This unfortunately still leaves me with a choice between "this was working with a hostile foreign power to influence an election and the Republicans on the committee agree with this but think it isn't so bad, WTF, that's disqualifying, and a shit ton of people on the internet are wilfully lying or r-slurred"
and, uhhh, thinking that these guys are more partisan and fear-mongering than they present as.
I think I'm really motivated by contrarianism & dislike of lots of the vibes around the democrats to want to believe Trump isn't that bad, but golly the facts seem to make that an uphill battle.
"I recognize my own woke derangement syndrome makes me want to question the facts."
I got a series of DMs from someone calling me nasty names for not having strong enough priors about RWers being r-slurred liars....
Me! That was me! I did that. It's here that you can see that the SFBA Rationalist concept of 'priors' aka 'preconceived notions' aka 'beliefs' is an agency-robbing mythos. This person can't take responsibility for their 'priors' because their 'priors' exist (in their dimwit head) as a fiction of perfect math. Reasoning through math can't be wrong, and you can't be responsible for the fact that you got something wrong if you were using math which was correctly calculated to arrive at that wrong information. Fricking morons. SFBA Rationalist Cultists are in for a rude awakening about the degree to which their mindless faith in Bayesian math derailed their ability to recognize their error.
I think I got some motivated epistemic learned helplessness going on here/ using the "nothing ever happens" heuristic that almost always works.
To be fair, these types are capable of some introspection.
Same as AI X-risk really: The arguments that this is really really bad are convincing, and taking them seriously (generally a virtue) implies I should be bombing data centres & assassinating ML researchers.
Or you could convince Scott Alexander to retract "You Are Still Calling Wolf."
But that seems a bit extreme, so I'm just gonna sit here & try not to think about it too much
lmao these people are so weak.
My US-politics information feed, now that I think about it in response to your question, is largely partisans from either side sharing terrible things the other side did, and rather too much of that is focussed on culture war stuff like trans issues.
They thought that they were spectating the culture war in their culture war threads (@TracingWoodgrains this is important) and that this gave them logical detachment from their politics, unlike those emotional leftists, and so even as they reified their politics they were in denial of the fact of that reification. Mass myopia. Fricking hilarious.
All politics is libidinal. The people trying to be unemotional about it are in a complicated form of denial about their own emotions. Which is, arguably, autism.
So I'm not sure if I'm sensibly fighting the tendency for my finger to keep wobbling back to the fire/ ignoring news that makes me feel bad & doesn't help me/ sanitising my inputs or if I'm cravenly ignoring a pressing threat because it doesn't affect me personally & thus normalising evil.
Scott Alexander normalized the evil.
.webp?h=10 "Nuzzles, pounces on you, UwU, you're so warm!..")
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I think it's pretty weird that "Russian propaganda" would be the major concern people have with Donald Trump. It's a little bit like being mad about Iran because they're friendly with Russia. It's not the core problem with Iran. And it's far from the core problem with Trump.
Russians were apparently effective in convincing some black voters not to vote in 2016 but not much else. In practice, Russia just isn't very good at propaganda. If they were, Euromaidan never would have happened in the first place. And that's in a country right next to Russia that speaks a mutually intelligible language.
Conversely, Scott or whoever arguing that Trump isn't so bad because the Russia thing was overblown is also a little bit like arguing that Iran isn't so bad because hey, actually, they're not that friendly with Russia. It's missing the point.
Donald Trump is an American politician who gets funding from mostly American interest groups, tycoons and radicals and who rose to power by exploiting largely domestic political discontent and dysfunction. Simple as. He poses a (limited but real) threat to the interests of the United States because of his domestic policies, not because he might prioritize speed over quality in a resolution to the invasion of Ukraine.
There is a weak analogy to Israel. The US is particularly insistent on its Israel policy because of a combination of sunk cost bias (and a sort of denial of the degradation of Israeli politics that followed the assassination of Rabin), terrorist attacks committed against Americans by Islamists claiming to support Palestine (from Sirhan Sirhan to 9/11), existing mutually amicable cooperation among intelligence agencies (our intelligence agencies are far better at manipulating our politics than Mossad is), and because of a general antipathy towards Arab Muslims among American conservatives, which has some relationship to the terrorism thing. Only a small fraction is related to the influence of AIPAC and the politics of American Jews. This doesn't stop a steady stream of conspiracy theorists insisting that Israel has kompromat on the likes of John Fetterman, which should hopefully appear in retrospect at least somewhat similar to the similarly lurid stories of Russian micturitious blackmail against Donald Trump.
Like there's a sort of no-shit reality to plenty of what you've said:
But you have to do it. You have to have the libido. What has limited my own efforts in opposing the rightoid idiocy I see around me is mostly a reflection on the need not to compromise my own effectiveness. I am too attached to my own dignity to act like Jonathan Chait.
Which is also why the rationalists have such ultimately circumscribed effects on the body politic for the normies. They're a bunch of losers. Don't be a loser.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/dont-be-a-nit
Opportunism, patience, and picking the right battlefield will do a lot more to stop the bleeding than fighting on every front all the time. The die will be cast again.
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You're missing the fricking point dipwad. The point isn't whether Russia helped Trump because Russia is going to do what Russia is going to do.
The point is that Trump helped Russia. Trump asked for Russian help in the election. Trump asked for Russia to attack his political opponent.
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This comment is entirely too good for this garbage site.
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