Early Retirement Extreme Forums

Here's another story of an innocent person getting negatively impacted by shoddy and unscrupulous news reporting: Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Tainted My Workplace. Then Ronan Farrow’s Botched Reporting Trashed My Reputation

I'm glad these stories are coming out. They're reminders to the next generation regarding how inaccurate and biased the news can be. If sacrificing the innocent serves the story, they won't hesitate to throw another reputation into the pyre.

More reading for those who think that anyone is safe ...

Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine: An Elite Progressive LISTSERV Melts Down Over a Bogus Racism Charge


Yascha Mounk, The Atlantic: Stop Firing the Innocent

Also moderately press-related, if you can find a free copy, read Matt Taibbi's Year Zero: On America's birthday, celebrating the corporate-sponsored revolution.

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While I applaud the rules of engagement set forth upthread, what's dangerous in the current environment is that you might get cancelled or run over without ever engaging with someone. You can be summarily judged in absentia ... there is no longer the presumption that someone has a right to engage with an accuser or deserves a chance to defend themselves. The cause has become more important than the truth. They delude themselves when they say (and I've heard this from 3 different journos personally) that things will go back to normal post-Trump. Things never go back to the way they were. Once Trump is gone, they'll continue their hunt for populists, deplorables, misogynists, and closet racists (now that everyone is presumed tainted with that original sin). People rarely give up power willingly once they've wielded it effectively.

A good strategy is to claim being racist or any other deplorable trait, and then just be nice like you would normally be. They won't have grip over you, you'll make them lose power, and you don't have to hurt anybody.

I think what we're seeing is that social control is being introduced because legal control has failed to bring equal justice in the minds of enough people. Social control obviously doesn't work unless enough people agree that behavior falls outside the Overton window in a rather public manner. The observed fact that it's working now, therefore, also shows that a critical mass has been achieved in terms of how many people find past attitudes/behavior unacceptable. Twitter, facebook, ... + smartphones make it very easy to make things public.

Being "deplorable" on camera or social media is thus a very quick way to get ostracized from "polite society" these days, at least in the US, regardless of how nice one otherwise is.

The US is also a country where justice has failed systemically for a long time. It's also a country where individualism ranks higher and many people feel like they should be able to treat other people however they please. E.g. that there's a right to do whatever you want as long as it's within the legal law. This innate presumption falls under the headline of "privilege" ... but some people without that privilege thinks that it's too much privilege and thus use whatever control they otherwise have, such as the right not to associate, and proceed to do just that. E.g. if you publicly claim you're a racist, you could be fired from your job, because racists are not a protected class (a legal thing), and therefore your employer does not have to do business/employ racists if they don't want to. (As far as I understand it.) In short, there's a conflict and an imperfect solution method that is "crashing" through the system because people have little experience with it. Also see the #metoo movement for an almost exact analogy in terms of a long-existing conflict, a social control resolution, and how it was initially and eventually handled.

In other countries people seem more used to having various unspoken rules constrain their behavior. This also means that people are used to gauging their Overton windows at all times. See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome or https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveling_mechanism ... In particular, people don't tend to get as wound up insisting on their right to say/do whatever, because they're used to the fact that there are extralegal limits to bad behavior.

Either way, this is happening and it's good to be aware of it lest one do something [self]-destructive, whether knowingly or not. The early stages of any "systems-revolution" or "regime-change" are generally not pretty or even always fair.

There were seven members of the first Politburo: Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov.

Lenin and Stalin eventually succeeded to dictatorship and (presumably) died of natural causes.

Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sokolnikov, and Bubnov and many of the Old Bolsheviks were later executed by Stalin in the Great Purge, but not before making humiliating false confessions and receiving false promises of clemency.

Trotsky was assassinated by one of Stalin’s agents while in exile.

Party members always get hit hard because they're the most subject to party control and they're the most important rivals of other party members, i.e. knocking them over is relatively speaking both cheap and lucrative. There is evidence many of the show trial victims really believed they were guilty of something or other, even though their charges were often factually false or outright nonsensical, since they had outsourced their moral judgement to the party. Easy to kill such people - they kill themselves.

"Undefended wealth" in outsiders is another typical communist target. I wouldn't necessarily want to be owning a gaudy neoclassical mansion outside St. Louis right now. On the other hand a guy who lives in a tent and has $500k in a Swiss bank account may be relatively safe.

Jacob seems to be somewhat inside the ideology bubble (Wheaton level 1) but also somewhat seeing the big picture mechanically (Wheaton level 4). People should indeed take a look, from the outside as much as they can, at how vulnerable they are and make a judgement how they think this is likely to progress. It is passing from the stage where you try to influence the outcome into the stage where you try to survive.

Even if you think it is rational now, it won't necessarily stay rational, since by definition a non-law control mechanism is outside all the checks and balances we have set up to control the formal law. See CHOP going in a few weeks from an anarchist commune to lynching a black guy for doing crimes.

nomadscientist wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 07, 2020 3:47 pm

Jacob seems to be somewhat inside the ideology bubble (Wheaton level 1) but also somewhat seeing the big picture mechanically (Wheaton level 4). People should indeed take a look, from the outside as much as they can, at how vulnerable they are and make a judgement how they think this is likely to progress. It is passing from the stage where you try to influence the outcome into the stage where you try to survive.

Yes, 1 and 4. It's almost paradoxical, but it's a rather deliberate survival strategy on my part. There's a Swedish concept called an opinion corridor [of popular opinion] where the point is to navigate it w/o crashing into the sides. In order to stay centered, one has to know where the Overton boundaries are and adjust accordingly. That doesn't mean it can't be steered, but there's a right time and place to do so.

Consider how the forum is being moderated. There are indeed people with a chip on their shoulder. They don't have an agenda but rather an agenda has them and they see it as the most interesting thing in the world---there's no other right way. They will always defend their agenda if they feel threatened. They're the sheep-dogs of their agenda. If someone makes a point or a slogan, e.g. "Black Lives Matter" they can not help themselves to counter with "Blue/All Lives Matter". They literally do not see the effect this has on others or how saying it reflects back on themselves depending on who hears it. Insofar they do see it, they don't care. I don't know how this fits into Wheaton levels, but in terms of Kegan, it corresponds to the imperial mind (level 2). Purity matters because they see themselves as representing that. These are the ones spoiling for a fight because they're looking to prove a point regardless of how much it matters or how ridiculous the argument gets as long as they remain consistent with their principles. They're prepared to die on their hill or find another hill to attack or defend. When two opposing agendas meet in a debate, I know I'll spend the rest of the day doing damage control. When it happens IRL, it results in videos and shitstorms on twitter.

There's also the sportsball voters. They don't have an ideology as much as they're on a team or a political party. Of course that's an ideology in and of itself, but it's not nearly as sophomoric as the paragraph above. They belong to a party and this requires them to most importantly a) defend that party from attacks (by pointing out similar bad things about the other party); and less importantly b) have and follow the ideology ostensibly being representative of the party. As countless survey's show, the latter is not nearly as important and voters are really good at joining a party that is against their personal interests and beliefs. In the grand scheme of things (wolves, sheepdogs, and sheep), these are the sheep---the technical term being low-information voters. Properly socialized adults or in Kegan terms, level 3. This is the middle class, who don't care enough about politics to engage in culture wars. Voting is enough for them. They might say some shit about the other party, but they don't really care, and if you do engage (as a sheepdog), all they have to offer back is whataboutism or "lol idk shrug" reactions which is code for wanting to end the political debate. You can end it the same way. This stuff is pretty easy to moderate and in terms of behavior, these guys are pretty easy to get along with as long as one doesn't stir the shit pot.

Then there are people who have bona fide ideologies, that is, beliefs they've constructed themselves. Not to be confused with those who've adopted an agenda. The difference between the two is that ideologists will usually allow for exceptions and they will change their minds if they're given the right argument at the right time by the right person. They are aware of the opinion corridor so to speak. If they hold views outside the Overton window, they know how to keep it for themselves insofar they're not in sympathetic company. In the US they'd describe themselves as Independents (despite voting consistently for the same party). The group above would dismiss them as RINOs or DINOs or closet-Republicans/Democrats. To a large degree, the person here has adopted their ideology based on their situation. They stand where they sit. As their situation changes, they'll change their ideology to reflect that. If they bring new people into their orbit with different values, their ideology might also change to reflect that. For example, a person might be against LGBT rights until a child comes out gay at which point the ideology is changed to resolve the cognitive dissonance. A person who receives a windfall might experience a sudden change in their opinion on the capital gains tax. A healthy person who got sick might start questioning their ideology on health care. Politics in this crowd reflect their lives, situations, and who they are and how they live. In Kegan terms, they're self-authoring. In the US they vote according to who best represents their interests with the understanding that they can't get everything. In the political vernacular these are high-information voters. However, this vernacular can be misleading because the agenda driven crowd is also highly informed in terms of absolute quantity.

And then there are people for whom ideology is just a tool(*) or an abstraction. Some politicians demonstrate the ability to wield different tools when off camera which is highly refreshing. This would be a person who can describe an opponent's position in a way that that person would find fair. Also see campaign operators. The group above typically can't do that because they don't have enough experience with ideologies other than their own. The group two steps above definitely can't do it because their perspective of "other ideologies" is that of the enemy, so while they can make a description, the person would hardly find it fair. (e.g. "A socialist is a person who hates America".) These guys have opinions, of course, but they're hard to pin down. I don't really encounter this attitude until I worked in finance, where the perspective of politics was very much one of what [market] consequences the clashing ideologies would have. The reason being that insofar the trader got it right, they would make money either way. Contrast this with the group above who only benefits if the ideology is aligned. (Metaphorically, a trader makes money whether the market goes up and down. A buy&hold investor only makes money when the market goes up. The former is agnostic. The latter is religious.). Seeing ideology as a competing or collaborating tools describes the interconnected mind. At this point, it does get frustrating seeing people dying on hills to attack or defend agendas. Why are they willingly banging their heads against the wall? (Of course you know why---the frustrating part is that they don't) Ditto the meme-sharing or talking point repeating sportball fans. However, from the point of running/moderating the forum, I am trying to guide it into the direction of being an interconnected mind. That is, one that is smarter with us together as well as one that will if not elevate people out of developing their politics according to their own beliefs but see politics as something (a process) that includes all people. Effectively, by trying to discourage sportsball fandom, pushing back on agendas (I have nukes), and pushing/pulling on ideologies to get people to see a bit more than their current spot.

(*) Rare masters of this can build new tools or change or refactor a tool completely. These individuals can either be highly dangerous or highly beneficial.

In that regard, staying within the opinion corridor is pretty easy, because regardless of how people deal with their political thinking, there are still some "absolute" rules one can count on and which people rarely diverge from. In particular, the one known as the golden rule which various philosophies and religions have each phrased in remarkably similar ways. Just remember to consider the other(s) as people too. (I prefer the Rawlsian formulation of justice.) The second one being "recognize and avoid trouble". Whenever someone gets hung out to dry by public opinion, it's usually because they forget both.

TL;DR - I talked about both how I set my own political values (the true neutral corridor) + a general framework for how I think political values develop/evolve. They're likely mutually reinforcing/codeveloped. I did not start out thinking this way. I very much used to be one of those pestering individuals who thought I held the [libertarian] keys to the universe.

For a fun animation explaining why revolutionaries often execute some of their own and many other features of governance, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs

There was a genuine opportunity for change but it was lost when the movement for change tilted toward extremism. Having an opposing opinion, if it causes someone to be "triggered", is enough justification to silence that opinion regardless how accurate the opinion and how humbly it's expressed. The egregiousness of this forced silence is compounded by demands to have that person fired.

This mob induced job termination is thought as recompense for all the lost opportunities the less privileged have historically suffered. Two wrongs don't make a right. Nothing is gained by empowering the historically disenfranchised by creating a new disenfranchised class.

Speech has to remain free so we can discover what might be better despite how uncomfortable the truth may be. Many of the rights we enjoy today were considered scandalous topics such as women's suffrage or the abolition of slavery. What speech will we suppress today which will be considered ignorant and dangerous by future generations?

Many think this problem and its enormity is unique to the United States. Jacob's post claims US justice has failed systematically. I think he's partially right. But the reason for this failure is not unique. The problems the US is experiencing today occurred in Europe beforehand. The colonist were transplanted Europeans after all; the US culture was birthed in a European cradle.

I suspect the problems we're seeing in the US today are occurring in Europe. Ask any Arab living in Europe if they feel disenfranchised. If the US justice system has failed systemically then European justice has to be failing as well.

https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/racism ... thers-9483:

A three-leg journey from Paris, France, to Antwerp, Belgium and onwards to Eindhoven in the Netherlands, served as a crude wakeup call.

On this journey I was accompanied by a Jordanian Arab friend living in Paris, who holds a 10-year residency card. We were travelling by bus; at the door, the conductor asked to see our tickets and ID. I handed him my e-ticket and my passport, and my companion, Fares*, was asked the same. He handed the conductor his ticket and residency card.

The Dutch man began to yell – as I was already in the bus, I rushed back out.

"You are not allowed to travel with this card, it only allows you to live here," the driver said.

"You have to respect the laws of this country otherwise we will send you back where you came from – I will let you pass, but next time this won't happen," he added in a half-yell.

https://www.justiceinitiative.org/voice ... -not-blind:

In Bulgaria, half of the people in prison in 2015 were Roma. In Estonia, foreigners are disproportionately represented among people being held in pretrial detention. In Greece foreigners who are convicted of a crime receive heavier sentences than Greeks. Roma in Hungary are three times more likely to be stopped and searched by the police, and are less likely than non-Roma to be released awaiting trial.

These alarming findings are highlighted in a new scoping study, produced by the two of us with Justicia, the EU criminal justice reform network, that looked at the treatment of minority groups and non-nationals by the police and justice systems across 12 European Union member states. The conclusion, unfortunately, is that there is a significant level of unfairness in how people are treated, depending on their ethnic background.

This is believed to be one of the first studies of its kind. Despite efforts by the European Union to ensure that EU members apply common standards in their justice system in terms of arrest rights—such as ensuring early access to a lawyer—the question of standards of ethnic or racial bias have not been on the agenda.

There are no European Union–wide regulations that have standardized data collection and monitoring of outcomes in the criminal justice systems, with particular attention to ethnic and racial minorities, and non-nationals...

....In Spain, the existence of clear institutional bias was paralleled by the disproportionate representation of non-nationals in crime rates statistics, pretrial statistics, or prison population statistics...

The point I'm trying to make here is not that Europeans are bad too. The point I'm making is these injustices will eventually cause a similar clash throughout Europe and this left extremism may silence the thoughtful and well reasoned voices which are needed to keep society civil and educated. I fear that the US and Europe will fall into an intellectual dark age. I just think Europeans have a higher tolerance for this style of leftism because they are used to an authoritarian style of collectivism which slants leftward. If the slant was rightward they would be loosing their minds similar to what is occurring with the non left extremists in the US.

“jacob” wrote: However, from the point of running/moderating the forum, I am trying to guide it into the direction of being an interconnected mind. That is, one that is smarter with us together as well as one that will if not elevate people out of developing their politics according to their own beliefs but see politics as something (a process) that includes all people.

Gotcha now.

Does it make sense that someone who was Level 4/5 cusp would purposefully choose polyamours from variety of political groupings while herself donning a sort of Independent Green Libertarian Red Cross costume in order to improve the likelihood of her survival post-apocalypse(s) while keeping herself better amused in the meanwhile? Or is this more indicative of rough mix of late midlife nihilistic depression and “still being a punk?”

Further interesting note from Lakoff would be that when subcultures flip accepted cultural metaphors, such as “Small is beautiful” instead of “Bigger is better.”, they still tend towards maintaining deeper culturally or physiologically experienced metaphors, such as “More is up.” Thus, for “Small is beautiful” subculture, “Even smaller” would be assigned bigger/higher Level status.

What we're seeing is that social control is being introduced because it is convenient for the elites to control the divided masses. The stay-at-home orders, the silencing of speech, is the state flexing its muscles.

Campitor wrote: ↑

Tue Jul 07, 2020 5:43 pm

I fear that the US and Europe will fall into an intellectual dark age.

The case being made is that whether the intellectual dark age is upon us or not, the True Neutral does not consider the intellectual dark age to be a negative development, and even if it were, that there is no point subjecting one’s self to risk to attempt resisting it.

And a case was made above that perhaps there was a window to change the outcome and now it just makes practical sense to survive. I am personally of the opinion that libertarianism is really viable only as a personal philosophy and not a political philosophy, so I will play this game to survive. I do think there are gradations in how much nobility one lives one’s life, for example in looking upon a conflict between Chaotic Good and Lawful Evil I identify with one side of the conflict and would aid and abet it, rather than viewing the conflict dispassionately like a chemical reaction between two different compounds.

It's a chemical reaction between two different compounds that may or may not be about to burn your face off. It's both a dispassionate objective reality and (sometimes) something to get mad about and resist.

@jacob

Very interesting post. My only quibble is that a constructed own ideology does not necessarily change to rationalise anything that happens or to rationalise things the individual wants to do for other reasons. It can also be constructed as a guide for living that is meant to work over the long term with possibility of short term discomfort. It's the difference between between "buy and hold" and "panic and sell" as investment strategies. They're both meant to serve the investor's purposes as he perceives it at the time but the latter just rationalises autonomic responses to short term happenings while the former adds something more.

@jacob

Ok, I get know.



Finally.

Interestingly, what level would you give me on based my posting history? I gonna PM you with some additional questions, btw.

__

@jacob, additionaly good to know whole picture of it (I wasn't able it to deconstruct based on OCD google fu of your activity). But I saw this quote/methapor of Sun Tzu before in your investing/other areas of life posts.

Also, this idea of being able to convince people to my side (or levelling them to higher Kegan/Wheaton levels) without their active part is also my wet dream (as could be seen in "Avoiding corporate BS" topic).

It's all correct, except that it makes the assumption of abundance. One Can argue if there is abundance, but human behaviors evolved in a non abundance setting. I don't see how we could change human instincts. Therefore, there will always be groupings and outing, and what looks like a stupide battle for a stupide Hill, hides a battle for survival. Basically, what @jacob seem to value, are loner strategies. They are good stratégies if you live in a Time Windows when you don't need to be in a group, but they arm the group, and then your interest, as long as you intend to exist (as futur you, or your biological heir), in a futur where group protection might be needed, and group relative strength to other groups will be a major survival factor.
I'm still waiting for someone opposing this point of view to describe it fairly, and explaining its blindspots to me.

@Jean:

Abundance is necessary precondition to transcend human instincts, but why do you believe it to be necessary or wise to pre-define the group which you may choose to join towards survival in an emergent crisis of scarcity? Shakespeare's note that "Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows." is more in alignment with my experience and knowledge.

Yay, Harpers! I can always count on you.

https://harpers.org/a-letter-on-justic ... en-debate/

but why do you believe it to be necessary or wise to pre-define the group which you may choose to join towards survival in an emergent crisis of scarcity?

Not speaking for Jean but IMHO, in a true intellectual dark age, it will be important for the STEM/Medical professionals to preserve, curate, and pass on their knowledge, and the best way to achieve this will be the formation of STEM/Medical enclaves similar to what occurred in Medieval times.

@Campitor:

Perhaps, but you are imagining a particular sort of extreme situation. I think recent events would tend towards lending weight to notion that we aren’t always preparing for the emergency we were expecting. For example, COVID-19 greatly devalued meat-space social capital in the moment, but nobody lost their internet connection. Do you really expect to live into an age where nobody, including you, could hack together a rough printing press or telegraph system?

Also, STEM/medical community is not equivalent to intellectual community.

7Wannabe5 wrote: ↑

Wed Jul 08, 2020 11:44 am

Also, STEM/medical community is not equivalent to intellectual community.

I wonder if some of this is the intellectual community's attempt to make itself relevant again since the big players are now in tech/STEM/bio/medicine. They've been given a platform and an issue to regain some ground. (I'm not being anti-intellectual. I'm mostly referring to the increasingly irrelevant academia in fields that are fading or aren't holding up well to scrutiny with improved scientific methods and testing.)

I don't believe we'll fall into a dark age wrt STEM. What I worry about is losing our humanity during the STEM revolution because the Humanities picked an inopportune time to go batshit.