Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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ajax18
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by ajax18 »

I have a hard time believing the lk existed. But if they did, children being strong and smart enough to fend for themselves at 3 yoa doesn't strike me as an example of weakness.
And when the Confederates saw Jackson standing fearless like a stonewall, the army of Northern Virginia took courage and drove the federal army off their land.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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ajax18 wrote:
Sun Nov 13, 2022 1:43 am

So what I'm wondering is if it's possible that as the world gets more complex, does it outgrow democracy? If people either can't know enough to make good choices or they are too easily biased, then there may be a bias toward bad leaders, and that may mean that the best hope we have is for a deep state, because it's either that or a dictator.
Make EAllusion Lord and emperor. Only He is intelligent enough to know what is best for humanity. Democracy clearly cannot be trusted given that voters chose economic nationalism and energy independence. They think they're owed cheap gas and prosperity when res Ipsa knows they should just shut up and be grateful they had enough to feed their family. Only DocCam is bold enough to weld the doors shut on their apartments to keep them from infecting those who are vulnerable to COVID. The deep state is our only hope. Never trust people with too much freedom.
Oh, look. The board dummy is just creating insane straw mans and gleefully larping away at the just-created argument he imagined in his thick skull. Meanwhile here in the real world this is an actual, real tweet:

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Take a wild guess to whom they’re directing this idiot-tier voting explainer.

Think about that tweet for a hot second. Think about what that means. Think about the direction this Republic is headed. And now re-read Xanax’s post above.

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- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
honorentheos
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by honorentheos »

ajax18 wrote:
Sun Nov 13, 2022 2:03 am
I have a hard time believing the lk existed. But if they did, children being strong and smart enough to fend for themselves at 3 yoa doesn't strike me as an example of weakness.
I should have written more in the follow up post so it was clear that the Ik were being misrepresented in those early works. Clans ties exist among the Ik, with more current anthropology expanding the scientific understanding of both their culture and the circumstances surrounding what was observed and reported in the original sources.

That said, how bizarre your response was is an onion. There's the level of bizarre involved in a person in the internet age expressing skepticism over something relatively easy to verify rather than, you know, investigating. But then the next layer down is the completely deranged perspective that results in reading that and making the takeaway, " Yeah, a three year old fending for themselves successfully isn't weakness". Then a third layers peels back as one recalls this is coming from a guy whose other expressions essentially disavow all forms of a social safety net. I feel it was a claim away from being an Onion parody.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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This was snapped at a polling station in AZ:

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The right-wing death squad thing is pushed hard in Alt-Right circles. The sentiment is usually combined with connecting any variation of Liberal or Democrat with communism and with this image:

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So, to answer the OP’s header, yes, yes they have, are doing, and will do because as witnessed on this very board the braindead doorknobs on the Right that think this way are literally projecting onto the Left what they’re doing when they complain about Leftists.

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Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Doctor CamNC4Me
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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Remember that bit ^ about projection? This was just plucked from r/conservative:

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:lol:

- Doc
Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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I've had time to read H's material and watch most of the YouTube interview. I don't think Tainter's thoughts as presented are entirely coherent, but I admit I've limited myself only to the materials Honor has shared. Honor's summary captures the noble side of Tainter:
Honor wrote:The other side of this is most people seek simplicity - i.e. collapse. Authoritarian regimes are a lower state of society. No person, no Putin nor Trump is going to be better capable of handling increasing complexity than a democratized system that aggregate solutions through competition towards the greater good of society. And no philosopher king can, either.
Honor wrote: One doesn't have to look far to find people who openly long for simpler times, easy and obvious "solutions", less entanglements, fewer people who think differently or have other views.
The first quote is a common rebuttal to central planning. Tainter strikes me as an old-school free-market guy yet at the same time environmentally aware. One example that shows his ideology; his contemplations on renewable energy. He shies away from nuclear and also government sponsored renewables that use lots of land, and thinks individuals with their own solar and wind are the way to go. Your house is already there so the panels aren't wasting any more space. But he also works in this libertarian idea that individuals managing their own energy production will be more enthusiastic and mindful about conservation. Take note of that idea as it will come back with a vengeance.

The second quote resonates with Tainter's pro-education views. Individuals can't be unhinged right-wingers, they need to learn and find efficient solutions to their complex problems. Part of this includes becoming aware of how events in other parts of the world affect themselves locally in this complex globalized world. Honestly, I don't understand his line of reasoning here, but he states this as important, and it resonates with H's sentiment about needing to avoid simplistic solutions, e.g., Trumpism etc.

But then around minute 43, toward the end, he offers the single example that he's aware of in history of a society simplifying itself rather than being simplified by brute-force nature -- this is the only example of triumph that he is personally aware of. And it doesn't seem to bolster the educated libertarian ideal.

He says the Byzantine Empire was under threat from Islam. It had to prepare for war, but this was costly. As H describes, the problem is in the energy flow. The cost of centralization is heavy -- bringing in the crops from around the empire to pay for soldiers and then training the soldiers and sending them out. They invent the "peasant soldier". The peasant solider is exactly like the household with solar panels who regulates their energy use and gets enthusiastic about it, out on his own plot of land incentivized to farm and fight. The result is the rebound and re-expansion of the Byzantine Empire. But here's what goes along with that, in his words:
Tainter wrote:the government simplified, literacy and numarcy declined, the society simplified; the aristocracy simplified...great cities now contract to fortified hilltops
That all makes great sense to me, I just can't figure out where he comes up with the need for individuals to be better educated and think deeply about global interconnectivity. Education is costly. Culture is costly. Simplifying to authoritarianism may be our collapse. However, the challenges we run up against require simplification. I don't see why the simplification necessitates retaining high levels of education.

(This line of thinking tracks my own personal sci-fi imaginings. One of my favorite sci-fi contemplations is social fragmentation because information sharing is either too costly or impossible. Let's change energy consumption to computational power. Ultimately, computational power reduces to energy consumption anyway. Imagine each of us as a processor. Multiprocessing has diminishing returns with each processor added because of the problem of tracking global information. Each processor has to know a little bit about what everybody else is doing so they don't step on each others toes and fault. There are limits to how much each processor can stay independent to work on its own stuff rather than spending all its time getting little hints and summaries of what its peers are working on. Take this as an analogy for the society of the educated individual who coordinates with the whole. In contrast is parallel processing. In parallel processing, the left hand doesn't know what the right hand does. Each processor is free to crunch nonstop on its own problems so it's far more powerful. A beehive. Each bee is a processor, but no bee has any clue what the hive is or what the hive is for. It emerges as a stable system. A worker bee can be tagged to fulfill one of four roles, and it fulfills its role blindly once marked. A bee is essentially an unhinged right-winger or a religious fanatic, but the hive is intelligent. Imagine if a bee questioned its purpose or the sanity of what it does; the hive would fall apart. You can also imagine the bee as an organizational clump of other units. Perhaps a bee represents a community, and within the community there are educated people, but the knowledge of the community is bounded in a similar way. Ignorance is strength.)
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

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Huh. No wonder Utah rallies around the skep so much.

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Hugh Nibley claimed he bumped into Adolf Hitler, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Gertrude Stein, and the Grand Duke Vladimir Romanoff. Dishonesty is baked into Mormonism.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by Gunnar »

Gadianton wrote:
Mon Nov 14, 2022 2:51 am
. . . Each processor is free to crunch nonstop on its own problems so it's far more powerful. A beehive. Each bee is a processor, but no bee has any clue what the hive is or what the hive is for. It emerges as a stable system. A worker bee can be tagged to fulfill one of four roles, and it fulfills its role blindly once marked. A bee is essentially an unhinged right-winger or a religious fanatic, but the hive is intelligent. Imagine if a bee questioned its purpose or the sanity of what it does; the hive would fall apart. You can also imagine the bee as an organizational clump of other units. Perhaps a bee represents a community, and within the community there are educated people, but the knowledge of the community is bounded in a similar way. Ignorance is strength.)
This portion of your post is reminiscent of something I read in Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid concerning an imaginary interview with an ant colony, treating the ant colony as a sentient entity. If you haven't already read that book, I highly recommend it. My bet is that you probably already have. Am I right?
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by honorentheos »

Gunnar wrote:
Mon Nov 14, 2022 5:31 am
Gadianton wrote:
Mon Nov 14, 2022 2:51 am
. . . Each processor is free to crunch nonstop on its own problems so it's far more powerful. A beehive. Each bee is a processor, but no bee has any clue what the hive is or what the hive is for. It emerges as a stable system. A worker bee can be tagged to fulfill one of four roles, and it fulfills its role blindly once marked. A bee is essentially an unhinged right-winger or a religious fanatic, but the hive is intelligent. Imagine if a bee questioned its purpose or the sanity of what it does; the hive would fall apart. You can also imagine the bee as an organizational clump of other units. Perhaps a bee represents a community, and within the community there are educated people, but the knowledge of the community is bounded in a similar way. Ignorance is strength.)
This portion of your post is reminiscent of something I read in Douglas Hofstadter's book, Gödel, Escher, Bach, an Eternal Golden Braid concerning an imaginary interview with an ant colony, treating the ant colony as a sentient entity. If you haven't already read that book, I highly recommend it. My bet is that you probably already have. Am I right?
Ha! That is a homework assignment and a half. I would be hard pressed to recommend Hofstadter to the vast majority of people in that the book isn't a read, it's a life detour.
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Re: Will unhinged right-wingers create a deep state?

Post by honorentheos »

Hey Gad,

You picked up on many problems, or perhaps better said "implications", in Tainter's comments in that video from 2006.
And I think you landed pretty close if not exact on where his ideological views lie. I don't think he views the Byzantine soft collapse as voluntary, but rather the result of having ran out of successful options. The "success" came from not just bullheadedly driving forward, but instead accepting reality in order to bend rather than break.

The premise that undergirds our modern society is that progress is inevitable, our collective standard of living irreversible. So the appeal of Trump's rhetoric isn't in a call for simplifying. It's appeal is that it promises we can have everything we expect and more, and the solution is to keep doing what we were doing when times seemed simpler and progress was inevitable. It's an appeal to be simplistic.

To the parallel processing analogy, I'd note I've tried to engage folks here in discussions about the issues of having a society that lacks shared ideals. Calling back to E.O. Wilson, behind the bees doing what they do is evolutionary "shared ideology". The eusociality of a hive is so baked into the biology of the bee they CAN'T question the concept of a hive. Or, more likely, the bees with maladaptive mutations that favor individuality over the hive don't get to pass on their genes for many reasons, starting with the unlikely chances of a single bee surviving let alone finding mates. Bees run on Hive OS, or the "hive" is intelligent like you said.

I think this is where Tainter is coming from the education angle. In many ways, globalism is a mythical monster to people without economic understanding (see Ajax) who are not really much better off than our ancestors who created myths to explain earthquakes to which virgins must be sacrificed. Their jobs disappear, their 401k shrinks, and a priest tells them evil demons did it, so they need to curse what they don't understand while being taken advantage of by those a little less mystified.

We need a common OS to effect a soft simplification in a globalized world built on easy access to oil. The alternative is a fast simplification, read: collapse.

Effecting a soft simplifying is already being seeded in our society, though. Some of it forced, some voluntary. As one example, younger generations are less likely the own a home. Partially it's due to complexity (i.e. debt, markets, housing stock and construction costs, etc.) But some is a cultural shift towards wanting to live closer to where they work where the richness of a neighborhood's mosaic encourages renting or buying a condo/apartment/townhome. As just one example.

It's late, so I'll stop here but there's more to discuss.
Last edited by honorentheos on Tue Nov 15, 2022 1:33 am, edited 1 time in total.
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