The guardian reports on a sobering event in Washington DC.
US police have arrested a man wielding an assault rifle who entered a pizza restaurant that was the target of fake news reports it was operating a child abuse ring led by Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her top campaign aide.
[...] The suspect entered the restaurant and pointed a gun at a restaurant employee, who fled and notified authorities, police said. The man then discharged the weapon inside the restaurant. There were no injuries.
[...] [Police] said the suspect during an interview with investigators revealed that he came to the establishment to "self-investigate" Pizzagate, the police statement said. Pizzagate is a baseless conspiracy, which falsely claims Clinton and her campaign chief John Podesta were running a child sex ring from the restaurant's backrooms.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:35PM
Meanwhile, the "real" news has US Marines about to invade Russia. It has Travon Martins murderer as a white guy who shot a 7 year old because "he looks black." It has Ahmed the clock boy as the victim of racism instead of the balloon boy son of an Islamic activist. It has Hillary winning the election in a landslide because Trump supporters are racist misogynists. Mainstream media is the ultimate echo chamber of fake news.
It's all made up. The whole "fake news" topic is the mainstream medias last denial to come to terms with the fact that they have been making up the news for years and in November 2016, Americans called them out on it.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:57PM
If you believe that what you wrote is how those things were reported, then you are part of the problem.
And the idiots who voted you up as insightful, god damn.
The blame is squarely on the "right" who, time and time and again, prove that they couldn't be more wrong.
Here's the quote from Karl Rove disparaging the "reality-based community"
The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:18PM
"Fake News" article [thebarentsobserver.com]
Original CNN Article [cnn.com]
Editor's note:The headline and first paragraph of this article were updated on December 1, 2016 to reflect that the exercises took place some distance from Norway's border with Russia, outside the town of Bardufoss.
So it looks like it took about 30 seconds of research to figure out that CNN's frightening video (aired on 1 December at lunchtime) and accompanying article were complete bullshit and that this is a joint exercise that happens every single year. But omg Trump.
And it looks like it took "Fake News" to make CNN issue somewhat of a retraction, except instead of saying "the extreme other end of the country as far away from Russia as is possible," they did a "I'm still not wrong" by saying "some distance from the border."
But have fun keeping the for profit media as your sole trustworthy source of everything. It's written for people like you. I'm sure Jill Stein will uncover that Hillary victory the media told you would happen as well, despite the fact all three recounts have yielded a widening gap in votes for Trump making it seem like the voter fraud actually went in Hillary's favor.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:30PM
Let me get this straight.
You are complaining that an obscure story was published with a minor error that was not only corrected, but the correction was noted at the top of the story?
Really?
Really?
That's what you consider a persuasive damning of the lügenpresse?
When the standard is 100% perfection, you guarantee 100% failure because if 99% accuracy and 0% accuracy are morally equal, pretty soon all the people who care about doing the best job they can will give up since there work isn't valued. And then, all that's left are those who are fine with 0% accuracy.
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:49PM
Clearly your post cannot be trusted because you wrote "there" where "their" would be correct. That demonstrates that you are clearly not caring about accuracy, so we have to assume that whatever you wrote is inaccurate, and therefore not to be trusted. So obviously you are just spreading lies. ;-)
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:15PM
Obscure story? WTF? WW3 isn't an obscure possibility, or an obscure story. WTF? CNN apparently wrote the story to imply that Russia was moving on Norway, as a consequence of Trump's election. Did you bother to READ?
"The story was published at 10.11 GMT on November 30. When the Barents Observer checked the portal around noon Norwegian time, the misleading headline was still top story. Lt Col Skogmo says CNN’s reporter was contacted 06.30 in morning to get the headline changed. At 12.12 GMT on December 1st, CNN took action and updated the story with a new headline. 30 hours after first published."
Misleading stories are misleading stories. CNN is to damned big for any damned fool to be calling it an obscure publication. A large segment of the world depends on CNN for their news. Or, at least a large segment of the US population, and a smaller portion of the world population.
The BEST that can be said of CNN, is that they sensationalised a routine story to alarm their readers. That is the BEST that can be said. We can say much worse.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:26PM
> CNN apparently wrote the story to imply that Russia was moving on Norway, as a consequence of Trump's election. Did you bother to READ?
Did you? Because what the article actually says is that Norway is afraid that Trump is going to back out of NATO.
Calm your hysteria dude.
> Misleading stories are misleading stories.
NO That's the same bullshit black and white thinking that enables the worst lies.
Everybody makes mistakes. To err is human. Legitimate news organizations publish corrections. Malicious publishers just double down.
As long as you can't, or won't, distinguish between those who make a good faith effort and those who deliberately mislead, then you are collaborating with the liars.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:57PM
Everybody makes mistakes.
But some repeatedly make mistakes that benefit themselves or favor some side.
As long as you can't, or won't, distinguish between those who make a good faith effort and those who deliberately mislead, then you are collaborating with the liars.
Heal thyself, physician.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:13PM
> But some repeatedly make mistakes that benefit themselves or favor some side.
That's the story of your entire posting history.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:42PM
WW3 isn't an obscure possibility, or an obscure story.
I don't see anything about World War 3. I see discussion of a new "Cold War." In case you don't remember, the OLD "Cold War" wasn't World War 3 either. It mostly consisted of a bunch of posturing on both sides, and the only warfare happened mostly through third-parties and confusing alliances in remote countries. I don't mean to underestimate how dire it was, but there's a big difference between implying an ongoing Cold War (which, guess what -- we do basically STILL have in some respects) vs. the onslaught of WW3.
CNN apparently wrote the story to imply that Russia was moving on Norway, as a consequence of Trump's election.
I don't see any evidence of that. I see a headline that implied the U.S. was making a posturing maneuver on a border. There's no mention of "Trump's election" anywhere in the story. And these sorts of stories are NOTHING NEW, since various countries in Eastern Europe ARE concerned about possible Russian invasions and actions, and they were scared BEFORE the election.
From CNN (2/26/2015): Norway: There's no more normality with Russia [cnn.com], which interviewed the Norwegian defense minister on escalating tensions with Russia
From CNN (2/18/2016): U.S. stationing tanks and artillery sent to Norway [cnn.com]
From CNN (10/18/2016, updated 10/24/2016): Norway welcomes US Marines amid Russian tensions [cnn.com]
And it's not just Norway. See, for example, CNN (10/28/2016): Lithuania issues manual on what to do if Russia invades [cnn.com], where Lithuania published a manual on defense in the event of invasion, which -- as the story notes -- is the THIRD TIME Lithuania has published such a manual since Russia's invasion of Crimea. Again, the story contains interviews with the secretary of defense from that country.
There's a LOT of tension in Eastern Europe over Russia, and it has nothing to do with the election of Trump. These are ongoing stories. I see no evidence in your quoted story or elsewhere that the publication of this story (or its error) had ANYTHING to do with Trump.
"The story was published at 10.11 GMT on November 30. When the Barents Observer checked the portal around noon Norwegian time, the misleading headline was still top story. Lt Col Skogmo says CNN’s reporter was contacted 06.30 in morning to get the headline changed. At 12.12 GMT on December 1st, CNN took action and updated the story with a new headline. 30 hours after first published."
A lot is unclear in this paragraph. On what day did the Barents Observe "check the portal around noon Norwegian time"? What time zone is "06.30 in morning to get the headline changed"? The most obvious reading of this paragraph is that the Norwegians contacted CNN at either 06.30 GMT or Norwegian time on December 1st, and CNN changed the headline about 6 hours later. Also, I'm not sure who performed the math that claims "12.12 GMT on 12/1 minus 10.11 GMT on 11/30" = 30 hours, since that looks clearly like 26 hours to me.
I'm not trying to quibble here -- just point out that your own source is ALSO exaggerating for some reason. Are you going to call them out for their error, too?? And why did it take the Norwegians something like 20 hours to get around to contacting CNN, if, as Col. Skogmo is reported in your link, he "had a busy day" apparently fielding questions from media? If they were that concerned about the incorrect info, and they were concerned about how it was spreading to other media sources, why did THEY not act sooner?
Or is Col. Skogmo in on your conspiracy theory, too?!
The BEST that can be said of CNN, is that they sensationalised a routine story to alarm their readers.
Or somebody made a legitimate geographical mistake. Or the reporter got it right but somebody along the chain of editing tried to "punch it up" a bit and misread the distance or location. Even with the 24 hour news cycle, it frequently takes several hours for retractions or corrections to made -- I agree with you that this was a clear error and it should not have taken so long. But given that such delays are COMMONPLACE if you actually pay attention to news cycles and how corrections tend to be made, I think it's reaching quite a bit to summarily assume the delay was strategic, let alone had anything to do with Trump.
Furthermore, the outrage in your article mostly seems to come from the claim that NATO is never allowed to exercises near the Russian border. So that supposedly made the story much more inflammatory. But it's doubtful that such intent could be ascribed to a CNN reporter who made a geographical error -- they didn't know where the border was in relation to the exercises, but they supposedly knew about a policy hatched 50 years ago about Norwegian-Russian relations?
Or -- MAYBE -- CNN did have this complex plot to get everyone worked up, and delayed fixing the story for a few hours after it took nearly a day for the Norwegians to contact them about fixing it. To what end? To start WW3?!? Apparently, according to you, to get people more worked up about Trump, even though he isn't even mentioned in the coverage. Why?
Anyhow -- whatever you may think here -- let's be clear on one thing: CNN *did* publish a correction. Actual "fake news" sites don't do that, because they don't care about facts at all. They make them up. That's what actually makes "fake" news.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:36PM
That the last "cold war" didn't end human civilization, and possibly humanity, is down to shear luck, and some brave Russian soldiers who defied launch orders. And we were at one point 30 seconds from a US initiated WWIII. That we still exist is one of the reasons I believe in the multiverse, as by any rational calculation we would have killed ourselves off by now. How we will be able to avoid it with nuclear arms spreading (slowly, but spreading) is something ... well, in SOME branch of the multiverse we'll survive, but expect most of your futures to experience destruction. All we can hope to do is to change the probabilities of what the future will hold.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:14PM
is down to shear luck,
"Yes, these are my lucky scissors, why do you ask?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:53PM
I did bother to read both the links and neither one of them say any such thing. Did you bother to read the links? Closer to the mark, it appears that Norway is now worried about Trump's apparent wavering commitment to honor a decades-old NATO alliance.
No, the sensationalism is coming from you and your Trump-supporting buddies. Next time, you would do well to read for content. You embarrass yourself (again!) when you make it obvious that you don't understand what is being discussed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:43PM
I read the links you posted. Did you? Because it appears that you have misunderstood what these articles are telling you. Nick Paton Walsh wrote a story about (yearly?) military exercises in Norway that US soldiers participate in. The story also includes a discussion about patrols on the Russian border by Norwegian soldiers; the intent appears to be to underline why these exercises are so important. Somehow, you--and, presumably some other Trumpsters--erroneously conflated the two vignettes as meaning that Paton Walsh was reporting that US soldiers were holding their exercises on the Russian border. It appears that you are the one spewing bullshit here.
Protip: before you go flying off the handle like that, you should really make sure you understand what is being discussed. Otherwise you end up looking like a know-nothing doofus.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:44PM
How is that a "right wing" thing when it is the same behavior in left wing areas like college campus LARPing?
Obviously when the right was in charge you'll get more people paying attention to a right guy saying how everyone in power acts. Or when the left is in momentary charge they get the same attention and the same observation can be made about Hillary and her Benghazi adventure, for example. Or Obama's policy toward ISIS or for that matter Russia?
Its more a design pattern of power and authoritarianism where you only researched one dude from one side but everyone does it.
A good analogy would be the time Bush puked on the president of Japan and trying to spread a narrative that puking on people is right wing or maybe even alt-right "literally hitler". But in reality everyone pukes sooner or later even people not in positions of political power. Or think of leftie Hollywood "college movie trope" for example, so clearly it don't mean nothing. Although it is a true observation that everyone pukes or everyone holding propaganda power tends to use it.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:45PM
You're trying to conflate a game, where everyone involved knows its fake and not real and has no impact on reality, with people pushing fake news onto others as if its true with the intent of having everyone believe that its factually correct and describes whats occurring in reality?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:47PM
Its crazy, right?
What could possibly lead someone to make that kind of equivalency?
All I can come up with is debilitating mental illness.
(Score: 2) by tynin on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:29PM
VLM, buddy, their are some crazy hardcore right-wingers out LARPing as well. And by some, I mean, the divide looks a lot like how this country ends up voting.
Then again, you are responding to an AC who's modded Troll... and the more I re-read your's, I'm getting a lot of Troll out of it too.
Indeed, after the 3rd re-read, I'm actually enjoying and laughing at the obviousness of it. Touche!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:37PM
Read his other posts.
Either he's dedicated to trolling at a near-superhuman level.
Or he's telling you exactly what he believes.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @08:25AM
The difference being one side lost the election to a tv reality star (really, that's one for the record books), and the other imploded upon impact.
At the moment, the absolute best critiques of Trump aren't coming from the left, but from old stalwart conservatives like Ben Shapiro. Let that sink in for a bit. One of the previous superstars of the "fake news" galaxy is doing some of the most incisive analysis of the problems with Trump.
You realize then how inconsequential the left, the MSM, and most of this mewling about fake news is. This is the last gasps of a failed ideology demanding attention while the rest of the world has moved on.
But wait, there's more-
What's worse is the left can't even get some reflected glory because that would mean sharing the street with conservatives, independents, libertarians, and moderates; and would bring into sharp focus the lefts' absence when the complaints about Obama were taking place.
The liberals' nightmare has finally come true- the country is right and further right. Liberalism is dead (at least in its current incarnation), and this fake news bit is nothing more than a last bid to maintain some relevance while the rest of us set the body on fire.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:05PM
That is what it is. It's the thrashing of a dying institution. I surveyed "left" sites the past several days, reading the comments. They believe Trump won because the media gave him too much attention. Nevertheless, they've lost faith in the media, too. So the media have lost everyone across the perceived political divide and now they're desperate to differentiate themselves with this "fake news" meme. It's absurd.
They've phoned it in for 20 years, gutting their newsrooms and simply plucking pieces off the AP Wire and passing them off as their own. They hoped nobody would notice and they could pump up their share prices for a bit. Then they gambled everything on their annointed one and lost.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:10PM
> Then they gambled everything on their annointed one and lost.
As if genuine human imperfection is the equivalent of deliberate lie telling.
You've always struck me as a right-winger in sheeps clothes.
I guess it should be no surprise you are so quick to apply a facile explanation that is in itself a kind of conspiracy to gloss over a complex problem.
(Score: 2) by rondon on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:19PM
Hope you got a big pile of stones in that glass house, cuz it sure is fun watching you throw them from out here...
Enjoy your petty one-liners from AC land.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:33PM
>> As if genuine human imperfection is the equivalent of deliberate lie telling.
>
> Enjoy your petty one-liners from AC land.
Yeah? If that's what you consider too petty to respond to, then the problem is you. I don't live in a glass house, I know I harbor no illusions about my perfection.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:23PM
It's pretty easy to come off as “right wing” when you can see the lizard people for what they are. Maybe not actual reptilians from between the 3rd and 4th dimensions here from Thuban to… psychically drain emotional energy, or something—Icke's theory. But close enough.
The MSM was a fucking joke this entire year. There are some false flag theories floating around about this guy who was unhinged enough not to get the joke here. I mean, maybe I'm an oldfag from when /b/ was good (*rolls eyes*), but this is clearly a case of loli haet pizza [encyclopediadramatica.se]. As far as fake news goes it's weak sauce. Some mentally unstable bozo takes a gun there, nobody is injured, and as the Joker noted, everybody loses their minds! But if everything goes “according to plan,” no matter how horrifying that plan is, nobody panics.
I mean, am I supposed to believe that out of all the news organizations out there, none of them felt the need to figure out just why Clinton decided she was “against” TPP? Did they really need to take every last little tweet from the Donald out of context and hyperventilate about it for a whole fucking year?
If we're to believe the Misogynerd Narrative, Trump is the fault of all of us sexually insecure video-game playing assigned males from the internet. But then why did so many womyn-goddamned-born-womyn vote for him? Where was the MSM coverage of Women for Trump?
I'm also still not quite over how blatantly The Advocate decided to illustrate that the homosexual lifestyle is an actual thing! But hey, it makes a lot of shit like The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Angels in America, Rent, and Jonathan Demme's supposed apology for The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, make sense. This is the kind of sexual perversity and diseased human degradation the lizard people want me to believe comes with being born a fag.
And hell, if being “right wing” means that you reject the homosexual lifestyle that the lizard people have prescribed for people who are born homosexual, I guess count me as “right wing” too.
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:10PM
So is it just gay dudes? Because aside from the annoying crowd who are also vegan/vegetarian/what-have-you, I don't see gay women doing things like that beyond the occasional separatist nuts like the TERFs.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:24PM
I think so.
This “gay [man] lifestyle” (interesting how the man bit there is completely implied in right-wing fears of the “gay lifestyle”) seems to revolve around the idea that developing GRID/AIDS is a totally normal part of the lifecycle of a gay man to the point we're being asked to accept promiscuous sexual activity leading to disease as a package deal with male homosexuality. If we don't accept the disease, we must be rejecting the idea of homosexuality. Accepting the disease as an inevitability of being born a homosexual man also means accepting that the disease is beyond the realm of personal responsibility.
So if one is a libertarian who prefers to keep disease-free by not being promiscuous (along with safety precautions) despite being homosexual, then what I think The Advocate was saying is that right there is fundamentally incompatible with “gay.”
(Score: 2) by Azuma Hazuki on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:34PM
Gods, that's a scary thought. I'm too young to remember (and halfway across the country from...) the Castro district, but I know the history. Including, incidentally, all the lesbians who helped the men and never get much credit for it but that's a side story.
So it sounds like the problem here is promiscuity. And, let's be real here, it's two men deciding when to fuck, the answer's gonna be "pretty much whenever we're not sleeping" given how horny men are. Odd thing, though, is this doesn't match the way my gay guy friends act. The one I'm closest to actually has had fewer partners and longer relationships than a few straight men I know.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:48PM
You're missing a lot of factors. In some countries AIDs was spread more my sharing needles among addicts. In much of Africa it was spread more by widespread prostitution. I AIDs spreads is a social factor, and wealth seems to act as a reasonable prophylactic, though it's certainly not perfect. There *are* documented cases of men getting AIDs and intentionally spreading it as widely as they could, but they weren't all gay. I can't remember whether they did or didn't decide that that counted as assault with a deadly weapon, but the question came up in court.
So quite possibly the cause of the "acceptance of AIDs" by gay men is due to a sense of despair at social rejection, and the resultant feeling that doom is inevitable. But I also doubt that it's really as universal as you're portraying, at least now that AIDs doesn't seem to be an immediate sentence of (delayed) death preceded by months or years of suffering.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:53PM
Consider that the AIDS infection rate among adults in South Africa in 2007 was 18.5%.
That's way, way beyond the scope of just gay people.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:49PM
Some mentally unstable bozo takes a gun there, nobody is injured, and as the Joker noted, everybody loses their minds!
Yea, I don't know what all the hype is about either. So what a deranged lunatic discharges a gun in a pizzeria because he believed Hillary was raping kids there. Liberal pussies these days, I swear...
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:01PM
Deranged lunatics do all kinds of things.
I'm sure it was a terrible situation for the people who were there, and it's probably been hard on the workers.
The part where everybody loses their minds is this scare about “fake news” and online radicalization. The level of bullshit and hysteria is straight out of a Chick Tract [chick.com]. If you play AD&D, Satan will take over your mind! If you read Fake News, the alt-right will take over your mind!
The MSM is writing in the style of Jack Chick with the same level of hysteria lately. It works for similar reasons people believe Dark Dungeons is an accurate depiction of an AD&D session. I'm sure there's some truth to AD&D being a tool of the devil in that there's a correlation between being a young person, being introduced to AD&D, questioning your parents' values, and drugs, sex, rock and roll, etc. I'm not got at classifying fallacies, but in both cases there is a severe confusion about causes and effects. [nizkor.org]
It's just… the whole thing is massive fail.
If “fake news” is such of a huge problem, I feel that the institutional failures that have lead to a populace with so many easily misled people are the real problem to be concerned about.
I mean, what is this? Dueling propaganda machines? Who can crank out the best sounding bullshit on the left and send it into the squared circle against the best sounding bullshit on the right?
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:27PM
This is a human condition. People are lazy. This has nothing to do with failure of anything, people just want the fuckin news. And whatever they are fed, they eat so long as it appeals to their palate. Doesn't matter if you took a sample of people from today, 30 or even 100 years ago. They're all lazy. They want to live in an ideal world where they can trust the news and that's that. Besides, they have enough to worry about besides playing Jr detective and Clark Kent, mild mannered reporter.
Yes. That's exactly what this is.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:35PM
As if genuine human imperfection is the equivalent of deliberate lie telling.
Why do you think this is just about lying? A lot of US media has been blatantly imperfect in more ways than just the telling of lies (such as parroting spoon-fed information from government and other sources). And as to your comment about "deliberate lie telling" all lies are deliberate by definition.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by HiThere on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:58PM
I attribute the decline in the care for truth to the monopolization of the mainstream media, and the retreat of control over the news to organizational levels where they don't actually deal with it, they only deal with money. I noticed this happening strongly when a local newspaper chain (already it was only weakly controlled by those who cared about news) was bought by a group that had the name of a liquor company, though I didn't bother to find out if that was really their main business. The quality of the news declined rapidly.
OK, so the traditional sources of news have become extremely poor, after being poor. Don't think that people don't notice this, but many people need to believe that they know what's really going on. So when they become disillusioned with the current news ("They can't even get ... right.", where "..." is something that they can check, or already know.) then they go looking for other sources to trust. Some will pick this source, and some that, but the crucial thing about the new source is it doesn't report anything that they can check, so they don't become disillusioned.
Well, that's my theory, and it's why I became disillusioned with the local news. Unfortunately for me I believe in epistemology, and so if a new source reports news that it has no way of knowing, I rapidly become disillusioned with it. So I then to believe mainly technical publications, and those that are careful in their wording when they are reporting that "my theory is that...".
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:39PM
Hahaha thank you, thank you. I haven't had a laugh like that in a long while.
Whaddya want? I was Lincoln-Douglas, not Policy. You sound like Serious Interpretation, which is two doors down past Mr. Foley's office, on the left.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:27PM
" I surveyed "left" sites the past several days, reading the comments. They believe Trump won because the media gave him too much attention."
I also believe that. I've mentioned that I listen to a radio talk show out of Houston - Walton and Johnson. All through the election, they observed that the more attention from the media that Trump got, the higher his numbers went. Postive mentions increased his popularity, and negative mentions increased his popularity. No matter what they said, no matter how good or how bad, mentioning Trump seemed to be guaranteed to move him up in the polls.
We can never know whether Trump could have won if the media just ignored him - but I don't really think so.
I could be wrong though.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:54PM
That's why I thought a year ago that Trump would win, because he understood the media and the zeitgeist much better than the Clintons did. In fact I think I did say that his time in RealityTV taught him all he needed to know about spectacle in today's America.
(I doubted toward the end after the comments to Howard Stern on his show came out, but Comey saved it for him.)
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:36PM
There is actually evidence of that: Trump received more media airtime than any other candidate, including Hillary Clinton. For example, one analysis showed he was getting about 4 times as much coverage during the primary as Hillary Clinton, and about 25 times as much coverage as Bernie Sanders. The classic example of this was on Super Tuesday, when all major news networks decided to ignore Bernie Sanders' speech in order to show the room waiting for Trump to speak.
What those left sites don't mention is the full reason why that happened:
1. Trump had people working for him working in some of the media outlets. He certainly wasn't alone in this (see: Donna Brazile).
2. The Clinton campaign pushed Trump as their opponent [wikileaks.org]. This is the part that the left-wing websites try to pretend didn't happen.
In any event, this election is hardly the first time faked news reports have found their way into mainstream media. Some examples of reporters who have been caught "reporting" completely false information: Jeff Gannon, Judith Miller, Brian Williams, Jayson Blair, Juan Thompson, Bill O'Reilly, Lara Logan, Stephen Glass, Steve Doocy.
That's why completely trusting a single un-corroborated source, for anything, is foolish. That's why science isn't considered true unless the idea in question is tested by multiple people, ideally using multiple equipment setups and multiple experimental methods.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:59PM
Reporters aren't the worst. Leslie Moonves, CEO of CBS, on Donald Trump: "It May Not Be Good for America, but It's Damn Good for CBS." Doesn't sound like a guy dedicated to uncovering the truth and reporting the facts. Does he even care about facts, or is he only interested in drama, only interested in what's easiest to produce and sell?
Les, let us know how it's working out for CBS when The Donald clamps down on your business. How's it feel to be censored, muzzled, and harassed by an organized army of angry, powerful fascists? Think he can't do that? Maybe. Would he do it if he could? What do you think? You'll wish for the good old days when your harassers were a scattering of powerless loonies.
With an attitude like that, he ought to switch to running a tabloid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:31PM
what kind of bs reality do you live in where the msm wasn't already completely owned by the NWO and it's minion the US federal gov?
(Score: 2) by tisI on Wednesday December 07 2016, @02:37AM
These days it's all about the money. Nothing more.
I doubt CBS or any other network will have any worries about entertaining the Donald. Press (ANY) is what feeds his ego.
As long as the airways are full of his mug and mop and the praise is flowing life will be good for them all.
One things for sure with this group, Democracy will be sucking hind tit but Capitalism will be in milk and honey land.
Someone's going to have lots of fun with somebody else's money me'sa thinks.
"Suppose you were an idiot...and suppose you were a member of Congress...but I repeat myself."
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:02PM
While it's clear that Trump got more coverage than Hillary did, it's not clear that that's why he won. My take is that there were lots of people who liked Trump (though even more hated him), but nobody really liked Hillary. So Hillary lost because a lot of people couldn't stomach voting for her. Many more people hated Trump than hated Hillary, but (nearly) nobody liked her. Both I and my wife felt it was a pity they couldn't both lose, but when we looked at the third party candidates they weren't any better (than Hillary).
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:53PM
You were far from alone in this [gallup.com]. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump were both in the same league of being hated as Barry Goldwater and George McGovern. Doing some more digging, since Gallup started tracking this in 1956, this was the very first time that both party nominees had a net negative favorability rating - they were both hated more than they were loved, by substantial margins. And that was at the beginning of the general election. It got worse as the race wore on: By early November, both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton had approval ratings were around 40% favorable, 56% unfavorable.
They really both deserved to lose. And anyone who wasn't rooting for Team Democrat or Team Republican realized that.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:57AM
Well, whose fault was that? I forget what the exact ultimate multiple was, but Hillary outspent Trump by scads. Google's results are all over the map, but it's at least double. So the result she got is after at least doubling his expenditures on advertising. Trump knew how to play the media and Hillary had to pay people great big piles of money to loathe her a little less.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday December 07 2016, @02:51PM
The media's, of course. They shouldn't have been played: Fool me once - shame on you. Fool me twice - shame on me.
My point is that they were being played by both Trump and Clinton to cover more of Trump's antics. So, no surprise, they covered more of Trump's antics, because they lacked the integrity to choose to do anything different.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:37PM
That's a large part of the problem. Trump was given billions of dollars in free air time and he probably wouldn't have been the nominee without that free airtime.
But, he won the GE because the Democrats rigged their primaries in favor of the less popular candidate who offered the people absolutely nothing, ran a campaign on sexism and was on stage routinely with hated neo-cons. Not to mention that it was an attempt at a personality cult to somebody who has no personality.
She might well have lost to any of the other candidates the GOP was pushing.
But, the MSM was largely responsible for the second term that W got, they didn't start asking anything other than softball question until after he was re-elected.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:24PM
You know what hasn't been really discussed? The ground troop leftist themselves.
One of the things consistently cited in why the polling numbers were so off is people constantly being badgered by leftist for even entertaining different points of views (imagine my shock at this revelation) that they simply shut down, nodded their heads, and proceeded to vote, even tepidly, for Trump in private.
And even now leftist are alienating independents (remember, these are mostly people who voted overwhelmingly for Obama) further with their antics.
I wouldn't say that the media is necessarily conspiratorial in their coverage as much as they are a reflection.
And that reflection is of a bunch of petulant children on the left.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:56PM
You know what also explains the polling numbers being so off? Election fraud.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:33PM
You know, that's funny.
Right about the time the left were screaming racism (correction- when has the left not been screaming about racism) about voter ID laws, that would have been the PERFECT time to turn the tables and demand more secure elections.
Except you guise (not you personally, but more of general "you") went on and on about how secure elections were from fraud, and now you are demanding a recount.
How fucking dumb do you look now?
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:10PM
While I'm sure election fraud happened, by both sides, I don't think it was the decisive factor. You can't judge national sentiment by the sentiment in the area in which you live.
But if we don't consider that they election was decided by personalities, then there's also the matter of sound-byte news. No issue was ever covered in any depth by either candidate, so it was basically impossible to vote on their explicit plans. And neither candidate controlled the party platform on which they purportedly stood. (Well, that may not be true for Hillary, she may have controlled it, but that wasn't much of a platform. And if she did, then why didn't the platform agree with here public statements on the TPP? I can think of bad reasons, but no good ones.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:03PM
I wish Americans really voted based on a candidate's explicit plans, but they don't. Americans are not such a people. They vote based on an amalgam of emotion and half-heard missquotes while they're waiting in line at the feed store.
In this election it was pretty clear that we didn't need to pay attention to what Hillary or Trump were saying their positions were, because we all knew they were lying. Trump might surprise the hell out of us and actually do something he said he would. Recruiting Goldman Sachs schmucks for his cabinet does not make me sanguine, though.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by mechanicjay on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:33PM
This really nails it for me. I cared during the primaries, but by the end? This was the first set of presidential debates I skipped out on since I was 11 years old, because it completely didn't matter what either one said, it was all bullshit. It was completely obvious to anyone who took half a step back, that one candidate was playing the media landscape like a fiddle, while the other seemed powerless to change the tune.
The worst part is that is clearly that the media/political establishment still hasn't learned. Trump CONTINUES to play them, every single fucking day and they're still either unware, unable, or unwilling to stop.
My VMS box beat up your Windows box.
(Score: 1) by Francis on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:55PM
I generally agree with that. The MSM has been ignoring the fact that the progressives and liberals either didn't vote for anybody or crossed over to vote for Trump. She did horribly with independents and conservatives, but the loss of the progressive and liberal votes pretty much doomed her candidacy.
As others have stated, election fraud explains a lot of this. Had she not had the party rigging the primary in her favor, the Democratic candidate probably would have won. Sanders would have had no issues winning PA, MI and WI, his message was resonating with the non-elites.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:42PM
[citation needed]
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:57PM
[no citation for obvious needed]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:52AM
[no citation for obvious needed]
Spoken like a true believer. Welcome to the regressive faith!
(Score: 2) by linkdude64 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:21PM
Five star post.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by bradley13 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:45PM
There are interesting questions around this event...
Gunman walks into restaurant, fires one shot into the ground, and is peacefully arrested. Hmmm... One article points out that the guy is actually a second-tier actor [imdb.com].
I am waiting for the prosecution. If, after a week or two, he is quietly released on some technicality, then he was hired to make a scene. To distract from...what?
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:05PM
On a site where the community likes to think of itself as grounded in science, conspiracy theories sure seem to dominate despite being completely anti-scienitific.
Conspiracy theories are the opposite of scientific theory - both attempt to explain the world, but the former are unfalsifiable and can be increasingly elaborated to accommodate new observations and ultimately, any information contradicting a conspiracy theory can be answered with, “Well sure, that’s what they want you to think.”
The right has been anti-science for so many decades now its sadly no surprise that the people here who are most vulnerable to conspiracy propaganda are the most right-wing.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:29PM
but the former are unfalsifiable
Well, actually, its more like geology. If you dig over there to the 10Myr strata you'll find a delicious crude oil salt dome with cap of natgas. Now sometimes they're wrong, but practically all the time they're right and eventually you admit you don't have to dig the entire freaking earth up to verify the model found every oil deposit, you just admit you have a working theoretical model that predicts where you'll find oil.
Or in this case, CP. If you build a model for finding weird CP or almost CP or abuse evidence or peculiar ultra high density of symbology and peculiar behavior, and the more you dig the more you find as long as you follow your model, then its a good model by the geologic criteria. And given decades or centuries of criminal justice investigation into these type of people, you can expect to find "grooming" and tada here's dozens of pix of Biden and really creeped out teen girls. At least they're (mostly?) post puberty females who already know how to handle teen boys their age so they can handle an old Biden. Of course you take a million group photos and you're gonna find a small number of rando creepy ones that mean nothing, but it sure was easy to find and there sure are a lot of them... Of course a teen girl looking creeped out next to an old man does not prove anything illegal ever happened, but it is interesting.
and ultimately, any information contradicting a conspiracy theory can be answered with
Sometimes for PR oriented theories, shaping public opinion is kinda the point not a bug. None the less that's an example of belief not a real model. You can't predict if you gained access to computers over there you'd find a folder full of "thats what they want you to think". You can't dig anything up with a belief, its pretty much the end of the conversation.
I'm just saying the cycle of "find weird stuff" "dig into the now usual suspects" is a rotating wheel thats gone around quite a few turns this time and it's still spining slowly. Just like prospecting for oil eventually every well comes up dry. There seems to be a hell of a lot of oil in this particular salt dome and I look forward to seeing more pumped out, its gonna be interesting.
Wonder what they'll find tomorrow? Recent past implies it'll continue to be interesting, whatever it is.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:42PM
"conspiracy theories sure seem to dominate despite being completely anti-scienitific."
Is anthropology a science? You know - the study of man.
Do you know people? I mean, real people, living near you, who have wants, desires, dreams, etc ad nauseum. Have you ever unearthed any conspiracies among them? Maybe two children conspired to trick you into believing they did their chores/homework/whatever, so that they could have their candy. Conspiracies, mostly minor petty ones, take place all around us, every day. Doctors, nurses, and family often conspire to hide the facts from terminally ill patients. Children conspire to cheat for better grades in school.
Are you going to pretend that rich bastards never conspire?
The thing about them is, they are more likely to "get away" with their conspiracies. They can afford high dollar security and muscle, whereas the kids cheating on exams cannot.
Anthropology. Empiric evidence, if nothing else, tells us that people DO conspire to get ahead in life. Some of the theories are based on better evidence, some of them are based on complete bullshit. But, they all remain theories, unless and until proven.
(Score: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:09PM
You fail vocab.
Conspiracy theories and people cooperating for their benefit are not even remotely the same thing.
Also, the word you are looking for sociology which is the study of human behaviour in groups. But I'm pretty sure you don't consider sociology a science since the field has produced so many conclusions you personally won't accept.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Runaway1956 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:00PM
I don't know you - you don't know me - you're just some anon fool on the internet - nothing you say counts.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:17PM
That's the best online interpretation of puting your fingers in your ears and going "na-na-na-na I can't hear you!" that I've ever read.
You are a fuckin riot!
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:45PM
As if some nobody named Runaway1956 is any more credible than AC. Or anyone for that matter. Take a note son: We're all nobodies.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:14PM
> Take a note son: We're all nobodies.
Speak for yourself son.
I'm Henry Kissinger.
I read soylent for the informative geopolitical commentary.
Runaway1956, VLM, Khallow, TheMighytBuzzard, Jmorris and Bradley13 are some of the most educated and insightful writers I have ever encountered. It is an honor to learn at their knee.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Wednesday December 07 2016, @05:14PM
Bark! Bark!
[wags tail]
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:18PM
Conspiracy theories and people cooperating for their benefit are not even remotely the same thing.
The obvious rebuttal here is that all of the examples of cooperation given were conspiracies. Let's look at the actual definition:
1. A secret plan by a group to do something unlawful or harmful:
1.1 The action of plotting or conspiring:
Now let's look at the examples:
Maybe two children conspired to trick you into believing they did their chores/homework/whatever, so that they could have their candy.
Covert plotting? Check. Not doing chores/homework/whatever might not be a great harm. Subverting the rule of the parental unit might not be greatly illegal. But this still meets the definition of conspiracy as advertised.
Doctors, nurses, and family often conspire to hide the facts from terminally ill patients.
Again with the secret plans. And while the rest of us might find the intent noble, the terminally ill patient might strongly disagree that concealment of their true medical condition is harmless.
Children conspire to cheat for better grades in school.
Again, fits the definition.
So you say "You fail vocab", but he obviously does not since at least two of his three examples fits the definition and the last could.
I get the earlier post about the "anti-scientific" nature of conspiracy theories. But the grandparent has a point. There are conspiracies. The question isn't whether they exist, but how big do they get? And there's just not much point to discussing any sort of scientific basis for conspiracies without some actual conspiracies of the appropriate scale to study.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:33PM
> The obvious rebuttal
I think I'm gonna start the khallow drinking game.
Every time you say "the obvious rebuttal" everybody takes a shot.
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(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:57PM
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:12PM
> The obvious rebuttal
Drink!
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:30PM
I have a minor degree in sociology and sociology is not a science. People who do sociology are barely literate in maths. Most studies are created by what the (current) government wants to fund and consequently studies contradict each other all the time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:44PM
> People who do sociology are barely literate in maths.
People who do science are barely literate in maths. Most know the bare minimum to get by in their field.
Math is not a requirement for science. It is a requirement for a certain range of sciences, but is not for all forms of science.
A falsifiable premise does not require math.
Repeatable results do not require math.
So, another vocab fail. Unsurprising. Its always the people who consider themselves superior that fall on their faces due to sloppy thinking.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:33PM
I suppose it matters how your program of study was constituted. The sociology program where I did my master's was all math, all the time. It was quite proud to be the home of NORC (if you studied sociology, you'll have heard of them). Then, they were right next to the economists who'd collectively won a dozen or more Nobel prizes. A lot of keeping up with the Joneses to do there with quantitative methods...
I consider both those disciplines to be social sciences. "Social" because human beings make poor test subjects and will never give you the predictability you need to be a "real" science. But it is certainly not for lack of trying, lack of mathematical understanding, or loosey-goosey modeling.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by cubancigar11 on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:18AM
May be. One of my teacher was the head of some central government body, but he personally thought that boys schools promote homosexuality.
Sociology depends a lot on modelling and funnily it was sociology that taught me how measurement of variables via polling is flawed for giving wildly different results based questioner and how a question is framed. That itself is a razor that cuts through most of the publications. I am not dissing the whole discipline but a lot of "research" is borderline propaganda with bad sampling, small sample size and ridiculously in agreement with current government policies. In fact I will go out on a limb and say that every thing in sociology that is insightful is either 50 or more years old or is debunking 50 or more year old theory.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:24PM
Anthropology focuses on culture. Anthropologists abhor quantitative methods. Sociologists don't, and use the same approach and many of the tools that "real" scientists do, with the additional challenges that it's hard to get reproducibility when your subjects are self-aware, unpredictable beings, and when it's illegal and unethical to experiment on them in a way to satisfy true scientific rigor. Basically "real" scientists have it much easier.
But that's an aside.
Runaway's point still stands, I think, because people do conspire all the time, and because his examples were people who were working together to do something wrong. Believing that others do that makes it a "theory." But what I appreciate about how Runaway put it was how banal conspiracies can seem and how easy it can be to fall into one as a participant. You see one in real life, and you often can't bring yourself to believe it because that kind of thing only happens in movies, right? It doesn't help that the conspirators say it's "just business."
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:46PM
> But what I appreciate about how Runaway put it was how banal conspiracies can seem
That's because conspiracies and conspiracy theories are wholly different things.
What's the difference? Well, conspiracy theories are never banal, rarely simplistic and are so mutable as to be unfalsifiable. Ask a conspiracy theorist what it would take to convince them that their theory was false. If you even get an answer it will be something so unreasonable as to be impossible for all practical purposes.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:55PM
Are you going to pretend that rich bastards never conspire?
No, they certainly do. And frequently, particularly if it's a simple quiet lie that only a few people know about, they get away with it.
What strains credibility is when major PUBLIC figures are claimed to be involved in conspiracies that would require hundreds or even thousands of people "in the know." Nobody can keep that kind of stuff quiet... even the Mob can't maintain that sort of loyalty over years or decades that these "conspiracies" claim to be hidden. And in most of these conspiracy cases, we're not just talking about NSA operations where you claim to only have people involved who would have a high-level of clearance and be recruited for loyalty or whatever -- there would often have to be oodles of random everyday government workers or civilians who would have to be "paid off" and likely "intimidated" if not just shot and buried in a ditch somewhere.
Anthropology. Empiric evidence, if nothing else, tells us that people DO conspire to get ahead in life. Some of the theories are based on better evidence, some of them are based on complete bullshit. But, they all remain theories, unless and until proven.
Wow. I don't think I've ever seen such a concise and complete repudiation of the scientific method in one sentence. It's throwing Karl Popper and "falsifiability" completely on its head. Science generally says, "Claims are only ever theories, which may forever be incomplete (and thus never the complete "truth"), unless or until they are falsified." The burden of proof in science is on empiricism to prove that something is NOT false. For you, the burden is on the doubter, who can apparently never falsify a theory -- only prove it.
I'm not sure anymore if you're trolling or if you actually believe what you say, but this is a profoundly anti-science attitude.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:34PM
What strains credibility is when major PUBLIC figures are claimed to be involved in conspiracies that would require hundreds or even thousands of people "in the know." Nobody can keep that kind of stuff quiet... even the Mob can't maintain that sort of loyalty over years or decades that these "conspiracies" claim to be hidden.
And yet what Ed Snowden revealed seemed to indicate it does happen. And for some reason James Clapper has still not been indicted for perjuring himself in front of Congress...
I am a crackpot
(Score: 3, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:18PM
Convenient how you ignore the rest of the paragraph of that quotation from my post. If you don't see the difference between a bunch of loyal NSA operatives with secret clearances doing stuff behind closed doors vs. keeping secret a freakin' pizza parlor where the public comes in and out in broad daylight, all the apparent "clues" are readily visible for anyone to pick up on (and even appear on the menu!), and nobody apparently saw anything suspicious before now, I really don't know what to say.
And by the way, the thing that's conveniently forgotten about the Snowden thing is that there WERE leaks before then. You had Bill Binney [wikipedia.org], along with others in the early post-9/11 days which led to a 2005 New York Times expose [archive.org], which wasn't just a low-profile article -- it won a Pulitzer Prize! You had Thomas Tamm [wikipedia.org] who spoke out and was covered in 2008 in Newsweek. You had Thomas Drake [wikipedia.org], who gave details of more developments and even gave a televised interview on 60 Minutes in 2011.
And there were other more minor figures too. Snowden's revelations did NOT come from nowhere. He himself even said he was inspired by some of these previous people.
Anyone who pretends that the NSA's warrantless wiretapping hadn't been front-page news for years before Snowden obviously wasn't paying attention. Obviously Snowden produced further details, but you had at least a half-dozen high-profile leaks about the NSA's activities before Snowden came along -- and that was among supposedly loyal screened NSA operatives who were trained to keep secrets... not stuff visible on menus in a public pizza shop.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:00PM
I didn't read the original story (or "fake" story, or "conspiracy") about this pizza shop, so don't read this as a position either way. It is, however, easier to hide stuff in plain sight than you think. The apartment building across the street from me was running a brothel out of the street-level apartments. I've lived on the block almost 20 years, and it's chock full of yuppy families with toddlers. Nobody had any idea it was going on.
Even people you know really well can surprise you. I had a good friend that was the most cheerful person I knew. Until he stuck a shotgun in his mouth and ended it.
Many wrap themselves in bubbles and only see that which gets between them and what they want. Most of us only show others what we want them to see.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by curunir_wolf on Wednesday December 07 2016, @02:43AM
Well I wasn't commenting in the context of "pizzagate". Frankly I don't know what to think of it, but I'm not seeing a smoking gun, especially not as regards the pizza parlor. Then again, there have been rumors of child trafficking / prostitution in and around D.C. elites for many years, at least back to Bush Sr.'s administration. And nothing came of that.
But the entire idea that "the government is reading your email and listening to your phone calls" and tracking everyone was totally considered a wild conspiracy theory and the people claiming it was happening were ridiculed just as much as the people posting about "pizzagate" are today. That's the point. There have been people ridiculed that way throughout history that turned out to be right.
I am a crackpot
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:31PM
I find that some of the right wing conspiracy theories are no different than blind faith in something. Asking questions is hard, but believing something because it's not what the other side believes and everyone you surround yourself with approves -- then that's great! Facts be damned, I feel good about being liked by other people!
Scientific consensus is rarely achieved on faith based research.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by HiThere on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:19PM
Sorry, but denial of conspiracy theories is just as anti-scientific as acceptance of them. I know we aren't supposed to believe this, but enough actual conspiracies have come to light that just assuming that no conspiracy is pushing things is unreasonable. One needs to ask, if there were a conspiracy, what evidence would I expect to see? One also needs a good definition of what a conspiracy. Is a trade union a conspiracy? If not, why not. What about a club of business men who socialize with each other an occasionally discuss business plans, while excluding those who aren't business men (of an appropriate stature)? If not, why not.
I tend to adopt a rather loose definition and consider BOTH of my examples to be conspiracies. They are people who meet to conspire (breathe together) in an exclusive group with the intent of benefiting themselves and scant concern over whether others are damages in the process. But note that this definition includes ANY company that maintains company secrets. You may well want a tighter definition, if so, what is it? Make it explicit enough that one can apply the definition to decide whether a particular group is or is not a conspiracy. That, after all, is what makes the definition scientific.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:35PM
> Sorry, but denial of conspiracy theories is just as anti-scientific as acceptance of them.
That's a bullshit reframing of the issue.
Get this through your head: conspiracies and conspiracy theories are two distinct things with only a small amount of overlap.
Legitimate conspiracies are falsifiable. Conspiracy theories are elaborated as needed to discount any contradictory evidence.
Ask any conspiracy theorist this simple question: What would convince you that the conspiracy theory is false?
If they won't answer or their answer is outlandish, then you aren't dealing with a rational examination of evidence, you are dealing with someone operating on faith.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:58PM
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:09PM
By that logic writing "If I Did It: Confessions of the Killer" completely cleared OJ Simpson of any possible suspicion of guilt.
In the real world the stereotypical most obvious suspect is the guilt party. Their is not a series of bluffs and double bluffs, their are no triple agents, and the guilty party does not frame himself to make it look like he must be innocent.
(Score: 2) by bradley13 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:28PM
Sure, you can double-think it. And triple-think it. I'm not even sure which side of #pizzagate it would benefit. But I find the story very strange.
As far as conspiracy theories go, do recall the saying: "Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they're not out to get you." Sometimes there really are conspiracies. If not #pizzagate, then whoever might benefit from a faked attack like this. Give enough double- and triple-think, it could be either side.
Or the guy could just be a nutcase.
Everyone is somebody else's weirdo.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:53PM
Like Milo mysteriously canceling his talk on Pizzagate, saying he was told: "Not Yet"
Was that all a stunt to make PG seem more real? Or is more going on?
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:15PM
Wasn't the fake news about a faked assault by a truth warrior, conceived to discredit alternative news sites and pushing the idea that pizzagate is fake?
I am confused nao.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:03PM
Which article? This one?:https://www.buzzfeed.com/tasneemnashrulla/heres-what-we-know-about-the-pizzagate-gunman?utm_term=.jsmm1XjWQa#.eyd3bv4XP6 [buzzfeed.com]
Few quotes from said article:
According to a Facebook page that appeared to belong to him,
According to an IMDb page that appeared to belong to Welch,...
"appeared". Weasel words. Nothing is proven or concrete.
And then there is this major coincidence from IMDB:
(Filmography)
Something About Pizza (Short) 2005
The Gunman
Synopsys: A young girl comes from school hungry, but her brother left nothing of her favorite food: Pizza. Her only thought now is revenge.
So this guy also happens to have played a gunman in a short film about pizza? And it appears to have been filmed in Luxembourg. I smell a red herring.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @12:52PM
https://dcpizzagate.wordpress.com/ [wordpress.com]
Its at the stage of something really weird being covered up. What exactly, well, thats unclear. Sure is an enormous pile of coincidences and the response from "the usual suspects" to censor it has been way over the top compared to other "weird events". Therefore its almost certainly got a grain of truth in there somewhere.
(Score: 5, Touché) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:08PM
Thanks very much for that link, which I found totally useful and informative and not at all wacko tinfoil-pants-on-head the-reptilons-are-feeding-on-my-dreams internet conspiracy theory loon crazy.
(Score: 0, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:17PM
When he posts such simple and glaringly obvious bullshit like that as if it were legitimate it gives me great comfort.
That's because it confirms just how untethered the guy is from reality. How all his long racist and reactionary posts, despite being well-formed with good syntax, really are the product of a defective mind suffering from a severe reality-gap.
Unfortunately, what makes me fear for the future is that it seems like mental defectives like himself are on the rise. Looks like Reagan's legacy of deinstitutionalization is really beginning to wreck havoc on our society. Its enough to erode my belief in democracy. I still think the alternative is worse, but democracy is looking a lot less good nowadays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:13PM
I seem to recall that one of the Founding Fathers said that an educated and well-informed citizenry is essential for democracy to work. Unfortunately, VLM and all his other conspiracy-theory loving buddies are showing, in a negative sense, exactly why this is so true.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:42PM
Looks like Reagan's legacy of deinstitutionalization is really beginning to wreck havoc on our society.
Because ridiculously growing medical costs wouldn't have done it anyway.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:58PM
You didn't even try to verify one fact, did you? Just jumped right to assuming it was wrong because it sounded crazy, didn't you? You'd think you'd know better after Snowden.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:11PM
Citing snowden is the biggest cop-out ever.
For every snowden there are literally a million conspiracies that are not true.
I am especially reminded of the completely made-up satanic ritual abuse [wikipedia.org] hysteria that ruined a lot of lives.
Pizzagate is just more bitch-hunt logic. Hillary's a satan worshipping pedo so anything that 'proves' it is true, anything that does not is irrelevant.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:28PM
I see you've made up your mind on something you can neither prove nor disprove. In the words of Dean Yeager: Your theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, your methods are sloppy, and your conclusions are highly questionable. You are a poor scientist, Anonymous Coward.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:20PM
> I see you've made up your mind on something you can neither prove nor disprove.
Lolwut?
Are you talking about yourself?
Because damn, that's some hardcore denialism on your part.
It could be true. Anything could be true. Its pretty revealing to go through this thread and tally up all the people who are arguing in support of this conspiracy theory. What is the common thread here? Bitch-hunt.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:59AM
Undoubtedly, but in the end if she weighs the same as a duck...
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:15PM
Not a lot to verify, to be honest, there's just a bunch of circumstantial and often tenuous connections pulled in from all sorts of different directions. Even if we were to assume that all the individual pieces of information are true, there's not enough holding it all together to give it any credit. It's Dan Brown stuff, where if you pick the right sequence of words or letters out of the bible you can get it to quote the free software manifesto, Mein Kampf or the script to the Star Wars holiday special.
"As we can see, Trump is wearing a RED tie. Now RED is a colour often associated with communism, including such organisations as the USSR (Or, in Russian, the CCCP). Now, throughout his career Trump has had dealings with an organisation called the Casino Control Commission, or the CCC. In the 1980s, a prominent member of the Pennsylvania branch of this organisation, or the CCCP..."
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:20PM
S'what I'm saying. Don't assume. Check into it yourself.
Right at this moment, there's not a serious case by my digging but I was anything but thorough. I'm neither giving them the benefit of the doubt nor withholding it, which is where any intellectually honest person should be at this point.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:38AM
I find that there is just enough circumstantial evidence there to warrant suspicion. It's certainly not enough to justify the conclusion given, but it's not as contrived as your analogies make it out to be either. I'm not saying all the conclusions are necessarily solid, but the pizza emails are reasonable evidence that there could be something amiss there, even if it's just drugs and hookers.
Just because someone has an an elaborate conspiracy theory doesn't mean there isn't a conspiracy.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:42PM
You didn't even try to verify one fact, did you?
You mean the pictures and "pedophilia symbology" and satanic symbology? I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume that they aren't photoshoped.
The use of fucking triangles in a logo for a pizza place or a heart in a logo for a nearby charity that campaigns against child slavery is almost too much of a coincidence to deny.
I'm incredibly disappointed that the level of evidence is on the level of "folded 20 dollar bills predicted 9/11". I admit that I may have missed the really damning evidence, since I only looked through 3/4 of the page (Oh noes! A child sitting on Obama's lap at the white house).
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:16PM
You're not interested in the truth? That's fine. Go ahead on with your rose-colored glasses. Don't look for verifiable facts in the story and try to prove or disprove it. Just write it off. It's what we expect of partisan fools.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:27PM
In discussions like this, I recall a quotation I first learned on Night Court from Judge Harry T. Stone: "I try to keep an open mind, but not so open that my brains fall out."
The quote didn't originate on TV (and apparently has a long history [skeptic.com]), but I think it's apt when confronted with conspiracy theories that make all sorts of claims, most of which are provably false (and conveniently discarded from the theory after they are demonstrated to be so), and the rest of which have no hard evidence to support them.
People want to see patterns in random data, casting off any inconvenient bits of information that don't fit the pattern. We even have terms like apophenia [wikipedia.org] to describe this fundamental cognitive bias.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:58AM
If a significant portion of the claims were actually provably false, I'd agree with you. Mostly though it's supposition and evidence that, while provably true, is highly circumstantial.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:34PM
I believe that you are an intelligent person and it seems like you are genuine in your belief in some of the conclusions from that dcpizzagate site. You mention that "there's not a serious case" but that you perceive some sort of pattern from what is presented that seems fishy.
From what I've read on the site, the data that they present is not convincing and the emotional way they interpret the data hurts their credibility in my eyes. I'm used to scientific data (so my standards may be too high) but pictures of a Biden-Obama friendship bracelet, pictures of satan, pictures of logos next to "pedophilia symbology", random social media shit, and coded emails with secret messages involving handkerchiefs does not rate very high on an objective scale.
If you have time, could you write a journal where you point to the specific data that is more convincing?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday December 07 2016, @11:55AM
I could but I think it's a case of you evaluating the same data and finding it slightly less indicative of "something going on" than I do. Also, we're currently pushing hard on getting site code tuned up to where it doesn't take a dozen seconds or more to render heavily commented stories and that just ranks higher in my list of interesting/important things right now.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:04PM
I hope some more conclusive data arises one way or the other.
The problem is that, while there is obvious physical evidence and testimony that could help prove a child sex ring, I can't think of evidence that would help prove the negative. Negative witness testimony would be unreliable (due to possible coercion) and "absence of evidence is not evidence of absence".
Thanks for responding and I also appreciate what you do for this site.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:12PM
Just for fun, soak in the ambiance and look at the anecdotes while totally ignoring the narrative. That alone is kinda interesting and entertaining.
Wait, WTF, look at that weird "art" and who owns it, holy crap. Don't pay attention to the narrative that its a trophy or re-enactment of what so and so did to some kid, or some kind of self help therapy to work thru what someone did to them in their own childhood, just look at the facts or pix. There's some interesting, crazy stuff going on even if the narrative is completely wrong.
Its like reading some of the Greek classics from 2500 years ago with a very secular or at least non-pagan eye. Yeah yeah I'm not very interested in the God Apollo willed it or WTF narrative, you can kinda skim past that stuff, but its an enjoyable pile of anecdotes and events anyway. I wouldn't rely on Herodotus as a primary text for veterinary school, for example, but he tells a hell of an interesting story anyway.
Now after enjoying the facts and anecdotes and "the scene" in general think up your own narrative and see if it matches anything you heard recently.
Or another analogy, think of it like a travelogue book about an interesting, weird, foreign land. I'm not asking you to move there permanently or asking you to convert to pre-islamic egyptian religion, but just look at those pyramids and WTF about them for a bit. Impressive, aren't they? No need to convert to "UFOs made them conspiracy theory" to be impressed. You don't have to worship Ankenaton or Ma'at or egyptian cats or whatever to look at the pyramids and WTF about them a bit. I suppose if you do convert, then looking at the pyramids is even cooler, but whatever.
Its really a no lose situation. The anecdotes and events are entertaining enough in themselves that even if you don't convert religions and become a priest of the God Apollo, or a true believer in pizzagate, its still fun to look at.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:16PM
The email cited is on Wikileaks and it does say that. There is, apparently, such a thing as a "hanky code" (learn something new every day). That the emails were coded talk about pedophilia is not clear. Possible, but not established. I say possible because I'm a freemason and we employ coded language and symbols to communicate in the open. Not established, because it's highly circumstantial and means nothing without real evidence.
FWIW, I never saw, heard, or picked up on anything that connected the Clintons to pedophilia. It's also not necessary to know that they're bad people. Have we really arrived at a discursive space where somebody's really not all that bad until you can prove they're a pedophile?
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 2) by GreatAuntAnesthesia on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:23PM
> Have we really arrived at a discursive space where somebody's really not all that bad until you can prove they're a pedophile?
I'd like to think we're in a place where we don't call people pedophiles until you can prove they're a pedophile...
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Serial_Priest on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:11PM
Another summary of the suspicious circumstances that draws parallels to past child abuse and trafficking cases may be found here: http://www.counter-currents.com/2016/12/pizzagate/ [counter-currents.com]
There is a fair bit of confirmation bias in the evaluation of the Podesta emails, but there is also a lot of smoke.
What seems unambiguous is that Comet Pizza is uncharacteristically well-connected and influential in elite circles and that most involved have a taste for sexually suggestive artwork and music involving children and simulated child abuse.
(Related - as a DC resident I can confirm that a significant number of people in government/finance are involved in sexual degeneracy and thrill-seeking, and there are generally rumors of children being "available" though I've never seen confirmation.)
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:52PM
most involved have a taste for sexually suggestive artwork and music involving children and simulated child abuse.
Some of the "art" stuff the owner of the CP restaurant and Podesta's family publicly admits to owning don't even bat an eye in DC but would be probable cause for a CP warrant anywhere else. Which leads to the puzzle of how much of the massive over the top backlash is due to actually covering up a CP ring or abuse ring and how much is merely a PR exercise in that they're guilty of nothing other than being utter sexual degenerates which probably sells very well in DC and certain "urban areas" but not so well in 99% of the country.
The situation is nearly perfectly analogous to the Marilyn Monroe/JFK situation. Probably JFK or the SS did not kill her and had nothing to do with her death. However in the short run any discussion of that conspiracy had to be almost violently suppressed (maybe was violently suppressed?) because no one knew JFK was going to be assassinated (well, thats another topic) and he was secretly fucking her brains out on a regular basis which if that got out at that time, probably wouldn't help his re-election campaign, so the whole murder conspiracy thing had to be stomped on which meant it must have been true given the extreme reaction. Now that his sex life with her is public knowledge and not controversial as an accepted fact, nobody gives a shit about loony conspiracy theories so they naturally die out. JFK was basically the behavior prototype of Bill Clinton, except he never got shot and some of the chicks didn't enjoy his company (he must not be very good, or not as good as JFK was) leading to rape allegations the morning after etc.
Likewise there's something going on at high levels in the D party that is probably not illegal CP or abuse, but there is a possible story lead about something legal or semi legal where Huma and/or her estranged husband are having group recreational activities "rug munching" or whatever with bill and hillary, or the podestas and/or the people running the pizzeria have some kind of mental issue where they love children in an inappropriate way, although they've never acted on their urges beyond buying disgusting "art" that if it didn't come from famous and well connected progressive "artists" would get incinerated as the CP that it is. I'd say given the over the top censorship reaction there's about 100% odds there's something disgusting but legal going on leading to massive censorship overreaction against the conspiracy. Its not illegal if Huma and Hillary find each others companionship to be highly satisfying but it would make an uncomfortable TV infotainment scandal show headline.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:02PM
In the end, your 'best case scenario' is probably closest to the truth. My problem with the whole hog satanic pedo ring theory is logistics. Where do they get all the kids and where do they dispose of the bodies? No way you have recognizable world leaders buggering kids and letting them live to testify so they would have to be sacrificing them to Satan and disposing of a lot of bodies. That makes for a lot of moving parts in an operation that would have had to have been operating for decades right in the heart of every Western Capital.
Of course if we really want to think dark, Pedo rings HAVE been turning up in the heart of Western Civ for some time now. Norway just broke one up involving elected officials. And isn't it interesting how little international coverage it got. The BBC comes to mind. The Madeleine McCann incident is really spooky, that wanted poster really does resemble the Podestas and Weiner, who really (still not as certain about Weiner and 'his' police sketch isn't as close a fit) were in the area at the time and they really were staying with a guy who was just arrested on pedo charges. Juts how much circumstantial evidence does #pizzagate need to dig before we have to say there is some fire inside the cloud of smoke.
All of which leads to the inescapable conclusion that whether it is true or not we will never be told. Trump might quietly clean it up, but there would be no public mention. If true this story would throw society into an upheaval far worse than if saucers landed on the White House lawn.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:09PM
Not disagreeing with any of that, but the logistics are a lot simpler if its one kid per lifetime "initiation" or whatever rather than one kid every friday night with a large pepperoni with extra sausage. Might explain the weird art. Looking at art rather than doing. One kid every new years celebration perhaps for the whole coven or whatever they'd call themselves.
Something interesting to think about is they have a congressional page system to provide a steady stream of high school kids. Maybe they're a little old for their tastes such that the artwork leans young in reaction.
Probably going to turn out like the spirit cooking thing, which interestingly is mostly the same people. Are they actually opening gates to hell and eating human flesh, well, it seems not, merely symbolically (which is almost as bad, and for PR reasons almost seems worse).
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:38PM
> Probably going to turn out like the spirit cooking thing,
You mean a big bunch of nothing?
“just a normal menu, which I call spirit cooking. There was no blood, no anything else. We just call things funny names, that’s all,”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-intersect/wp/2016/11/04/no-john-podesta-didnt-drink-bodily-fluids-at-a-secret-satanist-dinner/ [washingtonpost.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @02:01AM
https://sli.mg/a/mdv0hG
Explain that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @04:37AM
You seem unfamiliar with the concept of performance art.
Which. I am sure, the artist would take great pleasure in.
Not unlike when an author of a fake news story finds someone who took it at face value.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:30PM
And Bill Cosby was drugging and raping women for years. Not just anonymous women, but women with clout. The dude was the poster child for family values in the 80's. His show and his comedy were wholesome entertainment.
The Belgian politician Marc Dutroux had a pedophilia operation going for years.
Just to add a couple more examples. There is too much precedence now to dismiss allegations out of hand. People in power often commit ghastly crimes.
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:53PM
Ugh. Base rate fallacy for the fail.
Just because there are a handful of high profile cases out of a population of tens, if not hundreds of thousands, does not validate something outlandish supported by nothing more than coincidence.
The cosby case was well known long before it broke in the public, even had been to court and settled with previous victims more than a decade prior.
And Dutroux was not a politician. He was a damn car thief who had been in and out of prison and liked to tell tall tales that were completely unsupported by evidence.
Come on man, get a grip on reality.
(Score: 2) by wisnoskij on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:39PM
This. Some of the people drawing conclusions and parallels are either alien conspiracy stupid or paid to cloud the issue. But their are serious questions that should be answered.
Did Obama actually pay a hundred thousand dollars to get hot-dogs shipped in from Chicago? I had heard at one point that the White House does not allow outside catering, which makes sense from a security perspective (is this true)?
Their are a series of other similar questions, like does John Podesta actually own a secret hot dog stand in Hawaii, and why?
Why do a whole bunch of diverse elites seem to worship (???presumably tongue in cheek???) some sort of satanic old world god of child sacrifice?
Why are paintings of child torture and sexual abuse legal, and why is anyone is the public spotlight willing to be friends with people who make and collect that sick shit?
What is with the Lolita Express? Is that a conspiracy theory, or does it legit exist and have the Clinton's taken rides on it?
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:18PM
Did Obama actually pay a hundred thousand dollars to get hot-dogs shipped in from Chicago? I had heard at one point that the White House does not allow outside catering, which makes sense from a security perspective (is this true)?
Their are a series of other similar questions, like does John Podesta actually own a secret hot dog stand in Hawaii, and why?
If they're using their own money, who the fuck cares?
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:45PM
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:18PM
Use your words
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 2) by jimtheowl on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:10PM
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gidds on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:38PM
...that everything can look weird, if you dig down far enough, produce enough material out of context, and let people fill in the gaps themselves.
Hence the quote [brainyquote.com] commonly (but perhaps wrongly) attributed to Cardinal Richelieu.
Similarly, it seems Freud may never have said "Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar" [quoteinvestigator.com], but there's still a lot of truth in it.
That's why we have courts and are required to prove that people committed crimes before sentencing them, because we know how deceptive appearances can be.
In fact, because deceiving ourselves is so easy, we have a whole huge field of endeavour called 'science' based on trying to avoid it!
So no, just because something looks 'really weird', and like a 'pile of coincidences', doesn't mean there's anything wrong. There might be something going on that's related but mostly innocent and blown out of all proportion; there might be something completely unrelated and innocuous; there might be nothing at all. Especially if some of the things that look 'really weird' are the results of misunderstandings, exaggeration, misrepresentation, and/or outright invention. But even if not.
[sig redacted]
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:03PM
The value of that link is the article isn't even true.
which falsely claims Clinton and her campaign chief John Podesta were running a child sex ring from the restaurant's backrooms
has nothing to do with it.
It would be like claiming Bill Clinton and Monica invented the quote about sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Not even talking about the right people, but the media people are very certain about whats right or wrong, which is weird.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:50PM
> The value of that link is the article isn't even true.
You sure put in a lot of work to avoid addressing contradicting evidence that might pop your bubble.
You must have a lot of yourself invested in the idea of pizzagate.
What would it take to convince you that pizzagate is completely false?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:08PM
I was on /pol/ when the whole pizzaagate thing came up. Really never got interested in it but some of those Podesta emails were really creepy. I do not know when a bunch of neckbeards crossed over into generating fake news, but it seems to me that we have this whole freedom of speach thing.
Although I guess clickbait articles about the top 10 ways trump is destroying america with whatever conspiracy theories lie within is totally legit real high quality news that only CNN/MSNBC/etc are allowed to run.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:36PM
After skimming through that, I don't see how anybody can take this theory seriously. Well, unless I presume that the moon is hollow and transmitting some kind of matrix from the Sol-Thuban primary relay station near Saturn….
Why is the media giving this any airtime? I mean, it's fun shit, for sure, and well done too. The way it's all put together is expertly done. If somebody wanted a plot for a hard boiled detective adventure game, it would be very good. Maybe an X-Files spin-off.
It looks like some /b/ tards had a field day, and for whatever reason the MSM took them seriously!
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:40PM
If you click on this [npr.org] you will find npr publishing a thinly veiled advertisement for a Coursera course on stats, taught by people who do not know the difference between significance and hypothesis testing. The potential damage due to that fake news is far worse than what one gunman can accomplish. As pointed out by one of the founders of modern stats, perpetuating this confusion is country destroying stuff:
The mainstream media needs to really stop publishing this kind of content if they want to be taken seriously about "fake news".
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:49PM
If you click on this you will find npr publishing a thinly veiled advertisement for a Coursera course on stats, taught by people who do not know the difference between significance and hypothesis testing.
Seems like you have an axe to grind with coursera or maybe the particular instructors on that course.
Either way, I find your criticism and especially your exaggeration completely disproportionate. If some innumerate gets slightly more numerate via a free online intro to stats course that's not going to cause guided missiles to miss their target.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:06PM
Not at all. I have never heard of the instructors and no experience with Coursera. I do have an "axe to grind" (correctly) with the people who teach others pseudo-statistics though, so much (of my own, and everyone else's) time has been wasted due to that. The threat is not only real, it has been here for decades and the damage is being done. Just because lots of other people are teaching pseudo-stats doesn't reduce the responsibility they have to stop. By the way, the idea "it doesn't matter" or is "someone else's fault" is an old one at the center of the mess:
Now, NPR can't be expected to have expertise in this, but they should be able to label advertisements as such. That is their part of the responsibility.
(Score: 1) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:44PM
If true, that means the practice of pushing a new edition every 3 years or so is worse than I thought.
Psychology and computing science may be an exception, but undergraduate courses (should) rarely change enough to justify a new edition every few years.
Of course I noted that my post 1991 Economics textbooks changed the definition of economics to imply that the free-market is the 'correct' economic system. They defined economics as:
It took me a while to figure out what was wrong with that statement. Our wants are not unlimited because having unlimited wants would require infinite mental capacity. Our wants are subject to the "law of diminishing returns" just like everything else.
While I am ranting about textbooks, there is another problem with frequent editions: They do not include erratas. I tried contacting the publisher of a computer repair text-book to asked them about their errata, They don't keep one, so I did not report the 7 errors my classmates and I found.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @12:07AM
They defined economics as:
The study of how (society) allocates their limited resources to satisfy their unlimited wants
It took me a while to figure out what was wrong with that statement. Our wants are not unlimited because having unlimited wants would require infinite mental capacity.
I'm not sure why you think that would be required. Certainly if you take "unlimited wants" to mean an infinitely large number of desires, it would take infinite mental capacity to enumerate them. But "unlimited" can mean more than one thing; instead of interpreting it as "an infinitely long list of desires" (which is obviously foolish, so I assume you're not doing it), we should probably assume it refers to the magnitude of each individual desire, i.e. we cannot state any finite quantity of resources, such that every "want" of (any member of) society can be fulfilled by that quantity of resources.
If you give everybody a Trek starship, somebody will want at least two (one to fly around in, one to blow up!). Give everyone a solar system, and somebody will want his name spelled out in supernovae. Give everyone a universe, and somebody wants a universe and a pony. Thinking of these examples certainly didn't take mental capacity proportional to the ludicrosity of the wants in question, because we're just manipulating symbols, and the symbol for the universe is no larger or harder to handle than the symbol for a starship.
Our wants are subject to the "law of diminishing returns" just like everything else.
I'm not sure you understand the law of diminishing returns; it applies specifically to a production process with multiple inputs, and says that when holding all but one input steady, and increasing that input, you will eventually get lower output per unit of that input. As an example, inputs could be workers (labor) and drill presses (capital) -- if you have 5 workers, and 10 drill presses, adding another worker might increase productivity 20%, but eventually (somewhere around 10-20 workers, depending on how much time is spent actually drilling widgets, vs. sharpening drills, handling raw and finished widgets, etc.), you stop seeing proportional increases in output. (Notably, the law does not say that at some point you will necessarily see a net decrease, or even no net increase -- just that the net increase will be less than proportional, and thus that the money spent on the last worker would have been more profitably put towards an additional drill press.)
I'm struggling to apply this to the idea of unlimited wants... All I can think of is that you're considering desire as one input to a process, whose output is... personal satisfaction (I guess?), and suggesting that increasing one's desires will eventually lead to decreased satisfaction per want. I'm not sure that model is particularly helpful or valid, but assuming it is, it still doesn't indicate that wants are limited. After all, if the other inputs to that process come from the "limited resources", and thus cannot be increased when it would be economically optimal to do so, your only option is to increase the one input that is not fixed, and accept the increase in output you get, even though that increase is less than proportional.
Alternatively, if you're considering wants to be the output of a production process (and I have no clue what resources you imagine as inputs), the law of diminishing returns only suggests that increasing one input out of balance with the rest will have decreasing per-unit yield in wants. But that doesn't imply decreasing total wants, and it doesn't apply at all if all inputs are increased together.
If you do understand the law properly, and didn't mean to apply it in either of those ways, I guess you'll have to explain what you did mean, because I'm stumped.
(Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:35PM
Or maybe they got suckered by a cleverly-written press release presented as "news." It happens when two generations of journalists have been taught that "reporting" means "grab something juicy off the AP Wire!!!"
Washington DC delenda est.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:41PM
I am of the opinion that stories like pizzagate are new forms of electronic warfare. The trolls are taking it to the next level. I'm betting who ever is behind this is ecstatic that they got the crazies riled up to the point where a mentally disturbed person went into a family pizzeria and fired a gun. It's either a sick game someone is playing or we are looking at something bigger and well organized (conspiracy alert!).
This nation has lost its fucking mind.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:54PM
Then you haven't bothered to do your own investigation and fact-check anything. You just assumed that because it sounds outrageous that it must be fake. Remember "the NSA is spying on everyone"? Yeah, not so fake even though you were a tinfoil-hat-wearer if you mentioned it pre-Snowden.
Yes, there is a lot of confirmation bias and even more supposition. There's also a fuckton of coincidence in the provable facts if nothing shady is going on.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:20PM
Ever heard of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon [wikipedia.org]? I bet someone as high profile as Clinton will connect to everything well under six degrees. Especially if you're going through online social networks where every tweet, post, like and event makes thousands of connections.
compiling...
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:23PM
Not the same at all. These are people the Clintons hire and socialize with regularly rather than someone who someone's brother's girlfriend's former roommate went to grade school with.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:04PM
Guilt by association is tricky. DC is pay-as-you-go social club. Industry, commerce, politics, crime... There so many people running in the same circles that you just can't judge the nature of a relationship based on a paycheck or social gathering.
The Bushs and the Bin Ladens ties are a good example: Very big families with lots of money and politics going back 40 years.
The Clintons and Trumps aren't immune from this. It's simply statistically more likely the more ties you have to associate yourself with corruption. Take a police officer: All their friends are cops. Hence, they're more likely to be friends with a corrupt cop. Now, multiply this over border crossing trades, dealing with foreign dictators, assassinations, regulations... It's a dirty game filled with dirty players.
Specifically regarding Clinton, there's already have enough to convict her over the leaks. All this child-abuse nonsense smells like a calculated attempt to divert resources and prolong the investigation into dead-ends. Just enough breadcrumbs to have the police running in circles until the masses forget about her real crimes. Now that, that's a conspiracy theory I can believe.
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:50PM
... and if it turns out that the original cop was friends with a corrupt cop and was aware of the corruption without taking steps to correct it, then both are culpable.
The sheer number of convicted pedophiles in Podesta's social circle is alarming.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:44PM
How do you fact check bullshit?
Iv'e looked at the evidence and so far it goes like this: "Look at this email. It makes no sense without context. So we superimpose supposed child rape context and it looks like it fits. So it must be true." For all we know, the emails are completely fake. There isn't any hard such as video, pictures or audio. Nothing but easily faked emails and people reaching really fucking hard to try and connect the dots. It's all hearsay based on easily faked evidence.
Lets look at some other "evidence" shall we?
"Someone used the word farm which must make them pedos because some documentary back in the 80's referred to a child trafficking operation as the farm."(I'm paraphrasing) By that logic, every farmer in the USA must fuck kids. Hell, I guess my friends parents who started a little farm must be pedos too since they now refer to their property as a farm.
But wait, it gets better! "Look at the star and moon on the pizza sign! there is a star and moon on this picture of Satan so they must be devil worshipers!" I'm surprised they didn't connect the star and moon to Islam. Would have been much better since Muhammad was supposedly a pedo himself. That would have been much more lulzy.
Then we got to a spiral triangle symbol, one I've seen in art and earrings, is linking another pizza joint which happens to have a spiral triangle logo. As if the fucktards forgot the shape of a fucking pizza slice.
And crossed ping pong paddles look like a butterfly child love logo?
Or how about James Alefantis sounds like J’aime les enfants which means I love children in French. By that logic, Dick Butkus is a butt sex freak hiding in plain sight.
This whole thing is a sham and I cant believe you would consider such flimsy evidence. What ever happened to innocent before guilty? Seems no one gives a fuck about proper and fair justice. It's all torches and pitchforks. Salem witch trials all over again. Have we learned nothing?
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:40PM
I posted AC? This is what happens when you post and have a an awful head cold. Two fuck ups in a row and an unclosed block quote. Sheesh. I should go home.
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:12PM
I've read it. There are verifiable facts presented. Some I've even verified. Is it a solid case? Hell no. Is there a verifiable state where either something fishy as hell going on or one massive string of coincidences happened? Yup.
I get that you don't want to believe all the guys supporting you are rotten sons of bitches but if you're closed to the possibility that they are you're a fool.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 1) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:35PM
I agree with your analysis.
"Look at the star and moon on the pizza sign! there is a star and moon on this picture of Satan so they must be devil worshipers!" I'm surprised they didn't connect the star and moon to Islam. Would have been much better since Muhammad was supposedly a pedo himself. That would have been much more lulzy.
I'll do a little groundwork on this theory. The image depicted is of Baphomet, which is derived Pan, the fertility god and according to the link I'm about to put Cernunnous, another nature/fertility figure. I went to Wikipedia which gives a cite of 1098 for the first use of Baphomet, but I found this page [pneumatikos93.com] that attempts an etymology:
…There has been quite a lot of speculation as to the origin of the name of Baphomet. Indries Shaw, a Sufi scholar claimed it originated from the Arabic term abu fi ‘hamat, meaning ‘father of wisdom’ or ‘father of understanding’, explaining also that the Arabic term Ras el ‘fahmat means ‘head of knowledge’. And according to author Joshua Seraphim the Arabic word for father also translates into ‘source’ or ‘chief seat’, relating it to the great Sufi healer and martyr, Husain ibn Mansur al ‘Hallaj, who was crucified and beheaded in 922 A.D.
Both Wikipedia and that page give alternate etymologies, so it's not completely concrete, but it would seem plausible given Wikipedia's reference from 1098 [wikipedia.org]:
The name Baphomet appeared in July 1098 in a letter by the crusader Anselm of Ribemont:
Sequenti die aurora apparente, altis vocibus Baphometh invocaverunt; et nos Deum nostrum in cordibus nostris deprecantes, impetum facientes in eos, de muris civitatis omnes expulimus.
As the next day dawned, they called loudly upon Baphometh; and we prayed silently in our hearts to God, then we attacked and forced all of them outside the city walls.
I could see “Baphometh” being a corruption of “abu fi ‘hamat.” So we have a good link to Islam via the Crusades, even though the image shown with the moon iconography wouldn't show up until 1856 during a revival of occult interest. From the first link:
The image above [of Baphomet] was created by Alphonse Louis Constant under the pseudonym of Eliphas Levi Zahed, and published in a two volume book titled Dogme et Ritual de la Haute Magie, in 1856. The English title is Transcendental Magic: It’s Doctrine and Ritual, as translated by Arthur Edward Waite, a Freemason and esoteric author. But the literal translation is The Dogma and Ritual of High Magic.
That's good enough for a wild-eyed theory about devil-worshipers sexually abusing children in rituals meant to bring about the anti-Christ and New World Order, etc. (Organized through a pizza place!)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:56PM
> I am of the opinion that stories like pizzagate are new forms of electronic warfare.
Well over a year ago I submitted a story about "fake news" to this site:
Fake ISIS Attack on Louisiana Chemical Plant [soylentnews.org]
Looks like they were just learning the ropes and have now significantly upped their game.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:58PM
Essay test -- how is this "Pizzagate" different from swatting?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swatting [wikipedia.org]
> This article is about the act of fraudulently calling emergency services to another person's address. For the killing of houseflies, see Flyswatter.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:42PM
I leave somebody else to write the essay. I think it constitutes online harassment. There's also a difference between a group of people in combat armor, fully authorized by the government, breaking down the door of a private residence and one guy firing one shot in a business open to the public.
(Score: 2) by EvilSS on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:03PM
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:04PM
God dammit. I posted instead of previewing.
Anyways, the reason I say electronic warfare is simply because you can rile up people to the point of inciting violence using so-called "fake news". Don't like someone or something? Spread false rumors until someone passionately insane enough gets angry and does your dirty work for you. You get off scot-free because you didn't directly incite violence. You find a story and set it on fire, it may smolder out or it may turn into a fire storm. Just keep pumping this feedback loop until something big like a shooting happens. It's a goal, a bragging right. "We got someone to fire a gun in a pizza joint! LOL!" Whats the next level of Lulz? Arson? Murder? Mass murder? Terrorism? Full blown war?
And I'm wondering if this truly is for teh lulz or if there is an organization behind it. Anonymous, alt-right, 4chan, etc. are all the same people and there is a possibility that they have been infiltrated by agencies, foreign or domestic, to purposefully manipulate people on a massive scale. They don't have to be government either. Yea, yea, sounds like another conspiracy but you can't rule out that possibility.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:14PM
Russia's "troll army" [soylentnews.org] has been well documented. They pay those guys scraps. It would be easy for them to throw a couple of people into sites like 4chan just to stir up shit.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:22PM
The Yellow Press gave us war with Spain 120 years ago.
(Score: 3, Informative) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:24PM
Anyways, the reason I say electronic warfare is simply because you can rile up people to the point of inciting violence using so-called "fake news".
Yeah, like the fake Planned Parenthood videos from about a year ago. 3 people are dead over that one.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:59PM
they got the crazies riled up
Speaking of riled up crazies, a week or two ago the memes of "open borders are the best" and "religion of peace" got nine people in Ohio run over by car and slashed up by knife and the dude doing it gunned down.
This week we got a riled up crazy with the memes of "pizzagate" shot a hole in the floor, probably ruining one expensive floor tile and scaring the hell out of a bunch of people, but nobody got hurt not even the shooter.
Now we can observe what the left wing media is freaked out about compared to observed actual societal harm.
This nation has lost its fucking mind.
I would agree with you, although apparently the "meme-itic" danger of pizzagate is pretty minimal compared to other toxic memes in the meme-o-sphere given that its right up there with, like, homeless guy pees in alley, or getting a parking ticket for illegal parking.
There are dangerous memes that hurt and kill people; not pizzagate, so far.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:19PM
Speaking of riled up crazies, a week or two ago the memes of "open borders are the best" and "religion of peace" got nine people in Ohio run over by car and slashed up by knife and the dude doing it gunned down.
It is amazing that you see how your own believed-in propaganda is exactly the same as ISIS propaganda. Both of them animate people who suffer from poor self-esteem and are poorly moored to reality and eventually the most susceptible of them take action in the physical world. That's exactly the point I've made on numerous occasions. Its the net of a thousand lies chewing up and spitting out the most gullible among us. It doesn't really matter what the specific conspiracy is, its like there is a personality type that is much more susceptible to propaganda.
Except somehow you see that identical phenomenon as an exoneration of the lies you believe in. It so damn weird how you practically rub your own nose in the falsehood of your conspiracy theory and yet come away believing in that conspiracy even stronger.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:06PM
This whole site is full of people with mental issues and poor self esteem. This is what and who trolls are. And I should know, I am the same person. I used to be angry, very angry. But I woke the fuck up after taking a good hard look at myself in the mirror. Why did I hate minorities? Why did I spread lies? Why did I troll? I hated myself. That's why. Sure I was robbed by blacks, it was just three of them. Three different people who all share the same thing: they're angry. I'm still angry but mostly angry at myself for allowing myself to simmer in hate for the better part of a decade and blame everyone else but myself.
The big mouthed ass holes on this site are still angry. And there are a hell of a lot of other people all over who are angry. I get it. I really do. But the anger has blinded many, including myself, into focusing it on the wrong subjects so as to distract us from the real issues. Wake up people. Wake the fuck up!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:27PM
Use the machine to spread the message: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wauzrPn0cfg [youtube.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @05:01AM
The worst type of zealot is the reformed.
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday December 07 2016, @06:48PM
Eh, not a zealot. Just calling out bullshit for what it is.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @09:39PM
> The worst type of zealot is the reformed.
Er, no. That's literally the opposite of a zealot.
The actual saying is, "There's no zealot like a convert. [google.com]"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:24PM
"This week we got a riled up crazy with the memes of "pizzagate" shot a hole in the floor, probably ruining one expensive floor tile and scaring the hell out of a bunch of people, but nobody got hurt not even the shooter."
The only thing I can conclude from that fact, is that the shooter was white.
Now imagine the crazy shooter was not white. How many bullet holes do you think he would get?
(Score: 5, Insightful) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:15PM
Full fucking stop. That kid didn't go nuts because people defended a majority of Muslims who aren't violent or immigrants. That kid was incited by the same kind of propaganda as pizzagate. He was convinced that people were out to get him because of his religion. This kid is not much different than the pizza shooter. He read into a false narrative, believed it, and acted on it.
You know its getting bad when you go out of your way to downplay a shooting in a restaurant because no one was hurt. You live in a really fucked up reality bubble, don't you? Hello! McFly! These are the same kinds of incidents incited by the same kind of propaganda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @12:08AM
Where was the "good guy with a gun" that should have shot him?
(Score: 2) by fido_dogstoyevsky on Wednesday December 07 2016, @05:28AM
Where was the "good guy with a gun" that should have shot him?
He was convinced that HE was the "good guy with a gun".
It's NOT a conspiracy... it's a plot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @01:25AM
I'm betting who ever is behind this is ecstatic that they got the crazies riled up to the point where a mentally disturbed person went into a family pizzeria and fired a gun.
It was just an individual attacker. Most conservatives are peaceful and lovely individuals. The Qura...err subreddit does not advocate for this according to PizzaGate scholars. You are a racist against conservatives. #NotAllCoservatives
(Score: 3, Informative) by wisnoskij on Tuesday December 06 2016, @01:49PM
A conspiracy theory is not fake news. Most notably because a conspiracy theory is a made up of bucket loads do verifiable facts, and controversial opinion they draw from these facts is clearly marked as an opinion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:01PM
Most notably because a conspiracy theory is a made up of bucket loads do verifiable facts, and controversial opinion they draw from these facts is clearly marked as an opinion.
Well, an awful lot of what fox news reports is 'just' opinion. Should they be renamed to "fox controversial opinion" then?
I'm serious. Fox news does have a more than decent news reporting arm, but they love to mix their opinion in to the reporting in such a way that an uncritical viewer would have a hard time distinguishing fact from opinion.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:36PM
I just call them Faux News as I think it more accurately reflects what they are. Or, you could just call them the propaganda arm of the GOP; that works too.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:36PM
Or you could call the GOP the political wing of Fox news.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:27PM
opinion they draw from these facts is clearly marked as an opinion.
No, it isn't. That's a huge part of the problem.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:01PM
This is the same Guardian that recently published this:
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/28/alt-right-online-poison-racist-bigot-sam-harris-milo-yiannopoulos-islamophobia [theguardian.com]
You really want to start preaching about fake news? That giving Sam Harris's arguments consideration will lead to "online radicalization". How precipitously close a moral, righteous cliche of liberalism came to becoming a member of that most evil alt-right? Because there is absolutely no legitimacy to right-wing views whatsoever.
I've actually studied a bit on war propaganda. One of the bits that people get consistently wrong is that it isn't simply preying upon people's fears (fuck, advertising does that, and most people ignore it completely), but to paint a worst case scenario from a kernel of truth.
Stories such as these:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2014/07/07/a-big-political-cover-up-of-1980s-pedophile-ring-in-u-k-parliament/?utm_term=.086089bd9fd4 [washingtonpost.com]
http://www.veteranstoday.com/2016/03/22/uk-begins-coverup-of-scalia-paedophile-ring-inquiry/ [veteranstoday.com]
at least inform the possibility of a coverup, nor is it only the right that engages in such tactics
http://www.whatreallyhappened.com/WRHARTICLES/Franklin/FranklinCoverup/franklin.htm [whatreallyhappened.com]
Especially given the tenuous and tedious articles published about Trump recently, pointing the finger of "fake news" is going to leave several media sources with their pants down. The whole thing has the feel of a witchhunt, and I am dismayed at the gish gallop the media has chosen to engage in.
Even more that SN is becoming a proxy for the idiocy at large.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:21PM
+1 Underrated Post
I am a huge fan of Milo, there is no way any of the loonies on the left can win an argument with him based on facts and logic, so they result to hyperbole attacks claiming that even listening to his arguments is WRONG. I watched video after video of a femi-nazi ambush of Milo, and he always turns it around on them. They cannot win, and it drives them insane.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:05PM
I don't even like Milo. I find him to be a blowhard. Same with Harris.
But occasionally, they do make good points.
But that is a pretty long way away from thinking they are some Svengali-like characters, able to corrupt the minds of all that hear them. This is the level of absurdity we are dealing with now.
And most who aren't heavily invested in either narrative (although being moderate is synonymous with being alt-right iat the moment, so maybe there is a point) see this as obvious censorship under the guise of "it's for your own good". If you really want to talk about the start of fascism, it isn't Trump, it's this.
When Micah Johnson went on to kill cops in Dallas, BLM supporters were quick to point out how he was obviously mentally ill, and that it had nothing to do with them.
That this most recent shooting is somehow different just reeks of lies and hypocrisy.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:33PM
> although being moderate is synonymous with being alt-right
If you consider "white nationalism" to be moderate, you aren't moderate.
> When Micah Johnson went on to kill cops in Dallas, BLM supporters were quick to point out how he was obviously mentally ill, and that it had nothing to do with them.
That logic only works if you believe that BLM's issues are also a falsehood.
Which would be in line with believing that white nationalism is a moderate belief. So I guess you cleared that up!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:48PM
Indeed. I like to think of myself as being a Christian evangelical whose politics is center-right. And by center-right I mean the real center-right, not the abomination that the GOP has transmogrified itself into. I want nothing to do with the alt-right. It offends me that anyone would think to equate the two. Anyone who thinks that "being moderate is synonymous with being alt-right" doesn't have a clue what they are talking about.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:23PM
> Stories such as these:
What is it with the crazies citing articles that contradict their thesis as proof of their thesis?
You linked to articles describing how the "pedo ring" in the UK parliament was hysterical over-reaction that was not supported by the evidence.
And that's supposed to prove that an editorial saying that hysterical religious stereotyping has real consequences for innocent people should have said, "oh maybe that religious stereotyping might be legitimate?"
The only way your bullshit makes sense if you start with the premise that religious bigotry is appropriate.
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:34PM
There's one glaringly obvious reason that first link isn't "fake news."
I wonder if you can spot it.
It starts with an "O", in bold, at the very top of the page, and it actually appears twice.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:56PM
So, wait. Are you trying to say that the events described didn't take place? That this more akin to some performance art?
Or you trying to say that commentary isn't news. Any guess why it is appearing on the Guardian's website then?
I also note you are the submitter of the original story. Any possibility your own biases are clouding your judgment on the issue?
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:24PM
So, wait. Are you trying to say that the events described didn't take place? That this more akin to some performance art?
What events? Did you even look at the first link? It's clearly an opinion piece describing his thoughts on some crap he saw on the interwebs. Are you claiming he didn't see some crap on the interwebs?
Or you trying to say that commentary isn't news. Any guess why it is appearing on the Guardian's website then?
Yes, that's exactly what I am saying. It is clearly labeled an opinion piece in the opinion section. It's on the Guardian website because they have an opinion section.
I also note you are the submitter of the original story. Any possibility your own biases are clouding your judgment on the issue?
Yes, I am biased towards objective reality.
(Score: 2) by Bill Dimm on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:00PM
Except that, if you believe him, the "opinion" was written by Godfrey Elfwick [twitter.com], who was trolling. Check out his description of himself on his Twitter account.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:26PM
Either that, or the satirist is trolling you.
He made the mistake of offering up as "proof" an identical copy of the article, right down to the punctuation, claiming that he submitted that. The chance that a major newspaper wouldn't make at least some stylistic and syntax changes before publication is pretty small. Sure, its possible that he followed the guardian's style guide perfectly. But that's a big reach.
I think it much more likely that someone who has never had any work published in a newspaper would assume that's how it works. A guy who's some total of work has been self-published would know nothing of the role of an actual editor.
(Score: 2) by jmorris on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:37PM
You are making the mistake of thinking we still live in the day when newspapers had editors, fact checkers and all that. Downsized decades ago. These days even the NYT publishes horrid grammar errors, spelling mistakes, obvious factual errors, even allows 'fake journalists' to publish fiction under their banner for years and when these are pointed out they will admit they lack the resources they once had. It gets far worse as you move down the food chain. Read some copy at cnn.com sometime, you will be appalled; it is like they took the live closed caption stream, spent a couple of minutes fixing the most obvious glitches and then hit publish. Just blogs now, some have bigger budgets but also attempt to produce so much more content they amount of effort going into each post is getting really close to being the same minimum. The race to the bottom is over, everybody is there now.
Once the legacy media admits this, once everyone else admits this, we can move on to rebooting the whole industry. We do need an industry devoted to pounding the pavement and collecting "Who, What, When, Where, Why, How" information and publishing it; we need to find a way to make a profit doing this important work. The current players are good at punditing spinning and analyzing but nobody is feeding much actual raw data into the machine anymore. So we get an echo chamber where everybody is just pointing to somebody else's opinion piece or a press release.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:47PM
> You are making the mistake of thinking we still live in the day when newspapers had editors
You are making the mistake of telling yourself stories and believing them to be the truth.
Par for the course for someone so susceptible to conspiracy theories.
(Score: 2) by Dunbal on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:08PM
Crazy people are crazy. Dog bites man is NOT news.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @02:38PM
But voting in a conspiracy-theorist in chief is news. The guy built his political "credibility" on the birther conspiracy.
And its not like he's the only one in there, what with general flynn pushing pedo-conspiracies [cnn.com] and flynn's chief of staff (who is also his son) getting on twitter to defend the legitimacy of pizzagate [soylentnews.org] after this guy was arrested.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:23PM
As opposed to "the evil Russians hacked me/Podesta/the DNC" NOT being a "conspiracy theory".
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @03:20PM
I find it interesting to look at the wording used in the mainstream press articles on this subject.
Pizzagate is a baseless conspiracy, which falsely claims...
Pizzagate is a conspiracy theory (not a conspiracy). It is certainly not baseless. You can argue that the evidence is thin or insufficient (and I think it is), but baseless? There is nothing at all? There are several odd emails (dreaming of John Podesta's hot dog stand in Hawaii?), a pizza place with a pedo symbol in their logo, and weird Instagram posts by the owner of the pizza shops (e.g., a naked guy with slice of pizza draped over his dick). How does the Guardian know that the claims are false? They may be unsubstantiated, but false?
(Score: 2) by srobert on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:07PM
Yeah, fake news is a real problem. So what do the readers here think are legitimate sources of real news?
Foxnews
CNN
MSNBC
RT
CBS
HuffPost
Drudge
Aljazeera
SmirkingChimp
TheRegister
BBC
DemocracyNow.org
???
Tell me where do I find the REAL news? (besides soylentnews.org)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:14PM
> Tell me where do I find the REAL news?
You find "real" news anywhere there are journalistic standards and ethics. [wikipedia.org]
No news publication is perfect because omniscience is impossible. And there is a wide range in how well different publishers hold themselves accountable to those standards. But the less those standards are applied, the less "real" their reporting should be considered.
There is a certain strain of political ideology that seeks to discredit the concept of journalistic standards. Don't let those people convince you to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Because once you do that, all that's left is fact-free partisanship.
(Score: 4, Informative) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:40PM
Fake news is NOT simply biased news. Fake news is NOT simply news that might be distorted slightly, or selectively reported to promote an agenda. That may be "propaganda" and it may have its own problems, but it is NOT "fake news."
Fake news is when someone reports something literally false which they know to be false so that it has the appearance of "true" news. Putting a liberal or conservative "spin" on an event doesn't count. Actually making up an event you know didn't happen does. (E.g., "Person A did action B in city C on date D" when you know that none of that exists.)
There are many reasons people write fake news:
(1) Satire or parody (e.g., the Onion)
(2) Commercial gain (e.g., the Balkan teens who figured out they could make more ad money by making up incendiary "news" stories than by rewriting real ones; little different from someone who sells fake watches or fake designer purses)
(3) Propaganda (e.g., making up stuff that didn't happen to get your friends with similar views fired up or outraged)
(4) Hoaxes (e.g., the people who have come forward in recent weeks saying they were really trying to troll political opponents by posting hoaxes and then "outing" them for trusting BS; except this didn't work, because most people never read the debunkings)
All of those things clearly fall under the traditional definition of "fake," where someone knowingly presents a false thing as if it were legitimate. You can criticize the sources you list all you want for being non-objective at times (nobody is perfectly objective), but many of them seem to abide by a general tenet that IF they find out something they published had LITERALLY and OBJECTIVELY false facts in it, they will issue a correction.
Actual "fake news" sources not only don't file corrections -- they themselves often make up the false facts!
Since you don't seem to understand what an actual fake news site looks like, here's one [cnn.com.de]. That site is NOT affiliated or associated with CNN in any way, but it's meant to look like it is. It publishes mostly made up BS (e.g., see this story [cnn.com.de]), which you could spot if you took a few seconds and realized almost all the content on the site is created by one or two "reporters" and there's a lot of ridiculous nonsense in many of the stories. (The clues in this particular story escalate -- first you get references to "Cubs third basemen Paul Horner," except Paul Horner is the hoax author of this site, who embeds his own name in most of his stories. But the story gets even more ridiculous as you keep reading -- eventually getting to quotes from "Fappy the Anti-Masturbation Dolphin.")
This site happens to fall into categories (1) and (4), along with (2). It's created by someone who wants to create hoaxes/satire and wants to make money off of them. But you can see how people who don't look too closely at this site (e.g., when someone sends you a link to a story on there on Facebook or Twitter or whatever) and don't read beyond the headline or first paragraph might think it's not only "legit" but even is CNN.
THAT'S fake news. Except this guy at least goes to the trouble of including clues that it's all BS. Some of the people trying to do (2) or (3) don't do that, so it appears completely legit.
(Score: 2) by srobert on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:32PM
I hadn't seen that site before. I appreciate the distinction your making there. Obviously "Donald Trump says Earth is Flat" and "Why you should choose Microsoft over Linux" are preposterous headlines on that site. :-).
There is concern however that the mainstream media's sudden infatuation with "fake news" isn't necessarily aimed only at the types of sites your showing. I have heard that The Washington Post published a list of "fake news" sites (I haven't read it) which included some reliable sources.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by AthanasiusKircher on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:21PM
There is concern however that the mainstream media's sudden infatuation with "fake news" isn't necessarily aimed only at the types of sites your showing.
I agree that there is concern about that. And I too am concerned in all the discussion about Facebook and Google "stopping" fake news, perhaps with overzealous algorithms and "screeners" who might go beyond the actual "fake news" and start targeting sites that are merely slanted the "wrong" way politically or whatever.
But it seems like in many discussions online that everyone who is responding is assuming that sort of censorship is the only possible rationale for all the hubbub about "fake news." What's lost -- to my mind -- are the thousands of sites out there like the one I linked, many of which aren't merely hoaxes or parodies -- they're peddling made-up BS with no planted clues that they're just making it all up, either to get people "fired up" on one political side or the other, or even simply for commercial gain with no concern about the consequences of their actions.
Frankly, I think many who assume this is only about censorship or criticizing political sites don't have a clue about how much ACTUAL "fake news" is out there, and how much of it actually is being spread like wildfire on Facebook and Twitter. I too thought the same as you when I first started seeing these "fake news" headlines even before the election. Then I started actually reading the stories (I know, I know) rather than just reacting to what I assumed was a censorship movement... and I realized how big the actual "fake news" problem is getting.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @07:50PM
> I have heard that The Washington Post published a list of "fake news" sites (I haven't read it) which included some reliable sources.
Why haven't you read it?
I am serious. You are going to the effort of citing an article you have not actually read as proof of your conclusions.
Why don't you think that's not fucked up?
Is your standard of proof now just hearsay?
Its exactly that kind of sloppy thinking which promulgates fake news.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:13PM
You know, that's what I thought was the definition of "fake news", as well: news that is fake.
I've been reading several comments on this story, and yours was the first one that made sense.
I've actually started wondering: "is there some new kind of definition of "fake news", that I'm not aware of???"
Many of the other comments are difficult to understand for me. Like I'm missing some kind of common background knowledge.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:34PM
Many of the other comments are difficult to understand for me.
Like I'm missing some kind of common background knowledge.
There is a mindset that conflates mistakes and editorial perspective with deliberate lies.
I think it might be a defense mechanism to avoid an honest examination of how and why they've been suckered, a sort of "the liars I trust are no worse than the liars you trust" deflection. Its corrosive because it puts facts in the backseat to partisanship. I think it is psychologically more comfortable to tear down others than to do a honest self-examination of one's own failings, especially ideas that you have made significant personal investment in. Its almost like a defense of their personal identity.
(Score: 1) by Kalas on Saturday December 10 2016, @02:29AM
Surprisingly given the name, I find the Christian Science Monitor a great source of news written with little to no discernible bias either way.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @04:46PM
DC resident here.
My well-connected friend assures me that "everyone" already knows that there are elite pedos in that area, but the boys are usually around 17. Age of consent in DC is 16.
There are a lot of gays and transgendered in DC and some of them prefer young twinks. I live with one of those gays. He brings back a new ~18-20 year old male every other week.
There is so much illicit sexual activity in the city that has been flat out ignored by the 4chan neckbeards. Brothels all over the place. Backpage. Maybe they can't find it because blacks are running that stuff and they are focusing on white Clinton superfriends instead.
The "evidence" 4chan dug up is interesting, but I doubt that a pedo ring has been uncovered on Connecticut Avenue. The pedo symbols can be explained by triangles and hearts being fucking common. The creepy art can be explained by the fact that artists have always been edgy. Comet Ping Pong [wikipedia.org] is a hip establishment that serves alcohol, has ping pong tables, has live music, etc. Find some art that seems to depict abstract children being abused? You better purge centuries of art.
Call me naive but if there was something breaking the letter of the law here, it would be shut down right around now. The 4chan investigation was inspired by an "FBI anon". If that person is FBI and not multiple trolls, then it is a disgruntled and dumb agent. Many FBI agents are disgruntled over the handling of the Clinton emails. At least their agency and all others will get purged by Trump.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:31PM
> there are elite pedos in that area, but the boys are usually around 17. Age of consent in DC is 16.
You seem confused as to the definition of pedo.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @05:50PM
Hi wankey_monkey. You seem confused as to the definition of usually.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:18PM
If being usually around the age of 17 is not important, then why mention it?
He doesn't even make the effort to say their age is less than 17. For all the information in that sentence, it could mean "usually around 17, but sometimes older."
If you mean something, just say it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @12:20AM
why is it that it was mostly republicans that got outed (toe tapping, or very conservative priests and so on), and that the democrats get... anthony wiener, who seems to be straight? He sure screwed himself up, but he doesnt stay in the news for more than a few weeks per incident.
Do democrats in elected office just like lots of normal sex? I guess that's why it doesnt make quite the same headlines as a total anti-gay guy getting caught with an escort with expenses paid by the republican party.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @03:35AM
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/mike-rogers-outed-gay-republicans-108368 [politico.com]
There was a motive to out publicly homophobic and privately homosexual Republicans that didn't exist in the case of most Democrats.
Now Republicans are forced to be privately homophobic and the issue is considered settled.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @06:17PM
Just make a fake pizza parlor.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Tuesday December 06 2016, @08:40PM
Dafuq happened to the US, and Dafuq happened to SN?
The news was weird enough, but this thread is insane.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:00PM
Just look at the list of people who are believers in the conspiracy.
That tells you everything you need to know.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday December 06 2016, @09:57PM
"Fake news" is a dangerous phrase being used by the MSM to dismiss anything that goes against the mainstream narrative, regardless of whether it is true or not.
Internet giants are also collaborating to block "extremist" content.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday December 08 2016, @03:54PM
Yeah, we've been trying to push some sense into the more extreme users here but its hard to tell if anything sticks.
(Score: 2) by PinkyGigglebrain on Tuesday December 06 2016, @10:51PM
Fake news reports have been happening for how long and only now does it have "Real Consequences".
How many other people think this is going to be used to stir up support for legislation that will end up being used to censor free speech and other expressions of opinions/information that contradict the "approved" news.
"Beware those who would deny you Knowledge, For in their hearts they dream themselves your Master."
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 07 2016, @12:54AM
You know it's serious when there is a shooting, and the left wants to control the news instead of guns.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Tuesday December 06 2016, @11:07PM
I think it's a very evil act to get people riled up with fake news.
Consider the murder in India of a man suspected of eating beef:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2015_Dadri_mob_lynching [wikipedia.org]
- Somebody spread the rumor that a Muslim farmer had slaughtered a cow
- The rumor is spread over the tannoy of the local Hindu temple
- A mob forms and drags the farmer's family out of their house
- They find a piece of meat in their refrigerator. The family claims it is mutton.
- They kill the man and nearly his son.
Fake news has real consequences.