This makes horrific reading.
Baseless claim about Harris crash spread by mysterious website (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cy4ye15le8xo)
misinformation is a serious problem. people have always used it in po9litics and war, but its becoming much easier in th einternet world to say something false, and then to watch the ripples expand faster than anybody can ever catch up with.
in america in 1902 we did something we called the Pure Food and Drug Act, which made it a crime to sell poison to the public. i believe its time for a Pure Truth in Media Act, which would do the same thing.
details are difficult.
Yep. This be one of those uncommon cases where billy and The Asmo agree on a political point.
I'm not sure what such an act would practically do though, in the age of My Truth(tm) and where media find it ever more difficult to make a living from peddling facts without piling on opinion and judgement to appeal to "their bubble."
Hmm... Could one create a publicly financed media organisation, protect it from any and all government or corporate meddling and mandate it to only present verified information, with receipts where possible..? But even then, how could one keep it from rotting from the inside? Looking at the likes of you, BBC.
...Make it AI? Call it Skynet, perhaps? Teach it evil..? Yes... Yes, there might be gold in them hills... :thoughtful:
what we need is a bureau of people, one that will decide queztions put to it, and is completely reliable
government funded, independent, above all immune from partisan influence
wait
we have that
we call it our Supreme Court
^ What kind of knife should I use to cut that irony?
https://www.okwhatever.org/topics/wtf/poop-knife
I read that as facetious irony, "immune from partisan influence" is so not true of the current US Supreme Court.
the american supreme court is a farce, in my opinion.
they do not represent anything near an unbiased and consitutional position, which is their purpose.
thomas and alito have publicly shown that their influence is for sale.
Does this mean our brains are hard-wired for fake news?
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20190905-how-our-brains-get-overloaded-by-the-21st-century
Too much news means we just skim read and don't verify.
Here's some of my own:
Christianity is based on the bible.
Aliens are visiting our planet.
We are all Africans.
The moon landings had nothing to do with the Cold War.
Darwinism explains how life exists.
Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare.
History is based on real events.
Quote from: billy rubin on September 06, 2024, 04:22:34 PMwhat we need is a bureau of people, one that will decide queztions put to it, and is completely reliable
The Bureau of TRUTH(tm) :smilenod:
...That be the future.
there are some cautions
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_in_Nineteen_Eighty-Four
Quote from: billy rubin on September 14, 2024, 12:01:27 AMthere are some cautions
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ministries_in_Nineteen_Eighty-Four
As has been said before, '1984' is a warning not a set of guidelines. I wonder what Orwell would have made of Social Media?
But we all need our 2 minutes of hate.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1-C1FhHl38
Works wonders for your mental health.
Quote from: Tank on September 14, 2024, 08:11:02 AMAs has been said before, '1984' is a warning not a set of guidelines. I wonder what Orwell would have made of Social Media?
Ah, but do they not also say that "one man's trash is another man's cash?"
One man's warning is another man's wet dream and what have you... After all, THInK oF THe CHIldReN!1!!1!!ONE ;)
Here is the latest scandal that we Americans must try to deal with. Foreign influence in our elections is not cool.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/28/the-us-spies-who-sound-the-alarm-about-election-interference?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us (https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/10/28/the-us-spies-who-sound-the-alarm-about-election-interference?utm_source=pocket-newtab-en-us)
There is a lot of foreign interest in the US elections because various foreign entities stand to gain and/or lose substantially based on the outcome.
I would expect foreign meddling in a nation like the United States. Were China approaching democratic, they would be subject to that as well - partly from the very same United States.
As an interesting aside, over in my part of the globe, foreigners who have lived legally in a county for a certain number of years get to vote in the local elections there. That said though, we are a higher trust society than many, and still you need a legally recognised ID to exercise that right - foreigner or no. I must admit I was kinda' baffled the first time I heard that requiring ID for voting was a controversial issue in at least parts of the United States. Like... Why on Earth would you not?!
The US only interfere when they know it's right.
"The U.S. has a long history of attempting to influence presidential elections in other countries – it's done so as many as 81 times between 1946 and 2000,"
https://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-us-intervention-foreign-elections-20161213-story.html
It doesn't matter if it's "right." It is subject to a cost-benefit analysis, just like "everything else" in intergovernmental politics.
If "right" even comes into play at that level, I'd say it's likely to be little more than a way of selling it to the public.
non citizens in america have voted in local elections forhundreds of years.
they cant vote in federal elections, but they do mayors, and school boards and such all the time.
not everywhere
I suppose it does make more sense in the United States. A few assumptions on my part here, but I think they are logically consistent; As a foreigner [here: foreign national], you cannot vote in federal elections because you cannot vote on behalf of your state. You can, however, vote in local elections because that is voting for policy within that state.
Norway is not a federation, yet we do appear to have a similar practice. I imagine the reasoning is that as a foreigner, you cannot speak for or on behalf of Norway, but you can affect local policy in the part of it, in which you legally reside.
Our far right folks are all atwitter about illegal voting. They believe, or at least they claim to believe, that all voting is "rigged". There is no evidence whatsoever of any illegal voting or ballot stuffing anywhere across our nation but the conspiracy theorists persist. There are millions of them.
Are there ways of knowing though?
Assuming there is little identity verification, what's to stop, say, a person who has already voted or who has no right to vote from casting a ballot while pretending to be someone they know who has no intention of voting, but does have the right to do so?
Or in the case of mail-in, could a mother easily get away with sending in a ballot on behalf of a politically-apathetic adult child?
What evidence of the act would exist if she did?
The scope may well be tiny... But then, sometimes, so are the margins.
The vote cheating accusations are completely unfounded. One of the odd ball situations that lend suspicion to voting honesty is a reality called "red mirage". It goes like this......Large or medium large cities and counties typically have a majority of democratic voters. Small counties and rural communities are largely republican adherents. That is the way the demographics have aligned for many decades.
The small counties have far fewer voters than the larger cities and counties have. The small counties can count their votes and report the count rather quickly because the numbers are small. The larger population centers need more time to count the many times larger number of votes before they can prepare a report.
The early reports from the small population areas tend to indicate a large proportion of the votes are for red candidates including presidential candidates. Looks for all the world that the republicans have won by a landslide.
Uneducated egomaniacs, like Trump, will seize on the early evidence and claim victory. Later the Blue wave arrives. The larger population areas have counted their votes that show a Democrat vote much larger than the ones that were reported by the sum of the rural regions.
The blue side (democrats) win decisively. The red side will shout and scream that the damned election was rigged by some nefarious method contrived by those conniving democrats. The Screamers are never quite able to identify the methods that were used to rig the election. They do know in their hearts that there is no way in hell that their candidates lost. Must have been those devilish Jews and their space lasers, or the voting machines were compromised by a secret cabal in Venezuela.
Not everyone understands how the Red Mirage and the oncoming Blue wave actually work. The rural folks have never even heard of such a thing. They bring out their pitch forks and torches to smite the offenders. Actually not pitch forks. They have guns with which to augment their anger.
Quote from: Icarus on October 31, 2024, 03:18:20 AMThe vote cheating accusations are completely unfounded.
...and yet I have just lain the foundation in my above post. (As it remains unaddressed, it remains standing)
Sure, it may be the case that large urban centers tend to vote one way, while rural areas tend to vote the other. How do you verify that Bob Bobson Jr. did not vote on behalf of Bob Bobson III, his ne'er-do-well 19-year-old son AND Bob Bobson Sr, his 85-year-old senile dad?
Where I'm registered to vote, the family name contains the four individuals living in that precinct. Our names are checked off as we vote, if we vote at the polling place. Can't vote twice. My MiL passed away after the last election. We certainly could have voted her ballot, I guess. We shredded it. I can't speak for everybody's basic honesty, though.
:smilenod: A good and honest answer.
I think that largely, the vote-cheating conspiracy theorists are wrong in their assessment of the scope of the actual cheating. They do, however, seem to have a point or two with regard to it being effortless to cheat in certain ways.
For example, The Bobson conspiracy I presented here would be far less credible if each Bobson had to use his electronic bank ID to vote, or if a couple of election functuionaries stopped by their place and collected their individual ballots from them.
As it is, it seems to boil down to one side, which is willing to trust people in this regard, and another, which is not. I suppose that in a high-trust society, the former would be more "naturally credible," while in a low trust society, it would be the latter.
Maybe if you would expect to have your wallet handed to you unmolested if you dropped it, you'd be inclined to assume the best of people's intent. Maybe you'd be perfectly justified to. Or maybe your life and/or your perception thereof has taught you differently. Maybe you are just as justified to think that. [The Asmo goes on and on about the perception of cities and city-dwellers out in the sticks and such-like]
when i vote i have to present an id. to be registered, i have to present more stringent papers.
never had to do that when i started voting. i just told them who i was and that was that.
Quote from: billy rubin on October 31, 2024, 05:16:03 PMwhen i vote i have to present an id. to be registered, i have to present more stringent papers.
never had to do that when i started voting. i just told them who i was and that was that.
As a matter of personal opinion, I think that is good. It takes some air out of the tyres of "Bobson conspiracists" and makes the process more robust.
Yeah, it's nice to be able to just trust your fellow citizens, but on a tree of hundreds of million apples, there
are literal metric tons of bad ones, not to mention potential infiltrators from the pear tree over yonder, pretending to be all apple-like and... And I guess I'd better abandon this metaphor before it grows truly Asmoic in complexity and confusion.
On a unrelated note, in a recent poll, the Progress Party was the largest in Norway. I don't think that's ever happened before, but it does align with the trend of Labour taking their (former) base for granted to the point of having forsaken them to the point of being forsook by them. A few will move on left, but for a lot of people, there's just too much Commie in them hills... So here we are, a very surface-level and imperfect analysis though it is.