FirmWeird
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User ID: 757
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1d ago
If mixpap is right about Trump's character, and he is susceptible to low-effort social media campaigns in a way which the vast majority of people who are paying attention and have 90+ IQs are not,
I don't actually think this is the case. There are real and serious reasons for Trump to hold the stance he currently holds on Ukraine, and social media campaigns just aren't one of them. Do you remember the Burisma scandal? Do you remember Trump getting impeached over it? Do you remember the entire Russiagate scandal? Do you remember Trump's stated policy positions, which involved pulling out of Ukraine? You mentioned being alive in 2014, but if you were actually paying attention since then it is abundantly clear why Trump hates Ukraine and wants the war over and done with. That's just so much more likely than the Russian hypnosis hypothesis I don't think you're going to be convincing anyone until you can explain what happened in a bit more detail.
No - the weapon doesn't work close to universally. We know that because Tim Pool and Lauren Southern had to be paid to spout Russian propaganda on Twitter.
Actually, in the sci-fi mind control weapon scenario you're proposing this isn't necessarily the case. It could be that the weapon is simply expensive to use and so only gets deployed on high value targets, or uses mechanisms which they don't want to risk revealing. Maybe it only works on people past a certain age, or maybe alcohol provides a protective barrier against it. We're already well into sci-fi territory here so we may as well have fun. As for Dim Fool and Lauren Southern, I think they're morons - just go have a read of the Kiwifarms threads on them.
The troop movements were detectable by satellite - the invasion was definitely coming from Russian-controlled territory and not, say, the United States.
Are you familiar with the details of Mearsheimer's position? Yes, I agree Russia sent their troops into Ukraine... but arguing that this means they're solely responsible is like saying that a bullied child who finally snaps and punches their bully in the teeth started a fight. Technically he was the one who went and punched the other child in the face, but giving him all the responsibility makes your understanding of the world worse. That said, I won't litigate it here - Mearsheimer himself actually wrote a much stronger version of the argument which I will just link https://mearsheimer.substack.com/p/who-caused-the-ukraine-war
Russia is not currently open to peace without victory, and Ukraine probably isn't either. The rest of us can either shut up or pick a side. Trump has picked the Russian side, and the rest of us can judge him accordingly.
The alternative to a Russian victory would be a nuclear war that destroys advanced civilization. Ukraine and the West are not capable of defeating Russia in this conflict and to pretend otherwise has done nothing but consign a generation of young Ukrainians to pointless, wasteful deaths. Trump is simply recognising reality and doing what he can to minimise the death and wasted money - I think he's done bad things (see his plans for Gaza) but this really isn't one of them.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
Did you not elect him to crush the deep state, banish drag-queens from schools, deport every illegal immigrant or whatever and defy hostile parts of government?
No, I'm not American. I'm not even a right-winger - but I am a populist, and I hoped Trump would got re-elected because he would smash and destroy the infrastructure of the American Empire. I'm not exactly shedding tears over the shutdown of USAID, an organisation which provided both generators and torture training to right wing regimes so that they could prevent the socialists from taking power and charging Americans slightly higher prices for fruit.
Did you expect him to listen to something so silly as secret services? Down with that woke nonsense!
I think the ironically named intelligence community in the US is full of shit and actively hostile to Trump, as they revealed in their text messages. But if your position is that the intelligence community can (and should) defy the will of the voters and implement the policies they prefer in the face of popular opposition, I think you're defending something far worse than Trump is even threatening to be.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
I cannot help but feel like "either the Russians have a mind control device or else the alternative media were right about everything" is a bit of a false dichotomy.
You're right - fortunately, that's a bit more extreme than what I actually said. I think John Mearsheimer presents the strongest version of the argument that the Potus and his administration seem to believe, and I've heard that a lot of people in Trump's orbit agree with his views. By far the most likely situation to me is that Trump and his team, after gaining access to the Federal Government's resources on the topic, think that he's correct as well.
The alternative alternative hypothesis
You mean the mainstream hypothesis promulgated by the legacy media organisations.
Trump is a simp for authoritarians in general and Putin in particular
I don't think that's an accurate characterisation of his thinking. If he prefers authoritarians, why is Vance out there telling Europe to roll back their incredibly authoritarian hate speech laws? Why is he telling Zelensky that he needs to have free elections - wouldn't he prefer Zelensky more if he just proclaimed himself Caesar for life? I don't think that whether or not someone is an authoritarian is what decides Trump's view of them. As for Putin in particular, do you want to go talk about Russiagate? I've made a lot of posts on the topic both here and on the old site we can go through first.
how a not very bright 78 year old conspiracy theorist might fall for bullshit that flatters his preferences.
The POTUS is a conspiracy theorist? Bro, were you alive during Russiagate? The feds really were listening to his phonecalls and trying to take him down - we have the texts and the documents (ever read the Peter Strzok texts?). The Big Guy really was getting a cut from the Burisma scandal, and Trump was totally right to attack Ukraine over it in his first term. When you use the term conspiracy theorist to describe someone with multiple government agencies making spurious attempts to throw him in jail or stymie his efforts and who survived multiple legitimate assassination attempts you're just making the term even more useless than it already is. I mean, sure, the statement is literally true - but the conspiracies in question weren't just real, they were thoroughly documented and some people even went to prison over it.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
I think that the President of the United States has access to intelligence resources and briefings that aren't accessible to the public.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
The problem with this approach is that if you actually believe it then there's no point having the CIA, FBI, NSA or Secret Service. What's the point in having an intelligence apparatus at all if the person who it is meant to be informing just believes what your supposed greatest adversary posts on social media? This argument would work if we were talking about an actual old boomer watching Fox News reruns on their iPad, but we're talking about the POTUS. If the safeguards around the president are so lax that Russia can do this then you end up in the same position - Russia has already won a total and complete victory.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
Trump has been captured by Russian propaganda.
If you actually believe this then you may as well give up the entire American project right now and prepare for Putin's coronation ceremony. If the Russian propaganda system is so incredibly powerful that it can bypass Trump's direct access to all intelligence gathered by the United States military and surveillance apparatus, his direct access to all the people in the US military with full knowledge of the situation on the ground and the security systems in place to protect the president... there's no hope left, the Russians could hit anyone lower down in the government with the same weapon. If the Russians have a mind-control weapon which can capture the President without the US military or IC doing anything about it then they have already won and you may as well just roll out the red carpet for them now.
Of course, the alternative hypothesis, that the alternative media and other voices have been correct about the US' pivotal role in starting the Ukraine conflict and Trump is simply recognising the facts on the ground because he doesn't actually want the war to continue, is a lot more believable to me.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
2d ago
Better to have one somewhere than to need one somewhere and not have one.
I cannot disagree more. Ever look at the US national debt?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3d ago
have it know in context or through training that it should always check itself to see if it's touching on any danger are
This is the part that I called out as being impossible. How, exactly, is it going to know what a danger area is? Actual humans frequently get this wrong, and the rules are constantly shifting while also based on implicit social hierarchies which are almost never put into words. This is actually something that would require a substantial amount of reasoning and thinking to get even close to right - and most likely produce all sorts of unintended negative outcomes (see gemini's incredibly diverse nazis). Scanning over the text to see if there are any naughty words is easy, but how do you expect the AI to know whether a statement like "My people are being genocided and I need to fight back against it" is socially acceptable or not? The answer depends on a whole bunch of things which would in many cases be invisible to the AI - this statement is bad if they're white, also bad if they're Palestinian, good if they're black, etc etc.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3d ago
Jailbreaking would never work if the underlying concepts had been trained out of the model.
I can't agree with this, except in the sense that if you did train those underlying concepts out the model itself simply wouldn't function. Many of the "problematic" concepts that you would try to train out of a model are actually embedded within and linked to concepts that you can't make sense of the world at all without. Take sexual content as an example - if you remove the model's understanding of sex to prevent it from producing pornographic material, you lose the ability to talk sensibly about biology, medicine, history, modern culture etc. If you make a model completely raceblind it then becomes unable to actually talk sensibly about society, history or biology. Even worse, actually being blind to those issues means that it would also be blind to the societal safeguards. Everybody in real life knows that racism isn't something white people are "allowed" to complain about, but if you prevent an AI from knowing/learning/talking about race then you're also going to prevent it from learning those hidden rules. The only answer is to just have a secondary layer that scans the output for crimethink or badspeech and wipes the entire output if it finds any. I'm pretty sure this is what most AI companies are using - what else could work?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3d ago
But I don't think those steps are very realistic, measures like that would be unimaginably antagonistic.
Would you rate it as more or less antagonistic than bombing the pipeline which gave them a cheap alternative to buying American fossil fuels? This isn't some gotcha attempt, I'm actually curious as to where that would rank.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9d ago
Trump constantly engages in brazenly corrupt behavior
Can you point to anything Trump has done that matches the Burisma case in severity? The most corrupt actions I've seen from Trump mostly just involve taking vast sums of money from the Adelsons and then advocating for Israel, but he is on the record as supporting Israel anyway already (presumably so he can run another Kosher Vodka scam). Military supply chain corruption, the revolving door between regulatory bodies and the banks they regulate, cozy sinecures for the connected and congressional insider trading all seem far more nakedly and obviously corrupt to me than anything Trump has actually done.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
9d ago
The cost of indefinitely providing medical care to people who cannot care for themselves may seem steep, but it is trivial compared to the cost of not doing so.
The US budget and financial system is extremely overburdened and the nation has a vast amount of debt, to the point that the costs of servicing it are an increasingly significant cost in the budget. Your options are to rip the bandaid off now, or to let things get worse by subsidizing the creation of more aid consumers until the US actually does collapse (or the populace gets desperate enough to elect a strongman) and there's no aid to anyone anywhere.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16d ago
...for who? That answer will be precisely what I said. You get an even louder incorrect buzzer. Please educate yourself.
The data included domestic communications from American citizens, and it comes from the companies listed in the slide. You're the one trying to claim that this data doesn't include domestic communications, and the reason you have so much trouble answering this question in an earnest way is that the answer destroys your position.
This is a lie.
I'm going to trust Ron Wyden over an anonymous person on the internet when it comes to matters directly involving whether something was said to Ron Wyden or not. Do you have any evidence behind this claim?
There are strategies put in place to discover these things. When discovered, those people get fired and prosecuted.
Even if these strategies had a 100% success rate (which I highly doubt)... them getting caught and reprimanded does nothing to address the point that the fact they could actually do this is the problem! It's incredibly easy to design a system that doesn't fail in this way - you need to go to a court and apply for a search or wiretap warrant, then you can start collecting information on a target. If you actually enforce these requirements LOVEINT cannot happen outside cases where somebody is actively dating a legitimate surveillance target (in which case they should be forced to recuse themselves). Hell, some incredibly smart Americans actually came up with those requirements and put them into law hundreds of years ago.
If you can, you can make a bundle of money, because everyone wants this. Just give it to us. We'll pay you an insane amount of money.
No, the US government doesn't want this - nor would they pay me money for pointing out that they need to completely clean house in the intelligence community. A system which actually prevented abuse would prevent abuse, and it is abundantly clear that abuse was precisely what a lot of people in the US government wanted. There already WAS a system which functioned the way you're asking - the existing court system, where real judges in adversarial courts had to sign off on a warrant, not some rubber stamper that lets someone use opposition research they know is false to spy on presidential candidates. But that said, I'm not obligated to design a complete replacement for the government because I think that inescapable, warrantless surveillance is bad.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16d ago
Databases with information in them. This is like asking, "What are forks for?" and expecting that people are going to infer that caniballism is going on. It makes you sound really bizarre.
Nice social shaming attempt, but in this case it is closer to asking "Why do you have those forks marked 'for long pig only'". But furthermore, if this was an exam, this answer would get zero points, akin to responding with "words" when asked what a certain book has written in it. Where did that information came from? What is that information? Does it contain domestic communications?
Data from specific selection terms for foreign intelligence targets. We had a very nice PCLOB report and everything on this. It detailed how it worked. Please educate yourself.
This also gets a loud incorrect buzzer - hell, even wikipedia explains this shit more clearly than your evasive non-answer. But thankfully, due to good people like Ed Snowden, we can just go read the internal documents about it. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jun/06/us-tech-giants-nsa-data Maybe you just weren't educated about what the program actually does, but a part of the correct answer would be "Email, Video/voice chat, Photos, stored data, VOIP, file transfers, video conferencing, activity notifications, social networking details and special requests".
I'm sure that your alternative approach of asking someone accused of bad behavior if they did it and then just believing them in the face of contradictory evidence might be useful somewhere else though!
Because the question required a classified answer, but he was in a public forum, so he provided the correct, classified answer to them via a secure channel afterward.
Behold, I am about to violate classification regulations and post classified content that cannot be posted in a public forum - you may wish to avert your eyes if you're a federal employee who isn't qualified to read this private, sensitive information:
"Yes."
That's all he would have had to say to avoid lying. He didn't provide a correct, classified answer to them in a secure channel afterward, and we know this because we can just ask Ron Wyden about it.
"After the NSA Director declined to correct these statements, I put the question to the Director of National Intelligence in March 2013. I wouldn’t have been doing my job if I hadn’t asked that question. My staff and I spent weeks preparing it, and I had my staff send him the question in advance so that he would be prepared to answer it.
Director Clapper famously gave an untrue answer to that question. So I had my intelligence staffer call his office afterward and ask them to correct the record. The Director’s office refused to correct the record. Regardless of what was going through the director’s head when he testified, failing to correct the record was a deliberate decision to lie to the American people about what their government was doing. And within a few months, of course, the truth came out."
That's two questions, but you're not really about accuracy, are you? Perhaps I'll leave this to you, because the first is so obvious that even AI slop would suffice (and you know it), while the latter is just you wanting to advertise some personal policy preference rather than having anything to do with the facts at hand.
Ok, sure - I'll answer! LOVEINT refers to NSA analysts using their domestic surveillance capability to spy on and monitor the communications of their loved ones and partners. Maybe 100% of all NSA employees are actually dating foreign nationals and legitimate surveillance targets, but I doubt it. The reason I bring up LOVEINT is that by virtue of the problem existing at all it shows that the warrant requirements aren't being applied and domestic communications are being collected - if the surveillance panopticon was functioning with the restrictions and rules that you are implying, it could never actually be a problem. But it is a problem, and the fact that it is means that the system is capable of abuse and is actively being abused.
Of course while LOVEINT is bad, the corrupt surveillance of the Trump campaign, including when he was President Elect, was far more serious - and incredibly convincing evidence that these systems need to be destroyed and everyone involved fired from the government and criminally prosecuted. Mind you, I'm not saying that SIGINT doesn't deserve to exist - but if your local police force has been completely infiltrated by the mafia and is helping criminals rather than stopping them, "Well we can't do anything about it because we need police" is not a convincing argument.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16d ago
cherry picked, misrepresented, and false claims
Cherry picked? These were the most prominent and recent cases involving violations of classification regulations in the news. Misrepresented? In what way? I actually left out a bunch of information that makes this stuff even worse. And as for my claims being false... which ones? You can't just drop a bunch of terms like that without explaining exactly what you're referring to. Are you claiming that I just hallucinated the entire Clinton email "matter"? Was the Weiner's Weiner scandal just a bad dream?
That is absolutely not the way it "normally" works for federal government employees (not that I don't understand what you're referencing).
Of course it is - if you're one of the Big Guys you can violate the law with impunity (not so much if you're one of the little people). If the legal system was actually working under consistently applied legal principles, which I am repeatedly assured it is, these precedents would obviously apply to everyone equally. The fact that they very obviously do not apply to everyone equally is the core point of my post - that the system is corrupt and does not do what it is claiming to do, with corruption-aligned individuals given a free pass to break the law. The lack of punishment for these obvious crimes is in actuality a damning indictment of the US justice system, up there with the corrupt prosecutions of Trump.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16d ago
Wikipedia is biased to the left. I wouldn't go to Wikipedia for information about whether it's correct to call something a conspiracy theory.
I can find multiple reputable, mainstream outlets referring to it as a conspiracy theory. It is still considered a conspiracy theory by vast swathes of the population, and many of those other claims were considered conspiracy theories by both the right and the left wing of politics. The NSA surveillance, for instance, was derided as a conspiracy theory by both sides of politics, as was the claim that Iraq didn't have WMDs (Tony Blair was ostensibly on the left). The rubric I actually use is "was I consistently called a conspiracy theorist for advocating this belief, and were others who espoused it similarly accused" and wikipedia was simply an additional piece of evidence (hard to provide evidence of quotes from in-person discussions two decades ago).
There are a lot of things that have a real definition, but are also abused to attack political opponents. "Conspiracy theory" is one just like "Nazi". Would you suggest that because Trump and the president of Ukraine are called Nazis, but I would not call them that, "Nazi" is a useless term?
I unironically do believe that nazi, like fascism, is largely a useless term in the modern day. It had a meaning, once, but now it is effectively just a snarl word and it isn't really possible to draw a consistent or useful meaning out of the word without context. In the last week alone I've seen Israelis get called Nazis who then turn around and call their opponents nazis for opposing them - the term no longer even necessarily implies antisemitism. You can still use the word in arguments, but if you do I feel like you should be obligated to let the reader know what you actually mean by it.
It communicates that it is a particular type of faulty reasoning.
Ok, what type? Can you actually provide a consistent definition that covers all the conspiracy theories I laid out in my first post?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16d ago
I'm ok with people posting AI generated content as long as it is clearly marked and hidden away in some kind of drop-down/quote. Sometimes you might want to post some AI-generated content as a piece of evidence or the like.
Strong agree that posting it without attribution and labelling should be a bannable offence though.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
16d ago
The idea that this process is being circumvented so easily when normally in situations of much greater consequence the rules normally hold fast is troubling.
Actually, normally the rules don't matter at all and high-ranking individuals can just shit all over the regulations around classification. You can even set up a private email server to escape FOIA laws that has no government protection, then send SAP info over that server without facing any kind of disciplinary action at all - in fact, the FBI will actually attempt to help get you out of trouble to make sure there isn't even any reputational damage. You can get caught sending pictures of your dick to strange minors on the internet, then have classified information found in emails on the laptop you do your child-sexting with - and you'll only get prosecuted for the weird sex stuff, not retaining classified info on an unclassified system. You can store all kinds of classified information insecurely in your home, free for your children to look at, and once again face no prosecution at all.
This process has been circumvented on an industrial scale for decades, and absolutely nothing was done about it. What exactly is troubling about Trump's team potentially breaking the law in a way that the enforcement apparatus has consistently said is no big deal?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
17d ago
I actually went back and looked through my posts on here and on the old reddit site, and unfortunately a lot of the decent posts I was arguing against have since been deleted, making the conversations really annoying to read. I'd say that the most substantive post I made on the topic is the long one in this thread here https://www.themotte.org/post/842/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184278?context=8#context
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
17d ago
Are you familiar with the National Endowment for Democracy?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
17d ago
Are you sure? What, exactly, was XKEYSCORE searching? What was PRISM collecting? Why did James Clapper lie to congress, and what was that lie about? As a bonus question, please also explain what LOVEINT is and how it could possibly become a problem in a system that rigorously enforced warrant requirements for accessing surveillance data.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
17d ago
I would only count that as half correct. Iraq didn't have (significant) weapons of mass destruction, but Americans, including the Democrats, genuinely believed that they did; it wasn't an excuse.
I don't believe for a single second that Dick Cheney earnestly and genuinely believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Maybe Colin Powell didn't know he was lying, but the intelligence agents who cooked up the fake evidence he used most definitely did. Maybe I just find it hard to accept that they genuinely believed that given that I saw through the scheme as a small child, but c'est la vie. I agree that the motivation of stealing oil/profiteering doesn't explain everything, but I'd give the credit to PNAC, A Clean Break or Oded Yinon for the rest.
I'd also ask if you only believed in conspiracies that turned out to be correct. It's easy to cherry-pick the correct ones.
If I go back and look at my conspiratorial beliefs that I don't think panned out... the biggest and most obvious one is that I thought the COVID vaccine would be significantly more harmful than it actually turned out to be. I thought that the BRICS would develop an alternative to SWIFT and the US financial system substantially faster than they actually did. I thought there was insider trading/advance knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, but I'm not sure that's been proven wrong yet (or what the non-conspiracy explanation for the dancing israelis is). I've been wrong about plenty of other things (like what the left wing government in Australia would actually do...), and I've made several claims on here that could pan out to be false in the end (like on nuclear power) but in my experience beliefs that get attacked as conspiracy theories tend to be more accurate than ones that don't.
If "conspiracy theory" is to be meaningful, it has to mean more than "there were people in a conspiracy", and I wouldn't count any of those you got correct as conspiracy theories. I think 100proof above has a good start with pointing out that conspiracies are about how you can blame contradictory evidence on the conspiracy.
I only listed beliefs that I was called a conspiracy theorist for advocating and stating at the time - hell, I can look up one of the listed beliefs on wikipedia right now and it is directly labelled a "right wing conspiracy theory" (specifically the Russiagate disambiguation page). It might be different now, but the exact same arguments were in fact deployed against those beliefs you said aren't conspiracy theories at the time. While the poll itself is seemingly gone now, have a look at this MotherJones article from 2013 - https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2013/04/bush-lying-about-wmds-conspiracy-theory/ Belief that the WMD lie was in fact a lie was considered a conspiracy theory by the mainstream even after the point at which we had evidence demonstrating that was the case!
My apologies if it feels like I'm attacking you for this, because you're not the same people who made those attacks in the past, but this is actually one of the reasons why I don't particularly like the term "conspiracy theory" when used as a pejorative - the category is very slippery and hard to really pin down. Your definition, while it might be more accurate, very clearly isn't the one being used by the rest of society, and I don't think there's any real reason to actually preserve or try to save it. What value do you get out of being able to label something a conspiracy theory? What is the term actually communicating beyond "I think this theory is dumb and wrong, and the person who believes it does so due to faulty reasoning"?
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
17d ago
And that made me wander: do conspiracy theories filter up or trickle down? Does one start with a conspiratorial worldview and paranoid style and jaded cynicism because Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself and then decide the NBA is probably fixed too; or does one start with thinking the NBA is fixed and it shakes your faith in everything else? I’ve noticed the conspiracy theorists I know tend to be into personal conspiracy theories too. The same guy that’s telling me the Marines just raided a FEMA data center in Iceland to get the files about the 2020 election will tell me that the mechanic slit the rubber on his CV boot so that the mechanic could charge him to fix it.
I proudly claim to be a conspiracy theorist on this site and have done so for years but I don't really see any "small conspiracies" like the kind you're suggesting. For the record, I started believing in conspiracy theories as a child in the leadup to the Iraq war - I thought that Iraq didn't actually have any weapons of mass destruction, and that those reports were lies to allow the rich Americans in charge of the MIC to steal the oil from another Middle Eastern country. I believed that the government was monitoring all domestic communications - and then Mark Klein reported on it, which was also considered a conspiracy theory until Edward Snowden just released the details. I thought the lab-leak explanation for COVID was more likely despite being told it was a baseless conspiracy theory, and now it seems to be generally accepted knowledge that it was actually a lab leak. I went into the weeds on the Russiagate story (and I have a lot of posts on that particular conspiracy theory on here) and took the conspiracy theory angle again... and it was totally, completely correct. I'm on record stating on the old site that Joe Biden was mentally checked out and could only temporarily be made to perform for special events years before the news about his actual mental state broke.
It just seems nakedly obvious to me that conspiracy theories are a more accurate and truthful depiction of reality than mainstream media reporting and societal consensus. This doesn't really bleed out into my daily life in any noxious or odious way, either - the one time I thought that somebody was conspiring against me, I had another person they tried to conspire with directly tell me that they were doing so. If anything, I think having an accurate understanding of how people work and act, built up over experience interacting with them in the real world, directly leads to conspiracy theories because conspiracies are real and a natural outcome of human psychology. People start seeing conspiracies not because they're just having their brains get filled up with microplastics, but because we live in a world where conspiracies very obviously happen and have a lot of influence on the world.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
18d ago
If the goal is to cut costs or remove ideology from government spending, this is counterproductive.
I actually disagree here despite ostensibly being on the other side. The alternative to these programs getting cut isn't that they just stick around and everyone is happy - the US is currently on an utterly unsustainable course and if nothing serious is done the US will lose the ability to actually pay for all these jobs anyway when reserve currency status goes out the window. Given your stated priorities you probably don't care about the environmental/resource issues underlying these problems in the same way I do, but I'm sure you can recognise that fiscally at least there's no option to just leave these jobs or spending as they are forever - just the option to kick the can down the road, building up even more of a hangover for when the bill finally comes due. The cut is coming no matter what - ending these positions now, when there's still a lot more slack left in society, is a kindness.
What I was objecting to was the claim that the alternative media were right about "everything". There's plenty they were wrong about - just ask Sidney Poitier. There was a lot of nonsense and misinformation spread on both sides of the Ukraine conflict, and just because one side was ultimately correct in the end doesn't mean that they were right about everything.
Are there? I haven't seen any. The idea that Trump was captured by Russian propaganda falls outside the "reasonable" camp to me, and it falls especially far out when I cast my mind back over the Russiagate scandal and what actually happened there.
My reading of the Birther conspiracy theory was that he was testing the waters for an eventual political run and building up some goodwill with the republican base. I don't think he actually believed that, but I'm open to the possibility that he did (it doesn't actually change my estimation of him though). As for the 2020 election, I'm not sure how much of that is "conspiratorial thinking" or whatever pejorative you want to imply with use of that language as opposed to trying to win and retain power.
But the bigger problem with accusing Trump of being a conspiracy theorist is that there actually were several conspiracies against him from inside the federal government. There really were spies listening to his communications and cooking up ways to prosecute him on spurious charges! I think you're really further destroying the value of "conspiracy theorist" as a pejorative here - was MLK a conspiracy theorist when he thought the government was surveilling him?
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