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That looks like an accurate process. What I meant is that people frequently find truth locally, but miss a lot of larger context because of narrow focus. For
by graeme 10y ago
That looks like an accurate process.
What I meant is that people frequently find truth locally, but miss a lot of larger context because of narrow focus.
For instance, those videos and articles are about Clinton's emails. A lot of people analyzing that issue determined, correctly "Clinton made mistakes in email management".
The error there would be to think, without examination "Trump would be better at document security", or to hold the slightly more nefarious belief "therefore, clinton is the worse choice on document security". They're the same statement, of course, but cognitively the second one makes the believer less likely to notice they only examined one half of the equation.
The media more or less ignored Trump's data security practices, so there was no opportunity to raise the question if you only do media analysis. It's a comparison you have to do on your own.
Now, given the revelations about discussing classified documents in the open with u secured cellphones at mar a lago, it seems likely Trump is worse on data security.
This was something I think was possible to figure out before the election.
So, if you held the following belief, congratulations:
"Clinton has made errors in data management, but I have no idea if Trump is better and this has no impact on my comparison" or
"Clinton made errors, but based on other external evidence Trump may well be as bad"
But if you left things unexamined, you may have fallen into a trap. Both youtube channels you linked are Trump supporter channels. Did you analyze them as well? (In that case, the question to ask is not "is this video footage real, but instead "why am I seeing this footage at all? What do they want me to conclude?"
To more concretely state the error I'm worrying about: many people exercise skepticism only with regard to the mainstream media, but then are fairly credulous when dealing with alternative sources.
And for what it's worth, I don't watch CNN. But if you had told me they said if's illegal to read Wikileaks, I would have said "that's absurd, there's no such law".
I have a background of political knowledge and context that lets me make that judgement. My worry when I read people expressing skepticism of mainstream sources is that they frequently lack that context, and are vulnerable to being right on a few details and wrong on the larger picture.
- Natsu 10y agoFirst, good if you don't watch CNN, it's junk food news. But regarding that story, you do LSAT testing, so you have to actually know a thing or two about the law. But how many normal people are in a position to contradict someone who is both a lawyer and an attorney when he tells them that? (Yes, I know enough to know the difference.) As for who is better on document security, I wouldn't go down that rabbit hole to begin with. Have you read Assange's rationale for creating Wikileaks? The gist of it is that creating a leak culture raises the cost of conspiracies. This means that it's more difficult for any small group in power to plot against the public. So it's not really about document security, but closer to the opposite: to promote leaks so that nobody can control the flow of information. So it's not about Trump or Clinton or any such short-sighted political machinations, but rather to ensure that nobody can get away with conspiring against the public. It doesn't matter if the conspirator is Hillary or Flynn or whoever else. The point is to ensure that everyone is accountable. You can see how much this is hated by both sides these days, each calling the other hypocrite when they decry leaks against themselves. You can also see how those in power hate this from the Todd & Claire site, which I've seen very little press regarding. Speaking of that, it's funny how a bunch of people on different continents coordinate with a sham of a porn site / UN "partner" to frame someone as a pedophile, but it barely warrants any mention, no? You read a lot of news, no? How much coverage have you seen? How much do you know about that? Doesn't it seem like a rather odd thing to ignore?
- graeme 10y agoFair enough. No, I hadn't heard anything about Assange since hearing his internet was cut off. Current US political news is sucking up all thr oxygen. So there's a lot of stuff I imagine I'm not hearing about.
- Natsu 10y agoYeah, you won't find stories about that one in the news. But assuming it didn't get purged (and these things are wont to vanish), there were plenty of discussions / archives of the site. They used an obscure UN program to claim "partnership" with the UN by agreeing to abide by some set of principles, posted something to a UN website by virtue of that program and later got dumped when they were exposed. The site itself was fake. The profiles were clones of each other, the images were mirrored images harvested from the web (to hide from reverse image search, but they weren't that clever because the mirroring was obvious). The whole thing was basically a scam to make out JA as a pedophile, after which they ran off claiming to have been threatened. However, no part of the story held together. Given how much work went into framing someone as a pedo and it got blown up publicly, it's kind of weird that it never hit the news.