They're Neo-Confederates, celebrating the cause of treason. You may be sympathetic to that cause but own it without pretending it was anything other than an insurrection to protect slavery.
I don't really get calling Confederates traitors. I get that they are the baddies in the whole civil war thing, but traitors? I assume that they had the right to secede and the war was inevitable anyway.
Isn't the 4th of July literally a holiday in the US? That's totally a treason to the British empire.
If it's helpful, many of the confederate statues were actually put up many years after the end of the civil war explicitly to intimidate black people/minorities and to continue to establish that white supremacy is still something to be celebrated via statues. In this context the celebration of the 4th of july establishes the independence of the united states against an empire, while the statures are made to enforce white supremacy. [0].
In many cases they were active duty military officers who broke their oaths of service (e.g. Robert E. Lee), which tends to be mentioned a lot in the rationale for using that term.
The Nazi concentration camps still stand. Furthermore, when people vandalized Auschwitz's notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work sets you free) sign[0] it was restored.
If even Jews wish to preserve the concentration camps for the significance of historical mistakes for humanity that they represent, what does it say about those who wish to destroy history elsewhere?
"Those who do not learn history are doomed to repeat it".
Is it your contention that the people defending the statue of Lee would have given similar reasons for their behaviour as those who restored Auschwitz's sign? I ask, because that seems very unlikely to me.
Context is important. Few are arguing that there shouldn't be remembrances of those people and events and the reasons for them, it's how those things are remembered that is in question.
No, but the reason is less important than the pros of this outcome.
Would you condemn a man who saved a child from a burning building because he wanted his 15 minutes of fame and not because it was the right thing to do?
I'm deliberately using a hyperbole to emphasize a point, but there's also a much more recent example of statue destruction: ISIS has destroyed a lot of statues. Is this the company one should keep?
Note that when statue destruction is normalized, broken windows theory kicks in and statues of prominent black civil rights activists[0], Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi[1], etc. get vandalized as well. I think very few people would agree that Gandhi (I'm not a scholar of history, but I've seen many people referencing him as arguably one of the most virtuous people ever) deserved this.
> what does it say about those who wish to destroy history elsewhere?
This is a misleading framing: nobody is calling for destroying history. If you follow the discussion at all closely, a very common refrain is that statues should be in museums rather than major civic places and, even more importantly, presented with correct and complete historical context. A large number of these statues were put up for partisan purposes during the Jim Crow era and have little artistic or historical value since their purpose was always propaganda rather than education.
A similar dynamic plays out with plantations: nobody is calling to have them destroyed - what conservatives are objecting to is including the complete history of the slavery and torture which were as integral to their functioning as the luxuries enjoyed by the planter class.
Using the German example: the entire country is aware of the history but they learn that in schools and museums, there aren’t statues of Hitler in parks, and if you visit a concentration camp it shows the horrors suffered there rather than painting a rise-colored view of how comfortably the camp commander lived or talking about how productive the slaves in the forced labor factories were without acknowledging the cruelty of their lives.
Literally a hoax. He explicitly condemned them in the same sentence. You have been gaslit and are confident about it without having checked the basic facts.
You've linked to the second interview he gave about Charlottesville. In his first statements[1] in an interview on August 12th, 2017, he famously didn't condemn white supremacists who murdered someone, saying instead that he condemns "egregious displays of hatred, bigotry and violence on many sides, on many sides".
Then, several days later in the second interview[2] on August 15th that you linked to, he equates the violent white nationalists that murdered someone with what he calls the "alt-left", the purported group that the murder victim belonged to, saying that he thinks there is blame on both sides. After asking for further clarification, he says that there were fine people on both sides. Only after further questioning, and in a separate statement, does he condemn white supremacists.
People were criticizing him for his initial equivocation on August 12th, comparing the white supremacists who murdered a person to the victims of their violence, and the fact that he didn't name or condemn white supremacists. In fact, when journalists asked him to condemn them, he walked away from the interview. He refused to differentiate between the two.
Then, on August 15th, he defends his initial comments through his continued equivocations in the second interview.
It isn't a hoax to criticize inappropriate equivocations, especially when it took him 4 days to muster out a condemnation, but still only after doubling down on the equivocations.
That whole exchange is very different than what I have seen. Its actually alarming how reasonable he sounds in this clip. Believe me, I think he was an awful president, and I voted against him twice, but this is what I wish my liberal peers would admit about our own bias.
Are there evidence-based ratings for different publications? And is that the kind of thing that could be done at all objectively? If not objectively, at least methodically?
> And is that the kind of thing that could be done at all objectively?
No, unfortunately. And just as unfortunately, when you try to communicate why someone on "the other side" might have decent reasons for feeling the way they do, you are seen as an enemy. Alas this is human nature and not likely to change.
Sadly I have not found any trustworthy 'fact checkers' that are not in and of themselves also inherently biased.
But once you realize that every major news org seems perfectly willing to gaslight you fundamentally, you start to doubt basically everything you read.
If this one 'fact' about trump condemning nazis is so obviously a false story, how many other false stories are there?
The problem with this understanding is that it doesn't help you learn the truth, it just lets you understand that everyone is lying to you, and if you don't put in the exhausting work to find more information (assuming any is available) about every story you will be lied to with impunity.
When you offload the process of interpreting events to someone else, you lose the ability to tell truth from lies. When those people are so confident in their lying to do it on things like this, how many other things have they lied about?
It's important, I think, to not toss out the baby with the bathwater. Are fact checkers inherently biased? Probably. Should we ignore them? No. CNN's fact checkers called out the distortion on the 'both sides' discussion, as did PolitiFact and others.
When it comes to fact checker bias, PolitiFact is a good example to look at because they publish numbers on all the politicians. If you look at both left and right wing politicians, you'll see that they say plenty of inaccurate things. Mitch McConnell, Lindsey Graham, Hillary Clinton, Biden, all say inaccurate or untrue things to the order of 20 - 45% of checked statements.
Trump is in a category all his own. 72% of his checked statements are inaccurate.
Of course you should subject those numbers to scrutiny. Certainly there is sample bias in what statements get checked. But it is easy to find many, many Trump statements in which he makes statements that are so verifiably untrue that it becomes easy to conclude that he has little interest in providing evidence for his opinions. This graduates him from garden variety bias into active malfeasance.
I think it's important to recognize bias and fight it, but in the end, the mainstream media at least holds itself to a factual standard, as do mainstream politicians on both sides. Trump is very, very different. He himself represents nothing more than a war on factuality itself and a disdain for consensus or evidence of any kind.
I'm sorry but only an idiot would take that group of hipsters and provocateurs seriously, Trump said the next day he's not even familiar with the group.
Calling this evidence of 'racism' and 'fascism' is just pathetic.
Whatever, he said “stand back and stand by”. Politicians are word-smiths and that’s what he said. If anything it’s evidence of cluelessness which is also bad, given the responsibilities
With all of his commentary about cities like Portland, one of the Proud Boys' favorite targets, there is almost no chance he's never heard of them. And with the number of documented, public lies made by him, why would you ever take a statement like that at face value?
PPACA came straight out of Heritage Foundation. It had substantial bipartisan support in committee, markup, and amendments. Republicans voted against it to use as a political fundraising foil, which they did extremely effectively for a decade.
Is quite cynical.
As for the five year racist lie of birtherism told by Trump. 51% of Republicans believed it in 2017. There are more QAnon believers in the upcoming Republican caucus than Black members.
51% of republicans dumb enough to answer a poll in 2017 about where Obama was born believed it. How wrong do political polls need to get before we start laughing at them?
Yeah, QAnon is a real shame.
But that's an interesting thing for you to say. I agree, it's a shame the black republicans that were running for congress didn't win. But they didn't lose to... white republicans. They lost to democrats. Some of them were probably even white! And I doubt that republicans didn't vote for them because of their skin color. So that was a real interesting thing for you to say.
The president is the face of leadership for the country. The way they address the country and the things they say is unquestionably a huge part of the presidency.
They can say "not my president" all they want, just as Trump can say he won the election, when he clearly didn't.
One of those is far more impact, though. One of those is a person who runs the executive branch of the strongest government in the world. The other is someone making a post on twitter. To compare the two is wrong - period.
No. the other side is millions of emotional people with incorrect data posting on twitter getting everything wrong but then getting retweeted thousands of times based on a headline.
bless you that you think that doesn't do anything and is beyond analysis.
The thing is, bipartisan support was impossible to achieve at the time. Obama crafted a conservative health bill, attempted to reach across the aisle and got stonewalled - it was noted at the time that the Republicans adopted an unusually obstructive approach during the Obama era. Bipartisan support was (by design) more or less impossible to achieve.
More or less, yes. Take a look at the ACA. This is a piece of legislation that was essentially conservative in nature. It pleased very few on the democratic side, and bore plenty of similarities to some republican plans from the 90s. The Republicans reacted as if communism was coming to America.
> As opposed to the excellent state and not "unusually obstructive " form that democrats left the nation with after 4 years of never trump?
During the Trump administration, the Republicans had 2 years of controlling the house, the senate, AND the presidency. Not sure how much you think the Democrats could obstruct in that situation. In the following two years there's been just a democratic house, from which the Republican senate majority leader has been more or less unwilling to review legislation. And not just democratic-lead legislation - plenty of bipartisan legislation has been ignore too.
Really not sure why you're giving Pelosi sole blame for the failure to come to an agreement on stimulus. McConnell seems to be the clearest blocker here: seems there was hope for the White House and the House to come to an agreement, which McConnell scuppered: https://www.forbes.com/sites/sarahhansen/2020/10/15/mcconnel... .
You just said that democrats couldn't interfere with the republicans during theirs, so how on earth did the democrats pass a bill that they didn't like?
Not a single republican voted for the bill. I think that probably removes any intelligent reference you could make to Romneycare, which was bipartisan and for a single state.
It was Pelosi. Her position was my bill or nothing. No small immediate relief for renters getting the boot with a 1 trillion price tag that they could immediately add to. Your own article said McConnell wanted relief. It was her 2.2 trillion or nothing and she chose nothing. She did it knowing it would hurt trump. If she cared she'd do what she could to help and pass the trillion no?
> Not a single republican voted for the bill. I think that probably removes any intelligent reference you could make to Romneycare, which was bipartisan and for a single state.
McConnell threatened to filibuster due to the inclusion of the individual mandate which was in Romneycare (and still exists today in the form of a tax[0]). This was part of McConnell's strategy to prevent any democrat from doing anything, even things that have republican or popular support, even among republicans.
For example, while holding the majority, he prevents bills, which would pass on a floor vote, from getting that vote.
> It was Pelosi. Her position was my bill or nothing.
IDK, it sounds like she found a deal with the President, and McConnell refused it. I'd also expect that, like I mentioned above, the relief bill the house passed would pass a floor vote in the senate, which is why McConnell would refuse to bring it to a vote. If anything, it sounds like he's the one saying its his bill or nothing. Notably, you ignore the important point that McConnell also doesn't want relief to take effect until next year. Yes McConnell claims to want relief, he also claims to want to repeal the ACA. He claims a lot of things for political reasons that he doesn't actually want.
I've edited this post to address the (incorrect) response below.
the individual mandate has been ruled illegal btw.
I'm sorry, but you're not denying that her point was my bill or nothing. you just seem to think that trumps desperation to pass a bill gives you legitimacy.
which is, lets be clear, rich with irony.
WOAH: "Notably, you ignore the important point that McConnell also doesn't want relief to take effect until next year."
what is your source for that lol. why on earth would that ever make sense. and I mean that kind of loses effect if dems have refused to pass anything for the previous 3 months just so they could pass something when trump loses
He's stated as much. His goal was to start the new term by passing an aid bill. Pelosi wanted one sooner.
> and I mean that kind of loses effect if dems have refused to pass anything for the previous 3 months just so they could pass something when trump loses
Right, this is your invention and justification. We've moved into inappropriate for hn territory, so I'll stop now.
> I'm sorry, but you seem to absolutely refuse to keep the concept that Pelosi only wanted nothing less than her 2.2 trillion dollar bill.
Sure. And McConnell wants nothing more than his 1T bill. Why is it solely Pelosi's fault that an accord has not been reached?
> You can't complain about McConnell delaying it without complaining about Pelosi.
I wasn't? It's common during a negotiation for both sides to be at fault. I do think McConnell is more at fault given that the white house came to agreement, but it's obvious that Pelosi bears responsibility also.
I would also argue that if republicans hadn't spent the last 20 years playing hardball to a ridiculous extent, they wouldn't have inspired similar behavior in their democratic opposition.
Nope. Lieberman was an independent and broke with the democrats on many issues, including the ACA: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2009/dec/16/joe-lieberman-... . Funnily enough, this kind of makes my point for me. Even during a near-supermajority, the Dems could barely pass some conservative healthcare reform, because the republicans threatened to filibuster almost everything. Historical report here: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna35643530 . The filibuster has since been watered down to reduce that kind of abuse - and honestly I think the Democrats have learned that they need to play hardball, because Republicans sure as hell aren't interested in compromise.
In fairness to you, I did under-consider the effects of the use of the filibuster during Trump's term - appears that while the power of the filibuster has in general been watered down, the Democrats have been using it aggressively to block Trump's nominations. I wonder if the republicans regret kicking off this trend.
> Not a single republican voted for the bill
Sadly, we've reached a world where politicians largely vote as a block, not on their personal beliefs. I'd take this as indications of precisely nothing other than strategy. If you look at the bill itself, it's conservative, and a clear compromise from what the majority of Democrats want.
> It was Pelosi. Her position was my bill or nothing.
Patently untrue - she's already come down from an initial position of 3T.
So unless Pelosi caves to the Republicans' exact demands it's all on her? Let's imagine McConnell says that he'll approve a relief bill containing a trillion for the rich and a buck or two for the poor, is Pelosi solely responsible for delaying relief?
Pelosi is trying to get a level of relief that she views as appropriate. Of course the threat of walking away has to be there - otherwise the other side is free to offer something completely inadequate. If Pelosi and Trump of all people can get close to agreeing, it's worth considering pointing the blame at McConnell.
My point is, why is it that if Pelosi doesn't bend the knee, she bears sole responsibility for an agreement being reached? If she and the white house can agree, why can't McConnell be blamed? Your position seems to be that she should just take what she can get, but why shouldn't McConnell take what he can get? This is a negotiation. The idea that either side bears sole responsibility is crazy to me.
That’s just one of the many impossible pills in that bill that make it a non-starter. Knowingly including garbage like that in what is framed as a COVID stimulus bill is deliberate sabotage.
I agree that this sort of stuff is awful, and I don't support it one bit. But the reality is that provisions like this aren't going to make it into the final bill, and there's no indication that this is some kind of red line - just a negotiating position. Similarly the republicans are also setting their demands up in a way they know democrats will never accept: a low relief figure, excessive corporate protection from liability towards employees.
I don't like it one bit (and I've always favored targeted bills), but there's also no real indication that this provision is what is holding things up - right now, all the talk is about the dollar amount. Senate republicans can't even pass the 1T amount for the HEALS act right now, and are facing severe internal division over the proposed amount.
> One of the big reasons for voting Trump was standing up against this propaganda machine.
This is a horrible reason to vote. You should vote for the person you will think would do the best job of running the country out of the available choices.
Voting out of pettiness or personal offence is corrosive to the signal your vote should be carrying.
Trump is a great President, with a track record of being true to his word in the matters of policy, that was another big reason to vote for him.
But dems are trying to shove their agenda down people throats. If you don't stand up against lies, bullying and manipulation how different are you from people who conceded to Nazi thugs in Germany when they were grabbing political power through blatant propaganda and violence.
Your statement is de-latched from facts. What are you smoking.. seriously?
Who is following in the footsteps of strong-man totalitarian practices? Trump. You can not name any democrat that would fit this description.
Who uses propaganda incessantly. Trump. 25,000 provably false statement in 4 years. Fox news, owned by a Trump ally , maintained a stead stream of provably false pro-Trump right-wing propaganda. Does any democrat or other politician in US history is have such a record? None.
Who is trying on undermining government and shove an agenda down our throats. Trump and the Republicans, who despite have little popular support for many of their policies (by independent polling) use gerrymandering to twist the vote, actively obstruct the government from governing, jamb right-wing extremist justices into court positions. Do democrats ever do this? Almost never.
I grew up in the New York area, like other new yorker's who voted 90% for Biden, we all know something you don't. We've seen his ridiculous antics for decades. He has been a perpetual lier, tax-evader, serial failed business man, narcissistic self-promoter, and con-man. Heck he's been a democrat... but I guess that was back when he needed all those abortions for his mistresses.
In the end, he like much of his elections team, will be put in jail for his crimes. But because he knows he's done a lot of illegal shit, he will first pardon himself... just watch.
The way you stand up against lies, manipulation and propaganda is through truth, not just a mindless allergic reaction.
It doesn't matter what partisans have been shouting at you about their preferred candidate, you need to make a decision based on how the real candidates will behave in office.
If I took what you said at face value, I could change your vote through simply bombarding you with enough lies and propaganda against Biden. That is clearly illogical, and so much so that I don't think you really mean it that way.
Biden should be held accountable for excesses of the Drug War which he supported, but Kamala Harris was Attorney General for California and as such it was her job to enforce the law. Kamala Harris did strictly enforce the law, but also provided many with options to avoid punishment by staying employed and not reoffending.
At this point hypocrisy in politics is pervasive so it is important to be specific about what people did or did not say or do.
I've been listening primarily to the liberal mainstream news propaganda. Their lies are obvious if you dig a bit deeper, look at the facts and think for yourself.
Apparently critical thinking is what college-educated people lack this days after years of indoctrination into groupthink and compliance. Deresiewicz called them 'excellent sheep' for a good reason.
I find this kind epistemology fascinating. Suppose I were to not believe any institutional message, and lend it no credence whatsoever. "Thinking for myself" is not enough. Ultimately, I need information that I can't gather myself, and, often enough, some expert who can put it into context, because there are too many things and too little time, and learning anything in depth requires years. So, in the end, you have to trust someone, and it seems to me that the people who say "think for yourself" or "do your own research" might be skeptical of institutional sources, but are quicker to trust other sources than your "excellent sheep," but why they trust the particular sources they trust is pretty mysterious.
I tried, as a "magical mystery tour" exercise of sort, to see if I could get into the conspiracy theories that permeate the Trump world, but found that I was too skeptical and couldn't truly bring myself to believe what they believe, even as an experiment, because their entire epistemological system, the philosophy of how they come to "know" something, is something I couldn't follow the rules of. How someone's reputation is determined was a mystery to me. There are no documented methodologies, no agreed-upon "scientific method", no peer review. I once asked someone how he knew something, and he said that he'd done his own research. I asked him which databases and archives they had access to, but then realized that what he meant by "research" was that he'd read some posts on Facebook by people he didn't know and watched some videos on YouTube, also by people he didn't know, and he'd judged their reputation based on the opinions of others, but those others had had just the same corpus of knowledge, and nobody actually had any access to primary data, and no one even thought this should make them skeptical.
So how do you know that this conspiracy theory is something you should believe but not that other one? I assumed there was some internal logic, but I just couldn't find a pattern. I think it has to do with the aesthetics of the story; how dramatic it is, how good-vs-evil, and whether it fits with an overarching meta-conspiracy-theory of hidden powers. If the story is dramatic, they believe it. In other words, the truth is whatever makes for a good story, where I am played as a pawn of some hidden cabal. But perhaps you can shed some more light on that epistemological process.
(Before I begin, I'd like to thank you for trying to understand the perspectives of others rather than bashing and ignoring anyone who doesn't share the same beliefs. We need more of this in the world.)
I see a few important aspects to touch on here...I'm personally towards the right of the political spectrum, and would probably identify as Libertarian. First, you're generalizing the entire right-wing ideology from a "conspiracy theory" starting point. Most right-wing ideology isn't based around impacts from "conspiracy theories", it's mostly based around believing that the left's agenda is bad for America in the long-term. Adding up all the "conspiracy theories" won't give you the "sum" of what defines the right's beliefs...it could more reliably be defined as "subtracting" the future negative outcomes of left-wing policies. Second, most "conspiracy theories" by nature aren't fleshed out and therefore don't have clear-cut epistemological foundations. That's not to say they aren't possibly true in at least some form. It was once a "conspiracy theory" to say the Earth was round. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. That's not to say some things aren't completely outrageous, but it's much more dangerous to say every "conspiracy theory" is fake than the opposite, which is the media's/left's current approach. Third, you're over-distilling the term "think for myself/yourself". This doesn't literally mean go out and find every single fact yourself, it means diversify your source of news outside of the 3-4 media conglomerates (which are owned by a handful of individuals). Fourth, you seem to skip over the entire aspect of why the parent commenter mentions "think for yourself". It's not only the sweeping censorship that's an issue, it's also the non-reporting or shadow-banning of any topics that go against the left-wing narrative.
Political psychologists claim that, generally (and, of course, as a simplification), the right is over-sensitive to danger, while the left is under-sensitive. If I understand you correctly, you're saying that conspiracy theories aren't actual beliefs about what is actual reality, but rather potential threats, and so, tend to focus on hidden threats -- because that's where "real danger" is presumed to lie -- rather than overt ones, like, say, global warming. Is that what you're saying?
So I think I understand the general framework better now. Nevertheless, while conspiracies are, of course, always possible, they're quite implausible. I can't help but think about Hofstadter's "paranoid style":
> The paranoid’s interpretation of history is distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequences of someone’s will. Very often the enemy is held to possess some especially effective source of power: he controls the press; he has unlimited funds; he has a new secret for influencing the mind (brainwashing); he has a special technique for seduction...
> ... Having no access to political bargaining or the making of decisions, they find their original conception that the world of power is sinister and malicious fully confirmed. They see only the consequences of power—and this through distorting lenses—and have no chance to observe its actual machinery. A distinguished historian has said that one of the most valuable things about history is that it teaches us how things do not happen. It is precisely this kind of awareness that the paranoid fails to develop. He has a special resistance of his own, of course, to developing such awareness, but circumstances often deprive him of exposure to events that might enlighten him...
From what I see in popular conspiracy theories, this is what happens. They form around a Hollywood thriller's perception of power, but those who've seen power up close -- whether in large corporations, the military or politics -- know that this is not how power works. Secrets can't be kept; conflicting interests make it hard if not impossible to get enough people on the same page, and the less mainstream that page is, the harder it is; even the craftiest people are clumsy and make mistakes all the time.
The few successful plots and revolutions in history never happen even remotely to the way conspiracies say they could happen. E.g. they're virtually never dropped from above on an unsuspecting public, but almost always start with restless masses and pervasive instability like Russia's mutinous and depleted military in WWI, or Cuba's series of insurrections; you can usually see them coming a mile away. Even the relatively surprising Iranian revolution was at least as much grass-roots as it was led from above. So even if the framework is one of identifying threats, their originators'/believers' unfamiliarity with history and power looks for threats in the wrong place.
That's OK. I understand the system of not believing something. But Trump world is full of things that those people do believe, and I'm trying to understand why people who claim to believe so little actually believe so much, what they base their belief on, and why they think skepticism is their brand. It's like a bunch of people who'd walk around wearing five layers of clothes and identifying as nudists.
For example, there are thousands of people in that world who are self-proclaimed skeptics, yet believe predictions made by an anonymous person, whose only reputation is of having a perfect score of total misses. So if those people see doubting those who lie to them as central to their identity, why do they make a point of believing someone who so very clearly has done nothing other than lie to them? It's not even a matter of distrusting faceless institutions and trusting only acquaintances, because they're all too happy to trust people they don't even know exist.
Trump has been true to his word, the important things he promised in the matters of policy, the important things he’s done for the economy, diplomatic relations between Israel and Arab countries, cancelling critical race theory indoctrination in government, standing up for police being scapegoated by raging mobs.
His actions speak louder than words. He closed the border with China when everyone was accusing him of xenophobia, he did it just in time to flatten the curve. He helped millions of people with stimulus package, saved countless businesses and jobs via fed corporate bonds, I can go on and on. These are not opinions but facts.
You see it’s not about what or whom you believe but what you and them actually do.
The left accuse the president of being racist without any basis, by misinterpreting or intentionally misrepresenting his sayings. Building their whole campaign around massive 'racism' conspiracy. Many people vote Trump just because they are tired of this bullshit.
That whole BLM summer of protests? Gone, no longer in fashion. Dems don’t really care about black lives, they cynically exploit race politics to grab power. It worked marvels for them in these elections.
I'm not talking about any of that. Why people voted for Trump is a related discussion, but not the same. Clearly, Pizzagate or Q or Birthers or 9/11 Truthers or Ukranian conspiracists did not deliver on their word, so I'm wondering about the dissonance in the self-identification as skeptics by people who are clearly very credulous, as well as by their epistemology, the process by which they come to know what is "true."
Well, when I look at mainstream media saying for 3 years that Trump "is a Russian agent", that Trump is conspiracy theorist saying that Obama admin spied on his campaign - I by being a "critical thinker" compare it to IG report and comments in Senate hearings and make a decision of how adjust my trust ratings for sources. At some point rating of some sources is going to be too low to even consider them, and some will be Ok-ish. That's how I will know what "conspiracy theories" to consider. They might end up not being "conspiracy theories" altogether (like conspiracy theory that Iraq does not have WMD).
I don't have an issue with what the Trump world doesn't believe. A system that says, "we believe nothing" or even, "we believe nothing said by someone's who's ever lied" is fine. What I don't understand is how easily they do believe in stuff that is, at the very least, not more credible than the stuff they don't. It's not their skepticism that perplexes me, but their credulity. They clearly have an epistemology that's very different from the mainstream Western tradition (or any other, for that matter), and I'm curious to understand what it is.
> It is not about skepticism, it is about assigning weights - stories and opinions coming from more trusted sources warrant more attention.
Sure, but how is Q more trusted than, say, the FBI, even if the FBI is hardly to be trusted at all?
> I think that "believing in stuff" is not a problem affecting only the "Trump world".
I agree, but they're unique in not just being credulous -- if not more than others then certainly no less -- but also in self-identifying as skeptics while doing so. "I don't believe scientists and historians and law enforcement because I'm a skeptic, but I do believe the unsubstantiated ramblings of strangers online, some of whom are anonymous!"
> Sure, but how is Q more trusted than, say, the FBI, even if the FBI is hardly to be trusted at all?
Yep, it is all screwed up - we need to work on establishing new sources of information because many old ones pretty much discredited themselves (maybe they can be cleaned up but I doubt it). Political journalism is hard to find these days - but there are some brave people like GG and MT that are trying to do that outside of media corporations and I think it is a way to go for now.
You don't have to dig deep at all to see Trumps lies though. They're so obvious it's disgusting. They're irresponsible and harmful. The fact that you don't see this just invalidates anything you write
> "nepotism with his children is bad, but nepotism with the democrats children is fine."
Do you seriously believe that Biden as president will appoint his children as senior advisers and put his son-in-law in charge of everything from Middle East to Covid-19 response?
If not, then you can't argue that it's the same nepotism on both sides. It's clearly been much worse with the Trumps.
no, I don't. But I'm so glad that you'll suddenly being paying attention to nepotism appointments, like Lisa and Mike Madigan in Illinois.
I'm just saying that you won't complain about them, and you didn't. Just those mean old republicans matter.
I can't imagine what ridiculous credit democrats would take if the middle east countries kept normalizing relations with israel like they did in the past 6 months.
Was either of these Madigans the President of the United States, and the other a close relative in charge of half of the administration's portfolio? If not, then it's not the same. I'll probably start caring about Madigans when they're nationally relevant.
Most accounts from the Trump White House, e.g. Bolton’s book, report that Kushner had a substantial daily influence on Trump. He was officially in charge of numerous initiatives. It’s hard to argue that he and Ivanka were not present in White House deliberations.
wow its hard to argue with such things as demonstrative as "substantial daily influence" and "numerous initiatives" as well as being "present at white house deliberations"
it wouldnt suprise me if what he had for breakfast had a bigger impact.
People are probably harder on him because it was an explicit campaign promise that he would be less corrupt as a non politician. That doesn’t seem to have panned out imo.
