JarJarJedi
Streamlined derailments and counteridea reeducation
User ID: 1118
JarJarJedi
5d ago
Let's not forget that in The Boy Who Cried Wolf, the wolf did eventually come and eat everyone.
Way to miss the whole point of the story. What enabled the wolf to come and eat everyone is exactly the fact that the boy lied so many times before. So the first step is to make really sure it's the wolf and only then cry, otherwise you are fucking it up for everyone. And if you are about to sound the alarm, you need to make really, really sure that it's indeed a dictator is slowly installing an authoritarian regime, and not just an elected politician enacting policies you happen to dislike. You need to work extra hard if you already sounded multiple alarms which are on record as false. In fact, in this case it's better to just shut up and let somebody else, who doesn't have such a horrible record with alarm sounding, to do it.
American leftists warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results.
American leftists falsely warned everyone against this from day one, with poor results. That's the word you missed, "falsely". So your question is "how can you make somebody who lied many times before to sound believable this time?" And the answer is "you don't".
JarJarJedi
5d ago
I think this is the main and best claim.
Well, it is false. Moreover, as I noted, even people advancing this claim (I don't mean well-akshually-ers on internet forums, I mean politicians and media) don't really think it is true - they are just using it as a wedge to open the box with the sweet sweet budget money, and that's all. In the best case. That's like calling the opponent a Nazi - when it's done, they don't really think you are about to don the Hugo Boss uniform and invade Poland. They are just giving themselves permission to treat you like you already did. Same here - they are just giving themselves permission to treat Trump as if he already dismantled the democracy, even though he had no intent to, and they know it perfectly well - but that's not the reason to deny oneself a useful weapon!
JarJarJedi
5d ago
How could you possibly know that?
How could you? I think I have more base to claim the person is not a criminal if there's absolutely zero proof he is, than you do to claim he is a criminal with the same amount of proof.
There is no evidence
Thank you.
But bad people making motivated arguments for bad reasons doesn't automatically make them wrong.
It automatically makes their arguments dismissible. There's no point in considering argument if the whole framework of discussion is built just to manipulate you. Discussion makes sense when the goal is to find the truth. Or at least get closer to it somehow. If the goal is to just pull your strings, the right strategy is not to play the game at all.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
You may think that the system is "broken" because your political opponents are leveraging their role in it against your preferred politician.
No, it's the reverse - they are able to "leverage" it because it's broken. The whole "debt ceiling" debacle should never happen at all, let alone be happening year after year. But my main point it's not that, it's that discussing all these high-minded concepts is useless when we're dealing with a banal case of political extortion. Nobody is trying to change the basic principles under which US military operates, what Trump is doing is just trying to make people not suffer from the consequences of the brokenness of the system and its abuse. The pearl-clutchers may scream this is because he wants to turn US Army into a Pretorian guard loyal personally to him, but not only it has nothing to do with the truth, but they themselves know perfectly well it's false, they are just using it to try and fool some part of the public into putting pressure on Trump to achieve the real goal - getting the money. That's my point - considering all that as if it were a real argument about the real role of US Military is pointless, because there's no relevance for this discussion to the current events. It's all performative manipulation, not real discussion.
JarJarJedi
5d ago
We have the formal process and abstract system. Except it's broken, and being broken down further by the very same people who are now clutching the pearls about 0.05% of the military budget that is supplied as a short-term stopgap measure. Again, all the talk that this is about some high-minded principle is bullshit. It's not about "democratic Constitutional system", it's about hurting people on the ground so they lose faith in Trump and make them give money to the particular extractive gang leaders to distribute between their supporters. That's all.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
Trump didn't take any money in exchange for political favors (at least in this case). But if it has been happening for 100 years, and people suddenly start screaming today about it, saying they suddenly discovered that they had principles all that time, but somehow stayed silent right up until that moment, but now they honestly declare "they all bad" - they are lying. They just want to use this as a weapon to attack Trump. As they would use anything to attack Trump, because the point is not any principles - the point is attacking Trump.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
Organizations or people with huge amounts of money are rarely motivated by a deep sense of charity
Cool, now please do Open Society Foundations and Tides. Or Zuckerberg paying for elections. Or any of the thousands of other examples where people with huge amounts of money donated for causes directly benefitting some politicians.
How did they get so much money in the first place if they're so kind and charitable?
How does "none of your damn business" grab you as an explanation? Unless you have a probable cause and a warrant, nobody owes you explanation about anything in their property, and it is certainly absolutely unwarranted to accuse a person of being a moral degenerate and possibly criminal just because he did not give away all his money yet.
It's bad and illegal for someone to pay the president $100 million personal money in exchange for cutting their taxes by $200 million
It is completely legal for someone to give an NGO $100 million in exchange for the government not raising taxes by $200 million to finance the NGO. Though usually what happens they raise it anyway, the NGO gets $300 million and spends it on electing Democrats (well, that and buying large mansions, of course).
But how often do you think that really happens?
I don't know. Let's examine the whole multi-billion-dollar NGO network that is deeply intermeshed with governmental structures by now, especially on state and local level, and see? Somehow except a couple of DOGE folks nobody ever is interested in looking into that, and what you get for such interest is being called a Nazi.
It's usually bribery with just enough plausible deniability to stay out of jail.
If it's indeed so, then I prefer the bribery to pay for the soldier's salary and not for Governor's second cousin's yacht. If we're going to get rid of that bribery altogether, I would prefer to start from the latter, which had been going on forever and nobody ever showed any interest in it, and not with the former, which started just a week ago and somehow everybody is obsessed with intermixing private and government money. With this pattern, my strong suspicion is, as always, they don't give a whistle about any of the high-minded principles they cloak themselves in, and cynically use them to attack their political enemies, while in the same time doing the same thing ten times more, with gusto.
Money forcibly taken is clean because the giver can't use it to extract concessions and manipulate the government.
Yes, we never heard of the case when rich people could extract concessions and manipulate the government. I mean, until Trump came and ruined the perfect system.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
empirically people don't donate to the government for altruistic reasons.
People donate to all kinds of causes for altruistic reasons. In fact, people have been known donating literally their lives to governments. And the government is not shy to demand it. We hear that it is our patriotic duty to give as much as we can to the government. But somehow this only is laudable when done under the penalty of jail, if you do it without the threat, you are a pervert. Is that some kind of BDSM thing I am not aware of?
JarJarJedi
6d ago
A side note here: I find it fascinating how inflamed people become when they learn something the government directs is paid by people giving money voluntarily, rather than by money forcibly extracted from unwilling subjects. It's like the act of forcible extraction itself is the one that sanctifies the money and makes them fit for the official purposes, and otherwise it's impure and unfit for use. Thinking about it, though, it's probably not surprising - the same people probably are deeply suspicious of any action done by private individuals voluntarily cooperating (aka "business") and think that only giving all power and control to a small set of government functionaries can make anything those individuals do morally acceptable. Why spending money should be any different?
JarJarJedi
6d ago
Literally just yesterday I read about this: https://www.adamlogue.com/microsoft-365-copilot-arbitrary-data-exfiltration-via-mermaid-diagrams-fixed/ TLDR for those who doesn't enjoy the technical details: asking Microsoft AI to review some document may result in all your data (i.e. all corporate data accessible to you and Office 365 tools) be stolen and exfiltrated to arbitrary third party. One of the proposed solutions for this (besides the immediate short-term fix) is what you are talking about - mechanisms that ensure AI stays at the original task and does not decide "screw that whole document explaining thing, I must instead just gather all confidential emails and send them to dr_evil@evil.com". Of course, having N levels of checks only means you need N+1 exploits to break this, which somebody with enough time and motivation will eventually find.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
Finished Careless People. It has a lot of "hot" stuff, though I am not sure how true it all is. I can see why Facebook weren't happy about it being published, though I don't think they could do anything about it. Nobody (including the author) ends up looking any good at the end. I am thinking about writing a more detailed review for it.
JarJarJedi
6d ago
I know that women around don't owe me to look good (or anything at all) for my benefit, so if they want to wear ugly but comfy clothes, I have no right to complain. But selfishly, of course, I wish more beauty around me, because it makes me feel better. Hopefully, the wheel will turn again towards more aesthetically pleasing trends.
Not feeling it right now. Either it's sporadic or admins are doing really good job at fixing it.
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