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Echoing my point at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930056 when you cite a totally biased when it comes to

by hga 10y ago

Echoing my point at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930056 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930056 when you cite a totally biased when it comes to politics site like Snopes, our response is a simple "We Don't Care." But, tell me, why did she exile herself to 1970s Arkansas? As someone who grew up 3 counties north of the state, I can assure you back then it was considered to be a massively worse place than my native Missouri, and the very close states of Kansas and Oklahoma. There was something qualitatively different about it, in a bad way. Note that she went from working on the Watergate Committee, which was the highest pinnacle of the Left in the '70s aside from perhaps the Carter Administration years later, to being a partner at a politically well connected law firm in Arkansas, one no one ever heard of outside the state before the '90s. What's your explanation for her move? Surely she could have tried again to pass the D.C. bar exam.

zimpenfish 10y ago
I was just correcting your factually incorrect assertion that she was terminated from the WIC - she wasn't. I have no comment on her reasons for leaving Arkansas or anything else.
- hga 10y ago
  And I'm saying that when you cite Snopes on a political issue to "prove" your claimed fact, you're admitting up front that it's nothing of the sort. That sort of trick just doesn't work any more, which is, of course, the whole reason we're having this general discussion in the first place.
  - zimpenfish 10y ago
    I'm confused - what about the Snopes article is "nothing of the sort"? They cite sources, quote those sources, and provide good evidence that she wasn't fired. Do you have evidence to the contrary other than Zeifman's (self-contradictory) claims?
  - jalfresi 10y ago
    I'm confused... isn't saying "Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC" a political issue? You're trying to make a political point by using a mistruth as evidence of the fact? Could you explain a bit clearer?
    - hga 10y ago
      Sorry if I wasn't sufficiently clear: The claim that Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC is political. My claim that citing Snopes claim to the contrary---it being a political issue---does not make it a mistruth to me, rather, you might say it's an example of the maxim that "nothing is confirmed until officially denied". That, in fact, is pretty much how we on the Alt Right† nowadays treat anything political on Snopes. †For the purposes of this discussion, the Alt Right are those on the right who's response to being called racist is "We Don't Care".
      - jalfresi 10y ago
        Again, apologies for not grasping your point directly, but I'm not quite following you. Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved? And until Hillary Clinton (or presumably the WIC) come out and directly either confirm or deny that statement, then repeating the statement is "fair game"? But doesn't that put the onus on the subject to confirm or deny every single tinpot, falsehood statement out there, otherwise its safe to consider it the truth? Is it similar to the example you gave of being called a racist and responding with "We don't care"? Should Hillary Clinton respond to the statement with "I don't care if you think I was fired with prejudice from the WIC"? Is that what you are saying? How would that stop the "mistruth" from being repeated? (apologies, I'm from the UK so this isn't a line of thought I've come across) Edit: Bit of rewording for clarity
        hga 10y ago
        Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved? Yes. As for the rest, I believe the evidence I've seen that this was true is sufficient to support my opinion, especially when combined with my own analysis of "Why the hell did she self-exile to Arkansas?!?!??!!!", the latter admittedly using data most Americans, let alone people in the world don't and can't have, and therefore we don't need to get into epistemological weeds.
pjc50 10y ago
Citing Snopes as biased? Er, no. They're one of the few remaining sites that can be trusted to debunk bunk properly.
- hga 10y ago
  This answers zimpenfish below as well: whatever you believe, to the Alt Right, Snopes is dead to us for all things political. And what isn't political nowadays? Although the demarcation is pretty clear, falls along the line of a particular person who does their explicitly political stuff. But who trusts the rot to stay there? And it sounds like you don't believe in, or have never heard of Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics: "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." See Fox over the last few years, first the top dog explicitly said they were moving to the left, now he's been ousted in a coup and the writing is on the wall for the remaining figures on the right who are still under contract.
  - pjc50 10y ago
    > "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." So you're defining centrism as impossible? No wonder everyone ends up in bubbles. And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How? I just did a quick scan of foxnews.com and had a hard time finding a single story that wasn't obviously pro-Trump. The best I could do was http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/11/obamacare-enrollment-surges-after-trump-victory.html http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/11/obamacare-enrollm...
    - hga 10y ago
      Why? What have they done? Hired an explicitly politically biased person to do their political "debunking", see the item mdpopescu linked to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930881 With of course the predicable results. So you're defining centrism as impossible? Post-French Revolution, yes, by and large. Something we on the Right in the US have been saying prior to, say, this election, is that we think the Left is wrong, they think we're evil. Well, it's now polarizing as we decide they're not just wrong, but definitely evil. And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How? Maybe from your end of the pond they're "prototypically right-wing", and you might just be right about "prototypical", but they've always carried themselves as being "Fair and Balanced", i.e. allowing both sides a fair hearing. You can certainly look at their lineup of Leftists prior to the explicit shift to the Left that started a couple or so years ago as confirmation of this. Would a true "right-wing" (as defined in the US!) station give e.g. Juan Williams an honored seat at the table? And I guess you missed Megyn Kelly's feud with Trump, and her leading role in the coup that ousted the founder and head of the channel? I'm not telling you as someone across the pond that it's worth investigating, just like I haven't put any effort to speak of in discovering the causes of the Decline and Fall of the Torygraph, which I avidly read as a right of center 5 hours early for me news source back in the '90s, but, seriously, Fox has changed, and it's still a work in progress as two of Murdoch's more liberal sons run the place.
pessimizer 10y ago
> But, tell me, why did she exile herself to 1970s Arkansas? As someone who grew up 3 counties north of the state, I can assure you back then it was considered to be a massively worse place than my native Missouri, and the very close states of Kansas and Oklahoma. There was something qualitatively different about it, in a bad way. Fayetteville, AR was a cute, hippie college town in the mountains. Going to high school there in the early 90s, we thought Missouri and Oklahoma were holes, and the only place we related to in Kansas was Lawrence.
- hga 10y ago
  Yeah, but Fayetteville, which I have the most familiarity with (my father did his first year or two of college there, and it's close to Joplin) is not Little Rock, and we're also talking about the early-mid '70s, not the early '90s, which I can't speak to as to what Arkansas was like, since I'd moved to the Boston area for college in 1979. And neither are D.C., a center of international power. Hillary was nothing if not ambitious.

by hga 10y ago

zimpenfish 10y ago

I was just correcting your factually incorrect assertion that she was terminated from the WIC - she wasn't. I have no comment on her reasons for leaving Arkansas or anything else.

hga 10y ago
And I'm saying that when you cite Snopes on a political issue to "prove" your claimed fact, you're admitting up front that it's nothing of the sort. That sort of trick just doesn't work any more, which is, of course, the whole reason we're having this general discussion in the first place.
- zimpenfish 10y ago
  I'm confused - what about the Snopes article is "nothing of the sort"? They cite sources, quote those sources, and provide good evidence that she wasn't fired. Do you have evidence to the contrary other than Zeifman's (self-contradictory) claims?
- jalfresi 10y ago
  I'm confused... isn't saying "Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC" a political issue? You're trying to make a political point by using a mistruth as evidence of the fact? Could you explain a bit clearer?
  - hga 10y ago
    Sorry if I wasn't sufficiently clear: The claim that Hillary was fired with extreme prejudice from the WIC is political. My claim that citing Snopes claim to the contrary---it being a political issue---does not make it a mistruth to me, rather, you might say it's an example of the maxim that "nothing is confirmed until officially denied". That, in fact, is pretty much how we on the Alt Right† nowadays treat anything political on Snopes. †For the purposes of this discussion, the Alt Right are those on the right who's response to being called racist is "We Don't Care".
    - jalfresi 10y ago
      Again, apologies for not grasping your point directly, but I'm not quite following you. Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved? And until Hillary Clinton (or presumably the WIC) come out and directly either confirm or deny that statement, then repeating the statement is "fair game"? But doesn't that put the onus on the subject to confirm or deny every single tinpot, falsehood statement out there, otherwise its safe to consider it the truth? Is it similar to the example you gave of being called a racist and responding with "We don't care"? Should Hillary Clinton respond to the statement with "I don't care if you think I was fired with prejudice from the WIC"? Is that what you are saying? How would that stop the "mistruth" from being repeated? (apologies, I'm from the UK so this isn't a line of thought I've come across) Edit: Bit of rewording for clarity
      - hga 10y ago
        Are you saying you dismiss Snopes as being left-biased, therefore the matter over whether "Hillary Clinton was fired with prejudice" is still not resolved? Yes. As for the rest, I believe the evidence I've seen that this was true is sufficient to support my opinion, especially when combined with my own analysis of "Why the hell did she self-exile to Arkansas?!?!??!!!", the latter admittedly using data most Americans, let alone people in the world don't and can't have, and therefore we don't need to get into epistemological weeds.

pjc50 10y ago

Citing Snopes as biased? Er, no. They're one of the few remaining sites that can be trusted to debunk bunk properly.

hga 10y ago
This answers zimpenfish below as well: whatever you believe, to the Alt Right, Snopes is dead to us for all things political. And what isn't political nowadays? Although the demarcation is pretty clear, falls along the line of a particular person who does their explicitly political stuff. But who trusts the rot to stay there? And it sounds like you don't believe in, or have never heard of Robert Conquest's Second Law of Politics: "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." See Fox over the last few years, first the top dog explicitly said they were moving to the left, now he's been ousted in a coup and the writing is on the wall for the remaining figures on the right who are still under contract.
- pjc50 10y ago
  > "Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing." So you're defining centrism as impossible? No wonder everyone ends up in bubbles. And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How? I just did a quick scan of foxnews.com and had a hard time finding a single story that wasn't obviously pro-Trump. The best I could do was http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/11/obamacare-enrollment-surges-after-trump-victory.html http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/11/11/obamacare-enrollm...
  - hga 10y ago
    Why? What have they done? Hired an explicitly politically biased person to do their political "debunking", see the item mdpopescu linked to: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930881 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12930881 With of course the predicable results. So you're defining centrism as impossible? Post-French Revolution, yes, by and large. Something we on the Right in the US have been saying prior to, say, this election, is that we think the Left is wrong, they think we're evil. Well, it's now polarizing as we decide they're not just wrong, but definitely evil. And you're calling Fox News, the prototypical right-wing TV news station, left-wing? What? Why? How? Maybe from your end of the pond they're "prototypically right-wing", and you might just be right about "prototypical", but they've always carried themselves as being "Fair and Balanced", i.e. allowing both sides a fair hearing. You can certainly look at their lineup of Leftists prior to the explicit shift to the Left that started a couple or so years ago as confirmation of this. Would a true "right-wing" (as defined in the US!) station give e.g. Juan Williams an honored seat at the table? And I guess you missed Megyn Kelly's feud with Trump, and her leading role in the coup that ousted the founder and head of the channel? I'm not telling you as someone across the pond that it's worth investigating, just like I haven't put any effort to speak of in discovering the causes of the Decline and Fall of the Torygraph, which I avidly read as a right of center 5 hours early for me news source back in the '90s, but, seriously, Fox has changed, and it's still a work in progress as two of Murdoch's more liberal sons run the place.

pessimizer 10y ago

> But, tell me, why did she exile herself to 1970s Arkansas? As someone who grew up 3 counties north of the state, I can assure you back then it was considered to be a massively worse place than my native Missouri, and the very close states of Kansas and Oklahoma. There was something qualitatively different about it, in a bad way. Fayetteville, AR was a cute, hippie college town in the mountains. Going to high school there in the early 90s, we thought Missouri and Oklahoma were holes, and the only place we related to in Kansas was Lawrence.

hga 10y ago
Yeah, but Fayetteville, which I have the most familiarity with (my father did his first year or two of college there, and it's close to Joplin) is not Little Rock, and we're also talking about the early-mid '70s, not the early '90s, which I can't speak to as to what Arkansas was like, since I'd moved to the Boston area for college in 1979. And neither are D.C., a center of international power. Hillary was nothing if not ambitious.