Fake News, Trump, Deny Ignorance and ATS

originally posted by: ketsuko
a reply to: links234

Why would people vote for Trump if he touched Rupaul inappropriately?

Because it proved he was an equal opportunity groper?

a reply to: ketsuko

She won the popolur vote by 3 to 4% and lost the electoral college by 1%. Not the same.

a reply to: Indigo5

Wow talk about fuzzy math. According to your cnn she has 232 electoral votes to Trumps 290 plus the 16 they still haven't awarded to him yet makes 306 and that is supposed to be 1% . You are reaching.(badly)

Honesty seems to be an issue with your party.

originally posted by: Indigo5

originally posted by: Ohanka
Presumably fake news refers to CNN, ABC, MSNBC etc. etc.

The precise false equivalence that feeds the popularity of Fake News.

Problem is its not I just had to laugh CNN has been busted all ready creating fake stories on protests. My favorite still is where they outed themselves. Reporter trying to act like hes interviewing a random protestor. Then gets outed by the guy in the main office as the cameraman. You cant make this stuff up.

originally posted by: Diisenchanted
a reply to: Indigo5

Wow talk about fuzzy math. According to your cnn she has 232 electoral votes to Trumps 290 plus the 16 they still haven't awarded to him yet makes 306 and that is supposed to be 1% . You are reaching.(badly)

Honesty seems to be an issue with your party.

You don't understand the electoral college.

If she loses a state by 1 vote all electoral votes go to her opponent.

So yes. If 1 out of every 100 Trump voters had abstained or voted Hillary she would have swept the electoral college.

I do not have honesty issue you have a math issue.

What would have happened if just 1 out of every 100 voters shifted from Trump to Clinton? That would have produced a net shift of 2 percentage points in Clinton’s direction. And instead of the map you see above, we’d have wound up with this result in the Electoral College instead:

Clinton 307
Trump 231
fivethirtyeight.com...

a reply to: Indigo5

Apparently you don't understand the electoral collage very well either. There was only 2 states that Trump won where Hillary was even close. That was Wisconsin where Trumps won by exactly 1%, and Michigan where Trump won by .3% even if she had taken both she still would have lost. Wisconsin has 10 electoral votes. Michigan's 16 haven't even been awarded yet. All the other states where Trump won he won by a large margin.

So yeah you are still reaching, and you're still not being at all honest

From the link on your post: But ignore that for now — elections, after all, are contested in the Electoral College. (Hence the name of this website.) So here’s another question. What would have happened if just 1 out of every 100 voters shifted from Trump to Clinton? That would have produced a net shift of 2 percentage points in Clinton’s direction. And instead of the map you see above, we’d have wound up with this result in the Electoral College instead:

Where it talk about a 1% shift is still the popular vote. It is clearly talking about voters not electorate. The net shift of 2% they are talking about is the total number of 123,700,000 million votes. So what they are really saying is that if 1,237,000 would have cast their vote differently she may have had the results you posted.

Maybe its you that doesn't understand the material you posted.

Edit to add: It should also be noted from the material that you posted it shows her winning Florida, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. That means that the voters that you refer to the 1,237,000 would have had to have changed their votes in only those 4 states.





How is the web site you chose not considered fake news?


I know exactly what I did. I was going by the total voters. I should have only gone by the Trump voters. Which was 61,201,031. so if 1% of them changed their vote the turn around would have been 2% which would have been 1,224,020 votes in favor of Clinton. Still doesn't negate what I said.

Who said I was on the right? I surely never did. For the record I voted for Bill when he ran.

a reply to: Diisenchanted

You obviously understand the premise of math..so I'll ask you to spot where you are wrong in your calculations. I am at dinner now, but will carve out time tomorrow to explain your error if you don't spot it. I appreciate that you used math .. not something everyone on the right does.

a reply to: Indigo5

It was going on with both Trump and Hillary. Actually, it goes beyond partisan politics. The truth has been lost, there's only opinion, and what you want to believe is true or false. The media in the US has been 100% corrupted.

Half the country gets their news from facebook rumors they read from other people. I don't think it's even all malicious, I think it's rooted more in ignorance than anything. News has become one giant game of telephone, where each retelling of the message changes things a tiny bit. Then a message repeats in an echo chamber and wildly distorts.

CNN has been proven to be one of the biggest fake news sites there is.

The news that CNN tells is not always the truth.....false news = fake news.

originally posted by: Indigo5
Are we are flirting with an era where truth and facts are "alternative"...

No. That era is here.

I was reading another thread on this topic earlier today, and after a bit of research it became obvious that even well reasoned members, who were trying to use facts to back their opinion had also fallen into the pit of alternative facts that had been published.

I think you have to consider that we no longer have any media outlets in the country that are telling the truth. Even when they attempt to, the source is contaminated. There's atleast some false information in every story. And if you know you can't trust some of it, but you also can't separate what is and isn't trustworthy, that means it's all untrustworthy.

originally posted by: RickinVa
CNN has been proven to be one of the biggest fake news sites there is.

The news that CNN tells is not always the truth.....false news = fake news.

CNN isn't great and sells the news, but if they get a story wrong they correct it.

You are equating them to outlets that literally make up stories and facts. That is simply BS. Or more commonly referred to as the fallacy of false equivance.

I suspect you do so because you political leaning and worldview are significantly affirmed by fake news and rather than address that uncomfortable reality..you try to discredit reality.

Everyone wants the news to make them feel right. Studies have repeatedly shown people will ignore truth and accept lies ...even when fully debunked...as long as it rewards people with affirmation.

Unfortunate that you are in a state where you think CNN and a hoax news site run by teenagers in Moldova are the same thing. You become what you consume. Wishing you good health this holiday season.

a reply to: Indigo5

Just for a bit of historical context, prior to the printing press people could write and distribute any material they wished. It was only when the barrier to entry on what was then mass dissemination if ideas went away that governments found they needed to pass censorship laws because people were coming up with ridiculous ideas and just like now were unable to tell truth from lies.

With every major expansion in humanities ability to publish our ideas, more strict censoring has followed within 10-30 years after.

I think we're going to see something similar with the internet and fake news. We're just about due for the change. With great power comes great responsibility. Having the ability to publish our thoughts world wide, with the utmost of ease necessitates that we do so with some consideration as to what is and isn't true rather than merely what is and isn't ideologically convenient.

a reply to: Aazadan

It is worth noting that the expense and technology of the printing press posed an initial barrier to entry.

And immediately the two most published and distributed genres was the Bible and pornography.

What we have now is information flood where fact checkers have been overwhelmed.
The internet lets fake news spread instaneausly and with the massive amounts of information and short attention spans...line consumers...it's heady days for propaganda..more so when it is carefully crafted and well funded to manipulate public perception.

In some ways ..yes...history repeating, but in other ways like the nature of the internet and twitter etc? We are in uncharted territory for propanda and fake news.

a reply to: Indigo5

By some future standard, information today is going to be seen as spreading slow. By the standard of today, the world of 100 years ago, which was thought to move at a breakneck pace is seen as slow.

In the past though, it wasn't the ignorant who were spreading the news. It was journalists, and they had reasons to publish the truth. Todays press is little more than rumors, innuendo, and a convoluted game of telephone. They need more structure, and if that means we have to start putting a bit more structure on the internet... then that's what we have to do.

One of the big things I think we can do on that front, is to remove anonymity from the system. I like anonymity to an extent, I used to hang out on Tor sites afterall. But at the surface level where people are using forums, social media, blogs, and so on. I think a persons real name needs to be attached to their content. Make it easy to search a persons writings and you'll see a dropoff in the insanity as people will drift back towards supporting credible opinions simply for the sake of public image. You could go a step further with this idea and also publish what people read, but that's prone to creating more misunderstandings than it solves, as one has to be free to read alternative ideas so they know what is and isn't credible.

Just wanted to add here....
After describing how we arrived at our asymmetric polarization in their book, Mann & Ornstein “It’s Even Worse Than It Looks”, the authors give some solutions. I found these especially interesting in light of current events

We need to change the political culture. We can start with a restoration of public shame. “People like Colin Powell, Robert Gates, Bill Clinton, Tom Brokaw, George Schultz, and Oprah Winfrey, ideally through some collective effort, should have the goal of recreating in society some sense of shame for distortions, lies, and other efforts to coarsen the culture and discourse.” Google, Facebook, Apple and Microsoft should get together and find ways to reduce the falsehoods spread over the web.
.....
Traditional media must stop pretending that the partisanship is equal. The public must be properly educated on the meaning and reality of asymmetric polarization. Politician’s lies or distortions about facts should be emphazised in news stories not buried in back pages. Reporters should reveal when a minority party kills a bill by filibuster and not treat a 60 vote hurdle as customary. It is of utmost importance that traditional media clarify the differences in the party platforms.

It seems that it is now worse than it's even worse than it looks!

a reply to: desert

Part of this circles back to News for profit. In my youth there were 3 basic TV stations and the government gave them access to the airwaves in trade for providing news for an hour once a day at 5 or 6 O'Clock. It was called a loss leader, meaning they didn't make a profit, but did it as a public service. Then came cable news... o longer needing airwaves...and 24 hour news...Which required always having a story and headline to push..and profit motive...which required the network to have a specific demographic to pitch to advertisers..and the bigger that audience the more they could charge...partisan politics was the best solution..the biggest audience while still being able to put them in a demographic box...The news now makes money and does so by building loyal audiences they can sell to advertisers.
Please hay speaks to spin and bias.
Fake News takes that a step further...invented facts...cheap to produce...and internet profits for click through.
Having a Man elected President who leaned very heavily on false news has massively encouraged this market and validated its efficacy. We push back now and hard or sink to new lows in our public discourse. Propaganda is winning.

a reply to: Aazadan

Its a complex challenge.

Interesting ideas, but I am averse to things that would involve censorship or dampening free speech. I. We'd to think on that.

a reply to: Indigo5

As someone who can remember "rabbit ears", I appreciate your summary of the problem. Sensational headlines from overseas or homegrown are bad, but especially more troubling is when our leaders attempt to obfuscate deliberately, out of control or ignorance.

The saying, A fish rots from the head down. Combine the news industry history with the 1990s rising of GOP power star, Newt Gingrich, who advocated no compromise and using ‘Language: A Key Mechanism of Control’. A slide downward to this asymmetrical polarization, destroying the democratic ideals our founding leaders bequeathed us.

And we now have Newt deliberately confusing what to believe, truth relativism so evident today, urging the use of emotions over facts:

GINGRICH: The current view is that liberals have a whole set of statistics that theoretically may be right, but it's not where human beings are.

CAMEROTA: But what you're saying is, but hold on Mr. Speaker because you're saying liberals use these numbers, they use this sort of magic math. These are the FBI statistics. They're not a liberal organization. They're a crime-fighting organization.

GINGRICH: No, but what I said is equally true. People feel more threatened.

CAMEROTA: Feel it, yes. They feel it, but the facts don't support it.

GINGRICH: As a political candidate, I'll go with how people feel and I'll let you go with the theoriticians.

source

And now the new Republican Party head fish POTUS is less intellectually inclined than Newt and painfully ignorant:

Trump’s Call for ‘Equal Time’ on SNL is Just ‘Preposterous’

There are so many problems with Trump’s equal time demand, it is hard to know where to begin.

For the complete list, one needs to read the short article.


Newt got booted from Congress for his transgressions, but surfaces from time to time covered in his slime. Trump the ignorant, ultimate slimer is the new rotting head.