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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
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Welcome to postmodernism? It's fucked up, but we here. These days "non-biased journalism" is code for "journalism supporting my biases".
In other news, just in general, calm down folks. I know it sounds like I'm making light of the situation here, but seriously, calm down. Just tune out of the political cycle for a bit. This hype culture does no one any favors.
EDIT: I might have misinterpreted what
said juuuust a bit, so I'll shift said comment to a more general address.
edited 2nd Nov '16 6:39:05 PM by InAnOdderWay
This
Politifact article explains some of the exceptions.
edited 2nd Nov '16 6:44:45 PM by Lennik
That's right, boys. Mondo cool.![]()
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Honestly, this is the reason why I left the skeptic movements, not because they became toxic (they didn't) or because they became a circlejerk (kinda did), but because spending time debunking conspiracy theories and refuting misinformation was becoming both time consuming and honestly it felt like it had diminishing returns, arguing with conspiracy theorists and nutters was futile as none of them were changing their minds, to the point that instead of trying to change the minds of the people deep in conspiracy theories the folks at the Skeptic Project focused on providing information for those who didn't fall deep in the sinkhole. Which arguably had better results.
But then, politics got involved in debunking and correcting misinformation, which made things worse because if you didn't align yourself with a political ideology you'd be just a shill trying to get votes for another political entity. It is incredibly hard to not be overwhelmed by all the falsehoods being produced and doing so opens you to attacks too. I lost the count of how many times I've been called a kike disinfo agent at the service of the NWO since the conspiracies over the housing bubble burst became a thing.
edited 2nd Nov '16 6:53:35 PM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesRe that topic of unbelievability and tropeiness of this election, Trump is pretty well-covered. The tl; dr is that he's an over-the-top Politically Incorrect Villain.
For Clinton, one thing that struck me is the fact that she has an advisor whose last name is actually Mook.
Haven't been here in a while. I think the election wore me out.
Any group who acts like morons ironically will eventually find itself swamped by morons who think themselves to be in good company.Those "Japanese" Trump ads are not actually Japanese at all. They instead make fun of stereotypes regarding how Japanese ads are designed.
Anyway, what got me to stop believing in all the conspiracy wacko stuff was a couple things. Watching many of their predictions fail to come true, noticing holes in their logic, and also, just plain losing interest and walking away. As I spent more time away from them, their beliefs fell apart for me.
The big thing that has kept me away from conspiracies (aside from the complete lack of empirical evidence) is the simple understanding that the world is not ordered and that if two political parties can't even work together to pass a budget, the level of collusion it would take to manipulate the entire country into silence about crazy stories would be flat out impossible.
And always keep Occam's Razor in mind.
edited 2nd Nov '16 7:54:49 PM by Lennik
That's right, boys. Mondo cool.![]()
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This was one of my main arguments against conspiracies. The levels of competency required to pull what the conspiracy theorists claim it is happening virtually impossible, because people are incompetent.
But then, they rationalize that those mishaps "we know off" are all part of the plan and the incompetence is intentional.
The doublethink is strong.
edited 2nd Nov '16 8:48:24 PM by AngelusNox
Inter arma enim silent legesI never bought into most conspiracy theories. Then I noticed the Unfortunate Implications behind some conspiracy theories and theorists, so I finally recognized the overlap between conspiracy theorists, the things they peddle, and some of their believers.
But people are going to believe what they want to believe, I guess.¯\_(ツ)_/¯
edited 2nd Nov '16 8:53:02 PM by BearyScary
Do not obey in advance.

How the Internet is Loosening our Grip on the Truth
NY Times. 10 article per month limit. However, the article is too big to quote in full, so I'll quote parts.
You would think that greater primary documentation would lead to a better cultural agreement about the “truth.” In fact, the opposite has happened.
Consider the difference in the examples of the John F. Kennedy assassination and 9/11. While you’ve probably seen only a single film clip of the scene from Dealey Plaza in 1963 when President Kennedy was shot, hundreds of television and amateur cameras were pointed at the scene on 9/11. Yet neither issue is settled for Americans; in one recent survey, about as many people said the government was concealing the truth about 9/11 as those who said the same about the Kennedy assassination.
Documentary proof seems to have lost its power. If the Kennedy conspiracies were rooted in an absence of documentary evidence, the 9/11 theories benefited from a surfeit of it. So many pictures from 9/11 flooded the internet, often without much context about what was being shown, that conspiracy theorists could pick and choose among them to show off exactly the narrative they preferred. There is also the looming specter of Photoshop: Now, because any digital image can be doctored, people can freely dismiss any bit of inconvenient documentary evidence as having been somehow altered.
This gets to the deeper problem: We all tend to filter documentary evidence through our own biases. Researchers have shown that two people with differing points of view can look at the same picture, video or document and come away with strikingly different ideas about what it shows.
That dynamic has played out repeatedly this year. Some people look at the Wiki Leaks revelations about Mrs. Clinton’s campaign and see a smoking gun, while others say it’s no big deal, and that besides, it’s been doctored or stolen or taken out of context. Surveys show that people who liked Mr. Trump saw the Access Hollywood tape where he casually referenced groping women as mere “locker room talk”; those who didn’t like him considered it the worst thing in the world.
But that hasn’t quite happened. Today dozens of news outlets routinely fact-check the candidates and much else online, but the endeavor has proved largely ineffective against a tide of fakery.
That’s because the lies have also become institutionalized. There are now entire sites whose only mission is to publish outrageous, completely fake news online (like real news, fake news has become a business). Partisan Facebook pages have gotten into the act; a recent Buzz Feed analysis of top political pages on Facebook showed that right-wing sites published false or misleading information 38 percent of the time, and lefty sites did so 20 percent of the time.