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Palmer Luckey: The Facebook Fat Cat Secretly Funding Trump’s Meme Machine
- JBReefer 10y agoWhy is every article about the right so negative? Soros is rarely derided on HN like this
- jnordwick 10y agoThis year it is especially weird considering it is Hillary that is really making a killing from the billionaire club and massively outspending Trump too in virtually every market.
- acdha 10y agoIt's not “the right” but a specific subset characterized kind of fact-free propaganda and bigotry characterizing the alt-right. You can easily find people from the more intellectually-coherent portions of the right who also aren't happy with that type of attack, would prefer to be talking about actual issues, and don't appreciate being grouped in with a bunch of self-described shitposters. If Soros was found to be funding an equivalent group – maybe PETA or one of the black bloc groups, but there's really nothing comparable in both popularity and derangement currently – you would find similar disapproval for the same reasons. We don't because he's not the monster under the bed claimed by the less factually constrained.
- gozur88 10y agoThe fact that you don't know about something doesn't make other people "factually constrained". >That funding comes in addition to more than $33 million in grants to the Black Lives Matter movement from top Democratic Party donor George Soros through his Open Society Foundations, as well as grant-making from the Center for American Progress. http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/16/black-lives-matter-cashes-100-million-liberal-foun/ http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/16/black-lives-...
- astazangasta 10y agoYou shouldn't quote the Washington Times without doing your homework: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/19/no-george-soros-didn-t-give-33-million-to-blacklivesmatter.html http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/08/19/no-george-s...
- gozur88 10y agoYou impugn a source and respond with a link to The Daily Beast? Isn't that special. If you'd read the article you linked you'd see, after much hemming, hawing, and redefining terms they admit their own headline is wrong.
- astazangasta 10y agoI did read the article; where do you see anywhere in there $33 million being given to Black Lives Matters? The claim is specious.
- gozur88 10y agoNo it isn't. The article just tries a little mental flimflam with "umbrella organizations". If you think about that for a minute it's just a no-true-Scotsman argument.
- narrowrail 10y agoNear as I can tell, Soros founded the Open Society Foundation (OSF) in 1993, and Soros is not involved in the day to day operations. The OSF, in turn, gave a grant to BLM. The way the washtimes puts it (and Limbaugh etc.), one might think Soros himself gave money directly to BLM, but that's not the case. There is more nuance and context that is relevant, and it is a distinction with a difference.
- gozur88 10y agoSo your contention is Soros founded OSF with a boatload of money but has no influence on where the money goes? I can get you a bridge for cheap. One thing I've found disturbing about this election is the extent to which Democrats can stare blatant corruption in the face and not see it.
- DominikR 10y agoOh, so these Trump supporters are creating deranged art, therefore they are equally deranged themselves? What is your proposal on how to deal with them? Burn their books and art publicly?
- acdha 10y agoI have no way of knowing whether they truly believe what they're saying or simply is using it as a political weapon, but that doesn't matter because in either case the correct thing to do is to reject it as unserious. If they choose to spend their time circulating white supremacist memes, that's a shame but we don't need to censor it — only refuse to play the false equivalence game.
- gozur88 10y agoBecause the people who read this site generally lean leftward.
- flukus 10y agoDo they? If I had to characterize the political leanings of the majority of software devs it would be libertarian.
- astazangasta 10y agoYou can be a left-libertarian or a right-libertarian. Left vs. Right is about whether you favor the interests of the people or of the elites; a libertarian is usually someone who doesn't particularly care for a strong government. Says nothing about whether they are generally opposed to elite power.
- tnones 10y agoA better model is that "left" opposes oppression and favors care, empathy and equity, while "right" opposes barbarism and favors loyalty, family and just rewards. Most right wingers would e.g. see the dominance of left-wing thought in academia and entertainment as its own form of elite power, an unearned and unwarranted influence not based on merit, which only pays lips service to its own ideals of rationality and impartiality.
- drewrv 10y agoThis isn't the right, it's white supremacy.
- leurfete 10y agoCan you back that up with anything specific: evidence, examples...?
- GFK_of_xmaspast 10y agoThere's not a lot of difference between the two.
- icanhackit 10y ago> Why is every article about the right so negative? To paraphrase Noam Chomsky (IIRC) in many respects the left in the US is equivalent to the center right in most other highly developed countries. HN has an international following. Combine US-based "left" with the rest of the world and you'll have a strong leaning away from the extreme right. Add to that, Trump comes across as technology illiterate, sometimes hostile [1], which goes against the grain of the average HN reader. [1] “We have to talk to them about, maybe in certain areas, closing that internet up in some ways. Somebody will say, ‘Oh freedom of speech, freedom of speech.’ These are foolish people.”
- DominikR 10y agoPalmer Luckey supporting one candidate is not the problem, the leftist media that seeks to financially, politically and even socially destroy and ostracise anyone not supporting their candidate is the problem. How can anyone support that? You turn on any major news channel today and what you see is a warped world view where anyone supporting Trump is compared to a Nazi, a deplorable, a racist or a homophobe. Even Jimmy Fallon was attacked viciously for merely having Trump on his show because this "humanised" him to his viewers. So Trump and his supporters are subhuman according to the left? Did I get this right? No wonder that it's always been the Socialists who built Gulags and concentration camps. They just can't stop thinking in these categories of humans vs subhumans.
- throwanem 10y ago18th century Britain was socialist?
- DominikR 10y agoLook, throughout history countries took prisoners during wars, so did Britain and others, and many suffered because of that. But to compare this to concentration camps that were literally built to exterminate whole people isn't even funny. In fact I don't particularly like the British because of my eastern European heritage but they were always known to treat prisoners and people that lived in the colonies they captured exceptionally well and more humanely than anyone else at the time.
- throwanem 10y agoPerhaps you'd like to review the history of the Second Boer War. Here's a good place to start: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War#Concentration_camps_.281900.E2.80.931902.29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Boer_War#Concentration_...
- DominikR 10y agoI read that, don't you see the difference between this and setting up camps to exterminate people? It states right there that the deaths were results of gross negligence and mismanagement and the Boers attacking the British supply lines that prevented items from reaching these camps. There was no order from higher ups demanding to exterminate the inhabitants.
- unprepare 10y agoThis NimbleAmerica group seems like some kind of scam to me, I can't believe anyone would donate money to such a farce Their FAQs page literally has filler text, and one of the four most frequently asked questions is 'how do we know this is not a money grab?' >I have personally donated $xxx to our Booster.com fundraiser. really? you donated xxx dollars? Who is the "I" in that sentence? https://www.nimbleamerica.com/faqs https://www.nimbleamerica.com/faqs
- red_blobs 10y agoRemember when memes were lauded as a part of the millennial culture? Now when they are used for something you disagree with, it's seen as 'evil', 'wrong', or 'unethical'. The problem is that the vast majority of voters are swayed by emotion, not fact. These sorts of things are only going to get worse, because it is the only way to get people to vote your way. Even if you have a good idea and a sound plan, you need to dress it up in emotion-laced slop to get people to come out and vote for you. It also doesn't help that the mainstream media, which is a very powerful force in the US when it comes to politics, is biased toward the Democratic party (as seen in the recent Wikileaks emails from the DNC). It means that to counteract this, you need to try another tactic, like posting on the Internet. Even our leaders are swayed by emotion. Both Obama and Hillary have commented prematurely on important events ('Clockboy' and various police shootings) without having professionals and science weigh in on the actual facts of the events after a real investigation. This is one of the main problems with our society today: anti-science winning out over facts and assuming someone is guilty before even attempting to see if they are innocent. There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist. Social media has made it worse because instead of just having the mainstream media feed us hyperbole and rhetoric, anybody with a Twitter account can do it too. It has now had some real-world consequences and resulted in many people getting hurt and even getting killed in riots over half-truths, hearsay, and rumors. If you want shit posting to stop, we have to live in a society where it has to stop working so well. Maybe even holding people responsible for posting lies that lead to riots or death. Edit: sigh. I always try to have intellectual conversations here on HN and am always disappointed. Most people here seem to just want to hear the current San Francisco narrative about the world and live only within that bubble. It's actually really sad.
- acdha 10y ago> There was even a book on the New York best sellers list called 'Weapons of Math Destruction' claiming that math and statistics are somehow 'racist'. Think about that for a minute to let it sink in....Facts are now racist. I don't know where you read that but you really, really, really need to learn about that book before repeating it, much less complaining about the lack of intellectual conversation. Cathy O'Neil has a Ph.D in mathematics (https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=38230 https://www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu/id.php?id=38230), worked as a quant, and most definitely is not claiming that math is racist. Rather, she's talking about how MISUSING math – and especially machine learning – can reinforce biases which were already present or introduced by sampling error. She's actually calling for greater mathematical understanding so people keep these things in mind and avoid them: http://www.npr.org/2016/09/12/493654950/weapons-of-math-destruction-outlines-dangers-of-relying-on-data-analytics http://www.npr.org/2016/09/12/493654950/weapons-of-math-dest... https://mathbabe.org/2014/08/12/weapon-of-math-destruction-risk-based-sentencing-models/ https://mathbabe.org/2014/08/12/weapon-of-math-destruction-r...