Now let's hear from random conspiracy nuts! — SophistiCat

Just calling everyone you disagree with a 'conspiracy nut' is not a response you'd want to advertise. It's embarrassing.

In what world is the U.S. not the primary suspect after such a statement has been made? — Tzeentch

Yeah.

Is the US capable of such an operation? Undoubtedly, yes.

Have the US carried out such operations before? Undoubtedly, yes.

Would the US benefit from such an operation? From their own admission, yes.

It's amazing the world we now live in where suggesting the US has done something it's capable of, benefits from, and has done before becomes a 'conspiracy theory'.

That's really interesting, we had the same in the UK with the behavioural scientists in SAGE being instructed pretty much to find ways of amping up the fear.

Perhaps they were concerned that Pfizer's profits might dangerously dip below that $20 billion threshold we all know is, for some reason, crucial to human well-being.

I'm attempting to argue ... that knowledge comprises a synthesis of experience and intellect. ... that some fundamental ideas ... are apprehended or discovered by the mind - that they're not a product of the brain — Wayfarer

We're still waiting for the argument. So far, all you've done is claim it.

Ha!

Here's you talking about a piece with uncorroborated sources supportive of the US...

(Given that most of her sources are anonymous and there is little independent confirmation for any of this, you can only trust her integrity. But she has written for respected media outlets before independent media was completely shut down in Russia.) — SophistiCat

Here's you talking about equally respected, award-winning journalists using uncorroborated sources critical of the US...

It might as well be some random conspiracy nut (which is what Seymour Hersh has become in his dotage). But it will be amusing to watch how all the anti-American "skeptics" will jump on this juicy piece. — SophistiCat

I'd struggle to find a clearer example of ideological bias.

Support the US with anonymous sources - you're a respected journalist.

Criticise the US with anonymous sources - You're a conspiracy theorist.

So...

these intelligibles [numbers, which are real] are not a product of the mind — Wayfarer

...but...

the only reality we know is constructed by the activities of the intellect — Wayfarer

How do you square those two? If the only reality is "constructed by the activities of the intellect", then how can real numbers (which you claim are a part of reality), be "not a product of the mind"?

Either reality (part of which you claim includes numbers), is a product of the mind or it isn't.

My argument for mathematical platonism more generally is simply that number (etc) is real, but not materially existent. Numbers, and many other 'intelligible objects', are real, in that they are the same for anyone who can grasp them, but they're only able to be grasped by a rational intelligence. So they're independent of your mind or mine, but are only real as objects of the intelligence. — Wayfarer

For the second time in this thread you seem to be confusing an argument for a statement. There's no argument there, no series of logical steps from a common foundation. You've just said "numbers are real". A sentence of the form "X is y" is a proposition, not an argument.

Jewish so maybe a Jewish agenda. — Mark Nyquist

Seriously! What the fuck does 'maybe a Jewish agenda' mean in this context? In what sense could you possibly justify a 'Jewish' agenda toward bombing a gas pipeline?

Individual minds, that all operate under the same conditions and parse experience in the same way. Mind is ‘collective’ in the sense that we’re all members of the same language group, culture, and so on. — Wayfarer

But here you refute exactly the same argument in your support of mathematical platonism. You are derisive of the attempts to see number as unreal and your opposition derives entirely from the fact that our mathematical models , assuming number is real, have been extremely successful in predicting previously unknown facts about the world.

Firstly, if number ought be considered real on the grounds of the success of models which treat it as if it were, then our models which treat the external world as equally real have had even more success and so should count even more as evidence of a real external world.

Secondly, your argument for mathematical platonism itself relies on the reality of an external world described by physics because without it, the success of mathematical theories in predicting physical constants is not at all surprising and is evidence only of internal consistency.

masking up isn't exactly detrimental. — jorndoe

There are a large number of child psychologists and paediatricians worried about the effects of masks on children's development. For example...

https://healthpolicy.usc.edu/article/mandatory-masking-of-school-children-is-a-bad-idea/

https://theconversation.com/clear-masks-for-caregivers-mean-young-children-can-keep-learning-from-adults-faces-139432

https://www.cugmhp.org/five-on-friday-posts/why-a-mask-is-not-just-a-mask/

And since when did we start major mandatory interventions on the grounds that they "probably" don't do any harm?

Besides which you're simply attempting your usual switch. The issue here is the extreme vitriol with which anyone opposing mask-wearing was treated. People were screamed at, called 'murderers', physically assaulted, banned from public platforms, sacked from their jobs... all for disagreeing with a policy which had little evidential support, some risk of harm and now transpires may have been pointless.

The point of all this is not about health policy. It's about how we dealt with rational dissent.

Now consider the fact that the chain reaction that could've been initiated by this one person has been avoided — Agent Smith

It hasn't. It will happen at some point in time over the near future. That's the point. Everyone (who's within that cohort) will get Covid. So any effort to stop them getting Covid now is pointless because they will get Covid at some point. What you can do, if you have loved ones who are vulnerable, is get them vaccinated. Vaccination reduces the severity of the symptoms they will suffer when (not if) they get Covid. Beyond that, I suggest you direct any remaining vitriol to your atrocious healthcare provision so that when people get Covid they are better cared for than the third-rate slum that modern healthcare has been degraded to.

'm not aware of the CDC or US government mandating masks for children between 2 & 5. Recommended yes, mandated no. — EricH

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/02/world/with-cases-rising-mayor-eric-adams-is-keeping-new-york-citys-preschool-mask-mandate.html

given the numerous crises going on in the world, the issue of whether mask wearing was the best strategy for preventing COVID transmission (or minimizing the effects) is wa-a-ay low on my list of things to obsess about. — EricH

High enough to chime in when you thought you could exculpate your government, but as soon as it comes to actually holding power to account it suddenly becomes boring and low priority. And you wonder how they get to walk all over you...

For vulnerable people like the elderly and chronically ill, it makes sense to keep wearing them. — frank

in a social setting, even 1 person protected means a chain reaction of infections has been forestalled — Agent Smith

Neither of these suggestions make sense.

Sars cov 2 is so contagious your best efforts will not keep the virus away . It's not a question of if you can avoid the virus, it's only a question of when you get it.

There are still people who believe wrongly that if they mask, if they test religiously, they can prevent their loved ones from getting COVID. That's not true. It's setting them up for disappointment. One day, someone will infect their loved one. It might even be them. The test will be falsely negative. The mask will fail, which is what masks do. — Vinay Prasad - Associate Professor Epidemiology and Health Policy

The outcome mentioned there is not whether they contracted it. We already know they did by laboratory confirmation. "Outcome" in this case means the same thing it always does in research about healthcare. — frank

Which of the studies tested for these outcomes?

Children of this age should not wear masks for a long duration or without supervision.  — https://www.who.int/news-room/questions-and-answers/item/q-a-children-and-masks-related-to-covid-19

It's in the very article you cited. The US mandate went against this advice.

Also, the government in America mandated masks for children against the advice of the WHO. Since when did it become OK to mandate an un-trialled intervention, on children, on the basis of "no evidence that it's not effective"?

There's currently no evidence that slapping children repeatedly round the face is not effective. Should we mandate that too?

there are other highly qualified folks out there who are pointing out significant issues with this study: — EricH

I don't doubt it, especially given the vitriol with which the advice was promoted. there's going to be every incentive out there to find every flaw possible. Odd that no such flaw-finding zeal was applied to the studies showing even the vaguest links between mask-wearing and disease reduction, or the extremely flawed studies on myocarditis, or the sketchy trials for the original vaccine, or the barely existent trials showing any benefits to the interminable 'boosters'...

One can always find flaws. No trials are perfect. As I said earlier here...

What the Cochrane review shows is not that masks are useless, nor that governments were wrong to mandate their use. It shows that those who disagreed with the government's policy were normal, rational people who simply had legitimate and well grounded differences of opinion about the best way forward. — Isaac

Here outcome means whether you lived or died. — frank

It doesn't. The studies involved are summarised for you in tables 1, 2, and 3. None of them measured the outcome of the course of the ARI, they only measured contraction.

the portion you quoted was about outcomes — frank

Yes, and the 'outcomes' were, in that case, catching an ARI, not the course of that ARI once caught.

Only 3 studies out of the 12 had adverse affects as the outcome, all the rest had the mere contraction of an ARI. It was the summary of those that the quote referred to, as you would know if you had even a modicum of humility, and actually checked first before you blurt out whatever you 'reckon'.

he doesn't accept free will, but never-the-less he said it feels like we are making choices for ourselves — aminima

I may experience something to be true, but just believe it's an Illusion — aminima

they think murdering people for fun is bad, even though they believe that's just their opinion — aminima

In all of these examples, you privilege one feeling over another without any justification.

Your professor feels two things - that he makes choices, and that he doesn't have free will. Unless your professor's thoughts have clear labels attached to them informing him of their origins, he just has two thoughts. He doesn't have one real thought and another rational one superficially attached. They are just two thoughts.

You don't really experience an illusion as true, but then un-really learn it isn't, you simply have two sources of data which contradict one another. Nothing privileges one over the other.

People may believe murdering is wrong (in a universal sense) and also believe it is entirely subjective. Again, one belief is not more real, or deep, or primary than the other, they are just two beliefs which are contradictory.

This is about outcomes for those who contracted the disease. It's saying that if you contracted the disease, your outcome is not changed by whether you wore a mask in public or not. — frank

No it isn't. The review is entitled "Physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of respiratory viruses"

It's objective is...

To assess the effectiveness of physical interventions to interrupt or reduce the spread of acute respiratory viruses.

It goes on to say...

Compared with wearing no mask in the community studies only, wearing a mask may make little to no difference in how many people caught a flu‐like illness/COVID‐like illness

... and ...

The observed lack of effect of mask wearing in interrupting the spread

Honestly, Frank, if you can't even read simple article before commenting I think it's best you just don't comment at all. You're just embarrassing yourself.

our constitutional court ruled that our government was against both Constitution and the rest of laws because of the way they were facing the pandemic. — javi2541997

What happens in an ideal world is that a government rapidly (and proactively) makes public health decisions on the basis of listening to a range of different scientific opinions (with regards to the facts) and a range of different public opinions (with regards to values), and obviously a constitution fits in here too. Debate then continues in a relatively balanced way with the scientific arena discussing the facts as they are discovered (in their journals and conferences), and the public discussing their values in newspapers and social media. These discussions then change (or not) the data the government is using, which then changes (or not) government policy.

Obviously in the real world this doesn't happen because our system is imperfect.

What's been different this time is that the people who's role it is to push for a better system (activists, journalists, opposition...) were the ones most vocal about actively making the system worse. Actively limiting the full range of experts to be included in the debates over fact, actively removing dissenting voices from the public discussion over values, and actively campaigning for the government to ignore opinions which differ from their previous decisions.

It's not the government's behaviour that's been most reprehensible in this case (though it has been reprehensible), it's the activists, the community leaders, the journalists, the ordinary people... The ones who've not only willingly, but aggressively, pushed for a social world where questioning power is seen as a social taboo.

Yeah. To be clear, I think a general policy of mask wearing was a sensible public health precaution in the face of uncertainty.

I think screaming about non-maskers "murdering" innocents and equating dissent over their value with tinfoil-hat wearing flat-earthers was not only unhinged but positively dangerous.

It's one thing for a government to make difficult decisions with limited data. It's quite another for a whole section of the population to treat those decisions as if they were the word of God and all dissent as the work of Satan.

What the Cochrane review shows is not that masks are useless, nor that governments were wrong to mandate their use. It shows that those who disagreed with the government's policy were normal, rational people who simply had legitimate and well grounded differences of opinion about the best way forward.

The Cochrane review finally out on masks...

https://www.cochranelibrary.com/cdsr/doi/10.1002/14651858.CD006207.pub6/full

A few highlights...

Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of influenza‐like illness (ILI)/COVID‐19 like illness compared to not wearing masks (risk ratio (RR) 0.95, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.84 to 1.09; 9 trials, 276,917 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence. Wearing masks in the community probably makes little or no difference to the outcome of laboratory‐confirmed influenza/SARS‐CoV‐2 compared to not wearing masks (RR 1.01, 95% CI 0.72 to 1.42; 6 trials, 13,919 participants; moderate‐certainty evidence). Harms were rarely measured and poorly reported (very low‐certainty evidence).

There is a need for large, well‐designed RCTs addressing the effectiveness of many of these interventions in multiple settings and populations, as well as the impact of adherence on effectiveness, especially in those most at risk of ARIs.

Oh...I forgot to cheerily sign off...

:mask: :mask: :mask: :mask:

Despite USA's larger military budget, Toti opines: — jorndoe

... as we risk another high-end war in the Pacific

So the concern is that as the US deliberately provokes another war, it is simultaneously under-prepared for one, and the solution is not "then don't provoke another fucking war", it is "best get prepared then"?

As to your question. A smaller number of high innovation products is more profitable for the arms companies. Same is true of medicine. The companies can profit from 'innovation' almost 100%, whereas, when it comes to sheer number of actual tangible items, they have to (begrudgingly) share at least some of that profit with the raw material suppliers and labourers who manufacture it.

So there's an incentive to promote the higher end 'innovative' solutions. Add to that the most powerful lobbying groups the world has ever seen, and unsurprisingly government and establishment procurement tends to also favour these high-innovation, low-material/labour solutions.

Of course, they don't always work because $20 million spent on R&D has a much lower rate of return than $5 million spent on R&D for some crappy product and $15 million spent on lobbying to get the government to buy it anyway.

Though I don't know if only seemings can count as defeaters for seemings. Like if I see a black blur moving quickly past my window in a Y-ish shape, I could infer that was a black bird. If I see a bird fly at the same speed across the window again, with the same shape, and it's white, I'd have a defeater for the first claim as a seeming, but only if it simultaneously seemed like the same bird. — fdrake

The statistician I used to work with had this story (I'm sure it's not hers though, but I can't now recall the original source...)...

You're at a magic show, the magician asks you to pick a card and place it back in the deck anywhere, then shuffle the deck. This you do. He than takes the deck from you, taps it with his magic wand and asks you to look at the top card. What's the probability that this is your card?

Answers vary, but quite high among them is 1 in 52. Of course, the probability isn't 1 in 52. It would be a pretty crap magic show if the magician was just relying on luck! The probability that it's your card is almost 100% (barring error). Yet - and this is the interesting bit for the discussion here - we're still surprised when it is. Answering the question of why we're still surprised gives us an interesting set of possibilities for what goes on when we have contradictory expectations.

Is the surprise genuine? Do we 'go through the motions' of surprise because we can't just accept that magic exists (or that we can so little trust our judgement as to be so easily defeated)? Personally, I'm of the view that the surprise is part of the story, we are 'surprised' to re-affirm to ourselves that this is a rare event, that the world is a good deal more predictable in general than it is during a magic show, in much the same way as we laugh when a friend pokes fun at us to re-affirm that this is not an attack, it's a joke.

I think this post hoc talk of seemings and judgements is much like the 'surprise' at the magic show. It's a good story to re-affirm that we can trust our senses, the world is as it is given to us, but sometimes it's nature requires this additional step 'judgement' to discern.

free will skeptics still have an experience like "it seems that I have free will". — aminima

They don't. Otherwise they wouldn't be free will sceptics. They clearly have an experience like "it seems that I'm not sure if I have free will". If you're simply going to insist that other people's experience must be like yours really, despite what they say, then you're not using your own principle. It clearly seems prima facie that other people seem to experience doubt about free will because that's what they say.

in defending objective moral values, since the moral skeptics still (in my experience) have an experience like "it seems to me that I shouldn't murder people for fun" — aminima

Again, if they don't find it likely that there are moral universals, then they clearly don't have an experience like "it seems to me that I shouldn't murder people for fun". Once more you're denying the prima facie evidence that other people experience things differently to you and replacing it with your rational analysis that they probably deep down have such an experience.

Your thoughts don't have labels on them. You cannot crack open your brain and this one labelled "seemings", and this other one labelled "rational analysis", this third one labelled "interpretation" and a fourth, "gut instinct"...

All you have is a post hoc story about how you come to act the way you do, and the characters in that story are "seemings", "rational thought", "peer pressure", "feelings"...etc.

We tell ourselves things like "I feel like X is the case, but on rational analysis I come to believe Y, I still doubt it though, because my gut tells me it's wrong"...but none of this is given to us empirically, we can't detect these thought types with any mechanism outside of the same story-telling post hoc process of answering 'what just happened?'

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/abs/who-influences-us-foreign-policy/BDBD39237BF2EA6F86836FEB2F87F8B7

The results of cross-sectional and time-lagged analyses suggest that U.S. foreign policy is most heavily and consistently influenced by internationally oriented business leaders, followed by experts (who, however, may themselves be influenced by business). Labor appears to have significant but smaller impacts. The general public seems to have considerably less effect, except under particular conditions. These results generally hold over several different analytical models (including two-observation time series) and different clusters of issues (economic, military, and diplomatic)

Just do a little research.

I don't see the utility. Even if we were to take "it seems that X" as prima facie evidence that X, we'd almost immediately encounter someone for whom it does not seem that X, and thereby immediately have equally good reason to think that not X.

If we didn't ever encounter someone who didn't think that not X, we'd unlikely doubt X anyway, and so have no need for a justification.

It seems that the only situation in which we might want to justify a belief that X would be in the case that we encounter someone who does not believe that X.

Do you think there would have been an Iraq war with a President Gore? — RogueAI

Do you think there would have been a President Gore?

No. He never stood a chance.

So in what way was the foreign policy set by the president?

Even if we ignore lobbying, the order of events is;

1. Presidential candidates declare what their foreign policy will be.
2. They get voted in and can then enact it.

It is not;

1. Presidential candidates start with a blank slate.
2. They get voted in and then decide what their foreign policy will be.

This is nonsense. — RogueAI

About as much nonsense as using a hypothetical as evidence...

"I think things would have been different under Gore; that proves things would have been different under Gore"

Your argument is literally that it is "nonsense" to have an opinion that's different to yours.

Yeah, history is not on the side of the cheerleaders for this war.

Barely a single US foreign intervention has ever worked, since WWII whenever the US has tried to intervene in foreign wars/disputes. Virtually all failed.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/B9780128158746000381

The way in which it is the opposition to US involvement that is made to sound unreasonable, is truly astounding.

Whether it's a nationalist resurgence in an economically crippled Ukraine, or a deterioration of the region into warring sub-factions... The lesson from history is abundantly clear. It will not be a shining beacon of democratic enlightenment.

any government promoting human rights (competing with those promoting others political agenda) is realistically drawn willingly or unwillingly into a power race — neomac

Exactly why I spent so much time demonstrating that your assumption that the US are following a different agenda to Russia in terms of basic human rights is completely unfounded. It may have different methods (elections plus narrative control), but the outcomes are the same - power concentrated into the hands of a smaller number of wealthy individuals.

that doesn’t exclude convergence and cooperation among states at all (indeed, that’s why there are alliances and partnerships — neomac

Exactly. So none of your theory, even if true, has any bearing on the debate about the US's involvement in this conflict. It may gain this 'power' you claim it needs by beating Russia militarily, but it may also gain it by clever diplomacy, territorial deals, persuasion, economic offerings, power-sharing...

I struggle to see what economic prospects Ukraine will bring as it is being thoroughly wrecked.

Even if Ukraine wins an unlikely victory, Russia's significant strategic interests in the region will ensure it is the center of conflict for the foreseeable future and beyond. — Tzeentch

Blackrock have already made a deal with the Ukrainian government for the reconstruction deal. I'm no economist so I couldn't say what the relative benefits are, but Blackrock are not in the habit of making deals they're not going to profit from.

And.. guess who was advising the US government on Russian and Ukrainian economic affairs prior to this war? Yep. Blackrock.

I think it's one of the basic tenets of modern capitalism. There simply isn't an ever-increasing demand, so to make an ever-increasing profit companies need to generate demand. Planned obsolescence, addiction, fear,...and trashing whole cities in manufactured wars...

I'm not sure if something of this magnitude can be explained by corporate interests. I think it is simply too significant for that. — Tzeentch

Possibly. I get the scepticism, but even as individual companies many corporations have working turnovers higher than most countries. As an industry... the arms industry put together (with their shared interest in perpetuating war) has a lobbying power in the US larger than most of Europe can muster. Plus it's multinational, so the same interests are lobbying the governments of both the US and Europe, tying up media narratives through advertising revenue control...

Personally, I find it far easier to see how a multinational corporation has the power and will to push an agenda like this than I do most governments.

I think it makes good sense for the United States to instrumentalize any willing nation for its own goals. — Tzeentch

Obviously as a general principle this is true to the point of being a truism, but if you look at the analysis I presented from Rand, it's not even clear that this war is in the US's interests (as a geopolitical unit). It seems more likely that it is very specific key sectors in America, and Europe, whose interests are served by a protracted Ukrainian war - namely arms manufacturing, reconstruction, finance, and gas/energy companies. The rest of the US seems just as prone to the economic downturn and shift to China that the war seems likely to bring, and all are at the same risk from escalation.

I don't think it's true to say that Ukraine are being 'rationally' used as a pawn of the US government. If there's a rational self-interest explanation, it would be that they are being 'rationally' used as a pawn of major industrial investment holders with the US government being merely a tool.

After all, all that lobbying money and share buybacks are not offered out of charity.

Another of those posts.

There's two parts to this story...

1. A reputable Human rights group with a long and respected history accuses Ukraine of abusing human rights in it's landmine use.

2. One of Ukraine's war propaganda arms reports that Russians are using civilians to navigate these minefields.

In a sane world, which of these elements would receive most air, and which would be treated with some degree of suspicion during a bitter war?

In contrast, which do we have being promoted on social media here?

What I don't think should be in question at all is what you say: trying to take the discourse into a place in which we can have an effect (in principle) on policy, and that means our own countries, not a foreign one.

But this truism, is questioned as being doubtful. — Manuel

Yes, I think there's an aspect, as Stephen Walt says, of managed guilt avoidance. People love an enemy who is completely removed from any aspect they themselves may have any control over (and so obligation to do/have done something about). Putin makes a great bogeyman - no voting required, very few purchases linked directly to Russia, no benefits to give up...basically people can rail to their heart's content and no-one gets to come back and say "well what are you doing about it?" That's very attractive, we don't often have the opportunity to do that.

Absolutely. Part of what I've been trying to show here is that it's ideology, not facts which drive our beliefs. We seek out the theories (experts etc) which support those beliefs, myself included.

I believe that power should be held to account, so I seek out narratives which do that.

I've been trying to enquire about the ideology motivating those who want to exculpate the US, but thus far there's been nothing but a pretense that their positions are nothing but cold rational assessment of the facts.

That doesn't get us anywhere since none of us are qualified to comment on the accuracy of those facts. We can only discuss ideology.

Getting past the notion that one view is based on 'facts' and the other on 'misinformation' is a project which 439 pages in has yet to get anywhere.

My understanding — neomac

Rand corporation's expert opinion on the benefits and costs of continued war involvement for the US ...

https://www.rand.org/pubs/perspectives/PEA2510-1.html

(I've summarized their tables for ease of posting it as a quote).

Moderately significant benefits
•Fewer Ukrainians would be living under Russian occupation. The United States has a humanitarian interest in exposing fewer Ukrainians to Russian occupation.

Less significant benefits
•Ukraine could become more economically viable and less dependent on external assistance. Areas under Russian control as of December 2022 are unlikely to prove hugely economically significant.
• Ukrainian control of more of its sovereign land may reinforce the territorial integrity norm.

Highly significant costs
• Enabling greater Ukrainian territorial control increases the risk of a long war.
• There is a higher risk of Russian nuclear weapons use or a NATO-Russia war if Ukraine pushes past the February 24, 2022, line of control. Avoiding these two forms of escalation is the paramount U.S. priority.

Moderately significant costs
• Ukraine would have a greater need for external economic and military support during and after the war.
• More Ukrainian civilians would die, be displaced, or endure hardships stemming from the war.
• There would be continued upward pressure on energy and food prices, causing loss of life and suffering globally.
• Global economic growth would slow.
• The United States would be less able to focus on other global priorities.
• An ongoing freeze in U.S.-Russia relations would pose challenges to other U.S. priorities.

Less significant costs
• There is a possibility of Russian territorial gains. Russia is not likely to make significant territorial gains
• Russian dependence on China could increase. Russia will be more dependent on China than it was before the war regardless of its duration.

...but, you know, I'm sure your guesses are good too...

A mutual defence pact with a country that doesn't have the necessary checks and balances to ensure it doesn't elect a dictator or abuse minorities doesn't go down well. — Benkei

Yes, I think there are serious questions over America's membership...

... Oh, you were talking about Ukraine...