Sound of Freedom (2023)

Is it possible we can arrange to trade Corax for Socrates? What movie forum is he at?

Alas, sometimes you want a meal, but all you get are crumbs.

If by meal you mean week old oysters laying on the side of the road, yeah, that just about sums up your contribution.

For anyone interested in reality. Mormon Stories Podcast is reading the receipts about Tim Ballard's motives for creating OUR. Tim Ballard was sketchy guy who has been who has been excommunicated from the LDS church.

The Frank Dux of Child Trafficking,

My initial thought was that the topic is somewhat unusual for a modern Hollywood movie and therefore interesting enough to watch it.


After I watched it however, I couldn't see why it was so much hyped. I mean it's a good movie with a straightforward plot, but nothing more than that. The stuff around and behind it would've made more sense if the plotline referenced more clearly to the alleged forced behind the whole child abduction trade. Saving abducted children isn't new.

Well I bought the movie on Prime, and one day soon after I watch it I'll give my 2 cents on it.

You have the words and the context. And that context is what determines whether a thing I'm saying is about conspiracy theorists or conspiracy theories.

Also, your characterization of this "punt" is simply incorrect: I did not just say it was because you have suspect motivations. I believe I said, multiple times, that I didn't care to parse the issue with you because you were asking for empirical evidence about a non-empirical question. Now, you don't have to like or agree with that, but to excise it from your supposedly neutral summary of what happened is conspicuously forgetful at best, and dishonest at worst, both covered by the term "bad faith."

I actually didn't say it was addressed to you, I said it was the first thing I said "on the matter." And you're now simultaneously claiming that my comment was obviously about you yet had no relevance to you, which is not strictly impossible but requires far more contortion than other explanations.

Regardless, you're still inverting the logic of what took place: you say I should have ignored anything that did not clash with my beliefs, shrug, and move on. But by your own admission, you're saying you saw a thing which did not clash with your beliefs, and yet failed to shrug and move on.

This is what happens in the "sprawling discussions" you defended earlier: if they go on too long and turn in on themselves, the claims within start colliding with one another. Especially if argument itself is the real motivating factor. And even when someone can keep it all straight, it turns disagreements not into productive exchanges, and not even into questionably productive intellectual contests, but into useless stamina sinks that determine who's willing to sacrifice the most time and energy. It has all the import of a staring contest.

Oh, I didn't say the words were incorrect. I just said there's some shadow boxing going on, where things I say about groups of people are assumed to transfer smoothly to the underlying ideas. They don't. People believe the right things for the wrong reasons all the time, out of sheer statistical inevitability. That people win the lottery does not actually mean their numbers were lucky.

My experiences with conspiracy theorists have been overwhelmingly exasperating and full of absolutely terrible argumentation. It's anecdotal, but it's a helluva lot of anecdotes at this point (though I remain mindful of the aphorism that the plural of anecdote is never data), but it's not an empirical question. My experiences with them, combined with how comically bad so many of them have been, are the basis for my general conclusions about the group. It's the kind of conclusion that you can never prove but which you have to draw in order to function at all.

Yep, I do. I just don't agree with the conclusions downstream of the idea, where the existence of a hazy space where things are plausible but not demonstrated suggests conspiracies are therefore "wide-spread." As I keep pointing out, truth and falsity are not symmetrical. Shifting your standard for what is merely entertained (rather than immediately dismissed) does not necessarily increase the number of things you eventually accept, because all the evidentiary filters after that first one remain unchanged. The same way lowering your standards for which job applicants get an interview doesn't necessarily increase your chances of finding someone qualified.

Of course the advice is solid. That's the trick: it's inherently unobjectionable...just of dubious applicability. You can tell anyone that it's important to have humility, it's a truism. It could be on a calendar in an office break room. But the implication of saying it in a given context is clear: you're wrong about this! Be humble and admit it! The literal content of the "advice" cannot be argued with, because of course you might be wrong, and of course humility is important. There is nothing technically objectionable there, there is only the heavy-handed implication. And it is, yes, bad faith, to pretend it isn't there and resort to transparent legalism (Your Honor, I never technically accused the witness...) when cross-examined about it.

Indeed. And what's the best way to do that, to avoid confirmation bias and all the host of self-pleasing fallacies? Most people seem to recognize that outside viewpoints are the way to calibrate our internal sense of things, particularly from a diversity of sources.

So, in the obvious absence of anything dispositive, given that these questions lie squarely in the abstract, which is generally a better way to test psychologically pleasing conclusions? Judging by yourself how many of your own arguments are better than the other guy's? Or the opinions of many others?

I like and agree with all of this, very much. Some of it I almost want to applaud. I've given some version of this speech to many other people on this very site, with the roles reversed (in the sense of one person questioning the value of argument, leaving me to defend it). However, I don't think your behavior is always consistent with it. People who actually want these things do not look for ways to expand arguments or find more points to snag things on. They do the opposite, they try to streamline the discussion, particularly if the other person is trying to.

More importantly, it's not everyone's bag in every single interaction, and even more more importantly, it's not a technique that maps cleanly onto all questions. The dialectic, if actually followed unflinchingly, will also lead you to conclude that some questions don't fit it.

To be clear, I'm very sympathetic to a posture of critique. I find myself unable to turn that part of my brain off, constantly noticing and judging tiny mistakes all around me (many real, some, to be fair, probably imagined on my part). But I control it, it does not control me. The moment it becomes something I must do, cannot not do, it ceases to be philosophy and becomes pathology.

It's easy enough not to say something to someone at a party, sure. But it's a lot harder to not even be overheard by them. And then have them argue with you about what they overheard. And then they follow you to the punch bowl.

I'm at the point where I might have to watch it, "just to see." The impression I'm getting is that it's not the ridiculous overt dog whistle a lot of people assumed. But also that it's not that good, anyway.

Reminds me of the old adage that goes something like: take the two most extreme views at each end... and the truth usually lies somewhere in the middle.

I was asking for empirical examples to illustrate a conceptual distinction you were refusing to parse. If we might get a few examples in common, we might then discuss features which underwrite the conceptual category.

You made the assertion (i.e., "5 not 50"), but have begged off unpacking what that means by ANY means. It's not that I've unfairly asked you to make a category error, rather it is apparently unfair to ask you to explain you're category at all, even though that category underwrites a warrant in your argument. The idea that you might parse it does not, or so you say, "obligate you to discuss it in whatever granular or long-winded forms might be possible any more than I'm consenting to a week-long Oxford rules debate by expressing disagreement." The problem is that you've refused to explain it at all. Thus, we just have to (apparently) accept your flat assertion. What obligates you is not the mere idea of parsing, but the fact that you made the claim in the first place (you offered the distinction as a move in a mitigating argument).

And now I find that merely pressing you to justify a claim is proof of bad faith, because apparently you're not in the business of that sort of thing. Thus, asking you do hold up your side of the argument is now, miraculously, proof for your claim (an ad hominem at that) that I am arguing in bad faith.
It's the first thing you said immediately after I made a post in reply to Holden.

I said,

"you don't need a theory to grasp that there are conspiracies."

Your immediate reply in the thread was,

"There are conspiracies" is not a defense of any particular conspiracy."

In what world would one NOT read that as a direct reply?

I replied to you that,

"presumption not only favors credulity in suspicion, but also the specific suspicion that some rich and powerful people are involved in some very dark activities."

You explicitly and directly replied to this comment with a quote-reply, stating,

"I don't think this follows."

Thus, if even you weren't refuting me initially, you were certainly doing so in your second post.

As for the bolded text in your response, you are attempting to be too clever by half. You were addressing me (see above), but your argument was irrelevant to my claim. If someone objects to what your claim because the misunderstand it or misrepresent it, this does NOT mean that you can safely ignore it. If a passerby thinks that the irrelevant refutation is actually germane to your position, you may be straw-manned by it. More important, to the extent that we wish to understood, we're committed to pointing out to our interlocutors when their responses are not topical. You don't just pass it by, but offer clarification. And with that clarification offered, I submit that you should either accept that you had a misapprehension (e.g., "OK, I get it now, thanks!") or demonstrate how your initial position was relevant. You, however, both want to argue while maintaining that you were not taking to me. Odd position.
That's part of the game. It forces us to extend our attention-span beyond the bite-sized Twitter/X expectations to consider a chain of argument. Mistakes will be made. But as steel sharpens steel, so does one mind sharpen another. And if we lose our way, we can help each other get back on track.

At the point that disputants lose track of the chain, it is time to summarize, slow down, look for agreements, etc.
Once again, a Catch-22. If I continue to argue that is your "proof" of bad faith. If I don't, you get to drop the mic and move on. Convenient for you, compromising for me.
That's when you stop. Are you having fun? Are you engaged? If so, keep going. If not, stop. You are under no obligation to continue. I can't call the argument police and handcuff you to a keyboard. You're free. This is your website. You can ban me permanently and arbitrarily at any moment with no consequence. You are the freest poster on the board. You could literally "Atlas Shrugged" it and just shut down the whole forum, if you pleased (!). You're God here. But that may signal why we should have a little sympathy for the devil. You're intelligent, but I also get the sense that you're a little lazy and a little lordly. I submit that I can serve as the occasionally sparring partner for you, a sort of tackling dummy, someone who can do a deep dive on a disputation when you desire. I think what I have to offer is better, at least, better than "rotten oysters," and even rotten oysters have the benefit of occasionally yielding pearls.
I can appreciate that. I really can. There are genuinely crazy people out there and the thought of encouraging them is troubling. However, as annoying as these people are, it is similarly annoying to be lumped in with the crazy people as a mere "conspiracy theorist" when it is blatantly obvious to those with a memory greater than that of a goldfish that something is rotten in Denmark, even if we know not what particularly. This is evident in Holden's reply to me,
That is, "oh you're one of those crazy people, eh?"

The intensity of fire between the conspiracy theorists and skeptics converts a whole range of options between total credulity and total denial into a "No Man's Land" where one will meet a hail of bullets from either side.

I am not you're anecdote. I am arguing for as much consideration for the other side as is deserved (e.g., "Frida Epistemics," "penumbras"). The middle ground exists. I shall occupy it.
And this is, again, wrong. Find enough crimes happening in your neighborhood, move from five crimes a month to fifty, and you're justified in arguing that crime is widespread in your neighborhood, even if you have no particular grounds to accuse a given neighbor or visitor. You're refusal to parse doesn't undermine the logic.
Or just admit the possibility that you're wrong? Perhaps just admit that I am not arguing "in bad faith." If you could be wrong, then you should submit to the trial of ideas.
And when I encounter people who kick it at a high level, I respect their opinion. However, I look for signs of cognitive authority, not just disagreement. Democracy is not always the best way to adjudicate the best warranted assertion. Very often "the wisdom of the crowd" is just the "the howling of the mob."

I get that dialectical interaction is irritating, much as AKA23 seems to doubt it, but most of my posts in this forum are passing observations and jokes.
A good many cognitive biases are also biases of herding (e.g., The Emperor has No Clothes in the Asch experiments, but we conform to goofy opinions quite readily, even in contexts as troubling as the Milgram Experiment). I hear you. I listen to you. But that does not mean that I simply will or should agree with you.

I can live with this assessment of my own posting (see below)

However, the question here is whether or not I am wrong or habitually wrong.
Very well. Streamline away. Pick a single proposition as a point of focus. Propose an agreed upon limit for word counts in reply. If I'm game, I'll play. If I'm not, you don't have to play. I am not made of stone, but I am game.
But I am not like this in every single interaction. How does the shoe fit?

Moreover, I don't see how dialectic doesn't fit the particular question we're discussing.
LOL, I love the humble brag as a flex. Fine, I am pathological. But can you defeat my claims? I think that chess players are often pathological about chess, but if you're playing a game of chess that's not really a valid objection to their refusal to accept a draw.
I didn't follow you to this punchbowl. You entered the thread and said I was wrong (at least by the moment that you made your second reply). That's fine. Maybe I am. But the proof of it is not in speculation about my motives, or complaints about prolixity, or hand-waving about about having to actually justify your claims on grounds of parsing, bare ideas, lacking time, the nature of empirical proof, etc.

If youre looking for 'entertainment' this is not the movie to watch, but this is a movie that should be seen so that we dont commit ourselves of being willfully ignorant out of sheer jaded indifference. On this site we like to think movies are an art form, a tool for learning, and yet when this movie comes along, entirely factual true story, we balk. Because its just too "icky". Shame on us.

Growth always happens outside of our comfort zone. This was a hard movie to watch, but I made myself finish it because I believe movies, stories, etc... serve more than a purpose of just entertainment. Not always about 'craft" or performance. Does a powerful message have to be told to us in a certain way? Were too soft, too indifferent, and too spoiled to have the heart to want to make a difference. Now we go out of our way to stay ignorant as to not tickle our conscience.

Yes Im staying on topic because thats how this crime against humanity has been allowed to take epic proportions. Im going to see if theres an agency that combats this which runs on or takes donations. Its better than nothing. If we cant solve the problem it doesnt mean we cant try and make a difference.

No I cant rate this movie, I wont. Just see it.

Old news at this point but I found it interesting...

I had seen a a story float by with a headline that said something like "Sound of Freedom Financier Arrested for Child Kidnapping." This was of course accompanied by a litany of commenters stating the filmmakers were actually pedophiles etc., and that "Aha! See!! It's actually these people that are the child traffickers! They are a bunch of pedos!!" yadda yadda.

I found this at least worth reading up on a bit. Here is how this came about. Someone paid for a ticket, went in a watched the film (this was quite a while before it went digital at home), took pictures of the entire list of crowd-funders, went home, and then proceeded to run checks on every single one of the people who donated any amount, no matter how small, to the film. They eventually got a hit on a guy that had somehow been implicated as an accessory to kidnapping, which is odd, because there turned out to not be an actual kidnapping charge in the case his was related to, and he was eventually totally exonerated of the charge due to this fact.

The amount he donated? 50 dollars.

Of course, I still see people commenting this week saying things like "Yo! One of the main guys behind the film is a pedo!"

The charges were indeed dropped, according to many news outlets, and yet I see stuff like a Reddit thread entitled "The Financer for Sound of Freedom has been Arrested for Kidnapping!" The fact of the matter is that he was one of thousands of people who donated a small amount to the production of the film.

News Coverage

What bothers me the most is just how difficult it is to parse information on today's internet and in the media. How do find out what actually happens in any situation? Is all the info I found accurate? Who the F knows.

__________________

No one is balking on this story because it's too 'icky'.


And this movie is not what is responsible for bringing the issue of child trafficking to light. This is a story that has been in broad daylight for decades, and if anyone was unaware of it before this film, that's on them. Maybe they shouldn't be waiting around for Jim Caviezel to educate them.


The issues with those critical of the film has to do with their concern over its claims of being 'entirely true', the sketchy and likely sexually abusive behavior of the films real world 'hero', and the films lead actor outwardly courting the conspiracies of Qanon nutbags.


But, yes, let's keep playing the game that this is all about certain people not being able to handle the truth.

You keep saying "any" or "at all" as if I have this broad spectrum of engagement options I can scale up or down. I don't think that's true; I think any standards we come up with to try to quantify the significance of conspiracies would have lots of holes and exceptions and special pleading. Conspiracies, as a broad topic, seem to involve the least amount of people finding common ground of almost any type of issue I've seen discussed over the years, and I think this is why.

Here's what I think is happening: I think you've been in enough arguments (and treat arguments enough like contests) that if you see someone saying "I don't feel like supporting that" you immediately think of it as blood in the water. Which it usually is. It's usually someone who overextended their position and is trying to back away without losing face. But sometimes, it really is just a relatively useless, subjective thing to argue. I've been in enough arguments myself to know a relative dead-end when I see one.

I'm also skeptical that expounding will actually satisfy you: I'm pretty sure you'll just try to advance the level of detail, changing comments about how I'm not doing it "at all" into comments about how I'm not doing it "enough," which would mostly prove my point. When the mouse asks me for a cookie I immediately eye the fridge. BUT, in case I'm wrong, and in case you actually would be satisfied by a little expounding rather than just using it as an in to keep things going:

I think insofar as we can measure conspiracies at all, it's some combination of time and import. The NSA conspiracy, for example, did not actually last very long into the information age (and realistically I don't think it was ever going to). It affected many people but was quickly exposed. The UFO stuff is the opposite, it kind of hung around, but lots of people already doubted the official line and the eventual "reveal" was not a dramatic "zomg aliens are real!!" but the far more benign "okay yeah sometimes we don't know for sure what the moving lights are." Most of the exposed conspiracies lack either staying power or import. A UFO conspiracy about actual aliens, that's a 50. NSA spying that goes unproven for half a century, that's a 50 (literally). And both factors are augmented by how much people believed them to begin with: a lot of the exposed conspiracies, most normal, un-obsessed folks doubted on some level already. Nobody's really surprised to learn that elites engage in orgies or even sex crimes, either. Things like that are floating truths we know are attached to someone, somewhere, and there's no real revelation in confirming it happens, just in finding out exactly who and where. It's important but it's not really surprising.

Also, the 5-50 thing is an example of why scale matters, not an exchange rate, so you shouldn't be doing computations on it or demanding that X conspiracy is exactly/literally 10 times as important as Y conspiracy.

This is false, full stop. As I literally *just* said, it's evidence of bad faith to offer up a supposedly neutral description and completely leave out the actual reason I offered. And now, you're omitting that reasoning in your response, so in disputing the thing you're literally doing it again, immediately.

The end of your post:

"you don't need a theory to grasp that there are conspiracies."

In what world would one NOT read this as suggesting conspiracies existing is relevant to the consideration of others? If it DOESN'T mean that, then why say it?

The way I see it there are two possibilities: either my response to you is relevant to your claim, or your claim was irrelevant to Holden: just randomly listing a bunch of conspiracies for no reason. I don't see any daylight between these two options. So if my response is in error, the only error would be assuming you were saying something relevant and substantive yourself.

So you're saying it's not necessarily safe to "shrug" and "move on" even if someone's saying something not applicable to your position?

Extending our attention span is all well and good when it's done in service of the issue itself, but not when it's done to keep track of all the little twists and turns created by, and about, the interaction. Discussions lose most of their value when they become mostly about themselves.

Except this hasn't happened, at all. I haven't suggested (and will not suggest) that the mere fact you're arguing with me proves my point, because it doesn't. That would be, as you note, unfalsifiable and unfair.

I think, like the "blood in the water" thing, you're often swiping at things you expect people to do, or things people usually do in my position, even if I'm not doing them. It's reasonable that you might flinch at this stuff, but voicing it when it's not applicable isn't. As a wise man once said, "I am not your anecdote."

You inadvertently answered for me with that last sentence: it's my website. The consequences of walking away are different for me than they are for you, or anyone else. As you said eloquently above, there is a cost to people mistaking the straw man for the man, particularly when that man is The Man. Even moreso when the interaction is about how to interact, since that has a lot of import for moderation.

Also, it's slightly disingenuous to say "you can walk away" when my first hint at doing so was met with a lot of doubling down and what I can only describe as genteel taunting, which is the kind of thing people do when they're worried the other person's not going to keep arguing and figure they need to raise their hackles to entice them back. "You can walk away" is reasonable enough. "You can walk away while I shout 'yeah you better run!'" is less so.

Aye, and I'm sympathetic to people who don't like to argue with me because of that asymmetry. That said, that power is balanced by some of the considerations above. You can bail, come back under another name, whatever. I have a reputation I have to carry through to future interactions, and that binds me in ways great and small. That it's my house means you can trash the place and leave forever, but I have to keep living in it after every exchange.

Also, I've got a pretty substantial track record of giving even my most ardent critics a lot of leeway. In practice I give more slack to people who challenge me, not less. Caesar's wife and all that.

Sounds nice, but when I flat out say "nah, not interested" you complain and jab, so clearly it's more when you desire.

Then why bristle so much at my descriptions of conspiracy theorists? You don't want to be lumped in with them, but you also don't seem to like people talking bad about them. There's an echo here of the "you were talking about me even though it wasn't applicable to me" stuff. This is why I suggested awhile ago that this was really about vibes: you may intellectually agree that a lot of conspiracy theorists are nuts, but for whatever reason don't like people saying so. It reminds me of the lapsed Catholic who has come to many of the same conclusions as the atheist, but still gets upset when they criticize the church.

Of course I could be wrong. Everyone could be, so this is a pointless concession. Especially given that I just spent a paragraph describing the maneuver of rhetorical "advice" that is technically reasonable but argues by implication. Yet here it is again, immediately, with no acknowledgement. Please abstain from responding in ways that do not address or incorporate my previous response.

I can't, because there's significant evidence you are. NB: this does not mean you are merely pretending to believe things, or that everything you've said is bad faith, or anything like that. It means something limited and specific: that this interaction seems to contain several convenient omissions and unreasonable demands, and a few things that seem at odds with earlier things, which lead me to believe the primary concern is argument for sport rather than for illumination. Influenced slightly by having seen examples of these things in other interactions, but ultimately reserving judgment on the level of intentionality.

I might buy "herding" as an explanation with a lot of like-minded people, groupthink is a real problem in most communities...but not when the people in question come from a mix of ideologies and spend just as much time arguing with each other as they do you.

Obviously you can always lean on mere possibility: sometimes the crowd is wrong, sometimes the lone voice yelling against the throng is Galileo or whatever (though I hope you're a little uncomfortable with the argument that maybe you're just fine because maybe you're like Socrates or Galileo). Yes, Principal Skinner, sometimes it actually is the children who are wrong. But in general we are the worst judges of our own character, and the people least fit to evaluate ourselves. Things that are invisible to us, about us, are obvious to others.

You can try to dismiss this with "often" or "sometimes" or whatever. As I said, there's nothing dispositive here, you can always come up with exceptions. But that's the point: what you're describing--a situation where you're a better evaluator of yourself than a diverse group of people observing you from the outside--would be exceptional. It's not any reasonable person's a priori assumption.

It wouldn't be the word I'd use, because it suggests a level of deliberateness I'm not convinced of yet. But I do think you lapse into and out of a more charitable tone that, as far as I can see, could just be your tone the whole time. I think if you did that you wouldn't have a "herd" to explain away in the first place. But I think you find this entertaining, possibly even empowering, and because that is one of the primary motivators, occasionally it takes precedence over the best methods of talking about things.

I think this is a little revealing. It regards every disagreement (or even seeming disagreement) as identical to a straight competition. I hope the counters are obvious. We are not, in fact, playing a game of chess. And I think it misunderstands the purpose of the dialectic to think of it this way. A better analogy would be one of exploration. "Follow the truth wherever it leads." That's a journey, not a race. We're not competitors, we're cartographers.

The stresses and frictions of the courtroom, of cross-examination, may be one of the best ways to get at the truth of a thing when rights are at stake AND you have an unambiguous null hypothesis. Courtrooms and contests have clear standards and edicts and thresholds. Conversations about probability itself, about known unknowns, have very little of that. And when you try to apply dialectics and legalistic standards to those questions it just ends up looking ridiculous. It looks like Tom Cruise screaming at Jack Nicholson about he could possibly really know what his favorite color is. Sir, did you or did you not paint your bedroom robin's egg blue? Answer the question, sir. May I remind you you're under oath? You're DAMN RIGHT I DID. YOU NEED ME PAINTING THAT WALL.

This really shouldn't be a parenthetical, or treated as some minor detail, because the distinction between addressing you directly and unequivocally and disagreeing with you after you quoted me and said a bunch of stuff is what the entire analogy hinges on.

Anyway I think a better response would be to laugh at me for thinking parties still have punchbowls.

You can offer a definition which offers conceptual markers, irrespective of examples we might debate.

You can offer examples of fives and fifties. I have offered you a big list of confirmed conspiracies which has some real whoppers in it, so it is not like you lack for examples at the ready.

You can offer an example of the bait and switch happening to you by quoting a prior conversation where this happened.

That stated, it's not my fault if you don't have a wide range of options available. I didn't paint you into this corner.

Justification and clarification need not be perfect to be useful. What you're saying is, in effect, "I don't want to back up my claims, because it would take too much work!"

Broad topics still involve specific aspects which do offer common ground (e.g., conceptual definitions of terms like "conspiracy theory," the fact that a conspiracy theory "Y" has been confirmed, mundane facts such as "John F. Kennedy was killed," folk-psychological motivations such as greed). You're not being asked to prove a negative. You're not being asked asked to take on a burden of proof belonging to your opponent. You're not being asked to provide endless examples of cases within a category. You're simply being asked to mark the difference between 5 and 50, between mild and wild.
That's a nice speculative theory you have there. Is this one a 5 or a 50?

If you're argument rests on a cookie, then you're committed to produce the cookie (i.e., Habeas Cookius).
But do you agree that this was a 50-burger? A biggie?
I do love to watch you equivocate. Faith, here’s an equivocator that could swear in both the scales against either scale! Now I find intensity (is it a massive concerning conspiracy?) conflated with duration (how long did the conspiracy succeed?). Aww shucks! If only the government had gotten away with this for a few more decades, it could have been a 50! Never mind Clapper lying to congress. Never mind the violation of civil rights. Never mind the wide-spread compliance of big tech in aiding and abetting the government in doing so. No, it's only a big deal if they get away it for 50 years.

Alas, the Tuskegee Study only lasted a mere forty years. Just forty years of 399 men rotting to death of syphilis while doctors patiently watched, documenting their decline, telling the poor souls that they had "bad blood" and that there was nothing they could do. We'll have to tell their families that this one was, unfortunately, not a big deal.

Dang, they only kept Operation Northwoods a secret for 36 years. A blink of an eye!

Hmm, how about MK-ULTRA? Per Wikipedia, MK-ULTRA started in 1953:
Drat! They only got away with it for a mere quarter century! No big deal, right?

The FBI estimates that 20-25 serial killers are operating in the United States at any given time. It is doubtful that many of these killers have a career spanning fifty years. Although these killers are careful, they have a pattern of killing which makes them vulnerable to forensic science. Alas, Ted Bundy would not be a "50" level killer in Yoda's book, but if the FBI is correct, the career-span of these killers doesn't prevent it from being a fact that at any given moment a few dozen of these killers are active. Likewise, that conspiracies (that we know of) are (by necessity) revealed (or we wouldn't know about them) does NOT warrant concluding that it is unlikely that there are not other conspiracies happening at any given time. On the contrary, evidence of crime legitimates the induction that there are more crimes to be found. You, however, take the perverse logic of arguing that these crimes are less likely to be occurring for the fact that the bigger the conspiracy the more likely it is to be revealed! But so too is it true that the more audacious the serial killer, the more likely he will be to be caught--this has not led the FBI to conclude that they've caught all the serial killers. The penumbra position is no more radical than the FBI's estimations. Serial Killers are a serious concern and there are always serial killers in the wild. Serious conspiracies are also a concern and who knows how many there are at any given time.
A lot of people were surprised to find an island dedicated to these activities. A lot of people were surprised to find that a jet was dubbed the "Lolita Express" and that Bill Clinton rode that plane 26 times. A lot of people were surprised to find pictures of Prince Andrew with his arm around underage teenagers.
The scale was surprising. The coordination was surprising. The names were surprising.

This is the game that is always played. "It's not happening! You're insane." And then, "Oh, who cares, we always knew that this sort of thing was going on!"
I didn't. As I said,
I made no demand for a perfect metric to get you out of the numeric corner that you painted yourself into.
It would only bad faith if you had offered good reasons. But your reasons have not been good. In response to my observation,

Right, you made a claim and you don't want to support it.

You said,

Correct.

And proceeded to offer two weak reasons. One was that the question was that the question is "largely subjective" (If so, you should not have attempted to stand on it as a reason in the first place and you should have retracted your original claim) and that mean old Corax was going to make you work to hard to prove it, which was refuted that this speculation does NOT absolve you of the duty to minimally justify your claim. I stated that,

This doesn't mean that you have to argue to the center of the Earth.

So far, we have two bad reasons serving as proof of my bad faith in questioning them. Recently, you shifted to another bad reason,

you were asking for empirical evidence about a non-empirical question.

However, I pointed out that (there and here) that you could offer a conceptual distinction (i.e., definition), so no I was not necessarily asking for this. Rather, I was asking for anything. And again, it's not my fault that you painted yourself into a corner. If you claim that there are 5's and 50's as a part of your argument, you must be prepared to explain this.

And when I have pressed for explanation you have dodged and objected and speculated about bad faith.

I'll leave off here, and pick up the rest later. As it is taking you at least a week to reply, I recon I have time to cover the rest before you get 'round to this.

Great point! Let's see how my imperfect clarifications go over.

We're off to a bad start. This short paragraph somehow manages to fail in three completely separate ways.

First, I listed duration and import as two factors, but it in no way follows that you can just take one and isolate it like this. In fact, I explicitly said otherwise ("some combination of time and import").

Second, this transparent emotional manipulation ("what do we tell their FAMILIES?") has nothing to do with the scale of conspiracies. You can take anything ranked lower than something else and feign outrage because, to the people involved, it is of considerable importance, but that's cheap jury manipulation stuff, not an argument, and it has no relevance to this question.

Third, despite my clarification about numbers being about the concept of scale and not literal markers, you're making that exact mistake. You have completely imagined the idea that a conspiracy must last 50 years to qualify as important. Completely. Here's the part you apparently misread and ran with:

NSA spying that goes unproven for half a century, that's a 50 (literally).

This is saying that 50 years would clear a boundary of significance. It does not establish the boundary. Remember all that stuff you just said about how you don't need a specific line, just an example of something that would clear it?

It's also a hypothetical about a specific conspiracy. Your response, amazingly, is to:

a) pretend I've given 50 years as a marker
b) switch to a completely different conspiracy
c) pretend there's no import factor intersecting with it

And then, having changed all that, to sarcastically mock the idea with a reference to grieving families as a little coda.

So, unfortunately, we're at the point where "bad faith" is arguably the more flattering explanation. Because the alternative is that you're basically skimming this stuff and firing off thousands of words without taking a minute to understand what you're responding to.

Nope, you just asked for any delineation at all. I said 50 would be a huge deal, not that it starts being a huge deal at 50. Also, forget making it to 50, they barely made it five. And for all your focus on the import part, it's the secrecy part that actually makes a conspiracy a conspiracy. A conspiracy people know about (or even assume is happening) is just Bad Stuff.

And now, in addition to a, b, and c above, we've added d: randomly taking the invented standard and applying it to things that aren't even conspiracies any more. This is just a mess.

The mere fact that you think it's a "numeric corner" suggests you have, actually. As I said, the numbers mean nothing: the context was "scale matters." You're holding the brush. And a bunch of hats, apparently.

Excuse me? Your position is that if you don't like my reason for something, you can completely omit it from your summary of the argument and pretend I offered no reasons? Because that's what you actually did. Actually, worse, you later said I offered a different reason. You omitted my actual rationale and substituted another. And then you immediately did it again ("...merely pressing you to justify a claim...").

There is no world in which this is a reasonable or honest thing to do, even if my reason were utterly fanciful (and far from it, we can see from this latest response it was bang-on).

Your position is that people should not have opinions on things that can't be demonstrated (or, let's be real, argued about) empirically?

Oh? Do you not think conspiracies have scale? Do you not think there are smaller and larger conspiracies? If you do, then you already agree that "there are 5's and 50's." You just disagree about which ones qualify as which.

Oops, sorry, threw off the schedule.

If anyone cares I'd be happy to elaborate on why it took me awhile, a lot happened over the last week. It actually doesn't take long, but if I get distracted, rather than rush I let it sit. I find when I do that and come back later, my responses are a lot more productive and focused. More importantly, I miss fewer details that way. You should try it.

In regards to Epstein's island, are we claiming that the rich and powerful not being prosecuted for the crimes they commit, or victims of sexual abuse being ignored, is somehow a conspiracy? Who, except for the completely clueless, has been refuting this? Aren't both of these things that have been statistically probable, and painfully observable, for...ever? Do we need to even uncover shadowy men in shadowy places doing shadowy things before we can acknowledge their reality.


Next we are going to start calling out the conspiracy of children who refuse to eat their broccoli.

Happy Thanksgiving

You have not reproduced the entirety of last line of my post to Holden.

We can laugh it up about adrenochrome and pizzagate, but you don't need a theory to grasp that there are conspiracies.

Probably the world in which one reads the entirety of my last sentence. The qualifier (omitted in your quotation) excludes at least two theories, and by extension any unmentioned theories that are in the same category class as those two. Thus, the last line cannot properly be read as a general warrant offering direct support to particular theories.

I said it, because I was staking a claim to a middle ground position. This is the position that I unpacked as the penumbra stance/Frida epistemics.

Your response there was

"There are conspiracies" is not a defense of any particular conspiracy.

but my response was not offering a defense of any particular theory, so your response was indeed irrelevant (as I have already argued at length). Now, you take it that by this commitment my position is irrelevant to Holden's position. Why? I was not offering a refutation of Holden (e.g., we can indeed laugh it up about adrenochrome and pizzagate), but rather a qualification (e.g., people are not crazy for being suspicious). The film is not just a dog whistle for crazy theories ("the rest of the story" as Holden puts it in the style of Paul Harvey), but it also speaks to a general situation for which we have evidence (e.g., proven criminal conspiracies protecting the right and powerful, involving sexual abuse, human trafficking, and the underaged).


If you've had fifty documented robberies in your neighborhood this year, you have reason, inductively, to believe the general proposition (i.e., induction moves from particular to general) that you're in a neighborhood that still has robberies going on. The post was just bringing receipts for the induction.

Not always. Sometimes yes. Sometimes no.

So, let's stay on topic.

Sure. Rather than bicker, let's bracket. We're agreed that I may continue to argue without this being proof of bad faith, so let us continue in good faith.

So, you can't walk away? You're the comic who cannot afford to lose to the heckler? You're the cop who cannot allow the citizen to disrespect his authority? Heavy is The Head That Wears The Crown?



Except, you totally can walk away.
It would cost you nothing. The refinery will not be captured. You will not be chased down by hooligans in dirt buggies.

Hmm, that's not what I recollect. When I've begged off for this very reason, you've presented me with a resume of your alleged fairness. I shall, however, tuck this card into my hand and I reserve the right to play this card. I may need to duck and run myself. Right now, however, I'm having fun, so why not?

I could, but I wouldn't. It's your bar. If I'm 86'd, then I'm 86'd.

When I look into years old threads I see the word "BANNED" under so many user names that I have no doubt you can and do win by force on a regular enough basis that you effectively have "taken out the trash" (from your POV). And then there are thread locks, stealth deletions, and other tricks at your disposal such as the menacing PM of doom. On the user side, we have "Complain to the mod about the mod." At any rate, you're under no obligation. Indeed, if you're sincerely telling me that you don't want to do this, but that I've roped you into this, why don't we just stop right here?

Happy Thanksgiving.

Staking a middle ground to...Holden? Why? What was the relevance of your response to him? You were quoting him and addressing him, but either you were implying the existence of other conspiracies was relevant or you were addressing him while talking to a hypothetical reader. Which is still trying to start an argument, albeit in a confusing and indirect way.

That's because 50 is a lot of robberies for a single neighborhood. But what if you have 50 robberies in the world? Do you still have reason to believe the general proposition that you should be worried about robberies, that they are widespread, that they are common? The analogy ignores scale, even though that's the very thing being discussed, and something I pointed out very early in this exchange.

Let me guess: it was safe for me to shrug you off, but not for you to shrug me off?

Leaving aside that this is not actually mutually exclusive with what I said...I suppose we recollect differently. Feel free to quote me.

And yet those threads remain. The interactions remain transparent. All the challenges therein, even the ones full of outright slander and horrible insults, they stay up. And in virtually no cases were those things the impetus for the ban. In fact, name any of them, and it's likely I'll be able to produce the specific reason (usually reasons) for it, and we'll see if you can tell me with a straight face that it wasn't warranted. Again, it's more the other way: when someone gets into an argument with me I recognize that, as counterproductive as it is, banning them has to meet a higher threshold than banning someone who hasn't. But the Venn diagram of people who consistently pick fights and people who do genuinely banworthy things has an awful lot of overlap.

There are, of course, far more examples of me arguing with people who never even receive a gentle reprimand, nevermind a ban. And either way, I'd wager these examples overwhelmingly predate the newer rules about politics.

Okay, deal.

If there are some strands you want to tie up, even if just for your own edification or because you think I've been unfair, there are profile comments (which are off-thread but still public) and messages (private), feel free to avail yourself of either, or both.