The Internet's New Alternate Reality 869
Hugh Pickens writes "Tim Rutten writes in the LA Times that when President Obama released his long form birth certificate last week, one of the striking things about the reaction to the president's calm and — to reasonable minds — entirely persuasive appearance in the White House briefing room Wednesday was the rapidity and ease with which so many leading birthers rejected the evidence he presented. 'Until very recently, if every professional news organization in the nation examined a charge and found it baseless, it was — for all intents and purposes — dropped,' writes Rutten. 'Today, the growth of the Internet has drained the noun "news" of its former authority. If you don't like the facts presented on the sites of established news organizations, you simply keep clicking until you find one whose "facts" accord with your beliefs.'"
Re:Shock, horror (Score:5, Informative)
Erm, actually, yes, for the first two. It's in the Constitution. You can presumably visit other countries, but you do have to be a natural-born citizen [usconstitution.net]:
Re:kind of like the police (Score:3, Informative)
By definition, idiots like Hannity and Beck are not "pundits". [wikipedia.org]
Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High (Score:4, Informative)
"Distrust in U.S. Media Edges Up to Record High"
For the fourth straight year, the majority of Americans say they have little or no trust in the mass media to report the news fully, accurately, and fairly. The 57% who now say this is a record high by one percentage point.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/143267/distrust-media-edges-record-high.aspx [gallup.com]
Re:kind of like the police (Score:4, Informative)
The point is you can't prove or disprove god. ever.
Unlike say evolution, or electricity(both of which are theories and not fully proven) we can learn to understand them without resorting to blind faith. They have examples in the world around us.
you can't prove something was or was not god's work ever.
Re:That's not a bug, it's a feature (Score:3, Informative)
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Informative)
As Stephen J. Gould put it:
In the American vernacular, "theory" often means "imperfect fact"--part of a hierarchy of confidence running downhill from fact to theory to hypothesis to guess. Thus the power of the creationist argument: evolution is "only" a theory and intense debate now rages about many aspects of the theory. If evolution is worse than a fact, and scientists can't even make up their minds about the theory, then what confidence can we have in it? Indeed, President Reagan echoed this argument before an evangelical group in Dallas when he said (in what I devoutly hope was campaign rhetoric): "Well, it is a theory. It is a scientific theory only, and it has in recent years been challenged in the world of science--that is, not believed in the scientific community to be as infallible as it once was."
Well evolution is a theory. It is also a fact. And facts and theories are different things, not rungs in a hierarchy of increasing certainty. Facts are the world's data. Theories are structures of ideas that explain and interpret facts. Facts don't go away when scientists debate rival theories to explain them. Einstein's theory of gravitation replaced Newton's in this century, but apples didn't suspend themselves in midair, pending the outcome. And humans evolved from ape-like ancestors whether they did so by Darwin's proposed mechanism or by some other yet to be discovered.
Moreover, "fact" doesn't mean "absolute certainty"; there ain't no such animal in an exciting and complex world. The final proofs of logic and mathematics flow deductively from stated premises and achieve certainty only because they are not about the empirical world. Evolutionists make no claim for perpetual truth, though creationists often do (and then attack us falsely for a style of argument that they themselves favor). In science "fact" can only mean "confirmed to such a degree that it would be perverse to withhold provisional consent." I suppose that apples might start to rise tomorrow, but the possibility does not merit equal time in physics classrooms.
Evolutionists have been very clear about this distinction of fact and theory from the very beginning, if only because we have always acknowledged how far we are from completely understanding the mechanisms (theory) by which evolution (fact) occurred. Darwin continually emphasized the difference between his two great and separate accomplishments: establishing the fact of evolution, and proposing a theory--natural selection--to explain the mechanism of evolution.
- Stephen J. Gould, " Evolution as Fact and Theory"; Discover, May 1981
Re:kind of like the police (Score:4, Informative)
If Fox News just lied they would be out of business rather quickly.
Given Fox's demographic it's unlikely to cause them any grief commercially and of course the courts [projectcensored.org] have already decided that lying is not a problem for them legally speaking.
Re:kind of like the police (Score:4, Informative)
Damn right. The pundits screaming Obama is a socialist, communist, nazi, islamic, athiest who wasn't born in the US on the Faux news network, the idea that the media would then subsequently blame the internet for this is laughable and pathetic.
Wasn't it Dan Rather of Fox News that released that document about George Bush that was an obvious fake? Even after it was proven beyond any reasonable doubt that it was a fake, didn't he insist that it was authentic? I remember the contempt he held for those that dared to question him. He even tried to discredit them by claiming that they sat around in their pajamas, challenging the work of "real" jounalists?
All of that is true, except Dan Rather never worked for Fox News. And Fox News wasn't the ones pushing the "birther" thing. It headlined MSNBC every single night for weeks. The pundits at Fox News were calling birthers a joke. Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and even Glenn Beck called it a waste of time and every single one of them said Obama was born in HI well before the certificate was ever released.
Don't let the facts get in the way of your hatred of Fox News. I'm sorry the truth in the real world doesn't match the fantasies you've dreamed up in your head. I guess if the people you hate are not evil enough to justify your hatred, you have to make stuff up to fill the void. The sad part is that you have managed to convince yourself of something that doesn't match reality.
Re:Nothing new, it's a fishing expedition (Score:2, Informative)
Counterpoint: just about everything somebody with a big enough megaphone doesn't agree with gets called a "conspiracy theory". Sometimes Just Asking Questions is a good thing. What would the world think if, without proof, it was alleged that a President of the United States bugged his own office, kept an enemies list, etc., and a few other gems that happened back in the 70s that have been proven to be true? Those things also started out as "conspiracy theories" and were dismissed early and easily until proven to be true. Just because it's outlandish doesn't make it false, and calling it a "conspiracy theory" doesn't make the person saying it a nut job.
BTW, in the past, the US government HAS killed and/or done medical experiments on its own citizens, it HAS conspired to cover up inconvenient truths on behalf of wealthy individuals and large corporations, and we REALLY DID import genuine Nazis after WWII to help us, among other things, set up and run our own intelligence services. I am not in the slightest saying that any of the examples given in the parent post are true or that the people supporting those points of view are correct. In fact, most of the examples cited are fairly well discredited.
One must also keep in mind that sometimes "conspiracy theories" hide other inconvenient truths. For example, anybody who questions the "official" events of 9/11 is automatically called a nut job or a wing nut in a lot of circles. You don't have to believe that the World Trade Center was laced with explosives prior to remote piloted airplanes crashing into them in order to believe that the government was massively incompetent and failed to prevent an attack when sufficient information was present that they could have done so. There are a lot of problems with the "official" story that don't have anything to do with it being an "inside job" or anything like that, but which have plenty to do with serious screwups. Questioning things is good. Drawing conclusions based on incomplete facts is speculation at best, utter claptrap at worst.
Re:Where did the lost authority come from? (Score:5, Informative)
The real difference is that McCain's birth was questioned, IMMEDIATELY answered, and we moved on.
Obama's birth was questioned, the question was ignored for three years, then suddenly he decides to answer it. People wonder why he didn't answer as soon as it was questioned, and assume that he couldn't answer it then, hence the delay.
Let me fix that for you: Obama's birth was questioned, IMMEDIATELY answered to the satisfaction of his Democratic primary opponents, his Republican opponents in the general election, and the Supreme Court justice who swore him in when he presented the fully legal certificate from Hawaii. All sane people moved on. It was only not "settled" in the minds of a few pathetic trolls who can't accept the fact that a black man with a funny name might actually be allowed to sit in the Oval Office.
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Informative)
All of that is true, except Dan Rather never worked for Fox News. And Fox News wasn't the ones pushing the "birther" thing. It headlined MSNBC every single night for weeks. The pundits at Fox News were calling birthers a joke. Sean Hannity, Bill O'Reilly and even Glenn Beck called it a waste of time and every single one of them said Obama was born in HI well before the certificate was ever released.
Some pundits called the birthers a joke. Others let them have a forum to espouse their wild theories. Some like Glen Beck would admit the authenticity of the birth certificate on TV then go on other media like radio and internet and question it: Obama's birth certificate 'horrible forgery' [glennbeck.com]. And that was just a single search.
Re:The trust died when it became "The Media" (Score:5, Informative)
If the media would do a better job releasing the "news" to us then maybe the public would be more likely to believe what they were told.
The release of the "long form" birth certificate is a perfect example
No, it's a horrible example. The media didn't sit on the LFBC for three years, because they didn't have it either.
Hawaii released the SFBC because that's their policy. It just wasn't good enough for a lot of people who had some reason to desperately believe that the prez wasn't really the Prez. The media had nothing to do with it, except perhaps for some propaganda outfit fanning the flames of the kookery.
Re:Where did the lost authority come from? (Score:5, Informative)
Note also the argument that it was illegal to show his long-from birth certificate was a silly one from the get-go. Since Obama has miraculously managed to get a waiver to show it, there's no reason to suspect he couldn't have gotten a waiver in 2008....
If you did some research you'd realize that the Department of Health in Hawaii made a special exception for him in the interest of stopping the tide of requests they kept getting to release it. By policy, the Department of Health will not release the long-form birth certificate, even to the person in question. This was a special circumstance, over the last three years it has been independently verified by the governor and others that it was on file, yet the birthers refused to believe it.