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Facts have been invented in order to push agendas since the dawn of time. Nothing has changed. The day the printing press was invented is the day it was subver

Facts have been invented in order to push agendas since the dawn of time. Nothing has changed. The day the printing press was invented is the day it was subverted to push propaganda. The "era of fake news" is fake. It has always been this way.

kakarot 10y ago
No, you're the fake news!
e40 10y ago
I think something has changed: I want to start with Trump's lies. It's now a commonplace that Trump and his underlings tell whoppers. Fact-checkers have never had it so good. But all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all. Trump's lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission. That first press conference when Sean Spicer was sent out to lie and fulminate to the press about the inauguration crowd reminded me of some Soviet apparatchik having his loyalty tested to see if he could repeat in public what he knew to be false. It was comical, but also faintly chilling. From Andrew Sullivan, a conservative blogger, here: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan-the-madness-of-king-donald.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan...
- ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
  So you're trying to convince me something has materially changed by posting a quote that compares the current scenario to what the Soviets used to do? Either things have changed, or the Soviets were doing it in the past. Only one of these statements can be true.

kakarot 10y ago

No, you're the fake news!

e40 10y ago

I think something has changed: I want to start with Trump's lies. It's now a commonplace that Trump and his underlings tell whoppers. Fact-checkers have never had it so good. But all politicians lie. Bill Clinton could barely go a day without some shading or parsing of the truth. Richard Nixon was famously tricky. But all the traditional political fibbers nonetheless paid some deference to the truth — even as they were dodging it. They acknowledged a shared reality and bowed to it. They acknowledged the need for a common set of facts in order for a liberal democracy to function at all. Trump's lies are different. They are direct refutations of reality — and their propagation and repetition is about enforcing his power rather than wriggling out of a political conundrum. They are attacks on the very possibility of a reasoned discourse, the kind of bald-faced lies that authoritarians issue as a way to test loyalty and force their subjects into submission. That first press conference when Sean Spicer was sent out to lie and fulminate to the press about the inauguration crowd reminded me of some Soviet apparatchik having his loyalty tested to see if he could repeat in public what he knew to be false. It was comical, but also faintly chilling. From Andrew Sullivan, a conservative blogger, here: http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan-the-madness-of-king-donald.html http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/02/andrew-sullivan...

ConfuciusSay02 10y ago
So you're trying to convince me something has materially changed by posting a quote that compares the current scenario to what the Soviets used to do? Either things have changed, or the Soviets were doing it in the past. Only one of these statements can be true.