Comment by wamsachel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by wamsachel | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

No...the author of the article was the lazy one, and it's not just this author because as you may have noticed there's a rising cry for companies to help police cyber bullying, truthiness etc. Notice how no one inside the establishment is assigning culpability to themselves, the self serving conglomerates for the public's distrust. Instead shifting the blame and calling for actions...actions which undoubtably will ramp up propaganda and censorship for the benefit of elites. For every Alex Jones that gets censored, will there be a Chomsky that also gets banned from public discourse?

How am I supposed to sympathize with this author when we just had a presidential campaign openly discusses their social media astro turfing whilst leaks reveal dizzying amounts of media collusion, but is there any official cry to end that practice? Of course not. So go ahead and pretend that it's all because the internet allows people to go get their conspiracies from so many different sources, and pretend that the public's distrust in MSM is unfounded and undeserved.

Man, your reply is just exactly one of the reasons I almost never post online like this and just lurk.

Not only did you ignore the point of the post you replied to ("lets talk about the article and criticize those ideas in context"), you segued to exactly the kind of narratives that the author of the article was talking about and used them to declaim anyone who disagrees with you.

It would be one thing if you bothered to critique the author on any of his actual points, but you decided to ramp it up by somehow claiming if he got his way, we would be censoring Noam Chomsky. ctrl-f, censorship isn't even mentioned in the article.

The crux of your argument seems to be something along the lines that that the ideas in this article are being put forwards "for the benefit of the elites", which is the kind of thinking that I (and I think the author of the article would agree with me) that makes as much sense as saying "you are being punished for your hubris by Zeus". As in, you ascribe actions to beings that are fundamentally invisible to others, that secretly control the world around and that you can divine the existence of, but are unable to explain to others in any but in the most vaguest of terms.

The point that upsets me about this kind of behavior, is that in viewing it, often people are turned off and are less likely to take part in conversations where they see others treated that same way. The shrinking minority of people who post vs just lurk, already a tiny approximate 10%, in the end becomes the even smaller fraction of people who can put up with and dish out the exact same vitriol. Or, simply agree with vitriol directed elsewhere.

Welcome to HN!

Like you, I lurked for a long time (a couple of years) before a comment got me emotionally charged up enough to finally create an account. I'm certainly glad I did, though.

Yeah, every once in a while somebody "pees in the pool" but (as I'm sure you already know) normally the conversation and dialogue here is better than what you'll get at most other venues on the Internet.

Now that you've got an account, just stay logged in, continue contributing, and help even out the signal-to-noise ratio a little bit more.

I ignored the point because I wanted to (coincidentally because that's what the OP author was doing, imo). I wanted to point out the hypocrisy of the NYT, and to point out that a communication giant complaining about how consumers have options, is not good at all for objective truth; and this complaining, both from private companies and government, is growing. I was work and didn't have time to write a clean thesis, so sorry.

>For every Alex Jones that gets censored, will there be a Chomsky that also gets banned from public discourse?

Alex Jones is now part of the movement powering the Republican Presidential campaign, which stands a 30% chance of winning. Chomsky is still on the margins. Alex Jones is a conspiracy nutjob almost all of the time. Chomsky is sometimes a conspiracy nutjob because he has a shot-in-the-dark at guessing which wars and coups are actually American plots and which ones just happened on their own.

since its the only tangible point i can glean from what you said: alex jones is not an equal but opposite voice to chomsky, just as bill mitchell is not an equal but opposite voice to nate silver. unless you are going argue that we should weight everyone's opinion on every topic equally, i would give more credence to someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of political history than someone who ...does not have that. similarly, for projecting the outcome of an election, i would listen to someone with a long track record of public success with analytics and modeling - first with baseball, then poker, then politics, than someone with literally no qualifications at all. don't you think thats reasonable?

>alex jones is not an equal but opposite voice to chomsky

That's my point! Terrorism isn't a reason to run mass surveillance on everyone, yet here we are. I'm saying that by going after the crackpots, the establishment gets to contain critical adversaries.

The problem is that Nate Silver went against his own model, and then got every predictions about Trump wrong, so far.

wait, are you saying that bill mitchell is now a better analyst because of that?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com