Now I want to see a remake of Condorman, where the spy to extract is American, the comic book writer is Italian, and they're trying to escape to Slovenia.
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Peering from the top of Mount Stupid
__________________ The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner
Just weeks into Donald Trump’s presidency, you would think that everything had changed. The uproar over the president’s tweets grows louder by the day, as does concern over the erratic, haphazard and aggressive stance of the White House toward critics and those with different policy views. On Sunday, White House aide Stephen Miller bragged, “We have a president who has done more in three weeks than most presidents have done in an entire administration.”
But Miller was dead wrong about this. There is a wide gap, a chasm even, between what the administration has said and what it has done. There have been 45 executive orders or presidential memoranda signed, which may seem like a lot but lags President Barack Obama’s pace. More crucially, with the notable exception of the travel ban, almost none of these orders have mandated much action or clear change of current regulations. So far, Trump has behaved exactly like he has throughout his previous career: He has generated intense attention and sold himself as a man of action while doing little other than promote an image of himself as someone who gets things done.
It is the illusion of a presidency, not the real thing.
The key problem here is understanding Trump’s executive orders and presidential memoranda. Trump very quickly seized on the signing of these as media opportunities, and each new order and memo has been staged and announced as dramatic steps to alter the course of the country. Not accustomed to presidents whose words mean little when it comes to actual policy, opponents have seized on these as proof that Trump represents a malign force, while supporters have pointed to these as proof that Trump is actually fulfilling his campaign promises.
Neither is correct. The official documents have all the patina of “big deals” but which when parsed and examined turn out to be far, far less than they appear...
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Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
Lowest approval ratings ever for a president's first month, shortest tenure for a National Security Advisor, quickest resignation amid scandal, before the cabinet's even full!
During which our fine friend says (with no assumption on punctuation)
Quote:
the end result of this is that our opponents the media and the whole world will soon see
Now, they have already explicitly stated that the media are their opposition. So this can only be parsed as
Quote:
our opponents (the media and the whole world) will soon see
The comments are scary - it gives you the feeling that the whole fake news phenomenon is not making people scrutinize information better, but rather to give them an excuse to believe what they want to believe anyway. If you do not like what is being said, just shout "fake news!" and go with whatever confirms your biases.
If you do not like what is being said, just shout "fake news!" and go with whatever confirms your biases.
FAKE NEWS!
(sorry. couldn't resist )
__________________
Cēterum cēnseō factiōnem Rēpūblicānam dēlendam esse īgnī ferrōque.
“All for ourselves, and nothing for other people, seems, in every age of the world, to have been the vile maxim of the masters of mankind.” -Adam Smith
The comments are scary - it gives you the feeling that the whole fake news phenomenon is not making people scrutinize information better, but rather to give them an excuse to believe what they want to believe anyway. If you do not like what is being said, just shout "fake news!" and go with whatever confirms your biases.
Remember who brought the phrase "fake news" into popular usage, only...jeez, three weeks ago? (It seems like a lifetime since Trump's press conference.) This was never an endorsement of critical thinking.
__________________ The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner
I suppose so - but I had the impression it was also coined to describe a lot of the weird Trumpeteer-echo chamber stuff doing the rounds on Facebook and such, before Trump started mentioning it. And now with the addition of the wonderful alternative fact (Who said Kelly-Anne never gave us anything?) I was at least hoping it would steer people to be a bit more fact-conscious. But this seems to have been terribly naive of me: the opposite appears to be happening. In fact, the white house now seems to be actively encouraging an erosion of public trust in all media.
Fake news is a real thing, and it means those literally fake news stories like this one. It's a fake news site designed to look like it's real, the story is obviously completely made up, and most people who spread it obviously didn't bother to even finish reading it.
That's what fake news means. But stupid people coopted the term and started using it to describe anything they didn't agree with, including opinion pieces and legitimate news they didn't like. So they're drawing attention away from the fact that they're idiots falling for obviously hoax stories by diluting the term and turning it into a generic insult or something. It's sort of like that "everything I don't understand is bullshit" thing that dumb people do.
Fake news is a real phenomenon, and a lot of people fell for it, including, apparently, Trump himself. They shouldn't get away with using it as empty invective to obscure the fact that they are gullible, marginally literate morons who perpetuate ridiculous lies.
__________________ The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve. -Eugene Wigner
If you do not like what is being said, just shout "fake news!" and go with whatever confirms your biases.
Is there something wrong with that?
Quote:
Originally Posted by lisarea
It's sort of like that "everything I don't understand is bullshit" thing that dumb people do.
You know I can see this, right?
__________________ Old Pain In The Ass says: I am on a mission from God to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable; to bring faith to the doubtful and doubt to the faithful.
True, but I think they're getting away with it now because smarter people than them have been either ignoring them or being too polite to call them out.
This is why I recommend reading comment sections, at least every now and again. Trump sounds exactly like the commenters there and like people in real life. So when you see someone calling a sourced, legitimate news story "fake news," recall some time they shared some Pizzagate or paid protestors story or something like that and say, "You have no idea what you're talking about. That is a sourced, legitimate news story, not 'fake news.' This completely fabricated story you were just sharing on Facebook is what the grownups are talking about when they say 'fake news.'"
That 'so-called' thing, too. That is really, really common. I once saw a a LTTE where someone was so mad about Bowling for Columbine, I think it was, that she called it a "so-called movie."
I think that's something that people can actually do at a low level, at least. Call out that stupidity on the streets and in comment sections and other places that the howler monkeys have been dominating too much. Stop pussyfooting around calling people liars, be a little rude pointing out when people are wrong in predictable ways, and shame people for sloppy dangerous thinking. You can't reason with people like that, but you can train them to be afraid to say that dumb shit to people. They are generally pretty cowardly, and they depend very heavily on others' civility.
Re: Good King Trump
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