Musings from an iconoclast and hater of nonsense
This paper written by experts (you know, people who actually know a lot about their chosen subject) written by the Strategic Studies Institute, although a few years old, does a good job of why North Korea has become the Land of no Good Options for the USA.
After reading this, it should be fairly clear why Donald Trump’s current tactics of public ridicule are unlikely to be productive.
The best books about countries are usually written by people who did not grow up in the country. Growing up outside the goldfish bowl, they can cut through the assumptions and myths that are absorbed by people growing up in that country. The best diagnosis of many of the ills of the USA, “A Culture Of Complaint”, was written by an Australian.
This article about the UK, written by a Dutchman who lived in the UK for 6 years with his family, lays bare a lot of the shitty behavior and appalling attitudes that currently bedevil a lot of English people.
This article explains the long and sordid history of faux-insurgent railing and ranting against “elites” by politicians. The results can be seen in the mind-bogglingly incompetent Trump administration, where competence is trumped by connections.
My brief daily tour of Facebook reveals, as normal, that a significant number of people appear to think that making assertions without any supporting evidence comprises a good discussion contribution.
Er, no.
If I read an assertion with no supporting evidence, these are the thoughts that immediately pop up in my head about the writer:
1. The writer is seeking affirmation, not discussion or discovery
2. The writer is lazy and/or uninformed
3. The writer has a fixed view on the subject and therefore believes that evidence and argument are irrelevant or superfluous.
4. The writer does not know how to discuss and debate, and is likely to be uninterested in learning
As you tell, none of those are exactly complimentary thoughts.
If (1) and (3) are true, then it is likely that the writer is not interested in a good-faith discussion. That is a contra-indication to my becoming involved in the first place. However, I may try to jog the writer out of their zone by asking them to provide some evidence to back up the assertions.
Good faith discussion is not difficult, but it does require some basic standards of behavior to be useful. Among those are extending the principle of charity by assuming that you are dealing with an open-minded person, not a close-minded idiot, and a willingness to actually process input instead of being emotionally aroused or triggered by it.
I have reached a point where I can tell within 2 or at most 3 exchanges whether a good-faith discussion is even possible. Quite often, working on the principle that life is too short etc. etc. if I determine that it is not, I walk away.
Walking away is an interesting action in itself, since it often shows how mature the other party is. If their response is “so you got nothing?” or “then I won”, (or, as in one recent case, an imperious demand of “why have you not responded to me?”) you know you are dealing with somebody who, to varying degrees, is behaving like a juvenile, or who believes that “winning” or being vindicated or validated is more important than learning. Since I don’t go into discussions to “win”, but to learn, responses like that tend to validate why I walked away.
…as FEMA stops showing “bad” information about Puerto Rico and only shows the good information.
I feel like I have just moved to Eastern Europe or Russia at the end of the Cold War. This is parallel universe stuff.
The interesting thing is that one can actually get all of the numbers from the Puerto Rico government website. But the official US government relief body is not being allowed to report them.
…lots of media outlets are not even bothering to remind readers of why NFL players have been protesting?
I went through a bunch of news stories reporting on “local people don’t like NFL protest”. *ZERO* mentioned the reason for the protests.
— Anil Dash, Your Pal (@anildash) October 5, 2017
I’m shocked, I tell you! Shocked!
Well. not really. The complaints and animus against NFL players were never anything to do with their protest. Most of the whiners pissers and moaners don’t give a flying fish about that. They either want their football event to be unsullied by “politics”, although they were presumably quite happy with the paid patriotism, or they reflexively think the protests are “disrespectful, in which case they are clueless about the First Amendment and freedom.
In response to an article about the new political landscape in Germany after the rise of an ultra-nationalist party, here are the first two comments in the discussion thread:
Are these real people? Maybe not. They could be posting under a pseudonym. They could even be bots. However, what is certain is that this kind of eliminationist rhetoric has moved out of semi-underground forums and into the mainstream of political discourse in the last 18 months. For anybody who understands recent World history, this is alarming.
The field is getting crowded. CNN’s entry has appeared:
It is headline like this that easily convince the rest of the world that when it comes to personal ownership of firearms, the United States has lost its fucking mind.
