"I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past, people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously colored what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost anyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be a body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science”. There is only “German Science,” “Jewish Science,” etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened” — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not such a frivolous statement."
This is exactly why a focus on the one event that happened this week would be a big mistake. That was just the latest most extreme result of a much deeper problem, it was not the problem. Those responsible will of course be using the above technique to turn it into an isolated occurrence that has nothing to do with their own activities.
The saving grace may be that the Leader himself didn’t stay on message and continued calling the rioters “patriots” after the “shocking” event took place. That was way off script.
But if we don’t figure out the deeper problem, the next Leader may be much more competent.
I think the “deeper problem” is thinking that Californians and Iowans share anything in common at all. Or the idea that 300 million people can be effectively governed by a democracy when they have vastly different goals and values.
In my ideal world, the states could just peacefully break up into a looser group of nation states, with a shared military against outside threats. We’d invert the tax pyramid where the city and county get the most taxes, and the federal and state governments get the least. If we could have a non violent transition away from the existence of an unimaginably massive federal government.
I doubt that’s what will happen. There’s simply too many people employed by the government for it to contract peacefully. I fear for the future, and think that arresting and throwing the book at people at the Capitol is just going to increase the number of scary things happening.
What you described is how many founders envisioned the US. Granted some weren’t for benign reasons. And I think that’s an important point...many of the civil rights advancements made in the US might have only been possible because the strong federal government was able to drag many states kicking and screaming away from immoral practices.
It’s not like the United Nations would stop existing. It’s also not as if interstate trade would stop (I mean, unless a state tried to literally enslave its population, that’d stop interstate trade really quick).
If South Africa couldn’t manage Apartheid due to pressure from other nations, there is zero chance Louisiana could magically reinstate slavery. This is an absolute straw man.
I have an over-active imagination that turns on a dime. It will often automatically (without conscious direction) conjure up instant scenarios based on whatever I'm reading or hearing. Reading your comment I instantly visualised President Trump of the Confederate States of America announcing the construction of their friendly ally Russia's first military base on their northern border. Brains are funny things. If I were a writer it could make for an interesting alt-history novel.
"thinking that Californians and Iowans share anything in common at all"
I wonder what kind of policies / issues you mean by this, so I thought of some strawmen:
1. How to name the streets in San Francisco
2. The insurance pool for social safety nets
3. Abortion
Category 1 is issues that are obviously local, and are already handled locally, because there's no point wasting federal time on them. We both agree that Iowa shouldn't care what a street in SF is named.
Category 2 is where I oppose your plan. A bigger insurance pool will amortized risk better. If all the states split up, wealthy people can vote their taxes down by moving between states. And the poor are still stuck in whatever state they were born in, which is probably a state with crappy benefits. For welfare, I want the opposite - I think almost everything should be federal. It's a bigger pool, and the wealthy can't dodge taxes by moving.
Category 3 is a strawman - Obviously abortion is not related to longitude, so if the states split up and CA allows abortion and Iowa bans it, obviously one of them is wrong. There might be a subtler point that California's politics would advance if they weren't spending time trying to legalize abortion in red states, and Iowa might also get more done if they weren't ... doing whatever Iowa is doing. (This is just an example, for all I know Iowa might be very left on abortion already)
What specifically do you think _is_ different about those two states? Don't the citizens need police, firefighters, food stamps, public transit, and public roads anywhere in the country?
> Obviously abortion is not related to longitude, so if the states split up and CA allows abortion and Iowa bans it, obviously one of them is wrong.
This seems odd to me. Why wouldn't it be good for advocates and opponents of abortion to each have a place where they feel comfortable and their values are respected?
That structure probably falls apart in a world where there is internal trade and multinational corporations that can do tax between regions. Now you suddenly need to negotiate foreign policy and internal trade agreements and slowly stronger federal institutions start to grow. The shared military also doesn’t live in a vacuum but also depends on foreign policy.
> I think the “deeper problem” is thinking that Californians and Iowans share anything in common at all.
This is preposterous and I am flatly surprised that more people are not challenging it. Our differences may be more salient, but they are vastly outnumbered by our similarities. We speak the same language, eat the same foods, watch the same sports. We don't have vastly different goals and values -- we have serious differences of opinion about a tiny fraction of public policy and our shared culture.
What's more, the differences that do exist break down less along state lines and more along the distance from a city center. There are urban areas in every state, and there are rural areas in every state. Iowa and California are different inasmuch as (by the 2010 census) 95% of Californians were urbanized and only 64% of Iowans were.
> In my ideal world, the states could just peacefully break up into a looser group of nation states
The idea that all Californians think alike, or that all Iowans think alike is very strange. If you look at the election results there are plenty of people in both states on both sides.
>I think the “deeper problem” is thinking that Californians and Iowans share anything in common at all
I think just the opposite, there is virtually no difference between "red states" and "blue states", because nearly every urban area is "blue" and a few minutes drive away, every rural area is "red", no matter what state you're in.
And there's also the split between people who go to college and people who don't.
I think these are obviously the fault lines of today and therefore we aren't going to see a repeat of certain states seceding and something like the original Civil War.
> If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened” — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well two and two are five.
Recently there was a dustup in the twitter maths community over whether "2+2=4" was a fact or an artifact of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism.
Thanks, that was interesting for a bit but then went nowhere.
To save others the time, as I understand it, their disagreement is about the meaning of the equals sign. I suppose they're right, because we do use different definitions of equality for different needs, both within math and in other fields, and of course without a good definition all sides agree to, people can find themselves talking past one another.
For what it's worth, the definition of equality I like best is the one based on symbolic manipulation - two symbols a and b are equal iff substituting a by b in ANY statement does not modify the statement's truth value.
> To save others the time, as I understand it, their disagreement is about the meaning of the equals sign.
I think it's more general than that. The meaning of symbols is not fixed, but a matter of intersubjective agreement and context. "2+2=4" if we intend that "2" represents the natural number subsequent to one and preceding three; and we intend that "+" refers to infix addition; and we intend that "=" refers to quantitative equality; and we intend that "4" represents the natural number subsequent to three and preceding five. This is actually not an "iff" statement because there are an infinite amount of other meanings we could reassign to the symbols contained within the proposition in order to result in a true statement.
But intent is a property of the speaker, not the phoneme. Intent does not inhere in the message. Intent must be inferred from context and previous usage of the terms.
> without a good definition all sides agree to, people can find themselves talking past one another.
I think this happens a lot and its why people think other people deny things like "2+2=4." Then there is a whole class of people who take advantage of ambiguity to instrumentally employ fallacies of equivocation.
"in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less discoverable"
I recently found a graduation card, which an old classmate gave me:
The front is a picture of some abstract art. The inside says, "Yeah... I don't get it either."
Underneath the pre-printed punchline, my friend wrote, "But that does not mean that it cannot be gotten!" I could use more friends like him these days.
"This prospect frightens me much more than bombs" Me too, and that's why 1984 was too scary for me to finish. Bombs occupy physical space, they can't be nowhere and they can't be in two places at once. They are pretty easy to understand, and they can explode once. Mind-viruses don't kill as quickly, but they aren't subject to any of the limitations of a physical weapon, either. They can't be captured or destroyed, and as far as I know, dogs cannot sniff for them.
The greatest counter to such constructs is logic. For those who can wield it enjoy likewise greater capacities due to the inherent nature of mind viruses.
Love is necessary but not sufficient. Anecdotally, I think there's a ton of people who will say "I love my family but I hate everyone else". Maybe only love can drive out hate, but sometimes love also sits on its ass and does nothing.
If you want hard numbers, compare the number of vegans to the number of animal lovers.
Strikes me as bull -- there are many ways to look at the failure of communism and others are better.
Im the US we have a long history of building systems that dont work or only sorta kinda work. Some examples are the health care 'system' and the Space Shuttle. (e.g. the russians did not buy the idea that the Space Shuttle was intended to lower the cost to access space -- it was an obvious boondoggle that maximized the cost; looking back we know the study that killed the O'Neill colonies and associated Gumdam dreams said there was no point in that because if we gave the Saturn V the Falcon 9 treatment we could have launched solar power sats by 1990)
In retrospect I think it's pretty obvious the actual point of the space shuttle was national prestige. Studies done at the time pointed out it would take something like 60 launches a year for a reusable system to beat the cost of expendable rockets with available (1970s) technology, and yet the project was pursued regardless. Because the real, actual, honest reason we went with the STS was simply - the shuttle was a space ship, like in sci-fi, and was therefore cool and therefore a public darling. Even if it made no financial sense, people still loved it.
It's similar to the USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin serving in the Gulf War. Made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and was a total waste of money and time. But battle wagons are cool, and therefore people bent over backwards trying to justify it. They even invented "armored" pods for the tomahawks going on the Iowas:
The Russians were interested in hypersonic glide vehicles as a platform for nuclear weapons.
They really hated the Pershing 2 because that kind of reentry vehicle can break suddenly two or more times confounding the Moscow ABM system. (which might have been able to fire multiple nuclear shots, get lucky to disable the warhead, and burn out all the electronics for 1000 miles away with the EMP -- the American hit-to-kill ABM will just fail)
Russia was trying to outboondoggle us with Buran and the Energyia booster. Like the space shuttle Buran was a hypersonic glide vehicle that could land on a runway with a wing and a prayer, emphasis on the prayer. The rocket engines were on the booster but not the orbiter, so Energia by itself was a capable heavy lift vehicle which the russians planned to out-boondoggle us: one Energia exploded when Russia tried to launch a 1-MW class laser satellite with optical targeting and all the facilities to start burning up targets. (e.g. in response to the Reagan era SDI talk, the Russians tried to hastily launch real hardware)
--
BTW I have seen the boxes on the Iowa class and they are a hoot. The US Congress had a lot of resistance to Robert Macnamara's plan to switch the Navy to vertical launch tubes because they didn't look menacing enough but if you look at Chinese films like Wolf Warrior you see they are very proud of their missile destroyers and their cluster munitions too.
Regarding Buran: Delivery of nuclear weapons was part of the specs of 1950s XB-20 Dyna-Soar project (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar). The soviets probably saw the obvious similarities in the basic design, probably also knew about the Space Shuttle specs having been blown up in an otherwise inconceivable fashion by request of the armed forces and drew their conclusions, eventually answering the threat by coming up with a design that actually adhered to these assumed specs. It was a necessity dictated by panic.
The challenge with living in this world of lies is that eventually reality sets in, and reality can't be lied to. Whether that's the virus killing someone you love, or the Russian army crossing the Vistula, no amount of swearing up and down that it's all BS can change that.
During BLM protests conservatives were posting pro police updates. Now that Trump supporters murdered a police officer reality has set in for them. This is the end of Trump. Most conservatives are good people who would never murder a police officer for Trump. They are not going to fight for him to be replatformed. No one is going to insure his physical rallies. Even if they do the turnout will be low as most people don't want the attend a murder riot.
For what it’s worth, I’ve only seen the odds of this go to non-zero once: it was the case two days or so ago. It’s back to zero in my mind now that Twitter banned him and martyred him. I think he probably is actually now a permanent fixture in our lives, afraid to say.
As a counter-anecdote, I was pretty sure that the Access Hollywood tape would lead to Trump being dropped by Republicans. Instead, bragging about sexual assault somehow became "locker room talk" and the story had little impact. Since then, for each new story, I've been waiting to see whether there is a corresponding drop in his popularity among Republicans before ever concluding that there is a moral line that won't be justified.
To be clear, the reason for this and why it was different wasn’t because of the capitol attack alone. It was also because he appeared to capitulate and abandon the people who did it and supported it. That group took it as a sign he wasn’t the leader they thought he was and betrayed them. Now that he has been martyred and has re-rebelled against the tech companies, threatening to create a new platform, that is over.
It's hardly martyring to be kicked off of Twitter IMO, but even if his fans see it that way -- Trumps fans seem to predominantly posses a very short attention span.
It's the only way that many of Trumps reversals make sense. They can be cheering him for saying A and then cheering him five minutes later for saying ~A. I suspect that if Trump loses his platform for some number of months, the shine may wear off.
And Parler is being kicked from AWS, so their entire service is going down too--and they may get the full treatment of being kicked from other servers and payment services if they don't agree to police their content. And without easy access to his marks, it will be harder for Don the Con to stay relevant.
Not predicting that it will happen. I'm not that optimistic, TBH. But positing a mechanism that it could happen.
> I think he probably is actually now a permanent fixture in our lives, afraid to say.
Life has a 100% mortality rate. His presence is our lives is inherently temporary. And for a morbidly obese man, it could happen suddenly, or take 20 years. We just don't know.
Wouldn't people have said the same thing about Hitler after the failed Beer Hall Putsch?
I think Trump's allure is going to mostly survive this event, he will figure out a way to brand it as not being his fault or intention. I could be wrong about that though.
That doesn't mean the person's view will change. I've seen nurses on Twitter talk about how when they inform someone that their relative has died of Covid, they'll still insist it's fake.
The reason the US and the western world have been able to succeed and make such progress is because of the freedom to point out the failures and do something better.
Whether that's building a better phone, medical procedure, or communication network, or rocket, historically you've been able to point out that the emperor has no clothes, and then build something better.
This is what terrifies me about the current attitudes on both sides of the aisle - we're turning from, "I disagree but will fight for your right to say it" to "if I disagree you should be deplatformed and fired and mobbed."
Yeah, there definitely seems to be a lack of good-faith in almost all discourse these days. I don't know if that can be fixed without resorting to totalitarian control of information because there will always be incentive for malicious actors to argue in bad-faith, and I think recent events have shown that such propaganda can quite easily overwhelm good-faith efforts. Of course, totalitarian control of information has many of its own downsides so I'd rather not have that either.
A totalitarian control of information is not going to lead to good faith discussions. First, the totalitarians won't control the information in good faith. Second, even if you found good faith people to control the information, the malicious actors who argue in bad faith won't go away just because you control the information that they can argue about.
Seriously, "both sides of the aisle"? One side is saying "Here is categorical evidence of an issue", the other side is saying "the other side are demons and the sky is green.". There is no middle ground if one side is actively participating in bad faith.
Lockdown protests - super spreader events or valid exercises of freedom of speech?
George Floyd protests - super spreader events or valid exercises of free speech?
Riots attacking federal court house in Portland - treason or valid exercise of free speech?
Riots attacking capitol building in washington, d.c. - fortunately, everyone seems to agree it's bad. Oh, but it's apparently a super spreader event...
Remind me which side is participating in bad faith?
Imo, it’s strictly bad faith to be blamed: on the right, there is a refusal to separate the violent, unprotected speech from the protected opinions.
Meanwhile, the left seems to be refusing to accept that coercing people to act a certain way does not actually change what people believe. A list of banned words and opinions will never make the world progressive. Deplatforming people over truly just opinions or mannerisms is a temporary win.
Social media isn’t really a moderated community. It has “rules” and you can get “banned,” but Twitter is less “moderated” than a typical comments section. So when people act in bad faith, there’s no recourse unless they explicitly break rules. On say, a typical old Internet forum, it’d probably mostly be considered dramatic to do call-outs, not to mention pointless due to the disconnected nature of identity on the old internet. On Twitter not only is it common but you can make as many bad faith arguments and take as many things as far out of context as you like in attempts at character assassination. You can concern troll, you can use known misleading sources, etc. and even if someone calls you on it, you can just do it again later.
As usual though, most people are pretty “selfish.” A lot of people “get away” with being not “progressive“ enough because people like them. What happens is eventually someone has a trivial dispute with them and decides to seize the moment to pull out as much ammo as possible, which is how you end up with 50 page google docs arguing as hard as they can that every mistake someone has ever made is evidence that they are irredeemable.
So in self-preservation people become dishonest. And I mean I’ve seen it first-hand. Their beliefs haven’t changed, but they have to say certain things publicly in order to keep their status. And other people who also don’t believe in the things they're saying will express their disappointment if they ever deviate. It’s an amazing circus show. Things have gotten very perverted.
With the right, they are of course taking advantage of this in the worst faith way possible by using it as an argument against being progressive in and of itself. It’s not the methods, it’s the ideology. But in the same way a civil rights riot and a doomsday cult riot are not the same thing, there’s always going to be too much nuance for a conclusion that oversimplified.
Meanwhile, sites like Twitter simply do not give a fuck. All they care about is brand accounts, ads, and public image. But mostly the first two. So fat chance if they’re going to risk lowering engagement to help fix broken incentives.
> A list of banned words and opinions will never make the world progressive. Deplatforming people over truly just opinions or mannerisms is a temporary win.
When people know their opinions are generally considered reprehensible, they hide them. I can agree with that.
But if those opinions are successfully hidden or pushed underground, and the next generation is predominantly exposed to positive values, the world does become more progressive. Individuals change only a small amount, you're right, but society does change for the better over time.
It's when echo-chambers of intolerance exist that attitudes of intolerance and selfishness can be amplified and push the world in the wrong direction.
The problem to me is that it quickly becomes a game of what seems most progressive optically rather than what is right on a fundamental level. Like, the obvious bits of free speech are not very interesting; it’s the edges of free speech that are what really matter, and these are the things that need the most nuance. Nuance is not what you expect in a social media platform (especially not one aimed at explicitly short form communication only.)
> So in self-preservation people become dishonest. And I mean I’ve seen it first-hand. Their beliefs haven’t changed, but they have to say certain things publicly in order to keep their status. And other people who also don’t believe in the things they're saying will express their disappointment if they ever deviate. It’s an amazing circus show. Things have gotten very perverted.
Preference falsification. Its getting worse. and people who falsify preferences still act like radicals. They haven't internalized the values so they imperfectly carry them out.
"the left seems to be refusing to accept that coercing people to act a certain way does not actually change what people believe."
I know coercion is not enough, but it's the only thing that can be pushed by the people with power to push anything.
As soon as I find out what _will_ change beliefs, I'd like to start doing it. Assuming that, as an individual, I _can_ do anything at all. But breaking up the radicalization pipelines is better than nothing.
This assumes that there are no serious negative externalities to the scorched earth mentality. It’s easy to assume nothing serious could go wrong; I disagree, I think it could potentially be very harmful, and I wish we didn’t have to find out how that might happen.
Of course I am not actually against every time someone gets deplatformed; I think it is reasonable from a community standpoint to, for example, ban the doomsday cult garbage. That’s not a matter of banned opinion to me, even though it leans on a gray area.
My take has some nuance so you will probably never see it on the likes of Twitter:
I'm against mob violence, I hate the death penalty, but I'm still okay with de-platforming. It has a use. There is a difference between "This person is inciting violence" and "This person is disagreeing with us" and the line has not been blurred yet.
I'm glad Trump got banned, because he is an Internet troll who happens to hold office.
I'm glad that a few rioters were arrested. I hope they are convicted and serve jail time. I hope they live to realize why they were wrong. If they die it means I will never have them on my side.
I don't want anyone to die. Death, unlike de-platforming, cannot be undone if it turns out we are wrong.
So please don't lump me in with people calling for guillotines and mob violence.
I've spent the last 5 years being told by people that all of this is "normal". That "all politicians say these things". That "even Obama did X, Y, Z" even when X, Y, Z are completely different. Unfortunately, even the left-wing opposition often concedes these arguments or even agrees out of their own political self interest.
The concerning thing is one of the biggest divides is amongst the people that pay attention, and have paid attention, and everyone else that either can't or refuses to.
I was about to say much the same — I’ve had a face-to-face conversation with someone who tried to dismiss his own side’s dishonesty by saying “everyone does that”.
This analogy makes sense for me, right up until last week. How is staging the most incompetent coup ever demonstrating anything except that he actually doesn’t think ahead and just does whatever in the moment to further his own personal whims?
Well, there's Trump and there's Trump's planners. The latter probably have some skill at strategy.
I agree, though, that recent events seem to have finally answered the question of whether or not Trump has a plan. It seems not, but you can get very far by just falling forward and refusing to admit defeat, ever. The sheer cognitive dissonance of the idea that a US president could be so far off his rocker and still be highly popular forces us to look for any explanation, however contrived, that means there's some master plan behind it all.
But nope, it's been option A all along: A charismatic manipulator really was elected president despite never knowing what he was going to do with the position when he got there, and despite being constitutionally unable to take advice from people who do understand strategy.
He's a narcissist and he wants power and admiration, I think that explains most of his actions. If he had won, he would have praised the amazing American democracy. Now that he's lost, there's been talk about a "Trump TV" channel. Something like Fox News, but more radical. He will probably do whatever he can to stay in the spotlight and keep getting attention, keep his following.
No question about it, when he thought he might lose the first election, he already complained that the result would be fraudulent, before it even happened ;) But after he won he didn't mention it again.
An angry mob sacked the Capitol. If #ZipTieGuy and friends had arrived mere minutes earlier, they'd have walked into a joint session of Congress containing every member of succession to the President that he did not appoint himself. It's easy to call it incompetent now that it failed but we might have just avoided a revolution by the skin of our teeth.
I don’t understand this. So you’re thinking if they hold or execute members of Congress that’s all it takes to overthrow the government? This seems ludicrous and yet I’ve seen multiple people espouse such a thing, so I’m wondering if I’m not understanding some kind of checkmate that comes with such a move.
Until the conclusion of the ceremony that they disrupted, Joe Biden is legally just some guy. If Congress had been more seriously disrupted, it's possible the ceremony would have continued as normal sometime before the inauguration. Also possible it would have been postponed indefinitely for "the security situation in DC" and "investigations into voter fraud." On January 20th it would be Vice President Pence sworn in.
I guess a can’t refute your hypothetical here, but the process it describes is ridiculously brittle. It seems utterly unbelievable to think all it takes to overthrow the US government is disrupting a single ceremonious formality. That surely cannot be expected to withstand the test of time on merely goodwill and tradition.
Basically, if there is no absolute majority of electors, each state gets one vote in the house for president and two votes in the senate for VP.
All of that only comes into play if there is no majority winner though, so I don’t think just keeping them from voting would do the trick.
The Presidential Succession Act only covers succession in case of removal from office and only until an election can be held, so it is technically true that Pence would be in line, but that assumes Trump was removed and the electoral votes had still not been counted, a highly unlikely combination. Even then just counting the votes would resolve this problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Succession_Act
Or again, it can be argued that no unbiased outlook is possible, that all creeds and causes involve the same lies, follies, and barbarities; and this is often advanced as a reason for keeping out of politics altogether.
I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics – using the word in a wide sense – and that one must have preferences:
that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort.
I like Orwell, his fears are well justified, but it's statements like these which make me think he stopped short in his realizations (along with most people).
I think Plato's arguments presented in his Allegory of the Cave, paint a clear picture of "the truth" and the nature of the human condition. Particularly by showing that "finding out the truth" always relies on perception/observation of the truth (science is no different BTW). Which is to say what we come to regard as the truth is subjective to our perceptions of the actual truth. Which brings up a problem: How can you ever be certain that our perceptions are nothing more than "a shadow of a deeper truth" and thus not the real truth? The only way of resolving this trust problem (at least until further evidence comes along), is by taking a leap of faith (ie to adopt a belief). Thus ultimately, anything anyone regards as the truth, stems from adopting at least one or more beliefs/assumptions whether they realize it or not.
Fully realizing this, makes it so much easier to understand society, and why you can't always convince people using what you deem as "facts". Unfortunately, you may also realize how deep the rabbit hole really is...
Trump supporter: "This is the erosion of free speech"
Me: " Given that his supporters have already rioted and murdered, Twitter is trying to prevent him from inciting more riots"
Trump supporter: " Just wait until they come for you "
At first I was confused because I have no interest in inciting riots, and I don't even care if I get banned from Twitter. Now this makes sense, they are saying that Trump and Twitter are both trying to maintain and gain power. They think that I'm just too stupid to understand what Twitter is doing.
I can sympathize with them for feeling this way, it is hard to accept that you got scammed.
I'm from the UK so I don't have any skin in this particular game, but what would you do if you held an opinion that Twitter decided was pernicious enough to ban you?
Twitter bans things like calling people racial slurs, threating violence against people. If I wanted to do one of those things I would hopefully go see a therapist to understand why I'm acting that way.
Currently that's what they ban. The argument is more abstract than that. Should they have that power? UK gov is now talking about regulating them in law to prevent bias.
TBH it's not hard to see how this could end in the balkanisation of the net.
Twitter and most other online platforms have always shut down certain political groups like the KKK. KKK members have been silenced by most businesses.
Is it theoretically possible that someone at Twitter or FB could decide that Democrats were the only acceptable party and try to silence everyone else?
Yes, that is possible, but it also possible that they will continue to apply the policies the same way going forward. If I didn't like a change they made political or otherwise I would quit, just like I quit digg years ago.
That's not necessarily true. There are people, like myself, who often don't have a dog in the fight except that I look closely and skeptically at the tools and tactics being utilized and frequently ask myself: "Ok, but what if this were used in another way, or by the opposite side?" If the answer is that it's bad, then the means are objectively bad, and I oppose the use of those means.
This, in a sense is itself a political stance, but its not that hard to learn to distance yourself from the immediate emotions of politics. Particularly when I started to see how ubiquitous the weaoponization of anger has become in the modern era.
You're stripping nuance and treating highly complicated situations like simple logical propositions thinking that inductive logic and reversing statements can attain an elevated understanding of the situation.
In function you remain disconnected via privilege to the majority of implications of said issue, and self soothe by pretending that if others only had your level of enlightened understanding then there would be no issue.
Humans invented the Law, and it is the most objective thing that we have in order to know if someone does good or wrong.
Humans are not objective, but in a big part subjective. First, humans belongs to groups. And it is a completely different thing if your own group abuses and benefits you, than if some other group abuses you and you lose.
You only see dirt in one side. Of course the dirty side is not yours.
"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"
The fallacy is well articulated but it is an error to, if one sees this behavior, then go on to reject all the claims of the cultists. This would mean, say, that if the Soviets rightly criticized the US, we ought to assume the criticism was founded on a lie or invalid for other reasons.
It’s this error in my opinion we see just as much of. Just as much as Trump is able to influence the beliefs of his followers, he is able to induce beliefs in his haters, by causing them to become certain of the truth of the opposing claim. We should address both problems: ignoring one or the other will just lead to further destabilization.
The delusional do not lie uniformly, and the trick to a good false narrative ("conspiracy theory") is to include as many true facts as possible, though cropped, shaded, cast, and lit to create an overwhelmingly false account. Usually true facts aren't sufficient, and most fabulists throw in additional false elements, some entirely fabricated, some subtly twisted.
The effort involved in separating truth from bullshit from someone fundamentally indifferent to truth is too high.
If there is in fact truth to be had, there will virtually always be a credible source from whom it can be obtained.
In Dante's Hell, it was bearers of false witness who occupied the penultimate circle.
Exactly! The soviets and communists were not showing complete lies about the west.
I lived on the other side, and I remember seeing news about homeless under the bridges, about the police beating up black folks. And it was all true, as it's still a problem today!
What they didn't show is that 90% of the Americans were living better than even the top 10% of the communists
The fantastic "Hypernomalisation" documentary by Adam Curtis[0] talks about exactly this. How the actual reality stops mattering at all, and how political leaders build whatever reality they want to be in. The Soviet Union comparison is especially apt and also mentioned in this documentary - when the Soviet government would announce that the potato harvest is once again 300% above the norm everyone knew they were lying. But it didn't matter because obviously everything said by the other side is also a lie.
No no, what I mean is - when the Soviet government reported that the wealth in the soviet union is the greatest in the world, everyone knew it was a lie. But the side effect of assuming that everything the government says is a lie was also assuming that everything coming from the West is also a lie. So yeah, maybe we don't have the best quality of life - but surely Americans also don't, their TV also lies just like ours.
The MAGA movement ("Make America Great Again") doesn't understand what made America great in the first place.
I am going to tell you what made America great, but you will not necessarily like it:
WW2 devastated the most important industrialized economies throughout Europe and Asia. The US was left intact.
For many years, the US was #1 in exports, #1 in manufacturing, and most importantly, the Bretton Woods system was in place.
Under Bretton Woods, the US was effectively able to create money from thin air. The premise was that each dollar was backed with gold, and you could at any time redeem the gold equivalent to your dollars. However, because that right was never exercised and nobody could audit the gold reserves, the US abused the system and by 1971 it became clear that it was a fraud.
By 1971, Europe and Japan were done rebuilding their economies and now their manufacturing capabilities surpassed the that of the US. So countries like France take the initiative and challenge the US to give them their gold, and when the US fails to meet these obligations, the Bretton Woods system ends, also putting an end to the American economic golden age.
Since the Nixon shock, US living standards have started becoming similar to that of other countries, the cost of living has been raising and the US has been accumulating an enormous amount of debt.
Think about it: during the 1940s to the 1970s, the Interstate highway system was built, there were expensive Space exploration programs, millions of Americans had affordable housing, higher education... everything was affordable. And suddenly nothing is affordable anymore. And that is the reason.
Am not American, do not have a horse in this race, but the US grew a lot between 1800 and 1945.
It began as a mostly rural republic that had about as many full time soldiers as the Cree tribe had armed (with guns) fighters; Lafayette thought that USA would need French protection for a few centuries.
Then, American industrial capacity exploded and by 1900, it was competing for the first place with the UK and Germany. The entry of the US to both WWI and WWII made the decisive result precisely because of enormous American capacity to produce stuff.
That said, loss of American production capacity in the last 30 or so years ("the giant sucking sound" of Ross Perot) may really be an early sign of decay. Having digital giants is fine, but they won't produce a billion of N95 masks on demand.
Manufacturing grows as a response to market demand. And with an absence of competitive foreign manufacturing, the US could grow its manufacturing to satisfy the demand of all the countries left behind by the war.
However, as countries rebuilt their production infrastructure, competition went up, driving prices down, diminishing profits and the US started moving away from manufacturing.
Every nation on Earth in 1800 had that same fundamental demand.
The US had untilled praries, virgin forests, mountains of iron hills of coal, oceans of oil, a network of rivers and harbours (supplemented with canals and railroads), and no credible foes on the continent.
Russia at the time was not quite as advantaged, but strongly comparable in many regards.
The existing Great Powers of 1900 had extensive agriculture and coal energy resources (Britain, Germany, France), and at least some colonial holdings for further raw materials. But all were more constrained than the US, as well as knocked back by WWI.
WWII promoted an explosion in US industrial and resource extraction capability whilst Europe was again set back
Post WWII, the US retained its advantages, an intact (and substantially recently built) industrial infrastructure, and no international competition, as noted above. The Martial Plan and Japanese and Korean reconstruction helped.
I mostly agree with this, but you're missing post-1970s history where they replaced gold with oil by requiring USD for oil transactions (the "petrodollar"). This system that we live under has its own economic imperatives and sustains the USD as the reserve currency of the world. However, it has enriched the elites and impoverished the working class as imperial projects tend to do.
That is a good point, and is indeed the case. However, oil requires trading a tangible good, which makes it less efficient than the Bretton Woods system where money was simply infinite.
I don't think that's true. In my understanding of this, the oil peg works for the world kind of like how requiring taxes to be paid in USD makes a paper currency "real". In our system, the money is effectively infinite until somehow the dollar is displaced from the reserve position.
By the way, this is precisely how Putinist propaganda is presenting things in Russia today. "We have no democracy, elections are a fake and people are jailed for dissent? Right, but this is the case everywhere, trying to do otherwise would have destroyed any nation very quickly because populist demagogues would win and steal everything. It's just people in the West are too brainwashed to see how are they being used"
Sometimes it goes even better: "it's not our fault that we have to do more political persecution and violence than in the Western countries. it's just that Russians are a lot smarter than Westerners so what can be easily done in the West by simple brainwashing through media, doesn't quite work here and has to be augmented by force"
The comment about Soviet propaganda, though, is amusing. It's amazing how little people in the USSR knew about the rest of the world as late as the 1960s. Anatoly Dobrynin wrote in his 1995 autobiography that, when he came to the US in 1962 to be Ambassador to the United Nations for the USSR, he was amazed to see traffic jams. He'd been brought up to believe those were American propaganda. No country could have that many cars.
(That's a fun read, by the way. He got to be a diplomat in a very strange way. Stalin had a meeting in 1946 with some of his diplomats and grumbled that those old guys were out of touch, and they needed young new Soviet men like aircraft designers. The next day, Dobrynin, a young aircraft designer, was ordered from his job designing aircraft to Moscow to attend the Higher Diplomatic Academy and learn to become a diplomat. He turned out to be good at it.)
This is a neat analogy, but ultimately not quite true.
I believe that Trump followers believe him, for the most part.
The insurrection on Capital Hill was made by people who very deeply felt that the 'Election Was Stolen' and therefore Democracy itself was at stake. (There were several interviews by the press that highlighted this).
It's rational for someone to take reasonably dramatic action if they believed there were fraud at a fundamental level - so on a way - the actions of the protesters are understandable in a perverse kind of way, with the assumption that they are completely misinformed.
For the the 'not so gullible', the lie, repeated over and over again just has a ring of truth to it - enough that somewhere about 50% of the US believes that the 'elections were unfair' in some way, when in reality, that's not anywhere near the truth - the election was fair and free. There weren't any systematic shenanigans.
This means that a ton of 'regular, educated followers' buy into the BS at least partially.
And of course, since it's partisan, and some people 'want to believe it' - it's easier to believe.
The real question then becomes: will the gullible and not-so-gullible-but-partisan accept actual, material evidence when it's presented?
That's where you possibly meet the 'truly stubborn'.
Finally - in the efforts to get the truth out, a lot of these kinds of people have basically no faith in important institutions such as 'Science', the Judiciary, the DOJ etc..
Though most of the press is fairly legit, they are also biased, and so most plebes don't want to trust them either.
We are in a 'War for the Truth' right now it's a big deal with Politics, COVID, issues of Freedom of Expression (which includes the right to lie) etc..
> will the gullible and not-so-gullible-but-partisan accept actual, material evidence when it's presented?
What is being presented is not evidence. It's absence of evidence, combined with blunt assertions. That's not what we should be getting from a truly secure election system.
Years ago, the kernel.org servers that host the source code to the Linux kernel were hacked. Lots of people and lots of corporations use Linux, so the security of the source code of the kernel is a serious issue. So what did the owners of the kernel.org site do? Did they shout over and over that there was no problem? Did they make a huge effort to argue against people (and there were plenty of them) who claimed this showed Linux was just not a serious OS, as compared to those other OSs owned by large corporations? No.
What the kernel.org owners did was much simpler. They just showed the security measures they already had in place, and explained how and why they worked. And since those security measures were good ones, based on cryptographically secure methods of signing and verifying code and detecting tampering, and since they were open, so anyone who wanted to could check and verify them, that was all they had to do. All the accusations and speculations about insecurity simply evaporated.
That is the kind of security we should have for elections. And it's blatantly obvious that we don't. And until we do, given how divided the country is, we will continue to have close elections that the losing side, or at least a significant portion of it, refuses to recognize as legitimate. This problem cannot be handwaved away, and it cannot be solved by shouting louder, the way Americans do in foreign countries in the hope that it will cause the natives to start understanding English. It can only be solved by implementing a secure, and transparently secure, election system, where nobody has to take anybody else's word that nothing questionable happened.
1) There is an incredible amount of legitimacy and transparency in the system already.
Your linux analogy simply doesn't apply.
There are tons of 'eyes on the system', there are literally election observers. The rules are decided ahead of time etc..
With the 'Dominion' system there is literally a paper record of each ballot - there were recounts that validated the electronic counts perfectly.
The 'voting and ballot' part of the election is very secure, and there's no way to systematically defeat it.
2) If there is an issue with the elections, it's related to 'who can vote'. States are in a constant war over this, the rules over 'how to purge voter roles' (look into recent Georgia rulings). Those things, are today 'grey areas' not well defined by anyone so it means conflict.
3) "And it's blatantly obvious that we don't. "
Just the opposite, it's blatantly obvious that the elections are in fact secure - you've provided zero evidence to suggest otherwise.
But you're missing the issue - the perception of election of integrity has nothing to do with election integrity.
This has nothing to do with the facts.
This has to do with whatever Trump tells people (i.e. Cargo Cult).
If Trump had won the election, there would be zero concern over election integrity because it's entirely derided from his populist narrative.
The elections are as secure as they were in 2016 and 2012 - and there wasn't some big uproar over 'ballot counting' then, was there?
Why not?
Because 'some populist figure' wasn't screaming 'Fraud' 'Fraud' 'Fraud'.
And even if the election were 'mathematically secure' it still would not matter because this has nothing to do with reality, it has to do with narrative.
A populist figure will say 'The Election Was Stolen' - and his Cargo Cult followers will believe him, irrespective of the facts.
Who are placed far enough away from what is happening that they can't usefully verify anything. What we should have are election workers from each party, paired up, with transparently verifiable means of confirming that they both agree on every action taken.
> The rules are decided ahead of time
And then those rules, established by the State legislatures ahead of time in accordance with the Constitution and Federal election law, are changed by State executive branch officials and judges. That is clearly unconstitutional.
> With the 'Dominion' system there is literally a paper record of each ballot
Printed out by a computer system with known vulnerabilities and laughable "security" precautions.
> there were recounts that validated the electronic counts perfectly
By counting ballots which were printed by the same machines that gave the electronic counts, so this so-called "check" is meaningless.
> If there is an issue with the elections, it's related to 'who can vote'.
Yep. The way to solve that is obvious: voter IDs with simple, objectively verifiable rules for eligibility and a requirement that every eligible voter must be issued one. Other countries have this. Mexico has this. Why can't we?
> If Trump had won the election, there would be zero concern over election integrity because it's entirely derided from his populist narrative.
Excuse me? Trump won the 2016 election and for four years we've been hearing concerns over election integrity from the side that lost that one. Sure, those concerns weren't coming from Trump supporters, because Trump won. And now, as you yourself illustrate, Trump opponents have no concerns whatever despite multiple issues at least as blatant as any of the ones Trump opponents complained about in 2016, because Trump lost. In other words, the winning side will never complain and the losing side always will, because the system is broken.
The belief that Hillary won the popular vote overall is pretty widespread. But isn't that true and uncontroversial?
Beliefs about Russian interference are also widespread, but they are also true/well documented and unconnected to the actual voting.
There was no movement that I know of, like we see now, saying that the swing states that went to Trump had subverted elections.
Once or twice recently I may have seen someone idly saying "hey, Republicans tend to project, I wonder if we should investigate the 2016 and 2020 elections to see if they were up to something".
I ran across the claim that Republicans won in almost all of the states that don't have proper paper trails for voting, which could be suspicious. I don't know if that's accurate, and I don't know of any movement pursuing that.
There was questioning and ambiguity over Clinton's loss, particularly because of the fact that polling showed Trump was going to lose.
Donald Trump himself was surprised that he won.
But it's not remotely on the same scale as we see now.
There was 'smoke' with Russian relationships, and given the nature of a guy like Trump, a lot of people naturally believed the Mueller investigation would find him guilty of something. I did.
The press was happy to castigate Trump for two full years over it - until it just started to show that he was in fact innocent - at least of having colluded with Russians.
I hate Donald Trump, he's a psychopath who tried to overthrow the Republic in the end - but - he was actually treated unfairly during the Mueller investigation by the press as they banged 'Mueller + Collusion + Russia' over his head daily.
It turns out there were some shenanigans there, but definitely not Trump & Co. working with Russian.
The press never really cleared him from that.
In a way - Trump's mass lies about the current election is just him taking the same story but pushing it right up to the line of legality. Unfortunately, he pushed it way too far, and directing election officials to overthrow valid election results is definitely sedition, and he'd be in jail were he to note have the status and political protections he has as President. He's done much worse than Watergate.
Donald Trump is purposely claiming a mass election fraud, full well knowing it's a complete lie.
For gosh sake, he was on the phone with Georgia election officials, threatening them to overturn the results for him and publicly demanded that Mike Pence commit Sedition by throwing the election for him.
Not only does this have nothing to do with 'the other side' (i.e. Clinton) - there's no comparable in American history.
Every intelligent person knows this, especially Republicans, it's just a matter of how many are willing to go along with him because of the benefits it may bring, or the fear they have of being turned on.
> a lot of these kinds of people have basically no faith in important institutions such as 'Science', the Judiciary, the DOJ etc.
And that is because all of those institutions have lied to them, repeatedly, over many, many years. So has the mainstream media. So it is rational for people not to believe them when they insist, louder and louder, "no, really, this time we're telling the truth!"
Many of the problems do stem from the fact that bubbles are so easy to create. Social media has brought us the ultimate dream machine of living in your own world, where what you believe is a truth, and not only that, the algorithm will give you more of it!
If we want meaningful dialogue, we need less bubbles and better avenues for discourse. Facebook and its ilk is the worst of humanity if used beyond keeping in touch with friends.
The issue with Parler only gives more fuel to the ones in this particular bubble that they are being persecuted. A bubble they already believe in, a world they already mentally inhabit.
We must keep striving for what you address in your comment, and for platforms for meaningful discussions, with ample focus on material truths.
Trump went straight for the 'they do it too' lies, particularly early in his administration. When questions about his people's contacts with Russia and related people came up and what information might have been exchanged. His response was that he was sure other candidates would take any help / information from Russia if offered.
That struck me as one of those situations where you find that people who 'cheat' are more likely to greatly over estimate how many people actually cheat. But it certainly served the reverse cargo cult issue here too.
Interestingly enough when it came out that nobody in the Trump administration had informed US intelligence services that a foreign agent agent was offering them help... it also came out that every presidential candidate staff had reported some such contacts, with the exception of Trump, and Bush Sr. .
To this non-US observer, one of the things (from a very long list) that is most incomprehensible about Trump loyalists is the fact that his links with Russia seemed to provoke no particular outrage. Nor does it seem (correct me if I'm wrong) that there were particularly strenuous denials about these.
I’m in my thirties, and I have a feeling the process of “growing up” is an ideological bell curve that goes something like:
Youth: Extrovert certainty
Young adulthood: Extrovert uncertainty
Adulthood: Introvert certainty
As you learn more about the world around you, you realize the younger you was far too idealistic and cock-sure about the causes and solutions to the problems around you. Being barraged with uncertainty, the obvious answer then becomes that there is really no truth, there’s only approximations we can reach through the Socratic method: but eventually you grow weary of this as well. Surely there must be good and evil in this world, and if it quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck.
Being dogmatic isn’t a good thing, and I try to keep an open mind: but what’s equally dangerous is subscribing to the ideology that there is no such thing as good and evil. There is, and most of us have known the difference since we were children. I think adulthood is about finding the courage to speak out, when useful and constructive, instead of hiding behind the comfort of relativism.
> Being barraged with uncertainty, the obvious answer then becomes that there is really no truth
This is an extreme and absolutist conclusion. Feynman once said something to the tune of (paraphrasing): I have degrees of certainty about different things and there’s many things I don’t know anything about. This is not “no truth,” this is “no truth I should be 100% confident in.”
> Surely there must be good and evil in the world
I could not disagree more strongly. There are incentives, both genetic and societal. This does not mean we are resigned to relativism or an absence of truth, it means we are more enlightened about the factors that impose into our interaction than being subject to fanciful innate accusations.
I've been there and I dare think the percentage of people buying the communist anti-West propaganda was about the same as the percentage of die-hard trumpists.
116 comments
[ 2.2 ms ] story [ 185 ms ] thread"I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past, people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously colored what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost anyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be a body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science”. There is only “German Science,” “Jewish Science,” etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened” — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not such a frivolous statement."
The saving grace may be that the Leader himself didn’t stay on message and continued calling the rioters “patriots” after the “shocking” event took place. That was way off script.
But if we don’t figure out the deeper problem, the next Leader may be much more competent.
In my ideal world, the states could just peacefully break up into a looser group of nation states, with a shared military against outside threats. We’d invert the tax pyramid where the city and county get the most taxes, and the federal and state governments get the least. If we could have a non violent transition away from the existence of an unimaginably massive federal government.
I doubt that’s what will happen. There’s simply too many people employed by the government for it to contract peacefully. I fear for the future, and think that arresting and throwing the book at people at the Capitol is just going to increase the number of scary things happening.
As did the cold war. You can't counter a hegemon with anything other than another hegemon. To fragment the US is to accept the rise of China.
If South Africa couldn’t manage Apartheid due to pressure from other nations, there is zero chance Louisiana could magically reinstate slavery. This is an absolute straw man.
I wonder what kind of policies / issues you mean by this, so I thought of some strawmen:
1. How to name the streets in San Francisco 2. The insurance pool for social safety nets 3. Abortion
Category 1 is issues that are obviously local, and are already handled locally, because there's no point wasting federal time on them. We both agree that Iowa shouldn't care what a street in SF is named.
Category 2 is where I oppose your plan. A bigger insurance pool will amortized risk better. If all the states split up, wealthy people can vote their taxes down by moving between states. And the poor are still stuck in whatever state they were born in, which is probably a state with crappy benefits. For welfare, I want the opposite - I think almost everything should be federal. It's a bigger pool, and the wealthy can't dodge taxes by moving.
Category 3 is a strawman - Obviously abortion is not related to longitude, so if the states split up and CA allows abortion and Iowa bans it, obviously one of them is wrong. There might be a subtler point that California's politics would advance if they weren't spending time trying to legalize abortion in red states, and Iowa might also get more done if they weren't ... doing whatever Iowa is doing. (This is just an example, for all I know Iowa might be very left on abortion already)
What specifically do you think _is_ different about those two states? Don't the citizens need police, firefighters, food stamps, public transit, and public roads anywhere in the country?
This seems odd to me. Why wouldn't it be good for advocates and opponents of abortion to each have a place where they feel comfortable and their values are respected?
This is preposterous and I am flatly surprised that more people are not challenging it. Our differences may be more salient, but they are vastly outnumbered by our similarities. We speak the same language, eat the same foods, watch the same sports. We don't have vastly different goals and values -- we have serious differences of opinion about a tiny fraction of public policy and our shared culture.
What's more, the differences that do exist break down less along state lines and more along the distance from a city center. There are urban areas in every state, and there are rural areas in every state. Iowa and California are different inasmuch as (by the 2010 census) 95% of Californians were urbanized and only 64% of Iowans were.
The idea that all Californians think alike, or that all Iowans think alike is very strange. If you look at the election results there are plenty of people in both states on both sides.
I think just the opposite, there is virtually no difference between "red states" and "blue states", because nearly every urban area is "blue" and a few minutes drive away, every rural area is "red", no matter what state you're in.
And there's also the split between people who go to college and people who don't.
I think these are obviously the fault lines of today and therefore we aren't going to see a repeat of certain states seceding and something like the original Civil War.
Recently there was a dustup in the twitter maths community over whether "2+2=4" was a fact or an artifact of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/biostatistics/2020/09/kareem-ca...
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/08/2-plus-2-never-equals-5/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a33547137/why-...
https://arcdigital.media/mathgate-or-the-battle-of-two-plus-...
These are good summaries, they should have links to some of the relevant tweets.
To save others the time, as I understand it, their disagreement is about the meaning of the equals sign. I suppose they're right, because we do use different definitions of equality for different needs, both within math and in other fields, and of course without a good definition all sides agree to, people can find themselves talking past one another.
For what it's worth, the definition of equality I like best is the one based on symbolic manipulation - two symbols a and b are equal iff substituting a by b in ANY statement does not modify the statement's truth value.
I think it's more general than that. The meaning of symbols is not fixed, but a matter of intersubjective agreement and context. "2+2=4" if we intend that "2" represents the natural number subsequent to one and preceding three; and we intend that "+" refers to infix addition; and we intend that "=" refers to quantitative equality; and we intend that "4" represents the natural number subsequent to three and preceding five. This is actually not an "iff" statement because there are an infinite amount of other meanings we could reassign to the symbols contained within the proposition in order to result in a true statement.
But intent is a property of the speaker, not the phoneme. Intent does not inhere in the message. Intent must be inferred from context and previous usage of the terms.
> without a good definition all sides agree to, people can find themselves talking past one another.
I think this happens a lot and its why people think other people deny things like "2+2=4." Then there is a whole class of people who take advantage of ambiguity to instrumentally employ fallacies of equivocation.
I recently found a graduation card, which an old classmate gave me:
The front is a picture of some abstract art. The inside says, "Yeah... I don't get it either."
Underneath the pre-printed punchline, my friend wrote, "But that does not mean that it cannot be gotten!" I could use more friends like him these days.
"This prospect frightens me much more than bombs" Me too, and that's why 1984 was too scary for me to finish. Bombs occupy physical space, they can't be nowhere and they can't be in two places at once. They are pretty easy to understand, and they can explode once. Mind-viruses don't kill as quickly, but they aren't subject to any of the limitations of a physical weapon, either. They can't be captured or destroyed, and as far as I know, dogs cannot sniff for them.
The capacity for love also seems like a protective immune response to mind viruses that are so commonly rooted in hatred.
If you want hard numbers, compare the number of vegans to the number of animal lovers.
Im the US we have a long history of building systems that dont work or only sorta kinda work. Some examples are the health care 'system' and the Space Shuttle. (e.g. the russians did not buy the idea that the Space Shuttle was intended to lower the cost to access space -- it was an obvious boondoggle that maximized the cost; looking back we know the study that killed the O'Neill colonies and associated Gumdam dreams said there was no point in that because if we gave the Saturn V the Falcon 9 treatment we could have launched solar power sats by 1990)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
In retrospect I think it's pretty obvious the actual point of the space shuttle was national prestige. Studies done at the time pointed out it would take something like 60 launches a year for a reusable system to beat the cost of expendable rockets with available (1970s) technology, and yet the project was pursued regardless. Because the real, actual, honest reason we went with the STS was simply - the shuttle was a space ship, like in sci-fi, and was therefore cool and therefore a public darling. Even if it made no financial sense, people still loved it.
It's similar to the USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin serving in the Gulf War. Made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and was a total waste of money and time. But battle wagons are cool, and therefore people bent over backwards trying to justify it. They even invented "armored" pods for the tomahawks going on the Iowas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armored_Box_Launcher
To try and pretend there was some kind of operational point to using thickly armored battleships instead of something more modern.
Rule of cool is strangely powerful in real life in turns out.
They really hated the Pershing 2 because that kind of reentry vehicle can break suddenly two or more times confounding the Moscow ABM system. (which might have been able to fire multiple nuclear shots, get lucky to disable the warhead, and burn out all the electronics for 1000 miles away with the EMP -- the American hit-to-kill ABM will just fail)
Russia was trying to outboondoggle us with Buran and the Energyia booster. Like the space shuttle Buran was a hypersonic glide vehicle that could land on a runway with a wing and a prayer, emphasis on the prayer. The rocket engines were on the booster but not the orbiter, so Energia by itself was a capable heavy lift vehicle which the russians planned to out-boondoggle us: one Energia exploded when Russia tried to launch a 1-MW class laser satellite with optical targeting and all the facilities to start burning up targets. (e.g. in response to the Reagan era SDI talk, the Russians tried to hastily launch real hardware)
--
BTW I have seen the boxes on the Iowa class and they are a hoot. The US Congress had a lot of resistance to Robert Macnamara's plan to switch the Navy to vertical launch tubes because they didn't look menacing enough but if you look at Chinese films like Wolf Warrior you see they are very proud of their missile destroyers and their cluster munitions too.
The obituaries for Trump's popularity have been predicted so many times that it's hard to be confident that "This Time It's Different."
It's hardly martyring to be kicked off of Twitter IMO, but even if his fans see it that way -- Trumps fans seem to predominantly posses a very short attention span.
It's the only way that many of Trumps reversals make sense. They can be cheering him for saying A and then cheering him five minutes later for saying ~A. I suspect that if Trump loses his platform for some number of months, the shine may wear off.
And Parler is being kicked from AWS, so their entire service is going down too--and they may get the full treatment of being kicked from other servers and payment services if they don't agree to police their content. And without easy access to his marks, it will be harder for Don the Con to stay relevant.
Not predicting that it will happen. I'm not that optimistic, TBH. But positing a mechanism that it could happen.
Life has a 100% mortality rate. His presence is our lives is inherently temporary. And for a morbidly obese man, it could happen suddenly, or take 20 years. We just don't know.
I think Trump's allure is going to mostly survive this event, he will figure out a way to brand it as not being his fault or intention. I could be wrong about that though.
From these last four years I'm not so sure about that.
Whether that's building a better phone, medical procedure, or communication network, or rocket, historically you've been able to point out that the emperor has no clothes, and then build something better.
This is what terrifies me about the current attitudes on both sides of the aisle - we're turning from, "I disagree but will fight for your right to say it" to "if I disagree you should be deplatformed and fired and mobbed."
Lockdown protests - super spreader events or valid exercises of freedom of speech?
George Floyd protests - super spreader events or valid exercises of free speech?
Riots attacking federal court house in Portland - treason or valid exercise of free speech?
Riots attacking capitol building in washington, d.c. - fortunately, everyone seems to agree it's bad. Oh, but it's apparently a super spreader event...
Remind me which side is participating in bad faith?
That's the clearest way to show that both sides argue in bad faith, rather than simply presenting facts or standing on principle.
There are lots of other examples, but that's a prominent, current case where both sides argue both sides of the argument.
Another prominent case is arguments for or against confirming judicial appointments, but that's been out of the news for an eternity now.
Meanwhile, the left seems to be refusing to accept that coercing people to act a certain way does not actually change what people believe. A list of banned words and opinions will never make the world progressive. Deplatforming people over truly just opinions or mannerisms is a temporary win.
Social media isn’t really a moderated community. It has “rules” and you can get “banned,” but Twitter is less “moderated” than a typical comments section. So when people act in bad faith, there’s no recourse unless they explicitly break rules. On say, a typical old Internet forum, it’d probably mostly be considered dramatic to do call-outs, not to mention pointless due to the disconnected nature of identity on the old internet. On Twitter not only is it common but you can make as many bad faith arguments and take as many things as far out of context as you like in attempts at character assassination. You can concern troll, you can use known misleading sources, etc. and even if someone calls you on it, you can just do it again later.
As usual though, most people are pretty “selfish.” A lot of people “get away” with being not “progressive“ enough because people like them. What happens is eventually someone has a trivial dispute with them and decides to seize the moment to pull out as much ammo as possible, which is how you end up with 50 page google docs arguing as hard as they can that every mistake someone has ever made is evidence that they are irredeemable.
So in self-preservation people become dishonest. And I mean I’ve seen it first-hand. Their beliefs haven’t changed, but they have to say certain things publicly in order to keep their status. And other people who also don’t believe in the things they're saying will express their disappointment if they ever deviate. It’s an amazing circus show. Things have gotten very perverted.
With the right, they are of course taking advantage of this in the worst faith way possible by using it as an argument against being progressive in and of itself. It’s not the methods, it’s the ideology. But in the same way a civil rights riot and a doomsday cult riot are not the same thing, there’s always going to be too much nuance for a conclusion that oversimplified.
Meanwhile, sites like Twitter simply do not give a fuck. All they care about is brand accounts, ads, and public image. But mostly the first two. So fat chance if they’re going to risk lowering engagement to help fix broken incentives.
When people know their opinions are generally considered reprehensible, they hide them. I can agree with that.
But if those opinions are successfully hidden or pushed underground, and the next generation is predominantly exposed to positive values, the world does become more progressive. Individuals change only a small amount, you're right, but society does change for the better over time.
It's when echo-chambers of intolerance exist that attitudes of intolerance and selfishness can be amplified and push the world in the wrong direction.
Preference falsification. Its getting worse. and people who falsify preferences still act like radicals. They haven't internalized the values so they imperfectly carry them out.
I know coercion is not enough, but it's the only thing that can be pushed by the people with power to push anything.
As soon as I find out what _will_ change beliefs, I'd like to start doing it. Assuming that, as an individual, I _can_ do anything at all. But breaking up the radicalization pipelines is better than nothing.
Of course I am not actually against every time someone gets deplatformed; I think it is reasonable from a community standpoint to, for example, ban the doomsday cult garbage. That’s not a matter of banned opinion to me, even though it leans on a gray area.
I'm against mob violence, I hate the death penalty, but I'm still okay with de-platforming. It has a use. There is a difference between "This person is inciting violence" and "This person is disagreeing with us" and the line has not been blurred yet.
I'm glad Trump got banned, because he is an Internet troll who happens to hold office.
I'm glad that a few rioters were arrested. I hope they are convicted and serve jail time. I hope they live to realize why they were wrong. If they die it means I will never have them on my side.
I don't want anyone to die. Death, unlike de-platforming, cannot be undone if it turns out we are wrong.
So please don't lump me in with people calling for guillotines and mob violence.
The concerning thing is one of the biggest divides is amongst the people that pay attention, and have paid attention, and everyone else that either can't or refuses to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-poli...
I agree, though, that recent events seem to have finally answered the question of whether or not Trump has a plan. It seems not, but you can get very far by just falling forward and refusing to admit defeat, ever. The sheer cognitive dissonance of the idea that a US president could be so far off his rocker and still be highly popular forces us to look for any explanation, however contrived, that means there's some master plan behind it all.
But nope, it's been option A all along: A charismatic manipulator really was elected president despite never knowing what he was going to do with the position when he got there, and despite being constitutionally unable to take advice from people who do understand strategy.
An angry mob sacked the Capitol. If #ZipTieGuy and friends had arrived mere minutes earlier, they'd have walked into a joint session of Congress containing every member of succession to the President that he did not appoint himself. It's easy to call it incompetent now that it failed but we might have just avoided a revolution by the skin of our teeth.
Not checkmate by itself, but very scary.
In any case though, if this hypothetical is not hyperbole (and I still suspect it is), it would seem prudent to remedy ASAP.
Here’s the relevant process per the constitution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election
Basically, if there is no absolute majority of electors, each state gets one vote in the house for president and two votes in the senate for VP.
All of that only comes into play if there is no majority winner though, so I don’t think just keeping them from voting would do the trick.
The Presidential Succession Act only covers succession in case of removal from office and only until an election can be held, so it is technically true that Pence would be in line, but that assumes Trump was removed and the electoral votes had still not been counted, a highly unlikely combination. Even then just counting the votes would resolve this problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Succession_Act
I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics – using the word in a wide sense – and that one must have preferences:
that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort.
orwell, 1945
I think Plato's arguments presented in his Allegory of the Cave, paint a clear picture of "the truth" and the nature of the human condition. Particularly by showing that "finding out the truth" always relies on perception/observation of the truth (science is no different BTW). Which is to say what we come to regard as the truth is subjective to our perceptions of the actual truth. Which brings up a problem: How can you ever be certain that our perceptions are nothing more than "a shadow of a deeper truth" and thus not the real truth? The only way of resolving this trust problem (at least until further evidence comes along), is by taking a leap of faith (ie to adopt a belief). Thus ultimately, anything anyone regards as the truth, stems from adopting at least one or more beliefs/assumptions whether they realize it or not.
Fully realizing this, makes it so much easier to understand society, and why you can't always convince people using what you deem as "facts". Unfortunately, you may also realize how deep the rabbit hole really is...
Trump supporter: "This is the erosion of free speech"
Me: " Given that his supporters have already rioted and murdered, Twitter is trying to prevent him from inciting more riots"
Trump supporter: " Just wait until they come for you "
At first I was confused because I have no interest in inciting riots, and I don't even care if I get banned from Twitter. Now this makes sense, they are saying that Trump and Twitter are both trying to maintain and gain power. They think that I'm just too stupid to understand what Twitter is doing.
I can sympathize with them for feeling this way, it is hard to accept that you got scammed.
TBH it's not hard to see how this could end in the balkanisation of the net.
Is it theoretically possible that someone at Twitter or FB could decide that Democrats were the only acceptable party and try to silence everyone else?
Yes, that is possible, but it also possible that they will continue to apply the policies the same way going forward. If I didn't like a change they made political or otherwise I would quit, just like I quit digg years ago.
"All politicians are the same". No. Some are worse.
This, in a sense is itself a political stance, but its not that hard to learn to distance yourself from the immediate emotions of politics. Particularly when I started to see how ubiquitous the weaoponization of anger has become in the modern era.
In function you remain disconnected via privilege to the majority of implications of said issue, and self soothe by pretending that if others only had your level of enlightened understanding then there would be no issue.
Humans are not objective, but in a big part subjective. First, humans belongs to groups. And it is a completely different thing if your own group abuses and benefits you, than if some other group abuses you and you lose.
You only see dirt in one side. Of course the dirty side is not yours.
"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"
It's just so much easier and politically and socially beneficial to demonize the others.
It’s this error in my opinion we see just as much of. Just as much as Trump is able to influence the beliefs of his followers, he is able to induce beliefs in his haters, by causing them to become certain of the truth of the opposing claim. We should address both problems: ignoring one or the other will just lead to further destabilization.
The effort involved in separating truth from bullshit from someone fundamentally indifferent to truth is too high.
If there is in fact truth to be had, there will virtually always be a credible source from whom it can be obtained.
In Dante's Hell, it was bearers of false witness who occupied the penultimate circle.
I lived on the other side, and I remember seeing news about homeless under the bridges, about the police beating up black folks. And it was all true, as it's still a problem today!
What they didn't show is that 90% of the Americans were living better than even the top 10% of the communists
[0] https://youtu.be/fh2cDKyFdyU
I am going to tell you what made America great, but you will not necessarily like it:
WW2 devastated the most important industrialized economies throughout Europe and Asia. The US was left intact.
For many years, the US was #1 in exports, #1 in manufacturing, and most importantly, the Bretton Woods system was in place.
Under Bretton Woods, the US was effectively able to create money from thin air. The premise was that each dollar was backed with gold, and you could at any time redeem the gold equivalent to your dollars. However, because that right was never exercised and nobody could audit the gold reserves, the US abused the system and by 1971 it became clear that it was a fraud.
By 1971, Europe and Japan were done rebuilding their economies and now their manufacturing capabilities surpassed the that of the US. So countries like France take the initiative and challenge the US to give them their gold, and when the US fails to meet these obligations, the Bretton Woods system ends, also putting an end to the American economic golden age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
Since the Nixon shock, US living standards have started becoming similar to that of other countries, the cost of living has been raising and the US has been accumulating an enormous amount of debt.
Think about it: during the 1940s to the 1970s, the Interstate highway system was built, there were expensive Space exploration programs, millions of Americans had affordable housing, higher education... everything was affordable. And suddenly nothing is affordable anymore. And that is the reason.
It began as a mostly rural republic that had about as many full time soldiers as the Cree tribe had armed (with guns) fighters; Lafayette thought that USA would need French protection for a few centuries.
Then, American industrial capacity exploded and by 1900, it was competing for the first place with the UK and Germany. The entry of the US to both WWI and WWII made the decisive result precisely because of enormous American capacity to produce stuff.
That said, loss of American production capacity in the last 30 or so years ("the giant sucking sound" of Ross Perot) may really be an early sign of decay. Having digital giants is fine, but they won't produce a billion of N95 masks on demand.
However, as countries rebuilt their production infrastructure, competition went up, driving prices down, diminishing profits and the US started moving away from manufacturing.
Yes, America got lucky for about 25 years and isn't so lucky anymore. But even here the old adage says that luck favors the prepared.
The US had untilled praries, virgin forests, mountains of iron hills of coal, oceans of oil, a network of rivers and harbours (supplemented with canals and railroads), and no credible foes on the continent.
Russia at the time was not quite as advantaged, but strongly comparable in many regards.
The existing Great Powers of 1900 had extensive agriculture and coal energy resources (Britain, Germany, France), and at least some colonial holdings for further raw materials. But all were more constrained than the US, as well as knocked back by WWI.
WWII promoted an explosion in US industrial and resource extraction capability whilst Europe was again set back
Post WWII, the US retained its advantages, an intact (and substantially recently built) industrial infrastructure, and no international competition, as noted above. The Martial Plan and Japanese and Korean reconstruction helped.
The comment about Soviet propaganda, though, is amusing. It's amazing how little people in the USSR knew about the rest of the world as late as the 1960s. Anatoly Dobrynin wrote in his 1995 autobiography that, when he came to the US in 1962 to be Ambassador to the United Nations for the USSR, he was amazed to see traffic jams. He'd been brought up to believe those were American propaganda. No country could have that many cars.
(That's a fun read, by the way. He got to be a diplomat in a very strange way. Stalin had a meeting in 1946 with some of his diplomats and grumbled that those old guys were out of touch, and they needed young new Soviet men like aircraft designers. The next day, Dobrynin, a young aircraft designer, was ordered from his job designing aircraft to Moscow to attend the Higher Diplomatic Academy and learn to become a diplomat. He turned out to be good at it.)
I believe that Trump followers believe him, for the most part.
The insurrection on Capital Hill was made by people who very deeply felt that the 'Election Was Stolen' and therefore Democracy itself was at stake. (There were several interviews by the press that highlighted this).
It's rational for someone to take reasonably dramatic action if they believed there were fraud at a fundamental level - so on a way - the actions of the protesters are understandable in a perverse kind of way, with the assumption that they are completely misinformed.
For the the 'not so gullible', the lie, repeated over and over again just has a ring of truth to it - enough that somewhere about 50% of the US believes that the 'elections were unfair' in some way, when in reality, that's not anywhere near the truth - the election was fair and free. There weren't any systematic shenanigans.
This means that a ton of 'regular, educated followers' buy into the BS at least partially.
And of course, since it's partisan, and some people 'want to believe it' - it's easier to believe.
The real question then becomes: will the gullible and not-so-gullible-but-partisan accept actual, material evidence when it's presented?
That's where you possibly meet the 'truly stubborn'.
Finally - in the efforts to get the truth out, a lot of these kinds of people have basically no faith in important institutions such as 'Science', the Judiciary, the DOJ etc..
Though most of the press is fairly legit, they are also biased, and so most plebes don't want to trust them either.
We are in a 'War for the Truth' right now it's a big deal with Politics, COVID, issues of Freedom of Expression (which includes the right to lie) etc..
What is being presented is not evidence. It's absence of evidence, combined with blunt assertions. That's not what we should be getting from a truly secure election system.
Years ago, the kernel.org servers that host the source code to the Linux kernel were hacked. Lots of people and lots of corporations use Linux, so the security of the source code of the kernel is a serious issue. So what did the owners of the kernel.org site do? Did they shout over and over that there was no problem? Did they make a huge effort to argue against people (and there were plenty of them) who claimed this showed Linux was just not a serious OS, as compared to those other OSs owned by large corporations? No.
What the kernel.org owners did was much simpler. They just showed the security measures they already had in place, and explained how and why they worked. And since those security measures were good ones, based on cryptographically secure methods of signing and verifying code and detecting tampering, and since they were open, so anyone who wanted to could check and verify them, that was all they had to do. All the accusations and speculations about insecurity simply evaporated.
That is the kind of security we should have for elections. And it's blatantly obvious that we don't. And until we do, given how divided the country is, we will continue to have close elections that the losing side, or at least a significant portion of it, refuses to recognize as legitimate. This problem cannot be handwaved away, and it cannot be solved by shouting louder, the way Americans do in foreign countries in the hope that it will cause the natives to start understanding English. It can only be solved by implementing a secure, and transparently secure, election system, where nobody has to take anybody else's word that nothing questionable happened.
1) There is an incredible amount of legitimacy and transparency in the system already.
Your linux analogy simply doesn't apply.
There are tons of 'eyes on the system', there are literally election observers. The rules are decided ahead of time etc..
With the 'Dominion' system there is literally a paper record of each ballot - there were recounts that validated the electronic counts perfectly.
The 'voting and ballot' part of the election is very secure, and there's no way to systematically defeat it.
2) If there is an issue with the elections, it's related to 'who can vote'. States are in a constant war over this, the rules over 'how to purge voter roles' (look into recent Georgia rulings). Those things, are today 'grey areas' not well defined by anyone so it means conflict.
3) "And it's blatantly obvious that we don't. "
Just the opposite, it's blatantly obvious that the elections are in fact secure - you've provided zero evidence to suggest otherwise.
But you're missing the issue - the perception of election of integrity has nothing to do with election integrity.
This has nothing to do with the facts.
This has to do with whatever Trump tells people (i.e. Cargo Cult).
If Trump had won the election, there would be zero concern over election integrity because it's entirely derided from his populist narrative.
The elections are as secure as they were in 2016 and 2012 - and there wasn't some big uproar over 'ballot counting' then, was there?
Why not?
Because 'some populist figure' wasn't screaming 'Fraud' 'Fraud' 'Fraud'.
And even if the election were 'mathematically secure' it still would not matter because this has nothing to do with reality, it has to do with narrative.
A populist figure will say 'The Election Was Stolen' - and his Cargo Cult followers will believe him, irrespective of the facts.
Who are placed far enough away from what is happening that they can't usefully verify anything. What we should have are election workers from each party, paired up, with transparently verifiable means of confirming that they both agree on every action taken.
> The rules are decided ahead of time
And then those rules, established by the State legislatures ahead of time in accordance with the Constitution and Federal election law, are changed by State executive branch officials and judges. That is clearly unconstitutional.
> With the 'Dominion' system there is literally a paper record of each ballot
Printed out by a computer system with known vulnerabilities and laughable "security" precautions.
> there were recounts that validated the electronic counts perfectly
By counting ballots which were printed by the same machines that gave the electronic counts, so this so-called "check" is meaningless.
> If there is an issue with the elections, it's related to 'who can vote'.
Yep. The way to solve that is obvious: voter IDs with simple, objectively verifiable rules for eligibility and a requirement that every eligible voter must be issued one. Other countries have this. Mexico has this. Why can't we?
> If Trump had won the election, there would be zero concern over election integrity because it's entirely derided from his populist narrative.
Excuse me? Trump won the 2016 election and for four years we've been hearing concerns over election integrity from the side that lost that one. Sure, those concerns weren't coming from Trump supporters, because Trump won. And now, as you yourself illustrate, Trump opponents have no concerns whatever despite multiple issues at least as blatant as any of the ones Trump opponents complained about in 2016, because Trump lost. In other words, the winning side will never complain and the losing side always will, because the system is broken.
s/A populist figure/The losing candidate/. Hillary Clinton and her Cargo Cult followers still believe she won the 2016 election.
Beliefs about Russian interference are also widespread, but they are also true/well documented and unconnected to the actual voting.
There was no movement that I know of, like we see now, saying that the swing states that went to Trump had subverted elections.
Once or twice recently I may have seen someone idly saying "hey, Republicans tend to project, I wonder if we should investigate the 2016 and 2020 elections to see if they were up to something".
I ran across the claim that Republicans won in almost all of the states that don't have proper paper trails for voting, which could be suspicious. I don't know if that's accurate, and I don't know of any movement pursuing that.
Donald Trump himself was surprised that he won.
But it's not remotely on the same scale as we see now.
There was 'smoke' with Russian relationships, and given the nature of a guy like Trump, a lot of people naturally believed the Mueller investigation would find him guilty of something. I did.
The press was happy to castigate Trump for two full years over it - until it just started to show that he was in fact innocent - at least of having colluded with Russians.
I hate Donald Trump, he's a psychopath who tried to overthrow the Republic in the end - but - he was actually treated unfairly during the Mueller investigation by the press as they banged 'Mueller + Collusion + Russia' over his head daily.
It turns out there were some shenanigans there, but definitely not Trump & Co. working with Russian.
The press never really cleared him from that.
In a way - Trump's mass lies about the current election is just him taking the same story but pushing it right up to the line of legality. Unfortunately, he pushed it way too far, and directing election officials to overthrow valid election results is definitely sedition, and he'd be in jail were he to note have the status and political protections he has as President. He's done much worse than Watergate.
You can check the polling.
This is not a 'sided comparison'.
Donald Trump is purposely claiming a mass election fraud, full well knowing it's a complete lie.
For gosh sake, he was on the phone with Georgia election officials, threatening them to overturn the results for him and publicly demanded that Mike Pence commit Sedition by throwing the election for him.
Not only does this have nothing to do with 'the other side' (i.e. Clinton) - there's no comparable in American history.
Every intelligent person knows this, especially Republicans, it's just a matter of how many are willing to go along with him because of the benefits it may bring, or the fear they have of being turned on.
And that is because all of those institutions have lied to them, repeatedly, over many, many years. So has the mainstream media. So it is rational for people not to believe them when they insist, louder and louder, "no, really, this time we're telling the truth!"
If we want meaningful dialogue, we need less bubbles and better avenues for discourse. Facebook and its ilk is the worst of humanity if used beyond keeping in touch with friends.
The issue with Parler only gives more fuel to the ones in this particular bubble that they are being persecuted. A bubble they already believe in, a world they already mentally inhabit.
We must keep striving for what you address in your comment, and for platforms for meaningful discussions, with ample focus on material truths.
That struck me as one of those situations where you find that people who 'cheat' are more likely to greatly over estimate how many people actually cheat. But it certainly served the reverse cargo cult issue here too.
Interestingly enough when it came out that nobody in the Trump administration had informed US intelligence services that a foreign agent agent was offering them help... it also came out that every presidential candidate staff had reported some such contacts, with the exception of Trump, and Bush Sr. .
(Submitter.)
Youth: Extrovert certainty
Young adulthood: Extrovert uncertainty
Adulthood: Introvert certainty
As you learn more about the world around you, you realize the younger you was far too idealistic and cock-sure about the causes and solutions to the problems around you. Being barraged with uncertainty, the obvious answer then becomes that there is really no truth, there’s only approximations we can reach through the Socratic method: but eventually you grow weary of this as well. Surely there must be good and evil in this world, and if it quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck.
Being dogmatic isn’t a good thing, and I try to keep an open mind: but what’s equally dangerous is subscribing to the ideology that there is no such thing as good and evil. There is, and most of us have known the difference since we were children. I think adulthood is about finding the courage to speak out, when useful and constructive, instead of hiding behind the comfort of relativism.
This is an extreme and absolutist conclusion. Feynman once said something to the tune of (paraphrasing): I have degrees of certainty about different things and there’s many things I don’t know anything about. This is not “no truth,” this is “no truth I should be 100% confident in.”
> Surely there must be good and evil in the world
I could not disagree more strongly. There are incentives, both genetic and societal. This does not mean we are resigned to relativism or an absence of truth, it means we are more enlightened about the factors that impose into our interaction than being subject to fanciful innate accusations.