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Americans Are “Under Siege” From Disinformation

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday June 11 2017, @06:36PM   
from the just-look-at-the-comments-below dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

NASA chief scientist weighs in

Americans are "under siege" from disinformation designed to confuse the public about the threat of climate change, Nasa's former chief scientist has said.

Speaking to the Guardian, Ellen Stofan, who left the US space agency in December, said that a constant barrage of half-truths had left many Americans oblivious to the potentially dire consequences of continued carbon emissions, despite the science being unequivocal.

"We are under siege by fake information that's being put forward by people who have a profit motive," she said, citing oil and coal companies as culprits. "Fake news is so harmful because once people take on a concept it's very hard to dislodge it."

During the past six months, the US science community has woken up to this threat, according to Stofan, and responded by ratcheting up efforts to communicate with the public at the grassroots level as well as in the mainstream press.

"The harder part is this active disinformation campaign," she said before her appearance at Cheltenham Science Festival this week. "I'm always wondering if these people honestly believe the nonsense they put forward. When they say 'It could be volcanoes' or 'the climate always changes'... to obfuscate and to confuse people, it frankly makes me angry."

Stofan added that while "fake news" is frequently characterised as a problem in the right-leaning media, she saw evidence of an "erosion of people's ability to scrutinise information" across the political spectrum. "All of us have a responsibility," she said. "There's this attitude of 'I read it on the internet therefore it must be true'."

No editorial comment included.

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Original Submission

• Nope. Inheritance is a bet/vote on the heir Nope. Inheritance is a bet/vote on the heir (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @01:39AM (1 child)

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @01:39AM (#524081)

  Nope. Inheritance is a legitimate bet/vote on the heir.

  If a self-made billionaire becomes incapacitated due to illness, he may transfer control of his capital to his son until he recovers—that is a bet that the billionaire makes on his son; he bets that his son will be a good steward of the decision-making power that such capital provides... but he could be wrong. This is no different than when the billionaire dies, and transfers that capital to his son as an inheritance.

  From here [soylentnews.org]:

  • People don't just hand resources to wealthy individuals; it must be maintained.

    If some playboy inherits wealth, then his bad bets means he will squander it away—which happens all the time! Good riddance to the fool! His decision-making power is being stripped away, saving the rest of society from enduring his idiotic allocation of resources.

    More to the point, though, what if he lives on the interest from his bank balance? Well, that interest money doesn't just come from nowhere: It comes from the fact that skilled people at a bank are making good bets with the capital that is made available by the playboy; if the playboy remains profitable in this fashion, then he is making a decent bet! Society is benefiting from his stewardship of that wealth, no matter how indirect that stewardship might be.

  • Poor people are not just potentially wealthy people who have happened to fall on hard times; for one, you'll notice that poor people tend to have a whole lot more children than wealthy people, and they tend to be much more obese, and suffer from indulgence-induced medical troubles (obesity, alcoholism, lung cancer, etc.); this seems totally backwards until you realize something: The vast majority of poor people are pretty damn stupid. Guess what? IQ testing bears this out; poor people are significantly dumber than even the middle class.

    This is why Democracy is a terrible idea: The fool's vote carries as much weight as the scholar's; the more that the dregs participate in decision-making, the more a society descends into socialism, and the quicker the whole machine goes tits up. It happens over and over and over throughout history. Keep the proles away from the controls.

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• Re:Nope. Inheritance is a bet/vote on the heir (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @04:29PM

  by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 12 2017, @04:29PM (#524475)

  More insanity from the clueless department!

  "People don't just hand resources to wealthy individuals; it must be maintained."

  Once you get rich enough you can invest your money in pretty safe stuff and hire people to run everything. All the rich person has to do is make sure there bank balance matches reality close enough so they can catch embezzlement.

  #2: you're just a bigot who likes imagining that science has validated your bigotry. There have been plenty of smart people who fucked up and plenty of dumb people who have made the world a better place. Wisdom and intelligence are not always correlated. It doesn't take a genius to choose how to live, or how to set up government. Example: the current idiots trying to run things. Get your perversion of Natural Selection out of here! Go back to your basement and measure the brain capacities of dead people with some walnuts or something.

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