domain:anarchonomicon.com
07mk
6m ago
Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".
Those are merely descriptions of how these people supported the riot. Not doing the due diligence to figure out that widespread reports of violence are accurate is just figuring out how to construct (im)plausible deniability for why they're not actually supporting rioting. And even moreso for believing that riotous excesses are worth it for the protests. In the most literal, straightforward way, supporting protests while excusing the times they devolve to riots as understandable excesses is basically the central way for someone to support rioting.
07mk
15m ago
It's probably 50% of the 50%, so 25%, by my guess. Obviously exact numbers are impossible to get, and so I think anything more precise than that is probably foolish to speculate on. Certainly 1 in 10 seems implausibly low, given vast swathes of the country where it'd be at least 80% of the left support these acts of political violence and rioting.
2rafa
22m ago
While it is evidence of a cultural shift, it’s also much more closely related to Trump’s personal viewership of late night TV and his early-boomerish fondness for network television in general.
A millennial conservative president, even one as powerful as Trump and to the right of him, probably wouldn’t care about this Kimmel comment. His audience all agree with him anyway, it isn’t like affecting the editorial position of CBS News in 1982 when 30 million or whatever it was Americans of all political views tuned in every evening.
For Disney, as this kind of late night general show fades in relevance anyway, this firing was more than worth it, they likely barely made money on Kimmel anyway if they did at all.
How do you know it was about the money? Because if the show was profitable, they would have forced him to apologise sincerely on air and at least tried to keep it going.
07mk
23m ago
Your comment doesn't seem even tangentially related to the contents of my comment, so I'm not sure why you're using it as a response to me.
07mk
27m ago
The idea that how much the leader of the country lies should play a factor in whether or not Kimmel should be taken off the air (by his bosses in an independent private decision) seems far more risible.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
28m ago
Sure.
I generally subscribe to Nick Land's theory that the world is getting more complex at an accelerating pace, which renders attempts for control futile given a long enough timeframe.
We can see specific implications of this phenomenon in the internet, which allows political organization beyond borders, without identifiable leaders and in a way that's essentially impossible to shut down short of blunt measures; and drone warfare, which allows low cost interdiction of much more expensive military assets and renders the battlefield so observable it entirely negates concentration of forces.
Both of these instances point to what is the general direction of society as Land described in the 2000s: fragmentation and decentralization as people reduce their area of concern to immediate proximity (mediated by the non-local nature of cyberspace) because the concerns of a centralized nation state become intractable or incomprehensible and thus entirely unable to address the issues of the populations they nominally govern.
ControlsFreak
35m ago
It's a tough line to walk, especially because as you get closer to the optimal frontier, the quality of evidence for what is "best" declines significantly, so many folks find themselves swimming in all sorts of claims about minute details, which, even if real, may only have an extremely small effect size. E.g., people nitpicking about exact timing of protein intake and its exact composition at those times. Like, sure, if you're an elite athlete and your pay may depend on whether you can eek out an extra percent here and there, maybe it's worth trying to figure it out, but it's just not for most people. It's definitely not worth the psychological hassle of trying to wade through the various claims or attempting to micromanage a signal which may not even be high-quality enough to ever capture the phenomenon you're looking for.
On the other side, there are basic things that many people just don't grok until you collect their specific data from them and show it to them. For a couple examples, I've met people who simply did not truly comprehend that calories correspond noisily but directly to body weight or that alcohol messed up their sleep until it was shown to them with their own data.
Of course, it's always difficult to know which category you're in, because, well, you don't know what you don't know.
aqouta
41m ago
Are all the Gazans also getting sentenced to death in the Hague for supporting their own genocidal government that commits war crimes in this fantasy of yours? Maybe we could take out two birds with one stone and just glass the whole region to satisfy your bloodlust.
This isn't actually a statistic that's relevant at all by itself. If you're the descendant of someone from an EU country, you're able to get an EU passport
Less than half the jews in Israel are even European descendent. So your frothing genocide is still killing ~5 million people even assuming every European descendended jew is eligible.
ethnostate
Ah yes, the first ethnostste in the middle east. Curious that an ethnic state would have 20% of its population be Arab. What level of diversity do you expect to be present in the territory after you finish your retributive genocide?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
47m ago
That’s the only way to explain the absolute deluge of support among leftists for Kirk’s murder.
It's not the only way. The other way to explain it is selection effects. It's always selection effects.
Tanista
49m ago
I'd concede that not every individual would benefit from the cash-- I don't give money to homeless people directly because I reasonably suspect they would misuse it-- but that's a rule-proving exception.
I'm not sure that it is.
I think the left-wing position needs to reckon with the fact that some percentage of people have problems that can't easily be solved and, even worse, risk becoming disproportionate consumers (of welfare or police resources or park space, etc. ) whenever you liberalize controls on them or make systems more generous and less skeptical.
And perhaps worse than that, that you can move people on the bubble into that category.
Deciding which particular individual you want to give cash to re-introduces the hated administrative burden; better to do something like a UBI or the libertarian negative tax rate.
Corvos
49m ago
Agreed, I meant more than I don’t find acronyms a great solution in general.
I’m sure we didn’t use them before 1900. I’m not sure what we did do.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
54m ago
Yup. The fundamental problem with the "Trump is an unprecedented liar" claim is that leftwingers constantly and consistantly lie about the purported lies.
Almost like they don't believe there's any such thing as objective reality, just competing power narratives, and thus no obligation to even try to be accurate.
Tanista
1hr ago
I remember going through a WaPo list of 800 Trump Lies From the Biden Debate, and concluding that most of their examples were insults (FACT CHECK: JOE BIDEN IS NOT A PALESTINIAN), extremely biased nitpicking
The Kyle Rittenhouse fact-check is a classic
Not even a "misleading", which would imo is far more defensible, just a straight up, red FALSE so everyone who googled and skimmed leaves with the wrong impression.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
Still, the Kimmel episode was aired on the 15th, when none of these chat quotes were public (afaik).
There was never any evidence whatsoever that pointed to Robinson being MAGA. It was quite reasonable to insist that rightwingers wait for data before calling the shooter a leftist - are we just declining to hold leftists to any evidentiary standards whatsoever?
Kimmel is straight up lying there to defame millions of people, including the president himself. That sounds like the sort of thing that might cost a network 10 or 11 digits in settlement money.
philosoraptor
1hr ago
The solution I'm proposing is pretty simple (and required by many style guides for whatever that's worth), and is simply to expand the acronym the first time, and then go on using it to your heart's content. You come out ahead in legibility right away, and in reduced word count by the third use or so.
Of course, for relatively short posts here this might not make sense because you're not going to get to that third use. But in that case there's no meaningful loss in just spelling it out and doing without the acronym.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
1hr ago
However, I think the small lies have spread such an atmosphere of distrust that it's creating a low-trust dynamic between the public and the President that is almost unprecedented outside of wartime (when frankly the President is semi-allowed to tell white lies IMO).
Trump lies like your uncle telling fish stories. Understanding this dynamic creates trust by generating low-stakes opportunities to display ingroup loyalty. All the right has to do to gain this benefit is not crash out whenever Trump calls something "the greatest show" because "AKSHUALLY EXPERTS SAY IT WAS ONLY THE FOURTH GREATEST SHOW".
And even more so by presumptively taking most claims of Trump lying as themselves lies. I remember going through a WaPo list of 800 Trump Lies From the Biden Debate, and concluding that most of their examples were insults (FACT CHECK: JOE BIDEN IS NOT A PALESTINIAN), extremely biased nitpicking (I don't think either of them managed to word themselves accurately when they were arguing about the deficit over their comparative terms, but I think Trump was less wrong), or claims that were defensible/true but that Democrats don't like.
And this matters in a context when trust has already been completely destroyed. Remember "If you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor?" That was a blatant, meaningful, painful lie. The self-appointed "fact-checkers" called it absolutely true, then slowly walked it back until after Obama's re-election when they admitted it was the "Lie of the Year".
Shit, "Obama has a healthcare plan" was a straight up lie! He literally just let his speechwriters write a check his policy team couldn't cash because he assumed Hilary was going to be the nominee anyway!
A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?
The cost is entirely to you. Every time a respectable outlet melts down over something that didn't happen (because they default assume that Trump MUST be lying about everything), you guys lose trust and respect and a few more people realize that NYT and WaPo and CNN are on the same level as Glenn Beck at his worst.
This whole post is just Blue Team being mad that they can't lie with impunity and nasty consequences to Red Team anymore.
WandererintheWilderness
1hr ago
Blue Tribe collectively wanted them to do it
No, Blue Tribe wanted there to be protests. Most people fell on a spectrum going from "sincerely believes that the reports of widespread violence are Republican lies" to "grants that some protests devolved into riots, but thinks it's more important for protests to remain untouchable than to stop the riotous excesses".
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
1hr ago
The really funny thing for me which I knew at the time was the clash of the scale of the things they were talking about.
Health officials stating that “police violence against black s” was our “most important health crisis” which somehow overrode COVID.
I knew at the time how many “unarmed” black men were killed by police; it was like 12 per year. 12 goddamn people in the entire United States. In a year. With a very generous definition of “unarmed” which includes; had a gun but dropped it, had a gun within arms reach, etc etc.
The average democrat voter thought it was around 10,000 a year, an exaggeration in the ballpark of 10,000%.
These same people were claiming that literally millions of people would possibly die if their despotic covid policies weren’t followed to the letter.
Even in their own exaggerated rhetoric I couldn’t make it make sense.
It was maybe my first experience with an absolutely unsteelman-able position which looked suspiciously like mass voodoo, like witnessing 90 million people fall to dancing mania in the year of our lord 2020.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
1hr ago
No, it really is much closer to 50%. That’s the only way to explain the absolute deluge of support among leftists for Kirk’s murder. It’s a statistical argument. The only reason you’re hearing this many people who support it is because there are even more who don’t. Otherwise you’d have to believe that almost every person who supports Kirk murder has been vocal about it on the internet, which is implausible.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1hr ago
It's not super common, but it's not all that weird for Mormons in my lived experience. My mother was a fifth child adopted from a local hospital, I have two cousins adopted from Kazakhstan, a cousin from a different side adopted from Ukraine (one of the very literally very last actually), and I've heard of a few other cases besides.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1hr ago
I get the feeling that maybe you haven't spoken with many Trump-hating leftists recently? I do on a pretty regular basis, and put simply, most of the complaints boil down to one of the following: "he's stupid and I want a smarter president", "I dislike his thin skin and meanness", "his policies often make no sense", "I still haven't forgiven him for J6/the 2020 election lie", "he's been tanking the economy even more", and yes, "he's trying to take away important rights" does make an appearance. There's some resentment of perceived anti-LGB, anti-T, and anti-immigrant background too. But framing the first 5 reasons as not very specific I don't think is very fair.
Not OP but I think it's an open question as to whether the number of Trump's lies, in absolute terms, is greater or less than other politicians, but I don't really think it's too important to close it with an answer, I don't care about it per se.
However, it seems completely obvious that the lies he tells are particularly... maybe "brazen" is the right word? Like in real life people tell white lies, and usually don't get caught. Trump tells white lies, and regularly does get caught, when prior presidents and many other public figures are often careful enough that they, on the whole, seem to lay off the white lies (silence works pretty well for most administrations, in fact almost equally as well in situations where a white lie would otherwise attempt to hide an awkward truth, they both hide it in effect).
The usual defense amounts to one of three things: 1) Trump's words were hyperbole or maybe technically incorrect, but the broader truth is correct so the precise verbiage doesn't matter, 2) Trump was just relaying his understanding based on other reports/TV/hearsay, and any incorrectness is a simple lack of due diligence, which is fine because again his broader points are correct and people can be wrong sometimes, 3) Well if you look at what he said earlier or later or some other day, that clarifies things, that's what he really meant, obviously he was just riffing off that, and we should kind of average all his statements. No particular word, phrase, or claim ever has absolute meaning.
You know, honestly I was lowkey fine with this during election season, and in a number of cases I defended Trump (!) by saying that in an election it really does matter more what people hear than what you say. We all even expect it, fact-checker mania or no. However, I (and most liberals and even most centrists even despite any biases) think that when governing the words you say have special meaning. We can't and shouldn't be guessing. It's not like the Bible where reasonable people can disagree if X scripture is literal or metaphorical or symbolic or something in between! A word has meaning. Sometimes flexible, but all meanings can be stretched so far as to break. As an example, Trump said the fired BLS chief "rigged" the numbers. That means something, and it's not a Biblical interpretation situation. Factually, by any definition, Trump was wrong. She did not rig the numbers. End of story. The End. There is no wiggle room there. So which is it, 1, 2, or 3? They have some partial explanatory power. I admit that. But they do not actually change the lie.
It's the President and he has a responsibility. Sure, Presidents lie. Some have told some really, really big whoppers. But by and large, as I said above, that's usually about the big stuff. Trump's statements are frequently wrong about the small stuff.
How bad is one versus the other? Hypothetically is it better to have a habitual fibber who is honest about the big stuff, or a charming fact-wielding guy hiding a devastating betrayal? I have no firm opinion, and to be fair it's a little bit of new territory, and with a yet-unwritten and unrevealed history to match. Will we discover a Trump Iran-Contra under our noses and thus have the worst of both worlds? Does anything so far count? No one can say yet for sure.
However, I think the small lies have spread such an atmosphere of distrust that it's creating a low-trust dynamic between the public and the President that is almost unprecedented outside of wartime (when frankly the President is semi-allowed to tell white lies IMO). I think it's justified to be dismayed about that and worried about it. Because there's a significantly wide, if not deep, "interaction surface" on the utterings of Presidents to the public. They are literally the most newsworthy person in the world, so a lot gets transmitted. Trump's white lies, even if that's really all they are (not a given but let's roll with it), do immense damage to this trust. Suddenly, rather than more limited debates about whether the government is telling the truth about specific and big things, we suddenly are expected to guess whether the government is telling the truth about small things, tiny things, mundane things. We are expected to produce custom weighted-average factual conclusions based on contradictory government information releases. That's exhausting.
Conservatives aren't really bothered by this because they mostly have delegated their decision-making to Trump and his administration, since they trust that he will not betray them overall, so the small stuff is almost irrelevant. They even tend to enjoy Trump cynically playing with those assumptions to make the traditional media dance to his pleasure. But if you put yourself in anyone else's shoes, it's a pretty terrible state of affairs.
A lot of right-wingers around here like to spread this whole idea of high and low trust societies. Okay, fine. Here is a mini-society, and Trump is almost singlehandedly making it a low-trust relation full of perpetual suspicion and mistrust. Maybe he's "owning the libs", but at what cost?
Southkraut
The rain fell gentlier.
2hr ago
Can we have that conversation?
Corvos
3hr ago
IMO English is an unfortunate language (compared to Japanese) in that it is difficult and disapproved-of to shorten words and phrases in a way that is still readable. You can't just stick a couple of kanji together or throw out half the sounds. You can't turn 'leave without pay' into 'no-pay leave' without sounding childish, let alone 'go-no-pay' and 'life without parole' can't be turned into 'forever-jail'. I think part of it is the cultural love-affair with sophisticated latinate vocabulary (he says as someone with an impeccable classical education, but we're all hypocrites here).
Acronyms are an attempt to solve the job but are often too complicated in their own right and are mostly unreadable unless you already know what they mean (BATNA).
It’s not actionable, though. Even if a discrete class exists, how would they show measurable reputational harm from the lie?
More options
Context Copy link