5 ms·

Is digital literacy the problem? Believing that a prominent politician ran a prostitution ring is a basic reasoning problem. I think we'll have to wait until th

by dplgk 8y ago

Is digital literacy the problem? Believing that a prominent politician ran a prostitution ring is a basic reasoning problem. I think we'll have to wait until they die off.

sonnyblarney 8y ago
They are taking Dominique Strauss-Kahn down for exactly that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Strauss-Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Strauss-Kahn
- akiselev 8y ago
  Did his pizza shoppe actually have a basement, though?
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Allison Mack, some other prominent actors, and several members of the Bronfman family are going down for running a sex ring. Some of the circumstances are crazy. It would seem like fake news at first glance surely. It's downright bizarre. I certainly would have written it off as 'National Enquirer' were it not out of super credible institutions. Sometimes it's hard to tell what is 'truth' and the major 'credible' news agencies simply don't cover a lot of things.
    - pjc50 8y ago
      > were it not out of super credible institutions. Indeed. And there's a huge war over creditability. It's expensive to maintain and it suits some people to destroy it entirely.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      Or consider that horrible Jeffrey Epstein. Not a politician, but he hosted politicians on his island of victimized children. Now we've learned that federal prosecutors colluded with his defense team to fool the courts into letting him off with a few months in a part-time minimum-security resort prison. It was fortunate for him that he had cultivated friendships with those in power! It was unfortunate for the little girls, how he cultivated those friendships...
    - akiselev 8y ago
      Oh I don't doubt the depravity of some human beings. The stuff that's public knowledge about the lollita express alone is horrific, basically putting it a few rungs short of 100 days of sodom. The problem is that accusations of pedophilia and molestation are emotional warheads so we get nutcases trying to shoot up pizzerias because of a rumor that makes absolutely zero sense because it is physically impossible. There's a reason we have gag orders in high profile trials and why we sometimes sequester juries: every time the public gets involved in such an emotional issue, justice is at risk of getting perverted. People like Epstein must be brought to justice and everyone who covered for them like Dershowitz and Acosta must feel the full force of the law and society they betrayed, but we have to do so deliberately. Otherwise, they'll just get away and continue to hurt people while qanon and Breitbart continue to radicalize a vulnerable segment of the population using easily disprovable lies.
      - burfog 8y ago
        It's mighty hard to prove that a building has never contained a basement. It could be constructed in secret, used, and then filled in. You'd need to dig it up like an archaeologist would, examining layers of soil for signs of disturbance. More realistically though, the pizzeria was a codeword for the real location. Plenty of evidence for pizza-related codewords is in the Podesta emails. It's really creepy. Normal people don't rent specific numbers of slices of pizza for specific numbers of hours. It is widely thought that the number of slices is actually the age of the victim. Pizza-related codewords are known to be used by criminals involved in that sort of thing; some have been caught. Podesta also has some disturbing artwork in his home that features children.
- pjc50 8y ago
  Details and priors matter here. He seems to have been involved in the "procuring" middleman role, as was Berlusconi (who largely got away with it until one of the girls was underage). "Male French or Italian politician involved in sexual misconduct" is well within the range of plausible news; the whole pizzagate thing relied on all sorts of alleged implausible details. Then there's the UK's "Dolphin Square" controversy, which largely went silent after Lord Ashcroft started threatening people with libel lawsuits and in any case is now buried under Brexit news. I've filed that firmly in the "Don't Know, and maybe impossible to know" category. The public inquiry rumbles on and will no doubt not report until all the accused are safely dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Inquiry_into_Child_Sexual_Abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Inquiry_into_Child...
  - sonnyblarney 8y ago
    Of course of course. Context matters. Reality matters! My point is it's a mess out there, and most people don't have insight into how the world really works, so I usually don't go blaming retirees for passing along false information of the Tabloid kind. It is what it is. Facebook is not new, it's just now we have digitized banal gossip. I guess the difference now is we can measure it.
bbeonx 8y ago
Pizza gate is an extreme. But also, yes, news has changed dramatucally over the last couple of decades and older generations maybe don't consume as defensively as younger generations. Over time this can make ridiculous things sound plausible. I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time I saw that it looked sketchy as hell, but both of my folks (intelligent people, mind you) bought it hook, line, and sinker. In general, it's younger people that I saw citing it as a fake while older people shared it. Totally anecdotal, I'll grant you, but I hardly think my experience is unique
- beat 8y ago
  I don't think it's that ridiculous things can sound plausible. No, they sound ridiculous. I think it's when the fake news looks like something someone is inclined to believe anyway. In my little bubble, I'm always chiding young, progressive friends for uncritically sharing memes with fake quotes etc that happen to reinforce their political biases.
magduf 8y ago
Until they all die off? Go read about the pizzagate incident. The guy who fired a rifle inside that restaurant was 28 years old. Alex Jones, the lying asshole who runs infowars, is in his mid-40s. The alt-right is full of men in their 20s-40s. The problem in this particular case isn't old people. If you want to point at one broad demographic, it's men, largely under the age of 50.

by dplgk 8y ago

Is digital literacy the problem? Believing that a prominent politician ran a prostitution ring is a basic reasoning problem. I think we'll have to wait until they die off.

sonnyblarney 8y ago

They are taking Dominique Strauss-Kahn down for exactly that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Strauss-Kahn https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominique_Strauss-Kahn

akiselev 8y ago
Did his pizza shoppe actually have a basement, though?
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Allison Mack, some other prominent actors, and several members of the Bronfman family are going down for running a sex ring. Some of the circumstances are crazy. It would seem like fake news at first glance surely. It's downright bizarre. I certainly would have written it off as 'National Enquirer' were it not out of super credible institutions. Sometimes it's hard to tell what is 'truth' and the major 'credible' news agencies simply don't cover a lot of things.
  - pjc50 8y ago
    > were it not out of super credible institutions. Indeed. And there's a huge war over creditability. It's expensive to maintain and it suits some people to destroy it entirely.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Or consider that horrible Jeffrey Epstein. Not a politician, but he hosted politicians on his island of victimized children. Now we've learned that federal prosecutors colluded with his defense team to fool the courts into letting him off with a few months in a part-time minimum-security resort prison. It was fortunate for him that he had cultivated friendships with those in power! It was unfortunate for the little girls, how he cultivated those friendships...
  - akiselev 8y ago
    Oh I don't doubt the depravity of some human beings. The stuff that's public knowledge about the lollita express alone is horrific, basically putting it a few rungs short of 100 days of sodom. The problem is that accusations of pedophilia and molestation are emotional warheads so we get nutcases trying to shoot up pizzerias because of a rumor that makes absolutely zero sense because it is physically impossible. There's a reason we have gag orders in high profile trials and why we sometimes sequester juries: every time the public gets involved in such an emotional issue, justice is at risk of getting perverted. People like Epstein must be brought to justice and everyone who covered for them like Dershowitz and Acosta must feel the full force of the law and society they betrayed, but we have to do so deliberately. Otherwise, they'll just get away and continue to hurt people while qanon and Breitbart continue to radicalize a vulnerable segment of the population using easily disprovable lies.
    - burfog 8y ago
      It's mighty hard to prove that a building has never contained a basement. It could be constructed in secret, used, and then filled in. You'd need to dig it up like an archaeologist would, examining layers of soil for signs of disturbance. More realistically though, the pizzeria was a codeword for the real location. Plenty of evidence for pizza-related codewords is in the Podesta emails. It's really creepy. Normal people don't rent specific numbers of slices of pizza for specific numbers of hours. It is widely thought that the number of slices is actually the age of the victim. Pizza-related codewords are known to be used by criminals involved in that sort of thing; some have been caught. Podesta also has some disturbing artwork in his home that features children.
pjc50 8y ago
Details and priors matter here. He seems to have been involved in the "procuring" middleman role, as was Berlusconi (who largely got away with it until one of the girls was underage). "Male French or Italian politician involved in sexual misconduct" is well within the range of plausible news; the whole pizzagate thing relied on all sorts of alleged implausible details. Then there's the UK's "Dolphin Square" controversy, which largely went silent after Lord Ashcroft started threatening people with libel lawsuits and in any case is now buried under Brexit news. I've filed that firmly in the "Don't Know, and maybe impossible to know" category. The public inquiry rumbles on and will no doubt not report until all the accused are safely dead. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Inquiry_into_Child_Sexual_Abuse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Independent_Inquiry_into_Child...
- sonnyblarney 8y ago
  Of course of course. Context matters. Reality matters! My point is it's a mess out there, and most people don't have insight into how the world really works, so I usually don't go blaming retirees for passing along false information of the Tabloid kind. It is what it is. Facebook is not new, it's just now we have digitized banal gossip. I guess the difference now is we can measure it.

bbeonx 8y ago

Pizza gate is an extreme. But also, yes, news has changed dramatucally over the last couple of decades and older generations maybe don't consume as defensively as younger generations. Over time this can make ridiculous things sound plausible. I remember there was a trump meme going around where he supposedly said "if I ever ran for president it would be as a republican, they are all a bunch of morons". The first time I saw that it looked sketchy as hell, but both of my folks (intelligent people, mind you) bought it hook, line, and sinker. In general, it's younger people that I saw citing it as a fake while older people shared it. Totally anecdotal, I'll grant you, but I hardly think my experience is unique

beat 8y ago
I don't think it's that ridiculous things can sound plausible. No, they sound ridiculous. I think it's when the fake news looks like something someone is inclined to believe anyway. In my little bubble, I'm always chiding young, progressive friends for uncritically sharing memes with fake quotes etc that happen to reinforce their political biases.

magduf 8y ago

Until they all die off? Go read about the pizzagate incident. The guy who fired a rifle inside that restaurant was 28 years old. Alex Jones, the lying asshole who runs infowars, is in his mid-40s. The alt-right is full of men in their 20s-40s. The problem in this particular case isn't old people. If you want to point at one broad demographic, it's men, largely under the age of 50.