Reverse Cargo Cult (2017)
hanshowe.org
hanshowe.org
I do not accept this argument, if only because in the modern world no one describable as an intellectual can keep out of politics in the sense of not caring about them. I think one must engage in politics – using the word in a wide sense – and that one must have preferences:
that is, one must recognize that some causes are objectively better than others, even if they are advanced by equally bad means. As for the nationalistic loves and hatreds that I have spoken of, they are part of the make-up of most of us, whether we like it or not. Whether it is possible to get rid of them I do not know, but I do believe that it is possible to struggle against them, and that this is essentially a moral effort.
orwell, 1945
I think Plato's arguments presented in his Allegory of the Cave, paint a clear picture of "the truth" and the nature of the human condition. Particularly by showing that "finding out the truth" always relies on perception/observation of the truth (science is no different BTW). Which is to say what we come to regard as the truth is subjective to our perceptions of the actual truth. Which brings up a problem: How can you ever be certain that our perceptions are nothing more than "a shadow of a deeper truth" and thus not the real truth? The only way of resolving this trust problem (at least until further evidence comes along), is by taking a leap of faith (ie to adopt a belief). Thus ultimately, anything anyone regards as the truth, stems from adopting at least one or more beliefs/assumptions whether they realize it or not.
Fully realizing this, makes it so much easier to understand society, and why you can't always convince people using what you deem as "facts". Unfortunately, you may also realize how deep the rabbit hole really is...
"All politicians are the same". No. Some are worse.
This, in a sense is itself a political stance, but its not that hard to learn to distance yourself from the immediate emotions of politics. Particularly when I started to see how ubiquitous the weaoponization of anger has become in the modern era.
Humans are not objective, but in a big part subjective. First, humans belongs to groups. And it is a completely different thing if your own group abuses and benefits you, than if some other group abuses you and you lose.
You only see dirt in one side. Of course the dirty side is not yours.
"Why do you see the speck that is in your brother's eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?"
It's just so much easier and politically and socially beneficial to demonize the others.
The obituaries for Trump's popularity have been predicted so many times that it's hard to be confident that "This Time It's Different."
It's hardly martyring to be kicked off of Twitter IMO, but even if his fans see it that way -- Trumps fans seem to predominantly posses a very short attention span.
It's the only way that many of Trumps reversals make sense. They can be cheering him for saying A and then cheering him five minutes later for saying ~A. I suspect that if Trump loses his platform for some number of months, the shine may wear off.
And Parler is being kicked from AWS, so their entire service is going down too--and they may get the full treatment of being kicked from other servers and payment services if they don't agree to police their content. And without easy access to his marks, it will be harder for Don the Con to stay relevant.
Not predicting that it will happen. I'm not that optimistic, TBH. But positing a mechanism that it could happen.
Life has a 100% mortality rate. His presence is our lives is inherently temporary. And for a morbidly obese man, it could happen suddenly, or take 20 years. We just don't know.
I think Trump's allure is going to mostly survive this event, he will figure out a way to brand it as not being his fault or intention. I could be wrong about that though.
From these last four years I'm not so sure about that.
Youth: Extrovert certainty
Young adulthood: Extrovert uncertainty
Adulthood: Introvert certainty
As you learn more about the world around you, you realize the younger you was far too idealistic and cock-sure about the causes and solutions to the problems around you. Being barraged with uncertainty, the obvious answer then becomes that there is really no truth, there’s only approximations we can reach through the Socratic method: but eventually you grow weary of this as well. Surely there must be good and evil in this world, and if it quacks like a duck it’s probably a duck.
Being dogmatic isn’t a good thing, and I try to keep an open mind: but what’s equally dangerous is subscribing to the ideology that there is no such thing as good and evil. There is, and most of us have known the difference since we were children. I think adulthood is about finding the courage to speak out, when useful and constructive, instead of hiding behind the comfort of relativism.
This is an extreme and absolutist conclusion. Feynman once said something to the tune of (paraphrasing): I have degrees of certainty about different things and there’s many things I don’t know anything about. This is not “no truth,” this is “no truth I should be 100% confident in.”
> Surely there must be good and evil in the world
I could not disagree more strongly. There are incentives, both genetic and societal. This does not mean we are resigned to relativism or an absence of truth, it means we are more enlightened about the factors that impose into our interaction than being subject to fanciful innate accusations.
I agree, though, that recent events seem to have finally answered the question of whether or not Trump has a plan. It seems not, but you can get very far by just falling forward and refusing to admit defeat, ever. The sheer cognitive dissonance of the idea that a US president could be so far off his rocker and still be highly popular forces us to look for any explanation, however contrived, that means there's some master plan behind it all.
But nope, it's been option A all along: A charismatic manipulator really was elected president despite never knowing what he was going to do with the position when he got there, and despite being constitutionally unable to take advice from people who do understand strategy.
An angry mob sacked the Capitol. If #ZipTieGuy and friends had arrived mere minutes earlier, they'd have walked into a joint session of Congress containing every member of succession to the President that he did not appoint himself. It's easy to call it incompetent now that it failed but we might have just avoided a revolution by the skin of our teeth.
Not checkmate by itself, but very scary.
In any case though, if this hypothetical is not hyperbole (and I still suspect it is), it would seem prudent to remedy ASAP.
Here’s the relevant process per the constitution: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contingent_election
Basically, if there is no absolute majority of electors, each state gets one vote in the house for president and two votes in the senate for VP.
All of that only comes into play if there is no majority winner though, so I don’t think just keeping them from voting would do the trick.
The Presidential Succession Act only covers succession in case of removal from office and only until an election can be held, so it is technically true that Pence would be in line, but that assumes Trump was removed and the electoral votes had still not been counted, a highly unlikely combination. Even then just counting the votes would resolve this problem. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Succession_Act
"I know it is the fashion to say that most of recorded history is lies anyway. I am willing to believe that history is for the most part inaccurate and biased, but what is peculiar to our own age is the abandonment of the idea that history could be truthfully written. In the past, people deliberately lied, or they unconsciously colored what they wrote, or they struggled after the truth, well knowing that they must make many mistakes; but in each case they believed that “the facts” existed and were more or less discoverable. And in practice there was always a considerable body of fact which would have been agreed to by almost anyone. If you look up the history of the last war in, for instance, the Encyclopedia Britannica, you will find that a respectable amount of the material is drawn from German sources. A British and a German historian would disagree deeply on many things, even on fundamentals, but there would still be a body of, as it were, neutral fact on which neither would seriously challenge the other. It is just this common basis of agreement with its implication that human beings are all one species of animal, that totalitarianism destroys. Nazi theory indeed specifically denies that such a thing as “the truth” exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as “Science”. There is only “German Science,” “Jewish Science,” etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future but the past. If the Leader says of such and such an event, “It never happened” — well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five — well two and two are five. This prospect frightens me much more than bombs — and after our experiences of the last few years that is not such a frivolous statement."
The saving grace may be that the Leader himself didn’t stay on message and continued calling the rioters “patriots” after the “shocking” event took place. That was way off script.
But if we don’t figure out the deeper problem, the next Leader may be much more competent.
In my ideal world, the states could just peacefully break up into a looser group of nation states, with a shared military against outside threats. We’d invert the tax pyramid where the city and county get the most taxes, and the federal and state governments get the least. If we could have a non violent transition away from the existence of an unimaginably massive federal government.
I doubt that’s what will happen. There’s simply too many people employed by the government for it to contract peacefully. I fear for the future, and think that arresting and throwing the book at people at the Capitol is just going to increase the number of scary things happening.
As did the cold war. You can't counter a hegemon with anything other than another hegemon. To fragment the US is to accept the rise of China.
If South Africa couldn’t manage Apartheid due to pressure from other nations, there is zero chance Louisiana could magically reinstate slavery. This is an absolute straw man.
I wonder what kind of policies / issues you mean by this, so I thought of some strawmen:
1. How to name the streets in San Francisco 2. The insurance pool for social safety nets 3. Abortion
Category 1 is issues that are obviously local, and are already handled locally, because there's no point wasting federal time on them. We both agree that Iowa shouldn't care what a street in SF is named.
Category 2 is where I oppose your plan. A bigger insurance pool will amortized risk better. If all the states split up, wealthy people can vote their taxes down by moving between states. And the poor are still stuck in whatever state they were born in, which is probably a state with crappy benefits. For welfare, I want the opposite - I think almost everything should be federal. It's a bigger pool, and the wealthy can't dodge taxes by moving.
Category 3 is a strawman - Obviously abortion is not related to longitude, so if the states split up and CA allows abortion and Iowa bans it, obviously one of them is wrong. There might be a subtler point that California's politics would advance if they weren't spending time trying to legalize abortion in red states, and Iowa might also get more done if they weren't ... doing whatever Iowa is doing. (This is just an example, for all I know Iowa might be very left on abortion already)
What specifically do you think _is_ different about those two states? Don't the citizens need police, firefighters, food stamps, public transit, and public roads anywhere in the country?
This seems odd to me. Why wouldn't it be good for advocates and opponents of abortion to each have a place where they feel comfortable and their values are respected?
This is preposterous and I am flatly surprised that more people are not challenging it. Our differences may be more salient, but they are vastly outnumbered by our similarities. We speak the same language, eat the same foods, watch the same sports. We don't have vastly different goals and values -- we have serious differences of opinion about a tiny fraction of public policy and our shared culture.
What's more, the differences that do exist break down less along state lines and more along the distance from a city center. There are urban areas in every state, and there are rural areas in every state. Iowa and California are different inasmuch as (by the 2010 census) 95% of Californians were urbanized and only 64% of Iowans were.
The idea that all Californians think alike, or that all Iowans think alike is very strange. If you look at the election results there are plenty of people in both states on both sides.
I think just the opposite, there is virtually no difference between "red states" and "blue states", because nearly every urban area is "blue" and a few minutes drive away, every rural area is "red", no matter what state you're in.
And there's also the split between people who go to college and people who don't.
I think these are obviously the fault lines of today and therefore we aren't going to see a repeat of certain states seceding and something like the original Civil War.
Recently there was a dustup in the twitter maths community over whether "2+2=4" was a fact or an artifact of patriarchy, racism, and capitalism.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/biostatistics/2020/09/kareem-ca...
https://newdiscourses.com/2020/08/2-plus-2-never-equals-5/
https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/math/a33547137/why-...
https://arcdigital.media/mathgate-or-the-battle-of-two-plus-...
These are good summaries, they should have links to some of the relevant tweets.
To save others the time, as I understand it, their disagreement is about the meaning of the equals sign. I suppose they're right, because we do use different definitions of equality for different needs, both within math and in other fields, and of course without a good definition all sides agree to, people can find themselves talking past one another.
For what it's worth, the definition of equality I like best is the one based on symbolic manipulation - two symbols a and b are equal iff substituting a by b in ANY statement does not modify the statement's truth value.
I think it's more general than that. The meaning of symbols is not fixed, but a matter of intersubjective agreement and context. "2+2=4" if we intend that "2" represents the natural number subsequent to one and preceding three; and we intend that "+" refers to infix addition; and we intend that "=" refers to quantitative equality; and we intend that "4" represents the natural number subsequent to three and preceding five. This is actually not an "iff" statement because there are an infinite amount of other meanings we could reassign to the symbols contained within the proposition in order to result in a true statement.
But intent is a property of the speaker, not the phoneme. Intent does not inhere in the message. Intent must be inferred from context and previous usage of the terms.
> without a good definition all sides agree to, people can find themselves talking past one another.
I think this happens a lot and its why people think other people deny things like "2+2=4." Then there is a whole class of people who take advantage of ambiguity to instrumentally employ fallacies of equivocation.
I recently found a graduation card, which an old classmate gave me:
The front is a picture of some abstract art. The inside says, "Yeah... I don't get it either."
Underneath the pre-printed punchline, my friend wrote, "But that does not mean that it cannot be gotten!" I could use more friends like him these days.
"This prospect frightens me much more than bombs" Me too, and that's why 1984 was too scary for me to finish. Bombs occupy physical space, they can't be nowhere and they can't be in two places at once. They are pretty easy to understand, and they can explode once. Mind-viruses don't kill as quickly, but they aren't subject to any of the limitations of a physical weapon, either. They can't be captured or destroyed, and as far as I know, dogs cannot sniff for them.
The capacity for love also seems like a protective immune response to mind viruses that are so commonly rooted in hatred.
If you want hard numbers, compare the number of vegans to the number of animal lovers.
The comment about Soviet propaganda, though, is amusing. It's amazing how little people in the USSR knew about the rest of the world as late as the 1960s. Anatoly Dobrynin wrote in his 1995 autobiography that, when he came to the US in 1962 to be Ambassador to the United Nations for the USSR, he was amazed to see traffic jams. He'd been brought up to believe those were American propaganda. No country could have that many cars.
(That's a fun read, by the way. He got to be a diplomat in a very strange way. Stalin had a meeting in 1946 with some of his diplomats and grumbled that those old guys were out of touch, and they needed young new Soviet men like aircraft designers. The next day, Dobrynin, a young aircraft designer, was ordered from his job designing aircraft to Moscow to attend the Higher Diplomatic Academy and learn to become a diplomat. He turned out to be good at it.)
It’s this error in my opinion we see just as much of. Just as much as Trump is able to influence the beliefs of his followers, he is able to induce beliefs in his haters, by causing them to become certain of the truth of the opposing claim. We should address both problems: ignoring one or the other will just lead to further destabilization.
The effort involved in separating truth from bullshit from someone fundamentally indifferent to truth is too high.
If there is in fact truth to be had, there will virtually always be a credible source from whom it can be obtained.
In Dante's Hell, it was bearers of false witness who occupied the penultimate circle.
I lived on the other side, and I remember seeing news about homeless under the bridges, about the police beating up black folks. And it was all true, as it's still a problem today!
What they didn't show is that 90% of the Americans were living better than even the top 10% of the communists
That struck me as one of those situations where you find that people who 'cheat' are more likely to greatly over estimate how many people actually cheat. But it certainly served the reverse cargo cult issue here too.
Interestingly enough when it came out that nobody in the Trump administration had informed US intelligence services that a foreign agent agent was offering them help... it also came out that every presidential candidate staff had reported some such contacts, with the exception of Trump, and Bush Sr. .
I believe that Trump followers believe him, for the most part.
The insurrection on Capital Hill was made by people who very deeply felt that the 'Election Was Stolen' and therefore Democracy itself was at stake. (There were several interviews by the press that highlighted this).
It's rational for someone to take reasonably dramatic action if they believed there were fraud at a fundamental level - so on a way - the actions of the protesters are understandable in a perverse kind of way, with the assumption that they are completely misinformed.
For the the 'not so gullible', the lie, repeated over and over again just has a ring of truth to it - enough that somewhere about 50% of the US believes that the 'elections were unfair' in some way, when in reality, that's not anywhere near the truth - the election was fair and free. There weren't any systematic shenanigans.
This means that a ton of 'regular, educated followers' buy into the BS at least partially.
And of course, since it's partisan, and some people 'want to believe it' - it's easier to believe.
The real question then becomes: will the gullible and not-so-gullible-but-partisan accept actual, material evidence when it's presented?
That's where you possibly meet the 'truly stubborn'.
Finally - in the efforts to get the truth out, a lot of these kinds of people have basically no faith in important institutions such as 'Science', the Judiciary, the DOJ etc..
Though most of the press is fairly legit, they are also biased, and so most plebes don't want to trust them either.
We are in a 'War for the Truth' right now it's a big deal with Politics, COVID, issues of Freedom of Expression (which includes the right to lie) etc..
What is being presented is not evidence. It's absence of evidence, combined with blunt assertions. That's not what we should be getting from a truly secure election system.
Years ago, the kernel.org servers that host the source code to the Linux kernel were hacked. Lots of people and lots of corporations use Linux, so the security of the source code of the kernel is a serious issue. So what did the owners of the kernel.org site do? Did they shout over and over that there was no problem? Did they make a huge effort to argue against people (and there were plenty of them) who claimed this showed Linux was just not a serious OS, as compared to those other OSs owned by large corporations? No.
What the kernel.org owners did was much simpler. They just showed the security measures they already had in place, and explained how and why they worked. And since those security measures were good ones, based on cryptographically secure methods of signing and verifying code and detecting tampering, and since they were open, so anyone who wanted to could check and verify them, that was all they had to do. All the accusations and speculations about insecurity simply evaporated.
That is the kind of security we should have for elections. And it's blatantly obvious that we don't. And until we do, given how divided the country is, we will continue to have close elections that the losing side, or at least a significant portion of it, refuses to recognize as legitimate. This problem cannot be handwaved away, and it cannot be solved by shouting louder, the way Americans do in foreign countries in the hope that it will cause the natives to start understanding English. It can only be solved by implementing a secure, and transparently secure, election system, where nobody has to take anybody else's word that nothing questionable happened.
1) There is an incredible amount of legitimacy and transparency in the system already.
Your linux analogy simply doesn't apply.
There are tons of 'eyes on the system', there are literally election observers. The rules are decided ahead of time etc..
With the 'Dominion' system there is literally a paper record of each ballot - there were recounts that validated the electronic counts perfectly.
The 'voting and ballot' part of the election is very secure, and there's no way to systematically defeat it.
2) If there is an issue with the elections, it's related to 'who can vote'. States are in a constant war over this, the rules over 'how to purge voter roles' (look into recent Georgia rulings). Those things, are today 'grey areas' not well defined by anyone so it means conflict.
3) "And it's blatantly obvious that we don't. "
Just the opposite, it's blatantly obvious that the elections are in fact secure - you've provided zero evidence to suggest otherwise.
But you're missing the issue - the perception of election of integrity has nothing to do with election integrity.
This has nothing to do with the facts.
This has to do with whatever Trump tells people (i.e. Cargo Cult).
If Trump had won the election, there would be zero concern over election integrity because it's entirely derided from his populist narrative.
The elections are as secure as they were in 2016 and 2012 - and there wasn't some big uproar over 'ballot counting' then, was there?
Why not?
Because 'some populist figure' wasn't screaming 'Fraud' 'Fraud' 'Fraud'.
And even if the election were 'mathematically secure' it still would not matter because this has nothing to do with reality, it has to do with narrative.
A populist figure will say 'The Election Was Stolen' - and his Cargo Cult followers will believe him, irrespective of the facts.
Who are placed far enough away from what is happening that they can't usefully verify anything. What we should have are election workers from each party, paired up, with transparently verifiable means of confirming that they both agree on every action taken.
> The rules are decided ahead of time
And then those rules, established by the State legislatures ahead of time in accordance with the Constitution and Federal election law, are changed by State executive branch officials and judges. That is clearly unconstitutional.
> With the 'Dominion' system there is literally a paper record of each ballot
Printed out by a computer system with known vulnerabilities and laughable "security" precautions.
> there were recounts that validated the electronic counts perfectly
By counting ballots which were printed by the same machines that gave the electronic counts, so this so-called "check" is meaningless.
> If there is an issue with the elections, it's related to 'who can vote'.
Yep. The way to solve that is obvious: voter IDs with simple, objectively verifiable rules for eligibility and a requirement that every eligible voter must be issued one. Other countries have this. Mexico has this. Why can't we?
> If Trump had won the election, there would be zero concern over election integrity because it's entirely derided from his populist narrative.
Excuse me? Trump won the 2016 election and for four years we've been hearing concerns over election integrity from the side that lost that one. Sure, those concerns weren't coming from Trump supporters, because Trump won. And now, as you yourself illustrate, Trump opponents have no concerns whatever despite multiple issues at least as blatant as any of the ones Trump opponents complained about in 2016, because Trump lost. In other words, the winning side will never complain and the losing side always will, because the system is broken.
s/A populist figure/The losing candidate/. Hillary Clinton and her Cargo Cult followers still believe she won the 2016 election.
Beliefs about Russian interference are also widespread, but they are also true/well documented and unconnected to the actual voting.
There was no movement that I know of, like we see now, saying that the swing states that went to Trump had subverted elections.
Once or twice recently I may have seen someone idly saying "hey, Republicans tend to project, I wonder if we should investigate the 2016 and 2020 elections to see if they were up to something".
I ran across the claim that Republicans won in almost all of the states that don't have proper paper trails for voting, which could be suspicious. I don't know if that's accurate, and I don't know of any movement pursuing that.
Donald Trump himself was surprised that he won.
But it's not remotely on the same scale as we see now.
There was 'smoke' with Russian relationships, and given the nature of a guy like Trump, a lot of people naturally believed the Mueller investigation would find him guilty of something. I did.
The press was happy to castigate Trump for two full years over it - until it just started to show that he was in fact innocent - at least of having colluded with Russians.
I hate Donald Trump, he's a psychopath who tried to overthrow the Republic in the end - but - he was actually treated unfairly during the Mueller investigation by the press as they banged 'Mueller + Collusion + Russia' over his head daily.
It turns out there were some shenanigans there, but definitely not Trump & Co. working with Russian.
The press never really cleared him from that.
In a way - Trump's mass lies about the current election is just him taking the same story but pushing it right up to the line of legality. Unfortunately, he pushed it way too far, and directing election officials to overthrow valid election results is definitely sedition, and he'd be in jail were he to note have the status and political protections he has as President. He's done much worse than Watergate.
You can check the polling.
This is not a 'sided comparison'.
Donald Trump is purposely claiming a mass election fraud, full well knowing it's a complete lie.
For gosh sake, he was on the phone with Georgia election officials, threatening them to overturn the results for him and publicly demanded that Mike Pence commit Sedition by throwing the election for him.
Not only does this have nothing to do with 'the other side' (i.e. Clinton) - there's no comparable in American history.
Every intelligent person knows this, especially Republicans, it's just a matter of how many are willing to go along with him because of the benefits it may bring, or the fear they have of being turned on.
And that is because all of those institutions have lied to them, repeatedly, over many, many years. So has the mainstream media. So it is rational for people not to believe them when they insist, louder and louder, "no, really, this time we're telling the truth!"
If we want meaningful dialogue, we need less bubbles and better avenues for discourse. Facebook and its ilk is the worst of humanity if used beyond keeping in touch with friends.
The issue with Parler only gives more fuel to the ones in this particular bubble that they are being persecuted. A bubble they already believe in, a world they already mentally inhabit.
We must keep striving for what you address in your comment, and for platforms for meaningful discussions, with ample focus on material truths.
Trump supporter: "This is the erosion of free speech"
Me: " Given that his supporters have already rioted and murdered, Twitter is trying to prevent him from inciting more riots"
Trump supporter: " Just wait until they come for you "
At first I was confused because I have no interest in inciting riots, and I don't even care if I get banned from Twitter. Now this makes sense, they are saying that Trump and Twitter are both trying to maintain and gain power. They think that I'm just too stupid to understand what Twitter is doing.
I can sympathize with them for feeling this way, it is hard to accept that you got scammed.
TBH it's not hard to see how this could end in the balkanisation of the net.
Is it theoretically possible that someone at Twitter or FB could decide that Democrats were the only acceptable party and try to silence everyone else?
Yes, that is possible, but it also possible that they will continue to apply the policies the same way going forward. If I didn't like a change they made political or otherwise I would quit, just like I quit digg years ago.
(Submitter.)
Im the US we have a long history of building systems that dont work or only sorta kinda work. Some examples are the health care 'system' and the Space Shuttle. (e.g. the russians did not buy the idea that the Space Shuttle was intended to lower the cost to access space -- it was an obvious boondoggle that maximized the cost; looking back we know the study that killed the O'Neill colonies and associated Gumdam dreams said there was no point in that because if we gave the Saturn V the Falcon 9 treatment we could have launched solar power sats by 1990)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buran_(spacecraft)
In retrospect I think it's pretty obvious the actual point of the space shuttle was national prestige. Studies done at the time pointed out it would take something like 60 launches a year for a reusable system to beat the cost of expendable rockets with available (1970s) technology, and yet the project was pursued regardless. Because the real, actual, honest reason we went with the STS was simply - the shuttle was a space ship, like in sci-fi, and was therefore cool and therefore a public darling. Even if it made no financial sense, people still loved it.
It's similar to the USS Missouri and USS Wisconsin serving in the Gulf War. Made absolutely no sense whatsoever, and was a total waste of money and time. But battle wagons are cool, and therefore people bent over backwards trying to justify it. They even invented "armored" pods for the tomahawks going on the Iowas:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Armored_Box_Launcher
To try and pretend there was some kind of operational point to using thickly armored battleships instead of something more modern.
Rule of cool is strangely powerful in real life in turns out.
They really hated the Pershing 2 because that kind of reentry vehicle can break suddenly two or more times confounding the Moscow ABM system. (which might have been able to fire multiple nuclear shots, get lucky to disable the warhead, and burn out all the electronics for 1000 miles away with the EMP -- the American hit-to-kill ABM will just fail)
Russia was trying to outboondoggle us with Buran and the Energyia booster. Like the space shuttle Buran was a hypersonic glide vehicle that could land on a runway with a wing and a prayer, emphasis on the prayer. The rocket engines were on the booster but not the orbiter, so Energia by itself was a capable heavy lift vehicle which the russians planned to out-boondoggle us: one Energia exploded when Russia tried to launch a 1-MW class laser satellite with optical targeting and all the facilities to start burning up targets. (e.g. in response to the Reagan era SDI talk, the Russians tried to hastily launch real hardware)
--
BTW I have seen the boxes on the Iowa class and they are a hoot. The US Congress had a lot of resistance to Robert Macnamara's plan to switch the Navy to vertical launch tubes because they didn't look menacing enough but if you look at Chinese films like Wolf Warrior you see they are very proud of their missile destroyers and their cluster munitions too.
The concerning thing is one of the biggest divides is amongst the people that pay attention, and have paid attention, and everyone else that either can't or refuses to.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/20/opinion/polarization-poli...
I am going to tell you what made America great, but you will not necessarily like it:
WW2 devastated the most important industrialized economies throughout Europe and Asia. The US was left intact.
For many years, the US was #1 in exports, #1 in manufacturing, and most importantly, the Bretton Woods system was in place.
Under Bretton Woods, the US was effectively able to create money from thin air. The premise was that each dollar was backed with gold, and you could at any time redeem the gold equivalent to your dollars. However, because that right was never exercised and nobody could audit the gold reserves, the US abused the system and by 1971 it became clear that it was a fraud.
By 1971, Europe and Japan were done rebuilding their economies and now their manufacturing capabilities surpassed the that of the US. So countries like France take the initiative and challenge the US to give them their gold, and when the US fails to meet these obligations, the Bretton Woods system ends, also putting an end to the American economic golden age.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exorbitant_privilege
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nixon_shock
Since the Nixon shock, US living standards have started becoming similar to that of other countries, the cost of living has been raising and the US has been accumulating an enormous amount of debt.
Think about it: during the 1940s to the 1970s, the Interstate highway system was built, there were expensive Space exploration programs, millions of Americans had affordable housing, higher education... everything was affordable. And suddenly nothing is affordable anymore. And that is the reason.
It began as a mostly rural republic that had about as many full time soldiers as the Cree tribe had armed (with guns) fighters; Lafayette thought that USA would need French protection for a few centuries.
Then, American industrial capacity exploded and by 1900, it was competing for the first place with the UK and Germany. The entry of the US to both WWI and WWII made the decisive result precisely because of enormous American capacity to produce stuff.
That said, loss of American production capacity in the last 30 or so years ("the giant sucking sound" of Ross Perot) may really be an early sign of decay. Having digital giants is fine, but they won't produce a billion of N95 masks on demand.
However, as countries rebuilt their production infrastructure, competition went up, driving prices down, diminishing profits and the US started moving away from manufacturing.
Yes, America got lucky for about 25 years and isn't so lucky anymore. But even here the old adage says that luck favors the prepared.
The US had untilled praries, virgin forests, mountains of iron hills of coal, oceans of oil, a network of rivers and harbours (supplemented with canals and railroads), and no credible foes on the continent.
Russia at the time was not quite as advantaged, but strongly comparable in many regards.
The existing Great Powers of 1900 had extensive agriculture and coal energy resources (Britain, Germany, France), and at least some colonial holdings for further raw materials. But all were more constrained than the US, as well as knocked back by WWI.
WWII promoted an explosion in US industrial and resource extraction capability whilst Europe was again set back
Post WWII, the US retained its advantages, an intact (and substantially recently built) industrial infrastructure, and no international competition, as noted above. The Martial Plan and Japanese and Korean reconstruction helped.
Whether that's building a better phone, medical procedure, or communication network, or rocket, historically you've been able to point out that the emperor has no clothes, and then build something better.
This is what terrifies me about the current attitudes on both sides of the aisle - we're turning from, "I disagree but will fight for your right to say it" to "if I disagree you should be deplatformed and fired and mobbed."
Lockdown protests - super spreader events or valid exercises of freedom of speech?
George Floyd protests - super spreader events or valid exercises of free speech?
Riots attacking federal court house in Portland - treason or valid exercise of free speech?
Riots attacking capitol building in washington, d.c. - fortunately, everyone seems to agree it's bad. Oh, but it's apparently a super spreader event...
Remind me which side is participating in bad faith?
That's the clearest way to show that both sides argue in bad faith, rather than simply presenting facts or standing on principle.
There are lots of other examples, but that's a prominent, current case where both sides argue both sides of the argument.
Another prominent case is arguments for or against confirming judicial appointments, but that's been out of the news for an eternity now.
Meanwhile, the left seems to be refusing to accept that coercing people to act a certain way does not actually change what people believe. A list of banned words and opinions will never make the world progressive. Deplatforming people over truly just opinions or mannerisms is a temporary win.
Social media isn’t really a moderated community. It has “rules” and you can get “banned,” but Twitter is less “moderated” than a typical comments section. So when people act in bad faith, there’s no recourse unless they explicitly break rules. On say, a typical old Internet forum, it’d probably mostly be considered dramatic to do call-outs, not to mention pointless due to the disconnected nature of identity on the old internet. On Twitter not only is it common but you can make as many bad faith arguments and take as many things as far out of context as you like in attempts at character assassination. You can concern troll, you can use known misleading sources, etc. and even if someone calls you on it, you can just do it again later.
As usual though, most people are pretty “selfish.” A lot of people “get away” with being not “progressive“ enough because people like them. What happens is eventually someone has a trivial dispute with them and decides to seize the moment to pull out as much ammo as possible, which is how you end up with 50 page google docs arguing as hard as they can that every mistake someone has ever made is evidence that they are irredeemable.
So in self-preservation people become dishonest. And I mean I’ve seen it first-hand. Their beliefs haven’t changed, but they have to say certain things publicly in order to keep their status. And other people who also don’t believe in the things they're saying will express their disappointment if they ever deviate. It’s an amazing circus show. Things have gotten very perverted.
With the right, they are of course taking advantage of this in the worst faith way possible by using it as an argument against being progressive in and of itself. It’s not the methods, it’s the ideology. But in the same way a civil rights riot and a doomsday cult riot are not the same thing, there’s always going to be too much nuance for a conclusion that oversimplified.
Meanwhile, sites like Twitter simply do not give a fuck. All they care about is brand accounts, ads, and public image. But mostly the first two. So fat chance if they’re going to risk lowering engagement to help fix broken incentives.
When people know their opinions are generally considered reprehensible, they hide them. I can agree with that.
But if those opinions are successfully hidden or pushed underground, and the next generation is predominantly exposed to positive values, the world does become more progressive. Individuals change only a small amount, you're right, but society does change for the better over time.
It's when echo-chambers of intolerance exist that attitudes of intolerance and selfishness can be amplified and push the world in the wrong direction.
Preference falsification. Its getting worse. and people who falsify preferences still act like radicals. They haven't internalized the values so they imperfectly carry them out.
I know coercion is not enough, but it's the only thing that can be pushed by the people with power to push anything.
As soon as I find out what _will_ change beliefs, I'd like to start doing it. Assuming that, as an individual, I _can_ do anything at all. But breaking up the radicalization pipelines is better than nothing.
Of course I am not actually against every time someone gets deplatformed; I think it is reasonable from a community standpoint to, for example, ban the doomsday cult garbage. That’s not a matter of banned opinion to me, even though it leans on a gray area.
I'm against mob violence, I hate the death penalty, but I'm still okay with de-platforming. It has a use. There is a difference between "This person is inciting violence" and "This person is disagreeing with us" and the line has not been blurred yet.
I'm glad Trump got banned, because he is an Internet troll who happens to hold office.
I'm glad that a few rioters were arrested. I hope they are convicted and serve jail time. I hope they live to realize why they were wrong. If they die it means I will never have them on my side.
I don't want anyone to die. Death, unlike de-platforming, cannot be undone if it turns out we are wrong.
So please don't lump me in with people calling for guillotines and mob violence.