[Winstonm]

Seems to me the biggest difficulty Trump-supporting posters have on this thread is distinguishing facts from opinion. It is odd.

[Kaitlyn S]

hrothgar, on 2016-November-17, 05:29, said:

I think that you make a lot of things up.

That was not one of them, however

[jonottawa]

barmar, on 2016-November-17, 10:47, said:

Maybe we should all get together and buy Kaitlyn a box set of "All in the Family" for Chanukah. Archie didn't think he was a racist, the problem was with all the chinks, dagos, niggers, kikes, etc. ruining the country.

Quoted for posterity.

[Kaitlyn S]

Zelandakh, on 2016-November-17, 06:34, said:

I daresay everyone will recognise this as racism but do you notice, for example, the bias that comes from Hollywood? Parts for minorities are often just that - the "black role" rather than a character who also happens to be black - and, aside from a few specific directors, the parts are often in a supporting role.

Yes, I do notice that, however, the movies do have to be somewhat realistic. You won't see movies with modern day radical Jewish terrorists, and most racists in the movies will probably look like a white has-been football player. In fact, I am surprised at the fact that almost every one of CBS's Madam Secretary shows deals with Islamic terrorism; I thought the PC culture would demand that they not do that.

Zelandakh, on 2016-November-17, 06:34, said:

Closer to home, some classical examples of "covert" racism are sticking to a social group from your own race, ignoring members of other races except for servile acts, portraying victims and aggressors as equals, reacting differently to the same situation depending on the race of someone else involved, picking out specific racial features to be unattractive (wide nose, large lips, "kinky" hair) and generally denying the need for anti-discrimination laws.

I look at what you said from my own angle - in many instances I have a social group from my own race because those are the people that I have met. At one location I had just moved to, I was looking to have a card party and wanted to invite people from work. I chose to invite single people first since I presumed the married ones wanted to be with their families. Included were two black people. They both came, and would have been in my new group except for the fact that one of the other people that came was openly racist and caused the group to fall apart. I did play chess once a week with one of the black guys (we were about evenly matched.) However, when I moved away from that job, there just weren't that many people of other races to socialize with. I believe that the same is true for most people, it's not that they don't care to socialize with people of other races, it's that the opportunity isn't there.

And yes, until I recently did my research, I had assumed anti-discrimination laws weren't needed. I was surprised at how wrong I was.

Zelandakh, on 2016-November-17, 06:34, said:

The list of such points is almost endless. I daresay you will recognise some of them immediately and can probably find examples of all of them if you think about it hard enough. Indeed, you might be shocked just how much racism you yourself see on a daily basis if you really open your eyes to it. Rest assured that women and those from minority groups see such actions all of the time and the vast majority go unmentioned. Studies shows that this noticeably increases stress levels and can easily lead to isolation and withdrawal with the potential for health issues to come up. It is a very real problem, not only for the United States but for most cultures.

I hope you are able to become more aware of what is going on around you now that your eyes have been opened a little. What you do with the knowledge should you choose to pursue it is another question entirely. At the very least, I hope you gain a little understanding for just how rigged against women and minorities the system is at present (despite the anti-discrimination laws) and why that sometimes spills over into frustration and even violence.

I'm not doubting what you say. How do make the system more fair? I'm willing to switch the discussion over to that if you wish.

[olegru]

http://www.campusreform.org/?ID=7528
https://www.youtube....h?v=IawEMxTroBk

[PassedOut]

Interesting unintended-consequences Post interview today with Paul Horner: Facebook fake-news writer: ‘I think Donald Trump is in the White House because of me’

Quote

You’ve been writing fake news for a while now — you’re kind of like the OG Facebook news hoaxer. Well, I’d call it hoaxing or fake news. You’d call it parody or satire. How is that scene different now than it was three or five years ago? Why did something like your story about Obama invalidating the election results (almost 250,000 Facebook shares, as of this writing) go so viral?

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore — I mean, that’s how Trump got elected. He just said whatever he wanted, and people believed everything, and when the things he said turned out not to be true, people didn’t care because they’d already accepted it. It’s real scary. I’ve never seen anything like it.

You mentioned Trump, and you’ve probably heard the argument, or the concern, that fake news somehow helped him get elected. What do you make of that?

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me. His followers don’t fact-check anything — they’ll post everything, believe anything. His campaign manager posted my story about a protester getting paid $3,500 as fact. Like, I made that up. I posted a fake ad on Craigslist.

Why? I mean — why would you even write that?

Just ’cause his supporters were under the belief that people were getting paid to protest at their rallies, and that’s just insane. I’ve gone to Trump protests — trust me, no one needs to get paid to protest Trump. I just wanted to make fun of that insane belief, but it took off. They actually believed it.

I thought they’d fact-check it, and it’d make them look worse. I mean that’s how this always works: Someone posts something I write, then they find out it’s false, then they look like idiots. But Trump supporters — they just keep running with it! They never fact-check anything! Now he’s in the White House. Looking back, instead of hurting the campaign, I think I helped it. And that feels [bad].

To me it seems weirdly appropriate that our con-artist president got a boost from this guy, even though he regrets it now. I understand that Facebook is changing its policy on fake news now, but Elvis has already left the building.

[alok c]

What a rant!(ref post 2920) Particularly interesting was equating all problems of the world to the third worlds overpopulation(though all present day problems of the world have their roots in the so called first world).

[olegru]

interview said:

Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore

PassedOut, on 2016-November-17, 14:26, said:

Interesting Post interview today with Paul Horner ...

To me it seems weirdly appropriate that our con-artist president got a boost from this guy, even though he regrets it now. I understand that Facebook is changing its policy on fake news now, but Elvis has already left the building.

I hope you did cross check that information...

[kenberg]

This all reminds me of a lark when we were teens. I have the feeling that I already mentioned this, but it is short and you can skip it.

In St. Paul in the 1950s if the school system needed more money they had to put it before the voters. They did, and it failed. So they announced that since money was short they would be cutting back on football for the next fall, and then they put it up again. Probably they had already hit on the right strategy but to make sure we students had to bring stuff home that explained to parents the great importance of a yes vote. So a few of us got together and made up a Vote No flyer. We explained that property taxes would double, we explained that the so-called need for more money was all a sham and so on. Then we broke into the school, got into the office and put the copies we had made in the teacher mailboxes with a note saying that this should be distributed to the students. And so it happened. The measure was successful anyway. Cutting back on football??? Ok, so property taxes double. As long as they don't go spending the dough on Physics or English or that sort of stuff.

One has to take a realistic view of what will spur people to action.

There might be a clue to the recent election in here somewhere.

Added: And btw, I think it is really important to get this sort of nonsense out of your system when you are 16 or 17. For an adult to be doing ot is a bit pathetic.

[PassedOut]

olegru, on 2016-November-17, 14:53, said:

I hope you did cross check that information...

Yep.

National Report

Quote

In February 2013, National Report was registered as a site.

In 2014, a Facebook interface experiment included the site on a list of those whose stories were flagged as "satire" when appearing on the social network. Craig Silverman of emergent.info sees National Report as one of several websites which are "not driven by trying to do comedy or satire, but by what kind of fake stuff can we spin up to get shares that earn us money", with particularly widely spread hoax stories capable of earning thousands of dollars per day from on-site advertising.

Paul Horner was the publication's lead writer; his employment began shortly after National Report went online.

...

Several hoax National Report stories have been mistakenly reported as fact by media outlets.

A report that Arizona governor Jan Brewer intended to introduce mandatory gay-to-straight conversion courses into the state's public school system. A spokesman for the governor called the fake article 'vile' and said 'its authors should be ashamed.' Brewer has been a target of gay rights activists because of her efforts to strip same-sex partners of government benefits, and for her stance on making it harder for gay couples to adopt children.

One article, at the time of the closure of some US monuments including the World War II memorial in Washington, DC, during a budget dispute, fooled researchers at Fox News Channel into reporting that the President had announced his intention to spend his own money to keep a Muslim museum open during a government shutdown.

Making money by conning people is clearly a business model that Trump likes, pathetic or not. But Horner got more than he bargained for this time...

[olegru]

PassedOut, on 2016-November-17, 15:28, said:

Yep.
National Report

Existing of hoax news site is not a question.

I mean did you crosscheck the claim that fake news site actually played serious role in the election a favor of Trump:

Quote

My sites were picked up by Trump supporters all the time. I think Trump is in the White House because of me.

It is always nice to think that people who do not agree with you are idiots who cannot understand simple things. Usually it is not the case.

I have many friends who are living in Russia. Some of them are really smart people. Smarter then me. They also very ethical people. They are Putin supporters. Go figure.

[PassedOut]

olegru, on 2016-November-17, 15:55, said:

Existing of hoax news site is not a question.

I mean did you crosscheck the claim that fake news site actually played serious role in the election a favor of Trump:

That was Paul Horner's opinion. Everyone votes according to his or her own opinions. I don't have any way of knowing whether those fake news articles swung the election or not.

I do see that the Trump campaign tweeted fake news links to their supporters, so I suppose they intended those links to rake in some votes. For example, Lewandowski sent out the fake information about paying $3,500 to Trump protesters, and it is hard to imagine that he is stupid enough to believe that was true when he sent it. To me, that indicates the sorts of voters that he was trying to lure.

[kenberg]

Here is one possibility: For the most part, peple that believed the fake news stories were already inclined to support Trump. But the deciding factor in the election may have been that the Trump supporters really got themselves worked up and voted in droves. Sort of like cheerleading, I guess. Supporters are supporters, voters are voters, and they are not always the same thing.

It's a bit frightening to think about what really swings elections, no matter which side you support.

[cherdano]

For those of you who live in the US, maybe calling your Senators and House of Congress Rep is a better use of time than posting in this thread?
Ask your senators not to confirm unqualified Trump crownies. Here are some of the stakes:
http://www.vox.com/p...emic-corruption

[PassedOut]

olegru, on 2016-November-17, 15:55, said:

I have many friends who are living in Russia. Some of them are really smart people. Smarter then me. They also very ethical people. They are Putin supporters. Go figure.

A very smart, very ethical Russian that I've know for a long time has told me more than once that the Ukraine historically belongs to Russia and that the division was artificially established by the Soviet Union. If that view is widely held, I suppose it would account for some of Putin's support. (She does agree that the purchase of Alaska was legitimate.)

[PassedOut]

cherdano, on 2016-November-17, 16:46, said:

For those of you who live in the US, maybe calling your Senators and House of Congress Rep is a better use of time than posting in this thread?
Ask your senators not to confirm unqualified Trump crownies. Here are some of the stakes:
http://www.vox.com/p...emic-corruption

I'm in the habit of doing that, but first I need to see who the nominees actually are. If Romney gets Secretary of State, it's probably the best I could hope for.

Meanwhile, Trump will clearly change the tone in Washington: Civil servants befuddled by Trump's casual invitation to May

Quote

Downing Street refused to deny a leaked transcript in which the president-elect told the British prime minister: “If you travel to the US you should let me know.”

I'm sure she will.

[kenberg]

It's all too much. I suppose the invitation (to stretch the meaning of the word) might have been as stated. If so, I cannot imagine anyone is confused or befuddled, except in the sense of British understatement. I apologize to the people of Great Britain and express my embarrassment that we could have elected a total fool as president.

We can hope that this item is another of these fake news stories. If it is true, incomprehensibly rude only begins to describe it.

[Vampyr]

jonottawa, on 2016-November-17, 12:44, said:

Quoted for posterity.

I agree with you, great show.

[y66]

HRC gave a heartfelt speech yesterday (starts a little after 16:45). Best medicine ever and a powerful reminder of what it's all about.

[Zelandakh]

PassedOut, on 2016-November-17, 18:31, said:

A very smart, very ethical Russian that I've know for a long time has told me more than once that the Ukraine historically belongs to Russia and that the division was artificially established by the Soviet Union.

Send her the link to the relevant wiki page.