I've read a few really good books on how to communicate better with folks; if you're interested or curious, shoot me a message and we can chat a bit.
Meantime, I hope this helps folks become more self-reflective. A conversation always has at least two participants, and you can control the way others perceive you to a much larger degree than one might think.
This type of thing is fun pop psychology, but it's not really how things actually work. I've been hearing this one my whole life. But being able to bear witness to things that are wrong in society doesn't make that an equal and opposite reflection.
The two parties are not equally corrupt for instance. Republicans are astronomically more corrupt. Not even close to the same levels of corruption. Even if corruption is to be expected in a large society. The American government six months ago was remarkably less corrupt than the world average for corruption. But that has been changed.
This is a great response. I will say that in that first paragraph, you project against an argument I don't make. I say nothing about equal and opposite reflections.
As far as corruption goes, there's an irony in that you are absolutly making the case for this essay. That you can't see the fraud waste and abuse that's been uncovered in USAID alone with the incredible kickbacks, the nests of NGOs enriching people and the absolute lack of accountability is amazing. This has been known for decades. It was always a very open secret that USAID paid kickbacks to domestic supporters while providing dark money for IC operations overseas. All of which circumvent transparent and legal operations. Watching Democrats lose their mind as they lose their funding has been interesting to watch.
The US has been less corrupt than the world average since inception. Even, and especially, when run by Republicans. But back to the topic. You've done a splendid job of demonstrating why I wrote this article. Thank you for that.
If you're obsessed with USAID a tiny proportion of the budget, then basically I see you as robotically and mindlessly repeating what mainstream media told you to think. Foreign aid is such a tiny proportion of spending. Yet y'all obsess over it. Because that's what the TeeVee told you to do. Your obsession with USAID and the fact that you're just spouting what the party told you to believe even though the party never actually proved that corruption in court. Musk said it, Trump said it, so you accept it at gospel.
Your lack of care or allegiance to the truth is why your party is so corrupt. Your voters don't hold your elites accountable.
The truth is, you have no idea how corrupt USAID was or wasn't, you only go based on what the party told you.
Obsessed? You're projecting again. It's just critical evidence of corruption. The irony of your statement is multifold:
1. I don't watch TV, actually never have.
2. I've been looking at USAID for 20 years since I started tracking the corruption in the CIA. Great book on the topic is Legacy of Ashes (here: https://amzn.to/4bLUVoA)
3. My allegiance is only to the truth. That's why I wrote this damn article! 👊🏽😆
4. You started with the accusation that the Rs are more corrput than the Ds and I point out the fallacy there and you shift to saying USAID is a small amount of corruption. Great, let's find the rest!
Bringing up a program that was funded and run by both parties kind of gave you away.
Criticizing USAID isn't a criticism of Democrats. It's a criticism of the foreign policy establishment as a whole. Democrats and Republicans.
Yes, foreign aid is corrupt, anyone who knows anything about it, knows this, because foreign countries are corrupt.
This has nothing to do with Democrats though. That you framed it that way is fundamentally dishonest
But I'll let you go back to thinking writing a thousand words to say nothing deeper than, "when you point a finger there are three pointing back.", it's the lowest pop psychology. It's nonsense, it's always been nonsense.
Ah.. But look at what the investigation has uncovered. The NGOs that all got kickbacks are all Dem aligned. And They're the ones screaming the loudest as the funding gets cut. That's your tip off. When 92% of D.C. Votes Dem, you know where the corruption is don't you?
I avoided all of this by not voting (this past election). And I’m poor, I was never good at saving my money (ADHD). However, when I eat out or have food delivered or take Lyft, I always leave a tip.
"So when you see someone reacting against something that you aren’t"
--> This is a very interesting topic but the biggest struggle I think is to differentiate what is the mirror and what isn't (what is projection and what isn't) this is the most obscure part of the game. Some claim that everything is a mirror but I don't think it would be that simple ;)
Good point. Sometimes it’s too easy to discount another person. The other day I had to do this where I realized the person wasn’t looking into a mirror, they had a legit critique but weren’t articulating it clearly. It took a bit of analysis to teast it out. This is why I love the idea of Mixed Mental Arts… we have to grapple with these topics.
One of the most impossible things for a human to do is to be self-aware of their own shortcomings and character defects. An endless supply of examples for your essay.
I think you look at some of these issues a bit too superficially. For instance if blacks people are grossly overrepresented on crime statistics, and you are a small woman out late at night and a big black guy walks on your side, it is not irrational to cross the street.
But taking a precaution is not the same thing as thinking black people should be handled unjustly by the police. Remember we aren't talking about black people getting say stopped more frequent by police but the prevalence of violence by police against black people and the reaction by the public when that happens. BLM was about how black lives often did not seem to matter. Just because I am aware of a group being overrepresented on crime statistics doesn't mean I think their lives are less worthy than that of others. So you conflate two entirely different things. It is not surprising as it is easy to do that if you only look at the issue in a superficial manner without asking yourself: "Are these two things actually related?" No, not really.
As for the maternity leave question. Many of us advocating for public solutions are principled opposed to charity based solution in the same way as you are probably opposed to public solutions and would prefer charity based solution instead. In a sense you are attacking someone for not having your own preference in how an issue is solved.
You probably think charity is better, because it makes it optional. You are forced to pay by government. If you think that is better and actually don't want federally funded parental leave then try to reflect on why someone might view things opposite from you. Your perspective is from a more libertarian or conservative perspective on society and life. But we are not all right-wingers.
For us on the left the emphasis is not on avoiding government but rather on taking on shared responsibility, and avoiding free riders. If you try to solve an issue through charity you get a free rider problem: Many will be able to enjoy the benefits of others paying to charity while they don't.
Imagine if all taxation was replaced by charity? Roads, armed forces, police, fire department. All paid with charity. How do you think that would end up? They would all be severely underfunded, because few people want to say pay for armed forces or police while a majority opt out. Nobody wants to be the sucker paying for a service everyone benefits from. There is a reason why charity has never solved any major problem in any country. Charity has never managed to handle unemployment, maternity leave, pensions or health care.
For us that want national funded programs, our thinking is that we have a condition for supporting these programs economically: We will do it as long as everyone else pitch in. To understand this mechanism you need to study the prisoners dilemma. It explains why individual action doesn't work very well for things of shared interest.
Valid points. The challenge is that when you countered my admittedly simple examples with arguments ad absurdum. You over indexed. There will always be outliers. Those outliers don't disprove the mean. The people who hold the nuance you talk about are also not typically arguing into a mirror.
Not quite sure what you are saying. I am not a native English speaker, so "over indexed" is not immediately obvious to me. Anyway I think this needs to be put in context.
You are right that most people are not making the detailed argument I am making. Or rather they are not making it explicitly. Here is a thing that took me a long time to grasp: Whether you are on the left or right, most people approach political questions at a fairly emotional level. People intuit a lot they cannot clearly articulate.
I worked a lot on user interfaces before and UX. If you break important principles people will intuitively grasp something is wrong but they can very rarely articulate it. But as someone who studied it I can actually articulate for people in detail why they are thrown off. And once you explain it, they get it. They understand their own first response.
Lots of things in life are like that. You grasp something at an intuitive level without being able to articulate what you grasp. Most people are quite poor at articulating logical argument and observations. So what I talk about with respect to charity, free riders etc on maternity leave is stuff someone with a leftist mindset will intuit. They cannot necessarily express that clearly.
Someone like you who is good at arguing and articulating himself, can easily run circles around them and make them look stupid. But that doesn't mean their position is illogical.
I was once a right-winger specifically because I felt leftist based everything on feelings. Took me a while to realize the right does the same. It just isn't expressed the same way. Normal people are controlled a lot by emotions and are generally poor at articulating their positions.
The inclusion of this mirror you talk of is one of the great additions to my worldview when I gave it over to Christ to build and change according to His purposes. Conversion to Christianity had a number of benefits like that…restored self-worth, clear purposes in life, and a built-in conflict resolution through forgiveness and grace.
This certainly contains a lot of wisdom.
I've read a few really good books on how to communicate better with folks; if you're interested or curious, shoot me a message and we can chat a bit.
Meantime, I hope this helps folks become more self-reflective. A conversation always has at least two participants, and you can control the way others perceive you to a much larger degree than one might think.
I think what's crazy is how little control over the conversation that we actually have.
This type of thing is fun pop psychology, but it's not really how things actually work. I've been hearing this one my whole life. But being able to bear witness to things that are wrong in society doesn't make that an equal and opposite reflection.
The two parties are not equally corrupt for instance. Republicans are astronomically more corrupt. Not even close to the same levels of corruption. Even if corruption is to be expected in a large society. The American government six months ago was remarkably less corrupt than the world average for corruption. But that has been changed.
This is a great response. I will say that in that first paragraph, you project against an argument I don't make. I say nothing about equal and opposite reflections.
As far as corruption goes, there's an irony in that you are absolutly making the case for this essay. That you can't see the fraud waste and abuse that's been uncovered in USAID alone with the incredible kickbacks, the nests of NGOs enriching people and the absolute lack of accountability is amazing. This has been known for decades. It was always a very open secret that USAID paid kickbacks to domestic supporters while providing dark money for IC operations overseas. All of which circumvent transparent and legal operations. Watching Democrats lose their mind as they lose their funding has been interesting to watch.
The US has been less corrupt than the world average since inception. Even, and especially, when run by Republicans. But back to the topic. You've done a splendid job of demonstrating why I wrote this article. Thank you for that.
If you're obsessed with USAID a tiny proportion of the budget, then basically I see you as robotically and mindlessly repeating what mainstream media told you to think. Foreign aid is such a tiny proportion of spending. Yet y'all obsess over it. Because that's what the TeeVee told you to do. Your obsession with USAID and the fact that you're just spouting what the party told you to believe even though the party never actually proved that corruption in court. Musk said it, Trump said it, so you accept it at gospel.
Your lack of care or allegiance to the truth is why your party is so corrupt. Your voters don't hold your elites accountable.
The truth is, you have no idea how corrupt USAID was or wasn't, you only go based on what the party told you.
Obsessed? You're projecting again. It's just critical evidence of corruption. The irony of your statement is multifold:
1. I don't watch TV, actually never have.
2. I've been looking at USAID for 20 years since I started tracking the corruption in the CIA. Great book on the topic is Legacy of Ashes (here: https://amzn.to/4bLUVoA)
3. My allegiance is only to the truth. That's why I wrote this damn article! 👊🏽😆
4. You started with the accusation that the Rs are more corrput than the Ds and I point out the fallacy there and you shift to saying USAID is a small amount of corruption. Great, let's find the rest!
PS, my political philosophy is much richer than your strawman. I'm a Democrat and a Socialist when done right: https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/quantum-superposition-and-politics
Bringing up a program that was funded and run by both parties kind of gave you away.
Criticizing USAID isn't a criticism of Democrats. It's a criticism of the foreign policy establishment as a whole. Democrats and Republicans.
Yes, foreign aid is corrupt, anyone who knows anything about it, knows this, because foreign countries are corrupt.
This has nothing to do with Democrats though. That you framed it that way is fundamentally dishonest
But I'll let you go back to thinking writing a thousand words to say nothing deeper than, "when you point a finger there are three pointing back.", it's the lowest pop psychology. It's nonsense, it's always been nonsense.
Ah.. But look at what the investigation has uncovered. The NGOs that all got kickbacks are all Dem aligned. And They're the ones screaming the loudest as the funding gets cut. That's your tip off. When 92% of D.C. Votes Dem, you know where the corruption is don't you?
NGOs aren't aligned with a party by definition. That type of political alignment would conflict with their charter.
I know it's trendy to call foreign aid corruption. We heard you all when you put AIDS prevention in Africa at the top of your lists of corruption.
Most of DC votes Dem because Dem is the party of cities and DC is mostly poor minorities.
Do you even understand how any of this works? Do you think the average DC voter is a political operative?
Do you think the average government worker even lives inside DC?
https://open.substack.com/pub/richardhanania/p/conservatism-as-an-oppositional-culture?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=jthsd
That you've linked to Richard Hanania shows you don't understand conservatives either because he's all over the charts and mostly an NPC.
Also, you must have missed the article I linked about my own political stance: https://www.polymathicbeing.com/p/quantum-superposition-and-politics
I avoided all of this by not voting (this past election). And I’m poor, I was never good at saving my money (ADHD). However, when I eat out or have food delivered or take Lyft, I always leave a tip.
"So when you see someone reacting against something that you aren’t"
--> This is a very interesting topic but the biggest struggle I think is to differentiate what is the mirror and what isn't (what is projection and what isn't) this is the most obscure part of the game. Some claim that everything is a mirror but I don't think it would be that simple ;)
Good point. Sometimes it’s too easy to discount another person. The other day I had to do this where I realized the person wasn’t looking into a mirror, they had a legit critique but weren’t articulating it clearly. It took a bit of analysis to teast it out. This is why I love the idea of Mixed Mental Arts… we have to grapple with these topics.
One of the most impossible things for a human to do is to be self-aware of their own shortcomings and character defects. An endless supply of examples for your essay.
Thank you Michael.
I'm glad you liked it and yes, it is one of the most challenging things to do especially when we don't like what we see!
Meaningful personal Change only occurs when the pain of the current situation exceeds the fear of the unknown.
Very true.
I think you look at some of these issues a bit too superficially. For instance if blacks people are grossly overrepresented on crime statistics, and you are a small woman out late at night and a big black guy walks on your side, it is not irrational to cross the street.
But taking a precaution is not the same thing as thinking black people should be handled unjustly by the police. Remember we aren't talking about black people getting say stopped more frequent by police but the prevalence of violence by police against black people and the reaction by the public when that happens. BLM was about how black lives often did not seem to matter. Just because I am aware of a group being overrepresented on crime statistics doesn't mean I think their lives are less worthy than that of others. So you conflate two entirely different things. It is not surprising as it is easy to do that if you only look at the issue in a superficial manner without asking yourself: "Are these two things actually related?" No, not really.
As for the maternity leave question. Many of us advocating for public solutions are principled opposed to charity based solution in the same way as you are probably opposed to public solutions and would prefer charity based solution instead. In a sense you are attacking someone for not having your own preference in how an issue is solved.
You probably think charity is better, because it makes it optional. You are forced to pay by government. If you think that is better and actually don't want federally funded parental leave then try to reflect on why someone might view things opposite from you. Your perspective is from a more libertarian or conservative perspective on society and life. But we are not all right-wingers.
For us on the left the emphasis is not on avoiding government but rather on taking on shared responsibility, and avoiding free riders. If you try to solve an issue through charity you get a free rider problem: Many will be able to enjoy the benefits of others paying to charity while they don't.
Imagine if all taxation was replaced by charity? Roads, armed forces, police, fire department. All paid with charity. How do you think that would end up? They would all be severely underfunded, because few people want to say pay for armed forces or police while a majority opt out. Nobody wants to be the sucker paying for a service everyone benefits from. There is a reason why charity has never solved any major problem in any country. Charity has never managed to handle unemployment, maternity leave, pensions or health care.
For us that want national funded programs, our thinking is that we have a condition for supporting these programs economically: We will do it as long as everyone else pitch in. To understand this mechanism you need to study the prisoners dilemma. It explains why individual action doesn't work very well for things of shared interest.
Valid points. The challenge is that when you countered my admittedly simple examples with arguments ad absurdum. You over indexed. There will always be outliers. Those outliers don't disprove the mean. The people who hold the nuance you talk about are also not typically arguing into a mirror.
Not quite sure what you are saying. I am not a native English speaker, so "over indexed" is not immediately obvious to me. Anyway I think this needs to be put in context.
You are right that most people are not making the detailed argument I am making. Or rather they are not making it explicitly. Here is a thing that took me a long time to grasp: Whether you are on the left or right, most people approach political questions at a fairly emotional level. People intuit a lot they cannot clearly articulate.
I worked a lot on user interfaces before and UX. If you break important principles people will intuitively grasp something is wrong but they can very rarely articulate it. But as someone who studied it I can actually articulate for people in detail why they are thrown off. And once you explain it, they get it. They understand their own first response.
Lots of things in life are like that. You grasp something at an intuitive level without being able to articulate what you grasp. Most people are quite poor at articulating logical argument and observations. So what I talk about with respect to charity, free riders etc on maternity leave is stuff someone with a leftist mindset will intuit. They cannot necessarily express that clearly.
Someone like you who is good at arguing and articulating himself, can easily run circles around them and make them look stupid. But that doesn't mean their position is illogical.
I was once a right-winger specifically because I felt leftist based everything on feelings. Took me a while to realize the right does the same. It just isn't expressed the same way. Normal people are controlled a lot by emotions and are generally poor at articulating their positions.
The inclusion of this mirror you talk of is one of the great additions to my worldview when I gave it over to Christ to build and change according to His purposes. Conversion to Christianity had a number of benefits like that…restored self-worth, clear purposes in life, and a built-in conflict resolution through forgiveness and grace.