morlock-holmes

[morlock-holmes]

I feel like you seem to not understand that people lie in whatever way the situation requires to get people to stop asking questions. That is why there is no consistency in the things you are observing.

I just don't get why people fall for it so often.

[morlock-holmes]

I mean... There is libel. Which is what Jones committed.

I guess, to take the jury metaphor a step further, if I'm judging based on whether there is evidence beyond a reasonable doubt, and the evidence is mixed and doesn't reach that standard, one ought to vote for an acquittal.

Jones lives as though, since the evidence is mixed, it therefore doesn't matter whether you vote to convict or to acquit.

Like, there are really scary consequences when a guy like Jones talks about how obvious it is that a grieving parent is secretly a paid actor working on the American equivalent of the Reichstag fire.

And his defense (moral defense, he essentially refused to mount a legal defense for reasons that baffled court watchers) was essentially, "When I say something is definitely 100% true, everybody knows I'm saying that the evidence is mixed and it may or may not be true."

It really didn't play well with jurors, apparently.

Like, something I've noticed with conspiracy believers is that, in friendly environments like their own blogs or podcasts or publications, they will make extremely strong pronouncements, e.g.

"The Blargenforp theory is absolutely, 100% true, at this point the evidence is overwhelming. Hell, establishment figures are on the record admitting that the Blargenforp theory is true!"

But when taken to a neutral audience, they switch to,

"Look, what I'm saying is, science is the open-minded search for truth. What I'm saying is, shouldn't we be willing to make an open-minded investigation into whether or not the Blargenforp theory is true, and just see where the evidence leads us?"

Listen to the Alex Jones depositions in the Sandy Hook case and you'll see a real world example of this, where he makes incredibly concrete statements that Sandy Hook was definitely a hoax and that the evidence is overwhelming and inarguable, and then in deposition says, "That's just my opinion, I'm allowed to have opinions."

And when asked how a viewer would distinguish between which of the things he says are statements of fact and which are opinions he has no coherent answer.

And I think it's because to Jones and his employees and a large chunk of his viewers, there just... Is no concrete distinction between facts and opinions.

And since all statements of fact are just different wordings for what are fundamentally opinions, it is in some sense cheating to act like it matters whether a given statement is true or not.

[morlock-holmes]

I can't tell if I'm explaining it wrong or what.

Of course it's normal and admirable to say, "In my heart, I think the defendant is guilty, but I have to admit it hasn't been proven beyond a reasonable doubt, so I must vote to acquit."

If, instead, you vote to convict, and then in the jury interviews on the news afterwards you say,

"Well, you know, I went back and forth a lot, and the evidence is really mixed, you know, reasonable people really can disagree as to whether he was guilty or not"

That's a miscarriage of justice.

Jones does that kind of thing a lot, projecting an uncertainty backwards onto incredibly certain and concrete statements, often saying "This is true beyond any reasonable doubt" and then, when challenged, switching to "Well, there's mixed evidence, I'm saying it's possible and that we aren't really sure one way or another."

Like, something I've noticed with conspiracy believers is that, in friendly environments like their own blogs or podcasts or publications, they will make extremely strong pronouncements, e.g.

"The Blargenforp theory is absolutely, 100% true, at this point the evidence is overwhelming. Hell, establishment figures are on the record admitting that the Blargenforp theory is true!"

But when taken to a neutral audience, they switch to,

"Look, what I'm saying is, science is the open-minded search for truth. What I'm saying is, shouldn't we be willing to make an open-minded investigation into whether or not the Blargenforp theory is true, and just see where the evidence leads us?"

Listen to the Alex Jones depositions in the Sandy Hook case and you'll see a real world example of this, where he makes incredibly concrete statements that Sandy Hook was definitely a hoax and that the evidence is overwhelming and inarguable, and then in deposition says, "That's just my opinion, I'm allowed to have opinions."

And when asked how a viewer would distinguish between which of the things he says are statements of fact and which are opinions he has no coherent answer.

And I think it's because to Jones and his employees and a large chunk of his viewers, there just... Is no concrete distinction between facts and opinions.

And since all statements of fact are just different wordings for what are fundamentally opinions, it is in some sense cheating to act like it matters whether a given statement is true or not.

[morlock-holmes]

What the Democrats don't understand is that people need a hand up, not a hand out.

In completely unrelated news, we will be eliminating the federal department of giving people a hand up next month, so we encourage people to figure out alternative ways to get a hand up as soon as possible.

[morlock-holmes]

It's just so goddamn infuriating to listen to them explain that they are going to process millions of applications in the next two weeks, and that's why it's good that the supreme court is letting them fire all the people who do that stuff.

The website, last I checked day before yesterday, did not inform people that the IBR and Paye plans are being removed next year.

It's so mind-bending to me that Trump's position on the Department of Education is,

"They aren't doing nearly enough, most of their functions are critical, and they need to restart work on things Biden illegally stopped.

"That's why I'm cutting staff, with the ultimate goal of shuttering the entire department"

"This department does crucial work for the government and must be shut down as soon as possible"

It's such a wild fucking way to run things.

Also it's sort of a fascinating coincidence that this is absolutely never true of ICE, or local police forces.

[morlock-holmes]

"We, the jury, take no position on whether or not the defendant has committed a crime, and believe that in cases like this, in a pluralistic society, each citizen should have the right to reach his or her own conclusions.

"Therefore, we recommend life in prison without parole."

That's the dynamic I find bizarre.

Like, something I've noticed with conspiracy believers is that, in friendly environments like their own blogs or podcasts or publications, they will make extremely strong pronouncements, e.g.

"The Blargenforp theory is absolutely, 100% true, at this point the evidence is overwhelming. Hell, establishment figures are on the record admitting that the Blargenforp theory is true!"

But when taken to a neutral audience, they switch to,

"Look, what I'm saying is, science is the open-minded search for truth. What I'm saying is, shouldn't we be willing to make an open-minded investigation into whether or not the Blargenforp theory is true, and just see where the evidence leads us?"

Listen to the Alex Jones depositions in the Sandy Hook case and you'll see a real world example of this, where he makes incredibly concrete statements that Sandy Hook was definitely a hoax and that the evidence is overwhelming and inarguable, and then in deposition says, "That's just my opinion, I'm allowed to have opinions."

And when asked how a viewer would distinguish between which of the things he says are statements of fact and which are opinions he has no coherent answer.

And I think it's because to Jones and his employees and a large chunk of his viewers, there just... Is no concrete distinction between facts and opinions.

And since all statements of fact are just different wordings for what are fundamentally opinions, it is in some sense cheating to act like it matters whether a given statement is true or not.

[morlock-holmes]

It's so mind-bending to me that Trump's position on the Department of Education is,

"They aren't doing nearly enough, most of their functions are critical, and they need to restart work on things Biden illegally stopped.

"That's why I'm cutting staff, with the ultimate goal of shuttering the entire department"

"This department does crucial work for the government and must be shut down as soon as possible"

It's such a wild fucking way to run things.

Also it's sort of a fascinating coincidence that this is absolutely never true of ICE, or local police forces.

[morlock-holmes]

I'm perplexed by the Socratic method being employed here, because I don't quite know what you mean by "social facts", and part of the reason I brought this up is because this is how Jones and a lot of conspiracy theorists talk about concrete, evidence based ideas.

The question of whether children were murdered at Sandy Hook or whether it was a hoax and nobody died is not, like, a dispute about social etiquette; same with the shape of the earth, the question of whether vaccines cause autism, chem trails, homeopathy, all sorts of things.

It is specifically the application of this pattern of going from total certainty to agnostic pluralism when discussing factual matters that I'm talking about.

A big part of the reason Jones was sued for libel over Sandy Hook is that the statements he made on his show about it being a hoax were incredibly definitive; On his own show, Jones almost never says "We can't be sure, but the evidence suggests to me" when he can say, "We know this, it's been proven, the evidence is all there in black and white"

In court, and in front of neutral audiences, he takes a very different approach.

Like, something I've noticed with conspiracy believers is that, in friendly environments like their own blogs or podcasts or publications, they will make extremely strong pronouncements, e.g.

"The Blargenforp theory is absolutely, 100% true, at this point the evidence is overwhelming. Hell, establishment figures are on the record admitting that the Blargenforp theory is true!"

But when taken to a neutral audience, they switch to,

"Look, what I'm saying is, science is the open-minded search for truth. What I'm saying is, shouldn't we be willing to make an open-minded investigation into whether or not the Blargenforp theory is true, and just see where the evidence leads us?"

Listen to the Alex Jones depositions in the Sandy Hook case and you'll see a real world example of this, where he makes incredibly concrete statements that Sandy Hook was definitely a hoax and that the evidence is overwhelming and inarguable, and then in deposition says, "That's just my opinion, I'm allowed to have opinions."

And when asked how a viewer would distinguish between which of the things he says are statements of fact and which are opinions he has no coherent answer.

And I think it's because to Jones and his employees and a large chunk of his viewers, there just... Is no concrete distinction between facts and opinions.

And since all statements of fact are just different wordings for what are fundamentally opinions, it is in some sense cheating to act like it matters whether a given statement is true or not.

[morlock-holmes]

"Let me check on some of the things you said, I don't think that's correct"

Or in some other contexts,

"Huh, maybe I was wrong about that after all, wow, I didn't know that."

Like, really, it doesn't seem weird at all to you to say to a friend, "Man, the sky is blue today, what a beautiful color?"

And then, if a stranger said, "You're wrong, the sky is brown with purple polka dots"

Would you then go, "Hey, I hear you, what color the sky is a difficult question and I'm not here to pretend that I have all the answers. What I'm saying is, let's keep an open mind. Let's be willing to look at *all* the evidence without preconception, and have the humility to admit that every theory has to be open to new evidence."?

Because I would say,

"Bro I'm looking right at the sky it's clearly blue."

Like, something I've noticed with conspiracy believers is that, in friendly environments like their own blogs or podcasts or publications, they will make extremely strong pronouncements, e.g.

"The Blargenforp theory is absolutely, 100% true, at this point the evidence is overwhelming. Hell, establishment figures are on the record admitting that the Blargenforp theory is true!"

But when taken to a neutral audience, they switch to,

"Look, what I'm saying is, science is the open-minded search for truth. What I'm saying is, shouldn't we be willing to make an open-minded investigation into whether or not the Blargenforp theory is true, and just see where the evidence leads us?"

Listen to the Alex Jones depositions in the Sandy Hook case and you'll see a real world example of this, where he makes incredibly concrete statements that Sandy Hook was definitely a hoax and that the evidence is overwhelming and inarguable, and then in deposition says, "That's just my opinion, I'm allowed to have opinions."

And when asked how a viewer would distinguish between which of the things he says are statements of fact and which are opinions he has no coherent answer.

And I think it's because to Jones and his employees and a large chunk of his viewers, there just... Is no concrete distinction between facts and opinions.

And since all statements of fact are just different wordings for what are fundamentally opinions, it is in some sense cheating to act like it matters whether a given statement is true or not.

[morlock-holmes]

It's not about certainty, not really, and I'm never quite sure how to explain it, but the poor person in the notes with a flat earth mother made me think maybe an example with something I believe to be true would make it clearer.

Like, I think the Earth happens to be a roughly spherical shape.

If a really well informed flat-earther confronted me in a bar, I might not have enough facts in my head to rebutt all their arguments.

But it would never occur to me to say,

"Look, I'm not saying I have all the answers about what shape the Earth is. I'm not saying that it's definitely a sphere. What I'm saying is, as people who understand that nobody has all the answers, shouldn't we keep an open mind about what shape the Earth is, and be willing to entertain different theories and see where the evidence leads, rather than dogmatically assuming a certain shape merely because some authority figure says so?"

That is, to me, a really weird way to defend a proposition that you believe is inarguably true, *even in the face of evidence you don't know how to rebutt*.

Like, something I've noticed with conspiracy believers is that, in friendly environments like their own blogs or podcasts or publications, they will make extremely strong pronouncements, e.g.

"The Blargenforp theory is absolutely, 100% true, at this point the evidence is overwhelming. Hell, establishment figures are on the record admitting that the Blargenforp theory is true!"

But when taken to a neutral audience, they switch to,

"Look, what I'm saying is, science is the open-minded search for truth. What I'm saying is, shouldn't we be willing to make an open-minded investigation into whether or not the Blargenforp theory is true, and just see where the evidence leads us?"

Listen to the Alex Jones depositions in the Sandy Hook case and you'll see a real world example of this, where he makes incredibly concrete statements that Sandy Hook was definitely a hoax and that the evidence is overwhelming and inarguable, and then in deposition says, "That's just my opinion, I'm allowed to have opinions."

And when asked how a viewer would distinguish between which of the things he says are statements of fact and which are opinions he has no coherent answer.

And I think it's because to Jones and his employees and a large chunk of his viewers, there just... Is no concrete distinction between facts and opinions.

And since all statements of fact are just different wordings for what are fundamentally opinions, it is in some sense cheating to act like it matters whether a given statement is true or not.

[morlock-holmes]

I feel like a lot of Trump supporters (Including many voters and pretty much literally everybody in his actual cabinet) don't really have politics in the way that you or I would think of them.

I think they are people with a number of grudges (Some legitimate, some not), an incredibly shaky and surface level understanding of how anything in society actually works, and a bottomless appetite for good vs. evil stories where they get to imagine themselves as Neo in the Matrix, some bad ass underdog who's finally going to expose the corrupt bosses who have been keeping everybody else down.

And I think their policy ideas at any given time are therefore: Whatever policy idea lets me think of myself as the bad-ass but morally pure underdog finally winning one for the little guy against the scum who have been keeping us down for too long!

Like... The National Guardsmen and Military in LA clearly just clearly don't have a mission the way you or I would think of it, with some kind of concrete goal rooted in objective reality. Their mission, I think, is to be extras in the story where the brave and stoic Donald Trump finally put a stop to the Death Wish-esque anarchy which had been gripping LA.

And in order to accomplish that all that has to happen is that they're physically in LA and the crazy evil Democrats are complaining because somebody is finally doing what needs to be done and putting them in their place. So it doesn't matter that in actual practice they're sleeping on courthouse floors and just sort of... aimlessly milling around wasting their time and our tax dollars.

Or like, the head of a DOJ anti-semitism task force retweeting something from the founder of Identity Evropa.

Like... If the Trump administration are committed Jew haters they could just, like, not have an anti-semitism task force. What, are we going to say that Trump was pressured into it? That the Department of Education isn't a big deal, but god forbid the DOJ task force goes away?

And if the guy is supposed to be an undercover anti-semite then, like, he sure fucking blew his cover.

And anybody who is actually interested in fighting anti-semitism would fucking know what Identity Evropa is and not laugh at jokes about Trump revoking people's Jew card.

Like, you reading this and me writing it start with some kind of idea of what racism is. Maybe it's "prejudice plus power" or just "The expression of a prejudice based on race." and when we see something happen we check it against the definition. We ask questions like,

Was that an example of prejudice plus power?

or

What evidence do we have that this was an expression of prejudice rather than a coincidence?

And this can become incredibly Procrustean but I don't think Trump's lackeys even get that far.

I think that for them the definition of anti-semitism is "The left are the real anti-semites but they use it as a cudgel against the right". And so when they see a tweet or a claim they evaluate it based on whether it fits the story that the left are the real anti-semites.

And if the thing they're evaluating is coming from a literal holocaust denier that doesn't matter, because that has nothing to do with anti-semitism, that's how fucking far gone they are.

I really think this is kind of the only way to even vaguely make sense of their actions.

It's also why a lot of them used to have like, vaguely Occupy Wall Street or granola hippie politics: Because for a while far left politics let them imagine themselves as the bad-ass underdog sticking it to The Man, and when leftist rhetoric and fashion changed enough that it no longer worked to burnish their self-image that way, they found a new ideology which did a better job at it.

In fact I think the general haze of inconsistency around Trump is part of the appeal; if standards get too objective then those standards might eventually actually be used to judge them as something other than the heroic underdog, they might be measured and found wanting. But if there's no consistent or objective standard of measurement, that's way less likely to happen.

Well, that's my theory anyway.

[morlock-holmes]

As an aside to that:

Has Mahmoud Khalil actually said anything even vaguely anti-semitic? I figured that if he was actually this frothing anti-semite who posed a danger to Jewish students that, like, Fox or somebody would be constantly plastering it everywhere, but I can't find anything.

[morlock-holmes]

"If you can't be against racism without believing these insane and untrue things, then maybe i shouldn't care about being against racism."

See, I do think this is the crux of it, but it makes me really irritated by the framing of "They were thrown out of the overton window."

None of these people, aside from possibly Rowling, are people with strong principles who just happened to watch as society's consensus moved in some other direction while they held still.

I think a better way to understand it is that for them, the primary purpose of politics is to maintain their own self-image as heroic underdogs bravely fighting a hegemonic enemy that is on the verge of defeat.

And I think it's really easy to understand how Bush-era leftism might feed that self-image and also how the mainstream left culture started to mount really strong attacks on that self-image.

But look here: Elon Musk and JD Vance didn't stop caring about racism; they joined a political campaign that made the fight against racism one of its key platform goals and which has "A symbolic rampage against government racism" as one of its few actually implemented policies.

Like, look at Marko Elez; Vance and Musk went out of their way to defend him, intervening to prevent him from resigning.

Now look at Mahmoud Khalil, whose detention was justified because his anti-semitism was so rabid that it presented a threat to national security.

And, uh... I can't seem to surface a news article which cites a single anti-semitic quote from Khalil?

Let alone something worse than the things Elez said.

Vance, Musk, and the Trump administration writ large have a racism policy that is based not on some coherent, internal view of what racism is, but on pure opposition to left-wing definitions.

If a left wing person says somebody is racist, then that is strong evidence that they aren't racist. Like, literally for Vance if a person says "I was racist before it was cool" and left-wingers say, "That sounds dangerously racist" Vance believes that the person probably isn't racist. If leftists look at a museum exhibit about black America and say, "Wow, what a great way to combat racism" Vance will decide that it's radically racist.

Racism is just "The opposite of whatever the left says it is" which is how you end up with an Anti-Semitism Task Force Chief retweeting Identity Evropa.

And the whole politics of this motley crew seems to me to work this way. Their politics is based almost solely on maintaining a self-image as a scrappy underdog helping to lead people to victory a hegemonic evil force which is on the verge of collapse, and so their actual policy preferences veer wildly depending on which political tendency most allows them to maintain this self-image at any given moment.

And honestly, my sympathy for these chucklefucks is real limited at this point. If you want people to see you as heroic defenders of principle, try having a fucking principle and see how that goes. If you want pity for the cruelties perpetrated against you, stop being gleefully cruel to people who are weaker then you. And if you want people to see you as an underdog, well, tough shit if you're a billionaire because you just aren't and you should start admitting that.

You'll notice that Musk has already been ejected from Trump land, and also that all of his complaints about Trump are shit that any half-way informed person already knew before Musk hooked up with him.

PS - Rowling might have a case as somebody who just stood still while politics moved around her, and Zuckerberg strikes me mostly as a liar willing to say whatever words make the government side with Facebook at any given moment.

Am I right in feeling like there's a weirdly large category of public figure that's like: people who were seen as relatively normal, and either not involved with politics, or politically liberal-to-moderate, before 2020, and then went kind of (in the colloquial sense) crazy, in a right-wing direction, either around 2020 or since then?

Elon Musk and J.D. Vance, obviously. Tulsi Gabbard. J.K. Rowling, although she doesn't have the Trump connection that the others do. Kanye West, although in his case it was maybe a continuation of things he was already saying well before 2020. Possibly Mark Zuckerberg? Not strictly in the "went crazy" sense, but his PR image did seem to shift from a standard "coastal liberal" type to someone who expressed excitement about Trump's presidency.

Has this in fact been an anomalously large trend since 2020, and if so, does it have anything to do with long COVID? Or just like, the psychological effects of living through a pandemic?

I can't remember if I've seen other people talk about this before, at least explicitly. It seems like the kind of thing that people on Substack would write long analyses of

[morlock-holmes]

One thing that I'm starting to realize as I get older is that unlike in the movies, often the most radical acts of destructiveness will be perpetrated by people who have very little ideological fervor, at least not that they will admit to.

[morlock-holmes]

“The danger of training AI to be woke – in other words, lie – is deadly,” [Elon Musk] tweeted to Sam Altman in December 2022.

God the stupidest most self-absorbed people on earth are in charge right now.

Some speculation on mechahitler and why Grok is looking up Elon's opinions.

[morlock-holmes]

I wonder if there's some sort of distributed hypocrisy going on here. As in, there's just about room for someone to have a position like, "a Democratic candidate with Obama's views would work, since the Republicans reaction to him back then was because he's black." And there's also people who'll say to you, "How dare you say that right-wingers' values have anything to do with racism, you're exactly the sort of radical leftist who's alienating them." Unfortunately these two different groups of people start off saying "right wing radicalisation is because the Democrats won't compromise," indistinguishable until you've put in a whole load effort teasing apart their positions. Perhaps they don't even realise the extent to which they disagree with each other.

I mean, it really depends on what you mean by "Work".

I get pulled into side tangents because to some extent I sympathize with affirmative action and various Democratic policies. But that's not really my main point.

Trump's 2016 term represented probably the most wildly successful Republican presidency in the history of the modern party alignment.

And Biden still beat him.

I happen to think that the lesson of 2020 is, "The American public is so checked out that they are mainly deciding whether to vote against the incumbent, and neither party is going to get three consecutive terms in office for the foreseeable future"

In a fair election in 2028, I heavily favor "Not-Trump" to win, based on his platform of not being the incumbent.

The thing I object to is the idea that Republican paranoia and radicalism are best countered by aggressive moderation on the part of the Democrats.

Because we... like... already tried that.

After 8 years of Democratic reassurance (Remember the Beer Summit? Remember ACORN?) followed by four years of incredibly successful Republican work to ensure that the Supreme Court will reliably prevent the next several Democratic Presidents from doing anything that the base will object to, the result was...

The Jan 6th riots storming the capitol building.

12 years of the exact medicine that was supposed to cure the Republicans has only made them more feverish.

[morlock-holmes]

Like, to put it as simply as I can, the response to eight years of Barrack Obama and four of Trump was the Jan. 6th riots.

This suggests to me that no candidate the Democrats could possibly field will be moderate or conciliatory enough to moderate the Republican base or the Republican party.

The narrative is that the January 6th riots happened because, from 2008-2020, radical Democrats achieved so many profound and long-lasting victories and were so totally unwilling to work together with Republicans that the base had absolutely no choice but to storm the capitol building?

Come on.

EDIT: I can get sidetracked easily because I support much of the Democratic agenda.

But the point I really, really want to emphasize is that the current radicalism of the Republican party happened during 8 years of an incredibly conciliatory Democratic president followed immediately by the most successful Republican presidency in the history of the modern party alignment.

Trump's 3 Supreme Court Nominees have overturned Roe V. Wade and issued a series of sweeping decisions which mean that the country will be run on Republican terms for what may very well be the rest of my lifetime. Pretty much the entire Democratic agenda is now out of the Executive's hands, while the Executive still retains immense freedom to implement the Republican agenda, and a disciplined Republican Congress will likely be able to stonewall the Democrats ability to enact their legal agenda even during periods where the Republicans are the minority party.

And again, the response to this Democratic outreach and massive political success is a Republican party and base that is more radical, aggressive, and paranoid then it has been at any time in my life.

If the Republicans felt helpless and backed into a corner because they were helpless and backed into a corner, then conclliatory language and compromise might be logical responses.

But that feeling is not because they are actually backed into a corner.

If I have two empty hands raised over my head, and somebody is shouting "Stop pointing that gun at me!" well, it's a bit useless to say that I should make them feel better by dropping the gun.