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Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

It turns out eventually you have to deal with reality.

> Before writing off the totalitarian world as a nightmare that can't come true, just remember that in 1925 the world of today would have seemed a nightmare that couldn't come true. Against that shifting phantasmagoric world in which black may be white tomorrow and yesterday's weather can be changed by decree, there are in reality only two safeguards. One is that however much you deny the truth, the truth goes on existing, as it were, behind your back, and you consequently can't violate it in ways that impair military efficiency. The other is that so long as some parts of the earth remain unconquered, the liberal tradition can be kept alive. — Orwell

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality-based_community

> The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

The actors of the empire are dismantling said empire. It will be studied, not least by its adversaries.

I'm still waiting to hear that soliloquy in a movie.

It's pretty much a rewrite of a famous monologue in Network, for those who haven't seen that before. At least in tone and delivery.

https://youtu.be/35DSdw7dHjs

Deserves to be named too

It ruins the chance at dunking on the opposition but the key word is "discernable".

It's reality as it appears to be to a person on the outside. Not actual reality.

Bush Admin was doing Hyperstition before it was cool B)

> 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality‘

The American reality of stepping on rake after rake after rake. A gag that meanders repeatedly between funny and sad.

All of this talk about reality is giving them way too much credit.

The simple fact is that we’re dealing with idiots and pure stupidity. Idiots elected them and the idiots are having their day in the sun. Unfortunately, their stupidity is no longer contained to the office environments and executive leadership roles they had before. They are unfortunately able to make decisions that affect the general population.

The US did an okay-ish job for a long time keeping people like this from gaining a foothold of too many positions of power. Unfortunately, we lost control and we may never get it back on the right track.

Secretary Hegseth earned a BA from Princeton and an MPP from Harvard.

Princeton and Harvard are graduating idiots?

Thank goodness! Such a relief! In that case, since he went to Princeton and Harvard, we shouldn’t consider his actions idiotic. Instead his actions are malicious intent.

But you didn't just say Hegseths actions are idiotic (fwiw I think they are), you said Hegseth is an idiot. The evidence suggests he is not.

There was another article about cheating at Brown that said Princeton hasn't proctored tests since the 19th century so maybe you are right and Hegseth is an idiot but still managed to cheat his way through school.

However, they already got their headline. While I saw the original policy covered heavily in conservative news sources, I've not seen this retraction covered at all. Thus the base believes that the military is no longer "woke", and 100% of the desired value has been achieved.

Sadly, all the time spent deferring reality ends up hurting a lot of bystanders. The debt they've run up is going to be painful, maybe moreso than the damages incurred from the anti-science and anti-transparency policies.

The debt would be less painful if the pricks that were responsible for this mess would be billed for the consequences of their poor king-making.

We can start with whomever showed up to that inauguration, and expand from there. If they could afford that bribe, they can certainly afford to pay for repairing the damage their golden boy has caused.

And/or if the debt was for something useful. There’s nothing wrong with running up massive low-interest debt if it’s invested in high-return projects. I’ll borrow every cent anyone will lend me at 2% if there’s a 4% savings account handy, and that’s the leverage the US used to enjoy.

But just cutting taxes for the rich is not that model.

Hopefully sanity prevails and we retroactively declare those tax cuts as loans, now due with interest. Yeah, not how contracts are supposed to work. So what.

As we discovered to our cost here in the UK a few years ago, increasing government debt to give tax breaks to the rich doesn't just cause huge economic damage, it also makes it difficult for more responsible governments to borrow for actual investment, however critical.

Maybe. But long before that, many other people have to deal with the consequences of a few others' disbelief in reality.

"Every lie we tell incurs a debt to the truth. Sooner or later, that debt is paid."

I like it.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.”

all form is interpretation

"It is a well-known fact that reality has liberal bias." - Stephen Colbert

That's a bumper sticker looking for a Prius.

Hot take but we should let reality deal the blow. There's so many things that people think is redundant and unnecessary but actually have an army of people and machination that are working tirelessly to curb it. Only to called bloat and the deep state.

Vaccines should not be given automatically, because that causes people to not think about why they need it. They think that it is something is imposed on them. But if they always have to request it (and the request is quick and always given, or super cheap at the shop) then people would have to know to get vaccinated. Parents will talk to each other about which vaccine is necessary (and its going to be all of them because they will know someone that died from it)

This is true for any crisis really. For example, lets say that you are managing someone's finances or health, you found out that they are in a horrible situation. But then, you discovered a solution that does not require their attention. So you work tirelessly behind the scene to fix their finances or develop new cure. Voila! Problem solved. Or is it? You have not fixed the fundamental problem that they are an obese with obese lifestyle.

If millions more people are obese than were obese 50 years ago, clearly something has changed systemically that has made people more sedentary and eating more. People 50 years ago were not paying more conscious attention to their health than people today, but the background environment of available food and sedentary jobs/entertainment were different.

The personal responsibility model of obesity works for individuals (including myself), but falls flat when discussing how to lower the weight of millions.

“Freedom works for me but I want to also control millions of other people, for the good of me and their own good since they don’t know any better”

“Finding and halting the boot stomping on your friends and neighbors is a violation of your friends’ and neighbors’ freedoms”

Sounds nice but is that what you really mean? The government created Covid, let it leak from a lab and now people want to give them power to force millions of innocent people take the medicine they also created. “Finding and halting the boot” would look a little different from that in my mind

"Well you need to exercise more and eat more vegetables" is true, but it's only practicable advice if people have access to exercise facilities and healthy food, and the time to make use of them. Otherwise you may as well be blaming fire victims for not being incombustible.

“You need to x” is still the (apparently flawed?) personal responsibility model.

Replace “you” with “we will do x to you whether you like it or not” and now we’re talking

What changed 50 years ago is the US government decided saturated fats were bad and complex carbohydrates were good, and began setting policy to rebuild the food supply and culture around that worldview. We're now living in the result of that population-wide experiment.

Nothing has changed. Fat and sugar are appetizing, always have. The free market gave it to all of you by the truckload at the lowest price.

Try to assume your choices instead of blaming "the US government" and telling yourself fairytales.

No, it was literally government policy. The free market didn't give us the McGovern committee or the following half-century of subsidies, regulations, and guidelines to promote low-fat diets.

Markets don't exist in a vacuum. In this case, it was substantially shaped by state-driven incentives. If nothing had changed, we wouldn't be having this conversation. It's a historical fact that something did change: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_in_the_United_States#/....

The problem with this thinking on something like vaccines is that vaccines literally rely on a certain percentage of the population having received the vaccine. It's not actually possible to allow a personal choice policy if you want a vaccine to be effective.

I wouldn't necessarily declare that vaccines rely on sufficient population vaccination, but there's always going to be people who cannot take the vaccine (e.g. immune-compromised individuals) and their protection comes from the population having a high percentage of immunity due to the vaccines. Of course, having the majority being immune means that any outbreak tends to finish quickly as the virus runs out of people/vectors to infect.

That seems like the opposite of using intelligence to deal with issues.

Throughout history, human civilisations have tried to deal with problems (e.g. droughts, floods, famines etc) by proactively taking measures to increase their chance of survival. Simple things like storing grain to be used during the winter is an effective strategy, whereas letting people starve to death so that they can learn about storing grain seems like a really stupid idea for stupid people.

Also, throughout history, human civilization used to get rid of those who didn't play nice with others. Ostracism was common and there was no recourse.

Indeed - it was far more obvious to people that participating in society was not only desirable but often necessary (except for maybe the hermits). I'd argue that it's even more necessary these days in terms of global agriculture and production, but all the interconnected systems aren't as visible to people who are not involved in those industries.

What does this mean

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.

See: viruses and the efficacy of vaccines thereupon.

See: trans-women are human males.

The vaccine was mandatory, like in pretty much every army base of every half developed country, because not having it mandatory led to infection waves and in the army that's even worse than in genpop.

The reasons for not doing the vaccine anymore were, essentially, "the vaccine is more dangerous than the sickness" and "the vaccine is not necessary to avoid the sickness".

Both of those statement are, factually, scientifically, not true. That's reality. Which is what parent meant, no matter the deep conviction and the political innuendo, ultimately reality is you either do the vaccine and are safe for no risk or you don't and you get infection waves.

> because not having it mandatory led to infection waves and in the army that's even worse than in genpop

It also makes a stupidly-obvious tactic viable for the enemy.

Specifically, there is a reason the US military still vaccinates for smallpox, a virus that was eradicated world-wide 50 years ago. As a civilian, you can't get it even if you wanted it, but as a soldier, you have to take it even if you don't want it.

There is also the legend of sieging cities by catapulting diseased cows over the city walls. And if anyone knows the citation for that story, I'd love to see it.

"The earliest documented incident of the intention to use biological weapons is possibly recorded in Hittite texts of 1500–1200 BC, in which victims of tularemia were driven into enemy lands, causing an epidemic" [1].

Smallpox is a can of worms. But if you learn your enemy are idiots and don't have a flu vaccine, and you know your own forces do, I don't think you're going to get yourself sanctioned by your trade partners for exposing them to the flu. It will take out a statistically-measurable fraction of their troops, at a predictable interval, something you can plan to exploit with manoeuvre.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_biological_warfare#...

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