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Comment by camperman | Hacker News Reader

> insane, out of control conspiracy minded screaming blubbering trolls

This attitude is WHY YOU LOST THE ELECTION.

> Who cares? Why is this a big deal? I am so unbelievably unimpressed with the seriousness of this,

It is deadly serious. /r/pizzagate was just shut down for posting personal information. No proof was given. Reddit has users like Bill Gates who post regularly, it has interviewed the POTUS and countless movie stars. Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party, the founder of reddit reveals that he fucks around with people's posts. What's to prevent him going into a user's history and falsifying it? We've had the head of the FBI in front of Congress talking about a Reddit comment for crying out loud, because it was about national security.

His actions were extraordinarily poor judgement for an organisation that describes itself as a bastion of free speech.

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> Just as a pedophile scandal threatens to engulf both Twitter and very senior members of the Democratic Party

Ah.

I originally dismissed it before the elections, thinking it was all a whisper campaign but it has gotten legs after the election.

That doesn't mean it has substance but I now believe infowars objectively did a better job reporting the facts of what is presently known than the New York Times's supposed exposure of the story. The NYT piece contains a well placed lie I am certain isn't true.

There is enough circumstantial evidence to warrant a careful police investigation.

I would put it like this: the odds are not good but the goods are definitely odd.

To those who think "too obviously in the open to be true" I'd like to point out the case of Jimmy Saville.

>Infowars objectively did a better job reporting the facts of the case than the New York Times

Can you whack jobs stay on 4chan and Reddit please? It's bad enough you've taken over Twitter and the US government.

I think the media went out of their way to slant things towards Hillary in this election. I suspect they consensus in the media was something like "we created this monster, now we have to kill it" regarding Trump.

To me this was both wrong, since it basically ignored the basic responsibility of the media in our civilization, and counter productive, since it was so obvious that they were 'in the bag' that people stopped trusting the major news outlets entirely and started getting their 'information' from non-traditional sources, like the alt-media, social networks, etc.

So you can say that everyone is a bunch of 'whack jobs', but it seems like we have a competition here between the 'traditional media' who are being incredibly dishonest and more or less repeating talking points from the DNC, the 'marginally traditional' media like fox news, which is just as much in the bag for the right and so also not really a trustworthy source of information, and the 'other stuff' people are now getting information from, which is just a total mess of false information and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories mixed into all the actual things going on in the world.

So if you want to blame someone, blame the traditional media, of all the things that happened they were the only ones who abandoned their responsibility, and everything else followed from that.

The equivalence you draw is terrifying (and, I think, false, but mostly terrifying).

Yes, in a sense I think it's true that the "traditional media" is probably mostly staffed by people who tend to oppose the Trump presidency. But this is for two very specific reasons:

1. Trump ran a divisive campaign that was in many ways--perhaps primarily--a campaign against both the demographics of most media reporters and the actual institutions of media itself. Reporters, being humans with feelings, probably did respond to that a bit.

2. Trump ran a campaign that was founded on literal falsehoods.

Extending reporters some degree of professional respect, I tend to believe #2 is the primary factor here.

The terrifying equivalence here is between "traditional media" reporting factual truths where you can kinda-sorta-sometimes tell that the reporter probably doesn't respect Trump as a candidate and "alt media" reporting things of huge consequence that never happened and have no basis in fact.

Those are fundamentally different things, and what truly worries me about both the stupid shit like "pizzagate" and the significant lies (on economic measures, on science, on documented reality as we know it) is that our politics appear to have become unstuck from consensus reality.

There's no rational discussion--and, I believe, truly no hope for the democratic process--if we're not arguing about mutually agreed-upon facts. Yet that's where we are.

No, that is just not what happened.

Do you actually believe that the 'traditional media' just reports 'facts' as they are? Do you have no historical perspective whatsoever?? Because if they were just 'reporting factual truths' in this election cycle, that would literally be the first time they've ever done it.

In every election since I can remember, both sides have claimed, and many have believed, that the person on the other side was literally going to ruin the country and should they win the country was going to fall apart.

You happen to feel that way about Donald Trump. You're just as wrong as the people who thought that Hillary was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bush was going to try to become a dictator, and the people that thought Reagan was going to start WWIII, and the people that thought Bill Clinton was literally a murderer who killed state troopers and who killed Vince Foster, and the people that thought Obama was a Muslim 5th columnist, and on and on.

So there have always been crazies, getting obsessed with them or paying attention to them is pointless.

This time we have the 'alt-right', whatever that is, some make believe group created by being named in the media. I'm not sure where they are or who they are, but if you listen to the media they're 'out there' and they are rising.

So my advice is read some history, get some perspective, and move on as though nothing is really different than it ever has been, because it isn't.

EDIT: here is a video of the media 'just reporting facts': https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8NVVwZVd6ZM Look how stunned the 'reporter' is when they mess up and don't manage to cherry pick the clip to support the false narrative they are trying to reinforce..

(I read a lot of history. I do find the suggestion to "read some history," absent any actual historical argument being made, to be condescending and sort of useless, but I may be misunderstanding your intent here.)

I completely agree that asking one to perceive the world without ones' own biases is quite difficult. Would I know if I had a biased worldview? Maybe not.

On the other hand, I hear a view similar to yours quite commonly expressed. I read it as, "Both sides lie, everyone lies about the same amount, and we shouldn't try to call bullshit on those lies." That's exactly the view I find terrifying: it implicitly rejects the notion of objective truth, or at least rejects the idea that we can benefit from such truth in any way.

To take a counter view: do you think it's possible, in a given election (if not this one), for one candidate to be significantly more mendacious than the other? If so, how could we discover it? How could we agree when it is happening?

Absolutely, some politicians are more honest than others.

How can we discover it? Well that's pretty much impossible to do perfectly. There is a whole industry that for a long time has owned the mechanism by which the world is revealed to us, and if nothing else positive comes from this election, they have been exposed as being a very broken filter that is using their position to intentionally push their own agenda.

My hope is that the new forms of media that are developing step in to fill the void, and that a new kind of journalism comes about that grows beyond the irresponsible and incompetent 'traditional media'. That hasn't happened yet, and it seems like the democratization of news has actually led to more polarized outlets and given people the ability to tune into 'news' that just reinforces their beliefs.

At least with the 'mainstream media' there was some corrective pressure since there were only a few outlets and they were at least slightly sensitive to criticism, so they had to maintain at least the appearance of balance. They've completely thrown away that appearance now, and sadly the alternatives are insane.

I don't think things are going to go back to where they were, where the newspapers and other sources of reporting saw themselves as 'up against the system'. Traditional media depended on a lack of alternatives as part of their business model, and that model is dying very rapidly. Traditional news is rapidly going bankrupt, and as a result our 'best' newspapers have been sold at bargain basement prices to people who want to own that influence while it lasts. This isn't new either, but you used to have to be a massive industrial conglomerate to 'buy the news', like GE or Westinghouse. Now we have Bezos and Carlos Slim able to personally buy that influence very cheaply (while it lasts).

Being concerned about children is not a wack job. With yesterdays arrest in Norway and allegations about UK elites. Why do you think same can't happen in America.

Assuming you're serious:

Is there any evidence for the accusation? On its face, the whole claim appears to be entirely baseless and without merit, and its defenders appear to argue that it's hard to disprove so it deserves credence.

Am I missing something? I read the subreddit (before it was shut down) and was quite unable to tell if it's just a big Internet in-joke or if the participants are serious. Are they serious? If so, why?

It was deadly serious. But the evidence is purely circumstantial. However, the more you dig the more data you find. From another comment of mine:

James Alefantis posts suggestive pictures of children on his Instagram AND He makes lewd comments about them AND Many of his friends do too AND Some of those friends are into weird things like making child-sized coffins AND There's FBI-confirmed pedophile codes and symbols everywhere AND Alefantis knows John Podesta WHO is into Spirit Cooking with Marina Abramovic AND Podesta hangs disturbing child abuse-style art on his wall AND He likes artists who produce disturbing images of abuse AND His emails have masonic images hidden in the attachments AS WELL AS Pictures of children with notes saying "Happy Birthday John" AND contacts of his mail him with messages promising "entertainment" from the young children in the pool AND He and his brother look EXACTLY like the photofits of two men who abducted Madeleine McCann in 2007 AND they were connected to the McCanns through a mutual friend who lived nearby AND ....

There's literally thousands of people digging and all they do is keep throwing up more connections and suggestions that there is a pedophile ring hiding in plain sight.

I've seen this sort of thing (reddit+4chan conspiracy theory witch hunts) most aptly described as "weaponized autism"

Indeed. Except this time they're searching for real witches who kill real children.

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