Comment by teitoklien | Hacker News Reader

Comment by teitoklien | Hacker News Reader

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it is not a left or right wing thing, these events are happening. Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening.

Are all UK opposition politicians right wing tabloid dummies too ? They are all clearly saying this is happening. Reform UK party that is right now slated in polls to be the next winner if elections were to happen have publicly acknowledged this is happening.

Why make everything into a left vs right match ? if free speech dies here right now by people you support (people who call daily mail a tabloid “right wing” rag) when they go out of power and people you oppose win, they’ll use the same instruments to suppress people you do support.

Basic freedoms are deserved by all citizens, police shouldn’t go around arresting 12,000 citizens for facebook posts or grandmas for voicing their worries not even violent posts or jibes, just criticism and concerns.

While the same country has struggled across years to arrest and prosecute violent offenders targetting british orphanages and harming children. police did nothing about it despite knowing it, and continues to resist protecting children.

You think everything is normal ? Not everything is a football match, the score wont reset after “the game” round is over. Once these freedoms are lost they will be far more harder to bring back. people will be even more defenseless. Nothing good comes out of making everything expendable in a left vs right match.

Common citizens lose everything from it, while politicians on top from both aisles win with more power to do anything and everything they want when they rule.

> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening

Like the Haitian immigrants eating neighbor's pets?

The US VP is a highly untrustworthy individual.

You may want to consider a course on basic media literacy and critical reading.

Might help you when reading some of your news sources.

Sure, I hope those texts act as warm blanket to console you as western society loses its hard earned freedoms from the rise of extreme left and extreme right.

You’ll need them, much more than I will To realise where things went wrong.

What texts?

you’re courses you speak of.

you’ll need it for consoling if most people dont wake up and realise that the masses are slowly losing all of their freedoms from both the extreme left and extreme right in democracies globally.

Democratic backsliding is a fact that’s happening in all major countries. No media literacy course will save us all from it, if we don’t call out these issues and make it unpopular to do these things by governments.

> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening.

Ah yes, because the couch fucker sure is known to be trustworthy. Good god, do you also believe everything you read on Facebook and see on Fox news?

>because the couch fucker sure is known to be trustworthy

Just because he's a "couch fucker", doesn't mean he's wrong in that case. Some EU countries do have genuine issues with free speech. He's right about that one.

People should use critical thinking and judge WHAT is being said independent of WHO is saying it.

Unfortunately people do not use critical thinking anymore to judge topics in a nonpartisan way, because of fear of being attacked/ostracized by the colective groupthink mob based solely on adherence to a political ideology.

Isn't it using critical thinking to be able to know that a particular source of information is not credible after said source admitted to be "willing to create stories” after falsely claiming a certain population was eating people's pets?

Ah yes, but were they really people's pets? They just claimed people were eating animals commonly owned as pets. Even in my neighborhood, there are plenty of cats that are not owned by anyone. "They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats." That's the quote I'm familiar. I've never heard "They're eating the pet dogs. They're eating the pet cats." Isn't that a difference that a critical thinker would be able to notice?

Claiming they're eating cats and dogs, regardless of pet status, is incredibly racist. Trying to say "Nooo he meant strays" is not critical thinking. It's excusing horribly racist ideology and talking points.

So if he'd come out and say "the sky is blue", you'd consider it false without thinking twice just because to you he's not a credible source?

That's exactly what not using critical thinking means, when you just blindly agree or disagree with information based on the source alone.

I think it'd be worth double- and triple-checking anything he says, yes, beyond trivial examples about the color of the sky. He's a known liar. He lies for political gain. He is disgusting.

>I think it'd be worth double- and triple-checking anything he says

That's what I'm advocating for, but people I was replying to didn't even want to do that and were dismissing anything out of the box just because they don't like the source, which is detrimental to any honest and useful debate.

>He's a known liar. He lies for political gain. He is disgusting.

I never said he doesn't lie, of course he does, he's a politician, all of them lie, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.

I said some of the things he says are bang on the money and shouldn't be discarded on the basis that the information comes from a mouth you don't like, as that's just closed minded partisan zealotry and not using critical thinking.

But of course they should be discarded. Why shouldn't they? There are better sources and better people sharing opinions.

Maybe we can take what he says seriously if he comes clean about his past dangerous lies. Until then, he should at the very least be shunned if not ignored entirely.

>But of course they should be discarded. Why shouldn't they?

I rest my case. There's no point in arguing with zealots who don't want to even listen to reason let alone critically analyze information shared with them, but choose to automatically believe and disbelieve it based on their favorite or hated source.

>There are better sources and better people sharing opinions

Your "better sources" might be someone else's "worst sources". Where is that universal ground truth located at? Isn't that discovered though conversation, argumentation and debate like in university campuses, instead of blindly trusting your favorite partisan source? That's no different than religious zealotry that burned Galileo at the stake for saying thins considered "untrue" at the time.

The point is:

> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening

gives zero additional weight to the credibility of the claim. He's someone who has openly acknowledged about lying for political gain.

"If I have to create stories...then that's what I'm going to do."

He directly says he will lie to you and make up stories to drive his political agenda. He's not even trying to suggest he's representing reality; he's making up stories, telling fiction.

If any news organization openly admits they're going to continue to just write blatant lies to push their agenda, would you continue trusting that source?

I do agree, free speech is far less protected in many European countries than it is in the US. I don't doubt there are plenty of crazy stories of someone getting arrested for their speech in some places in Europe. But JD Vance telling me any specific story about it and I don't see much else making the same claims, my default is to assume it's probably untrue, because he told me he will lie to me. Why would I trust his statements?

So you think everything and everyone across the world is making a politically coordinated event to lie about reality ?

I don’t even vote for the republicans and since when has couches been equated to real things reported widely by media, politicians, citizens, watchdog groups become completely irrelevant because a politician you hate/dislike agreed with those things.

This is not a football match or he said she said, it’s happening and if you have to resort to calling a sitting vice president as “couch**” to deny reality instead of being able to clearly state no one innocent is being jailed for simple disagreements on facebook. then no you probably subconsciously know it’s happening too and need to depend on slander to deny reality.

it is especially ironic considering there are uk citizens getting police visits for saying things far less rude than what you said about US vice president.

You can disagree with ones politics but if you want to defend your ability to have that freedom (to disagree with ruling parties) it does require you to defend the freedoms and rights of people you disagree with politically too…

> So you think everything and everyone across the world is making a politically coordinated event to lie about reality ?

In a word, yes. More nuanced would say that anyone in power is willing to lie and make a politically coordinated event to lie about reality if it helps their agenda. More specifically, I would have you look at current US Administration as the greatest example. They are not the first nor only ones to do this, but they are the most brazen in their use of it

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