Timex
1767
Send it around to other folks you know.
None
1768
I’m not sure how anyone could be opposed to that. Signed and shared.
Timex
1770
Now it’s showing up as being closed as a TOS violation. Not sure exactly what is going on with it.
CraigM
1771
‘he won’t do it, so why bother causing the uproar that responding would create’
Looks like the late deciders broke heavily for Trump - and that decided the election.
Edit:
And here’s a look at what transpired in FL - a late GOP surge in the I-4 corridor did the damage:
I think the data is starting to show that anyone claiming Trump was winning all along is wrong,
(That this was at all close, let alone Trump winning is confounding, and frankly something I will never understand.)
It seems like this could answer many questions, including how the campaigns were both so surprised, and how the polls were slow to catch on to the results on the day. It also should force us look more at the late surge of Hillary-hostile ‘news’, including the FBI and the Facebook share-factories
Timex
1774
Folks are really focusing on this idea of fake news… but it’s not the problem.
The problem is that people are fucking imbeciles, and no one exercises any kind of critical thinking when consuming information. Because it’s pretty much trivial to prove the fake stories are fake. But people don’t.
You can’t fix stupid.
I’m a cynic, so I can’t say I disagree.
However… aren’t you sorta libertarian? AKA, let all these stupid, stupid people have as much freedom as possible? :D
Timex
1776
Absolutely, I don’t believe in tyranical oppression of them, just because they’re stupid.
But I can still lament their stupidity.
CraigM
1777
And advocate for changes that encourage, and enable, people to find truth more easily.
Like the filters and algorithms for Facebook? have those change to not be so favorable to fake news. Which, Facebook, you better fucking do.
Timex
1778
Honestly, I don’t think it’s going to matter. People are stupid, and value reinforcement of their preconceptions over objective truth. They’d rather be wrong, than KNOW they were wrong and forced to change.
[quote=“Timex, post:1774, topic:126864, full:true”]
Folks are really focusing on this idea of fake news… but it’s not the problem.
The problem is that people are fucking imbeciles, and no one exercises any kind of critical thinking when consuming information. [/quote]
If the public truly doesn’t care about a common shared reality for truth in news reporting, then we may have permanently digressed back to almost the civil war times in terms of partisan news. I don’t know how to deal with this new poly-reality world.
And it isn’t just on the right: I have a friend who I would basically say was broken mentally by Bernie’s loss in the primary. She now believes all MSM is completely fake, and is a voracious consumer of alternative sources, so she is now into anti-vaxx, and chemtrails, and Soros=theDevil. It is pretty much impossible to fact-check her back now.
Timex
1780
As long as individual choices have no measurable impact on survivability, intelligence isn’t really going to improve as an overall trait of society.
All this plays into what I have been saying for years, that the left needs to stop relying on common sense and critical thinking to win the day and start competing with the right’s giant media machine for the hearts and minds of America.
Since Obama was elected in 2008 we’ve had 8 years of ridiculously stupid right wing media “news” and “discussion” that anyone with half a brain should have been severely skeptical of. Yet the mantras were repeated, the articles recirculated and the memes reposted over and over and over again until enough of the 51% of eligible voters in this country who could be assed to get up and go to the polls last week actually picked Donald J. Trump to lead the free world.
What did the Democrats do during those 8 years? They laughed at the ever-growing ridiculousness of the “news” coming from places like FOX, Brietbart, Jones and others. They scoffed at the talk radio shows and TV interviews with right wing wonks, and generally acted like anyone who would believe any of it was a complete moron. America didn’t like being called a moron, even when it was being a moron, so BOOM, here we are.
If the left had countered with a well-structured campaign of media saturation of it’s own, maybe we’d have had a different outcome last week. It’s time to take a page from the playbook of the conservative right, and start vying for the ears and eyeballs of the American voting public, even if it means stooping to reducing things to memes, sound bytes and easily digestible one-paragraph “articles”. Hell, it shouldn’t even be that difficult given that Trump’s Presidency will likely make unbelievable headlines a daily occurrence.
When public opinion turns against Trump, and it will because he won’t be able to deliver what he’d promised, the Democrats have to be there to reclaim the mantle of the party of the working class, even if that means putting aside trying to educate America (which America sees as talking down to them) and communicating with them on their level instead. Those Barrack and Joe memes are a nice start, my conservative friends all seem to really enjoy them, so now we need to keep building on that.
CraigM
1782
There may be some truth to this, but fuck me I hate seeing it.
Reducing discourse to soundbytes and memes anymore? Get your shit together America, This is not OK. This is not fine. We should be expecting, nay, demanding more of the public discourse.
Not this piddly reductionist soundbytes. Actual substantive, not simply black and white but nuanced, discussions of public policy.
If this is too much to ask? Fuck it, bring the nukes.
It’s so bad that people post fake news, then when you post evidence the news is fake they claim the evidence is fake instead of the fake news.
Look at global warming. The fake news (Chinese hoax) is accepted truth in this country. The fact based evidence to the contrary (peer reviewed scientific research) is considered the fake news.
You can’t reason with that. Just tell the idiots comforting lies and then do the thing that needs to be done. That was Hillary strategy all along and I criticized her for it. She was right and I was wrong.
