By contrast my impression of Zero Hedge has been that they are constant economic contrarians. If mainstream media is touting the strong economy, Zero Hedge posters are writing about how fiat currency is unsustainable and how the long-term trend low interest rates is creating a bubble. I do agree the sources of their article range from "I think I heard somewhere" to "based on this Bloomberg data", it's all over the place. But I don't think I've ever seen anything that I would call insidious.
Fair disclaimer that I follow Zero Hedge on Twitter, for much the same reason I follow CNBC: I need a perma-bear to balance out the perma-bull.
With two stopped clocks you can tell the right time!
Back in the mid-late 1990s I ran technical operations for what was then Chicago's most popular ISP (it was eventually acquired, through multiple hops, by RCN). Our arch-competitor was a very strange guy named Karl Denninger, about whom I would relate stories here but I'm pretty sure he'll have a Google search set up on his name and I'd rather not pay to have bogus lawsuits against me dismissed. Anyways: he runs one of these sites, a sort of Zero-Hedge Jr, at Market-Ticker.org.
Maybe switch to Market-Ticker. It's just as batshit as Zero Hedge, but I'm pretty sure Karl isn't trying to influence low-information American voters about Syria.
Infowars is tabloid material at best; but even they say that this is a lie. They never asserted this.
>But I don't think I've ever seen anything that I would call insidious.
I've found myself on zerohedge a few times through investing reasons. I've looked through their content and I'm not really seeing anything offensive really.
>Fair disclaimer that I follow Zero Hedge on Twitter, for much the same reason I follow CNBC: I need a perma-bear to balance out the perma-bull.
Very wise move.
Yes they did. Alex Jones initially called Sandy Hook a hoax and the families crisis actors. He is being (so far successfully) sued for such acts[0]. He did walk back some of those claims, but here's his words:
>"Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey -- so yeah, or Pakistan. The sky is now the limit. I appreciate your call."[1]
They're tricky to find because they are not written but made live on a radio show, but yeah Infowars absolutely claimed that sandy hook parents and children were actors.
[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/alex-jones-de...
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170303201414/http://www.politi...
Could you provide a source for this? Both your links do not source anything from alex jones.
>They're tricky to find because they are not written but made live on a radio show, but yeah Infowars absolutely claimed that sandy hook parents and children were actors.
When we have a censorship and false accusation problem ongoing. You need to provide the source.
Dont get me wrong, alex jones is tabloid quality at best... but when you have the left-wing calling the right-wing nazis without any evidence of these people being nazis is insane.
>the second hour of Jones’ Jan. 13, 2015 show
Given that he posted them on Youtube and is now banned, I'm not sure where to find them now. Nor do I have any interest in trying to figure it out. However, it looks like you can listen to hour 2 here[1] after entering the date. I haven't tried though.
[1]: http://www.gcnlive.com/JW1D/index.php/archivespage?showCode=...
Again, there is a repeat issue of the left-wing lying and making false accusations against right-wingers. Ben Shapiro for example is a practicing jew but is regularly called a nazi.
I would love to hear your source but Alex Jones denies ever saying it and I'm not seeing any sources.
Regardless, again the guy is a walking tabloid. He literally calls himself retarded.The guy rants on and on for hours everyday. He gets super drunk and high. The guy is going to say retarded things. Yet you're going back to a 2015 show to find something the dumbass said and you cant even prove it?
That's some pretty weak arguments.
Like I said, Jones's comments were made in speech, not in written word, and the easiest place to find it was on youtube.
Since you don't seem to accept that, I am curious though, what "source" would you accept?
>The guy is going to say retarded things.
Your claim was very specific:
>They never asserted this.
Infowars did. I provided evidence of the falsehood of your claim. Your defense now seems to be that it was a while ago. Which is true, but so was the Sandy Hook attack, so that's not particularly surprising. If you don't want to be called out for defending a conspiracy theorist, don't make absolute claims about a conspiracy theorist that can be proven wrong with a few minutes of searching, and certainly don't then double down on your defense because he said them a while ago.
Please don't defend Alex Jones and Infowars. Its not a good look.
And I reject your comparison to Covington for a host of reasons. Some of which include:
- no one arrested for attempts against the Covington kids
- the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake
- those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.
This "both sides are the same" talking point is garbage.
There are ongoing investigations by law enforcement for threats made against the kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lInBTiL32Qo - Credible threats are not free speech.
> - the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake
You can have an opinion about what the kids could have to attempt to de-escalate and hypothesize about whether that would have led to a "better" outcome, but you can't point to anything that they did that they should not have done, unlike the other people in the story. What really happened was few frames of video were captioned and spread by a likely foreign agent: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/technology/covington-vide... and that set many peoples opinions - which has not fully been updated now that more information is available.
> - those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.
You can't really make that claim so soon from when the event happened. Some people still think the Covington kids were instigating conflict with that Native American guy and the Black Israelites, and some people believe that Sandy Hook were crisis actors. They will surely talk about it for a long time as long as they believe it's relevant.
I agree that the magnitude of harm is different - but not a completely different universe. However the reaction by mainstream media and tech platforms couldn't be more opposite. I hope you will at least consider that internet censorship is broadly only going one way right now, it is obvious to those being impacted, and really consider what the outcomes could be if taken to the limit. Listen to the recent Joe Rogan podcast with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey, and Vijaya Gadde (Twitter trust and safety) for quite a few examples.
Worth noting, it took the NYT until March 10th [1] to finally come to the conclusion that ZH had come to on Feb 24th [2], regarding the burning of AID trucks being sent to Venezuela. ZH has an anti-establishment bend, and will take a critically hostile point of view against the main stream, it's interesting to read that perspective when most established news organization are aligned one way in their reporting.
Glenn Greenwald had a great piece on the spread of fake news surrounding the AID truck event, worth reading for anyone who is somewhat skeptical of establishment narratives. [3]
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/10/world/americas/venezuela-...
[2] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-23/venezuela-border-t...
[3] https://theintercept.com/2019/03/10/nyts-expose-on-the-lies-...
You can find a few examples on algolia if you poke around: https://hn.algolia.com/?query=glenn%20greenwald%20russia&sor...
The latest update to the ZH article says:
ZH> True to his word, it appears the humanitarian aid trucks being sent from the west into Venezuela have been repelled by Maduro's guards as reports come in from social media that they are all now on fire.
I don't see anything that says that the protestors set them on fire, but might have missed it. The way that is written makes it sound like Maduro's guards did it. The only mention I see of protestors setting anything on fire is the burning of a bus covered earlier on the page.
[1] https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2019-02-28/burning-aid-interv...
To also clarify my position, ZH is not very reputable, but they provide interesting insight into current events and will sometimes post contradictory views from different blogs/news sites. It's up to the reader to determine if the "news" they produce is verifiable or merely conjecture. It should not be up to facebook to make the decision for the reader.
Also it is worrying that a company with the reach of NYT doesn't produce this information till weeks after the event. It allowed for the false version of the incident to complete its cycle in the news without interrupting the narrative being formed, and thus creates and incentive for people to seek-out ZH as a source of info. ZH isn't reputable, but their reputation is improved when they are stacked up against poor reporting from other agencies, which is unfortunate.
So like the rest of the news?
The point of news is to have a spectrum and you read them and determine the truth for yourself.
None of the points you make validate a ban.
Could you provide me some links showing Zero hedge is different?
Free speech isn’t about holding your hand and establishing a standard, it’s about laying out all the information, real or not, and letting you decide for yourself.
If you posit that censorship is an acceptable form of filtering where someone else with their own version of facts and biases does your thinking, then you are entering a very dangerous mindset.
Note that the ZH comments section, however, is a cesspit filled with all sort of -ists.
Seriously, I just looked at the stories on the front page and most are economic related.
Can you share the ones that are conspiracy related or are what you consider "insidious"? Thanks
https://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/is-the...
At least all this is happening above board. It's not like Facebook has employees running tutorials on private Slack servers teaching people how to game the harassment reporting system to spike down content involving opinions they don't like.
No, it believes that the Sandy Hook parents are all malicious liars and that none of them lost children.
It also believes in classic antisemitic conspiracy theories, cloaked in the thin disguise of being about Soros, the most convenient Jew in the world from the perspective of people who want to slide antisemitism back into the mainstream and give people and entrypoint to David Duke-style outright White supremacy.
Perhaps one site isn't into a lizard conspiracy, but they push a "gay bomb" theory.
Nobody is debating either topic, just noting how absurd the information they push is.
> "The reason there's so many gay people now is because it's a chemical warfare operation, and I have the government documents where they said they're going to encourage homosexuality with chemicals so that people don't have children," he said on his broadcast in 2010, according to NBC News.
> "The majority of frogs in most areas of the United States are now gay," Jones said in 2017. The claim was without evidence.