[nige1]

Winstonm, on 2016-December-10, 01:15, said:

Guy like that should be more careful, could have some kind of an accident, if you know what I mean.

Some condemned Jon for crowing.

[ggwhiz]

diana_eva, on 2016-December-09, 15:12, said:

Jon has been banned from the BBO Forums.

Well now I can admit to being in Ottawa and knowing the guy over many years. Most of our interaction came during my 7 year stint as Conduct and Ethics Chair for Unit 192 where he was (surprise) a frequent flyer.

[hrothgar]

nige1, on 2016-December-10, 06:40, said:

Some condemned Jon for crowing.

Nigel, your holier than thou act is wearing a bit thin

You engage in exactly the same sets of behaviors that you are constantly complaining about.
You single people out by name, you condemn some posters while letting others slide.

The only difference is your choice of targets...

[Winstonm]

nige1, on 2016-December-10, 06:40, said:

Some condemned Jon for crowing.

Nope, just for being an incredible jerk.

[kenberg]

Being academically trained, I am sometimes unbearable. I think it would be fair to say that I did object to the crowing. So "some criticized his crowing" is probably right, if I get included in the "some".. Condemned? Oh, I dunno. I wouldn't get too huffy if someone said I condemned it. Condemned the crowing. I don't have, or want, the power to condemn him. Probably it was clear that he is not on my Christmas card list. Nor me on his.

More to the point, or more to my point, I am very ready to move on.

[y66]

Crowing once or twice may be bad form but it's not a big deal. Crowing incessantly is too boorish which is unforgivable even on the bacon thread aka the official hijacked thread. Ditto for trolling. Not suggesting trolls make good bacon.

[y66]

Guest post from Alexandra Zapruder who lives near Comet Ping Pong:

Quote

WASHINGTON — On any given day, locals flock to Comet Ping Pong, a pizza joint here not far from where I live, to eat, talk and, of course, play Ping-Pong. But last Sunday, a man armed with a military-style assault rifle and a pistol turned up for an entirely different reason: to see for himself whether the restaurant was indeed, as right-wing fake news reports and conspiracy websites have declared, the hub of a vile child sex-slavery ring masterminded by Hillary Clinton.

The absurdity of this story would be laughable if it hadn’t led a man to bring a rifle to a restaurant filled with families. And if it hadn’t resulted in an army of online terrorists harassing the owner, his employees and others along that block of Connecticut Avenue, accusing them of unspeakable crimes and even issuing death threats.

I’ve seen my share of conspiracy theories. My grandfather, who accidentally took a home movie of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination — now known as the Zapruder film — was implicated in some of the most delusional stories about that event: He had colluded with the C.I.A. to allow his film to be altered just days after the assassination; he had secret ties to Lee Harvey Oswald through a co-worker who later married Oswald’s close friend; and, wait for it, he was the one who pulled the trigger through an elaborate gun-as-camera mechanism at the bidding of the Jewish Mafia.

The government’s failure, in the historian Art Simon’s words, to come up with “a coherent and believable account of the assassination” left many gaps to be filled. While early assassination researchers performed a valuable function by making important information public, later conspiracy theorists relied on association and innuendo and cherry-picked details to build increasingly wild narratives.

If one outcome of Kennedy’s assassination was a loss of trust in government and the news media, we have now entered an era in which such suspicions have mushroomed into something far more dangerous — a rupture in the very idea of shared truth.

The crisis at Comet was averted when the gunman surrendered to the police before anyone was hurt. But the deeper problem remains. We are no longer talking about a relatively small group of Kennedy conspiracy theorists trading notes and publishing articles. We are talking about millions who are reading Reddit and 4chan, imbibing fabricated stories attributed to fictitious publications like The Denver Guardian and getting whipped into a fury of self-righteous anger that — given the easy access to guns in our society — may well result in violence.

Is there any way to reverse this trend? The mainstream news media can’t do a thing. If I learned one thing from trying to understand the Kennedy conspiracy theorists, it’s that it is impossible to dispel the amorphous cloud of suspicion. If you try, you are either a dupe or part of the cover-up — the cloud simply grows to include you. Nor, needless to say, is anyone from the Democratic Party going to be able to reason with those who are convinced that Mrs. Clinton is organizing a child sex-slave network through a pizza restaurant in Northwest Washington.

The president-elect, on the other hand, could make a difference. But Donald J. Trump and his team have legitimized rather than repudiated this kind of speculation. He embraced the so-called birther movement, claimed that he saw Muslims celebrating after the Sept. 11 attacks and tweeted that millions voted “illegally” for Mrs. Clinton. Just before the election, his pick for national security adviser, Lt. Gen. Michael T. Flynn, fanned the flames of the so-called Pizzagate conspiracy by tweeting about Mrs. Clinton and sex crimes and providing a link to a fake-news article.

If Mr. Trump does nothing, could our new neighbor, Mike Pence, speak up? How about the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell; the speaker of the House, Paul Ryan; or Reince Priebus, the chairman of the Republican National Committee and future chief of staff to the president? Surely they see that assaults on truth are harmful to all of us, regardless of our political orientation. Why haven’t they and other responsible conservatives condemned these lies on the grounds that no one is safe in a world in which facts no longer have merit?

They should. And they should do it at Comet Ping Pong. They should stand in front of the restaurant and say that no matter how vehemently you disagree with Mrs. Clinton’s politics, there is no justification for accusing her of child trafficking. They should condemn “fake news” — which is a weak term for deep hatred that takes the form of a story — and encourage their supporters to do the same.

Is there any world in which this could happen? It depends on whether Republicans think vilifying Mrs. Clinton serves their interests. It depends on whether they accept that there is such a thing as truth and that we are morally obligated to defend it. This may be a political problem for our Republican friends, but it shouldn’t be a moral one.

They should stand up for the truth. Then stay for the pizza. And let’s put this madness behind us.

[Winstonm]

I think this thread should end just as the Trump presidency will end: as a disaster for everyone involved.

[y66]

From Truth and Lies in the Age of Trump by the NYT Editorial Board:

Quote

Donald Trump understood at least one thing better than almost everybody watching the 2016 election: The breakdown of a shared public reality built upon widely accepted facts represented not a hazard, but an opportunity.

The institutions that once generated and reaffirmed that shared reality — including the church, the government, the news media, the universities and labor unions — are in various stages of turmoil or even collapse. Because Mr. Trump himself has little regard for facts, it was easy for him to capitalize on this situation. But even as Americans gobble up “fake news,” there is the sense that something crucial has been lost. A North Carolina man told The Times that while he regularly clicked on links to stories claiming that Hillary Clinton was indicted or that Mexico built a wall along its southern border, he missed the days when Walter Cronkite delivered the news to the nation.

He’s not alone; it was different then. Americans knew that whatever they were hearing on the news, their neighbors were hearing, too. Cable TV fractured that shared experience, and then social media made it easier for Americans to curl up in cozy, angry or self-righteous cocoons.

The rise of social media has been great in many ways. In a media environment with endless inputs and outlets, citizens can inform and entertain one another, organize more easily and hold their leaders accountable. But it also turns out that when everyone can customize his or her own information bubble, it’s easier for demagogues to deploy made-up facts to suit the story they want to tell.

That’s what Mr. Trump has done. For him, facts aren’t the point; trust is. Like any autocrat, he wins his followers’ trust — let’s call it a blind trust — by lying so often and so brazenly that millions of people give up on trying to distinguish truth from falsehood. Whether the lie is about millions of noncitizens voting illegally, or the crime rate, or President Obama’s citizenship, it doesn’t matter: In a confusing world of competing, shouted “truths,” the simplest solution is to trust in your leader. As Mr. Trump is fond of saying, “I alone can fix it.”

He is not just indifferent to facts; he can be hostile to any effort to assert them. On Tuesday, Chuck Jones, a union boss at Carrier Corporation, told The Washington Post that Mr. Trump was wrong when he claimed to have saved 1,100 of the company’s jobs from moving to Mexico — the real number will be closer to 730. Rather than admit error, the president-elect instead attacked Mr. Jones, a private citizen, on Twitter, saying he had done a “terrible job representing workers.”

In other words, Mr. Trump’s is a different kind of lying, though it has been coming for some time. When Bill Clinton, during the Monica Lewinsky meltdown, defended his public contortions of the truth by saying, “It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he provided a sort of coda for the era of spin. In those days, politicians pinched and yanked at facts like Play-Doh, trying to shape them to their ends, but they were still acknowledging, and working with, the same shared underlying realities.

During the Bush years, the administration saw itself as racing ahead of a faltering media. In 2002, one of President George W. Bush’s top advisers mocked a Times reporter as living in the “reality-based community.” “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he was quoted as saying. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study, too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

By the time Mitt Romney was running for president a decade later, politicians recognized that they could treat the news media not as some sort of arbiter of the facts but simply one side of a he-said-she-said debate. As one of Mr. Romney’s aides put it, “We’re not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers.”

Mr. Trump has changed this game. He has exploited, perhaps better than any presidential candidate before him, the human impulse to be swayed more by story than by fact. As one of his surrogates said recently, “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts.”

Right now, Mr. Trump has his story, and he’s sticking to it — and he’s increasingly carrying the Republican party along with him. It’s bad enough when a truth-defying president-elect uses his megaphone to shout the lie that millions of illegal votes were responsible for Mrs. Clinton’s large popular-vote win. It’s even more ominous when the vice president-elect, the speaker of the House and the chairman of the Republican National Committee — all people who should know better — repeat that fiction, or refuse to disavow it.

Without a Walter Cronkite to guide them, how can Americans find the path back to a culture of commonly accepted facts, the building blocks of democracy? A president and other politicians who care about the truth could certainly help them along. In the absence of leaders like that, media organizations that report fact without regard for partisanship, and citizens who think for themselves, will need to light the way.

[Kaitlyn S]

Winstonm, on 2016-December-11, 00:39, said:

I think this thread should end just as the Trump presidency will end: as a disaster for everyone involved.

I tried starting a new thread for a new topic and got chastised for it.

EDIT: Upon further review, it's possible that my posting style was criticized and not the fact that I started a new thread.

[Winstonm]

Kaitlyn S, on 2016-December-11, 11:43, said:

I tried starting a new thread for a new topic and got chastised for it.

EDIT: Upon further review, it's possible that my posting style was criticized and not the fact that I started a new thread.

Some threads work; some don't. No big deal. It is not a personal affront if others are not interested in the subject.

[Winstonm]

Quote

"The most effectual engines for [pacifying a nation] are the public papers... [A despotic] government always [keeps] a kind of standing army of newswriters who, without any regard to truth or to what should be like truth, [invent] and put into the papers whatever might serve the ministers. This suffices with the mass of the people who have no means of distinguishing the false from the true paragraphs of a newspaper." --Thomas Jefferson to G. K. van Hogendorp, Oct. 13, 1785. (*) ME 5:181, Papers 8:632

What did WE miss?

[helene_t]

Kaitlyn S, on 2016-December-11, 11:43, said:

I tried starting a new thread for a new topic and got chastised for it.

Yes that is unfortunate. Maybe mods should make it a policy to move all ad hominem attacks to whos-the-biggest-forum-troll-in-bbf

[kenberg]

Kaitlyn S, on 2016-December-11, 11:43, said:

I tried starting a new thread for a new topic and got chastised for it.

EDIT: Upon further review, it's possible that my posting style was criticized and not the fact that I started a new thread.

ok, you talked me into it. I have responded to your thread.

[Kaitlyn S]

kenberg, on 2016-December-11, 13:15, said:

ok, you talked me into it. I have responded to your thread.

Thank you. I usually enjoy your insight.

[Al_U_Card]

Winstonm, on 2016-December-11, 00:39, said:

I think this thread should end just as the Trump presidency will end: as a disaster for everyone involved.

This thread is an example of the problems inherent in our society as well as why Trump's election was a surprise (to many). Hopefully Trump will have more success and a better result at the end of his presidency.

[Winstonm]

Donald Trump is so sick that he refuses to believe his own intelligence agencies because he sees their information concerning Russia's tampering in the election as somehow diminishing his win? What the hell is wrong with this man?

Quote

The Washington Post reported on Friday that the CIA and other intelligence agencies have concluded the Russian government took action to favor the Trump campaign, but Trump said he doesn’t believe it.

“I think it’s ridiculous. I think it’s just another excuse. I don’t believe it. I don’t know why and I think it’s just ― you know, they talked about all sorts of things. Every week it’s another excuse. We had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College,” Trump said on “Fox News Sunday.”

“They have no idea if it’s Russia or China or somebody. It could be somebody sitting in a bed someplace. I mean, they have no idea,” Trump said.

Trump added that he doesn’t believe that the CIA put out the story in The Washington Post.

“I think the Democrats are putting it out because they suffered one of the greatest defeats in the history of politics in this country. And frankly, I think they’re putting it out,” Trump said. “And it’s ridiculous.”

And what the hell is wrong with all you people who voted for this nutcase?

[onoway]

Blame it on the Supermoon. The last one was in 1948

"The United States presidential election of 1948 is considered by most historians as the greatest election upset in American history. Virtually every prediction (with or without public opinion polls) indicated that incumbent President Harry S. Truman would be defeated by Republican Thomas E. Dewey."

[y66]

Al_U_Card, on 2016-December-11, 16:08, said:

This thread is an example of the problems inherent in our society as well as why Trump's election was a surprise (to many). Hopefully Trump will have more success and a better result at the end of his presidency.

Indeed (the inherent problems part). Perhaps posters on this thread and successor threads can give some thought to discussing what success means -- what are the goals and what are the criteria and weights for measuring achievement -- not just for Trump people and not just for the U.S. Isn't this the question that unites all of us?

Perhaps it would also be useful for OPs to establish criteria (if they care) for determining off topic posts and also delegate mod authority to OPs to keep thread pollution from getting out of hand. Isn't this where the discussion went off the rails?

[kenberg]

What do we regard as success? I think it is a critical discussion. I'm not so sure I support giving mod authority to the OP. For one thing, it just doesn't sound right to me. Put here is a practical objection: With power comes responsibility. I would be reluctant, as a thread starter, to take the responsibility for moderating the comments of others. For example, while I find racism and sexism offensive, I also find the current style of finding racism and sexism in what i often see as attempts at honest discussion to be offensive. I have said that I strongly support immigration I do make a distinction between legal immigration and illegal immigration, and I think it reasonable to make substantial efforts to control illegal immigration. Early in the refugee crisis in Europe I said that I thought the enormity of it would cause substantial problems. This was treated as evidence of xenophobia (when I first heard the word, w/o the spelling to guide me, I thought maybe this was zenophobia, an irrational fear of paradoxes). Mostly I can stand being called names, although I don't think it is of much use as an argument. I don't think an OP should have to umpire any such issues.

I regard the forum as a useful exchange of ideas. I am happy enough with the monitoring as it is. I recognize the problem of someone coming in and finding it fun to create havoc. Mostly we have not had that problem. I suggest we keep to the current system. Which is, I think a real complement to the monitoring as it is now done.

But back to the beginning of this reply. What would we see as good, what do we see as not so good? I doubt that we all agree. It's tricky.