’t helpful to anyone. Luckily nobody takes it seriously, and the actual work of developing post colonial societies has been ceded to economists and public health experts. But that’s sad. Academia used to matter in this area. The American framers relied heavily on the work of academic writers and philosophers in creating our system of government.
There are many good reasons to preserve institutions such as private property and the legal infrastructure surrounding its disposition. I imagine rayiner's father's question had those in mind.
This is a sort of standard reply that seems very clever but entirely misses the point. Colonialism or any other system of injustice has winners and losers, heck even "perfectly just" systems would have winners and losers. The winners are less motivated to change the system that might create different winners, even if those outcomes are "more just" or "just as fair" or completely arbitrary in the assignment of new winners and losers. This was the basis for a lot of the colonial systems in fact, the British intentionally aligned themselves with minorities in many places to ensure a reliable partner that both profited from the rule and depended on the British to maintain their status.
Is the great Chinese famine relevant to a discussion of colonialism? Not really! The Bengal Famine on the other hand, pretty relevant! It killed a good 10 million people. Look it up!
> Is the great Chinese famine relevant to a discussion of colonialism?
It is relevant insofar as it addresses the question of private property and its value as an institution, which is precisely what the chain of comments I replied to was discussing.
I'm not sure why you chose to take issue with my comment, but not those preceding comments.
> The Bengal Famine
Another illustrative example of a famine caused by State policies and lack of respect for people's private property: Japanese raids and destruction of merchant ships, government-ordered destruction of rice stocks, trade barriers, the "rice denial" and "boat denial" policies, refusal of imports, etc.
Strangely enough, western property rights turn out not to prevent famine at all, though I imagine the property owners suffer least in these situations.
Not sure what you mean by "western" property rights. I'll assume you meant private property rights.
> turn out not to prevent famine at all
They do prevent famine. They don't prevent all famine. To conflate the two, as you have done here, is dishonest.
Certainly private property rights cannot prevent every natural disaster—that's not "strange" at all—but lack of respect for them can certainly amplify the effect of natural disasters.
For example, regarding the Great Irish Famine [0]:
After the defeat of James II in 1690 a series of “penal laws” were passed by the Irish Parliament, dominated by the Protestant minority who had supported William III. The first, in 1695, took away the right of Catholics to bear arms. Another forbade Catholics to go overseas for education and prohibited them from teaching or running schools within Ireland. The most important however was the Act to Prevent the Further Growth of Popery (1704). This prevented Catholics from buying land or inheriting it from Protestants, or from leasing land for more than 31 years. At about this time the potato was introduced as a major crop. The combination of the legislation and the new crop was ultimately disastrous.
The penal laws, together with other legislation, created a set of powerful and perverse incentives. Because Catholic tenant farmers could not own land or hold it on anything but short-term leases, with little or no security of tenure, they had no incentive to improve their land or modernize agricultural practice. All the benefit would go to the hated alien class of Protestant landlords in higher rents or more expensive leases.
By 1841, 45 percent of all holdings were of less than five acres. The lack of capital and the restraints on the Catholic majority meant that Irish commerce and manufacturing did not develop, and by 1841, 5.5 million out of a population of over 8 million were totally dependent on agriculture. The final, extra twist was the impact of the Corn Laws, the system of protection for English agriculture set up in the early nineteenth century that prohibited the import of grain until prices reached a particular level. This had the effect of preserving the flawed Irish farming system.
I'm not sure if you read your second link, but it doesn't refer to any particular famine. You'll have to be more specific.
It is not indoctrination, in that it comes from a sincere place. However, it does tend to construct a story that is reviewed and conceived entirely by liberals. This is by the very nature of academic research and the people who inhabit it. Especially in non-STEM fields where truth is a very subjective matter.
A clearer example is Economics, where people from certain schools of thought will actively consider what is taught at other schools as indoctrination. People can't even agree on the core axioms of their field.
We are already seeing a lot of weakly researched topics being pushed around as truths, because believing otherwise does not align with the political goals of the institution.
The problem here is that parts of college (any department that ends in "studies") are liberal indoctrination. So this is the college's job to fix before criticizing the students.
"Cornell University announced this week that its faculty has voted to change the name of the English department as part of a broader campaign to eradicate “structural forms” of racism at the university. The department will now be referred to as the “department of literatures in English.”"[0]
When the same people who draft the curricula are responsible for ridiculous stunts like the one above, it's hard not to be sympathetic to the students who reject them out of hand.
If you're talking about the geriatrics in Florida, the video withsome geezers standing around with signs and others rolling by in golf carts, your description is woefully inadequate to convey the contents of the video. While someone does literally say "white power", it seems like trolling.
The tweet was up for four hours! People pointed the "white power" part out right away. The president is always reachable by his people, by definition. It was more than a smoking gun.
He condemned white supremacy only after receiving more backlash than he expected. Don’t be a revisionist we were all there it was just three years ago. The old adage is than when white supremacists believe you’re one of them you might as well be.
I didn’t say anything about Biden dude. I’m perfectly capable of thinking they’re both problematic. As I said the fact that actual white supremacists, not from the media via their own boards, believe Trump is there guy tells you all you need to know.
> As I said the fact that actual white supremacists, not from the media via their own boards, believe Trump is there guy tells you all you need to know.
I disagree with this rationale. If the white supremacists also all listen to Nickelback, would that tell you everything you need to know about Nickelback? Maybe it would, but as a discerning person I would want to know more than just "We like Nickelback and we hate <random_genealogy> people" before I assumed that Nickelback was mascotting for that group.
Yes you did not. I am not saying you did. But I made an observation on how Biden was given a free pass when he literally not just passed racist statements but passed bills that incarcerated tens of thousands of Black Americans and destroyed families. Providing a counter-balance to the biased narrative is important in this day and age. Media is completely biased. So is Big Tech with its censorship. When all streams of information are openly supporting one side it becomes even more important to speak out the Truth. I wouldn't have cared much if the media was evenly balanced. If it had taken both candidates to task. Had held both accountable. But the media has completely lost credibility. Even if I'll end up being disliked and downvoted for it so be it! But if I feel something is wrong I'll say it. No matter what people think.
> As I said the fact that actual white supremacists, not from the media via their own boards, believe Trump is there guy tells you all you need to know.
This is truly ridiculous to be honest with you. I am a brown guy. Does my view count or only what white supremacists say count for you?
Radicalize? Trump has pretty much said he condemns KKK even after winning the 2016 elections (30+ times and counting). I am sorry to say but your hatred seems to blind you to the facts.
> Trump was also a Democrat prior to Obama’s election
And he was a Republican prior to being a Democrat. It doesn't matter what party he belonged to. What matters is what views he held with respect to racism, KKK and white supremacy. It is more important to focus on views and policy than on party affiliations. Party affiliations mean nothing. Policy is everything.
You've linked to the second interview he gave about Charlottesville. In his first statements[1] in an interview on August 12th, 2017, he famously didn't condemn white supremacists who murdered someone, saying instead that he condemns "egregious displays of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides".
Then, several days later in the second interview[2] on August 15th that you linked to, he equates the violent white nationalists that murdered someone with what he calls the "alt-left", the purported group that the murder victim belonged to, saying that he thinks there is blame on both sides. After asking for further clarification, he says that there were fine people on both sides. Only after further questioning, and in a separate statement, does he condemn white supremacists.
People were criticizing him for his initial equivocation on August 12th, comparing the white supremacists who murdered a person to the victims of their violence, and the fact that he didn't name or condemn white supremacists. In fact, when journalists asked him to condemn them, he walked away from the interview. He refused to differentiate between the two.
Then, on August 15th, he defends his initial comments through his continued equivocations in the second interview.
It isn't unfair to criticize inappropriate equivocations, especially when it took him 4 days to muster out a condemnation, but still only after doubling down on the equivocations.
I couldn't find the quote in your citation 1 so I looked it up.x
"...we're closely following the terrible events unfolding in Charolottesville, Virginia. We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides, on many sides."
It's even worse than how you phrased it. Trump brought up violence on "many sides" in response to pressure to condemn violence and intimidation from white supremacists. His suggestion that there is other violence was a quick "what about" argument that was supposed to argue in favor of his refusal to condemn white supremacists.
This is not the Charlottesville event. This occurred several months afterwards. Nor were those white supremacists. In fact, they were old age pensioners taking part in a Trump rally at a retirement complex in Florida. Anti-Trump protestors arrived at the scene and began shouting angrily and abusively, using the terms 'racist' and 'Nazi.' At one point in the clip, a single individual sitting in a golf cart sarcastically retorted to that abuse in clear mockery of the barrage of over-the-top insults.
The BBC News article, while clearly biased against Trump, provides enough context to read between the lines.
If only there were some way to measure popular consensus... In order for such a system to work then the major parties would need to respect the outcome of whatever way we decide popular consensus.
This would indeed be excellent. Unfortunately, "surrender to authority and do as you are told" is the main lesson of modern schooling, as they're mostly concerned about controlling (as in keep them physically close and supervised and presumably safe) as many students as possible with a limited budget and staff.
No, that's not what is taught, even subliminally. One might expect a more cowed populace were that true. Rather, public education in the US needs a deep overhaul, and a renewed discussion of what we collectively believe necessary to know and understand, and how best to accomplish that.
The public are not stupid. They have been tragically under-served by US public schools. Need to fix this.
Google is lifting a ban on political ads tomorrow, about a month ahead of a Jan 5th runoff election in Georgia that will determine which party controls the Senate.
Perhaps the message here from subsidiary YouTube is that potentially viral videos that could damage voter confidence in past elections (and thereby affect their responsiveness to political ads for future ones) will not be tolerated while parent Google is trying to sell political ads for the Jan 5th election.
How much money will Google make selling ads for this runoff election in Georgia.
Incisive and based in clear economic motivation -- that sounds more like the big G these days. George Washington himself warned against the meddling of foreign powers in our democracy, but if we cannot entertain discussion on such things it's unlikely we'll be able to detect it.
This can be very hard to acquire, especially for events that we are far removed from. Then again, maybe it isn't necessary. Simply reading about a story twice with a deliberate bias on each side can be extremely revealing.
Would more people be inclined to do this if we taught it in schools? I hope so. These days it feels like the reporting of the news is more real to the general population than the news itself ..
Not only is it hard to acquire, such viewpoints are impossible to acquire: every attempt to put experience and research into words has a point of view and that point of view colors the story being told. Attempts to be impartial are themselves often a persuasive technique intended to make your appear view more plausible.
> the practice of not giving full assent to propositions which there is no reason to believe true.
Given that YouTube is not school, I read this to understand that Bertrand Russell is here saying that YouTube shouldn't give equal weight to presumed falsehoods.
He is saying that people should be explicitly educated, in a controlled environment, to recognise the schemes of scoundrels - so that decent people can act accordingly.
That doesn't match how good researchers find quality information. Critical thinking is a ponderous tool, and can even be counter-productive in isolation. Efficient research techniques should be taught in school, with attention to awareness about personal biases, assessing sources of information and cross-referencing
During the run up to the Iraq war, my history teacher in high school showed us front page articles and headlines about it, basically reading between the lines and extracting information that the casual reader didn't pick up on.
Just like computer programs are not perfect the first time it's released, printed text is not either. Most people have good intensions, but we are stupid.
Today I had a frightening interaction on Facebook with a friend of my wife's cousin. He claimed "the new COVID-19 virus had never been tested on humans, only animals" and when I called him on his misinformation and pointed out that the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people he shrugged and told me he was entitled to his opinions, and he just had different sources.
Because it's not factually correct, it's stating a full on falsehood (no human studies) and then doubling down when challenged on this falsehood.
You can believe what you want about all sorts of things about the vaccine, but there _are_ fundamental facts, and that's what I find disturbing about this mode of thinking. Spreading misinformation on purpose and then covering it under the guise of "just my opinion, man"
And nobody said anything about censoring him or "deplatforming" him. But some basic human decency would be nice.
It's spreading it, willfully, that's frightening. The consequences of propagation of bad public health information, and also what it says about the possibilities of public discourse, when it's considered acceptable by people to simply ignore facts in favour of preferred falsehoods.
We can argue many things about the Pfizer vaccine. And it's his choice to get it or not. But telling people it underwent no human testing is lying to people.
Sure it’s dumb and poorly informed. There have always been dumb people spreading bad ideas. It is not our responsibility to force them to agree with us or de-platform them if they won’t agree with a certain narrative. This is called common human decency.
Seeing people you know believe in bullshit makes it harder to believe that you and the people around you believe in what is right and do not believe in bullshit. The idea that you might not be right and might instead be believing in bullshit is uncomfortable to a lot of people.
Re-read what I wrote, where did I say anything about deplatforming? Yes, I understand TFA was about YouTube deplatforming people, but the comment I was replying to was about people's need to learn basic media criticism/critical thought.
Frankly, it's about holding other human beings to basic standards when they make pronouncements in public. Entitled to your own opinions, but not your own facts, etc.
Did you ask for further explanations? What are his sources? "His opinions" may refer to the fact that he doesn't trust the secondary source you quoted in "the phase 3 trial for the Pfizer vaccine included 43,000 people", or the primary source, or the very process/protocol of this trial...
He sent me some "sources" in a private google drive link that was access restricted and required me to enter email address to request access -- which I wasn't going to do, as said personal also makes his living doing multilevel marketing and as a "life coach"; not a contact list I have any desire to be on.
> He sent me some "sources"
((...))
> required me to enter email address to request access
Such a "source" often lets you better understand what/how such material works on some people. I played this a few times and was never disappointed. A disposable email address may work.
It's depressing to read this quote and then realize it was delivered in 1922, meaning our media has been suffering from this problem of extreme political bias for likely more than a century now.
A lot of my friends spend all day "Liking" Facebook posts that mocking Trump supporters as ignorant simpletons, then they repeat blatant falsehoods like "Trump told people to drink bleach" or "Trump called Nazis 'very fine people'". The irony is completely lost on them because they're so deep in their own disinformation bubbles.
It's been a lot longer than a century. This is the natural order of things. Bertrand was not criticizing the media as much as he was pointing out its natural tendencies, which originate in the natural tendencies of humans. His solution was not to fix the media, it is to learn how to interpret it.
Learning how to interpret media means successfully defeating some of the best psychological tactics ever created. Bertrand didn't face these tactics and his methods are completely ineffectual at dealing with them.
"Learning how to interpret" the media is not even possible any longer.
Reporter: "The neo-Nazis started this. They showed up in Charlottesville to protest --"
Trump: "Excuse me, excuse me. They didn’t put themselves -- and you had some very bad people in that group, but you also had people that were very fine people, on both sides.
So. Trump admitted that the neo-Nazis are very bad people, but the group ALSO had some very fine people.
To Trump supporters or "enlightened centrists", this is proof that the left is also deliberately distorting the truth, but you're missing the point.
The point isn't that Trump drew a distinction between the Nazis (who were bad) and the non-Nazis (who were good), and therefore he didn't call Nazis good people.
The point is that there people marching with Neo-Nazis are not better than Neo-Nazis.
If you have a political position and you find yourself attracting neo-Nazis, you have to take a long hard look at what you're doing.
"And then I see the disinfectant where it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? So it'd be interesting to check that."
Pointing to his head, Mr Trump went on: "I'm not a doctor. But I'm, like, a person that has a good you-know-what."
OK. First of all, let's start with the fact that Trump has a Cult of Personality. His supporters don't just love him, they TRUST him implicitly - more than any other authority figure. More than other politicians, but also more than DOCTORS.
An idea from Trump matters more to his supporters than an idea from any medical expert.
So. You have Trump "just asking questions" that if a disinfectant can be shown to knock out the virus on a kitchen counter (and at that point there were COUNTLESS news articles about how to protect yourself from the virus by bleaching and disenfecting all your things. He goes a step further and says maybe there is a way to do the same by taking the same disinfectant INSIDE the body. Finally, he says I'm not a doctor, but I know things. Which basically seals the deal and confirms he thinks it's a promising idea.
So, no, he didn't say the words "MAGA NATION! Go buy bleach and drink it!"
But he did say that he believes that: Disinfectant inside the body could help with the virus through injection or something like it.
It is a plausibly deniable one, but it is an endorsement nonetheless.
> In your link, Trump says: "I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and the white nationalists -- because they should be condemned totally".
BUT HE IS.
The people he is talking about that he is separating out ARE white nationalists.
They are not carrying Nazi flags. They are not chanting "Jews will not replace us." If you asked them point blank, they wouldn't dog-whistle anything about "we don't think blacks are inferior, we just want a separate but equal society".
But their actions are aligned with white supremacy. Their obsession with the Confederacy and their generals is an expression of white supremacy. They are not interested in heritage. They are interested in perpetuating old power imbalances that keep "the poorest white man above the best black man".
> Regarding bleach, "So it'd be interesting to check that" is a suggestion for medical research, not a recommendation for what patients should do now.
That's now how supporters received it.
In both cases you give him the benefit of the doubt. His intentions are not to support white supremacy. his intentions are not to have his supporters drink bleach.
However he has a job, which is colloquially described as "the most powerful man in the world". That has responsibility. His throwaway lines embolden white supremacists who ABSOLUTELY seized on "fine people on both sides" just as much as the left did. His supporters do hear his guidance to the medial community and jump to the next conclusion.
Who is it that repeats the "fine people on both sides" comment again and again, never mentioning Trump's explicit condemnation of white nationalists? It's not Trump, or the Republicans. It's Democrats and the Democrat-supporting news media. If there are any white nationalists taking comfort from the (incorrect) idea that the US president is sympathetic to their cause, it is not Trump's fault. It is, to be blunt, YOUR fault.
And the same for bleach. Why did the news media portray Trump's comments as a recommendation for people to drink bleach, rather than (correctly) portray him as suggesting research into something related to bleach? (If they have to criticize Trump, they could then mock him for thinking he knows anything about what the promising directions in medical research are.)
We all know why, don't we? They prioritized political gains over lives.
ADDED: To address your other point: Sure, one might be able to argue that people wanting to keep up a statue of Robert E. Lee are really more or less white nationalists. Just as you can argue that people in favour of a minimum wage are really more or less communists. Conflating these "more or less X" views with actual X is not a recipe for maintaining a stable democratic society.
Why hasn't evidence for any of this appeared in lawsuits filed by the president's campaign? Why have the many lawsuits they have filed been so easily dismissed by the courts, often with prejudice?
I would imagine that the lack of evidence, is simply because it can’t be granted.
Ever.
The lawsuits are “theatrical” in a sense, because it establishes a significant series of burden, requiring the Supreme Court to “indulge their arbitration”
I.E. bullying the court is the only way to prosecute people for election performance or conduct because the court(s) can’t.
AFAIK The courts cannot collect evidence of election performance. It’s not their jurisdiction or mandate.
People seem to believe that the state courts can accept testimony or evidence.
They cannot accept evidence or suggest prosecution, no court can.
Fraud can’t be proven even if the action meets the definition and standard for fraud, if a court cannot be found or suggested.
They can only reject the motion, even if there is sufficient proof to investigate, affidavit or observation. Not that there is no evidence, but evidence can’t be collected and can’t be used, validated or collected until the Supreme Court is given the authority, agency and mandate to investigate the election.
It is a no-mans-land due to the lack of a court to prosecute those involved.
And it can’t be any other way.
A fundamental loophole exists because of the US constitution and the US court system during an election. It’s not new. It’s been there for centuries, and it can’t be patched over unless the elections are organised via a federal mandate, under a provisional government body with executive and/or legislative power.
The next few months are literally going to be noting that “the emperor has no clothes”, due to the hidden reality of the lack of legal consequence of people influencing the outcome, acting in a fraudulent manner.
And the resolve will be “the emperor has clothing, you just refuse to accept it”
It is a very long process of establishing that the “safeguards” have no meaning if the safeguards have no legal effect, and any election participant can’t provide evidence or audit results. That’s the theatre of the current process.
Especially if people know they can defraud the government, and communicate with others that they have done so, and avoid prosecution.
Only the Supreme Court can act during the election, and it is unwilling, because it can only intercept or accept cases that require the unburdened access to the undefined legal system to operate and arbitrate.
People seem to believe that these cases “lost”. They would never have “won”.
That’s the goal of the theatrical “losses” and attempts here, to show that the election process is vulnerable, and no legal domain exists, or can exist, so the Supreme Court is the intervention.
And it is prohibited from preemptive action for the reason that the Theatrics are legally necessary too.
There are no “Election Police”. There are no election courts / mandated legal bodies /commissions or state investigations that arrest people for election misconduct during or after election.
The role is absurdly and often temporary because of the partisan problems of establishing a “Neutral” body with the power to dismantle the US electoral system by degrees or by action, have the power to change the foundation and membership of the US Federal Government.
The mandate could only exist in a Supreme Court, with the power to arbitrate or commission an investigation, granted the domain to prosecute and perform this single task.
It’s fine to believe in Justice, but an Electoral Court would be the Arbitration of every future State and Federal Government. And they would require a mandate to act in the belief/service to a higher authority, perhaps the Constitution.
Perhaps not. Who would be appointed. Who would be compelled to attend or supply evidence. Who would be responsible for the decisions made, etc.
It’s far too late to implement an organisation with this epic mandate, one that could recreate or reshuffle an operating government.
Thus, There can never be Election Fraud. Because it cannot be investigated during the Election process, nor can evidence be collected, or interpreted/discussed under a legal action unless it exists outside of the election itself.
Something like “Purge” rules, the situation is generally grotesque if you try to process how the counter to the argument, that “of course the law exists”.
It’s also about applying the law. And enforcing the laws that exist. Think about the ramifications of not being able to process any evidence, because a court cannot exist in this domain.
You may believe a court could act, order, suggest or proscribe action, but if it cannot act, and it cannot compel or prove, what could a court order or interpret.
Who would apply the law. Who would determine the penalty. Who would apply that penalty, and who would defend the parties involved.
More importantly, can a court ever exist. Who determines the scope and power of a court to determine and act. The mandate to intervene.
What if that court does not exist, nor can it be created.
There is a degree of lawless agency because of the necessary expediency of counting and validating results.
If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no record, did it even exist? This aphorism applies to the entire process of the US Election.
Unless evidence is collected outside of the Election, it’s not wilful ignorance, it’s entirely legally oblivious to any action or consequence during the conduct of an Election.
And to say that there’s any ability to “catch” indicates a lack of familiarity with the brokenness of the election process in the United States.
The AP and media likely feel comfortable being arbiters because the laws governing the collection of results are Anarchic.
AFAIK, anybody involved in the election could very easily commit fraud during the election process, because the process is not able to detect, investigate, prosecute or determine criminal action took place.
There is no police, no agency to record or investigate criminal or audit performance. There is no office or commission that could arrest people or provide testimony, and convert that testimony to evidence of misconduct.
The ability of a court to investigate requires a legal mandate to operate in (sic).
AFAIK this has never existed in the US. Most of the prosecution and criminal investigation happens before, after an election, because there has never been a criminal investigation of misconduct of election representation, nor the ability of a court to intervene during the election.
It may be that someone deliberately fed ballots into a machine over and over, meeting the requirements of impropriety and the action of fraud, but nobody can recover or remove that action with the current legal frameworks that exist, possibly even if that person acknowledges their action.
Their conduct may meet the burden of fraud, but criminal prosecution can’t or won’t be recommended or forwarded to local authorities for prosecution.
It may be that you can cheat the election process, but be arrested for stealing a paperclip, given the legal framework for election(s).
Without a National management of election performance, prosecution would be improbable within the timespan of an election period of 4 years, let alone 4 weeks.
The FBI or DOJ may appoint some organising body in the future, but I have no idea what the burden of proof is for a state election or “538 separate audits” of performance during an election.
Nobody is keeping the receipts if they don’t have to. Especially not with the standard of criminal investigation and audit of conduct.
It may fall to the FBI or adjacent investigation officers across states to have a granted license or authority to.
The courts aren’t able to investigate or interpret/ introduce evidence, Especially across the burden of State Courts who aren’t responsible for vetting or establishing the requirements for evidence of criminal or unconstitutional proceeding.
versus hearsay or other court-approved material would require a police investigation, or branch of government to intervene and provide a form of license for the provision of evidentiary material at the standard of proof required to allege fraud ie Communication, Payment or Beneficience of the act (whatever the legal burden for Fraud requires) versus the legal burden for defining Widespread Fraud, wherein it has to be a certain volume of Fraud, a co-ordinated action, a hierarchy or actor who provides facilities and mediation, or who would act on behalf of others to obscure evidence of Fraud as a signal of agency and conspiracy.
The likelihood of proving conspiracy and fraud, even with evidence and recordings, communications and affidavits, would take years and decades to process, not days or weeks.
If the standard of evidence requires an investigation, or, It requires a level above affidavit or hearsay, this would also require a court or official to “hear” or ponder the statements made.
> AFAIK The courts cannot collect evidence of election performance. It’s not their jurisdiction or mandate. People seem to believe that the state courts can accept testimony or evidence. They cannot accept evidence or suggest prosecution, no court can.
Exact details depend on the state (because states are vested with the power to run elections, not the federal government, as anyone with even a cursory understanding of the Constitution ought to understand), but generally speaking, if you believe there is evidence of voter fraud, the court you submit to is the appropriate electoral board or commission for the district in question. That electoral board will decide on the verdict and issue a ruling, which may include annulling and rerunning the election--as happened two years ago for a House race in North Carolina, which is the only race in my lifetime that I'm aware of where election fraud may have affected the results of the race.
You seem to believe that such an entity cannot exist, yet the entity of which you speculate exists in (I believe) every single state, and, yes, there are definitely occasional partisan fights over the powers, makeup, and conduct of these boards.
Not sure what this has to do with my post. I meant my post as anti-censorship. That education in critical thinking is the answer to fake news, not censorship.
But I am curious why Kamala Harris would be expected to resign now? There are several weeks until inauguration, and there may be several votes in the Senate or on the Judicial Committee between now and then. Why would she leave her position vacant for that long?
If there is "obvious evidence of voter fraud", that sure sounds like something that should be taken to the courts! Hmmm, I wonder what all the Republican judges (some of which were Trump appointees) have had to say about all of the "evidence" that has been presented to them so far...
The Arizona case was denied essentially because the affidavits were declared hear-say, because the testimony wasn't provided during court. I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't make sense to me.
First, it took weeks to document their testimony - it would likely take further weeks to basically re-do their testimony in court / depositions.
Second, if it was so important that their testimony be sworn in to his court, why dismiss the case entirely, instead of just allowing the plaintiff to bring the witnesses to the stand?
It's pretty easy to dismiss a case as "having no evidence" when you ignore the 100's of affidavits as hear-say. Sure, it's not sworn testimony in court, but to automatically assume every one of them is lying, is a bit of a stretch.
Another rationale that has been used to dismiss cases is that evidence that the law was broken is not evidence that fraud that took place.
It's pretty much beyond dispute at this point that in several states, credentialed Republican poll observers were not allowed to do their job in a meaningful way - contrary to state law. (referring to MI/PA)
When literally hundreds of thousands of ballots are being counted without any oversight, those ballots should be thrown out. Not because its proof that fraud happened, but it is proof that the controls to prevent fraud were not in place (that were legally required to be in place).
"No evidence of widespread fraud", is true. But what is also true, is that there are mountains of evidence of election laws that were ignored/broken, that in a fair election, would result in those ballots being thrown out.
> "This court has no authority to take away the right to vote of even a single person, let alone millions of citizens."
That's his opinion and he's entitled to it, but it's not a universal truth that illegal ballots can't be thrown out. Judges have thrown out ballots before. Judges have even thrown out elections even after the candidate is sworn into office.
> Perhaps it's merely a partisan tactic.
Make no mistake about it, this is a hugely partisan issue. The "Left" is convinced beyond doubt that Trump is trying to overturn the election. The "Right" is convinced beyond doubt that the election was a fraud.
When the truth of a subject is determined largely by what party you associate with, it's pretty clear to me that there aren't any objective parties in this discussion.
I don't vote (its against my code of ethics; see Voluntaryism) and I don't associate with any party, so I believe I am about as objective as you can reasonably expect to find on this topic.
> "mountains of it!" rather than specifics is hand-waving gish-galloping stuff.
I'm happy to provide evidence to anything I've claimed.
Most of the evidence I have heard is from the many hours of testimony I have watched from the state legislature hearings (PA, MI, GA, AZ). Links can be found online.
>Judges have even thrown out elections even after the candidate is sworn into office.
And those judges were probably presented solid evidence that amounted to more than conspiracy and hand waving.
So far Trump and co are something like 1 win, 50 losses, from judges all over the country, local, federal, Supreme Court, GOP and Dem appointed, Trump appointed (who incredibly dismissed the Trump nonsense with prejudice, which is quite rare, and signals just how ridiculous the Trump suits are).
So don't use a false equivalence. There is none here.
I watched the entirety of the Michigan legislature hearing. I heard the affiants speak. Each one provided testimony with a consistent pattern: the Republican poll observers were harassed, kicked out, and not allowed to do their job. This would be in direct violation of state law (http://www.legislature.mi.gov/(S(d3swxbgf3srsrnw20ak5uthw))/...).
Nowhere in the judgement does the judge address the affidavits. The footnote for that statement (6) just calls it a "conspiracy theory" without addressing the substance of the affidavits at all.
This is generally the case for most of the judgements I have read. Other judgements are denied based on technicalities/standing.
Not a single judgement I have read has addressed the actual substance of the affidavits that have been provided.
First, the thing you linked calling a judgement is not a judgement. It's a filing by Trump's team.
The affidavits are smoke and mirrors. There is no reason to believe what is in them is true - the point of the case is that the plaintiff has to demonstrate they are true, and this was not done. In fact, so many of the Trump lawsuits were ridiculous, that Trump and co dropped them right as they were about to reach trial.
The particular case you list has all filed documents here [1]. The entire court hearing is archived on C-SPAN here [2].
>This is in direct contradiction to the affidavits that were provided
Affidavits are not fact. Repeat that to yourself until you get it. Affidavits are not fact. Stop believing them simply because they sound good to you.
If you honestly listened to the court case, you'd recall, as is clear on the C-SPAN recordings I linked, that this affidavit was hearsay, and inadmissible as evidence for this type of action. This is law 101. This is precisely why affidavits are not fact - they must be demonstrated. It's trivial in a nation of 320 million people to find a person willing to sign an affidavit for anything. However that does not make unicorns real nor does it overturn an election.
Hearsay has no bearing on a case requesting this outcome. The judge was even very, very lenient on asking over and over why this was not simply hearsay, and the lawyers kept trying to avoid answering, and they wobbled all over the place. It's actually embarrassing to have to watch them get caught with their pants down.
This is also why so many reputable lawyers dropped out of this on Trump's side - his requests are nonsense, and will eventually get lawyers disbarred for such a joke. Those firms know they want business in the future and cannot professionally afford to blow up their firms for this nonsense.
From a scan of the testimony, the judge in MI ruled well - Trump demonstrated zero fraud. If he wants to disenfranchise voters he needs to demonstrate actual fraud, not cry and tout conspiracies.
Now, if there was large scale fraud, Trump could easily prove it (I'll explain how researchers can check there is no widespread fraud in a moment). Trump also knows this, but his followers apparently are too dumb to do so.
Every state has a list of who voted; some states make the list public. All states provide the lists for researchers and groups like Trump's team.
If you claim there is, say, 5% fraud somewhere, get that list, sample say 500 people randomly on the list, send pollsters out to make those people voted. If 5% of votes are not real people, then you'd expect 25 people on your list to not exist, or similarly.
Trump has already tried this - you can tell because his team keeps releasing names of people they claim are dead but voted, and so far in each case the media has located the actual person and shown Trump wrong. So out of the tens millions of votes they have looked into, just like researchers do, they have found at most a few cases they questioned.
How do you think they get those names? They do exactly this, see there is no demonstrable fraud, then launch this 3rd rate legal circus, which is solely designed to grift money from gullible rubes.
So far that has worked to the tune of about $200M, enough to help Trump with his legal problems once out of the Whitehouse.
So - stop posting this goofy crap - it has no bearing on reality, and that has been demonstrated over 50 times around the US so far.
Trump's lawyers knew this, but brought it anyways for the theatre of it all.
This is not the action of a man who wants to win and has evidence. This is a con man running up support to raise money from his rubes WITH ALL CAPS PLEAS FOR HELP, only to take their donations and pocketing them.
My position, is that Trump has indeed failed to prove fraud.
But I do think that Trump has collected a preponderance of evidence that election laws were broken. Many affidavits have been provided that substantiate this.
> Hearsay has no bearing on a case requesting this outcome. The judge was even very, very lenient on asking over and over why this was not simply hearsay, and the lawyers kept trying to avoid answering, and they wobbled all over the place.
I can't speak to why Trump's legal team hasn't deposed more witnesses and gotten more sworn testimony. On this I am in complete agreement, it seems negligent. I can only speak to the evidence I have heard, and my reaction to it as a person, and not as a lawyer.
From a legal perspective, Trump's case may indeed have no basis. I'm not a lawyer and I don't know.
But I do know that there are hundreds of affidavits alleging that elections laws were broken, and very few people seem to be taking that seriously. Whether Trump wins or loses, I honestly & genuinely do not care (he lost; that horse has left the barn long ago). But I am disturbed by the ease to which people dismiss these claims, given that there is a substantial number of people providing the testimony, they seem to be genuine of character, and for most of them - their claims do seem to have merit (ethical merit, if not legal).
Even if their claims don't have legal merit, they should at least have ethical merit. Regardless of what a person thinks about Trump, there are honest people who are providing honest testimony about wrongdoing - and their claims and the people who give them voice, are dismissed with outright hostility & vitriol.
>I do think that Trump has collected a preponderance of evidence that election laws were broken
If so, but he has demonstrated zero fraud, then there is no reason to change a single vote. In each case he is asking for votes to be changed, so such cases are not granted.
The majority of places his team has claimed laws were broken have been shown to be false. There's ample places judges have called his team out on this.
That is the point.
>Below is one such piece of evidence:
That claim was pretty thoroughly demolished in the case and in the replies to that comment. This is not evidence. Again you mistake hearsay for evidence.
It's easy to find people willing to claim all sorts of nonsense. Courts demand evidence to prove a fact, and the standard is usually "beyond a reasonable doubt".
> their claims and the people who give them voice, are dismissed with outright hostility & vitriol
No, in every case I followed, the people with these "voices" were shills brought up to sow confusion. Case after case the voices were shown to not have standing, to not be reliable, several recanted before going to trial, and on and on. This is not an honest enterprise of honest people with legit concerns.
The evidence to this is the sheer brutality of the case outcomes - last I looked it was around 58-1 against Trump and co.
This is why there is hostility and vitriol. It's not an honest set of lawsuits being brought (again, just look how idiotic the cases are being run, and how much money has been raised on these cases, and that the money is going to Trump's pockets, not to cases, and you'll see how this machine works).
> If I'm understanding your position correctly, its basically that the people providing testimony are all liars?
Yes? You seem to be pushing the line that this is all sincere and done in good faith, and ignoring the easily noticeable conclusion that it is a performance from bad actors for obvious selfish ends. So much so that your own good faith is questionable. Creating alt accounts to continue the spam doesn't help.
> cases being dismissed is likewise not evidence of that.
I disagree. I put it to you that it is closely related.
Are you trying to fraudulently overturn the results of the free and fair election that your comments should be downvoted because they don't contribute to the discussion and violate the guidelines?
>Throwaway accounts are ok for sensitive information, but please don't create accounts routinely. HN is a community—users should have an identity that others can relate to.
Are you going to keep creating new accounts every time you get so much negative karma you can't post any more, as many times as Trump and the GOP have lost lawsuits trying to overturn the election, until you're at "prucomaclu50"?
>Trump And The GOP Have Now Lost More Than 50 Post-Election Lawsuits
>The Trump campaign and its Republican allies have officially lost or withdrawn more 50 post-election lawsuits, and emerged victorious in only one, according to a tally kept by Democratic Party attorney Marc Elias, underscoring the extent to which President Donald Trump and the GOP’s efforts to challenge President-elect Joe Biden’s win in the courts has overwhelmingly failed to affect the election results.
>The 50-case milestone was reached Tuesday as a state court in Georgia dismissed a Republican-led lawsuit, and the count includes both cases that courts have struck down and that the GOP plaintiffs have chosen to withdraw, such as an Arizona lawsuit that the Trump campaign backed down from because it would not affect enough ballots to change the election outcome.
>The Trump campaign and GOP’s only win struck down an extended deadline the Pennsylvania secretary of state set for voters to cure mail-in ballots that were missing proof of identification, and likely only affected a small number of mail-in ballots.
>Among the Trump campaign’s more notable losses in court thus far are the campaign’s failed lawsuit attempting to overturn Pennsylvania’s election results, which a Trump-appointed appeals court judge said was “light on facts” and “[had] no merit,” and a Nevada court that found the campaign had “no credible or reliable evidence” proving voter fraud.
>Courts have also repeatedly struck down the campaign’s allegations claiming their election observers were not able to properly observe the vote counting process, and while one Pennsylvania court did grant the campaign a win by ordering that poll watchers can move closer to election workers, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court later overturned the ruling.
>In addition to the Trump campaign, GOP allies including state lawmakers, Republican Party officials and former Trump legal advisor Sidney Powell have also brought dozens of entirely unsuccessful lawsuits, and a lawsuit brought by Pennsylvania GOP lawmakers was rejected Tuesday by the U.S. Supreme Court.
>The legal campaign is expected to continue until the Electoral College meets on Dec. 14—or potentially until January—but a “safe harbor” deadline midnight Tuesday, which ensures certified results submitted by that date can’t be challenged by Congress, will make it harder for outstanding cases to succeed.
> Each one provided testimony with a consistent pattern: the Republican poll observers were harassed, kicked out, and not allowed to do their job.
And I'm sorry that you take this laughable stuff at face value. The bullshit asymmetry principle means that I don't have the free time to dig into that; and if I did, I would not spend it on you.
Again: the election is over and it wasn't close. This "The South will rise again" stuff would be pitiful if it wasn't so nasty.
Please don't post in the flamewar style to HN and especially please don't be a jerk to others, regardless of how wrong they are or you feel they are. We're trying for something different here.
> When literally hundreds of thousands of ballots are being counted without any oversight
which is itself BS.
and then swaps in:
> illegal ballots
This conflation is not a good faith argument.
> The "Right" is convinced beyond doubt that the election was a fraud.
I know this. It's a problem. The prediction "If conservatives become convinced that they can not win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. The will reject democracy." turned out to be very true. It's not deeper than that.
> The "Left" is convinced beyond doubt that Trump is trying to overturn the election.
Who doesn't? If he isn't trying (badly but nonetheless) to overturn the elections, then what on earth _even are_ these nutty lawsuits? The idea that they exist and are an attempt to change the outcome of the election should not be up for debate. I mean, do you disagree about the existence of them? You think it's an attempt to order from McDonalds maybe?
Specific claim:
During the counting at the TCF Center in Michigan, Republican poll watchers were denied their legal right to meaningful observation. This resulted in many hours of counting without oversight, with hundreds of thousands of ballots counted during this time. This was in violation of state law:
That link mostly addresses Texas lack of standing to challenge PA's elections, which I am in agreement with - Texas does not have standing here. I would be more interested in a source that addresses the specific claims being made in the Texas lawsuit. I reference the Texas lawsuit only as a useful document, as it has a fairly well summarized list of complaints for each state.
> I've seen the quality of such that you provide elsewhere in this thread, I don't see the point in you doing this again.
No problem. I am genuinely interested in seeing an honest refutation of the claims being made by these witnesses. The judges haven't provided that. The media most certainly hasn't. From the replies on HN here, only 1 or 2 people have attempted to provide constructive information. The rest, very similar to yours, is primarily ad hominem and casual dismissal.
If you do have something productive to add, that would correct my perspective in a constructive way, I am genuinely eager to hear it.
it was "not credible" (1), it was thrown out of court, the end.
Move on. Accept that the election is over and it didn't go your way. That's what happens in democracies. The only question, is, is the USA still a democracy?
For the specific claim that we are discussing (poll challengers being kicked out at TCF), his ruling does not address the substantial number of affidavits that were provided.
The only place in the document where he addresses the meaningful observation issue, is in page 8, where he considers just one of the plaintiff's affidavits. Many affidavits on this issue were provided, with testimony to the effect that Republican observers were not allowed to do their job, kicked out, and they were not allowed to replaced. There is testimony that the Republican observers that were removed, were replaced with Democrat observers, resulting in many tables having 2 Democrat observers at the same table, and no Republicans.
The vast majority of the issued in these affidavits were not addressed by the judge. The closest that Judge Kenny came to addressing the above is with the below quote from page 8:
> Democratic party challenger David Jaffe and special consultant Christopher Thomas in their affidavits > both attest to the fact that neither Republican nor Democratic challengers were allowed back in during > the early afternoon of November 4th.
First off, this is 2 affidavits, compared to the dozens of affidavits that were provided by the plaintiff.
Second, it doesn't address at all the issue of Republican observers being kicked out. It only addresses the issue of observers not being allowed back in. It also does not address the imbalance of Democrat/Republican observers.
For this specific claim that we are discussing, dozens of affidavits simply were not addressed. This judge, as did the judge prior, simply ignored the vast majority of affidavits without addressing them. And then labelled the entire case as "not credible".
Again - we are discussing a specific claim (by your suggestion), so I would very much like to see where these specific claims/affidavits are deemed "not credible."
Outside of this specific claim we are discussing, I'm curious if you think this woman is similarly "not credible"? The issue that she is outlining seems pretty illegal to me with very little room for interpretation. Other witnesses made similar claims as well.
> The vast majority of the issued in these affidavits were not addressed by the judge.
You're missing a fundamental point: anyone can make wild, nonsensical claims. it is not for the judge to "refute" them, it is for the plaintiff to substantiate them. Prove your claims or walk. They walked.
I don't know why you nod along with this, or why you think you know better than the judge while making such basic errors. But that is your issue.
prucomaclu: Shame on you, and shame on Texas. You LOST the Civil war, and you FAILED to start another one. Trump and Texans are such Anti-American sore losers. No slaves for you!
Republican congressman rips Texas GOP for suggesting secession and says 'my guy Abraham Lincoln and the Union soldiers already told you no'
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger on Friday criticized the Texas GOP for floating the idea of secession after the Supreme Court rejected a bid to overturn the results of the presidential election.
In a statement, the Texas GOP chairman suggested that "law-abiding states should bond together and form a Union of states that will abide by the constitution."
Republican Rep. Adam Kinzinger of Illinois said the statement should be immediately retracted and the people involved fired. "My guy Abraham Lincoln and the Union soldiers already told you no," he said.
--Bertrand Russell