Big Tech Twits Get Dumber and Corrupter!

[Kalbear]

The idea of using debates to help people decide things is such bullshit and we should have figured that out at least with nixon/Kennedy back in the 1960s, where those listening on the radio overwhelmingly thought Nixon won but those who watched on TV thought Kennedy dominated.

Debates aren't about the subject. They're about the debaters. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

10 hours ago, baxus said:

You really don't see the problem with this train of thought? You really don't see the danger in labelling a part of the society as despicable. Pretty ironic that you mention nazis when they did the same to Jews (and others) back in the day.

 Forgive me you’re advocacy sounds like “The Nazis say Jews are bad, Jews say Nazis are bad, the only solution is to say no one is bad ever.”

Like as much you may feel discomforted by it people are going to ostracize others in some fashion for some reason—might as well make the mechanisms to do so and reasons for so is the most humane.
Like there’s a difference between saying someone is bad for being a Jew and saying they’re bad because they scream Hitler did nothing wrong.

10 hours ago, baxus said:

No, very high percentage of US population is not denying evolution and climate change because of "fetishization of neutrality", it's because higher education is so expensive most of the population can't dream of it and because very small minority of your population ever travels abroad. Guess what? The same happens in other countries in similar conditions.

The problem doesn’t come about mainly due lack of access higher education  it’s mainly comes to the fact in biology classes especially in southern states creationist are allowed to promote ‘intelligent design’ or skip over any specific talk of evolution. Usually the justification is wanting to keep things neutral.

10 hours ago, baxus said:

And where in the US do you actually see this "fetishization of neutrality"? Where do you have people trying to reconcile anyone? Who calls for a more rational approach and civilised debate? If anything, "fetishisation of extremes" would be more to blame.

Oh another instance is the media’s constant platforming of climate change deniers who’ve no qualifications or expertise on what they’re talking about against people against who’ve actual qualifications and expertise to instruct on the topic.

Like the debate in a America should have been more national investment in nuclear energy v public transit and walkable cities, not whether it’s a trick by the “elites”  to enslave everyone vs it’s an actual problem.

[baxus]

20 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Also how does one have an honest debate with someone who is willing to completely misrepresent the position of people on the other side. If they are living in another plane of reality there is no middle ground. 

But they are not living in another plane of reality. They are living right alongside you and me and everyone.

We can dismiss them or we can talk to (some of) them. If you pick the former, then you can't really say they don't want to listen since you don't want to talk to them in the first place.

19 hours ago, mormont said:

This is some wild, wild stuff.

The Nazis did a little more to the Jews and other than saying they were 'despicable' or complaining that they had unacceptable or unfounded beliefs. The comparison here is, in itself, pretty unacceptable. It's a reverse Godwin's Law. You don't get to compare people to Jews under the Nazis unless they are actually being subjected to comparable treatment.

Yeah, you need to go back and read what I wrote, not what you projected.

Nazis started their persecution of Jews (and others) by dismissing them as being lower forms of life. That's how they "explained" why they "had" to do what they did.

And yeah, you don't get to tell me what I get and what I don't get to do. If I broke any board rules, tell me when and where. Until then, get off your mod horse.

9 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

 Forgive me you’re advocacy sounds like “The Nazis say Jews are bad, Jews say Nazis are bad, the only solution is to say no one is bad ever.”

That is not what I said. If it does sound like that to you, I have nothing to do with that.

9 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

The problem doesn’t come about mainly due lack of access higher education  it’s mainly comes to the fact in biology classes especially in southern states creationist are allowed to promote ‘intelligent design’ or skip over any specific talk of evolution. Usually the justification is wanting to keep things neutral.

That's an education issue and you are right, it's not limited to higher education. I stand corrected.

There's no neutrality between scientific facts and make believe stories thousands of year old. Keeping scientific facts out of the textbook and promoting concepts out of book that's thousand of years old and so much of it has been disproven and obsolete is a pretty extreme action. It may hide behind the mask of "keeping things neutral" but that's about it.

9 hours ago, Varysblackfyre321 said:

Oh another instance is the media’s constant platforming of climate change deniers who’ve no qualifications or expertise on what they’re talking about against people against who’ve actual qualifications and expertise to instruct on the topic.

Ok, if those people have no idea what they're saying, experts should mop the floors with them in any debate on the matter. Right? What seems to be the problem? Experts aren't good public speakers? None of them? None of then can be trained for it? At least up to a certain point.

Experts backing down before loudmouths can only lead down one path - to the point where the movie Idiocracy is not a comedy but a documentary. 

[Larry of the Lawn]

Remember when Bill Bye debated that bible dude who had the dinosaur theme park ten years ago?  They debated evolution vs creationism and that was it.  Science was unleashed on the fundamentalist christian masses and the reason washed over them in a torrent.  It washed away belief and left behind nothing but cool rationality.  

People have been debating the efficacy of vaccines for the last three years.  Nothing's going to change by having a debate between RFK and a scientist.  

[Heartofice]

38 minutes ago, baxus said:

But they are not living in another plane of reality. They are living right alongside you and me and everyone.

Well in a way they kind of are. Quite often you see people with entirely different world views and ways of seeing reality that are so divorced from each other that is simply no way to find that middle ground.

If you are convinced that the world is one big conspiracy, that there is this secret layer of information that nobody wants you to know about (but somehow you do know because you saw it on the internet) , or that everyone that disagrees with what you say is clearly a nazi, then talking to someone who sees the world as a more rational place, where things happen less by plan but by chance, or taken a much less simplistic view of things, then I don't get how those two viewpoints meet in the middle. 

Or if you are talking about religion, then they really are living in another world in some ways.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

47 minutes ago, baxus said:

We can dismiss them or we can talk to (some of) them. If you pick the former, then you can't really say they don't want to listen since you don't want to talk to them in the first place.

Have you tried to discuss reality with a serious flat Earthie?

[Raja]

On 6/26/2023 at 12:25 PM, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

So, I propose that having public televised debates with RFKjr. or proponents of the “Flerfie” community are probably bad things.  But calmly and rationally talking with our acquaintances who hold such fringe beliefs or who are walking down the rabbit hole toward such is probably a good idea as we, through kind thoughtful individual engagement, may arrest such progress or pull them back out of such a rabbit hole.

Agree with all of this. I think the idea that this 'debate needs to happen' doesn't really hold that much weight for me, especially as this person is just another person in a long line of grifters espousing nonsense about vaccines.

I can only give my perspective as someone who speaks to people & parents about vaccinating their child on on a daily/ weekly basis.

Our pocket of east London has a significant population that is not vaccinated and generally exploring reasons as to why parents are not vaccinating their children and steering them towards getting them vaccinated, in a 1 on 1 setting with a health professional is how these people are convinced. With parents, a big concern I hear is that a lot of vaccines are combined and they think that is 'too many'. Kids, especially from the ages of 1-5, and when they start school get lots of colds/ sniffles and sometimes parents think they shouldn't be getting these because they're vaccinated. Taking the time to talk through these issues to me has proven to be effective. In an ideal world, GPs are having these conversations with parents all the time, but a lot of this is also about access, where lots of people don't even have or go to their GPs. I

In the US, this is probably even higher than somewhere like the UK, where registering with a GP is free ( though getting an appointment is of course, frustrating)

Edited June 27, 2023 by Raja

[baxus]

1 hour ago, Heartofice said:

If you are convinced that the world is one big conspiracy, that there is this secret layer of information that nobody wants you to know about (but somehow you do know because you saw it on the internet) , or that everyone that disagrees with what you say is clearly a nazi, then talking to someone who sees the world as a more rational place, where things happen less by plan but by chance, or taken a much less simplistic view of things, then I don't get how those two viewpoints meet in the middle. 

The thing is that when someone thinks that the world is one big conspiracy and that "big pharma" is trying to poison us with vaccines and stuff like that and they have a "spokesperson" (someone lik RFK Jr.) and that "spokesperson" calls for a debate and no one from "the experts side" steps up, it can give off one of two impressions:

• They have nothing to say and would be crushed by the "spokesperson" in a public debate
• They are hiding something

That doesn't help either way. Conspiracy theorists will just dig in deeper and their view that they are somehow "enlightened" or whatever and government/big pharma/aliens/whoever are out to get them will get reinforced.

Sure, most of the audience won't listen to what experts have to say, but some will. And that's best we can hope for. Just chipping away at that whole crowd and hoping we'll do enough after a while.

1 hour ago, Ser Scot A Ellison said:

Have you tried to discuss reality with a serious flat Earthie?

I must admit I haven't. I don't think I've ever even come across any kind of flat Earthie, let alone a "serious" one.  

As I already said, that's something I feel has been sufficiently covered in elementary school and I'd refer flat Earthies there and wouldn't get involved in that debate. Not saying it's not "worthy of debate" but that any arguments I'd have have already been covered in elementary school textbooks so they could just read that and not waste my time.

1 hour ago, Raja said:

I can only give my perspective as someone who speaks to people & parents about vaccinating their child on on a daily/ weekly basis.

Our pocket of east London has a significant population that is not vaccinated and generally exploring reasons as to why parents are not vaccinating their children and steering them towards getting them vaccinated, in a 1 on 1 setting with a health professional is how these people are convinced. With parents, a big concern I hear is that a lot of vaccines are combined and they think that is 'too many'. Kids, especially from the ages of 1-5, and when they start school get lots of colds/ sniffles and sometimes parents think they shouldn't be getting these because they're vaccinated. Taking the time to talk through these issues to me has proven to be effective. In an ideal world, GPs are having these conversations with parents all the time, but a lot of this is also about access, where lots of people don't even have or go to their GPs.

That's exactly the point. People who are against vaccinations (or most of them, at least) don't know enough on the subject. It's not as if they're evil people who want to spite the rest of us who are pro vaccination, they are people who are scared of something they don't know enough about. Explaining this to "the masses" would go a long way towards fixing this.

Btw, the worst thing I've heard of regarding this is that here in Serbia there are GPs who are actually advising parents NOT to vaccinate their kids. It just blows my mind. I can't fathom how someone who's doing that could keep their medical license.

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

23 hours ago, mormont said:

This is some wild, wild stuff.

The Nazis did a little more to the Jews and other than saying they were 'despicable' or complaining that they had unacceptable or unfounded beliefs. The comparison here is, in itself, pretty unacceptable. It's a reverse Godwin's Law. You don't get to compare people to Jews under the Nazis unless they are actually being subjected to comparable treatment.

Maybe all of you should just stop using us as examples. It's lazy. That said I took no offense to what @baxus said.

[hauberk]

1 hour ago, baxus said:

The thing is that when someone thinks that the world is one big conspiracy and that "big pharma" is trying to poison us with vaccines and stuff like that and they have a "spokesperson" (someone lik RFK Jr.) and that "spokesperson" calls for a debate and no one from "the experts side" steps up, it can give off one of two impressions:

• They have nothing to say and would be crushed by the "spokesperson" in a public debate
• They are hiding something

That doesn't help either way. Conspiracy theorists will just dig in deeper and their view that they are somehow "enlightened" or whatever and government/big pharma/aliens/whoever are out to get them will get reinforced.

The alternative perspective of this is that engaging does two things.:

1 - It assumes that both sides are coming to the debate in good faith.  This was pretty clear in the Bill Nye debate and would be absolutely the same with RFK Jr.  

2 - The participation of actual experts does little more than afford credibility to crackpots.  At best, this allows some fence sitters to be dazzled by the BS showmanship but is going to do very little to sway the diehard believers of the alternate facts (see, for example, the debate about how many people attended TFGs inauguration even in the face of NPS photos taken from the same location and at the same time in each inauguration). 

[Kalbear]

The worst thing you can do to defuse a conspiracy is give it any respect. By broadcasting it you automatically elevate it to actual newsworthiness and worthy of consideration. 

There are plenty of other ways to fight those ideas without actually debating them, and debate as I said above is one of the worst ways to engage the other side anyway. 

[baxus]

Ok, then. Let's just turn a blind eye to it and see what happens.

[mormont]

In this particular case, it's instructive to consider that RFK Jr's wild and false claims about the COVID vaccine stem from his long history of wild and false claims about childhood vaccines in general. In particular, he has a long history of making and continuing to make claims about the link to autism, on the basis of the Wakefield study, and the fact that this study has been disproved, retracted, and exposed as a fraud has not stopped him. You could debate RFK Jr about the Wakefield study today and he would assert that it demonstrates a link, but that the facts have shown that it does not. 

You can't keep debating the Wakefield nonsense every time someone brings it up. At some point, you have to let the facts speak for themselves. That's true of his COVID nonsense as well, and in fact most of his policies. 

The whole idea of debate, discussion, the scientific method, scholarship, research and all of our cultural tools around education and information are that they allow knowledge to advance. If you find yourself stuck debating the same things over and over with people who've made it clear they won't change their minds, you are not advancing knowledge and so you're not using those tools properly. You're just wasting time. It's like fighting the same challenger over and over again because he insists he didn't lose, though you knocked him down repeatedly. What's the point? What does it prove? 

[Gorn]

There is a number of Ukraine-war-related Twitter accounts that i read daily, and this morning I found that I could no longer read them without an account, since I would get automatically redirected to the login page. I guess there is some chance that they broke it by accident, but it is far more likely they want to force people to create new Twitter accounts.

Since I don't have a Twitter account and I never will, I did some digging and discovered a number of Twitter mirror websites that I can use to access the same information. This was strangely liberating, since even if the Twitter management reverses that change and permits browsing of tweets without an account again, I no longer have a reason to go back to their website since I can get the same information elsewhere.

Nice job, Twitter management, you just permanently lost my daily page views.

Edited June 30, 2023 by Gorn

[Varysblackfyre321]

9 hours ago, Gorn said:

There is a number of Ukraine-war-related Twitter accounts that i read daily, and this morning I found that I could no longer read them without an account, since I would get automatically redirected to the login page. I guess there is some chance that they broke it by accident, but it is far more likely they want to force people to create new Twitter accounts.

Since I don't have a Twitter account and I never will, I did some digging and discovered a number of Twitter mirror websites that I can use to access the same information. This was strangely liberating, since even if the Twitter management reverses that change and permits browsing of tweets without an account again, I no longer have a reason to go back to their website since I can get the same information elsewhere.

Nice job, Twitter management, you just permanently lost my daily page views.

Sucks for people using Twitter to use public announcements or sell their art.

[A Horse Named Stranger]

9 hours ago, Gorn said:

There is a number of Ukraine-war-related Twitter accounts that i read daily, and this morning I found that I could no longer read them without an account, since I would get automatically redirected to the login page. I guess there is some chance that they broke it by accident, but it is far more likely they want to force people to create new Twitter accounts.

Since I don't have a Twitter account and I never will, I did some digging and discovered a number of Twitter mirror websites that I can use to access the same information. This was strangely liberating, since even if the Twitter management reverses that change and permits browsing of tweets without an account again, I no longer have a reason to go back to their website since I can get the same information elsewhere.

Nice job, Twitter management, you just permanently lost my daily page views.

Same problem nitter doesn't seem to work anymore either. Got any other mirror sites?

[Clueless Northman]

Nitter worked a few hours ago. Guess Twitter managed to block it now.

 I used to check someTwitter accounts on both sides of the war, to have some limited insight into what's going on, and what they're thinking and saying about the latest events, to get some reasonably reliable info and to check how bad propaganda can be out there. Besides a few other non-war-related accounts of course, a few official ones for instance.

I'm not sure if it's Musk's decision or the new CEO's, but this is absolutely suicidal. People who never bothered to get a Twitter account aren't going to get one now, they'll just move on. I should thank them for improving my productivity at work

Edited July 1, 2023 by Clueless Northman

[Varysblackfyre321]

26 minutes ago, Clueless Northman said:

Musk's decision o

It is. Hell blame the woman though

[Mr. Chatywin et al.]

It's a really odd decision to do this. The accounts that generate the most traffic actually don't need Twitter anymore.

Elon the lame continues to find ways to piss people off. 

[Varysblackfyre321]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

It's a really odd decision to do this. The accounts that generate the most traffic actually don't need Twitter anymore.

Elon the lame continues to find ways to piss people off. 

https://vxtwitter.com/NBCNews/status/1675021557960253440?s=20
 

I’ve never been more in favor of seizing and nationalizing social media.