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You can fool some of the people, all of the time
121–130 of 229 posts
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#122So... I’m skeptical of the claims that we automatically believe what we hear. Especially when they use Milgram as support.
The Milgram experiment is problematic, yes. It's the most narrative-friendly, but there's an enormous body of work on this question, and it seems largely to point in that direction. (Google Scholar claims 819,000 results for "confirmation bias".)
But confirmation bias is very different than believing everything you hear automatically (by default).
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
The relevant word isn’t “force” it’s “consent”. All forms of government to some extent or another have to maintain a monopoly on legal violence and use force. The distinction with democracy is that the government secures and maintains the consent of those being governed.
I was born in a Democracy. Democracy was forced upon me. I never gave my consent. Note: I'm not talking about whether Democracy is good or bad, just about my "consent". edit: fixed typo
I'm not sure what the parent meant by consent, but you are in fact allowed to leave and resign your citizenship. So you aren't forced into the constitution.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#124Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#125I think the rise of lies has little to do with humans being hardwired to resolve questions using emotions over reason. We prefer lies because we want a complex world to be simple, predictable, and manageable. Obviously it's not, so the only way that powerless people can believe their lives aren't spinning out of control is for authority figures to tell them what they want to hear: 1) every problem is simple and 2) a…
Are these mutually exclusive ideas? I feel there's overlap between them. Acting based on emotional pull can also reduce cognitive overhead compared to the expensive process of making decisions predicated on logic.
On the other hand, lies don't necessary simplify worldviews either. We shouldn't forget that a significant part of the population is willing to engage in conspiracy theories that all too often draw lines between loosely correlated events.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#126Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#127My pet theory is that democracy is more tolerable because it alternates between incompetent people fast enough to keep people's hopes alive.
In that vein I often think of democracy of an escape valve chimera. You get to scream on paper for a while until the next overload.
I'd deeply love an analysis about the effectiveness of voting / political systems in relation to goals/results. We would probably choke on the accountability issue right away.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Historically, monarchy’s seem to be more stable and result in less open warfare. How did you come to that conclusion? It seems like ahistorical nonsense to me.
Plenty of research supports this, for example this trying to find why so many new democracies result in civil wars: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20752195?seq=1#page_scan_tab_co... By comparison England lasted from 886 to 1642 without open civil war. At the extreme Harappan civilization seems to have lasted 2,000 years without an open civil war or really any major wars.
Except for the Hundred Year War, the War of the Roses, and the many other smaller English civil wars.
But yes, if you exclude all the civil wars then England had no civil wars during that time period.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
Democracy is nothing more than a system that replaces swords/bullets with votes. That's it. The fight for power (aka. resources) it inescapable and the only thing that democracy did, was to change the field that this fight is fought on. Democracy is more tolerable because no people die (in the open) when the landscape of power changes. The only two benefits of democracy to "the people" are: (1) the fact that they hav…
Resources? The real fight is now for people's minds. We already have orders of magnitude more resources than 100 years ago and almost everyone can benefit from them.
Hello, conflict theory sociologist here.
What? Absolutely agree that we have a ton more resources than previously. However, as has always been the case, they're not equitably distributed. Plenty of people are removed from resources they want or need.
Look at the US. We still have homeless people. We still have people dying of curable diseases. The fight for resources is real to plenty of people.
Re: You can fool some of the people, all of the time
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
The relevant word isn’t “force” it’s “consent”. All forms of government to some extent or another have to maintain a monopoly on legal violence and use force. The distinction with democracy is that the government secures and maintains the consent of those being governed.
It's less rule by consent and more rule by mob. Just because 50.5% of people vote for something I disagree with, doesn't mean I suddenly consent to it being law. I still don't have a choice and must unconsentually comply, otherwise "men with monopoly on legal violence" come and kill me or take me to prison. The only other choices are 1. convince the 1% (literally millions) of people to change their mind and get that…
You forget the second amendment remedy. The USA was founded by destroying the agents of the state that taxed and oppressed the people.