Also read this: http://www.nationalreview.com/article/427625/no-fbi-didnt-cr...
Nixon's Chief Domestic Advisor, quote:
“You want to know what this was really all about?” he asked with the bluntness of a man who, after public disgrace and a stretch in federal prison, had little left to protect. “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This is not the only thing the government did, or continues to do, to destroy various peoples' faith in it.
And yet between here and reddit, I think I see this pop up every other week.
Either way, it seems people don't have a lot of faith in the government, and there are plausible examples of things the government has done to put itself in this situation.
Another example from the same era, gulf of tonkin incident. It doesn't matter what it costs the people at the bottom if the people at the top get what they want, that's the impression I think many of us are left with.
I think you know the answer to this.
There's lots of things I'd like to believe, but don't because they are not true.
Outside of HN and other geek outposts, a great many people, maybe most have a flaky relationship to the truth on almost everything. We're not immune to that of course but I at least know with fellow geeks they will admit the possibility of being wrong instead of relying exclusively on waving their hands and feels. Geeks will change minds when presented with data. Often slowly and grudgingly, but still they are able to do it, it is in them, their identity is looser.
One thing I suspect most of us have very wrong about people is that being 'scientific' is strongly connected to personality, and so appeals to logic and reason are simply not going to resound with everybody in totality. It is not meaningful to them.
The World is my anecdotal evidence for that.
Even those who aren't climate change deniers still seem committed to running us off the cliff with climate change. Perhaps because they believe in an "invisible hand" of Providence.
The posted article is an example. They could've simply quoted what at least one Kenyan thought about it. Anyone operating within a culture which values rationality would've done so. But not these people.