(09-16-2025, 02:28 AM)UltraBudgie Wrote: Right-wing nutjobs. Left-wing lunatics. They're all crazy. What even is crazy any more? A nonsense-word, a slur?
Does it have anything to do with being correct? What if the truth itself is crazy?
Has society been constructed that way, as a lever of power? An illusory bubble of sanity, actually composed of lies?
Is it more fundamental, in that pure truth cannot exist unburied in this world, by its very nature?
What I got from tin-foil hat man:
We Americans are in a Pathocracy because Psychopaths are better equipped to rise to the top of Business, Finance, and Politics. So it isn't just an Authoritarian Oligarchy we labor under but a full fledged Pathocracy.
My thought: And it just may happen that being Left in political and social matters may bring on the label of violent insanity leading to job loss, even stripping of citizenship.
His solution: Just dissent. Picture of 1936 speech at Blohm+Voss shipyard in Hamburg.
My question: And that led to mass dissent, stopping the Nazi machine?
No. Neither did Thoreau, author of
Civil Disobedience, going to jail rather than paying the war tax for Mexican/American War stop the war from happening. Or literally millions protesting the Invasion of Iraq stop that.
So what happened to either
August Landmesser or Gustav Wegert who refused to salute? Landmesser ended up in a penal battalion and was KIA in Croatia in 1944. His illegal wife starved to death in a euthanasia center which was a separate wing of the State Sanatorium and Mental Hospital in Bernburg.
Interesting enough, Wikipedia footnote led to
Mr. Wegert and Mr. Landmesser: People, Numbers and the Tipping Point which discusses dissent and how many dissenters can cause a tipping point.
Quote:“The Most Intolerant Wins: The Dictatorship of the Small Minority” from the book Skin in the Game by essayist and professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The book was still in progress when this text was written, and Taleb openly published its sections on the Facebook, offering them to the readers and welcoming their comments. In the core of Taleb’s explication there is an insight that stubborn minority choices, if acceptable for the majority, are an extremely important mechanism of social change. The examples he quotes are sometimes entertaining: even the prohibition in America was a minority choice, even the famous Bertrand Russell lost his professorship, for allegedly propagating immorality, due to the protests of only one but extremely persistent woman.
...
Tipping point
Taleb is, furthermore, leaving no doubt — all the moral norms of a society are not the product of a consensus in it, but rather the effect of minority choices. The same is the case with human rights. Apparently, our idea of evolution as a process of maturation of the society is totally unfounded? Yes, that is exactly the case, says Taleb: societies do not fundamentally evolve through consensus, voting, majority elections, panel discussions and scientific conferences, but only through a few persistent individuals who are sufficient to create changes within a society. It is necessary for them to operate with the rule of the asymmetric power of choice (minority rule), with the preconditions of sufficient diffusion or influence of these individuals in the society and the general acceptability of the change. This stubborn minority can be also a guardian of the society, not allowing it to accept devastating norms. Even when 95% of the population is ready to adopt them, a tiny minority by persistence and influence could prevent their legitimization. These are the peculiarities of non-linear, complex systems, such as our human society. In them, the influence of a fragment is not necessarily proportionate to its position or size, nor is the interaction of more such elements, or factors, equal to their simple sum. At one point it progresses to a tipping point, and the system enters new values and norms.
So hardcore minority of pathological liars can move a country as long as they claim a moral high ground and do not waver.
Corbett: And it's the perception produced by the amoral PR that matters not the underlying reality.
There's a reason you separate military and the police. One fights the enemies of the state, the other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people. - Commander William Adama
