trenton

The Ukrainian advance continues with the successful encirclement of Lyman. Russia used referendums that were so fake that they didn't even force people to vote yes. Instead they counted blank votes as yes resulting in over 99% approval for Russian annexation. Although Putin recognizes the new territory as part of Russia, much of it is still violently contested at the time of these referendums. Germany plans to supply Ukraine with more air defense systems and America plans to send more HIMARS in a few months. The delay in weapon delivery to Ukraine could be bad news for them. The Russian army hopes that the winter will slow the Ukrainian advance as the defense lines are stabilized. The infighting with The Russian public continues because there is constant good news in the propaganda, but it does not reflect the reality of the massive bloodshed in Lyman. Protesters risk their lives as news stations are abruptly and ominously silenced when they start telling bad news about the invasion. The Kherson front remains a long bloody stalemate with thousands of deaths from the constant bombardment of artillery fire. Ukraine hopes that once the country is liberated, they will join NATO in a couple of years to prevent invasions like these from continuing. Moral is high for Ukraine as the momentum of the counter attacks continues. The forces forces in the north are advancing toward Svotove to cut off the supply lines while the forces in the South advance toward Severdonesk and Lysychansk, two major holdouts for the Russian army.

@DocWatts wow. I learned a lot from that. You do a great job of tying the consequences of history together. I take it that because the West is biased I was blind to many of the ways in which it exploits the world. This is a very significant one I didn't know about. This is probably why nobody cared when Gorbachov died. Now the modern geopolitical situation with Russia makes much more sense. Unfortunately short term profits seem to matter more than the long term well being of all parties involved. As a result of this selfishness the West continues to pay the cost to this day.

The reason I care about politics is deeper than the surface level arguments. Yes there is a lot of fighting in religion and politics, but it is understanding conflict that interests me. A lot of the conflict in the world is created through attachment to ideology. These ideologies blind is to deeper levels of understanding. What you are trying to do is take out the fighting and focus on deeper levels of understanding. In doing so you may understand metaphysics, but you miss understanding conflict, ideology, the consequences of different levels of consciousness, an more. There are deeply spiritual aspects to politics, but these are hidden by the competing ideologies on the surface. It makes sense that you don't want to contribute to fruitless fighting. Why ruin your relationships over such things? If you want to understand reality at a deeper level, then then it makes sense to understand how humanity evolves. Most of humanity is not interested in such an understanding, thus you are the fighting between stages blue, orange, and green for instance. Understanding conflict actually requires a deeper understanding of politics than what most people have. Your understanding will come from a place of nuance, open mindedness, and detachment from ideology. When people are not interested in deep understanding, they get caught up in the culture war and stay in their current stage of development. Politics evolves more slowly because of a lack of interest in deep understanding.

At the moment the Ukrainian forces are attempting to encircle Lyman city and force a further Russian withdrawal from the region. Most of the remaining Russian occupied Karkyiv region is not as strategically important as capturing the supply lines on the way to Severdonesk. Most of fighting is otherwise a standstill in various regions where defensive lines are begin held by both sides. Nothing really profound, but I am learning more about how wars are fought and what kind of tactics are used. An interesting one is getting a woman to pretend she wants to have sex with an enemy soldier over social media in order to trick soldiers into giving away their positions for air strikes. Police officers are being bribed at border crossings. Some of the officers are being drafted into the Russian military, and this could make it harder to keep a lid on the protests against the war. When I look at how Russian citizens live, I know not to take my freedoms for granted because I say so many things that could get me killed if I lived in other parts of the world. I don't feel as alarmed as people speculating that Russia will nuke Ukraine. I won't know until it happens and I doubt it will happen now if it never happened before. I could easily be wrong if I'm predicting the future, but I don't think it does any good for us to predict nuclear wars.

There have been even more major updates. Russia is attempting to draft as many as 1.2 million men. Although poorly trained, the Ukrainian army could be over run if the drafting works. There have been massive protests because many Russians are against the war. Millions are trying to flee the country in an effort to avoid the draft, but many of the citizens are being stopped from leaving. Situations like these seem to show that Russians are desperately trying to control their lives, but they can't. Putin always had the bigger military to rely on for the war, and it looks like Ukraine is more likely to win through Russia's internal collapse. This would include the declining economy and the many Russian soldiers attempting to abandon the war zone and become a non-combatant. Some of these soldiers have lost faith in their commanders because of the logistical failures throughout the war. I see a problem with discussing war in that it is constantly open to uncertainty and speculation. I try to see some deeper spiritual aspects that are present like the illusion of control. Many of the soldiers don't want to be soldiers, but if they don't then they will be pushed out the window. Only time can tell if all Russia's problems will add up to a loss in this war or if Russia's bigger military vastly overwhelms Ukraine to the point that it wins in spite of all of the logistical, economic, political, supply, and morale issues.

Firstly, I would like to compare Leo's video to my experience. I have seen many times throughout my life that socializing has lead me to mimicking people's behavior in unoriginal ways. I will make a few. Laughing about sex as a kid. This was a way to score cheap laughs and make other kids want to be my friends. In fact I deliberately planned jokes in advance to make a good first impression when I was in school. My best joke was the admission that I am not really funny person with original jokes. I was just memorizing jokes I heard before so you would think I'm funny and want to be my friend. This was my Most original joke and my Most hilarious joke. This lead to more authentic friendships after a few weeks. Another one is how I pretended not to like girly music because I didn't want people to think I'm gay. Actually I like Justin Bieber. Noticing conformity is all about being more authentic. I see a lot of conformity starting when we are children especially in gender roles. The battle of the sexes starts with cooties. As I got into middle school I became more skeptical of conformity. First of all my parents were a terrible example because they were drug addicts and dad fled the state to avoid paying child support. I decided that I needed to think for myself and decide what was right and wrong or good and bad. My parents were not an option for understanding life and reality unless I wanted to become a drug dealer. This lead me to becoming more conscious of self deception. Even so I still made all kinds of mistakes with ideas like suffering is wrong. These misguided ideas have lead me to the constant struggle for self understanding which continues to this day. Today I look conformity in spiritual communities. I know that a question people are encouraged to ask is "who am I?" I am skeptical of these practices because people are following all the same questions in self inquiry. Therefore, they would reach similar conclusions. I think it is better to ask questions which we are most interested in and then expand from there, otherwise you will just be copying some other spiritual teacher. A question more interesting to me is "why do I want to understand myself?" Why am I so interesting to me? What do I feel I am missing by not understanding myself? I am observing my thoughts and emotions constantly because I am seeking self understanding. Why is self understanding so important? Maybe if I frame my questioning this way I will make better progress than if I copy the inquiry of others. Sometimes sitting there asking "who am I" doesn't do anything. secondly, I liked Leo's interesting decision to skip criticizing religious fundamentalism. I am not very vocal about my criticisms, but I see them happening in my thoughts when I see how foolish this behavior is. To me something feels off about criticizing religious fundamentalism. I have a few ideas why. Maybe although my criticisms are correct, it is not the direction I want to take in my life. It makes me feel heated on the inside and maybe many of these people will never change anyway. I have checked myself several times for hypocrisy surrounding religious fundamentalism to make sure I'm not projecting. Another interesting question is why does it feel dirty and off somehow to be criticizing people like these? Maybe my energy is better spent elsewhere just like in fruitless political arguments that change nothing. In my case I am actually careful to avoid heated arguments with my family and I instead share my relevant research in a non judgemental way. This actually stops a lot of arguments and clears up misconceptions while bringing my family closer together. I have done all but get my grandma to admit that Biden won because she is close minded to any evidence I show her that Trump did something wrong. She has admitted many of her biases and false beliefs though as my research chips away at her angry rants. I have taken action. I picked up more journals because I ran out of space in my other journals for contemplation. I also typed my questions into YouTube and I was stunned by the results. One question I am interested in is "what is a good education?" I have a lot of radical ideas about what education could look like. It should teach children how indoctrination works and the history of white washing history to legitimize pre existing power structures. The goal should be open mindedness, creativity, original thinking, critical thinking, and more. The YouTube channel I stumbled into by doing this search talks about raising our consciousness, ego development, ego death, non duality, and how psychedelics can change your life. It talked about all the same things I heard from actualized.org. https://m.youtube.com/c/EvolvedTeachings I think asking the questions we are most interested in and pursuing them is the key to personal and spiritual growth. I think this might be the best way for me to live my life and discover the beauty of reality. Conformity provides us with a false sense of comfort because it keeps us on the trodden path with an incomplete understanding of life. This curiosity and our desire to know is what pushes us outside of the box. When people lack the desire to know, they fall into conformity and they hand wave these things away as mere philosophy. Sometimes my sister gets annoyed with me because I am too abstract. Seeking truth and becoming abstract can make it hard to socialize if most people lack the desire to know. I get bored of small talk fast so I ask a lot of questions and my family gets annoyed by all of these questions. Sometimes strangers have a lot of fun with me by asking a lot of questions and wondering about reality as we become curious. We talk about how the definition of insanity changes over time and how only an insane person would never question their sanity. Good video

I think this would be a good educational thread that aims to disillusion is from many common mistakes. One of the interesting things about politics is that it is part of a mass self deception in which millions of people create an identity and cling to it. Collecting and discussing common false beliefs could help us to deconstruct our own worldview as well. I hope to learn something interesting when users point out less well known mistakes. These are beliefs we take for granted and don't question. to get a couple obvious ones out of the way. 1. The belief that Trump won the election. The accusation that democrats were cheating is analogous to an abusive relationship. The Republican party accused democrats of cheating to obfuscate their own cheating and the results of the election. 2. Vaccine conspiracy theories. These include vaccines cause autism, there are little robots spying on us, and more. Common False religious beliefs 1. The belief that Satanists worship the devil. In reality most Satanists use Satan as a symbol of man as an animal. They are not literally blood cults. 2. The belief that religious beliefs are sacred. Big one. There are thousands of sects created by the many translations of holy texts. The civil war is an example of a major schism in Christian caused by the issue of slavery. 3. The belief that Christianity is a monotheistic religion. Big one. Although most sects of Christianity are monotheistic, polytheistic interpretations have existed throughout history. One argument is that the old and new testament are incompatible because one is written by a wrathful and righteous father while the other a loving and forgiving mother. Some archaeologists argue that God has a wife, but it was edited out of the bible. Although monotheism is universally accepted today, it was not always like this because polytheistic sects have existed in the past. 4. The belief that religion is nothing more than superstition is common in those who commit the pre-trans fallacy by lumping together Other forms of spirituality with the same dogmatism. Other interesting examples 1. The belief that Hitler was Jewish. This is preposterous, but people believe it anyway. Hitler publicly supported Christianity, but in private he acted differently. I am not sure if he was faking it or not. 2. The belief that school shootings are a form of retaliation against bullying. A popular, but misguided assumption. In reality, school shooters fire into the crowd. Their targets are kids in the wrong place at the wrong time. 3. The belief that "murder" or "human being" can be objectively defined even during issues like abortion. If this belief is false, then the implication is that human beings are imaginary. Big one. It is very common for a human to believe that they are a human. 4. The belief that the leaders of enemy nations are insane. One example is Kim Jong Un. He launched a nuclear weapons program, causing Americans to fear him. This is a common stunt by North Korea given the unique political situation. Kim Jong Un acts crazy to make his enemies fear him and make them desperate for diplomacy. This forces concessions from other nations such as giving aid to the starving population. These stunts are not crazy, they are calculated and North Korea has a history of doing these sorts of things. I will be interested to see what the rest of you come up with.

@gettoefl in my heart I do feel that way. I see the profound tragedy taking place and my mind is trying to find way to stop this horribly depressing thing from happening. Maybe most people don't value independent thinking and they are happy without this freedom. It is painfully sad and no matter how long the list of criticisms it will not make this sad reality go away. I'm grateful for my freedom and my heart goes out to the less fortunate. This is what lies beneath my apparent dislike. I wish nothing but the best for them. Of course I never hold these things against individuals. They were indoctrinated And they do what they were taught. It is a collective issue and no individual is to blame. "Forgive them father for they know not what they do." This describes religious fundamentalism perfectly. The criticisms my mind comes up with prevents me from fully surrendering to the sad reality that not everybody can be helped. By the way I have met these people in a nearby church. They were giving out soup to the poor. Clearly they mean well and they are doing their best to be good. I understand that everybody is good no matter these tragic limits.

I would like to see more public debates on the effectiveness of debates when getting to the truth. It would be more meta to start debating debating. First of all, in debates people often resort to dishonest tactics in order to win. This could be gish galloping, cherry picking, and so on. This results in constant doubts about your intentions and your opponent's intentions as soon as you start to disagree. You can take the presidential debates for example. Most people already knew who they would vote for and only six percent of the population was tuning in because they weren't sure. This is evidence that debates are not about truth, they are about slamming your opponent and looking superior. I used to watch right wing hosts because they were good at winning debates. I stopped watching when I realized that they won through deception. Debates are about convincing people of your viewpoints and to hold your beliefs. I started distinguishing between belief and truth when I became more skeptical of debates. You can use legal debates in a court. It is not about what is legal, it is about who can present the most convincing legal arguments. You can see this in poor people who can't afford a lawyer and end up losing because a defense attorney does not have as much time to prepare arguments for you. Again this is about winning, not truth. How would society be if in a presidential debate the sides were arguing about how untruthful and misleading political debates often are? Leo has a video about this on his blog. Conscious people don't like debating because it's an ego game.

The video mentioned that Scandinavia still has a recidivism rate of 1 in 3. This is a low rate compared to the United States because there are more job opportunities to help people get into a position where they don't need to commit more crimes for survival. Even so there are still those who fail to rehabilitate. The evidence is in the video that dangerous offenders could still hurt you once they leave prison. On the other hand Scandinavia seems safer because they have a very low rate of imprisonment. This is about 3000, a low percentage of the population compared to the United States with millions in prison. Maybe the United States would be better off with this kind of system, but it would need to fix the fact that repeat violent offenders are leaving the system. Maybe the death penalty could be used for repeat offenders once it is made obvious that rehabilitation isn't working. That should deter some of these crimes, keeping the prisons with as low of a population as possible. This should definitely be combined with preventing crimes through providing for the poor and using other social safety nets. Do you think the death penalty would improve this system?

One of the reasons they loved the queen so much and didn't want to abolish the monarchy was because the queen worked alongside them during the second world war. When she was a princess she drove trucks and ambulances as she worked as a mechanic. I went to the palace on a tour and I was told that although the queen is expensive And the economy would be better off without her, the people love the royal family too much to get rid of them. Otherwise they would be better off without it.

@UnbornTao racial bias is common across all cultures when depicting Jesus. You can look for Chinese Jesus for example. The goal is to make him more relatable by not only changing his color, but also his ideology. Jesus is essentially boiled down to whatever the culture at the time deems desirable. This includes the belief that Jesus was a laissez faire free market capitalist. In communist countries Jesus is depicted as a man who would make up a whip of cords and use them to chase your animals out of a temple while yelling "do not turn my father's house into a marketplace" and scattering your coins. An interesting observation is that the belief that we are living in the biblical end times has been a false belief for thousands of years. 10 million Americans still believe this because so long as the belief is held in the present it is unfalsifiable. Basically, the belief that the end of the world is tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow is the day aliens decide to blow up the earth.

I should probably share my personal experience on this issue because autism affects my behavior in many ways. Hypersensitivity corresponds to a lot of experiences. This happened since I was a child and mother would yell at my sisters a lot. I was the one who cried and she had to adjust her behavior to account for these differences. I commonly have intense interests bordering on obsessions. This can allow me to be very detail oriented and exceptional in any limited field. I often laugh out loud instead of in my head. Apparently, most people don't struggle with this as much. This is why some people described me as a serial killer when I would pace back and forth a lot while laughing. Laughter is especially problematic when I am tired. This happened at school during seventh bell or toward the end of a long college day. Other classmates and the teacher would point out my strange behavior. I have an improved memory when I am absorbed or interested in any particular topic. People with autism can become a perfectionist when small details start to annoy them. This goes into a little bit with OCD. Meanwhile my memory is very poor when I'm not interested and it can make me seem indifferent to others. Guilt can be amplified in people with autism. This feeds into moral OCD when I'm afraid that I won't be able to control myself and I'm going to do something completely stupid. I am attempting to develop self trust to a sufficient degree so that I don't criticize myself when I have a thought which bothers me. I am often weaker in verbal communication, and I find writing easier. Other people often expect me to give quick answers when talking. I am usually very quiet and dreaming about grand ideals. I know somebody with a more extreme form of autism. This person is 14 and can't speak any language. Autism can be so different for so many different people that we may as well be talking about totally different conditions. It makes no sense to put Einstein in the same category as those with a very extreme form of autism. Maybe if this condition were better understood as our understanding of medicine continues to evolve, then maybe the proper distinctions will be made one day.

True suicide often is a mercy killing because a person is in intense suffering and they believe that nothing can change it. For example, if a person is in one of the twin towers on the day of 9/11, then they might jump out of the building to avoid being burned to death. In a sense suicide is a twisted form of love in that the goal is to avoid intense suffering. It can be very sad. @Danioover9000 I agree that we have been getting off topic and we should probably get back to the limitations of compassion. meanwhile @zurew beat me to the post. Prisoners must get jacked as a form of intimidation toward other inmates.

@Vibes I have a story about this. I once found a dying bed in my backyard. It was on its side trying to fly. I used my shoe to flip it over so it could stand straight. I wanted to try to help the new first like I did when I found one in the swimming pool, so I rescued it. I came back ten minutes later and saw the same bee on its side again in the exact same place in my drive way. This time undecided to kill it. For insects it is not practical to give them all the medical attention they need given the fact that their life span is much lower anyway and there are many things that hunt them like birds. Their numbers will not be hurt by stepping on one that is dying anyway. My position has changed and I now perform mercy kills on insects.

"Scientists have been reporting links between bacteria in the gut and autistic behavior since 1960. L-glutamine is an amino acid that repairs the lining of the stomach and can be quite beneficial, and can be found as a supplement. Another product that we have seen results with is Restore Gut Health Mineral Supplement." this is an interesting quote from the site I looked at.

I was born with autism. According to my research, there are people genetically predisposed to autism, and it can be influenced by environmental factors. However, all of these environmental factors involve a woman's pregnancy. Prenatal complications can influence the brain development of a fetus, thus creating a link to autism. The closest thing to a link between vaccines and autism would be the fact that pregnant women are advised not to take certain vaccines. It isn't like you give a five year old a vaccine and, it changes his brain structure this dramatically. I agree that in many cases autism could be a gift. There are people like Albert Einstein who are believed to have had high functioning autism. Autism can make it hard to relate to people emotionally, but people with autism can have enhanced logical abilities that compensate for this and can be used to create an alternative morality. Low functioning autism is the most problematic with a failure to develop speaking. In fact autism is such a broad spectrum, that maybe low and high functioning autism shouldn't even be classified as the same condition. There are new distinctions being made in ADHD for example to distinguish different disorders. Autism is different for a lot of people And it is misleading to classify them in the same way. Dr. Michael Cory https://www.autisticworld.com/11-ways-autism-cure/#:~:text=Field Control Therapy – This is a pretty,Encephalitis is a cause for many mental illnesses. This wildly contradicts what I learned about autism. There are others with autism who claim they cannot be cured because of how they were born while others claim that they were cured. Maybe for some it is environmental And for others it is genetic? Now that I am finding sources which contradict each other, I am no longer as sure.

I will do my best to steel man Leo's position in favor of the death penalty for the sake of argument. In the society Leo envisions, the criminal justice system is mostly focused on rehabilitation because imprisonment is incredibly inefficient. In fact imprisoning criminals can psychologically damage them, making them even more violent, increasing the likelihood of recidivism. In this way our current criminal justice system is poor at preventing crime. Our society should be effective at preventing crime because it is inefficient to rehabilitate everybody. In Leo's society, many of the crimes are prevented because there would be no more heavy metals in our food and water causing brain damage, wealth inequality and homelessness would be reduced, and spirituality and emotional mastery would be taught to children at a young age. For the most part this would prevent violent crimes worthy of the death penalty. For example, sometimes school shooters are discovered to have brain damage, and when the brain damage is corrected, they no longer have the desire to kill a dozens of children. This would be a controversial case for the death penalty if the man could plead insanity because heavy metals damaged his brain and caused him to do it. When rehabilitating criminals some criminals are too far gone. Psychedelics may increase compassion for some people, but for others they have no effect, or they even embolden people who have no desire to change who they are. In this way the death penalty can either serve as a deterrent or a necessary solution to a dangerous criminal. For example, Leo would give a criminal in rehabilitation an ultimatum. Either change who you are or else your gonna die. I remember sadhguru made similar arguments about justice being too slow. He points out that many people claim they would be compassionate and forgive a murderer, but if the murderer raped your daughter, cut your spouse in peices, and burned everyone in your family alive while cutting off your fingers one at time while laughing, then you would have a different opinion of the death penalty. A similar crime actually took place in America before. There are many criminals who would gladly do these things again if not for the death penalty. Sadhguru argued that justice is too slow for a man who clearly raped and murdered somebody. The family is then forced to relive all of the events dozens of times in a court with an excessively long appeals process. Leo's position is controversial because of the corruption of the criminal justice system. Although in a different society it would make sense to have the death penalty, we are currently dealing with a criminal justice system that hurts blacks more than it does whites as highlighted in "the new Jim Crow." The war on drugs has made our prisons overcrowded when though there are many medical benefits to marijuana and psychedelics. The death penalty has been suspended before. For example in 1972, the supreme court struck down the death penalty for four years because of how dysfunctional the criminal justice system was. 1976, the problems with jury selection were resolved and the death penalty was reinstated. If the death penalty were suspended in our current society to address the corruption of the criminal justice system, then it could fix a lot of the problems we currently face. This includes prosecutorial misconduct, mass incarceration, racist sentencing, federal judges who fail to refuse themselves when they hold stocks in a company involved in the case, misleading plea bargains, our dependence on plea bargains, failure to inform citizens of their rights, treating people like felons even when they are found innocent, and the fact that innocent people can sit on death row for 40 years even when they are known to be innocent. The last on is major because people lose faith in the death penalty when innocent people are too frequently killed for crimes they didn't commit. This is a problem as bad as the biased jury selection to ensure the death penalty. Maybe the death penalty could be suspended for about five years then reinstated if sufficient progress is made.

@Razard86 I profoundly disagree with Leo on that statement. I looked at "the new Jim Crow" for example which goes into detail about the criminal justice system. for example, blacks receive harsher sentencing than whites. This translates into blacks receiving the death penalty while whites do not even though the same crime is committed. There is a whole slew of problems with plea deals. The fact that prosecutors can provoke a guilty plea because of your lack of money is outrageous. The criminal justice system depends on these practices because of the mass incarceration caused by the war on drugs. Leo also tends to side with police officers in controversial cases. I wonder why he takes this kind of stance on criminal justice.

These people would be too dangerous to keep in a prison. Prisons can be used a grounds to spread their ideology and escape through prison riots. ISIS is doing this and recruiting new members in prisons. Think of all of the violent criminals these people could radicalize given life in prison.

@Leo Gura I can see why you think medical science is horrible. In this case it makes sense to hold the position that vaccines could cause autism, but our current understanding of science is not sufficient to prove this decisively. my doctor told me that the heavy metals in the food and water don't to hurt me. I use a water filter knowing that most water does not meet the epa safety guidelines. In this case the false beliefs are scientific studies are trustworthy, science has reality figured out, and your doctor gives you good medical advice. Today's society has thoroughly conditioned me into thinking science should be trusted. I would seem unreasonable to them if I heavily doubted science, but it seems reasonable to doubt it anyway.

@Leo Gura this kind of discussion is welcome. I remember now that in Nazi Germany jew was defined differently. There are white nationalists who hold that Jews are a different race than white because they base it On blood, not beliefs. When I think "Jew" I think of a person who believes in the Torah and goes to a synagogue. Maybe there is more to being a Jew than I previously assumed. It seems a Jew could be that or someone who inherited Judaism from their parents by blood. Suddenly, I can see why a white nationalist or Nazi would be so afraid of Jewish blood. That would explain why they chanted "our blood and soil." As for the claim about vaccines being linked to autism, there are many studies on it that claim the myth is debunked. Apparently the MMR vaccine is the most controversial. The reason people believe this is because Andrew Wakefield published a study on the MMR vaccine claiming it caused autism. He was stripped of his medical license in 2010 as the study was retracted by the Lancet. The ethical concern was that Wakefield failed to disclose that he applied for a patent for his own measles vaccine and was being paid to prove the vaccines were harmful. This man holds a lot of responsibility for spreading these lies and he is still out there claiming the CDC is covering up proof that vaccines cause autism. What makes you think there is a connection? What study are you looking at?

The list of alternative sources of energy continues to grow. I wonder how long it would take to implement all of these different sources so that we can stop depending on fossil fuels. Good video.

This is an interesting and complicated issue. Pretty much everybody wants to be anti-corruption. The approval of Congress is at an all time low with 82% of Americans disapproving of their actions. Reasons for this disapproval include partisanship, favoritism toward the rich, election security (including the lie that the 2020 election was stolen), nepotism, and much much more. The paradox comes up when being too critical of governmental corruption can destabilize a country. The legitimacy of those in power and all of the laws they pass are drawn into question. The question becomes how much corruption is tolerable? Yes the American government is corrupt in more ways than can be listed, but if the governed population does not believe in the stories of the great democracy, then what will we be left with? A power vacuum could easily be created if the United States suddenly became very strict on corruption. Some examples in other countries could be the corruption blitz in South Africa, the Tigray war of Ethiopia fought because of an illegal election, or the constant need to maintain a massive propaganda machine in places like North Korea and China. If the illusions propagated by communist countries were suddenly pulled away, then wouldn't that create a massive destabilization of these regions? How should anti-corruption be applied in the middle East? The United States is constantly struggling to maintain a positive relationship with Saudi Arabia in spite of their deep corruption in order to keep receiving oil. This could become the source of massive political pressure from around the globe to switch to renewable energy, similar to the pressure placed on Europe because of Putin's invasion of Ukraine. Is there any amount of corruption which should be tolerated in order to avoid unnecessary destabilization? I think these questions are important because faith in the US government is very low and there are many calls to violence especially by MAGA. In this case their claims of corruption aren't even real and it is very destabilizing. Is there a more organized way to confront governmental corruption without undermining faith in democracy? What would it take to restore faith in democracy?

@Razard86 very true. In the end all worldviews are partial because we would be driven insane if all of the information in the universe were poured into us at once as if to know every memory of being that ever lived. Any logic we make will be based on our own biases that help us to make sense of an infinitely complex universe.