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Oh I'm definitely being sarcastic.....I am endlessly fascinated by the mental hoops (the various caveats they will inject into their articulation of "democracy"

Oh I'm definitely being sarcastic.....I am endlessly fascinated by the mental hoops (the various caveats they will inject into their articulation of "democracy") people will jump through to continue believing that their country "is" democratic. I appreciate that this is a very complicated space that requires flexibility, compromise, etc, my complaint is that we tend to pretend (often extremely enthusiastically) that the situation is actually simple. If something is good, I don't think it should require continual lying, deceit, and delusion to prop it up in the minds of the population.

shadowgovt 3y ago
I mean... 79% of Democrats say the FBI is doing a good job (https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2022-10-05/poll-americans-view-of-the-fbi-improves-but-partisan-gap-widens https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2022-10-0...). I'd say the US is democratic with a polity that is deeply split on some key issues. But that doesn't imply the government doesn't reflect the will of the people (sometimes the will of the people is "a hot mess;" this was one of the deep concerns of the people who set up the Constitution in the first place).
- mistermann 3y ago
  > I mean... 79% of Democrats say the FBI is doing a good job And what school curriculum here most of these people raised on? American school curriculum perchance? That we believe that the average person is anywhere near remotely competent to judge such things is a big problem in itself. > I'd say the US is democratic... Based on what criteria, the fact that they get to cast a vote now and then, for a person that was pre-chosen in some also questionably democratic process? If people were able to wonder what is true, perhaps we would stand a chance.
  - shadowgovt 3y ago
    > for a person that was pre-chosen in some also questionably democratic process? I'm disinclined to entertain that notion until I see the average participation in the primary elections go above 40%. People need to stop complaining about the system choosing leadership without their input if they aren't providing the input. Besides, the two thoughts you expressed are contradictory... If the public isn't sufficiently educated, they shouldn't be choosing their leadership. That was exactly the risk that the authors of the Constitution were concerned about when they put in checks against simple mobocracy. Maybe the opinion that the FBI shouldn't be surveilling folks stems from an uneducated point of view? Either way we slice it, it seems like Americans are getting the government they should have... Paternalistic because they cannot self-govern, or governed by them and beholden to their general apathy. > If people were able to wonder what is true, perhaps we would stand a chance. We have plenty of folks who wonder what is true. Some believe (still) that a child prostitution ring was operating out of the basement of a building with no basement. Some believe (still) a massively decentralized election was centrally rigged via voting machine manipulation in spite of a media company losing a defamation suit... An incredibly hard kind of suit for a media company to lose, because truth is always an affirmative defense. We need more critical thinkers, not blind questioners.
    - mistermann 3y ago
      Do you consider yourself to be a highly skilled critical thinker on that wonders what is true, on an absolute scale? (Note: this isn't purely snark, there is a point to this style of thinking )
      - shadowgovt 3y ago
        Oh, there's plenty of room for improvement on me, no doubt. But there's been more than enough money spent on teaching me critical thinking that if I'm not somewhere past the median, we're not capable of teaching it. I'm sure I'm carrying some unjustified beliefs. I've never counted "child sex trafficking out of the basement of a building with no basement" as one of them. And I generally try, if I notice I'm gathering extraordinary claims, to bring the extraordinary evidence; I started working the polls when I had questions about how elections are done (turns out it's not hard to do; most municipalities are desperate for volunteers) and learned quite a bit about potential failure modes and the mechanisms employed to mitigate them.
        mistermann 3y ago
        > Oh, there's plenty of room for improvement on me, no doubt. But there's been more than enough money spent on teaching me critical thinking that if I'm not somewhere past the median, we're not capable of teaching it. Does this same law (of optimality?⁰ apply to manufacturing processes and various other human undertakings? As for elections: seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight, and also that this is necessarily knowable?
        shadowgovt 3y ago
        I don't know what you mean by "law of optimality," so I can't answer that question. > As for elections: seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight, and also that this is necessarily knowable? It's definitely not airtight. But airtight is fragile. Not unlike the Internet, It's better than airtight: it's decentralized and distributed. Each state runs its own election. Each election district (varies from state-to-state, because it really is fifty states with fifty sets of laws) sets its own policies for running its election. Each polling location is locally administered. The coordination necessary to attack such a decentralized and adversarial system (remember: the party affiliation of individuals within this process varies wildly, with many of the "battleground states" run by GOP operatives) is preposterous to assume, especially as a secret conspiracy. Any such conspiracy would be at a scale that would be obvious. One potential attack vector would be electronic voting machines, but (a) as previously noted: lawsuit, settled, wouldn't have settled if the truth was on the side of those accused of defamation and (b) those digital records are backed (in most jurisdictions, and specifically in the jurisdictions that were considered "battleground" in 2020) by paper records. Aligning fraud in the two records to escape the notice of poll workers, counters, and board officials (who are, again, generally of both major parties) is an absurdly improbable scenario. It's been three years since the 2020 election. That's more than enough time for the accusations levied by one party to materialize into something concrete and legally-actionable, something other than ghosts and innuendo. When all the accuser has is ghosts and innuendo, the critical thinker asks why a concrete story of fraud with numbers and responsible parties hasn't manifested.

shadowgovt 3y ago

I mean... 79% of Democrats say the FBI is doing a good job (https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2022-10-05/poll-americans-view-of-the-fbi-improves-but-partisan-gap-widens https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2022-10-0...). I'd say the US is democratic with a polity that is deeply split on some key issues. But that doesn't imply the government doesn't reflect the will of the people (sometimes the will of the people is "a hot mess;" this was one of the deep concerns of the people who set up the Constitution in the first place).

mistermann 3y ago
> I mean... 79% of Democrats say the FBI is doing a good job And what school curriculum here most of these people raised on? American school curriculum perchance? That we believe that the average person is anywhere near remotely competent to judge such things is a big problem in itself. > I'd say the US is democratic... Based on what criteria, the fact that they get to cast a vote now and then, for a person that was pre-chosen in some also questionably democratic process? If people were able to wonder what is true, perhaps we would stand a chance.
- shadowgovt 3y ago
  > for a person that was pre-chosen in some also questionably democratic process? I'm disinclined to entertain that notion until I see the average participation in the primary elections go above 40%. People need to stop complaining about the system choosing leadership without their input if they aren't providing the input. Besides, the two thoughts you expressed are contradictory... If the public isn't sufficiently educated, they shouldn't be choosing their leadership. That was exactly the risk that the authors of the Constitution were concerned about when they put in checks against simple mobocracy. Maybe the opinion that the FBI shouldn't be surveilling folks stems from an uneducated point of view? Either way we slice it, it seems like Americans are getting the government they should have... Paternalistic because they cannot self-govern, or governed by them and beholden to their general apathy. > If people were able to wonder what is true, perhaps we would stand a chance. We have plenty of folks who wonder what is true. Some believe (still) that a child prostitution ring was operating out of the basement of a building with no basement. Some believe (still) a massively decentralized election was centrally rigged via voting machine manipulation in spite of a media company losing a defamation suit... An incredibly hard kind of suit for a media company to lose, because truth is always an affirmative defense. We need more critical thinkers, not blind questioners.
  - mistermann 3y ago
    Do you consider yourself to be a highly skilled critical thinker on that wonders what is true, on an absolute scale? (Note: this isn't purely snark, there is a point to this style of thinking )
    - shadowgovt 3y ago
      Oh, there's plenty of room for improvement on me, no doubt. But there's been more than enough money spent on teaching me critical thinking that if I'm not somewhere past the median, we're not capable of teaching it. I'm sure I'm carrying some unjustified beliefs. I've never counted "child sex trafficking out of the basement of a building with no basement" as one of them. And I generally try, if I notice I'm gathering extraordinary claims, to bring the extraordinary evidence; I started working the polls when I had questions about how elections are done (turns out it's not hard to do; most municipalities are desperate for volunteers) and learned quite a bit about potential failure modes and the mechanisms employed to mitigate them.
      - mistermann 3y ago
        > Oh, there's plenty of room for improvement on me, no doubt. But there's been more than enough money spent on teaching me critical thinking that if I'm not somewhere past the median, we're not capable of teaching it. Does this same law (of optimality?⁰ apply to manufacturing processes and various other human undertakings? As for elections: seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight, and also that this is necessarily knowable?
        shadowgovt 3y ago
        I don't know what you mean by "law of optimality," so I can't answer that question. > As for elections: seeing what you've seen, do you consider the system (across all states) to be more or less air tight, and also that this is necessarily knowable? It's definitely not airtight. But airtight is fragile. Not unlike the Internet, It's better than airtight: it's decentralized and distributed. Each state runs its own election. Each election district (varies from state-to-state, because it really is fifty states with fifty sets of laws) sets its own policies for running its election. Each polling location is locally administered. The coordination necessary to attack such a decentralized and adversarial system (remember: the party affiliation of individuals within this process varies wildly, with many of the "battleground states" run by GOP operatives) is preposterous to assume, especially as a secret conspiracy. Any such conspiracy would be at a scale that would be obvious. One potential attack vector would be electronic voting machines, but (a) as previously noted: lawsuit, settled, wouldn't have settled if the truth was on the side of those accused of defamation and (b) those digital records are backed (in most jurisdictions, and specifically in the jurisdictions that were considered "battleground" in 2020) by paper records. Aligning fraud in the two records to escape the notice of poll workers, counters, and board officials (who are, again, generally of both major parties) is an absurdly improbable scenario. It's been three years since the 2020 election. That's more than enough time for the accusations levied by one party to materialize into something concrete and legally-actionable, something other than ghosts and innuendo. When all the accuser has is ghosts and innuendo, the critical thinker asks why a concrete story of fraud with numbers and responsible parties hasn't manifested.