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posted by FatPhil on Monday February 06 2017, @09:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the is-there-an-all-fake-news-sites-are-liars-paradox dept.

Over the last few months, we've talked about the weird obsession some people upset by the results of the election have had with the concept of "fake news." We warned that focusing on "fake news" as a problem was not just silly and pointless, but that it would quickly morph into calls for censorship. And, even worse, that censorship power would be in the hands of whoever got to define what "fake news" was.

Source: https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20170201/23481336610/bad-idea-worst-idea-having-ftc-regulate-fake-news.shtml


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  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @09:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @09:23PM (#463674)

    The only reason that "Fake News" is any sort of problem, is that it has the capacity to move large numbers of people push the buttons and pull the levers of a giant machine called "government", whose purpose is to impose (violently) some dictate on the whole of society.

    Fake News is a symptom of people's struggle to gain control of this machine; the fundamental issue is not the fake news, but rather the foundation of violent imposition around which even the most "enlightened" cultures have built themselves.

    The key is not to regulate fake news, but rather to diminish the destructive power of government (ideally to nothing; it's the last vestige of humanity's uncivilized origins). In this way, Fake News becomes pointless.

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  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @09:46PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @09:46PM (#463702)

    The "problem" with debunking libertarian idealism like this is that it's never really been tried on a large scale. One cannot say it doesn't work because it's never been tried in practice and failed in practice. Small islands or "crashed" war-torn governments are probably the closest that's been tried, with mixed results.

    I suspect that big corporations will step into the void of government and be just as evil if not more. I've worked in both private and public sector, and they are BOTH stupid/evil/wasteful, just in different ways for different reasons.

    I don't mind if somebody tries a non-trivial libertarian nation somewhere, JUST don't make the USA be the guinea-pig.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @11:02PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @11:02PM (#463765)

      There is no "nation" to build; there are no arbitrary "national" borders to a free market.

      The ideas of libertarian pervade society—even the most totalitarian ones; the ideas of libertarianism are what make any society robust, actually productive, and eventually prosperous, and this kind of society extends on just through some geographical region, but through any domain of economic (e.g., human) interaction, including cyberspace.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @02:13AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @02:13AM (#463842)

        The ideas of libertarian pervade society

        The ideas of lots of thing pervade society in various times and places. To a kid, parents are dictators, for example. Bits and pieces doesn't tell us anything special or different about libertarianism and its competitors.

        Further, some degree of X being good does not mean level-11 of X is also good. Some water is good. Too much, and one drowns.

    • (Score: 2) by slinches on Monday February 06 2017, @11:48PM

      by slinches (5049) on Monday February 06 2017, @11:48PM (#463794)

      I thought that's why we have states. I bet one or two would try something along the lines of libertarianism, if given the opportunity.

      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @02:19AM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @02:19AM (#463845)

        If all our state laws, conventions, and standards are too different, then commerce suffers. That being said, red states cannot seem to stand blue states and vice versa such that perhaps the US should be split into 2 or 3 nations rather than keep having the red/blue fight in DC. DC is dysfunctional. We have either wild swings or gridlock.

        • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @07:23AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @07:23AM (#463937)

          Well, with the advent of the internet the geographical issues are less of a problem. We may live fat away, but now people can find common ground and fellow supporters more easily. It is a double edged sword, but I think it will work out in the long run. Hopefully we can skip the state vs. Nation bit and move on to some broad overarching world constitution that all nations can agree on. Then we move forward from there. The US can't even comprehend it at this point, but I think many other countries can.

  • (Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @09:47PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @09:47PM (#463704)

    I'm afraid you've missed it. Fake news, formerly called propaganda, is the very thing that motivates all of the people throwing their weight behind the warlord and making up his armies when he marches on your contract enforcer.

    It doesn't matter that your interpretation of the contract is correct. Unless your contract enforcer is an even bigger warlord with a bigger army, which perhaps implies better propaganda, the warlord who's trying to violently break a contract with you will succeed and take from you far more than the contract ever specified.

    We call that bigger warlord "government," and I at least remain hopeful in this brave new era that said warlord's procedures and bureaucracies will keep his armies idle. It's a pretty bad way of going about things, but everything else is either worse or a fantasy where men are angels.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @10:58PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 06 2017, @10:58PM (#463762)

      Whether it's a warlord or a representative democracy, it is the violent imposition that makes an organization a government.

      That is why it is so important to have checks and balances, and there is no greater form of check-and-balance than competition within a market—Uncle Sam, for example, has emerged as a monopoly in this competition, only because the ancient, uncivilized culture from which it grew perceives (without merit) that such a Monopoly is virtuous—it's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but one which humanity will undoubtedly shake off as it becomes clear that even those "governmental" sectors of society do not benefit from monopolies either (especially ones that are violently imposed).

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @06:11AM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 07 2017, @06:11AM (#463919)

      Fake news, formerly called propaganda

      The new name for propaganda is PR. Fake news is the new name for yellow journalism. The later can be an aspect of the former, but it needs not be such.