Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Comment by somenameforme | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

The problem is that people have become so divided that the smallest of offenses by 'the other side' is blown up into the most egregious act since the birth of man, and the worst of offenses 'by our side' is turned into the smallest of issues, a technicality, perhaps not even especially real.

This is why you might think that isn't usual to not bother hiding the corruption, because I assure you most on "the other side" would rather disagree with you. Consider that a President gave banks who were failing, exclusively due to their own greed and reckless investing, hundreds of billions of dollars in an unprecedented scale bailout, and would then go on to go give 30 minute "chats" to these companies after leaving office for $400k a pop, making himself tens of millions of dollars out of it.

I'm trying to avoid more contemporary issues precisely because of my first paragraph. But I will say that overt corruption and weaponization of various institutions was perceived, by many, as exceptionally widespread in the previous administration. That's largely why November turned out the way it did, and similarly why many were so surprised by it. People increasingly live in two different realities and the hyper-polarization of media is heavily contributing to this.

The two women arguing before Solomon over which was the true mother of the baby each claimed the other was lying. One of them was actually the mother.

That both sides believe the other lies does not mean that both sides lie.

I don't believe that you believe that, in the circumstance we're discussing. I obviously could list basically endless lies of any contemporary political administration. Before the country became so polarized there were common 'jokes' that weren't really jokes like, 'How do you know a politician is lying?' 'Because his lips are moving.'

This is whataboutism. Everyone lies, power corrupts, but degree does matter. Sen. Murphy's speech does a good job of enumerating the big ones. One possible benefit of all this is that the left is trying to clean house to distinguish itself. If that actually happens using the moment to get them to put in laws to enforce it staying that way would be nice. A lot of Democrats regret enshrining independent districting boards in blue states because now they want to gerrmyander, but it is done. The rest of us have our best chance at increasing freedom by playing them against each other. Rather than letting them play is against each other like they have been. We all agree corruption is bad, and campaign finance reform is good I think. Democracy is a bit more contentious it is a matter of protecting individual rights while still letting the majority rule.

I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable. This is in large part because of partisanship but another issue is that we all value different things, and have different worldviews. For instance gerrymandering is an interesting thing, but I think it's entirely political theater, because there's a simple completely self-serving solution.

First off imagine an ostensibly completely fair system where each district was somehow made up of a random person within a state. Contrary to intuition, you would have actually just created the most gerrymandered system imaginable, where a party with only 51% of approval within a state would end up with 100% of representative seats, winning each and every district by 51%.

So counter-intuitively you do intentionally want to pack voters of a similar type into certain districts to create a fair system, which leads to all sorts of weird things, including the "solution"! It turns out the most fair system is to intentionally gerrymander! If you let each party with at least e.g. 1% of the vote take their turn creating an intentionally gerrymandered district for themselves (you can only 'district' your own voters), the self-maximizing solution is to create a 51% district in your favor. But if you mathematically work this out, this actually creates a perfectly fair (as close as possible to x% voters = x% of seats) result in the end! I can give an example if you find this unbelievable.

So all the rhetoric about trying to solve gerrymandering is mostly just theater and gesturing. The solution I gave is not some huge secret, even if most people are not aware of it. The only argument against it is that x% voters = x% seats is not desirable, but I think that's a rather fringe view. Geographic stuff doesn't mean what it used to, especially when there's millions of voters per district.

> I think comparing the wrongs of one administration vs another is not really viable.

Yet this is what we do at every election.

It is true that lies are about different things and have different impacts. People value different things. Lies are difficult to enumerate. Yet if person A says he ate 99 jellybeans when he only ate 98 and person B says he ate 99 jellybeans when he actually ate your mother, we can safely say that person A's falsehood is sufficiently different from person B's that we would rather put A in charge than B.

You can make this abstract argument, but imagine you have two politicians, call them T(rump) and H(arris). You ask advocates for T and H to make lists of the others' politician's lies ranked from most to least egregious and present them for judgement to a third party who will make an effort, showing their work, to evaluate their truth. Neither party may be fully satisfied by this process, but one is going to look ridiculous much faster than the other. When the argument is particular, not abstract, it becomes much harder to sustain.

Throwing your hands in the air and giving up because we cannot calculate a numerical measure of honesty like we can digits of pi is silly, because we still have to make decisions based on imperfect information. Claiming one must do this -- give up on evaluating honesty -- while still advocating for a particular candidate or policy is itself dishonest: you clearly do not believe your own argument but propound it in the hopes that others will and will then withdraw from the debate.

The point is that the example of 98 beans vs eating somebody's mother is obviously nothing like what we have in reality. We have different scales of offenses, many extremely serious in character, but there is no administration has been even remotely likely ethical and above board perhaps since JFK.

And the issue you're not considering is that we all subconsciously, if not consciously, discount the wrongs of those we prefer while blowing up the wrongs of those we dislike. I hate to use contemporary examples, because it's still so emotionally charged for most people - but I think there's too perfect an example not to here, and we've probably scared off everybody else by having responses with more than 100 words anyhow.

The last administration essentially turned the White House into the latest remake of Weekend at (B)ernie's. And they did this in complete collusive coordination with the media, and aggressively attacked and defamed anybody who tried to call them out on it. A person who fancied that administration is largely going to discount this because in the end the arguable net result was not much more than that advisors in that administration ended up playing a much more executive role than they would normally have.

But if you look at it from another person's perspective, it was a complete undermining of democracy that emphasized that the "independent" media is functionally identical to what we pejoratively refer to as state media in adversarial countries. And the response to people saying and seeing what was happening before their eyes (as, for instance, when the President would wander about in a senile stupor) was nothing short of 1984 - "The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command."

One person's molehill is another's mountain, and vice versa.

WTF does this primitive incorrect argument that "banks were given hundreds of billions" - you make your whole post irrelevant when clearly unfamiliar with basic facts on topic you so furiously discuss.

Those money were loaned and were returned back with interest, so US government actually earned some good money. Do you understand each word in that sentence and its overall meaning?

I am not defending banks and their too greedy and frankly idiotic behavior in any way, but if people keep ignoring absolutely basic facts about topics they so desperately want to discuss this has no bigger meaning than ie evolution vs creationism discussions with religious fanatics.

Can you share a link to read more about this?

So would it be fair to say that you're claiming the bank bailout is the smallest of issues, a technicality, and perhaps not even especially real? I mean after all it should be called the "banking temporary investment", right...?

I'm sure if Tesla, through their own excessive recklessness, did something that ruined countless lives and sent them spiraling towards bankruptcy, only to be saved by a not-a-bailout of hundreds of billions of dollars from the government, repaid some years later with token interest, you'd feel the same.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com