DocWatts

Both the contemporary Left and the Right have shortsighted, Toxic elements. Pointing out counter productive elements on the Left is useful, so long as it's not being done with the intent of drawing a false equivalency between the two. What are the worst elements to come out of Toxic aspects of the contemporary Left? Hypersensitivity, labeling people as racist or transphobic who might not necessarily deserve it, and not being pragmatic enough in thier political aims are some of the most obvious things that come to mind. In addition to that there's what Ken Wilber calls Aperspectival Madness, where the deconstruction of postmodernism ceases to serve a productive purpose and leaves an Ontological vacuum in its place. The effective consequence being what David Foster Wallace characterizes as the tyranny of postmodern irony and the resulting dearth of sincerity that's endemic to much of modern culture: ie. "How dare you have the audacity to ask me what it is I really mean?" While it would be intellectually dishonest to downplay these problems, it's also true that it's not contemporary American Left wing culture that's downplaying practices that are destroying the planet, nor Left Wing policies that are needlessly imprisoning millions of people, and leaving many more to languish in poverty and sickness. Probably the most damning thing that can be said of the Left is that it can be terrible at messaging, and that it might unintentionally drive some people backwards into reactionary politics. But how much of this is the Left's fault versus Bad Actors on the Right who are intentionally exploiting Culture Wars divisions to achieve exactly this effect is a more ambiguous issue

Came across two videos recently discussing the notion of the Banality of Evil which I found to be quite intriguing. The Banality of Evil was an argument that was developed by German born political theorist Hannah Arendt, in reaction to the 1961 trial of Adolf Eichmann, for his crimes as Architect of the Holocaust. Her impression of the man was that he was not in fact the evil monster she had come to expect; rather he came across as a rather unimpressive and unimaginative bureaucrat who was lacking in empathy. The great evil he created had less to do with an Intentional desire to do harm, and more to do with unreflective selfishness for such mundane an petty reasons as career advancement. She expounds on this to argue that people who unthinkingly participate in systems can contribute to evil in the world. While I don't dispute the overall argument (indeed it provides a compelling explanation for many current evils in the world), upon reflection my intuitive sense is that it's in fact a partial truth (and promotes Social Good by prompting self reflection on one's actions), on the other hand it doesn't adequately account for the willful and enthusiastic participation in human cruelty that arises from belief systems and ideologies. The arguments presented in the two Videos offer a seemingly compelling argument in this direction. The first video is a discussion of the Milgram Experiment, which is a famous social psychology about obedience to authority figures, where participants are asked to administer electric shocks to another person when pressured to do so by a researcher that was present with them in the room. What the lecturer in the video argues is that the way the experiment has been generalized in Culture draws the wrong conclusions from the experiment. Rather than the popular notion that orders are obeyed mechanically and unthinkingly when responsibility for one's actions can be deferred to an authority figure, what the lecturer argues for that what is actually going on is the following : "Obedience to authority is not a 'blind' or 'natural' process. Rather it's a product of engaged followership that is predicated upon identification with those in authority - whose cause is believed to be right, and who are followed on this basis." In the context of the Milgram experiment, this materialized as the participants having an engaged identification with the authority figure (the researcher), rather than with the subject who was receiving shocks. And upon being debriefed, rather than feeling remorse over their actions (of being coerced into administering a lethal shock into another person), the participants saw their actions as promoting Social Good by advancing the cause of science. The second video is a rather direct refutation of Hannah Arendt's Banality of Evil argument as proposed by the American social psychologist Jonathan Haidt, as it was applied to Adolf Eichmann and the Holocaust. In it he argues that far from being a pencil pusher whose perpetuated cruelty as a byproduct of unreflective self interest, a large part of Adolf Eichmann's job was to justify the necessity of the Holocaust to authority figures in occupied countries, who were very often reluctant to cooperate with the SS. And that far from being dethatched from what was going on, he was in the position he was in because he was enthusiastic in his anti-Semitism, believed in the mission of the Reich, and knew full well that after the war the Allied countries would see what he was participating in was a Great Crime against humanity. Furthermore, no one who ended up in the SS got there unless they believed in the mission of the Reich, and were already predisposed towards the regime of Hate that that Nazis inculcated. He doesn't mention it in the video, but it's my understanding that that recruitment environment of the SS was heavily predisposed to favor people with sociopathic and psychopathy personality traits. He goes on to argue that Authority figures inculcate echo chambers which blind people to the immoral effects of wrong decisions, because they are engaged followers whose interpretation of the social environment is heavy biased by those in charge. I would be very interested to hear some other thoughts and opinions on this subject, as the arguments laid out by both seem to be fairly compelling.

Casting doubt on the credibility of Information can be Good, but that will entirely depend on the motivations of the person making such a claim, and how that claim propagates throughout the Culture, including how that refutation is Framed by those who broadcast it, and also how Media Literate and Epistemologically sophisticated the person hearing that information is. Not all misinformation comes from Bad Faith actors, sometimes a dissenting expert makes a qualified and limited dissenting claim on a particular subject, which then becomes flattened and broadened as it's broadcasted by non-experts and reaches the eyes and ears of ordinary people, with important context and qualifications stripped away, to disastrous consequences (such as one or two scientists questioning the effectiveness of certain types of facemasks gets warped into a broad statement that face masks "don't work"). This can also happen when a study that is later discredited is generalized and makes waves as it works its way through the culture, with the Stanford Prison Experiment being a prime example here, or the discredited (and later retracted) 1998 study which popularized the notion that there's a link between vaccines and autism. But very often incredulity is an intentional tactic used by Bad Faith actors who are not being honest about their motivations and intentions; such as the Fossil Fuel Industry and its well documented disinformation campaign to discredit climate change science being a prime example. The intention was to confuse the public by creating the false impression that there was ambiguity among climate scientists about whether humans were causing the climate to change, and that arguments for against human caused climate change were equally credible. That 4chan reference wasn't a hypothetical, as it's become a mainstream political movement with tens of millions of adherents who look to an anonymous 4chan poster as a credible information source for factual claims about important political issues.

@vladorion "Who decides what is misinformation?" This sort of rhetoric is a common tactic employed by Bad Faith actors to avoid being called out for spreading misinformation, by attempting to cast doubt on the credibility of any information that contradicts their narrative. It's a fallback that's used when someone doesn't have any credible evidence to back up their arguments, and is employed by people who make Bad Faith arguments that 4chan is as reliable a source as Reuters or the CDC. If you want to figure out which sources of Information are reliable, I would recommend that you educate yourself on rhe basics of Media Literacy.

Getting back to the original topic of this post, as someone who's listened to JRE Podcast for years, the sense that I get isn't that Rogan's changed to a great degree over the past few years. Rather, what I see is that much of the aforementioned Irresponsibility in how Rogan would sometimes use his media platform was obfuscated, when he was operating in an earlier social environment where the consequences of platforming toxic media personalities and spreading misinformation was not nearly as apparent as it is now. Things are rather different in our current social environment where a deadly pandemic is killing hundreds of thousands of people, and where tens of millions have fallen under the sway of an Authoritarian Cult of Personality that's threatening American Democracy.

These are all questions that Courts have to deal with when deciding Libel and Slander cases, where something can be considered slander/libel if : (1) The claim(s) made about someone are untrue. (2) The person making such claim(s) had reasonable grounds to know that they were untrue. (3) The claim(s) caused Material harm to the person(s) or organization in question. So obviously there's going to be some ambiguity to any one of those claims, but the Law (or namely Juries) are asked to deal with ambiguous situations all the time. Also just because a Harm caused by some forms of Speech my be indirect, doesn't mean that there can't be a solid chain of evidence backing it up. Trump didn't directly tell his followers to break into the Capitol building, but still incited violence due through dog whistle rhetoric after months of fermenting rage over his false accusations that the election was stolen. Cigarette companies didn't directly tell ten year olds that they should smoke, they just advertised their products in a way that was highly accessible to children, and promoted their products using colorful cartoon characters that would appeal in a targeted way towards children. The majority of people who use Speech for Harmful or Malicious Purposes, are usually smart enough to give themselves at least a veneer of plausible deniability, so that they can avoid being held accountable for any Harm that comes as a result of their Speech.

Maybe another way of phrasing it then might be: is unlimited Free Speech regardless of the Harm it causes to other people always a Good Thing? If your answer to that is an unqualified yes, should cigarette companies be allowed to advertise to young children because doing so is Free Speech? How about when Corporations spend millions of dollars to influence elections through advertising? Should Libel and Slander laws remain on the books, or are there some situations where your Free Speech is unambiguously Harmful and thus infringes on someone else's Rights?

Does spreading misinformation that may directly lead to deaths count as Free Speech? If tons of people are misinformed about basic safety procedures during a pandemic due to the toxic disinformation from some of the people Joe gives a platform to on his podcast, and you end up catching Covid from one of them, does another person's 'freedom' to spread toxic misinformation end up impinging on your rights? 'Free Speech' isn't always a black and white issue, it has to be weighed against other social goods such as Public Safety.

The US is ______________. I'd argue dysfunctional (or developmentally imbalanced) would be a better word to put in there than Center-Left or Center-Right, since where a place is along the Left/Right spectrum is always going to be perspectival to some degree. The issue is that the US is a large and diverse country with regions that are both very Progressive and others that are still quite Conservative. Our Federal Government is dysfunctional in the way that it fails to proportionally represent this diverse range of interests, due to the continued existence of antiquated Institutions such as the Electoral College and the make up of the Senate, both of which give an outsized voice to rural (ie Conservative) regions within the US.

We can thank the ingenuity of scientists for managing to come up with a vaccine within a year, rather than anything Trump did. Trump and the Republican should not be credited when they are diametrically opposed to investments in Public Health and Scientific Research; the Covid vaccine exists in spite of Trump's administration, not because of it. The fact that he didn't have a game plan for what to do once vaccines became available is just one more point which goes to show how negligent his administration was during a National Emergency.

Trump's entire modus oprandi was to defund and dismantle the state, including Public Health and Safety measures. Him not having a plan in place to distribute vaccines is consistent with withdrawing from the WHO, underfunding and dismantling public health measures, and attempting to shift blame onto the governors rather than taking an active leadership role during a national emergency.

The claim that scientists told people not to wear masks is something that circulated in the Conspiracy Theory community as a Bad Faith effort to discredit epidemiologists such as Dr. Fauci and to absolve Trump's culpability for his failure to adopt measures to address the pandemic. These are literally the same tactics that Bad Faith actors use to discredit climate change; they cherry pick any minor qualified reservation they can find and conflate that to try and discredit the entire scientific establishment. Democratic states tend to be much more urbanized and thus have higher population densities than the largely rural Republican states, which is why they were hit harder in the initial stages of the pandemic. States that adopted mask mandates and stay at home orders were more successful in containing the spread of new cases. This is the same kind of idiocy as when you hear Right Wingers say that systemic racism doesn't exist because of 'black on black crime'; it's a Bad Faith oversimplification that intentionally disregards the underlying context surrounding the issue. Trump not having a plan to distribute vaccines was from Biden's transition team, who were left holding the flaming garbage bag that Trump left them. His 'plan' was to leave the States to figure it out, without any coordinated help or action from the Federal Government. https://mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSKBN29T0FY

Both the US and the UK were lead by right wing Populists with similar ideologies who ignored the advice of scientists and downplayed the pandemic, so no surprise both countries had similar outcomes as a result of thier negligent leadership. Perhaps someone more familiar with Spain and Italy could chime in, but I do know that both countries have a higher proportion than the US does of an aging populations that's at unique risk for Covid. Belgium has a much more urbanized population than the US (Belgium is the 7th most urbanized country in the world, right behind Qatar and Hong Kong; the US is 36th, right ahead of Canada). That said, I'll grant that the US isn't the only country that shit the bed when the pandemic hit, but that doesn't absolve Trump for things he easily could have done to prevent over a hundred thousand preventable deaths (just listen to the damn scientists, tell his legions of Cult like followers to wear a mask, stop pushing austerity measures to dismantle Health and Public Safety Services while in the middle of a pandemic, etc). Add to that Trump had literally no plan whatsoever to distribute vaccines to people, as Biden's transition team was shocked to find out.

Yeah and they managed it far better than the US, which had more Covid deaths than any other country; more than China and India each of which have more than a billion people. Had the Trump administration done at least a somewhat competent job of handing Covid, rather than downplaying and denying the pandemic for political reasons, hundreds of thousands of deaths could have been prevented. In our legal system we have a concept called criminal negligence, and if it doesn't apply to this case it doesn't apply anywhere.

Fair enough; my point was that the Scandinavian Social Democracies are further than anyone else towards the kind of social progress and socio-economic stability to make the first baby steps towards Yellow value memes even feasible. That said, even the Scandinavian Social democracies aren't immune from the problems that democracies in the world are facing. If anything I could see this getting worse with the instability that Climate Change will bring with it over the upcoming century.

In a more sane world Joe Manchin and Krysten Sinema would have a home in the Republican Party, and would be broadly representative of what a functional Republican Party might look like; conservative, yes, but not only in it to loot the country by dismantling the State. Way things are, what we really have is one relatively functional political party, and one party whose entire reason for existence is to enrich themselves by dismantling the state and undermining electoral democracy. Not a fan of Joe Manchin, but let's not draw false equivalencies between him and crypto-fascist Republicans.

Also agreed. Seems like it's easy to fall into the trap of demonizing Western Medicine (and taking all of its advancements completely for granted), when finding ways to Integrate Western Medicine and Holistic Practices seems like the obvious path forward.

Bringing up the deadly consequences of Trump's terrible domestic policy when someone tries to claim that Trump somehow holds a moral high ground for not killing a bunch of people is completely relevant. Whataboutism would be if I brought up Trump in response to a critique of Biden or Obama for instance. Let's not abuse the term here If someone tried to argue that Hitler was great for Germany because of the economic benefits of the autobahn without addressing World War II or the Holocaust, you'd be completely right for calling them out for neglecting some obvious things, eh?

Maybe a better way of saying it is that western medicine is in the relative dark ages when future people look back on this era in a century. Compared to the medicine from the actual Dark Ages we're living in a relative Utopia, as attested by the fact that when you have surgery five burly men don't have to hold you down because anesthetics weren't a thing yet. Dark Ages and Utopias are a matter of perspective.

A recent study found that around %40 of Covid deaths in the US could have been prevented if Trump had an even reasonably competent response to the pandemic. Even were the claim that Trump didn't start any new wars actually true, he still somehow managed to kill more Americans with his domestic policies than America has lost in any of its wars, with the only exceptions being WWII and The Civil War. Quite an accomplishment really, as it takes an aggressive level of incompetence and negligence to rack up hundreds of thousands of deaths through means other than a war.

Yellow seems like the next step for the Scandinavian Social Democracies, rather than a country like the US that's still arguing whether or not Health Care should be a Right. Yellow should try checking back in another 50 or 80 years when the US has gotten its shit together, and some of the limitations of Green Social Democracy start to become apparent.

It's my understanding that in there may be a small reduction in the number of low wage jobs, but this is more than offset by increased wages for people making less than the median wage (ie almost half of the country, the median wage here being only about $16/hour), and also by the number of people lifted out of poverty by an increase to the minimum wage.

Here's a Vox article outlining what's likely the final version of the Covid relief Bill: https://www.vox.com/2021/3/5/22315614/covid-19-stimulus-bill-economic-relief-coronavirus-pandemic Tldr; $1,400 stimulus checks $300-a-week boost to unemployment insurance A boost to the child tax credit $170 billion towards helping schools re-open $350 billion to State Governments Tax Subsidies for Individuals purchasing Health Care through the Affordable Care Act Tens of billions for Public Health directly related to Covid 19 Not Included: $15 federal minimum wage ____________________________________

Kind of comes with the territory when you've elected yourself President for Life. Is that a good tradeoff in exchange for no accountability or oversight, and treating the State as your own personal bank account? Politicians with a backbone can exist within a democratic framework, look to Bernie or AOC for people willing to speak in straightforward way with Conviction about a range of issues.

@Danioover9000 There are indeed multiple types of Biases; diving in to all of them would be difficult to do with any brevity. Confirmation Bias is part of a broader set of Psychological Biases which influence our thoughts and beliefs. This Infographic on this site does a decent job at outlining fifty of the more common Cognitive Biases that are out there (though of course some of these are more common than others, and of course they differ in how benign or malignant they are in practice). https://www.visualcapitalist.com/50-cognitive-biases-in-the-modern-world/