If the news is fake, imagine history
thenetworkstate.com
thenetworkstate.com
One thing I pointed out here recently is that all the "things they didn't you in school" books are populated with exactly the facts they taught you in school. Similarly, all these "shocking" facts here -- will you recognize them if you run across them a year from now? Two years from now? With that in mind, can you be sure that you haven't seen them before? Maybe multiple times? The strongest distortion of history is our limited ability to pay attention and then remember.
Well said.
Also some events that become popular and persist over time, just like memes.
I see this especially in writing about economics and markets, where 90%+ of the things people read, including the predominant views, are in my opinion partially or completely incorrect. You will often see a bunch of articles describing how the bear market has a ways to go at the very bottom, and vice versa, not to mention the pattern of headlines writing "Dollar falls 3% as <unrelated event happens today>." So aside from charts, I find there to be little else of use in studying economic history. Although Ray Dalio has some good data and a pretty reasonable first-principles based analysis of major historical economic cycles.
[1] http://www.holocaustresearchproject.org/trials/konradmorgen.... [2] https://www.unqualified-reservations.org/2011/10/holocaust-n...
- I don’t see how existing nations will ever allow “dual citizenship” with a network state.
- and by extension how will these Network States actually defend themselves?
- and based on this section they seem to be forecasting a Peter Zeihan style end of the current world order. If that happens cryptocurrency will be the first victim, not the savior: in a world where microchips are rare no one will want to waste them on anything not directly related to food or energy supply.
Don’t get me wrong: I highly recommend Zeihan’s “The End of World is Just the Beginning” (caveat I’m only halfway done) but see it’s predictions totally incompatible with the IMO wishful thinking of The Network State.
Aren't churches sort of network states?
They are networks, of a sort, but usually not states. Though some are subordinate to states and some have states subordinated to them.
But even in those cases the states are fairly conventional, not discontinuous sovereign pockets peeled off piecemeal from other states. While compactness isn't required and there are some oddities, the problems and ultimately difficult to resolve warfare resulting from patchwork states was a big motivator for the Westphalian nation-state model becoming a norm, and while that model might fall to some newer model, a regression to patchwork states isn't something I can see existing states going along with easily.
Even The State of Vatican City doesn't fit the definition of a network state: it's sovereign territory isn't a network of crowdfunded enclaves that have gotten recognized as sovereign territory. While, arguably, local Church property could meet that description aside from sovereignty, that's not sovereign territory of the State of Vatican City. Nope, that's just a tiny plot of land in the middle of Rome, negotiated between the Holy See and the State of Italy. It's a completely different dynamic.
Arguments for/against aside, I think it's important to note that every new powerful sociological concept that hadn't been done before was laughable at first. This sort of classification isn't really useful for reasoning about it.
Maybe it's a great idea, maybe it's a terrible one, but its laughability does not tell us anything about either of those states.
https://book.thenetworkstate.com/the-network-state-in-one-se...:
> The Network State in One Sentence
> In one informal sentence:
>> A network state is a highly aligned online community with a capacity for collective action that crowdfunds territory around the world and eventually gains diplomatic recognition from pre-existing states.
> ...
> Here’s a more complex definition that extends that concept and pre-emptively covers many edge cases:
>> A network state is a social network with a moral innovation, a sense of national consciousness, a recognized founder, a capacity for collective action, an in-person level of civility, an integrated cryptocurrency, a consensual government limited by a social smart contract, an archipelago of crowdfunded physical territories, a virtual capital, and an on-chain census that proves a large enough population, income, and real-estate footprint to attain a measure of diplomatic recognition.
Tl;dr: another verbose anarcho-libertarian fantasy. I'm glad I had JS disabled so it started me on page 1 of 3,440, instead of in the middle.
Sounds like yet another problem that blockchain ingeniously solves.
r/BrandNewSentence
Uh-huh.
Nevertheless, I find this part of your comment interesting:
These guys appears to be pushing a pretty radical
kind of political change, which doubtlessly influences
whatever they're writing about "the news" and "history."
- they actually believe what they wrote, and
- it's exactly these beliefs that drive the agenda, not the other way around
"Should I show up with five of my friends to the primaries?, No No! alternative crypto anarcho land grab is a better idea"
is way too high.
Conflict between countries is top of the list of things that could kill 100 million people or just end civillisation as we know it. The next superpower is run by a cabal who are unfortunatey very competent and yet still think one of the worst murderers in history was a great leader. Perhaps we should welcome ideas about how we can end the current atavistic geo-locked world structure drenched in blood and history.
History is truly written by victors.
History was written by those that could write at all!
Most of ancient history is not documented as most peoples didn’t have a written system at all.
Also, for many other battles and events there are other parties (third parties) that wrote about them, but they were neither the losers nor the victors.
Third parties has their own biases so that is often needed to take account into history.
In the case of India, the bias might be into minimizing conflict and trying to minimize bad sides of previous figures.
This happens in many other countries as well.
Probably one of his best.
Oh god, how can anyone seriously recommend this site. It lists lots of economic indicators, prominently indicating 1971, insinuating that everything was caused by the Nixon Shock... when it's clear from several of the graphs that the inflection point was closer to 1980.
There's just so much bad pop history and other stuff here, but that site really has the chutzpah crown for telling you a "truth" while simultaneously presenting facts that nakedly debunk it.
which is a big deal
Uploading a signed copy of the file to the Internet Archive is probably more effective.
Many people have forgotten that bias is the rule not the exception. Our institutions are built assuming bias exists and try to remove it to get desired outcomes.
In our justice system: A court trial is two parties trying to present their own self interested and biased version with a judge enforcing predetermined rules.
Scientific method exists in part to combat assumptions and bias.
Experiments are constructed to remove bias.
Papers are reviewed to remove bias.
Why would the news or anything be bias free? In my mind, if you are assuming it's bias free, that's big red flag. Maybe you are just happy when your biases are confirmed and unhappy with any information that goes against your biases. Almost everyone is, after all. That's how human beings are wired and it's the duty of people who want to be more rational to constantly combat that.
look at archeology and how we interpret those from a those who wrote something down. there is of course other interpretations from other indications of more direct evidence but a lot of times we do not get those in conjunction with written records.
In particular, I'm very sympathetic to the sense that the predominant styles of government prior to 2000 (esp Western Democracy) are obsolete in an era where there is instant, open access to information (and disinformation). The author's main point seems to be: unless the establishment can manage to regain control over information flows (a la the Chinese government) we will see a drastic reshaping of society.
Er, like the Immoral Journalist? https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ImmoralJournalis... The article itself supposes the conclusion "the news is fake."
> You don’t hear much about the evil communist, either.
Uh...the Red Scare? This one is incredibly easy to refute: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/DirtyCommunists
The author's counterargument?
> I’d bet the world has seen a >1000:1 ratio of scenes featuring evil capitalists to scenes featuring evil communists
They'd bet. Ok?
> They'd bet. Ok?
The context was "in the past several decades", if this means 3, that goes to 1992. I'd say that's a very, very safe bet. I'd take it too. If it was to 1982 it would be less so but still safe.
Otherwise it's been a long time since the cold war. The 'Red Scare' even longer.
I can't even think of a major movie since 2010 that had a villain who was socialist besides The Interview, Team America, and Red Dawn 2012 but those aren't even fake examples.
Even in your "Dirty Communists" TVTropes links all the examples were Cold War era, the only two modern films I found were also using historical real references:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/TheDeathOfStalin
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Film/BridgeOfSpies
I could list a countless modern films/shows where the enemy was an evil billionaire entrepreneur or faceless corporation. A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope.
Was there a more common insult than "communist" by the American right in the last decade? Most using it think it's synonymous with "socialist" and means Obamacare.
All the examples were NOT cold war era; Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Salt, Kundun, lots more. The Death of Stalin is a poor example, along with praise, it was criticized for making light of great suffering.
>A wealthy capitalist in a suit is pretty much today's standard cliche villain trope.
This was true during the Cold War, too. In the Bond films, Soviet Russia is the enemy in exactly one film, For Your Eyes Only. Red China is the implied power behind the throne in two, Thunderball and You Only Live Twice. In every other entry in the series, the villains are SPECTRE and a variety of madmen, predominantly the billionaire type.
Another example is the frequently made claim that "Muslims are always the villains in Hollywood". It is far, far, far easier to name films in which "Islamophobia" is the greater evil than the opposite, both before and after the September 11 attacks on the US. The Sum of All Fears is one example in which the book's Islamic villains are explicitly replaced (by "neo-Nazis") for the film.
"You furnish the pictures, I'll furnish the war." — Hearst, apocryphally
First, that was before most of our lifetimes. Times have changed quite a bit on that front, which is the point. Second, thanks to the Venona Files we know the "scare" had a large basis in reality.
> The article itself supposes the conclusion "the news is fake."
As posted elsewhere, this should be sobering: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9rbHpA_6W4
When's the last time you heard the right use "communist" as an insult?
Thank you for the youtube link, it's ANOTHER example of the Immoral Journalist trope to add to my list.
I dunno, they've been relegated to AM radio & FOX News so I never hear them anymore. The mainstream news sources continue to be cleansed of wrongthink.
There is no fleshing out of contrasting ideas in the news, only competing echo chambers for people to mainline their confirmation biases directly in toe their veins with no challenge to their preexisting thoughts and ideas. Carefully crafted into 7 second soundbites of course.
> it's ANOTHER example of the Immoral Journalist trope to add to my list
Then you don't know what a trope is. These are actual clips of real "journalists" dutifully reading their party-line scripts. This isn't a portrayal.
> Then you don't know what a trope is
Oops, I sure do, it's when an element recurs in a piece of art. The piece if art you posted (the youtube video) was created by an artist to portray the message "the news is fake." Thus, ANOTHER example of the Immoral Journalist trope.
Decades ago, sure. We're talking about during modern times though and over the last 30 years it's the capitalists that always get painted negatively in media.
>The piece if art you posted
So you missed the part where this isn't a portrayal. It's the actual journalists reading from a script, the same script they all read from.
And that's our "journalists", no wonder the news is so manufactured, homogenized and faked.
You said you haven't seen the media I'm referring to, meaning you're totally our of the loop on how often "communists" are painted negatively in mainstream American media. You simply don't have the data, you're guessing.
> So you missed the part where this isn't a portrayal
Sure didn't, it's also a piece of art that was created by an artist. Did you know that art can include clips from reality? They're called "documentaries."
So again, if you knew what a "trope" was you'd understand that the artist that edited this art is using the Immortal Journalist trope.
I'm happy to review your data. Care to post it?
>it's also a piece of art that was created by an artist.
It's as much of a piece of art as our posts on HN are.
Yeah, I stopped reading here. It's incredible how confident this person tries to sound when it's clear that very few of these statements are supported by evidence and also don't follow from each other. Bizarre stuff.
> Bizarre stuff.
Yeah. No matter how much cryptography you have, a gun or bomb will still kill you. This idea that that state really cares about whatever junk you've encrypted sounds like the McGuffin in a cliche thriller.
This sort of reminds me of the Eddie Izzard "Flags" bit, except that someone is trying to claim the land without the might of the British Empire behind them. Like, imagine the police coming to evict you from a house, and you confidently showing them that this ledger here says that it's actually your house.
I mean... that's not merely a statement unsupported by evidence, that's a statement that's demonstrably wrong. If I were to come up with a list of powerful forces in the Long 19th Century, "God" and "religion" wouldn't even come close to making it. It's a century that opens with the Enlightenment and reactions to it. The salient political features of the 19th century are the unhinging of the concept of divine right to rule, the social upheaval brought about by the Industrial Revolution, and the mighty juggernaut of nationalism that aroused passions and drove the world to several bloody conflicts, even in excess of the greatest and bloodiest wars of religion.