I don't see how the US recovers from the destruction in the government and among the people the past few years. It feels absolutely hopeless.
Now everybody is getting to see this happen in real time. Fabricating evidence to invade Iraq, a completely dystopic domestic surveillance system revealed by a whistle blower, what happens when societies faces even the slightest threat (from a pandemic in this case), the complete collapse of media integrity, completely routine abuse of spying powers, politicization of every single body of the government, and much more. This is what makes now, so much different than the past. "We", as in way more than 5%, are all seeing this play out in real time - and it's shaping our worldviews.
"In 1961, the US government put Jupiter nuclear missiles in Italy and Turkey. It had also trained a paramilitary force of Cuban exiles, which the CIA led in an attempt to invade Cuba and overthrow the Cuban government. Starting in November of that year, the US government engaged in a campaign of terrorism and sabotage in Cuba, referred to as the Cuban Project, which continued throughout the first half of the 1960s."
I'd recommend The Jakarta Method for some insight into the legitimacy of the concerns of regime change.
No, that's just crazy talk.
no, srsly, idk what's what
The West was consistently on defensive/deterrence against the USSR throughout the Cold War, there's no point denying that.
It is a bulletproof fact that throughout the Cold War the USSR had an offensive stance in Europe, and conventional NATO forces there only stood some chance in defensive. Eventually the insane military production, sometimes amounting to 25% GDP, including ludicrous quantities of tanks, IFVs and SPGs to support the supposed rush to the English Channel, brought the colossus down.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_territorial_claims_agai...
Seems everyone forgets the US' forward-deployment doctrine whenever its inconvenient to mention it ..
If by "few" you mean multiple decades; then yes, I don't know how they will ever recover.
I appreciate that this is a very complicated space that requires flexibility, compromise, etc, my complaint is that we tend to pretend (often extremely enthusiastically) that the situation is actually simple.
If something is good, I don't think it should require continual lying, deceit, and delusion to prop it up in the minds of the population.
I'd say the US is democratic with a polity that is deeply split on some key issues. But that doesn't imply the government doesn't reflect the will of the people (sometimes the will of the people is "a hot mess;" this was one of the deep concerns of the people who set up the Constitution in the first place).
And what school curriculum here most of these people raised on? American school curriculum perchance?
That we believe that the average person is anywhere near remotely competent to judge such things is a big problem in itself.
> I'd say the US is democratic...
Based on what criteria, the fact that they get to cast a vote now and then, for a person that was pre-chosen in some also questionably democratic process?
If people were able to wonder what is true, perhaps we would stand a chance.
I'm disinclined to entertain that notion until I see the average participation in the primary elections go above 40%.
People need to stop complaining about the system choosing leadership without their input if they aren't providing the input.
Besides, the two thoughts you expressed are contradictory... If the public isn't sufficiently educated, they shouldn't be choosing their leadership. That was exactly the risk that the authors of the Constitution were concerned about when they put in checks against simple mobocracy. Maybe the opinion that the FBI shouldn't be surveilling folks stems from an uneducated point of view?
Either way we slice it, it seems like Americans are getting the government they should have... Paternalistic because they cannot self-govern, or governed by them and beholden to their general apathy.
> If people were able to wonder what is true, perhaps we would stand a chance.
We have plenty of folks who wonder what is true. Some believe (still) that a child prostitution ring was operating out of the basement of a building with no basement. Some believe (still) a massively decentralized election was centrally rigged via voting machine manipulation in spite of a media company losing a defamation suit... An incredibly hard kind of suit for a media company to lose, because truth is always an affirmative defense.
We need more critical thinkers, not blind questioners.
(Note: this isn't purely snark, there is a point to this style of thinking )
I'm sure I'm carrying some unjustified beliefs. I've never counted "child sex trafficking out of the basement of a building with no basement" as one of them. And I generally try, if I notice I'm gathering extraordinary claims, to bring the extraordinary evidence; I started working the polls when I had questions about how elections are done (turns out it's not hard to do; most municipalities are desperate for volunteers) and learned quite a bit about potential failure modes and the mechanisms employed to mitigate them.
Does this same law (of optimality?⁰ apply to manufacturing processes and various other human undertakings?
As for elections: seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight, and also that this is necessarily knowable?
> As for elections: seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight, and also that this is necessarily knowable?
It's definitely not airtight. But airtight is fragile. Not unlike the Internet, It's better than airtight: it's decentralized and distributed.
Each state runs its own election. Each election district (varies from state-to-state, because it really is fifty states with fifty sets of laws) sets its own policies for running its election. Each polling location is locally administered. The coordination necessary to attack such a decentralized and adversarial system (remember: the party affiliation of individuals within this process varies wildly, with many of the "battleground states" run by GOP operatives) is preposterous to assume, especially as a secret conspiracy. Any such conspiracy would be at a scale that would be obvious.
One potential attack vector would be electronic voting machines, but (a) as previously noted: lawsuit, settled, wouldn't have settled if the truth was on the side of those accused of defamation and (b) those digital records are backed (in most jurisdictions, and specifically in the jurisdictions that were considered "battleground" in 2020) by paper records. Aligning fraud in the two records to escape the notice of poll workers, counters, and board officials (who are, again, generally of both major parties) is an absurdly improbable scenario.
It's been three years since the 2020 election. That's more than enough time for the accusations levied by one party to materialize into something concrete and legally-actionable, something other than ghosts and innuendo. When all the accuser has is ghosts and innuendo, the critical thinker asks why a concrete story of fraud with numbers and responsible parties hasn't manifested.
It is regarding (the italicized part): "But there's been more than enough money spent on teaching me critical thinking that if I'm not somewhere past the median, we're not capable of teaching it."
> Not unlike the Internet, It's better than airtight: it's decentralized and distributed.
This depends on what variable(s) one is optimizing for - if optimizing for correctness (which is what I'm interested in, [in part] because that is what has been claime3d by The Experts), your argument seems to be doing the opposite of supporting that aspect.
> The coordination necessary to attack such a decentralized and adversarial system...is preposterous to assume, especially as a secret conspiracy.
Representing a strawman characterization of concerns and then knocking it down is an excellent way to persuade the public, but it is terrible when it comes to logic & epistemology (something The Experts tend to be not very good at (on an absolute scale), but do not seem to realize). To me, this is a very big deal, "pedantry" aside.
> Any such conspiracy would be at a scale that would be obvious.
"Obvious" is mostly related to belief, not knowledge....but then belief is what matters most, so credit where credit is due I guess?
> but (a) as previously noted: lawsuit, settled, wouldn't have settled if the truth was on the side of those accused of defamation
Incorrect - this requires that there is zero discovered misjudgments by courts in the past, which is not the case. Legal scripture covers the epistemic issues of this problem extensively, and is why we use "presumed innocent", "beyond reasonable doubt", etc.
> is an absurdly improbable scenario
Again: belief (derived from prediction, possibly sub-perceptual), not knowledge.
> That's more than enough time for the accusations levied by one party to materialize into something concrete and legally-actionable, something other than ghosts and innuendo.
It's also adequate for it to not to have happened.
> something other than ghosts and innuendo
You have no way of knowing if this is all that exists.
> the critical thinker asks why a concrete story of fraud with numbers and responsible parties hasn't manifested.
A "critical thinker" on a relative scale may be satisfied by only this, but on an absolute scale the competition is much higher.
Not at all. There was no judgment here in that sense: Fox looked at the circumstances and instead of offering truth as an affirmative defense, refrained from doing so and settled the case. the likeliest conclusion is they couldn't offer truth as an affirmative defense (slightly less-likely conclusion: they could but doing so would open them up to even more liability than the defamation suit).
> Representing a strawman characterization of concerns
You may not have been claiming a vast conspiracy, but the people claiming election rigging definitely are. Look how many states they tried to sue in. That implied a vast multi-state conspiracy.
> Again: belief
Sure, I have a lot of beliefs grown from my personal experience. If you're going to argue epistemology, we'll be here awhile because that's a rich and dark sea to swim in. I don't know we'll have a productive discussion if epistemology is actually what you want to discuss. You asked me "seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight," and I've answered based on my epistemology; I don't have nearly enough drugs to discuss "But how do you, like, know that you know" right now.
> It's also adequate for it to not to have happened
Unsupported conjecture. As T approaches infinity, odds of action approach 1. T of three years is plenty of time for something to have stuck and nothing has.
You can flip that script and say it's been a long time for Trump to not have had criminal charges brought. It's true. It's entirely possible he did nothing criminally wrong. Burden of proof is on the other side to prove he did.
> You have no way of knowing if this is all that exists.
You're right; I have beliefs based on experience. But the parties claiming an election-theft fantasy have not provided concrete evidence to dissuade that belief; what they have put together doesn't hold up under simple scrutiny. My default belief will be "they're lying or blowing smoke" because that's the skeptical position; absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but it's also not evidence of evidence (and lacking evidence, the likeliest scenario is "things were basically on the up-and-up" because they tend to be).
> but on an absolute scale
What does that even mean.
This is certainly a possibility (I'd say even the most likely, by far), but in law it is not that uncommon to realize one doesn't have a great case and going for innocence can backfire. Plea deals with not well educated inner city people are alleged to be a common abuse of this inherent complexity.
> You may not have been claiming a vast conspiracy, but the people claiming election rigging definitely are.
There is a lot of nuance in this space, please acknowledge it (perhaps conceptualizing it as billions of rows of survey answers across millions of people would help....say, like the extensive analytics that are captured at runtime in a video game?).
> Look how many states they tried to sue in. That implied a vast multi-state conspiracy.
I think it's fair enough to say that that's what they were representing. It's funny, all humans do this, but generally disapprove when [certain] others do the same. I wonder if humanity has received any guidance on these matters....
> I don't know we'll have a productive discussion if epistemology is actually what you want to discuss.
Based on extensive experience: we won't! :)
> and I've answered based on my epistemology
You have expressed your opinion on the matter.
> I don't have nearly enough drugs to discuss "But how do you, like, know that you know" right now.
Framing epistemology as drug-addled "woo woo" is typically a very effective approach for persuasion, it works well in all communities I've experienced, even The Rationalists.
> Unsupported conjecture.
Is the irony intentional?
Is what's good for the goose not good for the gander?
> T of three years is plenty of time for something to have stuck and nothing has.
Have there been zero legal cases in the past where the truth took longer than 3 years to emerge?
> You can flip that script and say it's been a long time for Trump to not have had criminal charges brought. It's true. It's entirely possible he did nothing criminally wrong. Burden of proof is on the other side to prove he did.
Yep! But then, hardly anyone cares about burden of proof these days, or proof in general. The mainstream ideology of this era has many similarities to the hippies of the sixties, except without the good vibes lol
> But the parties claiming an election-theft fantasy have not provided concrete evidence to dissuade that belief; what they have put together doesn't hold up under simple scrutiny.
I sometimes wonder if these people, and the people who subscribe to their dumb stories, are fucking idiots tbh. But then there go I if not for the Grace of God!
> My default belief will be "they're lying or blowing smoke" because that's the skeptical position
If one thinks in binary, which seems to be the rather convenient (for some, less so for others) evolutionary/cultural default. Wouldn't it be wild if people could be taught not only what to think, but how to think?? Holy mackarel, you could control the world!
> absence of evidence is not evidence of absence
There's a good paper out there poking holes in this theory, that's why I always use "absence of evidence is not proof of absence".
> and lacking evidence, the likeliest scenario is "things were basically on the up-and-up" because they tend to be
And the best part: this requires literally zero probabilistic calculations....it's just "the way it is"!
>> but on an absolute scale
> What does that even mean.
What is possible vs what is actually done. Think of it in terms of efficiency at extracting energy from fuel: humans have gotten much better over time. What's interesting is that we seem intuitively aware that the physical world can be improved, but the metaphysical world seems beyond our ability to perceive (at least with the same quality of thinking we use in science). I wonder if people will ever figure this out, the parallels to religion vs science in the first enlightenment are uncanny imho, but its like people have switched teams!
Many thanks for the excellent conversation btw!