Obama's Failures

Hmmm, where is this/what are they saying? It's possible I'm wrong, BTW; I'm pretty sure it's not a new practice, but not completely positive.

Rant away; it's understandable. I guess that's why we have terms like conservative or liberal: for expressing an ideology without necessarily choosing a party, though I would hope most people could grasp the distinction between belonging to a party without necessarily endorsing all it says and does, or consuming whatever media content is usually consumed by its other members.

I have seen this mentioned by quite a few different sources at Fox. It is more what they omit than what they say that makes it disingenuous to me. Its framed in a way that makes it seem as though Obamas numbers are false while Bush's were legitimate. The fact that I only assumed this was not a new practice and that you yourself are not 100% I think backs up my assumption that they are using misdirection. I hope this doesn't come off as pompous, but I feel that most people are not nearly as discerning as me, and certainly you from what I can see, to not take what they say at face value. They hear Bush's unemployment rate when the recession started was 6%. Obama's now is 7% but he is misleading you it is really 11%. Leaving out that Bush's very well may have been 8% or more. Hope this is making sense. I'm on my phone at work. Dont tell the boss.

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Letterboxd

Well, actually, they may be right, in the sense that the Labor Force Participation Rate under Bush was relatively steady, so it really hinges on how they said it. If they said Obama's rate is "really this," and they went on to use some unemployment rate that accounted for participation, and then compared that to just the plain old unemployment rate under Bush, that would be misleading. But if they cited a rate for both that accounted for the participation rate, that would be fair--indeed, fairer than the number that's usually thrown around.

I don't think it's pompous to talk about being more discerning, either, no. I think the problem is that for many decades the guy with the stats was the guy less likely to be misleading you. But now, we have an insane amount of data, and it's available to everyone, so that's not necessarily the case any more. Everyone can cite a number, out of context or missing some crucial (but not readily apparent) component, so everyone can have their data to make their point, and it requires constant vigilance to sift through it all.

Frankly, this is a pretty good argument for thinking about data a little less and thinking more about underlying theory. I don't usually advocate this sort of thing, but it's really not enough to say that you believe in science, data, or empiricism any more. I think it produces better results to form a view of the world that is constantly tempered and corrected by data, but not born out of it, because which data you decide to believe at the outset will end up being largely arbitrary, anyway.

Definitely people should try and understand why they feel the way they feel about things before looking for information to back up their ideas.

Arguably the worst thing to come from the internet - people actively seeking out articles or statistics or arguments or whatever that confirm their biases and then parroting that stuff back to other people positing it as their informed worldview.

^^^ I'm very guilty of this in my life.

I think we're all at least somewhat guilty of that, yeah. Confirmation bias is not just tempting, but it's kind of unavoidable, unless you want a huge chunk of your life to be spent researching opposition arguments.

I think the most reasonable standard is one that at least tries to figure out the basic argument of the other side (and why to believe it or not) on the issues we decide we're going to talk about "in public." It doesn't bug me that much when people disagree, but it's pretty crazy to note how many people dismiss an idea when they've clearly never even heard the most basic counterarguments against it.

Obama is promising NSA reform.

Considering Obama's track history with keeping promises, I doubt anyone will buy into this.

He's a proven liar.

And he invented cancer.

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“The gladdest moment in human life, methinks, is a departure into unknown lands.” – Sir Richard Burton