Tuesday, May 10, 2016

Avoid Facebook for anything serious

The NY Times reports:
Facebook scrambled on Monday to respond to a new and startling line of attack: accusations of political bias.

The outcry was set off by a report on Monday morning by the website Gizmodo, which said that Facebook’s team in charge of the site’s “trending” list had intentionally suppressed articles from conservative news sources. The social network uses the trending feature to indicate the most popular news articles of the day to users.
Why is this startling? There have been many reports of left-wing bias at Facebook and Twitter.

Zuckerberg is an anti-American who uses his influence to replace American jobs with foreigners. He does not personally suffer the consequences of illegal aliens. He lives in a gated community and Facebook has disclosed that it spends $5M a year on his personal security.

Never press a "like" button. It just turns on Facebook spying and spamming.

Liberal NY Times columnist Nicholas Kristof writes:
Four studies found that the proportion of professors in the humanities who are Republicans ranges between 6 and 11 percent, and in the social sciences between 7 and 9 percent.

Conservatives can be spotted in the sciences and in economics, but they are virtually an endangered species in fields like anthropology, sociology, history and literature. One study found that only 2 percent of English professors are Republicans (although a large share are independents).

In contrast, some 18 percent of social scientists say they are Marxist. So it’s easier to find a Marxist in some disciplines than a Republican.

George Yancey, a sociology professor, says he has faced many problems in life because he is black, “but inside academia I face more problems as a Christian, and it is not even close.”
Think about that next time you hear some professor make some silly rant against Republicans. He probably knows more Marxists than Republicans.

An example is the Princeton professor and partisan hack Paul Krugman. His main economic advice is for countries to always borrow as much money as they can, and to pay it out in welfare benefits. He seems to have some economic theory that such spending will boost the economy. It is nonsense, of course. So now he is upset with Trump for proposing to reduce the national debt:
Truly, Donald Trump knows nothing. He is more ignorant about policy than you can possibly imagine, even when you take into account the fact that he is more ignorant than you can possibly imagine. But his ignorance isn’t as unique as it may seem: In many ways, he’s just doing a clumsy job of channeling nonsense widely popular in his party, and to some extent in the chattering classes more generally. ...

The Trump solution would, among other things, deprive the world economy of its most crucial safe asset, U.S. debt, at a time when safe assets are already in short supply. ...

He really is frighteningly uninformed; worse, he doesn’t appear to know what he doesn’t know. The point, instead, is that his blithe lack of knowledge largely follows from the know-nothing attitudes of the party he now leads.

Oh, and just for the record: No, it’s not the same on the other side of the aisle. You may dislike Hillary Clinton, you may disagree sharply with her policies, but she and the people around her do know their facts. Nobody has a monopoly on wisdom, but in this election, one party has largely cornered the market in raw ignorance.
I doubt that Krugman has any understanding of why Trump is popular.

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