Posts by B Jones
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I can't work out why, if editors need shit speech to drive engagement to earn advertising dollars, they won't at some point decide they also need shit speech to tempt people over the paywall. You might want to create a chill library, but there's still likely to be a tout on the outside grabbing passers-by with hints at something they might be outraged about going on inside if they hand over the $$. And still pressure to deliver that outrage in stories.
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I did the Weta Workshop tour a few weeks ago. It would be very appealing for film fans in general, but I was impressed by the enthusiasm the guide had for making stuff. It's a team of really keen people who want to encourage others.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Dennis Frank,
With a meritocracy, competence determines the outcome. Since such a positive alternative has never been tried...
Except in the world's most populous country, in various forms over thousands of years.
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I can't see how red zoning central Wellington would do anything other than add to people's misery. I have to walk an extra 300m around a cordon to get to work, and half my stuff is in a building I can't access, but I can work and so can thousands of other people, including the ones that make sure peoples' salaries get paid. The economic damage is going to be staggering enough without shutting down a sizeable fraction of our economy just in case. This guy says it better than me.
In any case, I have a renewed sympathy for Christchurchians, not to mention anyone in Kaikoura at the moment. Even the level of inconvenience I've experienced has been exhausting.
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What makes me chippy is the extent to which educated progressive folks direct their energy into dead ends like fluoridation and anti GM and so on when there are real issues that affect real people that they could be directing their passion and advocacy and so on into.
If you're not going to bother standing behind your partly untrue words, then you don't deserve the compliment of rational debate.
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
There’s normally a list of them on the product label. In very small print, to deter consumers from reading it. Not that they need worry: just about nobody has time to do the research required to get an inkling about what function they are meant to perform.
You'll have to do better than that. That's a huge claim you've just handwaved away with an argument from ignorance - they're in tiny writing and people don't understand what they're for, therefore they're mind control chemicals. Which additives, and what function do they perform. Supported by links to reputable journals if you've got them.
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Speaker: No, there isn’t a popular…, in reply to Dennis Frank,
Too addled by chemicals in the food injected by capitalists
What? Which ones?
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Russell Brown,
That actually happened already.
That actually gives me more confidence. I was talking more about epistemic closure - if Conservative loonies are prepared to fight Facebook rather that working around them to create ConservaBook or whatever, that says a common platform is still worthwhile keeping and fighting for.
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Hard News: The fake news problem, in reply to Bart Janssen,
And that sexism coloured every story about her and the election.
Overt sexism is still more socially acceptable than overt racism, I think, which suggests that implicit sexism will last longer than implicit racism. It's a bit frightening the extent to which overt racism has roared back into acceptability in the US, but it's also pretty damn alarming the number of lefty guys currently stroking their beards and wondering whether the US will ever be ready for a female leader, or locally, whether female politicians should be promoted in case someone thinks they might be getting special treatment.
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I'm pessimistic that even if Facebook do succeed in some quality control, they just get filed by the peddlers of misinformation as The Man, in the same way as I heard someone dismiss Snopes as in the pocket of Hillary or something recently. The real loonies love implying they've been censored. But perhaps the volume on their megaphone can be turned down a bit.