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.'"
kind of like the police (Score:5, Insightful)
You are supposed to trust the police, but then one of them treats you like shit. Then you end up not trusting any of them.
It is easy to criticize people for not trusting the media, but who hasn't been intentionally lied to by the media? The blame belongs on a lot of people here. Don't just blame the birthers.
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Insightful)
This isn't about the internet. It's just basic human behaviour. Look at religion for an example of the same types of thinking for the last few thousand years. Any time one of the basic beliefs of a religion is proven false, they either route around it or ignore it.
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Interesting)
When I was in religious studies, I took a sociology class called "The True Believer" that dealt with this phenomenon. In short, the True Believer exists in religion, politics, in movements and causes of every kind. For the True Believer, his/her cause has surpassed reason and become a matter of faith. Anyone who questions it has become a mere obstacle to test their faith. Any evidence to the contrary is false simple by virtue of that contradiction.
Any attempt to sway a True Believer is pointless. A True Believer can only be swayed by a serious personal crisis or epiphany, a "Road to Damascus" moment that shifts their faith radically. And when they do change, it's usually just to move on an embrace some new cause to be a True Believer in.
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Good point. Minor addition: I believe (personally, having studied anthropology) that the True Believer can also have their views modified by peer pressure. Cult followers for example: "de-programming" starts with removing the person from their True Believer environment. Over time they often mentally adapt to the new environment, and their views moderate slowly. Sometimes it doesn't work that way, but I think this is another (rocky) road out for true believers..
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In my routine dealings with others, I find myself frustrated at times with the wall of irrationality that I encounter in some people. I don't know if such people would meet the test of being a True Believer, in that they may not have embraced any specific cause. I think it's more that they don't hold evidence and reason to be impartial sources of truth. I
Re:kind of like the police (Score:4, Insightful)
This isn't about the internet. It's just basic human behaviour.
Point taken, but human behavior can be shaped and amplified by its environment, and the Internet is a BIG part of many peoples' environment. It is human nature to weigh beliefs and values against the ones that prevail in their community, say about the acceptability of shoplifting vs. the acceptability of driving ten miles per hour over the speed limit. In most cases this heuristic has some value, but it can be unreasonably hard on, say, a gay atheist sci-fi fan in a small town dominated by evangelical Christians. If you wish you can reverse the scenario and make it a born-again Christian living in an ultra-liberal gay enclave. Either way, such fish-out-of-water individuals find in on-line communities a counterpoint the prevailing opinions of those around them.
That's a good thing, but like most momentous inventions there's a dark side to the on-line community. The tendency to be influenced by the opinions of those around you can broaden viewpoints in real-world communities in ways that don't happen in on-line groups. Imagine a town meeting where fiscal conservatives and education advocates have rough parity. Since neither side can dominate the other, members of each side begin adapting and adopting positions of the other side in order to advance their agendas. An on-line community would simply split where a real-world community evolves. After you've bought into a virtual community that has coalesced around an issue like birtherism, everyone you spend most of your time talking to about the issue with seems to agree with you. Then one day you mention it to your neighbor, only to discover he's apparently a nut who actually thinks Obama was born in Hawaii.
On-line communities shapes "big" ideological opinions in a way that makes them more extreme and less vulnerable to critical examination.
A few years back I spent several days exploring the world of on-line white supremacist and neo-nazi communities. You'd expect those places to feel like scenes from Mel Brooks' *The Producers* for being too over-the-top. But they aren't. On the contrary, they're models of decorum. Why shouldn't there be? Everyone there essentially thinks the same things. There's even a fair facsimile of reasoned debate, as when newcomers bring up some ancient piece of discredited racist pseudoscience. The newcomer is called out in a kind and supportive manner *then pointed to a more impressive piece of racist pseudoscience*.
What these on-line extremist communities do is threefold:
(1) Reinforce the participants' beliefs by providing community that is much more supportive and seems much more reasonable than the real world, while isolating the participants' opinions from any substantial criticism.
(2) Train a participant to present the most effective arguments for the community's positions in a way that does not immediately brand him a lunatic, then provide emotional support and post-mortem analysis should he nonetheless be shown a lunatic.
(3) Unites what would be a scattered group of isolated misfits into a coordinated community with economic, and in time maybe even political clout.
Re:kind of like religion (Score:4, Insightful)
While "explaining the unexplained" may be a reason for some people to believe in god, in my opinion that is a minority. Most deeply religious people don't care about the "unexplained" and wouldn't even come up with any of the questions that where driving science and modern society for centuries.
Most religious people simply seek a omnipotent protecting father figure that shields them against plain everyday peril and distress. Something where they can take refuge in cases of illness or poverty. And something that gives them the hope, that they may see again those who they have lost in some "paradise" after death.
Re:kind of like religion (Score:4, Insightful)
It also conveys a sense of meaning and purpose to life and the universe. It is far more comforting to imagine an all-powerful being guiding providence by will alone, who offers eternal afterlife to those believers who are deemed worthy to receive it; than to imagine a cold and uncaring universe, with no design or purpose, operating by mere quantum chance, and an existence that to some seem arbitrarily short and cosmically pointless.
Some people feel this way and religion provides their needed hope that there's a reason for it all.
-dZ.
Re:kind of like religion (Score:5, Insightful)
Of course the idea that a god existing makes anything more meaningful is also pretty funny if you think about it.
What would then be the "reason" for that god existing for example?
In the end there is no meaning other than what you create for yourself. Most find it easier to copy their meanings from others - and the larger a group is, the more convincing their meanings appear..
Re:kind of like religion (Score:5, Interesting)
Of course the idea that a god existing makes anything more meaningful is also pretty funny if you think about it.
What would then be the "reason" for that god existing for example?
In the end there is no meaning other than what you create for yourself. Most find it easier to copy their meanings from others - and the larger a group is, the more convincing their meanings appear..
IOW, religions have always exercised the same sort of alternate-reality support as this story describes as "new" for the Internet Age.
When you immerse yourself in a subculture that believes X, it becomes easy to believe X and hard to be motivated to ask questions that challenge X. It doesn't matter whether your source of authority is FOX News, David Koresh, or the Pope - it works the same in each case, and depends on surrounding yourself with people who suckle at the same tit.
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Or the ones who who used the words of said omnipotent to justify slavery because this being (supposedly) said that enslaving someone is perfectly acceptable.
And when you say worthy to receive it, you mean a man who was willing to kill one of his sons to prove to this omnipotent being how far he would go to follow such a psychopath.
Or the people who slaughtered non-white people around the world because these savages were un-believers.
Or people who were gl
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Actually, Physics 101 is perfect as an example. When I took high school physics, the Instructor started out with the introduction of four fundamentals; Matter, Energy, Space and Time. It wasn't until my second semester of college physics that this started to be shot down, with relativity, and the third semester really threw out the idea of discrete space and time, matter and energy as we got into QM. In the same way, we went from particles to fields, and eventually by my senior year to some of the basics of
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By definition, idiots like Hannity and Beck are not "pundits". [wikipedia.org]
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To clarify: If you consider the Faux Nooz commentators "pundits", then so is the goatse troll.
Or, if you consider FOX News "news", you may as well consider their "pundits" as pundits.
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Insightful)
the idea that the media would then subsequently blame the internet for this is laughable and pathetic.
Exactly. Those rumors and criticisms are being started by people being paid a lot of money to skew the news. There's nothing accidental about it. Just because the dumbest fraction of society doesn't want to give up the lies isn't the fault of the internet, it's a failure of our educational system.
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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: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:kind of like the police (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously? Dan Rather is your big bogeyman from one mistake that he apologized and quit over vs hours and hours PER DAY OF COMPLETE DISINFORMATION [newshounds.us] on Fox?
Hannity and the rest weren't birthers? Err, they played up the hysteria quite well. I love how guys like you excuse them from playing up both sides. They'll legitimize it and then wash their hands of it when it gets too hot to handle. Here's Hannity loudly and childishly demanding the birth certificate. [mediamatters.org] Conservative pundit Lou Dobbs [mediamatters.org] went full retard with the birther nonsense that his boss had to make him stop. Sure Dobbs isn't Fox, but he's the conservative voice of CNN. These are two well known pundits. Here's conservative darling and occasional fox news commentator Sarah Palin legitimizing the issue. [huffingtonpost.com]
And its not just the birther crap. Its the other conspiracy theories. A few years ago it was "Iraq is out to get us with WMD." Now its Obama wants our guns. Healthcare is going to send us to death panels, etc. Whatever gets the GOP base excited. Yet, they're all conspiracy theories. See, once you live in a bubble of disinformation its easy to start believing that the president isnt an American.
The real issue isn't bloggers vs mainstream press but learning how to recognize the ownership and bias of the established media outlets. Fox is a great example because its such a shitty and biased network that it perfectly illustrates why people should be skeptical of the media. The problem is that most people skeptical of the media do so because they think its liberal and see Fox as the alternative, when it reality, the news is fairly even-handed and pro-corporate, and its Fox that's the ideological nightmare.
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Except for the part about where it's not. Who is being programmed by John Stewart?
John Stewart is well known for taking stuff out of context and using it as a punch line. In a way, it's OK because it's not meant to be news, it's a joke. Unfortunately, his audience takes what they see at face value. Yes, but people are stupid. I've actually had someone tell me that Steven Colbert was a conservative and his program was meant to be a counterpoint to John Stewart. Yes, he actually believed that Colbert, an obvious parody of Bill O'Reilly was serious. Likewise, people will not take the
Re:kind of like the police (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but people are stupid. I've actually had someone tell me that Steven Colbert was a conservative and his program was meant to be a counterpoint to John Stewart. Yes, he actually believed that Colbert, an obvious parody of Bill O'Reilly was serious.
There actually was a fun study awhile back on the Colbert Report. The more conservative a person was the more likely they were to think that Colbert was a serious conservative, the more liberal the more likely they were to think we was being purely sarcastic.
Basically, it is amazing how much cognitive biases color the world.
I used to live in a very liberal college town, and people routinely called me a fascist, neo-con freemarketeer. Now I live in a very conservative city and I'm a leftist, socialist, Mao worshiper. I've been called an "evangelical" on atheist boards (for disagreeing with pure materialism), while every single one of my religious friends think I'm a godless heathen.
I'm guilty of this too. One of my friends I haven't seen since high school came back from Afghanistan where he worked as an interrigator, and espoused being a Libertarian. I quickly dismissed him as being some flavor of Tea Party loon. After a bit of discussion I realized that we have a fair bit in common, though we disagree on core issues. He probably though I was a leftist pinko.
We only see the world in black and white, and it colors our perceptions of others. If you don't agree with my subjective opinion you must be diametrically opposed to everything I see as "good and true", and therefore the enemy. Sadly we let this trend take over, and it has become the whole basis of our debate. It isn't about whats best for people, its about furthering my ideology and banishing those I view as being its enemy.
This is why I completely stopped watching broadcast news. This is why I dread the upcoming primary season. This is why Slashdot is even getting tedious... here, as the perceptions go, you either are a Tea Partying, evangelical with a giant Ayn Rand tattoo; or a Communist, Pinko, Commie red only in favor of the government taking over everything. There is no middle, and this no room for actual conversation.
If I had one wish, it would be for the rebirth of rational civil discourse, or at least a higher standard of it.
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.
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Birthers are racists (Score:4, Insightful)
Plain, simple (really simple) racists.
It's pretty simple.
Re:kind of like the police (Score:4, Insightful)
No of course not, it's silly, only one American parent makes one a natural born citizen. Claiming that the left would make a similar noise is simply not true, as the facts of McCain's birth was used to point out the silliness of birtherism during the 2008 election; do you pay attention at all. Right wing talk radio has spent years pushing this nonsense, people like you should find other sources of information.
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think anyone believes he's not actually a US citizen. The point of conflict is that the US President is required to be a natural-born citizen. That means that if you immigrate and become a US citizen, you can become a citizen with all rights and privileges, except for one, becoming President. Like many things, the Constitution stipulates that, but doesn't really define the term in complete detail.
The major question is not of citizenship, but whether Obama (or McCain in this example) qualify for the natural-born part. The reality is that they do, but Obama's early life was one where he traveled with his mother quite a bit outside the US and that makes some suspicious that he was not natual-born. It's all garbage, of course, but history is filled with people trying to use these loopholes and conspiracy theories to challenge an order that they do not accept for whatever reason. This is just more of the same sort of thing that kingdoms used to have to deal with when the rumors were instead that the heir to the throne was actually the son of the Queen's lover, instead of the King. It's as old as having prerequisites for office.
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Insightful)
As for me I had no idea is Obama was born in Hawaii or not. Hillary and Bill Clinton SAID he was a foreign national
Bullshit. Prove it: when and where did either say that?
Some of Hillary's campaigners may have done so; believe if you like that she encouraged this, but she never herself made the statement you ascribe to her.
How could Obama have offered HIllary a place in his cabinet if she had?
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Insightful)
You are supposed to trust the police, but then one of them treats you like shit. Then you end up not trusting any of them.
It is easy to criticize people for not trusting the media, but who hasn't been intentionally lied to by the media? The blame belongs on a lot of people here. Don't just blame the birthers.
It's not just about trust. It's a failure of critical and rational thinking, and people opting for news sources that'll tell them what they want to hear. Plenty of these wingnuts trust Fox News because the channel will give them exactly what they want to see. The Internet has blurred the lines somewhat, with people pointing to blogs and any random site as being authoritative - simply because it happens to agree with their own beliefs.
It's a country in which the governor of Texas has repeatedly appealed to citizens to telepathically urge an omnipotent invisible deity to change the weather for the state. To borrow an analogy from Sam Harris, would Perry's appeal for divine intervention be any more insane if he asked that people communicate with God by talking in to a hairdryer? It shouldn't really be any more insane. The elephant in the room here is the idea that any kind of communication is possible with some invisible all-powerful being, yet people who believe they can talk to God would almost certainly consider Perry to be mad if he added the hairdryer to his request.
So long as it's culturally acceptable to proudly hold irrational beliefs it's difficult to imagine how people like the birthers really can be sidelined and ignored? Birthers are just one symptom. We have the anti-vaxxers, 9/11 truthers and God knows how many other nutjobs who receive far too much consideration and acceptance. There's a real need here to school people in rational and critical thinking. That doesn't mean being anti-religious, but certainly one would hope that with critical thinking people would realise that such beliefs are best kept as a personal thing in much the same way that a man's fondness for dressing up as a schoolgirl and getting his arse paddled is certainly harmless fun, but probably not something he can demand respect for in the public square.
Re:kind of like the police (Score:4, Insightful)
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I don't believe that all religious people are stupid per se, but it is obviously a human trait to invent invisible or visible friends/masters for themselves, otherwise we wouldn't have so many religions. The fact that so many religions conflict with each others' beliefs show that at least some of them must be made up, or if they're all real, that some gods are just lying bastards that you shouldn't worship.
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:kind of like the police (Score:5, Insightful)
The point is you can't prove or disprove god. ever.
Perhaps, but non-existence of God is the null hypothesis... People claim that God exists, so if they want to use God as a reason for their actions, then the burden of proof is on them. My only objection to most peoples religious beliefs is that they treat existence of God as the Null.
I am defined as an Atheist not because I don't believe in God, but because others do.
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
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Um, if you stood in the middle of a large, ornately decorated room, and called upon the spirit of Fairy Bojangles to modify the weather as you see fit, would you *expect* there to be any measurable response? Seriously?
Yes, you *cannot* disprove God. This is obvious to *anyone* capable of basic thought. But what's your point?
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atheists who claim with certainty that there is no god are first class fools
Who are these people? I've seriously never heard any of the famous atheist, or even one I've met in person, say that they know, as an absolute certainty, that there isn't a God of some kind.
They go around talking about the null hypothesis and scientific process ... they just don't know.
Exactly. They don't know, so the default assumption wins out. Not believing in God is just as rational as not believing in fairies, ancestral spirits, or super-advanced fungal space aliens - you can't prove that they don't exist. And more importantly, why doesn't the governor ever tell people to ask them for help?
Re:kind of like the police (Score:5, Insightful)
of course.
total certain atheism is irrational.
tooth fairy agnosticism is the sensible approach as in:
"the existence of god is about as likely as the existence of the tooth fairy"
now let us put our hands together and ask the tooth fairy to help with the weather.
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To take the Tooth Fairy example further, if we accept it is reasonable for a person to say "The Tooth Fairy does not exist" in day-to-day language without needing to add the disclaimer "of course, in a strictly scientific sense there is a small possiblity that the Tooth Fairy does exist so I am not ruling it out completely", is it not also reasonable for somebody to say "God does not exist" without having to add a similar disclaimer?
If somebody says "I was ten years old when I found out Santa Claus doesn't
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"Belief" in the religious sense is in more than faith in things unseen. It's faith in things completely undetectable and thus unprovable.
In the realm of rational discourse and policy making, it would seem to be beyond imaginable that anything without any sort of proof whatsoever would be allowed to dominate... yet it clearly does. It shows that people are largely irrational creatures.
Your elevator analogy is completely off base. Elevators are mechanical things that are testable and observable in the real
Birthers still unconvinced Obama white enough (Score:5, Funny)
KENYA, Indonesia, Wednesday (WorldNetDaily) — Barack Obama's alleged long-form birth certificate has been declared fraudulent by the noble and patriotic "Birther" movement, who claim firm evidence [newstechnica.com] that the President is insufficiently white.
"I've seen a few Photoshops in my time," said immigrant Birther and world's oldest emo kid Orly Taitz. "I can tell from a few of the pixels. They're nowhere near light enough."
Donald Trump, the next Sarah Palin, takes credit for provoking the release of this initial documentation of the mysterious Obama, and has now asked if Obama's college transcript is all that, and something about basketball as the President's favourite pastime. Betting pools are now forming on when Trump will allude to watermelon and fried chicken.
Birthers are routinely outraged at suggestions that blatant racism is at the heart of their disquiet with Obama's landslide victory in the 2008 presidential election. So it's really worth saying it to them, every time.
The Birther movement was originally started by Party Unity My Ass, a group of disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters during the 2008 Democratic primary. They note that Obama has, on his track record so far, been a first-class Republican president.
Re:who is a "natural born" citizen? (Score:5, Insightful)
Article II - The Executive Branch
Section 1 - The President
"No person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President;"
Question: who is "natural born"? I propose all candidates must prove they are natural born.
Well, it's clear that no one living today was a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of that Constitution, so it looks like we need to stop having presidents.
Surprising? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Surprising? (Score:5, Funny)
"People believe any quote they read on the internet if it fits their preconceived notions." - Martin Luther King
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"MartinLuther: Some thoughts about cleaning up the Church a bit - http://saint.ly/CCCXVII [saint.ly] #Reformation #IndulgencesSuck #Protestant" -- Martin Luther, 1517
Re:Surprising? (Score:5, Funny)
People will believe any old tripe if you tell them Benjamin Franklin said it.
-- Benjamin Franklin
Re:Surprising? (Score:5, Funny)
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Where did the lost authority come from? (Score:3)
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That was the point. NO other candidates have ever had to proven themselves born in the USA.
Bush didn't Clinton didn't, Reagan didn't Carter didn't. non of the other white guys have ha to do it. you get a non white guy with a non anglo saxon name in office and all the racists start a birther movement because they can't believe a non white guy was born here.
Think about it why was Obama singled out above all others? was it name? was it color? the fear was irrational and stupid.
Re:Where did the lost authority come from? (Score:5, Insightful)
I would've sworn McCain did. (See http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/23415028/ns/nightly_news/ [msn.com], "McCain's citizenship called into question".) Sorry, Charlie, not everybody who disagrees with Obama is racist.
Re:Where did the lost authority come from? (Score:5, Insightful)
Simple disagreement with Obama is not racism, but continuing to question the circumstances of his birth long after any reasonable doubt on the issue has been removed (which happened long before the release of the long form birth certificate), indicates something far beyond simple disagreement.
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John McCain - Not born in the US, Parents not married in the US, Parents lived outside the US for large portion of time ... ...people did continue to question this even after he released the documentation, but only on the internet and not on the national news ...
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False. Obama immediately released a certificate of live birth. Which his Democratic Primary opponents found sufficient. Which his Republic opponent found sufficient. Which the Supreme Court found sufficient. What does this tell you about the people who *didn't* find this sufficient?
So now he's released a complete official birth certificate. Guess who's not finding this sufficient either? Three guesses, and the first two don't count. Move forward a few months and the cry will once again be, "Why won'
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.
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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.
Um, Obama released the short form right away which is sufficient in every state in this country and the Federal government. Birthers just didn't believe it. If you read any of image analysis of the birthers that said his short form was a fake, you'd see it was about twisting facts to prove their suspicions and not real analysis.
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....
I'm pretty sure every state has rules against releasing your private information. Yes Obama could have released it himself but for most reasonable people the short form and the a
Re:Where did the lost authority come from? (Score:4, Insightful)
Wrong. You're a liar, woefully misinformed, or conveniently forgetting that the short-form (which has legal standing) has been released a /long/ time ago.
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.
Re: (Score:3)
Note I'm not claiming he was or wasn't born in Hawaii/overseas, but I can understand the desire to take a good look at it and check.
Which should have ended when he released his perfectly legal short form birth certificate back when he was still candidate Obama. The fact is that they drug it out over two years, and are leaving the impression that they will continue to drag it out is the issue. Which means that AFTER receiving evidence of his citizenship they stuck their fingers in their ears and went "nuh huh", and now that they got the long form they are just gonna scream "nuh huh" even louder.
Face it, Obama could take all of the birt
Re:Where did the lost authority come from? (Score:5, Insightful)
The world keeps turning (Score:4, Insightful)
"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."
That's the way it has always been. People choose the newspaper or TV channel that selects / presents / distorts / invents the news in the way most fitting to their own world view. All that has changed is that the number of available publications has increased.
Re: (Score:3)
There has to be more to it than just that. Otherwise the Daily Mail and Fox News would never get any new customers because their starting point is so far removed from reality that it would never fit non-customer's existing world view.
People tend to trust news sources, and in the past they were at least somewhat reputable and made some effort to check the facts. Printing outright lies could get them into litigation. Apparently people don't differentiate between reputable sources, less reputable sources and e
Irony? (Score:5, Insightful)
I can't be the only one who sees the irony in the URL being /news/opinion/...
Re:Irony? (Score:5, Funny)
easy mistake to make.
Re:Irony? (Score:5, Funny)
It's a typo. It should in fact read "s/news/opinion/;
That's what she sed.
The news establishment do not deserve our trust. (Score:5, Insightful)
Many revelations in later years have show us that the news establishment don't care for the truth at all. Many of the things reveled in the wikileaks cables was known but not reported. The war against Iraq was totally baseless but nobody seemed to care in the media. All they did was distributing what officials told them, without even bothering a simple fact check. All in all i think the problem described comes from the total lack of moral fiber in the media.
When you know almost everybody is lying to you, its only human to be drawn to news you think sounds most plausible.
Re:The news establishment do not deserve our trust (Score:5, Insightful)
Summary overly antagonistic (Score:4, Insightful)
There is a real problem of people selectively tuning in to news sources that cater to their bias, but the summary has a tone implying that established news sources are more correct or neutral than new media when this isn't always the case. The scare quotes around 'facts' clearly suggest that new media are wrong and established media is right. Using the term 'birthers' paints the believers as conspiracy theorists, which may be accurate but is unnecessary.
Blame where blame is due (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Blame where blame is due (Score:5, Interesting)
I think the traditional mass media has done plenty to damage their own credibility. Why blame the internet?
Their credibility was an aberration to begin with, and really only came about because of big business got in bed with big government during the 1920s. The syndicates, naturally, wanted to get stories ahead of the smaller papers and came to a cozy agreement with politicians not to say anything too outrageous. The politicians were only too happy to comply, and this pushed the smaller, noisier papers to covering local matters. The syndicates were able to promote themselves as being the voice of authority, the peak of which came with Walter Cronkite.
reputation and multiple sources (Score:4, Insightful)
We must not underestimate the importance of reputation and multiple sources. Modern technology, sleight of hand and a convincing smile mean that any claim can be well supported by physical "evidence" and we need independent tests of the reliability of the evidence.
For example, OBL was killed within the past week. We know this because the US government says so. The US government say they've confirmed it because they performed DNA tests. This means that we must trust the US government and, if the DNA test data is released, that the data is not fabricated. Why should we do that? What about the alternatives: that he is not dead, or - per Benazir - that he has been dead for several years already? We do not have sufficient reliable evidence for any of these claims, so we should not assume that any are true.
Similarly, what does OBL's birth certificate say? It says that a piece of paper was produced resembling a birth certificate. Is this sufficient evidence that he was born in the US? No. Is there credible evidence that he was not born in the US? No. We must either trust him, not care, or explore further. I've always thought the "where you're born" rule about the Presidency is against the principles on which the US was founded, so I'd pick the "not care" option.
Re: (Score:3)
so I'd pick the "not care" option.
The "don't care" option doesn't go down well with the conspiracy theorists though. Many times I've had some raving conspiracy nut going on and on about, eg, the JFK assassination and when I say "sorry, mate, I just don't give a toss about the assassination of JFK" they react like I'm the devils spawn or something. Almost like telling a raving evangelical christian that I'm agnostic.
Presumably subscribing to a conspiracy theory gives someone a sense of belonging, and thus of self-validation. It makes you a member of a small elite that knows what is *really* going on.
So not caring is more of an affront than disagreeing with them. Disbelieving just means you refuse to be converted, but not caring says that their subscription to the cult belief doesn't make them important even if they have the facts right.
William Miller (Score:4, Insightful)
Not new at all (Score:4, Insightful)
Over where I come from we have 3 main Tv channels. One is run by an independant group, and two others are run by different political parties.
If you watch the three news programs in series, you'll go from a country which is collapsing due to corruption and bad stuff the PM is doing, a country which is perfect because of what the PM is doing, to something in the middle.
So yeah, this is pretty much the case everything has been in for years.
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]
Nothing new, it's a fishing expedition (Score:5, Insightful)
This is yet another story about something we've heard a million times over, but they put "Internet!" in the title and treat it as though it's novel.
"Birtherism" isn't new, nor limited to black presidents. There was a long argument over whether McCain was native born, there were even debates about whether George W Bush was native born, and have been about presidents going way back. Even recently there was a huge amount of discussion over whether Sarah Palin was really Trig's mother. Even after multiple journalists reported that they had seen her pregnant belly, other equally prominent journalists were still Just Asking Questions.
And birtherism is loopy, but nothing compared to trutherism. About one third of Democrats believed that the government intentionally killed its own citizens to start a wars or, at least, that Bush knew about 9/11 and let it happen. Most Democrats also still claim that W was AWOL from his guard duty, and many prominent figures demanded explanations. CBS's Dan Rather, a 40 year veteran reporter, completely destroyed his career trying to pass off some forged documents. To this day, the guy insists that those forgeries were "fake but accurate". And, of course, there are long standing conspiracy theories about the Bush family's involvement with Nazis and such.
This gets play because "ooh, look, the Internet!" but if you look at what various conspiracies have in common, they're all old fashioned fishing expeditions. After Obama presented the long form, Trump *instantly* went to demanding his college records. The weird Palin birthers want all sorts of hospital records. The AWOL Bush people had huge lists of demands.
All these demands seek to scrutinize every possible second of a person's life. What happens when it's put into practice is the unbounded, independent prosecutor. Ken Starr, for instance, started out by investigating serious claims of corruption by the Clintons. When that turned up nothing, it morphed into a fishing expedition that turned up Lewinsky, Jones and Flowers. Incidentally, there are Clinton obsessives who are still Just Asking Questions, I won't link to it, but do a search for the "Clinton Death List" if you're curious to see some real crazy.
us news is unique (Score:5, Insightful)
I occasionally get a glimpse of US news shows (clips and some cnn), the contrast with bbc or al jazeera is pretty striking:
The most important piece of information is always the name of the host, which is repeated every 5 seconds.
The hosts seem to be picked up straight from plastic surgery, complemented by exaggerated facial expressions.
Its roughly 5 minutes of program then 5 minutes of commercials.
If there are 2 hosts they spend half the time demonstrating their "chemistry" for eachother, its painful to watch.
The graphics remind me of old arcade cabinets, classy like las vegas.
Interviews are rude and annoying, the object seems to be that noone should speak a complete sentence.
I dont think its odd americans dont trust news, theres nothing trustworthy about it.
Of course, Rutten is a journalist (Score:3)
But the positive side is (Score:4, Interesting)
that this can work both ways.
A day after President Obama made his joke about Michele Bachman being born in Canada I found someone on Yahoo Answers seriously asking if she was born there. Muhahahaha
I prefer needing to ignore the loonies... (Score:3)
...to having Walter Cronkite feed me the official truth. The loonies were always there and were not convinced by the media consensus: they just had no way to get their message out. Unfortunately, the same applied to some not-so-loonies.
What evidence would the birthers accept? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If they could travel back in time to witness Obama's birth (backed up by satellite imaging to make sure their apparent Hawaiian environment isn't an elaborate sound stage in Kenya) and collect baby Obama's DNA, they'd come back to the future and report that...
Today's Obama is a clone of the baby Obama born in Hawaii, and he was cloned in Kenya.
Re: (Score:3)
It's kinda hard to show the real thing to a few million people. I'm sure Obama's busy schedule doesn't allow him touring the country.
An answer (Score:3)
...comes from an expatriate, who moved to Canada and became a psychologist. Along the way, he was accused of dodging the draft, accidentally raised a kid who went in to politics, and discovered an alarming (and measurable) character trait that (among other things) brings along with it a willingness to accept any "logical" conclusion they agree with, no matter how faulty the reasoning, and to assert that the reasoning is valid.
http://home.cc.umanitoba.ca/~altemey/ [umanitoba.ca]
"The Authoritarians" is available as a free PDF, (~ 250 p), and it's moderatly funny, given that the subject is just what kind of lunacy you can expect when dealing with the hard core neocons and their followers, and where that lunacy comes from. Warning: I lost time reading this, and I normally don't give a rat's ass about psychology. It's that good.
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: (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, that's the rule -- and it's entirely nuts.
The president is *elected* I see no legitimate reason whatsoever that some person born abroad should not be eligible to be president. Infact, it'd make more sense if one would insist that to be eligible for president, one must hold *ONLY* American citizenship. (the current rules don't have any ban on a two-citizenship person becoming president, aslong as one of the two is American, and he's born with it)
What's the rationale for disqualifying someone who, for e
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When that was written , America had just come out of an independance war and didn't want to have foreign interference any more.
Kinda like the right to bear arms. Both made sense in that time, but they don't make as much sense nowadays.
Re:Shock, horror (Score:5, Insightful)
Why does it not make sense to allow a person to own an item?
Don't you need to draw a line somewhere? Which of the items below would you ban? Any of them?
1. Three foot poles.
2. Ten foot poles.
3. Unroadworthy cars.
4. Guns.
5. Car bombs.
6. Heavy weapons.
7. Non-weapons grade nuclear material.
8. Biological weapons.
9. Nuclear weapons.
Re: (Score:3)
That rule was incorporated into the Constitution to prevent the European practice of importing new royal families on a somewhat regular basis. The current British royal family, for instance was brought in from Germany. The idea was to keep American independence.
Of course, this was from an era when few people traveled between nations often (citizens were rarely born overseas) and before international adoption became frequent. Times have changed since then, and the constitutional requirement effectively exclu
Re: (Score:3)
It's a miracle at all that we allow international campaign funding. It's no accident that we give Israel billions of dollars each year in military and economic aid, then give them discounts on US military technology in return for tens of millions of campaign donations each year. Somewhere there's a debate between Al Gore and Bush where one says "I love Israel *smile*smile*" and the other retorts "I love Israel too *smile*smile*" and the crowd laughs. Why wouldn't we give the same assistance to impoverished
Re: (Score:3)
Article 2 Section 1:
No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States.
http://www.archives.gov/exhibits/charters/constitution_transcript.html [archives.gov]
Re: (Score:3)
but it certainly doesn't look like any other PDF I've seen.
Its the pixels and you having seen quite a few PDFs in your time.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re: (Score:3)
And the important bit of his analysis:
.
No more needed to be said, but some mad people get excited about layers.
Re: (Score:3)
No, because the doubt only exists in the mind of the insane, and no amount of "evidence" will change the mind of the insane.
Re: (Score:3)
Obama is a republican? Are you sure?
It was Linda Lingle, a republican, who was governor at the time.
Re: (Score:3)
It wasn't ad-hominem, and not directed to you personally. Just a statement about typical reactions, based on observations of other conspiracy-theory believers.
Compare with the Apollo project. We have excellent photographs, but people who believe in a hoax are not convinced. The fact that the photographs are sharp enough to see the stars only points their attention to the fact the stars are missing (being ignorant to the fact they shouldn't be visible in the first place)
Put enough detail in the scan of the b
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:Evidence? (Score:4, Insightful)
Just because a person is born on American soil does not make that person a citizen. (Take the children of diplomats, for example.)
"All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside." If you aren't here under diplomatic or some other kind of immunity, you're subject to the jurisdiction of the United States; see 83 US 36 and 112 US 94.
Does the fact of one of his parents being a British National confer British citizenship on him? Dual citizenship? Does it depend on the laws in effect at the time of his birth? How does that affect his eligibility?
Maybe; I'm not familiar with British citizenship law, but I imagine that without being born on British soil, application for citizenship under jus sanguinius would be required when he wanted to claim that citizenship. You can have dual citizenship in both the UK and the US. As it turns out, the Constitution only cares that you're a "natural born citizen," which clearly means that you're not a naturalized citizen. Being a citizen by jus soli or jus sanguinius means that you were born into citizenship (by location or by blood), which is about as "natural born" as you can be. Also, 169 US 649 would seem to indicate that he is indeed a citizen by the 14th amendment unless said parent happened to be working for the British government in an official capacity, which isn't the case.
If his mother became an Indonesian citizen, doesn't that mean he, as a minor, was also an Indonesian citizen? Doesn't he have to file a form during his 21st year asserting his birthright to American citizenship? (If he didn't, is he an illegal alien?) Did he attend Occidental College and Columbia as a foreign student? If so, how does that affect his eligibility?
Maybe; I'm not familiar with Indonesian citizenship law. However, in most countries, the mere act of your parents being naturalized doesn't have any effect on your citizenship, in much the same way that a child of a foreign national, born on US soil, doesn't immediately make his or her parents into citizens despite the rabid claims about "terror babies." As we've already established he's a citizen by jus soli, and US law assumes anyone born on US soil is a citizen unless a proper objection can be raised to the contrary (and in this case, that'd be that both of his parents were not subject to US jurisdiction at the time, or that the birth certificate is fake, and both of those objections have been disproven), no forms need to be filled out. I don't know where this "file a form during his 21st year" thing is coming from, since the only relevant form here to assert citizenship in the US is the notification of foreign birth, which is filed by the parents with the State Department after the birth in cases of jus sanguinius where the child is born outside the US.
I am bothered more by the fact that Obama and his groups have spent millions of dollars trying to suppress attempts to find out the facts, than I am by crazy people spreading doubts about where he was born.
Really? Because I think crazy people spreading doubts complicates the political discourse to no advantage and is essentially demeaning an institution and a person with no evidence. In my book, that's rather unethical. Would you be okay with people bringing up doubts here about your sanity, or your recent battles with drug abuse? See how easy it is to "spread doubts" that serve no purpose other than to engage in a cheap shot against someone with whom you disagree?
Re: (Score:3)
Does the fact of one of his parents being a British National confer British citizenship on him? Dual citizenship? Does it depend on the laws in effect at the time of his birth? How does that affect his eligibility?
If his mother became an Indonesian citizen, doesn't that mean he, as a minor, was also an Indonesian citizen? Doesn't he have to file a form during his 21st year asserting his birthright to American citizenship? (If he didn't, is he an illegal alien?) Did he attend Occidental College and Columbia