How America Went Haywire - Kurt Andersen
Link to the article:https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/how-america-lost-its-mind/534231/
This short video can serve as introduction:https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=131&v=15ovRt5IW6Q
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" " " " " " I wasn't going to post this because the whole thing is long as fuck and I doubt people will read everything, but I think the article is too relevant to something else that I've saw:
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Sauce:https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/896326301832925184 Last bumped on Aug 17, 2017, 10:37:45 AM
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Shit, some of those tweets are ignorant as fuck.
GGG banning all political discussion shortly after getting acquired by China is a weird coincidence.
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" It's just another twitter racist. Deposit posts in nearest garbage bin where they belong. --- re: the main topic, seems like an interesting discussion that is marred entirely by political speech. The assertion that the main reason for a Trump presidency is fantasy is plainly incorrect and a cheap dig at "the other". There is likely a small percentage of Americans that live outside conventional reality on both sides of the political spectrum. I would wager that the number of people convinced that Obama was going to try to take away everyone's guns (fantasy #1) is not dissimilar from the number of people convinced that HRC's e-mails were faked (fantasy #2). Or that the number of people convinced that the Clinton family kills people to keep things quiet (fantasy #3) is roughly the same as those that honestly believe the recent push-poll about Republicans wanting to postpone elections (fantasy #4). When the dust clears, the baser truths remain. Truths about the amount of taxation people want to manage, or how many resources we have or need, or how much environmentalism we care to support at some cost, or what kind of people should sit on our Supreme Court. The main thrust of the article is that we have to return to reality, which seems like a good thing to hope for. Curious advice from a novelist that writes for The Atlantic, though, and who was a teenager in the generation when it all "went wrong". Also I enjoyed the nice little paragraph about how libertarianism is infantile and based solely on Randian philosophy. What a guy. | |
"We do not have too much of that good thing. Does reason remain free to combat unreason? If you're a member of the press, I guess so; if you're an engineer at Google, not so much. I would remind Mr. Anderson to check his privilege. Still, this is why God founded Anonymous. Reason might not be free to invade the echo chambers of the left, but anyone can go into the echo chambers of the right and debate them. But do people do this? For the next few days, yes, to signal their virtue (ScrotieMcB said hypocritically). But as someone who argued with national socialists on the regular pre-Charlottesville, I can say confidently that reason has been really slacking off when it comes to combatting unreason. So soneka, have you considered the possibility the maybe /pol/ needs to read your post more than we do? You too can be Anonymous. But maybe hold off for a few days. Like I said, lots of virtue signallers currently. "The mainstream media convinces people the mainstream media cannot be trusted. Have you already forgotten WMDs in Iraq, much less 2016 coverage that reading Wikileaks is illegal or the preelection polling? They have a clear bias and deserve to be viewed with a critical eye. The problem is this: once the conservative anti-MSM propagandists tear the golden statue of Wolf Blitzer down from its pedestal, what happens to that exalted position? Is it replaced with the bust of Alex Jones, a new fountainhead of premature enlightenment to be swallowed on blind faith? (For the record, I don't believe InfoWars is significantly worse than CNN, but it most certainly is an upgrade.) Trust should be earned, and a great many in the alternative media have not earned it. You're not really "woke" if you're conscious enough only to move from the bedroom to the living room sofa then pass out again; you're still in dreamland, you're just laying in a different bed. We've got mainstream media liars and alternative media liars. The false dichotomy. The pincer attack. Poison as food and poison as antidote. Re: tweets... Affirmative Action is 1) law and 2) discrimination against white males. In order to "justify" it on fight-fire-with-fire grounds, its supporters must claim extralegal discrimination against women and ethnic minorities equal to or greater to Affirmative Action currently exists. But I don't believe anything can be justified by discrimination against those who have not necessarily discriminated against anyone. When Stephen Colbert was killed by HYDRA's Project Insight in 2014, the comedy world lost a hero. Since his life model decoy isn't up to the task, please do not mistake my performance as political discussion. I'm just doing what Steve would have wanted. Last edited by ScrotieMcB on Aug 14, 2017, 4:29:26 PM
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" Yup, agreed. As for the article, a lot of overly opinionated mental flagellation. ▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄▄
▒▒▒▒░░░░░ cipher_nemo ░░░░░▒▒▒▒ │ Waggro Level: ♠○○○○ │ 1244 ▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀▀ |
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He writes well. His magical thinking, however doesn't really fly with anyone who is even slightly informed on the subject.
Let's take his comments: "Why are we like this? The short answer is because we’re Americans—because being American means we can believe anything we want; that our beliefs are equal or superior to anyone else’s, experts be damned. Once people commit to that approach, the world turns inside out, and no cause-and-effect connection is fixed. The credible becomes incredible and the incredible credible." Has Kurt Andersen never traveled outside the United States? When he did travel, did he talk to people who live in these other countries? There is no one country with a monopoly on unusual ideas, and what people consider the truth depends on their background, locale, education, personal experiences and so on. Sadly, Kurt isn't alone in his false equivalencies, where he subjugates observation and documented facts to personal biases. Even well educated professionals are often deluded by their bias to overlook key data. Compare his lackadaisical logic with real science: Perceptual Biases in Relation to Paranormal and Conspiracy Beliefs https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4482736/ From the abstract: "Previous studies have shown that one’s prior beliefs have a strong effect on perceptual decision-making and attentional processing. The present study extends these findings by investigating how individual differences in paranormal and conspiracy beliefs are related to perceptual and attentional biases. Two field studies were conducted in which visitors of a paranormal conducted a perceptual decision making task (i.e. the face / house categorization task; Experiment 1) or a visual attention task (i.e. the global / local processing task; Experiment 2). In the first experiment it was found that skeptics compared to believers more often incorrectly categorized ambiguous face stimuli as representing a house, indicating that disbelief rather than belief in the paranormal is driving the bias observed for the categorization of ambiguous stimuli. " The research study goes on to demonstrate biases in both styles of thinking, and categorizes them as global-to-local interference effect or local-to-global interference effect. A rundown of what that entails can be found here: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00539/full Kurt conveniently ignores that the vast majority of humans have believed and still believe in some things that are scientifically questionable. His brain isn't wired better than those who do. Nor are the brains of the scientists who do such studies and keep reporting "contradictory" conspiracy beliefs. There was another article I was reading on this, where they writer calmly and falsely claimed that any two ideas were less likely to be true than one of those ideas alone. Had he taken his logic a step further and asked - is it less likely that the Earth is round because the speed of light is fixed? He could have discovered that things that are true, don't have a likelihood of being true - they are or they aren't. Further, if things are related in a cause and effect manner (Fixed Gravity, Wind resistance resulting in terminal velocity) than unrelated ideas can become logically intertwined. Whether that logic is sound or whether the relationship actually exists, and why the subject believes a relationship exists should be the focus of their studies. For "scientists" to assume that all people should think the same way is bad thinking. It is almost as if they didn't believe in evolution and the diversity of the species. Its essentially all fun and games now anyways, just about everything these experts are supposing will be rewritten with measurable, repeatable data from PET scans. The experts WON'T be happy with what they find. PoE Origins - Piety's story http://www.pathofexile.com/forum/view-thread/2081910 Last edited by DalaiLama on Aug 17, 2017, 10:40:23 AM
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