Here's the thing about bullshit: it doesn't produce belief in the same (refutable) way that regular lies do.
A bullshitter's initial object is to get you to go along with the bullshit. And you do because bullshit, even when you know it's false, is contrived to feel good to go along with. But his longer term goal is to shape your attitudes towards things and people in a durable way.
In the end this produces a habit of immediate and facile assent (I won't dignify it with the name "belief") to any information that confirms the bullshitter's desired attitudes. It also produces a characteristic reaction to information that challenges those attitudes: whataboutism.
Whataboutism is a sure sign of someone strung out on bullshit. It defends bullshit-induced attitudes by shifting attention away from dissonant information and toward consonant information.
Let me try to be clear here. We KNOW a FISA warrant to investigate Russian ties to 'Trump campaign operatives' was issued in October. In theory that actually might not be a BAD thing IF they had obtained it based on ANY concrete evidence of actual collusion or even just actual manipulation (you can be accused of being an 'agent' of a 'foreign government' without actually knowing you are doing so..e.g the 'useful idiot' theory).
The way a FISA warrant is you have to show probable cause that the person on the other end is a "bad guy" (i.e. a terrorist or intelligence agent). Not that there was any collusion.
Secondly, you have to show to a FISA court panel made up of judges appointed by the Chief Justice of SCOTUS. A panel which consists almost entirely of Republicans.
So let's recap here: a Democratic White House colluded with a Republican dominated FBI (there has never been a FBI director who wasn't Republican) and an independent panel of Republican judges to spy on the Republican candidate.
Right.
This is the key element of a conspiracy theory: not the conspiracy per se, but a conspiracy of people who are working, in perfect secrecy, against their own interests.
Well, not caring much about safety will be a cost savings, not that they need it. China's current GDP is 9x larger than the US GDP was in 1969. That and given that technology has made many things cheaper, and the general outlines of how to do it have been proven, and it should be very feasible for them to mount an impressive mission.
Sure, it's physically possible to wiretap someone illegally. Lots of men do it with their wives and girlfriends: install a rogue app on their phone, or listening devices in their apartments. The fact that they have physical access to the places is key.
The difference is that the Executive Branch is a bureaucracy. The President doesn't have physical access to his target, he has to order the bureaucracy to do it, and that leaves a paper trail. Even he ordered everything to be done without writing anything down, the order will go down the chain of the command from political appointees down to civil servants who don't have the personal loyalty to the president to be trusted to do something illegal. I have to believe that official CIA covert ops aren't run that badly. The very fact that you need people rash enough to do those kinds of things means you can't trust them to be cautious, even if they're personally loyal.
This is why Nixon turned to his political flunkies, who, to coin a phrase, "knew some guys". The results were predictably misbegotten. The "Plumbers" group broke into the office of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist looking for dirt. The failed to locate Ellsberg's file because they themselves threw it on the floor without looking at it. Then there was their more successful wiretapping of the DNC at the Watergate Complex. Of the two devices they planted only one worked and that soon broke down, forcing them to attempt a second burglary. That second burglary was badly bungled and five "plumbers" were arrested, eventually leading to the downfall of the Nixon presidency.
People are right to fear the surveillance might of the US government. But using it for spying on political opponents was too risky to be feasible even in Nixon's day.
No, what we have to fear is routine data collection, bending or stretching the law and done under the color of legitimate national security purposes. Such datasets can be illegally accessed by a single rogue actor with relatively little risk, and that can be used for political spying.
Trump shoots off mouth about topic with no justification in fact. News at 11.
Which is exactly the point. When he doesn't like the way the news is talking about he changes it by saying something outrageous.
Donald Trump isn't crazy. And he isn't really careless -- not about the things that matter to him. He's manipulative. His supporters understand this, and don't mind when he is factually wrong because they understand he is a bullshit artist. They just think he's their bullshit artist.
The difference between bullshit and a conventional lie is that the bullshitter doesn't lie to deceive, he lies to produce an effect. Bullshitting is often safer and more effective than lying because a lie disproven is neutralized, but disproving bullshit is a waste of time because nobody is meant to believe it.
A couple of years ago I undertook to read the complete output of the science fiction writer H. Beam Piper, who died in 1964. For most of his career he was a bottom-of-the-pack pro-writer, managing to get published regularly but never quite making enough to quit his job as a laborer in the Altoona PA railroad yards.
That's because for the most of his career he was a technically mediocre writer. His stories, taken on their own, were adequate for the most part. But if you look at his stories as a body, they're quite spectacular, envisioning a consistent history stretching thirty thousand years into the future (and some direction laterally if you count his "paratime" stories).
We take this kind of "world building" for granted in the post-LotR era; many aspiring writers start by creating elaborate historical backstories. What set Piper apart from these naval-gazing wannabes is that his future history is built around a single, central idea: nothing ever works for long. Sooner or later some people stop doing the things that system needs to be done because they've forgot why it should be done; or other people figure out ways to game the system; or both.
His stories always end on a happy, hopeful note, but if you fit it into the timeline with the next story it turns out that everything must have gone to hell in the end.
In many ways what we are seeing looks like the Piperian historical senescence of American small-r republicanism. Some people have stopped doing some of the things the system needs (informing themselves and dealing with opposing viewpoints). Others have figured out how to game the system (buying politicians without legally appearing to do so; flooding the mediasphere with bullshit).
Like Sears. It used to be by far the dominant American retailer, a kind of combination of WalMart and Amazon with its extensive and paid-for retail and distribution network and pioneering mail order business. What killed them is complacency and lack of focus. Management had a money-making retail machine that was so large it couldn't really grow. Rather than focusing on running that cash cow efficiency, management let the retail cash cow fall apart as they tried to grow the company by moving into other things like banking and real estate developing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against diversifying, but I remember going to Sears in the 60s with my Mom, and it was a horrible place: dirty and disorganized and badly lit. And they terminated their catalog business just in time to miss the opening up of the Internet to commercial traffic. Had they played their cards conservatively Sears would have been Amazon.
Well, anything you build eventually has to be taken down, or falls down But decommissioning a wind turbine is a pretty straightforward process -- all you need is a pair of cranes and it takes just a few hours.
Pollution IS bad. It DOES kill people. And no people are "saved" by pollution. People are saved by the economic products, the by product of which is pollution.
Pollution is simply not desirable, as you seem to think.
And since (unfortunately) we cannot yet have an industrial society without some pollution, it's disingenuous to say that pollution causes those deaths because we don't know if reducing it, and thereby reducing our output, would be beneficial or harmful at each margin. It's somehow implying that the pollution isn't accepted as part of trade-off -- or that we intentionally pollute with no side benefit -- which is ludicrous.
Well it would be ludicrous, if that's what anyone was saying... excuse me, somehow implying. This is what is known as a straw man argument.
You advocate making a trade-off between pollution and its benefits. I agree. But if you want to make a rational trade-off, it's necessary to quantify the costs empircially. Which is not to say this study is correct in its conclusions; it almost certainly gets some things wrong, because studies like this are never perfect.
But undertaking a study like this does not somehow imply that people are unaware we live in a less-than-ideal world where every course of action you can choose has some undesirable consequences.
It's easy to see how dysfunctional your own country's politics are but somewhat harder to see how your rival countries act in self-defeating ways. Somehow we picture them as perfectly rational and disciplined (albeit depraved) actors.
Well, Indians were foreign nations, but you are shifting the discussion away here. I never said that using the military to quell insurrections was radical. I said blurring the distinction between internal and external security forces was radical.
If you can't see the distinction, try this analogy. Sometimes necessity forces you to put a drill bit in a power drill to drill out a hopelessly damaged screw. That doesn't make a drill bit a screwdriver.
That assumes you build the concrete structures underwater, which I agree would be insane. But that's not how civil engineers do that kind of stuff. For example when they build an immersed-tube tunnel they build the concrete sections onshore, seal the ends, then tow the floating sections out and sink them in place.
You can always find an impractical way to build anything, even something as well-understood as a wire suspension bridge. The question is can you find a workable way to build it.
People here always assume that companies just throw hundreds of millions of dollars into a project like this without actually having actual engineers figure out the construction and operation costs first.
Because gearing is also really inefficient, and you'd need to gear up the motion of the buoys as the rise in the water column so it's fast enough to spin a generator.
In contrast with this scheme you can retrieve the energy using a perfectly conventional (and highly efficient) hydroelectric turbine. The net efficiency is (presumably) greater.
In any case physical efficiency isn't quite as big a deal with renewables as it is with fossil fuels. Renewables capture energy that you're not paying for in the first place: sunshine, wind, tides. It's the cost of operation per unit of energy that matters, especially in a storage scheme like this where you're capturing energy you can't use for various reasons and getting some of it back later when prices are higher.
Well, I think this is an example of how engineering is about the intersection of economics and technology.
The basic physical principle here is quite mature: pump water against gravity to store energy. Retrieve that energy later by allowing water to flow with gravity. Back it the 60s they built a system to store off-peak power from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant by pumping water into a reservoir, and then retrieving that power during peak demand by running it through a conventional hydro plant.
This is the straightforward way to do it, but you need a place to build your reservoir that is above the place you take the water from. Well, let's say you take the water from Lake Constance, where do you put it? I don't think Liechtenstein would be happy if you decided to flood one of their mountain valleys. Liechtenstein has the highest per capita GDP in the world, so land there is valuable.
So here's the clever bit with the design; they take water from Lake Constance -- and they put it in Lake Constance!
Nice try, but calling out federal troops has been going on for a lot longer than since 1961. The earliest examples predate the adoption of the Constitution, the 1783 Pennsylvania Mutiny, after which the Continental Army was disbanded.
In 1792 Congress passed the Militia Act which provided for federalization of state militias in response to insurrection, and the act was used by President Washington that same year in response to the Whiskey Rebellion. In 1811 a combined force of local militia and federal troops put down a rebellion by newly enslaved Africans in the Territory of Orleans, which became Louisiana the following year. The US Navy was called out in 1831 to assist in putting down another slave rebellion. Four years later federal troops in DC were called out to deal with a bank riot in nearby Baltimore.
Federal military intervention picked up noticeably after the Civil War, but it was not new even then.
But there was one novel feature of Kennedy's calling out the Alabama Guard: it was the first use of federalized troop to protect the interests of someone other than major property owners.
Actually, neither position is peculiar, if you understand how republics actually work, as opposed to how they purport to work.
Going all the way back to Rome, powerful organs of the state (like the army or praetorian guard) tend to become autonomous and ungovernable. Over the years countless minor acts of expedience become traditions, and their constitutional role in the republic is either undermined or revised.
Today you can see this most clearly in Middle Eastern "republics", where it is never safe to talk about the "regime" without specifying which part. In Egypt the military is a major force in the economy, running businesses (like China's PLA does), and acting as a major source of social welfare and employment for its veterans. In Turkey the military plays an independent role in politics, exercising a kind of veto (sometimes unsuccessful) of populist Islamist politics. Americans are often mystified by our military aid to Pakistan, when its "government" so often acts like an enemy. It's not mysterious at all if you understand that that government is a collection of rival power centers.
Here in the US, one very useful extra-Constitutional tradition we have is the separation of internal security (local policing, federal law enforcement) and external security (the military). This introduces a fissure in the deep state that works against its tendency to become independent and ungovernable. Internal security always poses the greatest immediate risk to liberty; external security the greatest potential for becoming ungovernable. It's by default seen as unpatriotic to deny the military anything it claims it needs.
This is why Trump calling ICE raids a "military" operation was a big deal. Blurring the line between external and internal security is a radical, pseduo-conservative move that underlines a long and successful American tradition.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's the thing about bullshit: it doesn't produce belief in the same (refutable) way that regular lies do.
A bullshitter's initial object is to get you to go along with the bullshit. And you do because bullshit, even when you know it's false, is contrived to feel good to go along with. But his longer term goal is to shape your attitudes towards things and people in a durable way.
In the end this produces a habit of immediate and facile assent (I won't dignify it with the name "belief") to any information that confirms the bullshitter's desired attitudes. It also produces a characteristic reaction to information that challenges those attitudes: whataboutism.
Whataboutism is a sure sign of someone strung out on bullshit. It defends bullshit-induced attitudes by shifting attention away from dissonant information and toward consonant information.
Let me try to be clear here. We KNOW a FISA warrant to investigate Russian ties to 'Trump campaign operatives' was issued in October. In theory that actually might not be a BAD thing IF they had obtained it based on ANY concrete evidence of actual collusion or even just actual manipulation (you can be accused of being an 'agent' of a 'foreign government' without actually knowing you are doing so..e.g the 'useful idiot' theory).
The way a FISA warrant is you have to show probable cause that the person on the other end is a "bad guy" (i.e. a terrorist or intelligence agent). Not that there was any collusion.
Secondly, you have to show to a FISA court panel made up of judges appointed by the Chief Justice of SCOTUS. A panel which consists almost entirely of Republicans.
So let's recap here: a Democratic White House colluded with a Republican dominated FBI (there has never been a FBI director who wasn't Republican) and an independent panel of Republican judges to spy on the Republican candidate.
Right.
This is the key element of a conspiracy theory: not the conspiracy per se, but a conspiracy of people who are working, in perfect secrecy, against their own interests.
Well, not caring much about safety will be a cost savings, not that they need it. China's current GDP is 9x larger than the US GDP was in 1969. That and given that technology has made many things cheaper, and the general outlines of how to do it have been proven, and it should be very feasible for them to mount an impressive mission.
He's manipulative. His supporters understand this
Oh, if only they did.
Oh, but they do. They just don't believe he'd do it to them.
Sure, it's physically possible to wiretap someone illegally. Lots of men do it with their wives and girlfriends: install a rogue app on their phone, or listening devices in their apartments. The fact that they have physical access to the places is key.
The difference is that the Executive Branch is a bureaucracy. The President doesn't have physical access to his target, he has to order the bureaucracy to do it, and that leaves a paper trail. Even he ordered everything to be done without writing anything down, the order will go down the chain of the command from political appointees down to civil servants who don't have the personal loyalty to the president to be trusted to do something illegal. I have to believe that official CIA covert ops aren't run that badly. The very fact that you need people rash enough to do those kinds of things means you can't trust them to be cautious, even if they're personally loyal.
This is why Nixon turned to his political flunkies, who, to coin a phrase, "knew some guys". The results were predictably misbegotten. The "Plumbers" group broke into the office of whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg's psychiatrist looking for dirt. The failed to locate Ellsberg's file because they themselves threw it on the floor without looking at it. Then there was their more successful wiretapping of the DNC at the Watergate Complex. Of the two devices they planted only one worked and that soon broke down, forcing them to attempt a second burglary. That second burglary was badly bungled and five "plumbers" were arrested, eventually leading to the downfall of the Nixon presidency.
People are right to fear the surveillance might of the US government. But using it for spying on political opponents was too risky to be feasible even in Nixon's day.
No, what we have to fear is routine data collection, bending or stretching the law and done under the color of legitimate national security purposes. Such datasets can be illegally accessed by a single rogue actor with relatively little risk, and that can be used for political spying.
Trump shoots off mouth about topic with no justification in fact. News at 11.
Which is exactly the point. When he doesn't like the way the news is talking about he changes it by saying something outrageous.
Donald Trump isn't crazy. And he isn't really careless -- not about the things that matter to him. He's manipulative. His supporters understand this, and don't mind when he is factually wrong because they understand he is a bullshit artist. They just think he's their bullshit artist.
The difference between bullshit and a conventional lie is that the bullshitter doesn't lie to deceive, he lies to produce an effect. Bullshitting is often safer and more effective than lying because a lie disproven is neutralized, but disproving bullshit is a waste of time because nobody is meant to believe it.
A couple of years ago I undertook to read the complete output of the science fiction writer H. Beam Piper, who died in 1964. For most of his career he was a bottom-of-the-pack pro-writer, managing to get published regularly but never quite making enough to quit his job as a laborer in the Altoona PA railroad yards.
That's because for the most of his career he was a technically mediocre writer. His stories, taken on their own, were adequate for the most part. But if you look at his stories as a body, they're quite spectacular, envisioning a consistent history stretching thirty thousand years into the future (and some direction laterally if you count his "paratime" stories).
We take this kind of "world building" for granted in the post-LotR era; many aspiring writers start by creating elaborate historical backstories. What set Piper apart from these naval-gazing wannabes is that his future history is built around a single, central idea: nothing ever works for long. Sooner or later some people stop doing the things that system needs to be done because they've forgot why it should be done; or other people figure out ways to game the system; or both.
His stories always end on a happy, hopeful note, but if you fit it into the timeline with the next story it turns out that everything must have gone to hell in the end.
In many ways what we are seeing looks like the Piperian historical senescence of American small-r republicanism. Some people have stopped doing some of the things the system needs (informing themselves and dealing with opposing viewpoints). Others have figured out how to game the system (buying politicians without legally appearing to do so; flooding the mediasphere with bullshit).
With you, maybe.
That's not the scenario the poster is positing. He's talking about women who treat him as a rapist because of the way he looks at them.
No, but there are lots of creepy men.
Like Sears. It used to be by far the dominant American retailer, a kind of combination of WalMart and Amazon with its extensive and paid-for retail and distribution network and pioneering mail order business. What killed them is complacency and lack of focus. Management had a money-making retail machine that was so large it couldn't really grow. Rather than focusing on running that cash cow efficiency, management let the retail cash cow fall apart as they tried to grow the company by moving into other things like banking and real estate developing.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not against diversifying, but I remember going to Sears in the 60s with my Mom, and it was a horrible place: dirty and disorganized and badly lit. And they terminated their catalog business just in time to miss the opening up of the Internet to commercial traffic. Had they played their cards conservatively Sears would have been Amazon.
And with "if you look at me in the wrong way you are a rapist" style feminism.
Seriously, if you have experienced that "style" of feminism in person (as opposed to on social media), I suspect the problem may be your demeanor.
Well, anything you build eventually has to be taken down, or falls down But decommissioning a wind turbine is a pretty straightforward process -- all you need is a pair of cranes and it takes just a few hours.
Pollution IS bad. It DOES kill people. And no people are "saved" by pollution. People are saved by the economic products, the by product of which is pollution.
Pollution is simply not desirable, as you seem to think.
And since (unfortunately) we cannot yet have an industrial society without some pollution, it's disingenuous to say that pollution causes those deaths because we don't know if reducing it, and thereby reducing our output, would be beneficial or harmful at each margin. It's somehow implying that the pollution isn't accepted as part of trade-off -- or that we intentionally pollute with no side benefit -- which is ludicrous.
Well it would be ludicrous, if that's what anyone was saying ... excuse me, somehow implying. This is what is known as a straw man argument.
You advocate making a trade-off between pollution and its benefits. I agree. But if you want to make a rational trade-off, it's necessary to quantify the costs empircially. Which is not to say this study is correct in its conclusions; it almost certainly gets some things wrong, because studies like this are never perfect.
But undertaking a study like this does not somehow imply that people are unaware we live in a less-than-ideal world where every course of action you can choose has some undesirable consequences.
it is a tiny fraction of the overall system usage unless you have a severely underspecced machine.
Uh... isn't that the point here? How many CPU cycles you need to have to burn before your system isn't "severely underspecced"?
But is China in total control of itself?
It's easy to see how dysfunctional your own country's politics are but somewhat harder to see how your rival countries act in self-defeating ways. Somehow we picture them as perfectly rational and disciplined (albeit depraved) actors.
Well, Indians were foreign nations, but you are shifting the discussion away here. I never said that using the military to quell insurrections was radical. I said blurring the distinction between internal and external security forces was radical.
If you can't see the distinction, try this analogy. Sometimes necessity forces you to put a drill bit in a power drill to drill out a hopelessly damaged screw. That doesn't make a drill bit a screwdriver.
That assumes you build the concrete structures underwater, which I agree would be insane. But that's not how civil engineers do that kind of stuff. For example when they build an immersed-tube tunnel they build the concrete sections onshore, seal the ends, then tow the floating sections out and sink them in place.
You can always find an impractical way to build anything, even something as well-understood as a wire suspension bridge. The question is can you find a workable way to build it.
People here always assume that companies just throw hundreds of millions of dollars into a project like this without actually having actual engineers figure out the construction and operation costs first.
Ridiculously impractical compared to what? The only answer I can think of is building the storage facility elsewhere.
Because gearing is also really inefficient, and you'd need to gear up the motion of the buoys as the rise in the water column so it's fast enough to spin a generator.
In contrast with this scheme you can retrieve the energy using a perfectly conventional (and highly efficient) hydroelectric turbine. The net efficiency is (presumably) greater.
In any case physical efficiency isn't quite as big a deal with renewables as it is with fossil fuels. Renewables capture energy that you're not paying for in the first place: sunshine, wind, tides. It's the cost of operation per unit of energy that matters, especially in a storage scheme like this where you're capturing energy you can't use for various reasons and getting some of it back later when prices are higher.
Well, I think this is an example of how engineering is about the intersection of economics and technology.
The basic physical principle here is quite mature: pump water against gravity to store energy. Retrieve that energy later by allowing water to flow with gravity. Back it the 60s they built a system to store off-peak power from the Vermont Yankee nuclear plant by pumping water into a reservoir, and then retrieving that power during peak demand by running it through a conventional hydro plant.
This is the straightforward way to do it, but you need a place to build your reservoir that is above the place you take the water from. Well, let's say you take the water from Lake Constance, where do you put it? I don't think Liechtenstein would be happy if you decided to flood one of their mountain valleys. Liechtenstein has the highest per capita GDP in the world, so land there is valuable.
So here's the clever bit with the design; they take water from Lake Constance -- and they put it in Lake Constance!
Err... why would it have to change buoyancy?
1 newton over 1 m == 1 joule. All it has to do is exert force over a distance AFAICS.
Nice try, but calling out federal troops has been going on for a lot longer than since 1961. The earliest examples predate the adoption of the Constitution, the 1783 Pennsylvania Mutiny, after which the Continental Army was disbanded.
In 1792 Congress passed the Militia Act which provided for federalization of state militias in response to insurrection, and the act was used by President Washington that same year in response to the Whiskey Rebellion. In 1811 a combined force of local militia and federal troops put down a rebellion by newly enslaved Africans in the Territory of Orleans, which became Louisiana the following year. The US Navy was called out in 1831 to assist in putting down another slave rebellion. Four years later federal troops in DC were called out to deal with a bank riot in nearby Baltimore.
Federal military intervention picked up noticeably after the Civil War, but it was not new even then.
But there was one novel feature of Kennedy's calling out the Alabama Guard: it was the first use of federalized troop to protect the interests of someone other than major property owners.
Actually, neither position is peculiar, if you understand how republics actually work, as opposed to how they purport to work.
Going all the way back to Rome, powerful organs of the state (like the army or praetorian guard) tend to become autonomous and ungovernable. Over the years countless minor acts of expedience become traditions, and their constitutional role in the republic is either undermined or revised.
Today you can see this most clearly in Middle Eastern "republics", where it is never safe to talk about the "regime" without specifying which part. In Egypt the military is a major force in the economy, running businesses (like China's PLA does), and acting as a major source of social welfare and employment for its veterans. In Turkey the military plays an independent role in politics, exercising a kind of veto (sometimes unsuccessful) of populist Islamist politics. Americans are often mystified by our military aid to Pakistan, when its "government" so often acts like an enemy. It's not mysterious at all if you understand that that government is a collection of rival power centers.
Here in the US, one very useful extra-Constitutional tradition we have is the separation of internal security (local policing, federal law enforcement) and external security (the military). This introduces a fissure in the deep state that works against its tendency to become independent and ungovernable. Internal security always poses the greatest immediate risk to liberty; external security the greatest potential for becoming ungovernable. It's by default seen as unpatriotic to deny the military anything it claims it needs.
This is why Trump calling ICE raids a "military" operation was a big deal. Blurring the line between external and internal security is a radical, pseduo-conservative move that underlines a long and successful American tradition.