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Comment by shagymoe | Hacker News Reader

It's really depressing how we totally fail to permanently learn our lessons. We're just doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past because there are so many uneducated (and "educated") people who suck the propaganda tit all day every day.

It's so bizarre that people will campaign for and champion the rollback of regulations that negatively affect them directly. For what? To feel like your political "team" won? There are REASONS why children have been taken out of the workforce. There are REASONS why food, water, work safety, etc should be protected with regulations.

It turns out the majority of people are just incapable of empathy or logic. So depressing.

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> It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Rather than writing everyone off a Just That Dumb(TM), perhaps the really neat trick has been to convince a sufficient proportion of people that their salary depends somehow on carefully not understanding "living wages" and "rising wealth inequality is a problem" and "the planetary ecosystem is in bad shape".

Disclaimer: for my own part I certainly have a substantial amount of decidedly uncomfortable cognitive dissonance between "I want a nice comfy life" and "I'm literally part of this problem, aren't I?". From the outside I probably seem like just another zombie to some people.

Ironically, although that quote is by Upton Sinclair, it is not from The Jungle, which concerns the meat packing industry.

> It turns out the majority of people are just incapable of empathy or logic.

This is an extremely solipsistic take if you actually believe it.

I'm sure that other people's minds exist. I don't have overwhelming evidence that they are capable of empathy or logic. How do _you_ explain poor, rural people fighting for the benefit of billionaires? IMHO, it defies logic. How do _you_ explain people campaigning against the civil rights of people whose personal choices have zero effect on the lives of those campaigning against them or negatively affect literally anyone in the world? IMHO, it shows a complete lack of empathy.

That's a very cynical view of your fellow human beings. Everybody is capable of empathy and logic. It's just that our brains try to conserve energy and don't want to spend energy thinking too much about stuff.

Your post is ironically a great example. It's easier for your brain to decide that these people are some kind of un-empathic illogical (sub)humans, than for your brain to really try to empathise and think about how things have lead to this point for those people.

But these economic changes aren't being propounded by a majority of the people. They're coming from people who currently have an electoral majority, which is not at all the same thing. The latter can be engineered by tailoring the borders of voting districts.

Go read The Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno de Mesquite and Alastair Smith, which explains how it's practical to rule a polity with a curated selection of supporters.

How do you explain the fact that you seem to be completely unable to understand other people who disagree with your politics? IMHO, it shows a complete lack of empathy.

Propaganda is really really effective and works really really well. Even on educated people.

> It's really depressing how we totally fail to permanently learn our lessons. [..] It's so bizarre that people will campaign for and champion the rollback of regulations that negatively affect them directly.

From my exposure to the political right, they've been preoccupied with CRT, drag queen story hour, and censorship. Occasionally immigration pops up, but politicians even on the right prefer to ignore that (as any graph of immigration to the US vs. which party is in power will show).

I haven't seen even a hint of a grassroots campaign against child labor restrictions - or any kind of campaign at all, just bills suddenly appearing out of the blue. This is strictly a top-down push, not even from the politicians, but their puppet-masters. They're banking on voters' loyalty and lack of alternatives to not lose any votes.

If there's a lesson we forgot, it's how to limit corruption in politics, not that maybe child labor is OK.

The puppet masters at the top are the 'tail wagging the dog' about the whole CRT/LBGT/etc issues. When you tell a group they are threatened they'll stop paying attention to 'little things' and focus on the threat. Meanwhile the oligarch class robs their pockets blind.

I saw this[1] comment today which uses a different shader on the notion of revisiting settled decisions. It was about Meta re-discovering why cubicles are a solid choice for productivity. This is fine. I don't think it'll pass.

> yes, it is Good Actually that we are continually questioning and testing received wisdom. If we end up reinventing old things from first principles, that means we have all the more confidence in them, rather than relying on the unalive momentum of tradition and path dependence.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35118384

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