How Technology Disrupted the Truth (theguardian.com) 259
A day after the Brexit, former UK Independence Party (UKIP) leader Nigel Farage admitted he had misled the public on a key issue. He admitted that UK's alleged 350M Euro weekly contribution to the EU would not be directed to the National Health Service, and that this commitment was never made official. Journalists worldwide tweeted photos of the campaign ads -- posted in conspicuous places like the sides of buses -- debunking the lie. This incident illustrates the need for more political fact-checking as a public service, to enable the voters to make more informed and rational decisions about matters affecting their daily lives. Fact-checking is supposed to be a part of the normal journalistic process. When gathering information, a journalist should verify its accuracy. The work is then vetted by an editor, a person with more professional experience who may correct or further amend some of the information. A long-form article on The Guardian today underscores the challenges publications worldwide are facing today -- most of them don't have the luxury to afford a fact-checker (let alone a team of fact-checkers), and the advent of social media and forums and our reliance (plenty of people get their news on social media now) have made it increasingly difficult to vet the accuracy of anything that is being published. From The Guardian article:When a fact begins to resemble whatever you feel is true, it becomes very difficult for anyone to tell the difference between facts that are true and "facts" that are not.Global Voices' adds:But the need for fact-checking hasn't gone away. As new technologies have spawned new forms of media which lend themselves to the spread of various kinds of disinformation, this need has in fact grown. Much of the information that's spread online, even by news outlets, is not checked, as outlets simply copy-past -- or in some instances, plagiarize -- "click-worthy" content generated by others. Politicians, especially populists prone to manipulative tactics, have embraced this new media environment by making alliances with tabloid tycoons or by becoming media owners themselves. The other issue is that many people do not care about the source of the information, and it has become increasingly hard to tell whether a news article you saw on your Facebook is credible or not. This, coupled with how social networking websites game the news feed to show you what you are likely to find interesting as opposed to giving you news from trustworthy sources, has made things even worse. As you may remember, Facebook recently noted that it is making changes to algorithms to show you updates from friends instead of news articles from publications you like. The Guardian adds:Algorithms such as the one that powers Facebook's news feed are designed to give us more of what they think we want -- which means that the version of the world we encounter every day in our own personal stream has been invisibly curated to reinforce our pre-existing beliefs. [...] In the news feed on your phone, all stories look the same -- whether they come from a credible source or not. And, increasingly, otherwise-credible sources are also publishing false, misleading, or deliberately outrageous stories.
Guardian?! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Guardian?! (Score:4, Insightful)
echochamber n Place which keeps repeating inconvenient facts which are unacceptable in my worldview.
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echochamber n Place where a person tells a lie, a few other persons repeat it, and the first person decides it must be true because their friends keep telling it to them.
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echochamber n: Place which keeps repeating a certain worldview regardless of inconvenient facts.
Yellow Journalism (Score:3)
it has become increasingly hard to tell whether a news article you saw on your Facebook is credible or not.
Not hard at all. Every media publisher, editor, reporter, and blogger has an agenda. Read a variety of news sources on both sides of the political spectrum and draw your own conclusions, but don't trust any of it.
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The banks won't fully leave, however they are going to either relocate a massive part of their UK operations to the continent or fire a massive part of their UK workforce. The UK population is roughly 65 million people, the EU population without the UK is roughly 440 million people. You don't need as many people in the "UK outside EU" operations to manage less than 13% of the "UK inside EU" potential clientele.
With the UK as a EU member, banks could "passport" their UK banking license to the rest of Europe.
Re: Guardian?! (Score:2)
Re: Guardian?! (Score:5, Insightful)
German banks want financial services to be a larger part of their economy. They already ask why the main interbank clearing house for Euro transactions is in London, when the UK isn't in the Eurozone. They will now ask even more why it is in a country that isn't even part of the EU.
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Theresa May does not have the strong hand in this game.
The banks can lean on Theresa as much as they want, she will get what the EU commission wants. And they are pissed off.
The French are already pushing to move some UK operations to Paris, as they want to strengthen their financial sector. So do the Germans. And right now the Franco-German axis have way more say in the EU than the Brits.
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The dependency tree for full passporting is simple: being a member of the EU. This was known before the vote, in fact several banks had to deposit in front of a parliamentary commission on the possible effects of Brexit. It was dismissed by the Brexit camp as being part of "project fear".
Switzerland, for example, doesn't have the ability to fully passport its financial services to the EU, it has 120-something bilateral agreements for some services. Those agreements have to be renegotiated every time there i
truth vs fact (Score:5, Insightful)
Whenever anyone throws out these terms, recall the line in that Indiana Jones move: (paraphrased) This class is about the search for facts, if you want to search for the truth then the philosophy class is down the hall.
Are journalists supposed to be searching for facts or for the truth? When they say they are "fact-checking" how often is it more like "truth-checking"?
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It's a pretty safe bet that nothing you receive from the entertainment industry or social media is trustworthy and only geared towards clicks or impressions anymore. If I want to find out whats going on around me I go outside or talk to my neighbor.
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If by Sun you mean a news-agency or news-paper that's still the entertainment industry.
Turn off or throw away the TV, delete your Facebook account, go outside and *talk to your neighbors*.
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Ah I see your point.
That's not the kind of 'whats going on' I was referring to. In that respect Facebook is the worst thing.
My inclination was towards something meaningful but you're right. Gossip is likely all that will occur.
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Re:truth vs fact (Score:5, Interesting)
Facts can be objectively checked by examining the physical world: Fact: Candidate X is wearing black pants today. Check: examine candidate X's pants.
Truth almost always involves at least a partial subjectiveness or state of mind. Truth: Candidate X is a liar about what happened. Check: Lying, as opposed to being incorrect, requires a state of mind where a fact is misrepresented on purpose. It is very difficult to prove whether Candidate X was misinformed, clueless, taking an honest but wild guess, talking out of their ass to try to sound good, or actively lying to mislead just partially or totally.
That's the difference between fact and truth. Beware people who try to represent truth as fact because fact implies it can be verified objectively.
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I did not ask whether "facts" and "truth" are equivalent. I asked how a fact can not be true.
Tomhath gave a good answer [slashdot.org] to my question.
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Oh, facts can not be true all the time, thus the need for fact checking. In my above example, if you examine Candidate X's pants and determine they are just dark green, then my fact is not true (where true is used to mean correct or incorrect). It then becomes a matter of determining truth to assign a motive to why I reported Candidate X's pants incorrectly, but the simple statement of fact itself is not a matter of truth. "True" as a shorthand for correctness or incorrectness of a fact should not be confu
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An "untrue fact" is not a fact. It may be a "factual claim", as in a "claim of fact", as in it purports to assert a fact, but if what asserts is not true, then it is not, in fact, a fact at all.
"Truth" just means "true-ness", and is synonymous with "factuality", just as "true" is synonymous with "factual"; and "a truth" is synonymous with "a fact".
Construing "truth" to mean something beyond factuality is a mistake similar to construing "belief" to mean something about faith. Take the proposition "the sky is
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Your approach seems to meld the objective and the subjective. Great if that works for you; my approach keeps them as far apart as possible, which I prefer.
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No, I keep objective and subjective very clearly separate thanks, you are just false equating them in turn with two words that both belong with only one of them. Facts or truths (same thing) are objective; if they're not objective, then they're not actually facts or truths. "Subjective facts" or "subjective truths" are just beliefs. Those can still coincide with the objective truths or facts, and can even be justified, meaning you hold those beliefs (you "have subjective truths" or whatever contortion of la
Re:truth vs fact (Score:5, Insightful)
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There are probably 10 sides and more to every story. Sometimes there are so many sides that you have a smooth continuum. Limiting story to two sides only is part of the "lie" politicians like to tell.
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Less than the whole truth does not mean less than the true. A fact, in absence of other relevant facts, is still "the truth" (inasmuch as that just means "true"). It may not be the whole truth (inasmuch as that means "all the facts"), but it's still the truth.
A fact is not all the facts, duh. It takes all the facts to have the whole truth, but a single fact is still the truth, else it wouldn't be a fact.
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Two ways come to mind:
First, when it is not actually a "fact", but is placed in a context where facts normally go. Example:
"After Natalie Portman bathed in hot grits, netcraft confirmed my opponent has never built a Beowolf cluster"
The "my opponent never built a beowolf cluster" is in the "claim" part of that sentence. The "Natlie Portman
bathed in hot grits" is "presented as fact" in a way that less swift people will more often take it as a
given. This is just a matter of the word "fact" having some shade
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Actually, it once was the prevailing belief. But you need to go back to before around 350 BC (I think that's the right era, I could be off by a century either way).
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And in any case, "prevailing belief" != "fact".
Facts are true propositions, and being widely believed doesn't make a proposition true.
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The truth is that million of pounds every day went from the UK to the EU. The truth was that some people in the UK wanted to believe that the money could be going into their council housing.
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Jesus, play a little KSP before you start lecturing on orbits.
It takes one half orbit to do a minimum energy transfer. That's half an eccentric orbit, so longer than half an earth year. 9 months.
Donalds plan to print money is _EVERYBODIES_ only plan. Nobody is even thinking of balancing the budget without accounting tricks. The question is do we print money when out of options, or do we print money at the strategically best time, like right after the euro craters...
No the tax raisers aren't thinking
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No, the reason is that we cannot build a spaceship that can carry enough fuel to keep up 1 g acceleration for a week, much less a month. Ever seen a rocket? They're huge, are mostly made up of fuel, and every stage has to be larger than the one used after it because it has to carr
Re:truth vs fact vs Donald's real plan (Score:2)
The Donald's real plan is completely orthogonal to any public policy including concerns about the national debt:
!. Win the so-called Republican nomination. Easy to fool some of the (stupid) people all of the time.
2. Pick a VP who loves Ford's pardon of Nixon.
3. Win the election by fooling most (51%) of the people some of the time (one election day).
4. Phuck up, get impeached, resign, get pardoned. (Step 2 was important.)
5. PROFIT.
Talk about building your brand recognition.
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The truth is that million of pounds every day went from the UK to the EU. The truth was that some people in the UK wanted to believe that the money could be going into their council housing.
It's much worse than that. They didn't just believe something that sounded good and "obvious" (money you don't spend on one thing can be spent on something else instead), they actually decided to ignore people pointing out that they were wrong. Gove (one of the main pro-Brexit campaigners) actually said on TV that "people have had enough of experts" and should listen to their hearts rather than their heads. And then the day afterwards I heard people discussing it as if it was a genuine decision to be made, hated of the mythical EU that only exists in newspapers vs. the cold reality of basically every expert in the entire world telling them it was an extremely stupid thing to do.
And in the end, by a narrow majority, we chose stupid. Our democracy is hopelessly broken, because it relies on people making somewhat informed decisions. And now we have an unelected leader, probably for at least another 4 years, who has promised to carry out what she imagines the people who voted to leave want, rather than actually asking them what they want. Yes, they voted out of the EU, but not the single market, or even anything to do with what Brexit would look like because one of the core parts of the Leave campaign was to avoid committing to specifics.
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That line is stupid and has spawned no end of stupid repetition of this false dichotomy.
Truth is a property of propositions.
Facts are propositions that have that property.
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Asking whether journalism is about facts or truth is like asking whether rocket science is about physics or design. The answer is, "yes."
You can't judge opinions of the truth until you've got your facts right AND you have a wide enough selections of facts to know you aren't dealing with cherry-picked data. It's not enough to merely check the facts, you have to put the effort into assembling a comprehensive, cross-cutting selection of them.
In the absence of facts, anyone's opinion is as good as anyone else'
Uhm... (Score:4, Interesting)
You can't fact-check something a politician says they're going to do. You just have to wait and see whether they actually do it.
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Nevermind that he's not in a position to do it anyway
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Sure you can.
If a politician claims he's going to pave the streets with unicorn poop you can be pretty sure it's a lie since unicorn poop does not exist. Likewise, if a politician claimed they'd give the 350 million GBP per week given to the EU to the NHS you can be sure it's a lie since that existed about as much as unicorn poop exists.
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But you can have reality checks. That is realizing that there's no likelihood at all for the politicians being able to carry out their ludicrous promises. Donald Trump has promised to do so many things on his first day in office that it's absurdly impractical to do it all in only 24 hours. Presumably those listening realize that it's just standard hyperbole and not meant to be taken literally. However there's a range where it becomes more difficult to separate the practical promise from the exaggeration
How to "question authority" when there is none? (Score:3)
None of this is new... (Score:5, Insightful)
People have always gravitated toward "news" that confirmed their biases. And although news outlets may have smaller budgets for fact-checking, the cost of fact-checking - not to mention the ability of individual consumers to fact-check - has become incredibly low. You no longer have to plod down to the library or news office and spend days (or weeks, or months) tirelessly pouring over articles on microfiche. You can do a LexisNexis search. Want to vet a claim made about economic growth? Pop on to the Federal Reserve economic research site and have instant graphs of hundreds of thousands of metrics.
The problem is people don't want truth; they want validation. If they do stumble across truth, they'll cherry-pick the pieces that agree with them and find some way to dismiss the rest.
In relying on a fact checker, one simply substitutes another's confirmation bias for their own, and in the process moves further from the raw facts than they were before. What people need is the intellectual curiosity to seek out a broad array of opinions and the humility to actually consider them in good faith. Good luck with that.
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If I had found this comment earlier, I would have attached my comment here, and I agree that you deserve the insightful mod.
It's not that hard. (Score:2)
"[I]t has become increasingly hard to tell whether a news article you saw on your Facebook is credible or not"
Easy. Don't get your news from Facebook.
Recursivity (Score:3)
Did anyone fact-check this slashdot story about fact-checking ?
Post lies about Farage (Score:5, Informative)
Is it too much to ask that a post about fact checking get its facts right?
The "350m to the NHS" billboards were created by the Vote Leave [wikipedia.org] campaign.
Nigel Farage was not part of that organization, he joined the separate Leave.EU [wikipedia.org] organization.
When Farage himself spoke about the money to be saved by leaving the EU, he gave a 34 million a day figure [independent.co.uk], which is 238m a week, 32% less than what Vote Leave claimed.
In the video, Farage also says the money saved should be spent on both schools and hospitals, as opposed to all of it going to the NHS.
Blaming Farage for lying for things said by Vote Leave is like blaming Bernie Sanders for things Hillary Clinton said. They are roughly on the same side, but they are not the same people, and do not support the exact same policies.
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Wrong, Farage himself was asked about the 350 million in a interview televised, and said "its not 350 million, in fact its MORE". :-
So, please take note, article is about facts not cherry picking what fits your narrative, perhaps you might try some too one day?
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/brexit-eu-referendum-nigel-farage-nhs-350-million-pounds-live-health-service-u-turn-a7102831.html
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I'm not a native speaker, but it sounds to me that he says "this money should go to schools, hospitals, GPs....". Schools are not part of NHS, are they?
Where has all the insight gone? Long time passing (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone is getting so delusional these days. Nigel Farage can't remember his own campaign promises and I can't remember why I once thought slashdot was a source of amusing comments and even a bit of insight. (My searches in the comments so far came up completely dry.)
I've never been able to earn many funny points, and the more insightful and thought-provoking my comments, the more they attract the game-playing trolls and their sad little mod points (trying to compensate for their small penises and inability to respond with stronger ideas).
Anyway, in this case the article is typically misleading. The problem isn't technology, but the will to believe as amplified by technology. The truths are out there, and you can use search technologies to find them, or you can go on believing exactly what you want to believe, and the search technologies will help you do that, too. Since most people already know EXACTLY what they prefer to believe, they can search for "proof" of exactly that, and thanks to today's google ("All your attention are belong to us.") they can find as much evidence as needed. However much "research" time you have, the google can stuff it with the evidence you like while allowing you to ignore any evidence you don't like. (If the google didn't do that, you might run away, which would be terrible for the google's advertising revenues.)
"Believing what you want to believe" might not be a fatal flaw of democracy. It would depend if most people are nice and want to believe nice things--but there's no profit in encouraging that sort of thing. Not sure of the best example for England, but in America we have the Second Amendment and it's hard to believe nice things when that's probably a gun in his pocket, even if he is pretending to be happy to see you.
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But insight is NOT profitable. (Score:2)
No, you are confusing technology with economics, which is why I think (1) We need to use new economic models to drive better journalism, and (2) We need to completely rethink the field of economics in terms of time, which is truly more important than money, but harder to count. I think the new field of study might be called ekronomics, but for now, let me focus (just a bit) on one possible economic model that could motivate better comments and even let slashdot support real journalism (if it wanted to).
Imag
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We need to completely rethink the field of economics in terms of time, which is truly more important than money, but harder to count.
Our very own Slashdot denizen bluelucidfox has been trying to do precisely that. He veers between seriously interesting, possibly insightful and "wat". He's sort of been using Slashdot as a sounding board, and the results are mixed, at best. Slashdot is having trouble coming to grips with the ideas and he's having trouble expressing some of them.
Speaking as someone who took many semesters of economics classes at university, I feel comfortable saying that his theories come a lot closer to reality than any
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I'll have to see I can find what he's up to. My analysis begins with work in the three categories of essential, investment, and recreational. Ring any bells?
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No such user?
Not new - even Pontius Pilate said "what is truth" (Score:2)
"as outlets simply copy-past" (Score:2)
. . . or even "copy-paste."
Well, at least this submission was not encumbered by the editorial process.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Humbug (Score:2)
Since Mr Farage held or holds no executive power, he cannot say that the money saved will go to the NHS, or that it be spent on growing daisies, for that matter. Those are not his political promises to make, or break. He _can_ say that it might be used for the NHS, and he _can_ say that it might not.
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Ah well, he's gone, along with all the other Brexiters, having ran away from the burning building, having set it on fire themselves. Now the country is in the hands of a Remainer, go figure.
The problem with democracy (Score:3, Insightful)
That 350 million a week was analysed and proved to be wrong _during_ the campaign but unfortunately there's more people around who believe what they are told than there are who do their own research and as such then realise the figure is bollocks.
The problem with democracy is that both types of people get the same number of votes per person so appealing to prejudices was enough to swing it for Leave.
Signed,
A pissed off Brit who did his own research and voted Remain as a result.
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The problem with democracy is that both types of people get the same number of votes per person
The problem with everything other system is that nobody really trusts the one(s) with enough time to do complete, accurate research: chances are he's involved in politics or selling something. Winston Churchill most famously pointed that out (quoting someone else). So basically this isn't a new problem, for the UK or for democracies.
I do think the English speaking world has suffered from confusion over the term
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
By the tail end of the campaign everyone was pretty clear about the fact we would not be pumping £350 million into the NHS. What the Brexit guys were saying was that we'd not be sending £350 million a week over the Channel and letting the EU bureacrats decide how it got spent. As I understand it we have a net deficit of about £100-150 million between what goes out and what comes back in terms of EU grants etc. They were saying this excess money could be largely spent on the NHS and a few
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What the Brexit guys were saying was that we'd not be sending £350 million a week over the Channel and letting the EU bureacrats decide how it got spent.
This too was a lie. The rebate is deducted before the money is sent.
https://fullfact.org/europe/ou... [fullfact.org]
Whilst this lie was incidental, lying politicians should face criminal charges and jail time. Blair's lie about 45min WMD may be responsible for ISIS.
Re:The problem with democracy (Score:4, Informative)
That "excess money" didn't include anything else in the discussion, namely the massive amount of EU nationals working in the NHS. Should they disappear, you'd need far more than £350m a week to shore up the NHS.
The EU pumped millions into training programmes across the UK, helping areas ignored by Westminster. The EU is good for everyone in Britain, regardless of your wealth. The problems people attributed to the EU were nearly entirely the fault of Westminster. For example, the immigration issue. Guess what? Britain was always in full control of its immigration. EU migrants wishing to live in the UK had to have job offers, or be self-sufficient. Non-EU immigration was always under full control of Westminster. Now, outside the EU, Britain will have to abide by the EU's freedom of movement laws, but will now have absolutely no say over what they are. So what did Britain gain? Nothing - it just gave away its ability to decide who gets to come to the UK. It is precisely the opposite of what the leave campaign promised.
Sorry. This whole debate (or lack thereof) really gets to me.
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The most important thing is that they were saying that the UK Government would be free to decide how the entire £350 million/ week would be spent. Some of this money (science, agriculture, regional aid) would be spent in the same way, but the UK Government would probably have different priorities than the EU and target this money differently.
Even if the £350m/week figure were correct, this would still be a lie, because they were also claiming that we'd have full access to the common market. Other countries that are not in the EU but have access to the common market pay a similar amount per capita to the UK in, but then don't receive a rebate. So this claim would more accurately be phrased as 'if we left the EU, we'd have to send more money there to retain a subset of our current benefits but at least we wouldn't then get a say in how it
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No, the country is in the hands of an inveterate fence-sitter with no mandate.
So, business as usual.
Now May, fix the fucking trains and fire GTR!
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You all lost, you just don't all know it yet.
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He did not admit misleading the public. He did say that somebody else "made a mistake". Not him. Somebody else. In short, he lied, then lied about lying. He admitted nothing.
Aaaah, Classic Trump! He's learning from the best.
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I think he just told us what he fantasizes abut when he does.
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I don't recall her having been tried, much less convicted. As in the United States of America, you are innocent until proven guilty, she did not "factually break the law". Insistence that she did break the law is completely right-wing one-sided propaganda.
FYI, The Espionage Act (18 U.S. Code 793(f)), which is the law most cited as the one she supposedly broke does not specify what the 'proper place' for a confidential document actually entails. Yes, she was dumb for designating, in the course of her duties
Re: Good to hear (Score:3, Insightful)
in her case being innocent and not having broke the law are not the same thing. According to the head of the FBI she did break the he law but is too clueless to prosecute.
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Y'all didn't read the second half of my post, apparently. If you download movies off Pirate Bay, it's possible that you haven't broken the law if your use of said movies falls under fair use. The law is nuanced, which is why we have courts in the first place. Only a court can determine whether someone has actually broken the law, and anything else is just opinion.
I am still waiting to hear exactly what it was that she supposedly did that actually broke the law anyway.
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And you're still not answering my question as to what law she actually broke.
Here is the Comey quote that everyone seems so apoplectic about:
To be clear, this is not to suggest that in similar circumstances, a person who engaged in this activity would face no consequences. To the contrary, those individuals are often subject to security or administrative sanctions. But that is not what we are deciding now.
If you re-read what he is saying, his point is that the reckless actions would normally lead to punishment within the department, just like any employee can expect to be chewed out by their boss for making bad decisions. Assuming he is talking about legal action here directly contradicts what he said earlier about how in the past legal action has only been taken in ext
Re: Good to hear (Score:5, Informative)
Fact remains FBI director came on to the television as stated that if this was _anybody else_ they would have been prosecuted. Facts are facts. Rules for us and rules for wing nut Democrat imbeciles. Come the revolution.
TRUMP 2016
FBI director Comey said he could find no previous precedent for prosecuting Clinton under these statutes. Former SOS's Powell and Rice although they didn't have their own email servers did use G-mail or other external email sites for similar messages and yet they weren't prosecuted. I guess if your ideology is strong enough you see what you want to see instead of reality.
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Like a say people tend to see what they want to see. After over 20 years of going after the Clintons people on the right are sure there's something there even though none of the investigations has been fruitful. So Hillary Clinton must have set up her e-mail server for nefarious reasons rather than simply as a matter of convenience. To me 20 years of going after the Clintons with essentially no results just indicates the right's obsession with them and their success a politicians.
Don't get me wrong. Hil
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Never ever believe anything you hear... and only half of what you see.
If mass media wasn't such an obvious propaganda machine, there might have been a modicum of trust, and social media could easily be blown off. But now, with all the censorship of war coverage (for example), and shared wire service that only recite government press releases, there is nowhere else to turn.
Easier said than done (Score:3)
Never ever believe anything you hear... and only half of what you see.
It would be nice if we were all capable of being skeptics to the truth. Unfortunately, we're not physiologically built for that. As Wired Magazine explained so well in an article back in 2009 [wired.com], our dorsolateral prefrontal cortex filters out information it determines to be unnecessary, including information that does not agree with our perception of the world. The vast majority of people do not understand this, so they naturally prefer t
How can you tell a politician is lying? (Score:5, Insightful)
How can you tell a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.
That is why we should elect Jeff Dunham [google.com] President of the United States.
Walter can run for Vice President. Plenty of precedent for having a dummy for VP.
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How can you tell a politician is lying? Their lips are moving.
That is why we should elect Jeff Dunham [google.com] President of the United States.
Walter can run for Vice President. Plenty of precedent for having a dummy for VP.
Its easy. The best American example is convoluting insulting exaggerating Donald Trump. He has called his opponents liers, crazy, and moreover, will not produce any facts, like his financial status. For example, does he owe money to the IRS, or to the electricians, plumbers. and other tradespeople who are or have sued him for non payment? I would say that DT is morally and financially bancrupt, and needs to win the presidency in order to avoid the truth and facts from being divulged. And just read body
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No, politicians sometimes lie, if (a) deception in the matter in question would be in their self-interest and (b) they can get away with it. Since "news" sources no longer can "afford fact checking" (i.e., they can't afford to actually do journalism), we can take (b) for granted.
Re:Politicians always lie (Score:5, Interesting)
Agreed - but you haven't described "all conservatives."
Agreed - but you haven't described "all conservatives."
Disagree - my support for Hillary Clinton doesn't make me "objectively a socialist" - in fact, I trend fairly conservative in matters of finance and policy. Hillary, however, is the least-bad alternative available to me, so I choose to support her. I agree with some of her positions, and disagree with others. Overall, I think she'll be a perfectly decent president if she gets elected - however, she's not my "ideal" candidate, nor is she running my "ideal" platform.
The destructive nitwit here is you - the person who insists that everything can be boiled down to only two sides, and that one's position on healthcare, for instance, necessarily comes with a host of other unrelated beliefs about foreign policy, women, religion, and fiscal policy. People vote their conscience, and not a single person voting believes they are doing something evil by doing so. Until you can understand what might motivate people to disagree with you (hint: it's not "stupidity," "ignorance," or "hate"), you are bound to be just another meme-spewing dolt who thinks he's clever because all the people in his little echo chamber agree with him.
Or, to summarize: twat.
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That amount is not being sent to the EU. The UK sends closer to £150m a week, and that does not include the amount of funding received from the EU. Thatcher worked very hard to decrease the amount of money the UK sent to the EU. The "£350M to the EU" can be checked, has been checked, and is complete nonsense. I sincerely hope you didn't vote in the referendum...
Re:Politicians always lie (Score:4, Interesting)
Thing is, that figure was still not correct, the £350M was shown to be wrong, the actual number is £180M, which is just over half the figure used by the Exit campaign. And people still went for it because it was "truthy [wikipedia.org]", so it played well to their own preconceptions. Similar to the rhetoric about Eurocrats, when the reality is that the EU has less bureaucrats employed in total than the UK has bureaucrats working in Birmingham, their second largest city.
I think one item that made it very clear that people were voting with their feelings rather than weighing positives and negatives, was Cornwall realizing, after the vote, that they get a lot of EU support, and trying to put pressure on London to match this. Whether or not it will happen, who knows, but after the vote probably wasn't the time to bring it up.
I've said before that I believe that much of the negative feeling towards the EU is from governments all over Europe using the EU as a handy scapegoat, and claiming that any unpopular decision was a result of the EU. This has been going on for 40 years in the case of the UK, which was bound to have an impact. It also doesn't help that people find it difficult to distinguish the EU from the ECHR (a separate organization) and EU related immigration from external immigration (in the UK, the largest number of immigrants are from India, for instance). This is a great example of what the article is saying because it shows that the narrative has been prioritized over the reality, and it's really difficult to dispute a narrative now because it's dispersed, rather than having a small number of sources.
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What? An article complaining about dodgy facts has dodgy facts?
What is truly infuriating about the whole thing is that he isn't even a MP. He has no power in the government. Yet journalists want to hang broken promises on him.
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Yet he has the power to cause Britain to leave the EU against its best interests, cause a recession, cause a 57% increase in racist assaults...
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The number was false [theguardian.com]. In fact it was widely known to be false.
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See, this is what you don't get. The FACT of 350m was wrong, but that fact you're disputing is not what was encouraging people to vote - the actual sum was completely irrelevant. Your own article says, "This equates to £136m a week, less than 40% of the amount splashed on the battlebus." So, regardless of the specific amount of cash you're "sending to the EU each week," you're still sending a fuckload of money to them.
The point of the slogan on the bus was not "AMG 350 millionz!" It was: "Shouldn
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Glorify the experts - that's the first thing you do. With experts that people trust, you can spread pretty much whatever BS you want. So you Glorify them. You laud their intelligence, of being beyond reproach, whatever works.
Interesting how that was so interchangeable.
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It's not interchangeable though. Sure it's grammatically correct, but it's nonsense.
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You're trying to change her story.
She and her staff said it wasn't planned and was a spontaneous demonstration related to some dumb video. That was a big fat lie and they all knew it.
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You're trying to change her story.
She and her staff said it wasn't planned and was a spontaneous demonstration related to some dumb video. That was a big fat lie and they all knew it.
You know, both sides were right. There was an enormous, spontaneous demonstration that was directly spawned by the release of The Innocence of Muslims video. Terrorists used the demonstration as convenient cover to get close enough to attack without being immediately spotted and caught. At the start, it was difficult to discern whether the attack was related to the demonstration or not, and until terrorists entered the compound itself, it was difficult to tell who was a demonstrator and who was a terrorist.
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That's... not anything like what she said. She said it was a spontaneous demonstration prompted by a movie nobody had ever heard of. And that was after the career bureaucrats told her it was a planned attack. She lied, and it's a documented lie. As Moynihan said, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.
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Being able to mislead is a skill which is sometimes needed in some of the roles politicians play. Doing it all the time, for the wrong reasons, or to great detriment to the public is of course undesirable, but being either bad at it, or too honest, is something that will turn off voters that actually want you to trick the villainous, so some politicians will try to show off this talent. The more perfect world where the public does not want or need this in a politician is a while away (and if you've ever r
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