bahurd

iTrader: (8)

I'm not sure the framers, if they had the foresight, would've wanted a minority dictating to the majority anymore than the Article Two advice and consent clause allowing a Supreme Court nomination to be blocked because of party. But that's an argument for another day and is what the amendment process is for.

And I'm aware a direct vote by the population wasn't the intent of the framers.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

^ See, now that's an argument that I can respect.

+ (I assigned it to the texting for seniors shirt.)

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

silly crybaby leftist talking points suggest lack of adaption.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

talk to me about the house of reps and senate...

here's a good read on the subject by some dude no one has ever heard of: http://xroads.virginia.edu/~hyper/detoc/1_ch15.htm

The Driver

And multiple bankrutpcy seeker businessmen, who are incapable of been for once honest to their spouses, while denying having made statements that were recorded verbatim.

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

I suspect if he was alive today he'd see the current USA not unlike that of his France in the early 1800's. If you like Tocqueville's writings then read this article: What Would Alexis de Tocqueville Have Made of the 2016 US Presidential Election? maybe you have.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

It's interesting to watch how the Balance of Snowflake vs. the Balance of Alpha shifts back and forth over the years, depending upon which party the current President claims to associate themself with.

I note that there seems to be much more reactionary apologism / revisionism being conducted by The Faithful during the present administration than during any else of recent memory.

I really wish that I had the personal perspective of someone who was a literate and informed adult during the administrations of Kennedy and Nixon, as I feel that they would provide a measure of meaningful context for the present situation.

The Driver

It's even better when the ones calling us snowflakes nowadays, were at best JROTC cadets. While stationed @ Ft. Bragg, as we were digging foxholes, we were called 1,000 things, but never a snowflake.
Even better, I was a registered Republican for almost 30 years, and was a founding member of my HS Junior Republicans chapter, and a V.P. of my College Republicans chapter.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

And that's really the underlying problem.

I'm not accusing you of being a ****, just illustrating how what you wrote is, in all seriousness, perceived by a disturbingly large (and growing) percentage of the electorate.

As a bona-fide expert on truth (see my avatar for proof), I can attest that it is fungible.

Are we living in a post-truth era? Yes, but that’s because we’re a post-truth species.
Sep 7, 2018 / Yuval Noah Harari

Shared fictions — in the form of news, religions, novels, sports, money, even brands — fill our lives, but that’s OK. It’s these shared beliefs that have helped humans cooperate and conquer the planet, explains historian Yuval Harari.

We are repeatedly told these days that we have entered the terrifying new era of post-truth, in which not just particular facts but entire histories might be faked. But if this is the era of post-truth, when, exactly, was the halcyon age of truth? And what triggered our transition to the post-truth era? The internet? Social media? The rise of Putin and Trump?

A cursory look at history reveals that propaganda and disinformation are nothing new. In fact, humans have always lived in the age of post-truth. Homo sapiens is a post-truth species, who conquered this planet thanks above all to the unique human ability to create and spread fictions. We are the only mammals that can cooperate with numerous strangers because only we can invent fictional stories, spread them around, and convince millions of others to believe in them. As long as everybody believes in the same fictions, we all obey the same laws and can thereby cooperate effectively.

Centuries ago, millions of Christians locked themselves inside a self-reinforcing mythological bubble, never daring to question the factual veracity of the Bible, while millions of Muslims put their unquestioning faith in the Quran. We have zero scientific evidence that Eve was tempted by the serpent, that the souls of all infidels burn in hell after they die, or that the creator of the universe doesn’t like it when a Brahmin marries a Dalit — yet billions of people have believed in these stories for thousands of years.

Some fake news lasts forever.

I am aware that many people might be upset by my equating religion with fake news, but that’s exactly the point. When a thousand people believe some made-up story for one month, that’s fake news. When a billion people believe it for a thousand years, that’s a religion, and we are admonished not to call it “fake news” in order not to hurt the feelings of the faithful (or incur their wrath).

Please note that I am not denying the effectiveness or potential benevolence of religion — just the opposite. For better or worse, fiction is among the most effective tools in humanity’s tool kit. By bringing people together, religious creeds make large-scale human cooperation possible. They inspire people to build hospitals, schools and bridges in addition to armies and prisons. Much of the Bible may be fictional, but it can still bring joy to billions and can still encourage humans to be compassionate, courageous, and creative— just like other great works of fiction, such as Don Quixote, War and Peace and the Harry Potter books.

Again, some people might be offended by my comparison of the Bible to Harry Potter. If you are a scientifically minded Christian, you might argue that the holy book was never meant to be read as a factual account, but rather as a metaphorical story containing deep wisdom. But isn’t that true of the Harry Potter stories too?

Of course, not all religious myths have been beneficent. On August 29, 1255, the body of a nine-year-old English boy called Hugh was found in a well in the town of Lincoln. Rumor quickly spread that Hugh had been ritually murdered by the local Jews. The story only grew with retelling, and one of the most renowned English chroniclers of the day, Matthew Paris, provided a detailed and gory description of how prominent Jews from throughout England gathered in Lincoln to fatten up, torture, and finally crucify the abandoned child. Nineteen Jews were tried and executed for the alleged murder. Similar blood libels became popular in other English towns, leading to a series of pogroms in which whole Jewish communities were massacred. Eventually, in 1290, the entire Jewish population of England was expelled.

The story doesn’t end there. A century after the expulsion of the Jews, Geoffrey Chaucer included a blood libel modeled on the story of Hugh of Lincoln in the Canterbury Tales (“The Prioress’s Tale”). The tale culminates with the hanging of the Jews. Similar blood libels subsequently became a staple of every anti-Semitic movement from late medieval Spain to modern Russia.

Hugh of Lincoln was buried in Lincoln Cathedral and venerated as a saint. He was reputed to perform various miracles, and his tomb continued to draw pilgrims even centuries after the expulsion of all Jews from England. Only in 1955 — ten years after the Holocaust — did Lincoln Cathedral repudiate the blood libel story, placing a plaque near Hugh’s tomb that reads:

“Trumped-up stories of “ritual murders” of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later. These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives. Lincoln had its own legend and the alleged victim was buried in the Cathedral in the year 1255. Such stories do not redound to the credit of Christendom.”

Well, some fake news only lasts seven hundred years.

Ancient religions have not been the only ones to use fiction to cement cooperation. In more recent times, each nation has created its own national mythology, while movements such as communism, fascism and liberalism fashioned elaborate self-reinforcing credos. Joseph Goebbels, the **** propaganda maestro, allegedly explained his method thus: “A lie told once remains a lie, but a lie told a thousand times becomes the truth.” In Mein KampfHitler wrote, “The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly — it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.” Can any present-day fake-news peddler improve on that?

Commercial firms also rely on fiction and fake news. Branding often involves retelling the same fictional story again and again, until people become convinced it is the truth. What images come to mind when you think about Coca-Cola? Do you think about healthy young people engaging in sports and having fun together? Or do you think about overweight diabetes patients lying in a hospital bed? Drinking lots of Coca-Cola will not make you young, will not make you healthy, and will not make you athletic — rather, it will increase your chances of suffering from obesity and diabetes. Yet for decades Coca-Cola has invested billions of dollars in linking itself to youth, health, and sports — and billions of humans subconsciously believe in this linkage.

The truth is, truth has never been high on the agenda of Homo sapiens. If you stick to unalloyed reality, few people will follow you. False stories have an intrinsic advantage over the truth when it comes to uniting people. If you want to gauge group loyalty, requiring people to believe an absurdity is a far better test than asking them to believe the truth. If the chief says the sun rises in the west and sets in the east, only true loyalists will clap their hands. Similarly, if all your neighbors believe the same outrageous tale, you can count on them to stand together in times of crisis. If they are willing to believe only accredited facts, what does that prove?

You might argue that in some cases it is possible to organize people effectively through consensual agreement rather than through fictions. In the economic sphere, money and corporations bind people together far more effectively than any god or holy book, even though they are just a human convention. In the case of a holy book, a true believer would say, “I believe that the book is sacred,” while in the case of the dollar, a true believer would say only, “I believe that other people believe that the dollar is valuable.” It is obvious that the dollar is just a human creation, yet people all over the world respect it. If so, why can’t humans abandon all myths and fictions and organize themselves on the basis of consensual conventions such as the dollar?

Yet the difference between holy books and money is far smaller than it might seem. When most people see a dollar bill, they forget that it is just a human convention. As they see the green piece of paper with the picture of the dead white man, they see it as something valuable in and of itself. They hardly ever remind themselves, “Actually, this is a worthless piece of paper, but because other people view it as valuable, I can make use of it.” If you observed a human brain in an fMRI scanner, you would see that as someone is presented with a suitcase full of hundred-dollar bills, the parts of the brain that start buzzing with excitement are not the skeptical parts but the greedy parts. Conversely, in the vast majority of cases people begin to sanctify the Bible or the Vedas only after long and repeated exposure to others who view it as sacred. We learn to respect holy books in exactly the same way we learn to respect paper currency.

For this reason there is no strict division in practice between knowing that something is just a human convention and believing that something is inherently valuable. In many cases, people are ambiguous or forgetful about this division. To give another example, in a deep philosophical discussion about it, almost everybody would agree that corporations are fictional stories created by human beings. Microsoft isn’t the buildings it owns, the people it employs, or the shareholders it serves — rather, it is an intricate legal fiction woven by lawmakers and lawyers. Yet 99 percent of the time, we aren’t engaged in deep philosophical discussions, and we treat corporations as if they are real entities, just like tigers or humans.

Blurring the line between fiction and reality can be done for many purposes, starting with “having fun” and going all the way to “survival.” You cannot play games or read novels unless you suspend disbelief. To really enjoy soccer, you have to accept the rules and forget for at least ninety minutes that they are merely human inventions. If you don’t, you will think it utterly ridiculous for 22 people to go running after a ball. Soccer might begin with just having fun, but it can become far more serious stuff, as any English hooligan or Argentinian nationalist will attest. Soccer can help formulate personal identities, it can cement large-scale communities, and it can even provide reasons for violence.

Humans have a remarkable ability to know and not know at the same time. Or, more correctly, they can know something when they really think about it, but most of the time they don’t think about it, so they don’t know it. If you really focus, you realize that money is fiction. But you usually don’t think about it. If you are asked about it, you know that soccer is a human invention. But in the heat of a match, nobody asks. If you devote the time and energy, you can discover that nations are elaborate yarns. But in the midst of a war, you don’t have the time and energy.

Truth and power can travel together only so far. Sooner or later they go their separate paths. If you want power, at some point you will have to spread fictions. If you want to know the truth about the world, at some point you will have to renounce power. You will have to admit things — for example, about the sources of your own power — that will anger allies, dishearten followers, or undermine social harmony.

Scholars throughout history have faced this dilemma: Do they serve power or truth? Should they aim to unite people by making sure everyone believes in the same story, or should they let people know the truth even at the price of disunity? The most powerful scholarly establishments — whether of Christian priests, Confucian mandarins or Communist ideologues — placed unity above truth. That’s why they were so powerful.

As a species, humans prefer power to truth. We spend far more time and effort on trying to control the world than on trying to understand it — and even when we try to understand it, we usually do so in the hope that understanding the world will make it easier to control it. If you dream of a society in which truth reigns supreme and myths are ignored, you have little to expect from Homo sapiens. Better to try your luck with chimps.

Excerpted with permission from the new book 21 Lessons for the 21st Century by Yuval Harari, published by Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2018 by Yuval Noah Harari.

https://ideas.ted.com/are-we-living-...truth-species/

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

I was a young adult during Nixon. Informed as much as reading the newspapers and evening news as you could be. By the end, like most, I was convinced he was crooked. While waiting on a crew bus to the flight line at then Pope AFB I watched him on tv climb into the helicopter thinking good riddance.

In the beginning of that investigation I can remember my parents telling me how unfair it all was and how he was being "railroaded". By the end, they were as convinced as anyone I'd met. Because they trusted what they read and saw and trusted the investigation was conducted justly.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

let us eat cake.





are we going to see antifa send the patriarchy to the guillotines?

The Driver

Hell, I was a Nixon apologist, well into my 30's not even a decade ago. Funny, Pope AFB, is where I'd carry my chute unto a C-130 or C-141 to do our jumps!

The Driver

If all you measure and quantify in life, is disclosed by the NYSE index, you must live a seriously empty life. This from someone with two business B.A.'s (Hotel & Rest Mngmt, Accounting), and a Business M.S. (Masters in Accounting).

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

Your chart reminded me of something...

Colin Kaepernick Campaign Gives Nike a Big Sales Boost

So we'll see how long it takes the stock price to tick back up.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

no one thought nike was going to tank, just like facebook isnt -- we all know how much anti-capitalist socialists love to give their money to "socially aware" for-profit companies.

bahurd

iTrader: (8)

Nike is a multinational company. Apparently the ad campaign is a hit around the world. Stock price will catch up to revenue streams.

Smart business move. I thought you were all for business?

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

I can't speak for Brainey, but personally, I'm more of an S&P500 kind of guy.


I'm really starting to think that trading on bad social media PR may be the next day-trading fad.

I'd be ying if I said I wasn't feeling really strong "buy" signals on Tesla at COB yesterday.


in unrelated news, I cracked the screen on my Galaxy S8. It's a small fracture, but after ten years of smartphone ownership, I have officially become one of "those people."

I feel much shame.

Braineack

iTrader: (62)

dont worry, i went to art school.

The Driver

I know you didn't. If you did, you wouldn't care what the NYSE is.

Yes, my 401K is up 17% YTD, but honestly that means nothing to me. I'll gladly give it back, for a POTUS who actually knows what he/she is doing.

Joe Perez

iTrader: (8)

PM me to discuss terms for this trade.