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Comment by gdulli | Hacker News Reader

> Speaking to Gizmodo through Twitter Direct Messages, Elon Musk said, “Our understanding is that this guy was paid by the UAW to join Tesla and agitate for a union,”

I guess he got this tactic from Trump, claiming that any dissent comes from paid protesters. While offering no evidence that it's actually the case.

> Update 10/2/17 9:20am EST: In a statement this morning UAW categorically denied that Moran had ever been paid by their organization.

https://gizmodo.com/elon-musk-responds-to-claims-of-low-pay-...

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Ugh, this is just a terrible conflation. And it ignores very real and well-understood union tactics like this. You can be pro- or anti- union all you want but if you don't think unions seek out individuals to use as essentially "seeds" for a union - including paying them - you're woefully naive.

If you don't think we've entered an era where "facts" are invented from thin air without fear of repercussion because the media portrays opposite sides of a demonstrable fact the way it portrays differences in opinion, you're woefully naive.

Recent events may have had a side effect of making honest people need to work harder to prove their claims. But that's not necessarily a bad thing, we could have used more discipline and scrutiny there before the era of fake news anyway.

Do you have an "facts" to back up your claim that this "era" we've "entered" is a recent phenomena?

Facts have been invented in order to push agendas since the dawn of time. Nothing has changed.

The day the printing press was invented is the day it was subverted to push propaganda.

The "era of fake news" is fake. It has always been this way.

No, you're the fake news!

I think something has changed:

I want to start with Trump's lies. It's now a commonplace that Trump and his underlings tell whoppers. Fact-checkers have never had it so good. But all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all. Trump's lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission. That first press conference when Sean Spicer was sent out to lie and fulminate to the press about the inauguration crowd reminded me of some Soviet apparatchik having his loyalty tested to see if he could repeat in public what he knew to be false. It was comical, but also faintly chilling.

From Andrew Sullivan, a conservative blogger, here:

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan...

So you're trying to convince me something has materially changed by posting a quote that compares the current scenario to what the Soviets used to do?

Either things have changed, or the Soviets were doing it in the past. Only one of these statements can be true.

I'm sorry, but do you have any evidence for this? Or that it happened here?

Did Musk ever present any evidence at all for his claim?

Did the employee?

I feel like there's a burden of proof that you're putting on Elon Musk that you're not also putting on Morgan here. All we have is his personal testimony without any other evidence either.

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