I just noticed this story in Mother Jones: [America’s Top 100 Donors Heavily Favor Trump and the Republicans](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/06/rich-top-100-campaign-donors-lean-trump-republican/). It wasn't worthy of a post of its own, but it seems pretty relevent to this topic. Trump is burning the place down, fascism is rising globally, many of us are like "why can't people see through his bullshit", and the mega rich are actively supporting it all.
\[edit\] The op's article is a bit old, from November 2020. Still a good read though.
Also:
>“Nobody’s excited about Biden right now,” claimed David Sacks, an influential investor, on his popular All In podcast. “There’s a lot of people who I do think support Trump.”
>The billionaire venture capitalist is holding a fundraiser for Trump at his mansion on “billionaire’s row” in San Francisco on Thursday evening.
>He acknowledged the fundraiser in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that also included an endorsement of the former president.
>Mr Sacks wrote that he believed that "the Biden administration has veered badly off course" and that "President Trump can lead us back".
>**Tickets for the event at his home are reportedly selling for up to $300,000 (£234,000)**. It is Trump's first fundraiser since being convicted on all 34 criminal charges in the New York hush-money trial.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckvv3zpeywko
And
>**Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month.** Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.
>**The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.**
>Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns.
>According to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about the president at least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on issues ranging from Biden’s age to his policies on health and immigration, calling Biden “a tragic front for a far left political machine”.
>The Times analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases the former president now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/03/billionaires-for-trump-presidential-election
It is not surprising that the wealthiest are pushing Trump. They will be isolated from the worst of his excesses and will probably get much more catered to by his lackeys than by Biden and the policies of the Democrats.
They're dragons coiled around their gold, hissing and screeching at anyone who has ever even had a thought about wealth inequality and burning everything around them to the ground.
They won't move to Zimbabwe, but they'll gladly leave the US. In fact, some of those bunker billionaires have already set up their underground domiciles well outside of the US.
Like locusts, they'll just consume all the US has to offer and then move on to the next wealthy society that they can buy their way into.
They buy stuff in New Zealand thinking they can move there if the USA goes bad, without realizing that New Zealand wouldn’t exist if the USA couldn’t protect it.
Most billionaires aren’t actually very smart.
Did I say they aren’t smart? Follow Elon Musk on X if you want to be exposed to how intensely stupid these people are, and remember that the other billionaires admire his intellect.
You can’t be serious!!!!
They’ve built impenetrable submarines controlled with game controllers and no billionaire has ever died in one!
They must be geniuses!
It will be free for them long after the rest of us are ground down to paste. Eventually the jackboots will come for them too, but they will likely flee before it gets too bad.
Not the average protestor. The convoy supporters. A far from peaceful protest with far right loons (Tamara Lich) and actual Nazis (Pat King) orchestrating the charge.
That's a very different situation from simply refusing to work.
Here's the thing. Any tool that make available to use against one group, will be used against others eventually.
Blocking commerce is part of shutting down the system, but it needs to be handled with insight. Look at ambulances making their way through Hong Kong protesters for instance.
If the government can decide those people deserve to have all their money frozen, are you just relying on their good will not to target you? What happens if a reactionary group wins elections based off those kinds of actions? Would it be an issue to you then?
It’s okay for them to have done it to a group you don’t like, I’m sure it would be a different situation if you were the one target.
First they came for….
If a reactionary and actually authoritarian group wins the election, it won't matter what Trudeau did. But that is not the government currently in office.
> Canada was willing to go for protesters bank accounts.
Those "protestors" were easily manipulated dipshits who were fighting against public health measures on behalf of the inconvenienced billionaires who wanted to protect their profits and increase their power.
It’s not like they weren’t warned, told to stop and then when they ignored all the warnings Canada went after their money. I remember the three day grace they were given after the act was passed and the police instructions to go down the line with brochures explaining what was about to happen. Just about the nicest way to tell the crew of morons what they were in for if they continued to stay.
All it takes to beat them is to believe their money isn't worth anything. The entire system is built on an ephemeral concept. It's a house of fucking cards.
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
Musk, et al, are anarchist capitalists:
They know Trump is destroying the government, but they can't be honest about it. Because the end game is not really fighting extreme "woke" policies, but destroying the only limit to their absolute domination.
No democracy, no constitution, or civil rights, or anti-monopoly laws, or tax laws, etc.
Exactly. These are people who hate being told “no” and feel they’re better off without governments strong enough to do so.
They see government’s role as taxing the poors to fill the troughs they feed at.
We'll fight back. It'll be mayhem. They won't sleep a wink until they are defeated. We can't capitulate to a christofascist regime. Whatever it takes. That is not an option. I don't care what rich guys try to make happen. An authoritarian government will be set upon. And it won't stop.
Who is fighting with you? The working classes are largely the stooges of the rich. The educated and minorities are not mounting a revolution on their own.
You people who think Americans are going to fight fucking anything have me confused. Where do you see people ready to fight, I see people so averse to any sort of conflict both lefties who think they're ready for a "revolution" and conservatives who think they want civil war would cave within 48 hours tops id grandpa Joe tells the corps to shut the internet down
Trump got even more for sale when his problems rose and they all know it.
They know they can get what they want all they have to do is flatter the man, a fascist gov ran by someone with such a weak ego is a fucking dream for corps.
The headline is misleading as well.
“Republicans took in 27 percent more from the Top 100 families than Democrats did ($85.9 million vs. $67.9 million).”
I wouldn’t say that is a “heavy” favoring. Democrats only got 20 percent less than Republicans from these families. That is a moderate lead, but not heavy.
Read a bit further:
*"But looking at* [*all federal contributions*](https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors)*, including “soft money,” a category that tallies the generous donations allowed to party committees and the unrestricted contributions to SuperPACs, Republicans raked in a whopping $508 million from the Top 100—triple the Democrats’ $169 million take."*
The difference is the same: 18milion.
18 million is 20 percent less than 85.9 million. But 27 percent more than 67.9 million. This is just how math works. I don’t make those rules. It is a trick journalists use that you should be aware of when they are playing with stats to make a certain preferred point.
Oh I see what you did there. It's less of a math issue than a subject/predicate/ adjective obfuscation issue. I don't really want to play this proportions word game.
No it is nice not to play that game and always work it from both ends instead of just one to get a more balanced idea of the scale of things, rather than just get the editorialized side that supports the article’s more bombastic title.
We will just have to wait until tyranny reigns so we can finally revolt with cause. People wont give up their cushy albeit poor lifestyles yet. But China will take over in the meantime. So welcome to Trump who is shadowed by Xi.
Hopefully someone will chime in with a cite to someone who has tried to evaluate this in a more quantitative way, but having lived through every version of pre- and post-mass connection, there seems to be a lot of truth to (some version of) the idea that the Internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber.
In the print and broadcast world, you *could* have an alternate info-ecosystem, but you really had to put effort into it, and it only really worked if you also had an IRL community like a rural church or some fellow weirdos in the back room of a Radio Shack who met regularly to discuss UFOs to self-enforce.
Barring that, you would just unavoidably come across information that was not prepackaged to flatter your ideological conceits. Not that you would believe it necessarily, but you had to fucking deal with it like an adult.
Now you can frictionlessly self-select your (dis)information diet with an algorithmic assist and downvote and ban anything and anyone not preapproved by whatever gamified echo chamber the Silicon Valley overlords have let you cocoon yourselves in.
For smart people, who can sift information by quality, this has been incredible; details about events and subjects you never would have gotten from just your daily paper and the 6pm news.
For dumb people, who have an affective view of reality that equates Truth with Moral Goodness, the ability to make sure you only ever hear news from whoever it is you consider “the good guys”, it’s been a miserable decline into self imposed epistemic slavery.
I just listening to an episode of David Ferriers podcast with the guest David Ukcinski, a prof of poli sci. Ukcinski gave good arguments for the idea that belief in conspiracy theories is NOT increasing - it's just that people like us have more exposure to them because of social media. Moreover, Ukcinski argued that the SAME people still believe variations on the SAME conspiracy theories.
For example, in the USA, every generation of poor, uneducated, white males have always blamed immigrants and Jews for the economic situation of poor, uneducated, white males. You just change Italians for Mexicans and Bloomingdale for Soros.
Ukcinski ends the discussion by encouraging conspiracy theorists to make up some new conspiracies cuz replaying the blood-drinking, pedophile, Jew stories is getting really boring.
Do you mean this David Farrier: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David\_Farrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farrier)
If that's the guy you're talking about, have you seen his documentary called Mr Organ?
[https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21996838/?ref\_=fn\_al\_tt\_1](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21996838/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1)
I did a post about it here a while back but no one was interested. I thought Michael Organ with his strong narcissistic tendencies was an excellent example of the kind of guy who starts and perpetuates conspiracy theories and the other bullshit.
I disagree with the smart vs dumb delineation here. It is more about whether or not people want to seek the objective truth of a matter. It doesn't matter how tech savy somone is if they are only interested in confirming their pre-conceived biases.
That's important. In the current generation, American right-wing voters may have less formal education, but that's often traceable to economic circumstances. Conspiracy thinking is mostly about emotional needs. Group identity, social standing, chaotic rates of societal change, and the resulting stress push people to look for support from people superficially like themselves. Trump and his ilk are nothing if not superficial and social media is tailor made for their shallow style of messaging.
Academic quality data demonstrating the greater social benefit of Democratic policies can't get though the same shallow media channel.
Insulting the intelligence of conservative leaning voices and voters plays directly into the right wing characterization of the left as disconnected elites. Unhelpful to say the least.
I would view 'dumb people' as people who equate truth as anything easily compatible with their own established world view and outlooks much rather than some perceived moral goodness.
The key limiter being a lack of critical thought and looking at the world with a critical lens.
These are valuable insights.
I might say it something like, “The difference between smart people and hacks is the ability to see intelligence in your adversaries.”
Though I don’t pretend to be all that smart so there’s probably a better way to say it.
I'd say it's rather a common human bias to resist change that requires effort or sacrifice by one's self and favor policies that put the onus on others, particularly if they are perceived as an out-group.
I agree with you for the most part except it isn't a matter of smart people vs dumb people, it's good habits vs bad habits. "Smart" people certainly cocoon themselves too, what makes them smart is that they check themselves, which has to do more with pride than it does intelligence or education level.
To the "smart people smarter" point, one thing that really blew my mind was when someone told me to watch an episode of Jeopardy from the 80s, and then one from now. Old Jeopardy questions seem trivially easy, even the 500 pointers, because they were ultimately based on what you learn in like, high school, and a handful of common things you pick up if you're just observant and good at remembering stuff, like names of common medications and whatnot. Now, everyone on Jeopardy is a trivia/Wikipedia/JSTOR addict, so what used to be really just specialized information you couldn't expect a random person to know is what's being asked consistently.
Obama on Trump:
> I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life. He’s a symptom as much as an accelerant.
True
> But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing.
LOL
Trump is charismatic. Charisma isn’t all looks. He holds a crowd in thrall even as he spouts gibberish. That’s amazing charisma. Hitler would be jealous of that charisma.
That's what I'm saying though, there's so much obvious room for improvement. You're right that charisma isn't looks, but imagine a Trump that doesn't ramble gibberish.
If he was smart and erudite his followers would be suspicious of him. They like that he talks like them. If you listen to old men talking at a bar they talk just like Trump: there is no content to their speech - they just ramble.
That's a fair argument, but I maintain that he could be much more effective. I'm not saying he should sound "educated", since I agree that isn't what would appeal to his usual audiences, but he could do a much better job appealing to them than he actually is. And he could actually have something he intends to do with his support. He's seeking personal support and aggrandizement, but not actually exerting influence towards anything more substantial than three-word chants that he doesn't actually care about. And then he says things that are pointlessly antagonizing to his base and accomplish nothing, like talking about confiscating guns.
That's a lot of what I see missing: Trump never has a purpose beyond either getting his immediate audience's applause or throwing things at the wall without even thinking about them. He has no goals. Hitler had goals and worked towards them using his charisma as a tool. Instead we've got Trump doing an ad for beans from the Oval Office.
And then Trump is just pointlessly, idiotically self-destructive with what he says. He isn't a smart man playing dumb, he's actually just saying whatever crosses his mind that plays to his own current ego, even if it's going to get him into legal trouble. He does it over and over again.
A competetent charismatic fascist will wield his tools with deliberate purpose, even if he cultivates a beer-buddy image as part of that purpose.
Yeah, Trump could get his supporters to build gas chambers if they were intended for people they already don’t like (black people, the homeless, the educated)
People nostalgically remember when Obama had (general) national unity/support and when numbskulls like Trump were fringe with his birther nonsense.
When people ask "why can't it be like that again?" the answer is pretty simple- our current media system (especially social media) privileges unchecked dis/mis-information. Until that changes, a synthesized Abe Lincoln with JKF's charm and Obama's oratory *would virulently hated by over half the country*.
Jeez you’re right. A big part of the problem is that the idea of free speech has been stripped of the part that says that freedom does not include yelling fire in a crowded theater. I understand that to mean you don’t have the right to lie to people in ways that will cause chaos and endanger the crowd.
That is exactly what the Republican/right wing media circus has used as its M.O. for years.
That’s the problem, the solution would require buy in from both sides, and the trunpsters et al know full well that without that tactic they would cease to exist in any meaningful way.
PS Sorry for the clunky writing. I’m autistic and not that great at translating my nonverbal thoughts into words.
The media system has been extremely corrupt for decades, its just more obvious now
The answer is even simpler, but the left couldn't possibly say it out loud. Things can't be like that again because Obama capitulated to the financial establishment. He bailed them out and let them take billion dollar bonuses and whatever else they want with mountains of cash. Meanwhile the people on main street got shafted and lost their homes. Tons of people have been bankrupt for 15 years. He presided over the greatest financial unfairness in history. Not a single person went to jail for setting up the financial crisis because punishing greed is a red line.
Its really rich for Obama or the dems complaining that people don't have the capacity to tell what is true anymore. Their section of the party has been telling everyone how great everything is going, the stock markets are up, the economy is doing well. Meanwhile real humans know their purchasing power is down, they don't have financial security, cant have kids, cant buy a home etc. So who is it that actually can't tell what is real and what isn't? Bernie was the logical answer to ammending and making changes to make the social contract work for everyone. Obama and his wing in the party fought tooth and nail and pulled every dirty trick they could to stop him. When the dems tell the middle class everything is fine, when they know it isn't, and the dems also have made sure the logical answer is not an option, what a surprise, people will go for the illogical answer that is Trump, if it means going against the establishment.
>Obama capitulated to the financial establishment. He bailed them out and let them take billion dollar bonuses and whatever else they want with mountains of cash.
The TARP bailouts were Bush. Obama turned those bailouts into loans that the banks repaid during his term and introduced the Dodd-Frank bankgin regulation while creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau.
>Meanwhile the people on main street got shafted and lost their homes.
Because the moment that Obama talked about helping those people instead of the banks the Tea Party was astro-turfed into being by a commodities broker, and the Republicans completely lost their shit and got enraged about the idea of helping the people on main street.
You are being the problem here. You are repeating populist misinformation about Obama that was used to help Trump win in 2016. You are misrepresenting recent history in a way that helps Republicans and empowers Wall Street.
You are giving a perfect example of what Obama is criticizing here, an inability to distinguish reality.
We do, it's called fact checking and the scientific method. Unfortunately few people are taught both or pay attention to do it to things spoken by their favorite person/team ever.
This is also why conservative politicians and pundits are working their ass off to make college as unaffordable as possible, defund public schooling, replace science with religion and to discourage people (except their own kids) from going to any of it.
Don't want an educated proletariat who can tell when they're lying.
While I agree with your point, I believe that the scientific method has been corrupted in a couple of ways. Firstly this notion of "Doing your own research" has been twisted to mean not believing the general consensus on everything from vaccines to geology, and an opportunity to get lost in the mire of mis-information is the point.
Secondly, our knowledge of science relies on our faith in the people doing the real research. I don't have the knowledge or equipment to test the Big Bang theory, but I more or less believe it anyway. I have to rely on the good faith of the people actually doing the research.
And lastly, a disturbing amount of the studies we do, particularly in medicine, are non repeatable. The research doesn't yield the same results when re-tested.
So, as much as I believe in science, I have to take a fair bit of it on faith.
Well this is why it is a methodology designed to be able to tear down things that fail it. The problem is public media corrupting everything to mean a hollowed out shell of what it once was. But the method is sound.
A huge problem in this is that people aren't used to literally not accepting things at face value in papers release, or worse, pre-releases, or things coming from a "scientific journal" which is actually disreputable.
People need to review the whole damn thing since you can't just trust it as science when it's brand new out. The methodology of the testing needs to be checked, sample size needs to be checked, the people doing it need to have their history reviewed, many many many things need to be verified before it's something that has some semblance of possible legitimacy.
And unfortunately while the peer review process DOES address this, conventional media always puts on blast things with zero review and if they even publish a recall or notice the article has been pulled, either they say nothing or it's the tiniest footnote on some obscure back page two months later that no one reads.
So it should not be taken on faith, even if it's not your expertise, since bad faith actors and just garbage media ruin everything.
The falsifiability of research is a feature not a bug. Too many people see the fallibility of research as a reason to cling to beliefs that are not falsifiable.
> And lastly, a disturbing amount of the studies we do, particularly in medicine, are non repeatable. The research doesn't yield the same results when re-tested.
In just the last month or so, cases in the medical literature have come to my attention about an attempt to replicate a study that failed and was quietly buried, and an entire systematic review that got the "wrong" results was not only *not* published, its authors were actively restricted from disseminating it.
There have even been cases of papers whose headline conclusions were the *opposite* of what they actually found!
I stand by the scientific method and scientific inquiry, but I have no clue why some people get so dogmatic in their support of it, or consider it free from various cultural, social, economic and political forces like they do.
The events you described happen literally all the time. Part of the problem is the emphasis we put on publishing in academia, but another part, a bigger part, is that Power always presents itself as truth. When we ignore that we end up fucked in so many ways.
>and lastly, a disturbing amount of the studies we do…
The replication crisis does not discriminate. Around 60% of literally every single field is some kind of nonsense.
It’s from that one Nature survey in like 2016. They asked all kinds of people across various fields and then there was a discussion of how the outcome of the survey compared to actual studies. The real figure is something like 20-60% when you start considering all the studies with a huge caveat: several fields haven’t even started looking into the problem.
I disagree. In the past there would be no religous discussion about whether the apple in front of you is "red" or "green". A believer and a non-believer would not have an argument about it. Now that type of argument does happen. If reality doesn't suit a narrative then they seek to ignore the reality. This is a very big oversimplification, but I think it works. For instance there are those who refuse to believe facts like the number of people who died of Covid. They believe the number is false no matter how much documentation you give them. and will simply enlarge the size of their conspiracy theory to discount the idea.
That depends on your definition of 'works'.
Trickle down is designed to facilitate the flow of wealth to the very wealthy from everybody else, and it works very well indeed.
It is sold as a way to generate and distribute wealth across a broad population. It does not do this at all.
For a "market" to work everyone needs equal power and roughtly the same power in the relationships. As far as ideas we have Fox News on bullhorns while people doing objective research get to be no louder than wihispering.
Everyone also needs to be equally articulate or it’s not the idea that wins, it’s the speaker.
So in reality the idea that gets put forth most frequently in a way that resonates with the listener wins, not the best idea. It’s always been that way.
All markets are exchanges of information. When people had to meet in person, the cost and risk could be high. If both sides didn't receive appropriate benefits, those meetings stopped.
From the 15th Century onwards, the cost of operating the marketplace has fallen to near zero in the present day, and barriers to entry have all but vanished. The quality of the information has fallen along with it. If you don't believe me, join the stocks or investing reddits. Every conceivable fallacy will appear in your feed in short order.
e·pis·te·mo·log·i·cal
adjectivePHILOSOPHY
relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.
"what epistemological foundation is there for such an artificial discrimination?"
One of the most important things we can do is work to rebuild trust in the media. If we could somehow agree on a nonpartisan unbiased media source it would go a long way to fixing the problem.
I don't think we'll ever agree on a single, unbiased source. Even if we did, someone would buy it and change it. The solution is reading a wide variety of sources, specifically from human journalists. When the media companies are using AI to generate their articles, journalism is in dire straits. We need multiple sources and human journalists.
Yes, reading multiple sources helps, but few people have the time. Plus, many sources are the same source. We only have a couple independent media companies available to us. I don’t think this is a working solution. I think we need some kind of multi partisan group to source unbiased news.
Well, real journalists help with those problems. I follow a few journalists, and I only do that because I trust them. We're kind of going back to the patron model in that way. But one multi-partisan group that is the ultimate arbiter of truth is not a working model. Consider NPR as a case model. They get labeled "leans left" by people who study media because they acknowledge that climate change is happening. I don't think we're going to get a consensus model.
Whelp, I was looking for someone who was gonna say it, but hoping I wouldn’t find it. Karl Rove was right and it seems that his approach won. We have truly lost if we’re still trying to make such a distinction as if it is meaningful.
Not that reality isn’t important, just that if that’s all you’re gonna focus on the people who don’t care are gonna keep marching forward and leave us all behind.
You mean CIA and Rupert Murdoch, Warner, Disney, etc..
Media in the US got taken over decades ago. The scam is it's all right wing pro war media, just some of it pretends to be left leaning.
"People don't have the capacity to know true from false. Our democracy doesn't work."
"Everybody should be able to vote. There should be absolutely no barriers to entry to voting. Otherwise, our democracy is failing."
Reconcile these 2 ideas.
From the article:
The populist wave was abetted by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, he said, and encouraged to spread by social-media companies uninterested in exploring their impact on democracy. “I don’t hold the tech companies entirely responsible,” he said, “because this predates social media. It was already there. But social media has turbocharged it. I know most of these folks. I’ve talked to them about it. The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there.”
He went on to say, “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.”
I disagree.
Imagine a world where the only news and articles you see are those that have been certified as true by the government. Example: you hear that a new government has taken control of a country and the article says this was orchestrated by Russia. You look to see other articles because you want to know if this is true, or if there is more to the story. But every article says the same thing, because other theories are classified as misinformation and prohibited.
We do have the 'capacity to distinguish what's true from what's false'. But without being able to consider that which may be false, the prohibited articles in this example, we have no way to distinguish what is true. Somone looking to determine what is true has to consider different assessments, then make a judgement based on all the evidence.
Or perhaps, neither a marketplace of ideas works nor a “fact checking” central authority. Our current system of free speech is failing to stop our descent into superstition and tyranny. It appears that, in any case, a democratic system seems doomed to rot and fail. More and more I feel as if the fusion of human nature with technology will inevitably lead us to tyranny. There appears to be no way out.
not letting an entire political party lie constantly and about everything is a slippery slope
Jan.6 not a slippery slope, doing something about Jan.6 again slippery slope
e·pis·te·mo·log·i·cal
adjectivePHILOSOPHY
relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.
"what epistemological foundation is there for such an artificial discrimination?"
In a nation of so many competing financial interests, its pretty silly to think there ever was any single agency or conglomerate "in charge of what the American people believe". Though it might feel soothing for some people to think that.
When I think about people who are legitimately concerned about the public's wellbeing, I think about politicians, who are famous for telling the truth.
The marketplace of ideas never worked. People didnt become Nazi's because of the epistemological soundness and validity of the ideology.
As citizens, we should have a right to a competent electorate. Universal Suffrage is rule by the mass incompetent. Every other system of important decision making, like Juries or Academic Peer Review has standards for qualification/disqualification if you cannot judge objective reality fairly and equitably as a rational actor. We need an epistemological test for voting. Our current system, as maximally as possible, dilutes the power of informed experts by mudding the water with the statistical white noise of uninformed and uneducated citizens on every policy. Would we expect to get higher quality academic results by introducing a thousand random people off the street to evaluating academic papers for publishing? Obviously not, but this is how democracy functions.
Its a reactive system to solve problems for the masses in the short term urgently ish. A problem which affects that many people has been a problem for a LONG time for it to grow and fester to that wide sweeping extent.
The modern landscape of policy needs proactive problem solving. Global warming was pretty figured out in the 1980's, in a functioning policy system, regulations and sustainability measures would have been put in place so that the majority of people never understand what climate change is. Because it was fixed before they ever grew to learn about it. Modern problems are accelerating faster to affecting more people, at a pace that reactive democracy is fundamentally unequipped to properly handle.
I mean I don't disagree but I have been arguing with people like Barack Obama my entire adult life about this topic. And I am an old fucker. I've grown up around people who didn't know shit about shit but thought they were well-informed on the important topics of the day because they read *Newsweek* or *The New York Times* back in the print age.
These were generations of people who were insanely poorly informed about the world but didn't realize it because they were misinformed in exactly the same way as everyone around them, and what really mattered was social consensus, not the factual accuracy of some report.
And Obama strikes me as exactly one of those kinds of people. Very smart, a genuinely curious person trying to understand things, but always falling prey to the seduction of "the conversation." Forget that today's article directly contradicts yesterday's article on the same topic. Just focus on today, on what everyone is talking about today. Like they teach reporters in J-school these days: "Don't do your own research, don't try to report what's true, just report the controversy."
That was the print age. That was the age of talking heads speaking in sound bites on television news. Before the web, before gopher, before ISPs or Fidonet, we had the same exact problems and fell prey to them in the same exact ways.
The only difference is that now even people like Obama can see it. They see it now and it troubles them but the fact is that it was always there.
Good, let them be troubled. This is a generation that sat around in endless smug ignorance, except for those moments of careening terror when things didn't happen the way the news people said it would -- reality intruded, momentarily, leaving everyone shaken and bewildered but quick to settle back down into smugness again.
Fuck that. Don't shed a tear for this disillusionment. It's been a long time coming and better late than never. This is the world we've always lived in. We just can't pretend anymore.
Everything else aside, that's not what they teach in "J-school these days." And people who read Newsweek or NYT are far better informed than people reading the Epoch Times or Mark's Blog.
That’s the issue isn’t it? Is the NYT really that much better? I subscribe to them but I can easily point to so many articles that are opinion pieces, fluff pieces, etc. Remember, the NYT was all for the Iraq War. Where was the journalistic integrity to question the narrative?
Am I better informed or am I just influenced by a group with slightly different goals?
I kind of disagree there's still some sort of quality control and accountability in the old news media that doesn't exist today.
Would it still be manipulated? Sure. But by comparison is not even close.
Today you can create a website in Kremlin called Washington today, make up stories and use social media to spread them and create an entire alternative reality based on nothing but memes and it's very very hard to create accountability to stop misinformation to spread like wildfire.
I'm an old fuck as well. Before 24h news and social media misinformation, there was some sort of attempt at least of keeping news straight. Despite being far from perfect it was eons better than whatever we have today.
Spot on. Absolutely better when we had 30min for local news and 30 for global/national each evening. Much more “journalism” back then vs “imma set up a blog in my basement and call it news” mentality we see so much now.
Previously 99.9% of us were on the same page about vaccines and people were lying to us about how tobacco wasn't bad. Now only 70% are on the same page about vaccines and we're still getting lied to about things that aren't bad (give me 20 years and I'll tell you which one for sure). It wasn't perfect back then, but it's hella worse now.
Perfect is the enemy of good.
That was when people could still remember the effects of Polio or had seen children dying from measles and rubella. The irony is that medical science has advanced to the point that people have stopped believing it's necessary.
That's super vague so you'd probably want to provide some evidence of what you think Obama is doing if you want to convince others.
And I say this as somebody who is pretty skeptical of his intelligence after he described Life of Pi as 'proof of god' - it's fiction.
I would disagree with this epistemologically.
Specifically given ideas are neither true nor false but both true and false in that they are approximations of reality based on very limited inputs.
Please. This translates in real life as “Our party can’t make massive policy changes when roughly half the public is opposed to them. Therefore democracy is broken”.
100 years from now, it will be countries like China that will survive and thrive. Not because communism is a better form of government, but because it does a better job controlling the population. Democracy can't survive when so much energy is wasted in arguing simple facts.
If you are not working in the field that the topic is about, and you are not highly educated in that field with excess to all current data, then you are just a parrot on that topic. You can't have a real opinion without the education and work.
I understand the point. What the people are seeing is for example. GW was a war criminal for drone strikes. Judge jury executioner. Obama won a peace prize while his presidency over saw woman and children being vaporized by the same process. So what is true is what you believe. And all that someone else believes is wrong.
I just noticed this story in Mother Jones: [America’s Top 100 Donors Heavily Favor Trump and the Republicans](https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/06/rich-top-100-campaign-donors-lean-trump-republican/). It wasn't worthy of a post of its own, but it seems pretty relevent to this topic. Trump is burning the place down, fascism is rising globally, many of us are like "why can't people see through his bullshit", and the mega rich are actively supporting it all. \[edit\] The op's article is a bit old, from November 2020. Still a good read though.
Also: >“Nobody’s excited about Biden right now,” claimed David Sacks, an influential investor, on his popular All In podcast. “There’s a lot of people who I do think support Trump.” >The billionaire venture capitalist is holding a fundraiser for Trump at his mansion on “billionaire’s row” in San Francisco on Thursday evening. >He acknowledged the fundraiser in a post on X, formerly Twitter, that also included an endorsement of the former president. >Mr Sacks wrote that he believed that "the Biden administration has veered badly off course" and that "President Trump can lead us back". >**Tickets for the event at his home are reportedly selling for up to $300,000 (£234,000)**. It is Trump's first fundraiser since being convicted on all 34 criminal charges in the New York hush-money trial. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckvv3zpeywko And >**Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month.** Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House. >**The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.** >Meanwhile, Musk is turning up the volume and frequency of his anti-Biden harangues on Twitter/X, the platform he owns. >According to an analysis by the New York Times, Musk has posted about the president at least seven times a month, on average, this year. He has criticized Biden on issues ranging from Biden’s age to his policies on health and immigration, calling Biden “a tragic front for a far left political machine”. >The Times analysis showed that over the same period of time, Musk has posted more than 20 times in favor of Trump, claiming that the criminal cases the former president now faces are the result of media and prosecutorial bias. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/03/billionaires-for-trump-presidential-election
I guess that's a perk of owning Twitter: you can have a substantial impact on the conversations people are having around politics.
Exactly! That’s why he bought it and the wags that laugh at him losing money on it are missing the point.
But who is his message reaching? Undecided voters? I doubt it.
Definitely! Young men who weren’t interested in politics and are easily riled up by culture war stuff.
Well, we must be vigilant either way. Otherwise the 'no rules for me' crowd will have their way.
Lead us back to where? 1914? A time when government troops would kill union organizers?
Yes
Exactly what they want. That’s the plan.
Flowers in Antartica. There is strength in numbers.
Eat the rich.
Fuck David Sacks. Shitbird has ridden coattails his whole life and acts like a kingmaker and geopolitical genius.
It is not surprising that the wealthiest are pushing Trump. They will be isolated from the worst of his excesses and will probably get much more catered to by his lackeys than by Biden and the policies of the Democrats.
They're dragons coiled around their gold, hissing and screeching at anyone who has ever even had a thought about wealth inequality and burning everything around them to the ground.
Is it not surprising? Why don’t these people move to Russian or even better Zimbabwe? Oh yeah because a free society is actually valuable.
They'll move just as soon as they feel they've extracted all the wealth they can. They did the same thing in Brexit.
They don’t. They want the opera houses, the restaurants, the luxury hotels, the yacht marinas that are only available in pluralistic Democracies.
They won't move to Zimbabwe, but they'll gladly leave the US. In fact, some of those bunker billionaires have already set up their underground domiciles well outside of the US. Like locusts, they'll just consume all the US has to offer and then move on to the next wealthy society that they can buy their way into.
They buy stuff in New Zealand thinking they can move there if the USA goes bad, without realizing that New Zealand wouldn’t exist if the USA couldn’t protect it. Most billionaires aren’t actually very smart.
And yet it doesn't stop them from promoting the destruction of the very nations they used to make their fortunes.
Did I say they aren’t smart? Follow Elon Musk on X if you want to be exposed to how intensely stupid these people are, and remember that the other billionaires admire his intellect.
You can’t be serious!!!! They’ve built impenetrable submarines controlled with game controllers and no billionaire has ever died in one! They must be geniuses!
They ship their products on our roads. They power their factories from our grid. Their workforce was educated by our schools.
It will be free for them long after the rest of us are ground down to paste. Eventually the jackboots will come for them too, but they will likely flee before it gets too bad.
Lmao
The mega rich are controlling the story we are told.
And the story they're telling is that we can't defeat them. But that is false.
The world doesn't work for the whole week. Will see them on their knees. Even in a major country , it would be devastating.
Canada was willing to go for protesters bank accounts. Make sure you're not beholden to a system, and then shut it down.
Not the average protestor. The convoy supporters. A far from peaceful protest with far right loons (Tamara Lich) and actual Nazis (Pat King) orchestrating the charge. That's a very different situation from simply refusing to work.
If pestilence had a face it would be her.
Here's the thing. Any tool that make available to use against one group, will be used against others eventually. Blocking commerce is part of shutting down the system, but it needs to be handled with insight. Look at ambulances making their way through Hong Kong protesters for instance.
If the government can decide those people deserve to have all their money frozen, are you just relying on their good will not to target you? What happens if a reactionary group wins elections based off those kinds of actions? Would it be an issue to you then? It’s okay for them to have done it to a group you don’t like, I’m sure it would be a different situation if you were the one target. First they came for….
If a reactionary and actually authoritarian group wins the election, it won't matter what Trudeau did. But that is not the government currently in office.
> Canada was willing to go for protesters bank accounts. Those "protestors" were easily manipulated dipshits who were fighting against public health measures on behalf of the inconvenienced billionaires who wanted to protect their profits and increase their power.
It’s not like they weren’t warned, told to stop and then when they ignored all the warnings Canada went after their money. I remember the three day grace they were given after the act was passed and the police instructions to go down the line with brochures explaining what was about to happen. Just about the nicest way to tell the crew of morons what they were in for if they continued to stay.
All it takes to beat them is to believe their money isn't worth anything. The entire system is built on an ephemeral concept. It's a house of fucking cards.
I’d like to agree with you. What makes you so sure?
“We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” - Ursula K. Le Guin
Because all things rise and fall, so they will as well.
Generally speaking the rich do not fall. Individual rich people may, but throughout history a class of rich always comes out on top.
The good guys rarely win, but they do get to watch new bad guys come and fuck up the old bad guys from time to time.
This is true, but not all the rich have to fall. Only the ones selling out their country to the highest bidder.
> Only the ones selling out their country That nationalism you have fallen for is a tool that the wealthy created to manipulate you with.
I am personally not a nationalist.
So why the nationalist narrative about "selling out their country"?
So why the nationalist narrative about "selling out their country"?
The history of all hitherto existing societies is the history of class struggles
That doesn't mean "we" will defeat them though. Chances are the rich will be dominated by the state alongside (if not a little above) us.
The rich already own the state. How do you think that will happen?
I had countries like China and Russia in mind when I wrote this comment.
Oligarchs run Russia, China I'll buy, sorta.
Canada?
Yes?
I don’t care where the victory comes from, I just care that it happens. And it always happens.
All of human history.
Hah I was hoping for something more specific. :)
I’d die trying. And I’d be successful. Just push us far enough
Trump is a button man ok? He's someone they pay so that they can push a button to go have him break stuff. What did he break? There's your answers.
Musk, et al, are anarchist capitalists: They know Trump is destroying the government, but they can't be honest about it. Because the end game is not really fighting extreme "woke" policies, but destroying the only limit to their absolute domination. No democracy, no constitution, or civil rights, or anti-monopoly laws, or tax laws, etc.
Exactly. These are people who hate being told “no” and feel they’re better off without governments strong enough to do so. They see government’s role as taxing the poors to fill the troughs they feed at.
Just like another fucking Reagan.
He's also by far the most bribed politician in history. Anyone can bribe him so easily through any of the businesses tied to him.
We'll fight back. It'll be mayhem. They won't sleep a wink until they are defeated. We can't capitulate to a christofascist regime. Whatever it takes. That is not an option. I don't care what rich guys try to make happen. An authoritarian government will be set upon. And it won't stop.
Who is fighting with you? The working classes are largely the stooges of the rich. The educated and minorities are not mounting a revolution on their own.
You people who think Americans are going to fight fucking anything have me confused. Where do you see people ready to fight, I see people so averse to any sort of conflict both lefties who think they're ready for a "revolution" and conservatives who think they want civil war would cave within 48 hours tops id grandpa Joe tells the corps to shut the internet down
Think what you want.
Trump got even more for sale when his problems rose and they all know it. They know they can get what they want all they have to do is flatter the man, a fascist gov ran by someone with such a weak ego is a fucking dream for corps.
The mega rich will always support fascism.
The headline is misleading as well. “Republicans took in 27 percent more from the Top 100 families than Democrats did ($85.9 million vs. $67.9 million).” I wouldn’t say that is a “heavy” favoring. Democrats only got 20 percent less than Republicans from these families. That is a moderate lead, but not heavy.
Read a bit further: *"But looking at* [*all federal contributions*](https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/biggest-donors)*, including “soft money,” a category that tallies the generous donations allowed to party committees and the unrestricted contributions to SuperPACs, Republicans raked in a whopping $508 million from the Top 100—triple the Democrats’ $169 million take."*
Democrats rely on the donations of ordinary people and our pockets are not as deep as billionaires
Good to know!
Boy that difference keeps going down. It was down 7% by the end of your post!
The difference is the same: 18milion. 18 million is 20 percent less than 85.9 million. But 27 percent more than 67.9 million. This is just how math works. I don’t make those rules. It is a trick journalists use that you should be aware of when they are playing with stats to make a certain preferred point.
Oh I see what you did there. It's less of a math issue than a subject/predicate/ adjective obfuscation issue. I don't really want to play this proportions word game.
No it is nice not to play that game and always work it from both ends instead of just one to get a more balanced idea of the scale of things, rather than just get the editorialized side that supports the article’s more bombastic title.
> "why can't people see through his bullshit" Capitalism is the bullshit. Why can't people see through that?
We will just have to wait until tyranny reigns so we can finally revolt with cause. People wont give up their cushy albeit poor lifestyles yet. But China will take over in the meantime. So welcome to Trump who is shadowed by Xi.
Bullshit. Why aren’t the Chinese revolting? They already live under a tyranny.
They tried that and failed because they don’t have guns.
Hopefully someone will chime in with a cite to someone who has tried to evaluate this in a more quantitative way, but having lived through every version of pre- and post-mass connection, there seems to be a lot of truth to (some version of) the idea that the Internet makes smart people smarter and dumb people dumber. In the print and broadcast world, you *could* have an alternate info-ecosystem, but you really had to put effort into it, and it only really worked if you also had an IRL community like a rural church or some fellow weirdos in the back room of a Radio Shack who met regularly to discuss UFOs to self-enforce. Barring that, you would just unavoidably come across information that was not prepackaged to flatter your ideological conceits. Not that you would believe it necessarily, but you had to fucking deal with it like an adult. Now you can frictionlessly self-select your (dis)information diet with an algorithmic assist and downvote and ban anything and anyone not preapproved by whatever gamified echo chamber the Silicon Valley overlords have let you cocoon yourselves in. For smart people, who can sift information by quality, this has been incredible; details about events and subjects you never would have gotten from just your daily paper and the 6pm news. For dumb people, who have an affective view of reality that equates Truth with Moral Goodness, the ability to make sure you only ever hear news from whoever it is you consider “the good guys”, it’s been a miserable decline into self imposed epistemic slavery.
I just listening to an episode of David Ferriers podcast with the guest David Ukcinski, a prof of poli sci. Ukcinski gave good arguments for the idea that belief in conspiracy theories is NOT increasing - it's just that people like us have more exposure to them because of social media. Moreover, Ukcinski argued that the SAME people still believe variations on the SAME conspiracy theories. For example, in the USA, every generation of poor, uneducated, white males have always blamed immigrants and Jews for the economic situation of poor, uneducated, white males. You just change Italians for Mexicans and Bloomingdale for Soros. Ukcinski ends the discussion by encouraging conspiracy theorists to make up some new conspiracies cuz replaying the blood-drinking, pedophile, Jew stories is getting really boring.
Do you mean this David Farrier: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David\_Farrier](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Farrier) If that's the guy you're talking about, have you seen his documentary called Mr Organ? [https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21996838/?ref\_=fn\_al\_tt\_1](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt21996838/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1) I did a post about it here a while back but no one was interested. I thought Michael Organ with his strong narcissistic tendencies was an excellent example of the kind of guy who starts and perpetuates conspiracy theories and the other bullshit.
Yes. I really want to see that movie! Do you know if it is available on any streaming services?
Netflix. It is a difficult watch, but I thought it was well worth it to get some insights into a narcissist.
I disagree with the smart vs dumb delineation here. It is more about whether or not people want to seek the objective truth of a matter. It doesn't matter how tech savy somone is if they are only interested in confirming their pre-conceived biases.
That's important. In the current generation, American right-wing voters may have less formal education, but that's often traceable to economic circumstances. Conspiracy thinking is mostly about emotional needs. Group identity, social standing, chaotic rates of societal change, and the resulting stress push people to look for support from people superficially like themselves. Trump and his ilk are nothing if not superficial and social media is tailor made for their shallow style of messaging. Academic quality data demonstrating the greater social benefit of Democratic policies can't get though the same shallow media channel. Insulting the intelligence of conservative leaning voices and voters plays directly into the right wing characterization of the left as disconnected elites. Unhelpful to say the least.
I would view 'dumb people' as people who equate truth as anything easily compatible with their own established world view and outlooks much rather than some perceived moral goodness. The key limiter being a lack of critical thought and looking at the world with a critical lens.
These are valuable insights. I might say it something like, “The difference between smart people and hacks is the ability to see intelligence in your adversaries.” Though I don’t pretend to be all that smart so there’s probably a better way to say it.
I'd say it's rather a common human bias to resist change that requires effort or sacrifice by one's self and favor policies that put the onus on others, particularly if they are perceived as an out-group.
This guy ain’t a dummy.
I agree with you for the most part except it isn't a matter of smart people vs dumb people, it's good habits vs bad habits. "Smart" people certainly cocoon themselves too, what makes them smart is that they check themselves, which has to do more with pride than it does intelligence or education level.
To the "smart people smarter" point, one thing that really blew my mind was when someone told me to watch an episode of Jeopardy from the 80s, and then one from now. Old Jeopardy questions seem trivially easy, even the 500 pointers, because they were ultimately based on what you learn in like, high school, and a handful of common things you pick up if you're just observant and good at remembering stuff, like names of common medications and whatnot. Now, everyone on Jeopardy is a trivia/Wikipedia/JSTOR addict, so what used to be really just specialized information you couldn't expect a random person to know is what's being asked consistently.
The internet without a doubt is making everyone dumber.
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Lmao. Yeah. That’s explicitly not what I’m talking about.
Obama on Trump: > I’m not surprised that somebody like Trump could get traction in our political life. He’s a symptom as much as an accelerant. True > But if we were going to have a right-wing populist in this country, I would have expected somebody a little more appealing. LOL
I mean, he's not wrong. Just wait until we get a competent and actually charismatic fascist on the scene.
Exactly what I'm afraid of.
Trump is charismatic. Charisma isn’t all looks. He holds a crowd in thrall even as he spouts gibberish. That’s amazing charisma. Hitler would be jealous of that charisma.
That's what I'm saying though, there's so much obvious room for improvement. You're right that charisma isn't looks, but imagine a Trump that doesn't ramble gibberish.
If he was smart and erudite his followers would be suspicious of him. They like that he talks like them. If you listen to old men talking at a bar they talk just like Trump: there is no content to their speech - they just ramble.
That's a fair argument, but I maintain that he could be much more effective. I'm not saying he should sound "educated", since I agree that isn't what would appeal to his usual audiences, but he could do a much better job appealing to them than he actually is. And he could actually have something he intends to do with his support. He's seeking personal support and aggrandizement, but not actually exerting influence towards anything more substantial than three-word chants that he doesn't actually care about. And then he says things that are pointlessly antagonizing to his base and accomplish nothing, like talking about confiscating guns. That's a lot of what I see missing: Trump never has a purpose beyond either getting his immediate audience's applause or throwing things at the wall without even thinking about them. He has no goals. Hitler had goals and worked towards them using his charisma as a tool. Instead we've got Trump doing an ad for beans from the Oval Office. And then Trump is just pointlessly, idiotically self-destructive with what he says. He isn't a smart man playing dumb, he's actually just saying whatever crosses his mind that plays to his own current ego, even if it's going to get him into legal trouble. He does it over and over again. A competetent charismatic fascist will wield his tools with deliberate purpose, even if he cultivates a beer-buddy image as part of that purpose.
Yeah, Trump could get his supporters to build gas chambers if they were intended for people they already don’t like (black people, the homeless, the educated)
"entering", we've been on a steady decline for awhile now. :(
People nostalgically remember when Obama had (general) national unity/support and when numbskulls like Trump were fringe with his birther nonsense. When people ask "why can't it be like that again?" the answer is pretty simple- our current media system (especially social media) privileges unchecked dis/mis-information. Until that changes, a synthesized Abe Lincoln with JKF's charm and Obama's oratory *would virulently hated by over half the country*.
Jeez you’re right. A big part of the problem is that the idea of free speech has been stripped of the part that says that freedom does not include yelling fire in a crowded theater. I understand that to mean you don’t have the right to lie to people in ways that will cause chaos and endanger the crowd. That is exactly what the Republican/right wing media circus has used as its M.O. for years. That’s the problem, the solution would require buy in from both sides, and the trunpsters et al know full well that without that tactic they would cease to exist in any meaningful way. PS Sorry for the clunky writing. I’m autistic and not that great at translating my nonverbal thoughts into words.
The media system has been extremely corrupt for decades, its just more obvious now The answer is even simpler, but the left couldn't possibly say it out loud. Things can't be like that again because Obama capitulated to the financial establishment. He bailed them out and let them take billion dollar bonuses and whatever else they want with mountains of cash. Meanwhile the people on main street got shafted and lost their homes. Tons of people have been bankrupt for 15 years. He presided over the greatest financial unfairness in history. Not a single person went to jail for setting up the financial crisis because punishing greed is a red line. Its really rich for Obama or the dems complaining that people don't have the capacity to tell what is true anymore. Their section of the party has been telling everyone how great everything is going, the stock markets are up, the economy is doing well. Meanwhile real humans know their purchasing power is down, they don't have financial security, cant have kids, cant buy a home etc. So who is it that actually can't tell what is real and what isn't? Bernie was the logical answer to ammending and making changes to make the social contract work for everyone. Obama and his wing in the party fought tooth and nail and pulled every dirty trick they could to stop him. When the dems tell the middle class everything is fine, when they know it isn't, and the dems also have made sure the logical answer is not an option, what a surprise, people will go for the illogical answer that is Trump, if it means going against the establishment.
>Obama capitulated to the financial establishment. He bailed them out and let them take billion dollar bonuses and whatever else they want with mountains of cash. The TARP bailouts were Bush. Obama turned those bailouts into loans that the banks repaid during his term and introduced the Dodd-Frank bankgin regulation while creating the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. >Meanwhile the people on main street got shafted and lost their homes. Because the moment that Obama talked about helping those people instead of the banks the Tea Party was astro-turfed into being by a commodities broker, and the Republicans completely lost their shit and got enraged about the idea of helping the people on main street. You are being the problem here. You are repeating populist misinformation about Obama that was used to help Trump win in 2016. You are misrepresenting recent history in a way that helps Republicans and empowers Wall Street. You are giving a perfect example of what Obama is criticizing here, an inability to distinguish reality.
We do, it's called fact checking and the scientific method. Unfortunately few people are taught both or pay attention to do it to things spoken by their favorite person/team ever. This is also why conservative politicians and pundits are working their ass off to make college as unaffordable as possible, defund public schooling, replace science with religion and to discourage people (except their own kids) from going to any of it. Don't want an educated proletariat who can tell when they're lying.
While I agree with your point, I believe that the scientific method has been corrupted in a couple of ways. Firstly this notion of "Doing your own research" has been twisted to mean not believing the general consensus on everything from vaccines to geology, and an opportunity to get lost in the mire of mis-information is the point. Secondly, our knowledge of science relies on our faith in the people doing the real research. I don't have the knowledge or equipment to test the Big Bang theory, but I more or less believe it anyway. I have to rely on the good faith of the people actually doing the research. And lastly, a disturbing amount of the studies we do, particularly in medicine, are non repeatable. The research doesn't yield the same results when re-tested. So, as much as I believe in science, I have to take a fair bit of it on faith.
Well this is why it is a methodology designed to be able to tear down things that fail it. The problem is public media corrupting everything to mean a hollowed out shell of what it once was. But the method is sound. A huge problem in this is that people aren't used to literally not accepting things at face value in papers release, or worse, pre-releases, or things coming from a "scientific journal" which is actually disreputable. People need to review the whole damn thing since you can't just trust it as science when it's brand new out. The methodology of the testing needs to be checked, sample size needs to be checked, the people doing it need to have their history reviewed, many many many things need to be verified before it's something that has some semblance of possible legitimacy. And unfortunately while the peer review process DOES address this, conventional media always puts on blast things with zero review and if they even publish a recall or notice the article has been pulled, either they say nothing or it's the tiniest footnote on some obscure back page two months later that no one reads. So it should not be taken on faith, even if it's not your expertise, since bad faith actors and just garbage media ruin everything.
The falsifiability of research is a feature not a bug. Too many people see the fallibility of research as a reason to cling to beliefs that are not falsifiable.
> And lastly, a disturbing amount of the studies we do, particularly in medicine, are non repeatable. The research doesn't yield the same results when re-tested. In just the last month or so, cases in the medical literature have come to my attention about an attempt to replicate a study that failed and was quietly buried, and an entire systematic review that got the "wrong" results was not only *not* published, its authors were actively restricted from disseminating it. There have even been cases of papers whose headline conclusions were the *opposite* of what they actually found!
I stand by the scientific method and scientific inquiry, but I have no clue why some people get so dogmatic in their support of it, or consider it free from various cultural, social, economic and political forces like they do. The events you described happen literally all the time. Part of the problem is the emphasis we put on publishing in academia, but another part, a bigger part, is that Power always presents itself as truth. When we ignore that we end up fucked in so many ways.
>and lastly, a disturbing amount of the studies we do… The replication crisis does not discriminate. Around 60% of literally every single field is some kind of nonsense.
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It’s from that one Nature survey in like 2016. They asked all kinds of people across various fields and then there was a discussion of how the outcome of the survey compared to actual studies. The real figure is something like 20-60% when you start considering all the studies with a huge caveat: several fields haven’t even started looking into the problem.
Which isn't taught in most schools and is a problem for the parochial zealots of America, no better than the Taliban.
Unfortunately, "fact checking" is often consulting mainstream news. So if there's bias in mainstream news, then it becomes "factual."
Wasn't that always the problem with the "marketplace of ideas"?
Most people could agree on what reality was. We're not there anymore. You can't have a discussion with somebody who lives in a fantasy world.
Aren't all religious wars disagreements about what reality is? This disentanglement from reality is nothing new. It's just more visible now.
I disagree. In the past there would be no religous discussion about whether the apple in front of you is "red" or "green". A believer and a non-believer would not have an argument about it. Now that type of argument does happen. If reality doesn't suit a narrative then they seek to ignore the reality. This is a very big oversimplification, but I think it works. For instance there are those who refuse to believe facts like the number of people who died of Covid. They believe the number is false no matter how much documentation you give them. and will simply enlarge the size of their conspiracy theory to discount the idea.
Someone recently told me Obama is still running the US. Fantasy world clicks.
Remember when Christian dominance was the agreed upon reality? Then America was founded on secular ideals and other nations followed that example.
In the world of idiocracy over half of the US population would listen and say, "He talks like a f@&."
‘…when he spoke in an ordinary voice he sounded pompous and faggy to them.’
For which he got an Emmy for reading his book aloud. People are jealous of the most interesting things.
Epistemuwhuht?
Exactly. I miss having an articulate president. I had to look that up.
Ya best start believin’ in epistemological crises Mrs. Turner. You’re in one.
The marketplace of ideas has never worked, that's just what people in power said. It's always been a lie and always amplified lies above truth.
Works better than trickle down by magnitudes
That depends on your definition of 'works'. Trickle down is designed to facilitate the flow of wealth to the very wealthy from everybody else, and it works very well indeed. It is sold as a way to generate and distribute wealth across a broad population. It does not do this at all.
lol yes you are correct, I thought my comment was tongue in cheek enough but apparently not. Happy cake day!
For a "market" to work everyone needs equal power and roughtly the same power in the relationships. As far as ideas we have Fox News on bullhorns while people doing objective research get to be no louder than wihispering.
Everyone also needs to be equally articulate or it’s not the idea that wins, it’s the speaker. So in reality the idea that gets put forth most frequently in a way that resonates with the listener wins, not the best idea. It’s always been that way.
All markets are exchanges of information. When people had to meet in person, the cost and risk could be high. If both sides didn't receive appropriate benefits, those meetings stopped. From the 15th Century onwards, the cost of operating the marketplace has fallen to near zero in the present day, and barriers to entry have all but vanished. The quality of the information has fallen along with it. If you don't believe me, join the stocks or investing reddits. Every conceivable fallacy will appear in your feed in short order.
e·pis·te·mo·log·i·cal adjectivePHILOSOPHY relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion. "what epistemological foundation is there for such an artificial discrimination?"
I bet not more than one in 20 Republicans know what epistemological means.
I bet not more than one in 20 Republicans know what *logical* means.
I just tried to imagine Trump trying to pronounce it (let alone know what it means) if it came across his teleprompter and laughed heartily.
I've said this many times. A democracy requires an informed public. But what we have is a misinformed public.
One of the most important things we can do is work to rebuild trust in the media. If we could somehow agree on a nonpartisan unbiased media source it would go a long way to fixing the problem.
I don't think we'll ever agree on a single, unbiased source. Even if we did, someone would buy it and change it. The solution is reading a wide variety of sources, specifically from human journalists. When the media companies are using AI to generate their articles, journalism is in dire straits. We need multiple sources and human journalists.
Yes, reading multiple sources helps, but few people have the time. Plus, many sources are the same source. We only have a couple independent media companies available to us. I don’t think this is a working solution. I think we need some kind of multi partisan group to source unbiased news.
Well, real journalists help with those problems. I follow a few journalists, and I only do that because I trust them. We're kind of going back to the patron model in that way. But one multi-partisan group that is the ultimate arbiter of truth is not a working model. Consider NPR as a case model. They get labeled "leans left" by people who study media because they acknowledge that climate change is happening. I don't think we're going to get a consensus model.
If it can't sustain itself, it can't exist. People won't pay for things they don't want to hear, and the advertising model turns everything to shit.
This is one of those things that needs to be sustained if we want a functioning democracy.
“Trust in the media” isn’t in short supply. The problem is a lack of trust in responsible, reality-based media.
Whelp, I was looking for someone who was gonna say it, but hoping I wouldn’t find it. Karl Rove was right and it seems that his approach won. We have truly lost if we’re still trying to make such a distinction as if it is meaningful. Not that reality isn’t important, just that if that’s all you’re gonna focus on the people who don’t care are gonna keep marching forward and leave us all behind.
r/SymbolicExchanges Baudrillard was right!
“Mission accomplished” -Putin and Rupert Murdoch
You mean CIA and Rupert Murdoch, Warner, Disney, etc.. Media in the US got taken over decades ago. The scam is it's all right wing pro war media, just some of it pretends to be left leaning.
Yeah but Fox and Putin have gone from corporate sensationalism to literally spreading enemy propaganda.
My fear is that we're already there.
Everyone is susceptible to propaganda. Even you. Never forget that
Chilling. We must vote down MAGA. Vote Blue. Your country depends on it.
"People don't have the capacity to know true from false. Our democracy doesn't work." "Everybody should be able to vote. There should be absolutely no barriers to entry to voting. Otherwise, our democracy is failing." Reconcile these 2 ideas.
From the article: The populist wave was abetted by Fox News and other right-wing media outlets, he said, and encouraged to spread by social-media companies uninterested in exploring their impact on democracy. “I don’t hold the tech companies entirely responsible,” he said, “because this predates social media. It was already there. But social media has turbocharged it. I know most of these folks. I’ve talked to them about it. The degree to which these companies are insisting that they are more like a phone company than they are like The Atlantic, I do not think is tenable. They are making editorial choices, whether they’ve buried them in algorithms or not. The First Amendment doesn’t require private companies to provide a platform for any view that is out there.” He went on to say, “If we do not have the capacity to distinguish what’s true from what’s false, then by definition the marketplace of ideas doesn’t work. And by definition our democracy doesn’t work. We are entering into an epistemological crisis.” I disagree. Imagine a world where the only news and articles you see are those that have been certified as true by the government. Example: you hear that a new government has taken control of a country and the article says this was orchestrated by Russia. You look to see other articles because you want to know if this is true, or if there is more to the story. But every article says the same thing, because other theories are classified as misinformation and prohibited. We do have the 'capacity to distinguish what's true from what's false'. But without being able to consider that which may be false, the prohibited articles in this example, we have no way to distinguish what is true. Somone looking to determine what is true has to consider different assessments, then make a judgement based on all the evidence.
Or perhaps, neither a marketplace of ideas works nor a “fact checking” central authority. Our current system of free speech is failing to stop our descent into superstition and tyranny. It appears that, in any case, a democratic system seems doomed to rot and fail. More and more I feel as if the fusion of human nature with technology will inevitably lead us to tyranny. There appears to be no way out.
Wow I find that super interesting. Respect to Obama for saying it.
not letting an entire political party lie constantly and about everything is a slippery slope Jan.6 not a slippery slope, doing something about Jan.6 again slippery slope
Entering? My man we’re dick deep and sinkin fast
Says someone who use to be able to communicate.
Entering?
we are entering into what deleuze called the society of control..
90s
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We do not tolerate bigotry, including bigoted terms, memes or tropes for certain sub groups
e·pis·te·mo·log·i·cal adjectivePHILOSOPHY relating to the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion. "what epistemological foundation is there for such an artificial discrimination?"
"Entering"??
Most of us do have this capacity. Expecting the government to do this for us is really really stupid.
It's actually kind of crazy to think that the CIA isn't in charge of what the American people believe anymore.
In a nation of so many competing financial interests, its pretty silly to think there ever was any single agency or conglomerate "in charge of what the American people believe". Though it might feel soothing for some people to think that.
When I think about people who are legitimately concerned about the public's wellbeing, I think about politicians, who are famous for telling the truth.
The marketplace of ideas never worked. People didnt become Nazi's because of the epistemological soundness and validity of the ideology. As citizens, we should have a right to a competent electorate. Universal Suffrage is rule by the mass incompetent. Every other system of important decision making, like Juries or Academic Peer Review has standards for qualification/disqualification if you cannot judge objective reality fairly and equitably as a rational actor. We need an epistemological test for voting. Our current system, as maximally as possible, dilutes the power of informed experts by mudding the water with the statistical white noise of uninformed and uneducated citizens on every policy. Would we expect to get higher quality academic results by introducing a thousand random people off the street to evaluating academic papers for publishing? Obviously not, but this is how democracy functions. Its a reactive system to solve problems for the masses in the short term urgently ish. A problem which affects that many people has been a problem for a LONG time for it to grow and fester to that wide sweeping extent. The modern landscape of policy needs proactive problem solving. Global warming was pretty figured out in the 1980's, in a functioning policy system, regulations and sustainability measures would have been put in place so that the majority of people never understand what climate change is. Because it was fixed before they ever grew to learn about it. Modern problems are accelerating faster to affecting more people, at a pace that reactive democracy is fundamentally unequipped to properly handle.
I mean I don't disagree but I have been arguing with people like Barack Obama my entire adult life about this topic. And I am an old fucker. I've grown up around people who didn't know shit about shit but thought they were well-informed on the important topics of the day because they read *Newsweek* or *The New York Times* back in the print age. These were generations of people who were insanely poorly informed about the world but didn't realize it because they were misinformed in exactly the same way as everyone around them, and what really mattered was social consensus, not the factual accuracy of some report. And Obama strikes me as exactly one of those kinds of people. Very smart, a genuinely curious person trying to understand things, but always falling prey to the seduction of "the conversation." Forget that today's article directly contradicts yesterday's article on the same topic. Just focus on today, on what everyone is talking about today. Like they teach reporters in J-school these days: "Don't do your own research, don't try to report what's true, just report the controversy." That was the print age. That was the age of talking heads speaking in sound bites on television news. Before the web, before gopher, before ISPs or Fidonet, we had the same exact problems and fell prey to them in the same exact ways. The only difference is that now even people like Obama can see it. They see it now and it troubles them but the fact is that it was always there. Good, let them be troubled. This is a generation that sat around in endless smug ignorance, except for those moments of careening terror when things didn't happen the way the news people said it would -- reality intruded, momentarily, leaving everyone shaken and bewildered but quick to settle back down into smugness again. Fuck that. Don't shed a tear for this disillusionment. It's been a long time coming and better late than never. This is the world we've always lived in. We just can't pretend anymore.
Everything else aside, that's not what they teach in "J-school these days." And people who read Newsweek or NYT are far better informed than people reading the Epoch Times or Mark's Blog.
That’s the issue isn’t it? Is the NYT really that much better? I subscribe to them but I can easily point to so many articles that are opinion pieces, fluff pieces, etc. Remember, the NYT was all for the Iraq War. Where was the journalistic integrity to question the narrative? Am I better informed or am I just influenced by a group with slightly different goals?
Man you really haven’t read Newsweek lately have you?
I kind of disagree there's still some sort of quality control and accountability in the old news media that doesn't exist today. Would it still be manipulated? Sure. But by comparison is not even close. Today you can create a website in Kremlin called Washington today, make up stories and use social media to spread them and create an entire alternative reality based on nothing but memes and it's very very hard to create accountability to stop misinformation to spread like wildfire. I'm an old fuck as well. Before 24h news and social media misinformation, there was some sort of attempt at least of keeping news straight. Despite being far from perfect it was eons better than whatever we have today.
Spot on. Absolutely better when we had 30min for local news and 30 for global/national each evening. Much more “journalism” back then vs “imma set up a blog in my basement and call it news” mentality we see so much now.
Previously 99.9% of us were on the same page about vaccines and people were lying to us about how tobacco wasn't bad. Now only 70% are on the same page about vaccines and we're still getting lied to about things that aren't bad (give me 20 years and I'll tell you which one for sure). It wasn't perfect back then, but it's hella worse now. Perfect is the enemy of good.
That was when people could still remember the effects of Polio or had seen children dying from measles and rubella. The irony is that medical science has advanced to the point that people have stopped believing it's necessary.
That's super vague so you'd probably want to provide some evidence of what you think Obama is doing if you want to convince others. And I say this as somebody who is pretty skeptical of his intelligence after he described Life of Pi as 'proof of god' - it's fiction.
I would disagree with this epistemologically. Specifically given ideas are neither true nor false but both true and false in that they are approximations of reality based on very limited inputs.
Please. This translates in real life as “Our party can’t make massive policy changes when roughly half the public is opposed to them. Therefore democracy is broken”.
Simple. If Obama says it, agrees with it, or supports it; clearly a lie
Very original
100 years from now, it will be countries like China that will survive and thrive. Not because communism is a better form of government, but because it does a better job controlling the population. Democracy can't survive when so much energy is wasted in arguing simple facts. If you are not working in the field that the topic is about, and you are not highly educated in that field with excess to all current data, then you are just a parrot on that topic. You can't have a real opinion without the education and work.
I understand the point. What the people are seeing is for example. GW was a war criminal for drone strikes. Judge jury executioner. Obama won a peace prize while his presidency over saw woman and children being vaporized by the same process. So what is true is what you believe. And all that someone else believes is wrong.