Statement from Jerome Powell

Usually followed by "... but I'd still vote for him again".

If I might add a couple of quotes:

"What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century. The merciless process into which totalitarianism drives and organizes the masses looks like a suicidal escape from this reality."

"Politically speaking, tribal nationalism always insists that its own people is surrounded by ‘a world of enemies,’ ‘one against all,’ that a fundamental difference exists between this people and all others. It claims its people to be unique, individual, incompatible with all others, and denies theoretically the very possibility of a common mankind long before it is used to destroy the humanity of man."

"Society is always prone to accept a person offhand for what he pretends to be, so that a crackpot posing as a genius always has a certain chance to be believed. In modern society, with its characteristic lack of discerning judgment, this tendency is strengthened, so that someone who not only holds opinions but also presents them in a tone of unshakable conviction will not so easily forfeit his prestige, no matter how many times he has been demonstrably wrong."

"Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness."

"The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (that is, the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (that is, the standards of thought) no longer exist."

-- Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism

Also Arendt: "The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as a lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to this end — is being destroyed."

> Who cares how they're doing it in Albania?

It would be interesting comparison, actually. As interesting as French, Germany or whatever.

> It used to be better in America, now it's worse and it's taken our entire society with it. [...] They peaked in 1992 and have been steadily decaying since.

I checked out tests and it is not true. Reading scores in 2022 were still higher then those in 1992. https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=38

So, yeah, this would be an interesting historical comparison. It was worst most of the time.

> These people lack the ability to think critically because they never learned it. They're the ones that open phishing emails and get taken by shady real estate con-men and Nigerian prince scammers.

You are confusing two different things here. First off, highly educated people are in fact vulnerable to scammers ... frequently because of their own confidence.

> You can be semi-literate and be a good person. You can't be semi-literate and make good decisions. Not in the modern world.

But issue in modern world are not people just dont make good decisions. It is people who make immoral decisions. Vance have good reading skills, but he is still a fascist.

> You'll also note that 1992 was the year Dan Quayle was disqualified from the presidency because he couldn't spell potato.

This is not an example of mass of people using critical thinking and acting rationally. This is an example of blown up reaction ala Twitter mob latching on something trivial and making a big deal out of it. This is example of what happen when soundbite wins over substance.

Oh that's bothersome, and it's too late to edit. Above sentence should begin "The Fed."

So more broadly, calling for any sort of capital punishment is also "political violence"? Even if you're against capital punishment, comparing it to something like Charlie Kirk getting shot is disingenuous. When people think of "political violence" they're thinking of the former, not capital punishment. Lumping the two together is like "do you support criminals? No? Why do you support Nelson Mandela, a convicted criminal?"