On Fake News
Perhaps it's the fact that a near-death experience has stripped me of any vestiges of a filter.
Or maybe it's that my natural inclination to intellectual discourse and attendant propensity to despise ignorance and bombast has come demanding an audience in the wake of Trump's ascension to the White House.
But whatever the case may be, I've lost any semblance of patience for the bevy of "news" outlets that masquerade as an unbiased alternative to the mainstream media. This is a subject about whi
“Now what’s the point here? Well, obviously the idea is to distract from the fact that Geert Wilders is a racist xenophobe (I’m not even sure he would deny that) by raising the specter of AK-47-wielding Muslim terrorists in Rotterdam.”
It’s not obvious to me. Here’s how I interpret that headline. Geert Wilders was proven correct by the arrest. Why are you dumb libertards worrying about being politically correct in the face of an imminent threat to your existence?
I suspect that you have not been reading enough social media, or you might be thinking too logically, to get the message. (My wife told me recently that no one believes fake news. Yeah, that’s why a pizza shop in D.C. was shot up.)
Aside from that one point, I appreciated this essay. You might have much more depth than you generally reveal on SA.
Glad you didn’t keel over. Thanks for your interest in humanity and love of the written word. Looking forward to your rancor as we move toward into this new experiment of ‘life as we don’t know it’. Keep up the good work.
As a former scientist and now technology futurist, I’ve been dismayed by the bias on scientific topics of critical importance on both sides of the debate (on any issue). Some things are established scientific “fact” such as evolution. Fact is in scary quotes because it is impossible to prove anything with the scientific method. It is only possible to disprove hypotheses, but the disproof of one thing does not prove another.
One of my favorite anti-science efforts is climate change, but not in the way that you think. The hypothesis that we are undergoing catastrophic climate change has been disproved repeatedly and yet the gravy train chugs along. All you need do is go back 25 years and see what the predictions were for today. Go back just to “An Inconvenient Truth” and look at all the things that have been disproved (more “extreme weather” foremost among these.) The climate models serve as a hypothesis for what will happen in the very simple model used to represent the complex model of the earth’s climate. They have been shown to be wrong over and over. This is not science. It is much more like a religion.