Who Debunks The Debunkers? (III)

We have written about the true facts that snopes.com claimed were false. Another example: snopes.com writes about the claim "Did Trump Pay $35M to Settle Child Rape Claims Against Him?" that is "MOSTLY FALSE", but if you read the text it makes clear that it is completely false...

But if you read the text it says: "A woman using the pseudonym “Katie Johnson” has twice filed a civil lawsuit accusing Trump (...) when she was just 13 years old. However, her first complaint was dismissed by the court and the second was voluntarily withdrawn by Johnson..." And that "the case is not “pending,” and no evidence has ever been offered in court to support Johnson’s allegations.". So I wonder whre is the part of truth that justifies a "Mostly False" when there is NOTHING that supports that claim?

This a small example, but it helps to show that there is a serious bias in snopes.com analyses. But let's check this in another way: is nopes.com not debunking some false claims?

Let's check at the recurrent claim that the Norweigen far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik is an example of Christian terorism. We hear/read this every time an islamist attack takes place. 

 

Surprisingly, nowhere in snopes.com debunks the false claim that Breivik is not a "Christian fundamentalist" but a Christian at all.

Who Debunks The Debunkers? (II)

We have just written about snopes.com and their bias. Another example is the "analysis" snopes.com makes of a billboard seen in Indiana about Prophet Muhammad, which claims is "MOSTLY FALSE:

"What's True

The Muslim Prophet Muhammad had multiple wives.

What's False

There are no historical accounts of the Prophet committing rape or torturing people; he was known for freeing slaves, not "dealing" them.

What's Undetermined

The age of his youngest wife, Aisha, at the time of marriage is contested; the male members of a Jewish tribe in Medina were executed for treason during a battle, but the number is also contested."

The fact is that the billboard is MOSTLY TRUE, and what is not true is just "undetermined", as snopes.com puts it. 

1. Muhammad not only had multiple wives, he had 13 wives. 

2. "The Prophet Muhammad did not try to abolish slavery, and bought, sold, captured, and owned slaves himself." [BBC] 

3. The most accepted age of Aisha foin the moment of the marriage with Muhamaad and when the marriage "was consumed" are 6 and 9 years old: "The majority of traditional sources state that Aisha was betrothed to Muhammad at the age of six or seven, but she stayed in her parents' home until the age of nine, or ten according to Ibn Hisham,[30] when the marriage was consummated with Muhammad, then 53, in Medina." [Wikipedia] 

4. So the only contested fact is the number of Jews beheaded on one day, as snopes.com puts it.

Snopes.com should have written "MOSTLY TRUE". If they didn't want to accept that it was true, they could have written "DISPUTED". In the moment they claim this is "MOSTLY FALSE" they are lying.

Who Debunks The Debunkers?

The website snopes.com described in Wikipedia as a "fact-checking website" and "as a 'well-regarded reference for sorting out myths and rumors'" has several examples of bias (if not straight fact-manipulation).

One undeniable exmample is the treatment of one of the leaked Podesta e-mails (copied at the end) has been described as "A leaked e-mail from former National Endowment for the Arts chairman Bill Ivey to Clinton campaign manager John Podesta revealed a Democratic "master plan" to "create an 'unaware' and 'compliant' citizenry", a claim that snopes.com says it is FALSE.", arguing this: "A more objective reading suggests that Ivey was actually stating the opposite, however — that a lack of awareness and a tendency toward compliance on the part of the citizenry in recent years was the result of the conflation of entertainment and the electoral process (as exemplified by the rise of Donald Trump), and these phenomena present a problem for democracy which must be countered."

The truth is that what the e-mail says is exactly what the "conspiracy theorists" claim. Maybe Ivey wanted to write what snopes.com but he wrote exactly the opposite, and snopes.com is lying when they say the claim is FALSE. But let's read carefully what Ivey says:

"And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking — and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging."

He literally wrote: "The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking". So according to Ivey, the "problem" is that "compliance is obviously fading rapidly". 

 

Let's put it in another way: if Ivey wanted to write what snopes.com claims he would have written "Although compliance is fading rapidly, the unawareness remains strong. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking", but he didn't write that. He wrote the opposite. Snopes.com is lying. 

 

If he wanted to write what snopes.com says, then he has serious problems with building ideas, which seems hard to believe from someone who was a a senior policy fellow for Americans for the Arts and trustee of the Center for American Progress.





From:bi@globalculturalstrategies.com 

To: john.podesta@gmail.com 

Date: 2016-03-13 17:06 

Subject: From Bill Ivey 

 

Dear John:

Well, we all thought the big problem for our US democracy was Citizens United/Koch Brothers big money in politics. Silly us; turns out that money isn’t all that important if you can conflate entertainment with the electoral process. Trump masters TV, TV so-called news picks up and repeats and repeats to death this opinionated blowhard and his hairbrained ideas, free-floating discontent attaches to a seeming strongman and we’re off and running. JFK, Jr would be delighted by all this as his “George” magazine saw celebrity politics coming. The magazine struggled as it was ahead of its time but now looks prescient. George, of course, played the development pretty lightly, basically for charm and gossip, like People, but what we are dealing with now is dead serious. How does this get handled in the general? Secretary Clinton is not an entertainer, and not a celebrity in the Trump, Kardashian mold; what can she do to offset this? I’m certain the poll-directed insiders are sure things will default to policy as soon as the conventions are over, but I think not. And as I’ve mentioned, we’ve all been quite content to demean government, drop civics and in general conspire to produce an unaware and compliant citizenry. The unawareness remains strong but compliance is obviously fading rapidly. This problem demands some serious, serious thinking — and not just poll driven, demographically-inspired messaging.

Rubio’s press conference yesterday AM was good and should be repeated in its entirety, not just in nibbles. I will attend the Clinton fundraiser here next week but as I can only afford the low level of participation may just get to wave without a “hello.”

I fear we are all now trying to navigate a set of forces that cannot be simply explained or fully understood, so it is and will reamin interesting!

Sent with a handshake,

Bill

¿A quién le interesa "la desparación de la niñez? Netflix, El País... Bilderberg

Iker Jiménez se pregúntaba en uno de los mejores programas de Cuarto Milenio a quién le interesa "la desaparición de la niñez"... Aquí tenemos dos ejemplos: Netflix y El País.

"La relación de los menores con la sexualidad es tabú, pero en la vida real las niñas perrean. En esta sociedad maniquea, muchos se sienten bien expresando su furia contra una obra de la que no saben nada". @ricardodequerol sobre la polémica de Netflix https://t.co/IJqXV8kwzi

— EL PAÍS (@el_pais) August 22, 2020

¿Qué tienen en común Netflix y El País? Ambos son medios que promueven la agenda globalista-multiculturalista radicalmente, una agenda que incluye la destrucción de la familia, la desaparición de la niñez, pero al mismo tiempo la infantilización (adolescenamiento) de la sociedad.

Cebrían, fundador de El País, y Mathias Döpfner (Netflix), participantes de la reunión de Bilderberg 2018 (Döpfner repitió en 2019).

Döpfner (Netflix, pero también Warner Music y del gigante alemán Axel Springer) és miembro del comité de dirección de Bilderberg.

Axel Springer, de la que Döpfner es director ejecutivo, controla, entre otros: Die Welt, Bild y Business Insider [Wikipedia]. 

El CV de Döpfner es un ejemplo perfecto: promueve la sexualización de las niñas desde Warner Music (adjunto el -execrable a todos los niveles- último éxito de Cardi B), y después lo presenta desde Netflix como un fenómeno social...

JK Rowling and the Gender Controversy

"People who menstruate"... I understand why JK Rowling felt hurt by this: describing women by a physiological process is an undeniable act of dehumanization. To do it allegedly in order not to hurt people who don't menstruate but feel as women is to think that the right of somebody to be identified as they feel is more important than the dignity of half of the Earth's population dignity.

She later had to explain herself:

What JK Rowling maybe didn't expect is for things to get scary. And I don't use the word scary in vain. The backlash that this tweet generated forced JK Rowling to write "bout Her Reasons for Speaking out on Sex and Gender Issues". I really advise reading this 3670-word piece.

There is a very revealing piece about a scientist who dared publish a paper about a worrying trend she had documented:

"The same phenomenon has been seen in the US. In 2018, American physician and researcher Lisa Littman set out to explore it. In an interview, she said:

‘Parents online were describing a very unusual pattern of transgender-identification where multiple friends and even entire friend groups became transgender-identified at the same time. I would have been remiss had I not considered social contagion and peer influences as potential factors.’

Littman mentioned Tumblr, Reddit, Instagram and YouTube as contributing factors to Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria, where she believes that in the realm of transgender identification ‘youth have created particularly insular echo chambers.’

Her paper caused a furore. She was accused of bias and of spreading misinformation about transgender people, subjected to a tsunami of abuse and a concerted campaign to discredit both her and her work. The journal took the paper offline and re-reviewed it before republishing it."

"On the same day that PLOS One announced its review, Brown University took down a press release they had earlier posted about the paper.[4][19] Responding to critics, Brown University President Christina Paxson and Provost Richard Locke said they had not infringed on academic freedom and stated that Brown's commitment to only "publicize research that unassailably meets the highest standards of excellence" required Brown to retract the press release after PLOS One opened an investigation on the paper in question." [Wikipedia]

To understand how unusual is all this, we will quote a former Harvard Medical School Dean:

"The fact that Brown University deleted its initial promotional reference to Dr Littman’s work from the university’s website—then replaced it with a note explaining how Dr Littman’s work might harm members of the transgender community—presents a cautionary tale.

Increasingly, research on politically charged topics is subject to indiscriminate attack on social media, which in turn can pressure school administrators to subvert established norms regarding the protection of free academic inquiry.

There is a real problem with a lack of reproducibility of published science in many academic fields. (...) But that is not what has happened in regard to Dr Littman, whose critics have not performed any systematic analysis of her findings, but seem principally motivated by ideological opposition to her conclusions.

There is no evidence for claims of misconduct in Dr Littman’s case. Rather, unnamed individuals with strong personal interests in the area under study seem to have approached PLOS One with allegations that her methodology and conclusions were faulty. Facing these assertions, which predictably drew support from social media communities populated by lay activists, the journal responded rapidly and publicly with the announcement that it would undertake additional expert review.

In all my years in academia, I have never once seen a comparable reaction from a journal within days of publishing a paper that the journal already had subjected to peer review, accepted and published. One can only assume that the response was in large measure due to the intense lobbying the journal received, and the threat—whether stated or unstated—that more social-media backlash would rain down upon PLOS One if action were not taken.

In her letter, Dean Marcus cites fears that “conclusions of the study could be used to discredit the efforts to support transgender youth and invalidate perspectives of members of the transgender community” (my italics). Why the concerns of these unidentified individuals should be accorded weight in the evaluation of an academic work is left unexplained.

The idea that unnamed parties might apply conclusions from a study such as to cause some vaguely defined harm to other third parties is a spurious basis for the university’s actions. Virtually any research finding related to human health may be used for unrelated and inappropriate purposes by independent actors. Indeed, this happens frequently in medical science, as when nutrition research is used to promote diets far beyond the validity of the underlying data. When this occurs, responsibility lies with those committing these acts, not the paper or its author." [Quillete]

Trans activists do not act only like the Spanish Inquisition regarding scientific research, they also do not like the media talking about detransitioning (reversal of a transgender identification or gender transition, whether by social, legal, or medical means), and they attack any program on this topic as "transphobic". Here you have an example after the BBC dared dedicate 57 minutes to detransitioners.

It is fascinating to read how they argue that the program should not have aired, like a conspiracy theory joining Christian groups, alt-right, lesbians, feminists.... But the most ironic is the one regarding the figures of "patients [who] expressed transition-related regret or detransitioned" being between 0.47 and 2.2 (assuming there are not studies with higher figures, and that the selected studies are reliable -what was the period of the study?-, and that, as we have already seen, it is difficult to conduct scientific research that doesn't match the believes of the trans community). It is ironic that transgenders don't consider detransitioners significant enough over the transgender population, when the number of transgenders over the total population are similar to the ones they attributed to detransitioners over the total transgender population...

What we see here is that a small minority (non-representative if we would follow the same standards they apply to detransitioners) attacking and limiting free speech, free scientific research and free press...

Según Julia Otero, las críticas a Soros son por antisemitismo

Julia Otero en Julia en la onda: "El factor Soros, es curioso porque ahí seguramente está la conexión antisemita. Osea, a Soros le odían por judío. Otra vez el antisemitismo. Todo es Soros, ¿os dais cuenta?" [ivoox]

Decir que los que "odían" a Soros lo hacen por antisemitismo, es una teoría de la conspiración en sí misma. Pero una conspiración que demuestra una gran ignorancia por parte de Julia Otero.

A Soros se le critica porque utiliza su riqueza (conseguida de forma bastante discutible) para moldear el pensamiento de la ciudadanía a su gusto.

A Soros se le critica porque se cree con derecho a derrocar presidentes elegidos democráticamente, cuando no son de su gusto, como él mismo admite que hizo en Ucrania.

A Soros se le critica porque se cree con derecho a interferir en la política de cualquier país o región: por ejemplo, presionando a la UE (a través del departamento de Estado americano) para facilitar los visados para ciudadanos ucraineses y georgianos [2016 State Department memos detailing contacts between George Soros' office and Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland]

A Soros se le critica porque, a diferencia de lo que indica el nombre de su fundación "open society", lo que defiende es una sociedad dónde las élites toman las decisiones en privado y convencen a la ciudadanía a través de propaganda.

US Protests: Inequality Wins?

Racism exists. It is everywhere. White racism is undeniable. But there is also racism in the arab world against blacks. Or even racism among blacks in Africa against albinos.

Having settled this, let me ask you this: a white person of the same socio-economical background of one black person, has more changes? In other words, once you remove the socio-economical differences, is racism still significant?

It is undeniable that black people live worse than white people, that they have less opportunities both professional and social, but I think the reason is economical discrimination. Black people are not poorer because they are discriminated; they are discriminated because they are poorer. And they are poorer because they started the "social race" from far behind, and, despite the opposite, there is no significant social mobility in the US (and the self-made man is a myth, but this is another story). Poorness brings criminality and criminality brings prejudice.

Let's talk about "Job applicants with white names needed to send about 10 resumes to get one callback; those with African-American names needed to send around 15 resumes to get one callback"[NBER]. Now are these job applicants getting less calls because they have African-American names or because these names are associated with lower socio-economical backgrounds? I was thinking that it would be interesting to make a similar study in Spain: trying with traditional names and names that are more commonly used to lower socio-economical backgrounds (English names such as Kevin or Jennifer, for instance). I am sure there would be a significant difference.

Why this is important? Because while the media focus on how blacks are discriminated and setting social plasters/band-aids to solve this discrimination, they divert the attention from the root of the problem: economical inequality.

I don't think anybody believes that media corporations are independent. We all know they are owned by the financial elites. And what do financial elites above anything else? To mantain the status quo. So with inequality growing, and black people suffering specially from the Covid19 tragic effects, putting the blame on an inherent racism in american society instead of on the inherent (and growing) economic inequality seems a smart move.


PS: Upward income mobility in the US [Forbes]:

 

 Upward educational mobility in the US [Forbes]: