Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[Sheb]

Oddly enough, I heard that the Russian Hack of a Vermont Power Utility was fake news before I actually heard the story.  That was last week some time.

On the other hand, and relevant to this thread, republicans seem incapable of learning from democrat mistakes.  They are in the process of gutting oversight and going whole hog with whatever strikes their fancy.  Our republic is doomed.

What democrat mistake are you referring to?

[Rockphed]

Oddly enough, I heard that the Russian Hack of a Vermont Power Utility was fake news before I actually heard the story.  That was last week some time.

On the other hand, and relevant to this thread, republicans seem incapable of learning from democrat mistakes.  They are in the process of gutting oversight and going whole hog with whatever strikes their fancy.  Our republic is doomed.

What democrat mistake are you referring to?

Going whole hog and trying to do whatever stupid thing happened into their mind, never mind the consequences.  For instance, Reid's decision to get rid of the filibuster for cabinet nominations and non-supreme court judges because republicans were "being the party of NO".

[Loud Whispers]

Oddly enough, I heard that the Russian Hack of a Vermont Power Utility was fake news before I actually heard the story.  That was last week some time.

On the other hand, and relevant to this thread, republicans seem incapable of learning from democrat mistakes.  They are in the process of gutting oversight and going whole hog with whatever strikes their fancy.  Our republic is doomed.

MAKE IMPERIUM
DO IT
MEME WAR NOW
Lol jk your republic is fine. Republics are always good this one guy called Caesar told me all about how he crashed that shit for a laff but that's a one off

What democrat mistake are you referring to?

Prolly Obama's unilateral action through executive orders in order to force a democrat agenda through US political gridlock. Since Republicans control everything they are their own oversight and won't even have to executive order everything

If they are their own oversight, there isn't much in the way of oversight

[smjjames]

Oddly enough, I heard that the Russian Hack of a Vermont Power Utility was fake news before I actually heard the story.  That was last week some time.

On the other hand, and relevant to this thread, republicans seem incapable of learning from democrat mistakes.  They are in the process of gutting oversight and going whole hog with whatever strikes their fancy.  Our republic is doomed.

What democrat mistake are you referring to?

Going whole hog and trying to do whatever stupid thing happened into their mind, never mind the consequences.  For instance, Reid's decision to get rid of the filibuster for cabinet nominations and non-supreme court judges because republicans were "being the party of NO".

To be more specific, they WERE going to gut the independent congressional ethics watchdog thing, until Trump slammed the thing and voiced his displeasure and basically said: "Why the heck are you making this your #1 priority when there is so much other work to be done? DRAINTHESWAMP!"

Some info on it.

CNN's timeline of it is probably slightly more entertaining

[Loud Whispers]

CNN using fallout 4 hacking puzzle as example of russian hacking

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

[Baffler]

What democrat mistake are you referring to?

Prolly Obama's unilateral action through executive orders in order to force a democrat agenda through US political gridlock. Since Republicans control everything they are their own oversight and won't even have to executive order everything

If they are their own oversight, there isn't much in the way of oversight

Not only that, but the executive order isn't exactly a solid foundation to rest reforms on. All the stuff Obama put through that way about immigration and stuff can be done away with at any time with just a stroke of Donald Trump's pen.

[PTTG??]

CNN using fallout 4 hacking puzzle as example of russian hacking

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

YES WE GET IT CNN USES STOCK FOOTAGE GET OVER IT.

[Rolan7]

Liberty Prime is best thing, though

[Baffler]

DEMOCRACY IS THE ESSENCE OF GOOD. COMMUNISM, THE VERY DEFINITION OF EVIL.

[smjjames]

And apparently Trump isn't going to discuss the Russian hacking stuff tomorrow, despite promising to edit: He could be waiting for the classified report on the election hacking which is expected soon, only he knows.

He's also scheduled to do the press conference (on managing his conflicts of interest, among other things) on the 11th, maybe he'll magically delay that thing or whatever

[Karnewarrior]

On inauguration day, he'll admit that he actually was a Russian spy the whole time, and the whole of us were fools for believing him, and then he'll cackle manically as he hops into his spiky black helicopter and fires his mind beam to make us all love Putin as much as he does.

And when that time comes, the Republican party will still let him pass whatever he wants, because being Republican is more important than being American.

[misko27]

I admit that the whole fake news thing has gone over my head, but that's because it struck me as an irrelevant side-act, and I'm surprised to see it gain as much as traction as it has. Can someone more knowledgeable fill me in? Or at least tell me if I can continue ignoring it.

[wierd]

The danger with "fake News" is not new. It has been around for at least 60 years that I know of, and is only recently been given this new name to make it seem new.  (See for instance, "bubble" vs "echo chamber" for how old things get new names by new generations just discovering them, thinking they are new and earth shattering.)

Propaganda is older than dirt, and spreading false news reports is just as old.  Usually this was limited to things involving troop movements and other "get them where we want them, not where we really are" type things when reviewing ancient history, but still there, and a prominent tool of statecraft.

These days, given the rise of "high information", it is much more in common with general propaganda, where people have become intellectually isolated, self-segregated in what information they are willing to accept as truth, and this has created a (wider) opening for various interests and groups to manipulate and control people via the information they already preferentially consume.

This is not isolated to just one group in current politics. It would be foolish beyond measure to leave that tool alone while the others are using the shit out of it.

That's why we see lots of very terrible attempts to connect the DNC hack with the discovery of malware of russian origin, despite the obvious holes and problems with that forced connection. (which is why most of it has been retracted by the MSM once they were called on it.)

Fake news is not new. Its flagrant use as a general propaganda tool is somewhat new-ish in terms of the scope it is being used with-- but again, general propaganda is not new either.

It is interesting to see which outlets carry such stories, as it betrays the endpoints by which such interests present their agendas.

Some, like Breitbart, are flagrantly obvious, but not always so.

[Lord Shonus]

I admit that the whole fake news thing has gone over my head, but that's because it struck me as an irrelevant side-act, and I'm surprised to see it gain as much as traction as it has. Can someone more knowledgeable fill me in? Or at least tell me if I can continue ignoring it.

Huge amounts of the election narrative was shaped by "news" stories that were completely fabricated and spread like wildfire across social media. A few of the more notable examples were the notion that a  pizza joint maintains a vast underground network to provide Hillary with underage sex slaves, that she has a small army of hitmen to silence critics, and various nasty things that Wikileaks allegedly reported there to say but even Wikileaks calls nonsense.

[Reelya]

What's new is that Facebook stopped using human editors. Then clearly made-up stories from non-existent newspapers started to be given equal billing with stuff written by actual journalists.

People gamed the system to make Onion-level stuff trend in the news aggregators. Without at least some human's checking what was presented, pure clickbait written by random trolls outweighed factual news of actual events. After all, if 20 million people clicked "like" on a story that says Hillary Clinton gave birth to an alien baby, then it must be just as newsworthy as the latest poll results. When people say "fake news" made up 40% of the newsfeed in Facebook, they don't mean spin or bias. They mean how you'd feel if you literally discovered that 40% of the news items in your feed turned out to be from The Onion or other satire sites, but more cleverly disguised as real events.

That's why this is worse than spin. With spin, there's an event portrayed, but you get some bias in reporting. But you can then google the event to get more information or another opinion. There might be massive bias, but there's at least an agreement at some level between e.g. FOX and CNN about who, what, where, when, which you can look into. Fake news doesn't have any of that. At least with FOX vs CNN they portray roughly the same set of world events, albeit with different worldviews and commentary. That allows for debate. The fake news such as Hillary Clinton murdering some non-existent person in a town that doesn't exist doesn't foster any sort of debate, because those events happened in a different universe to the one we inhabit.