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Is anyone else troubled by how impulsive[0] we are? Look at the original thread on this issue[1]. Hundreds of comments and conspiracy theories. And this is on H

• ajross 10y ago
  It's a chronic temporary insanity that pops up every four years or so. It will pass in exactly 21 days. Seriously: everyone here does this when we get to crazy time in the election. You're just seeing it on HN more because the Wikileaks kerfuffle happens to overlap the digital liberty stuff we talk about when the election isn't looming.
  • learc83 10y ago
    You don't normally have candidates insisting that the election is rigged despite having no evidence to support that assertion. The reason that the insanity subsides after the election is over, is because the majority of people accept the results. The losing candidate concedes that he was defeated fairly, and most of us move on with our lives. If 40% of the country doesn't accept the results because their candidate is telling them not too, things can quickly get out of hand.
    • ajross 10y ago
      > You don't normally have candidates insisting that the election is rigged despite having no evidence to support that assertion. This is true, of course. But you have seen that stuff all over the right wing media, reliably, in every election of the past few decades. Trump is merely terrible at message discipline (which is to say: unlike his more mature peers, he actually believes this stuff and will repeat what he reads on Drudge); the specter of brown democrats rigging elections has been a subtext of republican electioneering forever.
      • learc83 10y ago
        Definitely. The constant repetition of this stuff over the last few decades is what enabled Trump. The difference is mostly one of scale not kind. Except for the major difference that the candidate himself has never said something like this directly, and that candidates have always graciously conceded defeat. If Donald Trump comes out on November 9th and says "I told you it was rigged. They stole the election from us.", I really don't know what will happen. I think it's fairly likely there will be at least some small-scale rioting. I think the best case long term scenario, if this happens, is the creation of a new much more openly racist and xenophobic political party that is too small to gain any real power. The worst case scenario is obviously civil war, but I think that is still extremely unlikely. Especially because Trump isn't the incumbent, so he lacks any actual power. If he were the losing incumbent, and Hillary was the challenger, I think most die hard Trump supporters would back a power grab. And the most likely scenario is that a slightly smaller Republican party gets pulled even further right.
        • mistersquid 10y ago
          Historically in the US, disenfranchised whites do not riot in the way that disenfranchised/disempowered urban dwellers do. Typically they conduct what is today recognized as domestic terrorism: lynch mobs, church bombings, bombing the Oklahoma City Federal building, shooting congregants at mosques, killing worshippers at synagogue, etc. More recently, we even saw one example of disenfranchised whites occupying a Federal Bureau of Land Management building in Bend, OR. One notable exception is the 1921 Tulsa Race Riot where whites destroyed a prosperous black section of Tulsa. [0] Anyway, this is to say that the rioting for non-whites is very different than the resistance exhibited by whites. The socioeconomic reasons for such differences are too various to list, but as a very general statement, poor disenfranchised urban dwellers of color do not have access, mobility, motivation, or organization to attack the forces that undergird their civic misery. In this sense, riot is cathartic, reactionary, and self-defeating. The targeted violence that characterizes acts of US domestic terrorism may also come from similar feelings of disenfranchisement, but rarely, if ever, do they result in the wholesale destruction of the local environments of the aggrieved. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot
    • saynsedit 10y ago
      Nothing is going to get out of hand. That whole idea just seems like media sensationalism. There may be a minority of people who won't accept the results, but the vast majority of people are going to feel bad or good for a week or two and then go back to worrying about their jobs.
      • learc83 10y ago
        I think it's very unlikely, but people act like we're immune to violent transfers of power because it's never happened to us. Historically peaceful transition of power is the exception. Based on his current rhetoric, it's seems pretty likely that Trump will come out on November 9th and say the election was stolen. Sure most people will ignore it, but I live in the South, in the middle of Trump country. The majority of people that I know, over 40, think that Obama and Hillary are evil. They don't disagree with them, they think they are evil. They thought that the Federal government was going to invade Texas during Jade Helm. A fair amount of them think that Hillary is literally possessed by the devil. Breitbart is the most mainstream news source that they'll listen too, and they get most of their news from conspiracy sites spreading clickbait lies on Facebook (I know because many of them are family members and I see it). They don't believe the polls, and they really think that the only way Trump can lose is if the election is rigged. Oh and they're all heavily armed because they've been buying up ammunition since Obama was elected, in anticipation of a gun ban. (I have guns myself, but I don't have dozens of cases of ammunition in preparation for "the shit hitting the fan" like many people I know do.) I've never seen anything this bad, even when Obama was elected. I think the major difference is the polarizing effect of most Trump supporters getting the majority of their news from Facebook. Combined with the realization by some that demographics are changing, so this may be the last election they can win. Again, I think that actual civil war is extremely unlikely because luckily Trump won't be a losing incumbent. But I think that if Trump refuses to concede, a few acts of domestic terrorism are likely. The FBI just stopped a group of white nationalists who were trying to kick off a religious war by detonating a truck bomb in a mostly Somali apartment complex.
        • saynsedit 10y ago
          Never said violent revolt couldn't happen. It just seems very improbable. I'd bet that the vast majority of those people who believe Obama/Clinton are evil wouldn't be willing to risk their current living situation on that belief when it actually came down to it.
    • TheGirondin 10y ago
      >You don't normally have candidates insisting that the election is rigged despite having no evidence to support that assertion. I agree that Clinton's repeated conspiratorial assertions that Russia is trying to rig the election is dangerous to democracy.
      • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
        ...along with evidence of Russian hacking of elections databases?
        • TheGirondin 10y ago
          And? Chinese and Russian state hackers are constantly breaking into US systems. I'm sure American state hackers are constantly breaking into theirs. This is nothing extraordinary. Thank you for validating that Clinton's repeated conspiratorial assertions are dangerous to democracy. It seems like you will doesn't accept the results you don't like, just Democrats have always done when they lose.
          • JoeAltmaier 10y ago
            So now evidence is not evidence. Only vague accusations are evidence. Got it.
            • TheGirondin 10y ago
              No, no evidence is no evidence.
      • learc83 10y ago
        So which is it? Claims of vote rigging are dangerous to democracy or they aren't? If they're dangerous, then I can play you audio of Trump making them. Now that we've got that out of the way. Hillary isn't making claims of vote rigging, she's making claims that Russians hacked emails and released them to influence the election. Her claims are backed up by the United State's intelligence agencies.
• pdx 10y ago
  > Is anyone else troubled by how reactionary we are? People are waking up, and they're angry at the machinizations that have been used to influence and flat out control what we believed to be a free democracy. Personally, I am gratified that HN contains people who are not so cerebral that they would only talk about linux package managers at such a time.
  • dlp211 10y ago
    Except, you know, they were wrong. It's absolutely fine to talk about these things, but it is also absolutely pertinent that we take a measured approach. There was a lot of down voting of people that took the measured response in that thread and that is NOT healthy for this or any online community.
    • colordrops 10y ago
      Wrong about what exactly? There are hundreds of aspects to this story. There is no monolithic "right" or "wrong".
      • bduerst 10y ago
        >Wrong about what exactly? Unfounded reactionary conspiracies, at least that's the context to this thread. I don't think anyone is appealing to a universal morality of "right" or "wrong". Just yesterday someone implied that the FBI was colluding with the Clintons to falsely blame the Podesta hacks on Russia, and I was downvoted for saying that without proof it's absurd.
        • dmichulke 10y ago
          Maybe the downvotes were because the burden of proof still lies with the FBI or Clintons to show it was indeed Russia. Conversely, how can you prove that a state did not participate in a cyber attack?
          • bduerst 10y ago
• tomp 10y ago
  The problem is that the conspiracy theories are becoming more and more believable. As more and more have come true (Snowden, Iraq WMD, ...), people have less and less reason to doubt them.
  • aljones 10y ago
    Is it actually true that more are correct now than in the past?
    • Alex3917 10y ago
      The field of Organizational Behavior has done research on 'grapevine communication', and found that most rumors are true. And this was decades ago: http://tqr.nova.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/singh3.pdf http://tqr.nova.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/singh3.pdf What's changed is that we have more leaked documents, more ability for whistleblowers to mass broadcast anonymously, and more tools for immediately uncovering discrepancies in people's stories. So the rumor mill probably is a little more accurate than in prior eras, but it was probably already reasonably reliable even before the advent of WikiLeaks or whatever. The other difference is that people now have a lot more incentive to turn to the rumor mill (e.g. r/dncleaks, r/wikileaks, r/the_donald) since the mainstream media has been blatantly ignoring a lot of this stuff, and with the advent of Facebook they can spread whatever they find a lot faster.
      • mark_l_watson 10y ago
        +1 for the criticism of mainstream media - it is awful and apparently getting worse quickly. I sometimes have to turn to foreign news like Russia Times (RT), Al Jazeera, and the Israeli Haaretz news (and news from many other countries) to see news stories that are effectively blocked out in the USA. I do look with appropriate scepticism at all foreign and domestic news sources, but when major stories are not covered in domestic news sources there is no choice but to look around the web. It drives me a little crazy when friends who watch MSNBC, Fox News, CNN, etc. think that they are getting a full and accurate picture of world events.
    • 10y ago
• vectorpush 10y ago
  Many would argue that the events as they unfolded have actually vindicated their conspiracy theories by suggesting that Clinton has coerced Ecuador through treats or bribery. Personally, I think this is absurd but this is a common position. edit: %s/treats/threats
  • imron 10y ago
    > has coerced Ecuador through treats Well, Halloween is just around the corner, I wonder how many full-size snickers bars they'd need... :->
• jsprogrammer 10y ago
  I'd be more troubled by time and effort spent promoting ad hominem arguments and active censorship of discussions about theories that can actually be refuted (and the seemingly bare interest in even refuting them).
• colordrops 10y ago
  People are concerned and disturbed by the opacity around what appear to be deep machinations by several powerful parties. There is clearly something rotten going on but part of the game is obfuscation and misdirection, so people are flailing in absence of solid ground upon which to make assertions about the truth.
• ronald_raygun 10y ago
  "Conspiracy theories" are pretty broad, and some of them are crackpot, but some of them are reasonable, and some are still true. FWIF, the term didn't have a negative connotation until the CIA started to use it to discredit things they didn't like to control perception http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-cia-invented-and-promoted-conspiracy-theories-discredit-controversial-views http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/how-cia-invented-and...
• pera 10y ago
  "Reactionary"? could you point some examples of reactionism on HN? Also, I didn't see much (if any) "conspiracy theories" in the original thread. Finally I don't understand how a discussion about current political events can be considered gossips.
• droopybuns 10y ago
  Yes I am troubled by how reactionary we are. I am not troubled by how the Internet enables gossip on a global scale. Improved capability for communications and cross-culture dialog is always a good thing. Not all human communication is Yeats poetry. "conspiracy theory" (in my opinion) is a weakened phrase which in modern usage seems to mean "narrative I find unbelievable" rather than an actual conspiracy. For better or worse, it seems to be a phrase that indicates a profound arrogance of the speaker, rather than a description of the topic they don't believe. I wish this phrase would die. It is a polarizing tool that is not effective for persuading people who are inclined to disagree.
  • bduerst 10y ago
    I like the phrase that came up on one of the 538 podcasts, basically calling them Data Deniers. Even if you make ad hom accusations of speaker bias, i.e. "MSM is rigged against me!", it doesn't immediately invalidate the message.
    • paulmd 10y ago
      That's ironic because this year Nate Silver is big on his polls-plus models that include all kinds of non-data factors. He talks the talk but then goes and pushes a bunch of models that don't focus on data. He's right though, data talks. The only model that was even more accurate than 538's in the 2012 election was Sam Wang's model at the Princeton Election Consortium and Sam Wang did only the bare minimum to mesh the gears* whereas Nate Silver was trying to "weight" some of the polls and blew the call on some states. * Note that there's a difference between accuracy and precision. A poll can be very accurate (little variation between measurements) but not very precise (the center of the distribution is skewed to one side). For example Rasmussen is famous for this, they are a super accurate pollster but average something like +7 Republican. Different types of polls survey different groups of people (landline, cell, online, focus-group, etc) and you have to take that "house effect" out to really average different types of polls together.
      • bduerst 10y ago
• AvenueIngres 10y ago
  > Hundreds of comments and conspiracy theories. There was little to no information available and Wikileaks had released pre-commitment hashes just hours before. Conspiracy theories are not intrinsically evil you know. They are a natural byproduct of lack of information + high stake issue. And it should be no surprise that conspiracy theories arise when talking about Wikileaks, a non-profit defying the most powerful political/military apparatus on earth. And with that, right in the middle of v. high-stake national election. People speculate, they try to infer what is going on despite lacking information and uncover hidden power dynamics. I recommend you read Thucydides's War on Peloponnese just so you can realize how conspiracies are daily occurrences in politics and any structure that holds power. Now what you should not do is believe all of them uncritically. This is another thing. I don't think it is the case here. > how reactionary we are? I don't think we have the same definition for the word reactionary? What do you mean?
  • vinhboy 10y ago
    Wow. I admit it. I went all these years without actually knowing the meaning of the word "reactionary". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reactionary It's one of those words you think you can derive meaning from using context clues, but in this case I was wrong. That is really not the word I thought I was saying. The word I should have used is "impulsive". Thank you for correcting me and teaching me something new.
    • AvenueIngres 10y ago
      Ha! No worries friend, it happens to me all the time!
    • TeMPOraL 10y ago
      I was surprised by this word too, some two years ago. You never know when a phrase you took for granted actually turns out to be a political label!
    • deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
  • 10y ago
• Chathamization 10y ago
  It's troubling that instead of coming right out and saying that Ecuador cut Assange's internet access, they said that "state actors" did, knowing people would blame the U.S. government (as many did in that thread). For an organization that's supposed to be about openness, they seem more than willing to hide information to manipulate people. It's troublesome that this article which actual has the information about who cut the internet access is dropping off the front page much faster than the previous article which left people with the wrong impression. This is an old tactic; generate headlines by insinuating something, and most people will have moved on to something else when the correction comes. The result is that most people are left with the false impression, even after the facts come out. It's troublesome that the reaction many people have to their conspiracy theories being proved false are to shrug and say that this doesn't change anything. "If the Clinton campaign didn't get the CIA to do this, then the U.S. government must have pushed the Ecuadorians to do this" or "It was perfectly reasonable to assume a conspiracy based on no evidence because the government does things like this all the time." If proof that your conspiracy theory was based on nothing doesn't trigger any kind of self-reflection or at least admittance of error, then it seems like your world view isn't influenced by facts. So yes, I'm troubled by several aspects of this.
• whybroke 10y ago
  When there is an emergency humans look for an explanation of the events. Even when there is no possibility of finding one, they will still choose a fictional one derived from their existing world views. Putting huge effort into explaining a true emergency (eg fire, fight etc) is evolutionary useful, doing so for a non emergency is not. For a complex of reasons related to modern communication and the nature of celebrity among other things, the latest events around Assange feel like an emergency to some people and so they desperately seek an immediate explanation at all costs. In general this is always a problem because those removed from events could use their distance by calmly looking at the situation objectively and rationally instead of promulgating a wave of attractive but erroneous conspiracy theories (which are always entirely destructive). As a life rule it is convenient to note which category various information sources fall into.