Motus Mentis

5 Comments

1. Sean says

   Yes, this is exactly right. The leftist media has been perfectly consistent for decades. They know what their jobs entail and they do them as best they can and, obviously, those who pay them are approving of their efforts. All the complaining about media bias is a waste of time. They will never report fairly because that is not what they are paid to do nor is it what they believe is the right thing to do.

   Posted March 21, 2018 at 9:54 pm | Permalink
2. The one eyed man says

   False equivalency. The Obama campaign used data from people who opted in. The Trump campaign used data which were fraudulently acquired, without the consent of the users.

   Posted March 22, 2018 at 12:35 am | Permalink
3. Malcolm says

   No, both sides requested that Facebook users voluntarily provide their login credentials, and neither side informed them that those credentials would be used to hoover up personal information through a Facebook-provided backend API. (The Obama team went so far as to figure out which Facebook users were “persuadable” voters, figure out which of their friends could reasonably be profiled as “influencers”, and then to coax these influential friends to sway their wavering pals. I have to admit: that’s pretty clever.)

   But thanks, though, for the illustrative example of the principle I defined above:

   Defend your people, always.

   I was so confident in the principle’s consistency that I was pretty much counting the minutes until your comment appeared.

   Posted March 22, 2018 at 11:13 am | Permalink
4. Malcolm says

   From The Hill (my emphasis):

   In 2012, The Guardian reported that President Obama’s reelection team was “building a vast digital data operation that for the first time combines a unified database on millions of Americans with the power of Facebook to target individual voters to a degree never achieved before.”

   What, exactly, would Obama be doing? According to The Guardian, Obama’s new database would be gathered by asking individual volunteers to log into Obama’s reelection site using their Facebook credentials. “Consciously or otherwise,” The Guardian states, “the individual volunteer will be injecting all the information they store publicly on their Facebook page – home location, date of birth, interests and, crucially, network of friends – directly into the central Obama database.”

   Facebook had no problem with such activity then. They do now. There’s a reason for that. The former Obama director of integration and media analytics stated that, during the 2012 campaign, Facebook allowed the Obama team to “suck out the whole social graph”; Facebook “was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.” She added, “They came to [the] office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.”

   Or, in other words:

   Attack the enemy with whatever comes to hand, always.

   Posted March 22, 2018 at 11:26 am | Permalink
5. Malcolm says

   The principle needs a name. I dub it Pollack’s Primary Principle of Politics. (It goes nicely with the previous one).

   Posted March 22, 2018 at 1:29 pm | Permalink