The article mentions people are willing to suspend their belief in understandingthe truth in order to further their “team” or party objective, but I think this whole thing is simply foreign adversaries vying to destroy us from within by sowing contempt and spreading lies on social media and news outlets.
Occam’s Razor.
I think it’s been foreign adversaries meddling with our politics. Our whole country knows we need to be spending a lot more on public education. It’s not a mystery. Ask anybody who’s been in a public school.
And then with the grip that social media has on our masses, The ease with which social media silos us into a weird kind of social affirmation tunnel vision platform that essentially brainwashes us.
If you’re a foreign adversary that’s already meddling in the United States politics, it’s a hop skip and a jump to start meddling in their private sector. In fact it’s quite a lot easier id imagine.
we need to be spending a lot more on public education.
That probably won’t help much, until USA becomes more socially responsible overall.
The evidence is VERY clear, your chances of doing well in education decline dramatically with greater social problems.
your chances of doing well in education decline dramatically with greater social problems.
And that’s because we don’t spend enough on education… If the schools could provide sufficient support for all their students, then it wouldn’t just be the ones with means who succeed.
The suggestion that spending more on schools won’t fix a whole lot of problems, that’s just ridiculous. It’s pretty obvious, but it’s also demonstrably untrue. For instance, it’s well documented that smaller classrooms result in better outcomes for students. If schools could afford more teachers, they could have smaller classrooms. Similarly, better and newer materials result in better outcomes. And like in any field, paying higher salaries can attract a higher caliber of employee, so higher pay for teachers would also mean better teachers. As it is, public school teachers need a master’s degree and you can’t really expect teachers to spend more time in college racking up debt when they can only hope to pay it off after 30 years of teaching, you know unless they made more money.
If you’re a foreign adversary that’s already meddling in the United States politics, it’s a hop skip and a jump to start meddling in their private sector.
You don’t need any scary duplicitous foreigners for that, our own billionaires, are quite transparent about their desire and actions to “reform” education by channeling money from public schools to voucher schools. Bill Gates alone had put >10 billion into privatizing schools in America between ~2008 and ~2018., and haven’t stopped.
Russia buying $40,000 worth of FB ads is an utter drop in the bucket next to the oceans of influence our own billionaires/corporations legally exercise.
Isn’t occams razor the idea that it’s stupidity, not malice?
You explain two types of “malice” - one which is primarily driven by a lack of critical thinking and another which is an intentionally planned attack.
Occams razor would say the former is more likely. You may have well said “fuck occams razor I believe it’s Russian bots”
Occam’s Razor is that the simplest answer is probably right.
You’re thinking of Hanson’s razor which states:
Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Hanson’s razor
Occam’s Razor would suggest this is largely a domestic problem, perhaps exacerbated by foreign adversaries but far from being all their work.
We were watching Rings of Power and my wife kept being like “How can Celebrimbor be so stupid? How can he not see the war waging around him? This is so fake. Nobody is this dense.”
I legitimately cannot even. These themes were distilled into fiction 100 years ago, and that is just the version on my TV today. The danger of populism, the deception of the demagogue… It’s all fucking right there… Impossible to ignore. Yet here we are, dealing with the same shit in a different age.
The danger of populism
The wacko conspiracies aren’t due to populism, it’s the opposite.
People understand they have an antagonistic relationship with the government, but they don’t have the theory and historical knowledge to understand the systems at play due to centuries of anti-communist propaganda, so they latch onto conspiracies that match their prejudices and don’t threaten any of their beliefs.
We saw the same thing with nazi germany.
You’ve basically defined populism:
Say whatever rhetoric you believe to be currently popular at this very moment, with absolutely no coherent or consistent policies, within the framework of ‘all us normal people’ vs ‘those degenerate elites.’
This is actually precisely in line with appealing to latent rhetoric and amplifying and creating conspiracies.
Trump did/does this, the Nazis did this.
Basically all populists say whatever the fuck they want and then their actual policies are almost always in line with whatever helps out them and their immediate friends/allies the most. But these can also turn on a dime.
Instability and erratic decision making are the hallmarks of basically every populist leader in the modern era.
Mostly only in the US does the term ‘populist’ have connotations of actually popularly supported policy positions, as mostly only in the US is ‘Libertarian’ a right wing, pro business ideology instead of a left wing, socialist ideology, and mostly only in the US does communism/socialism mean ‘whenever the government spends money on stuff I don’t want it to.’
You are correct though that populism works best in a very stupid, uneducated, angry population.
… Which is why the Republicans actual ‘masterful political strategy’ of the last 30 or 40 years was:
Make everyone stupid and uneducated by destroying public education, and angry via bombastic fear and hate spread via talk radio, tv news, and more lately the internet.
Mostly only in the US does the term ‘populist’ have connotations of actually popularly supported policy positions
That explains it, that’s the only way I’ve seen it used when referring to modern America. NYT opinion columnists like it because it allows them to paint leftwing policy that is popular because it helps everyone and rightwing policy that is popular because most American have unexamined white supremacist beliefs with the same brush.
These themes were distilled into fiction 100 years ago
Just a nitpick: Rings of Power uses Tolkien’s characters but its story is almost entirely the work of the show’s modern script-writers. They don’t have the rights to use anything Tolkien wrote about that period of Middle Earth’s history beyond what is mentioned in LOTR and its appendices (which is very little).
How can Celebrimbor be so stupid? How can he not see the war waging around him? This is so fake. Nobody is this dense.
This is one time where the Simpsons answer is actually appropriate: A wizard did it.
Except the wizard is a Maia.
(note: all wizards are Maia but not all of the Maiar are wizards)
yeah its called capital accumulation, here’s how it works:
A cabal conservative institution of international rich people don’t want to pay taxes on their enormous wealth so they’re spending some of their money to prop up nazis, religious freaks, and insane conspiracy theorists to drown out common sense economic policy and pin the blame on minorities and a departure from religious orthodoxy.
Obviously persecuting people on these grounds makes the situation worse and people don’t want to be the next scapegoat so they fall in line (face eating leopard logic, etc.) but because we’re removing the most exploitable workers from the economy the economy spirals, creating the need for more scapegoats. Fascism in a nutshell.
In the long term its self destructive to every society that allows it but in the short term they get another hour of power.
The slightest bit of material analysis exposes the whole thing, but the minute you add “Marxist” to that sentence everyone shuts their brain off because of over a century of red scare nonsense. As designed.
the minute you add “Marxist” to that sentence everyone shuts their brain off because of over a century of red scare nonsense. As designed.
Which is a real shame, because collectivist systems are the only way we can survive long-term on this planet. Collectivist systems allow us to pool resources and consumption, allowing more people to subsist at the same level of comfort while using far less.
One of the biggest scams ever perpetrated on humanity (other than religion, that is) is the adoption of an economic system that demands infinite growth on a finite planet. In the real world, such as when looking at population dynamics, these systems always lead to catastrophic collapses that eviscerate that population and frequently produces long-term damage to the local ecosystem that prevents said population from easily recovering. Or recovering at all, if we’re talking about a species of megafauna (over 45Kg, on average).
Most megafauna that significantly overshoot go extinct, and humanity entered overshoot at the 2B population point early last century. With how we have damaged the ecosystem, the planet’s natural carrying capacity has probably declined to less than 1B humans. This is particularly concerning because any end-stage economic crash (via the chaotic weather of climate change) will lead to a population crash (with the failure of agriculture at scale and the international trade that supplies us with 90+% of all food), and will also destroy any ability to produce and maintain the technology that allows us to artificially exceed the planet’s carrying capacity via agriculture at scale. I would be very surprised if humanity still exceeds 2B people by the end of this century.
You’re preaching to the choir here, friend. I’ve been trying to shake people on the shoulders and get them to understand this for a while now.
And let’s not forget that lies are a lot cheaper to create and spread than the truth. They even propagate themselves, or rather, people will do it for you, in their free time, expecting nothing in return. They’ll spin and develop them further and further, just like that. It must totally make sense for any top capitalist to harness this free energy.
Top comment here. I was thinking along very similar lines in my commute to work this morning. The polarization that never ends or decreases seems to me to be purely a tool for rich elites to divide and conquer the general population.
The only minor asterisk I would add to your post is that I have personally been trying to avoid the term “cabal” because it can be accused of being an antisemitic dogwhistle. I don’t think you meant it this way, but wanted to alert you to that possible interpretation. In fact, I heard something a little while back that some people even claim that decrying “elites” in general is antisemitic. I don’t agree with this, but I think it’s a good idea to keep this in mind to try to prevent that line of attack.
That’s a fair point. The race science freaks are always trying to distort these things when in reality its usually like a conservative media, religious, or academic institution that facilitates and coordinates these projects: the federalist society, opus dei, the heritage foundation, fox news, xitter, etc.
The last time Donald Trump was President of The United States of America, a viral pandemic emerged out of China, he did not stop flights coming in, he did not enact the war powers to manufacture PPE for our first responders, health workers, or public, he eschewed the use of ventilators, and openly mocked those who wore masks.
A Million fucking Americans perished from COVID during his Presidency, the largest per capital, and total of any nation on gods green earth.
What’s happening is not the result of misinformation, it’s informed self immolation.
Republicans realized they cannot win on their arguments, so they wish to burn it all down, themselves and their children included.
Meanwhile the Cuomo was on the news every night talking about the need to balance human lives with “The Economy” and as soon as democrats were in power, they ended covid measures and testing.
Prioritizing short-term profits over human lives was a bipartisan effort.
Edit: NYC Governor Cuomo, not that he and DeBlasio weren’t competing to show how much they were doing to balance safety and the economy.
Bipartisan. A casual google news search for 2020 shows Cuomo talking about how awful it was that Trump was reopening the economy in May, and how we need to open the economy in April.
But he was also on CNN nearly every night, saying we need to get back to work and reopen as soon as possible, but in a good way, unlike Trump who wants to do the same thing, but in a bad way.
How is there any hope against misinformation when the top comment on a thread decrying misinformation contains major misinformation itself? Specifically, way more Americans have died of COVID under the Biden administration than under the Trump administration.
Just one source: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/09/18/covid-19-deaths-under-trump-1-million-fact-check/75197222007/
Granted, the Biden administration has had a lot more time under the COVID pandemic than Trump had, but the Biden administration has handled COVID in a very far from ideal way (see all the CDC missteps under Biden, for one example).
Please note: I am not a Trump supporter! I am only interested in truth, reason, and reality. Downvoting my post is a sign that you’re not interested in any of those.
Granted, the Biden administration has had a lot more time under the COVID pandemic than Trump had, but the Biden administration has handled COVID in a very far from ideal way (see all the CDC missteps under Biden, for one example).
Not only did it have more time under it, but it also inherited a public that was much more threatening toward anyone attempting to advance COVID control measures, including common sense ones like masking indoors.
The utter lunacy that polluted the public square during the late 2020 - early 2021 time frame caused a lot of the deaths that happened under Biden’s early days to be in the category of being completely preventable but a large portion of the country had been fed bullshit for a year that told them to resist every possible preventative measure.
Do you remember when the media had a fit about Trump being racist for blocking the flights to countries with high covid rates? How about the two weeks after he announced operation warp speed to develop a vaccine and everybody swore up and down that they wouldn’t take Trump’s vaccine? Trump bears a lot of responsibility for the toxic political culture, but it wasn’t just him.
A lot of that is fair, except that it wasn’t just Biden’s early days. The mishandling of the COVID pandemic continues to this day. It’s been a clusterfuck from the beginning under Trump to the present under Biden. The US doesn’t seem to be that unique in that regard though. It seems like it’s been a clusterfuck around most of the world.
I’m against the death penalty and I hate these posts that compare to Hitler but hear me out.
Though the US and world death toll in covid wasn’t entirely Trump’s fault, he was a major, if not the largest, contributer to it being that high through his actions and inactions. He lied about it, dismissed it, made it appear to be no-risk, egged his followers on to ridicule, hate, and threaten those that tried to protect themselves and their families.
Millions died. How many of those were needless deaths? How many were thanks directly or indirectly through the actions of orange dipshit clown? I think his death count is (obviously) lower than Hitler’s, but I think it’s in a similar range. I think he thinks about the deaths he caused in. A similar way that Hitler did, those that died were nothing, worthless.
If I murder more than two persons in the US, there is a good chance I get the death penalty. Trump willingly caused the deaths of millions just.tonfuether his political career. Why isn’t he on death row?
I guess the quote “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” is real indeed.
I relatively yearn for the days where it was only crazy trump supporters getting covid wrong, as opposed to tons of formerly sensible people joining them in pretending it went poof because we got tired of it, or that it suddenly became not enough of a problem to warrant massive action.
Yeah but at least he was able to send free COVID tests to his Daddy Vlad when supplies were short and Americans were dying.
Yep. Per the article:
But what feels novel in the aftermath of this month’s hurricanes is how the people doing the lying aren’t even trying to hide the provenance of their bullshit. Similarly, those sharing the lies are happy to admit that they do not care whether what they’re pushing is real or not.
You forgot the part where they were literally given a pandemic playbook and they choose to actively ignore its existence, with some republicans even claiming it didn’t exist.
Is anyone else starting to wonder whether Orwell was a time traveler trying to warn us?
It couldn’t possibly be that Trump and his handlers are using it (edit: 1984) as a road map and his followers are stupid enough not to notice.
It’s more that Trump read a book:
Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that from time to time her husband reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, My New Order, which he keeps in a cabinet by his bed. Kennedy now guards a copy of My New Order in a closet at his office, as if it were a grenade. Hitler’s speeches, from his earliest days up through the Phony War of 1939, reveal his extraordinary ability as a master propagandist.
“Did your cousin John give you the Hitler speeches?” I asked Trump.
Trump hesitated. “Who told you that?”
“I don’t remember,” I said.
“Actually, it was my friend Marty Davis from Paramount who gave me a copy of Mein Kampf, and he’s a Jew.” (“I did give him a book about Hitler,” Marty Davis said. “But it was My New Order, Hitler’s speeches, not Mein Kampf. I thought he would find it interesting. I am his friend, but I’m not Jewish.”)
Edit: I’ll note that this appears to the only time Trump has been observed reading a book.
Orwell wrote that book based on his personal observations from how the government already worked decades prior. All he did was 1+1=2 and he was visionary because of it. Same with Marx. Or Verne.
There’s a reason dystopian fiction has reigned supreme for over a decade now. We’re obsessed with our inevitable fate.
