President Trump: The NEW one and only politics thread

People can do that if they want. I personally don't want Facebook or Google in the business of censoring the content that flows through them. It makes me much less interested in their services. I don't trust anyone else to make decisions about what I can and can't see. It is a very short step from what I think is obviously false or dishonest to something that simply has a viewpoint the entity doing the censoring simply doesn't like. When that assistant professor created that list that was published all over the place, her list of "fake news" sites was a joke. She muddled together a lot of sites that do outright publish false or misleading things (at least in my estimation) with a bunch of sites that had a point of view she apparently didn't like. As I said in my post about it, Lew Rockwell's site or Zero Hedge is no more false or misleading than the Huffington Post or New Republic's site. In fact, I find some stuff on those sites actually does a better job of documenting things that support their point of view with "fact" than sites she approves of. Regardless, I just don't want others deciding what is false and what isn't because it invariably leads to what that woman did -- it's a chance to try to stifle things she just didn't like. Plus, I believe in most tenets of individual liberty. I want to be exposed to things freely, with it then up to me to do what I want with it. I don't need others filtering information for me -- along with their agenda for deciding what I see and what I don't.

 

A lot of the stuff they republish (as opposed to the stuff they do themselves) is heavy on hard-to-read opinion -- some of it ridiculous to me, especially when they cross over into politics. I largely skip over that stuff. Although, I will say that I think it is dangerous and naive to take the tact of labeling someone as "pro Russia" or "pro Putin" -- i.e. that that is bad, because only "Pro America" is good. The world isn't that cut and dried, and it is used by people to avoid actually looking more closely at American institutions.

At the same time also, opinion is not characteristic of EVERYTHING they do. They are very contrarian when it comes to finance and macro events. Sites like that serve a purpose, because those are the entities that are often pointing out things early that others aren't paying attention to but should be. They weren't around then, so I am not giving them credit, but people like them (who who now have a voice on the site) were the ones sounding the alarms in 2005 and 2006 about a credit bubble that was building and who were warning about the housing market (and getting laughed at, largely) and the causes behind what was brewing.

Also, not everything that site does is purely contrarian or "opinion," either. If you want to really understand high-frequency trading, for example, and be able to see through the mounds of bullshit related to the topic, Zero Hedge has done some great stuff. The flash crash in 2011? While regulators were creating a bunch of disjointed narrative to make a headline and seem relevant -- for example, scapegoating a guy in his parents basement in London --I didn't see anyone else who forensically did as good a job trying to figure out events the way Zero Hedge did. For example, pointing to some amazing forensic work that Eric Hunsader did at Nanex -- the kind of guy who no one else pays attention to. What they came up with was not just opinion. It was investigative reporting. Also, for someone who watches markets all day long with skin in the game, sometimes their wrap up at the end of the day nails the action I was watching in a way no one else does -- they are good at synthesizing (and making fun of) the various correlations and "narratives" forming behind the human behavior that can drive a day. The founders of the site had actual skin in the game in their careers before this, and it comes across, to me at least.