We also know now that the russian collusion hoax was entirely fabricated by Hillary's team: https://nypost.com/2021/11/04/the-real-collusion-was-the-cre...

I don't agree with what Trump did, but what he did was rile up a crowd of people that had zero capability of actually usurping the government, and then waited too long to ask them to leave after they went too far. Politicians on both sides do worse things than that all the time, including our friend Hillary. What she did was worse and far more diabolical, and helped undermine our democracy for four years. What Trump did was to just provide fodder for the democrat party to milk for 2 years in hopes of it saving them from a coming midterm election sweep.

Our government was under zero actual threat on that day. Even the left's own polling shows that moderates aren't buying their narrative: https://www.dailywire.com/news/cbs-buries-poll-results-showi...

Linking to opinion pieces by right wing media isn't a way of making an argument btw, it's outsourcing your thinking to partisans that can tell you want you want to hear.

I don't like a lot of things about politics these days, but excusing political violence because it's "your side", and you assume they would "never be actually violent" is a basic logical fallacy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman). Please try and see the blinders you have on regarding nearly everything you've said.

The assertion coming from the Clinton camp was that Donald Trump had a "server that was communicating with a Russian Bank". They were _very_ careful in their use of words talking about it on the campaign trail. It was never asserted the _content_ of those communications just that _communication occurred_.

This being a technology forum, I think we can all agree that kind of jives with how DNS works - DNS logs can show can infer the "who" but not the "what".

Knowing those things, I don't think it strains credulity to believe that a nefarious political actor could take advantage of people unfamiliar with DNS to suggest a connection that doesn't exist while still having plausible deniability.

I don't think anyone agrees with that, either in spirt or practice.

> The assertion coming from the Clinton camp

"Whatabout the Clintons" is not an actual response to my question, it's just deflection.

> Knowing those things, I don't think it strains credulity to believe that a nefarious political actor could take advantage of people unfamiliar with DNS to suggest a connection that doesn't exist while still having plausible deniability.

Yes Tucker Carlson and Co. ran with it under the headline "Bigger than Watergate" for days. There is no bottom in terms of what lies are told for partisan political purposes. None.

"Please try and see the blinders you have on regarding nearly everything you've said." is something you said a few comments up. You should listen to yourself more often.

> And, as we are learning now, Hillary Clinton's team paid to infiltrate into whitehouse servers as part of efforts to delegitimize Trump's election: https://www.dailywire.com/news/bombshell-clinton-campaign-pa...

Is false. It's a lie. And giving lies equal time as the truth, to be "debated", is one of the reasons why we are in this collective mess.

First, virtually none of what appeared in the recent filing from Durham’s office is new information. Here’s a New York Times story from over four months ago with basically all of it: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/01/us/politics/trump-alfa-ba...

Second, nothing in the filing supports breathless claims technically illiterate cable hosts are making. It does not allege anyone “hacked” Trump computers, or was paid to “infiltrate” networks, or that anyone “intercepted e-mails and text messages."

You mindlessly repeat these claims hoping people aren't looking critically enough to see through them. You either don't understand these matters yourself, or you know they are lies and repeat them anyways. I personally view the second outcome as much worse.

While some might blur the line between “spying” and “exploit[ing] . . . access to non-public and/or proprietary Internet data,” the distinction is, based on what we know right now, critical. Durham has not alleged a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), the Stored Communications Act (SCA), the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA), or the Defend Trade Secrets Act (DTSA) — all of which are major sources of law as to the prosecutions of federal computer crimes.

I still believe I am still correct that the Steel Dossier and the Russian collusion story were entirely unfounded fabrications of the Clinton team, and I still believe that what they did there was worse than what Trump did on January 6, but this latest alleged Clinton scandal might be overblown.

Big of you to say.

> I still believe I am still correct that the Steel Dossier and the Russian collusion story were entirely unfounded fabrications of the Clinton team

Then you double down on more partisan nonsense.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/18/us/politics/senate-intell...

The GOP-led bipartisan commission concluded Russia attacked the 2016 election in favor of Trump, their words. You are again to the right of your own party. Also nothing in the Steele Dossier has been disproven, and lots of it has been collaborated. If you are still interested in what is true and what isn't, please continue reading with an open mind:

https://www.lawfareblog.com/steele-dossier-retrospective

https://www.justsecurity.org/44697/steele-dossier-knowing/

https://www.cnn.com/2019/01/07/politics/dossier-two-years-la...

Right now, I believe Trump legitimately thought the election was stolen and he wanted Pence to de-certify the election to give time for his lawsuits to go through the courts and show the evidence of the fraud. I absolutely do not think Trump was in any way encouraging people to riot in the capitol, much less stage a coup. I also believe that no such fraud was ever found, putting Trump in the wrong, most likely. If I am wrong, let me see the evidence.

I believe you. No one thinks their guy is the bad guy, it's human nature.

> I believe Trump legitimately thought the election was stolen

Again, this is your blind spot. You give a man who deserves no benefit of doubt infinite rope.

But you are deluding yourself. You are to the right of your own party leadership on this matter: https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/593339-mcconnell-breaks-...

You don't refute any of the points, you merely state your opinion over and over "I don't think Trump meant to do anything wrong". Of course, intention cannot be known by anyone, so arguing in favor of what is unknowable brings this whole discussion to a standstill.

Also, people still go to jail for crimes even if they aren't intended (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manslaughter). So I don't particularly care if Trump meant to organize a violent attack on the nation's capital at the exact time and place the certification was taking place, he still did it.

I think that depends on how you interpret a lot of statements made by Trump and others[0], for instance:

    “We will never give up. We will never concede. It doesn’t happen. You don’t concede when there’s theft involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore, and that is what this is all about. And to use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal. …

    “You will have an illegitimate president. That is what you will have, and we can’t let that happen. These are the facts that you won’t hear from the fake news media. It’s all part of the suppression effort. They don’t want to talk about it. They don’t want to talk about it. …

    “We fight like hell, and if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.”

What's certain - and we know this from their own testimony and communications - is that many of the rioters believed they were acting under Trump's orders[1]. Where did this belief come from? Was there simply no relationship between the words coming from Trump and other Republicans, and what Trump supporters were hearing? After four years of paranoid rhetoric amongst the right about vast leftist conspiracies, violent Marxists in the streets, vaccines as fascism and now the election being stolen right before their eyes? Four years of the populist gospel of victimhood and the need to exact revenge upon the elites? When you, as a Trump supporter, see the courts throwing out lawsuit after lawsuit, and Republican Congressman Louis Gohmert suggests on TV that people should "go out and be violent like antifa[2]" how do you react?

On the spectrum of culpability from "Trump had absolutely nothing to do with anything" to "Trump literally planned it himself", I fall somewhere on the latter side. Where seems to depend on just how much Trumpists piss me off that day, I'll admit. Unfortunately, there's no smoking gun here.

But there's also no way Trump didn't at least understand the atmosphere he was creating, or really discourage it (until well after the damage was done, which isn't a good look.) I think at the very least he was hoping the chaos, whatever form it took, would benefit him.

[0]https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/jan/07/trump-incite...

[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/09/us/capitol-rioters.html?a...

[2]https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/louie-go...

The article is about how people have become better informed thanks to the internet, and how increasing political polarization is due to people making political choices based on more sophisticated ideological alliances and deeper held beliefs, rather than ways they might previously have done so. Part of why people are better informed is that the internet makes it easier to bypass 'elite consensus' in a handful of media outlets, and also, easier to link to sources to cite them in arguments.

PathOfEclipse is demonstrating this in action: he is citing sources for his beliefs, including sources from different partisan factions like the CBS poll he quotes at the end.

In response, you're taking a pre-internet approach. Dismissive and without intellectual merit, your post simply asserts that none of PathOfEclipse's sources should be considered legitimate, not even the (hopefully somewhat objective) opinion poll made by a left wing news outlet, that shows widespread bipartisan agreement by voters on the question of what happened on January 6th.

PathOfEclipse clearly wins this round. He uses the internet in the ways people hoped in the 90s it would be used - to cite evidence for calm, level headed beliefs and arguments that boil down to "cool it folks". There's nothing wrong here.

The kind of conversation you are suggesting is being offered here isn't. It requires a lot of good faith, and a relatively credible and overlapping set of facts.

This is what any honest exchange of ideas requires, and these conditions are almost never met online (social media, forums, etc.)

Id also add that source validation is required (as you point out an 'overlapping set of facts.') If you can't agree that a major news media organization with full time fact checking (no matter their political bent) is objectively better than a shiftless blog or single social media personality with a dodgy history of accuracy, then there is no hope for exchange. It's just a boxing match.

The problem comes down to "you don't trust the sources that I trust." Why people tend to trust sources that clearly aren't worthy of anyone's trust largely depends on their own confirmation bias.

Yes, in fact "single social media personalities" routinely beat major news media organizations in being correct (especially as the latter are perhaps most accurately described as coalitions of the former), and this happens frequently enough that lots of people have noticed. If you can't accept that this happens regularly, then there is indeed no hope for actual exchange because any evidence or argumentation of the form "news org X said Y which is proven false <here>" will be rejected as an inherently illegitimate challenge to power.

The solution is to, when possible, fact check sources yourself. You don't have to do it every time. Patterns will soon become apparent. Once done you can reserve such work for cases where someone disagrees and is citing a source you know to be false.

Yes, it's slow and hard work. The discovery of truth always has been; either toughen up or be quiet and leave the work to other people. Bleating about how terrible it is not everyone automatically regurgitates CNN is just holding society back at this point.

Citation?

> and this happens frequently enough that lots of people have noticed

Now we are getting back into "feelings" about what is true or not, or more plainly "this is what I want to hear" vs. "this is was is factually accurate". I am confident individual social media accounts become better confirmation bias machines than even you most slanted news orgs.

> If you can't accept that this happens regularly, then there is indeed no hope for actual exchange

I admit it has happened, like you can pull 1 or 2 examples using 30 years of history, but it's extremely uncommon. And you haven't sourced anything in making your arguments. If the statistics say individual social media accounts (or any specific account) have greater accuracy than news organizations with full-time fact checking, now is the time to provide those numbers.

> The solution is to, when possible, fact check sources yourself.

I think I know where this is going.

> Patterns will soon become apparent.

Yep. You are describing how people go down internet rabbit holes and become conspiracy theorists. "Doing your own research" is incredibly hard, we rely on trusted sources to do this work. What we need to do individually is make sure the sources we trust deserve our trust. No anonymous blogs, no podcasts with a long history of getting important things wrong with no accountability.

Mike Caulfield's SIFT method is an excellent intro into media (source) literacy: https://hapgood.us/2019/06/19/sift-the-four-moves/

> Yes, it's slow and hard work

It's literally impossible if you don't use trusted sources. If you attempt to understand vaccine science with no science background, international trade policy with no econ history, etc. You are setting yourself for failure.

> either toughen up or be quiet and leave the work to other people.

Please, you aren't a hero for trusting the wrong people (who are telling you what you want to hear, coincidentally).

> Bleating about how terrible it is not everyone automatically regurgitates CNN

And you end with a fundamental misrepresentation of what I am saying, not surprising. You should not automatically trust most sources, but some get things right far more than others. Living every moment of your life with "I need to research this" means a standard trip to the shop would take 8 hours.

And how exactly do you think the "sources we trust" are held to account? They don't hold themselves to account and I think you'll find they work hard to cancel anyone who reveals their flaws under their own name.

Example: you've proven above that whatever sources you are relying on to educate you about vaccines have misled you. You thought there were no safety issues with the polio vaccine, which is a false claim. Nobody has been held to account for misleading you and you probably won't do it yourself. I knew about this incident, but it wasn't from reading the New York Times or watching CNN. It was from venturing outside these untrustworthy sources and reading far more broadly than journalists are comfortable with anyone doing.

"You should not automatically trust most sources, but some get things right far more than others."

Like which ones? If you don't trust CNN (which I'm using here as a token to mean "all similar media outlets"), then where are you getting these false ideas from? Enquiring minds want to know.

Perhaps this is a reflection of how little people understand the journalism industry. To get something published on NYT.com, there is a process of fact checking and verification that goes through every comma, every claim. Of course mistakes are made, but they are publicly addressed and accounted for. There is no just thing as a purposeful, objective lie that remains unaccounted for.

> I think you'll find they work hard to cancel anyone who reveals their flaws under their own name.

The Joe Rogan / Tucker Carlson opinion stuff can be left out of this convo without losing anything.

> You thought there were no safety issues with the polio vaccine

Nope. I said "no one had any issues with a polio vaccine MMR, etc." not that there weren't an adverse health effects. You project what you think i'm saying so you can argue against that. I don't know if you are aware that you are doing this, but it would make you a perfect cable news guest as that is the tactic of choice.

If you can't even read what I said and accurately respond, there's no point in continuing. This isn't Thanksgiving and i'm not unlucky enough to be at your table.

> Like which ones?

Again, try and educate yourself in the basic differences in journalism, who follows the rules of accountability and accuracy and who blatantly ignores them while still attempting to come across as "news".

If you still want to respond, cite the claim you've made first:

> "single social media personalities" routinely beat major news media organizations in being correct

Citation?

That's usually how debate works, yes. That's the whole point of evidence-based argumentation.

Your post is kind of the worldview Yglesias is arguing against in his article. His argument, summarized, is that certain types of people are railing in frustration at so-called "misinformation" that, when examined carefully, turns out to simply be information that the current ruling classes don't like, often because it exposes them as hypocrites, intellectually dishonest or not actually expert in their claimed field of expertise. Because they can't rebut the data or facts being presented they instead fall back on logical fallacies like appeals to authority ("experts"), false claims of lacking good faith, blanket assertions that any non-left wing source is illegitimate and so on and so forth.

There's the conspiracy language, I had a hunch. Instead of discussing the world in vague platitudes, lets get specific. 20% of the US is avoiding getting a safe and effective vaccine, as a result thousands have died unnecessarily. This is a new problem, no one had any issues with a polio vaccine MMR, etc.

People don't trust experts at a time when that trust can literally save their lives. The information space is a minefield, expecting every person on earth to have the tool to "make up their own mind" is unrealistic, to put it simply.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/pmc/articles/PMC1383764/

"In April 1955 more than 200 000 children in five Western and mid-Western USA states received a polio vaccine in which the process of inactivating the live virus proved to be defective. Within days there were reports of paralysis and within a month the first mass vaccination programme against polio had to be abandoned. Subsequent investigations revealed that the vaccine, manufactured by the California-based family firm of Cutter Laboratories, had caused 40 000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10."

I thought the Cutter Labs incident was quite well known, but apparently not.

Now, back on topic. See what I did there? You made a false claim and then asserted that anyone who disagrees with you is the victim of misinformation and engaging in "conspiracy language". You believed there were no issues with the polio vaccine when in fact there were such severe safety issues the first mass vaccination programme had to be abandoned. I responded to this with facts and citations, showing conclusively that it's actually you who is a victim of (pro-vaccine) misinformation in this case, not anyone else.

All this is possible due to the internet. You're claiming the "information space" is a "minefield". But that doesn't seem to hold up. The internet is really much, much less dangerous for your mind than reading ordinary newspapers or watching TV news. And that's what Yglesia's is saying - people who doggedly stick to what media/government selected "experts" tell them are constantly being trounced in debate and made to look foolish by facts and data. They react to this with a massive case of projection.

Lol actually getting off of vague platitudes is "changing the subject". Right, enjoy your weekend.

> You made a false claim

No I didn't, you either misunderstood what I said or deliberately lied about it to argue a strawman, because that's easier than actually addressing what i'm saying.

> The internet is really much, much less dangerous for your mind than reading ordinary newspapers or watching TV news.

Lol. Truly, you made me laugh out loud. Funny you didn't say "is more accurate" - because that would be an impossible claim. You said "is less dangerous" which is also patently false. This book is the beginning of most study on the subject: https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/d...

It's unequivocal and damning.

> no one had any issues with a polio vaccine

Reality:

> 40,000 cases of polio, leaving 200 children with varying degrees of paralysis and killing 10

There's no misunderstanding or straw man here. You made a false claim whilst accusing others of misinformation. Which seems to be often the way it goes with "misinformation" - not a vague platitude, of course, but the topic of the entire thread.

"Dr. Offit also explores how, as a consequence of the tragedy, one jury's verdict set in motion events that eventually suppressed the production of vaccines already licensed and deterred the development of new vaccines that hold the promise of preventing other fatal diseases"

A big part of what drives vaccine refusal today is awareness that vaccination campaigns have a history of being so dangerous the producers cannot survive in the open market under the normal rules.

Also, the topic of discussion is actually the original article about misinformation and the internet, in general. It was you who insisted on bringing up vaccines in an unrelated thread.

Not to the point where 20% of the population refused it, which is the point of this discussion. Major news networks didn't run opinion voices lying about the safety and safety and efficacy of the vaccine. Comparing that era to this one is misinformed.

If you think that’s how debates work, we probably have nothing to say to each other that the other would find valuable.

In any case, your ascribation of those feelings and ideas to me and my post are baseless and completely false. You’ve failed to comprehend the point.

The irony here (ha) is while people are more polarized, actual ideology has almost completely gone away, replaced with vague slogans (MAGA) that don't actually mean anything and are designed to weaponize nostalgia in a way that is useful for particularly amoral politicians. Keep in mind, the GOP literally had no formal platform for 2020, just "we're with Trump" (https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/party-no-c...)