Early Retirement Extreme Forums

"Being lied to by the Clintons is as American as it gets."

@brute--I think Biden's strengths are his ability to work with people across the aisle and his foreign policy experience (without the pay to play baggage). He also has a reputation for being more of a blue collar/union democrat as opposed to a limousine liberal, which would appeal more to Trump supporters. He's also a much more sympathetic candidate than HRC.

I know it's a reach but if I were him I'd consider it.

jennypenny wrote: I wonder if Biden is assembling a team this weekend. Don't you think that if he came out and condemned her actions and said she should withdraw, she'd have to? He really holds the power here, right? Normally, I would say that's premature, but the election is only two months away and they would probably want to make a move before the debate.

I have to think Biden has to be kicking himself right now for not stepping up and challenging Hillary when he had the chance. I've always thought of him as a goofball, but when compared to Clinton and Trump right now I think he'd be a breath of fresh air. In a lot of ways he's everything both of them aren't.

Tyler9000 wrote: I've always thought of him as a goofball, but when compared to Clinton and Trump right now I think he'd be a breath of fresh air.

He's definitely a goofball. He's a local guy for me, so I've seen tons of his antics over the years. He would still be my first choice at this point. From an anti-Trump perspective, I don't think he ever says anything that's mean-spirited or purposely designed to get a rise out of people. From an anti-Clinton perspective, I think what you see is what you get with Biden. I don't think there are any skeletons in his closet except for girlfriend or two. If anything, Biden is the king of TMI.

Seriously? Biden as a first choice? I mean, I know the prospects are thin, but when biden seems like a good choice, it is time to reevaluate.

I mean, what is the problem with Johnson, again?

Riggerjack wrote:I mean, what is the problem with Johnson, again?

He can't win.

Biden is only my first choice out of the remotely possible winning candidates. I know his weaknesses. As I said he's a local, so I've had 25 years of Uncle Joe gaffes. But he could win it. Johnson has no shot unless Trump is no longer in the race.

Great Dan Carlin podcast about government misinformation came out today. Touches several threads but seems most germane to this one.

ffj wrote:@K
Interesting podcast. I was just explaining today how disheartening it is to have to work so hard to discover what is true and what is exaggeration, and what is simply misinformation designed to influence. And outright lies, of course.

I don't know if you have noticed, but news organizations are starting to shut down comment sections because people were using them to find and display the flaws and bias in the article, with some people openly admitting they don't even read the article in the first place, preferring to read the comments for the truth instead! If we can't trust the most basic of reporting, then how can we make informed decisions? There is no single source for fair reporting out there that I can find. I constantly have to read several sites from different biases to get a real sense of what the story is about in its full context.

This has been coming/developing for years (probably since the mid 1990s). The academics are calling it the "post-factual society/democracy", keyword: post-factual. Google "post-factual" anything for more hits.

I saw the "post-factual" term for the first time around May/June this year (2016) when people started noticing it and describing post-factualism as a "thing". As far as the wonks are considered, it's pretty much a decline or replacement of intellectualism where knowledge derives from using reason on objective facts. That way of thinking is going away and is being replaced with a system where knowledge derives from whether something feels true. This has been around since quite a while back https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truthiness ... but it seems that this election is the first one where it has reached a tipping point so that how anyone feels about something is more important than what that something objectively is.

Example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnhJWusyj4I ("As a political candidate I will go with how people feel and you'll go with the theoreticians [real world facts]". Then realize that this sentiment probably holds for most politicians! )

We're essentially moving towards an epistemology where "feeling/gut-facts" are as important or more important than "reason/brain-facts". So that's really interesting!! In particular because it seems like a paradigm shift in terms of public propaganda.

As far as I see it the transition from reason to feelings is driven by a complex combination of three factors. In no particular order,

1) Anyone on the internet is now capable of googling some rationalization of whatever talking point they feel they agree with. This is actively promoted (positive feedback) by the way the web works to attract eyeballs and ad-dollars. It tends to drive people into a filter-bubble where people only go to the sites that actively promote their personal views due to the fact that they're more likely to "Like" information they emotionally agree with---thus they get presented with more information that's similar to that and eventually, that's all they see. If you get your news from google or facebook you're highly susceptible to this. If you've been reading news from breitbart or fox for a while, you'll get served with more from those sources if you rely on internet apps. If you've been reading from slate or huffington for a while, you'll be served with more of that. You can combat this somewhat by trying to read news from all over the spectrum to confuse the algos. However, you have to be supercritical or pay up for a neutral (usually strategic or finance related or some other interest that's perpendicular to left/right to get a more unbiased perspective). TL;DR - The advert algos that present your content are polarizing!

2) Over the past three decades the general respect for experts has been undermined. This has been mostly a side-effect of commercial/special interest efforts. The most famous examples are tobacco and climate change but it likely goes much deeper than that. Most humans are not sufficiently educated/too dumb to understand anything so complicated that takes a long time effort and a full time engagement to understand. An easy way for a special interest group with a few million bucks to spare is to steer the "conversation" by introducing their own "experts" and convince gut-based tl;dr in-groups to thrust them instead of those other out-group ones who don't "feel" right. Google helps to make it easy to find the in-group. So you get discussions where people tl;dr and just keep repeating some talking points that they googled in 5 minutes and consequently sincerely believes they've done as much research as anyone else on the internets.

3) For a long time the media has tried to do an unbiased kind of reporting in which every single argument had to be presented in an unbiased way. This attitude feeds back and supports (1) and (2): Effectively, anyone with a few million bucks can buy some "expert" and present that expert as a fair and balanced counterpoint to any position they don't like. The media and the internet will present the position as 50/50 and so people will believe that the position is unsettled for far longer than it deserves. This undermining of rationalism has been going on for several decades. However, it seems that the media has had somewhat of a Murrow-moment during this election. Notice how fact-checking has become a significant force during this election. In previous elections (up to 2012 even), whenever some politician lied, the media would seek to find some other politician or whatever to state that someone lied. This allowed the media to remain "impartial". In this election, the media seems to have had too much. They have started to actively fact-checking and pointing out blatant lies as they happen w/o bothering to round up some other person to point it out. This could also explain why the media in a mea culpa moment is beginning to shut down discussions realizing that they're filled with "tl;dr - have opinion anyway"-morons. Heck, I've done this a couple of times here too when a thread finally turned insufferable. However, consider that citizens or should I say consumers are generally lacking in understanding of what the media tells them, because of (2)---they now, therefore, consider the media to be "biased" when they point out lies rather than "upholding long-abandoned standards once again". This indicates to me that non-intellectualism has established a proper beachhead.

So take these three developments and we pretty much end up in the situation you're describing. Almost everything is propaganda and the best one can hope for is somehow to cancel it out by reading a lot of different sources all over the spectrum.

yea it certainly seems that The Feelz have moved from 10% to 70% of what matters very quickly. maybe politics is just the latest area.

there's been extensive discussion about political correctness in this forum. while brute isn't generally worried about it, it seems like a generation of humans has been raised that were so sheltered by helicopter parenting, "everybody is a winner", and safe spaces, that reality is offensive to them. this doesn't explain the whole phenomenon, as these humans would be a minority of the voting population. but maybe they have helped make this attitude of "feeling is truth" more acceptable to the rest.

regarding the fact checking, it seems that never before has a candidate cared so little about saying true things. brute doesn't think Trump actively lies, he just doesn't live in reality. in Trump's mind, he's right. now they HAVE to fact check every word he says, before it was just a slip up now and then when a politician actually lied badly.

and about the science/experts thing: science is actually really hard. sometimes, science is wrong for 100 years straight. or things are just unknowable or hard to prove for really long times. brute thinks there's actually a sort of phenomenon where to know more (facts, studies) means to know less (certainties).

brute's main example is always nutrition/diet. it used to be that there were about 3 facts about what healthy eating meant, and that was that. nowadays there's pub med, there's hundreds of thousands of studies, some well done, some less well done. sometimes all studies are well done but contradict each other. a sort of Heisenberg-type "the closer one looks the less one sees" not just in presentation/media manipulation, but in aggregate knowledge about reality. even officials and "real scientists" have gone from debunking the other side's studies to just ignoring them and pulling up the bias-filter shields.

so it's not just that consumers are being misled by the media and algorithms, the actual state of knowledge in many fields has been completely muddled. it's not that they were clean and clear before, they were just one-sided before and now that humans shine more light on it, it's a mess. this is certainly true for nutrition, exercise, huge parts of medicine, all social sciences, economics..

I got dragged into working for a while today, so I've watched 4 different camera shots of her fainting beside the van and read the accounts of several reporters who were working the event. I felt awful watching those videos, like I was intruding on a private moment. Being ill is no fun, and it's horrible when it happens in public. It's the kind of video I would refuse to watch ... except that she's running for President.

I heard all of the excuses today, from the heat to the stress of campaigning. I could buy it except that campaigns are always hard, and yet I can't recall many instances of candidates suffering such public health issues, especially several in a row. Can you imagine the uproar if there were pictures of people escorting Trump or any other candidate up a staircase by the arms? If the stress of campaigning is making her sick, how will she handle the presidency?

They announced she has pneumonia, which is plausible, but why? Her cough has been present for years. I've had several bouts of pneumonia, but that's because I have scleroderma. It can be a symptom of many diseases and conditions. If she has an underlying condition, it should be disclosed. I wish they would do some form of candidate scouting combine early in the primary season and vet all candidates on health and tax records. That would give people better information when voting in the primaries and eliminate these crazy sideshows during the main election season.

I also think if she has an underlying condition, that doesn't automatically exclude her from the presidency. If it can be managed, I see no reason for disqualifying her. A health condition -- even a grave one -- doesn't mean a person needs to be put out to pasture. I've argued that point before on the forum because too many people seem to think that a serious health condition precludes a person from a normal life. It doesn't. It might require some modifications and/or management, but those kinds of allowances are made for people with physical disabilities all the time. Less obvious physical impairments are no different.

That said, it looks like they aren't doing a good job of managing her health. Maybe if it was out in the open she could get the care she needs to deal with her hectic schedule.

jennypenny wrote:If the stress of campaigning is making her sick, how will she handle the presidency?

maybe it's like marriage, all smooth sailing once it's locked in?

@Jennypenny -- there's been lots of speculation online that her collection of symptoms is consistent with Parkinson's. Who knows if that's true, but it bears pointing out that pneumonia is a common complication of Parkinson's. Of course nobody on her side will ever confirm this, but it seems plausible to me.

I hate posting this, but I'm not buying the 'it's only pneumonia' story. This video of her entering the van yesterday shows something metal dropping out of her pant leg. How could that be related to pneumonia? Looks more like part of a brace that came loose, but I have no idea what it is. I think we have a right to know. (and to be clear, I think we have a right to Trump's health records, too)

https://youtu.be/YzZl9j580tM

trump's records would likely reveal he's made of up to 30% cocaine

@ffj - You're asking way too much; at least, if you want it for free. That kind of journalism requires effort and it doesn't attract a large audience either, so it can't compete on ad-based terms.

jacob wrote:That kind of journalism requires effort...

I think this is the real problem.

RealPerson wrote:I had not heard this. How strange that a metal piece would fall out of her pants. There is something fishy going on. Did anyone retrieve the piece to see what it could be from?

It looked like a pen to me.

It looked like a pen to me.

Ockham's razor says the simplest answer is probably right. Therefore the item is obviously part of an advanced DARPA-built mechanical exoskeleton that Hillary wears under her clothes to keep her upright and moving despite a failing human body. She was having trouble walking because a rogue band of tea party hackers has found out about the cover up and is working to bring her down with North Korean anti-robotic suit malware. Also, Ted Cruz is a lizard person and Trump is Putin's brainwashed Manchurian candidate.

I must admit this is all rather amusing to watch from the outside, in the UK we just got a new prime minister and the fact she has type-1 diabetes was hardly mentioned.