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I feel like we are slowly reaching the state the movie “Idiocracy” describes. I feel very torn about this. On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up t

I feel like we are slowly reaching the state the movie “Idiocracy” describes. I feel very torn about this. On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. On the other hand I find it hard to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up. It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016 and the commission they started disbanding quietly after finding nothing. And now publicly spreading rumors about killing somebody. It’s insane how little respect the US has for the integrity of its political system. As long as it may hurt the “other” side everything is ok without regard to the damage they are constantly doing the health of the system.

thatwasunusual 6y ago
> On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. Is it really _censorship_ to fact check tweets? I mean, Twitter hasn't _removed_ (i.e. censored) any tweets from Trump, just added an annotation.
- deleted 6y ago
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- ecmascript 6y ago
  No but it's literally censorship to remove people from Twitter because they use the correct gender pronoun for a biological sex. Where are the fact-checking in all those cases, I wonder?
  - nkkollaw 6y ago
    Good point. Leftists think you're misgendering someone who thinks he's a woman if you call her a biological man, normal people see it the opposite way (that doesn't mean you need to not be nice and call her "she", but actually thinking one can change biological sex is insane). That's why everyone should be able to say whatever they want, and people can discuss the merits of what's been said.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  “Fact checking” is a nice exercise and somewhat helpful but a lot of people say half baked or stupid things all the time, including myself. Part of a healthy discourse is the ability to say questionable things and having a discussion. Once you start fact checking where does it end? A lot of people have different views on different things and there is no clear right or wrong. What I would like to see is that the US political system starts fact checking itself and stop spreading misinformation. This should be done out of self respect.
  - _never_k 6y ago
    >Once you start fact checking where does it end? With all the facts being checked?
    - whatshisface 6y ago
      I imagine he's suggesting that it will end with all the opinions being checked.
      - dspillett 6y ago
        Nothing wrong with that, particularly if those opinions are communicated in a way that makes them look like statements of fact. Someone being able to say "I think your opinion is wrong" is no less a freedom of speech matter than someone being able to state an opinion in the first place. Freedom of speech does not, or at least it should not, give special privilege or protection to the first person who speaks.
    - Ididntdothis 6y ago
      The line between fact and opinion can become very blurry. Whatever you do there will be a lot of issues that can’t be fact checked.
    - heurist 6y ago
      This is a tough position for Twitter because they now have to fact check practically all of his tweets. Any tweet not checked will be seen either as tacit endorsement by Trump's political opponents or 'undeniable truth' by some portion of their users regardless of validity.
- deleted 6y ago
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- nkkollaw 6y ago
  Yes, of course it is. Most people will all of a sudden ignore someone's message. I have no idea why anyone would argue in favor of Twitter. When has it become required to be an expert in the field to be granted the privilege of leaving a comment on a forum? When has it become unacceptable to lie? People lie all the time. Advertisements lie to you, politicians lie to you, your mom lies to you. It's really annoying that the truth police is going to go and check your tweets or comment—even if you ignore the fact that the line between facts and opinions isn't always easy to see. Even facts like Taiwan being its own country or part of China or the Armenian genocide can be denied, and people should be able to say that—and perhaps rightfully get shit for that, but still be able to say it. We're going back to the Middle Ages, where if you say Earth isn't flat or God doesn't exist (replace with global warming isn't caused by humans, Covid-19 is man-made), you're executed. Sad.
  - mplanchard 6y ago
    There’s a difference between you or I saying something incorrect (willfully or not) on the Internet and a world leader doing the same. Twitter already distinguishes famous people, world leaders, etc. in a variety of ways. It seems reasonable that this would be one of them, given that the potential reach and impact of anything they say far, far exceeds that of your average Tweeter.
    - nkkollaw 6y ago
      Is there, though? Why should Twitter be in charge of deciding who's a world leader or famous enough to get checked? Who is Twitter to fact-check world leaders? When world leaders rarely tell the truth, how can anyone realistically think that such a system could even work, even if it made sense?
      - bostik 6y ago
        Well, here's the funny bit: Twitter doesn't need to decide. If someone in a major power, such as a G20 member country, is in a government position, they are a world leader. And because things are always contested, that same category can be extended to high-ranking members of opposition. I'm going to take you at your word and accept that world leaders rarely tell the truth: so they should ALL get the same treatment then. But instead of stamping their output with just "fact-check this", why not unilaterally label all of it with: "may contain lies, omissions and half-truths"?
- DavidVoid 6y ago
  Use * text * (but without spaces) to italicize text btw.
- dspillett 6y ago
  > Is it really _censorship_ to fact check tweets? Not at all. Free speech in both cases. He is free to say what he thinks, we (us as individuals, Twitter as a company, everyone) are free to say we think he is talking complete and utter balderdash if that is what we think. A president trying to silence Twitter's statement about what he has said by intimidating them is an attempt at censorship though.
NicoJuicy 6y ago
Reaching Idiocracy is a pretty big understatement. To be honest, it feels that the president should have a babysitter, if you look at his constant tweet tirades.
- chartpath 6y ago
  What kind of oversight could even work though? We have the Queen in my neck of the woods but that is not exactly accountable and never does anything to check poor governance and only rips off taxpayers. We also have non-confidence votes which can bring down a Prime Minister, and it seems to work (in minority governments at least). How can a separation of powers approach still check itself? Like different term limits, VP powers, congressional army? Banning factions or breaking up parties that get too big, banning private donors? Rooting for the American experiment to get sorted!
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    You can’t have hard rules to achieve this. In the end it’s a matter of integrity and ethics to guide actions. You can’t write that down as an algorithm. Unfortunately it seems the system is set up for psychopaths who don’t know no limits as long as they can profit.
  - ISL 6y ago
    The difficulty here is that Congress has, for various reasons, not stepped up to do its job. There are millions of people better-qualified to do the job of President, but a sufficient number of Congresspeople have decided, for reasons I only partially fathom, that Trump is somehow preferable to Pence. Responsibility for America's debacles, and now, in part, the death of a hundred-thousand people, lies at McConnell's feet, not Trump's. Trump's lack of qualification for the job has been on display since before he took office. McConnell, on the other hand, clearly knows exactly what he is doing.
  - zozbot234 6y ago
    > What kind of oversight could even work though? Some New Confucians and Neo-Reactionaries argue that this kind of basic oversight should be provided by a novel council/board of "wise scholars", or people with real intellectual accomplishments which are not under serious dispute-- appointed with very long, perhaps lifetime terms. There's really no equivalent to this in the U.S. other than perhaps the Supreme Court, but the House of Lords in the U.K. is quite similar and does not currently have much of a political role, so it could be repurposed with relative ease.
pinopinopino 6y ago
>Idiocracy Or how they call it on the right side: Clown World. Guess nobody is happy with the current affairs.
- WaxProlix 6y ago
  From what I've seen, "clown world" can refer to perceived injustices like white women choosing black men as partners more than the incompetence or silliness of our president (or other world leadership).
  - pinopinopino 6y ago
    Of course, it is colored by the viewpoints of the other side. But there are also connections, like the idiotic emphasis on consuming. And they laugh about the incompetence of Bernie Sanders (getting cucked all the time!) or "Creepy" Joey. Same abstraction, other implementation.
bilbo0s 6y ago
What's sad is that the movie was meant as a joke. (I think?) And here we are? How did this happen?
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  This is not the first time that what was thought of as satire was actually an astute observation. This happened a lot under communism. A lot of jokes were just plain facts.
- pinopinopino 6y ago
  The rabbit hole goes deeper. If the movie describes reality then it does it pretty well and then apparently reality can be described as a joke. If the movie satires reality and we cannot discern the satire from reality then reality was already a joke to begin with, we just didn't know. The question is not how did we get here or how did this happen? But how do we get out of here? :)
dathinab 6y ago
> On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. True, but the think is Twitter did not censor his post. They added a "fact-check" hint that just pointed out that he was speaking made up thinks containing a link to an informative article. This is very different to censorship. People can still freely decided to believe him, or read the facts and don't or read the facts and still believe him. It's comparable with threaten to shutdown or control printed press when a specific new letter complained that what he says is complete makeup and wrong.
- nautilus12 6y ago
  For people that treat a "Fact Check" as an automatic "filter out this information" (I think there is a huge subset of the population that does, people don't thoughtfully take into account Fact Checks, they just treat them as a rebuke), it has the net effect of censorship. The move by twitter is kind of dumb in that sense because the population has already polarized into groups that think anything trump says is false, and those who do not. They are just basically putting an official seal on which side of that argument they land.
  - shadowgovt 6y ago
    Allowing him to post on their service with a counterpoint stitched right underneath his misinformation is far preferable for him to alternatives they could choose. Those alternatives would be "censorship" (in some sense; not any real legal sense). This is not censorship.
    - username90 6y ago
      What is the difference between this and the top tweet response posting the same response as always happened before with his tweets? The only thing we learned is that Twitter is no longer even trying to be impartial.
      - shadowgovt 6y ago
101404 6y ago
I think that's just symptoms of the real problem: the extremely profit oriented media industry. Senselessly creating and reporting on "conflicts" and "scandals" makes them the most money. Trump is just playing their game.
- zentiggr 6y ago
  Trump plays no game but his own. There is no world to him except what he perceives, even more so than 99.9% of people his own self-supporting delusions drive his entire existence. No one can puncture that bubble, at least not that I've seen.
  - 101404 6y ago
    I am surprised how people can still have this simplistic, lazy view. Including most "journalists". Anyways, by downvoting you already showed that you don't care about open discussions. Good luck with that.
    - zentiggr 6y ago
      Simplistic? I've been reading investigative reports of his very narcissistic, unstable behavior for decades. He's no different in office, just far more visible. He's not playing a media game when he praises every network that talks him up, and calls everyone else Never Trumpers, conspiracies, and fake news. That's a narcissist who can't accept ever being wrong. Have you ever seen how he waffles and grabs at any straw any time he's told to his face that something he said or tweeted was blatantly wrong? It's very obvious, diagnosable behavior. Not simplistic at all. More like all too well informed, and honestly afraid of what his personality cult might do even beyond the damage they've already caused.
      - 101404 6y ago
        The "Trump personality cult" that I see most often is the one you practice. Kind of a "reverse cult", where you are so focused on "not following" a person that it hinders rational thought. Pretty interesting phenomenon.
nojito 6y ago
>On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. Education != censorship. The tweets were never deleted. This is exactly what we need today when everyone blindly trusts what they read online because they like the person who says it and tell their audience that anyone saying differently is lying
zentiggr 6y ago
I find it incredibly easy to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing him up. It started decades before the 2016 illegal voter claims, and has been a flagrant, constant, malignant part of his personality since childhood. Research the constant streams of lawsuits and other allegations against him, his companies, and many of his closer associates. And then wonder how someone can screw up so badly that they run a casino into bankruptcy. A money printing factory, and it was so badly managed that it folded. And this is who the "disaffected" voted in. I only hope that this little episode is the shock to the system that wakes up enough people. But there's too many Trumpers for me to think that's happened.
- whatshisface 6y ago
  Has there ever been a time in history where politicians weren't slimy lying weasels? I feel like a lot of people came of age during the Obama era, which had a friendly media, and never realized the truth about how presidents usually are until we got to the Trump era and the media started doing its job again. Does anyone remember how we got in to Iraq?
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    I came of age with Reagan in office, I've seen plenty of politicians. How many other presidents have had a lifetime of lying publicly and being caught at it over and over for decades, and still lying and spouting obviously false BS, over and over, throughout a lifetime? Every other prior president that I have any knowledge of their lives prior to office, has never displayed the level of inability to see anything but what they want to, and an inability to see facts and corrections as anything but personal attacks. He is a classic narcissist, unlike anyone that's ever held the office before. Johnson is the only other one I can think of who ever reached near this level of unstable behavior. > the truth about how presidents usually are No, Trump is unique in the history of the office. Bush doesn't hold a candle to Trump's personality disorder. Saying so fails to acknowledge just how critically self-absorbed and malignant his behavior is.
nkingsy 6y ago
I've been watching Mrs. America, and it does a great job of showing an earlier, developing version of wedge politics leading up to the Reagan revolution. Where we are now feels like the inevitable conclusion to the process of eschewing norms for political gain.
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  “Where we are now feels like the inevitable conclusion to the process of eschewing norms for political gain.“ Agreed. Congress should be ashamed of themselves.
zozbot234 6y ago
I couldn't disagree more-- with the "slowly" part, that is. As some people might say, "there are no brakes on the Trump train". Enjoy the show!
asabjorn 6y ago
> the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up [to those voting down: these are convicted cases of voter fraud. If you are in favor of fact-checking these cases demonstrate the core question: who deserve this power?] Let's fact check these fact checkers. Here are some cases convicted in court of election fraud, a lot of them involve fraudulent use of absentee ballots https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/pacei-voterfraudcases.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p... And there is also a problem with the chain of trust, since 28 million mail-in ballots went missing in the last four elections: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil... Or what about the mail carrier recently charged with meddling with the ballot requests in his chain of trust? https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Pendleton-County-mail-carrier-charged-with-altering-absentee-ballot-requests-570777221.html https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Pendleton-County-mail-carr... And if you think politicians would never cheat, a Pennsylvania election official just plead guilty to stuffing the ballot box. He was paid by candidates that I believe won: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/21/doj-democrats-paid-pennsylvania-election-officials-to-stuff-ballot-box/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/21/doj-democrats-...
- mgkimsal 6y ago
  "Although there is no evidence that the millions of missing ballots were used fraudulently, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which compiled the public data provided from the Election Assistance Commission, says that the sheer volume of them raises serious doubts about election security." So... no evidence of fraudulent use. 28 million out of how many? "almost 1 in 5". so roughly 150 million ballots mailed out over multiple years and elections, and < 20% are not returned. Or something else? What does "unaccounted for" mean? They knew they were mailed out. All I can divine from that is 'not returned'. "There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud." Yet, right above that in the article, it says of the 28 million - "no evidence of fraud". How many more mail-in ballots do you need to get evidence of fraud? 200 million? 300 million? What is the insinuation? People are mailing their ballots back, but they're getting "lost"? It seems that when there's evidence found - as in, criminal investigations turn up fraud and people are charged and prosecuted - "there's evidence of fraud!". When no evidence is found... that's also evidence that it's going on, but not discovered yet. That's how I read this hysteria over 'mail in ballots'.
JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago
The most actionable decision one can make is to vote for candidates who don't make us test these questions. Academically, it's somewhat intriguing, but in terms of actual leadership, there are more pressing issues. (Unless your wedge issue is testing political free speech by government officials on private platforms. Then, by all means, have at it).
caseysoftware 6y ago
Idiocracy is premised on the idea that dumb people have more kids than smart people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA Based on the positive reaction to the "birthrates are at all time low!" article last week, it looks like most of the HN crowd is happy about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246734
Communitivity 6y ago
Trivia bit: The writer behind Idiocracy feels the same way, saying he never expected it to become a documentary. Details in https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/270642-idiocracy-writer-i-never-expected-my-movie-to-become-a https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/270642-idi...
user982 6y ago
Compared to our present reality Idiocracy was actually utopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZOZjHjT5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZOZjHjT5E
mindslight 6y ago
President Camacho delegated to experts, led people to keep them cohesive, and actually solved a problem. No, this demented clown is something else - a manifestation of hyperpolarizing social media driven by longstanding authoritarianism. It seems that absolutely nothing matters as long as the "other side" is upset, even while it hurts everyone. Responding to a public health emergency shouldn't even be a political issue, but it's been dragged into this post-truth realm where everything is up for debate. And so the Party continues to line up behind a "leader" that led us straight to catastrophe. Meanwhile 100,000 Americans have died in the real world, with the economy in shambles for the next year as we're stuck distancing.
smt88 6y ago
> It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016 No, it started long before that. Trump's political profile came about from being the most famous advocate of Birtherism[1] -- promoting the idea that Barack Obama is not American and demanding his birth certificate. He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls by saying that undocumented Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers[2]. Trump has been a conspiracy theorist for years now. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories#Born_in_Kenya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp... 2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/...
- mistermann 6y ago
  > He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls by saying that undocumented Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers[2]. He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls while saying... If you use "by" it implies causation, something no one is able to know, whereas "while" accurately points out that the two events only occurred simultaneously. Now I'm not sure if you were just writing casually, and I fully expect that now that I've pointed out this "minor" technical shortcoming in your statement you will see my point, and I'm in no way implying that you had a strong intent to imply a cause and effect relationship between these two events...but please don't underestimate the potential significance the aggregate effect millions of seemingly minor slip-ups like this (this is only one example, and only one form) can have on the collective consciousness (aggregate of the internal mental models of all people) of the members of national and global societies when individual members of those societies are subjected to it over a long period of time. If you now think about it, it may seem like you "know" how large of an effect it has, but you actually have literally no way of knowing with certainty and accuracy what the actual effect is. The world is incredibly complex, filled with all sorts of randomness and incredibly counter-intuitive events, but this is not how we perceive it. We perceive the world as extremely structured and organized, as if mostly everything "adds up", but only because our brain evolved to provide this illusion to our consciousness. This "good enough" illusion rose to the top over all other evolutionary paths that were tried, under the set of conditions in existence at the time they evolved. If conditions (variables) changed significantly, would we be shocked if a formerly highly trustworthy ML/AI model started producing less accurate predictions? I don't think so. Then why should we be surprised if the biological AI in our minds exhibits similar behavior when the inputs undergo a fundamental change? To me, this would be the equivalent of believing in magic of some sort. People's (that includes you and me) perception of the world is formed based on the information they consume - all of it. It may seem (clear as day, and in full UHD+ resolution) that your personal worldview is based solely on strict evidence and logic, but the fact of the matter is, this is not how the human mind works. Sure, some minds are better at it than others, but the exact degree to which that is true is also unknowable, and making judgements on relative capability are subject to the very same phenomenon I point out. I will wrap this up with a challenge: for the next month, read not just the news, but also all the general conversations and individual comments in social media forums from your normal perspective, and then also from this perspective. Carefully consider(!) when people are discussing a complicated, massively multivariate issue, whether the discreet observations and assertions that people make are actually knowably true, "first-principle" facts, or if they are actually predictions produced by an amazingly sophisticated AI model. This will not be easy, at all...it will be very difficult and require extreme discipline (you are literally fighting against nature), but the results may be incredibly interesting (perhaps one of the most interesting things you have encountered in years), if you are willing(!) to give it a serious try.
pipingdog 6y ago
Except that President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho had the capacity to realize there was someone smarter than he was and appointed him to solve the problem at hand.
simias 6y ago
I understand what you mean but I'm always frustrated when I see Idiocracy brought up in these discussions. Idiocracy is fine if you view it as a light satirical comedy but if you take it seriously to talk about politics it has very sinister undertones. For one thing it's extremely classist, throughout the movie popular culture is seen as fodder for dumb people while high culture if for clever people. Beyond that it also says that, effectively, dumb people and poor people are the same thing (as exemplified by the "white trash" segment at the start of the movie) and that dumb, poor people are bound to breed dump, poor people (and apparently they do that a lot) while clever people would breed other clever people (but they don't do it because... reasons). So social determinism taken to the limit. I mean just look at this intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E What are examples of clever people? Darwin, Beethoven and Da Vince. Examples of "degeneracy"? A girl in skimpy clothes, wrestling and a... woman with boxing gloves? Because clearly "panem et circenses" is a novel concept. Then we go to say "with no natural predators to thin the herd, we began to simply began to reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species". So we're now talking full-on eugenics. Also Beethoven was well known for fending packs of wolves in his youth, proving his evolutionary superiority. And I'm this point I'm literally one minute into the movie and I could go on and on and on. At best it's elitist, at worst it's much darker than that. If you like the movie as a funny comedy then be my guest, but please stop bringing it up in political discussions. If anything it's a symptom of the very thing you're decrying: a dumbed down, unnuanced caricature of political discourse.
dec0dedab0de 6y ago
I mostly agree, and I for one would welcome the rock as president, so maybe I'm part of the problem. However, any time I catch myself thinking that the idiots have taken over[1] I am reminded of this XKCD[2] from over 10 years ago, and I try to knock myself down a peg [1] NOFX reference, I normally wouldnt refer to anyone as an idiot, especially on HN which is where I come to feel dumb by comparison. [2] https://xkcd.com/603/ https://xkcd.com/603/

thatwasunusual 6y ago

> On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. Is it really _censorship_ to fact check tweets? I mean, Twitter hasn't _removed_ (i.e. censored) any tweets from Trump, just added an annotation.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
ecmascript 6y ago
No but it's literally censorship to remove people from Twitter because they use the correct gender pronoun for a biological sex. Where are the fact-checking in all those cases, I wonder?
- nkkollaw 6y ago
  Good point. Leftists think you're misgendering someone who thinks he's a woman if you call her a biological man, normal people see it the opposite way (that doesn't mean you need to not be nice and call her "she", but actually thinking one can change biological sex is insane). That's why everyone should be able to say whatever they want, and people can discuss the merits of what's been said.
Ididntdothis 6y ago
“Fact checking” is a nice exercise and somewhat helpful but a lot of people say half baked or stupid things all the time, including myself. Part of a healthy discourse is the ability to say questionable things and having a discussion. Once you start fact checking where does it end? A lot of people have different views on different things and there is no clear right or wrong. What I would like to see is that the US political system starts fact checking itself and stop spreading misinformation. This should be done out of self respect.
- _never_k 6y ago
  >Once you start fact checking where does it end? With all the facts being checked?
  - whatshisface 6y ago
    I imagine he's suggesting that it will end with all the opinions being checked.
    - dspillett 6y ago
      Nothing wrong with that, particularly if those opinions are communicated in a way that makes them look like statements of fact. Someone being able to say "I think your opinion is wrong" is no less a freedom of speech matter than someone being able to state an opinion in the first place. Freedom of speech does not, or at least it should not, give special privilege or protection to the first person who speaks.
  - Ididntdothis 6y ago
    The line between fact and opinion can become very blurry. Whatever you do there will be a lot of issues that can’t be fact checked.
  - heurist 6y ago
    This is a tough position for Twitter because they now have to fact check practically all of his tweets. Any tweet not checked will be seen either as tacit endorsement by Trump's political opponents or 'undeniable truth' by some portion of their users regardless of validity.
deleted 6y ago
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nkkollaw 6y ago
Yes, of course it is. Most people will all of a sudden ignore someone's message. I have no idea why anyone would argue in favor of Twitter. When has it become required to be an expert in the field to be granted the privilege of leaving a comment on a forum? When has it become unacceptable to lie? People lie all the time. Advertisements lie to you, politicians lie to you, your mom lies to you. It's really annoying that the truth police is going to go and check your tweets or comment—even if you ignore the fact that the line between facts and opinions isn't always easy to see. Even facts like Taiwan being its own country or part of China or the Armenian genocide can be denied, and people should be able to say that—and perhaps rightfully get shit for that, but still be able to say it. We're going back to the Middle Ages, where if you say Earth isn't flat or God doesn't exist (replace with global warming isn't caused by humans, Covid-19 is man-made), you're executed. Sad.
- mplanchard 6y ago
  There’s a difference between you or I saying something incorrect (willfully or not) on the Internet and a world leader doing the same. Twitter already distinguishes famous people, world leaders, etc. in a variety of ways. It seems reasonable that this would be one of them, given that the potential reach and impact of anything they say far, far exceeds that of your average Tweeter.
  - nkkollaw 6y ago
    Is there, though? Why should Twitter be in charge of deciding who's a world leader or famous enough to get checked? Who is Twitter to fact-check world leaders? When world leaders rarely tell the truth, how can anyone realistically think that such a system could even work, even if it made sense?
    - bostik 6y ago
      Well, here's the funny bit: Twitter doesn't need to decide. If someone in a major power, such as a G20 member country, is in a government position, they are a world leader. And because things are always contested, that same category can be extended to high-ranking members of opposition. I'm going to take you at your word and accept that world leaders rarely tell the truth: so they should ALL get the same treatment then. But instead of stamping their output with just "fact-check this", why not unilaterally label all of it with: "may contain lies, omissions and half-truths"?
DavidVoid 6y ago
Use * text * (but without spaces) to italicize text btw.
dspillett 6y ago
> Is it really _censorship_ to fact check tweets? Not at all. Free speech in both cases. He is free to say what he thinks, we (us as individuals, Twitter as a company, everyone) are free to say we think he is talking complete and utter balderdash if that is what we think. A president trying to silence Twitter's statement about what he has said by intimidating them is an attempt at censorship though.

NicoJuicy 6y ago

Reaching Idiocracy is a pretty big understatement. To be honest, it feels that the president should have a babysitter, if you look at his constant tweet tirades.

chartpath 6y ago
What kind of oversight could even work though? We have the Queen in my neck of the woods but that is not exactly accountable and never does anything to check poor governance and only rips off taxpayers. We also have non-confidence votes which can bring down a Prime Minister, and it seems to work (in minority governments at least). How can a separation of powers approach still check itself? Like different term limits, VP powers, congressional army? Banning factions or breaking up parties that get too big, banning private donors? Rooting for the American experiment to get sorted!
- Ididntdothis 6y ago
  You can’t have hard rules to achieve this. In the end it’s a matter of integrity and ethics to guide actions. You can’t write that down as an algorithm. Unfortunately it seems the system is set up for psychopaths who don’t know no limits as long as they can profit.
- ISL 6y ago
  The difficulty here is that Congress has, for various reasons, not stepped up to do its job. There are millions of people better-qualified to do the job of President, but a sufficient number of Congresspeople have decided, for reasons I only partially fathom, that Trump is somehow preferable to Pence. Responsibility for America's debacles, and now, in part, the death of a hundred-thousand people, lies at McConnell's feet, not Trump's. Trump's lack of qualification for the job has been on display since before he took office. McConnell, on the other hand, clearly knows exactly what he is doing.
- zozbot234 6y ago
  > What kind of oversight could even work though? Some New Confucians and Neo-Reactionaries argue that this kind of basic oversight should be provided by a novel council/board of "wise scholars", or people with real intellectual accomplishments which are not under serious dispute-- appointed with very long, perhaps lifetime terms. There's really no equivalent to this in the U.S. other than perhaps the Supreme Court, but the House of Lords in the U.K. is quite similar and does not currently have much of a political role, so it could be repurposed with relative ease.

pinopinopino 6y ago

>Idiocracy Or how they call it on the right side: Clown World. Guess nobody is happy with the current affairs.

WaxProlix 6y ago
From what I've seen, "clown world" can refer to perceived injustices like white women choosing black men as partners more than the incompetence or silliness of our president (or other world leadership).
- pinopinopino 6y ago
  Of course, it is colored by the viewpoints of the other side. But there are also connections, like the idiotic emphasis on consuming. And they laugh about the incompetence of Bernie Sanders (getting cucked all the time!) or "Creepy" Joey. Same abstraction, other implementation.

bilbo0s 6y ago

What's sad is that the movie was meant as a joke. (I think?) And here we are? How did this happen?

Ididntdothis 6y ago
This is not the first time that what was thought of as satire was actually an astute observation. This happened a lot under communism. A lot of jokes were just plain facts.
pinopinopino 6y ago
The rabbit hole goes deeper. If the movie describes reality then it does it pretty well and then apparently reality can be described as a joke. If the movie satires reality and we cannot discern the satire from reality then reality was already a joke to begin with, we just didn't know. The question is not how did we get here or how did this happen? But how do we get out of here? :)

dathinab 6y ago

> On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. True, but the think is Twitter did not censor his post. They added a "fact-check" hint that just pointed out that he was speaking made up thinks containing a link to an informative article. This is very different to censorship. People can still freely decided to believe him, or read the facts and don't or read the facts and still believe him. It's comparable with threaten to shutdown or control printed press when a specific new letter complained that what he says is complete makeup and wrong.

nautilus12 6y ago
For people that treat a "Fact Check" as an automatic "filter out this information" (I think there is a huge subset of the population that does, people don't thoughtfully take into account Fact Checks, they just treat them as a rebuke), it has the net effect of censorship. The move by twitter is kind of dumb in that sense because the population has already polarized into groups that think anything trump says is false, and those who do not. They are just basically putting an official seal on which side of that argument they land.
- shadowgovt 6y ago
  Allowing him to post on their service with a counterpoint stitched right underneath his misinformation is far preferable for him to alternatives they could choose. Those alternatives would be "censorship" (in some sense; not any real legal sense). This is not censorship.
  - username90 6y ago
    What is the difference between this and the top tweet response posting the same response as always happened before with his tweets? The only thing we learned is that Twitter is no longer even trying to be impartial.
    - shadowgovt 6y ago

101404 6y ago

I think that's just symptoms of the real problem: the extremely profit oriented media industry. Senselessly creating and reporting on "conflicts" and "scandals" makes them the most money. Trump is just playing their game.

zentiggr 6y ago
Trump plays no game but his own. There is no world to him except what he perceives, even more so than 99.9% of people his own self-supporting delusions drive his entire existence. No one can puncture that bubble, at least not that I've seen.
- 101404 6y ago
  I am surprised how people can still have this simplistic, lazy view. Including most "journalists". Anyways, by downvoting you already showed that you don't care about open discussions. Good luck with that.
  - zentiggr 6y ago
    Simplistic? I've been reading investigative reports of his very narcissistic, unstable behavior for decades. He's no different in office, just far more visible. He's not playing a media game when he praises every network that talks him up, and calls everyone else Never Trumpers, conspiracies, and fake news. That's a narcissist who can't accept ever being wrong. Have you ever seen how he waffles and grabs at any straw any time he's told to his face that something he said or tweeted was blatantly wrong? It's very obvious, diagnosable behavior. Not simplistic at all. More like all too well informed, and honestly afraid of what his personality cult might do even beyond the damage they've already caused.
    - 101404 6y ago
      The "Trump personality cult" that I see most often is the one you practice. Kind of a "reverse cult", where you are so focused on "not following" a person that it hinders rational thought. Pretty interesting phenomenon.

nojito 6y ago

>On the one hand I don’t think we should leave it up to companies like Twitter to censor things. Education != censorship. The tweets were never deleted. This is exactly what we need today when everyone blindly trusts what they read online because they like the person who says it and tell their audience that anyone saying differently is lying

zentiggr 6y ago

I find it incredibly easy to believe that the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing him up. It started decades before the 2016 illegal voter claims, and has been a flagrant, constant, malignant part of his personality since childhood. Research the constant streams of lawsuits and other allegations against him, his companies, and many of his closer associates. And then wonder how someone can screw up so badly that they run a casino into bankruptcy. A money printing factory, and it was so badly managed that it folded. And this is who the "disaffected" voted in. I only hope that this little episode is the shock to the system that wakes up enough people. But there's too many Trumpers for me to think that's happened.

whatshisface 6y ago
Has there ever been a time in history where politicians weren't slimy lying weasels? I feel like a lot of people came of age during the Obama era, which had a friendly media, and never realized the truth about how presidents usually are until we got to the Trump era and the media started doing its job again. Does anyone remember how we got in to Iraq?
- zentiggr 6y ago
  I came of age with Reagan in office, I've seen plenty of politicians. How many other presidents have had a lifetime of lying publicly and being caught at it over and over for decades, and still lying and spouting obviously false BS, over and over, throughout a lifetime? Every other prior president that I have any knowledge of their lives prior to office, has never displayed the level of inability to see anything but what they want to, and an inability to see facts and corrections as anything but personal attacks. He is a classic narcissist, unlike anyone that's ever held the office before. Johnson is the only other one I can think of who ever reached near this level of unstable behavior. > the truth about how presidents usually are No, Trump is unique in the history of the office. Bush doesn't hold a candle to Trump's personality disorder. Saying so fails to acknowledge just how critically self-absorbed and malignant his behavior is.

nkingsy 6y ago

I've been watching Mrs. America, and it does a great job of showing an earlier, developing version of wedge politics leading up to the Reagan revolution. Where we are now feels like the inevitable conclusion to the process of eschewing norms for political gain.

Ididntdothis 6y ago
“Where we are now feels like the inevitable conclusion to the process of eschewing norms for political gain.“ Agreed. Congress should be ashamed of themselves.

zozbot234 6y ago

I couldn't disagree more-- with the "slowly" part, that is. As some people might say, "there are no brakes on the Trump train". Enjoy the show!

asabjorn 6y ago

> the president is constantly claiming things without any evidence backing up [to those voting down: these are convicted cases of voter fraud. If you are in favor of fact-checking these cases demonstrate the core question: who deserve this power?] Let's fact check these fact checkers. Here are some cases convicted in court of election fraud, a lot of them involve fraudulent use of absentee ballots https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/pacei-voterfraudcases.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/sites/whitehouse.gov/files/docs/p... And there is also a problem with the chain of trust, since 28 million mail-in ballots went missing in the last four elections: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_million_mail-in_ballots_went_missing_in_last_four_elections_143033.html https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2020/04/24/28_mil... Or what about the mail carrier recently charged with meddling with the ballot requests in his chain of trust? https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Pendleton-County-mail-carrier-charged-with-altering-absentee-ballot-requests-570777221.html https://www.whsv.com/content/news/Pendleton-County-mail-carr... And if you think politicians would never cheat, a Pennsylvania election official just plead guilty to stuffing the ballot box. He was paid by candidates that I believe won: https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/21/doj-democrats-paid-pennsylvania-election-officials-to-stuff-ballot-box/ https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2020/05/21/doj-democrats-...

mgkimsal 6y ago
"Although there is no evidence that the millions of missing ballots were used fraudulently, the Public Interest Legal Foundation, which compiled the public data provided from the Election Assistance Commission, says that the sheer volume of them raises serious doubts about election security." So... no evidence of fraudulent use. 28 million out of how many? "almost 1 in 5". so roughly 150 million ballots mailed out over multiple years and elections, and < 20% are not returned. Or something else? What does "unaccounted for" mean? They knew they were mailed out. All I can divine from that is 'not returned'. "There’s little doubt that as the number of mail-in ballots increases, so does fraud." Yet, right above that in the article, it says of the 28 million - "no evidence of fraud". How many more mail-in ballots do you need to get evidence of fraud? 200 million? 300 million? What is the insinuation? People are mailing their ballots back, but they're getting "lost"? It seems that when there's evidence found - as in, criminal investigations turn up fraud and people are charged and prosecuted - "there's evidence of fraud!". When no evidence is found... that's also evidence that it's going on, but not discovered yet. That's how I read this hysteria over 'mail in ballots'.

JMTQp8lwXL 6y ago

The most actionable decision one can make is to vote for candidates who don't make us test these questions. Academically, it's somewhat intriguing, but in terms of actual leadership, there are more pressing issues. (Unless your wedge issue is testing political free speech by government officials on private platforms. Then, by all means, have at it).

caseysoftware 6y ago

Idiocracy is premised on the idea that dumb people have more kids than smart people: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA Based on the positive reaction to the "birthrates are at all time low!" article last week, it looks like most of the HN crowd is happy about it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246734 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23246734

Communitivity 6y ago

Trivia bit: The writer behind Idiocracy feels the same way, saying he never expected it to become a documentary. Details in https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/270642-idiocracy-writer-i-never-expected-my-movie-to-become-a https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/in-the-know/270642-idi...

user982 6y ago

Compared to our present reality Idiocracy was actually utopic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZOZjHjT5E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OmZOZjHjT5E

mindslight 6y ago

President Camacho delegated to experts, led people to keep them cohesive, and actually solved a problem. No, this demented clown is something else - a manifestation of hyperpolarizing social media driven by longstanding authoritarianism. It seems that absolutely nothing matters as long as the "other side" is upset, even while it hurts everyone. Responding to a public health emergency shouldn't even be a political issue, but it's been dragged into this post-truth realm where everything is up for debate. And so the Party continues to line up behind a "leader" that led us straight to catastrophe. Meanwhile 100,000 Americans have died in the real world, with the economy in shambles for the next year as we're stuck distancing.

smt88 6y ago

> It started with the claims of millions of illegal voters in 2016 No, it started long before that. Trump's political profile came about from being the most famous advocate of Birtherism[1] -- promoting the idea that Barack Obama is not American and demanding his birth certificate. He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls by saying that undocumented Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers[2]. Trump has been a conspiracy theorist for years now. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories#Born_in_Kenya https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_consp... 2. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/08/donald-trumps-false-comments-connecting-mexican-immigrants-and-crime/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/fact-checker/wp/2015/07/...

mistermann 6y ago
> He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls by saying that undocumented Mexican immigrants are rapists and murderers[2]. He later reached a plurality of Republican primary polls while saying... If you use "by" it implies causation, something no one is able to know, whereas "while" accurately points out that the two events only occurred simultaneously. Now I'm not sure if you were just writing casually, and I fully expect that now that I've pointed out this "minor" technical shortcoming in your statement you will see my point, and I'm in no way implying that you had a strong intent to imply a cause and effect relationship between these two events...but please don't underestimate the potential significance the aggregate effect millions of seemingly minor slip-ups like this (this is only one example, and only one form) can have on the collective consciousness (aggregate of the internal mental models of all people) of the members of national and global societies when individual members of those societies are subjected to it over a long period of time. If you now think about it, it may seem like you "know" how large of an effect it has, but you actually have literally no way of knowing with certainty and accuracy what the actual effect is. The world is incredibly complex, filled with all sorts of randomness and incredibly counter-intuitive events, but this is not how we perceive it. We perceive the world as extremely structured and organized, as if mostly everything "adds up", but only because our brain evolved to provide this illusion to our consciousness. This "good enough" illusion rose to the top over all other evolutionary paths that were tried, under the set of conditions in existence at the time they evolved. If conditions (variables) changed significantly, would we be shocked if a formerly highly trustworthy ML/AI model started producing less accurate predictions? I don't think so. Then why should we be surprised if the biological AI in our minds exhibits similar behavior when the inputs undergo a fundamental change? To me, this would be the equivalent of believing in magic of some sort. People's (that includes you and me) perception of the world is formed based on the information they consume - all of it. It may seem (clear as day, and in full UHD+ resolution) that your personal worldview is based solely on strict evidence and logic, but the fact of the matter is, this is not how the human mind works. Sure, some minds are better at it than others, but the exact degree to which that is true is also unknowable, and making judgements on relative capability are subject to the very same phenomenon I point out. I will wrap this up with a challenge: for the next month, read not just the news, but also all the general conversations and individual comments in social media forums from your normal perspective, and then also from this perspective. Carefully consider(!) when people are discussing a complicated, massively multivariate issue, whether the discreet observations and assertions that people make are actually knowably true, "first-principle" facts, or if they are actually predictions produced by an amazingly sophisticated AI model. This will not be easy, at all...it will be very difficult and require extreme discipline (you are literally fighting against nature), but the results may be incredibly interesting (perhaps one of the most interesting things you have encountered in years), if you are willing(!) to give it a serious try.

pipingdog 6y ago

Except that President Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho had the capacity to realize there was someone smarter than he was and appointed him to solve the problem at hand.

simias 6y ago

I understand what you mean but I'm always frustrated when I see Idiocracy brought up in these discussions. Idiocracy is fine if you view it as a light satirical comedy but if you take it seriously to talk about politics it has very sinister undertones. For one thing it's extremely classist, throughout the movie popular culture is seen as fodder for dumb people while high culture if for clever people. Beyond that it also says that, effectively, dumb people and poor people are the same thing (as exemplified by the "white trash" segment at the start of the movie) and that dumb, poor people are bound to breed dump, poor people (and apparently they do that a lot) while clever people would breed other clever people (but they don't do it because... reasons). So social determinism taken to the limit. I mean just look at this intro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwZ0ZUy7P3E What are examples of clever people? Darwin, Beethoven and Da Vince. Examples of "degeneracy"? A girl in skimpy clothes, wrestling and a... woman with boxing gloves? Because clearly "panem et circenses" is a novel concept. Then we go to say "with no natural predators to thin the herd, we began to simply began to reward those who reproduced the most and left the intelligent to become an endangered species". So we're now talking full-on eugenics. Also Beethoven was well known for fending packs of wolves in his youth, proving his evolutionary superiority. And I'm this point I'm literally one minute into the movie and I could go on and on and on. At best it's elitist, at worst it's much darker than that. If you like the movie as a funny comedy then be my guest, but please stop bringing it up in political discussions. If anything it's a symptom of the very thing you're decrying: a dumbed down, unnuanced caricature of political discourse.

dec0dedab0de 6y ago

I mostly agree, and I for one would welcome the rock as president, so maybe I'm part of the problem. However, any time I catch myself thinking that the idiots have taken over[1] I am reminded of this XKCD[2] from over 10 years ago, and I try to knock myself down a peg [1] NOFX reference, I normally wouldnt refer to anyone as an idiot, especially on HN which is where I come to feel dumb by comparison. [2] https://xkcd.com/603/ https://xkcd.com/603/