AlphaGo Zero is the second version of AlphaGo. It’s a leaner, meaner, smarter version than its predecessor, which beat the best Go players in the World. This version beats them worse, and beats the first version every time.
I’ve been fascinated with this due to my experience playing Go. I was a weak amateur player (4 kyu) but used to enjoy knowing that, at that level, I could still beat the best go playing software (11 kyu at the time, the numbers get smaller until they reach 1 kyu, then go to 1 dan and up for the good players). I took a certain pride in playing a game that couldn’t be mastered by computer, like chess had been.
Articles explaining why go is so difficult for a computer focus on the 19×19 grid the game is played on, and the astronomical number (well, more than astronomical, there are more possible games than atoms in the Universe) of possible games there are and how hard it is to make a blind search looking for best moves.
But it’s not the 19×19 grid that’s the problem. It’s the fact that a computer simply hasn’t been able to calculate the score, even of a finished game. And if it can’t know the score, it can’t decide which moves are best for improving its score.
Here’s the problem. Stones are put on the board in an attempt to control more territory on the board. If you put your stones in a tight close pattern, your opponent can place stones more loosely and surround more territory. But, and here’s the complexity of the game, if those loose stones are too loose, then they can be surrounded and captured.
A board, at the end of the game then, will have clusters of stones around various local battles for territory and control, and some of those stones will have been abandoned as dead, but some will definitely be alive and the players will understand the status of each. But there is no way, without playing out all scenarios, that a computer can determine which stones are even alive or dead.
This is the very first, easiest example in a collection of go exercises available online. Is the one black stone surrounded by white dead? Looks like it. Does white then have 4 points of territory? Or rather, will black with one more stone inside of white kill the white stones? And own the entire corner?
If this were part of a real game, depending on whose turn it is, a white or black stone would be played at C1 and the players would understand that the situation is resolved and require no more play. But how can a computer figure out the status of those white stones?
To make matters worse, even if black were to play at C1, and the players were to recognize the white stones as dead, still, if black made extremely stupid, but legal moves, the white stones could become alive again.
The answer is the neural network pattern-matching machine learning software. No longer is it required to code an algorithm to figure out the score of a situation like this, to decide the worth of it. The same technology that is used in self-driving cars to evaluate the visual field around the car, is used to evaluate board positions, after studying zillions of games.
Having used that technology to allow the computer to assess the value of different board positions, then it’s back to boring old AI planning software to search for the best moves.
Back to AlphaGo Zero. Here’s what’s scary about it. AlphaGo studied the vast libraries of human go games to learn how to play. AlphaGo Zero simply played against itself. It rederived centuries of Go wisdom on best play combinations in the opening moves, and then grew that knowledge.
I’d hardly call myself a Trump supporter, but I do have some conservative political roots. It is difficult, no maybe impossible, today to have a reasoned discussion of conservative vs. liberal ideas without the emotion surrounding Trump swamping the discussion. The screaming comes from both sides.
For example, the ACA. The liberals are screaming about millions of people losing health care! The conservatives are screaming to repeal the horrid law! I wish there was a way to have a reasoned discussion. There are two sides. We want better health care for all, but that requires subsidizing those who can’t afford it, so someone has to pay for it. This is a difficult, but fair discussion to have. I’d like to see the liberals talk about why they think it’s OK for healthy individuals and small companies to pay for that subsidy? I’d like to see the conservatives talk about a desire to expand health care to those who can’t afford it.
For example, the EPA and other governement programs that put constraints on business. One side is screaming to protect the environment, without care of the cost, the other screaming to let business to it’s thing, without care of the cost. There are real tradeoffs to be discussed here. The environment is what we live in. It’s important. Businesses are how we all, either directly or indirectly, make our livelihood. We really need a balance between a healthy environment and healthy economy. So where is the line? Has the EPA gone to far in some cases? What are the costs of various regulations? And the other way, has the EPA gone far enough? These are debates reasonable people could have, but simply not possible today.
One of the liberal positions that drives me nuts is the constant claim that the corporations can pay for it, whatever ‘it’ is. Like health care. I know corporations. They won’t pay for it. They’ll pass the cost on to us. They are soulless algorithms, income needs to exceed expenses by a certain percentage. It always will. It’s stupid to ask them to provide health care, because that’s just a tax on all of us in the cost of goods and services and lower salaries. Let’s just come out with it and tax the people directly for health care (yay universal health care) and let Exxon concentrate on energy, Applepees on crappy food, and all the small companies, selling furniture in your downtown, running a lawn service, etc. not have to worry about becoming health insurance providers as well.
The thing is, corporations are good for us. It’s how all of the wealth in our country is created. We all benefit financially, either directly or indirectly. But they have no soul. So again, there is room for a reasoned discussion on how much they need to be regulated in order to preserve the economic engine we all rely on, and yet have an environment that provides us all a good quality of life. They gets into income redistribution, how much is good? how much is needed? Could be a reasoned discussion. NOT.
Some one asked, how can anyone still support Trump. Fair question. This is my take on how maybe a majority of those 40% or so who support him think.
If I were a Trump supporter I would first of all have a conservative point of view, not a nasty one, but one that seeks more free markets, smaller government. And as a conservative, I would read the main stream media and be constantly upset with the liberal bias. Yes, Yes, it’s there, but maybe hard to see if you’re aligned with it*. So all the media attacks on Trump, I’d dismiss. I’d turn to Fox news, which, like the mainstream media is NOT fake news, but real news reported with a political bias.
Next, but maybe foremost, I’d be really disturbed by our government as usual, how it appears our politicians have all been bought. That would really bug me. And I would believe Trump’s claim that he doesn’t need money, that he will drain the swamp. That he will upset the apple cart and piss off the business as usual politicians. Everytime he did something to piss them off, I’d be cheering.
I’d be concerned that Obama did sell us down the river on all sorts of deals. I’d think that his policies were trying to be global, but that we, the average citizens of America were getting screwed, and when he said he’s dropping the Paris agreement, I’d say, right on!
I might be an independent worker in the building trades. Young and healthy. I’d be really pissed I was forced to buy insurance so other’s could have cheaper insurance. If I ran a small business getting close to 50 employees I would be bullshit that I couldn’t grow my company without taking a series financial hit as I suddenly had to become a health care expert as well as a lawn service, or whatever guy. Trump said he’s going to dismantle it, great!
More on that — it was Congress, not Obama that gave us the ACA, and it has flaws. And it’s Congress that won’t fix it. I’d be cheering Trump on as he dismantles it himself. I’d be happy to have a strong leader who tells it like it is and does what he needs to do.
Immigration? racism? I have a harder time here. Although I can say that there have been times when I’ve felt like I live in a foreign country in parts of Florida. Not saying I don’t like it, but still, when everyone around me is speaking Spanish, well it just doesn’t feel like America.
The point is I know a handful of Trump supporters who are not crazy. I know some that are as well, but that’s a different point of view. I have a hard time seeing how a fundamentalist Christian thinks God has chosen him, but that’s a different story.
If I was a Trump supporter I’d think all this sensitivity regarding speach and what can and can’t be said, and the correct terms that now have to be used because the perfectly good old terms were offensive… What a pile of crap. I’d cheer everytime Trump showed he didn’t give a damn about that.
And football. I would really like to just relax and enjoy football, it’s a place to get away from all the political turmoil in this country. It’s my happy place. And now I’ve got to look at black athletes using the game to make a statement about the difficulties of being black? About police shootings. No, no wait, even if I was the most sympathetic BLM person in the stands, the media is full of non-stop coverage of the atrocities of police racist brutality. This is not some hidden issue that someone is going to say, oh wait, really! I’d say get some other forum and just play football. I wouldn’t want any other displays of any other political issues either. and I wouldn’t want them at the academy awards or any other entertainment platform. There are enough others, so yay Donald for calling them out on that one.
For me, these are not unreasonable political stands, but positions that could be fairly debated. I hate how Trump has used them to further drive us apart.
* liberal bias — here’s one small example, the media were all in arms because, according to the headline “Trump calls Hillary the Devil!” This conjures up images of Trump going even further over the line of absurdity by casting demonic aspersions on Hillary. Well I listened to what he said. He was actually making a reasonable comment about Sanders throwing his support behing Hillary. He said Sanders “sold out,” which indicates that he had respect for the other candidate in the race who was trying to change the way government works. He then used a common phrase to describe it: “he made a deal with the devil.” He then, as an afterthough, saw a clever way to dig at Hillary: “and Hillary is the devil.” If I were writing the headline, I would have said: “Trump says Sanders sold out by supporting Hillary.” That’s the essence of it. So the liberal media was factual, not fake news, but very biased in it’s cherry picking of the statement to make Trump look bad. Google “trump calls hillary the devil” to see what I mean. Read all the outraged media you know, and then read this: http://www.dailywire.com/news/8022/trump-calls-hillary-devil-media-lose-it-theyre-ben-shapiro Imagine that you were a Trump supporter, would you want to continue to get your news from a source that so twisted this incident?
I ended a post about white privilege (although it’s really more general, it’s dominent culture privilege (like would you rather be a Buddhist or a Muslim in Myammar today?)) with a question, that being, what is the action item? Those posting about it seem to simply want people to know it exists. But aren’t there steps we can take to make our country more balanced? Some political positions we might take?
Well I’ve thought of some that I put up for discussion.
Universal health care — even the playing field for those most in need of simply good health.
Free college education — even the playing field in a society that is ever more dependent on an educated work force.
No real estate taxes for schools — one of the greatest advantages of being white is living in a neighborhood where the schools are well funded by real estate taxes. If state or federal taxes were used for schools instead, there would be a much better balance of education opportunities for those most disadvantaged. And there would be no need for ‘white flight’ as parents try to optimize the educational opportunities for their kids by moving to ‘good’ school districts.
No homework — I watch my daughter-in-law work with her kids (my grandkids) on their homework. She’s an amazing mom, makes sure her kids do well in school. As I watch, though, all I can think is it’s simply not fair. Kids in school without a parent like her are simply not going to be able to compete. Extend school hours, do homework in school with teachers around to help all, equally.
For any government programs that benefit a portion of our society, someone has to pay for it. Who will pay for these things? Well I would use my votes and tax dollars to support each of these programs.
One meme shows a picture of an military-like gun next to a picture of lawn darts, saying one has been banned because of danger.
Well, gun advocates will counter that one is protected by the second amendment.
So what would our Founding Fathers think of this? I’ll bet they’re rolling over in their graves wishing they would have expanded the second amendment to cover a citizen’s right to own and use lawn darts.
The one argument for guns that drives me nuts is, we need our guns to protect us from the government.
Note, these are people pleading to the government not to take their guns away, because they need them to be able to stop the government from taking their guns away.
I’ve never really liked guns. Didn’t particularly enjoy going to the shooting range at Boy Scout camp. Not very comfortable with the thought that the people I encounter on the street, or the driver who cuts me off, might be armed with lethal force at his fingertips. But that’s just me.
Can logic change a gut feeling like mine? Well yes, it can. If I review all the data, the statistics, it appears that I don’t really have to worry. People in nice middle class neighborhoods like mine aren’t randomly killing each other. Domestic violence, suicide, yes, but they’re not going to shoot me.
Mass shootings? They’re in the category of plane crashes. Scary, yes, but statistically unlikely that I’ll be hurt in one.
So I’m OK.
Yet, even though it doesn’t affect me, I still believe that our country would be better off without guns. For the mass murders, sure, but I was more moved by the pleas of a black woman minister in Titusville, near me, who lamented that she’d lost six young men in her church, in separate incidents of gun violence.
Regulating bump stocks is not going to help the kids in her neighborhood.
I talk to people, reasonable people, who own guns, who feel it’s important to have one for defense of their home. I believe that’s where the debate has to happen.
Admittedly, I only know of about 10 people who keep guns in their houses for that reason, but that’s the data I’ll work with.
None of these people has ever had to use their gun. But it makes them feel safe. I wonder about the logic of that?
First, I would think that most people who want to break into a home want to steal stuff, and would rather do it when the residents are away. So a gun doesn’t help there.
Hostile home invasions are scary, but just not that common. It takes a twisted person to want to do that. The question is, will having a gun make you safer in that situation? I’ve seen enough cowboy movies to know that having a gun for self defense simply isn’t good enough. You’ve got to be quicker and a better shot than the other person.
You’ve got to have the gun ready, and that means having it ready before the home invader is ready, so you can get the drop on him. But he’s showed up ready. And he’s probably better skilled at using his weapon.
So how many scenarios are there where having a gun for self defense makes sense?
It seems having a gun for self defense will only protect you against bad guys who have worse gun skills than you.
Isn’t making it harder for bad guys to get guns a better way to make us all a little safer? Yes, there’s millions of guns out there, and maybe we can’t control them for our generation, but if we start now maybe our grandchildren will live in a safer world.
The first thing I was struck with when I first saw this is actually how cool it is. How amazing it is to me that in our society, today, this needs to be explained.
It wasn’t like that when I was growing up, there was no need to explain white privilege. It was obvious. There were no blacks in the good high school I went to, there was one black kid in the Ivy League college I went to.
When I visited the South in the early 1960s, well I’d heard there were separate restrooms for colored, but it wasn’t until I went there that I learned there weren’t four, but three restrooms. Two nice ones on the side of the gas station and one filthy unmaintained colored restroom in the back.
I visited small Southern towns where the inhabitants viewed black people as little better than animals, not in a nasty way though, these were good people who would no sooner mistreat a black person than their dog, but who, in their experience, saw them as closer to animals than civilized humans.
And given how the blacks lived, well they were right. The blacks lived in small rickety shacks, with no plumbing, no electricity. They were uneducated and barely clothed, really, in the eyes of a white child growing up there, not much different than dogs.
No one needed to explain to any of us white people that we were a lot better off than black people.
It says a lot about how far we’ve come that today the problems of racism in our society have gotten subtle enough that it needs to be pointed out with screaming videos and cartoons.
I’m annoyed by the historical references when talking about ‘White’ privilege. It’s a bigger, more general, issue than that. It’s people. People have always sucked in that regard, not just white people. Throughout history, and across the planet, there has always been significant privilege associated with being a member of the dominent culture.
Much better to be a Roman in Roman times. And a Mongol under Ghenghis Ghan. And a Muslim as that religion spread all over the middle east. Want to try being a Sunni rather than a Shia in Iran? And Africa? would you rather be a Hutu or Tutsi?
Yes, today the dominent USA culture is white, and mostly Northern European white, and yes, life is much easier if you’re part of that culture.
And yes, as with most all dominent cultures, our dominent culture doesn’t try real hard to make life easier for those not in our culture. It takes leaders like Susan B. Anthony, or Martin Luther King to push for change.
I’m tired of being blamed for slavery, because I’m white. Yes, white people enslaved black people. And it’s horrible. But again, it’s people, not specifically white people.
The Old Testament of the Bible recognizes slavery as being OK and gives guidance on acceptable levels of mistreatment of slaves. It’s how the pyramids got built. It’s a human problem, humans have always been willing to enslave other humans.
And yes, those slave traders were awful. But they bought the slaves from black tribal leaders who were capturing them in other tribes. Another privilege example? much better to be a member of the tribe selling slaves than the tribe being enslaved.
And my ancestors? White people today say they shouldn’t be held accountable for the sins of their ancestors.
What if my ancestors were abolishonists? What if my Northeastern ancestors were the ones who created so much political pressure that Congress made it illegal for slavery to extend beyond the South?
What if my ancestors went to war to end slavery? What if some of my ancestors gave up their very lives fighting to end slavery. Those ancestors were white.
(Oh, the Civil War was about state’s rights? Well I’ve read Jefferson Davis’ (president of the Confederacy) account of the Civil War. The whole first chapter is a history of slavery and slavery laws, and what should and shouldn’t be. Yes, it was about state’s right, but there is only one state’s right that they cared about, and that was the right to own people as property and buy and sell them and make money.)
(This is the complexity of racial issues. Reading Jefferson Davis one is taken with the intelligence of the man, the education, the fairness even. He was clearly a remarkable man. The disconnect was he simply didn’t see black people as human. They were property, like horses.)
OK, fine, my ancestors also came over here and destroyed Native American cultures. Yup, well, it’s what people have done to other people since forever. (Have you ever read the chapter in the Bible about Joshua? It praises genocide. Joshua didn’t just take down Jericho, he took down over 30 cities and put all the inhabitants to the sword, because God told him the Israelites could have all that land. These were peaceful cities whose inhabitants were scared shitless at the approach of the Israelites.)
And the beautiful native people of Hawaii, such a peaceful community, got that way by killing all the members of the tribe that was competing with them to live there.
So yup, agreed, there were awful things done by our ancestors. We took the land from the Indians. We feel bad about it, but you know what? I’ve heard a lot of people say how horrible it was but don’t know a single family, white or anything else, that’s offered to give their home to a Native American family.
But I do agree, it’s good to continue to explain white privilege today, as, well yes, I and others probably aren’t that aware of it. It doesn’t affect our every day lives. We might be out of touch, and it’s good to be reminded of the various statistics, and the unfairness they reveal, although those statistics are readily available and often presented in a less harsh manner in the mainstream media.
I am very much aware that I was born in both a time and place, in a culture and of a gender, in economic circumstances that made it easy for me. Anything I read about almost any other time or place in history makes me feel very lucky in that regard.
I’m currently reading about the French Revolution. Wow, the ‘haves’ then really had, and the ‘have nots’ really didn’t. Much better to be born into that ruling class. For a while. Then much better to be in the other.
So how to raise my consciousness? I remember two instances where a prominent black, in one case columnist, and the other comic, hit me on a more emotional than intellectual level.
One was Leonard Pitts, my favorite columnist, who simply asked if a white father, teaching his teenager to drive, tells him to always keep both hands visible if pulled over by a cop. Oh. That brings it home.
The other was Richard Pryor, describing how the scariest thing for a black person to hear is some good ole boys going “Eeeh yah!”, cause you know someone is gonna get lynched. Same. That just-having-fun sound suddenly took on a much darker meaning.
I have a recommendation for those educating us about white privilege, and it comes from the idea behind Non-Violent Communication. It’s designed to make it easier for people to talk about difficult issues, without resorting to yelling, shaming, and name calling.
It’s based on four simple steps:
1- non-judgemental observation of a situation. (Key, don’t blame, or accuse, just here’s what I see.)
2- how one feels about that situation.
3- what one’s needs are.
4- and a request.
What’s interesting about the two rants above is they only really cover the first, one can maybe intuit the next two, but, here I really do plead ignorance, I don’t see the fourth.
Here’s how the rants appear to me:
1- non-judgemental observation (clearly stated): there are a lot of benefits to being white in this country that are not there for non-whites. OK, certainly true, no argument.
2- feelings (I’m inferring): that makes me feel as if our society is unfair. OK, yes, it would, and should make you feel that way.
3- need (I’m inferring): I need to live in a society that is more fair and equally available for all cultures, races, religions, genders. OK, very reasonable, I’d like that too.
4- request (I’m clueless here): So what I’m asking is for you to…. Yes? Yes? What?
Instead these rants seem to just want to tell me how ignorant I am. There isn’t a call to action. Instead one ends with “fucking educate yourself.”
Well you know, that just doesn’t give me a warm feeling, that just doesn’t make me want to do what needs to be done to make our society any better, it just makes me want to write a post like this one and say, “oh yeah, why don’t you go educate yourself.”
And that’s the sort of discourse that has replaced reasoned dialog in our culture today.
I have a suggestion for #4. Change the funding for public schools. No longer allow property tax to be used, but instead use uniform state funding. As long as property tax funds schools, there will be better and worse school districts, and the more affluent (often white) will move to where the schools are better and the less affluent (often non-white) will also cluster in poorer neighborhoods and we’ll continue to propagate de-facto segregation and begin the process of white privilege the very first day a 5 year old enters school.
I have a personal story about this. I was happy living in a racially mixed working class neighborhood, but when my son was about to enter school I learned the elementary school he was to attend had the highest rate of heroin addiction in the state. Heroin? Sixth grade? Sigh, we moved to an affluent white neighborhood.
Growing up in the North, I learned that the Civil War was about slavery. But I’d heard, that in the South, they all thought it was about state’s rights.
In 2004 I moved to Asheville, NC and was wandering about the library when a book almost jumped off the shelves at me. It was Jefferson Davis’ (President of the Confederacy) history of the Civil War (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government). I wondered how he saw it? So I immediately sat down to read.
I read his introductory material and the first chapter, which laid the background for the war.
I was struck by the intelligence and humbleness of the man. He takes great pains in the introduction to explain that he understands that he was too close to the events to be able to present an unbiased view. But also notes that those events are fresh in his mind, so he decided to write them down, as fairly as possible, in the hope that they would be useful to future historians who could view the war from a more distant perspective.
He opens the book with a detailed history of the laws in this country that led up to the war. It’s all about slavery. He shows an amazing breadth of knowledge about exactly what was legal, in regards to slaves, when and where in all the states of the country.
(I hadn’t known that the importation of slaves was made illegal sometime in the early 1800s. The only way you could buy slaves after that was from breeders, such as the businessmen in Charleston, SC.)
(Cynical aside — the South was in favor of the stopping of the slave ships from Africa. It meant the market for the slave trade was all theirs. But in stopping the slave ships, they cut the Yankees out of the profits of the business. Hmmm. Would things have been different if the North had still been getting a slice of that lucrative pie?)
Davis examines all these laws, many of them state laws, and makes the strong case that each state should be able to make it’s own laws regarding slavery. Here was the answer to age old debate. Yes it was about state’s rights, but the only state’s right they cared about was the right to own, buy and sell slaves.
Previous to discovering this book, I had been interested in Buchanan when historians were saying Bush was the second worst president ever. The worst was Buchanan, president just before Lincoln.
It turns out Buchanan was the best educated and most experienced president we’ve ever had. He is condemned by historians, however, for his failure to take steps earlier to stop the South from leaving the Union. But the reason he didn’t was that he just didn’t see that our Constitution said anything about forbidding states from leaving. While he regretted that the South might leave, he didn’t see how the Federal Government had any right to stop them.
Davis, in his book, expresses a lot of respect and admiration for Buchanan.
As I read through Davis’ historical perspective and his argued points of view, I couldn’t help but admire the breadth of his knowledge, and the reasoned intelligence behind his arguments. If only people wrote and argued like that today…
But one point kept grating. Everything he wrote, everything he believed, his entire intellectual edifice was built on one fundamental assumption. Slaves were property. Not people. Property.
He would argue, for example, why should a person’s property in one state become not property after crossing a state line? (Remember the issue of the day was slavery in the Western states.) He clearly viewed slaves in the same category as cattle, and that they should be covered by the same sorts of property law.
Mind you, there is nothing malicious or hateful in anything he wrote. He doesn’t come across like that. It seems his conscience was perfectly clear, and that he genuinely saw no difference between cattle and slaves.
Strange, how such an intelligent, well-spoken piece of work, such as his History of the Civil War, is based on a single fundamental premise, that slaves were property, not people. That so many people would die because of it, that tensions would still run high a hundred and fifty years later.
There appear to be polls that show a large percentage of Trump supporters believe the mainstream media is fake news, and that Trump’s tweets are more trustworthy.
Many on the more liberal side of things are surprised by that. But I’m not too surprised.
First, there is a huge difference between fake news and biased news. Fake news is, exactly that, fake. The events didn’t happen. Like the Bowling Green Massacre.
Biased news, on the other hand, is all other news. It is impossible to write a story, or even pick a story to write about, without showing some sort of bias.
Now, any serious media outlet will have some bias in its reporting, but it will take great care to ensure the facts underlying a story are, in fact, facts.
So why aren’t they trusted? Well I think anyone with political leanings away from main stream Democratic thinking was and is disappointed by this and last year’s media coverage.
If you liked Hillary, well then, you were probably pretty happy with what you read.
But if, like me, you liked Gary Johnson, you would have been bothered by: 1) the editorial decision to hardly cover him at all, and 2) the biased coverage given when he was covered.
He was only discussed in the main stream media as a spoiler. Barely mentioned. When he was discussed, two points were always made: he smoked pot and he didn’t know where Aleppo was.
Now, if I was writing the news, my biases would have shown. I would have put in more coverage of him, and I would have noted that he could have been a viable candidate, and that in New Mexico he balanced the budget, created jobs, was very popular, and vetoed a whole bunch of special interest, lobbyist created legislation sent to his desk. Basically he did all things I would want a president to do.
Now you might disagree with my editorial decisions, but they would be based on facts. Just as the main stream media was factual. Yet, when I read a serious news article that referred to him as Gary ‘Aleppo’ Johnson, well you can see how I might begin to not trust that news source. It’s factual, he got the Aleppo question wrong, but there was a bit more to him than just that, and constantly harping on this one error was, to say the least, extremely annoying to me.
My son was very interested in Bernie Sanders (and Gary Johnson) and always enjoyed getting a lot of his news from NPR. Well NPR gave Sanders almost zero coverage. It was Hillary, Hillary, Hillary. What about Bernie? Nothing. He was listening one day and realized it was the first time he had heard Sander’s voice on NPR. Sanders was giving up and pledging support to Hillary. That is, their editorial policy only covered him when he supported Hillary.
Nothing un-factual about that. But very disappointing to someone interested in Bernie Sanders. He doesn’t listen to NPR anymore. He wonders, where should he get his news?
And Trump, I hate Trump and all he stands for as much as the next Trump hater, but I believe someone, anyone, even Trump, should be given fair coverage.
Here were the headlines at one point last year in the major news media: “Trump calls Hillary the Devil!” Well, it was true. But I was curious and went back and listened to what he actually said.
It turns out he was making a legitimate point. He said he had respect for Sanders and what Sanders was trying to do, but that Sanders had sold out, compromised his principles, to support Hillary.
Well, that’s interesting. He raised a good point. You may or may not agree, but it’s certainly worth discussing whether what he did sold out his prinicples or not.
Then Trump used a common phrase for selling out, he said Sanders made a deal with the Devil. And then, realizing how he could play with it, said, and Hillary is the Devil.
Next day’s headlines from Google News feed: Trump calls Hillary the Devil! There was no coverage whatsoever of the legitimate point he was making, just outrage at the comparison of Hillary and the Devil.
It made me not trust their coverage of Trump. The only way I could learn about the point Trump was trying to make was to listen to Trump himself. The news media didn’t report it. Nothing fake about that, just biased. And very unsatisfactory.
I mentioned how I distrusted the media coverage because of how they treated Johnson, and my son distrusted the media because of how they treated Sanders. I assume you’re reading this because you’re one of my many liberal friends, but put yourself in a Trump supporter’s frame of mind for a second. How would you react to the main stream media’s coverage of him? One issue of the New Yorker Magazine had six, that’s right, six articles each one describing another way Trump was horrible.
Well if you hate Trump, that’s fun, but would you read that magazine if you liked him?
And so, my son follows Bernie on the Internet, I look for news of Libertarians on their Web site, and the Trump supporters? Well you can see how genuine fake news, straight from the horse’s mouth might just seem a whole lot more believable than truth as seen through the biases of the Washington Post or NY Times.
