Yea, yeah it is. I'm a liberal and can see how HuffPo is trash. I might be willing to grant that HuffPo uses softer titles and hides their outrage/fear/hate-mongering slightly better. Maybe it's not just seeing them as more tame because they're more agreeable to one's politics.

But as I was writing this comment I flipped over to both to check their headlines. Right now HuffPo [0] looks exactly like the Drudge Report when they think they've got something juicy. Does nobody else think that font treatment should be saved for a "holy shit airplanes just hit the twin towers" level of importance and immediacy?

Spoiler alert: HuffPo is no better than Breitbart. In fact they share a co-founded, Andrew Breitbart.

[0] http://archive.is/jAnzR

And yes, it is definitely much more nutty than anything I've ever got from being a member of ACLU, or subscribing to various Dem mailing lists in this cycle. Your description is spot-on - left-wing political spam tends to be click-baity and appeal to emotion, while right-wing one is chock full of debunked conspiracy theories and blatant fear-mongering.

Breitbart trades in hyperbole - they will tell us straight up that refugees are mugging grannies which proves Europe has fallen or some such.

HuffPo peddles distortion - their articles come wrapped in intentionally misleading statistics, righteous indignation and snark.

Both terrible. Both hugely popular. I weep for the web.

Watching American elections is like seeing a freak show. I don't understand who are those people who can support any of the candidates or the media.

While the Huffington Post obviously sensationalizes things too, their top headline, "SEX ASSAULT SPREE / ACCUSATIONS PILE UP", is completely true: the accusations are piling up. I don't think you can draw an equivalence here.

> The number is true but the inference is false.

How are the numbers taken out of context? In your opinion, how would that headline read if the numbers weren't taken out of context? Or does the mere act of publishing the headlines (at all) make Breitbart guilty of taking the numbers out of context in your opinion? Honest question.

Also, it's not clear to me what you mean by "inference". Are you referring to the "-- But Paul Ryan Targets Trump" phrase? If so, then I would contend that "inference" is not the correct word. Instead, I would perhaps use the word "juxtaposition". Whether or not you agree to Breitbart's thinking, it seems to me that what they're trying to do is call attention to what they see as false priorities -- essentially, IIUC, they're saying "Paul Ryan is attacking the wrong person, because 70K women are targeted by criminal aliens and this is worse than anything Trump has done". You can agree to that or not, but it seems to me unfair to accuse them of bad logic.

The numbers lack context in that they don't specify a rate, merely a value. It makes it sound like 70K women are attacked each year by undocumented immigrants, when the reality is that the number is closer to 1.27K per year since 1955. Let's do some back of the napkin math:

There are about 11 million undocumented immigrants in the US, meaning that the rate of sexual assault victims per undocumented immigrant would be ~0.012%. Meanwhile, in 2006, 300,000 college women were raped.[1] With 300 million people (in 2006), that puts the rate for the general population at 0.1% of victims per person. That's nearly 10x the rate of the undocumented immigrant population, and that's only including college-aged rape victims, rather than sexual assault victims of all ages as the 70K number claims to be.

Meanwhile, we have Trump who has no fewer than 4 woman claiming he sexually assaulted him. Divide that over the 70 years of Trump's life, and at 0.057 women-per-year you have a 1-man rate of 5.7% -- 57x the rate of the general population. Seems like Paul Ryan is targeting the right person, and that Breitbart is using bad logic.

[1]: https://www.nsopw.gov/en-US/Education/FactsStatistics#victim...

Also, your numbers seem to demonstrate the exact dishonesty that you accuse Breitbart of doing.

The number cited for illegal aliens is the number of arrests.

The number you cite for the general population is a victimization survey which includes a lot of alleged rapes that were never reported to the police. (In fact, I can't even figure out if all of them meet the legal definition for rape.)

According to your report [1], 12% of rapes were reported to the police. If every single rape report results in an arrest (hint: they don't), that eliminates your 10x factor right there.

When reading Breitbart, you seem to draw incorrect inferences from cited statistics. And when digging up your own data, you also seem to draw incorrect inferences. Consider the possibility that the problem here isn't Breitbart.

(Note: I hate Trump. I favor open borders and think we should let Mexicans in even if they are more rapey than Americans. In fact I have nothing but positive feelings towards Mexicans - their food is tasty and their women are beautiful. I'm just pointing out bad reasoning.)

We are now in a post-fact era. Watching the current idiocy of the Trump speech happening right now shows it in full force. Any factual data people don't like now is a "conspiracy".

"Criminal Aliens Arrested for Sex-Related Crimes 70,000 Times Between 1955 and 2010 — But Paul Ryan Targets Trump"

The original headline creates an emotional impact by implying certain things: that these 70,000 events are sexual assaults (not generic sex crimes like indecent exposure etc.) against women (implying a relationship with Trump's actions where none specifically exists) that happened recently (not during a 55-year period that ended six years ago). The headline with context doesn't have the same emotional impact because you can't make the same misleading inferences. Maybe these crimes are a problem, maybe they aren't, but either way this headline is a clear misrepresentation of the facts.

I have to say I agree with you on both counts. It would have been more accurate and neutral to write the headline as you suggest. (It would also have been longer and more boring.) Regarding your second point, a quick google search reveals that sex-related crimes encompass:

- Sexual Assault: Describes the catch-all crime that encompasses unwanted sexual touching of many kinds, with links to state penal code and federal law on related crimes. - Solicitation: It's illegal to entice someone else to commit a crime (such as prostitution). ... - Statutory Rape

I have no idea how the figures break down in these categories, so it's hard to the degree of unfairness being applied. If all of the 70K cases were rape, then Breitbart may actually be overly nice :) (Not saying it's likely!)

So thanks for that clarification. I would say, however, that this kind of headline is pretty typical for all news agencies. For example, during the Brexit "debate" in Britain, news outlets like BBC also quoted figures that were aggregated over a number of years to highlight the potential losses to the UK economy. Ditto the Daily Mail on the other side of the aisle. If this is the evidence that Breitbart is a shoddy news outlet, then I contend that the evidence is fairly weak.

They cite 70,000 sexual assaults from 1955-2010 and characterize it as a crisis. Yet, there are over 200,000 sexual assaults and rapes annually, and 80,000 sexual assaults in prisons alone annually. (https://www.rainn.org/statistics/scope-problem) If the 70,000 number was equally distributed, than 1,272 sexual assaults by criminal aliens would happen each year, which represents 0.006% of the total.

Is this a good thing? No. Is this some existential crisis where illegals are flooding over the border to rape american women? No.

Let's not dismiss what inaccuracy here can lead to: bigotry on false pretenses, violence against innocent immigrants, and blindly supporting wars against "the wrong kind of people."

It seems both sides abuse these numbers to lead readers to draw certain conclusions. Yet criticism of the practice often is not evenly applied.

I think the idea stems from the way the Graun has opened up it's 'Comment is Free' section which has lead to quite a few low quality opinion pieces particularly 'SJW' esq ones.

The actual reporting from the Gruan is still good quality in my opinion, certainly head and shoulders above the DMs. And whilst the Graun has its left bias it, quite rightly, hasn't been kind to the current Labour party.

I'm in the U.S., and I constantly scan most of the major news source and commentary headlines.

It's a cesspool out there.

For a bit of history as I remember it, for what it's worth: in the 80s and 90s, I think, right-wing think tanks started providing a lot of research and background material. Of course these were slanted to right-wing views, but for the most part, unless you were really digging for stuff, it was academic. So if you had an argument about Gulf War I? You could, with effort, find some right-wing slanted stuff. But it was all alongside other academic material. It all balanced out. It was possible to consume a bit of bias and still make analysis work.

Then suddenly when the net started taking off, all of that research and such became much more easily available. If you were some right-wing guy looking to bolster point X, Google was your friend! You could find some nice charts and data.

Of course this was intolerable for the left, as it should be, so they started funding their own foundations and truth-providers.

This quickly became an escalating war. The titles got more and more scandalous and no matter what side you were on no matter the topic, you could find some studies and PhDs somewhere to back you up. It became a post-truth era.

Now it's all grown into vertical silos. Left-wing news sources publish left-wing commentators who repeat left-wing studies. Same thing happens on the right.

It's reached the point now where not only are the headlines and articles slanted trash, but it's problematic to sort it all out. In many cases you need to track an issue over time in both left and right-wing silos to arrive at something that works. The cognitive load for the average reader is simply too great. So instead they just stick inside their bubble and go through their lives not worrying about it.

I think this election a large percentage of people are finally figuring out how hosed up and colluding the systems of news and politics are. I'm not sure there will be improvement, but it's good to see a little daylight shining on things.

Here is the first publicly available mirror I came across.[1]

[0] Tentacles of Rage The Republican propaganda mill, a brief history

LEWIS H LAPHAM / Harpers Magazine v.309, n.1852, September 2004

[1] http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/2004/Republican-Propaganda1s...

And sadly the Washington Times is the least biased source that I could find that even talked about it. That's why sites like Breitbart are able to be so successful. It's easy to build credibility by pointing out things like this, and then the rest of it can just be propaganda.

Benefit of the doubt needs to be earned. I mean, hopefully you are not taking supermarket-checkout tabloids at face value, right?

CNN may be terrible journalism that's full of softballs and "clickbait" but at the end of the day the things they report are true and when they're not they retract them. Can't say the same about Breitbart in the least.

Softballs and clickbait aren't any more true than lies.

The difference is how you spin the headlines and the facts. Both parties are guilty. Both parties feel only other side is doing it or say but look at the other website or magazine.

Huff is full of titles Trump is sexual predator without facts, just talks. Breitbart is full of stories Bill is rapist. So what's the difference?

It's all the same shit. It is just your bias talking.

We have, on record, him describing sexual assault. With his own words. On the other hand, some of the people who now are claiming Bill is a rapist once testified under oath that he did _not_ rape them. On top of the fact that there is zero evidence in favor of that statement.

That's the difference. And you would definitely know this if you weren't being disingenuous.

Yet other women have consistently claimed over decades that Clinton sexually assaulted them. And today women are coming forward accusing Trump of sexual assault.

There seems to be very little difference; both men have probably assaulted women in the past and abused their power to get away with it. I don't think arbitrarily slanting the narrative to defend one and condemn the other serves anybody. In fact, sweeping sexual assault under the rug when it doesn't serve your political agenda is a pretty horrible thing to do.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/us/politics/bill-hillary-c...

"One theory is that cars in Denmark are being burned by individuals from an angry underclass in a country where far-right groups have organized bitter protests against immigration, calling it a threat to the nation’s identity."

The article makes it clear the "angry underclass" is separate from the "far-right groups."

Why even mention the far-right at all, if nobody is suggesting they have something to do with these crimes?

The arab demographic has always been troublesome in Scandinavia.

So the far-right is implied to have something to do with these crimes, in the sense that they created an environment that triggers the crime.

It's basically like watching a Lifetime Movie. All the villains are straight white males. Except around Christmas, when all of sudden, they become caring selfless individuals.

http://www.snopes.com/2016/08/07/breitbart-duped-by-fake-new...

Loretta Lynch as a member of Bill Clinton's defense team:

http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2014/nov/10/...

Pretended a Cleveland Cavaliers crowd was a Trump crowd:

http://dailycaller.com/2016/08/04/breitbart-news-doesnt-mind...

Not to mention the whole ACORN thing in 2009:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACORN_2009_undercover_videos...

just to realize that it's all the media, not just some of them.

And no, it doesn't mean that Trump is any better or any worse. It's all bullshit.

It's not surprising that you and others people do, though. In the US, there are a lot of politicians who seem 'psycho/sociopathic' to many people. And, there are lots of CEOs like that, too. But, it doesn't prevent those people from leading or being effective.

Change takes time. If people really want it they'll have to work hard for it for at least the next eight years, regardless.

Tell me, which is "propaganda."

Look mate I'm not interested in arguing who is more wrong. The fact is both sides have bias and talk about things that for whatever reason they find most important. And usually it bothers other side of the political spectrum so it's like a never ending loop from both sides.

I'm decidedly not a fan of HuffPo, but this is a massive distortion. No-one is disputing that biological sex exists, and that's what science supports. The matter of gender, and various associated concepts such as gender roles and norms, is completely different - and there is plenty of research to support the idea that a lot of entrenched gender stereotypes are largely or purely a social construct.

No one is denying this. People are saying there's a significant difference between bias that influences the ways facts are portrayed, and bias that causes facts to be invented.

They definitely don't do this. It seems like you have a significant misunderstanding of the literature being discussed.

>Look mate I'm not interested in arguing who is more wrong.

No, it's about who is wrong _more often_ and who reports fake stories _more often_. When the standard for one set of sources is consistently absurdly low then you can't just pretend all sources are equal. Again, it's a false equivalency.

    The U.S. media is essentially 100 percent united, vehemently, against Trump, 
    and preventing him from being elected president. I don’t have an actual problem 
    with that because I share the premises on which it is based about why he poses 
    such extreme dangers. But that doesn’t mean that as a journalist, or even just 
    as a citizen, that I am willing to go along with any claim, no matter how fact-free, 
    no matter how irrational, no matter how dangerous it could be, in order to bring 
    Trump down.

EDIT: formatting.

[0] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/interrogatio...

[1] http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-i-acted-like-a-pundi...

Clinton campaigns Wikileaks emails confirm a vast media collaboration campaign to smear Trump and avoid negative Clinton stories.

Considering Greenwalt: October 11 2016, Glenn Greenwald: In the Democratic Echo Chamber, Inconvenient Truths Are Recast as Putin Plots

https://theintercept.com/2016/10/11/in-the-democratic-echo-c...

What is false?

[0]http://blog.dilbert.com/post/146605145036/persuasion-update-...

What Trump really said:

"When Mexico sends its people they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you; they’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists, and some, I assume, are good people. But I speak to border guards and they tell us what we’re getting.”[0][1]

There was the time Trump called for a wall to keep illegals out, and social media said securing our borders – which we already try to do – is racist.

There was the time Trump suggested mass deportation of illegal immigrants, and social media said upholding current law is racist.

There was the time Trump suggested banning all Muslim immigrants until we figure out what the risk is, and how to deal with it. Islam is a belief system open to all, not a race, but social media branded it as racist [2]

[0]http://www.salon.com/2015/12/21/the_media_needs_to_stop_tell... [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbyoUb3mp1E [2] http://blog.dilbert.com/post/146605145036/persuasion-update-...

Banning an entire religion is bigoted, racist, totally idiotic, call it whatever you like.

You can keep trying with the mental gymnastics to justify what he says, but thankfully the majority of Americans see through it. I'm enjoying the current implosion and fallout of his campaign as each day goes by and am wondering just how bad he is going to lose.

"You might well dislike Trump’s words. I did. But let’s not make it worse. He did not say that all Mexicans are rapists. Yet that’s what many commentators did. For example, Politico misquoted Trump by omitting his phrase about “good people.” They said he was “demonizing Mexicans as rapists.” They argued that Mexicans do not really commit more rapes in the U.S. than whites. But that’s not what Trump claimed."

"Trump was discussing crimes committed by unauthorized immigrants. Is it true that some people who illegally cross the border from Mexico are good? Yes. Is it true that some others commit crimes? Yes. Is that a problem? People disagree. Some conjecture that unauthorized immigrants don’t commit more crimes than U.S. citizens. But crimes by unauthorized immigrants, even murders, would not have happened if those individuals had not entered the U.S."[0]

[0]http://www.salon.com/2015/12/21/the_media_needs_to_stop_tell...

Bias disclosure: Left leaning, not by my own choice. More centrist, along the lines of the Economist editing staff view of the world. So not by choice, because there's not really centrism left.

Not all bias is based in partisan politics.

CNN's top story: Trump said "grab her in the pussy" in 2005

[0]http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/12/top-10-hilla...

[0]http://hillarytranscriptclock.com/

Scandal? Come on, that's not a scandal, that a policy position. Personally, I agree with free trade in general, so I'm not scandalized by this "revelation" one bit.

That is pretty clearly an endorsement for TPP (other leaks make this connection more obvious[0]). Hillary says she is not in favor of it, this seems to directly contradict that statement. Saying one thing behind closed doors and another in front of the voting public is a scandal to me.

[0]http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/oct/12/leaked-email...

It is also well known that Hillary Clinton has sort-of kind-of changed her position in response to the Bernie Sanders left pull.

Yes, in my personal opinion it's probably not a strong pull, and Sanders voters who feel strongly against free trade / TPP / etc. are justified in feeling suspicious. But a speech from 2013 when she was openly promoting it doesn't exactly tell too much.

What about emails from last year? Consider that with the 'private position' and 'pubic position' comment and you are a fool if you think she will do anything she claims.

This is the issue with all of these "leaks", they can create a one sentence soundbyte and make uninformed people think conspiracy theories when in fact it is standard mundane work being done by people trying to fix complex problems involving many different groups of people who need to come together to find a solution.

No wonder why the leaks are always in drips, no one is bothered or intelligent enough to spend more than 3 seconds analyzing the story they'll just re-post some nonsense from their Facebook feed and assume it is true.

I think this is the exact reason Trump is where he is. The right wing media frenzy has come full force and the echo chamber has reached a new high. Unfortunately when he loses badly the conspiracy nonsense will come back full force in that he was cheated out of the election. No one but the subset of a subset of Republicans will believe this but it is what it is.

The allegations against Trump are based on fact, rational, and hardly dangerous.

Repeating words that directly come out of his mouth isn't bias.

Just use asterisks around text. Block quote is intended for code to retain formatting.

"Voting for Team Hillary is Anti-Christ: E-Mails Expose Plot to Overthrow Authority of Pope, Create Catholic Spring to Foment Revolution & Attack Evangelicals-Who Has Place in Hillary's America?"

This goes quite beyond "opinionated" headlines.

"all true Christians must vote for Trump."

"Faith Trumps Politics for Faithful People"

"Put self aside and fight for Trump to help stop the forces of evil from prevailing"

"Trump’s past transgressions, of which he has expressed shame, remorse and apologies, pale in comparison to the revelations we now know about the plot against Christians and the strategy of creating a Catholic Spring, dividing Catholics and undermining the authority of the pope by Team Hillary and the global elite"

"Mother Teresa’s nuns are praying the rosary daily for voters to receive clarity of truth from The Holy Spirit and vote for the candidate who supports life and religious liberty (Trump) against the party engendering a culture of death and new atheism disguised as liberalism"

[1] http://archive.is/QI4Dq

However, there is absolutely a difference between journalists attempting to report news in a neutral way and journalists intent on spinning news to forward some agenda, even to the point of using strategic omissions and what not to completely mislead the reader about a conclusion.

Moreover, a reasonably intelligent human can (and should) read a variety of new sources (that at least attempt to be unbiased) and generally can get an idea of what actually is going on. When you read 3 different versions of the same news story by BBC, NPR, and NYT (for example), then hopefully the biases sort of cancel out and you get something closer to the truth.

You list three left-leaning news organisations, and expect their biases to cancel out? Wouldn't they reinforce each other?

But this is not about right/left anymore - the scary fact (and becoming patently obvious to more and more people) is the fact that all "mainstream" media is pro-establishment (whether it is left or right is less important). That's why outlets like Breitbart, warts and all, have been gaining so much popularity.

Breitbart isn't the anti-NYT, it's the anti-Daily Kos.

Pretty much the only readable right wing media is foreign - but if he had suggested The Economist or the Financial Times you probably would have called them left-leaning too...

If you're after other right-wing UK publications you could try the Daily Telegraph or the Spectator.

I could not believe my eyes when I saw The Economist devoting a full page to Trump's badly-fitting suits and overly-long ties, but musing over Clinton's numerous corruption scandals, because she is the preferred globalist candidate.

I am sad that even The Economist has fallen - I have been a subscriber for 25 years. Perhaps not much longer.

Almost any combination will omit some political stance. I don't believe that political viewpoints are binary, or even that they vary only along a single dimension.

I can't go to CNN (what most on the "right" would consider "left") most days without seeing some headline about Trump unaccompanied by a headline about Hillary, in what I can presume is an attempt to be "balanced". The headlines are crafted to make things look equally revelatory. But when you read the articles you find that one is a serious strike (saying shocking things on a mic), and the other is usually a non-story, ie. leaked emails showing the candidate saying pretty much exactly what their public stance has been all along.

For instance an event where an old man drives his car into a wall. A neutral headline could be "Old man drives car into wall". But the problem with this is that a lot of people will now assume he drove it into the wall because he is old. So a better neutral headline would be "Man drives car into wall" and then the article has to explain the reason. This is a very subtle change but makes a lot of difference.

Now lets say an old woman drove her car into a wall: "Woman drives car into wall". A lot of people think women are worse drivers than men, so this will already be a sensational title for some.

A good read about this is "Why you should stay away from news" from Rolf Dobelli.

I agree. I think we're seeing a sharp rise in foreign "soft power" online in America this election.

It's being supported by the evangelicals who will not remove their vote from Trump on the grounds that they really want that supreme court seat.

After the election, foreign influence will dwindle. The credibility of such websites cannot be maintained while pushing so much unverified or simply false information. This is the strength of our first amendment.

You make it sound illogical.

As a religious conservative, I do really want that supreme court seat.

The President has to really ask for permission for everything else (laws, budgets, wars, etc.), but justice nomination is very largely his choice. Don't be surprised if that factors heavily in my decision.

Apparently not, since Obama hasn't been able to make the nomination...

His average is 35 days, compared to 10-20 days for recent presidents. http://fivethirtyeight.com/datalab/obama-has-waited-longer-f...

I just don't understand how someone invests themselves into a conversation like this without having the first clue about the territory.

Reason magazine editorial made the same argument that Bernie was the best choice for libertarians. Basically he aligns with libertarians on social issues, and everything else he could not get done anyway.

> As a religious conservative, I do really want that supreme court seat. That factors heavily in the decision.

Sorry, that's my bias seeping in. I respect your choice.

> The President has to really ask for permission for everything else (laws, budgets, wars, etc.), but justice nomination is very largely his choice. Don't be surprised if that factors heavily in my decision.

Not nuclear. He could launch with approval of his self-chosen cabinet, or choose not to defend our allies, resulting in more tensions in areas prone to nuclear war.

Personally I think the risks posed by Trump with his thumb on the nuclear button are greater than the lives saved by repealing abortion rights. May God bless you and all of us through these tough times.

That's a tall order.

To put that claim in perspective, more Americans die in abortions every year than have died in combat in the entire history of the US.

(Whether a fetus is a person is of course the point debated, but anyway, those are the numbers.)

More pedantically, they are surely not Americans either, since citizenship is conferred at birth?

I'm talking about residency, not citizenship. Citizenship is more arbitrary:

* Does citizenship include Native Americans?

* Does citizenship include slaves?

* Which of the Revolutionary War casualties were U.S. citizens?

I'm not sure if this was a subtle way to imply that, although the risk of Trump using the bomb is negligible, it's still greater than zero, which is the number of lives you consider lost to abortion. Impressive accidental troll. :)

Realistically, what evidence do you have that Trump has any more likelihood of using a nuclear bomb against the wishes of congress than Hillary? Has he shown an inclination towards mass murder in other scenarios? Did he vote for the Iraq war?

Trump reportedly asked three times why we could not use nuclear weapons in a private briefing.

More importantly, he threatens to change the landscape of our deployed military so drastically that the moves would create opportunities for non-allies to take more aggressive positions against our allies.

If we failed to protect our allies, the US economy would tank, due to all the outstanding treasuries.

> Did he vote for the Iraq war?

Obviously Trump could not have voted on the Iraq war. That's an invalid question.

No, he's never served as a politician and so has no platform record. He's never demonstrated an ability to serve his country so I don't understand why we should entrust him with our most powerful station.

> Has he shown an inclination towards mass murder in other scenarios?

I don't believe there's any evidence of that.

> What evidence do you have that Trump has any more likelihood of using a nuclear bomb against the wishes of congress than Hillary?

To me it's his lack of temperament. I'm confident he means what he says that he doesn't want to use nuclear weapons. But in dire situations which may arise, I personally do not trust his temperament or judgement in dealing with foreign powers. This is because he's shown many times that he only cares for the most short-term benefits. His tax plans demonstrate this, his inability to explain many of his plans demonstrates this, and his history in business demonstrates this.

10 to 1 you're wrong.

https://xkcd.com/1132/

What are the two scenarios you're referring to? That Trump does or does not contribute to a nuclear war?

Trump trashes everyone who disagrees with him. He will likely increase tensions on the world stage.

Yes as a second consideration you can also take the view of the world will end, but that is not the point of the XKCD.

And then drawing it to this discussion, yes the odds that Trump would be willing to start a nuclear war might be high, but combined with the odds of an actual nuclear war occurring the odds of it happening is still neglible.

While Trumps opponent openly warns Russia of consequences. Lets be objective now.

> While Trumps opponent openly warns Russia of consequences. Lets be objective now.

Yes, let's. Russia is not an ally. There are consequences to its aggression.

Trump, on the other hand, has repeatedly said we should extract more money from our allies in east asia, and that we should threaten to withdraw from Japan and South Korea. These are scenarios China and Russia would love to see play out.

Trump argues NATO is obsolete. He defends Russia's annexation of Crimea, and he thinks we should give up Aleppo to Russian-friendly Assad.

He thinks he knows more than the generals. At the same time, he claims he never thought about this stuff during his time as a businessman.

The alternative to nuclear war is the proxy wars you see playing out in the middle east. Any concessions are gobbled up by whichever side backs down.

I see NATO bases all around the planet.

> The alternative to nuclear war is the proxy wars you see playing out in the middle east.

True. We also know who started that with leaders not bowing to the western interests. While Assad isn't exactly prince charming, his country wasn't in ruins as it is now. Same stands for Gaddafi and Hussein.

FTFY

Does your religious conservatism mean that you support the Citizens United decision? Or does it mean that you're opposed to Loving v. Virginia? How about Shelby County v. Holder?

1. How is that going to affect your decision? Who can you vote for that will ensure the SC seat goes to a conservative?

2. How do you feel about the unprecedented blocking of the President from doing this Constitutional duty of appoint SC justices for 9+ months? Or is that just a small price to pay to get your religious beliefs installed in the highest court in the land?

I don't know why you were downvoted, but I would like to point out that many laws are based on religion, like marrying only one person, or not stealing and killing. We take these for granted because we grew up with them.

So, I'm not sure the argument that they are "installing religious beliefs" does much to convince religious people that they are overreaching. Their feeling is that they are saving people, and they feel this can be done through politics as well as it can be done in person.

I'm not sure I agree with those who vote this way. I just wanted to throw it out there since I doubt you'll get a reply from a religious person.

Too much cognitive dissonance for people who are probably already completely overwhelmed at this point in the cycle, given the turmoil on that side of the aisle.

That's why I won't get a reply from any of the small downvoters.

Like gerrymandering and fillbustering, it's one of these stupid games that the sides play.

Some sites don't do this. When it became clear that the 2003 invasion of Iraq was misguided, the propaganda sites did not jump on board. When Rumsfeld finally admitted we weren't going to find weapons of mass destruction the right-biased sites changed the narrative and started trying to make other stories dominate the news cycle.

It happens on the left as well (watch some of the MSNBC shows). That's the difference. It shows up in the willingness to criticize your own team.

My wife is a news junkie. She actually watches CSPAN along with all of the news channels. Sometimes I catch the same story from a few different places, and it is clear they ALL apply their own bias. For a current example, Fox tries to pluck out emails from the leak that show some wrong doing and MSNBC has a story about a leaked email sharing a risotto secret.

Yes, this is you expressing your liberal bias. Huffington Post is Breitbart of the left. They just use a slightly different strategy for pushing their propaganda. The end result is the same: readers with skewed, dysfunctional views of reality.

You disagree? Okay. Which major left-wing website do you consider equally biased to Breitbart?

It seems like the 'correct' solution doesn't lie at one of these poles, unfortunately.

We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars.

Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals.

As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.

Keeping ideas that have already become signals quarantined, and minimizing overlap between groups in a context where they are likely to "go tribal" and convert more ideas into signals seems vitally important to me. That online discourse seems to have shifted towards a war of tribes rather than a crowd of individuals is (to me) a tragedy of the highest order.

> This is the nationalist mindset. "Create more walls. Diversity is difficult."

I do not think this course of action appeals to me because of a "nationalist mindset," but rather from a desire to see less topics become part of such mindsets. I guess I'd agree with "Create more walls. Partisanship is difficult." (though on the condition that the walls were around already partisan topics, and not in general)

> We all know what happens when we stop reaching across the divide. We go into our holes, there is miscommunication, and small disagreements turn into wars.

This is a shocking/wrong statement to me. We see tribal wars precisely when there is political outreach, not when there is focus on other things.

Consider HackerNews. Lately it has been taken over by heated discussions centered around political topics, in my model mostly because of the increased outreach due to this being an election year. Once the election passes, I hope, we will go back to discussing technical topics in blissful/ignorant harmony.

> Focusing on the areas where we disagree widens the chasm. We can bridge it by looking for common goals.

Yes exactly, hence the importance of keeping walls around partisan topics...

I love the way you put it; this goes straight into my quotes file.

> Keeping ideas that have already become signals quarantined, and minimizing overlap between groups in a context where they are likely to "go tribal" and convert more ideas into signals seems vitally important to me.

In a way, it's what some people do without realizing the idea. It's obvious that once a topic becomes a political issue, the general population loses the ability to discuss it in any reasonable way, so it's best to ignore that topic altogether until at least it falls off the news cycle. But maybe we need a more social-wide tools to "cordon off" topics that were exposed to the disease politics is.

I think it's unfortunate when people stop talking about the issues. You're right, people may have made up their minds, but the debate process is not just practice for the candidates, it's also practice for the public to get to know the issues the country is facing.

Of course, it's always up to you what you want to ignore.

1. Propaganda works really really well. Repetiton of propaganda, being a form of intellectual violence, will get people to believe almost anything. Thus, people who control the channels of repetitive messages delivered to the masses control what people believe.

2. The truth is out there, but due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, people who know the least think they know the most and they focus their energy on the most trivial issues due to bikeshedding. Thus, unless carefully vetted, discussion participants will overwhelmingly be people conditioned by repetition, think they're experts and be drawn to triviality.

In order to side step the nut house, just let people believe whatever they want to believe and charge big bucks for delivering messages, especially repetitivly, that do not easily fit in to the ruts in their cognitive road. That's because each time this is done, a small amount of cognitive violence is occurring to your viewers. Most people aren't intellectual masochists so it will drive them away eventually if done too much.

I am, it is..

> As near as I can tell, the political process converts ideas from logical propositions into group signaling devices. Once a idea becomes a signal, any question of its truth or falsehood is commonly ignored for several human generations.

This is true for more than just politics. Our language, culture, habits, facial expressions etc. are all learned from society. You can find evidence of ideologies in all of these.

> We see tribal wars precisely when there is political outreach, not when there is focus on other things.

I think both can be true. Best, to me, is if we can foster environments that both provide different views and also allow new ideas to grow without being persecuted. I don't think this happens by building walls around everything. There is a balance to strike.

There are lots of unbiased news outlets who just report on stories as they come in. I learn about all sorts of government corruption and waste from NPR, NYTimes, WaPO, etc... And relating to current events, I also learn about all the unscrupulous things Clinton did from these sources.

I don't need to be inundated with right-wing propaganda be unbiased. Just as I wouldn't spend too much time reading HuffPo or ThinkProgress.

No one news source is complete, or 100% correct, but not every news source is credible or deserve our attention.

Not directed at you specifically, but if you think those sources are unbiased, it just means that you're bad at detecting bias.

Edit: Haha, this one struck a chord.

https://wikileaks.org/dnc-emails/emailid/2699

http://heavy.com/news/2016/07/wikileaks-emails-clinton-berni...

I'm still waiting for them to do a story on their own involvement here....

I have a pretty complete understanding of current events from reading those sources.

For your statement to be valid, you'd have to prove that there is a considerable amount of information missing and is only available via conservative media.

No, information may have been made available by biased media, but it may have been presented in such a way to adjust the perceived significance of it.

Take the email scandal for example. Every news outlet provided the information, but there are vastly different conclusions about the importance of it that a reader will be led to draw based on how the information was presented.

Even the headline you were upset about was a logical conclusion given a viewpoint based on the information available about the recent shooting of the police officers.

Information: Two policeman killed by a man who was in the country illegally

Conservative news interpretation: Illegal immigrant a result of poor border control policies by current administration. Therefore, "Obama lets immigrants across border to kill white people."

Liberal news interpretation: Immigration is a touchy subject right now, exclude anything related to it. Therefore, "Two policeman were killed by a person who happened to be a human."

That is not the standard for bias, and the fact you make your standard "Well if it doesn't have info that conservatives have". What about libertarians? Anarchists? Socialists? Fascists? Communists?

Everyone is bias, some places do a great job of separating out their biases from reporting but its fantasy land to think that there are motivated journalists out there that just don't have an opinion one way or the other.

That's a bold claim.

Where the hell did I say that conservative media was unbiased?

Are you aware of the cathedral? What about the stagnation?

https://arxiv.org/archive/math

If you mean a news publication, I can't, because they don't exist.

We can maybe go for less biased, but that's a much more complicated question. Sorted by minimal bias, I'd probably just start linking to other arxiv URLs.

I want my views challenged, and to have at least a chance of finding out when I'm wrong.

With almost any given issue and viewpoint it's what they don't tell you that's the part you probably should know or at least get exposed to.

From a Machiavellian standpoint (read: Thiel or Zuckerberg), this isn't an intelligent long-term strategy, unless your view of how dumb and malleable people are is such that by playing your cards right, so few people would catch on that it would not hurt the bottom line.

EDIT: could you explain why you want to delete this post?

People already know about the filter bubble, but they don't actually care. Most people aren't going to Facebook for an unbiased stream of news and they don't like to feel uncomfortable (i.e. be barraged by things that challenge their core beliefs).

Willpower and motivation fascinate me. I've been living with depression for a while, but I've been able to conceptually reorient myself to embrace my circumstances and find willpower to do the 'I don't want to, but I should' things whenever they come around. But just as I don't think everyone is capable of advanced systems programming, for example, I'm not certain that everyone is capable of strong willpower.

You make a good point: regulation is a clumsy tool, and I don't think it needs to be applied here. However, I'm disappointed in what seem to be the fundamental motivations of Facebook and its board. I'm not sure that anything could come in the way of Mark Zuckerberg's pursuit of maximizing the world's dependence on his product.

I suspect this is an excellent heuristic for a media organization to become popular.

However I also don't like it because it would limit the range of thought. Most things that I find interesting are at the peripheral or in the cracks, intersections, oddities, peculiar facts.

Without countervailing narratives you don't have a benchmark for topic variance, and like the OP, become incapable of believing there even exists alternative models of reality.

In a relatively non-partisan example, I find that people who believe in God don't really understand atheists. Surely deep down these people believe in The Creator. I also find that secular oriented types do not really believe that religious people believe. They think they are faking it on some level.

These are serious, even dangerous errors.

So I submit that we need, require, something I'll label The Truman Clause or Exit from the Matrix. I do not know what that looks like in an ethical information aggregation system. I suspect it exists as part of meta-cognition in either our culture or in the human brain, since one of the most important functions of higher learning is to teach you to question your premises.

More so than any elite university I've seen, the kind of culture developed at LessWrong is perfectly suited to tackling these kinds of meta-cognition issues.

Well that is not fake, because such a title is unfalsifiable. Both sides use this kind of rhetoric now however, so, in a way the populist right wing has won. The idea of moderation or modesty is nonexistent in US and almost the same holds for UK media. That is wrong, because i believe (and i think one could find enough evidence if interested) that you can convince people by being moderate.

They are very upfront about their biases, but they have biases nonetheless.

The "black site" narrative went completely unquestioned in the liberal press. There is zero self-policing here or signs of skepticism with liberal claims. Heck, the "clock boy" was lauded by the liberal press and Obama for being this amazing genius being attacked by racists, when it was a purposeful ruse to get teachers scared to make this kid and his dad celebrities for the purpose of helping his dad's political career and perhaps a big jury payout for "damages" soon. Only hated skeptic Richard Dawkins was remotely skeptical of these claims only to be drowned out on Twitter by liberals calling him a racist.

I think a lot of this is liberal bias. Liberals can't see their own bias objectively because they're too close to the problem, the same way conservatives can't see bias at Fox. Guardian, Independent, Salon, etc are just as bad as Brietbart if not worse, because they sell the idea of being 'fact-based' when they're propaganda outlets for a certain viewpoint which generates ad impressions and gets subscriptions via endless outrage, anti-US bias, and pandering to our emotions.

Lets stop pretending liberals don't have their army of brietbarts too.

The NYT editorial board is separate from the news desk, and the NYT makes clear what is news and what is opinion.

Can't find that headline...

This was the top result from entering your headline google though

http://dailycaller.com/2014/07/05/border-meltdown-obama-deli...

There's a pretty big difference between ILLEGAL immigration and LEGAL immigration.