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Comment by landryraccoon | Hacker News Reader

> A decade later, participation in elite circles like media, academia, and politics is based on how convincingly one can be seen to parrot obvious untruths, not because anyone believes them at all, but because it signals status to be able to lie to the faces of people who know you are doing it, and still say nothing.

I don’t understand this. Can you elaborate on what untruths you mean? Who’s parroting these lies?

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Basically anyone who sits at a panel, interview or a discussion and talks about geopolitical affairs. It’s the space around politics and think tanks and national security. There’s an implicit expectation that you talk about certain topics in a certain way, and that way usually conforms to the narrative that’s acceptable to the apparatus of power. It’s a vague description but that’s because of the nature of this unspoken expectation.

More concrete examples would be how you’re expected to just completely agree that Russia and China are essentially evil and enemies. Like that’s the unspoken premise. Or in the US, playing this game of theatre around how Democrats or Republicans are bad. I’m not American but there’s a talk show host called Tucker Carlson who goes around talking about how Democrats are ridiculous and holds all these inflammatory and demagogue views on air, but is known to be completely normal and reasonable off air and in his private life. That’s the kind of skill that’s seen as necessary in these kinds of “elite” circles, where you’re just expected to be able to hold two contradicting views and milk them to your advantage. You’re expected to be able to peddle mistruths and warp facts convincingly and worse, you’re seen as higher status and more “refined” for being about to pull this off convincingly.

Another example I’m reminded of is an Australian one, where a think tank that is funded by arms manufacturers called ASPI, had its CEO defend itself on live television. As you’d expect, he was surprisingly able to spin a tale where they were seen as the good guys using all sorts of deception and rhetorical tricks. I don’t know how these people sleep at night but it’s the very definition of double think from 1984. I do believe more people will see this subtle aspect of how opinion is shaped in future.

> Basically anyone who sits at a panel, interview or a discussion and talks about geopolitical affairs. There’s an implicit expectation that you talk about certain topics in a certain way, and that way usually conforms to the narrative that’s acceptable to the apparatus of power.

How do you know that this is true without mind reading or lie detection powers? I'm not being sarcastic. You see these people talking and have somehow arrived at the strong belief that they do not believe what they are saying. How?

First, it’s because I noticed myself and others doing this through observation and intuition. Secondly, it’s because there are literally accounts and articles where these people say out loud what they’re doing. E.g The Tucker Carlson example wasn’t me just surmising something, I read it in an article where acquaintances literally said he held no outrageous views privately and was literally doing it to rile his audience up. Same for other Republican politicians who appear “rabid” and “crazy” in the Twittersphere to rile up their constituents, and then clock off work and behave completely normally, like flicking a switch. My impression is that the left thinks they’re morally superior for not supporting so called Republican crazies but they’re being played like a fiddle too, since they ALWAYS fall for this rage bait theatre and think that lambasting conservatives is actually constructive or achieves anything.

Ah yes, Tucker Carlson who was dropped by Fox News for managing to lose them $750m after refusing to reign in his messaging on Dominion, and then during discovery his personal messages and recordings include such explicit gems found in court filings as:

* "Now this guy may be a child rapist," he says, "I'm just telling you that arranging a marriage between a 16-year-old and a 27-year-old is not the same as pulling a stranger off the street and raping her."

and

* When the show host describes 14-year-old girls at Mr Carlson's daughter's school sexually experimenting with each other, he says: "If it weren't my daughter I would love that scenario."

and then

* Mr Carlson refers to celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton as "the biggest white whores in America", he calls the journalist Arianna Huffington a "pig" and says that Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton are "anti-man".

Yes I'm sure that guy who has day in and day out pushed "extreme" narratives for so long is just a totally well-adjusted person. You know, just like Bill O'Reilly who proceeded him ... what's that? He went down for sexual harassment in the workplace? [2] Total outlier. Definitely all an act.

[1] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47523608

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/media/2017/oct/21/bill-oreilly-3...

Russia commits countless war crimes on a daily basis (there is tons of documentation) and China has concentration camps. America is not perfect but they are legitimately much worse

This is the exact narrative that I’m talking about. It’s a hand wavy pseudo intellectual narrative that goes, Russia commits war crimes and kills civilians, China is Nazi Germany 2.0 and is trying to exterminate Muslims like the Nazis tried to do with the Jews and America is bad, you know with even more casualties in the Middle East but it’s not as bad as these cartoonishly evil regimes. I mean no offence to you by calling it hand wavy and pseudo intellectual but this is the exact attitude I’m talking about. It goes, “Everybody knows [something] [something]” and that’s usually a big warning sign for me; I know because I had to examine some of my own beliefs that way and it was painful to realise that most of it was talking points I had unfortunately picked up from so called thought leaders.

It’s a lot to unpack and I’m not going to discuss Russia because a lot of that is actually true, but why don’t you hold America to the same standards? Also regarding the concentration camps thing, this is another narrative. Can you describe to me what you think is going on in China? I’m genuinely curious. My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay, because you know, they had terrorist attacks where there were hundreds killed in stabbings in Xinjiang but you probably don’t know about that right? It seems all that people know is the pictures of lots of Muslims sitting in blue overalls behind wired fences, which has been deliberately used to evoke comparisons to gas chambers and the Holocaust, by ASPI. But when I say this, people often have a knee jerk reaction which is along the lines of: “How can you support genocide or another Holocaust, you’re evil.” Which is the exact problem because the whole premise of the discussion has been completely warped by so called accepted “truths“ and people manipulating our emotions in a classic appeal to pathos. Could the world really be this cartoonishly black and white and good and evil, where my side is morally righteous and our adversaries are morally despicable? This is exactly what Orwell described in his essay, “Politics and the English Language.”

Regarding the concentration camps narrative, just Google ASPI and you’ll realise that about 70% of this narrative originates from them. Not only that but they’re literally funded by the military industrial complex (e.g. Northrup Grumman, Thales) and their plan worked because Australia recently bought billions of dollars worth of crappy missiles from the very companies that sponsor this so called “think tank”. It’s most definitely NOT a conspiracy theory and it’s very revealing that these think tanks can be this brazen. If you want to get to the root of this, just search for the origin of common narratives like this one and you’ll find it’s just a handful of sources all repeating the same misleading points. You’ll be shocked at how easily narratives can be seeded in the media.

https://www.afr.com/policy/foreign-affairs/the-think-tank-be...

And this video is kind of memey but you get the gist.

https://youtu.be/_fHfgU8oMSo

Politicians leverage anti-China rhetoric to get votes while mainstream media use it to get an audience.

Just write "China bad" and automatically get 2x more views and clicks.

When was the last time you read something positive or even neutral on China in the mainstream media? I can't remember the last time. Probably before Trump.

1.4 billion people and not a single positive thing happens in China, according to Western media.

Show a Chinese person being happy? Must be CCP propaganda.

You didn't automatically say "China bad"? CCP shill.

Show a Chinese company having international success? Must have stolen the tech.

Social media app that US teens love to use? China must doing mass surveillance on Americans.

This sort of black and white demonizing of China creates extremist views. You can see these extremist views on China all over HN, where one expects users to not be easily deceived. I was wrong.

People are so concerned and fearful of pro-China propaganda that they don't even realize they've been drinking propaganda from the other side as well.

Mainstream media gets more views and clicks by generating fear, anger and saying "China bad":

* Your view of China turns negative over time

* Politicians need your vote in order to advance their careers

* Politicians say "China bad" to get your votes

* Media quotes politicians saying "China bad"

* Your view of China turns even more negative

* Politician's approval ratings are down

* Politician says "China bad" to distract you

* Your view of China turns worse

Because of this endless cycle, it's career suicide for a US politician to not be anti-China. Any US politician objectivity on China has been lost since 2016.

And it's not like there are alternative media since the media landscape has consolidated into a handful of powerful conglomerates.

I know some will accuse me of being anti-western or pro-CCP below. No. I'm not. I'm anti-extremists.

The fact that even people on HN are convinced by the good (western) vs evil (China) narrative shows you how effective this sort of thing is.

> My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay ...

Excuse me, but the camps are for free vocational training and re-education. A lot nicer than Guantanamo Bay! A lot of citizens in the US are crying out for free education!

>My understanding, after a lot of research and incredulity is that it’s essentially China’s version of Guantanamo Bay

Guantanamo Bay isn’t for US citizens though. You can’t be arrested in the US for being Muslim and be sent to Guantanamo bay.

They aren’t in any way similar because it’s not used against citizens, which is strictly what China’s concentration camps are for.

The military has claimed they could keep a citizen there indefinitely, but they haven’t yet and if they did it would get challenged in court pretty quickly.

China does not have "concentration camps." All that reporting goes back to a single man: Adrian Zenz.

The US has Guantanamo Bay. Among others.

The US did commit various war crimes in about every of their foreign engagements. Those had to be leaked of course and weren't reported by some self-correction built into the system.

The US uses false narratives like "national security" to justify unjustifiable actions regularly. See their economic sanctions, Huawei, etc. pp.

The list goes on of course. Now, the one thing clearly better about the US is, people being able to talk about it. But that only has meaning if it is done and actually leads to changes. Else it is only another layer of deception.

The huawei sanctions are a result of the origins of the company. Many people forget or never knew about the hacks that happened over 10 years ago

https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/nortel-collapse-linked-to-c...

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2020-07-01/did-china...

"Else it is only another layer of deception."

There is still a great difference between mainstream media and politicians avoiding certain topics and police activly supressing knowledge about historical events and rewriting history as they see fit (tiananmen square).

And completely banning Winnie Pooh, because some internet dudes made a funny picture.

Guantanamo Bay is thousands of times smaller in magnitude than putting millions of your own citizens in concentration camps. It's also reprehensible and should be closed, no one disagrees on that

There are NOT millions of people in “camps” in China, that’s a bizarre claim made by some so called researchers like Adrian Zenz. 1000s or 10,000s at most. And do you even know what the rationale for these so called “camps” are for?

Do you have any citations for that dismissal? Multiple researchers have the Uyghurs on the order of a million people, plus something like half that number of children separated from their families into boarding schools, and the primary reason for the decline in camp population being the preferential switch to forced labor programs rather than giving up on the genocide.

Maybe, but now we are discussing scales of evil and not whether evil is actually done. Moral superiority is effectively lost.

Also, this is nothing compared to millions of deaths due to wars and entire vast regions fucked up badly for generations. In that aspect, US is much worse than Russia or China, if we check past few decades (which is way more relevant for present than judgling last 200-500 years).

It pains me to say that, because I strongly align most of my values with US ones in this world, but this is fucking horrible and cant be ignored or marginalized. All done for profit of few since day 1.

> Also, this is nothing compared to millions of deaths due to wars and entire vast regions fucked up badly for generations. In that aspect, US is much worse than Russia or China, if we check past few decades (which is way more relevant for present than judgling last 200-500 years).

The hundreds of millions of people who lived under Soviet communism (entire Eastern Europe, South East Europe, Central Asia) are fucked badly for generations.

Even beyond the war crimes; just the wars themselves. The WMD thing in Iraq is nice because not only was the war flimsily justified, but that justification itself was a lie.

However, a lot of the other wars are just bizarre. Taking Afghanistan - the costs, suffering caused and damage to the global economy are completely absurd. Nothing was achieved. There isn't any reason for someone in the US to even feel better after that debacle. The decision makers had to know that was what they were triggering, they did it anyway and many of them are still treated like reasonable choices for leadership positions.

That decision making was worse than anything Russia or China did, it was just pointless killing and destruction.

The cost of one party is the profit of the other. What was that money spent on? Weapons, ammunition, vehicles, food and clothes and other stuff for the soldiers. Someone sold that stuff, and those people needed these wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military%E2%80%93industrial_co...

What you are trying to do is called whataboutism https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism#:~:text=Whatabo....

Look up "false equivalency" next. And then "bad faith".

The Ukraine used illegally cluster bombs on ethnic Russians for years. This is actually documentation. https://www.hrw.org/news/2014/10/20/ukraine-widespread-use-c...

They didn’t use them illegally neither Russia nor Ukraine are signatories to the CCM.

This makes no sense. The conflict started in 2014, you point to an article from 2014, how does that show years of bombs? In addition Russia no longer keeps up the lie that the 'little green men' that invaded Ukraine were just ethnic Russian Ukrainians already in Ukraine. They admit that they invaded with Russian troops. Soldiers will often have their service in 2014 hyped in online obituaries when they are eliminated now. Ukraine was responding to an unannounced invasion by it's much larger neighbor with the weapons is has at hand (weapon's that Russia also has and uses). What a non-point made with non-evidence trying to place blame on a country that was invaded. Do you also use 'how she was dressed was asking for it' as an arguement?

>The Ukraine

It's a country, not simply a geological region.

> there’s a talk show host called Tucker Carlson who goes around talking about how Democrats are ridiculous and holds all these inflammatory and demagogue views on air, but is known to be completely normal and reasonable off air and in his private life.

Exactly what Peter Pomerantsev described of domestic Russia in 2014. https://youtu.be/5Au332OG-M4?t=980

Random examples that I can think of: Trump has/had (strong) ties with Russia, needed those Russian ties to win the election and used them to win the elections.

People still believe this to this day. Globally.

> People still believe this to this day.

Who? It is accepted that Trump got help from Russia and that he publicly asked for it. It is not accepted that he has strong ties with Russia, and unlike what the GGP has claimed, there is no "official" story saying that. The only person who did say that was private investigator Steele, in a dossier that Clinton didn't believe and discarded but that McCain did and leaked.

As I understand it, the Wikileaks DNC email dump was just a front for Russia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2016_Democratic_National_Commi...

more realistically, it was israel: https://www.thenation.com/article/world/trump-israel-collusi...

perhaps you recall trump’s first two acts in office — recognizing jerusalem as israel’s capital, and sanctioning russia. curious!

Ha! Makes sense.

I abhor partisan politics but there are things associated with (e.g., Trump) that call for scrutiny.

Trump is a fascinating character and has broken so many norms that it's been mind bending. It saddens me that HN has many of his rabid acolytes that make any such discussion a shit show.

The GP comment is not telling the whole story. Yes the first thing _congress_ did was pass additional sanctions on Russia but Trump delayed [1] them from going into affect for over a year allowing more than enough time for Russia to mitigate the impact significantly.

[1] https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Politics/timeline-trumps-delays-r...

There's so much more to explore, but not here.

It blows my mind that there are so many rabid supporters here on HN. There's no point in dialog there because there's no interest in that.

That said, we should be exploring how to hack society to "improve efficiency at scale", and that requires discussing policy and that is what politics is ostensibly all about. C'est la guerre.

Why wasn't there a discussion of the contents of the leaks, that the DNC did everything in their power to coronate Hillary, and only a discussion of the leak's provenance?

There was a ton of discussion about those claims but it largely stalked because the leaked emails didn’t show anything significant. You can still find Bernie die-hards claiming a conspiracy but they’re generally ignored because there’s no evidence that he did anything but lose fairly.

There was. Only barely literate morons and Russian social media astroturfers interpreted the leaked documents that way.

There was plenty of discussion of the DNC crowning Hillary. I'm pissed about it to this day. What's your point?

It was discussed at the time. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz resigned as DNC chair over what was in the emails.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/jul/24/debbie-wasse...

which is often accused, although never proven.

when putin accuses media he doesnt like of being foreign agents without proof we can recognize how transparently self serving it is. wouldnt you agree?

Trump openly asked for help from Russia on national TV. I don’t see how the existence of some degree of Russian collusion is debatable given that it was done in the open.

I do agree that there are people who vastly overestimate the extent or effectiveness of whatever Russia did do. Trump won due to general discontent with the status quo coupled with the fact that Hillary Clinton was a politically tone deaf candidate who ran a terrible campaign. If anything Russia did succeeded it’s because it was able to capitalize on this dynamic.

The only incorrect part of that is that it played an important role in his winning the election. But that part isn't necessary for the whole thing to be very bad, in my view.

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