Honest question: why do you surf the web without an adblocker these days? Are there technical constraints that limit your browser/plugin choice? Is it a moral stance ("I want ad-funded sites to make money if I consume their content")?
In my case, iOS does not allow extensions on Firefox. I didn’t know this before recently getting and iPhone and was pissed, but the side effect is less browsing on my phone which is nice.
The author misunderstands Machiavelli. Works like De Principatibus are meant to help "subversive" democratic efforts to recognize, reveal, and hence counter tyrannical strategies. Machiavelli was a supporter of democratic governments, which were rare and revolutionary in his times, and had been burnt by the success of counter-revolutionary forces; so he described what were effectively catalogs of tyrannical behaviors, in order to help people avoid their traps. The fact that tyrants also ended up reading his works and treating them like manuals, was a side-effect.
Agree, those wishing to actually understand Machiavelli should read "Discourses on Livy", rather than "Prince". He was an avid supporter of republicanism (not democracy, those didn't exist yet) and proven superiority of republican order vs aristocratic on many examples from his era as we as from the long past, starting with Roman Kingdom times - described by Livy.
Pretty sweeping statement to say democracy hadn't existed prior to, unless you've got semantic arguments to press it. I'll, of course, grant you that suffrage wasn't prefect. But I'd also be willing to further that argument with the idea that we've still yet to see a proper democracy in any modern era, forwarded by Graeber and Wengrow in "The Dawn of Everything". You'll also note that, given these passages are true, an elected representative is simply the best aristocrat - which is a coin with two sides.
I'd also go so far as to posit that democratic processes are an innate form of human organization. Think of every time you've been organizing and out with your friends. Even coming to an end where you synthesize, it's nonetheless effectively informal voting. So, I'd say that indeed there were many societies, regardless of whatever precise definition is formalized, which predated Machiavelli quite probably on the order of tens of thousands of years.
From Dawn of Everything:
"[...] political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty. Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning ‘rule of the best’), allowing commoners – much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic aristocracy – to decide who among the well born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics."
"The Pnyx was the official meeting place of the Athenian democratic assembly (Ancient Greek: ekklesia). In the earliest days of Athenian democracy (after the reforms of Kleisthenes in 508 B.C.), the ekklesia met in the Agora. Sometime in the early 5th century, the meeting place was moved to a hill south and west of the Acropolis. This new meeting place came to be called "Pnyx" (from the Greek word meaning 'tightly packed together.'"
One interpretation is that it's satire. Another is that it's an attempt to trick dictators into planting the seeds of a republican revolution.
A third is that, while Machiavelli is a republican, he's also a realist. He understands that, sometimes, there will be a dictatorship, he accepts this and he's offering genuine advice to autocrats. That his advice is cold-blooded is a reflection of his concern with concrete reality as opposed to ideals and his belief that a dictator trying to be good is worse than a dictator who ruthlessly pursues his self-interest.
Machiavelli wrote De Principatibus to get a job with the Medici after losing his position when they returned to Florence. There are a lot of interpretations of the work but the simplest is that it's a manual for an autocrat and that Machiavelli believed that the maxims he described were true. The most important is that the ends justify the means.
It's quite a different question whether Machiavelli personally believed in autocracy. In the Discourses he discussed the management of republics. He also worked for the Florentine Republic for many years. There's no question he saw the strengths of republics, but his views are also conflated with admiration for Rome, which was Republican after 510 BC.
I think the simplest answer is that Machiavelli believed in Florence, desired the unity of Italy against foreign invaders, and wanted to be part of the action. That's just my own opinion.
Is this guy trying to convert me to Christianity? Am I misunderstanding his final statement where he seems to say that the only solution to subversion is faith in God?
> Is this guy trying to convert me to Christianity? Am I misunderstanding his final statement where he seems to say that the only solution to subversion is faith in God?
Care to link that part?
I'd believe it though. IIRC, disinformation techniques are meant to seize up rational judgement processes, and it makes sense that one way to defeat that is an extra-rational commitment to something.
I recall a scene in the show The Americans, where the Russian agent was blackmailing a very religious woman into helping him. Going against all rational self-interest and at great personal cost, she told her superiors about what was going on allowing them to thwart the Russian's plan, because she believed that was the right thing to do. The Russian agent character grumbled that religious people are the hardest to manipulate because they don't act predictably (or something like that).
A fictional TV show (even if 'based on a true story' as this one) is not the greatest source of useful anecdotes to guide your belief system, as what is shown simply reflects the beliefs of the writers rather than reality.
> A fictional TV show (even if 'based on a true story' as this one) is not the greatest source of useful anecdotes to guide your belief system, as what is shown simply reflects the beliefs of the writers rather than reality.
Eh. I'll take fiction over lifeless facts and data any day, about the only thing better is history.
I’m always scared to click on political videos in you tube, just in case it’s Jordan Peterson. Even one accidental click will inundate your suggested videos with right wing hatred.
But don’t worry. YouTube’s algorithms aren’t making the world worse!
> Both right and left wingers hate him because he undermines their collectivist/authoritarian sides
Speak for yourself. I don't hate him but I'm not a fan -- I think he's a gifted speaker in crafting what people want to hear but find his reasoning specious.
He has become associated with a typical young-white-conservative-wanmabe-manly-man crowd, which overlaps a lot with right wing movements. Whether that's his belief I dare not say, but I actually liked some (!) of his talks and bought his book and found it to be pure baseless drivel. He rehashes Jungian theory in a modern format but doesn't manage to create an overall narrative or logic.
So even if he were not associated with the right, in my view there is littele reason to watch his videos. For anyone looking for meaning and a way of life I would recommend modern stoics or even just classical Marcus Aurelius, or for those wondern about what is right something like Rawls' lectures on the history of moral philosophy.
Is there any evidence this guy was actually a KGB agent? I've seen this guy a lot and he talks awfully like someone who is saying what a certain group of people wanna hear.
> Is there any evidence this guy was actually a KGB agent? I've seen this guy a lot and he talks awfully like someone who is saying what a certain group of people wanna hear.
The 5-page article focuses on state security organization (Stasi, FBI) with massive resources and legal powers, going up against opposition movements with neither. Younger folks might not know that such organizations do such stuff...but to me, the stories read like "mighty army manages to track down and kill a 3-legged cow". Wow! Really? /s
Like most stuff I've read, the essay makes the Stasi out to supreme masters of their craft. Um, no. Remember what happened to East Germany when the Soviet Empire fell? The whole State vanished away like a sand castle in the face of a rising tide. The Stasi, like most such organizations, were a bunch of creepy machismo control-freak thugs with state backing. Their goals were: 1) indulging their own sociopathic inclinations, and 2) keep State backing, while said State lasted. Understanding why states endure or fade away didn't seem to be on their radar. Let alone doing anything to help East Germany endure.
Yeah, I only read so far into the article before losing interest in it. Great title, but it fails to deliver.
You raise an interesting point, about the fall of the Soviet Empire. Perhaps an extremely effective tactic, right up until the truth catches up and gets it's pants on.
"The strength of activists, social change, and opposition movements seems to be decreasing around the world. The trend is reinforced by the seemingly old tactic of discrediting, deception, building mistrust among members, and disinformation spread by various political and state actors, who over the millennia perfected their methods."
Could the decrease in "strength" (i.e. interest and involvement by its participants) be possibly due to how unpopular the demands of the activists are to the general public? It seems the author has a very myopic view of the situation. People are seeing what "defund the police" leads to, and what their kids are being taught in schools -- they see it, and they're judging it, and their response is increasingly "NO". The democrats in the US see their polling numbers plummet, and are recognizing that pursuing the agenda demanded by the activists will take them out of power altogether.
The examples cited are COINTELPRO and the Soviet Stazi? Those were quite a long time ago, and not at all part of any suppression of today's activists. The article fails to mention that for the most part, "big tech" has supported opposition movements, and show clear bias against conservatives.
There is only really one issue, and that's the rapidly increasing atmospheric CO2 level and the potential impacts it will have on our ability to maintain a functioning society. The fact that you're focused on a bunch of telegenic activists and police defunding (which appears to not be actually happening, anywhere) illustrates how successfully we've been distracted from matters that affect our own survival.
There has indeed been defunding and redirecting funds to other purposes...and several cities have recently reversed course due to the uptick in crimes:
Also, I'm leery of "There is only really one issue". The environment and climate are very real concerns, but a singular focus leads to zealotry and extremism -- which are discredits the cause(s) they're advocating. Anti-abortion activists learned that bombing clinics and assassinating doctors did not help their cause.
From what I can tell, studies that have tried to find a correlation between police funding (and rare, temporary "defunding" efforts) have come up with very little. In some cities that reduced police funding, crime rose. But then in some other cities that increased police funding, crime rose. And vice versa in other cities.
And the overall magnitude of the budget cuts is tiny. Even the examples you cherry picked, the budget cuts are hilariously small compared to recent increases. For example, your last link shows that Denver has been increasing its police budget ~5% a year since 2017 (well above inflation), and they decreased it by 0.75% for a single year during a pandemic. That's a city that's seen a 75% overall increase in police funding since 2012 and still has a visible upward crime trend that clearly predates the "defund" movement (http://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/wp-content/uploads/Per-c...)
This is exactly the kind of statistical nothingburger you'd expect to see if someone was inventing an issue to try to make people emotional and distract them from real problems.
> The strength of activists, social change, and opposition movements seems to be decreasing around the world.
Maybe it's some bias from my part, but (at least in the Western world, which I'm following more closely) it looks like the establishment is starting to get more and more shaky.
I think the last thing standing on the establishment's side was the "mainstream media" (for lack of a better word) but the ongoing pandemic plus a recent election or two (mainly Trump + Brexit) have shaken its influence to the core. The propaganda machine that is Hollywood has also lost most of its influence on the general public in the last few years, mostly because its movies don't target the general populace anymore.
It feels like if someone would just come in and grab the reins of power by force almost no-one will be willing to risk his/her life in order to defend today's democracy (or what's left of it).
Point of the article is that establishment is defending whoever is on power and itself, and there is no much more democracy, especially when opposition is dissolved, leaving people to chose between parties that are not fundamentally different. Erosion of democracy is the result, especially now all aided with technology and biases big tech platforms introduced
Regarding the dangers of disinformation, one way to build a democracy that is largely immune to disinformation would be to build a democracy in which you only vote for people whom you know personally. That would mean introducing another layer of representation, in-between the public and Congress. The simplest and most naive approach would simply establish districts of 860 people:
330,000,000 / 860 = 383,720
383,720 / 860 = 460
In other words, in the USA, where we have 330 million people and a House of 430 Representatives, if we wanted to keep the House at that size, while only having people vote for people that they know, you would divide them up into very small districts of a few hundred people, so that people in the districts could get to know each other directly, without having to rely on something like television.
860 people would be the population of a neighborhood in the suburbs, or 2 large apartment buildings where I live in New York City.
Someone will probably respond "Your intermediate district has 383,720 people in it." Right, but the 860 elected representatives in that district know they only need to get to know each other.
There is a small historical precedent for this, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, a democracy that at its peak in the 1500s had 10% of the population voting, in a system of small Sejms that would then send representatives to the main Sejm in the capitol. For many reasons, this is worth more study. The Commonwealth was the largest and most successful experiment with democracy that existed in the West between the end of ancient Athenian democracy and the revolutions of the 1700s.
I will say, based on personal experience, people's behavior is non-partisan when they vote for someone who they know personally. Indeed, it seems to engage a completely different part of the human brain.
To understand this, it is worth studying what happened to my mom. She is a left-leaning leader in a strongly Republican town (Jackson, New Jersey), yet the Republicans appointed her to the Environmental Commission and the Planning Board, because they knew her and trusted her. My mom served from 1973 to 2019, 46 years in total, and was finally given an award from the city government that recognized her as the longest serving member of the Jackson government, since its founding in 1848. She served for 26% of the town's total history.
My mom worked as a teacher in the high school, and even though most of her students, and their parents, were Republican, they loved her and wanted her to serve in government.
An illustration of this was during the angry years after 2008 when a new kind of Republican entered town politics, basically the Tea Party Republicans. They were very loyal to the real estate developers, who hated my mom, and so they conspired to oust my mom in 2009. This lead to an outcry, throughout the town, and so my mom was reappointed. You can read that story here:
The point is, this is an overwhelming Republican town that for 46 years was willing to appoint a left-leaning activist to several government commissions, because when they thought about my mom, they did not think about her in partisan terms. Instead, they thought of her as the teacher and activist that they loved.
From this I conclude, when people vote for people who they know personally, they engage a very different part of their brain, relative to the part of the brain they use when engaged in partisan politics.
Having said all this, I don't think a simple division of the pubic by 860 is ideal. I suggest a somewhat more subtle system here:
40 comments
[ 6.2 ms ] story [ 116 ms ] threadI'd also go so far as to posit that democratic processes are an innate form of human organization. Think of every time you've been organizing and out with your friends. Even coming to an end where you synthesize, it's nonetheless effectively informal voting. So, I'd say that indeed there were many societies, regardless of whatever precise definition is formalized, which predated Machiavelli quite probably on the order of tens of thousands of years.
From Dawn of Everything:
"[...] political philosophers of later Greek cities did not actually consider elections a democratic way of selecting candidates for public office at all. The democratic method was sortition, or lottery, much like modern jury duty. Elections were assumed to belong to the aristocratic mode (aristocracy meaning ‘rule of the best’), allowing commoners – much like the retainers in an old-fashioned, heroic aristocracy – to decide who among the well born should be considered best of all; and well born, in this context, simply meant all those who could afford to spend much of their time playing at politics."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pnyx :
"The Pnyx was the official meeting place of the Athenian democratic assembly (Ancient Greek: ekklesia). In the earliest days of Athenian democracy (after the reforms of Kleisthenes in 508 B.C.), the ekklesia met in the Agora. Sometime in the early 5th century, the meeting place was moved to a hill south and west of the Acropolis. This new meeting place came to be called "Pnyx" (from the Greek word meaning 'tightly packed together.'"
A third is that, while Machiavelli is a republican, he's also a realist. He understands that, sometimes, there will be a dictatorship, he accepts this and he's offering genuine advice to autocrats. That his advice is cold-blooded is a reflection of his concern with concrete reality as opposed to ideals and his belief that a dictator trying to be good is worse than a dictator who ruthlessly pursues his self-interest.
It's quite a different question whether Machiavelli personally believed in autocracy. In the Discourses he discussed the management of republics. He also worked for the Florentine Republic for many years. There's no question he saw the strengths of republics, but his views are also conflated with admiration for Rome, which was Republican after 510 BC.
I think the simplest answer is that Machiavelli believed in Florence, desired the unity of Italy against foreign invaders, and wanted to be part of the action. That's just my own opinion.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niccol%C3%B2_Machiavelli#The_P...
Care to link that part?
I'd believe it though. IIRC, disinformation techniques are meant to seize up rational judgement processes, and it makes sense that one way to defeat that is an extra-rational commitment to something.
I recall a scene in the show The Americans, where the Russian agent was blackmailing a very religious woman into helping him. Going against all rational self-interest and at great personal cost, she told her superiors about what was going on allowing them to thwart the Russian's plan, because she believed that was the right thing to do. The Russian agent character grumbled that religious people are the hardest to manipulate because they don't act predictably (or something like that).
Eh. I'll take fiction over lifeless facts and data any day, about the only thing better is history.
But don’t worry. YouTube’s algorithms aren’t making the world worse!
Both right and left wingers hate him because he undermines their collectivist/authoritarian sides
https://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngula/2018/09/21/jordan-pe...
Speak for yourself. I don't hate him but I'm not a fan -- I think he's a gifted speaker in crafting what people want to hear but find his reasoning specious.
So even if he were not associated with the right, in my view there is littele reason to watch his videos. For anyone looking for meaning and a way of life I would recommend modern stoics or even just classical Marcus Aurelius, or for those wondern about what is right something like Rawls' lectures on the history of moral philosophy.
Right-click, copy link, open new private window, paste link.
He showed up in this NY Times video identified as a former KGB agent, so that claim stood up to whatever fact checking they did: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tR_6dibpDfo&t=180s.
> I've seen this guy a lot and he talks awfully like someone who is saying what a certain group of people wanna hear.
That doesn't mean he's wrong.
The 5-page article focuses on state security organization (Stasi, FBI) with massive resources and legal powers, going up against opposition movements with neither. Younger folks might not know that such organizations do such stuff...but to me, the stories read like "mighty army manages to track down and kill a 3-legged cow". Wow! Really? /s
Like most stuff I've read, the essay makes the Stasi out to supreme masters of their craft. Um, no. Remember what happened to East Germany when the Soviet Empire fell? The whole State vanished away like a sand castle in the face of a rising tide. The Stasi, like most such organizations, were a bunch of creepy machismo control-freak thugs with state backing. Their goals were: 1) indulging their own sociopathic inclinations, and 2) keep State backing, while said State lasted. Understanding why states endure or fade away didn't seem to be on their radar. Let alone doing anything to help East Germany endure.
You raise an interesting point, about the fall of the Soviet Empire. Perhaps an extremely effective tactic, right up until the truth catches up and gets it's pants on.
Could the decrease in "strength" (i.e. interest and involvement by its participants) be possibly due to how unpopular the demands of the activists are to the general public? It seems the author has a very myopic view of the situation. People are seeing what "defund the police" leads to, and what their kids are being taught in schools -- they see it, and they're judging it, and their response is increasingly "NO". The democrats in the US see their polling numbers plummet, and are recognizing that pursuing the agenda demanded by the activists will take them out of power altogether.
The examples cited are COINTELPRO and the Soviet Stazi? Those were quite a long time ago, and not at all part of any suppression of today's activists. The article fails to mention that for the most part, "big tech" has supported opposition movements, and show clear bias against conservatives.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-de...
https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/2020/08/13/at-leas...
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/refund-the-police-cities-a...
https://www.axios.com/local/denver/2021/11/15/denver-refunds...
...and others easily searched.
Also, I'm leery of "There is only really one issue". The environment and climate are very real concerns, but a singular focus leads to zealotry and extremism -- which are discredits the cause(s) they're advocating. Anti-abortion activists learned that bombing clinics and assassinating doctors did not help their cause.
And the overall magnitude of the budget cuts is tiny. Even the examples you cherry picked, the budget cuts are hilariously small compared to recent increases. For example, your last link shows that Denver has been increasing its police budget ~5% a year since 2017 (well above inflation), and they decreased it by 0.75% for a single year during a pandemic. That's a city that's seen a 75% overall increase in police funding since 2012 and still has a visible upward crime trend that clearly predates the "defund" movement (http://pagetwo.completecolorado.com/wp-content/uploads/Per-c...)
This is exactly the kind of statistical nothingburger you'd expect to see if someone was inventing an issue to try to make people emotional and distract them from real problems.
What evidence do you have of this?
Maybe it's some bias from my part, but (at least in the Western world, which I'm following more closely) it looks like the establishment is starting to get more and more shaky.
I think the last thing standing on the establishment's side was the "mainstream media" (for lack of a better word) but the ongoing pandemic plus a recent election or two (mainly Trump + Brexit) have shaken its influence to the core. The propaganda machine that is Hollywood has also lost most of its influence on the general public in the last few years, mostly because its movies don't target the general populace anymore.
It feels like if someone would just come in and grab the reins of power by force almost no-one will be willing to risk his/her life in order to defend today's democracy (or what's left of it).
330,000,000 / 860 = 383,720
383,720 / 860 = 460
In other words, in the USA, where we have 330 million people and a House of 430 Representatives, if we wanted to keep the House at that size, while only having people vote for people that they know, you would divide them up into very small districts of a few hundred people, so that people in the districts could get to know each other directly, without having to rely on something like television.
860 people would be the population of a neighborhood in the suburbs, or 2 large apartment buildings where I live in New York City.
Someone will probably respond "Your intermediate district has 383,720 people in it." Right, but the 860 elected representatives in that district know they only need to get to know each other.
There is a small historical precedent for this, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth, a democracy that at its peak in the 1500s had 10% of the population voting, in a system of small Sejms that would then send representatives to the main Sejm in the capitol. For many reasons, this is worth more study. The Commonwealth was the largest and most successful experiment with democracy that existed in the West between the end of ancient Athenian democracy and the revolutions of the 1700s.
I will say, based on personal experience, people's behavior is non-partisan when they vote for someone who they know personally. Indeed, it seems to engage a completely different part of the human brain.
To understand this, it is worth studying what happened to my mom. She is a left-leaning leader in a strongly Republican town (Jackson, New Jersey), yet the Republicans appointed her to the Environmental Commission and the Planning Board, because they knew her and trusted her. My mom served from 1973 to 2019, 46 years in total, and was finally given an award from the city government that recognized her as the longest serving member of the Jackson government, since its founding in 1848. She served for 26% of the town's total history.
My mom worked as a teacher in the high school, and even though most of her students, and their parents, were Republican, they loved her and wanted her to serve in government.
An illustration of this was during the angry years after 2008 when a new kind of Republican entered town politics, basically the Tea Party Republicans. They were very loyal to the real estate developers, who hated my mom, and so they conspired to oust my mom in 2009. This lead to an outcry, throughout the town, and so my mom was reappointed. You can read that story here:
http://www1.gmnews.com/2009/07/30/board-member-offers-to-ste...
The point is, this is an overwhelming Republican town that for 46 years was willing to appoint a left-leaning activist to several government commissions, because when they thought about my mom, they did not think about her in partisan terms. Instead, they thought of her as the teacher and activist that they loved.
From this I conclude, when people vote for people who they know personally, they engage a very different part of their brain, relative to the part of the brain they use when engaged in partisan politics.
Having said all this, I don't think a simple division of the pubic by 860 is ideal. I suggest a somewhat more subtle system here:
https://demodexio.substack.com/p/democracy-for-realists-part....