Of course now that he's aware that the mistake was on his side, he has apologised and amended his Twitter posts. Because he wants his followers to get accurate information that allows them to make informed decisions based on rational thinking, not emotional outrage or base tribal instincts exacerbated by misleading information propagated by echo chambers. Because he understands that preserving a well functioning democracy and dialog is more important than advancing his own interests. Of course.
Be that as it may (your sarcasm), what is a person like this doing in congress? He has no grasp on the ability to think twice about what he is saying or doing.
Any rational person would first try and understand the root cause of the issue rather than jumping to something as outlandish as "deep state" as the first conclusion.
These people jump to stupid conclusions because it somehow validates their ignorant perspective of the world.
There's no aptitude test for Congress. People vote for people who represent their views. Being as positive about it as possible, the idea is the representative sets direction and then civil servants, who are tested for aptitude, implement it. People don’t need to be smart to have a valid point of view worth representing.
In the UK people mock ministers who don't have health experience running the NHS, or in Belgium an obese person running their health service, for two examples, but the point isn't that they represent the health service, the point is that they represent the users of the health service. (Sometimes that means representing the needs of the health service to the rest of the Government.)
In fact, I personally think one of the many reasons the US is less well-run than other rich democracies is that the professional civil service has a much lower level of responsibility (and prestige) compared to elected representatives.
I think the US being the largest rich democracy might have something to do with that, too.
The cultural history of valuing individual freedom above everything, so much so as to start a war rather than pay "unjust" taxes, also seems relevant to me. Society is all about giving up individual freedoms for the group's benefit, and the US's founding mythology is kind of the opposite.
When talking about a myth, do you mean the colonies taking issue with being taxed without having legislative representation? Is this something you disagree with when you finger-quote "unjust"?
I think it _was_ unfair and illegitimate, from a procedural perspective.
Practically, I think representation wouldn't have changed the outcome that much.
I'm no historian, but my impression is that the taxes
were in large part England trying to cover the bill from the French and Indian War, which was mostly incurred on behalf of the colonists.
So, procedurally unfair? Yeah. Actually unjust? I dunno about that.
Even if I'm wrong about the facts and the taxes were genuinely egregious abuse, I don't think that's good grounds for killing a bunch of people.
There wasn't a need to go to war. England could have just accepted the colonies' demand for independence. Was keeping the colony worth killing all of those people?
>There's no aptitude test for Congress. People vote for people who represent their views. Being as positive about it as possible, the idea is the representative sets direction and then civil servants, who are tested for aptitude, implement it.
Exactly, and the reason these people stand by unapologetically to their false accusations and lies and hypocrisy is because the real message they are sending to their “tribe” is that they are willing to screw others, no matter the truth, for the benefit of their tribe. And as long as you can believe you are part of their tribe, and hence you might receive their support, you might be willing to forego caring about the truth or what is right.
He's not. He's a candidate. And not for Congress, for the position of Secretary of State of Arizona.
More to the root of the problem: People are elected by other people by popular vote, not by an intelligence or ability test. Democracy is — at its heart — a popularity contest.
The theory is that the populace should be smart enough to recognize the unqualified and not vote for them. But that doesn't work as often as it should due to a number of reasons:
- The influence of advertising
- Political parties/political tribalism
- Fear-mongering in various forms.
None of these are new, and have been part of the nation's political life since its inception. But now we have new things:
- People who think that education is not important
- An entire industry trying to convince people that aspiring to higher education is a bad idea
- The removal of foundational subjects like civics, geography, and social studies from schools
The result is that the general population gets dumbed down, and is no longer able to discern who is a statesman and who is a court jester.
>He's not. He's a candidate. And not for Congress, for the position of Secretary of State of Arizona.
skilled wrote that Mark Finchem is a member of “congress”, which does not have to mean the US’s federal congress. Arizona state has its own congress, which Finchem is a member of in the Arizona House of Representatives.
With a lowercase "c," yes "congress" can mean anything.
A gathering of seven-year-olds to eat ice cream is also a lower-case "c" congress.
In the context of politics, which this article is, "congress" has specific meaning. If he had meant the generalized lower-case "c" congress, he would have written "what is a person like this doing in a congress."
The context of skilled’s argument is one in which it is not relevant that the congress is state or federal. The important part is that the congress is a significant one, such as that of a state of 7.3M people, and the surprise that such an unqualified person is part of the contingent to lead such an important organization responsible for shaping quality of life for millions of people.
So many ideas about improvement. I'll share one uncommon one:
Simply reading books older than 100 years will reveal the depth of understanding lacking in modern society. I would trade any modern curriculum if students were made to read books from hundreds of years ago (they cover all subjects anyway). Even silly children's books like Pinocchio (1883) are incredibility apt at teaching proper communication and reason.
Media these days is very shallow and lacking in character and understanding of the world.
> Media these days is very shallow and lacking in character and understanding of the world.
Correction: the media you’re exposing yourself to is lacking in character and understanding of the world. There is plenty of media being made now with depth and clarity that 1883 would be stunned by.
I think you might be confusing information with depth of character and understanding.
Yes, we have new and better information now, but the ways in which it is expresses is notably inferior to the writings I've been exposed to from the past.
My deep reading won’t be your deep reading, but the two standout books i’ve read recently and have changed my understanding of the world:
Parable of the sower by octavia butler
All about love by bell hooks
Neither of those were written in the last decade - but that’s a product of me not being very aware of the literary scene - it takes a long time for works to reach me, but by the time they do it’s only good stuff. I wonder if that’s maybe some of what you’re experiencing as well - older works that stuck around have stood the test of time, while the crap got forgotten.
There has never been as big a proportion of the population that is educated and literate as what we have now. For all their wisdom, our predecessors were engaged in the same constant warfare and genocide, whilst also having more restrictive social norms and a lower tolerance of the eccentric.
There's also the fact that if we are still talking about a story from 1883, it says more about the quality of that specific work than the average of the era.
> There's also the fact that if we are still talking about a story from 1883, it says more about the quality of that specific work than the average of the era.
Yes, exactly!
Old things that are still remembered have passed a lot of filters, significantly raising the probability that they're worth attending to.
It's not going to be true for everything, but it's a helpful role of thumb.
>Any rational person would first try and understand the root cause of the issue rather than jumping to something as outlandish as "deep state"
Conspiratorial thinking is now so widespread that virtually any act of incompetence, mere accident or random fluke is attributed to malice and collusion by 'deep' this or 'big' that or some shadowy foreign entity.
Including here by the way, every thread on some Google ranking, de-platformed Facebook winemom or what have you is full of comments on how it's either some Machiavellian business move or some other grand plan.
I wonder where this conscious disconnect happened. What was the catalyst for people to suddenly assume that everything is designed against their best interests? Was it social media in general? And if so, were people really this delusional before they got on social media?
Perhaps the proliferation of recorded written, audio, and video communications might have re-calibrated people’s assumptions.
Every time a leader or respected person says one thing and is trivially proven to have been lying puts a dent in societal trust.
Off the top of my head just in my lifetime, Snowden’s revelations, cops lying and suffering no consequences (over and over and over), politicians espousing views directly in contradiction with their actions, the myriad sexual abuse scandals, even tech leaders emailing each other to hold down pay for engineers who might have looked up to them and so on and so forth.
And then, of course, the whiplash from mob justice where certain thing get taken out of context or are difficult to understand without experience, and the consequences of that on those who are watching and understand.
The conspiracy theory that "Big Tech" and the "Deep State" are involved in an orchestrated conspiracy to deplatform Republicans and silence their views is literally just normalized Trumpist propaganda. Social media may have had a part in accelerating the normalization, but blaming it alone would be ignoring the root cause.
Donald Trump was banned from Twitter after the sustained extreme outbursts after he lost, after Twitter fueled the rise of Trumpism by first ignoring their published rules when he violated them and then, as that drew increasing attention, changed the published rules to create arbitrary, subjective exceptions for government and major political figures.
Yeah, I don't know why Donald Trump is their goto example of the Conspiracy when, if anything he's an example of how far social media was willing to bend to accommodate him.
I'm not re litigating this. Twitter's stated position and rationale are well known at this point[0], and this issue has been argued to death by now. Here's the HN thread with over 2K comments[1]. Any possible iteration of a conversation we would have on the matter is likely already there.
If you believe the only reason Donald Trump was banned was due to a conspiracy of political censorship, or refuse to at least recognize the relevance of the date and context under which that ban was issued, then it would be a waste of time to convince you otherwise.
I'm asking specifically what he says that violates the rules because you said they bended over backwards for him. I'm interested to see examples of obvious bad tweets, you don't know me but I assure you I'm am honest person who is willing to change their mind with new information. I will admit so far I'm unconvinced that Trump's treatment wasn't political, but I'm not American or a Twitter regular so didn't follow it too closely.
I'm not including the two tweets they actually banned him for because it's quite clear their interpretation of those tweets is highly subjective (I'm not ignoring the context there, context always matters, but even with context the idea that his tweets were "glorifying violence" seems to be some heavy extrapolation of what was said). Their decision to ban him then is obviously because of public and internal pressure mounting with the capital riot. So I'm more interested in what they essentially 'bent over backwards for'.
Congress is a popularity contest. The more outlandish you can get pandering to your base, the more you play in the news. It is universal. We have a government made of Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho clones.
We have a government made of Dwayne Elizondo Mountain Dew Herbert Camacho clones
That's the sort of patently false misinformation being propagated through the internet and social media these days that makes it difficult for us as a society to properly assess and deal with our problems.
President Camacho believed in listening to the best experts he could lay his hands on to advise him. He was not at all anti-intellectual. He's nothing like many of the people in congress.
If you believe he jumped to conclusions, I have a bridge to sell you. One doesn’t accidentally request to block indexing of their site. This was an intentional effort to spread conspiracy theories and he was caught red handed. He deserves to be put on trial for attempting to disrupt the democratic process.
I believe we call it "defamation"... (assuming, of course, that one can prove that on the balance of probabilities he knew that he had told Google not to index the site).
Good point. I read "put on trial" for hurting democracy as a criminal trial. A civil suit filed by Google and ending up in court-- sure, I could see that.
Note that I couldn't tell you were being sarcastic until a second reading. I honestly thought he had atoned for the mistake and you had a lot of respect for him. There's a good reason a lot of people on HN use /s. It's not just a joke.
The opposite of extremism is not centrism. It's something that aggravates me to no end in these discussion (not saying it for you but in general), it is possible to be partisan, have nuanced views on the left and/or the right, and to recognize the current parties don't represent the interests of their constituents.
If both parties are aligned on both ends of an axis of issues which are mostly irrelevant to people's daily lives, the answer is not to go to the center of this axis, it's to go orthogonal.
The "competent centrist" is a myth though. The centrists, who basically advocate business as usual, are who have given us so many financial crises, wars, poverty and suffering over the decades.
And yet consistent growth, overall better standard of living for all humanity, increased longevity, better quality of life, resuced human diseases, more than sufficient food production to feed every human on the planet (if we can figure out logistics)… yeah. Those unreasonable centrists.
All of the events you mention can be attributed to the politics of the extremists.
Not all centrists are competent and not all those who are competent are centrists. Yet far more sustainable prosperity has been brought about more by those leading from the centre compared to those at the fringes.
The whole conspiracy thing is very worrying, not just in the US or about Elections but about everything. 5G causes cancer, Bill Gates is chipping everyone, the Rothschilds/Soros's/Whoever runs the whole world. There will be some pieces of truth but mostly this is about confirmation bias.
"I believe Bill Gates is chipping everyone", therefore an article that ties him to an electronics company "proves" its true and his links to "Coronavirus" companies is the icing on the cake.
The worrying thing is that this is taking over so many areas including intelligent normal people. I guess the only way to make it go away is for our Leaders and Betters to have slightly better ability and morals so there is less reason to accuse them of corruption. Apologies to Bill Gates who is surely intelligent - not sure how he became the poster boy for Conspiracies.
Or, you know, he had his campaign website built by the lowest bidder, they for whatever reason accidentally included or forgot to remove the noindex tag, and the candidate wasn't aware of this and genuinely thought he was getting censored by Google.
But it's awfully hard to generate outrage on either side of the aisle with such a boring explanation.
I think the point is less about the technical acumen of a given candidate and what their tech team may or may not have done.
It's about that the result of what probably was an innocent mistake is a deep-state conspiracy theory being pushed as a huge censorship narrative.
The situation itself seems stupidly simple to me and I would concur the likeliest explanation is someone just made a mistake.
But the questions I have are:
1. How did the candidate notice that their site was not being indexed/shown?
2. What did they check once they realized it? Did they ask the team behind the site or anyone how this might happen?
3. If the candidate did, what did the team respond? What investigation was done?
4. What specific elements led to the conclusion of "Deep State Algorithm"? What specifically brought about this as a conclusion to publicly post about?
It's possible the candidate was misled and told "everything was fine" from the site side, but I guess for me it's still a huge leap to go from "Everything with the site is fine but it's not showing in searches" to "there is a conspiracy to censor what I am saying".
It's not about what technology _might_ exist to accomplish such a thing, it's about what was actually checked and done before this conclusion was reached. That a conspiracy theory was the only promoted conclusion from the candidate is the frustrating part for me, as checking their other tweets and publications, there's no indication anything else was considered. The article itself is being catty and while it's funny to think it's just a case of a politician staging outrage, the core problem I have still exists even if I assume completely benign actors leading up to the tweet.
I think your questions assume too much. It seems to me that the candidate saw the website not being in the search results, and either thought "a conspiracy will appeal to my voter base" and spun it as a conspiracy, or is just like his voter base, and "this is a conspiracy by the deep state!" is the only explanation he came up with.
It's either the former, or the guy is a complete idiot.
A normal person, on discovering this, would have contacted whoever is administering the website and asked them what's going on before simply assuming any particular cause.
Therefore "option two is that the guy who might soon be in charge of Arizona state elections is so incompetent and so stupid that he accidentally blocked Google from searching his website"
"Blocked" or "hired people who blocked" is the same thing in relation to a guy who wants to be elected to run things.
If stupidity was a disqualification from political office we’d run out of politicians quite quickly.
Google Search Console is pretty good on digging into this, we discovered that a portion of our website was unsearchable because a plug-in was adding a meta tag to those posts.
Maybe the contractor did that. It's still quite sad and very telling of a delusional mindset if he didn't first try to find out if his contractor can fix the problem and instead his initial response is full on conspiracy nonsense.
>Or, you know, he had his campaign website built by the lowest bidder, they for whatever reason accidentally included or forgot to remove the noindex tag, and the candidate wasn't aware of this and genuinely thought he was getting censored by Google.
This article posits two theories. He is incompetent in setting up his website or he faked oppression. Does the author really think this guy set up his own domain, built his own website, and went back in July and edited the HTML himself to not be indexed? Is it possible there's a third option that the person he hired is either malicious or incompetent? The tone of this article is cheap and overall it's terrible clickbait. The point of it is to either anger one side for clicks[0] or seek nods from the other. I don't know anything about this guy or his politics, but if we are judging people's ability to run a government office by their web development skills, let's do a full review.
With that said, this guy was either screwed by his technical team, or is quick to stir the pot without checking-- and is equally guilty of the same pathetic attempts at emotional manipulation used in the article. Maybe both.
[0] Or, option two is that the guy who might soon be in charge of Arizona state elections is so incompetent and so stupid that he accidentally blocked Google from searching his website:
> and went back in July and edited the HTML himself to not be indexed?
The HTML shows he uses All In One SEO, so chances are there's a "ask search engines not to index this page/site" setting in the extension. I haven't actually checked, though.
> The tone of this article is cheap and overall it's terrible clickbait.
Agreed, and what's worse to me is that it's all entirely speculative. The author didn't do any original research to, I dunno, email the guy's campaign about his website and ask if he made it? Having not done any research that didn't involve reading Twitter, he decided it was okay to write an article about it, and just pad that article out with wild-ass guesses and invective.
I assumed nothing. I added another, more plausible, cause for this. You assume a lot in an authoritative tone. Point me to the evidence you've found to make this definitive statement.
People don't usually set the noindex tag. The tag was deliberatly set by someone. It's not a cryptic tag where one has to wonder "does this flag turn A on or A off". It's not confusing and clearly says "noindex". In the world where SEO is king, tools don't default to "noindex".
Especially when later on the candidate was checking for SEO.
While the candidate appears to have shot himself in the foot here, and some on the Right seem to be particularly susceptible to conspiracy explanations; in the context of repeated Big Tech overreach in deplatforming and "accidentally" de-indexing conservative voices in the last few years, censorship is not an unreasonable hypothesis to assume.
Knee-jerk mockery is maybe a complacent response here from those of us on the liberal side.
Is there any actual evidence of "repeated Big Tech overreach in deplatforming and "accidentally" de-indexing conservative voices in the last few years"? Seems like a conspiracy theory to me.
You have to feel sorry for him. Pretending both to be a free speech candidate in order to not lose the libertarian-leaning base and also trying to get some cred in the oppression Olympics using the Christian-values base's mythology of persecution at the same time is a tough road for somebody who also desperately wants things censored.
edit: It's going to be a problem for a lot of conservatives this cycle. A lot of candidates in general. Claiming to be for free speech and free expression, with long lists of books to be burnt.
