Hillary poll

[Cassius Clay]

In this thread, we vote on Hillary

[Cassius Clay]

You guys suck at voting. Get your votes in you punk ass bitches!

[Anakin McFly]

Based on that Politifact website she's more honest than most previous presidential candidates, so while her record is still far from perfect, her gender seems to be skewing impressions by a lot.

[Derived Absurdity]

Politifact sucks. They pick and choose which claims to analyze, and their analysis is always some overly-literalist "is it technically true" reading which ignores how politicians always deceive people - through subtle distortions, cherrypicking, willfully missing necessary context, and so on. You can be technically accurate but still dishonest. They're propaganda.

Just last night in the debate Hillary laid down a gigantic whopper of a lie about how when she became secretary of state "Iran was weeks away from having enough nuclear material to form a bomb". Pure, absolute, unadulterated bullshit. A blatant, outright lie. And a dangerous lie. Not even in the same solar system as the truth. And as far as I can tell Politifact has had nothing to say about it.

She's a sociopath, an imperialist, and a warmonger, and her lies are all in service to that.

[Boomer]

Politifact is owned by the Tampa Bay Times and operated by its editors and reporters who are mostly left-leaning, just FYI.

[CashRules]

What DA and Boomer both said. If somebody tells 1,000 lies and just happens to put in five minor truths in with the lies, it's dishonest to unbelievable extremes to then say that person is honest by only mentioning the five true statements. As someone once said "Hillary Clinton will say anything to get elected." Too bad that someone turned out to be a warmongering, child murdering, sack of shit himself.

[Anakin McFly]

Thanks for the info.

What's your best case scenario for the election?

[Derived Absurdity]

Hillary beats Trump in a landslide of historic proportions and then dies of pneumonia the first day in office.

And then all their supporters die.

[CashRules]

They have a duel during the next debate and kill each other and nobody cares. What I would love to see is for it to be almost an even match in the electoral college with Gary Johnson miraculously winning his home state of New Mexico so that neither Trump or Clinton wins the electoral vote and the election goes to the House of Representatives and the Republicans turn on Trump and vote for Johnson.

[Cassius Clay]

Out of curiosity, where are you guys getting your information, and how/why do you trust it?

[Boomer]

Politifact's wiki page states it is owned by the Tampa Bay Times, a quick cursory search of Politicact's executive members shows they all have ties to the publication, and I lived in the Tampa Bay Area for about four years so I am personally familiar with the news paper (at the time it was known as the St. Petersburg Times).

[Cassius Clay]

I actually wasn't questioning that fact. But my question was based on the reasoning used in pointing out that fact. If you can dismiss a website defending Hillary because it's "left-leaning", how do you know who to trust?

[Cassius Clay]

And I'm not implying it's impossible to trust any sources, and I get why you should be wary of the underlying political agendas of various sources...I"m just curious about your process.

[Boomer]

I don't think the website should be dismissed completely, just that people shouldn't rely on it as the be-all-end-all of unbiased political fact-checking that Politifact is often presented as.

In other words, I think it's worth pointing out that a political fact-checking service is owned and operated by a liberal news publication that has endorsed one of the presidential candidates it is purporting to fact check, just like I think it would be worth pointing out a scientific study saying cigarettes are good for you was commissioned by Philip Morris. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't examine the data and draw their own conclusions, but people should know that those presenting said data may have their own agenda.

[Cassius Clay]

Agreed.

I've been arguing about crime statistics data with a few idiots for the past couple days. And I'm just thinking about how easy it is to completely misrepresent a story by just leaving out one tiny, but crucial piece. Or how the same data can appear to support two conflicting narratives. But, everyone just eats up data(or interprets in a a way) that reinforces what they already believe. This election is over-saturated with misrepresentations because everyone is deeply invested with their own agenda, to the point where I'm even becoming more skeptical of some of my more trusted sources.

[Derived Absurdity]

I have realized how easy to lie without necessary lying (meaning: presenting a false or inaccurate picture without technically saying anything false) by arguing with racists online. With the dumber ones, it's easy to see through them, but with the smarter ones, the ones who don't call themselves racist but "human biodiversity advocates", many of them are scarily good at this. Like, really good. There are a lot of "human biodiversity" blogs out there that are by very smart people, who are extremely good at writing, who are very good at giving off the impression that they are extremely level-headed and knowledgeable about the relevant scientific fields and world/historical affairs, who wield an impressive array of numbers and statistics, and who give off the idea that they're persecuted/ignored truth-tellers in a world which doesn't want to hear what they have to say. Like, if you understand how easy it is to lie without lying, to twist facts, to pretend to knowledge you don't have, they would be very convincing to some people. And they undoubtedly are.

Of course, I am now of the opinion that even the smartest of these people would be unable to convince you unless you, deep down, on some level, want to be convinced by them. That's the point I made with micgee. Reality is so complex that you can't be taken in by simplistic racist narratives, even if they're backed by books full of statistics and encyclopedias of historical facts, unless there's a part of you that wants to. Unless you were partly racist in the first place.

That's partly why I dislike Politifact and things like it so much, because they appeal to exactly the types of people who would be most easily taken in by people like them. People who think facts and statistics are what matters most when it comes to presenting an accurate picture of the world. If they're literally or technically true, then they must be actually true. They must be saying something relevant or meaningful about the world. This is how people go to these blogs and become racist just because they keep hearing "black people are only X percent of the population yet they commit X amount of Y".

And if some guy with a blog is so good at this, imagine how good Hillary Clinton is at it, who has been at the helm of the undisputed master of lying without lying for decades, Bill. This is why Politifact sucks, they're like the people who go "Well, black people really do commit X amount of crimes, he's completely accurate!!"

I'm sort of high.

Politicians have perfected the art of lying without lying. It's sort of easy to do with how complicated and nuanced reality is and how many people just want to be taken in by certain narratives.

[Boomer]

Agreed.

I've been arguing about crime statistics data with a few idiots for the past couple days. And I'm just thinking about how easy it is to completely misrepresent a story by just leaving out one tiny, but crucial piece. Or how the same data can appear to support two conflicting narratives. But, everyone just eats up data(or interprets in a a way) that reinforces what they already believe. This election is over-saturated with misrepresentations because everyone is deeply invested with their own agenda, to the point where I'm even becoming more skeptical of some of my more trusted sources.

Yeah, people can use numbers and data to say whatever they want and often the same set of statistics are spun in many ways. I think every source no matter how trusted should be questioned; we just have to realize confirmation bias exists in everyone and should especially be cognizant of it in ourselves.

[Anakin McFly]

People who think facts and statistics are what matters most when it comes to presenting an accurate picture of the world.

I'm one of those people, and I think it's important to distinguish between using vs abusing facts and statistics. The example you mentioned of "black people are only X percent of the population yet they commit X amount of Y" (say for crime) is an accurate picture of the world. What isn't accurate are the conclusions that racists draw from that (that black people are more naturally prone to crime), which are based on incomplete information and often an existing racist worldview. The only way to counter that is with more facts - on racial profiling, on how white men often get away for crimes that black men are arrested for, on the correlation between poverty, class, low education and crime, on the effects of racial oppression, etc. All those facts and statistics refine that original fact and affect the conclusions made.

Like with Politifact - letting me know it's left-leaning and biased towards Hillary is also a fact, and that likewise affects how I interpret their initially presented facts to get a more accurate picture of things.

[Derived Absurdity]

Well, yeah, that's what I meant.

[Cassius Clay]

I have realized how easy to lie without necessary lying (meaning: presenting a false or inaccurate picture without technically saying anything false) by arguing with racists online. With the dumber ones, it's easy to see through them, but with the smarter ones, the ones who don't call themselves racist but "human biodiversity advocates", many of them are scarily good at this. Like, really good. There are a lot of "human biodiversity" blogs out there that are by very smart people, who are extremely good at writing, who are very good at giving off the impression that they are extremely level-headed and knowledgeable about the relevant scientific fields and world/historical affairs, who wield an impressive array of numbers and statistics, and who give off the idea that they're persecuted/ignored truth-tellers in a world which doesn't want to hear what they have to say. Like, if you understand how easy it is to lie without lying, to twist facts, to pretend to knowledge you don't have, they would be very convincing to some people. And they undoubtedly are.

What's aggravating about this type of dishonesty is that you don't have to do it intentionally. Usually when I accuse someone of being dishonest, I'm talking about a type of intellectual dishonesty where you're not necessarily going out of your way to be all "tricksy" (said in Gollum voice) - while rubbing your hands together with mischievous intent - but it's more so about not trying to be as thorough/considerate as you could/should be...but picking and choosing when to be thorough by how convenient it is for your preferred narrative. This is how people are able to lie to themselves with conviction. It's being intellectually lazy when it suits your narrative. And then people think that because they are not intending to lie then they aren't really being dishonest and can't be held accountable. That's how these types of people justify their thoughtlessness to themselves...that it's not "intentional". But, everyone should hold themselves accountable for being reckless with the truth.

Edit: And the thing about intellectually dishonest/lazy racists(for example, the kind of people who say "all lives matter" and call BLM a terrorist organization) is that their intellectually laziness is driven by their lack of respect/compassion for black people. Like they have such little concern for black people(while feeling threatened by status quo challenges) that they won't even begin to consider that they might be wrong.

[Cassius Clay]

And the thing I discovered(which I always seem to forget when I get caught up in arguments with these types) is that one of the best ways to corner these types of people is to get them to accept some of your premises simply as "hypothetical scenarios". They are so reactionary in their resistance to even considering the reality of your arguments that they start to obfuscate either through oversimplification or over-complicating, probably due to some kind of cognitive dissonance. But, hypotheticals force them to actually begin to consider the other side without their typical defenses up, and/or they cut through all the extraneous stuff in the argument and force them to confront the irrationality in their thinking. Something similar happened when I was arguing about racism with the pedophilia-defending Jr dude(I think he was insisting that racism had to be "intentional" and directly from someone's mind, and the implication being that structural racism doesn't exist), then he suddenly disappeared when I stopped fighting him over the "reality" of racism and presented him with a hypothetical that cut through his bullshit.

Edit: Also, the point of using hypotheticals is to simplify things by ending the struggle over certain points where neither of you wants to give an inch. And if the person cannot even accept some of your premises, just hypothetically(that Jr motherfucker was very resistant to even considering certain things, hypothetically, right before he disappeared), that's a major red flag.

[Anakin McFly]

Tangentially related in the sense of how gender can skew impressions:
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid ... =3&theater

[Blade Azaezel]

*Sees the name 'Sarah Lynn'*
Oh yeah, bet she's American
*clicks name - is American*
Yup