Guest essay by Dave Burton
Today I watched an excellent educational YouTube video by Jim Steele, about polar and glacial ice trends and causes. If you view Jim’s video, you’ll notice YouTube/Google has added an “info-box” to it (and also to most other climate-related videos), with a link to a Wikipedia article (which is among the most untrustworthy of all information sources about climate change) — to prevent Jim from misleading people with his heretical opinions.
You’ll notice they also show a list of other suggested videos on the right. One of them had a provocative title, so I clicked on it.
Here’s a screenshot of Jim’s video, with YouTube’s recommended videos on the right (click it to enlarge):
http://sealevel.info/jims_youtube_vid_with_wikipedia_info-box_added.html
Here’s a screenshot of that YouTube-recommended video which I clicked on. It is, literally, a “flat-earth” video (with 1.7 million views, I kid you not).
Note that it did not earn an info-box addition. Apparently Google/YouTube isn’t worried that it might be misleading. Click on the image below to enlarge it:
http://sealevel.info/flat-earth_youtube_vid_with_no_wikipedia_info-box_added.html
Obviously, Google/YouTube is hopeless. I wish they were the only ones.
We live in very unscientific times. In some segments of today’s academy, you can spout gibberish like, “intersectional feminist post-dialectical assemblage criticism of science as a racist, colonialist social construct,” without raising eyebrows.
But you can’t show a graph like this, as evidence that sea-level rise hasn’t accelerated in response to rising CO2 levels, without being called a “science denier,” or worse:
http://www.sealevel.info/MSL_graph.php?id=Honolulu
These next images are not parodies, they are three actual examples of post-modern “thinking” (I use the term loosely).
The first of the three is even peer-reviewed:
http://sealevel.info/feminist_post-dialectical_assemblage_criticism_of_science_as_a_racist_colonialist_social_construct.html
It’s no wonder so many people are suckers for every goofy climate scare that comes down the pike.
Dave Burton
www.sealevel.info
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Thanks Dave for publicizing how youtube is trying to control the debate!
I don’t know what scares me more, that Google/YouTube is adding this to climate videos or that that flat earth video has 1.7 million views.
I would urge all WUWT readers to go to twitter to publicize google’s manipulations. Use
the tag #googlethoughtpolice to report all examples of youtube and google trying to deflect, suppress or denigrate alternative opinions. We must confront this step towards intellectual tyranny.
The youtube info-box re-directing viewers to wikipedia also has a drop down menu to explain to viewers “why they are seeing this”. Their explanation they put it “alongside videos on a small number of well-established historical and scientific topics that have often been subject to misinformation online, like the moon landing.”
In other words youtube/google is trying to equate and marginalize any climate skepticism as if it was the same as moon landing deniers. It is really slander cleverly phrased to avoid legal suits
Ha,ha, ha, ha. You just gotta love that last bulletin point in the Power Point “Words have meaning”. Apparently, they do not considering all the meaningless gibberish in that and the other examples given. And did no one notice the huge grammatical error in the title of the Flat Earth You Tube video?
“Why We Cannot Go The South Pole” What, did they hire Frankenstein’s monster as their typist?
“Fire bad. No go South Pole. Go North Pole. Arrgh.”
This is why when I posted on the WUWT facebook group about Youtube and Google doing this on the, I recommended that vloggers need to do their own debunking videos about those recommended links any time Youtube or google add them as disinformation. Fact check the supposed fact checkers. Then use http://trive.org to archive it all on the blockchain.
Since the spread of allegations about a child-sex ring at the Cosmic Pizza Pizzeria, it has been clear to grossly incorrect and misleading rumors are circulating on the Internet at a greatly increasing speed. It is also clear that some of this mis-information is being systematically and deliberately spread, including by Russia. RT is the biggest contributor of videos to Youtube and many are duplicated and submitted under a different name. Over half of all Tweets were re-tweets created by bots. Purely by chance, I googled the title of a post describing a police raid on the Clinton’s house in NY led by Trey Gowdy and got more that 50 websites and four videos that exactly matched the title.
What to do? a) Question the source of a provocative claim before sending it on to others? b) Challenge such claims when you know they are wrong?
All of the social media platforms are beginning to introduce tools such as this link to Wikipedia to combat mis-information and new laws in Europe require these platforms to censor. Unfortunately, the only tools they have are the major online fact-checking organizations – which are all controlled by the liberal media. In other words, the often-irresponsible liberal media is fact-checking itself AND the often-irresponsible conservative media that has arisen to make money off of angry conservatives.
I guess that people having in their social network “artistic” depiction of child rape is totally normal.
Pizzagate discussion has been avoided by mainstream, incl. Faux News.
try ZeroHedge
they didnt avoid it at all;-)
“got more that 50 websites and four videos that exactly matched the title.”
50 web sites? Or 50 matches. Not necessarily the same thing.
‘Climate change’ is meaningless leftist orthodoxy.
A “science denier” denies leftist orthodoxy. It has nothing to do with weather or climate.
Wow, regarding that last bit, about the #STEAMIF movement: I never would have guessed it was possible to have actual 100% grade A horseshit smeared all over my computer screen without ever even leaving my home.
oh i dunno
i consider using goo…doing just that to mine;-)
Our engineering students who put off to the last minute an elective course in culture for their USP requirements often end up in the women’s studies course–given a little lead time I suggest other courses that are more valuable. A lot of the content of that course looks remarkably like the “points to take away” slide. One of these students who got into women’s studies just argued with the instructor all the way through the course and left the instructor with a book about “Women who make the world worse”. He still passed the course.
We have all these liberal mega-corporations showing their true colors as leftists. (I now lament the true liberal MIA.) So the stupid question of the day which I cannot find addressed anywhere seriously is how can conservatives create their own youtube, facebook, google, media empire and yet have it open to all? Be the shining beacon on the hill. Who can lead on this?
I wondered 30 years ago, “Why don’t conservatives just buy the New York Times and Washington Post?”
Most conservatives can comprehend P&L statements… 😎
In an odd way this reminds of when Obama ran for President the first time.
There were “new” computer/game console games that came out that featured billboards and such that were Obama campaign ads.
This is from the first one:
Argumentation & Advocacy
“This essay argues that the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) is an example of an argument actor that makes assemblage arguments to perpetuate doubt and skepticism on the climate change thesis. The concept of assemblage arguments challenges dialectical approaches to argument because it rejects the assumption that argument subjects are reasonable actors that strive to settle disputes through critical-rational argument exchange. To determine how this assemblage functions as a pragmatic argument actor, this paper offers an assemblage criticism of the NIPCC’s argument expressions. We argue that this assemblage operates within a post-dialectical framework because networks, not reasons, drive the force of arguments.”
This is a word salad, only that’s unfair as you get nutrition from a salad.
According to these bright sparks it is “networks, not reasons, drive the force of arguments”. The examples of that are the 1930 Nazis, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, Pol Pot, Jim Jones.
Interesting that the one revolution that was built on reason was the Industrial Revolution, but so what that just made the majority better off.
So if I’ve understood this correctly what they are saying is Reason is bad. According to these dangerous people the age of reason was wrong and the burning of Giordano Bruno was a good thing.
This is not good.
I have been watching lots of “flat earth” videos on YouTube. I find, in this day and age, there are so many who believe the earth is flat. They can’t explain eclipses and that should be clue enough that the Earth *IS* a globe.
Many people don’t even know the Sun is star. I don’t mean “flyover country” or farmers or “hillbillies”. Educated people with a good salary.
Many people can’t explain the most simple phenomenons.
In some Internet discussion, someone claiming to be an highly educated liberal tried to “prove” me that (Earth isn’t flat/rockets work in vacuum/Moon landing is real/NASA is a good thing) (not sure why he made that point to ME) by using CELL phones as evidence: “the fact you can communicate via CELL phone is only because NASA put communication satellites in space”. (The guy was probably for real and not a troll. I smell them.)
I blame school!
When a person confronts you with an impenetrable wall of stupid, it is a declaration that reason can never prevail
I think Wikipedia is great – but only when it is about uncontroversial subjects in past history. Any issue on which there is the slightest debate or disagreement will not, of course, fit into the Wikipedia paradigm. Here it is completely useless – so don’t ever consult it in such cases.
On even the most uncontroversial computer topics, the French WP is garbage. And I was prevented for making it better because fixing stuff would have involved identify the garbage claims as garbage. Some of the worst pages even had a “good quality” tag (when even the literal application of the formal rules implied it couldn’t have one, without considering the correctness of the content).
I detest government intervention and regulation…but it may be time that Google was broken up and/or regulated…it is patently biased and unfair in its treatment of published information and just has too much influence to access of content.
Threats of breaking it up “might” get their attention. How one would break it up is anyone’s guess, but certainly don’t let them own both the biggest search engine and the biggest video service. I guess one could begin taxing profits in proportion to market share (say of search results) so that as a search engine grows in influence it makes less and less profit – that would stop the growth – not very friendly to capitalism.
I have no confidence that “fair minded people” will have any impact – most people are too busy, or too unfocused, or just too stupid to care that they are being fed propaganda.
Maybe if when the monopoly of MS Windows was discussed, the “conservatives” added their voices to the left and the “free software” people to split MS, they would be more credible now.
well the newer pcs etc i hear are being “set” so you cant remove their system and run linux,
so the monopoly grows
as it is many have looked to alt systems myself included.
when this pc drive/fills dies ,I will be all linux
As a person with experience in both electronic engineering and programing, let me add.
That can’t be done.
Reformat the disk, and any operating system can be installed on it.
Even built-in software like the motherboard BIOS can be reset, upgraded, or replaced.
All they can really do is throw up lots of roadblocks in front of the casual users who lack the tech knowledge to circumvent them.
Not heard that. What is happening is that if you do want to run Windows on the latest Intel CPU’s it will run Windows 10 only. You cannot run Windows 7. Linux on the other hand I have no idea but I see no reason why it would not.
well, Windows 7 will be unsupported. Doesn’t necessarily mean that it won’t run if you do decide to install it on the newer boxes, just that it’ll be at your own risk. If some feature of the new CPUs doesn’t work well under Windows 7 you’d be SOL when you try to do something the uses that feature.
That said, if Microsoft really wanted to be nasty, they could slip a code change into one of the patches to the previous windows versions (like win7) that would cause it to fail when detecting the newer CPUs. But that would eventually turn into self-inflicted a PR black-eye once users figure out what happened/what patch to avoid having on your PC.
sorry ozspeakup, but you are wrong. They can certainly put up obstacles to make it more difficult to change the OS, but they can’t actually stop you from doing so. As others have pointed out, the hard disk can be wiped/reformatted and a new OS installed on it. If the BIOS somehow blocks you from doing so, you can replace the BIOS as well. You can also remove the hard disk, take it to another computer and reformat and install the OS there and then return the hard disk back to the original PC.
There is no MS Windows monopoly. Not even close.
Depends on your definitions of what MS Windows is supposed to have a monopoly on. Since Windows is run on the vast majority of Personal Computers (90+% according to a report from a few years ago) it is colloquially referred to as a monopoly in that market segment even if it isn’t strictly a monopoly (as there is that < 10% of non-windows PCs). However, as Tablets and Smartphones have taken over many of the uses the PCs use to be used for, it's dominance in the PC world is not as a meaningful as it was even 5 years ago.
So, bottom line, while it was at one time as close to a monopoly as it's possible to get (back before tablets and smartphones) the current landscape has pretty much put an end to that overwhelming dominance.
Call me when smartphones are able to replace PCs.
you’re a bit late asking for that call. As already stated, many of the tasks that people use to use PCs for, they now use smartphones for. There are many people who only have smartphones and/or Tablets now who use to own PCs, so for them the PC has already been replaced.
Yeah. People who never used PCs for anything intelligent are now wasting their time on a smaller screen.
“Progress”
Oh, and if one wants to get really pedantic, yes there is a “MS Windows monopoly” as MS Windows is controlled by one party (Microsoft) and you can only (legally) purchase MS Windows from the one party – which is the very definition of a monopoly 🙂
There is a monopoly because Windows is the only Windows. There is no generic Windows.
Also, thanks to the inept Supreme Court, interfaces are copyrighted too.
Ford Mustang is a monopoly because Ford’s Mustang is the only Mustang, there is no generic Mustang. Beyond pedantry, it sounds like nonsense doesn’t it? That’s because it is, yet that’s exactly the nonsense you just stated in regard to Windows (as I said, in my previous post, one could make a argument for windows being a monopoly as an exercise in pedantry, not in any real sense in the current marketplace)
Windows is an OS. There are alternative OSes to Windows. Even ones that behave similar to how MS Windows does. Just as there are other cars (even in the narrow class of sports cars) beside the Ford Mustang. The competition does not have to be exactly *identical* products to be competition, they just have to be *comparable* products.
“there is no generic Mustang”
I have no idea what you are trying to say. What the hell is a generic Mustang, if not a car with same speed, type of fuel, and payload?
“they just have to be *comparable* products.”
A comparable product is one that runs on the same computer, same drivers, same programs. LOL
If the competition that tablets and smartphones have brought to the industry hadn’t of made MS Windows less relevant, you post would be more credible now. The fact is that Windows isn’t the powerhouse player it use to be thanks to simple free-market competition. No government interference was necessary.
Excellent article, Dave.
“Flat Earth”, while having one or two actual believers I’m sure, is a trolling exercise in identifying those who lack critical thinking skills. With the added benefit of demonstrating how all beliefs are pretty much faith based. It can be a fun exercise if you’re into that sort of thing. Verifying what you think you know I mean..
“NASA faked the Moon landing” is fun too.
1) Most “arguments” used to say that success of the Apollo mission was unlikely work AGAINST the faking.
2) Many in the comment section reply to absurd claims with equally absurd claims to “prove” the Moon landing.
In the end, some people who make videos debunking the “Apollo missions were faked” are revealed as exactly as inept as those who do the videos claiming “Apollo missions were faked”. This is very weird. Or maybe not. Most people are quite stupid. As in, intolerably stupid. You can have travel illness (the unbalance issue) just by listening to their chaotic attempts at “proving” something.
The problem is that codes of ethics imply that you show respect to other people in your field EVEN IF THEY DO NOT DESERVE ANY.
Calling a professional a buffoon is considered unprofessional. You can’t do it.
Also, you can’t be elected if you badmouth respected people. True story. Well, used to be.
The MythBusters did a pretty good episode refuting a lot of the “faked” arguments.
The thing that struck me, was that NASA had a room full of real space suits but wouldn’t lend one to MythBusters. They had to make their own. The devil really is in the detail! ;-(
School doesn’t select those who think it selects those who fit in a crowd and say the same things.
Sad!
Yeah – I just viewed the video from central FL and the Wikipedia box was there. I didn’t get a recommendation for a flat earth video but there was a link to a TED talk video about ocean acidification. Typical.
I looked at the data and they support Jim Steele
Arctic
https://chaamjamal.wordpress.com/2018/08/04/does-global-warming-drive-changes-in-arctic-sea-ice/
Antarctic
https://chaamjamal.wordpress.com/2018/08/06/antarctic-sea-ice-1979-2018/
Youtube is free to destroy its credibility as an open platform. People who want alternative view points will just go somewhere else. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P59KGR7JUvA
All this is Hitlers fault. He set such an example that the world was left wide open to be taken over by left wing idiots who write drivel such as “feminist post-dialectical assemblage criticism of science as a racist, colonialist social construct,””
Calvin, John Calvin. Also that Luther guy …
/mild s
This propaganda technique is not new. It has been around since at least the 1980s and became established in the 1990s as internet use grew. Just as when we didn’t fix our educational system after two major 1980 reports told us it was horrible neither have we pushed back hard enough on political correctness. The political correct Gestapo certainly push back at anyone with common senses, traditional values or daring to challenge the orthodoxy.
Once I literally had an ax murder working for my division. My first day on the job, as I sat down at my new desk I was told one of our work units had all gone home. A woman who had chopped her husband up with an ax and was out on probation, so long as she remained on her meds per a feminist judge, had come to work and announced she no longer needed her medications. Staff had worked with the woman prior to her ax murdering and she had been previously violent at work. I called our very liberal office of personnel. They told me I could do nothing, ordered me to take no further action and to talk to no one about it because the woman was protected by law due her “medical” ailment. I called the sheriff. Personnel called me back demanding to know why I called the sheriff. I got rather rude with our personnel bureau chief. While I called her no names she called me a misogynist and a fascists among other things. She wrote a long letter to the department secretary demanding I be fired because I had invaded the ax murder’s rights. I got slammed by anonymous emails and I am told also on several blogs I never bothered to read. The push back against me by segments of our very liberal staff even astounded me. In the end the personnel office was shrunk to a ghost of its former self and the ax murder incident was used as one of the reasons. Apparently it had not been the first time the office had given bad advice and even orders based strictly on political correct advice when a work unit was faced with the potential workplace violence.
It will not be long until ad blockers will figure out a way to remove those embellishments.