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Comment by tenpies | Hacker News Reader

Could you flesh your comment out a bit more? How are they more insidious than Infowars? I am assuming the worst thing Infowars has done was claim that that one school shooting was a fake shooting and the survivors crisis actors.

By contrast my impression of Zero Hedge has been that they are constant economic contrarians. If mainstream media is touting the strong economy, Zero Hedge posters are writing about how fiat currency is unsustainable and how the long-term trend low interest rates is creating a bubble. I do agree the sources of their article range from "I think I heard somewhere" to "based on this Bloomberg data", it's all over the place. But I don't think I've ever seen anything that I would call insidious.

Fair disclaimer that I follow Zero Hedge on Twitter, for much the same reason I follow CNBC: I need a perma-bear to balance out the perma-bull.

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> I need a perma-bear to balance out the perma-bull.

With two stopped clocks you can tell the right time!

You understand that pretty much anyone could relay random bits of technical news and produce banal op-eds about market conditions, calibrating the amount of jargon to sound just a level or two above Bloomberg, and then mix insane conspiracy theories into that feed, right? Like, it'd be a 9-5 job to keep it going, but not an especially difficult one.

Back in the mid-late 1990s I ran technical operations for what was then Chicago's most popular ISP (it was eventually acquired, through multiple hops, by RCN). Our arch-competitor was a very strange guy named Karl Denninger, about whom I would relate stories here but I'm pretty sure he'll have a Google search set up on his name and I'd rather not pay to have bogus lawsuits against me dismissed. Anyways: he runs one of these sites, a sort of Zero-Hedge Jr, at Market-Ticker.org.

Maybe switch to Market-Ticker. It's just as batshit as Zero Hedge, but I'm pretty sure Karl isn't trying to influence low-information American voters about Syria.

The only thing approaching an answer to the question you were asked was zerohedges Syria spin. Care to expand on that? My belief is that mainstream us new sources, including the most august, have been guilty of Iraq-level pro-war journalistic mispractice, absolutly hysterical xenophobic jingoism in some cases, in their quest to advance the geopolitical aims of the saudi-israeli-turkey-quatar-us-british-etc coalition. It's not pretty at all. I welcome zh's anti-war activism in principle at least.

>Could you flesh your comment out a bit more? How are they more insidious than Infowars? I am assuming the worst thing Infowars has done was claim that that one school shooting was a fake shooting and the survivors crisis actors.

Infowars is tabloid material at best; but even they say that this is a lie. They never asserted this.

>But I don't think I've ever seen anything that I would call insidious.

I've found myself on zerohedge a few times through investing reasons. I've looked through their content and I'm not really seeing anything offensive really.

>Fair disclaimer that I follow Zero Hedge on Twitter, for much the same reason I follow CNBC: I need a perma-bear to balance out the perma-bull.

Very wise move.

>Infowars is tabloid material at best; but even they say that this is a lie. They never asserted this.

Yes they did. Alex Jones initially called Sandy Hook a hoax and the families crisis actors. He is being (so far successfully) sued for such acts[0]. He did walk back some of those claims, but here's his words:

>"Yeah, so, Sandy Hook is a synthetic completely fake with actors, in my view, manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors there, clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors. I mean they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings here in a fake mass shooting in Turkey -- so yeah, or Pakistan. The sky is now the limit. I appreciate your call."[1]

They're tricky to find because they are not written but made live on a radio show, but yeah Infowars absolutely claimed that sandy hook parents and children were actors.

[0]: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/31/us/politics/alex-jones-de...

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20170303201414/http://www.politi...

>Yes they did. Alex Jones initially called Sandy Hook a hoax and the families crisis actors. He is being (so far successfully) sued for such acts[0]. He did walk back some of those claims, but here's his words:

Could you provide a source for this? Both your links do not source anything from alex jones.

>They're tricky to find because they are not written but made live on a radio show, but yeah Infowars absolutely claimed that sandy hook parents and children were actors.

When we have a censorship and false accusation problem ongoing. You need to provide the source.

Dont get me wrong, alex jones is tabloid quality at best... but when you have the left-wing calling the right-wing nazis without any evidence of these people being nazis is insane.

Yes they do, from the second link

>the second hour of Jones’ Jan. 13, 2015 show

Given that he posted them on Youtube and is now banned, I'm not sure where to find them now. Nor do I have any interest in trying to figure it out. However, it looks like you can listen to hour 2 here[1] after entering the date. I haven't tried though.

[1]: http://www.gcnlive.com/JW1D/index.php/archivespage?showCode=...

A couple videos I cannot watch is not a valid source.

Again, there is a repeat issue of the left-wing lying and making false accusations against right-wingers. Ben Shapiro for example is a practicing jew but is regularly called a nazi.

I would love to hear your source but Alex Jones denies ever saying it and I'm not seeing any sources.

Regardless, again the guy is a walking tabloid. He literally calls himself retarded.The guy rants on and on for hours everyday. He gets super drunk and high. The guy is going to say retarded things. Yet you're going back to a 2015 show to find something the dumbass said and you cant even prove it?

That's some pretty weak arguments.

I gave you a link to an archive where you can listen yourself. Your refusal to do so is on you, not me. I have proven what I've claimed, you just appear uninterested in believing what's in front of you.

Like I said, Jones's comments were made in speech, not in written word, and the easiest place to find it was on youtube.

Since you don't seem to accept that, I am curious though, what "source" would you accept?

>The guy is going to say retarded things.

Your claim was very specific:

>They never asserted this.

Infowars did. I provided evidence of the falsehood of your claim. Your defense now seems to be that it was a while ago. Which is true, but so was the Sandy Hook attack, so that's not particularly surprising. If you don't want to be called out for defending a conspiracy theorist, don't make absolute claims about a conspiracy theorist that can be proven wrong with a few minutes of searching, and certainly don't then double down on your defense because he said them a while ago.

Please don't defend Alex Jones and Infowars. Its not a good look.

Alex Jones is political humor, have you ever listened to his show? It's like the right wing version of Daily Show, John Oliver, Weekend Update, Bill Maher, or Colbert. Maybe you don't find it entertaining but other people do. By the way he was recently on Joe Rogan and was contrite about calling Sandy Hook crisis actors, he insists it was a hot take and he corrected himself when the situation became more clear. By the way, if you want to hold the left wing media to the same standards about harassment as you are Alex Jones, the world is still waiting for corrections and apologies from most of those shows about getting the Covington kids story wrong and in some cases calling for doxing and violence.

"it's all a joke" is only a valid defense when like you actually market yourself as a comedian or satire (like Stewart, Oliver, Colbert, Maher and snl do).

And I reject your comparison to Covington for a host of reasons. Some of which include:

- no one arrested for attempts against the Covington kids

- the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake

- those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.

This "both sides are the same" talking point is garbage.

> - no one arrested for attempts against the Covington kids

There are ongoing investigations by law enforcement for threats made against the kids. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lInBTiL32Qo - Credible threats are not free speech.

> - the Covington kids aren't blameless, while they weren't the only bad people, their behavior wasn't admirable. That's a far cry from calling a grieving parent a fake

You can have an opinion about what the kids could have to attempt to de-escalate and hypothesize about whether that would have led to a "better" outcome, but you can't point to anything that they did that they should not have done, unlike the other people in the story. What really happened was few frames of video were captioned and spread by a likely foreign agent: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/23/technology/covington-vide... and that set many peoples opinions - which has not fully been updated now that more information is available.

> - those shows, when they did even cover the Covington thing, covered it for a few days, they didn't make continued comments over years.

You can't really make that claim so soon from when the event happened. Some people still think the Covington kids were instigating conflict with that Native American guy and the Black Israelites, and some people believe that Sandy Hook were crisis actors. They will surely talk about it for a long time as long as they believe it's relevant.

I agree that the magnitude of harm is different - but not a completely different universe. However the reaction by mainstream media and tech platforms couldn't be more opposite. I hope you will at least consider that internet censorship is broadly only going one way right now, it is obvious to those being impacted, and really consider what the outcomes could be if taken to the limit. Listen to the recent Joe Rogan podcast with Tim Pool, Jack Dorsey, and Vijaya Gadde (Twitter trust and safety) for quite a few examples.

I'd define them as an infowar for people with a college degree!

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