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Not suitable for closed minds and those with short attention spans.
The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump
Fake news … precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump. Two of the most monstrous regimes in human history came to power in the 20th century, and both were predicated on the violation and despoiling of truth, on the knowledge that cynicism and weariness and fear can make people susceptible to the lies and false promises of leaders bent on unconditional power. As Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (ie the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (ie the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
Arendt’s words increasingly sound less like a dispatch from another century than a chilling description of the political and cultural landscape we inhabit today — a world in which fake news and lies are pumped out in industrial volume by Russian troll factories, emitted in an endless stream from the mouth and Twitter feed of the president of the United States, and sent flying across the world through social media accounts at lightning speed. Nationalism, tribalism, dislocation, fear of social change and the hatred of outsiders are on the rise again as people, locked in their partisan silos and filter bubbles, are losing a sense of shared reality and the ability to communicate across social and sectarian lines.
This is not to draw a direct analogy between today’s circumstances and the overwhelming horrors of the second world war era, but to look at some of the conditions and attitudes — what Margaret Atwood has called the “danger flags” in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm — that make a people susceptible to demagoguery and political manipulation, and nations easy prey for would-be autocrats. To examine how a disregard for facts, the displacement of reason by emotion, and the corrosion of language are diminishing the value of truth, and what that means for the world.
Trump made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office — an average of 5.9 a day The term “truth decay” has joined the post-truth lexicon that includes such now familiar phrases as “fake news” and “alternative facts”. And it’s not just fake news either: it’s also fake science (manufactured by climate change deniers and anti-vaxxers, who oppose vaccination), fake history (promoted by Holocaust revisionists and white supremacists), fake Americans on Facebook (created by Russian trolls), and fake followers and “likes” on social media (generated by bots).
Donald Trump, the 45th president of the US, lies so prolifically and with such velocity that the Washington Post calculated he’d made 2,140 false or misleading claims during his first year in office — an average of 5.9 a day. His lies — about everything from the investigations into Russian interference in the election, to his popularity and achievements, to how much TV he watches — are only the brightest blinking red light among many warnings of his assault on democratic institutions and norms. He routinely assails the press, the justice system, the intelligence agencies, the electoral system and the civil servants who make the US government tick.
Nor is the assault on truth confined to America. Around the world, waves of populism and fundamentalism are elevating appeals to fear and anger over reasoned debate, eroding democratic institutions, and replacing expertise with the wisdom of the crowd. False claims about the UK’s financial relationship with the EU helped swing the vote in favour of Brexit, and Russia ramped up its sowing of dezinformatsiya in the runup to elections in France, Germany, the Netherlands and other countries in concerted propaganda efforts to discredit and destabilise democracies.
How did this happen? How did truth and reason become such endangered species, and what does the threat to them portend for our public discourse and the future of our politics and governance?
How Donald Trump emboldened the US far right It’s easy enough to see Trump as having ascended to office because of a unique, unrepeatable set of factors: a frustrated electorate still hurting from the backwash of the 2008 financial crash; Russian interference in the election and a deluge of pro-Trump fake news stories on social media; a highly polarising opponent who came to symbolise the Washington elite that populists decried; and an estimated $5bn‑worth of free campaign coverage from media outlets obsessed with the views and clicks that the former reality TV star generated.
If a novelist had concocted a villain like Trump — a larger-than-life, over-the-top avatar of narcissism, mendacity, ignorance, prejudice, boorishness, demagoguery and tyrannical impulses (not to mention someone who consumes as many as a dozen Diet Cokes a day) — she or he would likely be accused of extreme contrivance and implausibility. In fact, the president of the US often seems less like a persuasive character than some manic cartoon artist’s mashup of Ubu Roi, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog, and a character discarded by Molière. But the more clownish aspects of Trump the personality should not blind us to the monumentally serious consequences of his assault on truth and the rule of law, and the vulnerabilities he has exposed in our institutions and digital communications. It is unlikely that a candidate who had already been exposed during the campaign for his history of lying and deceptive business practices would have gained such popular support were portions of the public not blase about truth-telling and were there not systemic problems with how people get their information and how they’ve come to think in increasingly partisan terms.
For decades, objectivity — or even the aim of ascertaining the best available truth — has been falling out of favour
With Trump, the personal is political, and in many respects he is less a comic-book anomaly than an extreme, bizarro-world apotheosis of many of the broader, intertwined attitudes undermining truth today, from the merging of news and politics with entertainment, to the toxic polarisation that’s overtaken American politics, to the growing populist contempt for expertise.
For decades now, objectivity — or even the idea that people can aspire toward ascertaining the best available truth — has been falling out of favour. Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s well-known observation that “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts” is more timely than ever: polarisation has grown so extreme that voters have a hard time even agreeing on the same facts. This has been exponentially accelerated by social media, which connects users with like-minded members and supplies them with customised news feeds that reinforce their preconceptions, allowing them to live in ever narrower silos.
For that matter, relativism has been ascendant since the culture wars began in the 1960s. Back then, it was embraced by the New Left, who were eager to expose the biases of western, bourgeois, male-dominated thinking; and by academics promoting the gospel of postmodernism, which argued that there are no universal truths, only smaller personal truths — perceptions shaped by the cultural and social forces of one’s day. Since then, relativistic arguments have been hijacked by the populist right.
Relativism, of course, synced perfectly with the narcissism and subjectivity that had been on the rise, from Tom Wolfe’s “Me Decade” 1970s, on through the selfie age of self-esteem. No surprise then that the “Rashomon effect” — the point of view that everything depends on your point of view — has permeated our culture, from popular novels such as Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies to television series like The Affair, which hinge on the idea of competing realities
I’ve been reading and writing about many of these issues for nearly four decades, going back to the rise of deconstruction and battles over the literary canon on college campuses; debates over the fictionalised retelling of history in movies such as Oliver Stone’s JFK and Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty; efforts made by both the Clinton and Bush administrations to avoid transparency and define reality on their own terms; Trump’s war on language and efforts to normalise the abnormal; and the impact that technology has had on how we process and share information.
In his 2007 book, The Cult of the Amateur, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur Andrew Keen warned that the internet not only had democratised information beyond people’s wildest imaginings but also was replacing genuine knowledge with “the wisdom of the crowd”, dangerously blurring the lines between fact and opinion, informed argument and blustering speculation. A decade later, the scholar Tom Nichols wrote in The Death of Expertise that a wilful hostility towards established knowledge had emerged on both the right and the left, with people aggressively arguing that “every opinion on any matter is as good as every other”. Ignorance was now fashionable.
The postmodernist argument that all truths are partial (and a function of one’s perspective) led to the related argument that there are many legitimate ways to understand or represent an event. This both encouraged a more egalitarian discourse and made it possible for the voices of the previously disfranchised to be heard. But it has also been exploited by those who want to make the case for offensive or debunked theories, or who want to equate things that cannot be equated. Creationists, for instance, called for teaching “intelligent design” alongside evolution in schools. “Teach both,” some argued. Others said, “Teach the controversy.”
A variation on this “both sides” argument was employed by Trump when he tried to equate people demonstrating against white supremacy with the neo-Nazis who had converged in Charlottesville, Virginia, to protest the removal of Confederate statues. There were “some very fine people on both sides”, Trump declared. He also said, “We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides.”
Climate deniers, anti-vaxxers and other groups who don’t have science on their side bandy about phrases that wouldn’t be out of place in a college class on deconstruction — phrases such as “many sides,” “different perspectives”, “uncertainties”, “multiple ways of knowing.” As Naomi Oreskes and Erik M Conway demonstrated in their 2010 book Merchants of Doubt, rightwing thinktanks, the fossil fuel industry, and other corporate interests that are intent on discrediting science have employed a strategy first used by the tobacco industry to try to confuse the public about the dangers of smoking. “Doubt is our product,” read an infamous memo written by a tobacco industry executive in 1969, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public.”
The strategy, essentially, was this: dig up a handful of so-called professionals to refute established science or argue that more research is needed; turn these false arguments into talking points and repeat them over and over; and assail the reputations of the genuine scientists on the other side. If this sounds familiar, that’s because it’s a tactic that’s been used by Trump and his Republican allies to defend policies (on matters ranging from gun control to building a border wall) that run counter to both expert evaluation and national polls.
In January 2018, protests were held in 50 states urging US senators to support scientific evidence against Trump’s climate change policies.
What Oreskes and Conway call the “tobacco strategy” was helped, they argued, by elements in the mainstream media that tended “to give minority views more credence than they deserve”. This false equivalence was the result of journalists confusing balance with truth-telling, wilful neutrality with accuracy; caving in to pressure from rightwing interest groups to present “both sides”; and the format of television news shows that feature debates between opposing viewpoints — even when one side represents an overwhelming consensus and the other is an almost complete outlier in the scientific community. For instance, a 2011 BBC Trust report found that the broadcaster’s science coverage paid “undue attention to marginal opinion” on the subject of manmade climate change. Or, as a headline in the Telegraph put it, “BBC staff told to stop inviting cranks on to science programmes”.
In a speech on press freedom, CNN’s chief international correspondent Christiane Amanpour addressed this issue in the context of media coverage of the 2016 presidential race, saying: “It appeared much of the media got itself into knots trying to differentiate between balance, objectivity, neutrality, and crucially, truth … I learned long ago, covering the ethnic cleansing and genocide in Bosnia, never to equate victim with aggressor, never to create a false moral or factual equivalence, because then you are an accomplice to the most unspeakable crimes and consequences. I believe in being truthful, not neutral. And I believe we must stop banalising the truth.”
As the west lurched through the cultural upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s and their aftermath, artists struggled with how to depict this fragmenting reality. Some writers like John Barth, Donald Barthelme and William Gass created self-conscious, postmodernist fictions that put more emphasis on form and language than on conventional storytelling. Others adopted a minimalistic approach, writing pared-down, narrowly focused stories emulating the fierce concision of Raymond Carver. And as the pursuit of broader truths became more and more unfashionable in academia, and as daily life came to feel increasingly unmoored, some writers chose to focus on the smallest, most personal truths: they wrote about themselves.
American reality had become so confounding, Philip Roth wrote in a 1961 essay, that it felt like “a kind of embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination”. This had resulted, he wrote, in the “voluntary withdrawal of interest by the writer of fiction from some of the grander social and political phenomena of our times”, and the retreat, in his own case, to the more knowable world of the self.
In a controversial 1989 essay, Tom Wolfe lamented these developments, mourning what he saw as the demise of old-fashioned realism in American fiction, and he urged novelists to “head out into this wild, bizarre, unpredictable, hog-stomping Baroque country of ours and reclaim it as literary property”. He tried this himself in novels such as The Bonfire of the Vanities and A Man in Full, using his skills as a reporter to help flesh out a spectrum of subcultures with Balzacian detail. But while Wolfe had been an influential advocate in the 1970s of the New Journalism (which put an emphasis on the voice and point of view of the reporter), his new manifesto didn’t win many converts in the literary world. Instead, writers as disparate as Louise Erdrich, David Mitchell, Don DeLillo, Julian Barnes, Chuck Palahniuk, Gillian Flynn and Groff would play with devices (such as multiple points of view, unreliable narrators and intertwining storylines) pioneered decades ago by innovators such as William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford and Vladimir Nabokov to try to capture the new Rashomon-like reality in which subjectivity rules and, in the infamous words of former president Bill Clinton, truth “depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is”.
But what Roth called “the sheer fact of self, the vision of self as inviolable, powerful, and nervy, self as the only real thing in an unreal environment” would remain more comfortable territory for many writers. In fact, it would lead, at the turn of the millennium, to a remarkable flowering of memoir writing, including such classics as Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius — books that established their authors as among the foremost voices of their generation. The memoir boom and the popularity of blogging would eventually culminate in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s six-volume autobiographical novel, My Struggle — filled with minutely detailed descriptions, drawn from the author’s own daily life.
Personal testimony also became fashionable on college campuses, as the concept of objective truth fell out of favour and empirical evidence gathered by traditional research came to be regarded with suspicion. Academic writers began prefacing scholarly papers with disquisitions on their own “positioning” — their race, religion, gender, background, personal experiences that might inform or skew or ratify their analysis.
Social networks give people news that is popular and trending rather than accurate or important In a 2016 documentary titled HyperNormalisation, the filmmaker Adam Curtis created an expressionistic, montage-driven meditation on life in the post-truth era; the title was taken from a term coined by the anthropologist Alexei Yurchak to describe life in the final years of the Soviet Union, when people both understood the absurdity of the propaganda the government had been selling them for decades and had difficulty envisioning any alternative. In HyperNormalisation, which was released shortly before the 2016 US election, Curtis says in voiceover narration that people in the west had also stopped believing the stories politicians had been telling them for years, and Trump realised that “in the face of that, you could play with reality” and in the process “further undermine and weaken the old forms of power”.
Some Trump allies on the far right also seek to redefine reality on their own terms. Invoking the iconography of the movie The Matrix — in which the hero is given a choice between two pills, a red one (representing knowledge and the harsh truths of reality) and a blue one (representing soporific illusion and denial) — members of the “alt-right” and some aggrieved men’s rights groups talk about “red-pilling the normies”, which means converting people to their cause. In other words, selling their inside-out alternative reality, in which white people are suffering from persecution, multiculturalism poses a grave threat and men have been oppressed by women.
Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, the authors of a study on online disinformation, argue that “once groups have been red-pilled on one issue, they’re likely to be open to other extremist ideas. Online cultures that used to be relatively nonpolitical are beginning to seethe with racially charged anger. Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities — having accepted run-of-the-mill antifeminism — are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas. ‘Ironic’ Nazi iconography and hateful epithets are becoming serious expressions of antisemitism.”
Some Trump allies on the far right invoke The Matrix to sell their inside‑out alternative reality Some Trump allies on the far right invoke The Matrix to sell their inside‑out alternative reality One of the tactics used by the alt-right to spread its ideas online, Marwick and Lewis argue, is to initially dilute more extreme views as gateway ideas to court a wider audience; among some groups of young men, they write, “it’s a surprisingly short leap from rejecting political correctness to blaming women, immigrants, or Muslims for their problems.”
Many misogynist and white supremacist memes, in addition to a lot of fake news, originate or gain initial momentum on sites such as 4chan and Reddit — before accumulating enough buzz to make the leap to Facebook and Twitter, where they can attract more mainstream attention. Renee DiResta, who studies conspiracy theories on the web, argues that Reddit can be a useful testing ground for bad actors — including foreign governments such as Russia’s — to try out memes or fake stories to see how much traction they get. DiResta warned in the spring of 2016 that the algorithms of social networks — which give people news that is popular and trending, rather than accurate or important — are helping to promote conspiracy theories.
There is an 'asymmetry of passion' on social media: most people won’t devote hours reinforcing the obvious. Extremists are committed to ‘wake up the sheeple’ This sort of fringe content can both affect how people think and seep into public policy debates on matters such as vaccines, zoning laws and water fluoridation. Part of the problem is an “asymmetry of passion” on social media: while most people won’t devote hours to writing posts that reinforce the obvious, DiResta says, “passionate truthers and extremists produce copious amounts of content in their commitment to ‘wake up the sheeple’”.
Recommendation engines, she adds, help connect conspiracy theorists with one another to the point that “we are long past merely partisan filter bubbles and well into the realm of siloed communities that experience their own reality and operate with their own facts”. At this point, she concludes, “the internet doesn’t just reflect reality any more; it shapes it”.
Language is to humans, the writer James Carroll once observed, what water is to fish: “We swim in language. We think in language. We live in language.” This is why Orwell wrote that “political chaos is connected with the decay of language”, divorcing words from meaning and opening up a chasm between a leader’s real and declared aims. This is why the US and the world feel so disoriented by the stream of lies issued by the Trump White House and the president’s use of language to disseminate distrust and discord. And this is why authoritarian regimes throughout history have co‑opted everyday language in an effort to control how people communicate — exactly the way the Ministry of Truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four aims to deny the existence of external reality and safeguard Big Brother’s infallibility.
Orwell’s “Newspeak” is a fictional language, but it often mirrors and satirises the “wooden language” imposed by communist authorities in the Soviet Union and eastern Europe. Among the characteristics of “wooden language” that the French scholar Françoise Thom identified in a 1987 thesis were abstraction and the avoidance of the concrete; tautologies (“the theories of Marx are true because they are correct”); bad metaphors (“the fascist octopus has sung its swan song”); and Manichaeism that divides the world into things good and things evil (and nothing in between).
Trump has performed the disturbing Orwellian trick (“WAR IS PEACE”, “FREEDOM IS SLAVERY”, “IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH”) of using words to mean the exact opposite of what they really mean. It’s not just his taking the term “fake news”, turning it inside out, and using it to try to discredit journalism that he finds threatening or unflattering. He has also called the investigation into Russian election interference “the single greatest witch-hunt in American political history”, when he is the one who has repeatedly attacked the press, the justice department, the FBI, the intelligence services and any institution he regards as hostile.
In fact, Trump has the perverse habit of accusing opponents of the very sins he is guilty of himself: “Lyin’ Ted”, “Crooked Hillary”, “Crazy Bernie”. He accused Clinton of being “a bigot who sees people of colour only as votes, not as human beings worthy of a better future”, and he has asserted that “there was tremendous collusion on behalf of the Russians and the Democrats”.
In Orwell’s language of Newspeak, a word such as “blackwhite” has “two mutually contradictory meanings”: “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts. Applied to a Party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when Party discipline demands this.”
This, too, has an unnerving echo in the behaviour of Trump White House officials and Republican members of Congress who lie on the president’s behalf and routinely make pronouncements that flout the evidence in front of people’s eyes. The administration, in fact, debuted with the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, insisting that Trump’s inaugural crowds were the “largest audience” ever — an assertion that defied photographic evidence and was rated by the fact-checking blog PolitiFact a “Pants on Fire” lie. These sorts of lies, the journalist Masha Gessen has pointed out, are told for the same reason that Vladimir Putin lies: “to assert power over truth itself”.
Trump has continued his personal assault on the English language. His incoherence (his twisted syntax, his reversals, his insincerity, his bad faith and his inflammatory bombast) is emblematic of the chaos he creates and thrives on, as well as an essential instrument in his liar’s toolkit. His interviews, off‑teleprompter speeches and tweets are a startling jumble of insults, exclamations, boasts, digressions, non sequiturs, qualifications, exhortations and innuendos — a bully’s efforts to intimidate, gaslight, polarise and scapegoat.
Precise words, like facts, mean little to Trump, as interpreters, who struggle to translate his grammatical anarchy, can attest. Chuck Todd, the anchor of NBC’s Meet the Press, observed that after several of his appearances as a candidate Trump would lean back in his chair and ask the control booth to replay his segment on a monitor — without sound: “He wants to see what it all looked like. He will watch the whole thing on mute.”
Philip Roth said he could never have imagined that “the 21st-century catastrophe to befall the USA, the most debasing of disasters”, would appear in “the ominously ridiculous commedia dell’arte figure of the boastful buffoon”. Trump’s ridiculousness, his narcissistic ability to make everything about himself, the outrageousness of his lies, and the profundity of his ignorance can easily distract attention from the more lasting implications of his story: how easily Republicans in Congress enabled him, undermining the whole concept of checks and balances set in place by the founders; how a third of the country passively accepted his assaults on the constitution; how easily Russian disinformation took root in a culture where the teaching of history and civics had seriously atrophied.
The US’s founding generation spoke frequently of the “common good”. George Washington reminded citizens of their “common concerns” and “common interests” and the “common cause” they had all fought for in the revolution. And Thomas Jefferson spoke in his inaugural address of the young country uniting “in common efforts for the common good”. A common purpose and a shared sense of reality mattered because they bound the disparate states and regions together, and they remain essential for conducting a national conversation. Especially today in a country where Trump and Russian and hard-right trolls are working to incite the very factionalism Washington warned us about, trying to inflame divisions between people along racial, ethnic and religious lines.
There are no easy remedies, but it’s essential that citizens defy the cynicism and resignation that autocrats and power-hungry politicians depend on to subvert resistance. Without commonly agreed-on facts — not Republican facts and Democratic facts; not the alternative facts of today’s silo-world — there can be no rational debate over policies, no substantive means of evaluating candidates for political office, and no way to hold elected officials accountable to the people. Without truth, democracy is hobbled -
Michiko Kakutani’s The Death of Truth is published by William Collins on 26 July.
"Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, the authors of a study on online disinformation, argue that “once groups have been red-pilled on one issue, they’re likely to be open to other extremist ideas. Online cultures that used to be relatively nonpolitical are beginning to seethe with racially charged anger. Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities — having accepted run-of-the-mill antifeminism — are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas."
Sounds like PS!
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 12:18 - Jul 17 with 4930 views
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 11:07 - Jul 15 by LeonWasGod
"Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, the authors of a study on online disinformation, argue that “once groups have been red-pilled on one issue, they’re likely to be open to other extremist ideas. Online cultures that used to be relatively nonpolitical are beginning to seethe with racially charged anger. Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities — having accepted run-of-the-mill antifeminism — are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas."
Sounds like PS!
Who on here has espoused white nationalist ideas?
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Didn’t all this start with Tony Blair and his spin merchant Alistair Campbell.
What about WMDs and Iraq?
Then again hasn’t this all been going on since Protagoras nd the Sophists ( the people who are supposed to have put together rhetoric?, to influence the masses.
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 13:57 - Jul 17 with 4853 views
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 11:07 - Jul 15 by LeonWasGod
"Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis, the authors of a study on online disinformation, argue that “once groups have been red-pilled on one issue, they’re likely to be open to other extremist ideas. Online cultures that used to be relatively nonpolitical are beginning to seethe with racially charged anger. Some sci-fi, fandom, and gaming communities — having accepted run-of-the-mill antifeminism — are beginning to espouse white-nationalist ideas."
Sounds like PS!
"Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis said that anti-feminism is a gateway drug. If you smoke just one joint of anti-feminism you will end up as a heroin addict, down the docks, letting a sailor cum in your bum for a bottle full of rum..."
What horseshit. They are using the same shite argument used to demonise cannabis for so many years. And who can forget the 'don't let your kids listen to heavy metal or they will end up sacrificing virgins in a satanic cult.
And I notice they don't point out that believing in Feminism can lead through Marxist ideology right into Communism. You know, that ideology responsible for millions of deaths through the 20th century.
This is an argument aimed at pearl clutching old farts out of touch with the youth. The truth is they have lost the feminist argument so time to stop arguing the points and start demonising the opponents.
Btw, my post is not aimed at you Leon. I recognised your tongue in cheek post
Good luck, Mr Cooper
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 14:15 - Jul 17 with 4832 views
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 13:57 - Jul 17 by Mo_Wives
"Alice Marwick and Rebecca Lewis said that anti-feminism is a gateway drug. If you smoke just one joint of anti-feminism you will end up as a heroin addict, down the docks, letting a sailor cum in your bum for a bottle full of rum..."
What horseshit. They are using the same shite argument used to demonise cannabis for so many years. And who can forget the 'don't let your kids listen to heavy metal or they will end up sacrificing virgins in a satanic cult.
And I notice they don't point out that believing in Feminism can lead through Marxist ideology right into Communism. You know, that ideology responsible for millions of deaths through the 20th century.
This is an argument aimed at pearl clutching old farts out of touch with the youth. The truth is they have lost the feminist argument so time to stop arguing the points and start demonising the opponents.
Btw, my post is not aimed at you Leon. I recognised your tongue in cheek post
Have you been hiding in the land where time stood still, Mo? Because sadly the cliched arguments you have wheeled out there have not aged well.
The paragraph quoted is bang on the the money, because this is precisely how social media algorithms work.
Imagine you are on YouTube watching old episodes of Rising Damp and reminiscing about the good old days of right-minded social relationships. When it is all over up pop 9 random suggestions from YouTube about what you might like to watch next. If you click on one about racial tensions in the 1970s with a BNP or Powellian tilt, the algorithms will detect a nascent interest.
Importantly they will do so even if there isn't one actually there. And the algorithms ill remember your choice and continue to feed you more and more extreme stories as you progressively click through.
And for YouTube you could equally substitute the newsfeeds in Facebook, Twitter, etc..
It is a form of self-hypnosis, and poses a significant threat to society.
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 14:15 - Jul 17 by Shaky
Have you been hiding in the land where time stood still, Mo? Because sadly the cliched arguments you have wheeled out there have not aged well.
The paragraph quoted is bang on the the money, because this is precisely how social media algorithms work.
Imagine you are on YouTube watching old episodes of Rising Damp and reminiscing about the good old days of right-minded social relationships. When it is all over up pop 9 random suggestions from YouTube about what you might like to watch next. If you click on one about racial tensions in the 1970s with a BNP or Powellian tilt, the algorithms will detect a nascent interest.
Importantly they will do so even if there isn't one actually there. And the algorithms ill remember your choice and continue to feed you more and more extreme stories as you progressively click through.
And for YouTube you could equally substitute the newsfeeds in Facebook, Twitter, etc..
It is a form of self-hypnosis, and poses a significant threat to society.
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 14:18]
Yes, Shakes I know. It also works if you watch Feminism it'll lead you to ideas sympathetic to Communism. So should we stop people watching feminist bullshit? And if feminists weren't such f*cking moronic retards you wouldn't have anti-feminists...so once again should we ban feminism because without feminism you can't have anti-feminism? And the algorithm of life means that when you start buying cannabis you may come in contact with someone who sells speed...then coke...then crack...then heroin.
Many people absolutely go to white nationalist videos via anti feminist videos (like many heroin addicts started out on cannabis). And when they get there do you know what they see? They see people presenting videos of SJW's, black lives matter, feminists and LGBT activist constantly demonising straight, white men. And the white nationalists say to these young men "the world hates you for what you are...but we accept you as you are". I think it was Jared Taylor who thanked black lives matter for driving young white men towards his ideology. So, in my humble opinion, if you want to stop kids going that way I suggest you turn your focus on the progressive f*ckwits who constantly demonise straight, white men. Or make arguments that are better than the white nationalist arguments...which is not made easier by the racism and sexism oozing out of progressive ideology. The simple fact is, without the SJW's the white nationalist argument would be unsellable.
Good luck, Mr Cooper
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 14:50 - Jul 17 with 4801 views
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 14:46 - Jul 17 by Mo_Wives
Yes, Shakes I know. It also works if you watch Feminism it'll lead you to ideas sympathetic to Communism. So should we stop people watching feminist bullshit? And if feminists weren't such f*cking moronic retards you wouldn't have anti-feminists...so once again should we ban feminism because without feminism you can't have anti-feminism? And the algorithm of life means that when you start buying cannabis you may come in contact with someone who sells speed...then coke...then crack...then heroin.
Many people absolutely go to white nationalist videos via anti feminist videos (like many heroin addicts started out on cannabis). And when they get there do you know what they see? They see people presenting videos of SJW's, black lives matter, feminists and LGBT activist constantly demonising straight, white men. And the white nationalists say to these young men "the world hates you for what you are...but we accept you as you are". I think it was Jared Taylor who thanked black lives matter for driving young white men towards his ideology. So, in my humble opinion, if you want to stop kids going that way I suggest you turn your focus on the progressive f*ckwits who constantly demonise straight, white men. Or make arguments that are better than the white nationalist arguments...which is not made easier by the racism and sexism oozing out of progressive ideology. The simple fact is, without the SJW's the white nationalist argument would be unsellable.
if we can try to abstract the discussion from the issue of feminism and gender politics in general that clearly weigh very heavily on your mind, we can readily agree that self-radicalisation works in all directions.
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 14:15 - Jul 17 by Shaky
Have you been hiding in the land where time stood still, Mo? Because sadly the cliched arguments you have wheeled out there have not aged well.
The paragraph quoted is bang on the the money, because this is precisely how social media algorithms work.
Imagine you are on YouTube watching old episodes of Rising Damp and reminiscing about the good old days of right-minded social relationships. When it is all over up pop 9 random suggestions from YouTube about what you might like to watch next. If you click on one about racial tensions in the 1970s with a BNP or Powellian tilt, the algorithms will detect a nascent interest.
Importantly they will do so even if there isn't one actually there. And the algorithms ill remember your choice and continue to feed you more and more extreme stories as you progressively click through.
And for YouTube you could equally substitute the newsfeeds in Facebook, Twitter, etc..
It is a form of self-hypnosis, and poses a significant threat to society.
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 14:18]
Let me put it this way, Shakes...You're asking the wrong question (not you personally). Instead of asking how are they ending up at white nationalist videos. The question should be why are they buying their arguments.
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 14:50 - Jul 17 by Shaky
if we can try to abstract the discussion from the issue of feminism and gender politics in general that clearly weigh very heavily on your mind, we can readily agree that self-radicalisation works in all directions.
Yes, feminism and gender politics does way heavily on my mind. I prefer to stay on point with it because I believe, along with the other SJW nonsense, these subjects are dividing society and pushing kids to places that are not good for society.
Edit - And yes, I agree, self radicalisation happens in all directions
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 15:12]
Good luck, Mr Cooper
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 14:56 - Jul 17 with 4796 views
. .and of course the key point is not whether better counter-arguments can be made, but rather that the algorithms' auto-selection features do not allow them to be presented.
They are not tools to educate or inform, but rather ones designed to encourage media consumption, to be monetised.
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 14:56 - Jul 17 by Shaky
. .and of course the key point is not whether better counter-arguments can be made, but rather that the algorithms' auto-selection features do not allow them to be presented.
They are not tools to educate or inform, but rather ones designed to encourage media consumption, to be monetised.
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 14:59]
Their best argument is to just show a reel of sjw's demonising white people. Without that they have no argument.
And are you telling me kids are going through life never hearing the message that racism is bad because social media algorithms won't let them? I've gone to many of those videos and made the arguments myself in the comment sections. I feel the only reason I need to is due to the anti-white rhetoric coming out of the progressive movement, tbh
Good luck, Mr Cooper
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 15:10 - Jul 17 with 4772 views
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 14:55 - Jul 17 by Mo_Wives
Yes, feminism and gender politics does way heavily on my mind. I prefer to stay on point with it because I believe, along with the other SJW nonsense, these subjects are dividing society and pushing kids to places that are not good for society.
Edit - And yes, I agree, self radicalisation happens in all directions
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 15:12]
Bit hypocritical to worry about the good of society when you write that feminists (definition being someone who believes women and men should have equal rights) are “f*cking moronic retards” don’t you think?
Someone is a ‘f*cking moronic retard’ for believing that a woman should have the same rights as you? Aww. Poor little buttercup. Surely you won’t have to compete on an equal basis will you? All that nasty oppression with those horrible people wanting a level playing field. Bless your little heart.
Btw - it’s ‘weigh’ rather than ‘way’. Your spelling isn’t any better with this username than the other one although your obsession with feminism remains constant.
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 15:16]
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 15:24 - Jul 17 with 4759 views
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 15:10 - Jul 17 by londonlisa2001
Bit hypocritical to worry about the good of society when you write that feminists (definition being someone who believes women and men should have equal rights) are “f*cking moronic retards” don’t you think?
Someone is a ‘f*cking moronic retard’ for believing that a woman should have the same rights as you? Aww. Poor little buttercup. Surely you won’t have to compete on an equal basis will you? All that nasty oppression with those horrible people wanting a level playing field. Bless your little heart.
Btw - it’s ‘weigh’ rather than ‘way’. Your spelling isn’t any better with this username than the other one although your obsession with feminism remains constant.
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 15:16]
No. People are moronic retards if they are still fighting for equal rights when they already have them.
Yes. My spelling is awful. Tbh, If not for spell check you may...sorry meigh think I was Swansealad 69. And he has the excuse of being dyslexic. What can I say? As for other username...not me sorry. Which name, btw?
Edit - I think my spelling meigh be down to my bad education. Tell me, where was your education again, Lisa? wasn't it Oxford or Cambridge? Is this that level playing field you were talking about? I think I compete with you quite well, tbh, Lisa even with your education advantage...and I never cry about an unlevel playing field or do I pretend that this means I don't have equal rights with you.
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 16:30]
Good luck, Mr Cooper
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 15:46 - Jul 17 with 4740 views
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 15:02 - Jul 17 by Mo_Wives
Their best argument is to just show a reel of sjw's demonising white people. Without that they have no argument.
And are you telling me kids are going through life never hearing the message that racism is bad because social media algorithms won't let them? I've gone to many of those videos and made the arguments myself in the comment sections. I feel the only reason I need to is due to the anti-white rhetoric coming out of the progressive movement, tbh
What i am telling you Mo is that these things are a numbers game. And that number of impacts matter, as any good advertising man - or woman - will tell you.
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 15:46 - Jul 17 by Shaky
What i am telling you Mo is that these things are a numbers game. And that number of impacts matter, as any good advertising man - or woman - will tell you.
Good luck, Mr Cooper
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 17:37 - Jul 17 with 4684 views
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 15:24 - Jul 17 by Mo_Wives
No. People are moronic retards if they are still fighting for equal rights when they already have them.
Yes. My spelling is awful. Tbh, If not for spell check you may...sorry meigh think I was Swansealad 69. And he has the excuse of being dyslexic. What can I say? As for other username...not me sorry. Which name, btw?
Edit - I think my spelling meigh be down to my bad education. Tell me, where was your education again, Lisa? wasn't it Oxford or Cambridge? Is this that level playing field you were talking about? I think I compete with you quite well, tbh, Lisa even with your education advantage...and I never cry about an unlevel playing field or do I pretend that this means I don't have equal rights with you.
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 16:30]
If anyone should be fighting for equal rights it’s men. Why is maternity leave so much longer than paternity leave? Why does the law side disproportionately with women in custody battles? Why don’t women have to deal with the discomfort of sweaty bollocks in this hot weather? It’s a disk race, I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna stand for it no more.
The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 15:24 - Jul 17 by Mo_Wives
No. People are moronic retards if they are still fighting for equal rights when they already have them.
Yes. My spelling is awful. Tbh, If not for spell check you may...sorry meigh think I was Swansealad 69. And he has the excuse of being dyslexic. What can I say? As for other username...not me sorry. Which name, btw?
Edit - I think my spelling meigh be down to my bad education. Tell me, where was your education again, Lisa? wasn't it Oxford or Cambridge? Is this that level playing field you were talking about? I think I compete with you quite well, tbh, Lisa even with your education advantage...and I never cry about an unlevel playing field or do I pretend that this means I don't have equal rights with you.
[Post edited 17 Jul 2018 16:30]
They don’t have them.
Let me give you an analogy since you don’t get the issue (or you do actually, but let's pretend you don’t to humour you).
Let’s say there’s a 100 m race. Half the starters in that race have to run through treacle for the first 50m of the race. Half don’t but run on a track. At the 50m mark the treacle stops and becomes a track for all. Your position is that at 50m we have equality. But we don’t do we. The half that ran through treacle can’t possibly catch up with those that didn’t, however level the running track is from that point on. That’s not equality Mo. That’s the removal of an unfair advantage once it’s served it’s purpose.
But you know all that. This is just the latest fad in ‘why women should shut up’.
As for my education. I went to my local state primary school and my local Swansea comp. completely level playing field. Or not as it happens as there are many that have a far more privileged education but I wasn’t a recipient of that. That’s unfair too. Why should rich kids have a better chance than ordinary kids. Treacle again.
As for the compete with me bit. Who knows. We only converse on a meaningless internet site and I don’t see that as a competition - that would be pretty weird.
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 18:38 - Jul 17 with 4648 views
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 17:37 - Jul 17 by Highjack
If anyone should be fighting for equal rights it’s men. Why is maternity leave so much longer than paternity leave? Why does the law side disproportionately with women in custody battles? Why don’t women have to deal with the discomfort of sweaty bollocks in this hot weather? It’s a disk race, I’m mad as hell and I’m not gonna stand for it no more.
Shared parental leave these days.
Custody - I agree with you.
And talcum powder is your friend.
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 19:06 - Jul 17 with 4621 views
Artificial Sovereigns: A Quasi-Constitutional Moment for Tech?
By K. Sabeel Rahman —
Consider the following developments: * In recent weeks, the explosive revelations about Cambridge Analytica and its systemic data-mining of Facebook profiles has cast into relief the way in which our contemporary digitized public sphere is not a neutral system of communication but rather a privately built and operated system of mass surveillance and content manipulation.
* Meanwhile, Alphabet has announced that its subsidiary, Sidewalk Labs, will take over management of a major redevelopment of part of Toronto’s waterfront, in an effort to build from the ground up a modern “smart city.”
*These developments come amidst the longer-term development of new forms of technological transformations of our political economy, from the rise of Amazon to its position as the modern infrastructure for the retail economy, to the ways in which technology is transforming the nature of work and the social safety net.
There has been a growing sense of concern about the twin crises of twenty-first-century democracy on the one hand and of the growing problems of inequality and insecurity on the other. Technological change is at the heart of both of these transformations. Technological change alters the distribution and dynamics of political and economic power, creating new forms of “functional sovereignty”–state-like powers concentrated in entities and systems that are not subject to the institutional and moral checks and balances that we associate with the exercise of public power. Such arbitrary power represents a kind of quasi-sovereignty that, left unchecked, poses a threat of domination.
The rich scholarly debate on law and technology has surfaced a range of approaches for addressing some of these concerns, from legal standards for privacy and data use to antitrust and public utility regulation, and more. These proposals and interventions can be reframed as part of a broader challenge of defusing the threat of domination created by these technological systems. Regulating and responding to new technologies and modern forms of economic and political power thus represent a variation on familiar questions of public law and constitutional design: how to structure the exercise of potentially arbitrary, state-like power, rendering it contestable, and therefore legitimate.
Defusing domination: a familiar problem of institutional and system design The problem of concentrated power–whether in its public, private, or technological variations–is best conceptualized as a problem of domination. In republican political thought, domination refers to the concentration of arbitrary, unchecked power. The remedy for domination is not necessarily the elimination of power, but more specifically the contestability of power. So long as power is exercised in contestable, legitimate, and thus nonarbitrary ways, its exercise can be consistent with freedom. Domination is thus prescriptive in that is suggests the remedy to arbitrary power is to find ways to balance it with adequate mechanisms of contestation and accountability.
The classic cases of defusing domination come from conventional traditions in constitutionalism and public law. The threat of arbitrary tyrannical rule–of master over slave, of tyrant over public–formed one of the central dangers for constitutional design. The remedy for such threats can be found in conventional public law institutional design models: direct accountability through elections; institutionalized checks and balances through the separation of powers; structural limits on public power through enumeration of governmental authorities and codification of rights-based limits.
Following the industrial revolution, a new generation adapted the normative critique of domination and anti-domination institutional designs to the new forms of private economic power unleashed by industrial capitalism. This was the intellectual revolution of the Progressive Era that set the stage for the New Deal transformation of American capitalism. For Progressive Era critics, one of the central problems of the new economy was that private actors had accumulated a degree of state-like, quasi-sovereign influence on social, economic, and political life–but absent any of the checks and balances we might require of public sovereigns. The language of sovereignty and arbitrary, dominating power suffused the writings of figures like Brandeis, labor republicans, legal realists, and more.
The response of these thinkers to the problem of privatized economic sovereignty launched another quasi-constitutional founding moment for the industrial economy, beginning in the Progressive Era and culminating with FDR’s New Deal. First, a range of legal developments sought to defuse the problem of concentrated corporate power: corporate governance mechanisms, antitrust laws limiting concentration, and public utilities that converted private power into outright public or quasi-public actors. Second, the creation of the modern administrative state provided a mechanism for public oversight, a form of indirect voice and accountability of the public channeled through general regulatory power in areas like labor relations, consumer protection, and securities regulation. At the same time, modern administrative law transposed domination-defusing constitutional designs to diminish the threat of arbitrary administrative power. Finally, reformers created more robust forms of countervailing power, building mass movement organizations particularly around labor.
The constitutionalization of public power in the Founding and the New Deal compact around economic power responded to a common set of problems with a common set of solutions. The problem in both is the potential creation of quasi-sovereigns that possess arbitrary, dominating power. The solution involves the development of legal institutional systems that create adequate checks and balances that defuse the threat of domination, rendering these forms of power accountable and legitimate.
A constitutional moment for tech? Technology today presents a similar set of problems: state-like powers that increasingly govern our economic, social, and political life, yet exist outside the kinds of institutional checks and balances needed to prevent domination. Some forms of techno-power are concentrated: the concentrated power of Facebook as information platform structuring the digital public sphere, or the concentrated power of Amazon as platform for the retail economy. Other forms of techno-power are structural, more diffuse–such as the proliferation of hidden algorithmic systems governing everything from workplace surveillance and management to policing to economic risk assessments.
Both forms occupy a liminal space between public and private. They exercise state-like powers of control and influence whether directly through platforms or indirectly through algorithmic systems, yet these powers are housed in nominally private actors. For instance, Uber, Airbnb, and similar services are effectively rewiring the patterns of zoning, land use, and urban flow in a subtle form of implicit privatization, yet are not subject to the formal processes that govern public land use regulation. Facebook and Google similarly structure our public sphere in both state-like and private ways.
We can identify three distinct species of anti-dominating institutional design to address these different forms of techno-power. First, we might create systems to facilitate voice, participation, and accountability of power. This can be done directly, analogizing to the role of elections and participatory mechanisms in public law. Or it can be achieved indirectly, by expanding regulatory oversight of techno-power, where that oversight is itself an expression of, and responsive to, the democratic public.
Second, we might impose structural limits on the organizations themselves. Thus revived antitrust laws might inhibit the concentration of too much power and control in too few hands, breaking up tech monopolies and data-opolies. We might “firewall” away different functions, preventing them from concentrating in the same parent company and thus mitigating potential conflicts of interest. If Amazon, for example, wants to operate as a platform, it cannot also at the same time produce material for sale on that platform. A variation on organizational structural change might be to tackle the corporate form of tech companies themselves. Through changes to securities laws and corporate governance requirements, we might alter the balance of interests and powers within the firm itself, in ways that might better align the corporate interest with the public interest.
Third, we might create limits on techno-power and domination by altering not just the structure of tech firms, but the structure and dynamics of the larger market systems in which they operate. Antitrust law features here as well: part of what makes antitrust work as a strategy for preventing economic domination is not just its limits to the individual firms’ size and powers, but also the ways in which it fosters a larger system of market competition that checks the power of any one firm. Other forms of regulation also shape market structure: through changes to how code, AI, and algorithms operate, we might create a more transparent, accountable, and self-managing system. A big data tax, for instance, would shift the ways in which tech firms deploy their technologically-mediated forms of power and influence.
I’ve previously suggested that these various tools can be applied to infrastructural tech firms in particular, regulating them as public or quasi-public utilities. The public utility framework in some ways combines all three of these approaches–oversight and accountability; changes to organizational structure; and changes to the larger market system. On the public utility approach, we might pursue anything from outright nationalization of tech infrastructure, to the creation of public options that compete alongside private actors, to the imposition of tight regulatory restraints that limit private tech firms to acting as de facto public utilities.
In context of specific forms of techno-power, these various approaches are suggestive of a possible way forward. We might respond to Facebook’s control over the digital public sphere through some combination of structural remedies–antitrust enforcement reducing concentration and creating more competition for media platforms, for example–with public options and public utility-style regulations. The absorption of public powers of urban planning–as in the Toronto case with Sidewalk labs, or the de facto ceding of urban planning control by many cities to Airbnb, Uber, and other such platforms–could be addressed through other combinations: again, choosing among antitrust, public utility, or public oversight approaches.
From domination to democratic agency Viewing the various problems posed by technology today through the lens of power, domination, and contestation highlights a number of general conceptual points. First, the central problem of technology is not so much discrete violations or actions of tech companies. Rather, we should look to the underlying structure that makes these violations and actions possible.
Second, when we think of how to respond to these problems of domination and power, the above sketch suggests that we must take a similarly broad, structural view of what regulatory and public-minded responses look like. We might build institutions for expanding direct voice and accountability, or for asserting greater oversight by public regulators. Or we might impose structural limits on the organizational forms and market dynamics around these firms.
Finally, at the highest level of abstraction, these efforts to diagnose and then defuse concentrations of power suggest a more fundamental tradeoff at work. At some point, defusing domination will necessarily require eliminating some forms of technological activity and innovation. But that is a choice we should be willing to make. We tend to think of “innovation” as a generic good. But taking domination seriously means effectively choosing between some kinds of innovation over others. To the extent that we think technology and the power it creates and concentrates is not contestable or controllable, we ought not to permit its continuation. The application of domination-defusing institutional designs represents at root attempts to rebalance sovereignty and agency, to reassert the primacy of public and democratic control over the accumulation of private and autocratic control.
K. Sabeel Rahman is an Assistant Professor of Law at Brooklyn Law School and a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. Visit our Political Economy of Technology page to read all the posts in this series.
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 18:36 - Jul 17 by londonlisa2001
They don’t have them.
Let me give you an analogy since you don’t get the issue (or you do actually, but let's pretend you don’t to humour you).
Let’s say there’s a 100 m race. Half the starters in that race have to run through treacle for the first 50m of the race. Half don’t but run on a track. At the 50m mark the treacle stops and becomes a track for all. Your position is that at 50m we have equality. But we don’t do we. The half that ran through treacle can’t possibly catch up with those that didn’t, however level the running track is from that point on. That’s not equality Mo. That’s the removal of an unfair advantage once it’s served it’s purpose.
But you know all that. This is just the latest fad in ‘why women should shut up’.
As for my education. I went to my local state primary school and my local Swansea comp. completely level playing field. Or not as it happens as there are many that have a far more privileged education but I wasn’t a recipient of that. That’s unfair too. Why should rich kids have a better chance than ordinary kids. Treacle again.
As for the compete with me bit. Who knows. We only converse on a meaningless internet site and I don’t see that as a competition - that would be pretty weird.
What RIGHTS don't you have that I do? What rights don't women (in the west) have that men do?
Maybe you could tell these women and ex feminists while you're at it. They only seem interested in 'why women should shut up'
I could go on. There are many more...shall I go on? Or are these all Russian bots?
Good luck, Mr Cooper
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The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 09:02 - Jul 18 with 4494 views
Lisa, in case you don't understand why women and men are rejecting feminism in droves it's due to the bullshit and the dishonesty, imo.
You claim 'feminism is just about wanting equal rights...that's all. How can you disagree with that?" Then when asked what rights you are lacking the answer is 'we don't not have actual rights. But it's an unlevel playing field and unconscious bias and manspreading and mansplaining..." So it's not 'just about wanting equal rights'
You also do a nice little trick by suggesting feminism and women are the same thing. They're not. Only a small percentage of women identify as feminists. Feminists can also be men." Me criticising feminism is not me telling women to shut up...it's me telling feminists to shut up. It's me telling Justin Trudeau to shut up. It's me telling you to shut up. Stop using women as a shield to protect your outdated ideology. Btw, Justin Trudeau had a sexual assault allegation against him, I see. There's another male feminist on the list.
And when you say 'telling women to shut up' you are accusing people of behaving like feminists...
The Death of Truth - How we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump. on 09:31 - Jul 18 by Brynmill_Jack
HE doesn't lie. He just "mis-speaks". Well that's what he said yesterday. It enables to tell one party one thing then completely deny it the next day.
Trump admitting a mistake? If you watch the full clip he was clearly speaking under duress reading off a prepared statement, with somebody possibly holding a gun pointed at him just out of shot.
Could even have been one of Putin's guys; he appeared genuinely embarrassed in Helsinki at the insane extent to which Trump was grovelling to him. "Don't overdo it Donald you moron, or we will release the pee-pee tapes anyway".
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think I was Swansealad 69. And he has the excuse of being dyslexic. What can I say? 