"Why can't Trump get his story straight about the nukes?"
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@futurebird TO me, this is fundamentil (like reading!) I grew up in a family that absorbed the Jewish tradition of education. I was going to college, like it or not, because that's what we do in our family. And I was married to an educator, helped her develop programs to support and encourage girls into STEM, while at the same time nervously watching the right-wing attack on public schools. As soon as they said "vouchers" I knew we were in trouble
@futurebird the right has systematically attacked not just higher education, but public education and the very IDEA that there is a standard curriculum that all students must be exposed to. THat undermining, vouchering, equalizing religious education with secular, all of that has a direct line attaching it to the administrations attacks on Harvard and NYU.
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"Why can't Trump get his story straight about the nukes?"
No one on the CNN panel will *really* answer this question: Trump just ... says stuff.
Creates a kind of halting problem:
“We obliterated the regime’s nuclear program”
(but then there is no reason for war so he says)
"They are close to nuclear"
(but that sounds like we messed up so he says)
“We obliterated the nuclear program”
(but then there is no reason for war so he says)
♾️etc.
He's not quite mentally ill with an IQ below 80... He's probably somewhere below the avg though.
But he is a complete sociopath, a narcissist who lacks all empathy and has no ability to comprehend and understand things. Everything is about him, if you don;t worship the ground he walks on, you're the enemy.
He also blindly believes what he's told... or at least what he was told by the last person he spoke too.
So he spouts whatever yes man bullshit he's given in the briefing before he speaks to the media... and will embellish it with his self aggrandising flavour of bullshit because he thinks he's the centre of the universe.. and is incapable of understanding that the majority of the world sees through his bullshit and sees him for the ignorant, pathetic, pedo that he is.
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But the US sees Iran as a lesser nation. A region of resource extraction with exotic annoying natives they think we can learn nothing from.
That is the chauvinism that will lead to bloodshed.
@futurebird @InkySchwartz @hazelnot Though to be fair the USA sees *every* other nation as a lesser nation.
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@futurebird That is the chasm that divides me from so many people, I love to learn new thing, I find joy in deepening my understanding of just about anything. I may sometimes be a bit stubborn about things I have opinions on, but if I learn something that invalidates that, I'm happy to change that opinion (but may be a bit embarrassed about it).
But this refusal to let new things into ones brain I.do.not.accept, it is a blight, a plague!I like to think that I'm in the same place but in growing up I had to get over a bit of self-consciousness and imposter syndrome driven anxieties. When encountering new people I wanted to bury them with expertise because I was scared someone would ask me to leave or decide I didn't belong. So I didn't like to admit when I didn't understand something. I'd try to play along then go home and study in secret.
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I like to think that I'm in the same place but in growing up I had to get over a bit of self-consciousness and imposter syndrome driven anxieties. When encountering new people I wanted to bury them with expertise because I was scared someone would ask me to leave or decide I didn't belong. So I didn't like to admit when I didn't understand something. I'd try to play along then go home and study in secret.
Now, I just say "I don't understand" as soon as I'm at all confused and I can learn things much faster. The kind of people I want to be respected by aren't phased by this, and the kind of people I used to worry about impressing were never going to be impressed by me no matter what I did. So it's much faster if I just ask questions when I have them and admit what I don't know.
Saves time.
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Now, I just say "I don't understand" as soon as I'm at all confused and I can learn things much faster. The kind of people I want to be respected by aren't phased by this, and the kind of people I used to worry about impressing were never going to be impressed by me no matter what I did. So it's much faster if I just ask questions when I have them and admit what I don't know.
Saves time.
"You don't even know how -- works."
"That's right, I *don't* know how -- works. Will you explain it to me?"When I discovered that this kind of person who I was so scared of finding out what I didn't know so often could NOT explain the topic themselves. Oooh. All of those worries vanished.
And if they can explain it? Well, now I know too. I win... or I win.
Wish I could have learned this at a younger age.
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And how do you unpack that? How do you deprogram someone from a place where learning things, and realizing how little they know is so horrible?
It's impossible to learn if you cannot admit that you do not already know everything you need to know about the world.
I think people *do* feel bad about what they don't know. Like not being able to find Iran on a map. That can feel embarrassing. But we can look at the maps. Read the history.
@futurebird This is something I don’t think I’ll ever really understand. I’m happy that I don’t know everything, won’t and can’t ever know everything, because it means there’ll always be something new out there for me. A world where I knew everything already would be a very boring one.
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@futurebird I don't know. I think one of the fundamental choices people make while growing up is how to react to discovering you didn't know something, or were wrong.
You either accept it without taking it as a personal affront, or you take it as a personal attack.
I don't know how we determine our choice; mine certainly wasn't conscious. But as far as I can tell, my entire peer group had chosen by the end of high school.Part of the problem is a culture of people who know things and use their greater knowledge to humiliate those who know less. I encounter this in job interviews all the time.
I *never* do this to other people, it's evil. But when you are being attacked, the instinct is to hate the people who know more.
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@futurebird @InkySchwartz @hazelnot Though to be fair the USA sees *every* other nation as a lesser nation.
@ariaflame @futurebird @hazelnot Currently yes. At other times? Your milage may vary depending on which other countries.
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@InkySchwartz @futurebird @hazelnot
In January 2001, Bush had not won the election, and was unpopular and rightly viewed as illegitimate.
He was determined to lower taxes and cut spending, so he eliminated many of the wasteful antiterrorism programmes started by Clinton.
On September 10th, he was not liked, was having trouble passing laws and was seen as not competent to hold his role.
A few weeks later, he was enormously powerful and able to pass legislation that had been previously unthinkably fascist.
So, like, why would Trump's handlers be _against_ a retaliatory strike? If he gets blamed, it will be forgotten amidst all the other chaos. And if he isn't blamed, they can rush to fill in all the blanks in their existing policy.
@celesteh @InkySchwartz @futurebird wait, I thought Bush did win the election but by a very small margin?
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I think the shame and that can be induced by learning new things is tied to an essentialist and immutable view of what it means to be intelligent and wise.
For them "Intelligence" isn't something that you do, for these people it's something that you *are*
But this is false. To be intelligent you simply need to be open to learning new things every day. Willing to grow. That's it.
Because he is a crook!
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@celesteh @InkySchwartz @futurebird wait, I thought Bush did win the election but by a very small margin?
@hazelnot @InkySchwartz @futurebird
A bunch of wealthy Republicans disrupted the recount and the Supreme Court declared Bush president (by stopping all unfinished recounts).
Several months later an audit showed that he lost.
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I think the shame and that can be induced by learning new things is tied to an essentialist and immutable view of what it means to be intelligent and wise.
For them "Intelligence" isn't something that you do, for these people it's something that you *are*
But this is false. To be intelligent you simply need to be open to learning new things every day. Willing to grow. That's it.
@futurebird Great points, well timed. I literally just a few minutes ago had conversation where I said “I have to admit that 3 weeks ago, I wasn’t really familiar with geography of Strait of Hormuz & Persian Gulf, & had to look them up on a map.”
On some level, you can’t learn anything if you aren’t readily willing to admit ignorance. To the extent that narcissism prevents a person from admitting that…
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@hazelnot @InkySchwartz @futurebird
A bunch of wealthy Republicans disrupted the recount and the Supreme Court declared Bush president (by stopping all unfinished recounts).
Several months later an audit showed that he lost.
@celesteh @hazelnot @futurebird Which audit? Because I found 3 major ones and all showed various outcomes depending on the standard.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/
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@celesteh @hazelnot @futurebird Which audit? Because I found 3 major ones and all showed various outcomes depending on the standard.
https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/
@InkySchwartz @hazelnot @futurebird
The media reporting on this was carefully vague, but all full recount of all Florida votes would be a narrow victory for Gore.
Gore didn't sue for a full recount, so his legal strategy was not a winning one, so most reporting focussed on Gore strategy and not on the end vote tally.
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@InkySchwartz @hazelnot @futurebird
The media reporting on this was carefully vague, but all full recount of all Florida votes would be a narrow victory for Gore.
Gore didn't sue for a full recount, so his legal strategy was not a winning one, so most reporting focussed on Gore strategy and not on the end vote tally.
@InkySchwartz @hazelnot @futurebird
The Supreme Court did specifically decode the election instead of a recount, so this did call Bush's legitimacy into serious question at the time.
Source: am old
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@AdrianRiskin @futurebird @GoblinQuester In the 1950s the journalist Edward R Murrow took his documentary _See It Now_ to Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study, to explain what it did and how it worked that to the public. He observed of the experience being around this most-famous-bunch-of-thinkers that he never heard the phrase "I don't know" so often in his life.
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