[Dr Lancer-X]

Exophase, on 20 October 2016 - 12:47 PM, said:

The last 30 minutes was a bunch of retreads.

I'm afraid that's a fairly good description of the entire debate.

[Verasev]

My granddad and I agree that the moderator did an excellent job, especially on his choice of questions. I can't believe that ass Trump doubled down on the election possibly being rigged. I liked the little dig about Chinese steel being used in Trump's buildings. Petty, but somehow satisfying.

[Exophase]

Verasev, on 19 October 2016 - 11:29 PM, said:

My granddad and I agree that the moderator did an excellent job, especially on his choice of questions.

Looks like Fox News dusted off someone a lot more competent than their most popular blowhards for this one.

I hear he asked why neither candidate seems to care about the national debt. This is pretty weird since it was this hugely talked about issue a few years ago and now it's barely brought up. Yes, the deficit has gone down a lot but the debt is still increasing (relative to GDP and inflation, AFAIK). I don't think people realize that we have to pay compounding interest on this debt and that the percentage of federal revenue spent on debt interest keeps going up.

Trump has mentioned the debt but only as an attack against Obama (even though it's more Bush's fault than anyone's) and his proposed tax cuts would only make it substantially worse.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Political answer: Yes, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton will put the country into more debt, but their policy is one of responsibly taking on more debt in the short term in order to revitalise the economy and rebuild infrastructure in the long term, the net result of which is a reduced national debt.

Real answer: It's not being talked about this election and as neither candidate is going to do anything about the debt there's no need to bring it up.

And yeah, I agree Chris Wallace was pretty good, probably the best of the moderators this election.

Quote

I can't believe that ass Trump doubled down on the election possibly being rigged.

I think he could well be technically right. I mean, there's been accusations of rigging before - suspicious outcomes in Bush v Gore, suspicious shit during the primary etc. However-- tactically, what does saying the election is going to be rigged buy you? I don't think there's any benefit to it, and it can actually be a negative. Sounds like Trump is already getting ready to say the outcome was bogus after the results come in. Doesn't look good.

[Dr Lancer-X]

So, Reddit has decided to only show posts from the Donald Trump subreddit in /r/all. On one hand, ugh, on the other hand, it does actually improve the overall quality of Reddit...

EDIT: guess it's fixed

[Bramble]

Found this gem today



eh eh eh eh eh eh

[Dr Lancer-X]

that doesn't even make any sense. carrots are green on top.

no, donald trump is more of a

[Verasev]

Dr Lancer-X, on 27 October 2016 - 08:04 PM, said:

So, Reddit has decided to only show posts from the Donald Trump subreddit in /r/all. On one hand, ugh, on the other hand, it does actually improve the overall quality of Reddit...

EDIT: guess it's fixed

It'll be great to watch the drama on reddit as the election results come in. They had someone on that subreddit calling for a mass protest in Washington if Clinton wins where they redo the election with foreign oversight to make sure it isn't rigged "again." A couple calls for violence that got banned. Reddit will probably get rendered unusable for at least a day. I wonder if they will finally ban r/the_donald for it's multiple violations against the rules.

[Bramble]

Dr Lancer-X, on 28 October 2016 - 02:48 AM, said:

that doesn't even make any sense. carrots are green on top.

no, donald trump is more of a

Nice!

[Exophase]

Verasev, on 28 October 2016 - 11:49 AM, said:

It'll be great to watch the drama on reddit as the election results come in. They had someone on that subreddit calling for a mass protest in Washington if Clinton wins where they redo the election with foreign oversight to make sure it isn't rigged "again." A couple calls for violence that got banned. Reddit will probably get rendered unusable for at least a day. I wonder if they will finally ban r/the_donald for it's multiple violations against the rules.

You sound like you read there a lot. Is it entertaining? I don't think I could read a forum where I strongly disagree with and dislike the message of most of the people there. I have a hard enough reading smug and obnoxious posts from the people I actually agree with. I was on some nasty debate subreddits before and the experience was pretty thoroughly awful.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Exophase, on 29 October 2016 - 05:35 AM, said:

You sound like you read there a lot. Is it entertaining? I don't think I could read a forum where I strongly disagree with and dislike the message of most of the people there. I have a hard enough reading smug and obnoxious posts from the people I actually agree with. I was on some nasty debate subreddits before and the experience was pretty thoroughly awful.

perhaps entertaining in the way that bar fights are entertaining. that website uses algorithms that tend to reward pandering / lowest-common-denominator remarks and punish reasoned discussion, since whether your comment is read or not is based on its score and its score is a factor of how quickly you posted it and how impulsively people upvoted it.

there isn't debate, there is shouting past people. 4chan /pol/ has more reasoned political debate than reddit.

[Verasev]

I go there for entertainment and transgender related stuff mostly. You can find even handed political debate if you are very picky and stick to smaller subreddit. R/neutralpolitics is a good all purpose one as it's heavily moderated, r/leftwithoutedge is a good left leaning sub without tankies or other assorted lunatics.

There needs to be a website with reddit's format but without reddit's voting system.

My user name on reddit is BalefullyResplendent in case anyone is interested. I mostly shitpost bad jokes about being transgender in r/transgendercirclejerk.

This post has been edited by Verasev: 28 October 2016 - 08:11 PM

[Exophase]

Dr Lancer-X, on 28 October 2016 - 03:48 PM, said:

perhaps entertaining in the way that bar fights are entertaining. that website uses algorithms that tend to reward pandering / lowest-common-denominator remarks and punish reasoned discussion, since whether your comment is read or not is based on its score and its score is a factor of how quickly you posted it and how impulsively people upvoted it.

there isn't debate, there is shouting past people. 4chan /pol/ has more reasoned political debate than reddit.

I'm active on reddit but I wouldn't want to read (much less post in) a sub catering to viewpoints I mostly oppose and people I mostly find repellent. I did follow S4P a bit but even as a Sanders supporter it was pretty dismal there. I couldn't ever really tolerate the_Donald for more than a few minutes and I wouldn't ever try to read it for fun. That probably goes for the Hillary sub too, although I can't say I've really tried. Even when I was thinking of voting for Jill Stein the sub wasn't that useful, just even more delusional than S4P.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that I'm miserable enough in my life without actively looking for more things to make me upset.

I agree that there's a lot to dislike about Reddit's voting system. On some level I approach it like I would any other forum, but it's really pretty fundamentally different given that threads are almost always guaranteed to die off after a couple days at most, and the most popular threads also become the most utterly unreadable. Like you say, the most upvoted comments are rarely ones that are actually most interesting. I also hate how people tend to downvote there. It can be pretty passive aggressive and lazy, and turns a lot of subs into circlejerks where people are afraid to even disagree with a popular sentiment.

I also don't like how much animosity there is between some subs.. like some people will be super prejudiced against you if you post on some subs, and it may even get you preemptively banned. And that seems to be the case for various ends of the spectrum. Works out especially badly for the people who actually do post in subs they generally disagree with.

[Dr Lancer-X]

I personally quite like /r/Bioinformatics and /r/MachineLearning - but I think the good subs work in spite of Reddit's terrible sorting algorithm, not because of it. Forget about talking politics there.

[Exophase]

When you get down to it, reddit was designed to be a content aggregator, and for that it works okay. Especially since so many "news" sites have shamelessly abandoned comments sections.

What Reddit gets right is being a place where anyone can easily create their own forums while also catering to a somewhat pre-existing userbase. The only other sites that I can think of that work anything like this, like 8chan, have their own massive problems and have failed to become very popular. It'd be nice if there was a site like Reddit that let you create more conventional long term discussion-oriented forums, with options for strictly chronological (by most recent post) and flat paginated thread views, along with subforums.

Dr Lancer-X, on 28 October 2016 - 04:50 PM, said:

I personally quite like /r/Bioinformatics and /r/MachineLearning - but I think the good subs work in spite of Reddit's terrible sorting algorithm, not because of it. Forget about talking politics there.

To be fair, how many places online are really good for talking politics?

[Dr Lancer-X]

Anthony Weiner.

[Verasev]

More like A. Weiner.

I figure whatever it is it's too little too late to matter for the election. Anyone scared off of clinton by email scandals has already left.

This post has been edited by Verasev: 30 October 2016 - 01:19 PM

[Dr Lancer-X]

Well, whether the emails are important depends on what's in them, and the FBI is being quite cagey on that point. If it's just more of what we already have then it doesn't matter. If it's SHOCKING NEW REVELATIONS then, well, I guess it could matter, even this close to the election? I think it's clear the Dems believe it's the former and want the FBI to hurry up and announce its findings because they view this uncollapsed superposition as being more harmful to Clinton than the truth is.

I'm not sure. What the FBI is doing is weird and one explanation could be that there is something serious in those emails - otherwise they're unlikely to face a backlash after the truth came out that they were holding onto this stuff before the election.

EDIT: 650,000 emails?! I feel like you wouldn't unconsciously get that many emails on your computer purely through auto sync, although who the hell knows. I'd say the biggest thing here is that if Clinton's team specifically deleted anything incriminating, those emails are now in the hands of the FBI. That's a big if, mind; wanting to delete emails doesn't necessarily mean there's evidence of criminal activity in them. They may just be especially embarrassing for the candidate, in which case Hillary is pretty safe; there's nil chance of the FBI releasing these things before the election, or even concluding their investigation by then. (They may be released at a later date to satisfy a FOIA request)

[Dr Lancer-X]

This was posted by the official Hillary Clinton twitter account.

I mean, we thought before that the Twitter account was run by a pro-Trump mole, but we haven't had proof until this tweet. How could anyone in the campaign possibly think this was a good idea?! If Hillary Clinton is really going all-in on 'ties to Russia' then she is done. Stick with the sexual assaults, stick with the fact that he's going to appoint 4 more SCOTUS Justices in the mold of Scalia, go with anything other than this zany conspiracy theory.

[Exophase]

Dr Lancer-X, on 31 October 2016 - 05:11 PM, said:

This was posted by the official Hillary Clinton twitter account.

I mean, we thought before that the Twitter account was run by a pro-Trump mole, but we haven't had proof until this tweet. How could anyone in the campaign possibly think this was a good idea?! If Hillary Clinton is really going all-in on 'ties to Russia' then she is done. Stick with the sexual assaults, stick with the fact that he's going to appoint 4 more SCOTUS Justices in the mold of Scalia, go with anything other than this zany conspiracy theory.

I think you're overestimating how much the current likely Hillary voters are put off by her (and the party's) obsession with Russia and paranoia over their influence with the election and Trump.

"4 more SCOTUS Justices" might not play so well either, since it seems to assume Trump would also win in 2020.. and it's not really nice to talk about people having a chance of dying soon.

[Verasev]

Why wouldn't the Clinton campaign think going with the russian puppet conspiracy theory is a bad move? What led them to the conclusion that it was an effective smear on Trump?

Edit: and i'm depressingly convinced that the sexual scandals did limited harm to Trump's campaign.

This post has been edited by Verasev: 01 November 2016 - 02:20 AM

[Dr Lancer-X]

Verasev, on 01 November 2016 - 12:16 PM, said:

Why wouldn't the Clinton campaign think going with the russian puppet conspiracy theory is a bad move? What led them to the conclusion that it was an effective smear on Trump?

Maybe there's a left wing equivalent of Alex Jones and InfoWars that digs this kind of thing? I mean, other than that Twitter account the Clinton campaign is pretty good about messaging and it's hard to imagine them pushing something like this unless they had some good information. Maybe they actually know that Trump is working with the Kremlin and are preparing for a leak they know is coming out soon?

If that is true it had better come out quickly, because I do think this is inflicting damage on their campaign. I'm thiiiiiis close to calling the election for Trump, and if they've really decided channeling McCarthy is the way to go I'm done. That was a dark period in American politics, but importantly, it doesn't work any more. So it's not a good tactic unleeeess it turns out to be true - but, in that case, why pre-empt the news?

[Exophase]

The best explanation is that Twitter is bad and brings the level of discourse down with everything it touches.

If you stop and think about how all the societal (first world) ills are bemoaned today you'll find an awful lot of them are heavily connected to Twitter in some way.

Whether that's more of a statement of how damaging Twitter is or how badly focused society is when it comes to what's considered harmful I'm not totally decided on.

Dr Lancer-X, on 31 October 2016 - 11:46 PM, said:

I'm thiiiiiis close to calling the election for Trump

Well that's fun. Bet you $10k USD Hillary wins. 2:1 in Trump's favor.

[Dr Lancer-X]

I sort of wonder if there's a disconnect between the level of impact Twitter has (which is pretty large) and the amount of seriousness it is treated with by the campaign. Wouldn't surprise me if some millennial straight out of college was put in charge of it so the party bigwigs don't have to think about it.

[Exophase]

Dr Lancer-X, on 01 November 2016 - 01:54 AM, said:

I sort of wonder if there's a disconnect between the level of impact Twitter has (which is pretty large) and the amount of seriousness it is treated with by the campaign. Wouldn't surprise me if some millennial straight out of college was put in charge of it so the party bigwigs don't have to think about it.

Tweets do have a ridiculous amount of influence, but there's more to it than that. That influence only really works when the media at large operates in concordance with it; either to amplify completely lose their shit over it. Look around at the major sites and you'll see they're not picking up on this, so it basically doesn't matter. Yeah, Hillary's twitter has like 10m followers, but they're mostly guaranteed Hillary voters who won't be swayed by this. Beyond their reaffirming eyes it's like this almost didn't even happen.

Compare it with the whole Pepe nonsense, which I think actually makes the Clinton side look a lot worse than this tweet does. Not just because it's a full blown article, but because it's something many media sites picked up on long after it was debunked (eg, the incompetence of the Clinton campaign was without argument on full display). Nonetheless, I have not seen a single major source reporting on the debunking (which from the DailyCaller, which is.. barely above fringe) so it's as if it never happened.

There are a few right wing sources who pounce on everything they can and have some following.. which were more or less Trump locks for since the start. To everyone else they're pushed seen as without any credibility whatsoever, so they'd may as well not exist. That's what happens when one side is represented by a minority; they will only be garnered by extremists and will therefore have ample reason for dismissal. The only media coverage that has worked to Trump's benefit - and I say this not to suggest it's any minor thing whatsoever - is that where the bias of his detractors is so blatant that those leaning even remotely in his direction feel sorry for him.

That's the state of discourse right now. And this is coming from someone who thinks Hillary is an eminently superior candidate. It's really bad.

[Dr Lancer-X]

I think this stuff filters down even if the major outlets ignore it. Trump's doing very well for a candidate the media is basically totally united against and willing to selectively report stories just to damage him. I think it would have been unthinkable ~20 years ago to do this well under those conditions. The media has lost quite a bit of its relevance.

And yeah, I agree that the tweet itself isn't that important. My point is more about what it says about the campaign. This is either a really weirdly desperate move or it's an extremely confident move because they figure they can do anything and they'll still beat Trump. I have a third theory on this - they're doing this because it's the sort of thing Trump does and it seems to work for him! And it does. Trump will happily tweet something that's utter garbage because he knows it will be reported on and give him exposure. I don't think this will work for Hillary.

I don't know what Hillary's campaign's internal polling is saying, but I'm getting the sense it's not positive.

[Exophase]

Looks like the Hillary campaign's angle was leading up to promoting this story about how a Trump server was allegedly facilitating communications with a wealthy Russian bank:

http://www.slate.com...ith_russia.html


Which has dubious statements like:

Quote

But now this capacious server handled a strangely small load of traffic, such a small load that it would be hard for a company to justify the expense and trouble it would take to maintain it. “I get more mail in a day than the server handled,” Davis says.

As if servers these days have such resources that a major corporation letting one wind down like this is particularly suspicious, and:

Quote

Furthermore, there’s no such thing as “regular” DNS server traffic, at least not according to the computer scientists I consulted. The very reason DNS exists is to enable email and other means of communication.

Which shows a pretty poor understanding of the role DNS plays in the internet.

The idea that a server with IP attached to "Trump-email.com", registered w/o even any kind of proxy front (but NOT to the Trump Organization directly, despite the article's repeated implications), was ever supposed to be secret is just baffling. Even more so when they allege that it was shut down to hide evidence, only to be replaced by another Trump email name openly registered and as if that were some secret that were communicated via some undercover method to the Russians.

There's also a big question in my mind as to where and how these DNS logs were acquired. Admittedly I don't know the full details of the DNS infrastructure but I thought it was pretty distributed and locally cached and I don't see why the requests would go further than whoever can supply the answer. So you'd think that just having the logs represents some kind of targeted breach of a specific DNS server or deliberate leak, all for the purpose of investigating the activities of two private entities. The rationalization that they were just looking for malware seems awfully flimsy. And while the data may look valid there's no consideration to how it may have been filtered to remove things that would work against the narrative, like communications between the Trump server and other entities (if any of these would have shown up in at the DNS server to begin with)

But where the Hillary campaign really screwed this up is that this time, unlike with the Pepe story, the rest of the media aren't buying it. Several sources, some more blatantly left-leaning and in Hillary's corner than Slate, have already written counter articles saying they got this totally wrong. Oops. A quick googling of the topic uncovers a bevy of these articles instead of the ones supporting Slate or the campaign.

http://www.theverge....nnection-debunk
https://theintercept...s-email-server/
https://www.washingt...mp-russia-link/

So yeah, it's nice that the campaign was finally exposed for pouncing on poor journalism.. but unfortunately I doubt it'll really have any noticeable effect. If anything, I think the rest of the media acted quickly to deflate this so they could pass it off as a simple mistake and stop the campaign from digging an even deeper hole.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Exophase, on 02 November 2016 - 03:01 PM, said:

Looks like the Hillary campaign's angle was leading up to promoting this story about how a Trump server was allegedly facilitating communications with a wealthy Russian bank:

http://www.slate.com...ith_russia.html

Quote

Was a Trump Server Communicating With Russia?

Betteridge's law of headlines.

[Exophase]

Dr Lancer-X, on 02 November 2016 - 01:59 AM, said:

Betteridge's law of headlines.

I don't know why these sites even allow articles with Betteridgable titles. Putting aside that particular negative association I don't think they really have much manipulative value anymore.

And it's not like such filtering would require them to start doing things like editing and fact checking.

I really winced at the particular appeals to authority this article made. Like how they leaned on "Indiana University computer scientist L. Jean Camp." As someone with an MS in computer science from IU I can tell you that the only expert qualification I'd have to contribute to this article is the knowledge that being an IU computer scientist is not by itself necessarily an expert qualification for anything in this article. But it gets worse than that - despite being a professor in IU's school of informatics (which isn't really the comp sci department although they shared oversight, at least when I was there), her actual education is in math/EE and public policy (!!) and not anything actually related to computer science or informatics (https://www.soic.ind...rofile_id=178).

One other aside on the IU school of informatics and their expertise on this matter: I TA'd a 400/500 informatics networking class my first semester there. I tried appealing to them to give me another appointment by telling them that I had never taken a networking class in my life, but that didn't deter them.

[Dr Lancer-X]

Exophase, on 02 November 2016 - 04:22 PM, said:

her actual education is in math/EE and public policy (!!) and not anything actually related to computer science or informatics (https://www.soic.ind...rofile_id=178).

Lot of overlap between electrical engineering and computer science nowadays, but yeah, this is pretty ridiculous.

EDIT: Whoa, what happened to the polls?

(That was a rhetorical question. I know what happened to the polls. Anthony Weiner.)

(By the way, this disproves all of the allegations that the Clintons kill off inconvenient people. Because goddamn Anthony Weiner is still alive and he's by far the biggest thorn in the Democratic Party's side. Although I suppose Anthony Weiner believed them because he apparently titled the folder he kept all the emails in "Life Insurance")