TheGrim-999

So, someone at the Department of Energy that was hired in 2012, under Obama, made a ruling, and that's translated by the NYTimes as the "Trump Administration" doing it, which then gets referenced as "Trump blocked it because they make him look orange". Fake news in action, folks.

This is reality-shaping in action. Every manufacturer has crashes, failures, problems. They always have, and always will. Yet all of the sudden a certain portion of society has decided to weaponize the internet / mass media against Boeing and showcase every Boeing failure, while ignoring all the problems that everyone else also has. Ask yourself when was the last time you read a negative story / post about Airbus? Do you really think there weren't any negative events?

Of course this is a US-centric forum so it makes sense to focus more on Boeing than others, and of course I want any problems that exist to be fixed, aircraft to be safe, transparency, etc., but I'm just trying to point out that the picture of reality that's being given to you is not a comprehensive picture of reality. You're being sold a narrative about Boeing aircraft compared to other aircraft that is not necessarily true.

It's a fallacy if you're deciding that Boeing aircraft are unsafe compared to others, because mass media has decided to shove every Boeing failure in your face. This is a political tactic that goes far beyond the Boeing discussion, but if you wanted an informed opinion about Boeing aircraft compared to other aircraft, you would need an unbiased source that equally reported all problems with all manufacturers/aircraft, or you would need to compile that data yourself, and look at the overall statistics.

Always try to think about what you're NOT being told. For all you know, Airbus could have an order of magnitude more problems and crashes (I'm not saying that's true). But if the news you consume only ever shows you Boeing problems, and you make that your worldview, your worldview has become disconnected from reality.

Seriously? It's monopoly over the ideas and culture of our society. It's monopoly over the speech that the citizens consume. The culture and ideas that people consume on daily basis obviously affect their actions and ideology.

And yes it is a monopoly. You can tell me that I can go in a town square and spread my ideas if I don't like Facebook, but we all know that means my ideas are effectively unheard, when compared to facebook being able to instantly reach millions of people. You can tell me I can create my own Facebook if I don't like it, which is such an insincere comment, as it's prohibitively expensive to do so, and even if I did, we've decided as a society that it's also fine to then just censor, ban, shut down any system that promotes competing ideas.

But honestly I don't know how you can say with a straight face that facebook/twitter/etc have no bearing on your life. They massively define and shape the society you live in, to a point that has never even remotely existed in all of past human civilziation.

The main issue with relying on education, teaching fact finding, the scientific method, etc., is that the average person is honestly just not very intelligent or capable of the level of thought that we'd be asking from them. If politicians, major companies, are allowed free reign to blanket them in partisan propaganda and disinformation, no matter how much we try to educate them, they're not going to be able to see through it, reject it, and come to their own decisions based on data, logic, first principles, etc.

This is the rational approach to take. At the beginning it was an unknown, and I was more cautious than anyone I knew. I was gathering supplies and locking down in January. There were videos of people in China having seizures in the middle of the road (whatever happened to those videos, by the way?). The correct response was to be overly cautious until we had more data.

We have more data now. If you're under 70 the chances of you dying, if you don't already have a massively serious disease are statistically almost irrelevant. It's a standard coronavirus like the common cold, that's 2-3 times deadlier than the flu, and predominately only deadly to the very elderly. People are wise now that their claims of how scary it is is provably wrong and are now turning to the much more ambiguous claim about "don't you know that X% have long lasting problems afterwards?". Hogwash. The only thing they have to back that up is that they heard someone else say it. They'll never link to data that says that, because there isn't any.

We have the data now. What I gave is the data. It comes straight from the CDC, not your emotional facebook friend. Any rational human being, who proports to "follow the science", should act in accordance to the data. The data doesn't care about your feelings. The data doesn't care what people on Twitter tell you you should think. We have the data now.

It's to the point where the parent comment and my comment will be downvoted to oblivion because we encourage people to follow the data. Downvoted and censored by people claiming they "follow the science". For pointing out the science. This is not a good situation for us to find ourselves in.

Wait, so now private entities censoring/deplatforming/shutting down anyone they want for any reason they want is a bad thing? Just pretend they were all evil Trump voters that got what they deserved.

An engineer that's being logical and thinking from first principles should come to the same solution, but the vast majority of the population base their viewpoints on what's "true" based on what the internet / mass media has told them for years is true, not by what actually makes logical sense in objective reality.

The news has been spamming PR pieces for years about self-driving cars, with absolutely no technical merit to them. Twitter/Reddit/Etc have been absolutely spammed by echo chambers that all assure themselves that self-driving cars have been invented and will be released soon.

The population is awash with the viral idea that they're possible, exist, and are on the way, because that's just what they've been told for years. The average person repeats the idea because that's what the internet told them is true, which makes it even more "true", since now there's another person repeating it.

What percentage of the population that goes online and talks about how self-driving cars are coming soon actually have the engineering background / technical knowledge to come to that conclusion?

Interestingly, comments like the one you're replying to are the reason why I'm ignoring Rust.

It's reached critical mass, meme status, where people will come in and shill for Rust or shill for how bad C++ is, not for any concrete or logical reason, but just because they've seen other people say the same thing. Which then, by becoming yet another person memeing that idea on, encourages more people to hold and repeat the same opinion, which then encourages more people to hold and repeat the same opinion, and so on. It's a viral idea, there's no stopping it at this point.

The people repeating the same lines rarely have any actual reason to repeat them other than the fact that they think they're true since they've seen so many other people repeat them. They'll just come in and assert that "C++ is an anti-pattern", with no rationale, no facts, no arguments, it's more political than technical, it's a mantra they've been brainwashed into repeating since everyone else in their echo chamber is repeating it. Of course this same pattern of a viral idea/meme extends much further into politics and all other areas of our life, enabled by the internet / mass media.

Maybe objectively C++ is pretty horrible and Rust is great, I'm not even saying anything about the objective reality of the situation. It's just so easy to spot the patterns at this point, across all areas of conversation, that I now just by default ignore and assume false anything that shows the same viral pattern, because I know the viral pattern is usually backed by nothing but itself. Maybe in the past if enough people believed something to be true it'd be easier to assume there's some reason for them to believe that, but in the era of the internet / mass media that's pretty much gone.

It's such a disgusting state of affairs that people have been brainwashed into openly mocking Americans concerned with their freedom. We went from the land of the free, home of the brave, to this. Trump was the last dying breath of anything that America once was, it's all over now. With near complete partisan control over mass media, big tech, and education, it's never coming back after this.

Man this post is so gross and I think a good encapsulation of everything going wrong with social/mass media. Hyper partisan, hyper biased, contains no facts, flippantly suggests mass censorship of opposing viewpoints, flippantly puts out massive blanket statements dehumanzing and generalizing half of the population, it reads like pure propaganda.

It's so "interesting" that you didn't consider what the left did this summer a "danger to society" worthy of repercussions, where they spent month after month rioting, burning down American cities, LITERALLY forcefully taken over a large chunk of a major American city and claiming it as their own autonomous zone where they make the rules, personally setting fire to multiple buildings on my block, looting businesses on my block because they were owned by "evil capitalist whitey", making me flee the city I had lived in for 6 years to escape their violence. No, there was nothing "problematic" with that. No, apparently all the politicians tweeting out their direct support for it weren't "inciting violence". The double standards are so sickening.

It's so interesting when people cheer on censorship because, don't worry, they've been convinced that it's good censorship. Still doesn't change what it is though.

I'm sure anybody that's been censored, dehumanized, and removed from society by an evil regime has been comforted by the fact that the people doing it think it's fine to do it, or because the people doing it are doing it legally. Those facts don't make it right ...

These companies have near monopoly control on the flow of information. Like it or not, they are the new public square. Just telling someone that's banned from Twitter, Facebook, etc., "but oh don't worry, you're still free to go downtown and hold up a sign and spread your message!", while everyone else is able to reach millions of people instantly, is not a solution, and you all know it isn't. Telling someone they can start their own website and not use Twitter, and then de-platforming the website they start, is not a solution, and you all know it isn't.

Seriously, look at the state of things. The left has decided to censor the President of the United States. They routinely censor and de-platform anyone that has differing political opinion, and they use disgusting tactics to do so, by just calling anyone that disagrees with them racist, evil, inciting violence etc., no matter how remotely those labels actually apply. Not to mention that the words no longer have any meaning and have been constantly redefined to mean whatever they want it to mean.

Anyone with different politics are banned from their platforms. If they try to start their own platforms then DNS providers ban them, payment providers ban them, companies drop them, app stores ban them. Like someone mentioned elsewhere, what's next? Does anyone not a leftist need to create their own mobile networks? Lay their own fiber? When the left puts an end to this too, what's next? It's already gone to an unacceptable level of censorship and destruction.

You really want to see how evil starts? This is it. A group of people so convinced that they're morally just, better than everyone else, just like every evil regime that ever existed, that have justified to themselves that everyone else is evil, that it's fine to do evil things to them, that's it's fine to literally burn books because the knowledge conflicts with their ideology, that it's OK to do evil things to those that they've deemed to be evil, and that, conversely, nothing they do is evil. That everything they do is "fighting for Democracy!", yet everything anyone else does is the literal death of Democracy. The supreme irony being that of course complete censorship and destruction of any opposing ideas is so obviously the death of democracy. Always getting your way is not democracy.

It's evil, pure and simple, from top to bottom. If you ever wondered how an evil regime forms, how people support it and cheer it on and let it happen, you're witnessing it right here and now.

All I want to contribute to this is that if you think CNN is any different/better than Fox News you're part of the problem. They're both insanely biased echo chambers. It's so blatantly obvious too. After finding some propaganda to bash Trump with every single day for the past five years, they'll never once in the next four years ever report a negative story about Biden or his administration. Please, go ahead and count how many times it happens. This is something you can verify yourself! Of course the bias rabbit hole goes so much deeper than just that, but they're so blatantly, demonstrably, biased that the fact that anyone considers them relatively impartial journalism, any better than Fox News, makes me lose so much hope.

How many children wind up in the hospital from the flu, pneumonia, and so on every year? Those are more deadly to children than covid is. Why are you being made to freak out about this yet you likely have gone your entire life never having a care in the world for children with those other diseases? Without having to change a single aspect of your life to prevent those other diseases? Why is this different?

My response to anybody that downvotes and disagrees with the parent comment is to just wait and see for yourself how long it'll take for the NYT or your news source of choice to ever report a negative story about Biden. Every day you read the news try to take a look through and find a negative story. I guarantee you the day will never come.

It absolutely blows my mind that people can say something like "CNN is relatively unbiased", and yet nearly 100% of every (political) story follows the same pattern: In the last four years I don't remember a single CNN headline that was positive of Trump. Of course you can say that he's a complete screw up that never once in four years did a single positive thing, but if you're honest with yourself, you know that's not true. The same way that in the next four years they won't publish a single negative article about Biden, but that doesn't mean he's a saint that never once did anything that could be reported on negatively. That people can't see how insanely biased these sources are really blows my mind. The proof is there for you to see - how many months or years will it take before you see a single negative story about Biden?