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> I think it's more about trust in propaganda. Both parties take a ton of money, and some of it always turns out to be from dubious people. A lot of those dubio

> I think it's more about trust in propaganda. Both parties take a ton of money, and some of it always turns out to be from dubious people. A lot of those dubious people go to jail. But this "SBF hasn't been arrested in the first 20 minutes so Democrats are corrupt" line is one I've seen as a talking point all over the US right. But it never comes with any perspective. So much "news discourse" today comes from people who have lost their minds to partisan politics. With every news item, the only question they ask is "how does this prove that my side is 100% right and very unfairly treated". It's not even the partisanship that is annoying about this, it's the straining for a connection. A lot of things don't have a meaningful connection to partisan politics, and trying to force it constantly leads to a lot of uninteresting noise. It's as if there were millions of people constantly trying to relate everything happening in the world to Weird Al Yankovic. Except that would at least be funny.

mjburgess 4y ago
Bingo. They're not trying to understand the case or offer an opinion about it. The term "virtue signalling" refers to a similar category of speech, ie., signalling (vs communicating). You can distinguish communication from signalling by the introduction of a hypothetical premise: suppose "The Issue" (eg., SBT) was discovered not to relate to "Identity" (eg., Left/Right, etc.), then would you/the-speaker still care? If not, then what you're actually concerned about is the impact of this issue on your ingroup/outgroup game, not the issue itself. Here, most either want to distance their identity from SBT, or associate it with their enemies.
hn_throwaway_99 4y ago
I want to take your comment and frame it. Honestly, the state of public political discourse these days makes me want to become a hermit and live in the middle of nowhere, primarily because it is extremely rare to see any good faith arguments. Instead, you have each side already knowing their desired outcome, and the only mental work going into the argument is "how can I pretend this event proves my side." And folks can say what they want about looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, but the sheer amount of conspiratorial nonsense that gets play at high levels, where it really shouldn't, is so much worse now than in the pre-Internet days. The thing that makes me particularly annoyed is when people's conspiracy theories don't make sense even if you believe all of their (usually false) points. I mean, if you believe that all politicians have 0 morals and only act in self interest, the idea that a politician who only cares about self interest would for some reason put their reputation on the line for SBF is insane. There is practically nobody, in public, sticking up for this villain, so even if a politician took money from him in the past, they have no reason to help him now. It's just totally logically inconsistent and makes absolutely no sense.

mjburgess 4y ago

Bingo. They're not trying to understand the case or offer an opinion about it. The term "virtue signalling" refers to a similar category of speech, ie., signalling (vs communicating). You can distinguish communication from signalling by the introduction of a hypothetical premise: suppose "The Issue" (eg., SBT) was discovered not to relate to "Identity" (eg., Left/Right, etc.), then would you/the-speaker still care? If not, then what you're actually concerned about is the impact of this issue on your ingroup/outgroup game, not the issue itself. Here, most either want to distance their identity from SBT, or associate it with their enemies.

hn_throwaway_99 4y ago

I want to take your comment and frame it. Honestly, the state of public political discourse these days makes me want to become a hermit and live in the middle of nowhere, primarily because it is extremely rare to see any good faith arguments. Instead, you have each side already knowing their desired outcome, and the only mental work going into the argument is "how can I pretend this event proves my side." And folks can say what they want about looking at the past with rose-colored glasses, but the sheer amount of conspiratorial nonsense that gets play at high levels, where it really shouldn't, is so much worse now than in the pre-Internet days. The thing that makes me particularly annoyed is when people's conspiracy theories don't make sense even if you believe all of their (usually false) points. I mean, if you believe that all politicians have 0 morals and only act in self interest, the idea that a politician who only cares about self interest would for some reason put their reputation on the line for SBF is insane. There is practically nobody, in public, sticking up for this villain, so even if a politician took money from him in the past, they have no reason to help him now. It's just totally logically inconsistent and makes absolutely no sense.